BT are pretty notorious about their self-renewing contract. Sometimes if you shout at them loudly enough you can get out of it, though. I think Oftel had raised some concerns about it with a view to stopping them doing it...
On another note, I like the look of the portrait oriented monitor. It looks to be so much better suited to documents, and probably coding, than the mostly landscape orientations that came later.
I suspect you can blame the early cinema pioneers for that... they decided on a "landscape" format for movies which then became the standard for Television sets. In the 80s, most home computers (Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad 64 and even the Atari ST & Amiga) used the TV as a monitor so a generation of kids grew up assuming monitors must be in portrait layout.
Sony are a royal PITA on so many levels. Most people who need to supply removable storage on a mobile device use SD cards (or mini/micro variants thereof) so that you can use them anywhere and buy from a variety of places. Hell, the manufacturers even have someone else doing all the hard graft in making up the specs for it. You'd think it was a given that someone would use the industry standard product for their stuff.
But no. Sony have to come up with their MMC cards, complete incompatible with everything else so you can't share them between devices. And, of course, there's only really one supplier. This was entirely what stopped me getting a Sony Walkman phone.
And then there's UMD - crap design as it's easy to get your fingers on the disc. And, of course, they rendered all the UMD disks unusable on the newer PSPs, although getting rid of it was probably a blessing.
Dropping linux support on the PSP3 was a slap in the face for customers, just because they'd screwed up their design and realised that the bits of code which let people run linux allowed them to hack the box.
There are a number of things which tie into the sun.com domain; XVM Ops Centre downloads patches & so on from that site, SFT (Sun File Transfer) uploads Explorers to supportfiles.sun.com; until they get all their customers to stop using those URLs, they can't switch it off. I'm sure there must be a few other things using sun.com as well.
I'm not quite sure why this was assigned to MS; I'm aware that the Gates foundation is doing work in this arena, but why they'd want to file a patent on it is unclear and using MS to do so is downright weird.
Side note - slight irony in the fact the favicon for the website is the (now obsolete) Sun logo on an MS patent;)
The penalty isn't for losing, it's for fighting. Most big companies can't be bothered with the hassle of paying lawyers for protracted lawsuits, where the judges often don't understand the technical detail being discussed and so there's a risk of losing even if the lawsuit is patently bollocks.
Patent trolls exploit the fact it's cheaper to roll over & pay the fee than it is to fight, where if you win, you lose.
On the flipside, my last PC upgrade was to get a new desktop before it got to the point I wouldn't be able to get XP on it...
I'm looking at a laptop upgrade now (old one is 6 years old and creaking...) which will end up running Windows 7 as there's little reason not to get it.
Well, there's two sides to that - in the main, most of the information is relatively harmless to the people on the ground (other than the obligatory stoking up of anti-American/allied sentiment). However, if it identifies Afghan informants on the ground, that's endagering someone who's put their neck out to help the allied forces and is a sucky way to repay their assistance as it will probably lead to their death. There are other ways in which information can directly harm individuals as well.
Reporting the outcome of engagements which may or may not have resulted in the death of civilians isn't something we should be suppressing unless it actively endangers someone.
I upgraded the firmware on one of our servers in June and was slightly shocked when the OBP banner said "Copyright Oracle Corporation" where it used to say "Sun Microsystem"... the rebranding continues apace...
"designed for the audio enthusiast" - i.e. the only people who will pay $500 for a cable they could buy for
I think in that way, it's perfectly designed.
Yup, had the whole thing in various people's facebook status whinging about how we've "pissed on his dreams". My response was that he'd pissed on the dreams of the others in X-Factor (not that I care about them) as well as anyone who might have actually put in the effort to write something orginal and aim to get to number 1.
Cue the world's smallest violin, playing just for Joe...
Desktop breaks? Ship out a new box, they plug it in and away they go. You don't need to worry about what software they need as it's all on the server.
Security - no hard drives on desktop which can be stolen.
Patching/maintenance. Would you rather maintain patches on 1000 desktops or 10 big boxes in the data centre?
Power/cooling/noise at sites. A "real" thin client (as opposed to a PC masquerading as a thin client) will have minimal power requirements which leads to less cooling and noise (no fans or crunching hard drives)
Portability. I don't care which desk I sit at, my virtual desktop will automatically have all my apps. If you have a solution like Sun's Sunray, you can even log out of your Sunray half way through writing a document, move to another desk (possibly in another city) and pick up the doc where you left off.
High bandwidth apps run in the same data centre as the database server/whatever and you only get the screen updates down the wire which can be more efficient.
To be honest, I've looked at a lot of these low power systems, but almost all of them run only a single hard disk. As the main point of these servers is for file serving, it seems remiss to not have some kind of mirroring of disks. Anyone got a good solution which supports two (or more) hard drives?
I'll give you a phrase to explain why - "distortion in the space/time continuum". That phrase was used in far more episodes in ST:TNG than it deserved to be used, to the extent it pretty much became a cliché.
It's not unique to ST and Stross doesn't claim it is, but it's probably the worst culprit. It tended to play a kind of Deus ex Machina with $RANDOM_TECH_DEVICE to solve the problem.
Urm, ISA hasn't been provided on PCs for ages - it would need to be a PCI card, surely? That said, the effect is largely the same, find the most minimal graphics card you can and slot it in.
Working in a large business where writing professional emails helps as well; I purposely try to use proper capitilisation and punctuation as required.
That said, I rarely write anything these days and it's often just a scrawl when I do. My writing was never up to much anyway, without practice it's deteriorated.
So, while in America, we should squint when walking past schools & government buildings so we don't know what they look like? Because surely only bad people would want to know what a school looked like...
This is something I wondered at the time. Sun paid a lot of money (~$1B) for a free database, even after they'd been bundling Postgres on Solaris 10 (you now get both Postgres & MySQL on the latest release of Solaris 10, FWIW).
Having chatted to some people at work, the concensus seems to be that it was primarily to piss off Oracle; "look, we can do databases too, we don't need you". So, Oracle have gotten into bed with HP & linux, just to spite Sun after having largely given Sun "favoured OS" status for a number of years.
All seems to be one big corporate soap opera/bitchfest...
To be fair, how many reports saying "this organisation is doing what it says" would get published? People aren't interested in people doing what they say, they're interested in scandals of corporate irresponsibility.
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Bastard... I only just managed to avoid coating my monitor with coffee...
BT are pretty notorious about their self-renewing contract. Sometimes if you shout at them loudly enough you can get out of it, though. I think Oftel had raised some concerns about it with a view to stopping them doing it...
On another note, I like the look of the portrait oriented monitor. It looks to be so much better suited to documents, and probably coding, than the mostly landscape orientations that came later.
I suspect you can blame the early cinema pioneers for that... they decided on a "landscape" format for movies which then became the standard for Television sets. In the 80s, most home computers (Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad 64 and even the Atari ST & Amiga) used the TV as a monitor so a generation of kids grew up assuming monitors must be in portrait layout.
But no. Sony have to come up with their MMC cards, complete incompatible with everything else so you can't share them between devices. And, of course, there's only really one supplier. This was entirely what stopped me getting a Sony Walkman phone.
And then there's UMD - crap design as it's easy to get your fingers on the disc. And, of course, they rendered all the UMD disks unusable on the newer PSPs, although getting rid of it was probably a blessing.
Dropping linux support on the PSP3 was a slap in the face for customers, just because they'd screwed up their design and realised that the bits of code which let people run linux allowed them to hack the box.
There are a number of things which tie into the sun.com domain; XVM Ops Centre downloads patches & so on from that site, SFT (Sun File Transfer) uploads Explorers to supportfiles.sun.com; until they get all their customers to stop using those URLs, they can't switch it off. I'm sure there must be a few other things using sun.com as well.
Side note - slight irony in the fact the favicon for the website is the (now obsolete) Sun logo on an MS patent ;)
Patent trolls exploit the fact it's cheaper to roll over & pay the fee than it is to fight, where if you win, you lose.
I'm looking at a laptop upgrade now (old one is 6 years old and creaking...) which will end up running Windows 7 as there's little reason not to get it.
Reporting the outcome of engagements which may or may not have resulted in the death of civilians isn't something we should be suppressing unless it actively endangers someone.
I upgraded the firmware on one of our servers in June and was slightly shocked when the OBP banner said "Copyright Oracle Corporation" where it used to say "Sun Microsystem"... the rebranding continues apace...
"designed for the audio enthusiast" - i.e. the only people who will pay $500 for a cable they could buy for I think in that way, it's perfectly designed.
Cue the world's smallest violin, playing just for Joe...
I'd like to say these kind of things are made up, but no.
To be honest, I've looked at a lot of these low power systems, but almost all of them run only a single hard disk. As the main point of these servers is for file serving, it seems remiss to not have some kind of mirroring of disks. Anyone got a good solution which supports two (or more) hard drives?
It's not unique to ST and Stross doesn't claim it is, but it's probably the worst culprit. It tended to play a kind of Deus ex Machina with $RANDOM_TECH_DEVICE to solve the problem.
I got Smartsuite bundled with a PC in the 90s and have to agree it sucked - it was OK for basic letters, but not much more than that...
Urm, ISA hasn't been provided on PCs for ages - it would need to be a PCI card, surely? That said, the effect is largely the same, find the most minimal graphics card you can and slot it in.
That said, I rarely write anything these days and it's often just a scrawl when I do. My writing was never up to much anyway, without practice it's deteriorated.
That doesn't stop the drive-by porn pop-ups (and before you say it, pop-up blockers are only partiall effective these days).
*sigh*
Having chatted to some people at work, the concensus seems to be that it was primarily to piss off Oracle; "look, we can do databases too, we don't need you". So, Oracle have gotten into bed with HP & linux, just to spite Sun after having largely given Sun "favoured OS" status for a number of years.
All seems to be one big corporate soap opera/bitchfest...
Pundits say recession is looming, people panic & spend less, cut costs, etc, etc, economy shrinks due to lowered spending, recession hits.
The term is "self-fulfilling prophecy", I believe.
(before this gets tagged as flamebait, this was meant as a joke...)
To be fair, how many reports saying "this organisation is doing what it says" would get published? People aren't interested in people doing what they say, they're interested in scandals of corporate irresponsibility.