Re:Sun - Corporate mismanagement at its finest
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Sun to Cut 5000 Jobs
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· Score: 1
Funding SCO to sue the linux world is undermining it. And that is just one example. I suspect that once everything settles down, we will see more.
Eh, this is an old myth spread around here that has no basis in reality. Sun was not funding SCO to sue the Linux world. Sun paid SCO so that they were in the clear with regard to the Unix code that was at the heart of Solaris. Sun was not paying SCO to sue IBM over Linux. But feel free to believe what you will.
Likewise, Staroffice started on Linux, sun bought it, and now is using this to try and break MS's monopoly.
I seem to recall StarOffice as always being a platform-neutral aplpication. The wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staroffice) seems to confirm that. And regardless, they took StarOffice and released it to the open source community as OpenOffice.org. I use it on all my Solaris, Windows and Linux boxes. What's the problem?
As to shipping linux, hmmmm. Yeeeaaaahhhhhh. In the same way that MS does apps on Linux. Only when it is a last resort.
Huh? Have you really been paying attention to what Sun is actually doing these days? Sure, Sun has a preference for Solaris, but this is nothing like the lock-in Windows stack that MS promotes. Sun will even sell you Linux support for their X64 servers. Take a look.
The _only_ reason that millions of jobs were created was because of the roaring success of the Internet accessible to the masses.
If anyone should be thanked, it should be Bill Gates and Microsoft for making computers easier to use for a vast majority of the population.
I think what the blog article, and the original letter, were saying is that McNealy was right. His vision back in the early 90s was of an open network, where the important thing was the network, not the devices connected to it, and that was the world we were moving towards. It's a world built on open standards with all sorts of room for innovation and differentiation. Schwartz is not claiming that McNealy invented the Internet. He was saying that McNealy's vision of the future was the correct one unlike all those other companies who killed their own R&D and fell into the Redmond camp because they had seen the light (from Redmond and Wall Street).
As for Microsoft... if not Microsoft, someone else would have filled their role. Apple perhaps? Digital Research? Who knows. I don't think Microsoft did anything really brilliant or overly original in GUI design. As for "the Network is the Computer", Microsoft had to be dragged kicking and screaming into embracing the Internet and any open standards that they didn't control. The Internet wasn't even on their radar until Sun, Java and Netscape scared them.
Finally, you have to put Schwartz's blog in context. It was written as a tribute to McNealy, his mentor. The original letter, paraphrased from two years ago, was written to cheer up his mentor when Sun's fortunes were sinking and the Wall Street boys were savaging McNealy. I'm willing to give Schwartz a bit of leeway on the hyperbole.
Java... NO (not on set top boxes that is) JXTA... NO SunRay... NO (only a few universities / corps) Liberty Alliance... NO OpenLook... NO JINI... NO
As others have said, Java is all over the place. It's certainly on my cell phone, so I think you're very wrong there as for Java being some kind of failure.
Sun stopped pushing OpenLook something like 11 or 12 years ago when they came out with CDE. Why are we talking about something that old?
As for the SunRays being limited to universities and corporations, well who do you think those devices are designed for? Somebody at home? They are not consumer devices nor were they ever intended to be.
And finally, who cares if not every project that Sun pushes is a market success. I have a lot of respect for Sun because they put so much money in R&D and occasionally some cool stuff comes out of it. Sure, not everything catches on, but they keep on innovating. And they usually are staunch defenders and promoters of open standards, something that can't be said of everyone else in the field.
Would you prefer them to just repackage stuff and stick a Sun label on it and kill off their R&D? Would you want to work for a company that did only that? Would you have any respect for a company that only did that?
Hey! I often read Slashdot on a SunRay thin client! It's nice being in a room with no computer generated noise. In the corporate and education worlds, these things make a lot of sense. System administration sure got easier when we switched to these in our classrooms and simulators.
I'm also interested in pushing the technology offsite to see if it the latest incaranation of the server software can really operate in that environment, i.e. on the big, bad Internet.
Amen. It amazes me how so many people see conspiracies when there is a simple explanation right there in the open. Sun needed to ensure that they were in the clear with their Solaris-Unix license.
As for the Tantella acquisition, that's clearly to get Tarantella's Citrix like software in a bid to drive down the cost of delivering legacy windows applications on the SunRay platform. No conspiracy here. Just a good business decision with no hidden agendas.
Sun's business in SPARC-based workstations, which used to be one of its mainstays, has dropped to almost zero.
We are still a Sun shop with SPARC servers, SPARC workstations for development and remote deployment, and SunRay thin-clients combined with Citrix servers for when we need windows in some of our classrooms and simulators (we do a mix of government and education work).
We're about to buy a new round of SunBlade 2500 workstations but in the back of my head I can't help but wonder if we should consider making the jump to their AMD x86 workstations (and servers). The main thing holding us back is binary compatibility (we would need to rebuild our in-house apps for X86 Solaris) plus I'm still not sure where Sun is heading. They seem more serious about x86 than ever before, but I still get mixed messages.
And finally, as a hedge we've also been playing around with Linux ports of our apps.
AFAIK, NASA never offered anonymous FTP access. Celstrak discontinued it years ago. NASA might have offered FTP access for "superusers" which involved quite a bit more paperwork then the Space-Track user application.
This worked fine up 'til NASA's server shut down. Space-track.org doesn't allow redistribution which is why Celestrak is now effectively down.
The only shenanigans I can see are with the legislation that placed the additional restrictions on the data. Come on. Anyone with the technology to actually try and shoot down these things probably already has the technology to track them. This doesn't really protect anything. It just presents additional hurdles to legitimate users of the information.
This change at NASA has been a problem for us. We've been using the NORAD orbital files that Celestrak distributed for years to control the dish we use to download weather satellite images and the ARGOS data embedded within from the NOAA polar orbiting satellites. It was as simple as setting up a cron job to download the latest TLEs every 3-5 days via anonymous ftp.
Now I have to sign up for spacetrack.org and agree that I won't redistribute said information on pain of answering to the U.S. department of Homeland Security. Say what? These are just two line orbital elements for weather satellites. Why the paranoia?
Now with NASA losing their server, I was forced to finally sign up for a spacetrack account. You say the new site is an improvement. How is it an improvement? In the past, I just downloaded the one file I wanted. Now I need to login with a user name, build the file I want. And then download it. I suppose I'll eventually find some way to automate this process, but it is certainly not an improvement. The old system was open and simple.
They're expert sailors. Paper maps = second nature. I doubt anyone was endangered by this.
I would have to disagree. If this "mapping" system is used for predicting the drift of objects and for coordinating a search, having it go down could endanger lives. When a person is overboard, or a vessel is in distress, any time delays can cost lives.
I work with such a system (CANSARP) and while it is true that you could do most of the calculations manually, it would take a lot more time to do so. When you are dealing with a vessel in distress or a person overboard, any increase in time can cost lives. That's why CANSARP is considered a critical application for the Canadian Coast Guard.
An an aside, CANSARP is a Unix based application and has remained so despite a push to windows in the department. The critical nature of the application has allowed us to swim against the tide.
I have to wonder if the writer of the article has ever really played D&D d20 (3.0 or 3.5) or AD&D/D&D from previous iterations. I suspect, given the tone early on in, that he was blinded by his personal gaming political prejudice.
The latest incarnation lends itself very easily to implementation on a computer. Heck, we've been toying with converting an old LPmud to d20 because for the first time the D&D has a standardized machanic that can be more consistently implemented.
The author even goes on to state that d20 fails to take a standard approach in monster/character creation. Clearly the autlor has no clue what he's on about. d20 applies the same ruleset to everything. You want to play a Minotaur sorceror. No problem. You want to play a goblin barbarian. No problem again. Heck, you want to play a half-dragon assassin, you can do that. Now try doing that with earlier versions of D&D. Good luck coming up with a standard approach.
If there is one complaint I do have about d20 D&D it is that it feels too much like a computer game. The rules are so clear on everything now, that it all feels too structured. I find that the game is geared more towards the video game generation and less to those of us who prefer role-playing.
SUN also has an article on exactly how Java is being used on the ground for this mission.
Re:Anybody using Solaris x86 on the desktop?
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Solaris 9 x86 Review
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· Score: 1
Chance yes, certainty not... It's the same question for us as I posted for Solaris x86: how many Solaris desktop users are actually out there?
I support a group of Solaris apps for Search and Rescue that we run on SPARCs. These apps involve a fairly high degree of simulation and number crunching which is why we never moved away from Sun/SPARC to the Intel platform back in the day when management was all obsessed with switching everything over to Windows NT on Intel.
We never did switch (thankfully) but now we're considering a possible port to Solaris x86 and Linux, but for the near and medium term we'll certainly be sticking with a Sun SPARC platform (and SPARC/Solaris Gnome desktop). I'd love to release our applications under an open source license, preferably the GPL, but I haven't yet sold management. Someday perhaps.
Getting back to your question, we also have several classrooms and simulators that utilize SunRay thin clients displaying a SPARC/Solaris based desktop, so if you do the port to SPARC/Solaris anyone with a SunRay deployment might well be interested.
...and what about all those *internel* windows servers running IIS that aren't visible to Netcraft. They're never counted in the stats.
Nor are our internal servers running apache. Worrying about internal servers is pointless. You'll never know for sure.
if you want X Term support the cost is through the roof. I want to know why the X capable clients cost so much more than the Winterm clients.
Is the cost really through the roof? We use SunRay's in a classroom lab and in several simulators for X applications. The cost per unit is quite affordable, even taking into account the SunRay server. We also run windows apps on them using Citrix ICA. The Sunrays themselves were cheap - the Citrix side of things was the expensive component, far more than the cost of the SunRays or the SunRay server, and you don't need Citrix for the X side of things.
Computer Science isnt "how to use your computer". The concepts and techniques you learn are beyond any operating system. Good algorithm design and analysis transcends linux vs windows vs mac osx
Back when I went through university my first computer (outside the Pet/CBM I had at home) was a HP 3000 running MPE. Most of my early computer science courses involved this although I had the assember course was on the 6502. Later on it was Unix workstations (Sun Boxes) and a big old IBM mainframe.
Yes, there were also PCs and Macs around and I certainly had a PC at home plus most of the work on the side I did was PC (and DOS/Windows based) during that time, but it was the true multi-user systems that really caught me, especially the Unix systems.
If the schools I attended didn't have MPE,the IBM mainframe or the Sun boxes and only Wintel machines then I doubt I would be working with *nix to this day. Yes, I may have still understand most concepts, but my preferred environment would probably be Windows because that's what I was exposed to.
It's frightening sometimes to see just how clueless some Comp Science students are these days who are coming from the Windows generation. It doesn't feel like they really understand what's going on because all they really know is windows and windows hides so much of what an OS does.
I really think that it's important that students be exposed to a variety of technologies, not just one set of technologies (i.e. the Mircosoft way).
To this day I still prefer to work in Unix (or its derivatives). Yes, I worked with PCs as well, but I had the advantage of being to exposed to all sorts of env
What baffles me is that even with all this evidence for the need for operating system diversity in the corporate realm both corporate America and the US government are eliminating anything non-Microsoft. Lemmings.
What is it going to take? Ships sinking? Trains being derailed? Satellites dropping out of orbit?
Sadly, that might be exactly what it takes. I've worked with a highly specialized Search and Rescue tool that was originally developed for SunOS. When I proposed a major upgrade to that application, the project got hijacked and mutated into everything must be converted to run under windows - certainly not what I was proposing. I lost the fight to keep the new system Unix and the system was outsourced for Windows development.
Several years later, the windows version still doesn't work and we've finally gotten the goahead to go ahead and upgrade the older (and more reliable) Unix code (we're moving to GTK+ from a really old OpenLook/Xview codebase).
What really bothers me about the wasted years dickering around in MS-Windows land is that there never was a good technical reason for the application to be ported there. That decision was coming from outside our group with lots of motherhood statements about Windows being the future, standardizing everything on one platform, etc etc.
Our application might not control a nuclear reactor, but it is a critical application and its failure does endanger lives. Yet system reliability and stability was never an issue when they decided to push us to MS Windows. I'm so relieved the Windows version never did go operational. I dreaded the idea of supporting it.
Just to pick nits, but the jump was from Solaris 2.6 to 7, not 8. SunOS went from version 4 to 'Solaris 2.4' So Solaris 2.4 is SunOS 4, Solaris 2.5 is SunOS 5, Solaris 2.6 is SunOS 5.6, though. I don't get it either.
Actually, SunOS 4.x is the older, more BSD flavoured, version of their operating system. SunOS 5.x is the version of their operating system that we normally associate with the Solaris environment. So, Solaris 2.4 would be running SunOS 5.4, not SunOS 4. Solaris 2.5.1 ran SunOS 5.5.1, etc. Note that Sun did eventually rename the older SunOS 4.x operating environment Solaris 1.x just to confuse people even more.:-)
1. Had Hitler gotten a majority of Europe to agree with his policies before acting upon them?
Does George Bush have the support of the majority of world in this current endevour in Iraq? Hardly. Considering they failed to get the majority required in the security council that the US and UK withdrew their proposal to save face I don't see how you could say that George Bush has the support of most of the world. Heck, even this so called list of 40 or so countries in the so-called alliance of the willing has a lot of anonymous members who are afraid to let their own people know where their government stands. And of those countries, how many have been bullied or blackmailed into agreeing to be on the list, anonymous or not? Even up here in Canada you have the worry being expressed over whether Canada will be punished for not backing this illegal war in Iraq. How many other countries gave in out of fear and doubt over U.S. economic punishment?
The parallels with Germany withdrawing from the League of Nations are a bit frightening, as are a number of the other analogies.
Here is another analogy that I hope doesn't occur. I pray that Turkey isn't given the go-ahead to invade northern Iraq and turn on the Kurds there. There are fears now that the Turks want to capture Mosul and other cities to keep them out of Kurdish hands and prevent the formation of a strong Kurdistan province in a new federated Iraq. If the U.S. lets that happen, it will be similar in some ways to the partitioning of Poland where the Soviets were permited to annex part of Poland after the Germans took Warsaw.
I'm not saying the analogy is perfect, but the author certainly does have a point. There may not be concentration camps for Jews, but take a look at the new rules for people from certain prescribed countries living in the United States. It's nowhere near as extreme, but there is certainly an analogy to be made.
D&D used to be published by a company called TSR (originally Tactical Simulation Rules, then the acronym was dropped). While the company was under the control of Gary Gygax, all was good; but when Gygax left, he was replaced by typical business types. They decided that by publishing new books, they could make more money from their existing players; so, they published an "advanced" version, AD&D, which would live alongside D&D. Some time after that, they published a 2nd edition AD&D and discontinued both D&D and AD&D. The new editions were improvements, but people weren't happy with re-purchasing and re-learning the same things repeatedly.
This isn't correct at all. Gary Gygax oversaw the creation of AD&D. Prior to AD&D, D&D was a more free wielding system with lots of folks creating and adding stuff and no one really worrying all that much about Intellectual Property. If you were gaming at the time (I take it you were not) you would have remembered that Gygax increasingly started to assert IP rights insisting that the only official AD&D products were written by him and that the reader shouldn't be fooled by knock-offs.
While things certainly did take a turn for the worse in a number of ways after Gygax left, the seeds you speak of were sown by Gygax and company.
I don't know why so many folks who were not gaming through the late 70s and 80s like to speak like experts on something they are quite clueless about.
At the same time, TSR was milking the market for all it was worth. They published "2.5th Ed." of AD&D, which was 2nd Ed. in a slightly different presentation (more pictures), and they published dozens and dozens of unnecessary, low-quality, repetitive and inconsistent rulebooks. In short, they made a mess of 2nd edition AD&D, and earned themselves a dismal reputation as "T$R". The backlash killed them, and TSR was bought out by Wizards of the Coast.
This statement is just an opinion and not really fact. Yes, TSR did repackage the rulebooks for 2nd edition without changing the content, but the improvements to the graphics were eye catching and I know our gaming group bought several copies of the new set - partly so we could all read from the same page if need be, but also because the books were more pleasing to read. But, no one had to buy the new printings; the old books still worked just fine. Complaining about that is like complaining about a new printing of a book with some new artwork on the cover and cosmetic changes to layout. Who cares? No one is forced to buy it.
Now TSR did publish something that was a real version 2.5. That would be the Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers and Spells & Magic books. Those were not a cosmetic change at all and radically changed how the game was played. In many ways third edition reminds me of these rules. Third edition sometimes feels like a simpler and better put together version of what they were starting to tinker with in S&P and C&T.
There's no way you could say that these rules were published just to milk the gaming world. TSR was genuinely starting to move away from 1st and 2nd edition AD&D (which were practically interchangeable for the most part). It was fun to be part of that experiment.
What I think killed TSR (and Game Designers Workshop and others) was Magic the Gathering and similar games. The old RPG companies weren't quick enough to adjust to the changing demographics of gaming and were blind sided.
The latter years of TSR were a sort of rennaisance on the creative side with a number of innovative (for TSR) campaign settings and supplements. We haven't seen anything approaching that yet for 3E.
I'll certainly give you that the d20 and OGL concept are great, and that the 3E mechanism is better than the older AD&D mechanism, but I'm still waiting for the cool settings like Planescape or Dark Sun. Seems that under WoTC the settings have reverted back to quasi-European munchkinism.
Yes, I remember the part time job I had back in school in the data center. On the first day on the job ( a Saturday ) I was the only person there and had to do a tape backup on one of the big reels. I didn't lock the reels in properly so when they ended up spinning off and rolling across the floor.
I'll certainly miss the HP3000's and MPE. The HP 3000 was the first computer I ever used back when I was a kid in the mid 70s and it was there that I learned Basic, Pascal, Fortran and Cobol on the 3000, plus the ins and outs of a real multi-user system.
Sure, and how could terrorists destroy the WTC and damage the Pentagon?
Because they were well known, large stationary targets on the ground? That was the point. Airforce One is a very different sort of target, not one well suited for crashing a plane into.
The US was under direct attack and long standing procedures designed to keep the president alive and in communication with the armed forces were put into effect.
I don't really have an issue with Bush not rushing to the scene. It made sense to keep the president away until they really had a handle on what was going on and whether it was over. My issue is just with the statement that AF1 was a target. As others have posted, HOW was it a target? It surely couldn't have been the guys in the planes. Do the FBI have evidence of some kind of some kind of surface to air missile trap being set up somewhere OR is this all just spin/untruths to deflect criticism?
I've heard the claim that Airforce One was supposed to be a target, but this just doesn't make any sense. How would airplane hijackers target Airforce One? Surely their targets would be large non-moving landmarks on land, not a well protected moving target in the air that they could not readily track.
The claim that Airforce One was a target feels from here like an attempt to justify the president's scarcity on the first day of the tragedy via the use of an untruth.
I was thinking the same thing last night as I looked up at the skies. Up here in Cape Breton we always see 4 or more planes in the night sky winding their way along the northern transatlantic route, but tonight there was not a plane to be seen in the sky. It's been a very long time since I can remember looking up and not seeing a plane in the night sky.
Slashdot Mirror
Funding SCO to sue the linux world is undermining it. And that is just one example. I suspect that once everything settles down, we will see more.
Eh, this is an old myth spread around here that has no basis in reality. Sun was not funding SCO to sue the Linux world. Sun paid SCO so that they were in the clear with regard to the Unix code that was at the heart of Solaris. Sun was not paying SCO to sue IBM over Linux. But feel free to believe what you will.
Likewise, Staroffice started on Linux, sun bought it, and now is using this to try and break MS's monopoly.
I seem to recall StarOffice as always being a platform-neutral aplpication. The wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staroffice) seems to confirm that. And regardless, they took StarOffice and released it to the open source community as OpenOffice.org. I use it on all my Solaris, Windows and Linux boxes. What's the problem?
As to shipping linux, hmmmm. Yeeeaaaahhhhhh. In the same way that MS does apps on Linux. Only when it is a last resort.
Huh? Have you really been paying attention to what Sun is actually doing these days? Sure, Sun has a preference for Solaris, but this is nothing like the lock-in Windows stack that MS promotes. Sun will even sell you Linux support for their X64 servers. Take a look.
The _only_ reason that millions of jobs were created was because of the roaring success of the Internet accessible to the masses.
If anyone should be thanked, it should be Bill Gates and Microsoft for making computers easier to use for a vast majority of the population.
I think what the blog article, and the original letter, were saying is that McNealy was right. His vision back in the early 90s was of an open network, where the important thing was the network, not the devices connected to it, and that was the world we were moving towards. It's a world built on open standards with all sorts of room for innovation and differentiation. Schwartz is not claiming that McNealy invented the Internet. He was saying that McNealy's vision of the future was the correct one unlike all those other companies who killed their own R&D and fell into the Redmond camp because they had seen the light (from Redmond and Wall Street).
As for Microsoft... if not Microsoft, someone else would have filled their role. Apple perhaps? Digital Research? Who knows. I don't think Microsoft did anything really brilliant or overly original in GUI design. As for "the Network is the Computer", Microsoft had to be dragged kicking and screaming into embracing the Internet and any open standards that they didn't control. The Internet wasn't even on their radar until Sun, Java and Netscape scared them.
Finally, you have to put Schwartz's blog in context. It was written as a tribute to McNealy, his mentor. The original letter, paraphrased from two years ago, was written to cheer up his mentor when Sun's fortunes were sinking and the Wall Street boys were savaging McNealy. I'm willing to give Schwartz a bit of leeway on the hyperbole.
Java... NO (not on set top boxes that is)
JXTA... NO
SunRay... NO (only a few universities / corps)
Liberty Alliance... NO
OpenLook... NO
JINI... NO
As others have said, Java is all over the place. It's certainly on my cell phone, so I think you're very wrong there as for Java being some kind of failure.
Sun stopped pushing OpenLook something like 11 or 12 years ago when they came out with CDE. Why are we talking about something that old?
As for the SunRays being limited to universities and corporations, well who do you think those devices are designed for? Somebody at home? They are not consumer devices nor were they ever intended to be.
And finally, who cares if not every project that Sun pushes is a market success. I have a lot of respect for Sun because they put so much money in R&D and occasionally some cool stuff comes out of it. Sure, not everything catches on, but they keep on innovating. And they usually are staunch defenders and promoters of open standards, something that can't be said of everyone else in the field.
Would you prefer them to just repackage stuff and stick a Sun label on it and kill off their R&D? Would you want to work for a company that did only that? Would you have any respect for a company that only did that?
Hey! I often read Slashdot on a SunRay thin client! It's nice being in a room with no computer generated noise. In the corporate and education worlds, these things make a lot of sense. System administration sure got easier when we switched to these in our classrooms and simulators.
I'm also interested in pushing the technology offsite to see if it the latest incaranation of the server software can really operate in that environment, i.e. on the big, bad Internet.
Amen. It amazes me how so many people see conspiracies when there is a simple explanation right there in the open. Sun needed to ensure that they were in the clear with their Solaris-Unix license.
As for the Tantella acquisition, that's clearly to get Tarantella's Citrix like software in a bid to drive down the cost of delivering legacy windows applications on the SunRay platform. No conspiracy here. Just a good business decision with no hidden agendas.
Sun's business in SPARC-based workstations, which used to be one of its mainstays, has dropped to almost zero.
We are still a Sun shop with SPARC servers, SPARC workstations for development and remote deployment, and SunRay thin-clients combined with Citrix servers for when we need windows in some of our classrooms and simulators (we do a mix of government and education work).
We're about to buy a new round of SunBlade 2500 workstations but in the back of my head I can't help but wonder if we should consider making the jump to their AMD x86 workstations (and servers). The main thing holding us back is binary compatibility (we would need to rebuild our in-house apps for X86 Solaris) plus I'm still not sure where Sun is heading. They seem more serious about x86 than ever before, but I still get mixed messages.
And finally, as a hedge we've also been playing around with Linux ports of our apps.
AFAIK, NASA never offered anonymous FTP access. Celstrak discontinued it years ago. NASA might have offered FTP access for "superusers" which involved quite a bit more paperwork then the Space-Track user application.
My bad, I meant anonymous http. Here is the link:
http://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/noaa.txt
This worked fine up 'til NASA's server shut down. Space-track.org doesn't allow redistribution which is why Celestrak is now effectively down.
The only shenanigans I can see are with the legislation that placed the additional restrictions on the data. Come on. Anyone with the technology to actually try and shoot down these things probably already has the technology to track them. This doesn't really protect anything. It just presents additional hurdles to legitimate users of the information.
This change at NASA has been a problem for us. We've been using the NORAD orbital files that Celestrak distributed for years to control the dish we use to download weather satellite images and the ARGOS data embedded within from the NOAA polar orbiting satellites. It was as simple as setting up a cron job to download the latest TLEs every 3-5 days via anonymous ftp.
Now I have to sign up for spacetrack.org and agree that I won't redistribute said information on pain of answering to the U.S. department of Homeland Security. Say what? These are just two line orbital elements for weather satellites. Why the paranoia?
Now with NASA losing their server, I was forced to finally sign up for a spacetrack account. You say the new site is an improvement. How is it an improvement? In the past, I just downloaded the one file I wanted. Now I need to login with a user name, build the file I want. And then download it. I suppose I'll eventually find some way to automate this process, but it is certainly not an improvement. The old system was open and simple.
They're expert sailors. Paper maps = second nature. I doubt anyone was endangered by this.
I would have to disagree. If this "mapping" system is used for predicting the drift of objects and for coordinating a search, having it go down could endanger lives. When a person is overboard, or a vessel is in distress, any time delays can cost lives.
I work with such a system (CANSARP) and while it is true that you could do most of the calculations manually, it would take a lot more time to do so. When you are dealing with a vessel in distress or a person overboard, any increase in time can cost lives. That's why CANSARP is considered a critical application for the Canadian Coast Guard.
An an aside, CANSARP is a Unix based application and has remained so despite a push to windows in the department. The critical nature of the application has allowed us to swim against the tide.
I have to wonder if the writer of the article has ever really played D&D d20 (3.0 or 3.5) or AD&D/D&D from previous iterations. I suspect, given the tone early on in, that he was blinded by his personal gaming political prejudice.
The latest incarnation lends itself very easily to implementation on a computer. Heck, we've been toying with converting an old LPmud to d20 because for the first time the D&D has a standardized machanic that can be more consistently implemented.
The author even goes on to state that d20 fails to take a standard approach in monster/character creation. Clearly the autlor has no clue what he's on about. d20 applies the same ruleset to everything. You want to play a Minotaur sorceror. No problem. You want to play a goblin barbarian. No problem again. Heck, you want to play a half-dragon assassin, you can do that. Now try doing that with earlier versions of D&D. Good luck coming up with a standard approach.
If there is one complaint I do have about d20 D&D it is that it feels too much like a computer game. The rules are so clear on everything now, that it all feels too structured. I find that the game is geared more towards the video game generation and less to those of us who prefer role-playing.
SUN also has an article on exactly how Java is being used on the ground for this mission.
Chance yes, certainty not... It's the same question for us as I posted for Solaris x86: how many Solaris desktop users are actually out there?
I support a group of Solaris apps for Search and Rescue that we run on SPARCs. These apps involve a fairly high degree of simulation and number crunching which is why we never moved away from Sun/SPARC to the Intel platform back in the day when management was all obsessed with switching everything over to Windows NT on Intel.
We never did switch (thankfully) but now we're considering a possible port to Solaris x86 and Linux, but for the near and medium term we'll certainly be sticking with a Sun SPARC platform (and SPARC/Solaris Gnome desktop). I'd love to release our applications under an open source license, preferably the GPL, but I haven't yet sold management. Someday perhaps.
Getting back to your question, we also have several classrooms and simulators that utilize SunRay thin clients displaying a SPARC/Solaris based desktop, so if you do the port to SPARC/Solaris anyone with a SunRay deployment might well be interested.
As per my previous post, you really need to take a look at SunRays if you're considering running X applications off a Solaris/SPARC box.
And as for the price of a SPARC/Solaris server, take a look at the prices on something like the SunFire V210 or their other entry level servers.
if you want X Term support the cost is through the roof. I want to know why the X capable clients cost so much more than the Winterm clients.
Is the cost really through the roof? We use SunRay's in a classroom lab and in several simulators for X applications. The cost per unit is quite affordable, even taking into account the SunRay server. We also run windows apps on them using Citrix ICA. The Sunrays themselves were cheap - the Citrix side of things was the expensive component, far more than the cost of the SunRays or the SunRay server, and you don't need Citrix for the X side of things.
So does that mean I can advertise then that I won't hire people who work for Republicans?
;-)
Or that I won't hire anyone who has worked in a unionized shop in the past?
Or that I won't hire anyone who has worked in a non-unionized shop?
It's clearly aginst the spirit of Equal Opportunity.
And speaking of creed, isn't that what the GNU/Linux movement really is? And does that mean that Slashdot is one of the temples?
Computer Science isnt "how to use your computer". The concepts and techniques you learn are beyond any operating system. Good algorithm design and analysis transcends linux vs windows vs mac osx
Back when I went through university my first computer (outside the Pet/CBM I had at home) was a HP 3000 running MPE. Most of my early computer science courses involved this although I had the assember course was on the 6502. Later on it was Unix workstations (Sun Boxes) and a big old IBM mainframe.
Yes, there were also PCs and Macs around and I certainly had a PC at home plus most of the work on the side I did was PC (and DOS/Windows based) during that time, but it was the true multi-user systems that really caught me, especially the Unix systems.
If the schools I attended didn't have MPE,the IBM mainframe or the Sun boxes and only Wintel machines then I doubt I would be working with *nix to this day. Yes, I may have still understand most concepts, but my preferred environment would probably be Windows because that's what I was exposed to.
It's frightening sometimes to see just how clueless some Comp Science students are these days who are coming from the Windows generation. It doesn't feel like they really understand what's going on because all they really know is windows and windows hides so much of what an OS does.
I really think that it's important that students be exposed to a variety of technologies, not just one set of technologies (i.e. the Mircosoft way).
To this day I still prefer to work in Unix (or its derivatives). Yes, I worked with PCs as well, but I had the advantage of being to exposed to all sorts of env
What baffles me is that even with all this evidence for the need for operating system diversity in the corporate realm both corporate America and the US government are eliminating anything non-Microsoft. Lemmings.
What is it going to take? Ships sinking? Trains being derailed? Satellites dropping out of orbit?
Sadly, that might be exactly what it takes. I've worked with a highly specialized Search and Rescue tool that was originally developed for SunOS. When I proposed a major upgrade to that application, the project got hijacked and mutated into everything must be converted to run under windows - certainly not what I was proposing. I lost the fight to keep the new system Unix and the system was outsourced for Windows development.
Several years later, the windows version still doesn't work and we've finally gotten the goahead to go ahead and upgrade the older (and more reliable) Unix code (we're moving to GTK+ from a really old OpenLook/Xview codebase).
What really bothers me about the wasted years dickering around in MS-Windows land is that there never was a good technical reason for the application to be ported there. That decision was coming from outside our group with lots of motherhood statements about Windows being the future, standardizing everything on one platform, etc etc.
Our application might not control a nuclear reactor, but it is a critical application and its failure does endanger lives. Yet system reliability and stability was never an issue when they decided to push us to MS Windows. I'm so relieved the Windows version never did go operational. I dreaded the idea of supporting it.
Just to pick nits, but the jump was from Solaris 2.6 to 7, not 8. SunOS went from version 4 to 'Solaris 2.4' So Solaris 2.4 is SunOS 4, Solaris 2.5 is SunOS 5, Solaris 2.6 is SunOS 5.6, though. I don't get it either.
Actually, SunOS 4.x is the older, more BSD flavoured, version of their operating system. SunOS 5.x is the version of their operating system that we normally associate with the Solaris environment. So, Solaris 2.4 would be running SunOS 5.4, not SunOS 4. Solaris 2.5.1 ran SunOS 5.5.1, etc. Note that Sun did eventually rename the older SunOS 4.x operating environment Solaris 1.x just to confuse people even more.
1. Had Hitler gotten a majority of Europe to agree with his policies before acting upon them?
Does George Bush have the support of the majority of world in this current endevour in Iraq? Hardly. Considering they failed to get the majority required in the security council that the US and UK withdrew their proposal to save face I don't see how you could say that George Bush has the support of most of the world. Heck, even this so called list of 40 or so countries in the so-called alliance of the willing has a lot of anonymous members who are afraid to let their own people know where their government stands. And of those countries, how many have been bullied or blackmailed into agreeing to be on the list, anonymous or not? Even up here in Canada you have the worry being expressed over whether Canada will be punished for not backing this illegal war in Iraq. How many other countries gave in out of fear and doubt over U.S. economic punishment?
The parallels with Germany withdrawing from the League of Nations are a bit frightening, as are a number of the other analogies.
Here is another analogy that I hope doesn't occur. I pray that Turkey isn't given the go-ahead to invade northern Iraq and turn on the Kurds there. There are fears now that the Turks want to capture Mosul and other cities to keep them out of Kurdish hands and prevent the formation of a strong Kurdistan province in a new federated Iraq. If the U.S. lets that happen, it will be similar in some ways to the partitioning of Poland where the Soviets were permited to annex part of Poland after the Germans took Warsaw.
I'm not saying the analogy is perfect, but the author certainly does have a point. There may not be concentration camps for Jews, but take a look at the new rules for people from certain prescribed countries living in the United States. It's nowhere near as extreme, but there is certainly an analogy to be made.
D&D used to be published by a company called TSR (originally Tactical Simulation Rules, then the acronym was dropped). While the company was under the control of Gary Gygax, all was good; but when Gygax left, he was replaced by typical business types. They decided that by publishing new books, they could make more money from their existing players; so, they published an "advanced" version, AD&D, which would live alongside D&D. Some time after that, they published a 2nd edition AD&D and discontinued both D&D and AD&D. The new editions were improvements, but people weren't happy with re-purchasing and re-learning the same things repeatedly.
This isn't correct at all. Gary Gygax oversaw the creation of AD&D. Prior to AD&D, D&D was a more free wielding system with lots of folks creating and adding stuff and no one really worrying all that much about Intellectual Property. If you were gaming at the time (I take it you were not) you would have remembered that Gygax increasingly started to assert IP rights insisting that the only official AD&D products were written by him and that the reader shouldn't be fooled by knock-offs.
While things certainly did take a turn for the worse in a number of ways after Gygax left, the seeds you speak of were sown by Gygax and company.
I don't know why so many folks who were not gaming through the late 70s and 80s like to speak like experts on something they are quite clueless about.
At the same time, TSR was milking the market for all it was worth. They published "2.5th Ed." of AD&D, which was 2nd Ed. in a slightly different presentation (more pictures), and they published dozens and dozens of unnecessary, low-quality, repetitive and inconsistent rulebooks. In short, they made a mess of 2nd edition AD&D, and earned themselves a dismal reputation as "T$R". The backlash killed them, and TSR was bought out by Wizards of the Coast.
This statement is just an opinion and not really fact. Yes, TSR did repackage the rulebooks for 2nd edition without changing the content, but the improvements to the graphics were eye catching and I know our gaming group bought several copies of the new set - partly so we could all read from the same page if need be, but also because the books were more pleasing to read. But, no one had to buy the new printings; the old books still worked just fine. Complaining about that is like complaining about a new printing of a book with some new artwork on the cover and cosmetic changes to layout. Who cares? No one is forced to buy it.
Now TSR did publish something that was a real version 2.5. That would be the Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers and Spells & Magic books. Those were not a cosmetic change at all and radically changed how the game was played. In many ways third edition reminds me of these rules. Third edition sometimes feels like a simpler and better put together version of what they were starting to tinker with in S&P and C&T.
There's no way you could say that these rules were published just to milk the gaming world. TSR was genuinely starting to move away from 1st and 2nd edition AD&D (which were practically interchangeable for the most part). It was fun to be part of that experiment.
What I think killed TSR (and Game Designers Workshop and others) was Magic the Gathering and similar games. The old RPG companies weren't quick enough to adjust to the changing demographics of gaming and were blind sided.
The latter years of TSR were a sort of rennaisance on the creative side with a number of innovative (for TSR) campaign settings and supplements. We haven't seen anything approaching that yet for 3E.
I'll certainly give you that the d20 and OGL concept are great, and that the 3E mechanism is better than the older AD&D mechanism, but I'm still waiting for the cool settings like Planescape or Dark Sun. Seems that under WoTC the settings have reverted back to quasi-European munchkinism.
Yes, I remember the part time job I had back in school in the data center. On the first day on the job ( a Saturday ) I was the only person there and had to do a tape backup on one of the big reels. I didn't lock the reels in properly so when they ended up spinning off and rolling across the floor.
I'll certainly miss the HP3000's and MPE. The HP 3000 was the first computer I ever used back when I was a kid in the mid 70s and it was there that I learned Basic, Pascal, Fortran and Cobol on the 3000, plus the ins and outs of a real multi-user system.
Sure, and how could terrorists destroy the WTC and damage the Pentagon?
Because they were well known, large stationary targets on the ground? That was the point. Airforce One is a very different sort of target, not one well suited for crashing a plane into.
The US was under direct attack and long standing procedures designed to keep the president alive and in communication with the armed forces were put into effect.
I don't really have an issue with Bush not rushing to the scene. It made sense to keep the president away until they really had a handle on what was going on and whether it was over. My issue is just with the statement that AF1 was a target. As others have posted, HOW was it a target? It surely couldn't have been the guys in the planes. Do the FBI have evidence of some kind of some kind of surface to air missile trap being set up somewhere OR is this all just spin/untruths to deflect criticism?
I've heard the claim that Airforce One was supposed to be a target, but this just doesn't make any sense. How would airplane hijackers target Airforce One? Surely their targets would be large non-moving landmarks on land, not a well protected moving target in the air that they could not readily track.
The claim that Airforce One was a target feels from here like an attempt to justify the president's scarcity on the first day of the tragedy via the use of an untruth.
I was thinking the same thing last night as I looked up at the skies. Up here in Cape Breton we always see 4 or more planes in the night sky winding their way along the northern transatlantic route, but tonight there was not a plane to be seen in the sky. It's been a very long time since I can remember looking up and not seeing a plane in the night sky.