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User: K-Man

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Comments · 495

  1. Re:No recommendation... on Ask Slashdot: Building a Large Email Service · · Score: 5

    I'm short on time, but I wish to submit what may be the ultimate Exchange story:

    A sysadmin at, ahem, a "large jeans manufacturer" was put in charge of Exchange on hundreds of NT servers. He dutifully logged and reported dozens of bugs, system outages, etc., to MS support, as the thing crashed and burned like the Hindenburg II. After a few months of this, Microsoft decided to act on the problems. The solution was simple: they sent a letter to his boss saying he was a troublemaker.

  2. Re:Its another Monopoly on Ask Slashdot: Is the United States Postal Service Obsolete? · · Score: 1

    In the US today, it is possible to pick up a telephone, dial a few numbers, and be connected to one of hundreds of competing long-distance companies. In some areas the local phone service can also be bought from multiple carriers.
    So, why is it so difficult to privatize mail service? The answer is politics, not technology.

  3. Re:Migrating from Oracle 7 to 8 on Oracle 8i Linux port on the scene · · Score: 1

    What do you do normally when an instance goes away? If your servers must not go down, you must have backup servers of some sort, and you could probably manage an upgrade to them.

  4. Re:Oakland, Richmond, San Leandro, ect ... on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    You may be right. I work for a startup in South Park that moved here from Australia, and we're refitting a big warehouse to hold 400+ cubicle monkeys. I hadn't been tracking the action down in SV (we only go down there to put machines into Global Center), but the tide may be shifting. And, there are still plenty of space left in SOMA, and there's living space too. For the past month I've been listening to a pile driver next door, putting up housing *across the street*.
    For those who live in SV, I'll clarify that last bit. It's not 10 miles away; it's not a mile away across the freeway. It's about 50 feet away, a new building with hundreds of housing units. I'm a little skeptical about the neighborhood, however, since it only has 2 markets and only a dozen or so restaurants within short walking distance. Simply deplorable living conditions ;-)

  5. Re:Another solution: Motor Homes on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    I've been studying the idea of living in a motor home. Most companies in SV have more land devoted to parking than to business, and these lots are empty at night...
    In SF if you go down to China Basin there are actually a large number of people living in campers and cars. There's actually a "vehicularly housed resident's association" there. It's the future.

  6. Re:Living in the 'Valley... on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    I was using the term loosely.

    In the Bay Area, the transit systems are operated by separate agencies, which may or may not share tickets as you describe. It's a mess.
    The major systems are:
    BART: serving everywhere except Silicon Valley and San Mateo county (heavy rail).
    SF Muni: San Francisco transit agency. Some bus lines in SF have higher ridership than BART lines costing 100x more.
    Caltrain: SF-San Jose train line with a terminal 1 mile south of downtown or the nearest BART station in SF.
    Santa Clara Valley Transit: a bus system with some light rail. The major agency serving SV.
    There's a web site describing this at transitinfo.org

  7. Re:Highrises, anyone? on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    San Jose requires 2.5 parking spaces per living unit.

  8. Basic fact on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    Make of it what you will, but over 50% of the land in SV is reserved, by government decree, for automobile use: freeways, streets, and parking.

  9. Re:I just moved to the valley... only $1400 a mont on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    California is based on the idea that parking must be free, even if housing is enormously expensive. If you give up you preconceived notions of living in a plywood hut, you can live in a Winnebago for practically nothing.

  10. Re:Living in the 'Valley... on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    Here, the government acts as a proxy for the car dealers. Employees receive up to $170/month in tax deductions for parking, plus $.32/mile for business travel in a car, but mass-transit users can only receive up to $40/month deduction for transit passes, and that was a recent liberalization of the law. People who walk or bicycle to work receive nothing - no refund for the parking they don't use, no benefits, nothing.

  11. Re:Very Complex Problem on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 1

    There never was a master plan. You must be from somewhere else. SV was modelled on one idea - the Winchester Mystery house.

    If every company in SV took half of its parking lot and built housing on it, the "crisis" would be over. It's not a complex problem, it's a government problem.

  12. Re:Very Complex Problem on In Silicon Valley $37K/Year May Mean Public Housing · · Score: 2

    It's a well-known fact among architects that traditional American small towns would be illegal under current zoning laws.

    If you go down to Los Gatos and look at the Victorian neighborhoods that everyone is paying millions to live in, you'll find that it's impossible to build those sorts of neighborhoods today. The idea of people living and working in the same building is also illegal, as is building housing without government-mandated quotas of parking spots, even if your tenants are too poor or enlightened to use motor vehicles.

    Silicon valley is the apotheosis of stupidity. People there are good at making chips, and bad at designing communities, if you could call them that.

  13. Re:Red Hat IPO Not going to be available to most.. on Red Hat IPO Update · · Score: 1

    Most shares will be allocated to the firms which underwrite the IPO, and the discount in the offer price is basically a gift to them, in return for sponsoring the IPO, and taking the risk that the company will turn out to be a total con job (they spend a lot of time auditing the books beforehand).

  14. Re:The author doesn't know what he's talking about on Wireless 10 gigabits/sec data transfer · · Score: 2

    >Also, what kind of redundancy does this thing
    >offer? What if something passes in between the
    >receiver and transmitter, or the weather is bad?

    If a cd-rom doesn't make it, you just walk over, pick it up, and throw it again.

  15. Re:PC Week:NT DESTROYS Unix web app servers - read on Microsoft Janus · · Score: 1

    I don't blame him for writing a cool app, but I do blame PC Week for defining the benchmark too broadly. I'm not too clear on what an "application server" is. If it's a machine running C++, that's fine with me. For instance our "application servers" serve up 10M hits a day on apache and fcgi's written in C++, and we have a full staff of people to profile apps, run benchmarks, find perfect hashes, watch cpu, etc.

    The main point is that anyone with enough time can tune an app down to the microcode; it's just kind of unrealistic to publish the result against other products that were used off-the-shelf. A lot of smaller vendors don't have even a few hours to spare on building a benchmark like this.

  16. Re:PC Week:NT DESTROYS Unix web app servers - read on Microsoft Janus · · Score: 1

    I did read the article, and it looks like MS hand-coded a lot of the app in C++, rather than using IIS or any "application server environment" being benchmarked. Great idea. Too bad they didn't let Microsoft develop specialized ASICs to run the app as well...damned editors.

    Let's see... next week we'll benchmark java against Microsoft Visual Assembler... yeah, that's the ticket.

  17. Re:Speeding up? on HTTP 1.1 approved by W3C and IETF · · Score: 1

    It takes a few roundtrips to set up a socket, plus some more roundtrips to get the window size > 1, so the server can send more than one packet before waiting for an ack. Until that happens, you're essentially in half-duplex mode.

  18. Re:What does the name "PHP" stand for? on C't NT vs Linux benchmarks : Linux wins · · Score: 1

    "Personal Home Page". The origin of PHP was in constructing the author's web page.

  19. Re:RDBMS on Review:Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing · · Score: 1

    >Find a way to index XML and you will have
    >re-invented the relational database.

    s/relational/hierarchical/

    I've been wondering, wouldn't IMS make a great XML database? ;-)

  20. More info on 1 Gigabyte RAM-Modules · · Score: 2

    Here's an excerpt from the Korea Times article. Samsung says it will save about $4B on the smaller chip size:

    Samsung Electronics yesterday announced it has developed the
    world's first 1GB DDR SDRAM (double data rate synchronous
    dynamic random access memory) chip.

    DDR is an improvement on traditional synchronous memory devices
    including DRAMs, graphics, and SRAMs.

    Samsung's newly developed DDR operates at a data processing
    speed of 350MHz, a technical breakthrough which brings enhanced
    SDRAM to the server, workstation and data communications system
    markets.

    The high-value-added product, which is worth about 3.48 million won
    per gram, is expected to be used for remote conferences,
    high-definition TV, satellite communications and e-money.

    DDR was developed as the next-generation SDRAM, which meets
    the evolutionary system bandwidth requirements in a cost-effective
    manner.

    Samsung's 1GB DDR product is equivalent to four 256MB DRAMs
    in terms of memory capacity, with the capability of storing the
    equivalent of 8,000 newspaper pages.

  21. Re:What are the taxes FOR? on US Internet Tax Committee Squabbles · · Score: 1

    So you're saying the system doesn't work. I would humbly suggest that one symptom of a system that doesn't work is a rapacious appetite for tax money, particularly from people who don't use or underutilize the system.

    A symptom of systems which do work is direct payments for services rendered, in which case taxes are unnecessary.

  22. Who wants the tax on US Internet Tax Committee Squabbles · · Score: 1

    From the NY Times, 6/13/99:

    "The lost revenue is going to be made up by the consumer at some point," said William McCabe Jr., chairman of the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade organization for the shopping center industry.



  23. You don't have to dig too deeply on US Internet Tax Committee Squabbles · · Score: 1

    Major support for the Internet Tax Panel is from Mall owners.

  24. Re:Out of line on US Internet Tax Committee Squabbles · · Score: 1

    UPS makes money by being cheaper than going to get the goods yourself, i.e. by using tax-funded resources such as roads and oil at a far lower rate than other methods. What would be a good way to tax UPS:

    1. a tax on all internet purchases, at the same rate, regardless of weight, distance, size, or speed of delivery?

    2. A tax on brown uniform shirts

    3. A tax on fuel, or a road toll that charges for each mile that UPS drives, adjusted for vehicle size. Taxes on aviation fuel, and landing fees to pay for airports if overnight shipping is used. Taxes on property where goods are stored, going to local police forces and fire protection.

    (hint: if in doubt, choose the longest answer)

  25. Progressive vs. Regressive taxation on US Internet Tax Committee Squabbles · · Score: 1

    Sales taxes are NOT progressive. If you went to the store and the cashier calculated your sales tax based on your current income level, that would have the effect you claim.

    Instead, poorer people spend a greater percentage of their income at retail, and end up putting a larger portion of their income into sales taxes.

    That's the hazard of having a broad-based, untargeted tax like this panel is contemplating.