Hmm, maybe I should try that -- My wife keeps DOS-ing me. (She keeps muttering something about a lost connection due to packet loss. I don't know exactly what she's talking about because I lose interest shortly after logon.
I disagree with your assessment of the Citrix situation.
Yes, the two companies are feuding. In fact, Microsoft is SOOOOOO pissed off at Citrix that they've even hooked up **pay attention, this is great** with a business partner called Netilla which manufactures a LINUX/APACHE BASED WEB SERVER FRONT END APPLIANCE to serve up virtual desktops through your web browser using a JAVA platform client! The bonus is that Netilla actually breaks Microsoft's per-seat licensing model, turning it into a per-user model.
Go back and read that again and just watch you don't burn yourself on the irony there!
However, notwithstanding the soap opera, Citrix is still alive and kicking and the inclusion of terminal services in Windows is a result of the licensing agreements between MSFT and CTX that were hammered out when MetaFrame 1.0 was released. (Another love/hate story - you want drama, go to a Citrix or Netilla sales presentation sometime, The Bachelorette is for sissies.) The virtual desktop code in Win2K and NT4TSE was written by Citrix and licensed to MS so they could have an in-house thin client solution to combat the now-virtually-nonexistant Java thin-applet threat. In fact, the Metaframe Installer on the CD really does little more than activate the disabled features that are already there and remap your server's drive letters if you want. Without Citrix, Windows TS has severely stripped down functionality: TCP/IP only, DOS/Win/Win32 clients only, no load balancing, no ICA protocol support, no server drive letter remapping etc. It basically gives you just enought to do simple Windows platform remote access, but on the other hand, if you use Windows and can live without the other nifty Citrix features, you don't have to pay Citrix to use it.
(Sorry for karma-whoring at PT's expense, but if it makes you feel better, the latest news is that there may be evidence corroborating Pete's story that he was just doing research.)
They've had a pretty good run of it, but the RIAA's days are already numbered, they know it, and like a cougar with it's back to the wall, they are going to hiss, bite and scratch at every ridiculous thing they can to avoid their inevitable extinction. The funny part is that it doesn't matter if file sharing is legal or not, and it doesn't matter if they figure out how to make use of the internet or not because the the job they were chartered to do no longer exists.
It occurs to me after seeing YET ANOTHER abslutely kick-ass song backing a Mitsubishi car commercial on TV last night ("Breathe", by Telepopmusik, I think) that Mitsubishi has done a better job of finding and selling new music to me than ANY of the RIAA labels.
They are arrogant, they have phony-baloney jobs and they are already dead. We are just waiting for them to stop breathing so we can get on with the music.
Plus, if they really wanted to make things easier-to-find for people (like my Mother-In-Law), they'd brew up virtual _temporary_ multi-colored post-it notes (maybe you could write on them? No! Additional complexity introduced by writing is BAD!) that would stay where you stuck them on the sides of the web page. To go back to that page, you click the post-it. Of course, few people can deal with the fact that the computer can have several things open at once, so most users run everything full-screen, which would render the post-its off the screen where you can't see them.
Screw it! We're hosed! Somebody's just going to have to build a single-purpose appliance for web and email for non-tech users! Oh, wait, that failed, too. Nope, we're hosed.
This guy Cockburn sounds like those soft-"science" alarmist wonks that make up a socio-phychological disease so they can get a federal grant and a book deal.
Sure, most people have trouble understanding page histories and navigation, but this guy seems to be willing to go to great lengths to make something that is arguably *too* simple, abundantly complicated. The problem people have isn't with the 'Back' button, but the 'Forward' button, and Cockburn doesn't even realize it.
It looks like they left off a reason why sales are slow: because it's a stupid idea!
How many people really want a personalized email domain that maps directly to your real name, cannot be changed and therefore says "HEY, SPAMMERS, I'M OVER HERE AND I DON'T GET ENOUGH CRAP IN MY EMAIL!!!!!"
I don't know what bothers me more - that they thought it was a good idea to begin with or that they think it just isn't being marketed well enough.
BTW, I *fully* expect that before they cash out and go home, we'll hear that they tried to market their customer database to spammers, not realizing that a 1 line perl script could generate a list of valid addresses of the form 'john@smith.name'.
This is just as lame, but there really isn't anywhere else to put it, but I was wandering through a Software Etc. in Toledo about 10 years ago when I ran across a "Macintosh For Dummies" book. Damn thing was about an inch thick, too.
I'm a longtime Mac user who was envious of IDE HD drives for years, then Apple abruptly switched. IRC there are certainly advantage to a SCSI HD, but omitting the on-drive controller saves $$$.
IDE has an on-drive controller just like SCSI - that's why they called it IDE in the first place: Integrated Drive Electronics. Before IDE/ATA, you had to run a separate controller card in an ISA slot that kept track of the allocation of physical (not logical) sectors on the disks and positioned the read/write heads manually. Anyone remember SpinWrite? Norton's Disk Optimizer? LOW LEVEL FORMATS? **shudder**
SCSI implements a much more sophisticated set of command, signaling and contention protocols than IDE, but they both feature a controller integrated into the drive.
Like, up to 14 I think? Oof. It looks like they hid the ATA/RAID muckety-muck behind (what amounts to) a dedicated-PC-in-a-cabinet like the folks at perifitech do it, so the server doesn't need to know anything about the nature or configuration of the arrays beyond the fiber-channel adapter driver.
This leads me to some questions:
1) Is this a STANDARD fiber-channel SCSI adapter?
2) If so, is there any chance of using this cabinet on an x86 server?
More justification why "The Phone Company" is at the top of my poop list.... If I ever lose my marbles and go Fight-Club-Tyler-Durden loonie, the phone companies are easily the first on my list of things to be eliminated. They go before the credit card companies, before the RIAA, before the SPAMMERS!
They peddle more (in volume AND quality) self-intoxicating raw sewage in the name of justifying their back-assed ridiculous business practices than all the other annoying people in the world combined. Anybody that's ever tried to decipher a phone bill knows what I'm talking about - FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! HAVE YOU SEEN TODAY'S DITHERATI?!?!
~~shudder~~
*DING*
Oh, time for my little blue pill again...
...(whew!).... [drool]......
Anyway, the only reason we have to put up with these bastards is because we can't live without their stupid service and running new cables to every address in America would be prohibitively expensive. Just brainstorming here, but let's say wireless networking doesn't pan out as a alternative to replace copper and/or fiber for last-mile cable across-the-board. What would happen if congress authorized the FCC (eminent domain in the public interest) to forcibly take control of the copper from the phone companies? They do it with dirt where I live when they say, "We need to expand the airport next to your home. Here's fair market value for your house, now go away."
Sure, I got my doubts, (for one you have to assume the government can maintain that infrastructure better than the private sector) but at least the local telcos' exclusive position of control would be eliminated.
Them's a lot of hassles. Me? I'm pulling for wireless.
Does it bother anyone else that the linked page on Opera's site which explains the problem looks horrible? It features a difficult-to-print color scheme, oversized fonts and tables that are way, way wider than the accompanying text?
I just thought that was kind of ironic for a page about how MSN is feeding their browser bogus style sheets, that's all.
Everyone (even the terminally ignorant) needs alternative boot devices beyond their WinXP system restore CD (if you *GET* one - BAD IBM!!![1]). Can you *boot* from a USB pen drive? Do you expect home users to make their own bootable CDs? How are they supposed to do that without a floppy image to use? Do CDRWs (especially packet formatted disks) still have problems reading in some CDROM drives or have they fixed that 'needs a special driver' problem?
Not that I'm against this - I recently had this argument with myself over a new PC I'm building for my wife and the no-floppy argument won, but I live with her so I can fix anything that'll come up. I just think there are issues that need to be addressed before floppies can be eliminated entirely.
[1] I recently bought a couple of IBM PCs for a couple of the users in my office. Nice boxes - HEAVY steel snap-tite cases with good hardware. They also have a very small factory-pre-installed-crap coefficient which made deployment easy. HOWEVER, it included no WinXP Pro install or system restore CDs. In short, no way to recover the PC if the hard drive dies because the setup files are on a special partition on the hard drive. I called IBM and unleashed the fury until they sent a set of recovery CDs to me, but sheesh - what's the world coming to! They said it was because MS made such practices a requirement of their OEM agreement. BTW, even more OT, but MS *really* *could* just make Linux a non-issue and maintain their market-dominating position if they would just STOP BEING EVIL! What is it about power that makes people greedy! Criminy, it's stuff like *THIS* that makes me seriously want to consider at Linux/StarOffice/LAMP as an alternative to MS, not the open-sourcedness of the alternative platforms. (Linux fanboys can take a hike - I'm not trolling, dorks. I love Linux and run a Woody box at home, it just can't the software we need at the office because our vendors are Windows-exclusive, but don't get me started on **THAT** again.) You know, this is the longest footnote I've ever typed in my life - in fact, you should get a free steak if you're still reading this, but I don't have the money right now. Try back later when my tax refund comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, maybe I should try that -- My wife keeps DOS-ing me. (She keeps muttering something about a lost connection due to packet loss. I don't know exactly what she's talking about because I lose interest shortly after logon.
Yeah, but now that they've got the simulator running, there is no need to **actually** **build** the hardware machine.
I disagree with your assessment of the Citrix situation.
Yes, the two companies are feuding. In fact, Microsoft is SOOOOOO pissed off at Citrix that they've even hooked up **pay attention, this is great** with a business partner called Netilla which manufactures a LINUX/APACHE BASED WEB SERVER FRONT END APPLIANCE to serve up virtual desktops through your web browser using a JAVA platform client! The bonus is that Netilla actually breaks Microsoft's per-seat licensing model, turning it into a per-user model.
Go back and read that again and just watch you don't burn yourself on the irony there!
However, notwithstanding the soap opera, Citrix is still alive and kicking and the inclusion of terminal services in Windows is a result of the licensing agreements between MSFT and CTX that were hammered out when MetaFrame 1.0 was released. (Another love/hate story - you want drama, go to a Citrix or Netilla sales presentation sometime, The Bachelorette is for sissies.) The virtual desktop code in Win2K and NT4TSE was written by Citrix and licensed to MS so they could have an in-house thin client solution to combat the now-virtually-nonexistant Java thin-applet threat. In fact, the Metaframe Installer on the CD really does little more than activate the disabled features that are already there and remap your server's drive letters if you want. Without Citrix, Windows TS has severely stripped down functionality: TCP/IP only, DOS/Win/Win32 clients only, no load balancing, no ICA protocol support, no server drive letter remapping etc. It basically gives you just enought to do simple Windows platform remote access, but on the other hand, if you use Windows and can live without the other nifty Citrix features, you don't have to pay Citrix to use it.
Coincidence?
(Sorry for karma-whoring at PT's expense, but if it makes you feel better, the latest news is that there may be evidence corroborating Pete's story that he was just doing research.)
Ob-OT-Trivia: Columbus, OH is also the setting for the 1980's US TV sitcom "Family Ties".
They've had a pretty good run of it, but the RIAA's days are already numbered, they know it, and like a cougar with it's back to the wall, they are going to hiss, bite and scratch at every ridiculous thing they can to avoid their inevitable extinction. The funny part is that it doesn't matter if file sharing is legal or not, and it doesn't matter if they figure out how to make use of the internet or not because the the job they were chartered to do no longer exists.
It occurs to me after seeing YET ANOTHER abslutely kick-ass song backing a Mitsubishi car commercial on TV last night ("Breathe", by Telepopmusik, I think) that Mitsubishi has done a better job of finding and selling new music to me than ANY of the RIAA labels.
They are arrogant, they have phony-baloney jobs and they are already dead. We are just waiting for them to stop breathing so we can get on with the music.
Plus, if they really wanted to make things easier-to-find for people (like my Mother-In-Law), they'd brew up virtual _temporary_ multi-colored post-it notes (maybe you could write on them? No! Additional complexity introduced by writing is BAD!) that would stay where you stuck them on the sides of the web page. To go back to that page, you click the post-it. Of course, few people can deal with the fact that the computer can have several things open at once, so most users run everything full-screen, which would render the post-its off the screen where you can't see them.
Screw it! We're hosed! Somebody's just going to have to build a single-purpose appliance for web and email for non-tech users! Oh, wait, that failed, too. Nope, we're hosed.
Put another way, the right to free speech is not a right to be heard.
This guy Cockburn sounds like those soft-"science" alarmist wonks that make up a socio-phychological disease so they can get a federal grant and a book deal.
Sure, most people have trouble understanding page histories and navigation, but this guy seems to be willing to go to great lengths to make something that is arguably *too* simple, abundantly complicated. The problem people have isn't with the 'Back' button, but the 'Forward' button, and Cockburn doesn't even realize it.
The law wasn't overturned, a preliminary injuction was granted suspending the law while the case is pending.
RTFA!
It looks like they left off a reason why sales are slow: because it's a stupid idea!
How many people really want a personalized email domain that maps directly to your real name, cannot be changed and therefore says "HEY, SPAMMERS, I'M OVER HERE AND I DON'T GET ENOUGH CRAP IN MY EMAIL!!!!!"
I don't know what bothers me more - that they thought it was a good idea to begin with or that they think it just isn't being marketed well enough.
BTW, I *fully* expect that before they cash out and go home, we'll hear that they tried to market their customer database to spammers, not realizing that a 1 line perl script could generate a list of valid addresses of the form 'john@smith.name'.
What a bunch of maroons!
Dude, I'm not sure who she is, but is there a reason why her web page has a Slashdot banner on her links page?
This is just as lame, but there really isn't anywhere else to put it, but I was wandering through a Software Etc. in Toledo about 10 years ago when I ran across a "Macintosh For Dummies" book. Damn thing was about an inch thick, too.
I'm a longtime Mac user who was envious of IDE HD drives for years, then Apple abruptly switched. IRC there are certainly advantage to a SCSI HD, but omitting the on-drive controller saves $$$.
IDE has an on-drive controller just like SCSI - that's why they called it IDE in the first place: Integrated Drive Electronics. Before IDE/ATA, you had to run a separate controller card in an ISA slot that kept track of the allocation of physical (not logical) sectors on the disks and positioned the read/write heads manually. Anyone remember SpinWrite? Norton's Disk Optimizer? LOW LEVEL FORMATS? **shudder**
SCSI implements a much more sophisticated set of command, signaling and contention protocols than IDE, but they both feature a controller integrated into the drive.
Like, up to 14 I think? Oof. It looks like they hid the ATA/RAID muckety-muck behind (what amounts to) a dedicated-PC-in-a-cabinet like the folks at perifitech do it, so the server doesn't need to know anything about the nature or configuration of the arrays beyond the fiber-channel adapter driver.
This leads me to some questions:
1) Is this a STANDARD fiber-channel SCSI adapter?
2) If so, is there any chance of using this cabinet on an x86 server?
More justification why "The Phone Company" is at the top of my poop list.... If I ever lose my marbles and go Fight-Club-Tyler-Durden loonie, the phone companies are easily the first on my list of things to be eliminated. They go before the credit card companies, before the RIAA, before the SPAMMERS!
They peddle more (in volume AND quality) self-intoxicating raw sewage in the name of justifying their back-assed ridiculous business practices than all the other annoying people in the world combined. Anybody that's ever tried to decipher a phone bill knows what I'm talking about - FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! HAVE YOU SEEN TODAY'S DITHERATI?!?!
~~shudder~~
*DING*
Oh, time for my little blue pill again...
Anyway, the only reason we have to put up with these bastards is because we can't live without their stupid service and running new cables to every address in America would be prohibitively expensive. Just brainstorming here, but let's say wireless networking doesn't pan out as a alternative to replace copper and/or fiber for last-mile cable across-the-board. What would happen if congress authorized the FCC (eminent domain in the public interest) to forcibly take control of the copper from the phone companies? They do it with dirt where I live when they say, "We need to expand the airport next to your home. Here's fair market value for your house, now go away."
Sure, I got my doubts, (for one you have to assume the government can maintain that infrastructure better than the private sector) but at least the local telcos' exclusive position of control would be eliminated.
Them's a lot of hassles. Me? I'm pulling for wireless.
Well, then, maybe I can fix it with a local style sheet!
Does it bother anyone else that the linked page on Opera's site which explains the problem looks horrible? It features a difficult-to-print color scheme, oversized fonts and tables that are way, way wider than the accompanying text?
I just thought that was kind of ironic for a page about how MSN is feeding their browser bogus style sheets, that's all.
Criminy, what good is AIM if you block images and file transfers?
The question is how much more black could it be? The answer is none... none... more black.
Everyone (even the terminally ignorant) needs alternative boot devices beyond their WinXP system restore CD (if you *GET* one - BAD IBM!!![1]). Can you *boot* from a USB pen drive? Do you expect home users to make their own bootable CDs? How are they supposed to do that without a floppy image to use? Do CDRWs (especially packet formatted disks) still have problems reading in some CDROM drives or have they fixed that 'needs a special driver' problem?
Not that I'm against this - I recently had this argument with myself over a new PC I'm building for my wife and the no-floppy argument won, but I live with her so I can fix anything that'll come up. I just think there are issues that need to be addressed before floppies can be eliminated entirely.
[1] I recently bought a couple of IBM PCs for a couple of the users in my office. Nice boxes - HEAVY steel snap-tite cases with good hardware. They also have a very small factory-pre-installed-crap coefficient which made deployment easy. HOWEVER, it included no WinXP Pro install or system restore CDs. In short, no way to recover the PC if the hard drive dies because the setup files are on a special partition on the hard drive. I called IBM and unleashed the fury until they sent a set of recovery CDs to me, but sheesh - what's the world coming to! They said it was because MS made such practices a requirement of their OEM agreement. BTW, even more OT, but MS *really* *could* just make Linux a non-issue and maintain their market-dominating position if they would just STOP BEING EVIL! What is it about power that makes people greedy! Criminy, it's stuff like *THIS* that makes me seriously want to consider at Linux/StarOffice/LAMP as an alternative to MS, not the open-sourcedness of the alternative platforms. (Linux fanboys can take a hike - I'm not trolling, dorks. I love Linux and run a Woody box at home, it just can't the software we need at the office because our vendors are Windows-exclusive, but don't get me started on **THAT** again.) You know, this is the longest footnote I've ever typed in my life - in fact, you should get a free steak if you're still reading this, but I don't have the money right now. Try back later when my tax refund comes in.
Wow.
And I thought QFD was evil.
*shudder*
Slashdot > Fark
Criminy, they post several HR/SB links a week and the site stays up.
What I want is an orange suit that dispenses morphine whenever I take damage and lets me run around with a broken leg.
"Whaddaya mean you stapled yourself 127 times?!"
Yeah - what's up with all of the confusion between 'Loose' and 'Lose'?! It's not that freakin' hard!
I was beginning to think I was alone, like maybe it was a European thing. (See 'Aluminium'.)