Back in the late '80s, when Novell ruled the world, things were different (and men were MEN dammit!). Anyway, we needed to add a second hard drive. Bought one from our Novell VAR. Stuck it in.
Now, before I go any further, you should know that our Corporate IT folks had not yet acquired a backup tape system. In fact, it had arrived the day before, but had not yet been installed on the network. Also, the old Novell system chose which drive to boot on based on the name of the volume. If the name was "SYSTEM", it was the boot drive.
Well, our VAR had *already* formatted our drive and installed Novell on it. No particular reason, just thinking he would help out.
So, when we started the format, it formatted our old drive. The one with 6 months of development source on it.
It took us 3 months to recover. I thought I should have been fired.
The Moral: When working on a server, step 1 is *always* do a backup.
If you believe in a "supreme being", then good and evil are absolutes. It's only our perceptions that are, as always, relative.
Even within the context of our perceptions, good and evil are established by the beliefs of the society we all live in. Within that definition, what they did was evil. Also within that context, it is exactly "we" who must judge them.
Remember that baby-rapers and all murderers think they are good people, too. There is always a way to justify doing whatever you want to do.
IT is a means, not an ends
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Smart business people realize that IT is an important enabler in their businesses, but IT should never be looked at as a differentiator or strategic advantage in and of itself. IT can be incredibly important, but only inasmuch as it furthers the other goals of the business.
A good example is Walgreen's. They decided, some time ago, that they were going to be the most user-friendly, convenient drug store on the planet. So, they implemented a far-reaching, ground-breaking IT infrastructure that allowed the stores to all share prescription information - way before the Internet was ubiquitous. But, it was only part of their efforts to be really convenient. (Another part was to always be on a corner, but I digress.)
That infrastructure was important to achieving the goal of being a convenient drug store, but the technology itself was not the real differentiator or the goal. The goal was to make it easy to pick up your prescription at whatever store was conenient at the moment.
The problem with the dot-bomb era was that the technology was the goal, not merely the vehicle.
But that's so cool! That's precisely what makes life so much fun (well, except for girlfriends). It would be a really, really boring place if everything was already figured out, all problems solved, nothing to invent, nothing left to do but watch old sitcom re-runs.
Although errors can theoretically occur, for the PC to not catch it, you'd need an enormous amount of corruption over a small area, that produces reproduceable false reads, with the correct CRC.
This is just plain wrong. There is a big difference between data CD's and audio CD's.
Your statement is essentially correct for data CD's. However, for audio, the parent's statements are correct, you must use a tool like EAC to get an exact copy.
With audio, the drive does all of the error checking and correcting. Uncorrectable, or C2 errors, can not be corrected, and occur on almost every CD. When a C2 error is encountered by the drive, it extrapolates (yes, guesses) the data and provides this data to the PC. You can't hear it (probably), but those errors do accumulate.
Most importantly, those errors, however slight, prevent you from doing a digital compare of the dupe back to the master.
We burn about 200K CD-R's here per month. We have found, unequivocally, that you can burn data CD-R's at 40x, but the best we can do for audio is 12x. We don't really know why, but we think it has more to do with the error correction capabilities that the data format has. That's the theory, anyway. Of course, we use only the best drives and media.
Some reactors (namely, Boiling Water reactors) run right at the boiling point. They use nucleate boiling at the surface of the fuel rod to break up a laminate layer that tends to insulate the rod from the rest of the water. In other words, the turbulance caused by the boiling increases the heat transfer rate.
I don't know about the rest of his article -- seems ok to me -- but his memories about Bill's "investment" in Apple are rather flawed:
1) Apple did not abandon their Java compliance projects. Today, they are arguably among the best Java development and deployment platforms out there.
2) It is hard to say Apple used the $150M to kill the clones. They had already been killed by the time Steve and Bill got together.
My recollection of the event was that the big thing that Apple got was an endorsement from Microsoft, a notion that Apple wasn't going to die in the next few weeks.
Re:Tesla is a magnet for kooks
on
Tesla Special on PBS
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And the dynamic brake, and the 3-phase motor, and the AC distribution system, and many more.
My point was simply that the original poster (I did reply to the wrong one) stated categorically that Macs were made exclusively for the ignorant, and that he was obviously wrong. I responded because this is a stereotype that I'm a bit sick of.
Actually, if you watch Mac ads, they don't really talk about being easy to use anymore, do they?
Oh, please, don't be so condescending. I'm a programmer, been one since 1978 (how old are you?) and I've been using Macs since they came out. Even have a Lisa. I'm the IT director at a company where we have about 30 servers, most of them Macs. The ones that aren't are running a variety of *nix, and one Windows Terminal Server. I've written TONS of code for DOS, for heaven's sake, and Windows since 3.1.
Trust me, I am not "proudly ignorant". I use Macs because they're better. Period. I am not genetically defective, either. Jeez.
Firstly, the lemon laws vary state by state. But, in most of them, the law doesn't talk about the number of defects. It talks about the number of times repair is attempted on a single defect without success. If they fix it in (usually) 3 times or less, it's not a lemon.
OK, you and I can agree here. Apple is not "open source", and probably never will be. The "dumbass" poster was out of line. I do think Apple is the most "open source friendly" major corporation out there, with the possible exception of IBM. 8*)
Dude,
maybe they could do better, maybe not. Please note that they *have* given cool shit back to the community, like the way Konqueror has significantly benefited from Apple's heavy investment in enhancing their core. Being OS-oriented does not mean everything they do has to be OS.
You gotta remember that they just switched to Linux a little over a year ago, right? At the time, everyone was amazed that Steve would let that happen. Obviously, Linux was a better choice then, and it now is not.
Steve makes most of his money from Pixar. He's not going to risk that!
All of the software companies have similar problems. The big difference is that Microsoft virtually forces you to buy into their program if your company is large at all.
Because of their monopoly, you have to upgrade eventually. If you don't buy into SA, the individual upgrades later will cost you much, much more. So you end up having to gamble and pick between the two choices.
What tidbits hey did have in there about encryption were absolute rubbish. He talks about "rotating plaintext" as the way to prevent a brute force attack. Folks, the "plaintext" is the content of an encrypted message! How can you "rotate" the content?
Plus, you *do* have to know the algorithm to do a brute force attack. Brute force means you "try" all of the possible keys, in order, until you find the right one. How can you do that without knowing the algorithm????
This kind of logic always just fries my butt: "other smart people drooled on themselves; this guy is smart; therefor he drools". Come on, folks, we're supposed to be *logical*.
Trying to argue that Wolfram is past his peak and his work is useless just because Einstein tried to find a "theory of everything" is obviously wrong. Will you always dismiss out of hand any project undertaken by a brilliant person after his first success, since Poe failed?
I think, for the most part, the responses here have been determined by the writer's political bent, not actual, objective thought about the benefits of space exploration.
A major poll yesterday said that roughly half of all Democrats thought Bush's proposal was a good thing when asked if they were told it was a "U.S. Goverment" proposal. When the question was changed to say it was Bush's proposal, then the results changed to 2 to 1 against.
Clearly, the country's future and the benefits of the program were not what the responders were thinking about.
So why do we care what they think? Why should their opinions matter when they are being purely emotional?
How is Quicktime part of this discussion? Apple's iTMS is in AAC format. The iPod supports AAC, MP3, Audible, AIFF, and WAV except WMA.
AND btw, AAC *is* an industry standard. It's just not the one Microsoft wants. WMA, on the other hand, is *proprietary*, and is not a "standard" at all. Just like all the other Windows stuff, the like to call it "the standard" simply because it's popular, and because they get away with it. Another example of doublespeak!
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the late '80s, when Novell ruled the world, things were different (and men were MEN dammit!). Anyway, we needed to add a second hard drive. Bought one from our Novell VAR. Stuck it in.
Now, before I go any further, you should know that our Corporate IT folks had not yet acquired a backup tape system. In fact, it had arrived the day before, but had not yet been installed on the network. Also, the old Novell system chose which drive to boot on based on the name of the volume. If the name was "SYSTEM", it was the boot drive.
Well, our VAR had *already* formatted our drive and installed Novell on it. No particular reason, just thinking he would help out.
So, when we started the format, it formatted our old drive. The one with 6 months of development source on it.
It took us 3 months to recover. I thought I should have been fired.
The Moral: When working on a server, step 1 is *always* do a backup.
If you believe in a "supreme being", then good and evil are absolutes. It's only our perceptions that are, as always, relative.
Even within the context of our perceptions, good and evil are established by the beliefs of the society we all live in. Within that definition, what they did was evil. Also within that context, it is exactly "we" who must judge them.
Remember that baby-rapers and all murderers think they are good people, too. There is always a way to justify doing whatever you want to do.
Smart business people realize that IT is an important enabler in their businesses, but IT should never be looked at as a differentiator or strategic advantage in and of itself. IT can be incredibly important, but only inasmuch as it furthers the other goals of the business.
A good example is Walgreen's. They decided, some time ago, that they were going to be the most user-friendly, convenient drug store on the planet. So, they implemented a far-reaching, ground-breaking IT infrastructure that allowed the stores to all share prescription information - way before the Internet was ubiquitous. But, it was only part of their efforts to be really convenient. (Another part was to always be on a corner, but I digress.)
That infrastructure was important to achieving the goal of being a convenient drug store, but the technology itself was not the real differentiator or the goal. The goal was to make it easy to pick up your prescription at whatever store was conenient at the moment.
The problem with the dot-bomb era was that the technology was the goal, not merely the vehicle.
But that's so cool! That's precisely what makes life so much fun (well, except for girlfriends). It would be a really, really boring place if everything was already figured out, all problems solved, nothing to invent, nothing left to do but watch old sitcom re-runs.
This is just plain wrong. There is a big difference between data CD's and audio CD's.
Your statement is essentially correct for data CD's. However, for audio, the parent's statements are correct, you must use a tool like EAC to get an exact copy.
With audio, the drive does all of the error checking and correcting. Uncorrectable, or C2 errors, can not be corrected, and occur on almost every CD. When a C2 error is encountered by the drive, it extrapolates (yes, guesses) the data and provides this data to the PC. You can't hear it (probably), but those errors do accumulate.
Most importantly, those errors, however slight, prevent you from doing a digital compare of the dupe back to the master.
BTW, IAAPD (I Am A Professional Duplicator).
Then *you'll* be the crackpot. Close-mindedness is not a boon, it is a bane to science.
Hence Microsoft.
We burn about 200K CD-R's here per month. We have found, unequivocally, that you can burn data CD-R's at 40x, but the best we can do for audio is 12x. We don't really know why, but we think it has more to do with the error correction capabilities that the data format has. That's the theory, anyway. Of course, we use only the best drives and media.
Some reactors (namely, Boiling Water reactors) run right at the boiling point. They use nucleate boiling at the surface of the fuel rod to break up a laminate layer that tends to insulate the rod from the rest of the water. In other words, the turbulance caused by the boiling increases the heat transfer rate.
I don't know about the rest of his article -- seems ok to me -- but his memories about Bill's "investment" in Apple are rather flawed:
1) Apple did not abandon their Java compliance projects. Today, they are arguably among the best Java development and deployment platforms out there.
2) It is hard to say Apple used the $150M to kill the clones. They had already been killed by the time Steve and Bill got together.
My recollection of the event was that the big thing that Apple got was an endorsement from Microsoft, a notion that Apple wasn't going to die in the next few weeks.
And the dynamic brake, and the 3-phase motor, and the AC distribution system, and many more.
My point was simply that the original poster (I did reply to the wrong one) stated categorically that Macs were made exclusively for the ignorant, and that he was obviously wrong. I responded because this is a stereotype that I'm a bit sick of. Actually, if you watch Mac ads, they don't really talk about being easy to use anymore, do they?
Oh, please, don't be so condescending. I'm a programmer, been one since 1978 (how old are you?) and I've been using Macs since they came out. Even have a Lisa. I'm the IT director at a company where we have about 30 servers, most of them Macs. The ones that aren't are running a variety of *nix, and one Windows Terminal Server. I've written TONS of code for DOS, for heaven's sake, and Windows since 3.1.
Trust me, I am not "proudly ignorant". I use Macs because they're better. Period. I am not genetically defective, either. Jeez.
Firstly, the lemon laws vary state by state. But, in most of them, the law doesn't talk about the number of defects. It talks about the number of times repair is attempted on a single defect without success. If they fix it in (usually) 3 times or less, it's not a lemon.
OK, you and I can agree here. Apple is not "open source", and probably never will be. The "dumbass" poster was out of line. I do think Apple is the most "open source friendly" major corporation out there, with the possible exception of IBM. 8*)
Dude, maybe they could do better, maybe not. Please note that they *have* given cool shit back to the community, like the way Konqueror has significantly benefited from Apple's heavy investment in enhancing their core. Being OS-oriented does not mean everything they do has to be OS.
You gotta remember that they just switched to Linux a little over a year ago, right? At the time, everyone was amazed that Steve would let that happen. Obviously, Linux was a better choice then, and it now is not.
Steve makes most of his money from Pixar. He's not going to risk that!
All of the software companies have similar problems. The big difference is that Microsoft virtually forces you to buy into their program if your company is large at all.
Because of their monopoly, you have to upgrade eventually. If you don't buy into SA, the individual upgrades later will cost you much, much more. So you end up having to gamble and pick between the two choices.
What tidbits hey did have in there about encryption were absolute rubbish. He talks about "rotating plaintext" as the way to prevent a brute force attack. Folks, the "plaintext" is the content of an encrypted message! How can you "rotate" the content?
Plus, you *do* have to know the algorithm to do a brute force attack. Brute force means you "try" all of the possible keys, in order, until you find the right one. How can you do that without knowing the algorithm????
Hated it.
This is bull$hit. I'm so tired of hearing it.
l ug gedin/bal-mac082803,0,1353478.column
r cu its/18POGUE-EMAIL.html?ex=1076216400&en=0e19cf89d7 cd31bc&ei=5070
Here are a couple links you may want to look into if you really want to understand this.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/custom/p
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/18/technology/ci
This kind of logic always just fries my butt: "other smart people drooled on themselves; this guy is smart; therefor he drools". Come on, folks, we're supposed to be *logical*.
Trying to argue that Wolfram is past his peak and his work is useless just because Einstein tried to find a "theory of everything" is obviously wrong. Will you always dismiss out of hand any project undertaken by a brilliant person after his first success, since Poe failed?
Is that stupid, or what?
I think, for the most part, the responses here have been determined by the writer's political bent, not actual, objective thought about the benefits of space exploration.
A major poll yesterday said that roughly half of all Democrats thought Bush's proposal was a good thing when asked if they were told it was a "U.S. Goverment" proposal. When the question was changed to say it was Bush's proposal, then the results changed to 2 to 1 against.
Clearly, the country's future and the benefits of the program were not what the responders were thinking about.
So why do we care what they think? Why should their opinions matter when they are being purely emotional?
How is Quicktime part of this discussion? Apple's iTMS is in AAC format. The iPod supports AAC, MP3, Audible, AIFF, and WAV except WMA.
AND btw, AAC *is* an industry standard. It's just not the one Microsoft wants. WMA, on the other hand, is *proprietary*, and is not a "standard" at all. Just like all the other Windows stuff, the like to call it "the standard" simply because it's popular, and because they get away with it. Another example of doublespeak!
Isn't that Big Brother doublespeak, an obvious oxymoron"?
This is truly the most double-faced marketing spin ever to come out of Redmond, and that's saying a lot. I think it's a sign of desperation!
Doesn't run on Linux. Runs on Mac OS X. This has been clearly stated a number of times.