I have to agree here. Does this even serve a purpose?
I think this is intended for a LAN party server. Built something like this, sans neon and the flashy stuff, in an army surplus canister. Tossed a 16-port Ethernet port on the side of the box, a cheap 640x480 LED so you could fire up the game server without dragging a monitor for it, and a padlock to make sure none of the innards happen to walk off. I'd be worried about the big sheet of plastic, as my server was built to make it survive the rough handling boxes get getting shuffled in and out of cars. Normal cases took enough damage from the banging around... That would not last long.
Is it even remotely possible for SCO to stop these shenanigans and drop this case at this point and still survive as a company for any period?
They can drop their case, but IBM already did a full retaliatory patent based counter strike. If they drop, they have nothing to negotiate with later... Not that they stand much of a chance anyhow. (and not that it matters, the SCOX execs have already done a huge pump and dump and it looks like they got away with it)
The truth is, IBM only open source products where they have competitors they want to hurt, by commotitizing that type of software
Not true. Big blue has open sourced bits that act as a loss leader, much like the 'free' items at a store, if it will make them cash longer term. I'd watch for IBM to make a low end 'open source' MQ, and have the connecting libraries match up perfectly with the WebSphere MQ. Much like what they are trying to do with Apache derby (formerly Cloudscape) using the same JDBC drivers as DB2... and hoping the departmental projects grow into something requiring a 'real' database.
Not that more options are not a good thing, but the Java Messaging Service (JMS) built into Jboss rocks. It is LGPL as well, which is one of the better open source licenses out there in my book.
I'm about four hours away from flying back to India for a work gig. Last time I was over there (first two weeks of January) I was hoping I could pick up an ipod for cheap, as 1 USD == 43.5 rupee. Turns out they were just as pricy as their US counter parts. Imported electronic goods (that I saw) were as pricy, if not more so for them. Difference being, their salary is much lower. Normal cost of living stuff was dirt cheap, but not electronics. Someone mentioned that 1000 rs a day was a pretty good gig in New Delhi (more down in Bangalore). At $500USD for the mini-mac (sans keyboard, monitor, and needed memory) OSX would be a huge luxury item.
Well, I spend a lot of quality time with Linux and a chuck of the IBM stack, so I tried to move over about a year or so ago.
Learned more about the innards of Linux than I ever cared to trying to get the OS to work on one of the higher end IBM thinkpads. SuSE SLES 8, more or less the standard for the WebSphere stack I work with, had a kernel that did not see the Ethernet port and the video was a mess. Due to a how-to and forum support on the Gentoo side, it was the first distro I got the xwindows and the wifi card working on! With a bruised forehead and a better understanding I went back to SuSE and got it to work as well on another HDD. Life was good. Problem was I suck as an installer, and getting the base to work (because I don't know the underlying details) was far worse (for me) than the development I was trying to do on it.
Eventually I tried the new SuSE Enterprise 9 (and desktop version) with the new 2.6 kernel. OS worked like a charm - many of the things I googled and dug through forums to figure out 'just worked'. Even Gentoo packaged up the hard bits to update. Unfortunately, it would seem that DB2 needed tweaking to get up and running, WebSphere was far from stable, and WSAD was a wreck. Same when I updated the Gentoo drive as well. With an extra six months, more config tricks, and a few helpful service packs it sort of works. This is my daily driver, however, so I reverted back to the older kernel.
So to sum up - it took about three months to get the hardware working, about the same to get the apps working, and a lot of work to do in between where I really should not have messed around with the system. My boss would die if he knew how much time I spent coding versus trying to just get the app server to install. I know the *nix gurus out there would laugh at my bonehead moves trying to get 1400x1050 to work (and then 3d acceleration), but I'm the type who had to hit the man pages to add users! So much easier today now that the hardware is a bit more mainstream. I'd say it was a year too early if they were gunning for the unwashed masses (like me).
You will know who wasted the time when the Emacs or vi user happily uses his/her knowledge with the next language and you have to relearn a whole IDE all over again because your IDE of choice just works (or just works as well as you describe) with one language.
They keep adding languages to eclipse. I'm using it for Java and C++ these days. I've seen one of our guys use it for COBOL! Not sure what else it does, but it sure is multi-language.
Any (quality) DDR ram work? I heard earlier Macs needed some goofy timing, so you had to be careful about what you bought. This still true, or did they use off the shelf stuff this time?
Never have figured out if the Pentium 3 or 4 flags are what you are supposed to use. Forms seem to be split down the middle of calling it one or the other. I used the Pentium 3 config without any issue, but I know there is someone out there who knows....
Of course he would say that--but the typical consumer interested in F/OSS databases are definitely not the handful of big companies that Oracle sends a team of slick salesmen to do 4 months of PowerPoint just to get one > $100,000 sale. Of what use is the "Oracle model" to the rest of us?
One of the areas Oracle shines is the developer support. While not free as in speech, they already make their product free as in beer for the folks doing development work. Granted, you pay the piper when you move to production land, but one of the strong points for the OSS offerings is not having to hork about with licensing on the dev side. I know I have used Tomcat and Jboss on the dev side while a customer noodles through the decision to get BEA or IBM kit.
I'd say Oracle might be in a world of hurt on the lower end database solutions. Light weight stuff that might have required a 100k license in production land and needed the sophistication of a ten column MS Access database is numbered. Many of the OSS solutions are 'good enough' for department scale use. An interesting move on IBM's side was donating Cloudscape (now Apache Derby). They salted the field for the lower end stuff, but were clever in they used DB2's JDBC connector. Build a simple app, find out it grows into the enterprise, and you have the option to pay the same mad cash as Oracle for the full featured solution....
Tomcat (also an Apache Foundation project) is even worse. It seems that 3.3, 4.1, 5.0 and 5.5 branches are all still active.
With the first three, each corresponds to a set of JSP/Servlet specifications. If I'm coding JSP tag libraries for BEA 8, I'm going to use Tomcat 5.0 since both support the JSP 2.0 specification. If I'm building code that will target WebSphere 5.0, I'll use Tomcat 4.x series. Tomcat 5.5 seems to be a bit of an odd duck - it requires the JDK 1.5 to run, so they must be using some of the latest greatest Java 5 stuff. Nothing that I've seen in the commercial application server space yet, but I'd suspect BEA 9's JSP/Servlet engine will look similar.
If you are looking to stick a mini-itx board in something, you can use almost anything as a case. I like the classics, and breathed new life into a dead SGI O2 workstation. (Not pics my box, but a nice set of pictures of the space you have to work with) Add a wireless mouse and keyboard, mix in a nice LCD display, and it makes for a lovely terminal.
The look on my uncle's face when they saw the 'email and web browsing' computer sitting on their mom's desk was priceless. Such awe for a meager fan less 533mhz Eden board - due only to the case. (grin) A gift that keeps on giving.
The last several projects have included jakarta-regexp-1.3.jar. Yes, if you are lucky enough to be able to count on using JDK 1.4 you have another option. One jar and you are golden for regular expressions.
The other is import org.apache.xpath.XPathAPI; My god is it nice to be able to say
Been a while, but it is not too hard to open a Open Office doc and do an XSTL on it into a format you want. I was parsing the (compressed) XML to pull out data for a program, but I'm sure there are style sheets out there that do just that... (if not within OO itself for that matter)
Most VC's expect a payback that defines usury as most of the business ventures will probably fail. If you succeed, you not only pay for your 'cost' but also all the other failed prospects. Shaking off these vermin after thing get established can be extremely expensive. - this applies to far more than the tech sector. Unless you plan to cash out, don't go there..
Oh come now - here in Minnesota we call these suckers ice fishing houses. Duct tape, old trailers, plastic tarps, cardboard - it is all good. Keeping in mind most of us consider ice fishing a drinking sport, so some of the shoddiest engineering you will ever see for shelter seems to make perfect sense.
Many fishing widows will claim we do actually live in these things... on second thought...
I picked up a Sun 180 server, complete with 8' tall rackmount, for $25USD. I mounted all my hardware above my child's reach or stashed it behind one of the panels. Not a snowball's chance in hell move the thing, all cables zip tied to the rack, a screwdriver needed to get at the UPS and all the power cords. Granted, I bought it back when my new bride looked at my mess of computers and said - buy one and consolidate this mess. Not sure something larger than the refrigerator was what she had in mind....
As a side note, go with the CRT tube. It takes a hell of a beating and the little one will be unlikely to move the mass of a 21" monitor.
While Debian is nice and stable, it usually has a devil of a time with latest-greatest hardware. I've found the Gentoo crew tends to put a fairly large focus on new kit. When I got a cutting edge laptop, the Gentoo was the first distro that would handle the video card, wireless, and a few other goofy things a good three to six months before other beta builds (SuSE, Fedora, Debian, and Mandrake specifically) did. It is also stable enough to use as my daily driver for work (and occasionally wasting a bit of time on/.) while getting incremental updates to chunks of code that are not baked yet, but I wanted to try in the interim.
For what it is worth, I did not build from source each time... I used the stage three precompiled builds to get the initial install up and running and let the emerge compile in the changes when they come up and I'm not using the system. A GUI installer would be a godsend, because most of the install is a series of carefully typed commands just begging for a typo.
Beyond that, apt-get and emerge are pretty close. I'll emerge and compile the changed packages, but I think there is even a flag to pull down precompiled packages. It is with the other distros - like getting hung out to dry with updates to RedHat 8 and 9 - that apt-get/emerge really shine.
If this is released into the environment, then we're dealing with another greenhouse gas (water vapor).
It is far worse than one would imagine. You can read more about the dangers here about the byproduct of hydrogen combustion. Truly sobering....were they to put these in automobiles, they would generate a key component of acid rain.
I wouldn't be suprised if someone sold that, but the screens are under 300x200 each. Great for games, but not much for web surfing.
I'm reading (and posting)/. on a blackberry - usable with even less resolution than that. Course, I'm bored out of my mind hoping the flight makes it home, but I'd kill for a few games other than breakout right now...
I think the original point was to have electronic versions of biometric data on the passports. Not sure what the point of making that information wireless if they still have to stamp the bloody thing every time you enter and exit a country. If you scrapped the wireless bit, you could actually use a smartcard concept to store not only info on the person, but the travel details in a much more useable form. I'm six stamps away from my third passport expansion (where they add extra pages again) - and there is nothing readable or practical about ink based entry/exit data.
You miss the point. It's about showing respect to the process.
I think we are on the same page. Way I read it (did go back and read the article) is they have a process - if the vote was within a certain threshold they order a automatic machine based recount. If it was even closer, they do a hand based recount. They did the machine recount and it is real close, but one party had a majority. Respect the process...
What scares me is either side will look to do what a bad D&D player who has every module or book and pulls out a obscure rule to try and change the outcome. Yes, they allow for the possibility to pay for a hand recount - but the last thing I want to see is our election process turned into a clever bit of lawyering in tactical areas. Watching both major parties even hint that they had thousands of lawyers on contingency for the election day was sickening. Watching some of the minor parties invoke rules that seemed more for the press and public relations just made me mad.
Anyhow, not a flame... just not happy about the new legal strategies setting precedence for how a campaign is won. Nothing like telling your kid - I don't know who won the election, it is still in the courts...
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree here. Does this even serve a purpose?
I think this is intended for a LAN party server. Built something like this, sans neon and the flashy stuff, in an army surplus canister. Tossed a 16-port Ethernet port on the side of the box, a cheap 640x480 LED so you could fire up the game server without dragging a monitor for it, and a padlock to make sure none of the innards happen to walk off. I'd be worried about the big sheet of plastic, as my server was built to make it survive the rough handling boxes get getting shuffled in and out of cars. Normal cases took enough damage from the banging around... That would not last long.
Is it even remotely possible for SCO to stop these shenanigans and drop this case at this point and still survive as a company for any period?
They can drop their case, but IBM already did a full retaliatory patent based counter strike. If they drop, they have nothing to negotiate with later... Not that they stand much of a chance anyhow. (and not that it matters, the SCOX execs have already done a huge pump and dump and it looks like they got away with it)
The truth is, IBM only open source products where they have competitors they want to hurt, by commotitizing that type of software
Not true. Big blue has open sourced bits that act as a loss leader, much like the 'free' items at a store, if it will make them cash longer term. I'd watch for IBM to make a low end 'open source' MQ, and have the connecting libraries match up perfectly with the WebSphere MQ. Much like what they are trying to do with Apache derby (formerly Cloudscape) using the same JDBC drivers as DB2... and hoping the departmental projects grow into something requiring a 'real' database.
Not that more options are not a good thing, but the Java Messaging Service (JMS) built into Jboss rocks. It is LGPL as well, which is one of the better open source licenses out there in my book.
They can't afford it outside the workplace.
I'm about four hours away from flying back to India for a work gig. Last time I was over there (first two weeks of January) I was hoping I could pick up an ipod for cheap, as 1 USD == 43.5 rupee. Turns out they were just as pricy as their US counter parts. Imported electronic goods (that I saw) were as pricy, if not more so for them. Difference being, their salary is much lower. Normal cost of living stuff was dirt cheap, but not electronics. Someone mentioned that 1000 rs a day was a pretty good gig in New Delhi (more down in Bangalore). At $500USD for the mini-mac (sans keyboard, monitor, and needed memory) OSX would be a huge luxury item.
Well, I spend a lot of quality time with Linux and a chuck of the IBM stack, so I tried to move over about a year or so ago.
Learned more about the innards of Linux than I ever cared to trying to get the OS to work on one of the higher end IBM thinkpads. SuSE SLES 8, more or less the standard for the WebSphere stack I work with, had a kernel that did not see the Ethernet port and the video was a mess. Due to a how-to and forum support on the Gentoo side, it was the first distro I got the xwindows and the wifi card working on! With a bruised forehead and a better understanding I went back to SuSE and got it to work as well on another HDD. Life was good. Problem was I suck as an installer, and getting the base to work (because I don't know the underlying details) was far worse (for me) than the development I was trying to do on it.
Eventually I tried the new SuSE Enterprise 9 (and desktop version) with the new 2.6 kernel. OS worked like a charm - many of the things I googled and dug through forums to figure out 'just worked'. Even Gentoo packaged up the hard bits to update. Unfortunately, it would seem that DB2 needed tweaking to get up and running, WebSphere was far from stable, and WSAD was a wreck. Same when I updated the Gentoo drive as well. With an extra six months, more config tricks, and a few helpful service packs it sort of works. This is my daily driver, however, so I reverted back to the older kernel.
So to sum up - it took about three months to get the hardware working, about the same to get the apps working, and a lot of work to do in between where I really should not have messed around with the system. My boss would die if he knew how much time I spent coding versus trying to just get the app server to install. I know the *nix gurus out there would laugh at my bonehead moves trying to get 1400x1050 to work (and then 3d acceleration), but I'm the type who had to hit the man pages to add users! So much easier today now that the hardware is a bit more mainstream. I'd say it was a year too early if they were gunning for the unwashed masses (like me).
You will know who wasted the time when the Emacs or vi user happily uses his/her knowledge with the next language and you have to relearn a whole IDE all over again because your IDE of choice just works (or just works as well as you describe) with one language.
They keep adding languages to eclipse. I'm using it for Java and C++ these days. I've seen one of our guys use it for COBOL! Not sure what else it does, but it sure is multi-language.
Any (quality) DDR ram work? I heard earlier Macs needed some goofy timing, so you had to be careful about what you bought. This still true, or did they use off the shelf stuff this time?
And beyond the people who cant make up their mind what color they want their car to be, what exactly is the point of this?
Seems like the ideal thing to paint marketing ads on. Do a trade show one week, peel off the paint, and put on a new one.
Never have figured out if the Pentium 3 or 4 flags are what you are supposed to use. Forms seem to be split down the middle of calling it one or the other. I used the Pentium 3 config without any issue, but I know there is someone out there who knows....
Of course he would say that--but the typical consumer interested in F/OSS databases are definitely not the handful of big companies that Oracle sends a team of slick salesmen to do 4 months of PowerPoint just to get one > $100,000 sale. Of what use is the "Oracle model" to the rest of us?
One of the areas Oracle shines is the developer support. While not free as in speech, they already make their product free as in beer for the folks doing development work. Granted, you pay the piper when you move to production land, but one of the strong points for the OSS offerings is not having to hork about with licensing on the dev side. I know I have used Tomcat and Jboss on the dev side while a customer noodles through the decision to get BEA or IBM kit.
I'd say Oracle might be in a world of hurt on the lower end database solutions. Light weight stuff that might have required a 100k license in production land and needed the sophistication of a ten column MS Access database is numbered. Many of the OSS solutions are 'good enough' for department scale use. An interesting move on IBM's side was donating Cloudscape (now Apache Derby). They salted the field for the lower end stuff, but were clever in they used DB2's JDBC connector. Build a simple app, find out it grows into the enterprise, and you have the option to pay the same mad cash as Oracle for the full featured solution....
Tomcat (also an Apache Foundation project) is even worse. It seems that 3.3, 4.1, 5.0 and 5.5 branches are all still active.
With the first three, each corresponds to a set of JSP/Servlet specifications. If I'm coding JSP tag libraries for BEA 8, I'm going to use Tomcat 5.0 since both support the JSP 2.0 specification. If I'm building code that will target WebSphere 5.0, I'll use Tomcat 4.x series. Tomcat 5.5 seems to be a bit of an odd duck - it requires the JDK 1.5 to run, so they must be using some of the latest greatest Java 5 stuff. Nothing that I've seen in the commercial application server space yet, but I'd suspect BEA 9's JSP/Servlet engine will look similar.
How do we define "completed" in terms of software, though? Bug-free? Feature-complete?
In the commercial world, it is pretty easy. When the check clears.... (only half kidding)
If you are looking to stick a mini-itx board in something, you can use almost anything as a case. I like the classics, and breathed new life into a dead SGI O2 workstation. (Not pics my box, but a nice set of pictures of the space you have to work with) Add a wireless mouse and keyboard, mix in a nice LCD display, and it makes for a lovely terminal.
The look on my uncle's face when they saw the 'email and web browsing' computer sitting on their mom's desk was priceless. Such awe for a meager fan less 533mhz Eden board - due only to the case. (grin) A gift that keeps on giving.
The last several projects have included jakarta-regexp-1.3.jar. Yes, if you are lucky enough to be able to count on using JDK 1.4 you have another option. One jar and you are golden for regular expressions.
The other is import org.apache.xpath.XPathAPI; My god is it nice to be able to say
NodeList nl = XPathAPI.selectNodeList(doc, "config/adapter/config/property[@name='foo']");
than the normal horking about with SAX or DOM parsers.
Been a while, but it is not too hard to open a Open Office doc and do an XSTL on it into a format you want. I was parsing the (compressed) XML to pull out data for a program, but I'm sure there are style sheets out there that do just that... (if not within OO itself for that matter)
Most VC's expect a payback that defines usury as most of the business ventures will probably fail. If you succeed, you not only pay for your 'cost' but also all the other failed prospects. Shaking off these vermin after thing get established can be extremely expensive. - this applies to far more than the tech sector. Unless you plan to cash out, don't go there..
only homeless people live in cardboard houses
Oh come now - here in Minnesota we call these suckers ice fishing houses. Duct tape, old trailers, plastic tarps, cardboard - it is all good. Keeping in mind most of us consider ice fishing a drinking sport, so some of the shoddiest engineering you will ever see for shelter seems to make perfect sense.
Many fishing widows will claim we do actually live in these things... on second thought...
I picked up a Sun 180 server, complete with 8' tall rackmount, for $25USD. I mounted all my hardware above my child's reach or stashed it behind one of the panels. Not a snowball's chance in hell move the thing, all cables zip tied to the rack, a screwdriver needed to get at the UPS and all the power cords. Granted, I bought it back when my new bride looked at my mess of computers and said - buy one and consolidate this mess. Not sure something larger than the refrigerator was what she had in mind....
As a side note, go with the CRT tube. It takes a hell of a beating and the little one will be unlikely to move the mass of a 21" monitor.
I think that an investigation would prove an unwilling zombie to be innocent.
Not that you will ever see your hardware again, innocent zombie or not...
While Debian is nice and stable, it usually has a devil of a time with latest-greatest hardware. I've found the Gentoo crew tends to put a fairly large focus on new kit. When I got a cutting edge laptop, the Gentoo was the first distro that would handle the video card, wireless, and a few other goofy things a good three to six months before other beta builds (SuSE, Fedora, Debian, and Mandrake specifically) did. It is also stable enough to use as my daily driver for work (and occasionally wasting a bit of time on /.) while getting incremental updates to chunks of code that are not baked yet, but I wanted to try in the interim.
For what it is worth, I did not build from source each time... I used the stage three precompiled builds to get the initial install up and running and let the emerge compile in the changes when they come up and I'm not using the system. A GUI installer would be a godsend, because most of the install is a series of carefully typed commands just begging for a typo.
Beyond that, apt-get and emerge are pretty close. I'll emerge and compile the changed packages, but I think there is even a flag to pull down precompiled packages. It is with the other distros - like getting hung out to dry with updates to RedHat 8 and 9 - that apt-get/emerge really shine.
If this is released into the environment, then we're dealing with another greenhouse gas (water vapor).
It is far worse than one would imagine. You can read more about the dangers here about the byproduct of hydrogen combustion. Truly sobering....were they to put these in automobiles, they would generate a key component of acid rain.
I wouldn't be suprised if someone sold that, but the screens are under 300x200 each. Great for games, but not much for web surfing.
/. on a blackberry - usable with even less resolution than that. Course, I'm bored out of my mind hoping the flight makes it home, but I'd kill for a few games other than breakout right now...
I'm reading (and posting)
I think the original point was to have electronic versions of biometric data on the passports. Not sure what the point of making that information wireless if they still have to stamp the bloody thing every time you enter and exit a country. If you scrapped the wireless bit, you could actually use a smartcard concept to store not only info on the person, but the travel details in a much more useable form. I'm six stamps away from my third passport expansion (where they add extra pages again) - and there is nothing readable or practical about ink based entry/exit data.
You miss the point. It's about showing respect to the process.
I think we are on the same page. Way I read it (did go back and read the article) is they have a process - if the vote was within a certain threshold they order a automatic machine based recount. If it was even closer, they do a hand based recount. They did the machine recount and it is real close, but one party had a majority. Respect the process...
What scares me is either side will look to do what a bad D&D player who has every module or book and pulls out a obscure rule to try and change the outcome. Yes, they allow for the possibility to pay for a hand recount - but the last thing I want to see is our election process turned into a clever bit of lawyering in tactical areas. Watching both major parties even hint that they had thousands of lawyers on contingency for the election day was sickening. Watching some of the minor parties invoke rules that seemed more for the press and public relations just made me mad.
Anyhow, not a flame... just not happy about the new legal strategies setting precedence for how a campaign is won. Nothing like telling your kid - I don't know who won the election, it is still in the courts...