...the more they stay the same. The third-world telco monopolies have been fighting a similar battle against long distance "callback" companies for over five years now, and for the most part they've been losing badly. They've known for a while that VoIP services were the next big threat, but it doesn't look like they have any better idea how to deal with them.
One detail that usually gets left out of these articles, though: the "local third world telco monopoly" is not in any way a homegrown Panamanian entity. No, the citizens of Panama, like most of their neighbors in the carribean, are getting royally screwed by our dear friends at Cable and Wireless.
More significantly, isn't him clicking through the end user agreements a forgery of your agreement?
100% odds that the EULA that you do sign with the cable company gives them a limited power of attorney to "pass on" your assent for the license of any software they want to foist on you.
Whether that would actually stand up in court is anyone's guess.
Secondly, they're just showing that no one gets the form factor yet. I don't want to have a headset sticking in my ear all the time, but I don't want to hold a big-ass product like the Treo up to my head either (talk about dorky-looking). The new RIM blackberry has a better idea... just hold the thing to your head without any flip up plastic crap.
Handspring tried that approach with the VisorPhone. Believe me, if you think the Treo looks dorky held up to your ear, the Visorphone/RIM approach is ten times worse.
I honestly don't get the complaints about the Treo's size. At worst, it's a smidgen larger than a StarTAC (and is shaped about the same), and nobody ever complained about them being funny-looking.
Millions of dollars in burned money from VA-Linux, thousands of man-hours invested in slashcode, untold numbers of CPUs and hard drives sacrificed to the cause, and slashdot's editors/maintainers still can't be bothered to put a spellchecker into their story posting system.
Why, exactly, do they expect people to pay money for this again?
Nope, the Acela is, again, 3.5 hours in a best case scenario (express train, no breakdowns). I wish it were two hours.
And the "seriously meant point" (in actuality, a hurried recitation of the exact same anti-apple flamebait that gets regurgitated here every time there's an apple story) was about as carefully thought out and insightful as his estimation of travel times, so the vitriol was well deserved.
Excuse me, I'm not certain what universe you live in, but it's apparently one with substantially nicer highways than we have here on the northeastern seaboard of North America on planet Earth.
From Manhattan to Boston is a minimum 3.5 hour drive, and that's assuming pretty much perfect driving conditions across I-95, I-91, I-84 and the Mass Turnpike, and a complete absence of speed traps so that you can take the entire trip at 90mph.
Since those criteria are basically impossible to meet (especially at any time other than 2am -- just getting out of Manhattan and onto I-95 can take up to 2 hours during business hours), the actual time tends to be more like 4.5 to 6 hours.
Journaling filesystems are slower than non-journaling because all file metadata update operations have to be written to a transaction log.
That isn't necessarily true. At least, not always. In a RAID environment, filesystem logging can actually result in a net performance increase, because queuing up your writes in cache ram while waiting for the journal to commit increases the likelihood that the physical write operation will get spread sequentially over all of the drive heads. See Adrian Cockroft's book for more details.
Trust me, Commodore's executive mismangement was much worse than the average perk-whoring.
Commodore was based in the carribean for a reason: much of the way that the company was "managed" was flat-out illegal in America (like driving down the stock price just before dispensing new shares to the directors, then pushing it back up again), and I believe there are still shareholder lawsuits being pursued against their ex=executives.
Sadly, "confidential" price quotes like this are more or less standard practice. The goal is to make comparison shopping impossible: the salesweasel maintains a monopoly on price information by leveraging first copyright and then contract law (post-sale) to make it impossible to find out how much your peers paid for the item that you are purchasing.
In all likelihood, both "copyrights" on price quotations and gag orders in sales contracts would never ever hold up in an actual court of law, but as you noted, he has more lawyers than you, so you lose. Isn't the american legal system wonderful?
I believe (although I am not 100% certain, so take this with a grain of salt) that the reason Apple is credited in the RS6k boot screen is that Apple did the port of OpenBoot/OpenFirmware to the PowerPC/POWER platform.
Lotus Notes design may not be winning any awards, but guess what? As a designer you have FULL CONTROL to modify the UI however you like!
Translated: "Sure, the default set of user-facing interfaces that ship with your multi-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars Notes installation may be not only completely worthless but an active impediment to getting work done, but hey, you can always turn around and spend another several hundred thousand dollars paying full-time developers to attempt to graft actual functionality onto it!"
This is, sadly, pretty much par for the course. Any time someone points out just how badly Notes performs any of its alleged real-world functions (ie: email, scheduling, document storage and collaboration), its apologists trip over themselves to remind you how customizable it is, which is sort of like Ford Motors pointing out all of the cool aftermarket exhaust pipes you could buy for the Pinto.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Notes exists, because it's always helpful to have a perfect example of how not to implement an important idea. But I won't shed any tears when it's gone, and neither will anyone else who ever faced the horror of using or administering it.
...alternic is a fraud. The entire operation, domain name and trademark included, was stolen from Kashpureff via a lawsuit by one of his ex-partners. I wouldn't trust them to shine my shoes, much less run my root servers.
...which is that nobody cares about the merits of the competing RW specs. Rewritable removable optical media is voodoo technology, sold by the cynical to the guillible, who generally use it until the one bundled RW disk gives out, and then take one look at the relative prices of R and RW media and switch to the former exclusively.
The one question which will determine the winner between DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W) is "which one produces DVDs that play more reliably in my $125 set-top DVD player?" So far, Pioneer seems to have a very clear edge, but the year is yet young and Sony/HP may yet get their act in gear.
Amusingly enough, there is a subway in Cincinnati. Well, about three or four stations worth, anyway. They started construction on it in the 70s, ran out of money, and never completed it.
As you appear to be a fan of Open Source Software, when are you going to release the code to the perl script you've apparently used to crank out the last fifteen or so Xanth novels, and will the code be GPLed or BSD-licensed?
Like a recurring infection, the "holographic storage" demo gets trotted out to the media every three to five years. Every time, the press breathlessly regurgitates claims of unbelievably storage capacities. Every time, IBM claims that it's "a few years away from shipping" the technology. And every last time, it never happens.
I first remember seeing IBM say that they were "a few years" away from a working implementation in Byte magazine...in 1983.
This isn't so much a vaporware story as it is the vaporware story of our generation. Expect Xanadu, Duke Nukem Forever and Debian/Hurd to ship decades before you ever see functional holographic storage in the consumer market.
Excuse me while I die crying.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
The syntax of UNIX config files is pretty standard
It is? Please enlighten me: which standard would that be, exactly? The one used by/etc/hosts? Yeah, that looks pretty much like the one used by syslog.conf, except oops you can't use spaces in the latter, it has to be tabs. Of course neither of them look much like Apache's config files, which in turn bear no resemblance at all to SAMBA's. Oh, and let's not forget what happens if you're silly enough to leave a blank line or a comment somewhere in/etc/passwd.
The/etc directory on a newly installed RedHat or Solaris machine contains close to a hundred files, and damn near each of them has its own unique configuration syntax, many of which will cause total failure if you use it in the wrong file.
The sense of accomplishment that unix geeks get from knowing how to manage this 50-car-pileup of interfaces somehow usually manages to overwhelm what should be our righteous indignation at being asked to do such a stupid thing in the first place.
You can rag on Microsoft's design choices all you like, but at least they actually attempted to solve the problem. Hell, at least they realized that there was a problem. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "let each app pick its own way" increases your job security at the cost of decreasing the likelihood that unix will win the datacenter wars.
Presumably it was wearing "magnetic boots" as well.
No need. It's traveling at the same velocity as the ship. Place it against the hull and it'll stay there for a least a while, until vibrations, space debris, or the ship making a small course correction serves to push it away.
"Magnetic boots" are only necessary if you want to walk: an action that, in zero G, will serve to propel you away from the thing you're trying to walk on.
That said, putting the phaser "down" was pretty silly: they could just as easily have left it hanging in midair, and expected to find it within a few inches of its original position when they came back to it. That would have cost more sfx money though...
...yet they're still rendered helpless by a solid uppercut to the jaw.
God forbid that I attempt to defend Trek physics, but I'm not sure why you believe that the orbital velocity of any spaceship has much of anything to do with the mechanics of doing an EVA or a hull excursion.
Yes, a ship in orbit around a planet is moving at several thousand miles an hour, with the associated inertia. But guess what? As a fringe benefit of being inside the ship during liftoff and orbital insertion, so are you. Your own body's velocity relative to the planet does not suddenly change as a result of stepping out of an airlock. You'll stay close to the ship until you apply some force to push yourself away from it -- hence the little backpack-mounted gas jets that Shuttle astronauts use for EVAs.
As far as the boots are concerned, they didn't strike me as terribly unrealistic. Put an electromagnet in the sole, and a pressure switch inside the top of the boot that switches the magnet off when you apply enough upward pressure on it with your foot. Et voila.
Orbital EVAs are incredibly tricky things; just not for any of the reasons you describe here.
Slashdot Mirror
...that's the same Cable and Wireless, aka Exodus, where Slashdot currently hosts all of its servers.
...the more they stay the same. The third-world telco monopolies have been fighting a similar battle against long distance "callback" companies for over five years now, and for the most part they've been losing badly. They've known for a while that VoIP services were the next big threat, but it doesn't look like they have any better idea how to deal with them.
One detail that usually gets left out of these articles, though: the "local third world telco monopoly" is not in any way a homegrown Panamanian entity. No, the citizens of Panama, like most of their neighbors in the carribean, are getting royally screwed by our dear friends at Cable and Wireless.
More significantly, isn't him clicking through the end user agreements a forgery of your agreement?
100% odds that the EULA that you do sign with the cable company gives them a limited power of attorney to "pass on" your assent for the license of any software they want to foist on you.
Whether that would actually stand up in court is anyone's guess.
Secondly, they're just showing that no one gets the form factor yet. I don't want to have a headset sticking in my ear all the time, but I don't want to hold a big-ass product like the Treo up to my head either (talk about dorky-looking). The new RIM blackberry has a better idea ... just hold the thing to your head without any flip up plastic crap.
Handspring tried that approach with the VisorPhone. Believe me, if you think the Treo looks dorky held up to your ear, the Visorphone/RIM approach is ten times worse.
I honestly don't get the complaints about the Treo's size. At worst, it's a smidgen larger than a StarTAC (and is shaped about the same), and nobody ever complained about them being funny-looking.
It's only a troll if there's a chance of people taking it seriously. +1 funny or -1 offtopic, please.
Can you vouch for Rollins' whereabouts on the days of any or all of the DC sniper shootings?
Millions of dollars in burned money from VA-Linux, thousands of man-hours invested in slashcode, untold numbers of CPUs and hard drives sacrificed to the cause, and slashdot's editors/maintainers still can't be bothered to put a spellchecker into their story posting system.
Why, exactly, do they expect people to pay money for this again?
Nope, the Acela is, again, 3.5 hours in a best case scenario (express train, no breakdowns). I wish it were two hours.
And the "seriously meant point" (in actuality, a hurried recitation of the exact same anti-apple flamebait that gets regurgitated here every time there's an apple story) was about as carefully thought out and insightful as his estimation of travel times, so the vitriol was well deserved.
Excuse me, I'm not certain what universe you live in, but it's apparently one with substantially nicer highways than we have here on the northeastern seaboard of North America on planet Earth.
From Manhattan to Boston is a minimum 3.5 hour drive, and that's assuming pretty much perfect driving conditions across I-95, I-91, I-84 and the Mass Turnpike, and a complete absence of speed traps so that you can take the entire trip at 90mph.
Since those criteria are basically impossible to meet (especially at any time other than 2am -- just getting out of Manhattan and onto I-95 can take up to 2 hours during business hours), the actual time tends to be more like 4.5 to 6 hours.
Just grab yourself a copy of CodeTek Virtual Desktop for OSX: it provides an option for focus-follows-mouse.
Trust me, Commodore's executive mismangement was much worse than the average perk-whoring.
Commodore was based in the carribean for a reason: much of the way that the company was "managed" was flat-out illegal in America (like driving down the stock price just before dispensing new shares to the directors, then pushing it back up again), and I believe there are still shareholder lawsuits being pursued against their ex=executives.
Sadly, "confidential" price quotes like this are more or less standard practice. The goal is to make comparison shopping impossible: the salesweasel maintains a monopoly on price information by leveraging first copyright and then contract law (post-sale) to make it impossible to find out how much your peers paid for the item that you are purchasing.
In all likelihood, both "copyrights" on price quotations and gag orders in sales contracts would never ever hold up in an actual court of law, but as you noted, he has more lawyers than you, so you lose. Isn't the american legal system wonderful?
I believe (although I am not 100% certain, so take this with a grain of salt) that the reason Apple is credited in the RS6k boot screen is that Apple did the port of OpenBoot/OpenFirmware to the PowerPC/POWER platform.
Lotus Notes design may not be winning any awards, but guess what? As a designer you have FULL CONTROL to modify the UI however you like!
Translated: "Sure, the default set of user-facing interfaces that ship with your multi-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars Notes installation may be not only completely worthless but an active impediment to getting work done, but hey, you can always turn around and spend another several hundred thousand dollars paying full-time developers to attempt to graft actual functionality onto it!"
This is, sadly, pretty much par for the course. Any time someone points out just how badly Notes performs any of its alleged real-world functions (ie: email, scheduling, document storage and collaboration), its apologists trip over themselves to remind you how customizable it is, which is sort of like Ford Motors pointing out all of the cool aftermarket exhaust pipes you could buy for the Pinto.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Notes exists, because it's always helpful to have a perfect example of how not to implement an important idea. But I won't shed any tears when it's gone, and neither will anyone else who ever faced the horror of using or administering it.
If Lotus spent so much time thinking about Notes' design, why did they get it so horribly, horribly wrong?
...alternic is a fraud. The entire operation, domain name and trademark included, was stolen from Kashpureff via a lawsuit by one of his ex-partners. I wouldn't trust them to shine my shoes, much less run my root servers.
...which is that nobody cares about the merits of the competing RW specs. Rewritable removable optical media is voodoo technology, sold by the cynical to the guillible, who generally use it until the one bundled RW disk gives out, and then take one look at the relative prices of R and RW media and switch to the former exclusively.
The one question which will determine the winner between DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W) is "which one produces DVDs that play more reliably in my $125 set-top DVD player?" So far, Pioneer seems to have a very clear edge, but the year is yet young and Sony/HP may yet get their act in gear.
Amusingly enough, there is a subway in Cincinnati. Well, about three or four stations worth, anyway. They started construction on it in the 70s, ran out of money, and never completed it.
More details here.
- Vorbis 1.0
- Perl 5.8.0
...and now Debian 3.0
REPENT, REPENT, THE END IS NIGH!As you appear to be a fan of Open Source Software, when are you going to release the code to the perl script you've apparently used to crank out the last fifteen or so Xanth novels, and will the code be GPLed or BSD-licensed?
Like a recurring infection, the "holographic storage" demo gets trotted out to the media every three to five years. Every time, the press breathlessly regurgitates claims of unbelievably storage capacities. Every time, IBM claims that it's "a few years away from shipping" the technology. And every last time, it never happens.
I first remember seeing IBM say that they were "a few years" away from a working implementation in Byte magazine...in 1983.
This isn't so much a vaporware story as it is the vaporware story of our generation. Expect Xanadu, Duke Nukem Forever and Debian/Hurd to ship decades before you ever see functional holographic storage in the consumer market.
The syntax of UNIX config files is pretty standard
/etc/hosts? Yeah, that looks pretty much like the one used by syslog.conf, except oops you can't use spaces in the latter, it has to be tabs. Of course neither of them look much like Apache's config files, which in turn bear no resemblance at all to SAMBA's. Oh, and let's not forget what happens if you're silly enough to leave a blank line or a comment somewhere in /etc/passwd.
/etc directory on a newly installed RedHat or Solaris machine contains close to a hundred files, and damn near each of them has its own unique configuration syntax, many of which will cause total failure if you use it in the wrong file.
It is? Please enlighten me: which standard would that be, exactly? The one used by
The
The sense of accomplishment that unix geeks get from knowing how to manage this 50-car-pileup of interfaces somehow usually manages to overwhelm what should be our righteous indignation at being asked to do such a stupid thing in the first place.
You can rag on Microsoft's design choices all you like, but at least they actually attempted to solve the problem. Hell, at least they realized that there was a problem. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "let each app pick its own way" increases your job security at the cost of decreasing the likelihood that unix will win the datacenter wars.
Presumably it was wearing "magnetic boots" as well.
...yet they're still rendered helpless by a solid uppercut to the jaw.
No need. It's traveling at the same velocity as the ship. Place it against the hull and it'll stay there for a least a while, until vibrations, space debris, or the ship making a small course correction serves to push it away.
"Magnetic boots" are only necessary if you want to walk: an action that, in zero G, will serve to propel you away from the thing you're trying to walk on.
That said, putting the phaser "down" was pretty silly: they could just as easily have left it hanging in midair, and expected to find it within a few inches of its original position when they came back to it. That would have cost more sfx money though...
Maybe they mistakenly assimilated Mike Tyson?
God forbid that I attempt to defend Trek physics, but I'm not sure why you believe that the orbital velocity of any spaceship has much of anything to do with the mechanics of doing an EVA or a hull excursion.
Yes, a ship in orbit around a planet is moving at several thousand miles an hour, with the associated inertia. But guess what? As a fringe benefit of being inside the ship during liftoff and orbital insertion, so are you. Your own body's velocity relative to the planet does not suddenly change as a result of stepping out of an airlock. You'll stay close to the ship until you apply some force to push yourself away from it -- hence the little backpack-mounted gas jets that Shuttle astronauts use for EVAs.
As far as the boots are concerned, they didn't strike me as terribly unrealistic. Put an electromagnet in the sole, and a pressure switch inside the top of the boot that switches the magnet off when you apply enough upward pressure on it with your foot. Et voila.
Orbital EVAs are incredibly tricky things; just not for any of the reasons you describe here.