Actually, Sirius had the head start, but they bungled it. In early 2001, Sirius had all of its birds in the air. XM was still figuring out when to launch.
You can find plenty of articles from that time proclaiming the death of XM because Sirius had the lead, and besides, they had more commercial-free channels.
I like Sirius: they have better content, better technology, fewer commercials, and Clear Channel doesn't have it's hooks in them. That said, they don't seem to have been able to gain much ground. XM's smarter partnerships (particularly with auto makers) has kept them in the race.
I don't know if this is really true. There are three major BSD "distributions" with subtle differences. Fans of each routinely look over the code for the others looking for good, "stealable" code. Not only does that mean that people are looking at the code, but informed "outsider" coders are looking at it with a critical eye. So, even if the code is reviewed by fewer people, it's reviewed by people who are more likely to notice, report, and fix bugs.
The software company is being rude, but they may be within their rights.
The thing is, whoever was supposed to be keeping track of keys wasn't doing their job. Somebody in the organization should have been tracking this stuff. Usually, it's an IT manager or the senior sysadmin, but sometimes, it's the person in accounting who cut the check.
Sure, take agressive steps to get another key (be a pest, contact the BBB, etc.), but the real lesson here is that your company shouldn't have lost the key in the first place. If you have to buy the software again, maybe that'll sink in.
Step 1: back up all of the data on the machine that you care about. Try not to back up any applications.
Step 2: Reformat the hard drive. Reinstall. Patch, patch, and patch some more. Get the AV and anti-spyware tools in place. Reinstall applications. Restore backups.
By threatening to withhold your pay, your boss can now argue that he has changed the terms of your agreement. That is, he can claim that you knew that you wouldn't be paid unless you found a replacement, and therefore, by sticking around, you implicitly agreed to the new deal.
Bogus? Sure. The thing is, you need to document what was said and when it was said and talk to a lawyer as soon as possible. If you wait, you may have a much harder time of things.
What the hell? The slashdot collective hive-mind doesn't speak with one voice?!?
The Slashdot user-base is made of bazillions of people (approximately). You can get MOST (but not all) of them to agree that "Linux is good". Anything beyond that, and all of the individual people have their own opinions.
Personally, I thought that the original Itanium concept was really nifty. Anybody who's been following it beyond the initial "The die is HOW large?" fiasco has been waiting for it to fail.
My setup: T-Mobile w/ "Unlimited Internet", Nokia 3660, Palm Zire 72 (bluetooth to phone).
I've used both the Symbian PuTTY port and various palm SSH apps. They work, but there are some significant problems:
-Latency is huge (I've seen over 2000ms). You'd better type it correctly the first time.
-Input is difficult, particularly when you need non-alphanumberic characters (pipe, braces, escape, control characters). You'll want to figure this out before you need it.
-For the above reasons, you may want to think about something with a small keyboard. Still, remember that the little keyboard is still going to be short on keys. Figure out how to enter the "missing" characters.
-You don't get a "real" IP address. It's a 10.x.x.x address going through a NAT. Be sure that any firewalls or admin tools can cope with that.
-The battery drain for this is pretty significant. I get about two hours total use. That's fine for quick fixes, but you won't want to stay logged in to watch an hours-long database rebuild.
-Given the odd screen size and intermittent connectivity, screen will become your best friend.
Attention free software developers. Yeah, you. And anyone who posts projects to Freshmeat:
The next person to write an app with a gratuitous G, K, or X at the beginning (gPornViewer, kFlamewriter, XBitTwiddler) wins scorn, derision, and a swift kick in the ass, absolutely free of charge. Moreso if you use a name that's already taken.
Just to be on the safe side, I should point out that you really, really, REALLY don't want to make big drive images with USB 1.1 (well, anything less than 2.0). That is, if time matters to you at all.
USB 1.x maxes out at around 1MB/second (12 megaBIT per second). For a 10GB image, you're looking at around 3 hours.
I wouldn't call an ad campaign based on their product's lower TCO "trashing their competitors". TCO does matter to companies, and advertising yours as lowest (particularly when you can back it up, however spuriously) is simply effective marketing.
Cisco (commercial) wireless APs do the same trick.
Essentially, the WEP key that you type into the client is only used to get a new randomly-generated "session" key. It IS a part of the 802.11b/g spec, but many wireless cards don't expect the key changes, so you need to be careful about which products you buy (or, at least, you had to be careful when I looked at this stuff a year or so ago).
Damn. That's one poorly seeded torrent. I was uploading more than I was downloading almost immediately. By the time the download finished, I'd uploaded 2-3x more than I'd downloaded. I'm currently uploading at 1050 KiB/s.
C'mon folks. Stay connected for a while after you finish downloading -- at least until you've uploaded as much as you've downloaded.
Oh, come on, people. We shouldn't give up just because we've been given an impossible situation without enough information. This is Slashdot! B'sides, these specs are more detailed than anything you'll ever see in the real world. Some ideas:
-Plug a Van de Graaf generator into the outlet. Put wires on top of the rack (e.g. a lightning rod). Attach to a capacitor and a DC-AC converter, and you're golden.
-Set up a bunch of rechargeable batteries and an army of Lego Mindstorms robots to shuttle the batteries back and forth from the outlet to the rack.
-Put in really bright overhead lights and solar panels on top of each rack.
-If you have a good AC system, thermal couplings between the AC and the machines might generate enough power. The laws of thermodynamics were made to be broken!
-Hamsters, water bottles full of Jolt cola, and hamster wheels hooked to generators.
-Finally, Steampunk is not just a frings Sci-Fi/RPG genre. A few cans of Sterno and a boiler can provide you with enough steam to run whatever computational engines you might have.
You're right: it's weird, but the difference that I saw was not subtle. It was "unwatchable" vs. "good". Some things that I can think of:
-Crappy DVI cable
-Analog VGA is boring, well-known, and well-tested. It's easy to make hardware that cleans up a VGA signal. Perhaps the monitor cleans up the VGA signal, but passes through the DVI signal unadultered.
-VGA (like most analog tech) degrades more gracefully. A few missed or altered bits in the DVI signal cause more obvious artifacts.
Does anyone even review 2D quality any more? Personally, 2D matters to me a lot more than 3D, but I can't find anywhere that reviews 2D quality. The only places that seriously review cards are gaming sites. They're mostly concerned about how many frames-per-second you get in the first-person-shooter du jour.
I've taken to visiting people and looking at their video quality. It works okay, but there are a lot of holes in my information. I don't know what a Parhelia looks like because I don't know anyone who owns one. Matrox has made good cards in the past, but...
I have an 18" 1280x1024 LCD with both analog VGA and DVI inputs. It looked awful with DVI and a GeForce mumble (can't remember the exact model number). It looks really good hooked up via the VGA cable to an old G400.
I'm going to guess that you're not referring to the Digital Radio Development Bureau (Google's top hit for DRDB) and, in fact, are referring to DRBD, which is a distributed block device for Linux HA clustering.
Hmm. An editorial in an amateur robotics site recommends using the cheapest projects. Who'll have the cheapest projects? Why, the amateurs who don't have to pay for (or, at least, account for) labor, project space, etc., of course!
DARPA is looking for people to push the envelope on autonomous vehicle research. However, this is also a very political project that involves a lot of cross-department cooperation. They don't want to have to talk to the press about how an out-of-control "giant robot" crashed into the home of the last colony of purple spotted pigmy desert lizards and exploded. That means, effectively, that talented amateurs with a go-cart and a spare PC are not welcome. They want people who either have a track record or who seem to really be on top of things. As a result, I fully expect them to reject most of the last-minute entrants, small teams, or teams with known problems (like "it don't work yet").
Right now, hard drives are the cheapest data storage medium bar none. Even an external USB or Firewire drive is cheaper per gig than tape/DVD/whatever for mortals once you factor in the cost of the drive (datacenters with terabytes of data are a different story).
For most of us, we have a lot of data that we keep "just in case", and that collection grows pretty slowly. So, once you've made the initial backup, the incrementals are pretty small.
There are three types of failure to worry about: drive failure, stupidity ("oops. I just deleted everything."), and major physical loss (theft, fire, etc.). Any second set of data on different media handles the first problem. An asynchronous second set of data (i.e. not RAID) handles the second problem. Off-site backups handle the third.
So, for off-site backups, I made an initial backup locally with a Firewire drive, then I shipped it to a friend's house. He leaves it plugged in to his machine, mounted off of my home directory on his machine. I make nightly incrementals and send them off to his place. Every few weeks, I grab the drive, take it back to my place, and do a fresh full backup.
If you have no friends (this is slashdot, after all), you could probably take the drive to work, so long as your boss doesn't object.
13%? You assume that 100% of your potential userbase is male. Lousy assumption. Let's run with it, though: Should they change the game to make it more color-blind friendly (increasing the userbase by 1/6) or change it to make it more female friendly (doubling the userbase)?
I hate it when people lie with statistics to make their problem look bigger than it is. I don't care whether it's the RIAA lying about CD burners or color-blind gamers overstating their numbers.
pretty much all of the little print appliance boxes do some amount of spooling. It's kind of necessary for the design.
The question is: how much spooling do you need? If 256k is enough, then any of the little boxes (like this one) will do just fine. If you need a few megs, you can still find little "print boxes" that do what you need, but they'll be "workgroup spoolers", and they'll cost more. If it's absolutely essential that the job leave the client machine ASAP (i.e. it's an old mainframe and there are billing issues), it's time for a real spooler. Set up a machine from the junk pile with a version of unix that IT'll support. Even, gasp, a Windows spooler (they'll talk LPR both in and out, though not by default) if you're at place that's enslaved to Microsoft. Plug the printer into that machine. Move on.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that UI designers should be forced to work with black-and-white monitors/TVs on a regular basis, with inconvenient access (in a test lab or something) to color equipment.
We see this crap all the time, and it doesn't just affect the color-blind. How often do you see web sites with dark green on black or white on light blue? How about WMs that use grey text on slightly lighter or darker background? Sure, you can read it if you try, but the designers should know better.
That said, games are the one place where I'm willing to make an exception. A game isn't strictly useful, so it doesn't need to be universally accessable. Would you argue that changes are necessary to poker because blind people can't play?
Sigh. Another benchmark where only speed was compared.
I want to see a feature benchmark where speed is one consideration, but not the only one. How about maximum file size (who would ever use a FS with a 2GB max file size?), resize-ability (important for LVM users), minimum partition size (matters for ramdisks, etc.), minimizing reads/writes (for flash memory), etc.?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Sirius had the head start, but they bungled it. In early 2001, Sirius had all of its birds in the air. XM was still figuring out when to launch.
You can find plenty of articles from that time proclaiming the death of XM because Sirius had the lead, and besides, they had more commercial-free channels.
I like Sirius: they have better content, better technology, fewer commercials, and Clear Channel doesn't have it's hooks in them. That said, they don't seem to have been able to gain much ground. XM's smarter partnerships (particularly with auto makers) has kept them in the race.
Fewer eyes looking over the code
I don't know if this is really true. There are three major BSD "distributions" with subtle differences. Fans of each routinely look over the code for the others looking for good, "stealable" code. Not only does that mean that people are looking at the code, but informed "outsider" coders are looking at it with a critical eye. So, even if the code is reviewed by fewer people, it's reviewed by people who are more likely to notice, report, and fix bugs.
The software company is being rude, but they may be within their rights.
The thing is, whoever was supposed to be keeping track of keys wasn't doing their job. Somebody in the organization should have been tracking this stuff. Usually, it's an IT manager or the senior sysadmin, but sometimes, it's the person in accounting who cut the check.
Sure, take agressive steps to get another key (be a pest, contact the BBB, etc.), but the real lesson here is that your company shouldn't have lost the key in the first place. If you have to buy the software again, maybe that'll sink in.
Step 1: back up all of the data on the machine that you care about. Try not to back up any applications.
Step 2: Reformat the hard drive. Reinstall. Patch, patch, and patch some more. Get the AV and anti-spyware tools in place. Reinstall applications. Restore backups.
Think of it as a test of your backup program.
By threatening to withhold your pay, your boss can now argue that he has changed the terms of your agreement. That is, he can claim that you knew that you wouldn't be paid unless you found a replacement, and therefore, by sticking around, you implicitly agreed to the new deal.
Bogus? Sure. The thing is, you need to document what was said and when it was said and talk to a lawyer as soon as possible. If you wait, you may have a much harder time of things.
What the hell? The slashdot collective hive-mind doesn't speak with one voice?!?
The Slashdot user-base is made of bazillions of people (approximately). You can get MOST (but not all) of them to agree that "Linux is good". Anything beyond that, and all of the individual people have their own opinions.
Personally, I thought that the original Itanium concept was really nifty. Anybody who's been following it beyond the initial "The die is HOW large?" fiasco has been waiting for it to fail.
My setup: T-Mobile w/ "Unlimited Internet", Nokia 3660, Palm Zire 72 (bluetooth to phone).
I've used both the Symbian PuTTY port and various palm SSH apps. They work, but there are some significant problems:
-Latency is huge (I've seen over 2000ms). You'd better type it correctly the first time.
-Input is difficult, particularly when you need non-alphanumberic characters (pipe, braces, escape, control characters). You'll want to figure this out before you need it.
-For the above reasons, you may want to think about something with a small keyboard. Still, remember that the little keyboard is still going to be short on keys. Figure out how to enter the "missing" characters.
-You don't get a "real" IP address. It's a 10.x.x.x address going through a NAT. Be sure that any firewalls or admin tools can cope with that.
-The battery drain for this is pretty significant. I get about two hours total use. That's fine for quick fixes, but you won't want to stay logged in to watch an hours-long database rebuild.
-Given the odd screen size and intermittent connectivity, screen will become your best friend.
The next person to write an app with a gratuitous G, K, or X at the beginning (gPornViewer, kFlamewriter, XBitTwiddler) wins scorn, derision, and a swift kick in the ass, absolutely free of charge. Moreso if you use a name that's already taken.
Just to be on the safe side, I should point out that you really, really, REALLY don't want to make big drive images with USB 1.1 (well, anything less than 2.0). That is, if time matters to you at all.
USB 1.x maxes out at around 1MB/second (12 megaBIT per second). For a 10GB image, you're looking at around 3 hours.
If you use Firewire or USB 2, you'll be okay.
I wouldn't call an ad campaign based on their product's lower TCO "trashing their competitors". TCO does matter to companies, and advertising yours as lowest (particularly when you can back it up, however spuriously) is simply effective marketing.
Cisco (commercial) wireless APs do the same trick.
Essentially, the WEP key that you type into the client is only used to get a new randomly-generated "session" key. It IS a part of the 802.11b/g spec, but many wireless cards don't expect the key changes, so you need to be careful about which products you buy (or, at least, you had to be careful when I looked at this stuff a year or so ago).
Even more troubling: the BitTorrent version linked to from the site has an md5sum of 20a8ecd2de7b5cd4f18396e80d215746
Would the real ifhsetup.exe please stand up?
Damn. That's one poorly seeded torrent. I was uploading more than I was downloading almost immediately. By the time the download finished, I'd uploaded 2-3x more than I'd downloaded. I'm currently uploading at 1050 KiB/s.
C'mon folks. Stay connected for a while after you finish downloading -- at least until you've uploaded as much as you've downloaded.
Oh, come on, people. We shouldn't give up just because we've been given an impossible situation without enough information. This is Slashdot! B'sides, these specs are more detailed than anything you'll ever see in the real world. Some ideas:
-Plug a Van de Graaf generator into the outlet. Put wires on top of the rack (e.g. a lightning rod). Attach to a capacitor and a DC-AC converter, and you're golden.
-Set up a bunch of rechargeable batteries and an army of Lego Mindstorms robots to shuttle the batteries back and forth from the outlet to the rack.
-Put in really bright overhead lights and solar panels on top of each rack.
-If you have a good AC system, thermal couplings between the AC and the machines might generate enough power. The laws of thermodynamics were made to be broken!
-Hamsters, water bottles full of Jolt cola, and hamster wheels hooked to generators.
-Finally, Steampunk is not just a frings Sci-Fi/RPG genre. A few cans of Sterno and a boiler can provide you with enough steam to run whatever computational engines you might have.
You're right: it's weird, but the difference that I saw was not subtle. It was "unwatchable" vs. "good". Some things that I can think of:
-Crappy DVI cable
-Analog VGA is boring, well-known, and well-tested. It's easy to make hardware that cleans up a VGA signal. Perhaps the monitor cleans up the VGA signal, but passes through the DVI signal unadultered.
-VGA (like most analog tech) degrades more gracefully. A few missed or altered bits in the DVI signal cause more obvious artifacts.
Does anyone even review 2D quality any more? Personally, 2D matters to me a lot more than 3D, but I can't find anywhere that reviews 2D quality. The only places that seriously review cards are gaming sites. They're mostly concerned about how many frames-per-second you get in the first-person-shooter du jour.
I've taken to visiting people and looking at their video quality. It works okay, but there are a lot of holes in my information. I don't know what a Parhelia looks like because I don't know anyone who owns one. Matrox has made good cards in the past, but...
That's a good start, but it's not enough.
I have an 18" 1280x1024 LCD with both analog VGA and DVI inputs. It looked awful with DVI and a GeForce mumble (can't remember the exact model number). It looks really good hooked up via the VGA cable to an old G400.
These services have free/cheap trial periods. Save us all a lot of trouble: go try them and report back to us when you're done.
I'm going to guess that you're not referring to the Digital Radio Development Bureau (Google's top hit for DRDB) and, in fact, are referring to DRBD, which is a distributed block device for Linux HA clustering.
Hmm. An editorial in an amateur robotics site recommends using the cheapest projects. Who'll have the cheapest projects? Why, the amateurs who don't have to pay for (or, at least, account for) labor, project space, etc., of course!
DARPA is looking for people to push the envelope on autonomous vehicle research. However, this is also a very political project that involves a lot of cross-department cooperation. They don't want to have to talk to the press about how an out-of-control "giant robot" crashed into the home of the last colony of purple spotted pigmy desert lizards and exploded. That means, effectively, that talented amateurs with a go-cart and a spare PC are not welcome. They want people who either have a track record or who seem to really be on top of things. As a result, I fully expect them to reject most of the last-minute entrants, small teams, or teams with known problems (like "it don't work yet").
Right now, hard drives are the cheapest data storage medium bar none. Even an external USB or Firewire drive is cheaper per gig than tape/DVD/whatever for mortals once you factor in the cost of the drive (datacenters with terabytes of data are a different story).
For most of us, we have a lot of data that we keep "just in case", and that collection grows pretty slowly. So, once you've made the initial backup, the incrementals are pretty small.
There are three types of failure to worry about: drive failure, stupidity ("oops. I just deleted everything."), and major physical loss (theft, fire, etc.). Any second set of data on different media handles the first problem. An asynchronous second set of data (i.e. not RAID) handles the second problem. Off-site backups handle the third.
So, for off-site backups, I made an initial backup locally with a Firewire drive, then I shipped it to a friend's house. He leaves it plugged in to his machine, mounted off of my home directory on his machine. I make nightly incrementals and send them off to his place. Every few weeks, I grab the drive, take it back to my place, and do a fresh full backup.
If you have no friends (this is slashdot, after all), you could probably take the drive to work, so long as your boss doesn't object.
13%? You assume that 100% of your potential userbase is male. Lousy assumption. Let's run with it, though: Should they change the game to make it more color-blind friendly (increasing the userbase by 1/6) or change it to make it more female friendly (doubling the userbase)?
I hate it when people lie with statistics to make their problem look bigger than it is. I don't care whether it's the RIAA lying about CD burners or color-blind gamers overstating their numbers.
The question is: how much spooling do you need? If 256k is enough, then any of the little boxes (like this one) will do just fine. If you need a few megs, you can still find little "print boxes" that do what you need, but they'll be "workgroup spoolers", and they'll cost more. If it's absolutely essential that the job leave the client machine ASAP (i.e. it's an old mainframe and there are billing issues), it's time for a real spooler. Set up a machine from the junk pile with a version of unix that IT'll support. Even, gasp, a Windows spooler (they'll talk LPR both in and out, though not by default) if you're at place that's enslaved to Microsoft. Plug the printer into that machine. Move on.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that UI designers should be forced to work with black-and-white monitors/TVs on a regular basis, with inconvenient access (in a test lab or something) to color equipment.
We see this crap all the time, and it doesn't just affect the color-blind. How often do you see web sites with dark green on black or white on light blue? How about WMs that use grey text on slightly lighter or darker background? Sure, you can read it if you try, but the designers should know better.
That said, games are the one place where I'm willing to make an exception. A game isn't strictly useful, so it doesn't need to be universally accessable. Would you argue that changes are necessary to poker because blind people can't play?
Sigh. Another benchmark where only speed was compared.
I want to see a feature benchmark where speed is one consideration, but not the only one. How about maximum file size (who would ever use a FS with a 2GB max file size?), resize-ability (important for LVM users), minimum partition size (matters for ramdisks, etc.), minimizing reads/writes (for flash memory), etc.?