Also, if I'm right, the driver wasn't installed if you clicked Cancel to the EULA. So you could just insert the disc, Cancel the EULA, and then play the CD on your computer by right of first sale (after all, other CDs didn't have to have EULAs on them to let you play them on CD, and the EULA can't say "if you don't accept this, you can't play the CD" because if you don't accept a license, nothing in it takes effect, not even that sentence)
No, if you cancel the EULA popup the disc is ejected.
I used to have a girlfriend who worked in IT (around the time of the HP-compaq deal) who acknowleged that Fiorina was the role model for women in IT, and that she wished that she wasn't - because Carly was making them all look bad.
Err, funny except that Sun is not part of the axis of evil. I've worked for two of them, and have a friend at the third, so I know what I'm talking about. It's hard to find a more open (as in standards and millions of lines of code) bunch of guys. Definately light side of the force.
It's similar, authough the qube is arguably more suited to file serving than this box, because it has a pair of mirrored disks and a SCSI controller to allow the addition of an external tape drive.
Solaris patches are very much based on ZIP. I may have been wrong about the Korn shell, however.
patchadd will barf if you feed it a zip file. Patches are distributed in zip files, just like Solaris packages are often distributed in zip files (or.tar.gz). Unpacking a zip file is hardly difficult - and very easy to script on a custom JumpStart build.
Daily rate project contracts are easier to negotiate, primarily because they're easy for the customer to budget for. For reactive work they also avoid much of the-meter-is-ticking-why-haven't-you-fixed-the-pro blem -yet-you're-supposed-to-be-an-expert stress element involved in some contracts.
Yeah, thanks for that wierdo. "Yes" to the only question that you've posed which I could possibly have been asked, the fewer tyrants around the better. We should get rid of Mugabe next. Seriously.
The other theory, the one I believe, is that people will think "oh, it's the European election today, how boring" and stay at home, so the net result will be a decrease in turnout for the local elections.
We need only look to the recent by-election turnout...
...it isn't just a limited term dictatorship by the biggest party. Just don't believe the crap from the S*N and the Daily Fascist - Murdoch, Rothermere and Black have their own WASP agendas.
You're making a large assumption there (as Grauniad readers often do:). Like a growing number of people in the UK, I don't read newspapers (I take the Telegraph for the General Knowledge crossword on Saturday, but I don't bother with the rest of the copy). I get my news from Radio4. I've been educated sufficiently well that I'm able to evaluate bias in my sources - thank you!
I'm prejudiced: I've been involved for years in technical standards making and lobbying politicians. My kids between them have racked up years in working on the EU mainland and can't understand the British isolationist attitude.
You understand my concern though. In what way have I been consulted in any EU legislation? As far as I'm concerned - they're dicta.
I didn't vote for Britain to join the EU, my parents generation did. I have never had the chance to vote for a European member of parliament - or indeed the chance to spoil my ballot paper. When are these elections held? I'm on the electoral register and have been for years - I've voted in two general elections and a number of local elections, I may have moved a couple of times but I've never had any notice or ballot cards through for European elections, not once.
Britain seems to be the only country that plays by all the 'collective' rules - much, it seems, to our disadvantage. But if they don't even attempt to represent my views, I want out. Now.
And this leads to an obvious question. Dell is able to sell products that meet millions of customers needs. They certainly sell more computers than Apple and they certainly beat Sun on desktops. So what is the innovation that Apple and Sun are bringing to the table? After all, with almost no R&D, Dell is able to sell a highly competitive product at a lower cost. I don't think there are too many Dell customers who thought they were settling for less.
They're shifting a commodity product. Classic economics: high-volume, low margin vs. low-volume high-margin, sure Sun don't sell many F15K's but they do sell a significant number of smaller boxes in the 8 to 24 CPU bracket. List price they make over 90% margin on every box they sell - as do HP and IBM. Simple, there's room for both. Dell are piggy-backing off of intel's R&D, Sun invest billions in R&D and recoup the investment over the longer term, on boxes which are as scalable as they are upgradable (with faster CPU's etc.) Sun Enterprise boxes, the 3000-6500 are still holding a amazing amount of their value 6 years after they came out, on a chassis which will accept 167MHz-400MHz CPUs. Just have a look on ebay.
Many problems can be solved by clustering cheap boxes together to achieve parallelism, some problems can't. Some customers need ultra reliable, 64bit big iron boxes with masses of storage. Many don't. Most slashdotters have never experienced high-end enterprise computing, a few have.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - the day Sun stop investing in SPARC/Solaris is the day I sell my stock - I'm not at all happy with the Xeon box precedent, but Sun have had short lived product lines like this before, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
Check quantum's site, you'll see the DLT 4000 is the last of the one branch DLTs, meaning after the 4000 the line diverged into two different product lines that don't interoperate (values vs enterprise series).
You're probably right. I only have experience with Sun badged drives (flexipack and low-end tape libraries) - which you'd hope were of the "enterprise" variety. They've never had much exercise though.
Somehow over the years I have accumulated a collection of various tape drives, most of the QIC and Exabyte variants, all DDS (up to 4), DLT 7000 - I have never bought a drive and I've never stolen one, they were just given to me. I mention to someone that I've got a few Sun boxes at home - the next time I meet them they give a surplus unipack tape drive and a bag full of media. Of course, not one of them has ever had enough capacity to back up the largest hard drive that I owned at the time.
Magnetic tapes leak, don't they? I have a pack of cassettes recorded with old stuff I wrote for a C64, 20-odd years ago, and even ten years ago they were already unreadable.
Not all tapes are made equal.
Buy a couple of decent SCSI DLT drives (to best future-proof them) and a bunch of tapes. It's expensive, but they're designed to last 30+ years and will store 40gig per tape (on DLTIV), so you can store redundant copies of your important stuff on each tape.
I agree with much of what you say, and that's mostly why I (mostly) browse at -1. You have to admit though, there's a awful lot of crap. Would the world be a poorer place if you never saw another goatse picture, or "GNAA aquires SCO press statement"?
Slashdot opinion is fickle. A few years ago Sun were (relative) heroes and apple and IBM peddlers of proprietry evil-ware. It's bollocks. I know from experience that IBM, Sun and Apple are like any other computer hardware manufacturers - a bunch of well meaning engineers just trying to churn out decent products while the idiots at the helm try to understand what's going on - and the marketing department don't even bother, they're only interested in the colour and which buzzwords they can put on the box.
We all know that the moderation system is badly broken, but any distributed moderation system is bound to result in the most popular stuff (and the not necessarily the technically correct stuff) rising to top the pile and as we know moderators are often substance abusers. Oh well, maybe they could apply the bayesian filter only to posts at 1 and under.
As for technical ignorance. Err, this is slashdot - or should I say "teh slashdot". What do you expect? I bet more than 50% of slashdotters have never seen a computer more powerfull than a 2-way PC - and I bet 3/4 of them have only come across ia32. Then there's the arrogance of youth...
No, it's entirely relevent, because as a public service broadcaster, their mandate is to reach the maximum of their achievable UK target market. On the web, it's windows (90+%) and Mac (less than 5% if the surveys are to be believed). This dictates which encoder is used and hence the player. Real, crap as it is, covers this demographic, plus Solaris and Linux and a few others (after a fashion).
BeOS and OS/2 are commercially dead O/Ss with very, very few users (and I know some). The Amiga - well! The C64 - it can't play FMV to start with.
I'm pretty sure that's just owned by the BBC...
I'm sure that the The BBC reserve all rights etc... How do the BBC know that your a UK license fee payer and not some random foreign freeloader?...As a British citizen, the BBC is supposed to have a mandate to represent my views directly; we pay a mandatory licence fee to them.
While your views are, of course, of paramount importance (I was forgetting), the TV license is not mandatory and never has been - you don't have to own a TV (I have never owned one).
And how rude is just *not responding* to an e-mail I sent? How unprofessional?
They *are* busy - believe me, it's not personal. I often send typo corrections to BBC news online, I seldom get a response, but the error is always corrected.
I recently fired off an e-mail complaining to the BBC's website that they only offered certain videos in.rm *STREAMING* format (useless for us 56k ers). I got no response. The idiots probably don't even understand the issues involved, and paid their money for the use of the encoding software, and don't see a good reason to change as they'd "lose their investment"
Actually, the BBC (a customer of a former employer of mine) are very technology savvy. When they bought the rights to use Real, it was practically the only cross platform media player available - some might argue that it still is (piece of junk though it is). The reason that it's streaming only is primarily because the BBC outsource a lot of programming to third party production companies who often grant the BBC broadcast rights, but nothing else. The BBC also flog a lot of thier own archive material on tape, video and DVD - so they'd be stupid to give it away in a freely reproducable format.
Terry Pratchet and British satirist. In his Discworld series of books one of the running jokes is the way that "million to one" chances are almost always a dead certainty.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I hate about Pratchet's books. That's not particularly funny, nor cleverly done, it's only weakly ironic. Making it a running gag doesn't make it any funnier - it quickly becomes really irritating.
"...Could you please replace your keyboard with one that has periods and commas on it?"
I had one of those once. I spilt red wine under the caps lock key and every so often it would START SHOUTING LIKE A WOMEN WITH PMS. It had a comma key too.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, if I'm right, the driver wasn't installed if you clicked Cancel to the EULA. So you could just insert the disc, Cancel the EULA, and then play the CD on your computer by right of first sale (after all, other CDs didn't have to have EULAs on them to let you play them on CD, and the EULA can't say "if you don't accept this, you can't play the CD" because if you don't accept a license, nothing in it takes effect, not even that sentence)
No, if you cancel the EULA popup the disc is ejected.
I used to have a girlfriend who worked in IT (around the time of the HP-compaq deal) who acknowleged that Fiorina was the role model for women in IT, and that she wished that she wasn't - because Carly was making them all look bad.
Err, funny except that Sun is not part of the axis of evil. I've worked for two of them, and have a friend at the third, so I know what I'm talking about. It's hard to find a more open (as in standards and millions of lines of code) bunch of guys. Definately light side of the force.
It's similar, authough the qube is arguably more suited to file serving than this box, because it has a pair of mirrored disks and a SCSI controller to allow the addition of an external tape drive.
Solaris patches are very much based on ZIP. I may have been wrong about the Korn shell, however.
.tar.gz). Unpacking a zip file is hardly difficult - and very easy to script on a custom JumpStart build.
patchadd will barf if you feed it a zip file. Patches are distributed in zip files, just like Solaris packages are often distributed in zip files (or
The rest of your criticism are equally risible.
Daily rate project contracts are easier to negotiate, primarily because they're easy for the customer to budget for. For reactive work they also avoid much of the-meter-is-ticking-why-haven't-you-fixed-the-pro blem -yet-you're-supposed-to-be-an-expert stress element involved in some contracts.
...I wish that AMD will create some low end chips in the $150-$200 range...
Why? Do you have >4GB of RAM?
Yeah, thanks for that wierdo. "Yes" to the only question that you've posed which I could possibly have been asked, the fewer tyrants around the better. We should get rid of Mugabe next. Seriously.
The other theory, the one I believe, is that people will think "oh, it's the European election today, how boring" and stay at home, so the net result will be a decrease in turnout for the local elections.
We need only look to the recent by-election turnout...
...it isn't just a limited term dictatorship by the biggest party. Just don't believe the crap from the S*N and the Daily Fascist - Murdoch, Rothermere and Black have their own WASP agendas.
:). Like a growing number of people in the UK, I don't read newspapers (I take the Telegraph for the General Knowledge crossword on Saturday, but I don't bother with the rest of the copy). I get my news from Radio4. I've been educated sufficiently well that I'm able to evaluate bias in my sources - thank you!
You're making a large assumption there (as Grauniad readers often do
I'm prejudiced: I've been involved for years in technical standards making and lobbying politicians. My kids between them have racked up years in working on the EU mainland and can't understand the British isolationist attitude.
You understand my concern though. In what way have I been consulted in any EU legislation? As far as I'm concerned - they're dicta.
Thanks for that.
Arlene McCarthy? Never heard of her. She doesn't represent me. That was, of course my point.
I didn't vote for Britain to join the EU, my parents generation did. I have never had the chance to vote for a European member of parliament - or indeed the chance to spoil my ballot paper. When are these elections held? I'm on the electoral register and have been for years - I've voted in two general elections and a number of local elections, I may have moved a couple of times but I've never had any notice or ballot cards through for European elections, not once.
Britain seems to be the only country that plays by all the 'collective' rules - much, it seems, to our disadvantage. But if they don't even attempt to represent my views, I want out. Now.
And this leads to an obvious question. Dell is able to sell products that meet millions of customers needs. They certainly sell more computers than Apple and they certainly beat Sun on desktops. So what is the innovation that Apple and Sun are bringing to the table? After all, with almost no R&D, Dell is able to sell a highly competitive product at a lower cost. I don't think there are too many Dell customers who thought they were settling for less.
They're shifting a commodity product. Classic economics: high-volume, low margin vs. low-volume high-margin, sure Sun don't sell many F15K's but they do sell a significant number of smaller boxes in the 8 to 24 CPU bracket. List price they make over 90% margin on every box they sell - as do HP and IBM. Simple, there's room for both. Dell are piggy-backing off of intel's R&D, Sun invest billions in R&D and recoup the investment over the longer term, on boxes which are as scalable as they are upgradable (with faster CPU's etc.) Sun Enterprise boxes, the 3000-6500 are still holding a amazing amount of their value 6 years after they came out, on a chassis which will accept 167MHz-400MHz CPUs. Just have a look on ebay.
Many problems can be solved by clustering cheap boxes together to achieve parallelism, some problems can't. Some customers need ultra reliable, 64bit big iron boxes with masses of storage. Many don't. Most slashdotters have never experienced high-end enterprise computing, a few have.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - the day Sun stop investing in SPARC/Solaris is the day I sell my stock - I'm not at all happy with the Xeon box precedent, but Sun have had short lived product lines like this before, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
Check quantum's site, you'll see the DLT 4000 is the last of the one branch DLTs, meaning after the 4000 the line diverged into two different product lines that don't interoperate (values vs enterprise series).
You're probably right. I only have experience with Sun badged drives (flexipack and low-end tape libraries) - which you'd hope were of the "enterprise" variety. They've never had much exercise though.
Somehow over the years I have accumulated a collection of various tape drives, most of the QIC and Exabyte variants, all DDS (up to 4), DLT 7000 - I have never bought a drive and I've never stolen one, they were just given to me. I mention to someone that I've got a few Sun boxes at home - the next time I meet them they give a surplus unipack tape drive and a bag full of media. Of course, not one of them has ever had enough capacity to back up the largest hard drive that I owned at the time.
Magnetic tapes leak, don't they? I have a pack of cassettes recorded with old stuff I wrote for a C64, 20-odd years ago, and even ten years ago they were already unreadable.
Not all tapes are made equal.
Buy a couple of decent SCSI DLT drives (to best future-proof them) and a bunch of tapes. It's expensive, but they're designed to last 30+ years and will store 40gig per tape (on DLTIV), so you can store redundant copies of your important stuff on each tape.
I agree with much of what you say, and that's mostly why I (mostly) browse at -1. You have to admit though, there's a awful lot of crap. Would the world be a poorer place if you never saw another goatse picture, or "GNAA aquires SCO press statement"?
Slashdot opinion is fickle. A few years ago Sun were (relative) heroes and apple and IBM peddlers of proprietry evil-ware. It's bollocks. I know from experience that IBM, Sun and Apple are like any other computer hardware manufacturers - a bunch of well meaning engineers just trying to churn out decent products while the idiots at the helm try to understand what's going on - and the marketing department don't even bother, they're only interested in the colour and which buzzwords they can put on the box.
We all know that the moderation system is badly broken, but any distributed moderation system is bound to result in the most popular stuff (and the not necessarily the technically correct stuff) rising to top the pile and as we know moderators are often substance abusers. Oh well, maybe they could apply the bayesian filter only to posts at 1 and under.
As for technical ignorance. Err, this is slashdot - or should I say "teh slashdot". What do you expect? I bet more than 50% of slashdotters have never seen a computer more powerfull than a 2-way PC - and I bet 3/4 of them have only come across ia32. Then there's the arrogance of youth...
Hmm. You almost sound like a troll, but I'll respond anyway.
Ahhh. The infamous opening line. Forget it twat. Get a life etc. etc.
The player used is totally irrelevant...
...As a British citizen, the BBC is supposed to have a mandate to represent my views directly; we pay a mandatory licence fee to them.
No, it's entirely relevent, because as a public service broadcaster, their mandate is to reach the maximum of their achievable UK target market. On the web, it's windows (90+%) and Mac (less than 5% if the surveys are to be believed). This dictates which encoder is used and hence the player. Real, crap as it is, covers this demographic, plus Solaris and Linux and a few others (after a fashion).
BeOS and OS/2 are commercially dead O/Ss with very, very few users (and I know some). The Amiga - well! The C64 - it can't play FMV to start with.
I'm pretty sure that's just owned by the BBC...
I'm sure that the The BBC reserve all rights etc... How do the BBC know that your a UK license fee payer and not some random foreign freeloader?
While your views are, of course, of paramount importance (I was forgetting), the TV license is not mandatory and never has been - you don't have to own a TV (I have never owned one).
And how rude is just *not responding* to an e-mail I sent? How unprofessional?
They *are* busy - believe me, it's not personal. I often send typo corrections to BBC news online, I seldom get a response, but the error is always corrected.
Anything to stem the flood of SPAM from those two countries.
China would argue that they're not two countries...
I recently fired off an e-mail complaining to the BBC's website that they only offered certain videos in .rm *STREAMING* format (useless for us 56k ers). I got no response. The idiots probably don't even understand the issues involved, and paid their money for the use of the encoding software, and don't see a good reason to change as they'd "lose their investment"
Actually, the BBC (a customer of a former employer of mine) are very technology savvy. When they bought the rights to use Real, it was practically the only cross platform media player available - some might argue that it still is (piece of junk though it is). The reason that it's streaming only is primarily because the BBC outsource a lot of programming to third party production companies who often grant the BBC broadcast rights, but nothing else. The BBC also flog a lot of thier own archive material on tape, video and DVD - so they'd be stupid to give it away in a freely reproducable format.
I say we take the aerospace guys and mix them up with the guys who build the nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines.
/give flight
/give speed
/g_gravity 0
No, lets swap the aerospace guys with 3D game engine designers:
~
Esc.
Terry Pratchet and British satirist. In his Discworld series of books one of the running jokes is the way that "million to one" chances are almost always a dead certainty.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I hate about Pratchet's books. That's not particularly funny, nor cleverly done, it's only weakly ironic. Making it a running gag doesn't make it any funnier - it quickly becomes really irritating.
Each to their own I suppose...
"...Could you please replace your keyboard with one that has periods and commas on it?"
I had one of those once. I spilt red wine under the caps lock key and every so often it would START SHOUTING LIKE A WOMEN WITH PMS. It had a comma key too.
That would be deterrent spelt with 2 r's.