Anyone who criticizes the Masons in any way (recall that the original posters main complaint was that the Masons promote books by their fellow Masons and that Jon Katz apparantly had Masonic sympathies) must necessarily be...
Okay, let's go back and look at the original wording of the complaint.
I don't know for sure you or the author are Masons , but your Masonic sympathies have become quite clear in your past posts on here with catch phrases urging us to support the "New World Order"
Okay, first the author admits that he doesn't know that Katz is a Mason, but then asserts that he has Masonic sympathies. He knows this because Katz has used the phrase "New World Order" at least once in his life. Oooh, that's a really strong justification. I'm convinced. Oh my god, I typed New World Order, I must be in on it. Fnord.
I'm particularily upset with Arthur C. Clark's published book 3001, which we had published after his death through his will to satisfy his Masonic friends, many of whom apparantly helped push his career.
The 'we' here is interesting. I assume this AC works for whoever published 3001. He claims 'to satisfy his Masonic friends', implying that being Masons is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about them. It's exactly the same as saying, 'to satisfy his Catholic friends' or 'his Baptist friends'. There's no reason to include the extra info unless it is important, and in this context can only be taken to imply that they had it published BECAUSE they are Masons... not because they are his friends. He also completely ignores the fact that fan demand would probably have gotten the book published anyway, as Clarke was a very popular author. (I didn't like him that much myself. There were a lot of 'lesser lights' that I much preferred. Clarke was too gloomy.)
ANYway.. here's a nice bit of paranoia:
This book contained all sorts of anti-Christain ramblings (one or two chapters were little more than a direct attack on Christainity.) Clarke probably promised this book to his Masonic friends who, in exchanged, promoted his earlier works.
The author is asserting that Clarke wrote anti-Christian texts in exchange for favors. Wow. In other words, Clarke didn't just believe that Christianity was bad for humanity and write about it. No, it had to be some bargain to promote the Masonic agenda. The simple explanation won't suffice -- it must be complex.
And, as another poster pointed out, this is the site for nerds; many of us know this stuff! I would much rather purchase a computing history textbook from someone who wasn't a Mason; this way, I wouldn't someday find my money used in some sort of subversive attack on Western Civilization. Just my $0.02.
So now we've gone from being Masonic to plotting the demise of Western Civilization. (see above for one alleged plot.) I'm sorry, but A does not lead to B. I absolutely know of at least one exception, and no, it does not prove the rule.
Okay, re: black helicopters and Satan and all that... admittedly, our AC did not mention those. I am indeed guilty of a presumption. I have argued a number of times with a number of people on this particular subject, and every single time I run into someone who is into Masons and their 'evil plots', it ends up in Illuminati and Satan. I baselessly projected that into the discussion before it arrived by itself.
However, you misstate me badly in the last bullet point. I don't presume that this AC wants to burn people at the stake. I'm sure that's the last thing he wants to do. He is, however, attacking an organization whose principal purpose is preventing another such horror from happening. My implication is that it is a bit unwise to take the word of organizations that HAVE tortured and killed about organizations that probably have not and are opposed to first's torture.
Now, are the Masons actually up to something? It's possible. Fraternities, as someone else was commenting here, do tend to look out for their own, and the Masons have been around a long time. I'm sure there's more than a few rotten apples in a barrel that big. However, from an individual standpoint, continuing the status quo is likely to be the most lucrative and beneficial course. What would they have to gain from attacking Western Civilization? They sure stand to lose an awful lot.... they have a lot of wealth and power in the current system.
The only answers I have gotten to that question have, so far, been frenzied frothing about bargains with Lucifer, the 33rd degree, Satanic rites and blood sacrifice. Usually with black helicopters, New World Orders, and conspiracies so deep and dark that they span hundreds of years, continents, and cultures, yet somehow have remained mostly secret.
Sorry, I don't buy those. If our AC can come up with a better reason, or if you can, please go ahead. You certainly can't do much worse than the answers I got before.:-) Conspiracies are like murders -- to hang together, they have to have a means, a method, and a motive/payoff. The bigger the conspiracy is, the larger the payoff needs to be to maintain it.
I submit that fear of torture and persecution is a strong enough motive to hold an organization together for hundreds of years, and that intent to conspire simply is not strong enough a motivation no matter WHAT the potential payoff is. I haven't heard many other plausible reasons to hold together an organization whose intent is the demise of Western Civilization. Remember, that same organization was instrumental in building a good chunk of it, and its existence predates Western Civilization by quite some time.
On the iMac, yes it will, and I would hope so since the iMac is a consumer machine and the P3 is not a consumer processor. Otherwise, Macs are really only deficient in two areas: sound and video.
Oh, "just" sound and video... sound may not be that critical, but video matters. Especially on the Mac, which is supposed to be a graphical machine! Not only do they have slow, outdated graphic cards, they also have that horrible abstraction layer that slows things down even more. You may not like Microsoft very much, but DirectX is really quite good.
In all real-world benchmarks, P3s are consistently faster at everything except raw CPU, and they're only just a whisker behind there. And K7s are just now shipping, and are faster still. You will get more work done faster on a PC, will spend less for it, and will be able to upgrade it much less expensively.
I would *a lot* rather be editing video on a PC than on a Mac.
Apple isn't any less open than PC manufacturers. The only parts that are kept closed are the ROM chips, the firmware, and the GUI. Every other spec is freely available, along with the code of the operating system.
That, sir, is absolute crap. Apple has refused to provide documentation on their systems to third party developers they don't like for some time now. They shut down the clone market to keep you from getting cheap Macs. You can't run BeOS on a Mac because Apple is a closed system. You can't run Linux very well on a new Mac for the same reason. Apple is even less on your side than Microsoft is. No matter how pretty the interface is, it's a gilded cage.
Well, then Microsoft, Intel and Compaq must be small, two bit companies.
You show me a PC manufacturer that won't let you upgrade a CPU. (Well, except Packard Bell, but they are probably the worst PC clones on the market.) Manufacturers constantly release new BIOS patches to support new CPUs. For the most part, the PC market is a marvel of both cooperation and backward compatibility -- despite the fierce, fierce competition, the consumer rarely gets really shafted. I submit that this is not the case with Apple, which constantly orphans old machines. They do it for their own good, but somehow convince people that it's in their best interest to pay twice as much for a computer that isn't as good to start with, is too expensive to upgrade, and is likely to be orphaned at the drop of a hat.
Apple will fix the firmware once the G4 hype has faded. If they don't do that within six months, you can bitch. Wait, no you can't, because Apple never said the machines were processor upgradable.
Oh, so it's okay for them to disable upgradability because it's good for them? If you want to do business with a company that thinks that way, go ahead.
Apple disabled the upgradability so nobody could ship a G4 accelerator before they shipped a G4 machine. If that's not coldly mercenary, I don't know what is.
They continue to demonstrate that they are not in business to help you, or anyone but themselves. Not even Microsoft is this bad.
I do not understand why ANYONE would do business with a company that has ethics like these... and why a/.'er would will probably forever remain a mystery. Remember open? Remember owning your own computer and being able to do what you want with it? Why on EARTH would ANYONE put on handcuffs, even if they are gold and have a nice fur lining?
Um, well.... er... strike that last question. But you get the gist.:-)
Whoah, dude. Talk about serious paranoia... and poor thinking.
Seems like most of the real conspiracy nuts have a very unclear grasp of the difference between correlation and causation.
Arthur C. Clarke, for example, may have had friends that were Masons. He may even have been a Mason himself; I don't know. And, 3001 was published after his death. These are both true, but this is just a correlation. Except for the timing problems, it would be equally valid to say that the publication of 3001 caused his friends to be members in the Masons. Correlation does not imply causation.
Arthur Clarke, btw, was considered one of the Big Three of the first wave of science fiction writers. Simple demand would have resulted in the publication of anything remaining after his death. It is very weak thinking to claim that its publication was a Masonic plot, when it is entirely obvious that simple fame suffices as an explanation.
And your subtext that 'Masons are evil' is silly. My father was a Mason, and I can assure you he neither worshiped Satan nor rode in black helicopters. He eventually got a bit disgusted with them -- it is something of an old-boys' club that has gotten away from its root causes, preventing another Inquisition and serving those in need -- but your fear is based on assertions by the same organization that CAUSED the Inquisition.
Given the overall credibility levels of the two organizations, who are you going to believe? Personally, I'll bet on the anti-Inquisition side.:-)
Apple is not undergoing a renaissance. They are blowing a lot of smoke and flashing a lot of mirrors.
"The new IMac! Now in color!"
I am really disappointed you bought into this garbage. A good quality P3 with well-picked components will run rings around a Mac. The Mac has a processor that does well on benchmarks, but the rest of the technology is second-rate.
Plus, you get all the joy of a closed system, which any self-respecting geek will loathe. Consider their G3s... which Apple has actively prevented from being upgradable by deliberately breaking the firmware. If you plug a G4 chip into a G3 machine, it won't boot up. On purpose.
No PC manufacturer would be able to get away with this, and I strongly suggest that you not let Apple do it either. They're not rebels. They're not making insanely great things anymore. They are, in my opinion, a bunch of thieves extorting way too much money from a captive market.
I was just thinking the same thing! The only MM points that will be used are negative ones. If you agree with someone, it's not going to stand out to you very much -- whereas if you disagree with someone's moderation decision, *whammo*, there goes a negative point.
In the first week or so of the moderation system, the moderation was just about perfect, IMO. The really good comments floated to the top quickly.
When you tightened down later, it really seems like the quality level dropped. There wasn't enough reinforcement of good ideas or negative reinforcement of the stupid stuff.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to try liberalizing the amount of moderator points given away each day for awhile.
Remember,/. is growing all the time, and the amount of moderation points needed to properly regulate the discussion areas is going to be growing too.
It probably should be a function of the average number of posts per day or something. If there are 2X as many posts, then there will need to be 2X as many moderators or 2X as many points per moderator to maintain the same degree of collaborative filtering.
Whatever the formula ends up being, I think we would be better off if there were more points available than we have now.
Okay, I should apologize a bit; it was in reading your specific comment that my temper finally broke and I decided something needed to be said. I wasn't talking about JUST you, and not all the observations were pointed at you. Most of them, in fact, were not. The specific comment that I really wanted to make was that blaming other people for thin skins does not change the fact that you are hurting them. If you took a gun to them, you couldn't blame them for not wearing body armor, now could you?
While I'm at it, I should also apologize because the original post wandered too much. It needed to go back through the typewriter again. Unfortunately,/. isn't well-suited for good editing. This silly text box is horrible!
As far as your actual reply goes: your statement that words do not hurt is not true. Words hurt worse than anything else. If you are not aware of that yet, then you need to do more introspection. If attacks didn't hurt, why would people defend themselves so vociferously? Why would all these silly flamewars get started? If words didn't hurt, arguments wouldn't exist. We would have discussions instead.
Look... you may not like Katz. But your attacks make the problem worse, not better. I have been reading him a long, long time, since the early Wired days, and he has had some amazing insights and done the geek community a lot of good. When you -- and all the people like you -- start flaming on him when you see something that doesn't meet your standards, all it does is throw him off balance, and makes his writing worse.
Think about it a minute. If you are having to be defensive against people, it is much harder to think and see clearly. Good writing, and good commentary, is usually about being very quiet and letting the observations flow. Attack-flamers hamper that flow. When you blast him for being a 'gasbag', you help insure that the next column will also be gasbaggy. One can't write well from inside a shell, and attacks like yours would force anyone to withdraw into one at least partway.
You are helping cause the problem you complain about.
It strikes me that people here are often, maybe even usually, rude. Your post is an excellent example. You even go so far as to blame it on OTHER people for being 'thin-skinned'. (!)
Telling the truth is a good thing. Calling someone names, most of the time, is not. It amazes me how hostile people have become online, and yet how blind they seem to their own hostility.
And he's right about the industry abusing its customers. Microsoft is our favorite example. They write code to make money: security and stability be dammed. Many people even praise them for this... making money, to these people, is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing.
When does it become enough? Microsoft has on the order of 25 billion sitting in the bank. Why don't they take the time to really push the boundaries of what computing is a little bit? Do a little bit of what open source does -- improve computers for everyone, just because it's the right thing to do.
It strikes me that one of the fundamental points of computer ethics is to write software that is secure. Almost nobody I know of does this with their programs. OpenBSD is *the only* operating system I know that has stressed security and code correctness from the beginning. (Netware may be another; it is quite secure, but I do not know what Novell's internal practices are like. )
Respect and tolerance are two more points I think should be taken up by a great many more/.'ers. I have rarely seen such arrogance. Back when it was young, a couple years ago, the expertise you could find here was genuine, and the flaming generally was merited. Nowadays, it's just a bunch of angry teenagers who flame first, think second. The same expert people are here, but their voices are mostly drowned out in the clamor of the angry amateur wannabes. Lots of ego, not much to back it up.
The hate that is so often spewed here will break up the open source movement before it ever really gets started. Each time you post something that blasts another person, you do a bit more damage to the community as a whole. Sometimes it's necessary, but there is absolutely no reason to blast Katz. It does no good, and causes harm to the overall community.
Strikes me that most of the people doing it are falling prey to the exact same pettiness they almost universally loathe and despise in others, at school and in other RL places. 'Get out, you don't belong here, you're Not One Of Us'... implying that the person who is saying it IS.
It is so very sad that the people who are tormented and abused most -- the geeks -- do the same thing to people who aren't exactly like them.
"How can we be in, if there is no outside." -- Peter Gabriel
Remember, the GPL merely says that they must provide source code to any customer who asks, and must inform the customer of that right. If I recall the GPL correctly, it does NOT say ANYWHERE that Redhat must give away copies of their program for free. They must give their source to any customer, and they must allow that customer to copy the source further, but they DO NOT have to provide either binaries OR source to non-customers.
Now, they may continue to give away RedHat via FTP for free, but there is NOTHING graven in concrete that says they have to. Eventually, RedHat's FTP site could be just for access to source code packages AFTER you had paid the license fee.
Other people would be able to mirror the source and binaries (at least of the GPLed portions of Redhat Linux), and RedHat couldn't do a thing about it.
Whether or not they will change that much remains to be seen. Frankly, I expect them to tighten down a lot.
As long as we're talking about government, did you notice how Echelon has just disappeared from the news?
Just *gone*.
The last I heard, the NSA, get this, REFUSED to tell Congress about Echelon, citing attorney-client privilege. And we have heard NOTHING more.
I don't know about you, but this scares the hell out of me. Something is going on, folks. Something bad. We need to keep digging. *Write* your Congresscritter and ask him/her what the status is of the Echelon inquiry. Don't let it fade from their memories.
I have been told that that Maxtor owns Quantum. Drives from both come off the same assembly lines, but Quantum gets 'pick of the litter'. In other words, Maxtor builds drives from the platters that Quantum didn't want/need.
In general, apparently, you get better drives if you buy Quantum over Maxtor. But you will pay more for them, too.
Don't know about you folks, but I'm getting nervous about how cheap drives are getting. The damn things are spinning 120 times A SECOND in there. Quality is likely to take a nosedive with the incredible financial pressures that drive makers are under right now.
We've had a LOT of Western Digital 9GB SCSIs fail at work. We brought in about twenty of those drives about 18 months ago, and eight have died. And those weren't even cheap..... I think we paid $850 each or so. WD has been very nice about replacing them, but they still broke.
It worries me when I see drives of about the same size and speed rating (EIDE, admittedly) for $150 in just 18 months... that is waaay too much price pressure. Something has got to give, and I fear it will be our data.
PCWeek isn't the most unbiased of sources. In general I don't like that magazine very much.
I can't comment on the review in c't directly, but personally don't plan on switching away from MP3 anytime soon -- it sounds good enough, and nobody 'owns' it. For me to buy into a proprietary standard, it would have to be A LOT better... and none of them, so far, are.
Whatever RIAA wants, SDMI is NOT going to happen. I guarantee it.
I think I was realizing this (re: geeks) in that last paragraph, because I have known a couple of people that absolutely would qualify... but they were into religion, not computers. And I was wondering if computers help to cause the other traits. Religion geeks are definitely obsessive but their other traits are very different. I don't know many of them so I can't generalize them well -- to me they are an alien species.:)
I think your observation about the prejudice on/. about geeks and nerds being ONLY computer-based is a good one. It seems like the prejudice level is very high in some; consider the reactions to Jon Katz, who did more to point out the fact that geeks *existed* and to legitimize them in mainstream society than probably any other single person.
He left Wired when it went corporate... and hasn't received the warmest of welcomes here. He definitely qualifies as a geek, but it seems a lot of people here don't agree with that. It's kind of ironic, because in a way he's the one who redefined the term to be a positive one.
ANYWAY, yes, it seems like the obsessiveness with mastery of something is a primary geek trait, which is why I make the comment about insecurity, and stand behind it. In my experience, 99% of the people with big egos have them mostly because of insecurity, as a sort of self-treatment to avoid the pain of feeling inadequate.
In fact, I think a lot of the drive toward mastery of things comes from that basic place... feeling inadequate and driven to be more than you are. Being insecure isn't bad -- it just is. A lot of change in the world comes from it.
If we were all perfectly secure, we would probably still be in caves hunting wildebeest.
That said, Linus Torvalds strikes me as one of the most secure people I have ever seen, and yet at the moment he's sort of the ubergeek.
In other words, if you really don't think insecure applies to you, maybe it doesn't.:-)
In my experience, geeks tend to have these traits:
1. Highly rational, though not necessarily intelligent. 2. Technology-oriented. 3. Enjoy being social but generally have low self-esteem. 4. Tend to be highly competent in multiple areas, less so in the hyper-rational dysfunctional type. 5. Have a real distrust of anyone who tells them what to do. 6. Believe very firmly that they should be allowed to make their own decisions. 7. Usually aren't interested in telling other people what to do either, as long as they're not being bothered. Live and let live. 8. Are very, very self-reliant. 9. Love to teach/expound.
There's no way that these observations will hold true for everyone who thinks of him or herself as a geek, but I'll bet each one would apply to a broad cross-section of/. readership.
Note that these traits don't exclude religion, conservatism, or (other?) stupidity, though I think in general they do tend to select against all three.
One thought that's coming to mind is that I have seen Bible geeks in my life. Maybe 'geekitude' has more to do with being obsessive about something? And perhaps these traits arise from the kind of thinking that is required to be obsessive about computers?
I've used 'marketing gigabytes' and 'real gigabytes' for a long time.
I'm not sure which of the big disk drive manufacturers deliberately created this confusion, but they did this back somewhere around the 40MB drive time frame. Suddenly, simply by redefining their terms a little, they could have '42 megabyte' hard drives instead of '40 megabyte'. Anyone who actually knew anything despised the practice, but the manufacturers that did NOT accept the term quickly found themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
I think it took less than six months for 'marketing gigabytes' to take over for the correct usage of the term. It has been causing problems ever since.
Castlewood is the only new manufacturer I know of that seems to be using 'real gigabytes'. I have one of their ORB drives and you really do get 2.2GB (at least as far as Windows is concerned).
These new words just aren't going to work. You must really understand them to use them properly, and how many people do YOU know in your daily life that understand base-10 versus base-2 notation?
Anyone will understand 'marketing gigabytes' versus 'real gigabytes'. This usage makes the original lie obvious, and will help to correct the problem by gently reclaiming the correct word, instead of forcing a new one down people's throats.
Bush declared the War On Drugs, which is when the US stopped being a free country.
Today's attempts at monitoring are simply extensions of the work that was begun there.
Folks, we are some of the only people who understand how bad this is. It is crucial that we fight this tooth and nail, because your Average Citizen just isn't going to get it unless we tell him or her.
The War on Drugs turned out to be a war on freedom. Know Your Customer, FIDNet and removal of encryption from the public domain are simply methods of locking that loss down permanently. You must already show your papers at checkpoints to travel from an airport. How much closer to Nazi Germany do you want to get?
Make no mistake: if encryption is outlawed, your children will be raised in bondage.
Once they have outlawed encryption, systems wizards (those evil "hacker people") are the next target.
They often have amazing depth. I consider Chrono Trigger on the SNES to be the single finest game I've played. It was an amazingly detailed RPG with an intricate story line, about a dozen possible endings, and very nice graphics for the time. The first RPG on the PC that I would consider even comparable is Might and Magic 6, though MM6 doesn't have nearly the storyline that Chrono Trigger did. It still blows me away that they fit 60+ hours of INTERESTING (read: not time-wasting) play in a 4 megabyte cartridge. (I'm not 100% certain about the size: if anyone out there wants to correct me, please do.:-))
I've seen this 'consoles are going to kill computers!' article at least twice before. The Genesis, and later the 3DO, Saturn, and Playstation were all supposed to kill off PC gaming. None of them have done it yet.
When the Playstation shipped, its graphics were wildly better than PCs, but you saw how long that lasted.:-)
If they don't include at least a 10-base-T port, this generation absolutely will not kill off PC gaming. Massive multiplayer gaming is going to be big. They're just now learning how to do it. And a modem just doesn't cut it for online play. Without DSL/cable and a 10-base-T port, the consoles will need at least one more rev to really enter the multiplay area.
Friends and family stock -- that is, stock guaranteed at the offering price -- is a great chance to make a killing. It's a virtual certainty that the stock will go up. There's too much Linux hype for anything else to happen.
What Red Hat did was just hand each and every one of those developers a chunk of cash. How much it will be, we don't yet know. It might be $1. My guess is that it's more like $10,000 each, assuming 500 shares going up $20.
In other markets and at other times, you would be correct. But in today's weird stock market, the net effect was that Red Hat handed those guys money. They should be lauded, not penalized. They are helping open source in a very real and substantial way.
All bitching to the contrary about spam is technically correct but not in the least sensible. Putting a rule ahead of doing the right thing is fundamentally stupid, no matter how well you can argue that the rule was broken.
Redhat is trying to let these developers have a piece of what RedHat itself will make from the IPO. How else are they reasonably going to get the word out on fairly short notice? By targeting lists directly, they are much more likely to get the word to people who are busy coding, not web surfing.
I can't believe people are going off sideways about this; it's just A PIECE of email, and probably the only unsolicited email Redhat will ever send. In really unusual circumstances, some rules don't apply. Telling people you're giving them a piece of your multi-million IPO is one of them.
The good in this case so far outweighs the minor annoyance that any frothing about it merely makes you look stupid.
Don't let rationality replace simple sense. Use your brain, don't let it use you.
I had a variant of tendinitis called DeQuervain's Syndrome when I was a word processor. (a horrible job, but I was eating during a recession, so I'm not complaining:) )
At the time (around 92-93), the medical thinking was explained to me this way:
First: reduce the inflammation. It is the inflammation that actually does the damage, by pinching the nerve between the swollen tendons and the surrounding tissue. This is usually done with anti-inflammatories. Ibuprofen is wonderful for this. There are also anti-inflammatories that are much, much stronger that are used in more severe cases. Naprosyn was one I was using for awhile.
Second: Strengthen the tendon's supporting muscles. Apparently, a lot of the reason for this kind of problem is that the muscles are weak, and the tendons take too much of the load. Exercise is one of the best ways to improve things like carpal tunnel -- as long as the inflammation has been contained first. If you are still inflamed, exercise will probably worsen the problem, not help it.
Third: IMMEDIATELY get someone to look at how you sit and FIX IT. Raise your monitor, raise your chair, lower your keyboard... those are most frequently what needs to be done. Study the diagrams and get help doing this.
After I filed my comp claim as a word processor (which I hated to do... and should have done much sooner), they gave me these wonderful things I called 'robot arms'. They cost like $200 each, but they are basically supports for your arms. You rest your forearms in these padded cradles, and they support your arms as you move your hands around and type. They move very naturally with you, thanks to a clever dual-jointed system. It took a few days to get used to them, but they were incredibly good.
Now that I'm getting older (over 30), I'm seeing slight signs of problems again, even though I don't do that much typing anymore. I replaced my keyboard at home with a Kinesis Ergo (about $200 for the base model). On the whole I like the Ergo a lot. My discomfort has diminished significantly. Two caveats: the Ergo seems to suffer from a stuck shift key sometimes and needs to have the shift key pressed again. (the key mechanism is fine, it's a firmware problem I think.) Second, the layout is weird enough that it's not very suitable for most gameplaying. I usually plug in a standard keyboard for games where I need cursor controls. Also, the Ergo takes several weeks to really adapt to. Give it the time; it's worth it.
Last: if you strike QUICKLY when you're only a little sore and get it taken care of SOON, you won't take permanent damage. Full blown tendinitis is excruciatingly painful and will interfere with everything in your life. For all intents and purposes, you will be crippled until it heals -- and if you don't take care of it early enough, it *may never heal properly*.
If you don't have medical coverage and can't see a doctor, STOP TYPING. There is no project you could be doing that is worth losing the use of your hands.
You can also try over the counter anti-inflammatories; it is my understanding that if you keep the pain in check, you will also be stopping the damage. Real tendinitis is far too painful to be masked by something like ibuprofen. Caveat: I AM NOT A DOCTOR and you could be screwing yourself up pretty seriously if you pay too much attention to this advice. If you have ANY other option, take it -- that includes filing a Workers' Compensation claim if you have it in your state. As an option of *absolute last resort*, over the counter anti-inflams may help some.
Certified means that a standards organization has OFFICIALLY DECLARED that it runs POSIX programs. This is usually expensive. Good testing isn't cheap, and standards organizations are often profit based. Apparently this hasn't been done for Linux yet.
I don't know which organization handles the POSIX trademark. (service mark? copyright?)
At work we've been looking into a method of setting up a large amount of fast network storage. We know the traditional methods of doing it (one way would be by attaching a RAID-5 unit to our Enterprise 450.)
We've been talking with Network Appliance. Their NetFilers look pretty good. They claim to be very fast, and are highly scalable. They natively speak both SMB (NT's file system) and NFS (for Unix). ALL they do is storage. You can't program them; they're highly specialized rackmount machines that tie into your NT domains (and presumably your NIS domains, though I didn't ask that) pretty much seamlessly. You can organize your available space as Unix, NT, or shared.
It has one very, very cool capability in the filesystem. You can take a snapshot on a given day/time, which basically means they copy all the inodes at that time. If anything changes subsequently, the original drive data is preserved, and only the new data is written. The inodes in the fresher filesystem are updated to point at the new data, where the old data is still there, being pointed to by the old inodes. It gives you an online revision history, which would be exceptionally nice right after one of those "*doh, I just did rm -rf/*' moments. Because it's just storing file deltas, it doesn't take as much space as you'd think.
Another real advantage we see to it is that because it's a specialized device, if something else on the network needs to be taken down for maintenance (say, the backup server), the network storage is unaffected. The only thing that's at all likely to take your storage down is, well, storage problems. And it's fully hot swappable and running fibre channel internally. It looks really good.
I think you're talking around $100K - $120K or so for a midrange box with 150GB of storage. I believe they presently scale to 1.5TB, and are building ways of scaling further -- they claim much further. Tons of options for high speed networking on it, too.
It's just a thought -- instead of doing what you are doing, which is using PC hardware, switching to a specialized device, with its custom, highly reliable hardware, might be a very appealing solution -- as long as all you're doing is streaming the data off the server. If you need the server to fiddle with the bits before they arrive, you'd have to have another server in the way, which is probably defeating most of the purpose in a specialized unit anyway.
My $0.02. I don't have actual experience with these yet. If anyone does, please chime in.:)
The authorities are not required to have a warrant to "wiretap" cell phone calls. The decision (which I know applies in California) was that because cell phones are radios, they are not afforded the same wiretap protection that phones are.
Yes, that is ridiculous. It is also true.
I am not sure whether this applies to anything except government. It wouldn't surprise me if it were illegal for private citizens to do this, but not police/gov't. In other words, they get to have their cake and eat it too; it's private, but only as long as Big Brother is uninterested.
Well, I'm just now installing Legato Networker for UNIX and it seems pretty good.
We've had endless trouble with Arcserve for Windows NT. It backs up UNIX clients very slowly, and trashes its databases on a regular basis. I finally called up Arcserve to scream at them about it, and the upshot is that their database system cannot handle more than 16 million records, about 1GB, and the sheer volume of files we need to backup overwhelms their database engine. Of course, it doesn't gracefully fail, it just quietly corrupts itself without telling you. I have been dodging bullets with that system for months.
Apparently, if you install a SQL server and use it to store your database of records, it works fine for larger installations, but I'm so pissed at them about not documenting such a basic limitation of their system that I've been exploring other alternatives.
I did a test install of Legato Networker on a Solaris 2.5.1 box, and it seems to work pretty well. It spools multiple volumes to tape at the same time, seems to run A LOT faster than Arcserve did under UNIX (about the same speed as Arcserve/NT backing up NT files, about 2.5MB/minute to a 40GB SCSI DLT tape unit), and the restores run fine. It is a bit slow about responding to commands, sometimes taking a minute or so to set itself up for the next job, but it seems good on Unix at least.
Unfortunately, there is no Linux client for Networker.:( Arcserve DOES have a Linux client, but that software is so bad I've never even tried it.
Have you used Networker in anything other than a Novell environment? S'possible that their Netware stuff isn't so good, while their UNIX stuff is fine. I have all of one week experience with it, and while it seems fine to me, I haven't really loaded it down yet.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, let's go back and look at the original wording of the complaint.
I don't know for sure you or the author are Masons , but your Masonic sympathies have become quite clear in your past posts on here with catch phrases urging us to support the "New World Order"
Okay, first the author admits that he doesn't know that Katz is a Mason, but then asserts that he has Masonic sympathies. He knows this because Katz has used the phrase "New World Order" at least once in his life. Oooh, that's a really strong justification. I'm convinced. Oh my god, I typed New World Order, I must be in on it. Fnord.
I'm particularily upset with Arthur C. Clark's published book 3001, which we had published after his death through his will to satisfy his Masonic friends, many of whom apparantly helped push his career.
The 'we' here is interesting. I assume this AC works for whoever published 3001. He claims 'to satisfy his Masonic friends', implying that being Masons is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about them. It's exactly the same as saying, 'to satisfy his Catholic friends' or 'his Baptist friends'. There's no reason to include the extra info unless it is important, and in this context can only be taken to imply that they had it published BECAUSE they are Masons... not because they are his friends. He also completely ignores the fact that fan demand would probably have gotten the book published anyway, as Clarke was a very popular author. (I didn't like him that much myself. There were a lot of 'lesser lights' that I much preferred. Clarke was too gloomy.)
ANYway.. here's a nice bit of paranoia:
This book contained all sorts of anti-Christain ramblings (one or two chapters were little more than a direct attack on Christainity.) Clarke probably promised this book to his Masonic friends who, in exchanged, promoted his earlier works.
The author is asserting that Clarke wrote anti-Christian texts in exchange for favors. Wow. In other words, Clarke didn't just believe that Christianity was bad for humanity and write about it. No, it had to be some bargain to promote the Masonic agenda. The simple explanation won't suffice -- it must be complex.
And, as another poster pointed out, this is the site for nerds; many of us know this stuff! I would much rather purchase a computing history textbook from someone who wasn't a Mason; this way, I wouldn't someday find my money used in some sort of subversive attack on Western Civilization. Just my $0.02.
So now we've gone from being Masonic to plotting the demise of Western Civilization. (see above for one alleged plot.) I'm sorry, but A does not lead to B. I absolutely know of at least one exception, and no, it does not prove the rule.
Okay, re: black helicopters and Satan and all that... admittedly, our AC did not mention those. I am indeed guilty of a presumption. I have argued a number of times with a number of people on this particular subject, and every single time I run into someone who is into Masons and their 'evil plots', it ends up in Illuminati and Satan. I baselessly projected that into the discussion before it arrived by itself.
However, you misstate me badly in the last bullet point. I don't presume that this AC wants to burn people at the stake. I'm sure that's the last thing he wants to do. He is, however, attacking an organization whose principal purpose is preventing another such horror from happening. My implication is that it is a bit unwise to take the word of organizations that HAVE tortured and killed about organizations that probably have not and are opposed to first's torture.
Now, are the Masons actually up to something? It's possible. Fraternities, as someone else was commenting here, do tend to look out for their own, and the Masons have been around a long time. I'm sure there's more than a few rotten apples in a barrel that big. However, from an individual standpoint, continuing the status quo is likely to be the most lucrative and beneficial course. What would they have to gain from attacking Western Civilization? They sure stand to lose an awful lot.... they have a lot of wealth and power in the current system.
The only answers I have gotten to that question have, so far, been frenzied frothing about bargains with Lucifer, the 33rd degree, Satanic rites and blood sacrifice. Usually with black helicopters, New World Orders, and conspiracies so deep and dark that they span hundreds of years, continents, and cultures, yet somehow have remained mostly secret.
Sorry, I don't buy those. If our AC can come up with a better reason, or if you can, please go ahead. You certainly can't do much worse than the answers I got before. :-) Conspiracies are like murders -- to hang together, they have to have a means, a method, and a motive/payoff. The bigger the conspiracy is, the larger the payoff needs to be to maintain it.
I submit that fear of torture and persecution is a strong enough motive to hold an organization together for hundreds of years, and that intent to conspire simply is not strong enough a motivation no matter WHAT the potential payoff is. I haven't heard many other plausible reasons to hold together an organization whose intent is the demise of Western Civilization. Remember, that same organization was instrumental in building a good chunk of it, and its existence predates Western Civilization by quite some time.
Sorry, it just doesn't hang together.
On the iMac, yes it will, and I would hope so since the iMac is a consumer machine and the P3 is not a consumer processor. Otherwise, Macs are really only deficient in two areas: sound and video.
/.'er would will probably forever remain a mystery. Remember open? Remember owning your own computer and being able to do what you want with it? Why on EARTH would ANYONE put on handcuffs, even if they are gold and have a nice fur lining?
:-)
Oh, "just" sound and video... sound may not be that critical, but video matters. Especially on the Mac, which is supposed to be a graphical machine! Not only do they have slow, outdated graphic cards, they also have that horrible abstraction layer that slows things down even more. You may not like Microsoft very much, but DirectX is really quite good.
In all real-world benchmarks, P3s are consistently faster at everything except raw CPU, and they're only just a whisker behind there. And K7s are just now shipping, and are faster still. You will get more work done faster on a PC, will spend less for it, and will be able to upgrade it much less expensively.
I would *a lot* rather be editing video on a PC than on a Mac.
Apple isn't any less open than PC manufacturers. The only parts that are kept closed are the ROM chips, the firmware, and the GUI. Every other spec is freely available, along with the code of the operating system.
That, sir, is absolute crap. Apple has refused to provide documentation on their systems to third party developers they don't like for some time now. They shut down the clone market to keep you from getting cheap Macs. You can't run BeOS on a Mac because Apple is a closed system. You can't run Linux very well on a new Mac for the same reason. Apple is even less on your side than Microsoft is. No matter how pretty the interface is, it's a gilded cage.
Well, then Microsoft, Intel and Compaq must be small, two bit companies.
You show me a PC manufacturer that won't let you upgrade a CPU. (Well, except Packard Bell, but they are probably the worst PC clones on the market.) Manufacturers constantly release new BIOS patches to support new CPUs. For the most part, the PC market is a marvel of both cooperation and backward compatibility -- despite the fierce, fierce competition, the consumer rarely gets really shafted. I submit that this is not the case with Apple, which constantly orphans old machines. They do it for their own good, but somehow convince people that it's in their best interest to pay twice as much for a computer that isn't as good to start with, is too expensive to upgrade, and is likely to be orphaned at the drop of a hat.
Apple will fix the firmware once the G4 hype has faded. If they don't do that within six months, you can bitch. Wait, no you can't, because Apple never said the machines were processor upgradable.
Oh, so it's okay for them to disable upgradability because it's good for them? If you want to do business with a company that thinks that way, go ahead.
Apple disabled the upgradability so nobody could ship a G4 accelerator before they shipped a G4 machine. If that's not coldly mercenary, I don't know what is.
They continue to demonstrate that they are not in business to help you, or anyone but themselves. Not even Microsoft is this bad.
I do not understand why ANYONE would do business with a company that has ethics like these... and why a
Um, well.... er... strike that last question. But you get the gist.
Seems like most of the real conspiracy nuts have a very unclear grasp of the difference between correlation and causation.
Arthur C. Clarke, for example, may have had friends that were Masons. He may even have been a Mason himself; I don't know. And, 3001 was published after his death. These are both true, but this is just a correlation. Except for the timing problems, it would be equally valid to say that the publication of 3001 caused his friends to be members in the Masons. Correlation does not imply causation.
Arthur Clarke, btw, was considered one of the Big Three of the first wave of science fiction writers. Simple demand would have resulted in the publication of anything remaining after his death. It is very weak thinking to claim that its publication was a Masonic plot, when it is entirely obvious that simple fame suffices as an explanation.
And your subtext that 'Masons are evil' is silly. My father was a Mason, and I can assure you he neither worshiped Satan nor rode in black helicopters. He eventually got a bit disgusted with them -- it is something of an old-boys' club that has gotten away from its root causes, preventing another Inquisition and serving those in need -- but your fear is based on assertions by the same organization that CAUSED the Inquisition.
Given the overall credibility levels of the two organizations, who are you going to believe? Personally, I'll bet on the anti-Inquisition side. :-)
Apple is not undergoing a renaissance. They are blowing a lot of smoke and flashing a lot of mirrors.
"The new IMac! Now in color!"
I am really disappointed you bought into this garbage. A good quality P3 with well-picked components will run rings around a Mac. The Mac has a processor that does well on benchmarks, but the rest of the technology is second-rate.
Plus, you get all the joy of a closed system, which any self-respecting geek will loathe. Consider their G3s... which Apple has actively prevented from being upgradable by deliberately breaking the firmware. If you plug a G4 chip into a G3 machine, it won't boot up. On purpose.
No PC manufacturer would be able to get away with this, and I strongly suggest that you not let Apple do it either. They're not rebels. They're not making insanely great things anymore. They are, in my opinion, a bunch of thieves extorting way too much money from a captive market.
Yes, you should think different -- think open.
I was just thinking the same thing! The only MM points that will be used are negative ones. If you agree with someone, it's not going to stand out to you very much -- whereas if you disagree with someone's moderation decision, *whammo*, there goes a negative point.
In the first week or so of the moderation system, the moderation was just about perfect, IMO. The really good comments floated to the top quickly.
/. is growing all the time, and the amount of moderation points needed to properly regulate the discussion areas is going to be growing too.
When you tightened down later, it really seems like the quality level dropped. There wasn't enough reinforcement of good ideas or negative reinforcement of the stupid stuff.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to try liberalizing the amount of moderator points given away each day for awhile.
Remember,
It probably should be a function of the average number of posts per day or something. If there are 2X as many posts, then there will need to be 2X as many moderators or 2X as many points per moderator to maintain the same degree of collaborative filtering.
Whatever the formula ends up being, I think we would be better off if there were more points available than we have now.
Okay, I should apologize a bit; it was in reading your specific comment that my temper finally broke and I decided something needed to be said. I wasn't talking about JUST you, and not all the observations were pointed at you. Most of them, in fact, were not. The specific comment that I really wanted to make was that blaming other people for thin skins does not change the fact that you are hurting them. If you took a gun to them, you couldn't blame them for not wearing body armor, now could you?
/. isn't well-suited for good editing. This silly text box is horrible!
While I'm at it, I should also apologize because the original post wandered too much. It needed to go back through the typewriter again. Unfortunately,
As far as your actual reply goes: your statement that words do not hurt is not true. Words hurt worse than anything else. If you are not aware of that yet, then you need to do more introspection. If attacks didn't hurt, why would people defend themselves so vociferously? Why would all these silly flamewars get started? If words didn't hurt, arguments wouldn't exist. We would have discussions instead.
Look... you may not like Katz. But your attacks make the problem worse, not better. I have been reading him a long, long time, since the early Wired days, and he has had some amazing insights and done the geek community a lot of good. When you -- and all the people like you -- start flaming on him when you see something that doesn't meet your standards, all it does is throw him off balance, and makes his writing worse.
Think about it a minute. If you are having to be defensive against people, it is much harder to think and see clearly. Good writing, and good commentary, is usually about being very quiet and letting the observations flow. Attack-flamers hamper that flow. When you blast him for being a 'gasbag', you help insure that the next column will also be gasbaggy. One can't write well from inside a shell, and attacks like yours would force anyone to withdraw into one at least partway.
You are helping cause the problem you complain about.
It strikes me that people here are often, maybe even usually, rude. Your post is an excellent example. You even go so far as to blame it on OTHER people for being 'thin-skinned'. (!)
/.'ers. I have rarely seen such arrogance. Back when it was young, a couple years ago, the expertise you could find here was genuine, and the flaming generally was merited. Nowadays, it's just a bunch of angry teenagers who flame first, think second. The same expert people are here, but their voices are mostly drowned out in the clamor of the angry amateur wannabes. Lots of ego, not much to back it up.
Telling the truth is a good thing. Calling someone names, most of the time, is not. It amazes me how hostile people have become online, and yet how blind they seem to their own hostility.
And he's right about the industry abusing its customers. Microsoft is our favorite example. They write code to make money: security and stability be dammed. Many people even praise them for this... making money, to these people, is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing.
When does it become enough? Microsoft has on the order of 25 billion sitting in the bank. Why don't they take the time to really push the boundaries of what computing is a little bit? Do a little bit of what open source does -- improve computers for everyone, just because it's the right thing to do.
It strikes me that one of the fundamental points of computer ethics is to write software that is secure. Almost nobody I know of does this with their programs. OpenBSD is *the only* operating system I know that has stressed security and code correctness from the beginning. (Netware may be another; it is quite secure, but I do not know what Novell's internal practices are like. )
Respect and tolerance are two more points I think should be taken up by a great many more
The hate that is so often spewed here will break up the open source movement before it ever really gets started. Each time you post something that blasts another person, you do a bit more damage to the community as a whole. Sometimes it's necessary, but there is absolutely no reason to blast Katz. It does no good, and causes harm to the overall community.
Strikes me that most of the people doing it are falling prey to the exact same pettiness they almost universally loathe and despise in others, at school and in other RL places. 'Get out, you don't belong here, you're Not One Of Us'... implying that the person who is saying it IS.
It is so very sad that the people who are tormented and abused most -- the geeks -- do the same thing to people who aren't exactly like them.
"How can we be in, if there is no outside." -- Peter Gabriel
Remember, the GPL merely says that they must provide source code to any customer who asks, and must inform the customer of that right. If I recall the GPL correctly, it does NOT say ANYWHERE that Redhat must give away copies of their program for free. They must give their source to any customer, and they must allow that customer to copy the source further, but they DO NOT have to provide either binaries OR source to non-customers.
Now, they may continue to give away RedHat via FTP for free, but there is NOTHING graven in concrete that says they have to. Eventually, RedHat's FTP site could be just for access to source code packages AFTER you had paid the license fee.
Other people would be able to mirror the source and binaries (at least of the GPLed portions of Redhat Linux), and RedHat couldn't do a thing about it.
Whether or not they will change that much remains to be seen. Frankly, I expect them to tighten down a lot.
As long as we're talking about government, did you notice how Echelon has just disappeared from the news?
Just *gone*.
The last I heard, the NSA, get this, REFUSED to tell Congress about Echelon, citing attorney-client privilege. And we have heard NOTHING more.
I don't know about you, but this scares the hell out of me. Something is going on, folks. Something bad. We need to keep digging. *Write* your Congresscritter and ask him/her what the status is of the Echelon inquiry. Don't let it fade from their memories.
Don't let it fade from yours.
This is unsubstantiated rumor: take with salt.
I have been told that that Maxtor owns Quantum. Drives from both come off the same assembly lines, but Quantum gets 'pick of the litter'. In other words, Maxtor builds drives from the platters that Quantum didn't want/need.
In general, apparently, you get better drives if you buy Quantum over Maxtor. But you will pay more for them, too.
Don't know about you folks, but I'm getting nervous about how cheap drives are getting. The damn things are spinning 120 times A SECOND in there. Quality is likely to take a nosedive with the incredible financial pressures that drive makers are under right now.
We've had a LOT of Western Digital 9GB SCSIs fail at work. We brought in about twenty of those drives about 18 months ago, and eight have died. And those weren't even cheap..... I think we paid $850 each or so. WD has been very nice about replacing them, but they still broke.
It worries me when I see drives of about the same size and speed rating (EIDE, admittedly) for $150 in just 18 months... that is waaay too much price pressure. Something has got to give, and I fear it will be our data.
PCWeek isn't the most unbiased of sources. In general I don't like that magazine very much.
I can't comment on the review in c't directly, but personally don't plan on switching away from MP3 anytime soon -- it sounds good enough, and nobody 'owns' it. For me to buy into a proprietary standard, it would have to be A LOT better... and none of them, so far, are.
Whatever RIAA wants, SDMI is NOT going to happen. I guarantee it.
I think I was realizing this (re: geeks) in that last paragraph, because I have known a couple of people that absolutely would qualify... but they were into religion, not computers. And I was wondering if computers help to cause the other traits. Religion geeks are definitely obsessive but their other traits are very different. I don't know many of them so I can't generalize them well -- to me they are an alien species. :)
/. about geeks and nerds being ONLY computer-based is a good one. It seems like the prejudice level is very high in some; consider the reactions to Jon Katz, who did more to point out the fact that geeks *existed* and to legitimize them in mainstream society than probably any other single person.
:-)
I think your observation about the prejudice on
He left Wired when it went corporate... and hasn't received the warmest of welcomes here. He definitely qualifies as a geek, but it seems a lot of people here don't agree with that. It's kind of ironic, because in a way he's the one who redefined the term to be a positive one.
ANYWAY, yes, it seems like the obsessiveness with mastery of something is a primary geek trait, which is why I make the comment about insecurity, and stand behind it. In my experience, 99% of the people with big egos have them mostly because of insecurity, as a sort of self-treatment to avoid the pain of feeling inadequate.
In fact, I think a lot of the drive toward mastery of things comes from that basic place... feeling inadequate and driven to be more than you are. Being insecure isn't bad -- it just is. A lot of change in the world comes from it.
If we were all perfectly secure, we would probably still be in caves hunting wildebeest.
That said, Linus Torvalds strikes me as one of the most secure people I have ever seen, and yet at the moment he's sort of the ubergeek.
In other words, if you really don't think insecure applies to you, maybe it doesn't.
Does anyone even know what it means anymore?
/. readership.
In my experience, geeks tend to have these traits:
1. Highly rational, though not necessarily intelligent.
2. Technology-oriented.
3. Enjoy being social but generally have low self-esteem.
4. Tend to be highly competent in multiple areas, less so in the hyper-rational dysfunctional type.
5. Have a real distrust of anyone who tells them what to do.
6. Believe very firmly that they should be allowed to make their own decisions.
7. Usually aren't interested in telling other people what to do either, as long as they're not being bothered. Live and let live.
8. Are very, very self-reliant.
9. Love to teach/expound.
There's no way that these observations will hold true for everyone who thinks of him or herself as a geek, but I'll bet each one would apply to a broad cross-section of
Note that these traits don't exclude religion, conservatism, or (other?) stupidity, though I think in general they do tend to select against all three.
One thought that's coming to mind is that I have seen Bible geeks in my life. Maybe 'geekitude' has more to do with being obsessive about something? And perhaps these traits arise from the kind of thinking that is required to be obsessive about computers?
Just a thought.
I've used 'marketing gigabytes' and 'real gigabytes' for a long time.
I'm not sure which of the big disk drive manufacturers deliberately created this confusion, but they did this back somewhere around the 40MB drive time frame. Suddenly, simply by redefining their terms a little, they could have '42 megabyte' hard drives instead of '40 megabyte'. Anyone who actually knew anything despised the practice, but the manufacturers that did NOT accept the term quickly found themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
I think it took less than six months for 'marketing gigabytes' to take over for the correct usage of the term. It has been causing problems ever since.
Castlewood is the only new manufacturer I know of that seems to be using 'real gigabytes'. I have one of their ORB drives and you really do get 2.2GB (at least as far as Windows is concerned).
These new words just aren't going to work. You must really understand them to use them properly, and how many people do YOU know in your daily life that understand base-10 versus base-2 notation?
Anyone will understand 'marketing gigabytes' versus 'real gigabytes'. This usage makes the original lie obvious, and will help to correct the problem by gently reclaiming the correct word, instead of forcing a new one down people's throats.
Bush declared the War On Drugs, which is when the US stopped being a free country.
Today's attempts at monitoring are simply extensions of the work that was begun there.
Folks, we are some of the only people who understand how bad this is. It is crucial that we fight this tooth and nail, because your Average Citizen just isn't going to get it unless we tell him or her.
The War on Drugs turned out to be a war on freedom. Know Your Customer, FIDNet and removal of encryption from the public domain are simply methods of locking that loss down permanently. You must already show your papers at checkpoints to travel from an airport. How much closer to Nazi Germany do you want to get?
Make no mistake: if encryption is outlawed, your children will be raised in bondage.
Once they have outlawed encryption, systems wizards (those evil "hacker people") are the next target.
It provides a gripping point for the tool to be applied.
They often have amazing depth. I consider Chrono Trigger on the SNES to be the single finest game I've played. It was an amazingly detailed RPG with an intricate story line, about a dozen possible endings, and very nice graphics for the time. The first RPG on the PC that I would consider even comparable is Might and Magic 6, though MM6 doesn't have nearly the storyline that Chrono Trigger did. It still blows me away that they fit 60+ hours of INTERESTING (read: not time-wasting) play in a 4 megabyte cartridge. (I'm not 100% certain about the size: if anyone out there wants to correct me, please do. :-))
:-)
I've seen this 'consoles are going to kill computers!' article at least twice before. The Genesis, and later the 3DO, Saturn, and Playstation were all supposed to kill off PC gaming. None of them have done it yet.
When the Playstation shipped, its graphics were wildly better than PCs, but you saw how long that lasted.
If they don't include at least a 10-base-T port, this generation absolutely will not kill off PC gaming. Massive multiplayer gaming is going to be big. They're just now learning how to do it. And a modem just doesn't cut it for online play. Without DSL/cable and a 10-base-T port, the consoles will need at least one more rev to really enter the multiplay area.
-- Ron
Friends and family stock -- that is, stock guaranteed at the offering price -- is a great chance to make a killing. It's a virtual certainty that the stock will go up. There's too much Linux hype for anything else to happen.
What Red Hat did was just hand each and every one of those developers a chunk of cash. How much it will be, we don't yet know. It might be $1. My guess is that it's more like $10,000 each, assuming 500 shares going up $20.
In other markets and at other times, you would be correct. But in today's weird stock market, the net effect was that Red Hat handed those guys money. They should be lauded, not penalized. They are helping open source in a very real and substantial way.
All bitching to the contrary about spam is technically correct but not in the least sensible. Putting a rule ahead of doing the right thing is fundamentally stupid, no matter how well you can argue that the rule was broken.
You're letting rationality replace intelligence.
Spam is not high crime.
Redhat is trying to let these developers have a piece of what RedHat itself will make from the IPO. How else are they reasonably going to get the word out on fairly short notice? By targeting lists directly, they are much more likely to get the word to people who are busy coding, not web surfing.
I can't believe people are going off sideways about this; it's just A PIECE of email, and probably the only unsolicited email Redhat will ever send. In really unusual circumstances, some rules don't apply. Telling people you're giving them a piece of your multi-million IPO is one of them.
The good in this case so far outweighs the minor annoyance that any frothing about it merely makes you look stupid.
Don't let rationality replace simple sense. Use your brain, don't let it use you.
-- Ron
I had a variant of tendinitis called DeQuervain's Syndrome when I was a word processor. (a horrible job, but I was eating during a recession, so I'm not complaining :) )
At the time (around 92-93), the medical thinking was explained to me this way:
First: reduce the inflammation. It is the inflammation that actually does the damage, by pinching the nerve between the swollen tendons and the surrounding tissue. This is usually done with anti-inflammatories. Ibuprofen is wonderful for this. There are also anti-inflammatories that are much, much stronger that are used in more severe cases. Naprosyn was one I was using for awhile.
Second: Strengthen the tendon's supporting muscles. Apparently, a lot of the reason for this kind of problem is that the muscles are weak, and the tendons take too much of the load. Exercise is one of the best ways to improve things like carpal tunnel -- as long as the inflammation has been contained first. If you are still inflamed, exercise will probably worsen the problem, not help it.
Third: IMMEDIATELY get someone to look at how you sit and FIX IT. Raise your monitor, raise your chair, lower your keyboard... those are most frequently what needs to be done. Study the diagrams and get help doing this.
After I filed my comp claim as a word processor (which I hated to do... and should have done much sooner), they gave me these wonderful things I called 'robot arms'. They cost like $200 each, but they are basically supports for your arms. You rest your forearms in these padded cradles, and they support your arms as you move your hands around and type. They move very naturally with you, thanks to a clever dual-jointed system. It took a few days to get used to them, but they were incredibly good.
Now that I'm getting older (over 30), I'm seeing slight signs of problems again, even though I don't do that much typing anymore. I replaced my keyboard at home with a Kinesis Ergo (about $200 for the base model). On the whole I like the Ergo a lot. My discomfort has diminished significantly. Two caveats: the Ergo seems to suffer from a stuck shift key sometimes and needs to have the shift key pressed again. (the key mechanism is fine, it's a firmware problem I think.) Second, the layout is weird enough that it's not very suitable for most gameplaying. I usually plug in a standard keyboard for games where I need cursor controls. Also, the Ergo takes several weeks to really adapt to. Give it the time; it's worth it.
Last: if you strike QUICKLY when you're only a little sore and get it taken care of SOON, you won't take permanent damage. Full blown tendinitis is excruciatingly painful and will interfere with everything in your life. For all intents and purposes, you will be crippled until it heals -- and if you don't take care of it early enough, it *may never heal properly*.
If you don't have medical coverage and can't see a doctor, STOP TYPING. There is no project you could be doing that is worth losing the use of your hands.
You can also try over the counter anti-inflammatories; it is my understanding that if you keep the pain in check, you will also be stopping the damage. Real tendinitis is far too painful to be masked by something like ibuprofen. Caveat: I AM NOT A DOCTOR and you could be screwing yourself up pretty seriously if you pay too much attention to this advice. If you have ANY other option, take it -- that includes filing a Workers' Compensation claim if you have it in your state. As an option of *absolute last resort*, over the counter anti-inflams may help some.
Compliant means it runs POSIX programs.
Certified means that a standards organization has OFFICIALLY DECLARED that it runs POSIX programs. This is usually expensive. Good testing isn't cheap, and standards organizations are often profit based. Apparently this hasn't been done for Linux yet.
I don't know which organization handles the POSIX trademark. (service mark? copyright?)
At work we've been looking into a method of setting up a large amount of fast network storage. We know the traditional methods of doing it (one way would be by attaching a RAID-5 unit to our Enterprise 450.)
/*' moments. Because it's just storing file deltas, it doesn't take as much space as you'd think.
:)
We've been talking with Network Appliance. Their NetFilers look pretty good. They claim to be very fast, and are highly scalable. They natively speak both SMB (NT's file system) and NFS (for Unix). ALL they do is storage. You can't program them; they're highly specialized rackmount machines that tie into your NT domains (and presumably your NIS domains, though I didn't ask that) pretty much seamlessly. You can organize your available space as Unix, NT, or shared.
It has one very, very cool capability in the filesystem. You can take a snapshot on a given day/time, which basically means they copy all the inodes at that time. If anything changes subsequently, the original drive data is preserved, and only the new data is written. The inodes in the fresher filesystem are updated to point at the new data, where the old data is still there, being pointed to by the old inodes. It gives you an online revision history, which would be exceptionally nice right after one of those "*doh, I just did rm -rf
Another real advantage we see to it is that because it's a specialized device, if something else on the network needs to be taken down for maintenance (say, the backup server), the network storage is unaffected. The only thing that's at all likely to take your storage down is, well, storage problems. And it's fully hot swappable and running fibre channel internally. It looks really good.
I think you're talking around $100K - $120K or so for a midrange box with 150GB of storage. I believe they presently scale to 1.5TB, and are building ways of scaling further -- they claim much further. Tons of options for high speed networking on it, too.
It's just a thought -- instead of doing what you are doing, which is using PC hardware, switching to a specialized device, with its custom, highly reliable hardware, might be a very appealing solution -- as long as all you're doing is streaming the data off the server. If you need the server to fiddle with the bits before they arrive, you'd have to have another server in the way, which is probably defeating most of the purpose in a specialized unit anyway.
My $0.02. I don't have actual experience with these yet. If anyone does, please chime in.
The authorities are not required to have a warrant to "wiretap" cell phone calls. The decision (which I know applies in California) was that because cell phones are radios, they are not afforded the same wiretap protection that phones are.
Yes, that is ridiculous. It is also true.
I am not sure whether this applies to anything except government. It wouldn't surprise me if it were illegal for private citizens to do this, but not police/gov't. In other words, they get to have their cake and eat it too; it's private, but only as long as Big Brother is uninterested.
Well, I'm just now installing Legato Networker for UNIX and it seems pretty good.
:( Arcserve DOES have a Linux client, but that software is so bad I've never even tried it.
:)
We've had endless trouble with Arcserve for Windows NT. It backs up UNIX clients very slowly, and trashes its databases on a regular basis. I finally called up Arcserve to scream at them about it, and the upshot is that their database system cannot handle more than 16 million records, about 1GB, and the sheer volume of files we need to backup overwhelms their database engine. Of course, it doesn't gracefully fail, it just quietly corrupts itself without telling you. I have been dodging bullets with that system for months.
Apparently, if you install a SQL server and use it to store your database of records, it works fine for larger installations, but I'm so pissed at them about not documenting such a basic limitation of their system that I've been exploring other alternatives.
I did a test install of Legato Networker on a Solaris 2.5.1 box, and it seems to work pretty well. It spools multiple volumes to tape at the same time, seems to run A LOT faster than Arcserve did under UNIX (about the same speed as Arcserve/NT backing up NT files, about 2.5MB/minute to a 40GB SCSI DLT tape unit), and the restores run fine. It is a bit slow about responding to commands, sometimes taking a minute or so to set itself up for the next job, but it seems good on Unix at least.
Unfortunately, there is no Linux client for Networker.
Have you used Networker in anything other than a Novell environment? S'possible that their Netware stuff isn't so good, while their UNIX stuff is fine. I have all of one week experience with it, and while it seems fine to me, I haven't really loaded it down yet.