but it seems most of them are for unrewarding and, sometimes, downright disappointing pork-barrel work that a local politician reeled in. Also, watch out for domestic-spying-smelling contracts. I saw a couple job postings for those and couldn't even work myself up to send a resume.
Also be prepared for top-down purchasing decisions...like spending several hundred thousand dollars on nice servers, WebLogic, and Oracle for a piddly-ass website that could have been done adequately with a few perl scripts and PostgreSQL.
No, it's merely a conicidence. It happens that Darl McBride gnaws off kitten heads to get at their juicy brains. He goes through a lot of kittens this way.
It's time to boycott Sun. It's about time it learned you can't bite the hand that feeeds you.
You are naive. Don't forget that Sun also has a history with commercial UNIX going back to the original BSD releases. If they need to use SCO-owned stuff in Solaris or other products, they have no choice but to licence from SCO.
It's called conducting business.
You can't ignore the fact that Sun is also a Linux reseller, they bootstrapped OpenOffice.org, among other things.
I'm slightly amazed they didn't give Sco more money.
Perhaps they didn't have to to close the deal. I'm really amazed that you were modded up at all.
High initial failure rate of the sunblades? The 10's & 20's of long ago were solid, not the new stuff.
Why are you comparing a >$15K workstation from 1994 to a $1300 workstation from 2001? Apples to apples would be SPARCstation 20 compared to Ultra 60 compared to Blade 2000 (all built like tanks, not PeeCees).
If Sun releases UltraSPARC IV modules for the Blade 2000, then they'll even be 4-CPU capable like the SS20s were. So there.
There is NOTHING interesting happening at Sun at this point.
I guess you missed everything that is happening yesterday and today on pretty much every techology-oriented discussion board in existence.
Sun is becoming irrelevent...
There is one thing that Sun has in their back pocket: they are not a Microsoft OEM in any fashion. Even their SunPCi co-processor cards require customers to obtain their Windows licenses from anywhere else. Microsoft has no thumb up Sun's ass, which isn't the case at IBM, HP, Dell, etc.
Me thinks Intel and Microsoft just found a way to justify the next generation of CPUs. We'll see benchmarks like "The octo-pumped 6035MHz Pentium Whizzo processes 100MB of XML in only 8 seconds, saving an average of 1/3 FTE per year compared to previous models!"
(iii) I think Sun should also bundle a little video game in with StarOffice. A Mortal Kombat-style game pitting the StarOffice butterfly against the MSN butterfly in a deathmatch would be quite entertaining.
It is to someone's advantage to remove my right to use dvds as I see fit, and I have lost that right.
First, no one has to buy and use DVDs, and the only real restriction is region-encoding, I believe. There are lots of ways around region-encoding. There are also a number of alternative ways of enjoying the movies and music that DVDs contain. Movies and music as sold by people like the RIAA and MPAA are products, and people always have a right to tell the MPAA and the RIAA to stuff it. Ways people can do this is to refuse to pay $8 at a movie theater (personally I prefer the $2 cheapo theater in town), $17 for a CD (I prefer $7 third-party CDs), $50 for a video game (wait for it to be $14.99 at Wal-Mart), etc.
Also, it really isn't a right for us to enjoy someone elses creation entirely on our own terms. Every purchase is a form of negotiation, where we accept the price and restrictions or refuse. If too many people refuse, the movies makers and artists go back to the drawing board and figure something else out. This is why it is critical that blank media taxes, rediculous copyright extensions, and art subsidies are not legislated into exsistence, because the serve only to prop up unnatural and otherwise unsustainable ways of doing business (people shouldn't live a legislated fantasy).
Oh, the constitution and free market don't put food on those shelves, migrant farm workers earning a few bucks a day and stockers earning $5.15/hr do.
Actually, migrant workers in the fields and low-wage stockers in the stores is exactly the free market at work. A loaf of bread for a dollar and a bag of apples for three dollars obtainable at a whim is nothing the average American should complain about. Food is very affordable, and there is a lot of competition among suppliers and stores. Unless a cartel formed, agriculture is one of the natural resources that probably will never be monopolized easily. If it were monopolized, then people would simply start tending their own gardens and stop buying from the cartel. The role of law enforcement would be to help prevent the cartel from spraying everyone's garden with RoundUp (destroying someone else's property is fundamentally illegal). Churches, missions, and charities also can help stave off a cartel by opening their own farms (not unlike the self-sufficient Amish).
The problem now is they aren't doing a good job of it, and they need to be made to.
In all of history, has any government lived up to its potential?
Everyone seems to assume that if the governement is small and powerless then it can't be abused and all these problems will go away.
The problems won't go away, but they will be less pronounced, when the role of the government is focused and limited. Right now, we have a vastly overworked Congress who wasn't even given a chance to debate the PATRIOT Act before passing it. That is a crime against every citizen in the country. We are forcing Congress to address so many issues that no congressperson can hope to comprehend them before voting. It is simply insane. Representative government works well only when those representatives are given a chance to succeed in their jobs, and the only way to do that is to not ask too much of them.
And the more significant point is that federal government should be very limited in scope, leaving most issues to cities and counties, then states, before an issue filters up to a federal level. If a community can deal with an issue on their own, then they should. Nagging to the federal government about things like illicit drugs and health care is like an employee asking his boss to proofread every e-mail he sends and asking his boss permission to go to the restroom five times a day.
A small and powerless government will just create a vacume other organizations will fill...
Exactly. All the government should care about is preventing organized crime from forming and destroying the free mark
Only the direct sale is illegal 18 or 21 , but drinking it is not illegal.
From which perspective are you speaking? In the USA, it is common for college parties or college-town bars to get busted with lots of "underage drinkers" getting into trouble.
I think you'll find your Freedom only applies when it's convient for major corporations, and that the free market reigns supreme largely for less affluent Americans.
Please explain how you have the right to post this to Slashdot. Please, I need to know. If you need some help, your reply might have the words "Bill of Rights" in it. That would be a good reply.
I want the government watching out for me.
They'll do a real good job of it, too. I promise.
The foundation of your rant is not that corporations or politicians are the evil step-children of Satan; rather, it is simply because they are not being held accountable for their actions. One failure of the checks and balances in the government is that, somehow, congressmen and other government officials are immune to some of the laws they pass. This inequity is simply terrible for the freedom of the general public, when public officials are not held to the same standards.
You should have more faith in the Constitution that grants you the right to bitch about it and the free market that lets you go to a grocery store with overflowing shelves of every imaginable food. It isn't as bad as you think it is.
Wow, the US meets 3 of the 4 criteria for being facist from that definition.
While true, fortunately in the US it is largely due to popular culture rather than government enforcement. However, given how democracy works, 2004 should work out just fine for those who think the war on terrorism was really not our fault and we should do anything to protect ourselves from the monster we can't see.
Real beer comes from the other side of the Atlantic.
This is why I enjoy European ethnic restaruants so much (Germany, UK, Austria, uh excluding France), because the beer is so damn good it is like eating dessert with the main course.
Why drink even a Sam Adams when I can have a pint of a German wheat beer or a smoked ale?
That's exactly what the US did in 1992 with the Audio Home Recording Act. The music cartels were inflamed about digital audio tape (DAT) and successfully levied a tax against that medium and serial copy protection into DAT recorders. Being "out of sight, out of mind" only a handful of technologists and audiophiles were affected, and the issue remained largely invisible. It basically killed DAT as a populist format...
And this is yet another argument for why the US government shouldn't be meddling in these things. A single government act killed a debatably good and useful technology that victimized no one! WTF?!?
Let the people choose what they want, not some asinine RIAA-purchased govermnet-passed legislation that really serves no interests well.
I would like to see smoking anything being banned (can't stand the stench) - but until we make tobacco illegal, we're just being hypocrites in allowing some mood-altering substances (alcohol, chocolate, caffeine, sugar-loaded pop) and not others.
I mostly agree, but it is better to ban fewer things than more. Most currently illegal drugs should be legalized, for example, except perhaps those that can kill on the first dose (due to the drug and not some one in a billion allergy).
Drinking ages should be abolished, too. Too many 21-year-olds have close calls from alcohol poisoning, for example. If we are going to put forth absolutely no effort to educate our children, why are we letting them learn everything for themselves on their 21st birthday?!?
Is this really true? Or is it simply affordable because Canada doesn't have an FDA? The same drugs in Canada are cheaper than in the USA.
lower crime
There are still areas of the USA (way far away from the inner city) where people still don't lock their doors. Also, Canada's population density is a faction of that of the US. Also, if Canadians didn't band together, they'd freeze to death.
These arguments comparing Canada to the USA are generally very very superficial.
How about this question, because I'm generally ignorant of these things: Does Canada have a founding document as potent as the US Constitution or are they still bent over for the Queen?
Agreed, because music and media are distinct. The fees tacked onto blank cassette tapes and CD-Rs is disgusting. Doing so to hard drives and pretty much anything else "for the artists" is just as evil.
The artists and their distributers will need to continue wearing their thinking caps until they can come up with a business model that doesn't infringe on our rights while protecting theirs.
I always hate these pricing models that are based on something different than what is being sold because they tend to create an inequity
Sun does business on every populated continent. I would hope they know how to avoid alienating foreign customers. I think Scott McNealy said half their business is international, which would be even greater incentive to not alienate them.
Slashdot Mirror
Aerogel is 99.8% holes.
A cool geeky name for the ultimate geeky girl.
but it seems most of them are for unrewarding and, sometimes, downright disappointing pork-barrel work that a local politician reeled in. Also, watch out for domestic-spying-smelling contracts. I saw a couple job postings for those and couldn't even work myself up to send a resume.
Also be prepared for top-down purchasing decisions...like spending several hundred thousand dollars on nice servers, WebLogic, and Oracle for a piddly-ass website that could have been done adequately with a few perl scripts and PostgreSQL.
Every time you reboot Linux, SCO kills a kitten.
No, it's merely a conicidence. It happens that Darl McBride gnaws off kitten heads to get at their juicy brains. He goes through a lot of kittens this way.
commemorative toilet paper
So, you use it then frame it? Yuck.
It's time to boycott Sun. It's about time it learned you can't bite the hand that feeeds you.
You are naive. Don't forget that Sun also has a history with commercial UNIX going back to the original BSD releases. If they need to use SCO-owned stuff in Solaris or other products, they have no choice but to licence from SCO.
It's called conducting business.
You can't ignore the fact that Sun is also a Linux reseller, they bootstrapped OpenOffice.org, among other things.
I'm slightly amazed they didn't give Sco more money.
Perhaps they didn't have to to close the deal. I'm really amazed that you were modded up at all.
High initial failure rate of the sunblades? The 10's & 20's of long ago were solid, not the new stuff.
Why are you comparing a >$15K workstation from 1994 to a $1300 workstation from 2001? Apples to apples would be SPARCstation 20 compared to Ultra 60 compared to Blade 2000 (all built like tanks, not PeeCees).
If Sun releases UltraSPARC IV modules for the Blade 2000, then they'll even be 4-CPU capable like the SS20s were. So there.
There is NOTHING interesting happening at Sun at this point.
I guess you missed everything that is happening yesterday and today on pretty much every techology-oriented discussion board in existence.
Sun is becoming irrelevent...
There is one thing that Sun has in their back pocket: they are not a Microsoft OEM in any fashion. Even their SunPCi co-processor cards require customers to obtain their Windows licenses from anywhere else. Microsoft has no thumb up Sun's ass, which isn't the case at IBM, HP, Dell, etc.
The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project
Sounds interesting, but is it really worth it if the initials don't spell out a funny word?
100 Meg of uncompressed xml
Me thinks Intel and Microsoft just found a way to justify the next generation of CPUs. We'll see benchmarks like "The octo-pumped 6035MHz Pentium Whizzo processes 100MB of XML in only 8 seconds, saving an average of 1/3 FTE per year compared to previous models!"
(iii) I think Sun should also bundle a little video game in with StarOffice. A Mortal Kombat-style game pitting the StarOffice butterfly against the MSN butterfly in a deathmatch would be quite entertaining.
It is to someone's advantage to remove my right to use dvds as I see fit, and I have lost that right.
First, no one has to buy and use DVDs, and the only real restriction is region-encoding, I believe. There are lots of ways around region-encoding. There are also a number of alternative ways of enjoying the movies and music that DVDs contain. Movies and music as sold by people like the RIAA and MPAA are products, and people always have a right to tell the MPAA and the RIAA to stuff it. Ways people can do this is to refuse to pay $8 at a movie theater (personally I prefer the $2 cheapo theater in town), $17 for a CD (I prefer $7 third-party CDs), $50 for a video game (wait for it to be $14.99 at Wal-Mart), etc.
Also, it really isn't a right for us to enjoy someone elses creation entirely on our own terms. Every purchase is a form of negotiation, where we accept the price and restrictions or refuse. If too many people refuse, the movies makers and artists go back to the drawing board and figure something else out. This is why it is critical that blank media taxes, rediculous copyright extensions, and art subsidies are not legislated into exsistence, because the serve only to prop up unnatural and otherwise unsustainable ways of doing business (people shouldn't live a legislated fantasy).
Oh, the constitution and free market don't put food on those shelves, migrant farm workers earning a few bucks a day and stockers earning $5.15/hr do.
Actually, migrant workers in the fields and low-wage stockers in the stores is exactly the free market at work. A loaf of bread for a dollar and a bag of apples for three dollars obtainable at a whim is nothing the average American should complain about. Food is very affordable, and there is a lot of competition among suppliers and stores. Unless a cartel formed, agriculture is one of the natural resources that probably will never be monopolized easily. If it were monopolized, then people would simply start tending their own gardens and stop buying from the cartel. The role of law enforcement would be to help prevent the cartel from spraying everyone's garden with RoundUp (destroying someone else's property is fundamentally illegal). Churches, missions, and charities also can help stave off a cartel by opening their own farms (not unlike the self-sufficient Amish).
The problem now is they aren't doing a good job of it, and they need to be made to.
In all of history, has any government lived up to its potential?
Everyone seems to assume that if the governement is small and powerless then it can't be abused and all these problems will go away.
The problems won't go away, but they will be less pronounced, when the role of the government is focused and limited. Right now, we have a vastly overworked Congress who wasn't even given a chance to debate the PATRIOT Act before passing it. That is a crime against every citizen in the country. We are forcing Congress to address so many issues that no congressperson can hope to comprehend them before voting. It is simply insane. Representative government works well only when those representatives are given a chance to succeed in their jobs, and the only way to do that is to not ask too much of them.
And the more significant point is that federal government should be very limited in scope, leaving most issues to cities and counties, then states, before an issue filters up to a federal level. If a community can deal with an issue on their own, then they should. Nagging to the federal government about things like illicit drugs and health care is like an employee asking his boss to proofread every e-mail he sends and asking his boss permission to go to the restroom five times a day.
A small and powerless government will just create a vacume other organizations will fill...
Exactly. All the government should care about is preventing organized crime from forming and destroying the free mark
Only the direct sale is illegal 18 or 21 , but drinking it is not illegal.
From which perspective are you speaking? In the USA, it is common for college parties or college-town bars to get busted with lots of "underage drinkers" getting into trouble.
And that about covers it. Honestly, if you admit you don't really know what you're talking about, it becomes pointless to discuss anything.
No, I admitted ignorance and, then, fielded a question. Isn't that how things are supposed to go? Why even bother with the question, then?
I think you'll find your Freedom only applies when it's convient for major corporations, and that the free market reigns supreme largely for less affluent Americans.
Please explain how you have the right to post this to Slashdot. Please, I need to know. If you need some help, your reply might have the words "Bill of Rights" in it. That would be a good reply.
I want the government watching out for me.
They'll do a real good job of it, too. I promise.
The foundation of your rant is not that corporations or politicians are the evil step-children of Satan; rather, it is simply because they are not being held accountable for their actions. One failure of the checks and balances in the government is that, somehow, congressmen and other government officials are immune to some of the laws they pass. This inequity is simply terrible for the freedom of the general public, when public officials are not held to the same standards.
You should have more faith in the Constitution that grants you the right to bitch about it and the free market that lets you go to a grocery store with overflowing shelves of every imaginable food. It isn't as bad as you think it is.
Wow, the US meets 3 of the 4 criteria for being facist from that definition.
While true, fortunately in the US it is largely due to popular culture rather than government enforcement. However, given how democracy works, 2004 should work out just fine for those who think the war on terrorism was really not our fault and we should do anything to protect ourselves from the monster we can't see.
Real beer comes from the other side of the Atlantic.
This is why I enjoy European ethnic restaruants so much (Germany, UK, Austria, uh excluding France), because the beer is so damn good it is like eating dessert with the main course.
Why drink even a Sam Adams when I can have a pint of a German wheat beer or a smoked ale?
That's exactly what the US did in 1992 with the Audio Home Recording Act. The music cartels were inflamed about digital audio tape (DAT) and successfully levied a tax against that medium and serial copy protection into DAT recorders. Being "out of sight, out of mind" only a handful of technologists and audiophiles were affected, and the issue remained largely invisible. It basically killed DAT as a populist format...
And this is yet another argument for why the US government shouldn't be meddling in these things. A single government act killed a debatably good and useful technology that victimized no one! WTF?!?
Let the people choose what they want, not some asinine RIAA-purchased govermnet-passed legislation that really serves no interests well.
I would like to see smoking anything being banned (can't stand the stench) - but until we make tobacco illegal, we're just being hypocrites in allowing some mood-altering substances (alcohol, chocolate, caffeine, sugar-loaded pop) and not others.
I mostly agree, but it is better to ban fewer things than more. Most currently illegal drugs should be legalized, for example, except perhaps those that can kill on the first dose (due to the drug and not some one in a billion allergy).
Drinking ages should be abolished, too. Too many 21-year-olds have close calls from alcohol poisoning, for example. If we are going to put forth absolutely no effort to educate our children, why are we letting them learn everything for themselves on their 21st birthday?!?
Dammit these laws are stupid.
How about 500,000 US Military deaths in WWII vs. 39,000 for Canada?
Holy shit. Human casualty numbers from a totally insane global war are not a basis for any pissing contest. Please, let's put this one aside.
Once again, we wait to get smacked in the head (Pearl Harbor) before we actually do something.
Do you prefer the more recent scheme of going around and smacking everyone else in the head?
better health care
Is this really true? Or is it simply affordable because Canada doesn't have an FDA? The same drugs in Canada are cheaper than in the USA.
lower crime
There are still areas of the USA (way far away from the inner city) where people still don't lock their doors. Also, Canada's population density is a faction of that of the US. Also, if Canadians didn't band together, they'd freeze to death.
These arguments comparing Canada to the USA are generally very very superficial.
How about this question, because I'm generally ignorant of these things: Does Canada have a founding document as potent as the US Constitution or are they still bent over for the Queen?
It seems as if Canada has become the land of the free, while the United States has become seemingly less thrilling to live in.
Well, we have the last few administrations to thank for this. The current one just makes it more blatant.
Be sure to vote accordingly in 2004.
The idea's a non-starter
Agreed, because music and media are distinct. The fees tacked onto blank cassette tapes and CD-Rs is disgusting. Doing so to hard drives and pretty much anything else "for the artists" is just as evil.
The artists and their distributers will need to continue wearing their thinking caps until they can come up with a business model that doesn't infringe on our rights while protecting theirs.
I do have a few V880's
With so many, you'd hardly be set back by giving me one of them, right?
I always hate these pricing models that are based on something different than what is being sold because they tend to create an inequity
Sun does business on every populated continent. I would hope they know how to avoid alienating foreign customers. I think Scott McNealy said half their business is international, which would be even greater incentive to not alienate them.