We had some code here designed for Textronics _vector_ terminals (basically an oscilloscope modified to plot). When they surplused those in the early 80s I wanted to buy one - however the electric bill made it a non-starter.
Awww - you actually have to do some coding, instead of all the nice objects being built for you? I'm sorry for you, you have to actually work for a living.
If you can't remember 8 to 20 characters for a while without writing it down, why the heck are we employing you? You won't be able to remember how to do your job past sundown!
Let's not forget IBM's Virtual Machine hypervisor, which has been consistenly improved since 1967.. VM runs virtual Linux servers on z/series hardware and does it quite well. A lot of your favorite software has been ported to it already (Apache, Mono... ). If you're in an organization that has z/Series you owe it to your bosses to look at Linuz on Z - you can consolidate some servers on the same hardware your other business software is running on, with no power increase - and the licensing of the IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux) engines is such that adding IFLs doesn't add to licensing costs for other software running on the "conventional" CPs.
Ah... so you use your PDA as a small GUI for the lap top (or more precisely,m for features of the lap top) in some ways "fast access to e-mail, posting to blogs, etc.". Perhaps if UMPCs (Origami was a better word)
Of course why you carry the gadgets is off-topic. You carry what you carry, the question was "what bag to carry it in?". We now hope to return you to your regularly scheduled Ask Slashdot.
Why do people seem intent on pitching these companies against each other? Aren't they ALL making money? What's the matter - dividends are too small? Stock didn't ramp up 100% in 7 days? Didn't make a billion dollars overnight?
These days, when people talk about a company "not growing" what they really mean is "I invested to ride the stock price rocket, damnit, not to wait and collect my share of the profits" - and I think this constant Micrsoft-killer, Google-killer kind of crap is related to that.
"When I hang my telecommunicator on the door, it means DON'T come in! Jeez, the last time you did that.. well, let's just say finding out that your ears aren't the ONLY pointy part was pretty freakin' weird, OK?"
It's the economics of the thing: if you are paying money for your server-class hardware, you should be using between 90 and 99% of the box, or you're wasting money. But, you say, it's so HARD to run a server at 90%, and my SMTP service barfs all over my SQL database, or it corrupts memory by being poorly written, so I run those on separate boxes. Virtualization allows you to use separate "boxes" while still running the hardware as flat out as you can.
Two reasons it came about in the mainframe world first: 1) those boxes were originially horrendously expensive (now they're just "merely" expensive) and so you definitely didn't want to buy more than one or two; and B) the IBM 360 architecture, from which the current z/series has evolved, was designed and engineered from the ground up for multi-user, multi-tasking environments, with later evolutions added for multi-processor envuronments. Things like storage protect keys on each hardware page of storage help to kill those applications that don't play nice with others, rather than killing your system.
If you haven't looked into it yet, look into Linux (especially SuSE) on 390x architecture, running on z/VM as the virtualization hypervisor. It runs your favorite Linux stuff, runs Apache, and you can get Mono for it too if you need to handle the.NET stuff as well. Depending on your z/box size, you can scale to hundreds of virtual servers making it potentially useful for a hosting environment as well.
Not to mention that most virus binaries won't run on this architecture.
See the Linux VM group. Although their web page is sometimes a little out of date, the mailing list isn't.
This poster (and others) have the right idea - organize the shelves alphabetically, or alphabetically within major subgroupings such as Fiction vs. Everything else, and don't use your database to keep track of where things are, you'll be turning your free time into an all-volunteer librarianship.
That said, however, a program (such as Book Bag) can have one very important use in a library that large- it can keep you from buying duplicates. In our house, we buy not only new, but also used, books (my wife has a history jones) quite often. Once you get past a certain number of books, it's difficult when encountering a volume to remember whether or not you already own it. For that purpose, it is nice to have a portable list of what you have, to avoid aquiring it again.
So, my recommendation is to inventory the books one time, keep the inventory updated as you acquire things, use a tool which lets you move that to something portable, and use that system to manage your acquisition of other books - but don't use it for managing the location of the items at all.
"The history of the world should be universally accessible" is an idealistic thought. But who pays for the infrastructure that makes all of this free (as in beer) media possible? Don't start a free/Communist/pay/Capitalist flame war - I'm not taking a side, I just think that there's a growing trend to provide either free media or places for people to upload their own media, and I don't see what's paying for the hardware and people-ware to support it.
For those aggravated about the DRM or whatever, they (E-Ink) do sell a prototyping kit (warning:PDF) with a Gumstix processor running Linux. It costs 3,000 dollars (US) though - not exactly hacker-level prices!!
Nowhere on their site is there a place to buy just a display, or just the material.
Also - those of you wanting to mark up the documents, etcetera - use another tool for that. E-readers will become cheap enough primarily by focusing on just reading documents, and reducing the costs involved with that.
Sometimes it's better, especially in the early stages of a technology, to have a cheap, single-purpose implementation, than a more expensive multi-function one. For example, the telephone. Early simplicity caused widespread adoption, which then created the markets for later technological improvements.
Create some user names, and use them to anonymize the submitter name if you think the name will become the issue. Still issue the link to the user (and knowing the crowd, the link will give him away maybe).. it may delay the firestorm of comments enough that the real discussion happens in the first hundred or so posts.
The only proper robot dispute resolution method is lasers at 20 meters;
"a realm in which we can find anyone or anything "
on
Ambient Findability
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· Score: 1
Except - information created a long time ago, which no one sees profit or value in digitizing. Ever tried looking up WW II or earlier service or military medical records? How about historical research - there's an incredible daily diary of a person living in Providence (Rhode Island, US) in the 1600s or 1700s; there are books written pre-Civil War that have a more accurate representation of people's thoughts and opinions than histories written in the twentieth century (notice I don't say the facts are necessarily more accurate, that's a different topic)... none of these sources, which can be valuable to individuals and which are care for by librarians, is easily searchable, and in many cases they are on deteriorating media. I hope projects like Gutenberg and Google Print manage to get to a lot of these before they're lost.
I know, we're all looking toward the future here, but we need to bring the past along with us (and for interesting takes on this I refer you to "A Canticle For Liebowitz" in the science fiction genre or "How The Irish Saved Civilization" for those more interested in history).
This relates to bandwidth concerns. RSS readers use a polling mechanism, constantly checking at intervals to see if anything's there. At least with e-mail (mailing lists anyway) the "news" source only sends data when there's something new to send. I like the XML-based format of RSS (or better, Atom), but maybe it should be delivered to me, rather than my reader and thousands of others polling for it.
To get management to seriously consider Open Source, it's nice for them to be able to see some management processes in place. It's one of their concerns over Open Source - is it all just "wild and wooly" development, or is there a plan, is there change management, etcetera. So, to that end, this so-called "overhead" helps get Open Source adopted in places where PHBs have to be convinced.
which makes it the right of a company to make a profit.
They're losing CD sales due to technological innovation (music downloads), and the companies much beloved "free market" will determine the price point for those goods. Apple apparently guessed right when it went for 99 cents; competitors however are now pricing songs for less. So, I'm guessing IF Apple agrees to let the price float, it will most likely end up dropping. I also believe the labels are making a mistake - because for lots of people, raising the price will quickly make a "popular" act less popular.
What about Atari 800 games?
on
Atari 800 XE Laptop
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Some of the old Atari 800 games ought to be re-released on the GameBoy platform, especially the Micro! Not via emulator, but just recode them. I, for one, would like to see Star Raiders and Star Raiders II for the GBM - it had the essentials: good game play, interesting graphics. And since the chips on the 800 were designed to work in basically a 320 x 240 layout, the graphics ought to be pretty portable without scaling.
Yes.. and it was brought to you by LucasArts. When it came out it was pretty innovative for its dual-view game play, in perspective. It was fast, too... never managed to beat anyone at it though - I, unfortunately, was not that fast.
I had to quickly scan replies so forgive me if I overlooked this...
What about the option of an employee buyout, like Avis did years ago? That would put the company in the hands of those who already know how to run it; the "non-creative" (hey, if you've ever seen an HR person clear a hiring logjam in a state bureacracy you'd think they do have some creativeness!) folks could do the business side, and the "creative" folks could continue to make it profitable.
1) store it in the format of my choice
2) make a backup copy in the format of my choice
"Aye, there's the rub" -- how can you be able to do that, and also have the seller of the product be sure you won't just upload your backup copy to some server where it can be accessed for free?
I'm not advocating DRM in this post - this is about the economic model of providing the content at a fixed price. If they're going to make it cheap enough to be popular, they have to also be relatively sure that the "piracy rate" will be low enough that they don't lose money.
This _seems_ to be working in some of the online music services, where people will pay for content rather than hunt up where it's available for free; so maybe it will work for other content as well - but the basic problem I'm mentioning here will always remain.
Employees should demand to see the Help Desk statistics (in summary form) and demand that an audit be done regularly to determine if the statistics have ANY relation to reality, AND if they're being used by the PHBs. Often the information-gathering is dumped on us ("you simply MUST categorize that toner problem as to which printer vendor supplied the printer") but no one creates or reads the statistics at all, other than to check to make sure that the grunts are filling in all of the boxes.
A fun hack (but it could get you in trouble, plus I stole this idea from somewhere in Computer Lib/Dream Machines) - try putting F*CK into some of the fields - you'll DEFinitely know if they're reading the things then!
But how are they going to miniaturize the shop steward who says only union buckyball-drivers can drive that barrel of protons from point A to point B, and that a different driver has to move it from point B to point C?
Slashdot Mirror
We had some code here designed for Textronics _vector_ terminals (basically an oscilloscope modified to plot). When they surplused those in the early 80s I wanted to buy one - however the electric bill made it a non-starter.
Awww - you actually have to do some coding, instead of all the nice objects being built for you? I'm sorry for you, you have to actually work for a living.
If you can't remember 8 to 20 characters for a while without writing it down, why the heck are we employing you? You won't be able to remember how to do your job past sundown!
Let's not forget IBM's Virtual Machine hypervisor, which has been consistenly improved since 1967.. VM runs virtual Linux servers on z/series hardware and does it quite well. A lot of your favorite software has been ported to it already (Apache, Mono... ). If you're in an organization that has z/Series you owe it to your bosses to look at Linuz on Z - you can consolidate some servers on the same hardware your other business software is running on, with no power increase - and the licensing of the IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux) engines is such that adding IFLs doesn't add to licensing costs for other software running on the "conventional" CPs.
Ah... so you use your PDA as a small GUI for the lap top (or more precisely,m for features of the lap top) in some ways "fast access to e-mail, posting to blogs, etc.". Perhaps if UMPCs (Origami was a better word) Of course why you carry the gadgets is off-topic. You carry what you carry, the question was "what bag to carry it in?". We now hope to return you to your regularly scheduled Ask Slashdot.
Why do people seem intent on pitching these companies against each other? Aren't they ALL making money? What's the matter - dividends are too small? Stock didn't ramp up 100% in 7 days? Didn't make a billion dollars overnight? These days, when people talk about a company "not growing" what they really mean is "I invested to ride the stock price rocket, damnit, not to wait and collect my share of the profits" - and I think this constant Micrsoft-killer, Google-killer kind of crap is related to that.
"When I hang my telecommunicator on the door, it means DON'T come in! Jeez, the last time you did that.. well, let's just say finding out that your ears aren't the ONLY pointy part was pretty freakin' weird, OK?"
It's the economics of the thing: if you are paying money for your server-class hardware, you should be using between 90 and 99% of the box, or you're wasting money. But, you say, it's so HARD to run a server at 90%, and my SMTP service barfs all over my SQL database, or it corrupts memory by being poorly written, so I run those on separate boxes. Virtualization allows you to use separate "boxes" while still running the hardware as flat out as you can.
Two reasons it came about in the mainframe world first: 1) those boxes were originially horrendously expensive (now they're just "merely" expensive) and so you definitely didn't want to buy more than one or two; and B) the IBM 360 architecture, from which the current z/series has evolved, was designed and engineered from the ground up for multi-user, multi-tasking environments, with later evolutions added for multi-processor envuronments. Things like storage protect keys on each hardware page of storage help to kill those applications that don't play nice with others, rather than killing your system.
If you haven't looked into it yet, look into Linux (especially SuSE) on 390x architecture, running on z/VM as the virtualization hypervisor. It runs your favorite Linux stuff, runs Apache, and you can get Mono for it too if you need to handle the .NET stuff as well. Depending on your z/box size, you can scale to hundreds of virtual servers making it potentially useful for a hosting environment as well.
Not to mention that most virus binaries won't run on this architecture.
See the Linux VM group. Although their web page is sometimes a little out of date, the mailing list isn't.
That said, however, a program (such as Book Bag) can have one very important use in a library that large- it can keep you from buying duplicates. In our house, we buy not only new, but also used, books (my wife has a history jones) quite often. Once you get past a certain number of books, it's difficult when encountering a volume to remember whether or not you already own it. For that purpose, it is nice to have a portable list of what you have, to avoid aquiring it again.
So, my recommendation is to inventory the books one time, keep the inventory updated as you acquire things, use a tool which lets you move that to something portable, and use that system to manage your acquisition of other books - but don't use it for managing the location of the items at all.
"The history of the world should be universally accessible" is an idealistic thought. But who pays for the infrastructure that makes all of this free (as in beer) media possible? Don't start a free/Communist/pay/Capitalist flame war - I'm not taking a side, I just think that there's a growing trend to provide either free media or places for people to upload their own media, and I don't see what's paying for the hardware and people-ware to support it.
Nowhere on their site is there a place to buy just a display, or just the material.
Also - those of you wanting to mark up the documents, etcetera - use another tool for that. E-readers will become cheap enough primarily by focusing on just reading documents, and reducing the costs involved with that.
Sometimes it's better, especially in the early stages of a technology, to have a cheap, single-purpose implementation, than a more expensive multi-function one. For example, the telephone. Early simplicity caused widespread adoption, which then created the markets for later technological improvements.
Maybe they can take out those spammers who terrorize my in-box every day!
Create some user names, and use them to anonymize the submitter name if you think the name will become the issue. Still issue the link to the user (and knowing the crowd, the link will give him away maybe).. it may delay the firestorm of comments enough that the real discussion happens in the first hundred or so posts.
The only proper robot dispute resolution method is lasers at 20 meters;
Except - information created a long time ago, which no one sees profit or value in digitizing. Ever tried looking up WW II or earlier service or military medical records? How about historical research - there's an incredible daily diary of a person living in Providence (Rhode Island, US) in the 1600s or 1700s; there are books written pre-Civil War that have a more accurate representation of people's thoughts and opinions than histories written in the twentieth century (notice I don't say the facts are necessarily more accurate, that's a different topic)... none of these sources, which can be valuable to individuals and which are care for by librarians, is easily searchable, and in many cases they are on deteriorating media. I hope projects like Gutenberg and Google Print manage to get to a lot of these before they're lost.
I know, we're all looking toward the future here, but we need to bring the past along with us (and for interesting takes on this I refer you to "A Canticle For Liebowitz" in the science fiction genre or "How The Irish Saved Civilization" for those more interested in history).
This relates to bandwidth concerns. RSS readers use a polling mechanism, constantly checking at intervals to see if anything's there. At least with e-mail (mailing lists anyway) the "news" source only sends data when there's something new to send. I like the XML-based format of RSS (or better, Atom), but maybe it should be delivered to me, rather than my reader and thousands of others polling for it.
To get management to seriously consider Open Source, it's nice for them to be able to see some management processes in place. It's one of their concerns over Open Source - is it all just "wild and wooly" development, or is there a plan, is there change management, etcetera. So, to that end, this so-called "overhead" helps get Open Source adopted in places where PHBs have to be convinced.
which makes it the right of a company to make a profit. They're losing CD sales due to technological innovation (music downloads), and the companies much beloved "free market" will determine the price point for those goods. Apple apparently guessed right when it went for 99 cents; competitors however are now pricing songs for less. So, I'm guessing IF Apple agrees to let the price float, it will most likely end up dropping. I also believe the labels are making a mistake - because for lots of people, raising the price will quickly make a "popular" act less popular.
Some of the old Atari 800 games ought to be re-released on the GameBoy platform, especially the Micro! Not via emulator, but just recode them. I, for one, would like to see Star Raiders and Star Raiders II for the GBM - it had the essentials: good game play, interesting graphics. And since the chips on the 800 were designed to work in basically a 320 x 240 layout, the graphics ought to be pretty portable without scaling.
Yes.. and it was brought to you by LucasArts. When it came out it was pretty innovative for its dual-view game play, in perspective. It was fast, too... never managed to beat anyone at it though - I, unfortunately, was not that fast.
We can all listen to a not-aging-so-fast Sammy Hagar sing "I can't drive 299792.458 km/s !"
I had to quickly scan replies so forgive me if I overlooked this... What about the option of an employee buyout, like Avis did years ago? That would put the company in the hands of those who already know how to run it; the "non-creative" (hey, if you've ever seen an HR person clear a hiring logjam in a state bureacracy you'd think they do have some creativeness!) folks could do the business side, and the "creative" folks could continue to make it profitable.
2) make a backup copy in the format of my choice
"Aye, there's the rub" -- how can you be able to do that, and also have the seller of the product be sure you won't just upload your backup copy to some server where it can be accessed for free?
I'm not advocating DRM in this post - this is about the economic model of providing the content at a fixed price. If they're going to make it cheap enough to be popular, they have to also be relatively sure that the "piracy rate" will be low enough that they don't lose money.
This _seems_ to be working in some of the online music services, where people will pay for content rather than hunt up where it's available for free; so maybe it will work for other content as well - but the basic problem I'm mentioning here will always remain.
Employees should demand to see the Help Desk statistics (in summary form) and demand that an audit be done regularly to determine if the statistics have ANY relation to reality, AND if they're being used by the PHBs. Often the information-gathering is dumped on us ("you simply MUST categorize that toner problem as to which printer vendor supplied the printer") but no one creates or reads the statistics at all, other than to check to make sure that the grunts are filling in all of the boxes. A fun hack (but it could get you in trouble, plus I stole this idea from somewhere in Computer Lib/Dream Machines) - try putting F*CK into some of the fields - you'll DEFinitely know if they're reading the things then!
But how are they going to miniaturize the shop steward who says only union buckyball-drivers can drive that barrel of protons from point A to point B, and that a different driver has to move it from point B to point C?