If you're right (and I think you are) and a new standard comes out, expect it to be ignored by the general population. If we're not ready, it'll be like the laser disc fiasco: used by elite technophiles, but not by the masses.
And if they try to ram the format down our throats, expect piracy to pick up (either on the DVD format or something else such as VCD). Consumers have repeatedly proven their resourcefulness and it just keeps getting easier.
There are plenty out there that see REMOVAL of that article as the honest move by Time. To them, it should have been mod'ed -1 (Flamebait).
The argument: The article was Bush, Sr.'s opinion 4 years ago. A lot has happened since then, and to ignore that is being dishonest to your readership. To take it out of context and purport it has relevant for today is dishonest journalism.
It's interesting how being honest is not a black and white issue. Think about that before you ask a company (or an individual, for that matter) to be honest; you are really asking them to use your definition of honesty.
Back to programming... where true is true and never false.
Hey buddy, run this on your IDE drive (after you man hdparm, of course). I'll bet you'll see a difference. My drives go from around 3-5MB/sec to 25-35MB/sec. hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -a 8 -u 1 -m 16/dev/hda
Linux defaults IDE drives to pathetically slow settings. This is because there are/were a lot of bad IDE drives out there, so conservative settings are used as defaults to avoid data loss.
For a 900Mhz, 256MB, 40 gig laptop, that's a bit steep. Dell's equivalent (300m) is around $1500, but the DVD/CDRW is external and it's probably not as pretty. Is this worth $900? I vote no.
The problem is politicians don't understand free markets. If you want a company to do something, you have to motivate them with their balance sheet. Regulation, inspections, requirements, whatever don't work because they will always find a way to cut corners. That's their job, save money, increase profits. Duh.
For electricity, if you real want to deregulate, do it right. First, if you want reliability, make the companies financially responsible for outages. If it hits them in the bottom line, they will invest the infrastructure, procedures, etc. to make sure the lights stay on.
Second, you have to make sure it's not at all a monopoly. If it even smells like a monopoly, then you should remain regulated. It's pretty hard to make electricty a non-monopoly when there's only one line coming to my house. This means we really only have one distributor. Ever. As long as we have one, leave it regulated, state-owned, etc. and let the suppliers compete. This is coming from the biggest capitalist you are likely to meet. But without competition, capitalism doesn't work.
Oh, give the segway a break. I think it's pretty damned good for a 1.0 release. Bicycles have had almost 150 years to mature. Remember the
first bicycles back in the day? How many people do you think we're look at these fools saying "wouldn't it be simpler to just walk?"
Just getting the segway a decent power supply would make for a vast improvement in stability, durability, and weight.
Somehow, I've always found it most useful to organize my work mail by sender. I gave up early on the "sort by topic" approach since email threads rarely stay on topic and can easily apply to multiple topics (e.g. "gee, I'll bet we'd find that bug in products x, y, and z, too"). On the other hand, I always remember who sent the email.
Maybe its some quirk of how my brain operates, but this has always seemed like the right mix of simple and organized to me.
You need deltas. What happens if someone, benign or malicious, changes something and you don't notice for a week? Oops, you've rsynced the new version and lost the old.
That said, I do prefer hard drives as a backup medium, over tape. I use the same tar files (full, incrementals), just put them on the hard disk. Further, we'll burn snapshots of really important stuff (e.g. CVS tree) to CDR.
Davis-Besse is run by FirstEnergy, or was until it was shutdown in Feb 2002. It seems they found a hole in a cap covering the plant's reactor vessel. In case you missed it, FirstEnergy is the same company that is being blamed for the blackout.
We use HP's OpenView Operations around here to monitor Solaris systems. Agents run on the managed systems and report back to the server. It uses RPC, implemented by the "dced" daemon. dced died on almost all of our boxes simultaneously yesterday. We brought them back up, they died in unison again. Repeated 4 times now. These boxes are in different cities and a bunch of different networks. So, we're lost as to what's happening. I was assuming some Y2K like bug, but now...
So my question: Anyone else use OVO and see this madness?
On the other hand, the article does show that using gentoo does not mean you can assume better performance, which I think is the common perception. If you use gentoo for performance reasons, you should be prepared to tweak, rebuild, test, repeat.
It's silly when people use gentoo and simply build the way someone told them too. How is this different from a binary distro? Except for the hours of compiling, of course.
Agreed. Frankly, I'd be thoroughly impressed if the US gov't could show the level of competence required to pull off a conspiracy like this. Christ, if they could, do you think we'd still be looking for WMD in Iraq? There are 150k+ soldiers over there... think they couldn't find a couple to plant the necessary evidence?
I believe in the incompetence theory of gov't. If you don't understand wtf they are doing, it's because they don't either.
If you are referring to the one with Jack Black, it's already on the Extended version of Fellowship as an easter egg. How to access it for region 1 and region 2. It's pretty damned funny, in a Jack Black sort of way.
The long TTT trailer is also hidden on the Extended version.
Not all companies have forgotten that a quality product will get you farther than a loud mouth, but enough have that it seems pretty noisy out there. I make a point of ignoring the ads and reading the reviews. Oh yeah, and I will never, ever buy anything from x10, no matter how good it reviews. I won't even link to the bastards.:-)
This is nothing new. Hustlers have been selling snake-oil with good looks and charm for years.
I may or may not agree with you, but you make a lot of assertions without backing them up. If you expect someone to listen, you need to convince them with facts, insteading of spewing what sounds like second-hand drivel.
Re:Technology gives - and technology takes away
on
Instant Concert CDs?
·
· Score: 1
If there is one word which doesn't belong next to the word "music", it's the word "business".
True, but "business" and "entertainment" do belong together.
Re:Hack a computer, spend life in prison.
on
HomeSec In the News
·
· Score: 2
Umm... CNET summarizes it as follows:
Promise up to life terms for computer intrusions that "recklessly" put others' lives at risk.
Frankly, I don't see a problem. Hack into the air traffic control system, fry. Hack into grandma's recipe database, don't fry.
Pork is pork. Its all bad. Its all superfluous to the bill it gets attached to. Its stuck there because it wouldn't get passed any other way. If it can't stand up on its own then it should never happen.
I don't care who's in power, be it W, Clinton, or Bugs Bunny, pork is always some one abusing their power to pay for votes/campaign contributions.
Screw line item votes. We need a committe of English teacher reviewing each paragraph in a bill for consistency, coherence, and relevance.
Our species gave up the benefits of evolution by natural selection (at least as Darwin saw it) when we decided to come out of the trees and build civilizations. Think about it: instead of letting the weak die, we raly to help them and the strong no longer have a reproductive advantage. Is this right or wrong? Who cares, but it isn't helping our gene pool.
Instead of natural selection at an individual level, we have natural selection at a civilization level. The earth has multiple civilizations, whether they are delinated by geography or culture can be debated, and they rise and fall, just as species come and go.
The interesting part is that what makes a good civilization is rarely something physical, like it usually is for species, but something mental (if that's the right word).
Kind of like a fibre run getting hacked by a back hoe? Only, that happens frequently and is out of the telecom company's control. This critter would be 60,000 feet in the air and out of reach. The only thing that could bring it down would be the operator's incompetence. That's a darn sight better than today's situation with fibre where anyone's incompetence could make for a bad day.
Besides, what could bring it down? Its 60,000 feet in the air! Above damned near everything in the sky except maybe an SR-71 and the ISS. It would have to be a mechanical malfunction, or oops we forgot to fill the tank.
As for affecting the customers, I don't know of any backbone, which this would be essentially, that isn't fault tolerant. I suspect they will fly redundant drones or have overlapping service areas.
I agree with you if the pattern is common knowledge. It's common knowledge if you can find multiple developers that know the pattern, yet come from a different background, worked for different companies, etc. It's not common knowledge if only this developer and the developers he worked with at his previous company know it. In that case, it becomes something unique to his original company. That is Intellectual Property and its protected under the laws of the U. S. of A., like it or not.
Looking at NDAs that I've had to sign to work for someone, they all so something like "I will keep in confidence during and after my period of work any IP that I learned or developed while working for company." So if this guy's NDA looks like mine and what he did was unique to his previous employer, then he's got to keep his lips sealed or open himself for a lawsuit. Sorry.
As an aside, if we think the developer's previous company should be denied of their IP, then how dare we GPL anything? The company "created" IP, they can do as they please with it, including keep it proprietary. Open Source projects "create" IP, they also can do as they please, including give it away with restrictions. In both cases, the creator determines the fate of the IP and decides to place restrictions on its use. If we believe that IP does not exist, then creators have no rights, and we should all use a BSD-style license.
Disclosure: I am not a lawyer, but I know to avoid them at all costs.
Re:Moving production to Asia?
on
IBM Spins Down
·
· Score: 2
It's not exactly all that easy to find a tech job once you're over 40.
Only if you're still developing like you did in your 20s. Times change, if you don't keep up, you get unemployed, no matter how old you are.
Wait. He gets bent of shape with the word "patent," because patents are exclusive rights to ideas and as everyone knows, ideas cannot be possessed, so how could someone be given exclusive rights to them? But, when it comes to getting "credit" for an idea, don't short change him! That idea may be free, but I came up with it. All hail me!
So, he's not really for freedom of ideas and information. Instead, he's for an economy of credit derived from new ideas as opposed to an economy of money derived from new ideas. Greedy of credit or greedy of money; its still greed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're right (and I think you are) and a new standard comes out, expect it to be ignored by the general population. If we're not ready, it'll be like the laser disc fiasco: used by elite technophiles, but not by the masses.
And if they try to ram the format down our throats, expect piracy to pick up (either on the DVD format or something else such as VCD). Consumers have repeatedly proven their resourcefulness and it just keeps getting easier.
How can we keep corporate America honest?"
There are plenty out there that see REMOVAL of that article as the honest move by Time. To them, it should have been mod'ed -1 (Flamebait).
The argument: The article was Bush, Sr.'s opinion 4 years ago. A lot has happened since then, and to ignore that is being dishonest to your readership. To take it out of context and purport it has relevant for today is dishonest journalism.
It's interesting how being honest is not a black and white issue. Think about that before you ask a company (or an individual, for that matter) to be honest; you are really asking them to use your definition of honesty.
Back to programming... where true is true and never false.
My favorite example is: Democracy causes cancer. Cancer rates are much higher in democratic countries, therefore democracy causes cancer. QED.
As a friend of mine is fond of saying: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Hey buddy, run this on your IDE drive (after you man hdparm, of course). I'll bet you'll see a difference. My drives go from around 3-5MB/sec to 25-35MB/sec. /dev/hda
hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -a 8 -u 1 -m 16
Linux defaults IDE drives to pathetically slow settings. This is because there are/were a lot of bad IDE drives out there, so conservative settings are used as defaults to avoid data loss.
Lowest Price: $2,399.00
For a 900Mhz, 256MB, 40 gig laptop, that's a bit steep. Dell's equivalent (300m) is around $1500, but the DVD/CDRW is external and it's probably not as pretty. Is this worth $900? I vote no.
The problem is politicians don't understand free markets. If you want a company to do something, you have to motivate them with their balance sheet. Regulation, inspections, requirements, whatever don't work because they will always find a way to cut corners. That's their job, save money, increase profits. Duh.
For electricity, if you real want to deregulate, do it right. First, if you want reliability, make the companies financially responsible for outages. If it hits them in the bottom line, they will invest the infrastructure, procedures, etc. to make sure the lights stay on.
Second, you have to make sure it's not at all a monopoly. If it even smells like a monopoly, then you should remain regulated. It's pretty hard to make electricty a non-monopoly when there's only one line coming to my house. This means we really only have one distributor. Ever. As long as we have one, leave it regulated, state-owned, etc. and let the suppliers compete. This is coming from the biggest capitalist you are likely to meet. But without competition, capitalism doesn't work.
Oh, give the segway a break. I think it's pretty damned good for a 1.0 release. Bicycles have had almost 150 years to mature. Remember the first bicycles back in the day? How many people do you think we're look at these fools saying "wouldn't it be simpler to just walk?"
Just getting the segway a decent power supply would make for a vast improvement in stability, durability, and weight.
Somehow, I've always found it most useful to organize my work mail by sender. I gave up early on the "sort by topic" approach since email threads rarely stay on topic and can easily apply to multiple topics (e.g. "gee, I'll bet we'd find that bug in products x, y, and z, too"). On the other hand, I always remember who sent the email.
Maybe its some quirk of how my brain operates, but this has always seemed like the right mix of simple and organized to me.
You need deltas. What happens if someone, benign or malicious, changes something and you don't notice for a week? Oops, you've rsynced the new version and lost the old.
That said, I do prefer hard drives as a backup medium, over tape. I use the same tar files (full, incrementals), just put them on the hard disk. Further, we'll burn snapshots of really important stuff (e.g. CVS tree) to CDR.
And yes, offsite backup is a must.
Davis-Besse is run by FirstEnergy, or was until it was shutdown in Feb 2002. It seems they found a hole in a cap covering the plant's reactor vessel. In case you missed it, FirstEnergy is the same company that is being blamed for the blackout.
We use HP's OpenView Operations around here to monitor Solaris systems. Agents run on the managed systems and report back to the server. It uses RPC, implemented by the "dced" daemon. dced died on almost all of our boxes simultaneously yesterday. We brought them back up, they died in unison again. Repeated 4 times now. These boxes are in different cities and a bunch of different networks. So, we're lost as to what's happening. I was assuming some Y2K like bug, but now...
So my question: Anyone else use OVO and see this madness?
On the other hand, the article does show that using gentoo does not mean you can assume better performance, which I think is the common perception. If you use gentoo for performance reasons, you should be prepared to tweak, rebuild, test, repeat.
It's silly when people use gentoo and simply build the way someone told them too. How is this different from a binary distro? Except for the hours of compiling, of course.
Agreed. Frankly, I'd be thoroughly impressed if the US gov't could show the level of competence required to pull off a conspiracy like this. Christ, if they could, do you think we'd still be looking for WMD in Iraq? There are 150k+ soldiers over there... think they couldn't find a couple to plant the necessary evidence?
I believe in the incompetence theory of gov't. If you don't understand wtf they are doing, it's because they don't either.
If you are referring to the one with Jack Black, it's already on the Extended version of Fellowship as an easter egg. How to access it for region 1 and region 2. It's pretty damned funny, in a Jack Black sort of way.
The long TTT trailer is also hidden on the Extended version.
Wow. That was an extremely mature response to constructive (hopefully) criticism. Are you sure you belong here? :-)
Not all companies have forgotten that a quality product will get you farther than a loud mouth, but enough have that it seems pretty noisy out there. I make a point of ignoring the ads and reading the reviews. Oh yeah, and I will never, ever buy anything from x10, no matter how good it reviews. I won't even link to the bastards. :-)
This is nothing new. Hustlers have been selling snake-oil with good looks and charm for years.
I may or may not agree with you, but you make a lot of assertions without backing them up. If you expect someone to listen, you need to convince them with facts, insteading of spewing what sounds like second-hand drivel.
If there is one word which doesn't belong next to the word "music", it's the word "business".
True, but "business" and "entertainment" do belong together.
Umm... CNET summarizes it as follows:
Promise up to life terms for computer intrusions that "recklessly" put others' lives at risk.
Frankly, I don't see a problem. Hack into the air traffic control system, fry. Hack into grandma's recipe database, don't fry.
Pork is pork. Its all bad. Its all superfluous to the bill it gets attached to. Its stuck there because it wouldn't get passed any other way. If it can't stand up on its own then it should never happen.
I don't care who's in power, be it W, Clinton, or Bugs Bunny, pork is always some one abusing their power to pay for votes/campaign contributions.
Screw line item votes. We need a committe of English teacher reviewing each paragraph in a bill for consistency, coherence, and relevance.
Our species gave up the benefits of evolution by natural selection (at least as Darwin saw it) when we decided to come out of the trees and build civilizations. Think about it: instead of letting the weak die, we raly to help them and the strong no longer have a reproductive advantage. Is this right or wrong? Who cares, but it isn't helping our gene pool.
Instead of natural selection at an individual level, we have natural selection at a civilization level. The earth has multiple civilizations, whether they are delinated by geography or culture can be debated, and they rise and fall, just as species come and go.
The interesting part is that what makes a good civilization is rarely something physical, like it usually is for species, but something mental (if that's the right word).
Kind of like a fibre run getting hacked by a back hoe? Only, that happens frequently and is out of the telecom company's control. This critter would be 60,000 feet in the air and out of reach. The only thing that could bring it down would be the operator's incompetence. That's a darn sight better than today's situation with fibre where anyone's incompetence could make for a bad day.
Besides, what could bring it down? Its 60,000 feet in the air! Above damned near everything in the sky except maybe an SR-71 and the ISS. It would have to be a mechanical malfunction, or oops we forgot to fill the tank.
As for affecting the customers, I don't know of any backbone, which this would be essentially, that isn't fault tolerant. I suspect they will fly redundant drones or have overlapping service areas.
I agree with you if the pattern is common knowledge. It's common knowledge if you can find multiple developers that know the pattern, yet come from a different background, worked for different companies, etc. It's not common knowledge if only this developer and the developers he worked with at his previous company know it. In that case, it becomes something unique to his original company. That is Intellectual Property and its protected under the laws of the U. S. of A., like it or not.
Looking at NDAs that I've had to sign to work for someone, they all so something like "I will keep in confidence during and after my period of work any IP that I learned or developed while working for company." So if this guy's NDA looks like mine and what he did was unique to his previous employer, then he's got to keep his lips sealed or open himself for a lawsuit. Sorry.
As an aside, if we think the developer's previous company should be denied of their IP, then how dare we GPL anything? The company "created" IP, they can do as they please with it, including keep it proprietary. Open Source projects "create" IP, they also can do as they please, including give it away with restrictions. In both cases, the creator determines the fate of the IP and decides to place restrictions on its use. If we believe that IP does not exist, then creators have no rights, and we should all use a BSD-style license.
Disclosure: I am not a lawyer, but I know to avoid them at all costs.
It's not exactly all that easy to find a tech job once you're over 40.
Only if you're still developing like you did in your 20s. Times change, if you don't keep up, you get unemployed, no matter how old you are.
Wait. He gets bent of shape with the word "patent," because patents are exclusive rights to ideas and as everyone knows, ideas cannot be possessed, so how could someone be given exclusive rights to them? But, when it comes to getting "credit" for an idea, don't short change him! That idea may be free, but I came up with it. All hail me!
So, he's not really for freedom of ideas and information. Instead, he's for an economy of credit derived from new ideas as opposed to an economy of money derived from new ideas. Greedy of credit or greedy of money; its still greed.