Now that the writers from The Nation can't carp about the superiority of communist governments (due to the somewhat dramatic collapse of the USSR and subsequent run-to-capitalism by the eastern bloc), they needed something else to fear-monger about.
Apparently they've moved on to privacy and identity concerns.
Let's get things straight: nobody really cares about what you buy except for marketers. And right now marketers don't even understand the POS data from your club card, much less the random crud that'll come off of RFID.
Anyone writing about RFID and privacy is so far ahead of the technology that they're basically sci-fi writers who are pitching totally hypothetical, worst-case scenarios.
If the government wants to track you, they can already do it with those big-ass confinement anklets...or some other, smaller devices. Eveyone else can, too, including your cell phone provider.
Take a chill pill, and relax. At least in the US, you're safe. Wal-mart doesn't care if you're a man wearing womens' underwear - until it wants to offer you a discount on them.
One interesting fact is they're only using 20,000 samples for the superbowl instead of their whole customer base. Last I heard Nielsen only had 20-35k boxes out there doing sampling, and poor sampling at that.
If TiVo knows how, they can beat Nielsen to death with their data. The only problem right now is TiVo users are more likely to be in upper income segments, which skews the data.
I'd wager that right now the Active Directory toolsets are much better and more mature than whatever you'll be using to manage samba and open directory.
I'm saying this because there are companies who's specialty is building tools to manage AD forests, while as far as I know nobody really makes real (industrial strength) tools to manage samba - and only apple (and a small part of apple at that) does anything with OD.
It was a toss-up whether the hubble was going to be put on ice or not, and it looks like nasa made a decision.
But really, what's wrong with the militarization of space? Almost all the sci-fi tv shows dealing with space, yes, the ones you know and love, are populated by military folks: star trek, babylon 5, stargate sg-1, battlestar galatica come to mind. The only space show I can think of that didn't have the military as primary characters was firefly, which died an unfortunate (and probably premature) death.
Let's face it, the military are the only ones who are crazy enough to spend billions for a strategic position. No sane commercial enterprise is going to spend that much to build a space beachhead, because there's no ROI. If commerical enterprises can leverage off of the military infrastructure, well, that makes it a bit more acceptible from an ROI point of view.
I don't understand why it was so hard for a *nix guy to run on a Sun. It's not that hard, really. Having used all the majors (aix, hpux, solaris, bsd), sun is by far the easiest to get some arbitrary piece of code to compile/work.
The biggest problem is trying to get Linux software to compile on anything else, because Linux developers use so many Linux-specific things...or don't really think about x-platform stuff like byte-ordering (more likely).
And to be honest, I can't imagine what kind of problem you had with, of all things, gcc and the spec viewperf. I mean, it's gcc and some x11 app. Did you ask on one of the newsgroups? How about downgrading to 2.95.2? Did you use the sun gcc binaries, or did you build it with cc? etc etc etc.
C'mon man, this is Solaris, a Real Life operating system. People run their businesses on this stuff. If you can't get something to compile on Solaris, you shouldn't be publishing the article at all(!).
The whole COD bruhaha is driven by the same things that drove electricity generation back in the day, namely, that today getting incremental computing power is expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and hard-to-manage.
In the old days (and today for some really big shops), everyone generated their own electricity - they had to. Either that, or they bought it from local collectives. As you can imagine, that was relatively expensive and way inefficient. If you needed a few thousand kw more than your generators could produce, well, you'd have to buy new generators.
Well heck, why not use some kw from your neighbor? Well you can, but the interconnect cost is high, as are the risks. What happens if you overload your neighbor's generator? Both of you are hosed. For your neighbor, the incremental benefit for selling you their excess electricity is far outweighed by the downside of total loss of all electrical. Doh!
Back then it might have been called "electricity on demand." As much electricity, when you needed it, on a metered basis. Hey, you don't have to worry about your electricity needs anymore. And by leveraging electricity generation across a region, the total price is magnitudes less than what you would pay. A no-brainer, and something with benefits so great that the local governments gave monopolies to local power companies so they'd build out their infrastructures.
Fast-forward to now, and COD is a major problem. No sane computer vendor wants to become a commodity like electricity, except...IBM. Only IBM has the scope to survive computing commoditization, because it believes its boxes are what's going to be at the end of that data cable snaking into your (or someone else's) business.
Face it, nobody except geeks really cares how stuff happens on computers, just that it happens quickly, reliably, and as expected, three things that most IT departments are mostly incapable of doing. Why not let IBM do it?
Right now there are a bunch of things to work out, like management, uptime, performance, and getting internal apps on hosted systems, stuff like that. It's the annoying management and administration stuff that's bogging everything down. But this is more than outsourcing, this is outsourcing to the next level.
Think about it. Why does every business need their own accounting program? They don't, not really. How about for payroll? HR? Inventory? Email? They don't. They might like to think they do, but realistically speaking if accounting software adheres to GAAP they'll live with it. If they can customize reports, they'll be fine. Same with everything else.
It would have millions (or billions) of dollars if the world was like this. Why have 5000 instances of peoplesoft running all over the US, when they basically do the same thing in the same way, with minimal customization? etc etc.
That's the promise of CoD - getting rid of your IT department completely. IT is generally the worst-performing, least responsive part of any business. Let it be handled by pros, instead of the yokels you've got. And you'll save money to boot.
Don't your realize that 95% of the humanities is designed to trap people with severe mental defects, so they don't get out into the Real World? By keeping them safe and talking to each other, society inures itself to their unique, but completely worthless jabbering. Indeed, the humanities could be viewed as an experiment in large group masterbation.
The only ones with this defect who have successfully managed to escape from academia are lawyers, psychologists, and economists, much to the detriment to society at large.
Modern science is currently unable to devise a way to sequester practitioners of the above 'disciplines', but have successfully segrated english departments by planting a mental virus (deconstructionism), making most english graduate students and faculty unemployable.
that's what I remmeber too - kermit with for use with high-noise environments, and zmodem was when you wanted to just get stuff fast over relatively clear lines.
I vaguely remember that most kermit window sizes were set to ridiculously small values because they were defaults.
Then there was sliding window kermit, which was a sort of lame attempt to match zmodem's speed.
The reason gerrymandering exists is simple: you need to split people up into relatively equal-numbered-sized chunks, so each representative represents a mostly equivalent number of people.
Where those lines are drawn can be key to who gets elected.
Let's use a simple example. If each representative represents 100 voters and you have 100 relatives that live in a 2-block square, the best district for you would be a shape specifying the exact size of that 2-block square where your relatives are. You can pretty much guarantee that all your relatives will vote for you, or at least most of your relatives won't vote for someone else. Thus you're a guaranteed winner.
What's wrong with that? Are you not going to represent the will and desires of those 100 people?
Any whining about gerrymandering is done by the people that lose out. In this case, it's the Democrats (usually) that are whining about gerrymandering, because they're starting to get voted out of office at the local level. In the past, the Republicans were whining about it because they were "drawn out" of the election process by the Dems.
Really, it's just a game of tactical advantage played by people on all sides. Advantage today turns into disadvantages tomorrow. Whiners today turn into brutal gerrymanderers of tomorrow.
That's how it is.
And "independent" councils are nothing of the kind. Anyone involved in the political process is a political actor, and are by definition not independent. They live, work, and eat with everyone else...it's just that everyone agrees not to complain too loudly when the "independents" favor one part or another.
This guy would have been a real asset to the government, really. His presentation is great, he has these great tables that illustrate exactly what he's trying to say, and they're also really funny.
Plus, he's got a good eye, a pretty developed sense of humor, and a lot of creativity. An outside-the-box thinker, maybe.
But our government is more concerned with "safe" than "good." "Safe" people don't rock the boat and destroy pension opportunities.
For best results, organize your stuff into loose categories before putting them into containers.
At one point I had a big plastic bin of just old cables (scsi, 13w3, serial, thinnet, old power adapters), one for components (drives, memory, PCI cards, etc), one for newer cables (usb, fw, enet), and one for power cords.
After a few years of non-use, I was able to donate the "old cable" collection without fear - I figured if none of my systems needed anything from that bin, then that bin was safe to throw away.
Get clear containers if you can, because you can spend a lot of time trying to find stuff, and it's always better to find the right box the first time.
And if you have time, be sure to tie up the cables. There's nothing more annoying than having to spend 20 minutes untangling the 40 cables that have managed to twist themselves around the cable you want!
Anyone who knows what they're doing will tell you that IT matters only in the sense that it enables good processes. Your IT is a tool that needs to be backed by processes and people.
Wal-mart might have realtime inventory statistics across the world, but the reason they have that is because they know what to do with that information. If you gave that capability to Kmart executives, they wouldn't have any idea what to do with it.
The problem with IT, though, is that KMart might actually buy a system that can give them realtime inventory, then not use it. Whoops, there goes tens of millions of dollars.
IT doesn't matter because everyone can do it now. Can anyone on/. not figure out how to build an iTunes music store from a technical perspective? Does anyone here not know how to create a scalable mail system? That knowledge (or know-how) is commodity knowledge now.
So no, IT doesn't matter, or it matters - the way electricity matters.
It's already easy for this to happen. Think about your workplace - the IT guys (you guys, mostly) can put whatever the hell you want on someone's box, and they'd have no idea.
For example:
Staffer: "Hey, I have no idea where that child pr0n came from!"
Manager: "Look, don't make this harder than it has to be. Just pack up your stuff and we won't tell your wife or the paper."
Staffer: "But I never saw that before!"
Manager: "That's what they all say."
With a careful admin, even browser history and caches can be faked. And there's not a thing that the poor staffer could do about it.
Yeah, get off it. Longshoremen are basically cargo monkeys, no different than the UPS delivery guys, except for one thing - longshoremen have more equipment, so they don't actually have to lift anything.
It's great that their union is so powerful that it can disrupt commerce worldwide. That just means that, like the Mob, they've become experts in extortion.
Don't try and point the finger somewhere else - those guys are way overpaid, and it's no good to say "hey, they're overpaid because the other guys is a monopoly too."
Fairly recently as compared to when? I remember using ftp behind NAT years ago, back in the mid-90s...and boy does that sound strange.
Anyhow, the stuff now works and is stable (and has for years), so there's no reason to whine about stability, etc. If your software doesn't work behind NAT, it's because they hired an inexperienced network guy to write the code.
Why not complain about something else, like the crappy X server stuff?
You win the "I went a long distance to find a reason to blast Apple" award!"
People can't blast them for overpriced machines, low performance, monokernels, having an unstable OS with no real preemptive multi-tasking, and no protected memory. So let's blast them for not giving buyers discounts! Whoo!
One problem with using the words "Audiophile" and "iPod" together is simple: the iPod doesn't use a real tube amp. It also doens't weight more than 50 lbs, the minimum "Audiophile" standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that the writers from The Nation can't carp about the superiority of communist governments (due to the somewhat dramatic collapse of the USSR and subsequent run-to-capitalism by the eastern bloc), they needed something else to fear-monger about.
Apparently they've moved on to privacy and identity concerns.
Let's get things straight: nobody really cares about what you buy except for marketers. And right now marketers don't even understand the POS data from your club card, much less the random crud that'll come off of RFID.
Anyone writing about RFID and privacy is so far ahead of the technology that they're basically sci-fi writers who are pitching totally hypothetical, worst-case scenarios.
If the government wants to track you, they can already do it with those big-ass confinement anklets...or some other, smaller devices. Eveyone else can, too, including your cell phone provider.
Take a chill pill, and relax. At least in the US, you're safe. Wal-mart doesn't care if you're a man wearing womens' underwear - until it wants to offer you a discount on them.
One interesting fact is they're only using 20,000 samples for the superbowl instead of their whole customer base. Last I heard Nielsen only had 20-35k boxes out there doing sampling, and poor sampling at that.
If TiVo knows how, they can beat Nielsen to death with their data. The only problem right now is TiVo users are more likely to be in upper income segments, which skews the data.
Find out what they know.
I'd wager that right now the Active Directory toolsets are much better and more mature than whatever you'll be using to manage samba and open directory.
I'm saying this because there are companies who's specialty is building tools to manage AD forests, while as far as I know nobody really makes real (industrial strength) tools to manage samba - and only apple (and a small part of apple at that) does anything with OD.
How much does redhat cost, now that they've gone to advanced server? Here it is:
item: basic, standard, premium
red hat enterprise, x86: 349, 799, -
red hat advanced, x86: -, $1499, $2499
red hat advanced, pseries: -, $1992, $2998
Not bad, really - it's cheaper than rhas on POWER.
It was a toss-up whether the hubble was going to be put on ice or not, and it looks like nasa made a decision.
But really, what's wrong with the militarization of space? Almost all the sci-fi tv shows dealing with space, yes, the ones you know and love, are populated by military folks: star trek, babylon 5, stargate sg-1, battlestar galatica come to mind. The only space show I can think of that didn't have the military as primary characters was firefly, which died an unfortunate (and probably premature) death.
Let's face it, the military are the only ones who are crazy enough to spend billions for a strategic position. No sane commercial enterprise is going to spend that much to build a space beachhead, because there's no ROI. If commerical enterprises can leverage off of the military infrastructure, well, that makes it a bit more acceptible from an ROI point of view.
I don't understand why it was so hard for a *nix guy to run on a Sun. It's not that hard, really. Having used all the majors (aix, hpux, solaris, bsd), sun is by far the easiest to get some arbitrary piece of code to compile/work.
The biggest problem is trying to get Linux software to compile on anything else, because Linux developers use so many Linux-specific things...or don't really think about x-platform stuff like byte-ordering (more likely).
And to be honest, I can't imagine what kind of problem you had with, of all things, gcc and the spec viewperf. I mean, it's gcc and some x11 app. Did you ask on one of the newsgroups? How about downgrading to 2.95.2? Did you use the sun gcc binaries, or did you build it with cc? etc etc etc.
C'mon man, this is Solaris, a Real Life operating system. People run their businesses on this stuff. If you can't get something to compile on Solaris, you shouldn't be publishing the article at all(!).
The whole COD bruhaha is driven by the same things that drove electricity generation back in the day, namely, that today getting incremental computing power is expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and hard-to-manage.
In the old days (and today for some really big shops), everyone generated their own electricity - they had to. Either that, or they bought it from local collectives. As you can imagine, that was relatively expensive and way inefficient. If you needed a few thousand kw more than your generators could produce, well, you'd have to buy new generators.
Well heck, why not use some kw from your neighbor? Well you can, but the interconnect cost is high, as are the risks. What happens if you overload your neighbor's generator? Both of you are hosed. For your neighbor, the incremental benefit for selling you their excess electricity is far outweighed by the downside of total loss of all electrical. Doh!
Back then it might have been called "electricity on demand." As much electricity, when you needed it, on a metered basis. Hey, you don't have to worry about your electricity needs anymore. And by leveraging electricity generation across a region, the total price is magnitudes less than what you would pay. A no-brainer, and something with benefits so great that the local governments gave monopolies to local power companies so they'd build out their infrastructures.
Fast-forward to now, and COD is a major problem. No sane computer vendor wants to become a commodity like electricity, except...IBM. Only IBM has the scope to survive computing commoditization, because it believes its boxes are what's going to be at the end of that data cable snaking into your (or someone else's) business.
Face it, nobody except geeks really cares how stuff happens on computers, just that it happens quickly, reliably, and as expected, three things that most IT departments are mostly incapable of doing. Why not let IBM do it?
Right now there are a bunch of things to work out, like management, uptime, performance, and getting internal apps on hosted systems, stuff like that. It's the annoying management and administration stuff that's bogging everything down. But this is more than outsourcing, this is outsourcing to the next level.
Think about it. Why does every business need their own accounting program? They don't, not really. How about for payroll? HR? Inventory? Email? They don't. They might like to think they do, but realistically speaking if accounting software adheres to GAAP they'll live with it. If they can customize reports, they'll be fine. Same with everything else.
It would have millions (or billions) of dollars if the world was like this. Why have 5000 instances of peoplesoft running all over the US, when they basically do the same thing in the same way, with minimal customization? etc etc.
That's the promise of CoD - getting rid of your IT department completely. IT is generally the worst-performing, least responsive part of any business. Let it be handled by pros, instead of the yokels you've got. And you'll save money to boot.
Don't your realize that 95% of the humanities is designed to trap people with severe mental defects, so they don't get out into the Real World? By keeping them safe and talking to each other, society inures itself to their unique, but completely worthless jabbering. Indeed, the humanities could be viewed as an experiment in large group masterbation.
The only ones with this defect who have successfully managed to escape from academia are lawyers, psychologists, and economists, much to the detriment to society at large.
Modern science is currently unable to devise a way to sequester practitioners of the above 'disciplines', but have successfully segrated english departments by planting a mental virus (deconstructionism), making most english graduate students and faculty unemployable.
that's what I remmeber too - kermit with for use with high-noise environments, and zmodem was when you wanted to just get stuff fast over relatively clear lines.
I vaguely remember that most kermit window sizes were set to ridiculously small values because they were defaults.
Then there was sliding window kermit, which was a sort of lame attempt to match zmodem's speed.
Ah, those 300 baud days of old!
The reason gerrymandering exists is simple: you need to split people up into relatively equal-numbered-sized chunks, so each representative represents a mostly equivalent number of people.
Where those lines are drawn can be key to who gets elected.
Let's use a simple example. If each representative represents 100 voters and you have 100 relatives that live in a 2-block square, the best district for you would be a shape specifying the exact size of that 2-block square where your relatives are. You can pretty much guarantee that all your relatives will vote for you, or at least most of your relatives won't vote for someone else. Thus you're a guaranteed winner.
What's wrong with that? Are you not going to represent the will and desires of those 100 people?
Any whining about gerrymandering is done by the people that lose out. In this case, it's the Democrats (usually) that are whining about gerrymandering, because they're starting to get voted out of office at the local level. In the past, the Republicans were whining about it because they were "drawn out" of the election process by the Dems.
Really, it's just a game of tactical advantage played by people on all sides. Advantage today turns into disadvantages tomorrow. Whiners today turn into brutal gerrymanderers of tomorrow.
That's how it is.
And "independent" councils are nothing of the kind. Anyone involved in the political process is a political actor, and are by definition not independent. They live, work, and eat with everyone else...it's just that everyone agrees not to complain too loudly when the "independents" favor one part or another.
This guy would have been a real asset to the government, really. His presentation is great, he has these great tables that illustrate exactly what he's trying to say, and they're also really funny.
Plus, he's got a good eye, a pretty developed sense of humor, and a lot of creativity. An outside-the-box thinker, maybe.
But our government is more concerned with "safe" than "good." "Safe" people don't rock the boat and destroy pension opportunities.
It was good enough for Time Warner, and lord knows HP can only make printers.
India: "Hmm. I'm sorry, I'll have to put you on hold for a specialist. One moment please."
US: "Hmm. I'm sorry, I'll have to put you on hold for a specialist. One moment please.'
For best results, organize your stuff into loose categories before putting them into containers.
At one point I had a big plastic bin of just old cables (scsi, 13w3, serial, thinnet, old power adapters), one for components (drives, memory, PCI cards, etc), one for newer cables (usb, fw, enet), and one for power cords.
After a few years of non-use, I was able to donate the "old cable" collection without fear - I figured if none of my systems needed anything from that bin, then that bin was safe to throw away.
Get clear containers if you can, because you can spend a lot of time trying to find stuff, and it's always better to find the right box the first time.
And if you have time, be sure to tie up the cables. There's nothing more annoying than having to spend 20 minutes untangling the 40 cables that have managed to twist themselves around the cable you want!
Anyone who knows what they're doing will tell you that IT matters only in the sense that it enables good processes. Your IT is a tool that needs to be backed by processes and people.
/. not figure out how to build an iTunes music store from a technical perspective? Does anyone here not know how to create a scalable mail system? That knowledge (or know-how) is commodity knowledge now.
Wal-mart might have realtime inventory statistics across the world, but the reason they have that is because they know what to do with that information. If you gave that capability to Kmart executives, they wouldn't have any idea what to do with it.
The problem with IT, though, is that KMart might actually buy a system that can give them realtime inventory, then not use it. Whoops, there goes tens of millions of dollars.
IT doesn't matter because everyone can do it now. Can anyone on
So no, IT doesn't matter, or it matters - the way electricity matters.
It's already easy for this to happen. Think about your workplace - the IT guys (you guys, mostly) can put whatever the hell you want on someone's box, and they'd have no idea.
For example:
Staffer: "Hey, I have no idea where that child pr0n came from!"
Manager: "Look, don't make this harder than it has to be. Just pack up your stuff and we won't tell your wife or the paper."
Staffer: "But I never saw that before!"
Manager: "That's what they all say."
With a careful admin, even browser history and caches can be faked. And there's not a thing that the poor staffer could do about it.
Yeah, get off it. Longshoremen are basically cargo monkeys, no different than the UPS delivery guys, except for one thing - longshoremen have more equipment, so they don't actually have to lift anything.
It's great that their union is so powerful that it can disrupt commerce worldwide. That just means that, like the Mob, they've become experts in extortion.
Don't try and point the finger somewhere else - those guys are way overpaid, and it's no good to say "hey, they're overpaid because the other guys is a monopoly too."
Fairly recently as compared to when? I remember using ftp behind NAT years ago, back in the mid-90s...and boy does that sound strange.
Anyhow, the stuff now works and is stable (and has for years), so there's no reason to whine about stability, etc. If your software doesn't work behind NAT, it's because they hired an inexperienced network guy to write the code.
Why not complain about something else, like the crappy X server stuff?
You win the "I went a long distance to find a reason to blast Apple" award!"
People can't blast them for overpriced machines, low performance, monokernels, having an unstable OS with no real preemptive multi-tasking, and no protected memory. So let's blast them for not giving buyers discounts! Whoo!
4 tons per gallon * the number of gallons used forever = more than the mass of the earth.
What's the deal?
Have you ever thought that there might be a real difference between a $5 D/A converter and a $15 D/A converter?
One thing for sure, my iPod sounds a heck of a lot better than my dad's Nomad, with the same tracks loaded in both (and the same headphones).
I remember this from the early days of CD: paint the outside edge of your CD with a green (or black) market, and your CD was supposed to sound better.
I tried this on a spice girls CD, and it suddenly sounded 100% better!
One problem with using the words "Audiophile" and "iPod" together is simple: the iPod doesn't use a real tube amp. It also doens't weight more than 50 lbs, the minimum "Audiophile" standard.
One of the things Newton didn't do is kiss ass, which seems to be around 80% of the hiring prereq.
Newton would've joined a dot-com instead.
OTOH, maybe MIT or CalTech would have hired him. Those institutions still have balls.