Is IBM going to buy out SCO and make the lawsuit go away in the NEAR future?
Or are going to drag the case through the courts for a while, so as to devalue SCO's stock, and THEN complete the buyout?
'Cuz those are really the only two ways this is going to end.
(And you know there's a tie-wearing IBM beancounter, somewhere in Armonk, whose job for the moment is to do the math and see exactly which of the two would be cheapest.)
Or can they be thought of more as a support and SERVICES company?
1) The last time I worked somewhere where we depended on Oracle, and I was privy to such details: Yes, the Oracle license did cost a lot. But our support contract cost MORE (per MONTH). And where the license was a one time purchase (not counting upgrades). Said company will be sending Oracle a monthly check for as long as it is in existence, because:
2) All pretensions of the open source databases aside; Oracle's product really *IS* second to none. Hands down, if you want a database, Oracle is the only way to go. As another poster mentioned; they're better than two DECADES ahead of their competition.
3) That Oracle support, for which we paid far more than the license itself, really WAS, as before, second to none. Maybe IBM's support and services are on par with Oracle's. No one else in the tech industry even comes close.
4) Oracle really *IS* a beast. Sure, once you get it up and running, it's just about bulletproof. But it really is a monstrosity that pretty much REQUIRE support to get going.
Isn't "giving the software away for free, and selling support contracts" the way everyone says that OSS companies are supposed to make money?
Now, I'm obviously not privy to the internals of Oracle; so I can't say for sure. But if I were a betting man, I'd give good odds that:
1) Oracle makes more money providing services and support than they do selling software licenses themselves.
and
2) They could give away their software for free, open the source even; and they would STILL be rakeing in the cash supporting their products.
You're jokeing, right? Or have you just not really read Microserfs???
> they are a GREAT employer. In terms of corporate
> culture they really rock. ...
> And everyone there LOVES Microsoft. ...
> Anyone who hasn't should read Microserfs. While it may
> not be based on a true life story, it definitely captures the
> essence of Microsoft.
I HAVE read Microserfs... a number of times actually. It seems as if you have not. Either that, or it went totally over your head.
The whole POINT of Microserfs was that the protagonists were absolutely miserable losers, unfulfilled and anti-social with no lives (and not to mention: perpetually cold and wet)...
... until they QUIT their jobs at microsoft, and went to work in The Valley; at which point they all became MUCH happier, started socializing, had more fun, and generally all-around improved their lives by a couple orders of magnitude.
Saying that Microserfs "captures the essence of Microsoft" is not AT ALL an endorsement of the place. Just makes it more likely that I'll avoid the place like the plague, it does.
Then again, you could just be trolling. I've mostly quit paying attention to such matters.
Both are large corperations that don't practice much innovation (Honestly... Madden 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003???), but since the mid to late '90s have been running around buying out smaller developers, milking whatever profits they can out of the franchises, and letting the studios wither on the vine.
It was only a few weeks ago that it was announced that Westwood (now a subsidiary of EA) was closeing up it's Las Vegas development offices. When WAS the last time anything good came out of the C&C series? I bet it predates Westwood's fall to EA.
Westwood in particular stings ME hard, because, before EA, they used to do some REALLY cool games outside C&C. Remember the Blade Runner "adventure" game? That was one of my faves. Do you think that, under EA's flag, we'll EVER see anything from Westwood but more played-out C&C's?
Or take microsoft's assimilation of one of my other previously-favroite game developers: Bungie. I STILL dig out Marathon and Myth every so often. And who else remembers all the previews of what Halo was going to be before gates had it stripped down to become the Xbox's flagship yet-another-generic-FPS.
Back to EA... Remember Origin? Remember Autoduel and Ogre? What about the Wing Commander series? Crusader? BioForge? Remember the excellent storytelling in the old Ultima series? I sure do. What is Origin all about NOW though, under the stewardship of EA? Ultima Online, Ultima Online expansions, and a sequel to... Ultima Online!
Remember "Jane's"? Remember the excellent military simulations of the '90s. 688i, in particular, STILL has quite a following. Quite an achievement for a game released in 1997! Where is Jane's now? Electronic arts. What has Jane's done recently? Nothing since 2000.
Remember when Maxis had a sence of humor? Remember when they released some really WIERD sims? Remember Sim Ant, Sim Earth, and Sim Tower? NOW what does Maxis do? Well, they just released another Sim City... one which I'm told is STILL not as fun as Sim City 2000 was. Oh, and they do expansion packs for The Sims. Quick check of EA's site to be sure.... yup.
I'm sure there are MORE game studios that others could name that have been assimilated by microsoft or EA. The above are mostly my pet peeves in the "large corperations buying and destroying small game studios" world. But I think THAT is the problem with game development. In my experience as a gamer, studios have been so much more creative, and... well... FUN when they were independent. The big corperations seem to forget that games are supposed to be FUN. They just see a trend (FPS, RTS, MMRPG, etc.), and want to milk it dry.
In the UK, and in most other European countries, in order to get their licenses from the local equivelents of the FCC, it was mandatory for the cellular carriers to offer coverage for the entire country.
And YES that DOES include the non-urban areas!
Our own FCC just doesn't have the balls to stand up to, and regulate, US telecomms corperations. So from a European (And others, Japan for instance.) point of view, the US's real (Sorry, AMPS and other obsolete garbage don't count, G2 and G3 GSM are where it's at.) cellular network IS tiny, and pretty damn ass-backwards.
The standard-issue America-bashing does grate on ME a bit too. But really... our cellular system really *IS* backwards compared to Europe. And it's positively neolithic compared to Japan's.
Looks like I'm going to have to go back to keeping my maratime rescue whistle next to the phone.
For those of who who don't live near the ocean, rescue whistles are these nice, bright orange jobbies. They are made to be able to be heard by search parties over ocean surf, even if you're somewhat weak when you blow them. A good, healthy, dry person can make them blast at 110-120 dB! (And you'd be suprised at how much of that can carry over the phone lines!)
> I think that's a problem with the administration though. > It's unrealistic to think that everyone in a class can be > above average. That's what a C is supposed to mean right?
College is different than high school, where they HAVE to keep the dregs of society around. Everyone in college SHOULD be above average from the very beginning.
The D and C students should never have set foot in a college (or university) in the first place. The admissions process should have weeded them out. And if people ARE chronicly getting those sub-par grades, admissions should be tightened up and made more competetive.
If that ever happens, I'll just take the SIM card out of the old (broken) phone, and put it in the new one... My phone book, settings, everything will all be there. No worries.
If by some freak chance I wreck the phone to the point that my SIM chip dies, I'll just sync my phone book onto the new phone from my Palm's IR port, just like I populated the phone book of my current phone. Hell, my next phone just might be the S/E T68i or the Nokia 3560. So I could just iSync the numbers straight in from the computer.
Anyway you look at it, it's no big deal. The only thing I'd lose sleep over is the waiting, with no phone, from the time I break the old one to the time I get the new one.
I thought that the difficulty in finding OGG compatability in portable players wasn't that all the makers were being "evil" and trying to suppress the new "free" format.
I thought it was because most portables use integer-only CPUs to save that little bit more money. And while there ARE integer-only deconders for MP3s, there aren't for the Vorbis codec.
Is this no longer true, or am I caffeine defficent and wrong in the first place?
cya, john
Five Nines? I don't think so...
on
SGI launches R16000
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> for 99.999% (that's 5 nines) PCs can do the job > and even do it better and especially do it much > cheaper.
I don't buy it. With ix86 PCs, it's not just the software that's crap compared to legitimate enterprise solutions, but the hardware too. Linux is nifty and all, but it only improves the software side. The hardware is still shit.
I've used ix86 boxes from most every builder... from solidly well-built IBM machines, to crap boxes built by dell from commodity parts. Not a one of them has achieved five nines. Remember, that's only five and a quarter minutes of downtime PER YEAR. With most OSs, if you reboot two or three times, that eats up all of your downtime right there, assuming NO other problems.
ix86 boxes just are NOT up to the "five nines" standard. OTOH, I've seen more than a few Sparc, SGI, and RS6000s that can do it.
Remember... just because you CAN do something on the cheap with crap hardware doesent mean that you should. And it doesn't mean that enterprise hardware doesn't have its place.
Just for kicks, I chmodded IE back to 755, fired it up and went to the address to see what would happen... nothing.
I even logged into slashdot and clicked on it in the story to see if THAT would do the trick...... nothing... Just a blank white page with some gunk in the source which, I presume, was supposed to crash Explorer. It didn't.
Oopsie. Nice try, but no cookie. Back to the drawing board for bconway, I guess. And IE is back to 000 for me.
cya, john
A little late to object, isn't it?
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 1
Most of the WiFi technology *IS* designed to operate on internationally agreed upon standards, yes? I know that 802.11, at the very least, is generally preceeded by an "IEEE" label. And I imagine that IEEE has or is defining standards for the rest of the WiFi gear and protocols as well.
I don't know EXACTLY goes into getting a technology certified as an IEEE standard, but I refuse to believe that they don't consider things like interfearence before they approve an RF protocol and frequency spectrum.
The time and place for the DOD to object to WiFi was to the IEEE, when they were defining these standards. Since they didn't bother to object until after the standards were approved, and the devices in stores, Rumsfeld and his cronies should be told to go piss on an electric fence.
I'm running top right now (and not running Quicktime), and I don't see anything I can identify as a Quicktime process.
Quicktime has never, in my memory, hijacked a file type or creator without my permission. Of course, it came pre-installed on my computer, so I dunno what would have happened had I installed it fresh. But I can easily, for example, tell mp3's to associate themselves with Audion or iTunes, and Quicktime won't hijack them; either on opening the file, or on launching Quicktime.
And any icons (except for those in the Applications folder itself) are easily removed.
Open your eyes, and stop spreading FUD.
(And hell... when you come right down to it, the most recent version of RealOne is remarkably well-behaved. I admit, I was reluctant as hell to install it, given my past experiences. But they do seem to have listened to the input (complaints) of the users. Still not a company I would give money to, given their past behavior. But they seem to suck significantly less.)
> typically rushes and posts answers to questions no
> one asked in the first place, hoping to get modded
> up. And a lot (most?) of it is offtopic as well,
> so he's the canonical example for a karma whore.
Walk into any rave; especially a massive with lots of cheezy trance, or pretty much ANYTHING this time of year (closer to halloween, the better).
You'll fine PLENTY of people running around and dancing with butterfly wings on (and even whole butterfly costumes too). Ditto for angels, fairys, dragonflys, and just about ANY winged creature.
Oops... there goes ANOTHER claim for gates' so-called originality.
> We also have a Congress who feels that Amtrak > should be paying its own way, and not requiring > federal subsidies.
I'm all in favor of more travel via train... ESPECIALLY locally, I'd LOVE it if, for example, if BART and MUNI were to dramaticlly expand the areas they cover and reduce my need for a car.
But Amtrack is operated by a bunch of incompetant fucktards. It deserves to die a nasty death.
As an example of the stupidity of Amtrack:
Last time I went to the east coast to visit family, (I'm in San Francisco, they're in West Palm Beach, Florida.), I thought it would be cool to look into taking a train. This was before 9/11. I wasn't scared to fly. It was just for the hell of it; because I thought taking the train would be fun. So I put my origin, destination, and travel dates into Amtrack's online trip planner.
To get myself from San Francisco to West Palm Beach, Amtrack wanted me to:
1) First, take a bus (WTF???) to Emeryville. 2) Take a train From Emeryville to Los Angeles. (So far, so good, right? But wait.) 3) Then, Amtrack wants me to take another train, LA to Chicago. 4) Change trains, Chicago to New York. 5) Change trains again, and go down the east coast from NY to WPB.
The total round trip time would have eaten up TEN DAYS of my two-week trip! And the bastards were going to charge MORE than it eventually cost me to fly! (six hours each way, with ONE plane change in Philidelphia)
Thanks, Amtrack, but no thanks. I'll keep flying; terrorist risk or no.
Remember, "management" at Apple is the same guy who used to sell blue boxes to UC Berkeley students to earn the money so he could afford his acid and eat his fancy organic vegan meals.
Somehow, I suspect that if DRM ever makes more then the slightest advance into the Macintosh it will NOT be "management"'s idea. More likely it will be a law sponsored by the senator from disney.
Do you have any IDEA of the energy density that would be necessary in a portable storage cell to power a Star Trek style hand phaser? Or even a Star Wars style blaster?
(And have either contain enough juice for more than the smallest number of shots, that is)
It's perfectly plausable that even when people are flying around in FTL starships (powered, after all, by very NON-portable reactors), that the dominant hand weapon will be the same old "bullet propelled by an explosive charge" that we have now.
This was one of my favorite aspects of Cameron's "Aliens". The colonial marines used hardware that was obviously far in advance of our own, but was actually a plausable evolution.
As for the designs, there's an old saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". The Colt.45, for example, has been essentially unchanged for over ninty YEARS now. And who's to say that Colt or Winchester won't still be around and selling guns in the future? After all, there are only SO many "human interfaces" that work if you're building something to shoot people with. Would you rathar they were shooting lasers out of dustbusters, ala first season ST:TNG?
And if you want to get MORE primative, more than a few SciFi authors have re-introduced swordplay in their futures. And I don't mean lightsabers. I mean those pointy metal things. Mostly, I think it's because they think it would look cool if their work ever ends up on screen. But the explanation (again, quite plausable) usually given, is that projectile/energy weapons would rupture the hull and depressurise the comparment, killing EVERYONE.
> where you got the idea that the whole ship had > simulated gravity?
He probably got the idea from the fact that the bridge of the Omega class was often shown with gravity.
So many years of Star Trek probably has him (and many others) conditioned to believe that the bridge MUST be prominently placed on the top of the ship, like a big hood ornament. Such a placement would preclude the bridge of the Omega class being in the rotating section.
Personally, I always thought that was a damn stupid design decision.
> any other clues that determine their > whereabouts.
There are plenty of clues, actually, that Springfield is in northern California.
The biggest, and most obvious one, is that in a recent episode I heard one of them say "hella", and NOT in a mocking "South Park" way. That, right there, immediately places them in California, somewhere north of Monterey, but south of Eureka.
Add to that the geography. Springfield is a coastal town, with a harbor. It is close to some wicked mountains (the Murderhorn) and a gorge. And it is near some rathar pastoral farmlands (where tomacco can be grown). The wide variety of terrain, within very a short drive, also implies California.
Another dead giveaway if the flora... particularly the giant redwood tree that Lisa sat in during her stint as an enviromentalist. This same episode also included a reference to Burning Man, which, despite being held just inside Nevada, is very much a California (and Bay Area in particular) thing.
There are probably more clues, that could lock it down further. But between the harbor, "hella", and the redwood; it's pretty much locked down as being coastal California somewhere north of SF (the redwoods start a bit north of Marin), but south of Eureka (where people stop saying "hella").
In B, the disenfranchised group/company/person occasionally has to FIND the A-Team before they can hire them.
This involves them venturing into "the Los Angeles underground", which just happens to include Hollywood, where Hannibal, one of the Army's most wanted fugatives, has a lucrative carrear as a B-movie swamp monster. It, of course, never occurs to Decker, et. al., that the John "Hannibal" Smith in the credits of "Swamp Thing XXIV" jusy MIGHT be the same John "Hannibal" Smith that, in 1972, escaped from a "maximum security stockade".
Oh, and between B and C, you need to include an additional step: The A-Team breaks Murdock out of the insane aslyum.
cya, john
Re:First they came for the Indians...
on
Shop Till It Drops
·
· Score: 1
> I'm pretty sure we're going to tell our kids > about the days you had to talk to people to buy > things at the store.
Not really. And I see no particular reason why they'll be missed.
I don't get my "fulfilling human interaction" from the Clerks at the Quick Stop. I get it from my friends and my family.
Well, for two years, while in college, I earned my beer money by providing IT services and support to various professors engaged in grant-funded research projects. By no means does that make me a full-time academic, but I got a good feel for the (computing) tools that go along with the job.
The vast majority of documentation and other paperwork in industry
(Emphesis mine)
Who said anything about industry? The parent, and I, were talking about the scientific community; and specificly talking about research papers, at that. And yes, amongst scientists (as opposed to corperate drones), tex is, and always has been, king.
> If you want to be a hermit and be unable to send > your scientific reports to PC users since you > have inappropriate software
You haven't spent much time around the scientific community, have you? Inappropriate software? PC users? Scientific reports are written in tex, (or latex or whatever front-end to tex is the preference nowdays) not word. And the people who write them don't give two shits about the little people and their toy computers.
If they lower themselves to make ANY accomidation to the ms types, they just export their tex document to pdf, and be done with it. And word/office is *still* unnecessary in this case.
> OS X may not be the sleekest girl on the block
OS X is a memory hog. The best medecine for a slow Mac is an extre 256MB of ram. I think that actually helped ME more than going from 10.0 to 10.1.
> (which are optimized for speed in the 10.2 > update)
Won't help me. I don't have a 3D card that supports Quartz Extreme. But I do have room for another 256MB (see my above statement)
> CLI and OS kernel that soars.
No arguement there. Though I'm not a big fan of Apple's terminal program, I hardly ever have to use it (except as a novelty... to proove to skeptics that MacOS really IS BSD/Mach now). And getting X to run is no big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
So...
Is IBM going to buy out SCO and make the lawsuit go away in the NEAR future?
Or are going to drag the case through the courts for a while, so as to devalue SCO's stock, and THEN complete the buyout?
'Cuz those are really the only two ways this is going to end.
(And you know there's a tie-wearing IBM beancounter, somewhere in Armonk, whose job for the moment is to do the math and see exactly which of the two would be cheapest.)
cya,
john
Or can they be thought of more as a support and SERVICES company?
1) The last time I worked somewhere where we depended on Oracle, and I was privy to such details: Yes, the Oracle license did cost a lot. But our support contract cost MORE (per MONTH). And where the license was a one time purchase (not counting upgrades). Said company will be sending Oracle a monthly check for as long as it is in existence, because:
2) All pretensions of the open source databases aside; Oracle's product really *IS* second to none. Hands down, if you want a database, Oracle is the only way to go. As another poster mentioned; they're better than two DECADES ahead of their competition.
3) That Oracle support, for which we paid far more than the license itself, really WAS, as before, second to none. Maybe IBM's support and services are on par with Oracle's. No one else in the tech industry even comes close.
4) Oracle really *IS* a beast. Sure, once you get it up and running, it's just about bulletproof. But it really is a monstrosity that pretty much REQUIRE support to get going.
Isn't "giving the software away for free, and selling support contracts" the way everyone says that OSS companies are supposed to make money?
Now, I'm obviously not privy to the internals of Oracle; so I can't say for sure. But if I were a betting man, I'd give good odds that:
1) Oracle makes more money providing services and support than they do selling software licenses themselves.
and
2) They could give away their software for free, open the source even; and they would STILL be rakeing in the cash supporting their products.
cya,
john
> they are a GREAT employer. In terms of corporate
...
...
> culture they really rock.
> And everyone there LOVES Microsoft.
> Anyone who hasn't should read Microserfs. While it may
> not be based on a true life story, it definitely captures the
> essence of Microsoft.
I HAVE read Microserfs... a number of times actually. It seems as if you have not. Either that, or it went totally over your head.
The whole POINT of Microserfs was that the protagonists were absolutely miserable losers, unfulfilled and anti-social with no lives (and not to mention: perpetually cold and wet)...
Saying that Microserfs "captures the essence of Microsoft" is not AT ALL an endorsement of the place. Just makes it more likely that I'll avoid the place like the plague, it does.
Then again, you could just be trolling. I've mostly quit paying attention to such matters.
cya,
john
What is wrong with game development?
Microsoft, and even moreso: Electronic Arts.
Both are large corperations that don't practice much innovation (Honestly... Madden 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003???), but since the mid to late '90s have been running around buying out smaller developers, milking whatever profits they can out of the franchises, and letting the studios wither on the vine.
It was only a few weeks ago that it was announced that Westwood (now a subsidiary of EA) was closeing up it's Las Vegas development offices. When WAS the last time anything good came out of the C&C series? I bet it predates Westwood's fall to EA.
Westwood in particular stings ME hard, because, before EA, they used to do some REALLY cool games outside C&C. Remember the Blade Runner "adventure" game? That was one of my faves. Do you think that, under EA's flag, we'll EVER see anything from Westwood but more played-out C&C's?
Or take microsoft's assimilation of one of my other previously-favroite game developers: Bungie. I STILL dig out Marathon and Myth every so often. And who else remembers all the previews of what Halo was going to be before gates had it stripped down to become the Xbox's flagship yet-another-generic-FPS.
Back to EA... Remember Origin? Remember Autoduel and Ogre? What about the Wing Commander series? Crusader? BioForge? Remember the excellent storytelling in the old Ultima series? I sure do. What is Origin all about NOW though, under the stewardship of EA? Ultima Online, Ultima Online expansions, and a sequel to... Ultima Online!
Remember "Jane's"? Remember the excellent military simulations of the '90s. 688i, in particular, STILL has quite a following. Quite an achievement for a game released in 1997! Where is Jane's now? Electronic arts. What has Jane's done recently? Nothing since 2000.
Remember when Maxis had a sence of humor? Remember when they released some really WIERD sims? Remember Sim Ant, Sim Earth, and Sim Tower? NOW what does Maxis do? Well, they just released another Sim City... one which I'm told is STILL not as fun as Sim City 2000 was. Oh, and they do expansion packs for The Sims. Quick check of EA's site to be sure.... yup.
I'm sure there are MORE game studios that others could name that have been assimilated by microsoft or EA. The above are mostly my pet peeves in the "large corperations buying and destroying small game studios" world. But I think THAT is the problem with game development. In my experience as a gamer, studios have been so much more creative, and... well... FUN when they were independent. The big corperations seem to forget that games are supposed to be FUN. They just see a trend (FPS, RTS, MMRPG, etc.), and want to milk it dry.
cya,
john
In the UK, and in most other European countries, in order to get their licenses from the local equivelents of the FCC, it was mandatory for the cellular carriers to offer coverage for the entire country.
And YES that DOES include the non-urban areas!
Our own FCC just doesn't have the balls to stand up to, and regulate, US telecomms corperations. So from a European (And others, Japan for instance.) point of view, the US's real (Sorry, AMPS and other obsolete garbage don't count, G2 and G3 GSM are where it's at.) cellular network IS tiny, and pretty damn ass-backwards.
The standard-issue America-bashing does grate on ME a bit too. But really... our cellular system really *IS* backwards compared to Europe. And it's positively neolithic compared to Japan's.
cya,
john
Looks like I'm going to have to go back to keeping my maratime rescue whistle next to the phone.
For those of who who don't live near the ocean, rescue whistles are these nice, bright orange jobbies. They are made to be able to be heard by search parties over ocean surf, even if you're somewhat weak when you blow them. A good, healthy, dry person can make them blast at 110-120 dB! (And you'd be suprised at how much of that can carry over the phone lines!)
cya,
john
> I think that's a problem with the administration though.
> It's unrealistic to think that everyone in a class can be
> above average. That's what a C is supposed to mean right?
College is different than high school, where they HAVE to keep the dregs of society around. Everyone in college SHOULD be above average from the very beginning.
The D and C students should never have set foot in a college (or university) in the first place. The admissions process should have weeded them out. And if people ARE chronicly getting those sub-par grades, admissions should be tightened up and made more competetive.
cya,
john
> until you break your phone
If that ever happens, I'll just take the SIM card out of the old (broken) phone, and put it in the new one... My phone book, settings, everything will all be there. No worries.
If by some freak chance I wreck the phone to the point that my SIM chip dies, I'll just sync my phone book onto the new phone from my Palm's IR port, just like I populated the phone book of my current phone. Hell, my next phone just might be the S/E T68i or the Nokia 3560. So I could just iSync the numbers straight in from the computer.
Anyway you look at it, it's no big deal. The only thing I'd lose sleep over is the waiting, with no phone, from the time I break the old one to the time I get the new one.
cya,
john
I thought that the difficulty in finding OGG compatability in portable players wasn't that all the makers were being "evil" and trying to suppress the new "free" format.
I thought it was because most portables use integer-only CPUs to save that little bit more money. And while there ARE integer-only deconders for MP3s, there aren't for the Vorbis codec.
Is this no longer true, or am I caffeine defficent and wrong in the first place?
cya,
john
> for 99.999% (that's 5 nines) PCs can do the job
> and even do it better and especially do it much
> cheaper.
I don't buy it. With ix86 PCs, it's not just the software that's crap compared to legitimate enterprise solutions, but the hardware too. Linux is nifty and all, but it only improves the software side. The hardware is still shit.
I've used ix86 boxes from most every builder... from solidly well-built IBM machines, to crap boxes built by dell from commodity parts. Not a one of them has achieved five nines. Remember, that's only five and a quarter minutes of downtime PER YEAR. With most OSs, if you reboot two or three times, that eats up all of your downtime right there, assuming NO other problems.
ix86 boxes just are NOT up to the "five nines" standard. OTOH, I've seen more than a few Sparc, SGI, and RS6000s that can do it.
Remember... just because you CAN do something on the cheap with crap hardware doesent mean that you should. And it doesn't mean that enterprise hardware doesn't have its place.
cya,
john
Just for kicks, I chmodded IE back to 755, fired it up and went to the address to see what would happen... nothing.
... nothing... Just a blank white page with some gunk in the source which, I presume, was supposed to crash Explorer. It didn't.
I even logged into slashdot and clicked on it in the story to see if THAT would do the trick...
Oopsie. Nice try, but no cookie. Back to the drawing board for bconway, I guess. And IE is back to 000 for me.
cya,
john
Most of the WiFi technology *IS* designed to operate on internationally agreed upon standards, yes? I know that 802.11, at the very least, is generally preceeded by an "IEEE" label. And I imagine that IEEE has or is defining standards for the rest of the WiFi gear and protocols as well.
I don't know EXACTLY goes into getting a technology certified as an IEEE standard, but I refuse to believe that they don't consider things like interfearence before they approve an RF protocol and frequency spectrum.
The time and place for the DOD to object to WiFi was to the IEEE, when they were defining these standards. Since they didn't bother to object until after the standards were approved, and the devices in stores, Rumsfeld and his cronies should be told to go piss on an electric fence.
cya,
john
I'm running top right now (and not running Quicktime), and I don't see anything I can identify as a Quicktime process.
Quicktime has never, in my memory, hijacked a file type or creator without my permission. Of course, it came pre-installed on my computer, so I dunno what would have happened had I installed it fresh. But I can easily, for example, tell mp3's to associate themselves with Audion or iTunes, and Quicktime won't hijack them; either on opening the file, or on launching Quicktime.
And any icons (except for those in the Applications folder itself) are easily removed.
Open your eyes, and stop spreading FUD.
(And hell... when you come right down to it, the most recent version of RealOne is remarkably well-behaved. I admit, I was reluctant as hell to install it, given my past experiences. But they do seem to have listened to the input (complaints) of the users. Still not a company I would give money to, given their past behavior. But they seem to suck significantly less.)
cya,
john
Gandalf could kick harry potter's candy ass clear into the next time zone...
Assuming, of course, he got the chance, and Gimli doesn't just lop the annoying little prat's head right off beforehand.
cya,
john
> one asked in the first place, hoping to get modded
> up. And a lot (most?) of it is offtopic as well,
> so he's the canonical example for a karma whore.
You, obviously, don't remember Signal 11.
cya,
john
Walk into any rave; especially a massive with lots of cheezy trance, or pretty much ANYTHING this time of year (closer to halloween, the better).
You'll fine PLENTY of people running around and dancing with butterfly wings on (and even whole butterfly costumes too). Ditto for angels, fairys, dragonflys, and just about ANY winged creature.
Oops... there goes ANOTHER claim for gates' so-called originality.
cya,
john
> We also have a Congress who feels that Amtrak
> should be paying its own way, and not requiring
> federal subsidies.
I'm all in favor of more travel via train... ESPECIALLY locally, I'd LOVE it if, for example, if BART and MUNI were to dramaticlly expand the areas they cover and reduce my need for a car.
But Amtrack is operated by a bunch of incompetant fucktards. It deserves to die a nasty death.
As an example of the stupidity of Amtrack:
Last time I went to the east coast to visit family, (I'm in San Francisco, they're in West Palm Beach, Florida.), I thought it would be cool to look into taking a train. This was before 9/11. I wasn't scared to fly. It was just for the hell of it; because I thought taking the train would be fun. So I put my origin, destination, and travel dates into Amtrack's online trip planner.
To get myself from San Francisco to West Palm Beach, Amtrack wanted me to:
1) First, take a bus (WTF???) to Emeryville.
2) Take a train From Emeryville to Los Angeles.
(So far, so good, right? But wait.)
3) Then, Amtrack wants me to take another train, LA to Chicago.
4) Change trains, Chicago to New York.
5) Change trains again, and go down the east coast from NY to WPB.
The total round trip time would have eaten up TEN DAYS of my two-week trip! And the bastards were going to charge MORE than it eventually cost me to fly! (six hours each way, with ONE plane change in Philidelphia)
Thanks, Amtrack, but no thanks. I'll keep flying; terrorist risk or no.
cya,
john
> subject to management whims
Remember, "management" at Apple is the same guy who used to sell blue boxes to UC Berkeley students to earn the money so he could afford his acid and eat his fancy organic vegan meals.
Somehow, I suspect that if DRM ever makes more then the slightest advance into the Macintosh it will NOT be "management"'s idea. More likely it will be a law sponsored by the senator from disney.
cya,
john
Do you have any IDEA of the energy density that would be necessary in a portable storage cell to power a Star Trek style hand phaser? Or even a Star Wars style blaster?
.45, for example, has been essentially unchanged for over ninty YEARS now. And who's to say that Colt or Winchester won't still be around and selling guns in the future? After all, there are only SO many "human interfaces" that work if you're building something to shoot people with. Would you rathar they were shooting lasers out of dustbusters, ala first season ST:TNG?
(And have either contain enough juice for more than the smallest number of shots, that is)
It's perfectly plausable that even when people are flying around in FTL starships (powered, after all, by very NON-portable reactors), that the dominant hand weapon will be the same old "bullet propelled by an explosive charge" that we have now.
This was one of my favorite aspects of Cameron's "Aliens". The colonial marines used hardware that was obviously far in advance of our own, but was actually a plausable evolution.
As for the designs, there's an old saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". The Colt
And if you want to get MORE primative, more than a few SciFi authors have re-introduced swordplay in their futures. And I don't mean lightsabers. I mean those pointy metal things. Mostly, I think it's because they think it would look cool if their work ever ends up on screen. But the explanation (again, quite plausable) usually given, is that projectile/energy weapons would rupture the hull and depressurise the comparment, killing EVERYONE.
cya,
john
> where you got the idea that the whole ship had
> simulated gravity?
He probably got the idea from the fact that the bridge of the Omega class was often shown with gravity.
So many years of Star Trek probably has him (and many others) conditioned to believe that the bridge MUST be prominently placed on the top of the ship, like a big hood ornament. Such a placement would preclude the bridge of the Omega class being in the rotating section.
Personally, I always thought that was a damn stupid design decision.
cya,
john
> any other clues that determine their
> whereabouts.
There are plenty of clues, actually, that Springfield is in northern California.
The biggest, and most obvious one, is that in a recent episode I heard one of them say "hella", and NOT in a mocking "South Park" way. That, right there, immediately places them in California, somewhere north of Monterey, but south of Eureka.
Add to that the geography. Springfield is a coastal town, with a harbor. It is close to some wicked mountains (the Murderhorn) and a gorge. And it is near some rathar pastoral farmlands (where tomacco can be grown). The wide variety of terrain, within very a short drive, also implies California.
Another dead giveaway if the flora... particularly the giant redwood tree that Lisa sat in during her stint as an enviromentalist. This same episode also included a reference to Burning Man, which, despite being held just inside Nevada, is very much a California (and Bay Area in particular) thing.
There are probably more clues, that could lock it down further. But between the harbor, "hella", and the redwood; it's pretty much locked down as being coastal California somewhere north of SF (the redwoods start a bit north of Marin), but south of Eureka (where people stop saying "hella").
cya,
john
There's more variety than THAT...
In B, the disenfranchised group/company/person occasionally has to FIND the A-Team before they can hire them.
This involves them venturing into "the Los Angeles underground", which just happens to include Hollywood, where Hannibal, one of the Army's most wanted fugatives, has a lucrative carrear as a B-movie swamp monster. It, of course, never occurs to Decker, et. al., that the John "Hannibal" Smith in the credits of "Swamp Thing XXIV" jusy MIGHT be the same John "Hannibal" Smith that, in 1972, escaped from a "maximum security stockade".
Oh, and between B and C, you need to include an additional step: The A-Team breaks Murdock out of the insane aslyum.
cya,
john
> I'm pretty sure we're going to tell our kids
> about the days you had to talk to people to buy
> things at the store.
Not really. And I see no particular reason why they'll be missed.
I don't get my "fulfilling human interaction" from the Clerks at the Quick Stop. I get it from my friends and my family.
Real life is not a Kevin Smith movie.
cya,
john
Well, for two years, while in college, I earned my beer money by providing IT services and support to various professors engaged in grant-funded research projects. By no means does that make me a full-time academic, but I got a good feel for the (computing) tools that go along with the job.
The vast majority of documentation and other paperwork in industry
(Emphesis mine)
Who said anything about industry? The parent, and I, were talking about the scientific community; and specificly talking about research papers, at that. And yes, amongst scientists (as opposed to corperate drones), tex is, and always has been, king.
cya,
john
> If you want to be a hermit and be unable to send
> your scientific reports to PC users since you
> have inappropriate software
You haven't spent much time around the scientific community, have you? Inappropriate software? PC users? Scientific reports are written in tex, (or latex or whatever front-end to tex is the preference nowdays) not word. And the people who write them don't give two shits about the little people and their toy computers.
If they lower themselves to make ANY accomidation to the ms types, they just export their tex document to pdf, and be done with it. And word/office is *still* unnecessary in this case.
> OS X may not be the sleekest girl on the block
OS X is a memory hog. The best medecine for a slow Mac is an extre 256MB of ram. I think that actually helped ME more than going from 10.0 to 10.1.
> (which are optimized for speed in the 10.2
> update)
Won't help me. I don't have a 3D card that supports Quartz Extreme. But I do have room for another 256MB (see my above statement)
> CLI and OS kernel that soars.
No arguement there. Though I'm not a big fan of Apple's terminal program, I hardly ever have to use it (except as a novelty... to proove to skeptics that MacOS really IS BSD/Mach now). And getting X to run is no big deal.
cya,
john