I'm sure if anyone implied that their special relationship benefits the customer. You're right, of course, I jumped to conclusions. I'm still suffering from sticker shock. I hope their advertising barrage goes very well.
Personally, I could care less what kind of chip the machine runs if it's just a desktop. My users run the sort-of-finicky Corel Office 2000 app, and whoever makes a computer that can run it without crashing wins our vote.
Honestly, though, I don't think HAL could run it.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
Good point. I hadn't thought of that. When I hear "special relationship," I think post-WWII Iandoli's supermarkets here in MA: they had an inside deal with ADM or something and they "passed the savings on to you."
The high-end chip angle makes sense seeing how they've always maintained their reputation by buying at the top of the market. Still, the other day one of the statisticians asks for a new laptop and it's $1000 more than the best Thinkpads, which I like better anyway. I can see it if you're Fortune 500 or something, but we're non-profit and that just looks bad on paper.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
So far I've dealt with support from Dell, IBM, Compaq, Gateway, and Micron. The IBM guys are fucking geniuses with their product, though the hold times are occasionally long. At the other end of the spectrum, Gateway's people always seem on the virge of blurting "you want fries with that?", though I suspect this has something to do with the way Gateway tracks their equipment ("You can't get sound? What kind of card do you have?").
Dell and Compaq were about the same, very professional. Micron's weird: not as sharp as IBM (no one is), but if they can't tell you how to fix it within about 10 minutes, they send a new one. I've gotten motherboards, RAM, monitors, even whole PCs replaced like next day without even asking.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
Dell's PCs are so goddamned expensive I don't see how their "special relationship" benefits anyone. Everytime I get price quotes on PCs from these companies there's Dell, 20% more than everyone else.
I can see where you could make an argument from quality or support comparing Dell with Gateway or something, but if you can't even compete with IBM and Compaq on price, there's something wrong.
I asked these people for a quote on 45 Celeron 466s last year and even IBM had them beat, part for part, by like $20,000. WTF? If the cost of their products is related in any way to their "relationship" with MS/Intel, I say they need to start carrying other people's processors ASAP.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
What you said is right over my head - I was just conjecturing. We have all these SuperSPARCS to run one big database (lab data for cancer patients all over the world, plus massive statistical calculations over that data), plus a little NT LAN for our end users. Since they do like 90% of their work on the SPARCS through cheesy VT320 emulators, and the non-VT320 stuff, WordPerfect 2000 and Netscape, has been ported to Linux, we could run a mainframe without using Windows at all.
I figured we solve all our problems in one shot:
Run IBM's mainframe w/ virtual machines to emulate the SPARCS, then emulate a few Linux servers for the end users to boot from, which will turn their machines into dumb X terminals, while still giving them ports of their favorite apps (WP and NS). The users keep their current apps and get the benefit of using Color X (they don't even have cut-and-paste now!) for their database work, the company doesn't have to buy new hardware for like 10 years, and I don't have to screw around with windows.
I guess I'm just dreaming again.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
Anyone remember the previous story about mainframes running linux on virtual machines? Maybe you take one of these S390s and run hundreds of dumb terminals from it, each one a fully-functioning linux install. That way you get both the 390s mainframe applications (another VM?) and all of the little tools and apps that get ported to Linux.
This actually sounds like a good move. It would allow one of these big bank/insurance/investment/Mr. Burns-type organizations to save millions on hardware (a few of these and cheap dumb terminals) and software (no need for windows licensing).
I bet IBM offered SuSE a deal to do this, and it's a good move on their part if they did. IBM could sell a complete solution (including a mainframe with the old OS and one with the new stuff, then a bunch of terminals and a HUGE support contract) and Microsoft wouldn't see a dime in licensing.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
The foreign nations I was referring to weren't conered by the Marshall Plan, who's beneficiaries mostly seem to like us, though I don't know if we're real popular in Serbia right now.
You're right that I don't work with Cisco every day. Or ever. I know our T1 hops through their equipment a few times before it hits the Cambridge router, and I get the Network Alert mails, seems very few of them are issues with Cisco's equipment. I've actually heard nothing but good things about them, up until your post. More research is in order, it seems.
It's true that companies usually get to the top by stepping on everyone, but it is not necessarily their market position that draws the ire of people who don't compete with them. I for one couldn't care less how much money Bill Gates or anyone else has, it's way more than me one way or another.
My problem is that where I work, everyone's job would be a hell of a lot easier if NO ONE ran Windows, but used Macs (for forms creation) or Solaris (for development of a database that runs on that OS anyway). Not only can we not get rid of Windows, but we get constant pressure from our affiliates to switch to Word and Outlook etc etc.
And I don't need to hear that "dominant business applications" garbage, we're non-profit.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
Sure they would. People always hate #1, and the US is defintely #1 in the world.
Just look at most of the people on this site's irrational hatred of Microsoft. Same thing.
People do not always hate whoever is #1. Cisco is #1 in their market, and worth more than Microsoft besides. You don't hear us complaining about them.
What some foreign nations hate are the "strong-arm tactics" America has used on weaker nations over the course of this country's history. The "rogue nations" (US Gov term, not mine) who hate us usually do so because at some point in the last fifty years we've tried to kill them, their leaders, and/or their economy. They don't hate us because we're #1, they hate us because we act like we own them and there's nothing they can do about it.
The people on this board who hate Microsoft hate them for the same reason: abuse of power. The complaints against this company range from basic stuff like me having to support their worthless products for 150 users to other/. users having their companies ruined by Microsoft's business practices. I'm not saying there aren't a few people on here bitching just because it's the thing to do, but a lot of us have valid reasons to complain about that company whether they're #1 or not.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
Sopranos wins that fight. On New Years, when HBO had a Sopranos marathon at the same time Sci-Fi Channel had a Twilight Zone marathon, I couldn't figure out which one to watch. The Sopranos is that fsckin good. X-Files doesn't even come close, especially not after the early seasons.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
I've actually followed this story for years. Strictly as a spectator, though, but as far as I can tell:
The Alphas used to have NT on them as an option. You could run both Softimage and 3DS MAX at phenominal speeds, which I understand is what they used for a lot of the (mediocre) computer effects on Titanic.
The translator card they used supposedly rewrote certain parts of the MS code for optimization, and at the time (for like a week) was far and away the fastest NT-running hardware around, if I remember right.
When Linux started getting bigger, the Alpha-with-NT market dried up (not that it was huge in the first place), and right around the Digital-Compaq merger, it was suggested that they wouldn't run MS on their newer chips. Digital had already been in a pissing match with Intel over MMX and now they were competing in the 64-bit race, MS made the obvious choice to stick with Intel and that was that.
MS predatory pricing stuff may have kept Compaq relatively quiet in the past, but after the court stuff comes down you'll probably see Compaq throw their weight behind Linux to the degree where they reassign some of the Alpha development folks to supporting Linux directly with official drivers (like with Lucent's special Linux driver for their Thinkpad-deployed Winmodems) and possibly even ports of their supposedly excellent (I'm no judge) Digital-UNIX filesystem and development toolsets.
Like I said above, I'm not an expert at any of this stuff, it's just that I'm interested in 3D animation and I was looking at Alphas with 3DS Max as a lower-cost alternative to SPARCs with Renderman (in like '95-'96), and the weird politics of the Digital/MS/Intel relationship sort of drew me in.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
He's probably using one server for a PDC and another for a fileserver. That's what we do here, and ours never have a problem. One reboot for Norton Utilities install since last July.
Know why? We never ask anything of them. All our real work gets done on SPARCs (And one Linux box for SMBFS).
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
I relaize that a moderator may not like the flip tone of this guy's post, but moderating it down is patently unfair. He's right about the inverse correlation between armed populace and crime rates, both in Switzerland and here in the States.
There isn't nearly as much violence in our country as people would like to believe. You see it on the news because they need to compete with the violent entertainment we like here. I've lived in and visited some of the most unpleasant places on the East Coast, and it's just not as bad as they say.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
It's no better anywhere else. We've gone and remade the whole world in our image. All the countries worth living in are too expensive, and even they show signs of Americanization.
He's right that we have a degree of socialism in this country, but better that than the pure corporatism we're offered as an alternative. I'd like to keep a mix of many forms: treat them as tools to fix whichever problem they fit best.
Of course, that may not be simple enough for prime time.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
Yes, I agree. But pseudo-science like "warp drives" and "wormholes" are not going to produce anything except for fat research grants for "scientists" more interested in Star Trek than the real Universe.
Science fiction is responsible for conceptualizing a number of things we use every day. The best example of this is probably the satellite, as the people who build them still credit Arthur C. Clarke for coming up with the idea.
NASA's scientific research has resulted in the invention of devices we use every day, arguably benefitting this country far more than they cost us. You own a microwave, right?
Finally, look at the page for Breakthrough Propulsion Research. I read it a few months ago and they tell you how much they're spending. It's not much, and the projects they've awarded (small) grants to are NOT pseudo-science and could have applications here on the ground.
As far as medical research funding goes, I work at a federally-funded cancer research organization and I'll tell you right now we're pretty well covered.
Disclosure: I don't have any connection to NASA in any way, though a job there would be the only thing that could get me to move back to Florida.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
...think it was a good enough post regardless of misspellings. Did you know that the average person born in America has a near-perfect grasp of the English language's idiosyncracies by age four? Most never learn to write it, though, so there's no reason to fret over one word.
Or look at it this way: if I had the infinitely-more-valuable HTML skill I could make one of those HREF links to an online dictionary.
For now you'll have to cut and paste: www.m-w.com
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
But Bob's Graphic Card Pro makes Quake III look all crispy! Besides, how will I feel superior to my users if I can't run a more complicated OS than they do?
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
"ok, who does this, huh? I mean, viewing a gif or clicking a URL, but running a strange program?"
Not everyone knows the difference. They see the attachment and click. After the last one, I sent an explanation of how to figure out what kind of file the attachment is (by looking at the extension) and why it's important to know before you click on it. Since I support a hundred-plus windows users, I'm not really surprised that people don't know this. I'm sort of irritated, though, that if I don't tell them stuff like this, they aren't going to learn it anywhere else. The programs don't have little warning screens about it, and no one will ever RTFM, so they're stuck. Good thing we don't use Outlook here, eh? We still got last week's virus, but only two people lost.jpgs over it.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
That's what I mean. Having multiple contributors from each language add to the translation dictionaries would allow you to use both single words and mutliple-word phrases for translation.
That way you could have an entry: "Throw the book at them" = "Prosecute to the fullest extent" and THEN translate it. It would take a lot of work to get the right basic system down, but once you did, some sort of distributed entry system with peer review would allow you to keep up with rapidly changing areas of language. The pool of idiomatic expressions we use in the US is hell for any non-native speaker to navigate, and since English is currently the world's common language for business purposes, having a translator that kept current would be of great benefit to others.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
"Or can I just galavant around selling GPL'd material, make a profit, then stop with but a wrist slapping or less when caught?" You can sell "GPL'd material," and even make a profit, if you'd like. It's the "now release the source code you based on GPL'd material" that gets these people. Some forget, some are stuck with old habits or unwise legal departments. It's like they hear the part about us sharing with them but tune out everything after that.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
an open-source type project. If you could come up with a good enough basic translation system, you could take dictionary updates from everywhere, so the software would keep up with the languages involved. What good's a little box that translates Japanese to English, when words and phrases move in and out of use so quickly in the two languages you end up with Babelfish-type results. Without tons of people working on something like this continuously you'll need new equipment every year, and like you said, it's not cheap.
-jpowers
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
What the Protestants did to each other later on is nothing to sneeze at, either. They pretty much all pale in the face of what organized religion in general did to women during that period. We all know The Salem Witch Trials and all, but the actual numbers killed in Europe are staggering.
You're right about the new ideas leading to bloodshed, though. Just the other day I installed linux on my home pc and Bill Gates had my whole family killed.
The "shortage" is really companies wanting to have extra people to devote to growth rather than simple maintenance. They also aren't willing to pay market rate for the skillsets they need.
The recession in the early '90s made companies used to having a hundred overqualified candidates willing to work for peanuts, and now that the situation's reversed, these corporations are whining about having to take what they can get.
Any company who looks at the payscale for the position they're trying to fill and starts offering a salary at least at the middle of that scale rather than the bottom will have no problem getting the people they're looking for. Once they start valuing their IS employees as more than mere maintenance crew / union laborers, they'll find themselves having an easier time both hiring people and keeping them. -jpowers
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I could care less what kind of chip the machine runs if it's just a desktop. My users run the sort-of-finicky Corel Office 2000 app, and whoever makes a computer that can run it without crashing wins our vote.
Honestly, though, I don't think HAL could run it.
-jpowers
The high-end chip angle makes sense seeing how they've always maintained their reputation by buying at the top of the market. Still, the other day one of the statisticians asks for a new laptop and it's $1000 more than the best Thinkpads, which I like better anyway. I can see it if you're Fortune 500 or something, but we're non-profit and that just looks bad on paper.
-jpowers
Dell and Compaq were about the same, very professional. Micron's weird: not as sharp as IBM (no one is), but if they can't tell you how to fix it within about 10 minutes, they send a new one. I've gotten motherboards, RAM, monitors, even whole PCs replaced like next day without even asking.
-jpowers
-jpowers
-jpowers
I can see where you could make an argument from quality or support comparing Dell with Gateway or something, but if you can't even compete with IBM and Compaq on price, there's something wrong.
I asked these people for a quote on 45 Celeron 466s last year and even IBM had them beat, part for part, by like $20,000. WTF? If the cost of their products is related in any way to their "relationship" with MS/Intel, I say they need to start carrying other people's processors ASAP.
-jpowers
I figured we solve all our problems in one shot:
Run IBM's mainframe w/ virtual machines to emulate the SPARCS, then emulate a few Linux servers for the end users to boot from, which will turn their machines into dumb X terminals, while still giving them ports of their favorite apps (WP and NS). The users keep their current apps and get the benefit of using Color X (they don't even have cut-and-paste now!) for their database work, the company doesn't have to buy new hardware for like 10 years, and I don't have to screw around with windows.
I guess I'm just dreaming again.
-jpowers
This actually sounds like a good move. It would allow one of these big bank/insurance/investment/Mr. Burns-type organizations to save millions on hardware (a few of these and cheap dumb terminals) and software (no need for windows licensing).
I bet IBM offered SuSE a deal to do this, and it's a good move on their part if they did. IBM could sell a complete solution (including a mainframe with the old OS and one with the new stuff, then a bunch of terminals and a HUGE support contract) and Microsoft wouldn't see a dime in licensing.
-jpowers
-jpowers
You're right that I don't work with Cisco every day. Or ever. I know our T1 hops through their equipment a few times before it hits the Cambridge router, and I get the Network Alert mails, seems very few of them are issues with Cisco's equipment. I've actually heard nothing but good things about them, up until your post. More research is in order, it seems.
It's true that companies usually get to the top by stepping on everyone, but it is not necessarily their market position that draws the ire of people who don't compete with them. I for one couldn't care less how much money Bill Gates or anyone else has, it's way more than me one way or another.
My problem is that where I work, everyone's job would be a hell of a lot easier if NO ONE ran Windows, but used Macs (for forms creation) or Solaris (for development of a database that runs on that OS anyway). Not only can we not get rid of Windows, but we get constant pressure from our affiliates to switch to Word and Outlook etc etc.
And I don't need to hear that "dominant business applications" garbage, we're non-profit.
-jpowers
Just look at most of the people on this site's irrational hatred of Microsoft. Same thing.
People do not always hate whoever is #1. Cisco is #1 in their market, and worth more than Microsoft besides. You don't hear us complaining about them.
What some foreign nations hate are the "strong-arm tactics" America has used on weaker nations over the course of this country's history. The "rogue nations" (US Gov term, not mine) who hate us usually do so because at some point in the last fifty years we've tried to kill them, their leaders, and/or their economy. They don't hate us because we're #1, they hate us because we act like we own them and there's nothing they can do about it.
The people on this board who hate Microsoft hate them for the same reason: abuse of power. The complaints against this company range from basic stuff like me having to support their worthless products for 150 users to other
-jpowers
-jpowers
The Alphas used to have NT on them as an option. You could run both Softimage and 3DS MAX at phenominal speeds, which I understand is what they used for a lot of the (mediocre) computer effects on Titanic.
The translator card they used supposedly rewrote certain parts of the MS code for optimization, and at the time (for like a week) was far and away the fastest NT-running hardware around, if I remember right.
When Linux started getting bigger, the Alpha-with-NT market dried up (not that it was huge in the first place), and right around the Digital-Compaq merger, it was suggested that they wouldn't run MS on their newer chips. Digital had already been in a pissing match with Intel over MMX and now they were competing in the 64-bit race, MS made the obvious choice to stick with Intel and that was that.
MS predatory pricing stuff may have kept Compaq relatively quiet in the past, but after the court stuff comes down you'll probably see Compaq throw their weight behind Linux to the degree where they reassign some of the Alpha development folks to supporting Linux directly with official drivers (like with Lucent's special Linux driver for their Thinkpad-deployed Winmodems) and possibly even ports of their supposedly excellent (I'm no judge) Digital-UNIX filesystem and development toolsets.
Like I said above, I'm not an expert at any of this stuff, it's just that I'm interested in 3D animation and I was looking at Alphas with 3DS Max as a lower-cost alternative to SPARCs with Renderman (in like '95-'96), and the weird politics of the Digital/MS/Intel relationship sort of drew me in.
-jpowers
Know why? We never ask anything of them. All our real work gets done on SPARCs (And one Linux box for SMBFS).
-jpowers
There isn't nearly as much violence in our country as people would like to believe. You see it on the news because they need to compete with the violent entertainment we like here. I've lived in and visited some of the most unpleasant places on the East Coast, and it's just not as bad as they say.
-jpowers
He's right that we have a degree of socialism in this country, but better that than the pure corporatism we're offered as an alternative. I'd like to keep a mix of many forms: treat them as tools to fix whichever problem they fit best.
Of course, that may not be simple enough for prime time.
-jpowers
Science fiction is responsible for conceptualizing a number of things we use every day. The best example of this is probably the satellite, as the people who build them still credit Arthur C. Clarke for coming up with the idea.
NASA's scientific research has resulted in the invention of devices we use every day, arguably benefitting this country far more than they cost us. You own a microwave, right?
Finally, look at the page for Breakthrough Propulsion Research. I read it a few months ago and they tell you how much they're spending. It's not much, and the projects they've awarded (small) grants to are NOT pseudo-science and could have applications here on the ground.
As far as medical research funding goes, I work at a federally-funded cancer research organization and I'll tell you right now we're pretty well covered.
Disclosure: I don't have any connection to NASA in any way, though a job there would be the only thing that could get me to move back to Florida.
-jpowers
Or look at it this way: if I had the infinitely-more-valuable HTML skill I could make one of those HREF links to an online dictionary.
For now you'll have to cut and paste: www.m-w.com
-jpowers
-jpowers
Not everyone knows the difference. They see the attachment and click. After the last one, I sent an explanation of how to figure out what kind of file the attachment is (by looking at the extension) and why it's important to know before you click on it.
Since I support a hundred-plus windows users, I'm not really surprised that people don't know this. I'm sort of irritated, though, that if I don't tell them stuff like this, they aren't going to learn it anywhere else. The programs don't have little warning screens about it, and no one will ever RTFM, so they're stuck. Good thing we don't use Outlook here, eh? We still got last week's virus, but only two people lost
-jpowers
That way you could have an entry: "Throw the book at them" = "Prosecute to the fullest extent" and THEN translate it. It would take a lot of work to get the right basic system down, but once you did, some sort of distributed entry system with peer review would allow you to keep up with rapidly changing areas of language. The pool of idiomatic expressions we use in the US is hell for any non-native speaker to navigate, and since English is currently the world's common language for business purposes, having a translator that kept current would be of great benefit to others.
-jpowers
-jpowers
-jpowers
What the Protestants did to each other later on is nothing to sneeze at, either. They pretty much all pale in the face of what organized religion in general did to women during that period. We all know The Salem Witch Trials and all, but the actual numbers killed in Europe are staggering.
You're right about the new ideas leading to bloodshed, though. Just the other day I installed linux on my home pc and Bill Gates had my whole family killed.
-jpowers
The "shortage" is really companies wanting to have extra people to devote to growth rather than simple maintenance. They also aren't willing to pay market rate for the skillsets they need.
The recession in the early '90s made companies used to having a hundred overqualified candidates willing to work for peanuts, and now that the situation's reversed, these corporations are whining about having to take what they can get.
Any company who looks at the payscale for the position they're trying to fill and starts offering a salary at least at the middle of that scale rather than the bottom will have no problem getting the people they're looking for. Once they start valuing their IS employees as more than mere maintenance crew / union laborers, they'll find themselves having an easier time both hiring people and keeping them.
-jpowers