Most companies run their websites on Mickey Mouse web servers. I've worked at several large ISP's and none of them really had adequate server power to deal with a/.-like effect.
Nowadays, you can fit a class C worth of websites on a single machine and save a lot of money. So what if you don't survive one day of/. while serving up another 364 days of reliable service. There's no point in being bleeding-edge just to satisfy link sites, such as slashdot..
If you are looking for specs of a/. effect, I think there's some old post by one of the moderators on here somewhere, I leave ye to find it.:)
I agree with you completely. By passing the work off to other nations' poor, we are increasing our unemployment statistics and weakening the industrial capability of our own nations.
Meanwhile, we strengthen communist countries with this money by giving their civilians more money to pay more taxes with.
I hope the day China drops a nuke on us, people find the humor in knowing that Nike helped pay for it.
Not to sound harsh, but I could have gone to CNN for this type of thing. Sure, open source was mentioned but the folks in the 3rd world could care less about GNU, as they are a little more concerned with their own survival. Not to mention the cultures in such places tend to embrace spiritual understanding over technology and american dollars.
Your article seems to be fostering the idea of 'how can we make them more like us?' instead of actually understanding why the United States and other rich countries are hated by these people. Not everyone wants to play the capitalism game. Some folks want to be left alone to herd their sheep and cattle.
Who here thinks/. should have a slashpoll to see if Katz should be replaced with someone who has a little better grasp of reality? If so, let's make our voices heard!
That's the problem with america these days. We will once again sit and watch our rights disappear before us, and all we'll have to show for it is some bitching and moaning on message boards. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the fatcats are getting fatter and you are stuck in a world where there's no freedoms with media, code, etc. So, I'll try and make the first constructive suggestion in this thread:
Write your congressman, spread the word, talk to your non-geek friends about how encrypting all media content is a bad thing. Hell, try writing the president. Do what you can, but complaining endlessly on a BBS is not the solution.
Meanwhile, in other news..
What's next? Will Slashdot editors start verbally attacking people for their opinions? Will subscribers be the only ones spared from this dissent?
The way I look at it, content control is the JonKatz of Congress. Though the world would be a better place without him, the above link proves what I am saying about just complaining. It doesn't seem to offer much of an solution, regardless of how valid the points in said complaint.
Instead of flaming your source of income, why don't you put your money where your mouth is?
How about putting up a/. poll to see if Katz should be let go?
If it turns out the majority of/. readers would rather he go away, then he could be replaced with someone that will generate better articles, resulting in more hits, more banners, and more subscribers. Giving us what we want gives you more of what you want.
Victor
PS - I'll subscribe the moment he's gone.
Re:Doesn't anyone remember the Monorail?
on
iMac LCD Impostors
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for making mention of the Monorail. The company I worked for years ago did software testing for these things. They are really crappy computers, but are amazingly reliable (the 5 year old ones from the tests are still cranking away). This is another bit of evidence that the slashdot posters will talk out of their ass a bit when it comes to the facts.
Using the same logic they've used for the remarks concerning Gateway ripping on Apple, I guess we'd have to say that Apple ripped off Monorail. Geez, starts to sound like small children after a while, doesn't it?
Let's face it, there's nobody getting 'ripped off' here. The path to more innovative products has enough room for designers to start taking advantage of modern technologies as they become accepted and cheaper to manufacture.
I wish folks would quit saying 'disturbing trend' on slashdot so much. I've noticed it in so many articles and posts. There are plenty of other phrases you can use that do not make you sound like someone who's watched too many X-Files re-runs.
"Its designers say ULTra could spell the end of taxi lines, because passengers would find on-call pods at designated stops at least 80 percent of the time."
I doubt this will be the end of the taxi. In my area, as urban as it is, there are no taxi 'stops' around here. If you want a taxi, you have to call a cab company and they send one to you. The times I've used a taxi, I've needed to go places or make stops that a bus or rail wouldn't be able to accomodate.
It also seems that the biggest money makers for Taxi companies are the 'lines' from urbania to the airport. I'd much prefer 55-70 mph in a cab on the freeway than in a little, skinny box doing 25 mph on a proprietary course.
"Advanced Transport Systems estimate that building an ULTra network would cost about one-third to one-half of the amount needed for a light railway."
Okay, I can go 1/2 the speed for 1/2 the cost. All while in a tiny plastic box. That's progress.
For the love of God, I hope they don't plan on deploying those things anywhere near cars. I can imagine the carnage brought on by one of these little buggers when a distracted Volvo or SUV driver T-bones one. I think the end result will be a new bumper for the car and (up to) four funerals for the ULTRa Robo customers.
"Resistant to vandalism"
How many teenagers do you think it would take to tip one of these things over? Looking at the size, shape, and it's materials.. I would have to guess three or four.. I know for a fact, if they released those things in my area when I was a teen, you'd find them sideways with their little tires spinning helplessly on a daily basis.
"designed to stop automatically if they sense an object in their path."
Now any bum or robber can get an accomplice to stand in the cart's path while his buddy robs, rapes and/or murders the occupants. Most taxi drivers I have encountered are armed and will either open fire or stomp the gas when put in a threatening position.
It's a major step towards the future of autonomous transportation, but I'll wait a few generations of these things being deployed before getting all excited. Well, by then I'm sure my expectations will be too high once again. What am I talking about? The only technology I get stoked over these days are faster CPUs and better video cards.:)
This may extend a tad off the topic, so mod me however. I do not think the speed of RAM and programmers themselves have much to do with it, as RAM is pretty fast and the programmers tend to be a wise bunch.
Programmers tend not to want bloated code. There's no pride taken in an application that is slow and buggy, but deadlines, marketing, a lack of oranization between groups on the project, etc. tend to result in a hacked together application that could use a lot of optimization (aka, bloated and slow).
I do agree with your position on open sourced projects being more efficient. The open source world doesn't live by deadlines assigned by non-technical people.
I think this combined with the need to show off one's artistic ability to code result in a much better end product; albeit a lot slower to the market place and pissed on by a monopoly's marketing and patented features.:(
I'm estatic about doing my first 'make world' on a dual 64bit CPU box. That'll be a far cry from the old dual 700.
" Trust me...give a programmer the computing power to do something, and he'll do it. We haven't run out of ideas to implement yet, have we?"
I really have to disagree with you there. Computer power and graphics power are so far out ahead of what programmers are writing, it's rather sad.
Just look around at graphical interfaces on computers. X11, Windows, etc. None of these run nearly as well as they should. {clicks to open a new netscape window and waits while the hard drive grinds away, geez 2 CPUs, ultra2 scsi, dual TNT2 cards, 1gig of ram and here I sit *grind grind*}.
I agree that we will always need more power. More power to crunch through the, even more, bloated software of tomorrow. Please don't assume I am being flamebait here -- Just look at how little has changed from the first versions of MS Office to the modern-day MS Office. Not a whole lot of gain for a whole lot of bloat. This seems to happen across just about every part of the software industry.
After reading the comments in this thread so far, I am a little ashamed of most of you. Can we let go the days where every Linux user has this attitude of learning the OS inside and out? Give me a break, this distribution looks great for joe-bob computer user who would like an alternative to Windows.
A distribution like this can be installed in an office enviroment. Think about it, if you have a small company with little money to spare on software licenses, for $30 you can have a complete turn-key workstation solution for everyone. Just don't give the receptionist root!
Anyway, can we please demonstrate more maturity and wisdom by not instantly bashing a distro that tries to attract new people? These newbies aren't stupid, they just don't want to spend 2 weeks setting up and tweaking out their first linux box. They don't have geek jobs and they make more money being doctors, lawyers, etc.:-)
I am sure that depends on how far you are from a transponder.
The closer you get, you pass between the towers antenea quicker and lose sync (which will land you a new IP in most cases). If you are pretty far from one (few places in my town), you stay in one antenea's focus and can travel faster/further without a momentary blackout.
This is less noticable when you are browsing web pages, but I dare you to go mobile with ssh or telnet sessions open. They'll be reset ever few moments as you are being logged out and logged in quickly as you travel.
The one lacking side of their modems I forgot to mention in my previous post was the lack of support for Linux. I typically run FreeBSD (Yeah, mod me down!) and installed Linux on the box with the hopes of tinkering the card into working with it. No such luck. Let's hope the new Ricochet bounces onto the scene with some Linux support. The monetary gains from that choice wouldn't be huge, but the geeks would love them for it.
It's not very bad at all. I used to be a beta tester for these guys when they first deployed the network in Atlanta, GA. I use ssh a lot to access servers where I work and found the latency was minimal, much better than a modem and not quite as good as DSL. There were occasional pauses where the modem would lose a few packets back to the tower, but it was very reliable and stable. So much so, I could keep AIM and ssh sessions open for 6-7 hours without having to reconnect.
The Bandwidth was quite nice too. You can easily stream 128k/bit mp3's off shoutcast and other radio sites. When I had this service, I would stream mp3's off my DSL machine at home on my laptop while sitting at the park doing work or while at a friend's place (just for the uber-geek factor).
Their network also was accessible from 90% of the places I tried to use it from around town. There were countless times work would call and I would be out to dinner, instead of having to drive home and fix things, I could walk back out to the car for a few minutes and ssh in via the laptop. Well worth the money if you are in an on-call position where you are the only contact point.
The only drawback is that their network does not support a moving connection. If you are in a car, the modem loses sync at about 30mph. That's probably good since you do not want to be fiddling with your computer while operating a vehicle.
Well now, let's mod up the old-timer and smear the slashdot newbies. From the article, I quote:
"The first chips built with the technology are expected to appear later this year."
I get that funny feeling every time I see a headline about a CPU running amazingly fast. Now that they have the hi-speed CPU, what sort of RAM and power supply (4000+ watt?!) are they planning on using?
I see nothing about what else is required, or planned for in the deployment of this chip. Until we see such figures, I am assuming this is FUD. Especially when they are making claims of having this out on the market by 2003.
If anyone else finds links to articles other than the ones in the headline, please post them for the rest of us. Especially if they have decent technical information and not just marketing hype.
Dearest Timothy & Slashdot crew,
Can we make an effort to get your terminology up to speed? I find it troubling that you guys tend to try and get us all worked up by using misleading phrases in the headlines.
SPAM = unsolicited email
The service these guys are offering is solicited when users download software, fill out magazine subscriptions, etc. I don't see where this is spam. Is all email businesses send to obtain clients considered spam by slashdot? I hope not. I would hope we were a bit more educated than that.
To my fellow readers, please don't fall for Timothy's silly attempt at enraging you. Go ahead and mod me down, but I just disagree with misleading posts. They do nobody any good and a company's image some harm, and for no good reason.
Victor
I have to agree whole-heartedly. The only answer to this will be government regulation of email addresses. Just like your street address is determined by the government.
Mod me down for telling you something most folks don't want to hear. I am just stating which direction things are going.
Slashdot Mirror
Most companies run their websites on Mickey Mouse web servers. I've worked at several large ISP's and none of them really had adequate server power to deal with a /.-like effect.
/. while serving up another 364 days of reliable service. There's no point in being bleeding-edge just to satisfy link sites, such as slashdot..
/. effect, I think there's some old post by one of the moderators on here somewhere, I leave ye to find it. :)
Nowadays, you can fit a class C worth of websites on a single machine and save a lot of money. So what if you don't survive one day of
If you are looking for specs of a
Regards,
Victor
I agree with you completely. By passing the work off to other nations' poor, we are increasing our unemployment statistics and weakening the industrial capability of our own nations.
Meanwhile, we strengthen communist countries with this money by giving their civilians more money to pay more taxes with.
I hope the day China drops a nuke on us, people find the humor in knowing that Nike helped pay for it.
Regards,
Victor
Not to sound harsh, but I could have gone to CNN for this type of thing. Sure, open source was mentioned but the folks in the 3rd world could care less about GNU, as they are a little more concerned with their own survival. Not to mention the cultures in such places tend to embrace spiritual understanding over technology and american dollars.
/. should have a slashpoll to see if Katz should be replaced with someone who has a little better grasp of reality? If so, let's make our voices heard!
Your article seems to be fostering the idea of 'how can we make them more like us?' instead of actually understanding why the United States and other rich countries are hated by these people. Not everyone wants to play the capitalism game. Some folks want to be left alone to herd their sheep and cattle.
Who here thinks
Regards,
Victor
.. Not to mention the advertisement is twice the size of the actual article content. That *is* the sign of a professional, right? :)
Victor
That's the problem with america these days. We will once again sit and watch our rights disappear before us, and all we'll have to show for it is some bitching and moaning on message boards. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the fatcats are getting fatter and you are stuck in a world where there's no freedoms with media, code, etc. So, I'll try and make the first constructive suggestion in this thread:
l d=0&commentsort=0&tid=103&mode=thread&cid=3271333
Write your congressman, spread the word, talk to your non-geek friends about how encrypting all media content is a bad thing. Hell, try writing the president. Do what you can, but complaining endlessly on a BBS is not the solution.
Meanwhile, in other news..
What's next? Will Slashdot editors start verbally attacking people for their opinions? Will subscribers be the only ones spared from this dissent?
Hmm.. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30409&thresho
The way I look at it, content control is the JonKatz of Congress. Though the world would be a better place without him, the above link proves what I am saying about just complaining. It doesn't seem to offer much of an solution, regardless of how valid the points in said complaint.
Regards,
Victor
Hey Hemos,
/. poll to see if Katz should be let go?
/. readers would rather he go away, then he could be replaced with someone that will generate better articles, resulting in more hits, more banners, and more subscribers. Giving us what we want gives you more of what you want.
Instead of flaming your source of income, why don't you put your money where your mouth is?
How about putting up a
If it turns out the majority of
Victor
PS - I'll subscribe the moment he's gone.
Thanks for making mention of the Monorail. The company I worked for years ago did software testing for these things. They are really crappy computers, but are amazingly reliable (the 5 year old ones from the tests are still cranking away). This is another bit of evidence that the slashdot posters will talk out of their ass a bit when it comes to the facts.
Using the same logic they've used for the remarks concerning Gateway ripping on Apple, I guess we'd have to say that Apple ripped off Monorail. Geez, starts to sound like small children after a while, doesn't it?
Let's face it, there's nobody getting 'ripped off' here. The path to more innovative products has enough room for designers to start taking advantage of modern technologies as they become accepted and cheaper to manufacture.
Victor
I wish folks would quit saying 'disturbing trend' on slashdot so much. I've noticed it in so many articles and posts. There are plenty of other phrases you can use that do not make you sound like someone who's watched too many X-Files re-runs.
bad trend
silly trend
upsetting trend
horrible trend
unsettling trend
CmdrTaco trend
Victor
Japan, I think. It's from an old 1998 website previewing the release.
Negative.
Here's a picture of a first generation DC's guts:
http://www.mindspring.com/~refridgerator/dc5.jp
Note the heatsink and fan combo on the top-left of the image.
Victor
"Its designers say ULTra could spell the end of taxi lines, because passengers would find on-call pods at designated stops at least 80 percent of the time."
:)
I doubt this will be the end of the taxi. In my area, as urban as it is, there are no taxi 'stops' around here. If you want a taxi, you have to call a cab company and they send one to you. The times I've used a taxi, I've needed to go places or make stops that a bus or rail wouldn't be able to accomodate.
It also seems that the biggest money makers for Taxi companies are the 'lines' from urbania to the airport. I'd much prefer 55-70 mph in a cab on the freeway than in a little, skinny box doing 25 mph on a proprietary course.
"Advanced Transport Systems estimate that building an ULTra network would cost about one-third to one-half of the amount needed for a light railway."
Okay, I can go 1/2 the speed for 1/2 the cost. All while in a tiny plastic box. That's progress.
For the love of God, I hope they don't plan on deploying those things anywhere near cars. I can imagine the carnage brought on by one of these little buggers when a distracted Volvo or SUV driver T-bones one. I think the end result will be a new bumper for the car and (up to) four funerals for the ULTRa Robo customers.
"Resistant to vandalism"
How many teenagers do you think it would take to tip one of these things over? Looking at the size, shape, and it's materials.. I would have to guess three or four.. I know for a fact, if they released those things in my area when I was a teen, you'd find them sideways with their little tires spinning helplessly on a daily basis.
"designed to stop automatically if they sense an object in their path."
Now any bum or robber can get an accomplice to stand in the cart's path while his buddy robs, rapes and/or murders the occupants. Most taxi drivers I have encountered are armed and will either open fire or stomp the gas when put in a threatening position.
It's a major step towards the future of autonomous transportation, but I'll wait a few generations of these things being deployed before getting all excited. Well, by then I'm sure my expectations will be too high once again. What am I talking about? The only technology I get stoked over these days are faster CPUs and better video cards.
Victor
This may extend a tad off the topic, so mod me however. I do not think the speed of RAM and programmers themselves have much to do with it, as RAM is pretty fast and the programmers tend to be a wise bunch.
:(
Programmers tend not to want bloated code. There's no pride taken in an application that is slow and buggy, but deadlines, marketing, a lack of oranization between groups on the project, etc. tend to result in a hacked together application that could use a lot of optimization (aka, bloated and slow).
I do agree with your position on open sourced projects being more efficient. The open source world doesn't live by deadlines assigned by non-technical people.
I think this combined with the need to show off one's artistic ability to code result in a much better end product; albeit a lot slower to the market place and pissed on by a monopoly's marketing and patented features.
I'm estatic about doing my first 'make world' on a dual 64bit CPU box. That'll be a far cry from the old dual 700.
Victor
" Trust me...give a programmer the computing power to do something, and he'll do it. We haven't run out of ideas to implement yet, have we?"
I really have to disagree with you there. Computer power and graphics power are so far out ahead of what programmers are writing, it's rather sad.
Just look around at graphical interfaces on computers. X11, Windows, etc. None of these run nearly as well as they should. {clicks to open a new netscape window and waits while the hard drive grinds away, geez 2 CPUs, ultra2 scsi, dual TNT2 cards, 1gig of ram and here I sit *grind grind*}.
I agree that we will always need more power. More power to crunch through the, even more, bloated software of tomorrow. Please don't assume I am being flamebait here -- Just look at how little has changed from the first versions of MS Office to the modern-day MS Office. Not a whole lot of gain for a whole lot of bloat. This seems to happen across just about every part of the software industry.
Call me on this if I am wrong.. Thanks.
Victor
After reading the comments in this thread so far, I am a little ashamed of most of you. Can we let go the days where every Linux user has this attitude of learning the OS inside and out? Give me a break, this distribution looks great for joe-bob computer user who would like an alternative to Windows.
:-)
A distribution like this can be installed in an office enviroment. Think about it, if you have a small company with little money to spare on software licenses, for $30 you can have a complete turn-key workstation solution for everyone. Just don't give the receptionist root!
Anyway, can we please demonstrate more maturity and wisdom by not instantly bashing a distro that tries to attract new people? These newbies aren't stupid, they just don't want to spend 2 weeks setting up and tweaking out their first linux box. They don't have geek jobs and they make more money being doctors, lawyers, etc.
Victor
I am sure that depends on how far you are from a transponder.
The closer you get, you pass between the towers antenea quicker and lose sync (which will land you a new IP in most cases). If you are pretty far from one (few places in my town), you stay in one antenea's focus and can travel faster/further without a momentary blackout.
This is less noticable when you are browsing web pages, but I dare you to go mobile with ssh or telnet sessions open. They'll be reset ever few moments as you are being logged out and logged in quickly as you travel.
The one lacking side of their modems I forgot to mention in my previous post was the lack of support for Linux. I typically run FreeBSD (Yeah, mod me down!) and installed Linux on the box with the hopes of tinkering the card into working with it. No such luck. Let's hope the new Ricochet bounces onto the scene with some Linux support. The monetary gains from that choice wouldn't be huge, but the geeks would love them for it.
Victor
Ryu2,
It's not very bad at all. I used to be a beta tester for these guys when they first deployed the network in Atlanta, GA. I use ssh a lot to access servers where I work and found the latency was minimal, much better than a modem and not quite as good as DSL. There were occasional pauses where the modem would lose a few packets back to the tower, but it was very reliable and stable. So much so, I could keep AIM and ssh sessions open for 6-7 hours without having to reconnect.
The Bandwidth was quite nice too. You can easily stream 128k/bit mp3's off shoutcast and other radio sites. When I had this service, I would stream mp3's off my DSL machine at home on my laptop while sitting at the park doing work or while at a friend's place (just for the uber-geek factor).
Their network also was accessible from 90% of the places I tried to use it from around town. There were countless times work would call and I would be out to dinner, instead of having to drive home and fix things, I could walk back out to the car for a few minutes and ssh in via the laptop. Well worth the money if you are in an on-call position where you are the only contact point.
The only drawback is that their network does not support a moving connection. If you are in a car, the modem loses sync at about 30mph. That's probably good since you do not want to be fiddling with your computer while operating a vehicle.
Victor
Well now, let's mod up the old-timer and smear the slashdot newbies. From the article, I quote: "The first chips built with the technology are expected to appear later this year."
Anyone who mods up a flamer has issues. Victor
I get that funny feeling every time I see a headline about a CPU running amazingly fast. Now that they have the hi-speed CPU, what sort of RAM and power supply (4000+ watt?!) are they planning on using?
I see nothing about what else is required, or planned for in the deployment of this chip. Until we see such figures, I am assuming this is FUD. Especially when they are making claims of having this out on the market by 2003.
If anyone else finds links to articles other than the ones in the headline, please post them for the rest of us. Especially if they have decent technical information and not just marketing hype.
Victor
Dearest Timothy & Slashdot crew, Can we make an effort to get your terminology up to speed? I find it troubling that you guys tend to try and get us all worked up by using misleading phrases in the headlines. SPAM = unsolicited email The service these guys are offering is solicited when users download software, fill out magazine subscriptions, etc. I don't see where this is spam. Is all email businesses send to obtain clients considered spam by slashdot? I hope not. I would hope we were a bit more educated than that.
To my fellow readers, please don't fall for Timothy's silly attempt at enraging you. Go ahead and mod me down, but I just disagree with misleading posts. They do nobody any good and a company's image some harm, and for no good reason. Victor
I have to agree whole-heartedly. The only answer to this will be government regulation of email addresses. Just like your street address is determined by the government. Mod me down for telling you something most folks don't want to hear. I am just stating which direction things are going.