The article is pretty high level, but interesting none the less. I'm skeptical that is really as secure as they say it is. It would seem that any building which relies on outside connections would be vulnerable if those connections were cut. Not to mention that the air towers that were mentioned could be closed off, etc.
It seems to me that the best defence would be geographically distributed datacenters synced up on a regular basis. Of course you would have to deal with data syncing, and perhaps a master-slave relationship amongst the datacenters, but these are relatively simple problems to solve, compared to preparing for a nuclear or other attack...
In a somewhat related topic, I wonder if December 26th is eBay's highest listing day? I mean, you would think that there are millions of people who undoubtedly got stuff for X-mas that they didn't want right? Well, what better place to dispose of it than through eBay.
Even if it isn't their highest listing day I bet it is one of the highest...
At least that's what I've been told and found. We have Dish Network and I'd love to get a PVR like Tivo, but no one supports them. Them being Dish Network.
Oh well. We'll have to stick with good old-fashioned VCR's.:-)
After all the risks that were taken to put this thing in space - it would be a shame for it to go to waste. (Risk = putting 75 LBS of plutonium within a few miles of crashing down onto the earth.)
NASA is having a rough time with it lately. There have been a lot of pretty expensive and embarasing failures. If NASA were a private enterprise I'd suspect a management shakeup. Since it is a government body - I'm not sure what can be done. Clearly something should be done...
1) Shut off the incoming heating vents to the room in the Winter. Then reopen them in the summer when you don't heat your house, or when you have the AC on.
2) Make sure any outgoing vents are open so that air from the room is circulated out.
3) Fans in the window (in case the room really gets hot.)
4) Thermostat controlled fans or AC unit in the window.
That should do it. Nothing like killing your coworkers in a video game to spur team building, and fun.
The addition of beer, wine and other alcoholic drinks can only enhance this effect. Just have barf buckets handy - Quake induced motion sickness and alcohol can be messy!
Their monopoly in portable gaming is well earned. The Gameboy/Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance are all great systems. Not great technically necessarily - but they are a hell-u-va lot of fun. The games are well suited to the system, and the system is well suited for gaming.
I don't see any competition on the market at all. Fortunately, it isn't really a bad thing since the GBA and GC systems are pretty cheap, as are the games.
Actually I think the supply issue CmdrTaco is refering to is just better planning on Nintendo's part. The Gamecube uses less powerful, more widely producable parts, and therefore I think they can keep up with demand better.
Having said that - good luck finding one in Northern VA where I am. You can't.
Absolutely. I live in Northern Virginia and commute to Downtown Washington, DC every day via the Metro (our subway). My phone is spotty in Virginia, doesn't work in some buildings, and doesn't work at all in the Subway. Its not the company either - we switched cell companies about a year ago - we had the same problems we have now.
It is just amazing to be that this area is supposed to be one of the most high-tech in the country, yet you cannot use a cell phone half the places you go.
So if you hire private security guards to protect your house, do you expect them to forcibly keep out the FBI when they have a warrant?
No, of course not. But I think the point is that the FBI doesn't need a warrant to bug your computer with a keystroke logging virus. They should. Anything else should be considered breaking and entering - even if it is the government that does it...
Nice post. I often wondered what people have enough time or energy to try to max out on Karma t Slashdot. Don't you kiddies have video games or something to play with?? Sheesh...
Roadrunner is pretty decent. I've used them twice in two different cities. If that is indeed what ends up happening, then it won't be the worst thing in the world.
Transmeta never had a competitive advantage in the marketplace. They could never claim that their CPU's were better enough in any respect to make them a suitable replacement for a comperable Intel CPU.
Their key angles of low heat/longer battery life were true, but the extent with which they were true wasn't enough to get anybody's attention.
For example: If Transmeta's CPU would have made my laptop last 8 hours on a charge vs 4, then THAT is worth making a switch, even if it means lost CPU power. I don't think they ever produced that kind of difference.
In order to compete with Intel, Transmeta had to have a REAL competitive advantage. They never had one good enough to make them a viable option. So, I'd have to agree that they may not belong for this world...
I thought it was interesting how the author discussed the mid-release swap out of VM code in the 2.4 series kernel. He mentioned that Linus had felt that the AA version of the code was better than the existing version and wholesale swapped it out.
Does anyone know why Linus did this? Are there some empirical results somewhere that dictate a reason to do this? Certainly, it would seem that there would be, but the author didn't point it out.
Also the author pointed out that 2.2.x kernel's break at very high load levels. Is there documentation somewhere discussing what that might be?
With Linux, customers "end up being in the operating systems business," managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other," Miller said. "That's the job of a software vendor like Microsoft."
So, if you use Microsoft, what business are you in? The pay through your nose business or the pray that my system will not crash horribly today business...
This quote makes it seem like you can use a Windows OS out of the box with no work at all. OK raise your hand the last time that happened. I've never had a new machine fresh out of the box running some variation of Windows that didn't need a patch right away. Windowsupdate or not, Windows machines are just as much if not more work than Linux machines as far as keeping up with the OS releases...
I think Slashdot's backout plan is to move the servers back into CmdrTaco's basement, and to run the site off of his DSL line.:-)
Seriously though, it will be interesting to see what does happen to this place if/when VA goes under. I would miss this site. I've been coming here for a long time now.
K-meleon is Pathetic
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I thought I'd give it a try. Especially when I saw how small the download file was (less than 4MB).
I guess what I was hoping for was the lightweight, fast, and standards based Netscape that NS 6.x was supposed to be. Well, what I found out was that it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it doesn't even really work.
It failed trying to import my IE favorites. (I have more than 512 - that is a no, no in K-meleon.) Then it refused to load any pages. Oh, and it cannot figure out how to work with a proxy config file either.
I can understand the IT department's headaches from users who screw up their machines, but developers are typically smarter than the average Outlook user (hopefully??) and can manage their own computers just fine. Computers as company property and subject to coroporate/IT policies is one thing... coding with my wrist chained to the chair is another.
I wholehartedly agree with your post. I also particularly like this last section.
The fact of the matter is that most developers are more experienced and more knowledgable about the setup and usage of their machines than the IT staff is. I've always found it to be ironic that some 19 year old moron with no formal computing education and no previous work experience could be empowered and trusted to have Admin rights on an NT/2000 system, when the developer who works on it cannot.
I've been in that kind of environment, and as many folks here have pointed out it KILLS productivity. You instantly create a huge bottleneck in your work by always waiting for the IT guy to come and run a command for you, or install an application. It sucks. It sucks. (It's worth saying three times.) It SUCKS!
Wow. This sounds amazingly familiar to a consulting company I used to work for. They did the same thing. Hire like mad, pimp themselves to VC's and all of a sudden the contracts all dried up. Out of the 70 or so employees, only 6-8 were billing. Of those, 3 were working for a client who wasn't paying its bills. Fortunately, I was one of the other 5 - but still. You could just tell we were going nowhere REAL fast.
Needless to say, I made haste and got out of there.
Lucky for me, this was more than a year ago, so there were still plenty of jobs to be had. If I were in the same situation now, I'd be worried. There are not nearly as many opportunities, and tons of H1-B Visa holders who will take work for 1/3 of what I would rather than go back to their home country.
I don't see how a car can become obsolete. Especially after just 1 year. Cars, like computers are quick depreciators, but they can last a long, long time with proper care.
As other posters pointed out the Computer industry is becoming a slow growth industry. There just isn't the level of innovation and performance gains today that we were seeing 3-5 years ago to justify a new computer every year.
The Auto industry is the same way. My 1993 Dodge Ram is just as good as a 2001 Dodge Ram. I have AC, Automatic, etc. Sure, the newer Ram looks prettier, but it is just eye candy. The FUNCTION of the truck is what matters, and it works and drives just as well as the new one.
Unless you like throwing away your money, you should seriously consider purchasing a car and running it until it has a catestrophic failure. That may mean owning the same car for 8, 10, 15 or even 20 years. (!) If it still gets you to work, Tae-Bo lessons, and the grocery store, what reason do you have to upgrade?
I don't think so. Lawmakers who support the draconian DRM measures will be voted out of office, and they will be replaced with more citizen friendly policies.
Laws that are passed which overstep the rights of citizens will be repealed by courts.
Users will choose not to purchase and use DRM protected media. (Remember DIVX?)
Savvy users will break the DRM Schemes and post the cracks to the net effectively destroying the technology.
DRM won't work. It has no benefits to end users, no one wants it and everyone will resist it. Its a bad idea, plain and simple.
Actually, what you are refering to is called public key Encryption. You encrypt the file with your friends public key, he/she decrypts the file with their private key. Bingo. Secure data transfer and access.
PGP would do this for you nicely. You don't need DRM.
Take care,
Brian
Having relatively recently graduated from college, I don't really see a way that this can be done. Most of my group experiences involved maybe half of the group caring about their grade, and the other half being ok with a C. You then end up with an extremely unbalanced work load as the ones who care the most do the most and produce the better product. Then they usually have to go around and fix up the people's work who really didn't care as much. All in all, it rarely leads to a produtive group and doesn't teach you much about the work force.
Oh boy can I tell you just graduated from college. What you just described is _exactly_ how it works in the real world.
Very, Very, Very rarely will you be fortunate enough to have an assignment to complete on your own. The vast majority of the time you will be working with a team. A team consisting of:
50% Morons
30% Unmotivated sloths who surf the web all day
10% Motivated, yet incompetent programmers who produce the most buggy, god awful code ever.
10% Motivated, Competent programmers
No this is not an exageration. This is how the real world works. The 10% of us who can pull our own weight often times pull the weight of the other 90%.
I've never had the pleasure of being on a team where a majority of the team members were usefull or productive. Perhaps I'm just really unlucky. If that is the case, I hope you end up working with a better calibre of folks than I have!
Slashdot Mirror
The article is pretty high level, but interesting none the less. I'm skeptical that is really as secure as they say it is. It would seem that any building which relies on outside connections would be vulnerable if those connections were cut. Not to mention that the air towers that were mentioned could be closed off, etc.
It seems to me that the best defence would be geographically distributed datacenters synced up on a regular basis. Of course you would have to deal with data syncing, and perhaps a master-slave relationship amongst the datacenters, but these are relatively simple problems to solve, compared to preparing for a nuclear or other attack...
Take care,
Brian
--
Only a few Free Palm m100's left...
--
In a somewhat related topic, I wonder if December 26th is eBay's highest listing day? I mean, you would think that there are millions of people who undoubtedly got stuff for X-mas that they didn't want right? Well, what better place to dispose of it than through eBay.
Even if it isn't their highest listing day I bet it is one of the highest...
Take care,
Brian
--
We only have a few FREE Palm m100's left...
--
At least that's what I've been told and found. We have Dish Network and I'd love to get a PVR like Tivo, but no one supports them. Them being Dish Network.
Oh well. We'll have to stick with good old-fashioned VCR's. :-)
Take care,
Brian
--
Just a few free Palm m100's left...
--
After all the risks that were taken to put this thing in space - it would be a shame for it to go to waste. (Risk = putting 75 LBS of plutonium within a few miles of crashing down onto the earth.)
NASA is having a rough time with it lately. There have been a lot of pretty expensive and embarasing failures. If NASA were a private enterprise I'd suspect a management shakeup. Since it is a government body - I'm not sure what can be done. Clearly something should be done...
Take care,
Brian
--
We are almost out of Free Palm m100's...
--
There are a few of ways to do it:
1) Shut off the incoming heating vents to the room in the Winter. Then reopen them in the summer when you don't heat your house, or when you have the AC on.
2) Make sure any outgoing vents are open so that air from the room is circulated out.
3) Fans in the window (in case the room really gets hot.)
4) Thermostat controlled fans or AC unit in the window.
Take care,
Brian
--
We are almost out of Free Palm Pilots...
--
That should do it. Nothing like killing your coworkers in a video game to spur team building, and fun.
The addition of beer, wine and other alcoholic drinks can only enhance this effect. Just have barf buckets handy - Quake induced motion sickness and alcohol can be messy!
Take care,
Brian
--
Limited Time Only - Free Palm m100's!
--
DSL wasn't such a bad way to go after all. Verizon isn't going away anytime soon, the service is fast, reliable and always on.
Maybe this will be how the battle of DSL vs Cable will be decided - in bankruptcy court.
Take care,
Brian
--
Come and get a free Palm m100 --
I don't see any competition on the market at all. Fortunately, it isn't really a bad thing since the GBA and GC systems are pretty cheap, as are the games.
Take care,
Brian
--
Do you want a free Palm m100?
--
Actually I think the supply issue CmdrTaco is refering to is just better planning on Nintendo's part. The Gamecube uses less powerful, more widely producable parts, and therefore I think they can keep up with demand better.
Having said that - good luck finding one in Northern VA where I am. You can't.
Take care,
Brian
--
Do you want a free Palm m100?
--
It is just amazing to be that this area is supposed to be one of the most high-tech in the country, yet you cannot use a cell phone half the places you go.
Take care,
Brian
--
Want a Free Palm m100?
So if you hire private security guards to protect your house, do you expect them to forcibly keep out the FBI when they have a warrant?
No, of course not. But I think the point is that the FBI doesn't need a warrant to bug your computer with a keystroke logging virus. They should. Anything else should be considered breaking and entering - even if it is the government that does it...
Take care,
Brian
--
Do you want a Palm m100? Get one Free now...
Nice post. I often wondered what people have enough time or energy to try to max out on Karma t Slashdot. Don't you kiddies have video games or something to play with?? Sheesh...
Take care,
Brian
We are giving away free Palm m100's...
Roadrunner is pretty decent. I've used them twice in two different cities. If that is indeed what ends up happening, then it won't be the worst thing in the world.
Take care,
Brian
We are giving away free Palm m100's...
Transmeta never had a competitive advantage in the marketplace. They could never claim that their CPU's were better enough in any respect to make them a suitable replacement for a comperable Intel CPU.
Their key angles of low heat/longer battery life were true, but the extent with which they were true wasn't enough to get anybody's attention.
For example: If Transmeta's CPU would have made my laptop last 8 hours on a charge vs 4, then THAT is worth making a switch, even if it means lost CPU power. I don't think they ever produced that kind of difference.
In order to compete with Intel, Transmeta had to have a REAL competitive advantage. They never had one good enough to make them a viable option. So, I'd have to agree that they may not belong for this world...
Take care,
Brian
--
http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/
--
I thought it was interesting how the author discussed the mid-release swap out of VM code in the 2.4 series kernel. He mentioned that Linus had felt that the AA version of the code was better than the existing version and wholesale swapped it out.
Does anyone know why Linus did this? Are there some empirical results somewhere that dictate a reason to do this? Certainly, it would seem that there would be, but the author didn't point it out.
Also the author pointed out that 2.2.x kernel's break at very high load levels. Is there documentation somewhere discussing what that might be?
Take care,
Brian
--
100% Linux Web Hosting
--
The first question that comes to mind is:
When has a new Windows release EVER performed faster than a previous one??
Where is the news here??
Take care,
Brian
Brian
--
http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/
With Linux, customers "end up being in the operating systems business," managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other," Miller said. "That's the job of a software vendor like Microsoft."
So, if you use Microsoft, what business are you in? The pay through your nose business or the pray that my system will not crash horribly today business...
This quote makes it seem like you can use a Windows OS out of the box with no work at all. OK raise your hand the last time that happened. I've never had a new machine fresh out of the box running some variation of Windows that didn't need a patch right away. Windowsupdate or not, Windows machines are just as much if not more work than Linux machines as far as keeping up with the OS releases...
Take care,
Brian
100% Linux Web Hosting
I think Slashdot's backout plan is to move the servers back into CmdrTaco's basement, and to run the site off of his DSL line. :-)
Seriously though, it will be interesting to see what does happen to this place if/when VA goes under. I would miss this site. I've been coming here for a long time now.
Time will tell...
Brian
100% Linux Web Hosting...
I thought I'd give it a try. Especially when I saw how small the download file was (less than 4MB).
I guess what I was hoping for was the lightweight, fast, and standards based Netscape that NS 6.x was supposed to be. Well, what I found out was that it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it doesn't even really work.
It failed trying to import my IE favorites. (I have more than 512 - that is a no, no in K-meleon.) Then it refused to load any pages. Oh, and it cannot figure out how to work with a proxy config file either.
Stay away. Even NS 6.2 cannot be this bad...
Take care,
Brian
--
100% Linux Based Web Hosting
I can understand the IT department's headaches from users who screw up their machines, but developers are typically smarter than the average Outlook user (hopefully??) and can manage their own computers just fine. Computers as company property and subject to coroporate/IT policies is one thing... coding with my wrist chained to the chair is another.
I wholehartedly agree with your post. I also particularly like this last section.
The fact of the matter is that most developers are more experienced and more knowledgable about the setup and usage of their machines than the IT staff is. I've always found it to be ironic that some 19 year old moron with no formal computing education and no previous work experience could be empowered and trusted to have Admin rights on an NT/2000 system, when the developer who works on it cannot.
I've been in that kind of environment, and as many folks here have pointed out it KILLS productivity. You instantly create a huge bottleneck in your work by always waiting for the IT guy to come and run a command for you, or install an application. It sucks. It sucks. (It's worth saying three times.) It SUCKS!
Take care,
Brian
Web Hosting Solutions running on 100% Linux Servers...
Wow. This sounds amazingly familiar to a consulting company I used to work for. They did the same thing. Hire like mad, pimp themselves to VC's and all of a sudden the contracts all dried up. Out of the 70 or so employees, only 6-8 were billing. Of those, 3 were working for a client who wasn't paying its bills. Fortunately, I was one of the other 5 - but still. You could just tell we were going nowhere REAL fast.
Needless to say, I made haste and got out of there.
Lucky for me, this was more than a year ago, so there were still plenty of jobs to be had. If I were in the same situation now, I'd be worried. There are not nearly as many opportunities, and tons of H1-B Visa holders who will take work for 1/3 of what I would rather than go back to their home country.
Take care,
Brian
I don't see how a car can become obsolete. Especially after just 1 year. Cars, like computers are quick depreciators, but they can last a long, long time with proper care.
As other posters pointed out the Computer industry is becoming a slow growth industry. There just isn't the level of innovation and performance gains today that we were seeing 3-5 years ago to justify a new computer every year.
The Auto industry is the same way. My 1993 Dodge Ram is just as good as a 2001 Dodge Ram. I have AC, Automatic, etc. Sure, the newer Ram looks prettier, but it is just eye candy. The FUNCTION of the truck is what matters, and it works and drives just as well as the new one.
Unless you like throwing away your money, you should seriously consider purchasing a car and running it until it has a catestrophic failure. That may mean owning the same car for 8, 10, 15 or even 20 years. (!) If it still gets you to work, Tae-Bo lessons, and the grocery store, what reason do you have to upgrade?
Take care,
Brian
I don't think so. Lawmakers who support the draconian DRM measures will be voted out of office, and they will be replaced with more citizen friendly policies.
Laws that are passed which overstep the rights of citizens will be repealed by courts.
Users will choose not to purchase and use DRM protected media. (Remember DIVX?)
Savvy users will break the DRM Schemes and post the cracks to the net effectively destroying the technology.
DRM won't work. It has no benefits to end users, no one wants it and everyone will resist it. Its a bad idea, plain and simple.
Take care,
Brian
--
100% Linux Based Web Hosting: http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/
Brian
--
AssortedInteret.com
Featuring 100% Linux Based Web Hosting: http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/
Having relatively recently graduated from college, I don't really see a way that this can be done. Most of my group experiences involved maybe half of the group caring about their grade, and the other half being ok with a C. You then end up with an extremely unbalanced work load as the ones who care the most do the most and produce the better product. Then they usually have to go around and fix up the people's work who really didn't care as much. All in all, it rarely leads to a produtive group and doesn't teach you much about the work force.
Oh boy can I tell you just graduated from college. What you just described is _exactly_ how it works in the real world.
Very, Very, Very rarely will you be fortunate enough to have an assignment to complete on your own. The vast majority of the time you will be working with a team. A team consisting of:
No this is not an exageration. This is how the real world works. The 10% of us who can pull our own weight often times pull the weight of the other 90%.
I've never had the pleasure of being on a team where a majority of the team members were usefull or productive. Perhaps I'm just really unlucky. If that is the case, I hope you end up working with a better calibre of folks than I have!
Take care,
Brian
100% Linux Web Hosting - 0% Windows