The reality of this is Sun's lost any claim on 'high performance' computing. E10,000 has just not got the bang. It especially doesn't have the bang compared to high end Intel or AMD CPUs. The Sun supporters need to run real jobs on E10k then run the same job on an Intel/AMD cluster that cost 10% as much. The differences are profound and not in Sun's direction.
Sun's last 5 years of CPU development have it way behind the performance curve. Can they catch up? Perhaps. I doubt it.
It turns out there are lots of places that have
big bandwidth. Many corporations and most major
universities do.
I'll note that because of this posting, the/.
humorless thugs banned the IP addresses of the
email address associated with my/. account from accessing/..
The issue of what/.ing does to a site will not
go away, no matter what they do to the messengers
that wish to bring it up as a discussion item.
Just a little warning (30min?) would make being/.ed a WHOLE LOT SAFER for the/.ed site.
Even a piece of mail saying "you've been featured on our site -- here are some of the problems you may experience over the next YEAR." would be good.
But nooooo...
I am greatful for being featured in/. a couple of years ago, but it sometimes gets old when yet another round of attacks comes in on the site that was featured.
How about/. tell us the details about the DoS attacks and perhaps the community can help out, never mind it is hopeless to get/. to recipricate. Your security through obscurity needs to end just as much as MS's does.
Palm OS has 82% of the market of the 20m or so organizers 'out there'. I don't see that as the end of the line.
I do think that the O/S division being separate is a good thing so if the bozos (former Apple people who have apparently learned nothing about inventory management) that now run Palm screw up again, it is available as a ready-sale item which will keep Palm O/S viable.
Now if we can keep Handspring from shooting itself in the foot (No more Springboard Slots -- WHAT A DUMB IDEA), then the non-MS PDA market can continue to flourish.
Springboard cool thing of the month is
MemPlugs which allow your Handspring to have up to 256MB of RAM. Now that is cool and very usefull for walknetting things from point a to point b.
I've been in the University world now for 15 years and have yet to work on a project that had a single funding source. Most projects are some from here, some from there. I agree, and have released under the GPL, projects where it was clear the software was developed with public funds.
But what about the projects that are 50% private money and 50% public? What about projects that are all public money, but all private facilities and hardware? What about projects where the ideas and supervision come from the private sector?
I don't know of a general rule that covers all these situtations. If one said, "if it has $0.01 of public money, it has to be BSDed or GPLed" I know that there would be significantly less money available and that in turn means less support for graduate students and hence fewer graduate students.
So this is a case by case deal. You don't have to like it. It is just the realities of modern universities that a big chunk of their money comes from non-public sources.
Sometimes there is a discussion around where I work about what are good interchange formats. We decided that 'god' owns drives for the following formats (this was a few years ago):
800/1600/6250 bpi 9-track
DC-300A tape cartridge
1.44 3.5" floppy
5.25" DS/DD floppy
HP format 2gb DAT
8mm Exabyte tape
100mb Zip
and now I'd probably add
600mb CDR
20gb/40gb DLT
This becomes important because we were forever being asked which media we supported for interchange (people would send us 100mb things). "Oh, we have the ability to read all of the stuff god sends us..."
-- Multics
P.S. Oh, yeah god has retired only three media formats so far: 80-column punched cards, 8" SS SD floppy disks and of course paper tape (via his/her recently retired ASR-33 TTY)
P.S.S. I'll be keeping my 9-track drive around until it dies. Never know when another 9-track tape needs to be dusted off and despooled. The final era of tape drives are painless, rackmountable, reliable, self-loading, and play well with others on a SCSI-2 bus.
Your comments are true for a 486. They are not true for anything much newer. An IBM SP machine, which owns half of the top 10 on the
top500 list, is basically a commodity parts built system.
Yes, these systems are not sometimes the best for handling vectorizable jobs, but they are so inexpensive compared to the old specialized hardware that it is easier to waste cycles than build special hardware.
As to memory bandwidth. Modern CPU caches make the question nearly moot.
If all of this were not true, then people wouldn't be building clusters and the majority of the top500 list wouldn't be dominated by clusters. Instead there are 3 traditional architecture machines in the top 20. This is the reason that Cray (etal) no longer dominates the marketplace... commodity systems have overtaken nearly all of the specialized hardware world.
I am reminded of the US Patent Office manager that reported that all that could be invented has been invented. NOT
As someone with their own supercomputer
(ACME and/. of 6/6/2000) I can say that you'll come up with a bunch of things you would like to do but haven't found the CPU time to do. This of course presumes that you have half a brain.
We run NP complete problems to completion. Our idle loop is a prime number factoring of one of the RSA challenge numbers. If we were to hit one of those numbers (even the $10k one) we'd more than pay for the machine (but not the A/C or power).
I do ponder what a typical
PBS.org reader would do with their own supercomputer. Most lack the sophistication to get a return on investment on even just the air conditioning and electricity better yet the cost of the hardware and the set up. But what do you expect from someone who practices
identity theft?
All that said, it is having this class of power out in the hands of the masses that could well bring the next BIG NEW IDEA. It is neat that it can be done and I hope a bunch of/.ers write the code they want to run on such a thing then build one to run it.
How about everyone spend an hour or two on the first Saturday of every quarter working on 'hurting' all the SPAMMERS in their mailbox?
Hurt could be legal (complaints, blocking, etc), quasi-legal (nmap, ping attacks, etc) or illegal (kill the bastards and drag their guts down the block as an example of what could happen to spammers in the future). Let your rules of engagement be your guide.
If we all spent 1-2 hours on this four times in 2002, I'll guess that there would be fewer spammers in the trade by the end of the year, not more.
I'll make two un-MS remarks just so there is some content down here in the least-read section of these comments.
1) As Multics taught us, security with significant hardware support is significantly easier to do than without. A result of this is that we need to be asking Intel (etal) about help (like tagged memory blocks) in hardware. It really is time that we got away from just the stale VonNeuman ideas that Mr Cray graciously gave us in the 1960s and 1970s.
2) Once the hardware exists, then we can move to implement better O/Ses that are significantly more robust. Everyone will win, even MS.
I think Verison did a so-so job recovering from 9/11. There are still gobs of data circuits that are not up and have no scheduled ETA for being back. Ditto 10k or so voice circuits. We'll sadly never get a fair accounting of Verison vs Other connection delays.
That said, it is an enormous undertaking rebuilding around several large central offices that were simply obliterated. In the bad-old-days where there was mother AT&T, this kind of mess would have brought people from all over the country in to fill the gap in raw bodies. We're left with the impression that this particular disaster was nearly 100% covered by Verizon people. Would calling for help to other operating companies have expidited the return to service?
All that said, at the beginning of deregulation was a proposal (squashed by lobbying) that central offices become 'open facilities' and all the copper in the street also become 'open'. Then these facilities would be serviced by a separate regulated monopoly which would level the playing field between the big, the small and the miscellaneous. Then outages like 9/11 would be dealt with by the 'open network operating company' as well as all those firms that provide dial tones.
I think it is probably time to revisit this as the ONOO would have sufficient scale to deal with network failures while still keeping real compition alive.
-- Multics
P.S. I have customers in Verizon and Ameritech/SBC. Give me Verizon *every* time. Ameritech genuinely sucks -- there are now times that simple things simply can't be done because there is no one left with the knowledge of how the damn system works.
I have mostly cat 5e everywhere. Into each wall three drops. Then a drop is normally phone and the other two can be whatever. All run as a star.
I *did* run fiber and a Topaz transformer ultra-isolated AC circuit (with separate ground) to the stuff that then goes on to my antenna tower. The goal was to use the fiber as a 20 meter lighting gap between the stuff over there (soon to be a long-haul 802.11 link) and the rest of my network. So now when (not if) lightning comes to wreck my day, the worst that will happen in terms of data is the tower end of the data service (fiber hub, 802.11 stuff, some ham stuff) will all go POOF, but the core network will be safe.
If I had a separate garage, I'd run fiber (via a conduit) to there too. Fiber is *perfect* for longer hauls where lightning can be a problem. I buy all my fiber links from ebay, BTW... way cheaper than 'for real' and also allows me to avoid having to terminate them myself.
On 7/27/00 I wrote (
here)
a pretty seriously negative set of comments about PLS. It had 7 points:
1 Has no net bearing on the present.
2 NOW is dead as far as PLS is concerned.
3 The timeline went to infinity.
4 Has no net bearing on the present.
5 BINGO. No business PLAN, no net nothing.
6 They've moved once (twice?) so far.
7 They got a lot of warm bodys and then RIFfed many of them when round two funding didn't happen. Many had moved to Indy from distant places. The toll in people is the worst part of this deal (unless you invested in this thing).
I am not slamming Ian or anyone else here. My point is this company, like so many of the other dotcoms, needed skilled, experienced, professional management from the outset to assure the basics of business were followed. The venture capitalists were at serious fault for not assuring that these rules were followed and as a result they lost (or have nearly lost) all their investment.
I wish PLS lots of luck in the services arena. Rumor has it that they have a positive net cashflow doing services. If they can keep these customers and carefully manage their growth they can flower into a cool, competent Unix/Linux oriented consulting house. The world could certainly use more of those... Linux space or not.
I have on my website two mailto: addresses that are in html comments. Sitting next to both are comments that these shall not be used for SPAM. They are do_not_spam1@ and do_not_spam2@. According to my terms of use, anyone who uses them is up for (us)$10,000 per use + cost of collection.
An email address harvester apparently from:
bidmain.com
came through took them then used them.
I sent them a bill with a 30-day deadline to pay. Bidmain's information, BTW is:
iBIZCAST (BIDMAIN-DOM)
302, 1008-2, Daechi-dong,
Kangnam-gu, Seoul 135-280
KR
But more interestingly, their phone numbers are:
822-564-3404 fax: 822-539-0925
So far, for my complaint, my spam per day has trippled. They don't use the above addresses, but they sure do use the address I used to send them the bill. The 30 days is up in about a week.
My take on all of this is SPAMMERs are criminals. They are taking huge amounts of money from us (us == owners of systems).
If anyone wants to join in class action against the criminal above, I'd like to hear from you. Reply below.
Amen to that. Most divisions of Sony are so overburdened with rules and marketspeak that getting even a yes or no out of them is near impossible. This one must not yet have been assimilated into the collective.:-) I'll bet Sony America could do 20% more sales company wide if they were not total asses to deal with.
Try, for example, asking email questions to professional video about their products. The web site is to screwed up to reliably answer any questions (this holds for both the old and new web sites -- both of which fail any kind of reasonable American's with Disabilities Act tests). Also heaven forbid that Sony keep discontinued products on their site under some kind of 'discontinued label'. It really is too bad their web site sucks so horribly.
There will be other cool robots (sadly from Japan, since the USA can't fund things that are not going to be profitable this quarter). Some of them will have open architechtures and then is when the real fun will begin.
I got whacked by a similar deal. 12 positive feedbacks and then wham, 6 of us were ripped off for HP laser printer parts. Thankfully, TWO of us paid by USPS.
Between the TWO who paid by USPS we crossed the felony fraud line for them. It took them about 2 months to find him (he skipped his address and skipped on his roommates too). Though all I got back was ebay insurance (so far), USPS PIS did find him and jail him. I've not heard if they'll go for recovering all of our money, but eBay was very friendly with the USPS setting up the case.
Moral: NEVER PAY BY ANY MEANS BUT USPS. People who only accept PayPal are likely to be trouble because they know that there can't be a USPS inspector knocking on their door if they exclude that mechanisim for payment.
I wonder how much of the problem with BA/GTE/Verison really comes down to most of the people who knew how the system worked are no longer there?
Computer scheduling of all of this stuff is well fine and good, but none of those systems have much relevence when entire COs have gone missing. All of a sudden it is we need 'n' dialtones on this block right now or people will die. No pretty computer printed work orders, no f**king union work rules, no buck to pass.
Perhaps BA (originally NY Bell Telephone) has lost sight of the knowledge of the line staff and supervisors. Perhaps too, the union (CWA if I remember correctly) has lost sight that the customers getting bad service will ultimately come back to get them.
It is time that there be some kind of new relationship between the company, the employees and the customers. I know NYC has lost dozens if not hundreds of business because the telecommunications provider sucks. (The same can be said about Ameritech in the midwest!)
This is not ment as a flame -- just an expression of surprise.
I am stunned. In the tens of thousands of posts I've read here over the last couple of years, I'd not have thought I'd ever have seen such resounding support for full-blown college. When I clicked on 'Read More' I expect to see an endless flame about why college sucks. Instead I see a literate discussion about roundedness and thinking! COSMIC!
I'll add my own bit here. I was totally yawned out by Introduction to Psychology. I paid attention, I got a B. I use that stuff more now mid-career than I do the engineering and science I was taught. Most problems are about people and the 'roundedness' was important in dealing with people.
What'll be next?/.ers argueing that finishing college is a good idea? I'll be dieing of a heart attack when it happens.;-)
Well/. is being it's typical blather without even the beginning of a shread of thought. Let's see if we can add information to the uninformed, uneducationed fodder that is about to be drafted to go to war.;-)
In order to manage a problem like this one, one needs to communicate effectively between all the different stakeholders that are interested in the problem. To this end, NYC has a group just for the purpose. They are called The City of New York Emergency Mapping Center. They produced the parent of all these status maps which is located
here.
There wasn't a 'big' map before now because the assessments (as noted elsewhere in these postings) take considerable skill & time. It will not be until the surveyers and the structural engineers get together and measure each building against known locations that we'll really know what will become of some of these buildings. The risks to be still standing buildings are by no means over yet. No one knows the damage that has been done below goround -- nor will we for weeks to come. There are many stories about earthquake damaged buildings that looked fine but had failed foundations in the literature -- those kinds of problems will have to be found by non/.ers who have gone to school for a zillion years. Just because you're in a building and it appears to be working 'ok' doesn't mean that it will ultimately not be raised because its foundation is unsafe.
-
Now for the creeper part of this posting. Have a look at
New York City Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. It is amazing that the rescue and recovery is going so smoothly when the people charged with the problem are office-less.
And finally to the scum below that said "rescuers took to long". They've hurt post-collapse several hundred rescuers already with many hundred if not thousands more to be hurt. The site is extremely dangerous in terms of both individual hazards like sharp objects and biohazard as well as bigger hazards like debris piles collapsing, fires or even some of the still standing frames collapsing. They are making a trade-off between danger and speed and their families will argue they're already going too fast. To you (the scum) I say go enlist so you can be canon fodder someplace where we won't miss your/. postings.
I wrote them and said that I'm averaging 100 of their cards a year (very true -- perhaps a little low) and that I'll buy somewhere else so I don't have to stock different cards for OpenSource systems versus Windows.
What this says is AMD's old product lines are not making enough money compared to reutilizing their us$1,000,000,000++ fabrication facility for newer devices. They apparently have decided that a non-slashdot concept called Return on Investment is maximized if they phase out the old lines.
There are few companies in the world that can caugh up the $1,200,000,000 to $1,400,000,000 to build a new fab manufacturing building and AMD obviously wants to do this as infrequently as possible.
Too bad! The AMD K6 line was practically what braught AMD back from the edge of extinction and allowed them to produce the very competitive follow-ons.
Slashdot Mirror
The reality of this is Sun's lost any claim on 'high performance' computing. E10,000 has just not got the bang. It especially doesn't have the bang compared to high end Intel or AMD CPUs. The Sun supporters need to run real jobs on E10k then run the same job on an Intel/AMD cluster that cost 10% as much. The differences are profound and not in Sun's direction.
Sun's last 5 years of CPU development have it way behind the performance curve. Can they catch up? Perhaps. I doubt it.
-- Multics
I'll note that because of this posting, the /.
humorless thugs banned the IP addresses of the
email address associated with my /. account from accessing /..
The issue of what /.ing does to a site will not
go away, no matter what they do to the messengers
that wish to bring it up as a discussion item.
-- Multics.
Just a little warning (30min?) would make being /.ed a WHOLE LOT SAFER for the /.ed site.
Even a piece of mail saying "you've been featured on our site -- here are some of the problems you may experience over the next YEAR." would be good.
But nooooo...
I am greatful for being featured in /. a couple of years ago, but it sometimes gets old when yet another round of attacks comes in on the site that was featured.
How about /. tell us the details about the DoS attacks and perhaps the community can help out, never mind it is hopeless to get /. to recipricate. Your security through obscurity needs to end just as much as MS's does.
-- Multics
internet.com for late in 2001. -- 81.1% between Palm, Handspring, and Sony.
-- Multics
I do think that the O/S division being separate is a good thing so if the bozos (former Apple people who have apparently learned nothing about inventory management) that now run Palm screw up again, it is available as a ready-sale item which will keep Palm O/S viable.
Now if we can keep Handspring from shooting itself in the foot (No more Springboard Slots -- WHAT A DUMB IDEA), then the non-MS PDA market can continue to flourish.
Springboard cool thing of the month is MemPlugs which allow your Handspring to have up to 256MB of RAM. Now that is cool and very usefull for walknetting things from point a to point b.
-- Multics
But what about the projects that are 50% private money and 50% public? What about projects that are all public money, but all private facilities and hardware? What about projects where the ideas and supervision come from the private sector?
I don't know of a general rule that covers all these situtations. If one said, "if it has $0.01 of public money, it has to be BSDed or GPLed" I know that there would be significantly less money available and that in turn means less support for graduate students and hence fewer graduate students.
So this is a case by case deal. You don't have to like it. It is just the realities of modern universities that a big chunk of their money comes from non-public sources.
-- Multics
800/1600/6250 bpi 9-track
DC-300A tape cartridge
1.44 3.5" floppy
5.25" DS/DD floppy
HP format 2gb DAT
8mm Exabyte tape
100mb Zip
and now I'd probably add
600mb CDR
20gb/40gb DLT
This becomes important because we were forever being asked which media we supported for interchange (people would send us 100mb things). "Oh, we have the ability to read all of the stuff god sends us..."
-- Multics
P.S. Oh, yeah god has retired only three media formats so far: 80-column punched cards, 8" SS SD floppy disks and of course paper tape (via his/her recently retired ASR-33 TTY)
P.S.S. I'll be keeping my 9-track drive around until it dies. Never know when another 9-track tape needs to be dusted off and despooled. The final era of tape drives are painless, rackmountable, reliable, self-loading, and play well with others on a SCSI-2 bus.
I fear that he's got better crypto people that /. has...
-- Multics
Yes, these systems are not sometimes the best for handling vectorizable jobs, but they are so inexpensive compared to the old specialized hardware that it is easier to waste cycles than build special hardware.
As to memory bandwidth. Modern CPU caches make the question nearly moot.
If all of this were not true, then people wouldn't be building clusters and the majority of the top500 list wouldn't be dominated by clusters. Instead there are 3 traditional architecture machines in the top 20. This is the reason that Cray (etal) no longer dominates the marketplace... commodity systems have overtaken nearly all of the specialized hardware world.
-- Multics
As someone with their own supercomputer (ACME and /. of 6/6/2000) I can say that you'll come up with a bunch of things you would like to do but haven't found the CPU time to do. This of course presumes that you have half a brain.
We run NP complete problems to completion. Our idle loop is a prime number factoring of one of the RSA challenge numbers. If we were to hit one of those numbers (even the $10k one) we'd more than pay for the machine (but not the A/C or power).
I do ponder what a typical PBS.org reader would do with their own supercomputer. Most lack the sophistication to get a return on investment on even just the air conditioning and electricity better yet the cost of the hardware and the set up. But what do you expect from someone who practices identity theft?
All that said, it is having this class of power out in the hands of the masses that could well bring the next BIG NEW IDEA. It is neat that it can be done and I hope a bunch of /.ers write the code they want to run on such a thing then build one to run it.
-- Multics
Hurt could be legal (complaints, blocking, etc), quasi-legal (nmap, ping attacks, etc) or illegal (kill the bastards and drag their guts down the block as an example of what could happen to spammers in the future). Let your rules of engagement be your guide.
If we all spent 1-2 hours on this four times in 2002, I'll guess that there would be fewer spammers in the trade by the end of the year, not more.
Thoughts? I'll stay legal for the moment.
-- Multics
1) As Multics taught us, security with significant hardware support is significantly easier to do than without. A result of this is that we need to be asking Intel (etal) about help (like tagged memory blocks) in hardware. It really is time that we got away from just the stale VonNeuman ideas that Mr Cray graciously gave us in the 1960s and 1970s.
2) Once the hardware exists, then we can move to implement better O/Ses that are significantly more robust. Everyone will win, even MS.
-- Multics
That said, it is an enormous undertaking rebuilding around several large central offices that were simply obliterated. In the bad-old-days where there was mother AT&T, this kind of mess would have brought people from all over the country in to fill the gap in raw bodies. We're left with the impression that this particular disaster was nearly 100% covered by Verizon people. Would calling for help to other operating companies have expidited the return to service?
All that said, at the beginning of deregulation was a proposal (squashed by lobbying) that central offices become 'open facilities' and all the copper in the street also become 'open'. Then these facilities would be serviced by a separate regulated monopoly which would level the playing field between the big, the small and the miscellaneous. Then outages like 9/11 would be dealt with by the 'open network operating company' as well as all those firms that provide dial tones.
I think it is probably time to revisit this as the ONOO would have sufficient scale to deal with network failures while still keeping real compition alive.
-- Multics
P.S. I have customers in Verizon and Ameritech/SBC. Give me Verizon *every* time. Ameritech genuinely sucks -- there are now times that simple things simply can't be done because there is no one left with the knowledge of how the damn system works.
I have mostly cat 5e everywhere. Into each wall three drops. Then a drop is normally phone and the other two can be whatever. All run as a star.
I *did* run fiber and a Topaz transformer ultra-isolated AC circuit (with separate ground) to the stuff that then goes on to my antenna tower. The goal was to use the fiber as a 20 meter lighting gap between the stuff over there (soon to be a long-haul 802.11 link) and the rest of my network. So now when (not if) lightning comes to wreck my day, the worst that will happen in terms of data is the tower end of the data service (fiber hub, 802.11 stuff, some ham stuff) will all go POOF, but the core network will be safe.
If I had a separate garage, I'd run fiber (via a conduit) to there too. Fiber is *perfect* for longer hauls where lightning can be a problem. I buy all my fiber links from ebay, BTW... way cheaper than 'for real' and also allows me to avoid having to terminate them myself.
-- Multics
Closed Source
-- Multics
1 Has no net bearing on the present.
2 NOW is dead as far as PLS is concerned.
3 The timeline went to infinity.
4 Has no net bearing on the present.
5 BINGO. No business PLAN, no net nothing.
6 They've moved once (twice?) so far.
7 They got a lot of warm bodys and then RIFfed many of them when round two funding didn't happen. Many had moved to Indy from distant places. The toll in people is the worst part of this deal (unless you invested in this thing).
I am not slamming Ian or anyone else here. My point is this company, like so many of the other dotcoms, needed skilled, experienced, professional management from the outset to assure the basics of business were followed. The venture capitalists were at serious fault for not assuring that these rules were followed and as a result they lost (or have nearly lost) all their investment.
I wish PLS lots of luck in the services arena. Rumor has it that they have a positive net cashflow doing services. If they can keep these customers and carefully manage their growth they can flower into a cool, competent Unix/Linux oriented consulting house. The world could certainly use more of those... Linux space or not.
-- Multics
An email address harvester apparently from:
bidmain.com
came through took them then used them.
I sent them a bill with a 30-day deadline to pay. Bidmain's information, BTW is:
iBIZCAST (BIDMAIN-DOM)
302, 1008-2, Daechi-dong,
Kangnam-gu, Seoul 135-280
KR
But more interestingly, their phone numbers are:
822-564-3404 fax: 822-539-0925
So far, for my complaint, my spam per day has trippled. They don't use the above addresses, but they sure do use the address I used to send them the bill. The 30 days is up in about a week.
My take on all of this is SPAMMERs are criminals. They are taking huge amounts of money from us (us == owners of systems).
If anyone wants to join in class action against the criminal above, I'd like to hear from you. Reply below.
Thanks!
-- Multics
It wouldn't have been possible to 'upgrade' them to some version of MS IE since their tools are way to customized to their impairments.
Just when I think MS is 100% evil, there is a 1% pop-up of good.
-- Multics
Try, for example, asking email questions to professional video about their products. The web site is to screwed up to reliably answer any questions (this holds for both the old and new web sites -- both of which fail any kind of reasonable American's with Disabilities Act tests). Also heaven forbid that Sony keep discontinued products on their site under some kind of 'discontinued label'. It really is too bad their web site sucks so horribly.
There will be other cool robots (sadly from Japan, since the USA can't fund things that are not going to be profitable this quarter). Some of them will have open architechtures and then is when the real fun will begin.
-- Multics
Between the TWO who paid by USPS we crossed the felony fraud line for them. It took them about 2 months to find him (he skipped his address and skipped on his roommates too). Though all I got back was ebay insurance (so far), USPS PIS did find him and jail him. I've not heard if they'll go for recovering all of our money, but eBay was very friendly with the USPS setting up the case.
Moral: NEVER PAY BY ANY MEANS BUT USPS. People who only accept PayPal are likely to be trouble because they know that there can't be a USPS inspector knocking on their door if they exclude that mechanisim for payment.
-- Multics
Computer scheduling of all of this stuff is well fine and good, but none of those systems have much relevence when entire COs have gone missing. All of a sudden it is we need 'n' dialtones on this block right now or people will die. No pretty computer printed work orders, no f**king union work rules, no buck to pass.
Perhaps BA (originally NY Bell Telephone) has lost sight of the knowledge of the line staff and supervisors. Perhaps too, the union (CWA if I remember correctly) has lost sight that the customers getting bad service will ultimately come back to get them.
It is time that there be some kind of new relationship between the company, the employees and the customers. I know NYC has lost dozens if not hundreds of business because the telecommunications provider sucks. (The same can be said about Ameritech in the midwest!)
-- Multics
I am stunned. In the tens of thousands of posts I've read here over the last couple of years, I'd not have thought I'd ever have seen such resounding support for full-blown college. When I clicked on 'Read More' I expect to see an endless flame about why college sucks. Instead I see a literate discussion about roundedness and thinking! COSMIC!
I'll add my own bit here. I was totally yawned out by Introduction to Psychology. I paid attention, I got a B. I use that stuff more now mid-career than I do the engineering and science I was taught. Most problems are about people and the 'roundedness' was important in dealing with people.
What'll be next? /.ers argueing that finishing college is a good idea? I'll be dieing of a heart attack when it happens. ;-)
-- Multics
In order to manage a problem like this one, one needs to communicate effectively between all the different stakeholders that are interested in the problem. To this end, NYC has a group just for the purpose. They are called The City of New York Emergency Mapping Center. They produced the parent of all these status maps which is located here.
There wasn't a 'big' map before now because the assessments (as noted elsewhere in these postings) take considerable skill & time. It will not be until the surveyers and the structural engineers get together and measure each building against known locations that we'll really know what will become of some of these buildings. The risks to be still standing buildings are by no means over yet. No one knows the damage that has been done below goround -- nor will we for weeks to come. There are many stories about earthquake damaged buildings that looked fine but had failed foundations in the literature -- those kinds of problems will have to be found by non /.ers who have gone to school for a zillion years. Just because you're in a building and it appears to be working 'ok' doesn't mean that it will ultimately not be raised because its foundation is unsafe.
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Now for the creeper part of this posting. Have a look at New York City Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. It is amazing that the rescue and recovery is going so smoothly when the people charged with the problem are office-less.
And finally to the scum below that said "rescuers took to long". They've hurt post-collapse several hundred rescuers already with many hundred if not thousands more to be hurt. The site is extremely dangerous in terms of both individual hazards like sharp objects and biohazard as well as bigger hazards like debris piles collapsing, fires or even some of the still standing frames collapsing. They are making a trade-off between danger and speed and their families will argue they're already going too fast. To you (the scum) I say go enlist so you can be canon fodder someplace where we won't miss your /. postings.
-- Multics
I wrote them and said that I'm averaging 100 of their cards a year (very true -- perhaps a little low) and that I'll buy somewhere else so I don't have to stock different cards for OpenSource systems versus Windows.
--multics
What this says is AMD's old product lines are not making enough money compared to reutilizing their us$1,000,000,000++ fabrication facility for newer devices. They apparently have decided that a non-slashdot concept called Return on Investment is maximized if they phase out the old lines.
There are few companies in the world that can caugh up the $1,200,000,000 to $1,400,000,000 to build a new fab manufacturing building and AMD obviously wants to do this as infrequently as possible.
Too bad! The AMD K6 line was practically what braught AMD back from the edge of extinction and allowed them to produce the very competitive follow-ons.
-- Multics