Can you demonstrate that a "private effort" would cost "10 times" less?
Are you aware that the vast majority of the work done for NASA missions is done by private contractors (i.e., Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, etc.)?
I really wish people would make an effort to educate themselves before making statements like this:
If the Hubble can zoom in on galaxies that are millions of light years away i'm sure it resolve a LEM on the moon only a few hundred thousand miles away.
Distance is not the issue.
Repeat: Distance is not the issue.
When you're observing an object with a telescope, there are two factors that come into play: brightness (visual magnitude) and apparent size (how large the object appears to be in the sky.) For example, take the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, which is the spiral galaxy M31 (The Great Andromeda Galaxy.) This object lies at a distance of 3 million light-years, but has an apparent size that is larger than that of the full Moon! (Think about that.. how large must that galaxy be!)
The usefulness of a telescope is largely a factor of how much light it can collect, not how many times it can magnify an object! When I have my telescope out in the backyard and I'm looking at galaxies tens of millions of light-years away, I typically use an eyepiece that gives me 50X magnification. This is more than sufficient because galaxies are large objects! Even at distances of tens of millions of light-years, 50X is more than enough to see them. Higher resolutions are useful for resolving spiral arms and the like, but ridiculous magnifications are not terribly useful when imaging remote galaxies.
In fact, there is a practical limit to the amount of magnification that a telescope can provide. This usually amounts to 50X per inch of aperture (the diameter of the primary mirror.) So if your telescope has an 8" mirror, the maximum practical magnification you can expect is 400X. (Note that this means that the cheapo Tasco scopes that are sold in department stores that promise "650X" with a 2-inch mirror are complete bullshit.)
But let's look at the Hubble, and your expectation that it should be able to view artifacts from the lunar landings. For a telescope with a circular collecting area of diameter D (2.4 m for Hubble), the smallest feature that one can resolve at wavelength L (550 x 10^-9 m for visible light) is given roughly by:
resolution = 1.4 L/D = 3.2 x 10^-7 radians
This estimate gives the "diffraction limited" resolution, or the resolution based on light's wave-like characteristics. It is difficult to improve upon this limit.
The distance to the Moon is roughly 240,000 miles. Hubble's resolution corresponds to a physical dimension of
size = x = 0.08 miles = 405 feet = 124 meters
This is about the size of a football field.. obviously much larger than any of the artifacts left over by the moon landing!
Jesus. Don't let your obvious seething hatred of Jon Katz put words into his mouth. Where did he "push" for a "stronger rating system?" He is simply pointing out a glaring inconsistency in the MPAA's logic: unbelievable violence is okey-dokey, but nudity is evil and must be banned and those who participate in it and enjoy it will earn an eternity of unimaginable torture because of it. You will agree that this is a preposterous double standard; if you do not, you are insane.
My advice to you is to let go of your Katz hatred. Take some deep breaths. Maybe go out and get some exercise. Do some work around the house. Being bitter and consumed by hate is no way to go through life.
One of the marks of a mature OS. I'm glad to hear that a major linux distro has it...
FWIW, Mandrake 7.x has automatic hardware detection as well. Other distributions probably include it, but Mandrake 7 is the only one I've used since Redhat 6.2 a couple of years ago or so. This worked out great one day last week; I had a short in my keyboard (PS/2) port which rendered it unusable. This would have been a big problem (obviously) but I found that for some reason, I could plug the keyboard into the mouse (PS/2) port and the BIOS recognized it fine!
Of course, now the problem was I had no mouse. What I did have was a spare serial port, and so digging through my Box O' Tricks, I found an old serial mouse. I plugged it in, booted up Mandrake 7.1, and sure enough.. it told me that it had found a new serial mouse, set it up for me, and that was it. It worked fine in both the console (gpm) and in X, and required no further work from me.
Now Windows users are probably reading this and saying "Big deal." But for Linux, it is a big deal, because this is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs to get broader desktop acceptance. It never ceases to amaze me how far we supposedly "powerless" open source developers can come in such a short amount of time.
Get a bunch of investors to run a big fat network pipe into a country with a name like "Ljubilvaniastanistan" where the rutabaga is the national currency and the yak is the national delicacy. Then watch Hillary Whats-Her-Name from the RIAA swallow her own tongue when she learns that her vast legion of lawyers are powerless to do anything about it. Of course, the Bush administration would probably order immediate airstrikes on the grounds of "protecting the wealth-creation security of national corporate interests", but that would be a public-relations nightmare, particularly if we put the new Napster right in the middle of a bustling village full of non-coms.
In all seriousness, I don't condone mass piracy, but the RIAA has been screwing people for decades and I have to admit that I enjoy watching them squirm. What could the RIAA conceivably do if Napster were located offshore, preferably in a country not bound by the terms of the Berne convention?
How interesting that you crow on about "taking personal responsibility" and then in the next breath attempt to absolve e-mail users of all responsibility with regards to their actions. Virus writers clearly shoulder the majority of the blame when it comes to the affects that viruses cause, but dim-witted users are a big part of the problem, as well. Anybody who opens an "attachment" with the extension "jpg.vbs" that ends up unleashing Hell onto a corporate intranet is culpable. They should know better, but because they didn't know better, their stupidity has cost their company potentially millions of dollars from downtime and lost wealth creation opportunity.
If you're going to shout the virtues of personal responsibility from the highest tower in the land, at least be consistent. Users who ignore all virus warnings and common sense security precautions share the blame when viruses bring companies to their knees. They are legally and financially responsible for a portion of the damages. If they lose their Lexus and end up driving a Chevy, so be it; you can bet they'll be more careful next time.
In terms of Internet activity, you are not looking at anybody, lustfully or otherwise, so the above verse does not apply. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that by reading this Slashdot post of mine, you are "looking" at me. There is zero Scriptural justification for this.
Consider this: A married man has "cybersex" on an IRC channel. Unbeknownst to him, his "partner" is actually a sophisticated bot written in Perl. Is that adultery, since there is no "other woman?"
.. is to require the responsible parties to pay for them. By "responsible parties", I'm really referring to two groups of people. First and foremost are, of course, the authors and/or originators of the virus. Certainly, when they unleash a destructive virus on the computing community, they are culpable for much of the damage that is caused. The second group is one that doesn't get discussed a whole lot.. the users who spread the virus. Clearly, the brunt of the blame lies with the virus authors, but surely those "promiscuous" users who allow the virus to spread are partially at fault as well.
This country (and, in many ways, the entire Western world) has been transformed into a place where there is no such thing as personal responsibility anymore. If you spill a cup of hot coffee on yourself, it's not your fault.. it's the fault of the person that served it to you. If you're daydreaming while walking and trip over a crack in somebody's sidewalk, it's not your fault.. it's the fault of the homeowner. And if you stupidly open an overtly suspicious attachment and unleash Dante's lowest level of Hell on your corporate intranet, it's not your fault, it's the script kiddie that wrote the virus!
I hereby call "bullshit" on this. People need to be taught a basic modicum of computer security common sense. Sure, the virus authors need to be held accountable, but if a virus or e-mail worm paralyzes a corporate intranet for a day and the point of injection can be determined, why not hold that user responsible as well, particularly if a virus alert has already been issued? I'll tell you what: a moron who blindly clicks on and opens every single attachment they get will think twice about it if they have to put a couple of month's worth of mortgage payments on their credit cards because half of their paycheck went to paying the tech support guys to clean up the mess they created.
Viruses can be thwarted so that their effect is minimal, but this is not going to happen so long as user stupidity is coddled and encouraged and users who do stupid things are allowed to claim that it's "not their fault." It's not their fault that the virus was created, of course, but it is their fault that they did a very stupid thing that cost a lot of people a lot of money. If you start making people pay for their mistakes, you'll find that they wind up making a hell of a lot less mistakes.
That's a good trick. Note that I specifically mentioned kernel patches. You can do that without downtime? You must be able to also spin straw into gold because, take yer pick, both are bullshit.
You must be a Linux or Windows user. This would explain your apparent reliance on upgrading your kernel every couple of weeks to eradicate the latest bug that was found. It will doubtless come as a shock to you to realize that real production operating systems don't need to be upgraded every time the wind changes directions. Hope you were sitting down, kiddo, because I can't be responsible for any head trauma you may have suffered during your fainting spell. Anyway, the next time you're downloading 2.4.2.1b39a to patch the latest exploit, I'll be thinking of you.
And keep driving that car without ever taking it "down" for maintenance too, and we'll who makes it further in our travels in the same vechicle.
This is a laughable, juvenile comparison that serves only to illustrate the impassible gulf between my vast experience and your lack thereof. My peals of loud, braying laughter are most likely disturbing the neighbors. Servers do not need to have fluids changed every 3,000 hours of uptime. Nor do they need to have brake lines inspected. If your preferred method of system administration is to pour 10W-30 into your server's air slots, then it is little wonder that you have no chance whatsoever of approaching uptimes that even resemble those attained by real admins running real operating systems.
Nice try, though. Have fun tinkering with your "vechicle" (sic).
Gee, that's funny; I thought I specifically mentioned in the previous reply that the machine was heavily used. And as far as security holes are concerned, there are actually systems that can be patched without taking them down. With the system in question, I had to patch a bug in rlogind to fix a root exploit, but that was it; no reboot involved. The rest of your post sounds like sour grapes from somebody who's never acheived a similar uptime. Hey, don't sweat it, guy. It's not your fault. Not everybody is lucky enough to run AIX. Maybe one of these days you'll trade up.
Well, Jesus Christ on a corndog. I guess I missed the notification that the Jargon File is the end-all authority on OS quality. Yes, earlier versions of AIX had issues. So did earlier versions of IRIX, Solaris, and other commercial UNIX variants. By your argument, Windows 2000 should be avoided because Windows 1.0 was such a piece of shit. And only a moron would use Linux 2.4 because the original Linux kernel supported virtually no hardware. Makes perfect sense, right?
Well, according to you, it does.
Those who are under the impression that anti-AIX bigotry will be tolerated on Slashdot (or anywhere else, for that matter) are sadly mistaken. Get a life. Try using it instead of simply reading about it in the Jargon File.
My experience has been similar. We had an RS/6000 in our CS department that was up for slightly over a year (~370 days or thereabouts.) This was a heavily-used machine that ended up finally going down so that we could replace the UPS.. so there's no telling how long it would have stayed up if we had allowed it to keep going! I've never had the pleasure of looking after an AIX box since then, and (not surprisingly) I've never had a box as reliable as that one. My motto: "If you ain't using AIX, you ain't using SMIT."
I have found that typical AIX bashers are mindless bigots who speak from zero experience.
Are you spitting bile out between your teeth as you write this shit? What am unimaginably hateful attitude. The problem you describe has been fixed, and it's been fixed for some time. Oh, that's right.. I forgot! Linux has never had any bugs! As a matter of fact, AIX is the only OS that's ever had a problem! Why don't you get a life? Go out on a date with a girl. Write some goddamn code. You're so full of pent-up hatred that I shudder even replying to your post.
While it's true that some things in AIX are not where your typical Linux user would expect them to be, that is certainly not the standard that should be used to measure the OS's worth. AIX is stable, scalable, and downright dependable, so your statement smacks of ignorance. But then you go further and attach the label "Nazi" to it. This is a despicable ad hominem, marked by sheer, unadulterated hatred. You, sir, must be a sad, sorry, pitiful little man. Get help, quick.
I think Bill Maher said it best, with regards to Kurt Warner's interview attributing last year's Super Bowl victory to Jesus. Why is there this inconsistency? If Jesus is responsible for football wins, certainly he is also responsible for losses as well? (That is, if he can intercede to win games for faithful players, certainly his lack of intercession can cause faithful players to lose games?) More succinctly: Why don't these players blame Jesus when things don't go their way?
INTERVIEWER: Kurt, you could have won this game if your last pass would have been a couple of feet shorter; it would have been an easy completion and touchdown. What was the problem?
KURT: It was that fuckin' Jesus, that was the problem!
Of course, you could make the case that it is perhaps Satan that causes faithful players to lose games, but I'm betting that he's more of a soccer fan.
.. is the attitude that you display. The ability of people to classify entire groups of other people ("homosexuals", "pagans", "Jews", etc.) as "wicked" has been the basis of the most heinous and atrocious episodes in the history of humankind. Nobody is asking you to agree with or participate in drug use, paganism, homosexual activity, or anything else that departs from your beliefs. But when you take your brush of righteousness and use it to color entire groups of people "evil" and "wicked", you are an embarking down an extraordinarily dangerous road that has led to bloodbaths of unimaginable proportions.
I really miss the days where software development and hardware engineering was really about being clever. A lot of the work being done these days has been tainted by the Microsoft mindset: "If it's too slow, throw more CPU at it; if it's too big, throw more RAM at it." This is a luxury that we didn't always have, and it's something that I think a lot of people take for granted these days. Programmers are at their best when they take a machine with definite resource limitations and work with those limitations to develop an acceptable solution. This is, IMHO, a far more noble effort than simply throwing more resources at the problem until you've gotten to the point where the "lazy man's method" is acceptable.
I can remember years back writing some assembly code on an Apple II; I had a routine that ended up being two bytes too long to fit between Page 3 and the keyboard buffer. In order to make it fit, I ended up resorting to self-modifying code that saved three bytes. Now, you might make the argument that self-modifying code is horrible style (and you'd be right), but at the time, that didn't matter to me; what mattered was that I'd come up with a solution that worked given the limitations I was stuck with. Coming up with something like that gives a person a far greater sense of accomplishment than does a solution that was attained simply by artificially throwing more resources at the problem.
This type of mindset is for the most part dead. Oh, there are examples of it around in certain specialized arenas (for example, the current crop of Playstation 1 games has pretty much pushed that platform to its limitations.) But Moore's Law and dropping RAM prices have mandated that general software development should be quick and dirty rather than compact and elegant. And maybe, from a financial standpoint, that's how it should be; after all, it takes considerably more development time and effort (and therefore more money) to write the slickest code than it does to write acceptable code that works, given enough resources. However, that doesn't mean that we should not be able to lament the passing of the earlier era.
Finally, I should point out that I am not saying that current software developers are entirely devoid of creativity, because they're not. There are a lot of developers for a lot of different hardware platforms and operating systems that are doing some pretty cool things. I am claiming, however, that software development is rapidly becoming a field of endeavor that requires far less cleverness and wherewithall than it once did. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view, but I don't see how it can contribute to any increase in general software quality.
I know it has. It's interesting how this Republican administration preaches the virtues of tolerance and bipartisanship while at the same time crushing any and all Internet speech that it believes to be dangerous. Bush is too close to Cuba; he's stealing plays from Fidel Castro's book. A popular Internet search engine contains anti-Bush sentiment, therefore they must be forced to change their content. Talk about a "Your Rights Online" article.
At any rate, I'll change my sig once I find a suitable replacement.:-)
Take a minute and look at how consumers have soundly thrashed other lame single-provider "solutions" such as DivX. If the consumers have demonstrated anything over the past few years, it is that they will not allow themselves to be blackmailed into these kinds of situations. If Microsoft attempts to succeed where Circuit City has failed, then let them try. Their inevitable failure will only be more humorous.
The Internet would be doing just fine today without "spam", if it only had 10,000 users.
The Internet has a hell of a lot more than 10,000 users.
Sustaining viability these days takes a hell of a lot more than a couple of liberal arts universities with extra cash to throw around. It takes real commercial backers. Sorry if this offends you.
So your point is that people did not attempt to exploit the internet for profit until it was profitable to do so? The rating on the duh meter is off the scale.
What are you, some kind of moron? If I start up "Dipshit Cable Network" or some sort of nonsense like that, of course I'm not going to spend advertising money there until the network demonstrates that it has the critical mass of viewers to make the advertising a useful investment. An Internet with 10,000 users does not meet that criteria. An Internet with 10,000,000 users does.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you demonstrate that a "private effort" would cost "10 times" less?
Are you aware that the vast majority of the work done for NASA missions is done by private contractors (i.e., Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, etc.)?
What do you mean it was good despite the violence and sex?! :-)
I really wish people would make an effort to educate themselves before making statements like this:
.. how large must that galaxy be!)
.. obviously much larger than any of the artifacts left over by the moon landing!
If the Hubble can zoom in on galaxies that are millions of light years away i'm sure it resolve a LEM on the moon only a few hundred thousand miles away.
Distance is not the issue.
Repeat: Distance is not the issue.
When you're observing an object with a telescope, there are two factors that come into play: brightness (visual magnitude) and apparent size (how large the object appears to be in the sky.) For example, take the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, which is the spiral galaxy M31 (The Great Andromeda Galaxy.) This object lies at a distance of 3 million light-years, but has an apparent size that is larger than that of the full Moon! (Think about that
The usefulness of a telescope is largely a factor of how much light it can collect, not how many times it can magnify an object! When I have my telescope out in the backyard and I'm looking at galaxies tens of millions of light-years away, I typically use an eyepiece that gives me 50X magnification. This is more than sufficient because galaxies are large objects! Even at distances of tens of millions of light-years, 50X is more than enough to see them. Higher resolutions are useful for resolving spiral arms and the like, but ridiculous magnifications are not terribly useful when imaging remote galaxies.
In fact, there is a practical limit to the amount of magnification that a telescope can provide. This usually amounts to 50X per inch of aperture (the diameter of the primary mirror.) So if your telescope has an 8" mirror, the maximum practical magnification you can expect is 400X. (Note that this means that the cheapo Tasco scopes that are sold in department stores that promise "650X" with a 2-inch mirror are complete bullshit.)
But let's look at the Hubble, and your expectation that it should be able to view artifacts from the lunar landings. For a telescope with a circular collecting area of diameter D (2.4 m for Hubble), the smallest feature that one can resolve at wavelength L (550 x 10^-9 m for visible light) is given roughly by:
resolution = 1.4 L/D = 3.2 x 10^-7 radians
This estimate gives the "diffraction limited" resolution, or the resolution based on light's wave-like characteristics. It is difficult to improve upon this limit.
The distance to the Moon is roughly 240,000 miles. Hubble's resolution corresponds to a physical dimension of
size = x = 0.08 miles = 405 feet = 124 meters
This is about the size of a football field
Jesus. Don't let your obvious seething hatred of Jon Katz put words into his mouth. Where did he "push" for a "stronger rating system?" He is simply pointing out a glaring inconsistency in the MPAA's logic: unbelievable violence is okey-dokey, but nudity is evil and must be banned and those who participate in it and enjoy it will earn an eternity of unimaginable torture because of it. You will agree that this is a preposterous double standard; if you do not, you are insane.
My advice to you is to let go of your Katz hatred. Take some deep breaths. Maybe go out and get some exercise. Do some work around the house. Being bitter and consumed by hate is no way to go through life.
It's a joke. Lighten up.
One of the marks of a mature OS. I'm glad to hear that a major linux distro has it...
.. it told me that it had found a new serial mouse, set it up for me, and that was it. It worked fine in both the console (gpm) and in X, and required no further work from me.
FWIW, Mandrake 7.x has automatic hardware detection as well. Other distributions probably include it, but Mandrake 7 is the only one I've used since Redhat 6.2 a couple of years ago or so. This worked out great one day last week; I had a short in my keyboard (PS/2) port which rendered it unusable. This would have been a big problem (obviously) but I found that for some reason, I could plug the keyboard into the mouse (PS/2) port and the BIOS recognized it fine!
Of course, now the problem was I had no mouse. What I did have was a spare serial port, and so digging through my Box O' Tricks, I found an old serial mouse. I plugged it in, booted up Mandrake 7.1, and sure enough
Now Windows users are probably reading this and saying "Big deal." But for Linux, it is a big deal, because this is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs to get broader desktop acceptance. It never ceases to amaze me how far we supposedly "powerless" open source developers can come in such a short amount of time.
Get a bunch of investors to run a big fat network pipe into a country with a name like "Ljubilvaniastanistan" where the rutabaga is the national currency and the yak is the national delicacy. Then watch Hillary Whats-Her-Name from the RIAA swallow her own tongue when she learns that her vast legion of lawyers are powerless to do anything about it. Of course, the Bush administration would probably order immediate airstrikes on the grounds of "protecting the wealth-creation security of national corporate interests", but that would be a public-relations nightmare, particularly if we put the new Napster right in the middle of a bustling village full of non-coms.
In all seriousness, I don't condone mass piracy, but the RIAA has been screwing people for decades and I have to admit that I enjoy watching them squirm. What could the RIAA conceivably do if Napster were located offshore, preferably in a country not bound by the terms of the Berne convention?
How interesting that you crow on about "taking personal responsibility" and then in the next breath attempt to absolve e-mail users of all responsibility with regards to their actions. Virus writers clearly shoulder the majority of the blame when it comes to the affects that viruses cause, but dim-witted users are a big part of the problem, as well. Anybody who opens an "attachment" with the extension "jpg.vbs" that ends up unleashing Hell onto a corporate intranet is culpable. They should know better, but because they didn't know better, their stupidity has cost their company potentially millions of dollars from downtime and lost wealth creation opportunity.
If you're going to shout the virtues of personal responsibility from the highest tower in the land, at least be consistent. Users who ignore all virus warnings and common sense security precautions share the blame when viruses bring companies to their knees. They are legally and financially responsible for a portion of the damages. If they lose their Lexus and end up driving a Chevy, so be it; you can bet they'll be more careful next time.
In terms of Internet activity, you are not looking at anybody, lustfully or otherwise, so the above verse does not apply. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that by reading this Slashdot post of mine, you are "looking" at me. There is zero Scriptural justification for this.
Consider this: A married man has "cybersex" on an IRC channel. Unbeknownst to him, his "partner" is actually a sophisticated bot written in Perl. Is that adultery, since there is no "other woman?"
.. is to require the responsible parties to pay for them. By "responsible parties", I'm really referring to two groups of people. First and foremost are, of course, the authors and/or originators of the virus. Certainly, when they unleash a destructive virus on the computing community, they are culpable for much of the damage that is caused. The second group is one that doesn't get discussed a whole lot .. the users who spread the virus. Clearly, the brunt of the blame lies with the virus authors, but surely those "promiscuous" users who allow the virus to spread are partially at fault as well.
.. it's the fault of the person that served it to you. If you're daydreaming while walking and trip over a crack in somebody's sidewalk, it's not your fault .. it's the fault of the homeowner. And if you stupidly open an overtly suspicious attachment and unleash Dante's lowest level of Hell on your corporate intranet, it's not your fault, it's the script kiddie that wrote the virus!
This country (and, in many ways, the entire Western world) has been transformed into a place where there is no such thing as personal responsibility anymore. If you spill a cup of hot coffee on yourself, it's not your fault
I hereby call "bullshit" on this. People need to be taught a basic modicum of computer security common sense. Sure, the virus authors need to be held accountable, but if a virus or e-mail worm paralyzes a corporate intranet for a day and the point of injection can be determined, why not hold that user responsible as well, particularly if a virus alert has already been issued? I'll tell you what: a moron who blindly clicks on and opens every single attachment they get will think twice about it if they have to put a couple of month's worth of mortgage payments on their credit cards because half of their paycheck went to paying the tech support guys to clean up the mess they created.
Viruses can be thwarted so that their effect is minimal, but this is not going to happen so long as user stupidity is coddled and encouraged and users who do stupid things are allowed to claim that it's "not their fault." It's not their fault that the virus was created, of course, but it is their fault that they did a very stupid thing that cost a lot of people a lot of money. If you start making people pay for their mistakes, you'll find that they wind up making a hell of a lot less mistakes.
That's a good trick. Note that I specifically mentioned kernel patches. You can do that without downtime? You must be able to also spin straw into gold because, take yer pick, both are bullshit.
You must be a Linux or Windows user. This would explain your apparent reliance on upgrading your kernel every couple of weeks to eradicate the latest bug that was found. It will doubtless come as a shock to you to realize that real production operating systems don't need to be upgraded every time the wind changes directions. Hope you were sitting down, kiddo, because I can't be responsible for any head trauma you may have suffered during your fainting spell. Anyway, the next time you're downloading 2.4.2.1b39a to patch the latest exploit, I'll be thinking of you.
And keep driving that car without ever taking it "down" for maintenance too, and we'll who makes it further in our travels in the same vechicle.
This is a laughable, juvenile comparison that serves only to illustrate the impassible gulf between my vast experience and your lack thereof. My peals of loud, braying laughter are most likely disturbing the neighbors. Servers do not need to have fluids changed every 3,000 hours of uptime. Nor do they need to have brake lines inspected. If your preferred method of system administration is to pour 10W-30 into your server's air slots, then it is little wonder that you have no chance whatsoever of approaching uptimes that even resemble those attained by real admins running real operating systems.
Nice try, though. Have fun tinkering with your "vechicle" (sic).
Gee, that's funny; I thought I specifically mentioned in the previous reply that the machine was heavily used. And as far as security holes are concerned, there are actually systems that can be patched without taking them down. With the system in question, I had to patch a bug in rlogind to fix a root exploit, but that was it; no reboot involved. The rest of your post sounds like sour grapes from somebody who's never acheived a similar uptime. Hey, don't sweat it, guy. It's not your fault. Not everybody is lucky enough to run AIX. Maybe one of these days you'll trade up.
Until then, happy downtime to you!
Well, Jesus Christ on a corndog. I guess I missed the notification that the Jargon File is the end-all authority on OS quality. Yes, earlier versions of AIX had issues. So did earlier versions of IRIX, Solaris, and other commercial UNIX variants. By your argument, Windows 2000 should be avoided because Windows 1.0 was such a piece of shit. And only a moron would use Linux 2.4 because the original Linux kernel supported virtually no hardware. Makes perfect sense, right?
Well, according to you, it does.
Those who are under the impression that anti-AIX bigotry will be tolerated on Slashdot (or anywhere else, for that matter) are sadly mistaken. Get a life. Try using it instead of simply reading about it in the Jargon File.
My experience has been similar. We had an RS/6000 in our CS department that was up for slightly over a year (~370 days or thereabouts.) This was a heavily-used machine that ended up finally going down so that we could replace the UPS .. so there's no telling how long it would have stayed up if we had allowed it to keep going! I've never had the pleasure of looking after an AIX box since then, and (not surprisingly) I've never had a box as reliable as that one. My motto: "If you ain't using AIX, you ain't using SMIT."
I have found that typical AIX bashers are mindless bigots who speak from zero experience.
Are you spitting bile out between your teeth as you write this shit? What am unimaginably hateful attitude. The problem you describe has been fixed, and it's been fixed for some time. Oh, that's right .. I forgot! Linux has never had any bugs! As a matter of fact, AIX is the only OS that's ever had a problem! Why don't you get a life? Go out on a date with a girl. Write some goddamn code. You're so full of pent-up hatred that I shudder even replying to your post.
While it's true that some things in AIX are not where your typical Linux user would expect them to be, that is certainly not the standard that should be used to measure the OS's worth. AIX is stable, scalable, and downright dependable, so your statement smacks of ignorance. But then you go further and attach the label "Nazi" to it. This is a despicable ad hominem, marked by sheer, unadulterated hatred. You, sir, must be a sad, sorry, pitiful little man. Get help, quick.
This is great news! The next time you try to convince PHB-types that going with Microsoft is a gamble, you have some literal proof to point at!
I think Bill Maher said it best, with regards to Kurt Warner's interview attributing last year's Super Bowl victory to Jesus. Why is there this inconsistency? If Jesus is responsible for football wins, certainly he is also responsible for losses as well? (That is, if he can intercede to win games for faithful players, certainly his lack of intercession can cause faithful players to lose games?) More succinctly: Why don't these players blame Jesus when things don't go their way?
INTERVIEWER: Kurt, you could have won this game if your last pass would have been a couple of feet shorter; it would have been an easy completion and touchdown. What was the problem?
KURT: It was that fuckin' Jesus, that was the problem!
Of course, you could make the case that it is perhaps Satan that causes faithful players to lose games, but I'm betting that he's more of a soccer fan.
.. is the attitude that you display. The ability of people to classify entire groups of other people ("homosexuals", "pagans", "Jews", etc.) as "wicked" has been the basis of the most heinous and atrocious episodes in the history of humankind. Nobody is asking you to agree with or participate in drug use, paganism, homosexual activity, or anything else that departs from your beliefs. But when you take your brush of righteousness and use it to color entire groups of people "evil" and "wicked", you are an embarking down an extraordinarily dangerous road that has led to bloodbaths of unimaginable proportions.
I really miss the days where software development and hardware engineering was really about being clever. A lot of the work being done these days has been tainted by the Microsoft mindset: "If it's too slow, throw more CPU at it; if it's too big, throw more RAM at it." This is a luxury that we didn't always have, and it's something that I think a lot of people take for granted these days. Programmers are at their best when they take a machine with definite resource limitations and work with those limitations to develop an acceptable solution. This is, IMHO, a far more noble effort than simply throwing more resources at the problem until you've gotten to the point where the "lazy man's method" is acceptable.
I can remember years back writing some assembly code on an Apple II; I had a routine that ended up being two bytes too long to fit between Page 3 and the keyboard buffer. In order to make it fit, I ended up resorting to self-modifying code that saved three bytes. Now, you might make the argument that self-modifying code is horrible style (and you'd be right), but at the time, that didn't matter to me; what mattered was that I'd come up with a solution that worked given the limitations I was stuck with. Coming up with something like that gives a person a far greater sense of accomplishment than does a solution that was attained simply by artificially throwing more resources at the problem.
This type of mindset is for the most part dead. Oh, there are examples of it around in certain specialized arenas (for example, the current crop of Playstation 1 games has pretty much pushed that platform to its limitations.) But Moore's Law and dropping RAM prices have mandated that general software development should be quick and dirty rather than compact and elegant. And maybe, from a financial standpoint, that's how it should be; after all, it takes considerably more development time and effort (and therefore more money) to write the slickest code than it does to write acceptable code that works, given enough resources. However, that doesn't mean that we should not be able to lament the passing of the earlier era.
Finally, I should point out that I am not saying that current software developers are entirely devoid of creativity, because they're not. There are a lot of developers for a lot of different hardware platforms and operating systems that are doing some pretty cool things. I am claiming, however, that software development is rapidly becoming a field of endeavor that requires far less cleverness and wherewithall than it once did. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view, but I don't see how it can contribute to any increase in general software quality.
Your sig has lost its punchline.
:-)
I know it has. It's interesting how this Republican administration preaches the virtues of tolerance and bipartisanship while at the same time crushing any and all Internet speech that it believes to be dangerous. Bush is too close to Cuba; he's stealing plays from Fidel Castro's book. A popular Internet search engine contains anti-Bush sentiment, therefore they must be forced to change their content. Talk about a "Your Rights Online" article.
At any rate, I'll change my sig once I find a suitable replacement.
Take a minute and look at how consumers have soundly thrashed other lame single-provider "solutions" such as DivX. If the consumers have demonstrated anything over the past few years, it is that they will not allow themselves to be blackmailed into these kinds of situations. If Microsoft attempts to succeed where Circuit City has failed, then let them try. Their inevitable failure will only be more humorous.
The Internet would be doing just fine today without "spam", if it only had 10,000 users.
The Internet has a hell of a lot more than 10,000 users.
Sustaining viability these days takes a hell of a lot more than a couple of liberal arts universities with extra cash to throw around. It takes real commercial backers. Sorry if this offends you.
So your point is that people did not attempt to exploit the internet for profit until it was profitable to do so? The rating on the duh meter is off the scale.
What are you, some kind of moron? If I start up "Dipshit Cable Network" or some sort of nonsense like that, of course I'm not going to spend advertising money there until the network demonstrates that it has the critical mass of viewers to make the advertising a useful investment. An Internet with 10,000 users does not meet that criteria. An Internet with 10,000,000 users does.