That would be the two Blade 150s I own.
That would also be the UltraSparc 5 and 10s I used to support. That would also be any Netra you care to mention. Cheap ass sheet metal with ugly purple and gray plastic cases and ridiculous prices given the performance, quality, lackluster engineering and bottom of the barrel OEM parts, but hey, they had Sun logos on the front. While Sun was crapping out the UltraSparcs SGI released the Octanes and Fuels and HP had the B1000s, which pretty much kicked Sun's ass in terms of engineering, performance or quality.
Sun jumped the shark years ago, in the late 90s they bought into all of that dot.com hype and bullshit (remember, they were the dot in dot.com). Unfortunately they missed out on two important trends, Microsoft started eating their lunch in desktop systems and Linux systems started eating their lunch in low end UNIX systems running commodity services. It was interesting to watch, there was a time when everyone ran MATLAB on Sparcs, it's what you had to do, then in about a two year period from '97 to '99 all of those users bought PCs running Windows. The same thing happened with webservers which went from Suns running Apache to Linux systems running Apache. Meanwhile Scott McNealy ignored all of this and kept telling everyone how great his company was and how we didn't want those cheap-ass Windows boxen or Linux systems. No, we really wanted a network that consisted of big Sun servers with craptacular Sun storage (Sun did do something smart when they bought StorageTek, they're leaving StorageTek alone and dumping all of their Sun branded storage and replacing it with StorageTek) and Sun thin-clients and we would just flit about from workstation to workstation like so many butterflies storing all of our data on SmartCards. It was basically a repeat of the stupidity and arrogance of Apple Computer in the early 90s when Apple kept telling everyone what damned fools they were for buying those ugly stupid Windows boxen instead of spending more money to buy Apple boxen. If the customers had only listened to the vision of Scott McNealy, instead of looking at their capital equipment budgets, Sun would still be doing really well, but those damned customers lost sight of Scott's vision and instead followed the path of mere pecuniary gratification. The bastards!
Now of course Sun claims to have learned their lesson, they have cheap boxes (well they're not that cheap once you add in the support). They'll support Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, NetBSD (well that doesn't count, is there anything that doesn't run NetBSD?) anything you want. They want back into your data center to replace all of those damned Dells that you bought to run Sendmail, Apache, BIND, LDAP and now Oracle RAC. They also want to replace all of the damned Dells you have running Windows. They're scrambling as desperately as HP is to keep their customers but they don't have the cash cow of printer cartridges to fall back on.
Sun's biggest problem is that their corporate strategy is defined in opposition to Microsoft, the problem with having a strategy which is defined in opposition to a competitor like Microsoft is that your every move is reactive and your competitor controls the game. Apple was locked into this losing game until Steve Jobs came back into the company, made his peace with Microsoft and then revitalized the Macintosh line, released the iPod and started the iTunes music store. Apple's corporate strategy these days isn't defined as being "not Microsoft".
If Sun can figure out a new corporate strategy that stands out and offers customers something unique that they can't get anywhere else then they have a chance of coming back. But I don't see that happening. Yeah, Sun has customers to buy their big iron boxes (and their midrange stuff runs NetBackup like nobody's business because the systems have awesome throughput). But the big iron market is pretty competitive, you have SGI offering some kick ass Itanium systems, HP is t
What about having a work surface made out of stainless steel tied to the building electrical ground as an aid to preventing static damage? You can find stainless steel tables at a lot of kitchen supply places and sometimes they're surprisingly cheap. They're also built like tanks and easy to clean. Failing that having the worksurface covered with stainless by a countertop company would give you a nice hard surface, easy to clean and great for discharging static buildup.
I stand corrected on the compatibility of the new servers with Windows and Linux, but have you guys ever bought anything from Sun? The last time I talked to Sun they made all of these claims about how their hardware would run Linux, but when push comes to shove they're really trying to sell Solaris. Go to a sales meeting with a Sun VAR some time and bring up running something other than Solaris on Sun hardware they're going to steer you back to Solaris, which is great if you want to run Solaris, if you don't and want to run Linux and/or Windows instead Dell is a better place to go.
As far as Sun's quoting the price of support on their webpage you guys need to pull your heads out of your asses and wash the shit from your eyes and ears. Sun quotes standard warranty support, which is basically next business day parts exchange in the standard price that they advertise. Now, go to Dell's website and price out a server, Dell's advertising quotes their three year gold support option, with 7x24 service as the default option in the list price. Since this is a server, which means that it's probably going to be high availability, I want to see what those support costs are up front. Dell is a lot more honest about this than Sun is.
And Sun having a contract that provides Windows support, big fucking deal. Hell, if you paid Microsoft enough money they'd support Linux and FreeBSD and send you a tech with Tux tattooed on one ass-cheek and the FreeBSD daemon on the other. Years ago when I was dealing with HP they offered to "support" the DEC and Sun systems that my company had, we declined and stayed with our DEC and Sun contracts, which were cheaper. Sun's support for other platforms might cost like Hell, and it might not be any good, but they will sell it to you if you're dumb enough to buy it. Sun will "support" anything they can, and in doing so they will charge you an arm and a leg for the contract. This is because Sun would like to make a lot of money on high-margin consulting services and support like IBM does. Getting your Windows or Linux support from Sun is like having a Corvette worked on at a VW dealership, it's possible (if you spend enough money) but it's not necessarily smart.
Why is anyone going to purchase a Sun Opteron to run Windows or Linux on anyways? It's not the performance. It's not the price. It's not the quality of the systems (I've disassembled a bunch of lower-end Suns and quite frankly I've seen better built systems from beigebox clonehouses) and it's not because of any brilliant engineering on Sun's part (Sun reserves their good engineering for their larger systems, which is why they pretty much own the market for NetBackup media servers and NetBackup master servers). When it comes right down to it the only reason is "because you can", which plays well on/. where the readers like to install Linux on dead badgers, but not in the real world.
where one of the Sun execs says that Sun got disttracted by the dot.com boom and all of those people with blue hair and piercings. Nice try at revisionism coming from someone who works for a company that at one point claimed to be the dot in dot.com. If you were to put hardware companies on trial for hyping the dot.com boom then Sun would be number one in the dock.
The biggest problem I foresee for Sun in competing with Dell is simple, Suns don't run Windows and they don't run Linux. Dell makes nice, solid boxes, they're not imaginative by any stretch, but they work well and reliably and perform decently. One of the nice things that Dell does is that they quote you the price of the service contract in the initial purchase price for the system. Compare and contrast this with Sun and HP who basically say "service, hey, you bought it, the check cleared and if it stops working then come see us about a service contract (which we will charge you up the wazoo for)".
But back to that Windows thing, it's nice to be able to take a Dell and repurpose it from being a Linux system to a Windows system or vice versa. This helped me out this year with a project I was working on, the project was delayed and one of the Windows admins I worked with needed a new box PDQ. So I gave him my quad proc Dell which he put to good use right away and he ordered me a replacement off of his budget. In a mixed environment, which we're all working now, being able to do this is a major plus. If I buy a bunch of shiny new Suns not only am I locked into Solaris (which is painful to use after working on Linux for so many years) but I'm also locked into that hardware. If you have Suns already and want to stay with them then perhaps these systems make sense, but if you've started bringing Linux into your environment then why are you going to go back to Solaris?
"freedom-hatery", "pollutive"? Did you go to the same school that George W. Bush did?
Environmental groups would lose if cheap and clean energy became a reality because most of what environmental groups are selling is fear and hysteria. Remove the causes for that fear and hysteria and you remove a lot of their justification, just as George W. Bush and the Neo-cons would lose if Osama bin Laden and the entire membership of Al Qaeda were killed tomorrow. When you motivate people with a boogeyman, whether or not it has some basis in reality (such as the effects of fossil fuel consumption) then the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose that boogeyman. The reason why having governments give up torture would not be a problem for Amnesty International the way that discovering a cheap and clean source of energy would be for the environmental movement is that AI is not a utopianist movement with fascistic tendencies as much of the environmental movement is.
Oh, and it's "Ayn Randian" not "Ayn Ryndian" and you need to review the difference between "it's" the conjunction of "it is" and "its" the posssessive. Here's a question: Given that your spelling and grammar are not much better than George W. Bush's why should anyone assume that you are any more intelligent or knowledgable than he is?
Faberge egghead like Nathan Myhrvold was. No one I've known who worked at Microsoft really knew what Nathan did there other than make oracular pronouncements, tout his educational accomplishments and collect a large salary. Nice work if you can get it.
People who want the car to be less central to American society do so because cars are wasteful, pollutive, and there ought to be more alternatives available... not because they "hate our freedom."
The word is "polluting". There is no such word as "pollutive" when you use it you reveal yourself to be a stupid fuck. And if you're a stupid fuck who can't master English then why should anyone listen to what you have to say?
Unless you can provide a quote from this "sub-culture" where they specifically say that they're against clean energy, I must conclude that you are either having paranoid delusions or a troll.
How about this little doozie from Jeremy Rifkin:
"It [cheap fusion energy] is the worst thing that could happen to our planet."
"Fear of Fusion: What If It Works?" Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1989
Let's face it, if someone invented a clean and cheap source of energy tomorrow there would be two losers, the fossil fuels industry and environmental groups.
How do the dupe articles make it through when I submit articles that get rejected - like news on non-volitile MRAM replacing volitile DRAM and how Freescale is getting closer and closer to this being reality.
That's something nerds can sink their teath into, but the editors reject it for "more of the same".
The reason your articles are rejected is simple, you haven't let CmdrTaco come over to your house and
teabag you yet. Once you've wrapped your lips around your scrotum and orally pleasured him then your articles will be posted, but if you want to be a link whore like Roland P. you have to go all the way and give him a suck and rim.
Damn you're ignorant. Have you ever heard of a little thing called "Google Earth". Check it out sometime. There's this cool feature where you can measure the distance between two points, if you can figure out how to do this (which might be a feat for you given your obvious ignorance) you'll see that Downtown Seattle is 57 miles from Mount Rainier. It would have to be a pretty huge eruption to take out Seattle. Compare this with Pompeii, which was five miles from Vesuvius. This isn't like Pompeii, we're not smack up against the base of the volcano, we're smart enough up here in the PNW to not build cities right up against volcanos. The biggest risk from a hypothetical eruption of Mount Rainier comes from the suburbs in South King County and North Pierce County which could get hit by a lahar or a pyroclastic flow going through the valleys that come off of Rainier. But no one worries too much about it because major volcanic eruptions happen much less often than hurricanes do. We don't have
"volcano" season up here in the PNW like you southerners have "hurricane" season every year from June through November.
Oh, and if you get a rider your home owner insurance will cover earthquakes, which I do worry about, but again, we don't have an annual "earthquake" season up here in the PNW five months out of every year.
What it comes down to is this: building a city 15 feet below sea level right on the coast in a major hurricane zone is a really, really, really bad idea and doing so will come back to bite you in the ass very, very quickly.
Distraction where the Chinese bankrupt the US economy by making all of America's IP, movies, songs, TV shows, etc, freely available on their networks for everyone to download. The resulting loss of revenue for the media conglomerates wipes them all out and causes the US economy to tank. You have to wonder how effective this could be if some government or NGO (crime syndicates qualify as NGOs) actually decided to do this to the US.
1) as stated elsewhere most BT users won't break your knees, crush your nuts in a vise or bust a cap in your ass if you go after them.
2) Since BT users are not prone to violence they're easy targets. It's kind of like the TSA at airports, rather than doing something useful but hard, such as securing the borders or inspecting the millions of containers shipped through our ports every day, each one a potential WMD delivery system, Homeland Security has chosen to do something useless and easy, namely harass people at airports. I'm sure there's some division of the **AAs that has some metric where they are rewarded for the number of pirates they catch, regardless of whether or not those pirates are the Yakuza, Mafia or the Tongs who are making a million copies of Spiderman 2 at a pop or if they're BT users who downloaded a low resolution transfer Dr. Who episode. In large organizations it's often OK to do things that are completely worthless, so long as you look really busy while you're doing them.
There is a very good chance that Rainier will go off at some time
Yes, on a geological time scale there is a very good chance that Rainier will go off some time. On a less than geological time scale there's a good chance that a cat 5 is going to smack into the Big Easy on the west side of Lake Pontchartrain, blast through the levees and leave the city even worse off than it is now.
I'll tell you what. I'll compare my volcano insurance premiums for living south of Seattle and close to all of these volcanos with the flood insurance premiums for New Orleans residents. Oh wait, we don't have volcano insurance up here on the left coast, probably for the same reason we don't have meteor strike insurance or monkeys flying out of our asses insurance, so it's not really a fair comparison, and when you factor in the lower premiums guaranteed by the National Flood Insurance Program that FEMA runs, basically government subsidized flood insurance, the comparison becomes even more unfair.
By the way, when you listed all of the cities in your post you forgot about Tokyo, which risks getting stamped flat by Godzilla every once in a while.
BTW if we are going to condemn cities that are could be damaged by natural disasters lets start the list with most of California and let's face it New York is just a giant target for terrorists. How many Billions did 9/11 cost the US? Oh and Seattle is next to a chain of volcanoes.
Yeah, let's see, how many times have their been major earthquakes in California that caused the kind of damage that Katrina just did? Not too many, Northridge and Loma Prieta were bad, but at least when they were over LA and SF were still above water, more than can be said for New Orleans at the moment. Oh, and how many terrorist attacks has New York had since 9/11? Well, none (and if we're going to talk terrorism what would happen if Al Qaeda set off some truck bombs next to the levees in New Orleans during Mardi Gras?) and the volcanos that Seattle is next to? Well, the only one that erupted and caused any damage was Mount St. Helens, which actually didn't do anything to Seattle as we were out of the path of the ash, Rainier and the other Cascade volcanos are dormant. New Orleans is an incredibly stupid city, it's eight feet under water and built in an area that periodically gets reformatted by hurricanes (where periodically generally equals less than every 20 years) and it's smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi river flood plain. Rebuilding there is like rebuilding on the edge of an active volcano such as Kilauea. People who keep rebuilding in New Orleans are morons, haven't they ever heard the Itsy Bitsy Spider" song?
I think you mean the point would be "moot". Based upon the stuff that Intel has been announcing lately I'm looking forward to an Intel based Macintosh and I'm not too worried about this.
Bar codes were invented [about.com] in 1952 but only became really widely used in the last ten years, thanks to ink jet printers and laser scanning at many checkouts. It's going to take RFIDs decades to replace bar codes and probably it won't happen until a RFID chip can be literally micro-printed onto a paper receipt, onto an egg, or onto a newspaper.
Dude, do you vacation on the same planet that George H.W. Bush does? Bar codes have been used widely in stores since the late 1970s. I remember back in the early 80s when they finally came to Kitsap County, Washington and the religious nutjobs I went to high school with were concerned that the lasers in the scanners were being used to secretly burn the mark of the beast into everyone's forehead and right hand as foretold in Revelations.
Barcoding software for smaller users has been common since the mid 1980s, you would just print the bar codes out on a sheet of labels in your laser printer and stick them onto whatever you were tracking. Barcodes have a huge advantage over RFIDs in that they are cheap, readily produced onsite and widely adaptable with a variety of coding symbologies (code 3 of 9, UPS 3D), etc.
The article you refer to was written by a/.er with the handle of Rei who is the most mindless pro-NASA whore I have ever seen.
That's pretty harsh. I mean, I get into arguments with her all the time and think she's biased about certain things, but when it comes to aerospace, she's one of the most knowledgeable folks around here.
So what, she's somewhat knowledgeable about aerospace, she's also an incredibly biased liar who has claimed that NASA shuttle missions led to the development of NPH and Lente insulins (and a host of other drugs), which were on the market for decades before NASA ever launched the first shuttle mission. When confronted with demands for proof of the scientific value of the Shuttle and ISS the best she has been able to come up with are popsci articles from news websites and press releases from research organizations that are receving NASA money to conduct research on the Shutttle and ISS. And despite her knowledge about aerospace she has a blind spot when it comes to discussing the disfunctional NASA bureaucracy in the manned space program, or the fact that NASA lied to everyone about what the Shuttle was going to be able to do. Given this lack of integrity on her part why should I respect her expertise?
Well Slashdot has definitely peaked
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Has Google Peaked?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
A complete lack of editorial oversight leading to a near constant stream of duplicate stories. A complete lack of editorial standards leading to reposts of Robert X. Cringely articles (hint to the editors, if we really wanted to read Cringely's cringe-worthy crap we'd go directly to his
website and read it!) and Roland Piquepaille's constant whoring for page hits. Incredibly stupid queries to ask Slashdot that could have been answered by reading the fucking manual or STFN (searching the fucking net). Yep, Slashdot has definitely peaked, indeed it has not only peaked, it has jumped the shark.
but the fertility thing isn't too bad. I don't care if I'm shooting blanks so long as the gun fires, if you know what I mean. Besides, the fertility thing might balance out, sure, you'll be less fertile, but you'll have more time to fuck, so it all comes out in the wash.
OGG is widely used for distributing music on bittorent based sites, and it's annoying to have to convert it to mp3 or aac...
And here's a great big reason why Apple doesn't support Ogg Vorbis (besides the fact that it doesn't do anything for you that MP3 doesn't), it's widely used for distributing music on bittorrent based sites, that is to say that it is widely used in piracy, and Apple doesn't need to get assfucked by the RIAA over iPod sales for a bunch of geeks, especially after the Grokster decision.
In other words, I think this scum-sucking doctor is at least as due for "due process" as the spammer. The spammer is annoying, the doctor is putting peoples' lives at risk. Well, OK, they both are. Throw the book at them.
More War on Some Drugs bullshit. How is this doctor putting people's lives at risk? They're willingly buying these drugs, he's not dumping the stuff into the water supply late at night. This doctor is no more putting these people's lives at risk than any bartender, beer company McDonalds or tobacco company is.
Personally I think you should be able to purchase any drug you like except for anti-virals or anti-biotics. If you want to suck down Oxycontin all day long no problemo, just don't drive or operate any heavy equipment while doing so or you'll end up in a prison cell sucking down Pruno. If you're dumb enough to take a bunch of different drugs without a doctor's prescription then you damn well deserve to die and society will be all the better off without you.
The article you refer to was written by a/.er with the handle of Rei who is the most mindless pro-NASA whore I have ever seen. At one point she claimed that crystals grown on shuttle missions had been used to invent certain forms of insulin. Of course the fact that these forms of insulin (Lente and NPH) which had actually been on the market for decades before the first Shuttle launch.
The big advantage of Scaled Composites and the other rocket shops is that they aren't big, stupid, brutally inefficient, Soviet style bureaucracies like the NASA manned space flight program is. Jerry Pournelle has some good ideas on how to fix NASA and get us back into space without spending much more money than we do now. Unfortunately implementing his ideas would cost lots of NASA employees their cushy jobs and would break up the monopoly cartel that Boeing and LockMart have on launch vehicles, which is something that Congress, which gets lots of money from Boeing LockMart, isn't going to allow.
This is pretty much the equivalent of keying a car illegally parked in the handicapped space. It feels good, but it still isn't right.
No, but it does a lot more to prevent that person from parking in a handicapped space than complaining will. Have you ever trained a dog? When the dog shits on the floor you rub his nose in it right then and there, you don't sit down and have a discussion with him about why you don't want him to shit on the floor, you punish him immediately so that he makes the connection between having shit on the floor and getting his nose rubbed in it. Human beings are much like dogs in this respect. If you punish the little cell phone princess right away she learns a lesson and will probably be more polite next time, if you punish the asshole who has parked illegally in the handicapped space right then and there he learns the lesson really quickly and makes the connection between his obnoxious behavior and the punishment. Disintermediating by complaining to an authority figure might satisfy some legalistic impulse but it also reduces the impact of the punishment by pushing it further out in time from when the offending behavior took place.
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That would be the two Blade 150s I own. That would also be the UltraSparc 5 and 10s I used to support. That would also be any Netra you care to mention. Cheap ass sheet metal with ugly purple and gray plastic cases and ridiculous prices given the performance, quality, lackluster engineering and bottom of the barrel OEM parts, but hey, they had Sun logos on the front. While Sun was crapping out the UltraSparcs SGI released the Octanes and Fuels and HP had the B1000s, which pretty much kicked Sun's ass in terms of engineering, performance or quality.
Sun jumped the shark years ago, in the late 90s they bought into all of that dot.com hype and bullshit (remember, they were the dot in dot.com). Unfortunately they missed out on two important trends, Microsoft started eating their lunch in desktop systems and Linux systems started eating their lunch in low end UNIX systems running commodity services. It was interesting to watch, there was a time when everyone ran MATLAB on Sparcs, it's what you had to do, then in about a two year period from '97 to '99 all of those users bought PCs running Windows. The same thing happened with webservers which went from Suns running Apache to Linux systems running Apache. Meanwhile Scott McNealy ignored all of this and kept telling everyone how great his company was and how we didn't want those cheap-ass Windows boxen or Linux systems. No, we really wanted a network that consisted of big Sun servers with craptacular Sun storage (Sun did do something smart when they bought StorageTek, they're leaving StorageTek alone and dumping all of their Sun branded storage and replacing it with StorageTek) and Sun thin-clients and we would just flit about from workstation to workstation like so many butterflies storing all of our data on SmartCards. It was basically a repeat of the stupidity and arrogance of Apple Computer in the early 90s when Apple kept telling everyone what damned fools they were for buying those ugly stupid Windows boxen instead of spending more money to buy Apple boxen. If the customers had only listened to the vision of Scott McNealy, instead of looking at their capital equipment budgets, Sun would still be doing really well, but those damned customers lost sight of Scott's vision and instead followed the path of mere pecuniary gratification. The bastards!
Now of course Sun claims to have learned their lesson, they have cheap boxes (well they're not that cheap once you add in the support). They'll support Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, NetBSD (well that doesn't count, is there anything that doesn't run NetBSD?) anything you want. They want back into your data center to replace all of those damned Dells that you bought to run Sendmail, Apache, BIND, LDAP and now Oracle RAC. They also want to replace all of the damned Dells you have running Windows. They're scrambling as desperately as HP is to keep their customers but they don't have the cash cow of printer cartridges to fall back on.
Sun's biggest problem is that their corporate strategy is defined in opposition to Microsoft, the problem with having a strategy which is defined in opposition to a competitor like Microsoft is that your every move is reactive and your competitor controls the game. Apple was locked into this losing game until Steve Jobs came back into the company, made his peace with Microsoft and then revitalized the Macintosh line, released the iPod and started the iTunes music store. Apple's corporate strategy these days isn't defined as being "not Microsoft".
If Sun can figure out a new corporate strategy that stands out and offers customers something unique that they can't get anywhere else then they have a chance of coming back. But I don't see that happening. Yeah, Sun has customers to buy their big iron boxes (and their midrange stuff runs NetBackup like nobody's business because the systems have awesome throughput). But the big iron market is pretty competitive, you have SGI offering some kick ass Itanium systems, HP is t
As far as Sun's quoting the price of support on their webpage you guys need to pull your heads out of your asses and wash the shit from your eyes and ears. Sun quotes standard warranty support, which is basically next business day parts exchange in the standard price that they advertise. Now, go to Dell's website and price out a server, Dell's advertising quotes their three year gold support option, with 7x24 service as the default option in the list price. Since this is a server, which means that it's probably going to be high availability, I want to see what those support costs are up front. Dell is a lot more honest about this than Sun is.
And Sun having a contract that provides Windows support, big fucking deal. Hell, if you paid Microsoft enough money they'd support Linux and FreeBSD and send you a tech with Tux tattooed on one ass-cheek and the FreeBSD daemon on the other. Years ago when I was dealing with HP they offered to "support" the DEC and Sun systems that my company had, we declined and stayed with our DEC and Sun contracts, which were cheaper. Sun's support for other platforms might cost like Hell, and it might not be any good, but they will sell it to you if you're dumb enough to buy it. Sun will "support" anything they can, and in doing so they will charge you an arm and a leg for the contract. This is because Sun would like to make a lot of money on high-margin consulting services and support like IBM does. Getting your Windows or Linux support from Sun is like having a Corvette worked on at a VW dealership, it's possible (if you spend enough money) but it's not necessarily smart.
Why is anyone going to purchase a Sun Opteron to run Windows or Linux on anyways? It's not the performance. It's not the price. It's not the quality of the systems (I've disassembled a bunch of lower-end Suns and quite frankly I've seen better built systems from beigebox clonehouses) and it's not because of any brilliant engineering on Sun's part (Sun reserves their good engineering for their larger systems, which is why they pretty much own the market for NetBackup media servers and NetBackup master servers). When it comes right down to it the only reason is "because you can", which plays well on /. where the readers like to install Linux on dead badgers, but not in the real world.
The biggest problem I foresee for Sun in competing with Dell is simple, Suns don't run Windows and they don't run Linux. Dell makes nice, solid boxes, they're not imaginative by any stretch, but they work well and reliably and perform decently. One of the nice things that Dell does is that they quote you the price of the service contract in the initial purchase price for the system. Compare and contrast this with Sun and HP who basically say "service, hey, you bought it, the check cleared and if it stops working then come see us about a service contract (which we will charge you up the wazoo for)".
But back to that Windows thing, it's nice to be able to take a Dell and repurpose it from being a Linux system to a Windows system or vice versa. This helped me out this year with a project I was working on, the project was delayed and one of the Windows admins I worked with needed a new box PDQ. So I gave him my quad proc Dell which he put to good use right away and he ordered me a replacement off of his budget. In a mixed environment, which we're all working now, being able to do this is a major plus. If I buy a bunch of shiny new Suns not only am I locked into Solaris (which is painful to use after working on Linux for so many years) but I'm also locked into that hardware. If you have Suns already and want to stay with them then perhaps these systems make sense, but if you've started bringing Linux into your environment then why are you going to go back to Solaris?
Environmental groups would lose if cheap and clean energy became a reality because most of what environmental groups are selling is fear and hysteria. Remove the causes for that fear and hysteria and you remove a lot of their justification, just as George W. Bush and the Neo-cons would lose if Osama bin Laden and the entire membership of Al Qaeda were killed tomorrow. When you motivate people with a boogeyman, whether or not it has some basis in reality (such as the effects of fossil fuel consumption) then the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose that boogeyman. The reason why having governments give up torture would not be a problem for Amnesty International the way that discovering a cheap and clean source of energy would be for the environmental movement is that AI is not a utopianist movement with fascistic tendencies as much of the environmental movement is.
Oh, and it's "Ayn Randian" not "Ayn Ryndian" and you need to review the difference between "it's" the conjunction of "it is" and "its" the posssessive. Here's a question: Given that your spelling and grammar are not much better than George W. Bush's why should anyone assume that you are any more intelligent or knowledgable than he is?
The word is "polluting". There is no such word as "pollutive" when you use it you reveal yourself to be a stupid fuck. And if you're a stupid fuck who can't master English then why should anyone listen to what you have to say?
Unless you can provide a quote from this "sub-culture" where they specifically say that they're against clean energy, I must conclude that you are either having paranoid delusions or a troll.
How about this little doozie from Jeremy Rifkin:
Let's face it, if someone invented a clean and cheap source of energy tomorrow there would be two losers, the fossil fuels industry and environmental groups.
That's something nerds can sink their teath into, but the editors reject it for "more of the same".
The reason your articles are rejected is simple, you haven't let CmdrTaco come over to your house and teabag you yet. Once you've wrapped your lips around your scrotum and orally pleasured him then your articles will be posted, but if you want to be a link whore like Roland P. you have to go all the way and give him a suck and rim.
Oh, and if you get a rider your home owner insurance will cover earthquakes, which I do worry about, but again, we don't have an annual "earthquake" season up here in the PNW five months out of every year.
What it comes down to is this: building a city 15 feet below sea level right on the coast in a major hurricane zone is a really, really, really bad idea and doing so will come back to bite you in the ass very, very quickly.
2) Since BT users are not prone to violence they're easy targets. It's kind of like the TSA at airports, rather than doing something useful but hard, such as securing the borders or inspecting the millions of containers shipped through our ports every day, each one a potential WMD delivery system, Homeland Security has chosen to do something useless and easy, namely harass people at airports. I'm sure there's some division of the **AAs that has some metric where they are rewarded for the number of pirates they catch, regardless of whether or not those pirates are the Yakuza, Mafia or the Tongs who are making a million copies of Spiderman 2 at a pop or if they're BT users who downloaded a low resolution transfer Dr. Who episode. In large organizations it's often OK to do things that are completely worthless, so long as you look really busy while you're doing them.
Yes, on a geological time scale there is a very good chance that Rainier will go off some time. On a less than geological time scale there's a good chance that a cat 5 is going to smack into the Big Easy on the west side of Lake Pontchartrain, blast through the levees and leave the city even worse off than it is now.
I'll tell you what. I'll compare my volcano insurance premiums for living south of Seattle and close to all of these volcanos with the flood insurance premiums for New Orleans residents. Oh wait, we don't have volcano insurance up here on the left coast, probably for the same reason we don't have meteor strike insurance or monkeys flying out of our asses insurance, so it's not really a fair comparison, and when you factor in the lower premiums guaranteed by the National Flood Insurance Program that FEMA runs, basically government subsidized flood insurance, the comparison becomes even more unfair.
By the way, when you listed all of the cities in your post you forgot about Tokyo, which risks getting stamped flat by Godzilla every once in a while.
Yeah, let's see, how many times have their been major earthquakes in California that caused the kind of damage that Katrina just did? Not too many, Northridge and Loma Prieta were bad, but at least when they were over LA and SF were still above water, more than can be said for New Orleans at the moment. Oh, and how many terrorist attacks has New York had since 9/11? Well, none (and if we're going to talk terrorism what would happen if Al Qaeda set off some truck bombs next to the levees in New Orleans during Mardi Gras?) and the volcanos that Seattle is next to? Well, the only one that erupted and caused any damage was Mount St. Helens, which actually didn't do anything to Seattle as we were out of the path of the ash, Rainier and the other Cascade volcanos are dormant. New Orleans is an incredibly stupid city, it's eight feet under water and built in an area that periodically gets reformatted by hurricanes (where periodically generally equals less than every 20 years) and it's smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi river flood plain. Rebuilding there is like rebuilding on the edge of an active volcano such as Kilauea. People who keep rebuilding in New Orleans are morons, haven't they ever heard the Itsy Bitsy Spider" song?
I think you mean the point would be "moot". Based upon the stuff that Intel has been announcing lately I'm looking forward to an Intel based Macintosh and I'm not too worried about this.
Dude, do you vacation on the same planet that George H.W. Bush does? Bar codes have been used widely in stores since the late 1970s. I remember back in the early 80s when they finally came to Kitsap County, Washington and the religious nutjobs I went to high school with were concerned that the lasers in the scanners were being used to secretly burn the mark of the beast into everyone's forehead and right hand as foretold in Revelations.
Barcoding software for smaller users has been common since the mid 1980s, you would just print the bar codes out on a sheet of labels in your laser printer and stick them onto whatever you were tracking. Barcodes have a huge advantage over RFIDs in that they are cheap, readily produced onsite and widely adaptable with a variety of coding symbologies (code 3 of 9, UPS 3D), etc.
That's pretty harsh. I mean, I get into arguments with her all the time and think she's biased about certain things, but when it comes to aerospace, she's one of the most knowledgeable folks around here.
So what, she's somewhat knowledgeable about aerospace, she's also an incredibly biased liar who has claimed that NASA shuttle missions led to the development of NPH and Lente insulins (and a host of other drugs), which were on the market for decades before NASA ever launched the first shuttle mission. When confronted with demands for proof of the scientific value of the Shuttle and ISS the best she has been able to come up with are popsci articles from news websites and press releases from research organizations that are receving NASA money to conduct research on the Shutttle and ISS. And despite her knowledge about aerospace she has a blind spot when it comes to discussing the disfunctional NASA bureaucracy in the manned space program, or the fact that NASA lied to everyone about what the Shuttle was going to be able to do. Given this lack of integrity on her part why should I respect her expertise?
And here's a great big reason why Apple doesn't support Ogg Vorbis (besides the fact that it doesn't do anything for you that MP3 doesn't), it's widely used for distributing music on bittorrent based sites, that is to say that it is widely used in piracy, and Apple doesn't need to get assfucked by the RIAA over iPod sales for a bunch of geeks, especially after the Grokster decision.
More War on Some Drugs bullshit. How is this doctor putting people's lives at risk? They're willingly buying these drugs, he's not dumping the stuff into the water supply late at night. This doctor is no more putting these people's lives at risk than any bartender, beer company McDonalds or tobacco company is.
Personally I think you should be able to purchase any drug you like except for anti-virals or anti-biotics. If you want to suck down Oxycontin all day long no problemo, just don't drive or operate any heavy equipment while doing so or you'll end up in a prison cell sucking down Pruno. If you're dumb enough to take a bunch of different drugs without a doctor's prescription then you damn well deserve to die and society will be all the better off without you.
The article you refer to was written by a /.er with the handle of Rei who is the most mindless pro-NASA whore I have ever seen. At one point she claimed that crystals grown on shuttle missions had been used to invent certain forms of insulin. Of course the fact that these forms of insulin (Lente and NPH) which had actually been on the market for decades before the first Shuttle launch.
The big advantage of Scaled Composites and the other rocket shops is that they aren't big, stupid, brutally inefficient, Soviet style bureaucracies like the NASA manned space flight program is. Jerry Pournelle has some good ideas on how to fix NASA and get us back into space without spending much more money than we do now. Unfortunately implementing his ideas would cost lots of NASA employees their cushy jobs and would break up the monopoly cartel that Boeing and LockMart have on launch vehicles, which is something that Congress, which gets lots of money from Boeing LockMart, isn't going to allow.
No, but it does a lot more to prevent that person from parking in a handicapped space than complaining will. Have you ever trained a dog? When the dog shits on the floor you rub his nose in it right then and there, you don't sit down and have a discussion with him about why you don't want him to shit on the floor, you punish him immediately so that he makes the connection between having shit on the floor and getting his nose rubbed in it. Human beings are much like dogs in this respect. If you punish the little cell phone princess right away she learns a lesson and will probably be more polite next time, if you punish the asshole who has parked illegally in the handicapped space right then and there he learns the lesson really quickly and makes the connection between his obnoxious behavior and the punishment. Disintermediating by complaining to an authority figure might satisfy some legalistic impulse but it also reduces the impact of the punishment by pushing it further out in time from when the offending behavior took place.