SCSI was supposed to be a general purpose interface where you could connect Drives, printers, tape drives, scanners, mice, kb's.....just like USB is pitched now. Except that it just never worked that way. Anyone tried to connect a SCSI scanner to a loop with a bunch of drives or even mix and match devices on a single loop? Sure it MAY work but you'll probably spend some time swapping out adapters, adjusting the connection order (even though that isn't supposed to happen), terminating, not terminating blah blah blorgh.
And oh yeah - - I've got a carton of SCSI 1,2, FW, Differential, "3" drives and adapters that don't work with one another, terminate differently have different cable connections, use 8-16bit interposers that don't work and generally require cables that cost of forking FORTUNE; The last.5 meter external U2W 68 pin cable I bought was ~$75.00 retail. Sure I could have bought it mail order for about ~$25-30 but I can't be sure they'd send me the right part.
SCSI is great if you've got the money and time to set it up and support it but for home use? Bleh.
This could be the greatest thing since....well since anything? We no longer need real brand name athletes, their obscene payouts, criminal records and constant bickering with owners. We no longer need owners or even teams at all. Just create a bunch of player agents and slap somebody's face on it. Imagine we could finally know if Ty Cobb is better than today's players, or if Walter Johnson could beat Randy Johnson. Swap out different stadiums like wallpaper. Hell auction off the rights to build your own players. Give them fishheads and metal arms and whatnot.
wink wink wink wink. Seriously, this could signal the end of 'city' sponsorship in Baseball. You could just paste up corporate logos on stadiums on uniforms on anything and instead of for example the Seattle Mariners you would have the eBay/Coke/Nike/AT&T Mariners. It's what's sports are about anyway.
We've always had a hard time selling DFS internally. In fact we've stopped trying to do that because there weren't enough internal customers. The hurdle costs were too high the skills were hard to find and expensive and customers still wanted SMB shares via Samba which drove the cost even higher. The client side DCE licence costs drove Samba since the per client cost was $65/seat in bulk. AFS as open source can only be a good thing since we can always find someone to pick up the development and maintenance and foregoing DCE-Kerberos is really not that big a deal from an internal perspective. In our environment the challenge was to collapse hundreds of LanServer domains. DFS or AFS fit the bill and the cost dynamics work very well compared to staffing 1 headcount/25-35 servers in the LanServer world. The problem anyone will find though is backup and storage management. butc or buta just don't scale very well even with multiple replicas of the fldb core so whoever tries to manage this, as we did, will be forced to write extensions to their storage management code, as we did with ADSM. Also you will find that Samba doesn't scale nearly as well as you want with only a few hundred accounts on a Samba server even if it sits on a huge Unix machine. This leaves you will a few hundred or more SMB gateways if you try to scale up to the huge numbers we did.
Once again AFS open source can only be a good thing - it will propagate a great technology into large sites where they would shied away from it previously.
What I like more is conditional fractional voting. That's where you get to plug in a part of vote based on other contingencies. Such as if Prop X gets passed by >Z% then I give 0.45 votes for Prop W. Or, I could split my votes into.25 candidate 1 and.75 candidate 2. Or I could save up votes into a vote pool and spend several votes at once apportioned over many different contingencies.
The idea though of vote auctions seems dangerous. The first thing I'd do is form a VC firm and buy up masses of votes and use them as a more aggressive form of lobbying. I could threaten a candidate with a loss if I didn't get my way where I could control a large percentage of votes that I bought with other people's money. Hell I could sell debt to some third world country at junk bond rates that you would pay for anyway in order to get a tinhorn dictator into my VC vote fund. That way I could get guys like bin Ladin or the Medellin cartel to effectively buy whatever US election they wanted. Now that's Democracy!
Maybe we can get microvotes for surfing the web. You know - click on this button get.01 votes for Dubya or whatnot. Or in exchange for giving up some private information you get a tiny vote credit. Of course you'd have to sign it away anyway so that Steve Case or somebody could use it however they wanted and they not you could transfer it, etc. just like software licences. But you get the picture. Hell - maybe instead of change back from your purchases you could get microvotes! Whoever gives the best deal in exchange would get your business. The end result is obvious - if people can get enough vote credits together then they can unlaterally make up their own referendums, props and candidates. And since the US's three biggest creditors are Japan, UK and Holland, they could swoop in at the last minute and enact gun control and legalized reefer. I can hear Rush's head exploding now.
The bottom 5th of households by income do not pay
on
Voteauction.com
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· Score: 2
Today roughly the bottom 5th of households by income do not pay Federal tax. Do you propose that households that effectively pay no tax either by credits or by being on public assitance lose their right to vote. Do they vote only in state or local elections if they pay state or local tax? Everybody pays sales tax, does that count? You pay imputed tax on gasoline does that count. Maybe we should give MORE votes according to how much tax you pay? Is that what you propose? That's Uh.......aristocracy. So be prepared to get a t-shirt that says Apre Moi l'Deluge!
I can understand the notion that community standards or parental quasi-control is a good thing. If for nothing else then mom & dad won't barge into my room and start screaming that I'm polluting myself. I have to question though what we expect of people who turn 18 or 21? Here we have this society that will stop at seemingly nothing to block pictures, sounds, ideas (and sometimes products, like condoms) of more or less any arbitrary 'value' from minors, or in the case of alcohol, adults but not quite. We can't talk about it, debate it, acknowledge that it exists at all. And then the magical day arrives when said child reaches the age of majority and all barriers crumble. Are we rearing a generation of people uniquely unqualfied to function as adults in the world without Mommie's strong hand? What exactly are we protecting these fragile souls from? Turning into us? And before anyone gets all angry about how violent games are rilly rilly bad - I'm not just talking about that one thing.
Circa 1989-96. Ran Ultrix 3.2 on it. Other than innumerable problems with the serial port servers and terminal connections it ran like a Russian truck. I don't think we rebooted it for other than maintenance one time, ever. Never Ever. It was a single purpose machine hosting one clinical nursing application. Unfortunately the user base was a group of overworked abused nurses who would come into work in the morning and promptly hose getty to their terminal and then tell their manager (who they hated) that the the system was down. They also put in help desk calls to put more paper in the printer. But on it's own the machine was one stable MoFo.
Ug....just what we need another license maintenance cash cow. Strip out NDS & terminal glide path the rest. Or we could open source the whole shebang and beef up the consulting offerings, and (out) sourced services. Does anyone know if we make any money with yet another 2nd tier products and services company while keeping all of the slowly ageing stuff around? I mean we paid 4 billion for Lotus - - did we make that back yet? How long are we going to keep SmartSuite around? Are we making money with Whistler? Do Tivoli product sales make money outside of the consulting services? I know I know - port Novell to S/390 and provide 32000 hosted images on one server.
I dunno - just can't let something like that go uncommented upon.
I have had several run ins with wonks from Gartner, McKinsey and the like when they make statements that essentially boil down to either:
"the market leader now will be the market leader tomorrow because that's what market leaders' do".
or
"the market leader today will be crushed in the next 2 years by (something in) the MS camp". Whether that's MS itself or some 'partner'.
These research firms are targetted @ CIO's & CEO's who just finished reading an airline mag. And in that airline mag was probably some article that ran on 4 or 5 ages or so about the coming revolution in computing that will be brought on by Windows2000, or wireless solar powered credit card terminals, or stable wormhole computers, or outsourcing all development to Ulan Bator or something equally precient. Those same execs get back from the execu-retreat mudbath team building whore party in Vegas, call up their Meta/Gartner/whomever account exec and ask them why the fuck the service he or she is paying 50G/year couldn't predict the next revolution in online sheep shit-to-methane fuel B2B exchanges?
Flash forward one month. The research company publishes a groundbreaking research paper that says sheep shit-to-methane (SS2MF-B2B) is poised for an explosion (with a.7 probability) And all you have to do is roll everything out on Win2000 servers in Ulan Bator, which is where the sheep are, power up your solar powered handheld terminals and you too can be a master of the universe!!
In the Linux example here the comment had to do with fear. Fear that all CEO's have that they don't really know or understand or want to, what their own IT departments do, spend, save, earn, hire or anything else. It plays to that fear that leverages the unquenchable lust for control that is the persona of all CEO's, and the dread that the rest of the world will discover the utter fucking cluelessness that they loathe in themselves. Your average 6 or 7 figure exec may not know how to turn on a printer and wouldn't dirty their royal hands to do it if their next downsizing depended on it, but one thing they do know is that all computers are magical black boxes operated by people he hates; free thinkers, longhairs, etc. And the only thing between profits and the gore dappled horde trying to hurl plague killed carcasses over the ramparts is keeping a throttlingly tight rein on the magicians, because you really can't trust those folks and perhaps it's a good idea to kill every other one to keep some of them in check.
Which is to take a branded product install it and declare victory. Every subsequent failure is 'just the vendor's fault'. What you don't want to do is take on the burden of making those decisions yourself because a) you can never make most people happy b) it will become your maintenance problem forever c) if you take on the responsibility then you also load on liability. Direct all complainants to direct their ire to some corporate suit hired to handle those kind of things. Honestly, what kind of organization would press all of the responsibility of such a hot button issue down onto the technical staff? They sound like cowards. You are there to fill a technical role not a social role so eliminate yourself from it.
Ok so the chip will perform slower regardless of speed . But the decision seems to have been based on Fab yield. Ummm.. cheaper chips that may run somewhat slower than latest/greatest coming out of the oven at rock bottom prices. And the design and the track record leads one to believe that at least the possibility of computer-on-a-chip designs are in the pipeline. What does this add up to? Sounds like practically disposable mid tier performance PC's in a very small form factor.
Most of the latest batch of highly successful chemotherapy drugs are almost completely natural, eg. not synthesized. For example Taxol is drawn from Yew trees. It's administered in a solution of concentrated Histamine so the patient has to be given high doses of antihistamine to prevent shock. Likewise, cyclosporins are extremely concentrated antibiotics purified out of weaker natural strains not that much different from most other moulds. And if you're interested most the work related to chemotherapy in recent years has not been to make them particularly more effective but instead to mitigate the more toxic side effects so that patients can tolerate them better.
There used to be a difference. But today Libertarianisn has co-opted one for the other. There is no longer a difference. Once upon a time it was not polite to say "I want my shit and fuck you too". But now we have Libertarianism which more or less says the same thing except in a clouded crypto-euphemistic acceptable way. It's not just about the Gummint either. It's also about not giving a shit about what your neighbors think. Not giving a shit about them at all. If they're different from you. It's about tribalism. Once upon a time there was a movement toward hyphenation; the ethnic hyphenation of Americans. But that really didn't work because it didn't give people much opportunity to feel superior to everyone else because it encoded the same old stereotypes. Today though we have 'ideology' based divisions, whatever they are. So you can mix in whomever you want & feel that you're part of a really important mob.
You can carp about how Libertarianism is all about personal freedom, small Gummint, blah blah but in the end it's about: hate taxes, hate Clinton, gimme my guns, hate furrinurs, private religeous schools paid for tax dollars.....oops I mean vouchers, fuck you. C'mon admit it.
I'd add that if you get asked any question that has a factual or quantitative answer you can look up in a book then that is the answer you should give. "well I'll look that up in 'xxx' and let you know". The next thing I'd add about Big5 firms is that their tech interviews while rigorous, don't have any correlation to the job and dont' have any correlation to either the person asking you the questions or anyone's else's knowledge who works there. They open up a phone book sized list of questions and just read down the list.
They have a nice office complex in Chantilly, VA. I don't think there is anything in the NRO charter that prohibits spying on US citizens or tracking anything within the US.
Distributed load balanced NFS features are what AFS and DFS do best and there are far fewer calls for each I/O. The setup for DCE/DFS can be breathtakingingly complex but once you get there it's pretty much the cat's ass.
Straight up text mode surfing <& largely unformatted text at that> U. of Syracuse public 'web' servers circa 1989. I think I got rid of my account in '98
Hey !
....remember when All the Gophers in the World meant something?
Computers are just tools, no?
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 1
In the article: "JOEB7 doesn't seem to know that the vast majority of people have never even heard of encrypted e-mail programs, let alone used them. Such people dominate the most powerful and vital subculture in the world, but have no coherent political values beyond a nearly universal contempt for the one in place."
Or more concisely, most people don't care to know. Most people don't want to know how a computer works they just want results. People might be shocked to know about the chemicals and hormones in their food. But they don't really care to understand, don't really want to know the mechanics of how or why they should avoid them. What they want is a result, a 'give me something an idiot can use to fix this'. And that's at the high end of awareness.
People don't really want to know or care about how computers or networks or ecommerce work. Not even the people who make most of these decisions. Is that arrogant? Probably. But it's still true. Nobody has any respect for the mechanic whether that person is laying tile, working a loom, fixing your dishwasher or keeping your network running. This point hit home with me when I had a discussion recently with a recruiter, a partner in a firm who screamed about the lousy system support he got. For a network of ~100 clients he had one person who was paid ~$30,000 year.
Avg sysadmin overhead is 1 HC/25-35 machines for a distributed environment vs. ~1HC/service function in the S/390 world. That is, you have <1 RACF admin, <1 sysadmin, 1-2+ DB admins for the box regardless of the number of VM's on it. That's why people run S/390's. The real savings is in the labor. Plus if you expend some extra effort to consolidate console ops and messages through Tivoli agents or something similar then most of the grunt work can be eliminated altogether. Since 85% of the total cost of ownership is labor which averages out to US$140K/HC/yr fully loaded with benefits, if you can save on people that are no longer are responsible for scads of PC shaped machines then the cost efficiencies are enormous.
Well there are lots of cheap S/390's some even as low as 125K but it's like getting a barebones PC you have to add DASD, I/O controllers, Channels, RAM, etc etc. What does a used 3745 or 3172mod3 cost?
Does anyone know what kind of machine and how much of it was used to IPL 41k system images? Poughkeepsie doesn't just hand out large 'spare' mainframes for people to test on.
Slashdot Mirror
SCSI was supposed to be a general purpose interface where you could connect Drives, printers, tape drives, scanners, mice, kb's.....just like USB is pitched now. Except that it just never worked that way. Anyone tried to connect a SCSI scanner to a loop with a bunch of drives or even mix and match devices on a single loop? Sure it MAY work but you'll probably spend some time swapping out adapters, adjusting the connection order (even though that isn't supposed to happen), terminating, not terminating blah blah blorgh.
.5 meter external U2W 68 pin cable I bought was ~$75.00 retail. Sure I could have bought it mail order for about ~$25-30 but I can't be sure they'd send me the right part.
And oh yeah - - I've got a carton of SCSI 1,2, FW, Differential, "3" drives and adapters that don't work with one another, terminate differently have different cable connections, use 8-16bit interposers that don't work and generally require cables that cost of forking FORTUNE; The last
SCSI is great if you've got the money and time to set it up and support it but for home use? Bleh.
This could be the greatest thing since....well since anything? We no longer need real brand name athletes, their obscene payouts, criminal records and constant bickering with owners. We no longer need owners or even teams at all. Just create a bunch of player agents and slap somebody's face on it. Imagine we could finally know if Ty Cobb is better than today's players, or if Walter Johnson could beat Randy Johnson. Swap out different stadiums like wallpaper. Hell auction off the rights to build your own players. Give them fishheads and metal arms and whatnot.
wink wink wink wink. Seriously, this could signal the end of 'city' sponsorship in Baseball. You could just paste up corporate logos on stadiums on uniforms on anything and instead of for example the Seattle Mariners you would have the eBay/Coke/Nike/AT&T Mariners. It's what's sports are about anyway.
We've always had a hard time selling DFS internally. In fact we've stopped trying to do that because there weren't enough internal customers. The hurdle costs were too high the skills were hard to find and expensive and customers still wanted SMB shares via Samba which drove the cost even higher. The client side DCE licence costs drove Samba since the per client cost was $65/seat in bulk. AFS as open source can only be a good thing since we can always find someone to pick up the development and maintenance and foregoing DCE-Kerberos is really not that big a deal from an internal perspective. In our environment the challenge was to collapse hundreds of LanServer domains. DFS or AFS fit the bill and the cost dynamics work very well compared to staffing 1 headcount/25-35 servers in the LanServer world. The problem anyone will find though is backup and storage management. butc or buta just don't scale very well even with multiple replicas of the fldb core so whoever tries to manage this, as we did, will be forced to write extensions to their storage management code, as we did with ADSM. Also you will find that Samba doesn't scale nearly as well as you want with only a few hundred accounts on a Samba server even if it sits on a huge Unix machine. This leaves you will a few hundred or more SMB gateways if you try to scale up to the huge numbers we did.
Once again AFS open source can only be a good thing - it will propagate a great technology into large sites where they would shied away from it previously.
What I like more is conditional fractional voting. That's where you get to plug in a part of vote based on other contingencies. Such as if Prop X gets passed by >Z% then I give 0.45 votes for Prop W. Or, I could split my votes into .25 candidate 1 and .75 candidate 2. Or I could save up votes into a vote pool and spend several votes at once apportioned over many different contingencies.
.01 votes for Dubya or whatnot. Or in exchange for giving up some private information you get a tiny vote credit. Of course you'd have to sign it away anyway so that Steve Case or somebody could use it however they wanted and they not you could transfer it, etc. just like software licences. But you get the picture. Hell - maybe instead of change back from your purchases you could get microvotes! Whoever gives the best deal in exchange would get your business. The end result is obvious - if people can get enough vote credits together then they can unlaterally make up their own referendums, props and candidates. And since the US's three biggest creditors are Japan, UK and Holland, they could swoop in at the last minute and enact gun control and legalized reefer. I can hear Rush's head exploding now.
The idea though of vote auctions seems dangerous. The first thing I'd do is form a VC firm and buy up masses of votes and use them as a more aggressive form of lobbying. I could threaten a candidate with a loss if I didn't get my way where I could control a large percentage of votes that I bought with other people's money. Hell I could sell debt to some third world country at junk bond rates that you would pay for anyway in order to get a tinhorn dictator into my VC vote fund. That way I could get guys like bin Ladin or the Medellin cartel to effectively buy whatever US election they wanted. Now that's Democracy!
Maybe we can get microvotes for surfing the web. You know - click on this button get
Today roughly the bottom 5th of households by income do not pay Federal tax. Do you propose that households that effectively pay no tax either by credits or by being on public assitance lose their right to vote. Do they vote only in state or local elections if they pay state or local tax? Everybody pays sales tax, does that count? You pay imputed tax on gasoline does that count. Maybe we should give MORE votes according to how much tax you pay? Is that what you propose? That's Uh.......aristocracy. So be prepared to get a t-shirt that says Apre Moi l'Deluge!
I can understand the notion that community standards or parental quasi-control is a good thing. If for nothing else then mom & dad won't barge into my room and start screaming that I'm polluting myself. I have to question though what we expect of people who turn 18 or 21? Here we have this society that will stop at seemingly nothing to block pictures, sounds, ideas (and sometimes products, like condoms) of more or less any arbitrary 'value' from minors, or in the case of alcohol, adults but not quite. We can't talk about it, debate it, acknowledge that it exists at all. And then the magical day arrives when said child reaches the age of majority and all barriers crumble. Are we rearing a generation of people uniquely unqualfied to function as adults in the world without Mommie's strong hand? What exactly are we protecting these fragile souls from? Turning into us? And before anyone gets all angry about how violent games are rilly rilly bad - I'm not just talking about that one thing.
Circa 1989-96. Ran Ultrix 3.2 on it. Other than innumerable problems with the serial port servers and terminal connections it ran like a Russian truck. I don't think we rebooted it for other than maintenance one time, ever. Never Ever. It was a single purpose machine hosting one clinical nursing application. Unfortunately the user base was a group of overworked abused nurses who would come into work in the morning and promptly hose getty to their terminal and then tell their manager (who they hated) that the the system was down. They also put in help desk calls to put more paper in the printer. But on it's own the machine was one stable MoFo.
All those cycles...hmmm could it be sentient? Starting to sound a little like Sid 6.7.
Ug....just what we need another license maintenance cash cow. Strip out NDS & terminal glide path the rest. Or we could open source the whole shebang and beef up the consulting offerings, and (out) sourced services. Does anyone know if we make any money with yet another 2nd tier products and services company while keeping all of the slowly ageing stuff around? I mean we paid 4 billion for Lotus - - did we make that back yet? How long are we going to keep SmartSuite around? Are we making money with Whistler? Do Tivoli product sales make money outside of the consulting services? I know I know - port Novell to S/390 and provide 32000 hosted images on one server.
I just don't get it.
I dunno - just can't let something like that go uncommented upon.
.7 probability) And all you have to do is roll everything out on Win2000 servers in Ulan Bator, which is where the sheep are, power up your solar powered handheld terminals and you too can be a master of the universe!!
I have had several run ins with wonks from Gartner, McKinsey and the like when they make statements that essentially boil down to either:
"the market leader now will be the market leader tomorrow because that's what market leaders' do".
or
"the market leader today will be crushed in the next 2 years by (something in) the MS camp". Whether that's MS itself or some 'partner'.
These research firms are targetted @ CIO's & CEO's who just finished reading an airline mag. And in that airline mag was probably some article that ran on 4 or 5 ages or so about the coming revolution in computing that will be brought on by Windows2000, or wireless solar powered credit card terminals, or stable wormhole computers, or outsourcing all development to Ulan Bator or something equally precient. Those same execs get back from the execu-retreat mudbath team building whore party in Vegas, call up their Meta/Gartner/whomever account exec and ask them why the fuck the service he or she is paying 50G/year couldn't predict the next revolution in online sheep shit-to-methane fuel B2B exchanges?
Flash forward one month. The research company publishes a groundbreaking research paper that says sheep shit-to-methane (SS2MF-B2B) is poised for an explosion (with a
In the Linux example here the comment had to do with fear. Fear that all CEO's have that they don't really know or understand or want to, what their own IT departments do, spend, save, earn, hire or anything else. It plays to that fear that leverages the unquenchable lust for control that is the persona of all CEO's, and the dread that the rest of the world will discover the utter fucking cluelessness that they loathe in themselves. Your average 6 or 7 figure exec may not know how to turn on a printer and wouldn't dirty their royal hands to do it if their next downsizing depended on it, but one thing they do know is that all computers are magical black boxes operated by people he hates; free thinkers, longhairs, etc. And the only thing between profits and the gore dappled horde trying to hurl plague killed carcasses over the ramparts is keeping a throttlingly tight rein on the magicians, because you really can't trust those folks and perhaps it's a good idea to kill every other one to keep some of them in check.
From first proof of concept to a commercialy viable product is often very very long. Such as:
Liquid fuel rockets - 1920's
Turbojet - mid 1930's
TV - 1920-something
High temp superconductor 1992?
Digital electronic computer - 1945
Which is to take a branded product install it and declare victory. Every subsequent failure is 'just the vendor's fault'. What you don't want to do is take on the burden of making those decisions yourself because a) you can never make most people happy b) it will become your maintenance problem forever c) if you take on the responsibility then you also load on liability. Direct all complainants to direct their ire to some corporate suit hired to handle those kind of things. Honestly, what kind of organization would press all of the responsibility of such a hot button issue down onto the technical staff? They sound like cowards. You are there to fill a technical role not a social role so eliminate yourself from it.
Ok so the chip will perform slower regardless of speed . But the decision seems to have been based on Fab yield. Ummm.. cheaper chips that may run somewhat slower than latest/greatest coming out of the oven at rock bottom prices. And the design and the track record leads one to believe that at least the possibility of computer-on-a-chip designs are in the pipeline. What does this add up to? Sounds like practically disposable mid tier performance PC's in a very small form factor.
Hey I want cartons of those !!!
Except of course for the fact that it's equal to 10 car payments.
Most of the latest batch of highly successful chemotherapy drugs are almost completely natural, eg. not synthesized. For example Taxol is drawn from Yew trees. It's administered in a solution of concentrated Histamine so the patient has to be given high doses of antihistamine to prevent shock. Likewise, cyclosporins are extremely concentrated antibiotics purified out of weaker natural strains not that much different from most other moulds. And if you're interested most the work related to chemotherapy in recent years has not been to make them particularly more effective but instead to mitigate the more toxic side effects so that patients can tolerate them better.
There used to be a difference. But today Libertarianisn has co-opted one for the other. There is no longer a difference. Once upon a time it was not polite to say "I want my shit and fuck you too". But now we have Libertarianism which more or less says the same thing except in a clouded crypto-euphemistic acceptable way. It's not just about the Gummint either. It's also about not giving a shit about what your neighbors think. Not giving a shit about them at all. If they're different from you. It's about tribalism. Once upon a time there was a movement toward hyphenation; the ethnic hyphenation of Americans. But that really didn't work because it didn't give people much opportunity to feel superior to everyone else because it encoded the same old stereotypes. Today though we have 'ideology' based divisions, whatever they are. So you can mix in whomever you want & feel that you're part of a really important mob.
You can carp about how Libertarianism is all about personal freedom, small Gummint, blah blah but in the end it's about: hate taxes, hate Clinton, gimme my guns, hate furrinurs, private religeous schools paid for tax dollars.....oops I mean vouchers, fuck you. C'mon admit it.
On both sides of the table - you and them, is at joel.editthispage.com/stories/StoryReader$20
This guy knows what he's talking about.
I'd add that if you get asked any question that has a factual or quantitative answer you can look up in a book then that is the answer you should give. "well I'll look that up in 'xxx' and let you know". The next thing I'd add about Big5 firms is that their tech interviews while rigorous, don't have any correlation to the job and dont' have any correlation to either the person asking you the questions or anyone's else's knowledge who works there. They open up a phone book sized list of questions and just read down the list.
Hell with 1Ghz CPU's. Give me a half speed computer, preferably on one chip, for $99.
They have a nice office complex in Chantilly, VA. I don't think there is anything in the NRO charter that prohibits spying on US citizens or tracking anything within the US.
Distributed load balanced NFS features are what AFS and DFS do best and there are far fewer calls for each I/O. The setup for DCE/DFS can be breathtakingingly complex but once you get there it's pretty much the cat's ass.
Straight up text mode surfing <& largely unformatted text at that> U. of Syracuse public 'web' servers circa 1989. I think I got rid of my account in '98
Hey !
....remember when All the Gophers in the World meant something?
In the article: "JOEB7 doesn't seem to know that the vast majority of people have never even heard of encrypted e-mail programs, let alone used them. Such people dominate the most powerful and vital subculture in the world, but have no coherent political values beyond a nearly universal contempt for the one in place."
Or more concisely, most people don't care to know. Most people don't want to know how a computer works they just want results. People might be shocked to know about the chemicals and hormones in their food. But they don't really care to understand, don't really want to know the mechanics of how or why they should avoid them. What they want is a result, a 'give me something an idiot can use to fix this'. And that's at the high end of awareness.
People don't really want to know or care about how computers or networks or ecommerce work. Not even the people who make most of these decisions. Is that arrogant? Probably. But it's still true. Nobody has any respect for the mechanic whether that person is laying tile, working a loom, fixing your dishwasher or keeping your network running. This point hit home with me when I had a discussion recently with a recruiter, a partner in a firm who screamed about the lousy system support he got. For a network of ~100 clients he had one person who was paid ~$30,000 year.
Avg sysadmin overhead is 1 HC/25-35 machines for a distributed environment vs. ~1HC/service function in the S/390 world. That is, you have <1 RACF admin, <1 sysadmin, 1-2+ DB admins for the box regardless of the number of VM's on it. That's why people run S/390's. The real savings is in the labor. Plus if you expend some extra effort to consolidate console ops and messages through Tivoli agents or something similar then most of the grunt work can be eliminated altogether. Since 85% of the total cost of ownership is labor which averages out to US$140K/HC/yr fully loaded with benefits, if you can save on people that are no longer are responsible for scads of PC shaped machines then the cost efficiencies are enormous.
Well there are lots of cheap S/390's some even as low as 125K but it's like getting a barebones PC you have to add DASD, I/O controllers, Channels, RAM, etc etc. What does a used 3745 or 3172mod3 cost?
Does anyone know what kind of machine and how much of it was used to IPL 41k system images? Poughkeepsie doesn't just hand out large 'spare' mainframes for people to test on.