When I drive to the store, I would burn, just for arguments sake, 1 oz driving throught town. You burn three. Thanks for making a concerted effort to pollute less.
As far as affording an SUV - does it feel good giving the car companies the highest profit margins on a given vehicle? There are instances where an SUVs costs up to 10-15K less than MSRP to produce. You must feel good in a pickup truck with a couple hundred pounds of tackily styled sheet metal wrapping your precious family.
I happen to find cars an enjoyable pastime. SUVs handle like crap, oft have cheap interiors (eg, Lincoln SUVs what share parts with F100/F150 trucks), create this false sense of security which makes the drivers act like total jerks on the road. 4WD does not mean go 80 on pack snow/ice. I laugh when I see a silly blond woman in her suburban toting her todd to the store for organic milk all the while spraying more nasty fumes into the air for her kiddie to choke on in 10 years.
If you arnt in montana plowing snow or hauling wood or doing something more useful than toting your overweight selves around, stuff yourself into a car and drive safe for once.
Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket.
on
Coder on the Cross
·
· Score: 5
I am currently under the employ of a Silicon Valley startup. I was allured by the prospect of becoming rich from the stock options. While I did receive a 16% raise in pay, I moved 2800 miles from home to come to this new position as an 'IT Manager'.
So, with my new salary in hand I go off to the land of the high-tech, the SI Valley, the birthing place for the greats. Yeah, the land of high rents, outrageous gas prices, ludicrous state taxes and the best weather this earth has ever seen.
I arrive at the startup to find this mongoloid 'IT Manager'. My dreams of truly attaining a higher rank are smashed in a single moment. I have to get into a dick waving contest with a valley kid who covets Microsoft. We were officially deemed both IT Managers. I knew I just had to wait this loser out.
Finally, the hard rain falls and economics kicks in. Valley boy gets the boot and I get to pick up all the slack. Under-funding is abound. The two fools before me squandered $750,000 and I have no budget. The end result is a lot of time spent on AIM, email and Slashdot. Hopefully, I'll be moved from the IT group to something more intelligent, I can only hold my breath.
So here I am, smack in the middle of Silicon Valley during job-nuclear-winter. I'm afraid to get too cocky to be fired because jobs aren't growing on trees. So I keep coming back for budget-less existence. The one thing that stands out the most - the job I left which was paying rather well was sending me to school/training/etc. I received several certifications under their employ. Now I will get nothing, unless it is done under my own volition.
Here I am with my worthless stock, high rent and outrageous taxes from the foul state of California (good weather though). It's not all that bad, its really a long, almost paid vacation without any schooling.
All in all the company is interesting, I have the possibility of expanding my horizons with some new things to administer, and luckily this startup has weathered the storm of.com deaths... It's not all that bad, but I would have been better off leveraging my offer with a counter offer with my former employer.
Don't fall into the trap, and make sure a bonus, schooling/education/training is in the contract!
I agree with you. I think destroying dams in place is a bad thing - the damage is done.
The nuclear waste is totally sensationalized. There are new reactor setups, breeding and tandem reactor designs which burn off most of the waste. The waste can be bound inside ceramics to become rather benign. Not like the Russians don't scram reactors all over the ocean floor already, we can properly dispose of waste.
Another interesting fact about waste and radiation, is that burning coal releases radiation into the air. You ask, how so? Well besides there being naturally occurring Carbon 14, there are other trace amounts of radioactive material found in coal. Burning coal releases them into the atmosphere. It takes 2 tons of coal to equal 5 pennies worth of fissionable uranium (size not weight). Low and behold, there is more radiation released into the natural world than where would ever be from a nuclear power plant.
Think of it this way - I hate thinking like a 100% pure capitalist, but the economic damage to a company being help liable for a nuclear waste/meltdown is infinite. The company would have to close. The media would never stop. So it must be worth it, and safe. I mean, airplanes crash all the time, more people die from airplanes than nuclear power plants, yet we all still fly. And even more from cars. Yet the risk is apparently worth the gain.
Of organisms can eat pieces of MIR for breakfast, we should be able to find something to chew on radioactive waste =)
And finally, yes, nuclear plants only break down because of being in disrepair. There is a lot of mythology about Chernobyl as well. People think mushroom clouds and Hiroshima. Far from it, Chernobyl released gas into the atmosphere, it was horrible, but the reactor was almost 50 years old and there are three other reactors there still operating normally. The resulting explosion/gas release was due to a test gone horribly wrong, the control rods were never put back in place and there was no anti-meltdown measures in place. Most of our reactor designs drop the core into some safe reservoir rather than let it sit and melt down above ground.
By the way, the Swedish who are obsessed with cleanliness, environmentally sound , safety consciousnesses, etc, etc, they run nuclear power and they are obsessed with the miniscule radiation emanating from your monitor right now. (MPRII).
I've read on numerous occasions that hydroelectric power is one of the most destructive to ecosystems. The Aswan High dam in Egypt, finished in 1972, has caused horrific changes to the ecosystem in the Nile river valley and a lot of environmentalists what that thing torn down.
On a longer term prospective the interruption in the Nile ecosystem (by building dams and diverting water into canals at the delta), have many negative effect on Egypt and it surrounding.
The Hoover dam also displaced Indian tribes and burial grounds and destroyed the ecosystem there and created a flood plane over the wrong kind of soil.
IMHO, the more we rip apart and terraform and screw with the Earth, the worse off we will all be.
I love reading about alternatives to horribly invasive forms of energy we use today. This is a meta stop gap solution, a way of reducing peaking by bleeding compressed air to help the generators during peak usage. The crux of the issue remains, our power generation techniques are dirty and deprecated.
Most of quelling of useful technology is done by: the old boys club not wanting to give up on the profits, a lot of it is mis-information, and the remainder of the reason why we use horribly inefficient power sources is lack of attention (by our sheep like media).
I used to live near a nuclear power plant in Minnesota. I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power. There used to be a lot of cancer there, and everyone jumped on the power plant, but it was shown that most of the cancers were not related to the power plant at all, there was solvents being dumped into the local water supplies that were causing intestinal cancer. People don't understand radiation cancers always occur in statistical rings, that certain percentage of the people a certain distance get some very specific cancers. Nevertheless, even after the nuclear power plant was vindicated - the media failed to report that the solvents killed the people, not the power plant.
Anyways, here we are burning coal and fossil fuels all day long. Fuel cells, gyroscope technology, ceramic engine and electric cars are getting the kibosh due to the retrofitting costs. And we burn, burn burn.
Today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2001, Coal and Utility companies are lobbying the ever-environment-hating White House to reduce the clean air rules on power plants. Cheney said the administration energy policy will focus on more output for oil and natural gas.
They can continue to sell us electricity at higher prices, cut the cost, pollute the air, and keep real technology from proliferating.
I would like the Slashdot readership to see this complain I am filing to Simple Technology.
The refused to send me an advanced replacement on a hard drive that was broken out of the box:
==== BEGIN ====
To: support@simpletech.com
Subject: Bad Support.
Dear Simple Technology;
I purchased and expensive re-labeled hard drive from Simple at CDW.com.
Part no:
STI-HD2.5/12.0SL
I am very very upset that I could not obtain an advanced replacement, the drive shipped new out of the box with bad sectors.
I THIS MY FAULT? NO.
So now I have to suffer more downtime no a laptop because of a broken drive by Simple.
This is the worst business practice. Simple takes a standard IBM/Hitachi drive, re-labels it, charges more, and screws me on advanced replacement.
I am posting this information to all of my friends and on several high traffic web sites, in fact, Slashdot.org is featuring an article about this - bad customer support. I'm posting this incident there.
There was also no "customer service" person or manager to speak to.
I paid almost $300 for this. I thank you for NO value added.
I am also reporting this to CDW.COM, my vendor, with whom we have a very large account.
xxxxxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxxxx, Inc.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Redwood City, CA 94xxx
(650) xxx xxxx xxxx
==== END ====
I like this forum where people who engage in dishonest business can be cited for their poor performance.
They said it would be shipped out FedEX two day AFTER a "processing period" of 3-5 days.
1 day to Start + 1 day to ship + 3 to 5 days to Fester + 2 Days to come back = 7-9 buiness days because they screwed up.
This is a refreshing piece of software. I would love to once again hear things coming from places that are not polluted by advertisers and special internet. I have noticed the amateur section in the Linux kernel for some time, and would love to be able to tune into a Linux powered broadcast.
I have had intentions of getting into HAM, but I can't due to the fact my antennas would not be appreciated in my apartment complex, but an Internetwork of VHF sites allowing the un fettered broadcasting of "revolutionary" material and un-edited news.
I think any public forum devoid of foul regulations and constraints imposed by mega corporations is a step in the right direction.
Now we have to keep our vile FCC from selling our amateur freedoms on the airwaves.
They will have you believe that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but vigilance does not have the right to invade my privacy, this will be another method to leverage our last shreds of freedom.
The sad story about RAMBUS being implemented wrong
on
Rambus Losing In Court
·
· Score: 5
I know a person who works at DEC/Compaq on actually designing the Alpha chip. He said the next generation of Alpha systems will center around RAMBUS.
My first reaction was "NO, the bane of our existence is now going to fester in high end systems as well!"
He calmed me down and explained on several levels why RAMBUS was superior in this application. And by no means did he ever advocate the use of RAMBUS on a PC, he stated that it would be too costly and Intel had implemented RAMBUS incorrectly.
From what I got out of the conversation was this: RAMBUS was a high speed bus, but it is only 8 bits wide. Sounds ridiculous at first. Apparently Intel decided that 2 channels per CPU would be enough. Practically speaking, especially with high memory bandwidth application, they were somewhat correct. But the day to day performance was no better. DEC has decided to move ahead, but they are planning to use 5 channels per CPU. They are going to do many interesting things with these channels, one of the things he mentioned was the use of memory striping with parity. The probability for a multi-bit error being uncorrectable in this configuration is huge - tending to make more sense for high availability systems.
I also asked him to show me the money, where are there RAMBUS chips with the densities that are not laughably low. He indicated that the EV7 would be able to physically have 64TB of memory. That would, from what I have seen, need a memory stick the size of a 1 foot ruler per slot. The densities required for this are being made to order for DEC.
RAMBUS is a vile company, they don't seem to do much but glean royalties off of others for producing the technology. They produced something that was implemented poorly and is not especially useful for the average Joe. It would be a fitting end to see it end up on the Alpha, outside of broad market appeal. Low volume sales is just what the saps at RAMBUS need. They have done a few things to ensure royalties, they have planted RAMBUS in consoles, tried to get PC buyers to use it. They would want the price of a microwave to go up by $100 bucks too, if they could stuff RAMBUS in there somehow.
Why don't these people stop suing and whining, go to some area of the world to setup a memory plant, and make this stuff. Is it so hard to manufacture, so difficult to have good yields that they have to grab the coat tails of memory giants to pull the fabrication off?
I think NEC and Samsung should just be given the rights to RAMBUS, and have this pest of a company dissolved into the annuls of history. And Intel, shame on you for being duped into doing something so silly next time implement things correctly.
This kind of thing has gotten out of hand!
on
Ring-Tone Royalties
·
· Score: 5
I can not believe that time is wasted with this sort of thing. Someone actually wasted the time to fester about who gets the proceeds and royalties for the cacophonous blips that emanate from a cellphone.
This sort of continual ranting and raving about who own what makes people like me, and most of the "little people" populace want to go out and steal everything in sight. At least I do. Its cathartic to think that my actions may in some way violate some injunction a bastard lawyer crafted.
This is the beginning of the end in the way of copyright law abuse. To think, some day, this horrible lawyer type will look at his kid sticking his quarters into a playschool wind up music box to hear the music so the record labels run by people formerly known as humans can glom a royalty.
I like to see audiophiles stashing away thousands of SHN files - they make nice MP3s and music CDs. The over-regulation of music is like the banning of sex and drugs, didn't work to well, and it wont for the rock and roll either. Just like prohibition created the mafia, this kind of crap just promotes boot legging.
I hope that people can stop focusing on what they are losing and start adding value to things. Try a CD with some words printed on it or some lyrics. And I wont be wasting airtime trying to quip clips of copyrighted music on a device which currently has no mass storage.
I once had the fortunate experience to work with a group of people obsessed with the AS/400 series of machines. The machines are seemingly built with robustness in mind more than anything else. Speaking of never breaking, this is almost true. When the machine sees the impending doom of any of its myriad of fault tolerant part, it calls IBM up, tell them what is wrong, and the next day an IBM guy shows up saying he is there to fix the server that you never knew there was anything wrong with in the first place. I've seen this on more than one occasion.
Hats off to IBM - I hope their new endeavors proliferate the unparalleled reliability to the lower echelons of the Computing world.
I also saw a Mainframe work for 7 years without ever turning off - IBM.
A few comments and questions about the DMA world..
on
What is Ultra DMA?
·
· Score: 5
I have noticed in the recent past that there has been a lot of marketing whoring with regards to Ultra DMA and its various speeds.
I am most disappointed with IDE in general from a performance standpoint. I go through hardware all the time because of the nature of my job, and two things stick out as the sore thumb in bad system performance. The first is the availability of huge quantities of memory, the second being the hard drive.
As far as controllers go in the this area of performance, I tend not to care for anything that is not Intel or Promise, not that I have a fetish for Intel goods. I've yet to try any striping/parity striping controllers yet either. My observation of IDE thus far, regardless of bus 'speed' is somewhat negative. High CPU usage, bad multi-thrashability (e.g., hitting the disk with nasty requests in multiple ways all at once). I feel the hard disk holding me up, especially in Windows. I have found the following registry keys for Windows 2000 to enable DMA66+ operations, FYI:
If using Regedt32 uncheck "Read Only Mode" in the Options menu.
Note that the "0000" key above might show as "0001", "0002" or "0003" on your machine, depending on your particular hardware settings. Select the key appropriate to your case.
Right-click to create a new DWORD [REG_DWORD] Value, call it "EnableUDMA66" (no quotes), and type 1 in the Decimal box to enable ATA/66 (UDMA/66) support. To disable it, change the Decimal value to
0, or delete the "EnableUDMA66" Value altogether.
Reboot when done.
A MUST: To properly enable the UDMA/66 setting, you need to have your ATA/66 (or ATA/100) capable drive(s) hooked up to a different IDE channel than the one your older (E)IDE (even if UDMA/33 capable) drive(s) are connected to!
Here and there you will see reports about reduced CPU usage. This is laughable. One place indicates that mass transfers were taking 90% CPU and with the new and improved drivers, a "mere 56%". Meanwhile all my SCSI drives never elevate the CPU at all.
Another alternative to using all these tweaks and hacks is to just download the Intel drivers (if you have an Intel chipset which you should for PCs, save the glorious Athlon).
I have noticed various anomalies with these drivers.
Sorry for giving so much attention to Windows, these operating systems tend to need the most attention. As far as unix goes, the hdparm suggestions I have seen so far seem correct, thanks for the input.
The SCSI paradigm is greatly suffering from the same pomp with festering numbers. My experience has been that Ultra 160 drives perform no better than Ultra 80. Open Magazine did a whole battery of benchmarks to illustrate its uselessness (unable to locate link).
I personally look for fast rotational speed, good platter density and fewer platters and a fast media rate, and lastly seek times.
IDE and its Ultra friends are great for huge drives to dump crap onto, and even mirror. Keep the OS and the swap file on a SCSI drive, and you can use your CPU for something else.
I remember my first Job in IT/IS/MIS/(whatever else they call the work of a martyr); it was great. I was getting benefits and travel compensation, as well as $28.00/hour. This may not sound like a lot (For New York/San Francisco); after 40 hours this started to rack up dough pretty quickly.
Then came the day I was offered the coveted Salary. Oh, paid vacation! Oh, getting paid when I'm not around. Oh, getting ripped off and having to work un-compensated overtime and having various people call you at all hours. What happened to the days of the Hawaiian shirt, waking up at 9:30, and just knowing it all (compared to lusers where the PEBKAC - I would not presume to know it all) and working late when the servers crashed or messed up.
The suit and tie replaced khakis and polo (I didn't mind dressing up, its like a uniform - and always looks kind of nice). The boss and every co-worker felt like weekends and sick days and vacation days were open season because I was the one who implemented most of the 30 servers in the main location. Never mind the fact the servers has good uptime and were well documented, these people didn't know how to USE the software they were 'professionals' in. When I went away to Mexico one year, I left my cell phone home, and the stupid pager. When I got back there were 40+ messages which were dent to null immediately.
People and Employers don't get it. I use to work late without overtime almost every day in NYC, it's part of the work culture there. People used to get very upset with this guy, Vlad, who basically worked nine to five. I used to say "Lets unite! If we all work nine to five, we will send a message to the management that we need more personnel". This advice fell on deaf ears - the toiling continued.
I am by no means complaining outright, I feel that I am lucky and am well compensated. Work does encroach on my life from time to time, and I resent it. I think its ridiculous and unfair. I work at a Si Valley startup now, so I am less resentful. Everyone works overtime, and the risk and added work is supposed to be rewarded by shares.
It is painful for me to be the pivotal person here, the bridge between the engineers and the marketing whores and others. I have to explain the subterfuge and lameness of the lusers to the engineers, and have to hold the hands of the lusers and explain that people on *nix platforms like PDFs, not work documents, and that HTML mail doesn't play nice. Or how to make a VPN connection. Or how to dial up and ISP. Or how to get a DSL "router" NAT box or wireless network for the home. Or do something else that is overtly simple. The list goes on forever.
I think the service groups in various companies should start valuing their employees, most of the time the only way to send a message is to walk. I've walked with great success, always getting more money each time I hop. It's not about the money for me, it's about being worn to the bone. It about being expected to be superman always by lusers. You should have seen the face on this person whose hard disk failed. "I can replace the hard drive, sure, no problem." "Will I get all my data back?" "No, You never backed it up. You were told many times how to back it up and failed to do so." "I thought it was automatic."
Christ, if you were to tell a professor in University that your floppy died and you lost your project, you would at best get a ~day~, maybe less to produce it. Most of the time you would just fail. These people have graduated from the world of school to the world of being a fetus with a big body in the workplace.
I think IT/MIS/IS/blah should be seen as valued. Companies should train their employees, and increase support. Think of it, when you call {Insert publicly traded technology company here, e.g., HP, Dell} you hate waiting for service, and you hate how stupid the tech support is most of the time. I think of myself as someone who is a pleasure to deal with, I'm polite, like to crack a few jokes, and always try my hardest to get the job done well and in a timely fashion. No, instead, these companies have to bleat to the shareholder, not pay/eliminate good people and as consumers get the shaft.
In a company, the people you support are the consumers, the customers. And people are getting crappier and crappier service because decent people like myself are getting disgruntled and pissed. So they fleet of DeVRY graduates takes my place, from flipping burgers to re-ghosting machines every time they see an application error they don't understand.
Companies and managers - keep the good ones around, pay them more and try not to tell them how to do their jobs. Fire people who don't tow the line, and give the good ones gophers and underlings. You will be rewarded. Start paying out overtime instead of "comp. days," which are a total crock since you page them anyway!
I honestly wish I was still on hourly.
Best of luck to all my fellow MIS/IT/IS/blah support people - may the force of fairness be with us!
I personally love the Supermicro 1U Server Works chipset based products. Looking in them, I can imagine them stuffing that power into a half-length (deep) 1U box fairly soon.
Dell's PowerEdge 1550, which we just received two "seed" servers. Dell was nice enough to send these servers to me for free to keep forever in order to show us how they are better than Sun Netra boxen. They also have 3 U160 hot swap bays as compared to Supermicro 6010 series two.
Not to mention that the dual 850 MHz, 512MB RAM, Dual 18GB Cheetah U160 (Mirrored with RAID Card 64/MB), 1U, 2-way interleaved memory (fast), with ATI AGP and video/mouse/keyboard in front and back with a serial console (nice) would be about $4000-$4500 shipped.
IMHO, small SMP boxen have arrived.
As far as insane laptops go, Sun tried with uber-laptops years ago and for the most part failed. I wish I could get my hands on one of those PowerPC IBM Thinkpads (604e). That line of thinking would produce the kind of power you want in a laptop without the vile constraints of an Apple OS.
I found that Diane Swinestein letter: I can't find her second reply.
:
#1 - Original Message.
To: senator@feinstein.senate.gov [mailto:senator@feinstein.senate.gov]
From: XXXX@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Napster must be allowed to operate.
1- I build a park.
2- Lots of kids play there.
3- A drug dealer comes and sells drugs to all the kiddies.
4- Am I to blame for building the park?
5- No.
Seems like a closed case to me.
#2 Her lame reply.
-----Original Message-----
From: senator@feinstein.senate.gov [mailto:senator@feinstein.senate.gov]
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 6:30 AM
To: XXXX@ix.netcom.com
Subject: About your e-mail message ( Ticket# 02222001C47353395:AR0001 )
Thank you for writing to me about Napster. I read your
letter with interest, and I welcome the opportunity to
respond.
I understand that many people would like to hear music
before they buy it. Napster has become very popular for
providing such a service. I am worried, however, that
Napster is also facilitating the widespread violation of
copyright laws. When an artist produces music, that artist
has made an intellectual and financial investment. When
entities like Napster make it so easy for others to swap
the artist's work without remuneration, then the artist is
not being compensated for that investment. Napster could
reduce the incentive for musicians to create music and
reduce the diversity we enjoy in our listening choices.
The nature of the Internet makes this threat very real.
This issue is currently the subject of judicial
proceedings, and I am awaiting the results of those
proceedings with great interest. I'm sure the courts will
address both commercial copying and non-commercial copying
during the case.
Again, thank you for writing to me. I hope that you will
continue to share your thoughts with me in the future. If
you have further questions or comments, please feel free to
call my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841.
With warmest personal regards.
Sincerely,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
#3 My reply to her.
Using 'threat' and 'Internet' in the same sentence is not what I want my government or my representatives to be doing. I voted for you to represent my beliefs. I do not believe in a monopoly of recording companies squeezing the blood from the musicians. This is a capitalist society with a concept of an open market. This is a new venue and the monopolists do not like it. Lots of artists support Napster. Popular music is trite trash anyway, with labels defining the music and not the best man wins as it should be in a free & open market. I personally have come to the conclusion government is useless and would like to support any and all action to reduce it. I've been all over Europe. While they take home less, they certainly have a lot more in they way of quality of life to who for their spent tax dollars. I don't see a need for a big government who fails to serve the people. Libertarianism would prevail if more people were more effectively educated. I suspect that's the idea, keep the public dumb, as it is right now by design, so that things can continue as they are.
I think the prospect of the US ever using free software is slim to none, however it is do-able.
To answer where technical support would come from, the free software vendors and others who integrate solutions. We do not have to use Linux either, there is plenty of free industrial strength BSD flavors around.
Scalability is often a problem when it comes to free software, so the paradigm 'use free software wherever ~possible~ would prevent total free software dominance.
I think the revenue created by software sales is ludicrous because the vendor can leverage their proprietary knowledge to extort money from people. However, if the software is free or more preferably open source, the can charge what the market is willing to bear.
Speaking of IBM, they have several initiatives that are based on free/open software, and I'm looking forward to seeing the integrated solutions they provide.
And the use of RedHat on a large scale is clearly not an option, and associating RedHat with free/open software isn't fair to the 'movement'. RedHat has done a number of things, especially with regard to scene they created with gcc 2.96.
As far as the economy goes, more people with better software is preferred. I think vendors have to be more interested in the supportability and usability of free software, the ones that cost a lot tend to care only about getting that next version out the door and 'service packing' it.
I was wondering if the Samba/Extended ACL stuff was merged into to the Linux source tree yet? I was frustrated today to have to go and get Samba 2.2.0 and have to go messing around with patching the kernels.
It's nice to see USB getting some more attention/fixes even though it was given a late start.
The first Swinestein response was a canned form letter - obviously auto generated. Upon being angered by a form letter, I replied asking for a better acknowledgement. She gave me a second letter, a brief history of how essentially she's been paid off, and I can go sit in a corner.
I am very sorry to say I didn't save the letter, well... I'll go fish through it now..... Yeah, I chucked it because it was trash.
It amazes me that in a recent article published about UPS winning the rights to deliver packages in a direct route from California to China from Congress a member stated that it was quid pro quo to be bribed. It turns out UPS gave various Congressmen a total of 1.2 million in contributions (bribes). I'm sorry for being vague, I will dig up the link the statement made by the Congressman about bribery.
This state is fried, isn't it?
I wish Diane Feinstein would have the gumption to speak out this blatant waste of resources that will at best produce an absurd (and freedom-crushing) precedent.
I can't believe the RIAA isn't going to be liable for the damages to the tax payer's wallet with all this complete mindless crap. Meanwhile, 9,000,000 other p2p methods are cropping up and being refined - and the RIAA still get to waste our money litigating this foul argument. Napster has opened the doors for endless attack because they attempted to knuckle under and cut a deal.
I wrote my senators and congressmen here in California, apparently they support monopolies (the replied with rude letters that made me not want to vote for them again =).
I believe replacing the human being is akin to digital communism. Remember when China executed the bank thieves? To a system such as theirs, the offing of humans incongruent with their idea of what a computer user should be is highly attractive.
It is a cookie cutter system used to punch out intellectual biscuits. AI-like initiatives such as these should be very careful of the end result. Dumber human beings on the other end are easier to predict and control because they see less alternatives. Less alternatives to controlling oligarchy is better for the sheeple on the end.
How does this all relate to a possible AI-self-correcting hack me if you can system by IBM? I believe in the abstract it does. I was made aware by a friend that individual people inside General Motors know very little about how an overall car works. They specialize on specific pieces of the system, and focus on increasing performance and driving down cost and milking old technology, but they have little regard on the impact of their work on the ~system~. Cars is one things, computers another. The dangers are the same; the users of these systems will have less and less of an idea on how to control what is going on.
Suppose IBM and some smaller company are competitors. With mega-corporations walking around, everyone is a potential competitor. How convenient would be to have a system administrator who uses no more than his brain stem in front of this uber-security software. Say the company has good stuff IBM wants. Now I am an IBM advocate, so this is purely theoretical, but it would be easy for IBM to exploit and leverage their proprietary knowledge of the system to infiltrate their corporate enemy.
Cameron's Terminator series sheds light on runaway technologies and ignoramuses buying and administering them. They are vile. There is no easy way out. We must work together to pave a golden path into the future. Think of this way, we spend a lot of time trying to take away money from one another on wealth that is based on a relative scale. Salt used to be money in some places, now it melts ice. The sooner we stop trying to eliminate the need for intelligent humans to do work (and get compensated for doing so) and research and start embracing the collective intelligence potential the better off we will all be;-).
Ultimately, someone needs to be responsible. If the world becomes a place where no one needs to be responsible for much of anything humans in general are, well, obsolete.
Many movies come to mind when thinking of bureaucracies and AI to support the iron fist of a control trust - 'Brazil', 'Matrix' and others...
"Chicago officials rankled by IBM's 'peace' ads
Associated Press, 04/25/2001"
"CHICAGO - Big Blue has been caught red-handed.
City officials are considering fining IBM for painting peace symbols, hearts and penguins on sidewalks as part of a promotion for the company's Linux computer operating system.
The Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said the black designs, painted at about 100 spots, were supposed to be done in biodegradable chalk.
Company spokeswoman Trink Guarino said Tuesday that IBM had discontinued that part of the 'Peace, Love and Linux' campaign.
The fines run $50 per location. Officials also said they may try to charge IBM for the cleanup - about $134 an hour for equipment, labor and supplies. Each patch will take up to an hour to remove, said Debbie DeLopez, who runs the city's graffiti removal program.
The city learned about the campaign after police arrested Ali Morsy, 20, on suspicion of painting some of the symbols. He faces property damage and vandalism charges.
San Francisco ordered IBM to remove similar graffiti last week, an official said."
Re:What in the world is Mandrake thin..? MirrorSux
on
Mandrake 8.0 Comes Out
·
· Score: 2
I was patently annoyed at not being able to get an ISO to evaluate this. Now my dislike for Mandrake will stand - they release stuff that is so poorly mirrored why bother at all, and I'm not going to Fry's and paying for boxes and marketing dribble to get a hold of this. So I will assume Mandrake 8 is as bad as every previous incarnation. I'll stick to Slack or Debian if I want to deal with Linux.
Personally, I like seeing these ad campaigns. I see this refreshing billboard all over Si Valley, and the only other one that sticks in my mind is some vile Microsoft ad touting 99.999% uptime and the coveted 5 nines as if anyone knows what they are talking about.
I think that using guerilla marketing strategies such as placing graffiti on sidewalks is and excellent idea, considering the campaign fall in place with technology based on Open Source ("Free") software. So, as my logic would have it, it's nice to see free software be advertised using free techniques.
I see all sorts of graffiti lying around on sidewalks of San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury section - it's a interesting mix of pseudo-hippy crap clashing with encroaching yuppies. This IBM campaign is an intellectual break from the mindless dribble more frequently found in these places.
So instead of boring us with another set of made up numbers, IBM uses a refreshing way of reminding us what they are doing at the moment - and I like it - I feel compelled to smile at that penguin every time, even though I like BSD flavors much better because they are more coherent than Linux distributions.
I find it interesting that the big blue whose position in the industry is pretty much anchored is making strides to have a fresh face and participate in the whole 'open' movement. Strides in Apache and Java come to mind in particular, I know at my company most of Java developers us the IBM development tools. IBM also embraced the Linux kernel very early on and makes laptops that come with Caldera on them (T22).
Peace, love and Linux, right on. For once there is an ad from one of the big boys that doesn't have any lies in it.
The story that is filled with hacker-esque buzzwords went awry when he mentioned a girlfriend. Another flaw is how would a e-journalist locate such a mind fetus to get an 'expose' on the subject? Please.
I have heard of this a long time ago, on the order of years. I suppose it never came to fruition because it's just as silly as it ever was.
Now, if Angel partnered with @Home, they could ensure the lowest QOS ever! Imagine, no more "Your cable is out because (insert variation of 'we are incompetent here')!" now its, "Your service is out because the plane is down for refueling!" Now they would have a real excuse. It's beautiful.
They want you to know they are there. They wallow in the semi secret shadow they live in. Its strange how much you see that number reappearing - especially whenever Bush is mentioned. Fnord.
Slashdot Mirror
When I drive to the store, I would burn, just for arguments sake, 1 oz driving throught town. You burn three. Thanks for making a concerted effort to pollute less.
As far as affording an SUV - does it feel good giving the car companies the highest profit margins on a given vehicle? There are instances where an SUVs costs up to 10-15K less than MSRP to produce. You must feel good in a pickup truck with a couple hundred pounds of tackily styled sheet metal wrapping your precious family.
I happen to find cars an enjoyable pastime. SUVs handle like crap, oft have cheap interiors (eg, Lincoln SUVs what share parts with F100/F150 trucks), create this false sense of security which makes the drivers act like total jerks on the road. 4WD does not mean go 80 on pack snow/ice. I laugh when I see a silly blond woman in her suburban toting her todd to the store for organic milk all the while spraying more nasty fumes into the air for her kiddie to choke on in 10 years.
If you arnt in montana plowing snow or hauling wood or doing something more useful than toting your overweight selves around, stuff yourself into a car and drive safe for once.
I am currently under the employ of a Silicon Valley startup. I was allured by the prospect of becoming rich from the stock options. While I did receive a 16% raise in pay, I moved 2800 miles from home to come to this new position as an 'IT Manager'.
.com deaths... It's not all that bad, but I would have been better off leveraging my offer with a counter offer with my former employer.
So, with my new salary in hand I go off to the land of the high-tech, the SI Valley, the birthing place for the greats. Yeah, the land of high rents, outrageous gas prices, ludicrous state taxes and the best weather this earth has ever seen.
I arrive at the startup to find this mongoloid 'IT Manager'. My dreams of truly attaining a higher rank are smashed in a single moment. I have to get into a dick waving contest with a valley kid who covets Microsoft. We were officially deemed both IT Managers. I knew I just had to wait this loser out.
Finally, the hard rain falls and economics kicks in. Valley boy gets the boot and I get to pick up all the slack. Under-funding is abound. The two fools before me squandered $750,000 and I have no budget. The end result is a lot of time spent on AIM, email and Slashdot. Hopefully, I'll be moved from the IT group to something more intelligent, I can only hold my breath.
So here I am, smack in the middle of Silicon Valley during job-nuclear-winter. I'm afraid to get too cocky to be fired because jobs aren't growing on trees. So I keep coming back for budget-less existence. The one thing that stands out the most - the job I left which was paying rather well was sending me to school/training/etc. I received several certifications under their employ. Now I will get nothing, unless it is done under my own volition.
Here I am with my worthless stock, high rent and outrageous taxes from the foul state of California (good weather though). It's not all that bad, its really a long, almost paid vacation without any schooling.
All in all the company is interesting, I have the possibility of expanding my horizons with some new things to administer, and luckily this startup has weathered the storm of
Don't fall into the trap, and make sure a bonus, schooling/education/training is in the contract!
There is no free lunch.
I agree with you. I think destroying dams in place is a bad thing - the damage is done.
The nuclear waste is totally sensationalized. There are new reactor setups, breeding and tandem reactor designs which burn off most of the waste. The waste can be bound inside ceramics to become rather benign. Not like the Russians don't scram reactors all over the ocean floor already, we can properly dispose of waste.
Another interesting fact about waste and radiation, is that burning coal releases radiation into the air. You ask, how so? Well besides there being naturally occurring Carbon 14, there are other trace amounts of radioactive material found in coal. Burning coal releases them into the atmosphere. It takes 2 tons of coal to equal 5 pennies worth of fissionable uranium (size not weight). Low and behold, there is more radiation released into the natural world than where would ever be from a nuclear power plant.
Think of it this way - I hate thinking like a 100% pure capitalist, but the economic damage to a company being help liable for a nuclear waste/meltdown is infinite. The company would have to close. The media would never stop. So it must be worth it, and safe. I mean, airplanes crash all the time, more people die from airplanes than nuclear power plants, yet we all still fly. And even more from cars. Yet the risk is apparently worth the gain.
Of organisms can eat pieces of MIR for breakfast, we should be able to find something to chew on radioactive waste =)
And finally, yes, nuclear plants only break down because of being in disrepair. There is a lot of mythology about Chernobyl as well. People think mushroom clouds and Hiroshima. Far from it, Chernobyl released gas into the atmosphere, it was horrible, but the reactor was almost 50 years old and there are three other reactors there still operating normally. The resulting explosion/gas release was due to a test gone horribly wrong, the control rods were never put back in place and there was no anti-meltdown measures in place. Most of our reactor designs drop the core into some safe reservoir rather than let it sit and melt down above ground.
By the way, the Swedish who are obsessed with cleanliness, environmentally sound , safety consciousnesses, etc, etc, they run nuclear power and they are obsessed with the miniscule radiation emanating from your monitor right now. (MPRII).
Thanks for the input though
My initial sentiment would be the same but...
I've read on numerous occasions that hydroelectric power is one of the most destructive to ecosystems. The Aswan High dam in Egypt, finished in 1972, has caused horrific changes to the ecosystem in the Nile river valley and a lot of environmentalists what that thing torn down.
Many ecologists feel that dams on big rivers have put numerous animal species in peril.
The Hoover dam also displaced Indian tribes and burial grounds and destroyed the ecosystem there and created a flood plane over the wrong kind of soil.
IMHO, the more we rip apart and terraform and screw with the Earth, the worse off we will all be.
I love reading about alternatives to horribly invasive forms of energy we use today. This is a meta stop gap solution, a way of reducing peaking by bleeding compressed air to help the generators during peak usage. The crux of the issue remains, our power generation techniques are dirty and deprecated.
Most of quelling of useful technology is done by: the old boys club not wanting to give up on the profits, a lot of it is mis-information, and the remainder of the reason why we use horribly inefficient power sources is lack of attention (by our sheep like media).
I used to live near a nuclear power plant in Minnesota. I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power. There used to be a lot of cancer there, and everyone jumped on the power plant, but it was shown that most of the cancers were not related to the power plant at all, there was solvents being dumped into the local water supplies that were causing intestinal cancer. People don't understand radiation cancers always occur in statistical rings, that certain percentage of the people a certain distance get some very specific cancers. Nevertheless, even after the nuclear power plant was vindicated - the media failed to report that the solvents killed the people, not the power plant.
Anyways, here we are burning coal and fossil fuels all day long. Fuel cells, gyroscope technology, ceramic engine and electric cars are getting the kibosh due to the retrofitting costs. And we burn, burn burn.
Today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2001, Coal and Utility companies are lobbying the ever-environment-hating White House to reduce the clean air rules on power plants. Cheney said the administration energy policy will focus on more output for oil and natural gas.
They can continue to sell us electricity at higher prices, cut the cost, pollute the air, and keep real technology from proliferating.
I would like the Slashdot readership to see this complain I am filing to Simple Technology.
The refused to send me an advanced replacement on a hard drive that was broken out of the box:
==== BEGIN ====
To: support@simpletech.com
Subject: Bad Support.
Dear Simple Technology;
I purchased and expensive re-labeled hard drive from Simple at CDW.com.
Part no:
STI-HD2.5/12.0SL
I am very very upset that I could not obtain an advanced replacement, the drive shipped new out of the box with bad sectors.
I THIS MY FAULT? NO.
So now I have to suffer more downtime no a laptop because of a broken drive by Simple.
This is the worst business practice. Simple takes a standard IBM/Hitachi drive, re-labels it, charges more, and screws me on advanced replacement.
I am posting this information to all of my friends and on several high traffic web sites, in fact, Slashdot.org is featuring an article about this - bad customer support. I'm posting this incident there.
There was also no "customer service" person or manager to speak to.
I paid almost $300 for this. I thank you for NO value added.
I am also reporting this to CDW.COM, my vendor, with whom we have a very large account.
xxxxxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxxxx, Inc.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Redwood City, CA 94xxx
(650) xxx xxxx xxxx
==== END ====
I like this forum where people who engage in dishonest business can be cited for their poor performance.
They said it would be shipped out FedEX two day AFTER a "processing period" of 3-5 days.
1 day to Start + 1 day to ship + 3 to 5 days to Fester + 2 Days to come back = 7-9 buiness days because they screwed up.
THANKS SIMPLE.
This is a refreshing piece of software. I would love to once again hear things coming from places that are not polluted by advertisers and special internet. I have noticed the amateur section in the Linux kernel for some time, and would love to be able to tune into a Linux powered broadcast.
I have had intentions of getting into HAM, but I can't due to the fact my antennas would not be appreciated in my apartment complex, but an Internetwork of VHF sites allowing the un fettered broadcasting of "revolutionary" material and un-edited news.
I think any public forum devoid of foul regulations and constraints imposed by mega corporations is a step in the right direction.
Now we have to keep our vile FCC from selling our amateur freedoms on the airwaves.
They will have you believe that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but vigilance does not have the right to invade my privacy, this will be another method to leverage our last shreds of freedom.
I know a person who works at DEC/Compaq on actually designing the Alpha chip. He said the next generation of Alpha systems will center around RAMBUS.
My first reaction was "NO, the bane of our existence is now going to fester in high end systems as well!"
He calmed me down and explained on several levels why RAMBUS was superior in this application. And by no means did he ever advocate the use of RAMBUS on a PC, he stated that it would be too costly and Intel had implemented RAMBUS incorrectly.
From what I got out of the conversation was this: RAMBUS was a high speed bus, but it is only 8 bits wide. Sounds ridiculous at first. Apparently Intel decided that 2 channels per CPU would be enough. Practically speaking, especially with high memory bandwidth application, they were somewhat correct. But the day to day performance was no better. DEC has decided to move ahead, but they are planning to use 5 channels per CPU. They are going to do many interesting things with these channels, one of the things he mentioned was the use of memory striping with parity. The probability for a multi-bit error being uncorrectable in this configuration is huge - tending to make more sense for high availability systems.
I also asked him to show me the money, where are there RAMBUS chips with the densities that are not laughably low. He indicated that the EV7 would be able to physically have 64TB of memory. That would, from what I have seen, need a memory stick the size of a 1 foot ruler per slot. The densities required for this are being made to order for DEC.
RAMBUS is a vile company, they don't seem to do much but glean royalties off of others for producing the technology. They produced something that was implemented poorly and is not especially useful for the average Joe. It would be a fitting end to see it end up on the Alpha, outside of broad market appeal. Low volume sales is just what the saps at RAMBUS need. They have done a few things to ensure royalties, they have planted RAMBUS in consoles, tried to get PC buyers to use it. They would want the price of a microwave to go up by $100 bucks too, if they could stuff RAMBUS in there somehow.
Why don't these people stop suing and whining, go to some area of the world to setup a memory plant, and make this stuff. Is it so hard to manufacture, so difficult to have good yields that they have to grab the coat tails of memory giants to pull the fabrication off?
I think NEC and Samsung should just be given the rights to RAMBUS, and have this pest of a company dissolved into the annuls of history. And Intel, shame on you for being duped into doing something so silly next time implement things correctly.
I can not believe that time is wasted with this sort of thing. Someone actually wasted the time to fester about who gets the proceeds and royalties for the cacophonous blips that emanate from a cellphone.
This sort of continual ranting and raving about who own what makes people like me, and most of the "little people" populace want to go out and steal everything in sight. At least I do. Its cathartic to think that my actions may in some way violate some injunction a bastard lawyer crafted.
This is the beginning of the end in the way of copyright law abuse. To think, some day, this horrible lawyer type will look at his kid sticking his quarters into a playschool wind up music box to hear the music so the record labels run by people formerly known as humans can glom a royalty.
I like to see audiophiles stashing away thousands of SHN files - they make nice MP3s and music CDs. The over-regulation of music is like the banning of sex and drugs, didn't work to well, and it wont for the rock and roll either. Just like prohibition created the mafia, this kind of crap just promotes boot legging.
I hope that people can stop focusing on what they are losing and start adding value to things. Try a CD with some words printed on it or some lyrics. And I wont be wasting airtime trying to quip clips of copyrighted music on a device which currently has no mass storage.
I once had the fortunate experience to work with a group of people obsessed with the AS/400 series of machines. The machines are seemingly built with robustness in mind more than anything else. Speaking of never breaking, this is almost true. When the machine sees the impending doom of any of its myriad of fault tolerant part, it calls IBM up, tell them what is wrong, and the next day an IBM guy shows up saying he is there to fix the server that you never knew there was anything wrong with in the first place. I've seen this on more than one occasion.
Hats off to IBM - I hope their new endeavors proliferate the unparalleled reliability to the lower echelons of the Computing world.
I also saw a Mainframe work for 7 years without ever turning off - IBM.
I have noticed in the recent past that there has been a lot of marketing whoring with regards to Ultra DMA and its various speeds.
I am most disappointed with IDE in general from a performance standpoint. I go through hardware all the time because of the nature of my job, and two things stick out as the sore thumb in bad system performance. The first is the availability of huge quantities of memory, the second being the hard drive.
As far as controllers go in the this area of performance, I tend not to care for anything that is not Intel or Promise, not that I have a fetish for Intel goods. I've yet to try any striping/parity striping controllers yet either. My observation of IDE thus far, regardless of bus 'speed' is somewhat negative. High CPU usage, bad multi-thrashability (e.g., hitting the disk with nasty requests in multiple ways all at once). I feel the hard disk holding me up, especially in Windows. I have found the following registry keys for Windows 2000 to enable DMA66+ operations, FYI:
From this site...
Another site has directions for NT 4.0 Sp5+ here.
Another useful site is here, BMDRIVERS.
Here and there you will see reports about reduced CPU usage. This is laughable. One place indicates that mass transfers were taking 90% CPU and with the new and improved drivers, a "mere 56%". Meanwhile all my SCSI drives never elevate the CPU at all.
Another alternative to using all these tweaks and hacks is to just download the Intel drivers (if you have an Intel chipset which you should for PCs, save the glorious Athlon).
I have noticed various anomalies with these drivers.
Sorry for giving so much attention to Windows, these operating systems tend to need the most attention. As far as unix goes, the hdparm suggestions I have seen so far seem correct, thanks for the input.
The SCSI paradigm is greatly suffering from the same pomp with festering numbers. My experience has been that Ultra 160 drives perform no better than Ultra 80. Open Magazine did a whole battery of benchmarks to illustrate its uselessness (unable to locate link).
I personally look for fast rotational speed, good platter density and fewer platters and a fast media rate, and lastly seek times.
IDE and its Ultra friends are great for huge drives to dump crap onto, and even mirror. Keep the OS and the swap file on a SCSI drive, and you can use your CPU for something else.
I remember my first Job in IT/IS/MIS/(whatever else they call the work of a martyr); it was great. I was getting benefits and travel compensation, as well as $28.00/hour. This may not sound like a lot (For New York/San Francisco); after 40 hours this started to rack up dough pretty quickly.
Then came the day I was offered the coveted Salary. Oh, paid vacation! Oh, getting paid when I'm not around. Oh, getting ripped off and having to work un-compensated overtime and having various people call you at all hours. What happened to the days of the Hawaiian shirt, waking up at 9:30, and just knowing it all (compared to lusers where the PEBKAC - I would not presume to know it all) and working late when the servers crashed or messed up.
The suit and tie replaced khakis and polo (I didn't mind dressing up, its like a uniform - and always looks kind of nice). The boss and every co-worker felt like weekends and sick days and vacation days were open season because I was the one who implemented most of the 30 servers in the main location. Never mind the fact the servers has good uptime and were well documented, these people didn't know how to USE the software they were 'professionals' in. When I went away to Mexico one year, I left my cell phone home, and the stupid pager. When I got back there were 40+ messages which were dent to null immediately.
People and Employers don't get it. I use to work late without overtime almost every day in NYC, it's part of the work culture there. People used to get very upset with this guy, Vlad, who basically worked nine to five. I used to say "Lets unite! If we all work nine to five, we will send a message to the management that we need more personnel". This advice fell on deaf ears - the toiling continued.
I am by no means complaining outright, I feel that I am lucky and am well compensated. Work does encroach on my life from time to time, and I resent it. I think its ridiculous and unfair. I work at a Si Valley startup now, so I am less resentful. Everyone works overtime, and the risk and added work is supposed to be rewarded by shares.
It is painful for me to be the pivotal person here, the bridge between the engineers and the marketing whores and others. I have to explain the subterfuge and lameness of the lusers to the engineers, and have to hold the hands of the lusers and explain that people on *nix platforms like PDFs, not work documents, and that HTML mail doesn't play nice. Or how to make a VPN connection. Or how to dial up and ISP. Or how to get a DSL "router" NAT box or wireless network for the home. Or do something else that is overtly simple. The list goes on forever.
I think the service groups in various companies should start valuing their employees, most of the time the only way to send a message is to walk. I've walked with great success, always getting more money each time I hop. It's not about the money for me, it's about being worn to the bone. It about being expected to be superman always by lusers. You should have seen the face on this person whose hard disk failed. "I can replace the hard drive, sure, no problem." "Will I get all my data back?" "No, You never backed it up. You were told many times how to back it up and failed to do so." "I thought it was automatic."
Christ, if you were to tell a professor in University that your floppy died and you lost your project, you would at best get a ~day~, maybe less to produce it. Most of the time you would just fail. These people have graduated from the world of school to the world of being a fetus with a big body in the workplace.
I think IT/MIS/IS/blah should be seen as valued. Companies should train their employees, and increase support. Think of it, when you call {Insert publicly traded technology company here, e.g., HP, Dell} you hate waiting for service, and you hate how stupid the tech support is most of the time. I think of myself as someone who is a pleasure to deal with, I'm polite, like to crack a few jokes, and always try my hardest to get the job done well and in a timely fashion. No, instead, these companies have to bleat to the shareholder, not pay/eliminate good people and as consumers get the shaft.
In a company, the people you support are the consumers, the customers. And people are getting crappier and crappier service because decent people like myself are getting disgruntled and pissed. So they fleet of DeVRY graduates takes my place, from flipping burgers to re-ghosting machines every time they see an application error they don't understand.
Companies and managers - keep the good ones around, pay them more and try not to tell them how to do their jobs. Fire people who don't tow the line, and give the good ones gophers and underlings. You will be rewarded. Start paying out overtime instead of "comp. days," which are a total crock since you page them anyway!
I honestly wish I was still on hourly.
Best of luck to all my fellow MIS/IT/IS/blah support people - may the force of fairness be with us!
I personally love the Supermicro 1U Server Works chipset based products. Looking in them, I can imagine them stuffing that power into a half-length (deep) 1U box fairly soon.
Dell's PowerEdge 1550, which we just received two "seed" servers. Dell was nice enough to send these servers to me for free to keep forever in order to show us how they are better than Sun Netra boxen. They also have 3 U160 hot swap bays as compared to Supermicro 6010 series two.
Not to mention that the dual 850 MHz, 512MB RAM, Dual 18GB Cheetah U160 (Mirrored with RAID Card 64/MB), 1U, 2-way interleaved memory (fast), with ATI AGP and video/mouse/keyboard in front and back with a serial console (nice) would be about $4000-$4500 shipped.
IMHO, small SMP boxen have arrived.
As far as insane laptops go, Sun tried with uber-laptops years ago and for the most part failed. I wish I could get my hands on one of those PowerPC IBM Thinkpads (604e). That line of thinking would produce the kind of power you want in a laptop without the vile constraints of an Apple OS.
I found that Diane Swinestein letter: I can't find her second reply.
:
#1 - Original Message.
To: senator@feinstein.senate.gov [mailto:senator@feinstein.senate.gov]
From: XXXX@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Napster must be allowed to operate.
1- I build a park.
2- Lots of kids play there.
3- A drug dealer comes and sells drugs to all the kiddies.
4- Am I to blame for building the park?
5- No.
Seems like a closed case to me.
#2 Her lame reply.
-----Original Message-----
From: senator@feinstein.senate.gov [mailto:senator@feinstein.senate.gov]
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 6:30 AM
To: XXXX@ix.netcom.com
Subject: About your e-mail message ( Ticket# 02222001C47353395:AR0001 )
Thank you for writing to me about Napster. I read your
letter with interest, and I welcome the opportunity to
respond.
I understand that many people would like to hear music
before they buy it. Napster has become very popular for
providing such a service. I am worried, however, that
Napster is also facilitating the widespread violation of
copyright laws. When an artist produces music, that artist
has made an intellectual and financial investment. When
entities like Napster make it so easy for others to swap
the artist's work without remuneration, then the artist is
not being compensated for that investment. Napster could
reduce the incentive for musicians to create music and
reduce the diversity we enjoy in our listening choices.
The nature of the Internet makes this threat very real.
This issue is currently the subject of judicial
proceedings, and I am awaiting the results of those
proceedings with great interest. I'm sure the courts will
address both commercial copying and non-commercial copying
during the case.
Again, thank you for writing to me. I hope that you will
continue to share your thoughts with me in the future. If
you have further questions or comments, please feel free to
call my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841.
With warmest personal regards.
Sincerely,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
#3 My reply to her.
Using 'threat' and 'Internet' in the same sentence is not what I want my government or my representatives to be doing. I voted for you to represent my beliefs. I do not believe in a monopoly of recording companies squeezing the blood from the musicians. This is a capitalist society with a concept of an open market. This is a new venue and the monopolists do not like it. Lots of artists support Napster. Popular music is trite trash anyway, with labels defining the music and not the best man wins as it should be in a free & open market. I personally have come to the conclusion government is useless and would like to support any and all action to reduce it. I've been all over Europe. While they take home less, they certainly have a lot more in they way of quality of life to who for their spent tax dollars. I don't see a need for a big government who fails to serve the people. Libertarianism would prevail if more people were more effectively educated. I suspect that's the idea, keep the public dumb, as it is right now by design, so that things can continue as they are.
I feel compelled to enter this fray.
I think the prospect of the US ever using free software is slim to none, however it is do-able.
To answer where technical support would come from, the free software vendors and others who integrate solutions. We do not have to use Linux either, there is plenty of free industrial strength BSD flavors around.
Scalability is often a problem when it comes to free software, so the paradigm 'use free software wherever ~possible~ would prevent total free software dominance.
I think the revenue created by software sales is ludicrous because the vendor can leverage their proprietary knowledge to extort money from people. However, if the software is free or more preferably open source, the can charge what the market is willing to bear.
Speaking of IBM, they have several initiatives that are based on free/open software, and I'm looking forward to seeing the integrated solutions they provide.
And the use of RedHat on a large scale is clearly not an option, and associating RedHat with free/open software isn't fair to the 'movement'. RedHat has done a number of things, especially with regard to scene they created with gcc 2.96.
As far as the economy goes, more people with better software is preferred. I think vendors have to be more interested in the supportability and usability of free software, the ones that cost a lot tend to care only about getting that next version out the door and 'service packing' it.
I was wondering if the Samba/Extended ACL stuff was merged into to the Linux source tree yet? I was frustrated today to have to go and get Samba 2.2.0 and have to go messing around with patching the kernels. It's nice to see USB getting some more attention/fixes even though it was given a late start.
The first Swinestein response was a canned form letter - obviously auto generated. Upon being angered by a form letter, I replied asking for a better acknowledgement. She gave me a second letter, a brief history of how essentially she's been paid off, and I can go sit in a corner.
I am very sorry to say I didn't save the letter, well... I'll go fish through it now..... Yeah, I chucked it because it was trash.
It amazes me that in a recent article published about UPS winning the rights to deliver packages in a direct route from California to China from Congress a member stated that it was quid pro quo to be bribed. It turns out UPS gave various Congressmen a total of 1.2 million in contributions (bribes). I'm sorry for being vague, I will dig up the link the statement made by the Congressman about bribery.
This state is fried, isn't it?
I wish Diane Feinstein would have the gumption to speak out this blatant waste of resources that will at best produce an absurd (and freedom-crushing) precedent.
I can't believe the RIAA isn't going to be liable for the damages to the tax payer's wallet with all this complete mindless crap. Meanwhile, 9,000,000 other p2p methods are cropping up and being refined - and the RIAA still get to waste our money litigating this foul argument. Napster has opened the doors for endless attack because they attempted to knuckle under and cut a deal.
I wrote my senators and congressmen here in California, apparently they support monopolies (the replied with rude letters that made me not want to vote for them again =).
I believe replacing the human being is akin to digital communism. Remember when China executed the bank thieves? To a system such as theirs, the offing of humans incongruent with their idea of what a computer user should be is highly attractive.
;-).
It is a cookie cutter system used to punch out intellectual biscuits. AI-like initiatives such as these should be very careful of the end result. Dumber human beings on the other end are easier to predict and control because they see less alternatives. Less alternatives to controlling oligarchy is better for the sheeple on the end.
How does this all relate to a possible AI-self-correcting hack me if you can system by IBM? I believe in the abstract it does. I was made aware by a friend that individual people inside General Motors know very little about how an overall car works. They specialize on specific pieces of the system, and focus on increasing performance and driving down cost and milking old technology, but they have little regard on the impact of their work on the ~system~. Cars is one things, computers another. The dangers are the same; the users of these systems will have less and less of an idea on how to control what is going on.
Suppose IBM and some smaller company are competitors. With mega-corporations walking around, everyone is a potential competitor. How convenient would be to have a system administrator who uses no more than his brain stem in front of this uber-security software. Say the company has good stuff IBM wants. Now I am an IBM advocate, so this is purely theoretical, but it would be easy for IBM to exploit and leverage their proprietary knowledge of the system to infiltrate their corporate enemy.
Cameron's Terminator series sheds light on runaway technologies and ignoramuses buying and administering them. They are vile. There is no easy way out. We must work together to pave a golden path into the future. Think of this way, we spend a lot of time trying to take away money from one another on wealth that is based on a relative scale. Salt used to be money in some places, now it melts ice. The sooner we stop trying to eliminate the need for intelligent humans to do work (and get compensated for doing so) and research and start embracing the collective intelligence potential the better off we will all be
Ultimately, someone needs to be responsible. If the world becomes a place where no one needs to be responsible for much of anything humans in general are, well, obsolete.
Many movies come to mind when thinking of bureaucracies and AI to support the iron fist of a control trust - 'Brazil', 'Matrix' and others...
IBM has been fined for this interesting ad campaign.
5 01 /ibm_ads.html
http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/daily/04/042
"Chicago officials rankled by IBM's 'peace' ads
Associated Press, 04/25/2001"
"CHICAGO - Big Blue has been caught red-handed.
City officials are considering fining IBM for painting peace symbols, hearts and penguins on sidewalks as part of a promotion for the company's Linux computer operating system.
The Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said the black designs, painted at about 100 spots, were supposed to be done in biodegradable chalk.
Company spokeswoman Trink Guarino said Tuesday that IBM had discontinued that part of the 'Peace, Love and Linux' campaign.
The fines run $50 per location. Officials also said they may try to charge IBM for the cleanup - about $134 an hour for equipment, labor and supplies. Each patch will take up to an hour to remove, said Debbie DeLopez, who runs the city's graffiti removal program.
The city learned about the campaign after police arrested Ali Morsy, 20, on suspicion of painting some of the symbols. He faces property damage and vandalism charges.
San Francisco ordered IBM to remove similar graffiti last week, an official said."
I was patently annoyed at not being able to get an ISO to evaluate this. Now my dislike for Mandrake will stand - they release stuff that is so poorly mirrored why bother at all, and I'm not going to Fry's and paying for boxes and marketing dribble to get a hold of this. So I will assume Mandrake 8 is as bad as every previous incarnation. I'll stick to Slack or Debian if I want to deal with Linux.
Personally, I like seeing these ad campaigns. I see this refreshing billboard all over Si Valley, and the only other one that sticks in my mind is some vile Microsoft ad touting 99.999% uptime and the coveted 5 nines as if anyone knows what they are talking about.
I think that using guerilla marketing strategies such as placing graffiti on sidewalks is and excellent idea, considering the campaign fall in place with technology based on Open Source ("Free") software. So, as my logic would have it, it's nice to see free software be advertised using free techniques.
I see all sorts of graffiti lying around on sidewalks of San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury section - it's a interesting mix of pseudo-hippy crap clashing with encroaching yuppies. This IBM campaign is an intellectual break from the mindless dribble more frequently found in these places.
So instead of boring us with another set of made up numbers, IBM uses a refreshing way of reminding us what they are doing at the moment - and I like it - I feel compelled to smile at that penguin every time, even though I like BSD flavors much better because they are more coherent than Linux distributions.
I find it interesting that the big blue whose position in the industry is pretty much anchored is making strides to have a fresh face and participate in the whole 'open' movement. Strides in Apache and Java come to mind in particular, I know at my company most of Java developers us the IBM development tools. IBM also embraced the Linux kernel very early on and makes laptops that come with Caldera on them (T22).
Peace, love and Linux, right on. For once there is an ad from one of the big boys that doesn't have any lies in it.
The story that is filled with hacker-esque buzzwords went awry when he mentioned a girlfriend. Another flaw is how would a e-journalist locate such a mind fetus to get an 'expose' on the subject? Please.
I have heard of this a long time ago, on the order of years. I suppose it never came to fruition because it's just as silly as it ever was.
Now, if Angel partnered with @Home, they could ensure the lowest QOS ever! Imagine, no more "Your cable is out because (insert variation of 'we are incompetent here')!" now its, "Your service is out because the plane is down for refueling!" Now they would have a real excuse. It's beautiful.
They want you to know they are there. They wallow in the semi secret shadow they live in. Its strange how much you see that number reappearing - especially whenever Bush is mentioned. Fnord.