Does the new CEO of HP look as hot in person as she does in that "garage" commercial?
What I would really like to know is doesn't the new CEO of HP know what Hewlett and Packard made in that garage? (They made oscillators, the HP 300, to be exact, based on Hewlett's Stanford Master's thesis. Neatest little lightbulb trick for the amplitude stabilization, if you're a circuit geek.)
When she talks about "going back to the garage", does that mean that HP is going to start making test and measurement equipment again (which they were very good at), and stop trying to be "Dell Also" (which they suck at)?
That also makes me wonder if they plan to shield against Tempest / Van Eck attacks. Although it would seem that anyone listening "Van Eck"-style would be obvious to the isolated Sealanders. Let's not forget that probably don't have equipment for detecting underwater stuff like subs and ROV's. And Tempest would be easy in the North Sea because the Sealanders are the only RF source around.
High frequency RF has a spectacularly short screening length in sea water. That's why submarines have to surface to communicate, or be stuck with a few bps over ELF radio (and long antennas).
So all they have to do is put the servers below the water line. Problem solved! (This would probably mitigate the EMP susseptibility, too.) --
Damn it. My DSL won't be ready for anotehr four weeks, at least. And the network at the office blocks UDP. God damn, I feel left out!
I read somewhere on the battle.net support forums that the network code in Diablo 2 uses TCP, so maybe that's fixed. (I can't find the reference right now because their search page is broken...) I look forward to trying to play multiple machines over my cable modem, using my Netgear Gateway Router (RT311).
In Diablo, if you and a friend, running over the same connection (using a single IP address and NAT) joined the same game, you couldn't see each other. Other players (on other connections) could see both of you, but it was like you were playing in different games. Monsters I killed didn't die in her game, etc.
I hope this is fixed in Diablo 2. Note to game developers: Many of us run behind NAT! Use TCP or die! --
I hear a lot about how a flywheel can store energy. These are the things that spin around at high speeds right? Moving parts, bearings, grease, and all those things that wear out?
Good flywheel designs use magnetic bearings (no friction losses) and composite flywheels (that turn into hot dust instead of flying shrapnel during mechanical failures). Modern devices boast similar energy-in/energy-out ratios to chemical batteries, and much improved energy-store/physical-volume over chemical batteries.
All we need to get the price down is economy-of-scale. Preorder yours today! --
Reminds me of "Good Omens"
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
Reminds me of one of favorite passages...
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys."
-- a footnote from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in "Good Omens" (Crowley is one of the main characters, and a servant of Hell).
"You keep using that word. I don'ta think it means what you think it means." --- The Princess Bride
I throw things at the television whenever I hear Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer say "freedom to innovate". I shake my monitor when I see it on a web page. I crumple up the paper when I see it in print. I'm sure you do, too.
There is a monopolist that could have argued that case. But it is not Microsoft. AT&T had a monopoly on phone service, and with it, they could charge everyone in the United States a nickel, and fund Bell Labs. Take a look at http://www.bell-labs.com/history/.
Are you a control geek? I am. It blows my mind to think that Black, Nyquist, and Bode all worked together at Bell Labs. Ask the nearest Electrical Engineer if they've ever used Black's Formula, the Nyquist Stability Criterion, the Nyquist Sampling Rate, or a Bode plot.
Ever heard of the transistor? Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain all worked for Bell Labs. Want a humbling experience? Read Shockley's book. By 1950, he had it all figured out: electrons, holes, bolch waves, brillouin zones, etc. *cough* Nobel Physics Prize *cough*.
Ever heard of the Laser? UNIX? C? Personally, I would be willing to put up with a monopoly that is capable of this kind of research.
If there were ever any question as to whether Microsoft was going to play nicely with the other children in the Kerberos schoolyard, we now have our answer. Why am I not surprised?
Clearly, Microsoft has no intention of participating in any open standard process. Someone should develop a cleanroom version of the specification document, so it can be implemented in open source projects.
That's not to say that Microsoft isn't trying really hard to break NetWare... Remember the old good days of "DOS isn't done, until Lotus doesn't run"? It looks like Microsoft has a new manta: "Windows isn't done Until NetWare doesn't run".
One of the really cool features of the Novell NetWare Client for Windows 95 is "Automatic Client Update" (ACU). By just putting
#sys:\public\client\win95\setup.exe/acu
in the appropriate login script, the Novell Client version is checked at login time, and upgraded automagically if necessary.
This trick is especially useful when installing new machines, because it will even upgrade from the Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks. All you have to do in install Windows 95 from CD, and after logging into a NetWare server once, you're automatically running the latest and greatest client from Novell.
However, Microsoft broke this feature in Windows 98. Trying to install Novell Client 3.x from a network drive causes the installation to fail with the errors
"Install could not find the class type for device id NWWSMGR"
"Install could not find the class type for device id NWNDPS"
Copying the install files locally (or using a Novell Clients CD-ROM) works fine, but that is time consuming to do at every workstation. These errors are caused by a bug in the Windows 98 netdi.dll file. See Novell's Technical Infomation Document TID 2946390. Microsoft knows about this problem. They even have a fix for it. You need a specific version of the netdi.dll file (version 4.10.2029, size 317,840 bytes). This hotfix is referenced in Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q190656. But you can't have it. If you want it, you have to call Tech Support, and pay them $150 for an "incident". If you can convince them that all you needed was the hotfix, you might be able to get your money back, but don't count on it...
There is a nice description of the problem of trying to get your money back at Trent University. Also, despite what the above Knowledge Base article says, this problem was not corrected in Windows 98 Second Edition!
Now, according to Infoworld, the next version of Windows, Windows Millennium Edition (ME), won't have any NetWare connectivity built in. Microsoft is going to remove it from the box. That will fix it! You can't use ACU to upgrade Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks, because you can't have Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks at all!
Okay, so I'm back to my conspiracy theories... Windows isn't done until NetWare doesn't run.
We do hold gun makers responsible for accidental deaths: witness the recent outcry for child safety locks on handguns.
We do hold tobacco companies responsible: witness the recent multi-state settlement.
We hold car companies responsible for cars that catch fire, we hold drug companies responsible for Viagra causing heart attacks, we even hold McDonald's responsible for coffee that's too hot.
Now, remind me again why Microsoft isn't responsible for easily-exploitable software? --
Microsoft is right. The ILOVEYOU virus isn't a software issue, it's a user education issue.
Just the same way that accidental gun deaths are a user education issue. And prescription drug overdoses. And smoking-related lung cancer. And traffic accidents. All of these things could be prevented if the user just *weren't* *so* *dumb*.
My pet peeve (right now) is predictive dialing. Their PBX dials a bunch of numbers all at once, and when someone answers, they are patched through to a waiting telemarketer. The problem occurs when there are more answers than telemarketers, so some victims answer the phone to a dead line. A third of my phone calls are dead lines like this, and it ought to be against the law.
(IANAL, but in some readings of the law, it is. There are laws that outlaw war-dialers and harassing phone calls by language like "it is unlawful to dial a phone without the intent to communicate". Shouldn't predictive dialing fall under this?)
Of course, there is the bonus that with predictive dialers, the telemarker doesn't hear your initial "hello". If you ever call my house, and you don't respond to my initial "hello" (or respond with a "hello?" that sounds like "is anyone there?"), expect to be hung up on. --
Hmm. Much though I dislike this tactic in Microsoft, it is probably worth pointing out that Novell, M$'s biggest competitor in the network server market, are doing almost exactly the same thing to their CNEs - "upgrade to a Netware 5 CNE, or lose it"
Not really the same thing at all:
Netware 5 has been out for two years.
To get the upgrade, you only have to pass one (out of a choice of two) tests.
You can take the test as many times at you want.
Besides, Novell still offers NetWare 3 certifications. You are required to take one test about Netware 4, and get the Netware 5 upgrade, but 3/4 of the track-specific tests are on Netware 3.1x! You can't say Novell doesn't stand behind its products.
Note: Netware 4 has been out since 1991 or 1992. That would be like Microsoft offering a Lan Manager certification track. As if. --
Why use TeX when MS Word is so wonderful? Why use gcc when Visual Basic is such a joy?
TeX rocks. If you're a coder, you should be using TeX. Where else can you produce a document with source code? Using reusable include files? Using \def statements and conditional logic (\ifthenelse)? Comments in the source? Plus, nothing (and I mean NOTHING) approaches the beauty of mathematical equations laid out in TeX. Your subscripts, greek letters and limits-of-integration never looked better!
As an added bonus, I have TeX input files that I wrote in 1988 that still compile today. That's older than some/. readers! Word 97 can't even read Word 6.0 files.
When I write a document, I want it to last. TeX is for the ages. --
> OK.... let's reveiw the licensing... > I can buy NT and spend $$ > I can buy Novell on top of NT and spend $$$ >... snip... > I can avoid Novell and save $$$
OK... let's review the downtime...
I can buy Novell and have no downtime (cost: 0). I can but NT and have 10% downtime (cost: $$$$$$$$$$).
Netware is faster but hardly more stable... Maybe recently something changed but before.. hehe, ever tried to run crappy NLMs there? or running short on memory?
Yeah, Netware also sucks when you run it on crappy hardware or without a UPS.
Give me a break! If you're running Netware in low memory configurations, then YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Get another job, because sys admin ain't working for you.
Let me give you a hint: memory == cache == fast. Look, I hate to break it to you, but some of us aren't hobbyists. Some of us need blazing performance and 24/7 reliability. Some of us need a network operating system that can keep up with our 1G RAM, monster RAID, redundant power supplied servers... Netware is it. --
As much as I would like to live on Mars by the end of my lifetime, human exploration is simply too expensive. I think that NASA's New Millennium Program of "faster, cheaper, and lots of 'em" is the most economical way to do exploration.
If NASA wants to drum up popular support, they should involve high school science classes by running a contest for cheap probes. Offer to launch probes for high schools and colleges. Here are the specifications: NASA will provide standard power and telemetry, and a ride into space.
Your team of high school students or college students or drinking buddies has to build everything else: sensors, computer, programming, and some neat bit of random science.
I would love to build a probe using an old 386, an A/D card, some thermocouples and pressure sensors and lob it into Jupiter. Could you imagine how much fun this would be? Imagine how excited your local high school would get to have their probe picked for launch. Imagine the pissing war between the engineering departments of MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.
And some cool science might just happen along the way.
Here's another example...
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 1
My office uses accounting software in Windows that requires entering many numbers from paper (invoices, purchase orders, etc) into a dialog full of entry fields. The staff has gotten pretty adept at entering the numbers quickly using the numeric keypad, but in order to move to the next entry field, they have to either reach across the keyboard and hit the tab key, or they have to fiddle with the mouse and click on the next field.
Needless to say, after an hour of this, their hand, wrist,... hell, their whole arm gets sore. It seems that a very elegant solution to this problem would be to make one of the keys on the numeric keypad (like enter or "+") a tab button.
I tried finding a software solution, but none that I have found work, not even the Kernal Toys package. The weird thing is that while pressing tab moves you to the next field, hitting Ctrl-I or Alt-009 won't. Windows 95 grabs the keyboard scan code for the tab key before it's decoded into ASCII.
Finally, I found ZDKeyMap (whoever said nothing useful every came out of Ziff Davis?). I use it to redefine one of the unused numeric keypad keys (the "plus" key) to be a tab button. Now we can enter a whole dialog full of entry fields without moving an arm. So far, it works in all the software that we use, and we're feeling better.
GUIs are killing good CLI and keyboard shortcuts
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 3
I have Quickcam connected to a machine running Windows that updates a picture on my web site. Which sucks, because it's the only machine I own that doesn't recover gracefully from a reboot. For some reason, there is no way to put the little Quickcam applet into the Startup Folder so that it starts up in Autocapture mode. Everytime the machine reboots, I have to go up to the keyboard and type "Alt-F, down, down, return, return" to get it to start taking pictures. I have sent Connectix technical support a few emails about this, and here is the (rather curt) reply that I finally received:
> Is there a way to put the quickpict applet in the startup folder > so that it starts up automatically in the autocapture mode?
Unfortunately, not at the moment. Thanks.
The menu in the Color QC applet claims that spacebar is the keyboard short cut for "start capturing", but that doesn't even work.
You know, this touches on one of my pet peeves. Say what you want about graphical user interfaces making computers "easier to use", sometimes they make computers less useful. This is a perfect example. Here's a perfectly good program, that these guys spent time on, but they were so wrapped up writing a GUI for Windows that they forgot to make any command line options available. Give me a break! This autocapture function was written for a web server (obviously), yet it explicitly requires user intervention at startup. How smart is that? Shouldn't servers be able to reboot in the background without user intervention?
A friend of mine works for a company that recently bought a specialized piece of scientific software for $50,000. It has a beautiful graphical user interface, but no batch mode. So if they had some 10,000 data files that they wanted to run through it (and they do), they'd have to paid somebody to sit there for a month clicking with the mouse. They're sending it back. Like I said, easier to use, but less useful.
Code would need to be written for so many things besides simply the CPU that, when all is said and done, what you'd have would be a far cry from the Linux we all know and love.
As the article said, this effort isn't really about porting the linux kernel to big iron, it's about porting linux software to big iron.
Want some real performance? Look at how fast Apache and all your perl cgi scripts run on this machine! Imagine serving slashdot off an S/390. Suddenly, IBM has the latest versions of samba, mars_nwe, domino, SAP, gnuplot, and that numerically intensive simulation your poor grad student has been writing. AND LOOK HOW FAST IT RUNS!
IBM will sell some boxes with that sales pitch. I want one in my basement.
From the article:: Vixie described this last feature as "the split-horizon DNS people have wanted for a long time," noting dryly (and to considerable applause) that as for "people like AlterNIC who want us to believe it's possible to have more than one set of root name servers, this will not facilitate their political agenda at all."
What is this feature, and why does Vixie hate AlterNIC? Is the (erstwhile) maintainer of BIND in bed with the money-grubbing, freedom-denying, satan-worshipping domain-name-controlling oligarchy?
Unfortunately, this civil disobedience thing was ill-conceived from the get-go. If we really wanted to jam echelon for a day, we shouldn't have been peppering our email with supposed keywords, we should all have encrypted *everything*.
If you really want to bring the computers at the NSA to a grinding halt, make them spend all their cycles on decrypting your shopping lists, your notes to your girlfriend, and the access logs from your web server.
Imagine, even if we all just used gzip, crypt(*), and uuencode, think of all preprocessing the NSA would have to do before they could scan the email and realize that all it said was "Cheezy poofs, ice cream, ciderjack".
(*) Yes I know that crypt is totally insecure. I'm not looking for security... I'm just looking to waste cycles on some poor schmoe's machine who's going to find httpd.log when he's done "cracking".
Better yet, why don't we all just use GPG, every day of the year?
Slashdot Mirror
a bunch of really smart people at microsoft who could run rings around Knuth academically
Riiiiight. The man who wrote "The Art of Computer Programming" versus the people who brought us the talking paper clip. Suuuuure.
and most importantly, can buy him several times over.
Do you also purchase music using this criterion? And clothing? And food? Wow, you suck.
--
Does the new CEO of HP look as hot in person as she does in that "garage" commercial?
What I would really like to know is doesn't the new CEO of HP know what Hewlett and Packard made in that garage? (They made oscillators, the HP 300, to be exact, based on Hewlett's Stanford Master's thesis. Neatest little lightbulb trick for the amplitude stabilization, if you're a circuit geek.)
When she talks about "going back to the garage", does that mean that HP is going to start making test and measurement equipment again (which they were very good at), and stop trying to be "Dell Also" (which they suck at)?
There goes my karma.
--
That also makes me wonder if they plan to shield against Tempest / Van Eck attacks. Although it would seem that anyone listening "Van Eck"-style would be obvious to the isolated Sealanders. Let's not forget that probably don't have equipment for detecting underwater stuff like subs and ROV's. And Tempest would be easy in the North Sea because the Sealanders are the only RF source around.
High frequency RF has a spectacularly short screening length in sea water. That's why submarines have to surface to communicate, or be stuck with a few bps over ELF radio (and long antennas).
So all they have to do is put the servers below the water line. Problem solved! (This would probably mitigate the EMP susseptibility, too.)
--
I read somewhere on the battle.net support forums that the network code in Diablo 2 uses TCP, so maybe that's fixed. (I can't find the reference right now because their search page is broken...) I look forward to trying to play multiple machines over my cable modem, using my Netgear Gateway Router (RT311).
In Diablo, if you and a friend, running over the same connection (using a single IP address and NAT) joined the same game, you couldn't see each other. Other players (on other connections) could see both of you, but it was like you were playing in different games. Monsters I killed didn't die in her game, etc.
I hope this is fixed in Diablo 2. Note to game developers: Many of us run behind NAT! Use TCP or die!
--
I hear a lot about how a flywheel can store energy. These are the things that spin around at high speeds right? Moving parts, bearings, grease, and all those things that wear out?
Good flywheel designs use magnetic bearings (no friction losses) and composite flywheels (that turn into hot dust instead of flying shrapnel during mechanical failures). Modern devices boast similar energy-in/energy-out ratios to chemical batteries, and much improved energy-store/physical-volume over chemical batteries.
All we need to get the price down is economy-of-scale. Preorder yours today!
--
Reminds me of one of favorite passages...
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if
the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive
advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and
in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened
it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault
or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should
consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the
manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for
as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of
serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had
been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer
industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that
drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached
just saying: "Learn, guys."
-- a footnote from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in "Good Omens"
(Crowley is one of the main characters, and a servant of Hell).
--
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of tape speeding down the highway.
That's one of my favorites, even if I have forgotten who said it...
--
I throw things at the television whenever I hear Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer say "freedom to innovate". I shake my monitor when I see it on a web page. I crumple up the paper when I see it in print. I'm sure you do, too.
There is a monopolist that could have argued that case. But it is not Microsoft. AT&T had a monopoly on phone service, and with it, they could charge everyone in the United States a nickel, and fund Bell Labs. Take a look at http://www.bell-labs.com/history/.
Are you a control geek? I am. It blows my mind to think that Black, Nyquist, and Bode all worked together at Bell Labs. Ask the nearest Electrical Engineer if they've ever used Black's Formula, the Nyquist Stability Criterion, the Nyquist Sampling Rate, or a Bode plot.
Ever heard of the transistor? Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain all worked for Bell Labs. Want a humbling experience? Read Shockley's book. By 1950, he had it all figured out: electrons, holes, bolch waves, brillouin zones, etc. *cough* Nobel Physics Prize *cough*.
Ever heard of the Laser? UNIX? C? Personally, I would be willing to put up with a monopoly that is capable of this kind of research.
Are we supposed to believe that Microsoft is?
--
If there were ever any question as to whether Microsoft was going to play nicely with the other children in the Kerberos schoolyard, we now have our answer. Why am I not surprised?
Clearly, Microsoft has no intention of participating in any open standard process. Someone should develop a cleanroom version of the specification document, so it can be implemented in open source projects.
Embrace: done. Extend: done. Extinguish: underway.
--
One of the really cool features of the Novell NetWare Client for Windows 95 is "Automatic Client Update" (ACU). By just putting
in the appropriate login script, the Novell Client version is checked at login time, and upgraded automagically if necessary.This trick is especially useful when installing new machines, because it will even upgrade from the Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks. All you have to do in install Windows 95 from CD, and after logging into a NetWare server once, you're automatically running the latest and greatest client from Novell.
However, Microsoft broke this feature in Windows 98. Trying to install Novell Client 3.x from a network drive causes the installation to fail with the errors
Copying the install files locally (or using a Novell Clients CD-ROM) works fine, but that is time consuming to do at every workstation. These errors are caused by a bug in the Windows 98 netdi.dll file. See Novell's Technical Infomation Document TID 2946390. Microsoft knows about this problem. They even have a fix for it. You need a specific version of the netdi.dll file (version 4.10.2029, size 317,840 bytes). This hotfix is referenced in Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q190656. But you can't have it. If you want it, you have to call Tech Support, and pay them $150 for an "incident". If you can convince them that all you needed was the hotfix, you might be able to get your money back, but don't count on it...There is a nice description of the problem of trying to get your money back at Trent University. Also, despite what the above Knowledge Base article says, this problem was not corrected in Windows 98 Second Edition!
Now, according to Infoworld, the next version of Windows, Windows Millennium Edition (ME), won't have any NetWare connectivity built in. Microsoft is going to remove it from the box. That will fix it! You can't use ACU to upgrade Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks, because you can't have Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks at all!
Okay, so I'm back to my conspiracy theories... Windows isn't done until NetWare doesn't run.
--
You're missing the sarcasm...
We do hold gun makers responsible for accidental deaths: witness the recent outcry for child safety locks on handguns.
We do hold tobacco companies responsible: witness the recent multi-state settlement.
We hold car companies responsible for cars that catch fire, we hold drug companies responsible for Viagra causing heart attacks, we even hold McDonald's responsible for coffee that's too hot.
Now, remind me again why Microsoft isn't responsible for easily-exploitable software?
--
Microsoft is right. The ILOVEYOU virus isn't a software issue, it's a user education issue.
Just the same way that accidental gun deaths are a user education issue. And prescription drug overdoses. And smoking-related lung cancer. And traffic accidents. All of these things could be prevented if the user just *weren't* *so* *dumb*.
--
My pet peeve (right now) is predictive dialing. Their PBX dials a bunch of numbers all at once, and when someone answers, they are patched through to a waiting telemarketer. The problem occurs when there are more answers than telemarketers, so some victims answer the phone to a dead line. A third of my phone calls are dead lines like this, and it ought to be against the law.
(IANAL, but in some readings of the law, it is. There are laws that outlaw war-dialers and harassing phone calls by language like "it is unlawful to dial a phone without the intent to communicate". Shouldn't predictive dialing fall under this?)
Of course, there is the bonus that with predictive dialers, the telemarker doesn't hear your initial "hello". If you ever call my house, and you don't respond to my initial "hello" (or respond with a "hello?" that sounds like "is anyone there?"), expect to be hung up on.
--
Not really the same thing at all:
Besides, Novell still offers NetWare 3 certifications. You are required to take one test about Netware 4, and get the Netware 5 upgrade, but 3/4 of the track-specific tests are on Netware 3.1x! You can't say Novell doesn't stand behind its products.
Note: Netware 4 has been out since 1991 or 1992. That would be like Microsoft offering a Lan Manager certification track. As if.
--
TeX rocks. If you're a coder, you should be using TeX. Where else can you produce a document with source code? Using reusable include files? Using \def statements and conditional logic (\ifthenelse)? Comments in the source? Plus, nothing (and I mean NOTHING) approaches the beauty of mathematical equations laid out in TeX. Your subscripts, greek letters and limits-of-integration never looked better!
As an added bonus, I have TeX input files that I wrote in 1988 that still compile today. That's older than some /. readers! Word 97 can't even read Word 6.0 files.
When I write a document, I want it to last. TeX is for the ages.
--
> OK.... let's reveiw the licensing... ... snip ...
> I can buy NT and spend $$
> I can buy Novell on top of NT and spend $$$
>
> I can avoid Novell and save $$$
OK... let's review the downtime...
I can buy Novell and have no downtime (cost: 0).
I can but NT and have 10% downtime (cost: $$$$$$$$$$).
Get the picture?
--
Yeah, Netware also sucks when you run it on crappy hardware or without a UPS.
Give me a break! If you're running Netware in low memory configurations, then YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Get another job, because sys admin ain't working for you.
Let me give you a hint: memory == cache == fast. Look, I hate to break it to you, but some of us aren't hobbyists. Some of us need blazing performance and 24/7 reliability. Some of us need a network operating system that can keep up with our 1G RAM, monster RAID, redundant power supplied servers... Netware is it.
--
The government already has a precedent: your diary is not protected by the fifth amendment!
If the government can sieze my diary (remember Bob Packwood?) and then use it against me, then it don't look good for encryption.
If NASA wants to drum up popular support, they should involve high school science classes by running a contest for cheap probes. Offer to launch probes for high schools and colleges. Here are the specifications: NASA will provide standard power and telemetry, and a ride into space.
Your team of high school students or college students or drinking buddies has to build everything else: sensors, computer, programming, and some neat bit of random science.
I would love to build a probe using an old 386, an A/D card, some thermocouples and pressure sensors and lob it into Jupiter. Could you imagine how much fun this would be? Imagine how excited your local high school would get to have their probe picked for launch. Imagine the pissing war between the engineering departments of MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.
And some cool science might just happen along the way.
My office uses accounting software in Windows that requires entering many numbers from paper (invoices, purchase orders, etc) into a dialog full of entry fields. The staff has gotten pretty adept at entering the numbers quickly using the numeric keypad, but in order to move to the next entry field, they have to either reach across the keyboard and hit the tab key, or they have to fiddle with the mouse and click on the next field.
... hell, their whole arm gets sore. It seems that a very elegant solution to this problem would be to make one of the keys on the numeric keypad (like enter or "+") a tab button.
Needless to say, after an hour of this, their hand, wrist,
I tried finding a software solution, but none that I have found work, not even the Kernal Toys package. The weird thing is that while pressing tab moves you to the next field, hitting Ctrl-I or Alt-009 won't. Windows 95 grabs the keyboard scan code for the tab key before it's decoded into ASCII.
Finally, I found ZDKeyMap (whoever said nothing useful every came out of Ziff Davis?). I use it to redefine one of the unused numeric keypad keys (the "plus" key) to be a tab button. Now we can enter a whole dialog full of entry fields without moving an arm. So far, it works in all the software that we use, and we're feeling better.
I have Quickcam connected to a machine running Windows that updates a picture on my web site. Which sucks, because it's the only machine I own that doesn't recover gracefully from a reboot. For some reason, there is no way to put the little Quickcam applet into the Startup Folder so that it starts up in Autocapture mode. Everytime the machine reboots, I have to go up to the keyboard and type "Alt-F, down, down, return, return" to get it to start taking pictures. I have sent Connectix technical support a few emails about this, and here is the (rather curt) reply that I finally received:
> Is there a way to put the quickpict applet in the startup folder
> so that it starts up automatically in the autocapture mode?
Unfortunately, not at the moment. Thanks.
The menu in the Color QC applet claims that spacebar is the keyboard short cut for "start capturing", but that doesn't even work.
You know, this touches on one of my pet peeves. Say what you want about graphical user interfaces making computers "easier to use", sometimes they make computers less useful. This is a perfect example. Here's a perfectly good program, that these guys spent time on, but they were so wrapped up writing a GUI for Windows that they forgot to make any command line options available. Give me a break! This autocapture function was written for a web server (obviously), yet it explicitly requires user intervention at startup. How smart is that? Shouldn't servers be able to reboot in the background without user intervention?
A friend of mine works for a company that recently bought a specialized piece of scientific software for $50,000. It has a beautiful graphical user interface, but no batch mode. So if they had some 10,000 data files that they wanted to run through it (and they do), they'd have to paid somebody to sit there for a month clicking with the mouse. They're sending it back. Like I said, easier to use, but less useful.
As the article said, this effort isn't really about porting the linux kernel to big iron, it's about porting linux software to big iron.
Want some real performance? Look at how fast Apache and all your perl cgi scripts run on this machine! Imagine serving slashdot off an S/390. Suddenly, IBM has the latest versions of samba, mars_nwe, domino, SAP, gnuplot, and that numerically intensive simulation your poor grad student has been writing. AND LOOK HOW FAST IT RUNS!
IBM will sell some boxes with that sales pitch. I want one in my basement.
What is this feature, and why does Vixie hate AlterNIC? Is the (erstwhile) maintainer of BIND in bed with the money-grubbing, freedom-denying, satan-worshipping domain-name-controlling oligarchy?
Blech.
> obviously not all 1024 bit numbers are products of two large primes
Gauss conjuectured that number of primes smaller than an integer x is approximately x/ln x. So that's
2^1024/ln 2^1024 = 2^1014/ln 2 > 2^1014. That's a lotta primes.
But you wanted number of integers that are the products of primes. It's going to be a LOT larger than this number...
Unfortunately, this civil disobedience thing was ill-conceived from the get-go. If we really wanted to jam echelon for a day, we shouldn't have been peppering our email with supposed keywords, we should all have encrypted *everything*.
If you really want to bring the computers at the NSA to a grinding halt, make them spend all their cycles on decrypting your shopping lists, your notes to your girlfriend, and the access logs from your web server.
Imagine, even if we all just used gzip, crypt(*), and uuencode, think of all preprocessing the NSA would have to do before they could scan the email and realize that all it said was "Cheezy poofs, ice cream, ciderjack".
(*) Yes I know that crypt is totally insecure. I'm not looking for security... I'm just looking to waste cycles on some poor schmoe's machine who's going to find httpd.log when he's done "cracking".
Better yet, why don't we all just use GPG, every day of the year?