My father was an engineer at Zenith, back in 60's and 70's... We had one of the first color televisions in the neighborhood. It also just happened to be a engineering prototype. But don't worry! My father had the schematics!
So in my family, we had what we called the yearly "Fix the Television" event. This would be somewhat akin to reinstalling the OS in your computer. It involved taking the back off the television and with a combination of compressed air and a vacuum, removing most of the dust. Sometimes it involved replacing weak solder joints. But it always involved replacing worn out vacuum tubes.
Each vacuum tube, of which there were perhaps 20 total, was removed one at a time and carefully wrapped in kleenex and placed in a box. This box then was taken down to Radio Shack where each tube was placed into the tube tester to verify it's performance characteristics.
After buying the new tubes to replace the old ones, back home we came to reassemble the television.
People today lament about how there is no longer a need for television repair men. Instead people keep their televisions for 10-15 years and when they die they throw them away. Some day people will be complaining about how you don't need a help desk, and desktop support teams.
Or the "Scientology effect"? Plenty of earlier examples than something that happened in 2005.
In 2000, GW tried to get banned a site named GWBush.com or something like that, which kept putting up his stupid quotes. When he was caught on video saying "There ought to be limits to freedom", the story exploded.
And of course there is the whole scientology censorship debate going back as long as I can remember... At least to the early 1990s on usenet.
2005 is rather late in the evolution of the internet, and this shit has been going on for a long time before that.
I was trying to write my comment in a technology neutral way. It really doesn't matter what you choose, just kind of work around it. Sometimes you do have to change radically. Older stuff, which just isn't around any more, etc. forces that. This is as much true of open source as anything else.
Too often IT is about building something and dumping it onto the next guy. One must always think of that next guy.
I'm leaving my company now, and I'm writing up some documentation on the systems I've left behind.
They're all similar. They are web apps which did similar things, so I wrote the applications in similar ways using similar technologies. The build similarly, they install similarly. I would choose new technologies as I went, if they were clearly better but I tried to fit them into my existing assumptions.
Choice is great if you are a rogue cowboy developer. Lot's of stuff all over the place, bits and pieces thrown together. I remember a project we had here, it'd been outsourced to some third party. It came back with just about every piece of free open source software you can imagine. The data entry screens were Java running on Apache, the reporting screens were Python, the admin screens were running Perl scripts. The data entry stuff used Oracle, the reporting used postgres. The whole thing was tied together with some other bits of glue and tape. Thank God the morons who wrote it were horrible architects and the thing couldn't scale, otherwise this piece of unmaintable crap might have ended up in production.
But when you're trying to write documentation to hand stuff off to the next person, it is so much easier if what you have left behind is all similar to other stuff. It's just so much more maintainable, and easier to train the new guy in.
That's what wins in the long term. It's not raw freedom and choice, it's making intelligent choices and then sticking with them.
The Rutgers womens basketball players purposefully won every game up until the final, and then threw the game for the sole purpose of getting Imus to talk about it, put his foot in his mouth and then use that against him.
Just as racist, just as misogynistic, just as insensitive.
While I certainly don't like it when rappers like DMX use that kind of language.
African-Americans use this language to mock it, to lessen it's blow and demean the initial purpose. I see this all the time, not just with racial groups but even political.
To claim it's the same is really pretty stupid, and I think it's a pretty childish way to try to divert the attention away from what Imus said.
don't you think the EPA saying 'we don't have authority' is just an excuse for them to not enforce?
When have you ever heard of a government angency not trying to push the limits of a piece of legislation granting them authority? That's generally what the SCOTUS is deciding... "you've gone too far", not the opposite position.
Respect for the environment is a totally separate issue from respect for the mechanisms that prevent abuse. If people are poisoning each other, there are valid non-abusive mechanisms to prevent that. If no such mechanism exists then, and only then, should the system be reformed. Thankfully the system in the US is sufficiently flexible that no such reform appears to be necessary, in the long run.
It should be noted that when the Clean Air Act and the EPA were established... pollution was pretty bad so it appears the market failed, which is why the system was reformed.
I understand the desire to allow market mechanisms to address issues, but it seems to me that the only time you see calls for government action is when the market fails to respond. So do market mechanisms work sufficiently?
I got into an argument with a coworker over something similar relating to our state's passing a bill to ban smoking in restaurants and such. It's my contention, that the main impetus for this bill was the simple fact that restaurants had not eliminated smoking already. For years now, whenever I would go into any restaurant and be asked "smoking or non", the non section had an hour wait, and the smoking section had empty tables, and only a small handful of smokers. If the industry had recognized this, realized that they were losing business by wasting a portion of their facilities which could be more efficiently utilized, I suspect there would have been little call for a smoking ban at the government level.
Similarly all the calls for change in the credit card and subprime industries. If the industry had regulated themselves and responded to consumer criticism in a reasonable manner, you would not see people pushing the government to do something.
If Congress passed a law, and the Executive Branch was refusing to implement or enforce that law, it seems perfectly reasonable for a group of concerned individuals to sue the government over that. Yeah, it's symbolic. So what? Most of the cases the SCOTUS takes up are.
But it appears that the dissent in this case wasn't over whether or not the executive branch can pick and choose what to enforce... but rather whether those dissenters agreed with the policy decisions of this particular executive branch. Consider the alternative, that if this had been Clinton, and the executive branch then was failing to enforce a law banning partial birth abortions... would they have been for or against?
It'd be nice if Scalia et al could be honest and just come right out and say "I don't agree", without trying to fabricate some after the fact legal argument for their disagreement. Constructionist means, reach a conclusion, and then work backwards to construct a defense for it.
Interesting. I was not aware they were installing iDrive in the new 3-series. I have a 2002 3-Series, and was just at the dealership yesterday looking at the new 3 while I was getting my oil changed and didn't even notice it in the cars.
It must be something that only comes with the gps/map system, as most cars around here don't sell with that.
Anyway, I don't usually agree with Glenn Reynolds, and I'm not sure what car he is talking about. The only complaint I have about my 3-series is that there is no easy way to just turn off the ventilation system. For the most part I just leave it on 'Auto', but to turn it off you have to push down on the fan all the way to the off position, but if you hit it once more it comes back on.
Other than that, the stereo works fine, although I certainly understand the point. The volume control on the radio is a knob, the one on the steering wheel is up/down buttons. Guess which one works better? The knob... the steering wheel controls change the volume too fast.
Anyway, good luck with your 3-series. As I said, mine is five years old with around 65k miles on it. I've only had a few failures... the wiper pump seems to go bad easily, so make sure the resovoir is filled. I did have to replace CV boots here after 5 years, and that cost about $1100. Otherwise, the car five years old drives better than most everything else on the road brand new. I intend to keep it another 3-4 years or so. Maybe longer. I've never been able to keep a japanese or American car longer than about 4 years, before they're driving me batty.
Oh yeah, and use a good leather conditioner on the seats, such as Lexol... and I'd suggest 301 Aerospace protectant for the dash.
This isn't anything new, there have been DOS and Windows emulators on many products over the years. Amiga, OS/2, etc.
The downside is, as a development company given a choice of limited resources and the realization that Mac users can run Windows software, but not vice versa. What do you target?
Windows, obviously.
Without development of software specifically for the Mac platform, the Mac will never have an edge that pushes it. So in effect, Microsoft has already won.
Remember, it's not the OS... It's the software that runs on top of the OS.
They state in the test that the servers are dual proc servers.
VMWare Server, the free edition only emulates a single processor environment for your virtualized host.
VMWare ESX or whatever they are calling the expensive thing today, has the ability to give your virtualized host multiple processors.
So it's not surprising that it could only handle half the load, it only had half the processors.
We don't do virtualization for heavy use environments. We do it because different business groups don't want to share servers... that is, they can't agree on maintenance windows, etc.
Actually if NBC started up a site that posted their NBC content that was easy for people to use and link to and such, they'd probably do quite well.
The problem that most corporations get into when trying to delve into something cool, is their first instinct is to cripple the technology. Look at how cool Sony once was when they were doing just consumer electronics. They had the walkman, and the CD and such. After they bought up Columbia and tried to obtain "synergy" between content creation and consumer electronics, they started sucking big time.
NBC will likely ignore all advice, and create something you can't link into, can't say "Hey go look at this!" to your friends, without signing up for a free userid so they can track everything you do bullshit. And they'll fail.
Youtube as far as technology goes sucks, much like myspace. But as far as usability goes, it's pretty cool. The fact that you can link to the videos through your website so easily is what made it a hit.
And no corporate lawyer or marketing group is going to understand that.
I love his chart showing the price increase of Actuate(ACTU) showing the wonderful world of Open Source. Claiming it's risen in value 200% in the last two years. Then claiming the rest of the industry has only averaged 50% gain.
He doesn't mention that ACTU is nowhere near it's 2000 bubble price.
he also doesn't tell us which players he's averaging together. The two largest players in BI are Hyperion and Microsoft. Hyperion's stock has gone up at a rate faster than Actuate, but more importantly they're back at their bubble high, around 52 bucks a share.
Compared to Actuate's $5.
This whole thing is like reading a press release from George Bush on how wonderful the Iraq war is going because the schools all have fresh coats of paint.
I'm surely gonna get troll rated for this, but it needs to be said...
I've been there done that. Had an Amiga, used Linux and so forth at one time or another. I remember with the Amiga how many of us wrote letters to Software, Etc. or other companies begging them to support our computers. And then the demand never materialized as we claimed it would. So eventually, the Amiga was dropped to the dustbin of history. After buying a PC, I came to realize that the Amiga really wasn't "better", it was simply different. advanced in some ways, behind in others.
The Linux "demand" is similar. It's largely just astroturfing, rather than real demand from customers. It's people from/. going over to the polls on the Dell opinion site and clicking "Yes" thousands of times. [Or did you not realize that advocacy groups can astroturf as well as corporate groups?]
I'm fairly certainly Dell understands this. They've been around a long time. At one time they even release their own version of System V which was highly regarded in the industry. So they're not unfamiliar with Unix. They've also at various times offered machines without operating systems, or even with Linux.
But the demand wasn't there, which is why they keep falling back to the position they are in, and why despite freeping their poll they are unlikely to listen to it. Maybe they will, and if they do, you'd better start buying your machines from Dell to backup your poll answers.
As for open source advocates starting up their own company to sell machines. It's been tried. It was called VA Linux. They changed their name, abandoned selling computers and now run sourceforge.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't think either are particularly damaging. They're just things. As a Christian, my faith is not based on earthly things.
So I'm curious why you brought it up. Was it somehow important to you? Why?
My father was an engineer at Zenith, back in 60's and 70's... We had one of the first color televisions in the neighborhood. It also just happened to be a engineering prototype. But don't worry! My father had the schematics!
So in my family, we had what we called the yearly "Fix the Television" event. This would be somewhat akin to reinstalling the OS in your computer. It involved taking the back off the television and with a combination of compressed air and a vacuum, removing most of the dust. Sometimes it involved replacing weak solder joints. But it always involved replacing worn out vacuum tubes.
Each vacuum tube, of which there were perhaps 20 total, was removed one at a time and carefully wrapped in kleenex and placed in a box. This box then was taken down to Radio Shack where each tube was placed into the tube tester to verify it's performance characteristics.
After buying the new tubes to replace the old ones, back home we came to reassemble the television.
People today lament about how there is no longer a need for television repair men. Instead people keep their televisions for 10-15 years and when they die they throw them away. Some day people will be complaining about how you don't need a help desk, and desktop support teams.
That day can't come soon enough for me.
I abandoned WEP like 3 years ago. Use WPA instead, and it's a breeze to configure and use.
I'm fine with DIY, if it works well. What I can't stand is spending 12 hours trying to get my frickin video card working with my HDTV set.
Or the "Scientology effect"? Plenty of earlier examples than something that happened in 2005.
In 2000, GW tried to get banned a site named GWBush.com or something like that, which kept putting up his stupid quotes. When he was caught on video saying "There ought to be limits to freedom", the story exploded.
And of course there is the whole scientology censorship debate going back as long as I can remember... At least to the early 1990s on usenet.
2005 is rather late in the evolution of the internet, and this shit has been going on for a long time before that.
I was trying to write my comment in a technology neutral way. It really doesn't matter what you choose, just kind of work around it. Sometimes you do have to change radically. Older stuff, which just isn't around any more, etc. forces that. This is as much true of open source as anything else.
Too often IT is about building something and dumping it onto the next guy. One must always think of that next guy.
I'm leaving my company now, and I'm writing up some documentation on the systems I've left behind.
They're all similar. They are web apps which did similar things, so I wrote the applications in similar ways using similar technologies. The build similarly, they install similarly. I would choose new technologies as I went, if they were clearly better but I tried to fit them into my existing assumptions.
Choice is great if you are a rogue cowboy developer. Lot's of stuff all over the place, bits and pieces thrown together. I remember a project we had here, it'd been outsourced to some third party. It came back with just about every piece of free open source software you can imagine. The data entry screens were Java running on Apache, the reporting screens were Python, the admin screens were running Perl scripts. The data entry stuff used Oracle, the reporting used postgres. The whole thing was tied together with some other bits of glue and tape. Thank God the morons who wrote it were horrible architects and the thing couldn't scale, otherwise this piece of unmaintable crap might have ended up in production.
But when you're trying to write documentation to hand stuff off to the next person, it is so much easier if what you have left behind is all similar to other stuff. It's just so much more maintainable, and easier to train the new guy in.
That's what wins in the long term. It's not raw freedom and choice, it's making intelligent choices and then sticking with them.
Bush-haters? Has the guy done anything worthy of praise?
You are about six years too late with the Bush-haters schtick. The man is going down in history as the worst President we've had.
The Rutgers womens basketball players purposefully won every game up until the final, and then threw the game for the sole purpose of getting Imus to talk about it, put his foot in his mouth and then use that against him.
It was truly a giant conspiracy.
While I certainly don't like it when rappers like DMX use that kind of language.
African-Americans use this language to mock it, to lessen it's blow and demean the initial purpose. I see this all the time, not just with racial groups but even political.
To claim it's the same is really pretty stupid, and I think it's a pretty childish way to try to divert the attention away from what Imus said.
I don't think I've read tripe that poorly researched since five minutes ago when I was reading blogs4bush.
When was the last time you saw someone carrying a PDA? :-)
Perhaps
Apparently, they're more qualified than some of the natives.
Good point. /. isn't the place for serious, intelligent discussion.
Why won't the NHTSA look into deaths caused by pet food? Obviously, this is a serious issue we must discuss.
don't you think the EPA saying 'we don't have authority' is just an excuse for them to not enforce?
When have you ever heard of a government angency not trying to push the limits of a piece of legislation granting them authority? That's generally what the SCOTUS is deciding... "you've gone too far", not the opposite position.
It should be noted that when the Clean Air Act and the EPA were established... pollution was pretty bad so it appears the market failed, which is why the system was reformed.
I understand the desire to allow market mechanisms to address issues, but it seems to me that the only time you see calls for government action is when the market fails to respond. So do market mechanisms work sufficiently?
I got into an argument with a coworker over something similar relating to our state's passing a bill to ban smoking in restaurants and such. It's my contention, that the main impetus for this bill was the simple fact that restaurants had not eliminated smoking already. For years now, whenever I would go into any restaurant and be asked "smoking or non", the non section had an hour wait, and the smoking section had empty tables, and only a small handful of smokers. If the industry had recognized this, realized that they were losing business by wasting a portion of their facilities which could be more efficiently utilized, I suspect there would have been little call for a smoking ban at the government level.
Similarly all the calls for change in the credit card and subprime industries. If the industry had regulated themselves and responded to consumer criticism in a reasonable manner, you would not see people pushing the government to do something.
Just an observation.
If Congress passed a law, and the Executive Branch was refusing to implement or enforce that law, it seems perfectly reasonable for a group of concerned individuals to sue the government over that. Yeah, it's symbolic. So what? Most of the cases the SCOTUS takes up are.
But it appears that the dissent in this case wasn't over whether or not the executive branch can pick and choose what to enforce... but rather whether those dissenters agreed with the policy decisions of this particular executive branch. Consider the alternative, that if this had been Clinton, and the executive branch then was failing to enforce a law banning partial birth abortions... would they have been for or against?
It'd be nice if Scalia et al could be honest and just come right out and say "I don't agree", without trying to fabricate some after the fact legal argument for their disagreement. Constructionist means, reach a conclusion, and then work backwards to construct a defense for it.
Just kind of funny, and interesting.
Interesting. I was not aware they were installing iDrive in the new 3-series. I have a 2002 3-Series, and was just at the dealership yesterday looking at the new 3 while I was getting my oil changed and didn't even notice it in the cars.
It must be something that only comes with the gps/map system, as most cars around here don't sell with that.
Anyway, I don't usually agree with Glenn Reynolds, and I'm not sure what car he is talking about. The only complaint I have about my 3-series is that there is no easy way to just turn off the ventilation system. For the most part I just leave it on 'Auto', but to turn it off you have to push down on the fan all the way to the off position, but if you hit it once more it comes back on.
Other than that, the stereo works fine, although I certainly understand the point. The volume control on the radio is a knob, the one on the steering wheel is up/down buttons. Guess which one works better? The knob... the steering wheel controls change the volume too fast.
Anyway, good luck with your 3-series. As I said, mine is five years old with around 65k miles on it. I've only had a few failures... the wiper pump seems to go bad easily, so make sure the resovoir is filled. I did have to replace CV boots here after 5 years, and that cost about $1100. Otherwise, the car five years old drives better than most everything else on the road brand new. I intend to keep it another 3-4 years or so. Maybe longer. I've never been able to keep a japanese or American car longer than about 4 years, before they're driving me batty.
Oh yeah, and use a good leather conditioner on the seats, such as Lexol... and I'd suggest 301 Aerospace protectant for the dash.
This isn't anything new, there have been DOS and Windows emulators on many products over the years. Amiga, OS/2, etc.
The downside is, as a development company given a choice of limited resources and the realization that Mac users can run Windows software, but not vice versa. What do you target?
Windows, obviously.
Without development of software specifically for the Mac platform, the Mac will never have an edge that pushes it. So in effect, Microsoft has already won.
Remember, it's not the OS... It's the software that runs on top of the OS.
If Windows had come out as the worst.
/. must do our best to totally discredit the survey.
Since it did not, we here at
They state in the test that the servers are dual proc servers.
VMWare Server, the free edition only emulates a single processor environment for your virtualized host.
VMWare ESX or whatever they are calling the expensive thing today, has the ability to give your virtualized host multiple processors.
So it's not surprising that it could only handle half the load, it only had half the processors.
We don't do virtualization for heavy use environments. We do it because different business groups don't want to share servers... that is, they can't agree on maintenance windows, etc.
Actually if NBC started up a site that posted their NBC content that was easy for people to use and link to and such, they'd probably do quite well.
The problem that most corporations get into when trying to delve into something cool, is their first instinct is to cripple the technology. Look at how cool Sony once was when they were doing just consumer electronics. They had the walkman, and the CD and such. After they bought up Columbia and tried to obtain "synergy" between content creation and consumer electronics, they started sucking big time.
NBC will likely ignore all advice, and create something you can't link into, can't say "Hey go look at this!" to your friends, without signing up for a free userid so they can track everything you do bullshit. And they'll fail.
Youtube as far as technology goes sucks, much like myspace. But as far as usability goes, it's pretty cool. The fact that you can link to the videos through your website so easily is what made it a hit.
And no corporate lawyer or marketing group is going to understand that.
There's a reason why CompUSA is closing it's stores.
And it's not because of good prices and qualified tech staff.
I love his chart showing the price increase of Actuate(ACTU) showing the wonderful world of Open Source. Claiming it's risen in value 200% in the last two years. Then claiming the rest of the industry has only averaged 50% gain.
He doesn't mention that ACTU is nowhere near it's 2000 bubble price.
he also doesn't tell us which players he's averaging together. The two largest players in BI are Hyperion and Microsoft. Hyperion's stock has gone up at a rate faster than Actuate, but more importantly they're back at their bubble high, around 52 bucks a share.
Compared to Actuate's $5.
This whole thing is like reading a press release from George Bush on how wonderful the Iraq war is going because the schools all have fresh coats of paint.
I think he meant... It's expensive to develop cross platform apps that don't look like Ass.
I'm surely gonna get troll rated for this, but it needs to be said...
/. going over to the polls on the Dell opinion site and clicking "Yes" thousands of times. [Or did you not realize that advocacy groups can astroturf as well as corporate groups?]
I've been there done that. Had an Amiga, used Linux and so forth at one time or another. I remember with the Amiga how many of us wrote letters to Software, Etc. or other companies begging them to support our computers. And then the demand never materialized as we claimed it would. So eventually, the Amiga was dropped to the dustbin of history. After buying a PC, I came to realize that the Amiga really wasn't "better", it was simply different. advanced in some ways, behind in others.
The Linux "demand" is similar. It's largely just astroturfing, rather than real demand from customers. It's people from
I'm fairly certainly Dell understands this. They've been around a long time. At one time they even release their own version of System V which was highly regarded in the industry. So they're not unfamiliar with Unix. They've also at various times offered machines without operating systems, or even with Linux.
But the demand wasn't there, which is why they keep falling back to the position they are in, and why despite freeping their poll they are unlikely to listen to it. Maybe they will, and if they do, you'd better start buying your machines from Dell to backup your poll answers.
As for open source advocates starting up their own company to sell machines. It's been tried. It was called VA Linux. They changed their name, abandoned selling computers and now run sourceforge.