Actually, the US solution is probably smarter - just as with Mao's "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom" - if you don't block your wackos, but merely let them think they're not being monitored, they'll continue to be wackos.
You then accumulate reams of data on your subversives and lock 'em (and their friends) up, or infiltrate their networks with agents provocateur, or whatever you like. Carnivore with a hard drive (60G) instead of a ZIP disk (120M) would make this pretty easy.
You Euro folks don't get snooty - on the other side of the pond, you just wade through the petabytes of stuff the Brits are collecting from their ISPs.
China's doing it the old - and dumb - way. The problem with filters is that they don't tell you who's "loyal but curious about what those damn Falun Gong subversives are up to" and who the real activists are. Data collection, mining, and profiling does.
The Western equivalent would be "give [your enemy] enough rope to hang himself".
>I used to use Tactical Neural Implant, which is the title of a phenomenal Front Line Assembly
album. [but got tired of it being shortened to Tac or TNI, so I switched...]
And on another "tack" - I leeched my nick shamessly from Gary Clail's "Tackhead Sound System".
For those who haven't heard of Tackhead, they were a late-80s industrial group - their musical style is almost
impossible to describe - imagine a really weird blend of heavy bass and dub-like riffs, heavily
processed, and then overlaid with multiple layers of samples from military/religious/political figures.
Probably responsible for the start of the whole "sampling music" genre.
Their influence as individuals was far greater than their influence as a band per se - the names of the
four main members (Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald, Adrian Sherwood, and Doug Wimbish) seem to crop up just
about everywhere in music from about 1980 through 1990 in a range of styles from old-school rap (e.g.
Grandmaster Flash), to funk/dub (George Clinton), to jazz (BB King, Miles Davis), to
pop/retro/industrial (Annie Lennox, Depeche Mode, NIN).
The mix of solid beats and heavy sampling, plus some seriously geeky artwork served as inspiration for many a late-night assembly-coding run.
I recently paid a bit of homage by doing the obligatory boot logo thing and "rebranded" my hacked I-Opener in the same vein. After all - what would be a more appropriate name than "Tackhead Sound System" for a project that involves hacking a 6.4G MP3 boombox out of spare parts?
(As long as I don't have to power up my I-Opener at an airport. My boot logo might be a little more imposing than it should be;-)
Recommended tracks: Mind at the End of the Tether, and What's My Mission Now?. Y'all know where to find MP3s.
Finally, if you liked those two tracks, the "Power, Inc." series (3 CDs released in the late '90s) is highly recommended. (Feel free to buy the original CDs - I believe Keith LeBlanc released these on his own label, so he might be getting more than the usual $1/CD when you buy 'em.;-)
"There really isn't much value in free," [said the MSFT flack]
Funny, I think "free and it runs pretty well on an old PII-450" is pretty good value compared with the costs of four Athlon-class servers and four Win2000 server licenses, a MSexChange license, and another $500 per user for Orifice, $200 per user for the OS, when all I need to do is give my developers to send email to each other.
But let's take a closer look at his points:
"Static growth rate" -- umm, first off, measured by what, and second of all, while that may matter to RHAT and LNUX shareholders, it doesn't change the value equation at the CTO level.
"lessening mainstream interest [in Linux]" -- if the end user only needs email and they do it in Nutscrape 4.71, what do they care about what OS they run? Is there mainstream interest in Win2K or Win98 as compared to the enormous hype (sorry, "mainstream interest") there was in Win95? Again, sounds like he's more interested in the lack of hype resulting in a more realistic valuation of the stock price of Linux companies, not technology.
"a drop in Linux-based companies stock value" -- again, very important if you're an investor in one of the Linux-based companies. All that means is that it's hard to make money selling something that's free. Bad if you're a shareholder in an overvalued "it had 'Linux' in its name!" company. But utterly irrelevant if you're making a technology decision.
Think about the pointiest-haired boss you ever worked for.
Now imagine him as CTO of your favorite bank or brokerage, and running into a board meeting, hollering "Oh my God! SUNW and ORCL are down more than MSFT from their 1999 dot-com-hype highs! Throw out that obsolete Sun E10K server running Oracle and get me a farm of Quad-Xeons, we need.NET, M$Exchange and M$Access!"
OK, maybe there are some PHBs dumb enough to base technology decisions on today's stock quotes, but not many. Evolution in action, and all that.
>a NET app checks the.NET server it belongs to (either over the web or intranet) to check
for updates, if the connection is dead, then it relies on the previously downloaded components until
the connection is restored.
Fair enough. But I still Don't Get Why This Is Useful.
When it's done over the web, all it means is that my software's continually phoning home and updating itself. This rubs me the wrong way; if it ain't broke, maybe I'd prefer not to upgrade. And if it's mission-critical, I definitely don't want to upgrade until such time as it's no longer mission critical. (e.g. "Hey! Let's compile the life-support modulee we're releasing tomorrow with the new version of gcc we downloaded today!")
And if it's over the intranet, I don't see much value at all. (Short of having to buy more servers running NT to act as.NET servers, which is presumably the value to Bill;-) Where's the payoff of "upgrade everyone's word processor from a.NET server on the intranet" versus "upgrade everyone's word processor by sticking a CD-ROM in a server accessible through the intranet"?
I'm probably missing something here; but the whole thing smells fishy. The one thing that's been consistent about "Zero Administration" (for any platform) is that... it ain't.
>1. Wait for a clear line of site to earth > 2. Point ore towards the center of the earth. > 3. Give it a decent push. > 4. Let gravity take over.
Actually, that's exactly what happened! The Sudbury nickel deposit is the result of an impact; the whole basin is an impact crater.
(So technically, we now have robots mining the asteroid belt! Woo-hoo!;)
Re:DoD needs WebStats for Recruiting !
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 2
>My guess is the US Armed Services are falling short of their recruiting targets and need to lure more
unsuspecting youth to their unusual lifestyle.
That's the most likely hypothesis. (Our.mil doesn't want dossiers on every grade-school kids, that's the FBI's job;-)
Sadly, IMNSHO, it's not gonna solve the problem. The DoD's problem isn't recruiting new folks, it's retaining the people it already has.
Doubly sadly, no amount of advertising can solve that problem.
Of course, in an ironic note, some of the.mil advertising campaigns brought it on themselves - you know the ones, "Join the Army and get $25000 towards your college education, then quit after a year or two and take your skills elsewhere!"
>Or maybe it's all some nefarious back-room big-govt/police conspiracy:)
Hey, on Slashdot, it's always a back-room big-govt/police conspiracy;-)
> These 'birds' are impervious to
any weapon currently deployed.
And God willing, they'll stay that way.
> What is more valuable, 50,000 soldiers standing in the
wrong place or 5,000 soldiers who know exactly where the targets are, thanks to the 'eye in the sky'?
Amen, with only one addition...
...when you have 5,000 soldiers with an "eye in the sky", every place is the "wrong place" for the opposing side's 50,000;-)
> [ the simulation models are based on lots of guesswork, but have value because they ] can help guide current weapons development to lead us away from
situations that are expensive and unfruitful.
Amen.
Many/.ers would be the first to recognize that a $1M/year web server doing the work of 10 $20K/year customer service reps is a good investment. Yes, it costs five times as much in the first year - but it scales to handle larger capacity, and frees up those 10 people to do more useful work elsewhere in the economy.
Any/.er who recognizes the impact of the web to bring a "big presence" to a small business, yet considers the US' current emphasis on the use of technology as a force multiplier to be "a waste of money", should rethink their assumptions.
If a Tomahawk costs $1M, the fact that conventional bombs "could have gotten the job done for $10K per target, even if it takes two or three tries" is irrelevant if the target is right.
Were I a commander, I'd gladly pay $50M for a barrage of Tomahawks to waste the enemy's SAM sites and airbases in the first hour of a campaign. The Tomahawks are cheap - and after I launch 'em, my expensive pilots and aircraft are then free to concentrate on blowing up the enemy's now-defenceless tanks sitting on the ground with neither SAM nor air cover.
Finally - and this is both important from a "PR" view and a morale view - as a result of my up-front investment in $50M worth of hardware greatly increases the odds that my pilots and my ground troops get to come home when the war's over.
I can easily buy $50M worth of cruise missiles when the war ends. But I can't buy replacements for my trained troops without years of training. And I can't buy increased morale for any price.
>the whole point
of war is _not_ to blow up your enemies' toys, but to kill the opposing legion's fighters.
And since US doctrine (since the Gulf War and on to the present) appears to be based on the use of technology as a force multiplier, the way to kill lots of Americans is to blow up their toys in the sky.
When your mobile artillery piece relies on one technology to pick up the flashes of fire from your opponent's gun, and GPS to say "I know I'm here. I know the enemy's gun is there. If I point my gun in this direction and fire now, the enemy's gun goes bye-bye before he gets a second shot at me", you can win the war with a fraction of the manpower (and firepower) you used to need.
But you only get to win if your opponent can't blind your spysat/UAV, or your GPS satellite.
Once your space network goes down, you're as blind as a bat, and outgunned two-to-one.
Control of space is vital to warfighting today. Ask any Iraqi artilleryman... if any survived.
>I use Yahoo quite routinely [for mail.yahoo.com and briefcase.yahoo.com]
Sorry, I should have clarified - If the Yahoo search engine (which isn't really a search engine, just a directory of links that have been categorized by humans) gets turned into a portal-like "all content comes from us" thing, then it [meaning the search engine part] dies.
The only reason people visit Yahoo is because it contains useful links.
If it becomes a "portal", like AltaVista, msn.com, or any of the other "front page" sites, people will stop visiting it, and it will cease to be valuable to those who visit it.
That's not to say YHOO won't be bought out. Merely to say that if YHOO is bought out by some generic media conglomerate, the conglomerate has two choices:
Leave it as-is, and own its revenue stream, or
Turn it into a "walled garden", and receive a negative return on their investment as it's abandoned.
Portals are dead. A YHOO buyer who doesn't realize this will just be wasting his shareholders' money.
>In fact, Java apps are often very small, just the JVM is huge.
Y'know, this sounds a lot like Visual Basic. I remember lots of "cute little programs" people had hacked together, and you could either download the.EXE for the program (usually 100-200K), but you had to have the right.DLL installed. If you didn't, you downloaded the whole enchilada, which was 1-2M.)
VB: Small app relying on huge-azz.DLL
Java: Small app(let) relying on huge-azz JVM .NET: Small app relying on huge-azz M$ install
So yeah, Yamla's onto something - all this crap about "let's serve really small things over the wire" is just that; crap - because in order to do something useful (like draw pretty pictures on your screen after it's chewed on the data), you still need a big pile of code somewhere to interact with the OS.
As for the.NET world, MSFT's recent DNS failure should have clued in every IT manager on the planet that relying on a third party's availability is nothing short of suicidal for mission-critical applications.
Code you rely on must reside on machines you own. And if that code is client-server, you have to own not just the client and server, but the pipe that connects the two.
My use of the dated (i.e. non-buzzword-compliant) "client-server" terminology is intentional. The fundamental archictectural flaw of Java (and.NET) would have been obvious to anyone in 1992. It's depressing to see that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
The web's a great thing, but when I can't route packets to Slashdot, it's only an annoyance. But how many of you would rely on Hotmail/Yahoo for your job-related mail?
>That Cingular ad was ludicrous, bordering on offensive. It really sickened me to see them
take what was a very cool and eye-opening short and parlay it into a sales-pitch for fucking cellular phones.
As the most politically-incorrect person I know...
As the guy who said "Whoa, cool!" at the Christopher Reeves ad - while other PC types were saying it exploited the disabled.
Even I found the Cingular ad disappointing. Excellent Public Service Announcement. Would have fit in great with the Accenture "Now it gets interesting" theme and gotten a "wow, cool!" from me.
His self-expression through his art, overcoming his motor dysfunction, was damn cool.
But to go the extra leap and say that he could overcome his speech impediment and "express himself" over a Cingular cellphone was an insult - not so much to the audience - but to the guy and his art.
The disability had nothing to do with it - imagine Picasso/Beethoven coming on TV and saying that a cellphone was just as useful a tool for self-expression as a paintbrush/orchestra. Puh-leeze.
(My vote for the winner: The sock puppet. "Invest Wisely" - E*Trade and discount brokers having been a big part of the message last year that "if you get an account with us, you don't need good research assistance, any average Joe can make $BIGNUM in the markets!". Oh, the irony!)
Until Qwest disconnects Alan Ralsky and his spam front Telodigm) (you know, those spams you've been getting from spewspew.net dialups pumping www.gatheredsales.net, www.linkusnow.net and now www.speedquality.org), I don't have any fucking interest in how Qwest runs things.
Because the evidence about how Qwest runs things is in my inbox every goddamn morning.
Fuck Qwest.
And for those reading in nanae, until MAPS gets off its ass and RBLs the whole goddamn 216.144.192.0-216.144.223.255 Qwest/Telodigm netspace, hey, fuck MAPS too.
>How do you compensate someone who is totally lost to their
family because they're stuck in the office 7 days a week?
You tell his wife and kids to make up her mind whether she
wants him or the fancy goddamn appliances,
because she can't have both.
Or she tells him to make up his
mind whether he wants her or the fancy goddamn
stock options because he can't have both.
Two jobs ago, I was in a Saturday morning meeting when my sysadmin
got the latter call on his cellphone. He chose the wife.
Regrettably, the company went titsup.com and he ended up
losing both.
If you can't take the heat, stay outa the kitchen.
If you've got a family and mortgage, it's incumbent upon you to
choose your employers and manage your finances more wisely.
> I watched a supermarket go union. The promoters came in,
and over a year and a bit, took a place where everyone *liked*
the boss, [... to a place where ] everyone just bitches about
their 'contract' instead of liking going to work every day
Anyone interested in unionization or revolt against their
capitalist masters should read George Orwell's "Animal Farm".
Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but
your chains.
What the union organizers won't tell you is that you're only
trading your chains for their chains.
>What happens when your "skills" are commonplace and the job market is no longer tight?
You were either smart enough to acquire new skills for which the job market is tight while your old skills were current, or you lose your job.
Or you pay a bunch of thugs a few percent of your paycheck every month to preserve your job, even though you're obsolete, and your job can be more efficiently performed by someone (or something!) else.
I prefer to live in the former reality, not the latter. Therefore, I will oppoze unionization in my industry and my company, and I will not work in a union shop.
My company is run by managers smart enough to realize that the way to succeed is to make the employees sufficiently happy that they'll never want to unionize.
If your company's so bad that you want to unionize, it's a symptom of a problem with management. A union is a brute-force solution - beat the crap out of management until they grudgingly give you a few pennies back; with luck, it'll be more than the union thugs take. The better solution is to enclue management until they take the right steps to fix the underlying problem of employee dissatisfaction.
Any manager who refuses such encluement can easily be dealt with by leaving such a company.
Isn't it ironic - the Marxist fantasy of how the "workers shall own the means of production" is the reality in the tech world, by definition.
If you're a leftist tech worker, re-read your Marx. You don't need the class warfare, (of which a Union is part) because you're already living in utopia.
> [ Tech shops need unions ] for the sake of the clients/customers who put up with bad products as the result of bad management.
You obviously haven't seen the quality of service from your local (unionized) DMV lately, have you?
Or attended a trade show and waited four hours for people who walk at a snail's pace and take routes around booth spaces reminiscent of a Family Circus cartoon in order to get your packing materials back for your booth.
Unions exist to protect union members, not customers.
>The main reason that Unix youngers will just
plain not use ksh, is lack of arrow key support. But no *real* Unix user would think of using
arrow keys.
You just described my "first time" with/bin/ksh, having been raised on/bin/csh and/bin/tcsh in 1990-1992.
As soon as I was shown "set -o vi", I never looked back. If you know how to use vi (or emacs - you can "set -o emacs"), you'll never use the arrow keys again in any shell.
(Actually, in all seriousness - I really like that "Csh considered harmful" - and the Korn shell rocks. I grew up on SunOS 4.x and csh/tcsh (with Bourne shell for scripting) and was led to ksh by a clued manager in my first job after graduation who said "Hey, check this out, they even say Sun might make this the standard shell someday instead of that C shell".
Been addicted to it ever since. First thing I do is make/bin/ksh my default shell. If it ain't there, I put it there.
> NEVER leave anything personal in your locker. I ran away once
and they raided the thing for clues.
Nice thing about people like that is... it doesn't matter how many clues are in your locker. They couldn't get a clue if it was clue mating season and they were in a field of clues covered in clue pheromone.
>Keep stuff like that under lock and key. In your room, and hidden.
Keep the happy poetry, the stuff you copied out of birthday cards, in your locker. Keep more of the same hidden in your room under lock and key.
Keep your poetry on multiple redundant floppies or in emails "in your inbox" on a Hotmail account, encrypted with PGP.
>The brain drain is the inevitable result of such a fascist system, and is instrumental in bringing about its
eventual downfall. Causing the exodus of your best and brightest has its costs, and such a system pays for
its stupidity.
Amen, brother.
Hitler is burning in hell right now.
He could have lived to a ripe old age - and acquired the title of Global Emperor by means of owning the first operational nuclear weapon - had he spent a little more time paying attention to "Jew science".
Somewhere in heaven, Albert Einstein, "Jew scientist" is playing dice with God - but I think he's OK with the way things turned out - even if God had to show him a thing or two about dice.
Rule #1 for all wannabe-evil-emperors: NEVER piss off your geniuses. They're either your weapons enginners or your enemy's. Your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
You then accumulate reams of data on your subversives and lock 'em (and their friends) up, or infiltrate their networks with agents provocateur, or whatever you like. Carnivore with a hard drive (60G) instead of a ZIP disk (120M) would make this pretty easy.
You Euro folks don't get snooty - on the other side of the pond, you just wade through the petabytes of stuff the Brits are collecting from their ISPs.
China's doing it the old - and dumb - way. The problem with filters is that they don't tell you who's "loyal but curious about what those damn Falun Gong subversives are up to" and who the real activists are. Data collection, mining, and profiling does.
The Western equivalent would be "give [your enemy] enough rope to hang himself".
And on another "tack" - I leeched my nick shamessly from Gary Clail's "Tackhead Sound System".
For those who haven't heard of Tackhead, they were a late-80s industrial group - their musical style is almost impossible to describe - imagine a really weird blend of heavy bass and dub-like riffs, heavily processed, and then overlaid with multiple layers of samples from military/religious/political figures. Probably responsible for the start of the whole "sampling music" genre.
Their influence as individuals was far greater than their influence as a band per se - the names of the four main members (Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald, Adrian Sherwood, and Doug Wimbish) seem to crop up just about everywhere in music from about 1980 through 1990 in a range of styles from old-school rap (e.g. Grandmaster Flash), to funk/dub (George Clinton), to jazz (BB King, Miles Davis), to pop/retro/industrial (Annie Lennox, Depeche Mode, NIN).
The mix of solid beats and heavy sampling, plus some seriously geeky artwork served as inspiration for many a late-night assembly-coding run.
I recently paid a bit of homage by doing the obligatory boot logo thing and "rebranded" my hacked I-Opener in the same vein. After all - what would be a more appropriate name than "Tackhead Sound System" for a project that involves hacking a 6.4G MP3 boombox out of spare parts? (As long as I don't have to power up my I-Opener at an airport. My boot logo might be a little more imposing than it should be ;-)
Recommended tracks: Mind at the End of the Tether, and What's My Mission Now?. Y'all know where to find MP3s.
Finally, if you liked those two tracks, the "Power, Inc." series (3 CDs released in the late '90s) is highly recommended. (Feel free to buy the original CDs - I believe Keith LeBlanc released these on his own label, so he might be getting more than the usual $1/CD when you buy 'em. ;-)
Funny, I think "free and it runs pretty well on an old PII-450" is pretty good value compared with the costs of four Athlon-class servers and four Win2000 server licenses, a MSexChange license, and another $500 per user for Orifice, $200 per user for the OS, when all I need to do is give my developers to send email to each other.
But let's take a closer look at his points:
Think about the pointiest-haired boss you ever worked for.
Now imagine him as CTO of your favorite bank or brokerage, and running into a board meeting, hollering "Oh my God! SUNW and ORCL are down more than MSFT from their 1999 dot-com-hype highs! Throw out that obsolete Sun E10K server running Oracle and get me a farm of Quad-Xeons, we need .NET, M$Exchange and M$Access!"
OK, maybe there are some PHBs dumb enough to base technology decisions on today's stock quotes, but not many. Evolution in action, and all that.
Fair enough. But I still Don't Get Why This Is Useful.
When it's done over the web, all it means is that my software's continually phoning home and updating itself. This rubs me the wrong way; if it ain't broke, maybe I'd prefer not to upgrade. And if it's mission-critical, I definitely don't want to upgrade until such time as it's no longer mission critical. (e.g. "Hey! Let's compile the life-support modulee we're releasing tomorrow with the new version of gcc we downloaded today!")
And if it's over the intranet, I don't see much value at all. (Short of having to buy more servers running NT to act as .NET servers, which is presumably the value to Bill ;-) Where's the payoff of "upgrade everyone's word processor from a .NET server on the intranet" versus "upgrade everyone's word processor by sticking a CD-ROM in a server accessible through the intranet"?
I'm probably missing something here; but the whole thing smells fishy. The one thing that's been consistent about "Zero Administration" (for any platform) is that... it ain't.
Look, Ma! Al Gore's got a Slashdot account. ;-)
> 2. Point ore towards the center of the earth.
> 3. Give it a decent push.
> 4. Let gravity take over.
Actually, that's exactly what happened! The Sudbury nickel deposit is the result of an impact; the whole basin is an impact crater.
(So technically, we now have robots mining the asteroid belt! Woo-hoo! ;)
That's the most likely hypothesis. (Our .mil doesn't want dossiers on every grade-school kids, that's the FBI's job ;-)
Sadly, IMNSHO, it's not gonna solve the problem. The DoD's problem isn't recruiting new folks, it's retaining the people it already has.
Doubly sadly, no amount of advertising can solve that problem.
Of course, in an ironic note, some of the .mil advertising campaigns brought it on themselves - you know the ones, "Join the Army and get $25000 towards your college education, then quit after a year or two and take your skills elsewhere!"
>Or maybe it's all some nefarious back-room big-govt/police conspiracy :)
Hey, on Slashdot, it's always a back-room big-govt/police conspiracy ;-)
And God willing, they'll stay that way.
> What is more valuable, 50,000 soldiers standing in the wrong place or 5,000 soldiers who know exactly where the targets are, thanks to the 'eye in the sky'?
Amen, with only one addition...
Amen.
Many /.ers would be the first to recognize that a $1M/year web server doing the work of 10 $20K/year customer service reps is a good investment. Yes, it costs five times as much in the first year - but it scales to handle larger capacity, and frees up those 10 people to do more useful work elsewhere in the economy.
Any /.er who recognizes the impact of the web to bring a "big presence" to a small business, yet considers the US' current emphasis on the use of technology as a force multiplier to be "a waste of money", should rethink their assumptions.
If a Tomahawk costs $1M, the fact that conventional bombs "could have gotten the job done for $10K per target, even if it takes two or three tries" is irrelevant if the target is right.
Were I a commander, I'd gladly pay $50M for a barrage of Tomahawks to waste the enemy's SAM sites and airbases in the first hour of a campaign. The Tomahawks are cheap - and after I launch 'em, my expensive pilots and aircraft are then free to concentrate on blowing up the enemy's now-defenceless tanks sitting on the ground with neither SAM nor air cover.
Finally - and this is both important from a "PR" view and a morale view - as a result of my up-front investment in $50M worth of hardware greatly increases the odds that my pilots and my ground troops get to come home when the war's over.
I can easily buy $50M worth of cruise missiles when the war ends. But I can't buy replacements for my trained troops without years of training. And I can't buy increased morale for any price.
And since US doctrine (since the Gulf War and on to the present) appears to be based on the use of technology as a force multiplier, the way to kill lots of Americans is to blow up their toys in the sky.
When your mobile artillery piece relies on one technology to pick up the flashes of fire from your opponent's gun, and GPS to say "I know I'm here. I know the enemy's gun is there. If I point my gun in this direction and fire now, the enemy's gun goes bye-bye before he gets a second shot at me", you can win the war with a fraction of the manpower (and firepower) you used to need.
But you only get to win if your opponent can't blind your spysat/UAV, or your GPS satellite. Once your space network goes down, you're as blind as a bat, and outgunned two-to-one.
Control of space is vital to warfighting today. Ask any Iraqi artilleryman... if any survived.
Because a rich white man is likely to either say "fine" (e.g. board member of CMG) or "they suck" (ESR, Torvalds, many /.ers...).
A poor [black|white|green|man|woman] is likely to say "Huh? I got bigger problems to worry about, like where my next meal is coming from."
Sorry, I should have clarified - If the Yahoo search engine (which isn't really a search engine, just a directory of links that have been categorized by humans) gets turned into a portal-like "all content comes from us" thing, then it [meaning the search engine part] dies.
If it becomes a "portal", like AltaVista, msn.com, or any of the other "front page" sites, people will stop visiting it, and it will cease to be valuable to those who visit it.
That's not to say YHOO won't be bought out. Merely to say that if YHOO is bought out by some generic media conglomerate, the conglomerate has two choices:
- Leave it as-is, and own its revenue stream, or
- Turn it into a "walled garden", and receive a negative return on their investment as it's abandoned.
Portals are dead. A YHOO buyer who doesn't realize this will just be wasting his shareholders' money.Y'know, this sounds a lot like Visual Basic. I remember lots of "cute little programs" people had hacked together, and you could either download the .EXE for the program (usually 100-200K), but you had to have the right .DLL installed. If you didn't, you downloaded the whole enchilada, which was 1-2M.)
VB: Small app relying on huge-azz .DLL
.NET: Small app relying on huge-azz M$ install
Java: Small app(let) relying on huge-azz JVM
So yeah, Yamla's onto something - all this crap about "let's serve really small things over the wire" is just that; crap - because in order to do something useful (like draw pretty pictures on your screen after it's chewed on the data), you still need a big pile of code somewhere to interact with the OS.
As for the .NET world, MSFT's recent DNS failure should have clued in every IT manager on the planet that relying on a third party's availability is nothing short of suicidal for mission-critical applications.
Code you rely on must reside on machines you own. And if that code is client-server, you have to own not just the client and server, but the pipe that connects the two.
My use of the dated (i.e. non-buzzword-compliant) "client-server" terminology is intentional. The fundamental archictectural flaw of Java (and .NET) would have been obvious to anyone in 1992. It's depressing to see that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
The web's a great thing, but when I can't route packets to Slashdot, it's only an annoyance. But how many of you would rely on Hotmail/Yahoo for your job-related mail?
Metrol: Dude, you rock. Couldn't have said it better myself.
As the most politically-incorrect person I know...
As the guy who said "Whoa, cool!" at the Christopher Reeves ad - while other PC types were saying it exploited the disabled.
Even I found the Cingular ad disappointing. Excellent Public Service Announcement. Would have fit in great with the Accenture "Now it gets interesting" theme and gotten a "wow, cool!" from me.
His self-expression through his art, overcoming his motor dysfunction, was damn cool.
But to go the extra leap and say that he could overcome his speech impediment and "express himself" over a Cingular cellphone was an insult - not so much to the audience - but to the guy and his art.
The disability had nothing to do with it - imagine Picasso/Beethoven coming on TV and saying that a cellphone was just as useful a tool for self-expression as a paintbrush/orchestra. Puh-leeze.
(My vote for the winner: The sock puppet. "Invest Wisely" - E*Trade and discount brokers having been a big part of the message last year that "if you get an account with us, you don't need good research assistance, any average Joe can make $BIGNUM in the markets!". Oh, the irony!)
Until Qwest disconnects Alan Ralsky and his spam front Telodigm) (you know, those spams you've been getting from spewspew.net dialups pumping www.gatheredsales.net, www.linkusnow.net and now www.speedquality.org), I don't have any fucking interest in how Qwest runs things.
Because the evidence about how Qwest runs things is in my inbox every goddamn morning.
Fuck Qwest.
And for those reading in nanae, until MAPS gets off its ass and RBLs the whole goddamn 216.144.192.0-216.144.223.255 Qwest/Telodigm netspace, hey, fuck MAPS too.
You tell his wife and kids to make up her mind whether she wants him or the fancy goddamn appliances, because she can't have both.
Or she tells him to make up his mind whether he wants her or the fancy goddamn stock options because he can't have both.
Two jobs ago, I was in a Saturday morning meeting when my sysadmin got the latter call on his cellphone. He chose the wife. Regrettably, the company went titsup.com and he ended up losing both.
If you can't take the heat, stay outa the kitchen.
If you've got a family and mortgage, it's incumbent upon you to choose your employers and manage your finances more wisely.
Anyone interested in unionization or revolt against their capitalist masters should read George Orwell's "Animal Farm".
Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
What the union organizers won't tell you is that you're only trading your chains for their chains.
You were either smart enough to acquire new skills for which the job market is tight while your old skills were current, or you lose your job.
Or you pay a bunch of thugs a few percent of your paycheck every month to preserve your job, even though you're obsolete, and your job can be more efficiently performed by someone (or something!) else.
I prefer to live in the former reality, not the latter. Therefore, I will oppoze unionization in my industry and my company, and I will not work in a union shop.
My company is run by managers smart enough to realize that the way to succeed is to make the employees sufficiently happy that they'll never want to unionize.
If your company's so bad that you want to unionize, it's a symptom of a problem with management. A union is a brute-force solution - beat the crap out of management until they grudgingly give you a few pennies back; with luck, it'll be more than the union thugs take. The better solution is to enclue management until they take the right steps to fix the underlying problem of employee dissatisfaction.
Any manager who refuses such encluement can easily be dealt with by leaving such a company.
Isn't it ironic - the Marxist fantasy of how the "workers shall own the means of production" is the reality in the tech world, by definition.
If you're a leftist tech worker, re-read your Marx. You don't need the class warfare, (of which a Union is part) because you're already living in utopia.
If you're a rightist tech worker, just laugh ;-)
You obviously haven't seen the quality of service from your local (unionized) DMV lately, have you?
Or attended a trade show and waited four hours for people who walk at a snail's pace and take routes around booth spaces reminiscent of a Family Circus cartoon in order to get your packing materials back for your booth.
Unions exist to protect union members, not customers.
You just described my "first time" with /bin/ksh, having been raised on /bin/csh and /bin/tcsh in 1990-1992.
As soon as I was shown "set -o vi", I never looked back. If you know how to use vi (or emacs - you can "set -o emacs"), you'll never use the arrow keys again in any shell.
Yeah, this thread's s'posed to be about shell wars, not OS wars :-)
C shell considered harmful!
(Actually, in all seriousness - I really like that "Csh considered harmful" - and the Korn shell rocks. I grew up on SunOS 4.x and csh/tcsh (with Bourne shell for scripting) and was led to ksh by a clued manager in my first job after graduation who said "Hey, check this out, they even say Sun might make this the standard shell someday instead of that C shell".
Been addicted to it ever since. First thing I do is make /bin/ksh my default shell. If it ain't there, I put it there.
Nice thing about people like that is... it doesn't matter how many clues are in your locker. They couldn't get a clue if it was clue mating season and they were in a field of clues covered in clue pheromone.
>Keep stuff like that under lock and key. In your room, and hidden.
Keep the happy poetry, the stuff you copied out of birthday cards, in your locker. Keep more of the same hidden in your room under lock and key.
Keep your poetry on multiple redundant floppies or in emails "in your inbox" on a Hotmail account, encrypted with PGP.
Amen, brother.
Hitler is burning in hell right now.
He could have lived to a ripe old age - and acquired the title of Global Emperor by means of owning the first operational nuclear weapon - had he spent a little more time paying attention to "Jew science".
Somewhere in heaven, Albert Einstein, "Jew scientist" is playing dice with God - but I think he's OK with the way things turned out - even if God had to show him a thing or two about dice.
Rule #1 for all wannabe-evil-emperors: NEVER piss off your geniuses. They're either your weapons enginners or your enemy's. Your choice.