This could be spectacular! Tossing water droplets around in zero-G pales in comparison to getting that thing twirling like a baton at a Texas halftime show...
While I appreciate ESR's statements, pinheaded politicians and bureaucrats tend to take things the wrong way regardless how small the words are you use to spell it out. I can picture some knucklehead seeing the Gilmore quote and saying, "well, these internet geeks are getting militant! They're threatening us!" And then they do stoopid things like propose federal licensing of all network engineers backed by heavy fines and Federal prison terms, to where resetting your own WAP would get you a year in jail and a $50,000 fine.
Indeed. I've been off-grid at various times, and my ace in the hole is a 2x2 solar panel with alligator clips charging a 12v automotive jumpstart box that had a built-in inverter. Charge it all day, power the laptop and charge the phone all night.
Yep. About ten years ago I had a Gateway/ALR server with then-massive 2Gb of RAM. It insisted on checking that RAM at startup, 256K at a pop, a couple of steps per second. Yes, this means it took nearly 15 minutes *just to check the RAM that never failed*. Called Gateway and asked how that could be bypassed.
"Whyyyy would you ever want to do thaaaaaaat????" the rep mooed at me.
Ummmm... maybe because 32,000 people are waiting to use the site while this machine is counting its frickin' toes, that's why.
There was no bypass, no BIOS setting, no keypress. It was like the original IBM PC again.
Oh, and then Windows 2000 *started* booting.
And if it had to check the RAID array, forget it. Go home, come back tomorrow.
Sure, the days when I had to wait for a particular server to count through 2Gb of RAM 256K at a time at boot are gone, but in compensation, cell phones, which used to be largely instant-on, now take longer and longer to start. The worst example was a work-issued Blackberry 9630 earlier this year, running BBOS 5.x, which took an astonishing 13 minutes, 10 seconds to come to ready from a battery pull. Even my 9700 with OS6 takes over two minutes to fire up, down from five minutes when it was new with OS5.
It should be illegal to sell a phone that takes longer to start than the human brain can live without oxygen.
Canadian content requirements for commercial websites? What, so walmart.ca would have to sell at least 80% hoser merchandise? The Globe and Mail website would have to feature at least 75% Canadian news even if nothing happened in the Great White North that day?
"Age" doesn't always equate to "useful experience" but wherever you find useful experience, you usually find someone who's taken some time to acquire it. Personally, if I was in an organization where we had the wherewithal to mentor someone on their way up, show them how to learn things on their own, give them the latitude to make potentially-costly mistakes in a sandbox, I'd have no problem hiring inexperienced people. Unfortunately, in my organization right now we can't afford to have anybody in there who hasn't wised up by making some mistakes in someone else's sandbox, since we can't afford to have them make those mistakes in ours. Average age of my recent (last five years) hires: about 47. Average experience: 25 years.
OK, then, what filesystem would we want Apple to make available on their machines? ZFS? After the announcement on MacForge that they'd ported ZFS to OSX, I heard a big fat silence. ReiserFS? Ummmm...
OSX Server supports UFS and ZFS, but for a developer workstation you'd want other options, yes? So, what do you wanna see?
I put up Sun's free VirtualBox VM environment on a MacBook Pro, and both OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 Intel were worthless. Both achieved speeds reminiscent of PearPC.
XP worked OK. Ubuntu was fine.
You'd think if you were going to release a VM, at least you'd make sure your flagship OS would run on it at speeds that would compare favorably to a 20-year-old Amiga.
The thing about tweets is also off the mark... for those people who rise to the limited medium, 140 characters can be a challenge to be complete and concise and even funny in barely three lines. Sure, there's lots of IM-speek, but I think Twitter and other such things are forcing people to trim down the bloat that had crept into modern written speech. You can't fit that many empty buzzwords into an IM and still have it make sense.
Some days I wish the Capitol Building had one of those carnival signs next to the door. YOU MUST BE THIS SMART TO RIDE THIS RIDE.
Really? Identity theft over P2P? Anyone who identity is so weak they could lose it by grabbing a torrent of Ubuntu probably has bigger problems than this congressdroid wants to address.
I'd vote for this as one of the toughest ever made. One time I got home late at night and somehow left the phone on the roof of the car. Overnight, it snowed about five inches. I didn't feel like shoveling the driveway, so I just got in, gunned the engine and after a few back-and-forth runs, made it out onto the road. Got to work, couldn't find the phone. Finally, after I got home again, I took my cordless house phone outside and dialed the Nokia. Underneath the packed snow, under the car, there was a green glow and a faint ring. I dug the Nokia out, wiped it off, and it still worked. Sure, the stubby antenna had broken (easily replaced) but the screen wasn't cracked and it could still make calls. I still have that phone in a drawer somewhere and in the battery on the back there are still deep grooves from the grit on the tires rubbing through the plastic.
What really got me was that I figured I had driven over the thing about eight times.
The late lamented Sony UX-50 Palm-based PDA of several years ago was (and I'll go out on a limb here) the finest PDA that *will have ever been built*. A usable thumb keyboard, WiFi, BlueTooth, still camera, video, audio record and playback, removable storage, and a fairly active Palm-based third-party app base. It worked well with my Macs and Windows. And it was pretty darn small. Its few drawbacks mostly were related not to its technology (which was amazing for three or four years ago and still solid now) but mostly related to Sony's hoogizzashit attitude toward cool products (release them, hype them, and in two years deny you ever sold them -- this goes back at least 20 years).
Sony could have leveraged that platform to own what we now call "UMPCs" but the current UX is overpriced, overloaded (with a Redmond operating system) and just not sized right. I adored just about everything about the hardware on my UX50, to the point where when my first was stolen off my desk at work, I went and got another immediately. No, it wasn't a phone, but it sported BT and I had a pretty good EDGE BT-capable phone.
My HTC Wizard may be a phone, and have a usable keyboard, WiFi and BT, but it isn't even in the same league.
I work for a fairly large federal agency, and not only is this done, they actually have a designated staff of some size whose job it is all day to go through not only national print publications, but even regional or large local papers and magazines looking for articles about this agency. These are then collected and circulated among senior executives and used to brief officials before they go testify on the Hill and look stupid because they didn't see that some columnist in East Bufu, Ohio wrote an article critical of some regulation we instituted.
What's next...? Suing and billing companies where people pass around interesting URLs? Suing people when they print an article, take it home and show it to their wife or husband?
If SIIA thinks that every company will buy a subscription to every publication every person in that company might ever find of interest, they should be living in East Bufu, Ohio.
Oh, and in the last 24 hours, Michelle Madigan has jerked her profile off of LinkedIn. She probably is now burying every computing device in her house out in the yard.
I've conducted a fairly thorough de-redmondization of my house in the last year, and neither I nor my fiancee (nor the cats) miss Office, Outlook, Word, MSIE, Works, FrontPage, or pretty damn near anything else they've ever produced.
I've sometimes enjoyed Flight Simulator, though. However, X-Plane on Linux and Mac rox.
If you actually NEED an "office suite," that is. I spend at least 10 and often 16 hours a day in front of a screen, and I never "need" an "office suite."
Most people spend most of their time in Office in the word processing module. Word processors are for putting things on paper. Why are they putting things on paper?
If paper IS still the medium of choice for communicating schoolwork, then hoogizzashit how it got ONTO paper? And if the files are electronic, they should be in an open, interchangeable format (and again, hoogizzashit what software you used to produce that open, interchangeable file)?
Yeah, we are well on our way to remove the concept of "learning" and substitute "training." It's already prevalent in a lot of workplaces... where I work, at a Big-Ass Federal Agency, they won't spend a dime to help people get a degree in computer science, even though their job involves juggling technology that affects the lives of millions, but they'll waste tens of thousands of dollars a year on "vendor training" that does little but to teach them what button to push, not why they're going to push it. And you can forget "here's how to write the code behind that button." And in 18 months when the vendor completely revamps their software, all that "training" will be head garbage.
Far from teaching people to make their own rods and reels, or even teaching them to fish, we've descended to where we aren't even giving people a fish. We're giving them the educational equivalent of Louis Kemp Imitation Crabmeat, made of Genuine Imitation Fish Flakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Nø, really!
This could be spectacular! Tossing water droplets around in zero-G pales in comparison to getting that thing twirling like a baton at a Texas halftime show...
While I appreciate ESR's statements, pinheaded politicians and bureaucrats tend to take things the wrong way regardless how small the words are you use to spell it out. I can picture some knucklehead seeing the Gilmore quote and saying, "well, these internet geeks are getting militant! They're threatening us!" And then they do stoopid things like propose federal licensing of all network engineers backed by heavy fines and Federal prison terms, to where resetting your own WAP would get you a year in jail and a $50,000 fine.
Indeed. I've been off-grid at various times, and my ace in the hole is a 2x2 solar panel with alligator clips charging a 12v automotive jumpstart box that had a built-in inverter. Charge it all day, power the laptop and charge the phone all night.
Yep. About ten years ago I had a Gateway/ALR server with then-massive 2Gb of RAM. It insisted on checking that RAM at startup, 256K at a pop, a couple of steps per second. Yes, this means it took nearly 15 minutes *just to check the RAM that never failed*. Called Gateway and asked how that could be bypassed.
"Whyyyy would you ever want to do thaaaaaaat????" the rep mooed at me.
Ummmm... maybe because 32,000 people are waiting to use the site while this machine is counting its frickin' toes, that's why.
There was no bypass, no BIOS setting, no keypress. It was like the original IBM PC again.
Oh, and then Windows 2000 *started* booting.
And if it had to check the RAID array, forget it. Go home, come back tomorrow.
Sure, the days when I had to wait for a particular server to count through 2Gb of RAM 256K at a time at boot are gone, but in compensation, cell phones, which used to be largely instant-on, now take longer and longer to start. The worst example was a work-issued Blackberry 9630 earlier this year, running BBOS 5.x, which took an astonishing 13 minutes, 10 seconds to come to ready from a battery pull. Even my 9700 with OS6 takes over two minutes to fire up, down from five minutes when it was new with OS5.
It should be illegal to sell a phone that takes longer to start than the human brain can live without oxygen.
Let's ask two popular search engines the same simple question:
"Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks?"
Seriously. Try it on Bing, then try it on Google.
Game over.
TWAIN? Lolwut?
MS-DOS 1.0 was a variant of CP/M, not the other way around.
What the hell fun is THAT? I mean, this is the best thing since Girls On Trampolines, and they design a dress to defeat the most intriguing part.
Canadian content requirements for commercial websites? What, so walmart.ca would have to sell at least 80% hoser merchandise? The Globe and Mail website would have to feature at least 75% Canadian news even if nothing happened in the Great White North that day?
LIGHT PARROT
>>That will not ignite.
"Age" doesn't always equate to "useful experience" but wherever you find useful experience, you usually find someone who's taken some time to acquire it. Personally, if I was in an organization where we had the wherewithal to mentor someone on their way up, show them how to learn things on their own, give them the latitude to make potentially-costly mistakes in a sandbox, I'd have no problem hiring inexperienced people. Unfortunately, in my organization right now we can't afford to have anybody in there who hasn't wised up by making some mistakes in someone else's sandbox, since we can't afford to have them make those mistakes in ours. Average age of my recent (last five years) hires: about 47. Average experience: 25 years.
OK, then, what filesystem would we want Apple to make available on their machines? ZFS? After the announcement on MacForge that they'd ported ZFS to OSX, I heard a big fat silence. ReiserFS? Ummmm...
OSX Server supports UFS and ZFS, but for a developer workstation you'd want other options, yes? So, what do you wanna see?
I put up Sun's free VirtualBox VM environment on a MacBook Pro, and both OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 Intel were worthless. Both achieved speeds reminiscent of PearPC.
XP worked OK. Ubuntu was fine.
You'd think if you were going to release a VM, at least you'd make sure your flagship OS would run on it at speeds that would compare favorably to a 20-year-old Amiga.
The thing about tweets is also off the mark... for those people who rise to the limited medium, 140 characters can be a challenge to be complete and concise and even funny in barely three lines. Sure, there's lots of IM-speek, but I think Twitter and other such things are forcing people to trim down the bloat that had crept into modern written speech. You can't fit that many empty buzzwords into an IM and still have it make sense.
Some days I wish the Capitol Building had one of those carnival signs next to the door. YOU MUST BE THIS SMART TO RIDE THIS RIDE.
Really? Identity theft over P2P? Anyone who identity is so weak they could lose it by grabbing a torrent of Ubuntu probably has bigger problems than this congressdroid wants to address.
I'd vote for this as one of the toughest ever made. One time I got home late at night and somehow left the phone on the roof of the car. Overnight, it snowed about five inches. I didn't feel like shoveling the driveway, so I just got in, gunned the engine and after a few back-and-forth runs, made it out onto the road. Got to work, couldn't find the phone. Finally, after I got home again, I took my cordless house phone outside and dialed the Nokia. Underneath the packed snow, under the car, there was a green glow and a faint ring. I dug the Nokia out, wiped it off, and it still worked. Sure, the stubby antenna had broken (easily replaced) but the screen wasn't cracked and it could still make calls. I still have that phone in a drawer somewhere and in the battery on the back there are still deep grooves from the grit on the tires rubbing through the plastic.
What really got me was that I figured I had driven over the thing about eight times.
The late lamented Sony UX-50 Palm-based PDA of several years ago was (and I'll go out on a limb here) the finest PDA that *will have ever been built*. A usable thumb keyboard, WiFi, BlueTooth, still camera, video, audio record and playback, removable storage, and a fairly active Palm-based third-party app base. It worked well with my Macs and Windows. And it was pretty darn small. Its few drawbacks mostly were related not to its technology (which was amazing for three or four years ago and still solid now) but mostly related to Sony's hoogizzashit attitude toward cool products (release them, hype them, and in two years deny you ever sold them -- this goes back at least 20 years).
Sony could have leveraged that platform to own what we now call "UMPCs" but the current UX is overpriced, overloaded (with a Redmond operating system) and just not sized right. I adored just about everything about the hardware on my UX50, to the point where when my first was stolen off my desk at work, I went and got another immediately. No, it wasn't a phone, but it sported BT and I had a pretty good EDGE BT-capable phone.
My HTC Wizard may be a phone, and have a usable keyboard, WiFi and BT, but it isn't even in the same league.
I work for a fairly large federal agency, and not only is this done, they actually have a designated staff of some size whose job it is all day to go through not only national print publications, but even regional or large local papers and magazines looking for articles about this agency. These are then collected and circulated among senior executives and used to brief officials before they go testify on the Hill and look stupid because they didn't see that some columnist in East Bufu, Ohio wrote an article critical of some regulation we instituted.
What's next...? Suing and billing companies where people pass around interesting URLs? Suing people when they print an article, take it home and show it to their wife or husband?
If SIIA thinks that every company will buy a subscription to every publication every person in that company might ever find of interest, they should be living in East Bufu, Ohio.
Or maybe they already are. In their minds.
Oh, and in the last 24 hours, Michelle Madigan has jerked her profile off of LinkedIn. She probably is now burying every computing device in her house out in the yard.
My favorite line from the parking-lot video?
"Can I have your badge?"
Second choice: "She looks like Lindsay Lohan, except Linday Lohan was smarter."
Seriously, I don't know what NBC thought they were gonna pull off here...
"People want what Microsoft peddles"
We do?
I've conducted a fairly thorough de-redmondization of my house in the last year, and neither I nor my fiancee (nor the cats) miss Office, Outlook, Word, MSIE, Works, FrontPage, or pretty damn near anything else they've ever produced.
I've sometimes enjoyed Flight Simulator, though. However, X-Plane on Linux and Mac rox.
If you actually NEED an "office suite," that is. I spend at least 10 and often 16 hours a day in front of a screen, and I never "need" an "office suite."
Most people spend most of their time in Office in the word processing module. Word processors are for putting things on paper. Why are they putting things on paper?
If paper IS still the medium of choice for communicating schoolwork, then hoogizzashit how it got ONTO paper? And if the files are electronic, they should be in an open, interchangeable format (and again, hoogizzashit what software you used to produce that open, interchangeable file)?
Fark it, kidz... hand your stuff in HAND WRITTEN!
Do they still give out grades for penmanship?
Yeah, we are well on our way to remove the concept of "learning" and substitute "training." It's already prevalent in a lot of workplaces... where I work, at a Big-Ass Federal Agency, they won't spend a dime to help people get a degree in computer science, even though their job involves juggling technology that affects the lives of millions, but they'll waste tens of thousands of dollars a year on "vendor training" that does little but to teach them what button to push, not why they're going to push it. And you can forget "here's how to write the code behind that button." And in 18 months when the vendor completely revamps their software, all that "training" will be head garbage.
Far from teaching people to make their own rods and reels, or even teaching them to fish, we've descended to where we aren't even giving people a fish. We're giving them the educational equivalent of Louis Kemp Imitation Crabmeat, made of Genuine Imitation Fish Flakes.