I live (literally) next door to the Dulles Airport. You could hit a golfball to the runway. I stayed up late last night and was really, really tired. The dog woke me up at around 8:50 and I took him outside for a walk. When I walked outside, I remarked to myself that this was such a beautiful day. The sun was shining and the air was cool and dry. I heard (as usual) planes taking off at Dulles and didn't pay much attention to them. I'm a real big commercial airline buff--I normally spent most evenings on my patio watching all the International flights take off--but I was too sleepy this morning to watch any of them. So, in all likelyhood, the plane that hit the Pentagon flew right past my apartment window unnoticed.
Here's what really freaks me out. I live right next to the main entrance to the airport. Sometime this morning, while I was sleeping, the terrorists drove right past my home. It may sound kinda lame to some of yall but it really, really has me wigged out right now.
I don't have it one-half as bad as my boss, though. He went to Dulles Airport this morning to fly to Ohio on business. While he was still on the tarmac, the Pentagon plane was hijacked and his plane was rushed back to the terminal and deboarded by airport police. Who knows if they were doomed...
GovOS isn't about restricting freedom. It's about increasing it, by providing a tax-funded public domain desktop computing infrastructure. OS plus office suite, with some well-paid professional developers behind it, in the public domain... It sounds good to me.
As if we don't already have enough government waste. If Microsoft needs something like 7000 employees (source: here) to build an OS and Office suite, I can't imagine what the government would need. We'd probably have a Department of Operating Systems and a congressional Operating Systems committee.
No thanks, I'd much rather take a one-time hit of $600 for an OS and office suite than take another income tax hike so that some poor folks can have theirs for free. That, by the way, is the problem with excessive government. Those of us with higher incomes usually end up saddling most of the burden to provide services that are mostly utilized by those with lower incomes.
Nah, @Home was pretty well fscked long before the Excite merger. I used to work there back in early 98 as a unix systems administrator. I'll sum it up for ya:
Big corporation mentality in a not-so-huge corporation.
You had to hold a meeting for EVERYTHING. I can't tell you how many three hour meetings I attended, only to leave and ask myself, "What the hell was that about?"
Goof-off employees. I should know, I was one of them. With video arcade machines (inc. a sit-down version of California Racing!!), ping pong, foosball, free cappucinos, free sodas, and cheap snacks--it was hard/not/ to goof off.
Bullshit top-down management style. Take, for example, the mail fiasco. At the time, we were running crappy Netscape Mail Server (ie post.office) which was seriously out of its league for what we were doing. At best, it could deliver two messages a second while running on a Sun Enterprise 450. So, we decided to build a new mail system. The architects made their recommendations but their fuckwad CTO ended up having most of the say in the matter. I no longer use the @home service but from what I hear, the mail system still sucks.
Two words: the slide.
So this bluegrass picker goes into 7-Eleven for a few minutes and returns to parking lot, only to find his car window broken. As soon as he sees the shattered glass, his heart sinks. He had left his $3000 banjo in plain view on the passenger seat. "Oh no", he sighed. He looks through the broken window and sees his beloved banjo, still sitting on the seat. And lying next to it is...another banjo!
Why would AOL cable modem service suck? You don't *have* to use the AOL client. AOL's network backbone is fscking amazing. You can get from just about any point on it to any other point in less than 3ms. I've yet to see a DSL provider with a backbone that can even come close to this.
Have you seen this software? It's a psuedo Windows NT sound driver that intercepts a sound output (from, say, cdplayer.exe) and saves it to a.WAV file. Yes, it's still D->A A->D but at least your audio doesn't have to travel through that crappy $2.95 Radio Shack patch cable attached to your sound card.
I found this link on Chris Lightfoot's software page.
A) Continue to waste company bandwidth from the inevitable DoS attacks to come... Continue to waste company time and money fighting the 13 year old kids who do this kind of thing (most of whom will receive no more than a spanking from their dad, anyway)... Continue to cause agony for your customers (your real customers, not your IRC clients) and potentially lose their business altogether
or...
B) Say "Later." to EFNet and, in all likelyhood, never face an irc-related DoS attack again.
True... I have no idea what those Georgia machines are but the machines we used when I was in high school were mass-produced low-end boxes. I doubt that they had more than the most basic CPU fan, if they had any at all.
If I were the State of Georgia, I'd be more concerned about the power consumption and decreased hardware lifetimes (due to temperature from constant processor use than I would a few hundred Kb of data a day. Try feeling your CPU heatsink after a day of running the dnet client and you'll see what I mean.
It took a bit of digging but I found a page with this explanation:
Will we ever see your homepage return, more specifically the "fire, explosions, and antics" section? I'd be glad to put a mirror of it on the extra space I have in my home account...
I'm not sure... maybe but honestly it was really out of date. It was kind of funny originally but it's over 4 years old now...
and you can get really cheap airfares there, too. Iceland rocks. I took a weekend trip there from Boston last winter and had a blast. It has everything I need:
- unbelievably attractive women
- fast internet access
- clean environment
- a really wild clubbing scene
- lots of outdoor activities
- very modern capital (Reykjavik) with everyting a city dweller could need
- friendly, intelligent citizens
- great food, especially when it comes to fish
- did i mention beautiful women?
Back in the day, I had this leet-o prompt on my DOS box that was a little Texas flag made from an asterisk and a little high-ascii block. I wonder, first off, if any *nix terminal emulators will support all of those old ANSI drawing characters and if anyone still has this prompt lying around.
Refuting idealistic babble with hard, cold facts - Priceless.
Not to be a dick, man, but life costs money. I want to hike and garden and drink beer with my friends just as much as you do but I know that unless I make some money to pay my mortgage, it ain't gonna happen...
I don't mean to troll or turn this into a giant flame ware but you are using some slightly incorrent claims to make your point. Redhat is nowhere near profitable. Yes, they may have taken in more last quarter than they spent but if you look at their total cash flow for the lifetime of the company, it is decidedly in the red.
And since when is OSS the 21st century business model? Last time I check, most of the OSS companies had either folded or laid off huge numbers of employees. Just because thousands of Slashdot folks think it is so, don't believe that the rest of the corporate world is going to jump to this business model any time soon.
I respectfully disagree. The GPL is not well suited for (closed source) hardware devices such as load balancers and firewalls. There are companies out there that have taken a stock BSD distro and modified the kernel and userland to suit their particular commercial application. Perhaps I should have used the words "anti-closed-source" instead of "anti-big-business", since small businesses can just as easily benefit from closed source licenses. When you're in business to make money (and who isn't?), it's in your best interests to make sure that your competitors can't easily use your coding efforts to beat you. Yes, Open Source software can definitely make money but it will never approach the money-making abilities of closed source software.
"It's an attack on Linux, which has market share as an operating system. FreeBSD has no market share, so they say, 'Oh, that's the good one,' " de Icaza said.
First of all, it's an outright lie. FreeBSD certainly has a market share. Ever heard of Yahoo!, Miguel? Secondly, FreeBSD does not have the anti-big-business licensing (ie no closed source--yes, this can be anti-big-business) that Linux has.
My comment (thought, admittedly, not all that funny) was not at all intended to be a troll. Rather, it was intended to poke fun at Slashdot's leftist, anti-big-business (despite being one themselves...), anti-property-owner sway. Do you really think VA would hesitate to sue someone who comes out with a copy-cat product with a copy-cat name?
I was out off-roading with some friends in my jeep this weekend in the George Washington National Forest. We were driving along a high ridge in what appeared to be total wilderness when, all of the sudden, we came upon a bunch of RVs, campers, and pickups and some crazy looking antennas. These guys had a regular tent city set up on top of this mountain! It looked like a lot of fun.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew I'd seen this somewhere before...
I live (literally) next door to the Dulles Airport. You could hit a golfball to the runway. I stayed up late last night and was really, really tired. The dog woke me up at around 8:50 and I took him outside for a walk. When I walked outside, I remarked to myself that this was such a beautiful day. The sun was shining and the air was cool and dry. I heard (as usual) planes taking off at Dulles and didn't pay much attention to them. I'm a real big commercial airline buff--I normally spent most evenings on my patio watching all the International flights take off--but I was too sleepy this morning to watch any of them. So, in all likelyhood, the plane that hit the Pentagon flew right past my apartment window unnoticed.
Here's what really freaks me out. I live right next to the main entrance to the airport. Sometime this morning, while I was sleeping, the terrorists drove right past my home. It may sound kinda lame to some of yall but it really, really has me wigged out right now.
I don't have it one-half as bad as my boss, though. He went to Dulles Airport this morning to fly to Ohio on business. While he was still on the tarmac, the Pentagon plane was hijacked and his plane was rushed back to the terminal and deboarded by airport police. Who knows if they were doomed...
Chris
Obviously, you've never used Cygwin. OpenSSH works great on my Win2k box.
GovOS isn't about restricting freedom. It's about increasing it, by providing a tax-funded public domain desktop computing infrastructure. OS plus office suite, with some well-paid professional developers behind it, in the public domain... It sounds good to me.
As if we don't already have enough government waste. If Microsoft needs something like 7000 employees (source: here) to build an OS and Office suite, I can't imagine what the government would need. We'd probably have a Department of Operating Systems and a congressional Operating Systems committee.
No thanks, I'd much rather take a one-time hit of $600 for an OS and office suite than take another income tax hike so that some poor folks can have theirs for free. That, by the way, is the problem with excessive government. Those of us with higher incomes usually end up saddling most of the burden to provide services that are mostly utilized by those with lower incomes.
Nah, @Home was pretty well fscked long before the Excite merger. I used to work there back in early 98 as a unix systems administrator. I'll sum it up for ya:
Big corporation mentality in a not-so-huge corporation.
You had to hold a meeting for EVERYTHING. I can't tell you how many three hour meetings I attended, only to leave and ask myself, "What the hell was that about?"
Goof-off employees. I should know, I was one of them. With video arcade machines (inc. a sit-down version of California Racing!!), ping pong, foosball, free cappucinos, free sodas, and cheap snacks--it was hard
Bullshit top-down management style. Take, for example, the mail fiasco. At the time, we were running crappy Netscape Mail Server (ie post.office) which was seriously out of its league for what we were doing. At best, it could deliver two messages a second while running on a Sun Enterprise 450. So, we decided to build a new mail system. The architects made their recommendations but their fuckwad CTO ended up having most of the say in the matter. I no longer use the @home service but from what I hear, the mail system still sucks.
Two words: the slide.
So this bluegrass picker goes into 7-Eleven for a few minutes and returns to parking lot, only to find his car window broken. As soon as he sees the shattered glass, his heart sinks. He had left his $3000 banjo in plain view on the passenger seat. "Oh no", he sighed. He looks through the broken window and sees his beloved banjo, still sitting on the seat. And lying next to it is...another banjo!
Why would AOL cable modem service suck? You don't *have* to use the AOL client. AOL's network backbone is fscking amazing. You can get from just about any point on it to any other point in less than 3ms. I've yet to see a DSL provider with a backbone that can even come close to this.
Have you seen this software? It's a psuedo Windows NT sound driver that intercepts a sound output (from, say, cdplayer.exe) and saves it to a .WAV file. Yes, it's still D->A A->D but at least your audio doesn't have to travel through that crappy $2.95 Radio Shack patch cable attached to your sound card.
I found this link on Chris Lightfoot's software page.
Nope, it's actually "Yoko Ono: The Polyester Years".
--
A) Continue to waste company bandwidth from the inevitable DoS attacks to come... Continue to waste company time and money fighting the 13 year old kids who do this kind of thing (most of whom will receive no more than a spanking from their dad, anyway)... Continue to cause agony for your customers (your real customers, not your IRC clients) and potentially lose their business altogether
or...
B) Say "Later." to EFNet and, in all likelyhood, never face an irc-related DoS attack again.
--
According to AnandTech it does.
--
True... I have no idea what those Georgia machines are but the machines we used when I was in high school were mass-produced low-end boxes. I doubt that they had more than the most basic CPU fan, if they had any at all.
--
If I were the State of Georgia, I'd be more concerned about the power consumption and decreased hardware lifetimes (due to temperature from constant processor use than I would a few hundred Kb of data a day. Try feeling your CPU heatsink after a day of running the dnet client and you'll see what I mean.
--
It took a bit of digging but I found a page with this explanation:
Will we ever see your homepage return, more specifically the "fire, explosions, and antics" section? I'd be glad to put a mirror of it on the extra space I have in my home account...
I'm not sure... maybe but honestly it was really out of date. It was kind of funny originally but it's over 4 years old now...
--
and you can get really cheap airfares there, too. Iceland rocks. I took a weekend trip there from Boston last winter and had a blast. It has everything I need:
- unbelievably attractive women
- fast internet access
- clean environment
- a really wild clubbing scene
- lots of outdoor activities
- very modern capital (Reykjavik) with everyting a city dweller could need
- friendly, intelligent citizens
- great food, especially when it comes to fish
- did i mention beautiful women?
--
Back in the day, I had this leet-o prompt on my DOS box that was a little Texas flag made from an asterisk and a little high-ascii block. I wonder, first off, if any *nix terminal emulators will support all of those old ANSI drawing characters and if anyone still has this prompt lying around.
BTW, remember ANSI bombs? heehee
--
I also like to hike
Hiking boots, $110
Topo maps, $15
and read
"Earth in the Balance" by Al Gore, $14.95
and Make-love-to-my-wife
Birth control, $10
and garden
Ambrosia Canteloupe seeds, $1.75
Spade, $9
and drink-cold-beer
Pint of Uintah Brewing Co. Cuthroat Ale, $3.50
Refuting idealistic babble with hard, cold facts - Priceless.
Not to be a dick, man, but life costs money. I want to hike and garden and drink beer with my friends just as much as you do but I know that unless I make some money to pay my mortgage, it ain't gonna happen...
--
I don't mean to troll or turn this into a giant flame ware but you are using some slightly incorrent claims to make your point. Redhat is nowhere near profitable. Yes, they may have taken in more last quarter than they spent but if you look at their total cash flow for the lifetime of the company, it is decidedly in the red.
And since when is OSS the 21st century business model? Last time I check, most of the OSS companies had either folded or laid off huge numbers of employees. Just because thousands of Slashdot folks think it is so, don't believe that the rest of the corporate world is going to jump to this business model any time soon.
--
I respectfully disagree. The GPL is not well suited for (closed source) hardware devices such as load balancers and firewalls. There are companies out there that have taken a stock BSD distro and modified the kernel and userland to suit their particular commercial application. Perhaps I should have used the words "anti-closed-source" instead of "anti-big-business", since small businesses can just as easily benefit from closed source licenses. When you're in business to make money (and who isn't?), it's in your best interests to make sure that your competitors can't easily use your coding efforts to beat you. Yes, Open Source software can definitely make money but it will never approach the money-making abilities of closed source software.
--
I love this one...
"It's an attack on Linux, which has market share as an operating system. FreeBSD has no market share, so they say, 'Oh, that's the good one,' " de Icaza said.
First of all, it's an outright lie. FreeBSD certainly has a market share. Ever heard of Yahoo!, Miguel? Secondly, FreeBSD does not have the anti-big-business licensing (ie no closed source--yes, this can be anti-big-business) that Linux has.
--
My comment (thought, admittedly, not all that funny) was not at all intended to be a troll. Rather, it was intended to poke fun at Slashdot's leftist, anti-big-business (despite being one themselves...), anti-property-owner sway. Do you really think VA would hesitate to sue someone who comes out with a copy-cat product with a copy-cat name?
--
Yep. Right here.
--
Well said, hobo. Here is a wonderful book that pokes fun (and common sense) at the many "fashionable worries" of our day.
--
Yeah, but then you'd have to come up with your own dot.com logo--ie. MEANINGLESSWORD surrounded by some planetary-looking rings.
--
I was out off-roading with some friends in my jeep this weekend in the George Washington National Forest. We were driving along a high ridge in what appeared to be total wilderness when, all of the sudden, we came upon a bunch of RVs, campers, and pickups and some crazy looking antennas. These guys had a regular tent city set up on top of this mountain! It looked like a lot of fun.
--