Oooooooooo, I'd be in line. That book and A Fire Upon The Deep are on the short list of books I've re-read more than once.
A Fire Upon The Deep would be even harder, imagine trying to film the interaction of even a single pack, much less a city full of them?
two lightsabers melt through a massive blast door, and continue to be useful on the other side. Is this the same universe where balky old spaceships have to be continually tweaked into running, blasters overheat and quit shooting, and droids get all sand-jammed?
Every character from the good films appears as a child in the bad films.
Huge amounts of technology are introduced which are supposed to have vanished without a trace twenty years later? My son sees these inconsistencies at 7, so don't tell me that I'm only seeing them because I'm older now.
I kept a Betta in a coffee pot for a couple of years, it was fine. However, as mentioned elsewhere, a bottle would not be okay for surface area oxygen transfer reasons.
10 years old, and I still play it with some friends. It's small and fast by modern standards, quake2evolved gives it updated looks, and I don't need to learn new controls, carry an external mouse with my laptop, or have a dedicated "just for games" console at home. I've tried the newer FPS games from Id and played Quake3 for a little while, but I keep coming back to Q2.
Nah, it's a stupid move. It decreases the motivation for us bleeding edge types to use them, increasing our motivation to use alternatives (mentioned elsewhere in this article). The more we use and settle on something better, the lower Google's traffic. The lower their traffic, the more their marketing people will resort to flashy crap like Yahoo! uses now. The vicious cycle leads inexorably to decreased relevance.
Remember, Google grew so big so fast because they were a better choice than Yahoo!... that same market force can act against them just as well.
Selfishly, I hope otherwise as my company relies heavily on Blackberries and would be set back measurably by a successful injuction. However, I do agree that this would make an effective catalyst for much-needed change.
1) JWZ rocks. I don't claim to judge his code, but his rants are funny and well-informed. 2) I can totally see that sort of company-cancer happening... it certainly happened to Cable & Wireless when they bought Exodus. 3) From a distro perspective, this makes me unhappy. I had just ditched Mandriva for its lack of stability and lousy hardware support. SuSE 9.3 rocked, and SuSE 10.0 is even better. I thought I had reached a point at which I could quit mucking around with distro changes, but it looks like I'm going to have to go elsewhere for that for my laptop. 4) Miguel and Nat have already made their opinions of other people's opinions clear. A fine example of the Nader effect in action, though it's in slow-motion.
this is the part where recognizing the reality of monopoly becomes relevant and advisable. Let's use an analogy, shall we?
State IT Dept: These railroads are unfair and not open, because the train manufacturer's cars have 5-foot-wide axles that only work on their proprietary 5-foot-wide tracks. We're going to switch to the new magical adjustable railroad cars that can run on any track. Well, any track except the existing 5-foot-wide tracks, that is. Everyone using the new train cars will have to transfer their stuff to the old cars before they can use the old tracks.
Lawmakers: That's a fine idea in theory, but how are we going to replace all those tracks that already exist? And how much of the old stuff are we going to have to keep around for interfacing with the rest of the world?
State IT Dept: No problem, we've got a systems management package that will take care of everything.
Lawmakers: Nice, but does it retrain users and maintain compatibility with the existing 5-foot-wide infrastructure?
State IT Dept: Look, you want to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs.
Screen-readers, macros, plugins, forms, database front-ends, workflow automation, blah blah blah. Remember converting people from WordPerfect to MS Office? It's gonna be even harder this time. The benefits of an open office document format are clear, but let's not sweep the cost of conversion under the rug.
[hacker@iran.gov $] ssh -l joeuser boxtoroot Welcome to boxtoroot, how may I serve you? [joeuser@boxtoroot $] sudo vi/path/to/index.html Please enter your password: *******
Google will show you that someone wrote a kernel driver and PAM module... still, I'm waiting for the RFID version. I don't want a big old battery-powered blinkenlight in my pocket, how about it just picks up the RFID card in my wallet?
10 diver hands out waterproofed copies of Socialist literature
9 diver fails seven-part questionnaire (as a bonus, a high score on the questionnaire earns the foreign diver entry in a drawing for a student visa and a job at Burger King)
8 diver hands out big round black bombs with long fuses that burn under water
7 diver has an accent so thick you can hear it through a SCUBA regulator
6 diver doesn't smell like Starbucks or Coca-Cola
5 diver has gray sandpaper-like skin, many rows of sharp teeth, prominent dorsal fin
4 diver's chest reads "my brother blew himself up in Tel Aviv and all I got was this lousy wetsuit"
3 Internet background check on the diver turns up a UC Berkeley Peace and Conflict Studies Bachelor's degree
2 diver's fingerprints match Che Guevara
1 diver is not a dolphin
"Is this where the future is headed? Everyone must license every single thing they ever play, write, direct, say - whatever? Every creative work MUST have a license or it will become unusable and unsharable?"
Yes, the cable in that book is spooled down from an orbiting platform. But since the platform in that case was a huge interstellar spaceship, I didn't think it was really cogent to the problem of our society building its first elevator.
Besides which, _Fountains of Paradise_ is a pretty bad novel, IMHO, and I'd rather plug something that's a pleasure to read in addition to having good ideas.
getting people to the moon (well, live ones who want to come back that way) is a different problem. You might as well say that it's impossible because we haven't built a deep sea habitat yet.
The key factor that's missing is motivation. Why do we want a space elevator? To get to space. Why do we want to get to space? Well, it's cool, and we think there'll be some manufacturing side benefits (but these are still unquantified).
Kim Stanley Robinson (_Red Mars_) had an elegant solution to this problem... use a robot factory to push a carbon-rich asteroid into position, then spin cable down from it. The non-carbon mass of the asteroid remains to provide counterweight (and structural support for a space station, which is a handy thing to have at the end of a space elevator.
Still a chicken placed before the egg if considered with today's technology, but it's more feasible and practical than "build all the cable on earth and lift it into space, so we can lift heavy things into space".
typing this on Mandriva LE 2005... It's far superior to Red Hat Workstation or FC-anything IMHO. SuSE is supposed to be very good, but in my experience has more of the non-standardisms that you refer to.
Mandrake's GUI configuration tools are decent enough, though I tend to use the config files myself. They don't commit the Linuxconf sin, they're open source, they work.
The package management is where things get far superior. I've used urpmi for several years and it's always worked better for me than apt4rpm or red-carpet or yum or up2date. Too bad that so many other distros put Not Invented Here over using a mature open-source platform that someone else wrote...
As far as package choice, it comes preconfigured to make some fairly solid choices, though they're not perfect for my needs. Still, I think it's a good solution (or at least, no worse than any other Linux distro) for the non-technical user. I have my doubts about giving Linux to non-technical home users at all, but that's another discussion...
I use Linux (Mandrake, now Mandriva), OS X, and Windows on a regular basis. Mac OS X is an excellent example of how to do it right, and is much more likely than Linux to see a corporate usage uptick if Vista is a PITA to upgrade to. I'm not a huge Mac fan, but credit where it's due.
Any uptick will be minor though, as it's all about expectation management... people are used to getting poor return on their money from Microsoft, and they know that everything would have to be rethought if they made a major change.
Yeah, throwing out the calendar is pretty unusual and makes me think that the OP's boss isn't high enough up the ladder to be making the decision (or is so high up the ladder that they have no clue what makes the company go).
I've been looking for a free calendar that doesn't suck for a long, long time, and it ain't here yet. A mod_webdav server hosting.ics files accessed by Apple iCal and Mozilla Sunbird is about as good as it gets, but iCal's UI sucks and Sunbird occassionally gets confused and loses all the data.
Double-check on that calendaring requirement, then look into commercial solutions when they say that they didn't mean it and they really did want groupware.
Because SQL Server required no tuning in our scenario, and the few tweaks I did try either didn't affect performance or hurt it compared to the "next-next-next-install-servicepack" installation.
Postgres installed and patched in 5 minutes thanks to RPM, but then required about a week of tuning efforts in which I spent a great deal of time learning database architecture and arguing about the real-world utility of "tune your database" versus "rewrite your application" with the PG developers. At the end of that week Postgres performed very well (with the one exception I noted above), and I was able to document a BKM on installing and maintaining it for our customers.
Still, the TCO of Postgres was obviously higher: it was higher for us as developers because we had to either rewrite and retest our app or spend that man-week on tuning Postgres. It was also higher for our users, who had to find, read, understand, and use the document I had written before they'd get decent performance (or retrace my steps with the pg mailing lists). Don't get me wrong, I'd still rather use PG than Oracle ANY DAY. I'm just saying that MS-SQL is IMHO not the toy that some think it is.
Of course I realize what DBAs are for, and of course I realize that the query could be optimized to run like a greased pig on Oracle.
It could also be made more beautiful if it was engraved on a solid gold plate and hung on the board room wall... but why would anyone do that? If the query works fine as is on a very popular, moderately expensive solution that is easy to install, the only thing driving Oracle/PG optimization is customers that use Oracle or Postgres, and since there were a lot fewer of those than there were of MS-SQL...
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I bet Ringworld would make a pretty good movie, now that CGI has caught up, if someone with the chops to actually do a decent movie got the job.
Oooooooooo, I'd be in line. That book and A Fire Upon The Deep are on the short list of books I've re-read more than once. A Fire Upon The Deep would be even harder, imagine trying to film the interaction of even a single pack, much less a city full of them?
all of those, plus these:
two lightsabers melt through a massive blast door, and continue to be useful on the other side. Is this the same universe where balky old spaceships have to be continually tweaked into running, blasters overheat and quit shooting, and droids get all sand-jammed?
Every character from the good films appears as a child in the bad films.
Huge amounts of technology are introduced which are supposed to have vanished without a trace twenty years later? My son sees these inconsistencies at 7, so don't tell me that I'm only seeing them because I'm older now.
I kept a Betta in a coffee pot for a couple of years, it was fine. However, as mentioned elsewhere, a bottle would not be okay for surface area oxygen transfer reasons.
10 years old, and I still play it with some friends. It's small and fast by modern standards, quake2evolved gives it updated looks, and I don't need to learn new controls, carry an external mouse with my laptop, or have a dedicated "just for games" console at home. I've tried the newer FPS games from Id and played Quake3 for a little while, but I keep coming back to Q2.
Nah, it's a stupid move. It decreases the motivation for us bleeding edge types to use them, increasing our motivation to use alternatives (mentioned elsewhere in this article). The more we use and settle on something better, the lower Google's traffic. The lower their traffic, the more their marketing people will resort to flashy crap like Yahoo! uses now. The vicious cycle leads inexorably to decreased relevance.
Remember, Google grew so big so fast because they were a better choice than Yahoo!... that same market force can act against them just as well.
then it would work just fine on low-color-depth displays!
J :www.techbits.itsyndicate.ca/images/reviews/roe/da rkness.jpgJ :www.offtone.com/images/dump/doom3/2.jpgJ :doom3.gameamp.com/modules/gallery/uploads/1030.JP G
http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:zEoX2XFm9GE
http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:69kfWDGbjqo
http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:UsyI0tK8gxI
Ma! How come the web's all dark? Who turned out the lights!?
And it generally works, at least in comparison with NYC subways. BART trains are pretty quiet everywhere except in the Bay Tube.
Selfishly, I hope otherwise as my company relies heavily on Blackberries and would be set back measurably by a successful injuction. However, I do agree that this would make an effective catalyst for much-needed change.
1) JWZ rocks. I don't claim to judge his code, but his rants are funny and well-informed.
2) I can totally see that sort of company-cancer happening... it certainly happened to Cable & Wireless when they bought Exodus.
3) From a distro perspective, this makes me unhappy. I had just ditched Mandriva for its lack of stability and lousy hardware support. SuSE 9.3 rocked, and SuSE 10.0 is even better. I thought I had reached a point at which I could quit mucking around with distro changes, but it looks like I'm going to have to go elsewhere for that for my laptop.
4) Miguel and Nat have already made their opinions of other people's opinions clear. A fine example of the Nader effect in action, though it's in slow-motion.
Hear Hear! Damn newfangled kids these days.
Actually, I'm just waiting for the state of the word-processing art to return to WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows levels. View tags, baby!
this is the part where recognizing the reality of monopoly becomes relevant and advisable. Let's use an analogy, shall we?
State IT Dept: These railroads are unfair and not open, because the train manufacturer's cars have 5-foot-wide axles that only work on their proprietary 5-foot-wide tracks. We're going to switch to the new magical adjustable railroad cars that can run on any track. Well, any track except the existing 5-foot-wide tracks, that is. Everyone using the new train cars will have to transfer their stuff to the old cars before they can use the old tracks.
Lawmakers: That's a fine idea in theory, but how are we going to replace all those tracks that already exist? And how much of the old stuff are we going to have to keep around for interfacing with the rest of the world?
State IT Dept: No problem, we've got a systems management package that will take care of everything.
Lawmakers: Nice, but does it retrain users and maintain compatibility with the existing 5-foot-wide infrastructure?
State IT Dept: Look, you want to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs.
Screen-readers, macros, plugins, forms, database front-ends, workflow automation, blah blah blah. Remember converting people from WordPerfect to MS Office? It's gonna be even harder this time. The benefits of an open office document format are clear, but let's not sweep the cost of conversion under the rug.
[hacker@iran.gov $] ssh -l joeuser boxtoroot /path/to/index.html
Welcome to boxtoroot, how may I serve you?
[joeuser@boxtoroot $] sudo vi
Please enter your password: *******
Does that make it clearer to you?
Google will show you that someone wrote a kernel driver and PAM module... still, I'm waiting for the RFID version. I don't want a big old battery-powered blinkenlight in my pocket, how about it just picks up the RFID card in my wallet?
10 diver hands out waterproofed copies of Socialist literature
9 diver fails seven-part questionnaire (as a bonus, a high score on the questionnaire earns the foreign diver entry in a drawing for a student visa and a job at Burger King)
8 diver hands out big round black bombs with long fuses that burn under water
7 diver has an accent so thick you can hear it through a SCUBA regulator
6 diver doesn't smell like Starbucks or Coca-Cola
5 diver has gray sandpaper-like skin, many rows of sharp teeth, prominent dorsal fin
4 diver's chest reads "my brother blew himself up in Tel Aviv and all I got was this lousy wetsuit"
3 Internet background check on the diver turns up a UC Berkeley Peace and Conflict Studies Bachelor's degree
2 diver's fingerprints match Che Guevara
1 diver is not a dolphin
"Is this where the future is headed? Everyone must license every single thing they ever play, write, direct, say - whatever? Every creative work MUST have a license or it will become unusable and unsharable?"
Yes. So fight the rearguard action here (http://www.eff.org/ and subvert the new order here (http://www.creativecommons.org./
Neither is going to take more time than typing that missive did.
Yes, the cable in that book is spooled down from an orbiting platform. But since the platform in that case was a huge interstellar spaceship, I didn't think it was really cogent to the problem of our society building its first elevator.
Besides which, _Fountains of Paradise_ is a pretty bad novel, IMHO, and I'd rather plug something that's a pleasure to read in addition to having good ideas.
getting people to the moon (well, live ones who want to come back that way) is a different problem. You might as well say that it's impossible because we haven't built a deep sea habitat yet.
The key factor that's missing is motivation. Why do we want a space elevator? To get to space. Why do we want to get to space? Well, it's cool, and we think there'll be some manufacturing side benefits (but these are still unquantified).
Kim Stanley Robinson (_Red Mars_) had an elegant solution to this problem... use a robot factory to push a carbon-rich asteroid into position, then spin cable down from it. The non-carbon mass of the asteroid remains to provide counterweight (and structural support for a space station, which is a handy thing to have at the end of a space elevator.
Still a chicken placed before the egg if considered with today's technology, but it's more feasible and practical than "build all the cable on earth and lift it into space, so we can lift heavy things into space".
typing this on Mandriva LE 2005... It's far superior to Red Hat Workstation or FC-anything IMHO. SuSE is supposed to be very good, but in my experience has more of the non-standardisms that you refer to.
Mandrake's GUI configuration tools are decent enough, though I tend to use the config files myself. They don't commit the Linuxconf sin, they're open source, they work.
The package management is where things get far superior. I've used urpmi for several years and it's always worked better for me than apt4rpm or red-carpet or yum or up2date. Too bad that so many other distros put Not Invented Here over using a mature open-source platform that someone else wrote...
As far as package choice, it comes preconfigured to make some fairly solid choices, though they're not perfect for my needs. Still, I think it's a good solution (or at least, no worse than any other Linux distro) for the non-technical user. I have my doubts about giving Linux to non-technical home users at all, but that's another discussion...
I use Linux (Mandrake, now Mandriva), OS X, and Windows on a regular basis. Mac OS X is an excellent example of how to do it right, and is much more likely than Linux to see a corporate usage uptick if Vista is a PITA to upgrade to. I'm not a huge Mac fan, but credit where it's due.
Any uptick will be minor though, as it's all about expectation management... people are used to getting poor return on their money from Microsoft, and they know that everything would have to be rethought if they made a major change.
Yeah, throwing out the calendar is pretty unusual and makes me think that the OP's boss isn't high enough up the ladder to be making the decision (or is so high up the ladder that they have no clue what makes the company go).
.ics files accessed by Apple iCal and Mozilla Sunbird is about as good as it gets, but iCal's UI sucks and Sunbird occassionally gets confused and loses all the data.
I've been looking for a free calendar that doesn't suck for a long, long time, and it ain't here yet. A mod_webdav server hosting
Double-check on that calendaring requirement, then look into commercial solutions when they say that they didn't mean it and they really did want groupware.
Sort of like the difference between documented server maintenance/upgrade plans and what actually happens :)
Because SQL Server required no tuning in our scenario, and the few tweaks I did try either didn't affect performance or hurt it compared to the "next-next-next-install-servicepack" installation.
Postgres installed and patched in 5 minutes thanks to RPM, but then required about a week of tuning efforts in which I spent a great deal of time learning database architecture and arguing about the real-world utility of "tune your database" versus "rewrite your application" with the PG developers. At the end of that week Postgres performed very well (with the one exception I noted above), and I was able to document a BKM on installing and maintaining it for our customers.
Still, the TCO of Postgres was obviously higher: it was higher for us as developers because we had to either rewrite and retest our app or spend that man-week on tuning Postgres. It was also higher for our users, who had to find, read, understand, and use the document I had written before they'd get decent performance (or retrace my steps with the pg mailing lists). Don't get me wrong, I'd still rather use PG than Oracle ANY DAY. I'm just saying that MS-SQL is IMHO not the toy that some think it is.
Of course I realize what DBAs are for, and of course I realize that the query could be optimized to run like a greased pig on Oracle.
It could also be made more beautiful if it was engraved on a solid gold plate and hung on the board room wall... but why would anyone do that? If the query works fine as is on a very popular, moderately expensive solution that is easy to install, the only thing driving Oracle/PG optimization is customers that use Oracle or Postgres, and since there were a lot fewer of those than there were of MS-SQL...