How often do people take screen grabs of their posts to a forum? Was their expectation of it being removed?
Apple routinely deletes posts discussing known defects; it's very well known among Apple-using techies. Apple has done it in almost every case where there have been hardware defects of any kind. A classic example would be the iBook motherboard failures. I would imagine they do it to a)keep other owners from finding out and demanding fixes as well, b)keeping the press from finding out, and c)to defend themselves in any lawsuits which can claim "well, people reported it on your forums, so you must have known about it!" So...yes.
Web forums and mailing lists fuck with a classic PR/customer service move: deny all knowledge. I had a problem with speakers in my car, which in some cases had caused smoke or fire in this particular model. We called the car company, and each member of the forum, over a period of several weeks, was told "we have no knowledge of any other reports of problems with this model." They lied straight through their teeth. We later found out that over ten years before, a vehicle had completely burned to the ground because of the same defect, and company reps came out, looked at the car, purchased it back off the owner no questions asked, etc. They knew about the defect for over a decade and a half, and only after lots of bitching to NHSTA, did we get them to do anything about it. Oh, and dealing with NHSTA was another barrel of monkeys. Call their 800 number, and you get an operator who cannot do a single thing except ask for your address and send you the forms to report a problem. Once you do, they completely prevent you from speaking to the investigator at NHSTA to communicate further details et al.
According to an article on DeviceForge.com quite a few RSS feeds around the probably web stopped working properly over the past few weeks because Netscape recently stopped hosting the critical rss-0.91.dtd file.
STOP, Grammar time. Ooooh whoooaaa oh oh...
Probably someone over at netscape.com simply thought he was cleaning up some insignificant cruft."
Or Netscape got tired of people using their bandwidth. Regardless of the reasons: if you reference a file on someone's site, it's hardly their fault if they move/change/delete it, and it breaks your stuff.
But Toshiba will probably hate Cannon temporarily, especially with the "Canon had planned to exploit Toshiba for
its 'mass-production technologies,'" remark.
Exploit is a transitive verb with two meanings/usages. "To make productive use of", and "to use unfairly to one's advantage."
It is different, because Hardison's belief system has a bearing on his own ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning global warming, while your hypothetical gay scientist's sexual preference has no bearing on his ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning evolution.
Wrong, and your statement itself is ad hominem. Go read the definition, please. Example, from wikipedia:
"An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the man") is a logical fallacy consisting of replying to an argument by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument."
Any time your retort's subject matter is your opponent in the debate, that is ad hominem.
...that this nonsense is being spoken by someone who couldn't possibly be even considered sensible or correct... having anything close to a valid argument against global warming.
...yet despite that nonsense, a school board kowtowed to his demands. That has a powerful message: the toughest argument to fight is an invalid one, especially in front of an uneducated audience.
You used one yourself, in fact- you engaged in ad hominem. Maybe he is a hick; it doesn't affect the validity of his argument, which can be dismissed on other grounds (example: one is science, the other is a belief system.) It's no different than saying "well, that pro-evolution scientist is GAY!"
Furthermore, the article summary and TFA both help perpetuate the myth that evolution and global warming are theories. They're not. They're proven fact- and one of the reasons An Inconvenient Truth is so unpopular with those who don't "believe" in global warming is because it step-by-step, methodically destroys every argument they've used against global warming. Evolution is also proven fact based on not just a decade or two of research, but more than a century and a half of research.
...until AFTER you sign the deal taking the name, not BEFORE.
When Apple announced it as the "iPhone", their bargaining position weakened considerably; they haven't quite committed to the name (Apple COULD use a different name), but doing so put Cisco in a stronger position. Which, of course, Cisco realized- you'll note the day of the conference, Cisco was saying that they had faxed over stuff and were waiting for Apple to return the docs. I bet- the agreement probably said "all your cash are belong to us."
Even if Apple calls it the QRTB-3000, everyone ELSE will continue to refer to it as the iPhone. Apple may be hoping legions of rabid fans will side with them and Cisco will back down from a PR standpoint. Which I hope to hell never happens, because Apple fucked up on this big time. Apple may try to argue that despite Cisco having the trademark, they haven't used it in the ten years they've had it- and Cisco hasn't quashed everyone running around for the last year talking about how Apple would come out with an "iPhone."
Cisco can hardly argue damages; they have no "iPhone" product from which Apple is causing confusion.
One thing is for sure- this is going to keep Groklaw busy for the next few months.
After checking the feature set on Apple's web site, mark me down for at least two of those things.
You want it because all you saw was what Apple wanted you to see. You have no idea how it'll actually perform as a phone in ways that matter. I don't care how sexy it animates the UI if it's a shitty phone.
All the fervor is akin to GM showing off a new sexy looking car, and people wanting it, having no idea if it'll actually be a good car or not.
How is reception/signal strength- cellular, Wifi, and Bluetooth?
Does it drop calls mysteriously? (lot of early smartphones did)
Does it explode in shards of expensive bits when dropped on the ground? (treos are famously fragile. Newtons were very tough. Will this be a Treo, or a Newton?)
How clueful will Cingular be in sales and tech support?
Will voicemails in the new "random access voicemail" system get deleted/disappear?
How does the touchscreen feel? Is it a real problem having no actual buttons for tactile use of the phone (say, when driving?)
Is the speakerphone loud enough/clear?
Is the touchscreen durable?
How well does it load pages over EDGE, which by all accounts is high-latency, slow, and already outdated? (I guarantee anything Steve did was over Wifi.)
Will it support 802.11N so that it doesn't knock an N network down to G wherever it goes? It'd be pretty stupid to have an N network if your iPhone on your desk knocks you down to G.
You won't know any of this until Apple gives units to users (or maybe SOME journalists who aren't too distracted by "OOOO, NEW SHINY APPLE TOY". You're an absolute fool if you "pre-order" this thing.
From the article: wildly popular video showing Cicarelli and Brazilian banker Renato Malzoni making out along a beach near the Spanish city of Cadiz.
Uh, if you look at the video (thanks to fellow slashdotters), they do a lot more than "make out".
Talk about PC bullshit...the video clearly shows them having sex in the water. Or is the AP full of very, very naive reporters? Or do Brazilians have a very loose definition of the term "make out"?:-)
No they don't. Votes do. And more specifically, votes in the middle of the country.
Ever been to the midwest? They have the nicest highways, "community centers", police and fire departments.
Farmers are paid to grow crops people will never eat; food is thrown away by the ton, or bought by the government to rot in warehouses (powdered milk is a great example. Google that one.)
Corn syrup/high fructose corn syrup has largely replaced sugar in much of America's "prepared" foods. It's horribly bad for you: because it's a slightly different sugar, your body's mechanisms for "I feel full" aren't triggered, and you over-eat.
10% of every drop of gasoline you put in your car's tank is ethanol that is produced by the most wasteful, expensive method: corn. Brazil is producing huge amounts of ethanol off of sugar cane, which produces eight times more energy. You can't import Brazilian ethanol, though. US won't allow it, because it endangers corn-based ethanol.
Defense Department bases with little or no strategic value keep barely-educated young people "employed".
You have the midwest to thank for SUV emissions exceptions: it was originally intended for farm vehicles. Had midwestern senators voted for emissions standards that would force ma+pa kettle to dump $1k into their tractor so it doesn't spew nitrous oxide and unburned hydrocarbons- they would find themselves unemployed next election.
Midwesterners get hail that destroys their crops, and Uncle Sam is there to hand them a big fat check. Hail damages my house or destroys the car I need to use to get to work in the northeast, and Uncle Sam says "gee, sorry to hear that."
Whoever brings home the most bacon and has "good old American [Christian] [family] values", gets votes. In the midwest, the government works for you. Everywhere else, you work for the government. The south is much of the same- the Tennessee Valley Authority? West and Northeast tax dollars giving southerners cheap electricity. Air conditioning is a luxury: heat in the wintertime in the northeast IS NOT. Guess what happened last year? Republicans drastically cut fuel assistance programs in the northeast.
The majority of midwestern voters are ignorant and uneducated (especially in civics issues). Come election time, they don't give a damn about anything outside their town, or anyone except themselves and their family. Most of the reason they're all pissed off about the Iraq war now is because their sons and daughters are coming home in body bags. It has nothing to do with the fact that we arrogantly invaded a sovereign nation plunging it into a civil war...
You (and the Spanish) invaded countless sovereign nations around the world. Nations where people not only understood the concept of time (perhaps not down to the minute, or by "hours") but in some cases had been tracking celestial bodies for millenniums. And then you told them that they needed to keep time relative to some place they'd never heard of, using your methodology, calendar, etc.
Arrogance is the basic reason your country spent the last 300 years losing most of its "empire":-)
Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year
Wouldn't surprise me. Linux on a kernel level seems mired in a bog of endless debate and egos, and on a distribution level- well, everyone just goes and rolls their own instead of helping make an existing one better.
Look at how many half-baked virtualization models there are for Linux- and none of them are as powerful as what Solaris has. SATA support took years to come up to snuff and it's still half-baked. Recent 2.6 kernels wouldn't even boot on some AM2 systems.
Likewise for poor filesystems...Solaris ZFS, even if it can't change pool types (ie, you can't go from a pair of mirrored drives to a triplet of RAID-5 like drives) solves problems no other linux filesystem has. Namely, it scrubs the disk, not just testing readability but correctness (via checksums), and regularly walks its own filesystem structure and metadata checking for inconsistencies.
Meanwhile, the best Linux has to offer are filesystems borrowed from others (XFS), grossly unreliable (ReiserFS), or based off ten year old filesystem concepts/technology (ext3.)
The note about revenues compared to one Costco store is pretty sad. It makes me wonder where any of the other "blogger" "elite" sites stock up. I always deeply suspected that most of the "web 2.0" and "blogger" fad was just a giant San Francisco circle jerk by people who think far too highly of themselves.
The reason that they have to encrypt a zillion machines is because they store sensitive personal data on a zillion machines.
Given it's a "presidential mandate", I suspect this has more to do with making unpopular government data/facts very hard to get to. "Oops, sorry, Bill lost the encryption key to his PC. Sorry, Judge."
This is the same administration that has refused (still) to turn over papers regarding Cheney's talks with energy companies...has drastically changed how Freedom Of Information Act requests are handled, and demanded release of information on "sensitive" topics like the environment be filtered through the white house first...
Why am I still shopping for an affordable NAS that actually does what it's supposed to do without bugs and the feature set is actually what they say it is instead of vague promises and bullshit? Oh yeah I forgot, all the goodness is in the next version of their $700 unit.
Which unit are you talking about, out of curiosity? I've been eying the ReadyNAS NV+ and the Thecus N5200.
I've seen benchmarks showing performance is all over the map with the ReadyNAS, and I know that it painfully slow with fsck's (a client bought a unit and put 4 500GB drives in. An fsck after he had loaded it less than a tenth full, takes an HOUR...) However, it seems much more polished than the Thecus- which has a much faster/better processor, dual ethernet, and five bays instead of four. I've also seen a lot of bug reports and complaints about odd behavior in the infrant forums, and apparently Infrant is also systematically purging any discussion of enabling ssh on the ReadyNAS. That's not cool (nor is the fact that they encrypt their firmware, and act like their raid "technology" is really advanced. It isn't. Don't be fooled: it is a SPARC processor, running LINUX, and lvm stuff. "RAIDX" isn't even remotely proprietary or worthy of a patent.)
It's so annoying that I am highly tempted to build my own box; $600-700 comes damn close to buying some damn nice commodity hardware I could run something like FreeNAS on, or maybe Solaris with ZFS. The big problem with ZFS is that it (shockingly) doesn't allow you to migrate at all from one kind of pool to another. For example- if you set up two drives with ZFS (mirrored) and then later add a third and go striped- forget it. No can do. That alone makes ZFS laughably useless. There is a lot of other cool technology under the hood of ZFS, but it lacks in basic practical areas.
I was also slightly less than impressed that Sun has been shipping Solaris with a huge bug that keeps you from activating the installation until you change the locale; the system spins its wheels for several minutes before finally rejecting your Sun Online account. They've known about the issue for months. Have they bothered to fix the one file on the CD image? No. Issued errata? No. Put a warning on the download page? No. I had to go hunting through their support forums to find a 20+ page back-and-forth between Solaris users and a hapless tech where he FINALLY hits on the solution that works...
The data would already be in a database, and that could be converted pretty easily.
You're assuming a)The data isn't in some horrid proprietary database (lot of them didn't even run DOS, and the system my high school had used serial terminals for everything) b)that the original authors of the software were good DBAs. c)That someone will work for free to do said conversion.
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured.
This is irrelevant. There WAS no free, more secure, or full featured solution for library management.
Nevermind that most of the cost, at least initially and for the first few years, is NOT the software. About a decade ago when my school went to a computerized system, the cost was mostly in labor.
The entire card catalog was boxed up and shipped to a company for either data entry or OCR, I don't recall
Every single book was pulled, barcoded, and had an anti-theft strip (which could be deactivated) inserted into the binding
I don't recall how they managed to link barcodes to books; whether each book was pre-assigned a specific barcode, or barcodes were applied and the system brought into sync via hand entry.
This process took MONTHS and the work of several librarians and the expensive data-entry company.
I can imagine scenarios where you could get 2 dozen volunteers and go shelf by shelf through a library and catalog the collection, but it'd still be a massive undertaking, even for a small library such as one in a high school.
Your only hope is aggressive use of laptops on wireless with barcode scanners, and an ISBN lookup database you can pull, quickly verify the basics, and toss the book on the shelf again (in the proper order.)
Now, is this because Windows is just what everyone is running in a VM, so all of the resources are going toward it, or is there some inherent difficulty in replicating these features in Linux.
This is a more than fair question, because Parallels users have been complaining, as a google search shows. Linux is open source down to its skivvies, and it should follow that it should be easier to understand/tie into/work with the kernel, develop kernel modules if necessary, etc.
Yet a closed OS like Windows has numerous advanced integration features available for it that are sorely lacking in Linux. What gives? I understand development getting priority on Windows since the market share is bigger, but...I didn't expect it to be so lopsided, or perhaps some sort of community effort (though it bugs me when the community is forced to "do" a company's "job" for them.)
The thread I cited above mentions one good point: Parallels has been rushing to get marketshare precisely because VMware was highly likely to jump into the pool. They're been shipping for a while now, are showing great progress and promise. The author points out that Microsoft has decided not to play, leaving VMware as the 500lb gorilla.
Hopefully once Parallels is comfy in their market share, we'll see more support for Linux. Or, perhaps VMware will take advantage of Parallels' deficiencies and provide good Linux support. Either way- competition will hopefully fix this problem!
Kudos to the Attrition crew for posting the whole email dialogue online!
Not really. It's great grounds for them getting sued. It was a private communication and one could (probably) argue he had a reasonable expectation of privacy. It may come as a shock to slashdotters, but you can't just forward any old email that drifts into your inbox.
Also, it would have been far more effective to have brought the emails to the attention of federal authorities. Now, the chances of a fair investigation (and trial) are pretty much blown to hell.
Instead of actually helping, they just grandstanded...
My wife has family in Russia so that is why I am posting anonymously.
Right. Because the KGB is reading Slashdot, has a lookup table between slashdot usernames and addresses, and has nothing better to do except target the family of some guy who said a few nasty words about Putin.
Putin may be very evil, but don't use melodrama to puff up your claims, please. Also- Yeltsin's name is spelled with an S.
...and I enjoy seeing what happens to the moderators who get meta-moderated into oblivion and lose their mod points. Unless it's the slashdot editors, trying to be funny.
My comment wasn't even remotely redundant- neither the article, nor any posters, mentioned this problem with FIOS TV.
I've heard that you can't get business service and FIOS TV, because the TV box for some reason doesn't like having a static IP instead of DHCP. A friend was told that if he wanted TV and business service, he'd have to have two FIOS terminals installed, and it wasn't clear if that meant, for example, being billed for two complete sets of service, or what.
Sounds like either a typical technical blunder, or a great way to discourage home users from getting business class service.
So, I was an AT&T customer. I still sort of kind of am.
I kept getting free phone offers from "the new" Cingular, and I figured out why as soon as I found out from a rep that getting a new phone meant I had to sign a contract.
See- I never signed any contract with AT&T. I can cancel at any time. Not only that- I have a regional plan (which Cingular no longer offers) and I pay about $25/mo before taxes and such (add in extra for 8MB of data, something I've been meaning to can as I never use it.)
Bop over to Cingular's site and notice that the CHEAPEST plan is over $40. They literally DOUBLED the minimum "plan". Sure, you get twice as many minutes- but I almost never use the minutes I have now...something like 250.
Wanna see something interesting? Compare per-minute charges from the 90's to per-minute charges today. Despite "competition" between Verizon, T-mobile, Cingular, etc- they haven't changed much. Once you go over your minutes, it still costs you almost half a dollar a minute.
Hell even the single fact that when you are presented the logon screen, the pointer is on 10,10 and not at screencenter as on Windows, KDE or Gnome is an inconvenient. A little one but just a little thing here and a little thing there does a lot.
Why does this matter, when at the text login page, you can type your username, hit tab, enter your password, hit enter, and be looking at a desktop seconds later? And actually launch programs, not have those programs cancel mouse actions (I love how Windows repeatedly cancels menus you're trying to navigate. When the entire OS revolves around a giant heirarchial menu. For fuck's sake, a program loading itself into the toolbar causes this!)
In fact, I can then hit apple-space and type "Mail", use the down arrow and enter key to select it and launch Mail.app, and read+respond to email in my inbox. Still haven't touched my (multibutton) mouse. How about that...
How can a NIC decrease the latency in any noticable way?
It can't. It is most likely doing some traffic shaping tricks to make it look like ping times are lower.
If you want lower latency and you're using a custom firewall- make sure polling is off on the cards so packet processing is interrupt driven, and check what timer value the kernel is using. Turn off polling on the gaming system as well, but increased interrupts may hurt performance in-game.
This will, however, result in so little improvement it will most likely be unnoticeable.
The United States Department of Justice says that the 2nd amendment is an individual right
The United Stated Department of Justice also says that the Patriot Act is legal and a wonderful, necessary tool.
The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch. It's not their job to "interpret" law or the constitution. It is their job to execute the law of the land. Did you flunk middle school and high school history/civics?
Slashdot Mirror
How often do people take screen grabs of their posts to a forum? Was their expectation of it being removed?
Apple routinely deletes posts discussing known defects; it's very well known among Apple-using techies. Apple has done it in almost every case where there have been hardware defects of any kind. A classic example would be the iBook motherboard failures. I would imagine they do it to a)keep other owners from finding out and demanding fixes as well, b)keeping the press from finding out, and c)to defend themselves in any lawsuits which can claim "well, people reported it on your forums, so you must have known about it!" So...yes.
Web forums and mailing lists fuck with a classic PR/customer service move: deny all knowledge. I had a problem with speakers in my car, which in some cases had caused smoke or fire in this particular model. We called the car company, and each member of the forum, over a period of several weeks, was told "we have no knowledge of any other reports of problems with this model." They lied straight through their teeth. We later found out that over ten years before, a vehicle had completely burned to the ground because of the same defect, and company reps came out, looked at the car, purchased it back off the owner no questions asked, etc. They knew about the defect for over a decade and a half, and only after lots of bitching to NHSTA, did we get them to do anything about it. Oh, and dealing with NHSTA was another barrel of monkeys. Call their 800 number, and you get an operator who cannot do a single thing except ask for your address and send you the forms to report a problem. Once you do, they completely prevent you from speaking to the investigator at NHSTA to communicate further details et al.
According to an article on DeviceForge.com quite a few RSS feeds around the probably web stopped working properly over the past few weeks because Netscape recently stopped hosting the critical rss-0.91.dtd file.
STOP, Grammar time. Ooooh whoooaaa oh oh...
Probably someone over at netscape.com simply thought he was cleaning up some insignificant cruft."
Or Netscape got tired of people using their bandwidth. Regardless of the reasons: if you reference a file on someone's site, it's hardly their fault if they move/change/delete it, and it breaks your stuff.
But Toshiba will probably hate Cannon temporarily, especially with the "Canon had planned to exploit Toshiba for its 'mass-production technologies,'" remark.
Exploit is a transitive verb with two meanings/usages. "To make productive use of", and "to use unfairly to one's advantage."
It is different, because Hardison's belief system has a bearing on his own ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning global warming, while your hypothetical gay scientist's sexual preference has no bearing on his ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning evolution.
Wrong, and your statement itself is ad hominem. Go read the definition, please. Example, from wikipedia:
"An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the man") is a logical fallacy consisting of replying to an argument by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument."
Any time your retort's subject matter is your opponent in the debate, that is ad hominem.
...yet despite that nonsense, a school board kowtowed to his demands. That has a powerful message: the toughest argument to fight is an invalid one, especially in front of an uneducated audience.
You used one yourself, in fact- you engaged in ad hominem. Maybe he is a hick; it doesn't affect the validity of his argument, which can be dismissed on other grounds (example: one is science, the other is a belief system.) It's no different than saying "well, that pro-evolution scientist is GAY!"
Furthermore, the article summary and TFA both help perpetuate the myth that evolution and global warming are theories. They're not. They're proven fact- and one of the reasons An Inconvenient Truth is so unpopular with those who don't "believe" in global warming is because it step-by-step, methodically destroys every argument they've used against global warming. Evolution is also proven fact based on not just a decade or two of research, but more than a century and a half of research.
When Apple announced it as the "iPhone", their bargaining position weakened considerably; they haven't quite committed to the name (Apple COULD use a different name), but doing so put Cisco in a stronger position. Which, of course, Cisco realized- you'll note the day of the conference, Cisco was saying that they had faxed over stuff and were waiting for Apple to return the docs. I bet- the agreement probably said "all your cash are belong to us."
Even if Apple calls it the QRTB-3000, everyone ELSE will continue to refer to it as the iPhone. Apple may be hoping legions of rabid fans will side with them and Cisco will back down from a PR standpoint. Which I hope to hell never happens, because Apple fucked up on this big time. Apple may try to argue that despite Cisco having the trademark, they haven't used it in the ten years they've had it- and Cisco hasn't quashed everyone running around for the last year talking about how Apple would come out with an "iPhone."
Cisco can hardly argue damages; they have no "iPhone" product from which Apple is causing confusion.
One thing is for sure- this is going to keep Groklaw busy for the next few months.
After checking the feature set on Apple's web site, mark me down for at least two of those things.
You want it because all you saw was what Apple wanted you to see. You have no idea how it'll actually perform as a phone in ways that matter. I don't care how sexy it animates the UI if it's a shitty phone.
All the fervor is akin to GM showing off a new sexy looking car, and people wanting it, having no idea if it'll actually be a good car or not.
You won't know any of this until Apple gives units to users (or maybe SOME journalists who aren't too distracted by "OOOO, NEW SHINY APPLE TOY". You're an absolute fool if you "pre-order" this thing.
From the article: wildly popular video showing Cicarelli and Brazilian banker Renato Malzoni making out along a beach near the Spanish city of Cadiz.
Uh, if you look at the video (thanks to fellow slashdotters), they do a lot more than "make out".
Talk about PC bullshit...the video clearly shows them having sex in the water. Or is the AP full of very, very naive reporters? Or do Brazilians have a very loose definition of the term "make out"? :-)
Dollars speak louder than anything else.
No they don't. Votes do. And more specifically, votes in the middle of the country.
Whoever brings home the most bacon and has "good old American [Christian] [family] values", gets votes. In the midwest, the government works for you. Everywhere else, you work for the government. The south is much of the same- the Tennessee Valley Authority? West and Northeast tax dollars giving southerners cheap electricity. Air conditioning is a luxury: heat in the wintertime in the northeast IS NOT. Guess what happened last year? Republicans drastically cut fuel assistance programs in the northeast.
The majority of midwestern voters are ignorant and uneducated (especially in civics issues). Come election time, they don't give a damn about anything outside their town, or anyone except themselves and their family. Most of the reason they're all pissed off about the Iraq war now is because their sons and daughters are coming home in body bags. It has nothing to do with the fact that we arrogantly invaded a sovereign nation plunging it into a civil war...
We British invented Time
You (and the Spanish) invaded countless sovereign nations around the world. Nations where people not only understood the concept of time (perhaps not down to the minute, or by "hours") but in some cases had been tracking celestial bodies for millenniums. And then you told them that they needed to keep time relative to some place they'd never heard of, using your methodology, calendar, etc.
Arrogance is the basic reason your country spent the last 300 years losing most of its "empire" :-)
Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year
Wouldn't surprise me. Linux on a kernel level seems mired in a bog of endless debate and egos, and on a distribution level- well, everyone just goes and rolls their own instead of helping make an existing one better.
Look at how many half-baked virtualization models there are for Linux- and none of them are as powerful as what Solaris has. SATA support took years to come up to snuff and it's still half-baked. Recent 2.6 kernels wouldn't even boot on some AM2 systems.
Likewise for poor filesystems...Solaris ZFS, even if it can't change pool types (ie, you can't go from a pair of mirrored drives to a triplet of RAID-5 like drives) solves problems no other linux filesystem has. Namely, it scrubs the disk, not just testing readability but correctness (via checksums), and regularly walks its own filesystem structure and metadata checking for inconsistencies.
Meanwhile, the best Linux has to offer are filesystems borrowed from others (XFS), grossly unreliable (ReiserFS), or based off ten year old filesystem concepts/technology (ext3.)
The note about revenues compared to one Costco store is pretty sad. It makes me wonder where any of the other "blogger" "elite" sites stock up. I always deeply suspected that most of the "web 2.0" and "blogger" fad was just a giant San Francisco circle jerk by people who think far too highly of themselves.
The reason that they have to encrypt a zillion machines is because they store sensitive personal data on a zillion machines.
Given it's a "presidential mandate", I suspect this has more to do with making unpopular government data/facts very hard to get to. "Oops, sorry, Bill lost the encryption key to his PC. Sorry, Judge."
This is the same administration that has refused (still) to turn over papers regarding Cheney's talks with energy companies...has drastically changed how Freedom Of Information Act requests are handled, and demanded release of information on "sensitive" topics like the environment be filtered through the white house first...
Why am I still shopping for an affordable NAS that actually does what it's supposed to do without bugs and the feature set is actually what they say it is instead of vague promises and bullshit? Oh yeah I forgot, all the goodness is in the next version of their $700 unit.
Which unit are you talking about, out of curiosity? I've been eying the ReadyNAS NV+ and the Thecus N5200.
I've seen benchmarks showing performance is all over the map with the ReadyNAS, and I know that it painfully slow with fsck's (a client bought a unit and put 4 500GB drives in. An fsck after he had loaded it less than a tenth full, takes an HOUR...) However, it seems much more polished than the Thecus- which has a much faster/better processor, dual ethernet, and five bays instead of four. I've also seen a lot of bug reports and complaints about odd behavior in the infrant forums, and apparently Infrant is also systematically purging any discussion of enabling ssh on the ReadyNAS. That's not cool (nor is the fact that they encrypt their firmware, and act like their raid "technology" is really advanced. It isn't. Don't be fooled: it is a SPARC processor, running LINUX, and lvm stuff. "RAIDX" isn't even remotely proprietary or worthy of a patent.)
It's so annoying that I am highly tempted to build my own box; $600-700 comes damn close to buying some damn nice commodity hardware I could run something like FreeNAS on, or maybe Solaris with ZFS. The big problem with ZFS is that it (shockingly) doesn't allow you to migrate at all from one kind of pool to another. For example- if you set up two drives with ZFS (mirrored) and then later add a third and go striped- forget it. No can do. That alone makes ZFS laughably useless. There is a lot of other cool technology under the hood of ZFS, but it lacks in basic practical areas.
I was also slightly less than impressed that Sun has been shipping Solaris with a huge bug that keeps you from activating the installation until you change the locale; the system spins its wheels for several minutes before finally rejecting your Sun Online account. They've known about the issue for months. Have they bothered to fix the one file on the CD image? No. Issued errata? No. Put a warning on the download page? No. I had to go hunting through their support forums to find a 20+ page back-and-forth between Solaris users and a hapless tech where he FINALLY hits on the solution that works...
The data would already be in a database, and that could be converted pretty easily.
You're assuming a)The data isn't in some horrid proprietary database (lot of them didn't even run DOS, and the system my high school had used serial terminals for everything) b)that the original authors of the software were good DBAs. c)That someone will work for free to do said conversion.
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured.
This is irrelevant. There WAS no free, more secure, or full featured solution for library management.
Nevermind that most of the cost, at least initially and for the first few years, is NOT the software. About a decade ago when my school went to a computerized system, the cost was mostly in labor.
I don't recall how they managed to link barcodes to books; whether each book was pre-assigned a specific barcode, or barcodes were applied and the system brought into sync via hand entry.
This process took MONTHS and the work of several librarians and the expensive data-entry company.
I can imagine scenarios where you could get 2 dozen volunteers and go shelf by shelf through a library and catalog the collection, but it'd still be a massive undertaking, even for a small library such as one in a high school.
Your only hope is aggressive use of laptops on wireless with barcode scanners, and an ISBN lookup database you can pull, quickly verify the basics, and toss the book on the shelf again (in the proper order.)
Now, is this because Windows is just what everyone is running in a VM, so all of the resources are going toward it, or is there some inherent difficulty in replicating these features in Linux.
This is a more than fair question, because Parallels users have been complaining, as a google search shows. Linux is open source down to its skivvies, and it should follow that it should be easier to understand/tie into/work with the kernel, develop kernel modules if necessary, etc.
Yet a closed OS like Windows has numerous advanced integration features available for it that are sorely lacking in Linux. What gives? I understand development getting priority on Windows since the market share is bigger, but...I didn't expect it to be so lopsided, or perhaps some sort of community effort (though it bugs me when the community is forced to "do" a company's "job" for them.)
The thread I cited above mentions one good point: Parallels has been rushing to get marketshare precisely because VMware was highly likely to jump into the pool. They're been shipping for a while now, are showing great progress and promise. The author points out that Microsoft has decided not to play, leaving VMware as the 500lb gorilla.
Hopefully once Parallels is comfy in their market share, we'll see more support for Linux. Or, perhaps VMware will take advantage of Parallels' deficiencies and provide good Linux support. Either way- competition will hopefully fix this problem!
Kudos to the Attrition crew for posting the whole email dialogue online!
Not really. It's great grounds for them getting sued. It was a private communication and one could (probably) argue he had a reasonable expectation of privacy. It may come as a shock to slashdotters, but you can't just forward any old email that drifts into your inbox.
Also, it would have been far more effective to have brought the emails to the attention of federal authorities. Now, the chances of a fair investigation (and trial) are pretty much blown to hell.
Instead of actually helping, they just grandstanded...
My wife has family in Russia so that is why I am posting anonymously.
Right. Because the KGB is reading Slashdot, has a lookup table between slashdot usernames and addresses, and has nothing better to do except target the family of some guy who said a few nasty words about Putin.
Putin may be very evil, but don't use melodrama to puff up your claims, please. Also- Yeltsin's name is spelled with an S.
...and I enjoy seeing what happens to the moderators who get meta-moderated into oblivion and lose their mod points. Unless it's the slashdot editors, trying to be funny.
My comment wasn't even remotely redundant- neither the article, nor any posters, mentioned this problem with FIOS TV.
I've heard that you can't get business service and FIOS TV, because the TV box for some reason doesn't like having a static IP instead of DHCP. A friend was told that if he wanted TV and business service, he'd have to have two FIOS terminals installed, and it wasn't clear if that meant, for example, being billed for two complete sets of service, or what.
Sounds like either a typical technical blunder, or a great way to discourage home users from getting business class service.
Anyone?
I kept getting free phone offers from "the new" Cingular, and I figured out why as soon as I found out from a rep that getting a new phone meant I had to sign a contract.
See- I never signed any contract with AT&T. I can cancel at any time. Not only that- I have a regional plan (which Cingular no longer offers) and I pay about $25/mo before taxes and such (add in extra for 8MB of data, something I've been meaning to can as I never use it.)
Bop over to Cingular's site and notice that the CHEAPEST plan is over $40. They literally DOUBLED the minimum "plan". Sure, you get twice as many minutes- but I almost never use the minutes I have now...something like 250.
Wanna see something interesting? Compare per-minute charges from the 90's to per-minute charges today. Despite "competition" between Verizon, T-mobile, Cingular, etc- they haven't changed much. Once you go over your minutes, it still costs you almost half a dollar a minute.
Hell even the single fact that when you are presented the logon screen, the pointer is on 10,10 and not at screencenter as on Windows, KDE or Gnome is an inconvenient. A little one but just a little thing here and a little thing there does a lot.
Why does this matter, when at the text login page, you can type your username, hit tab, enter your password, hit enter, and be looking at a desktop seconds later? And actually launch programs, not have those programs cancel mouse actions (I love how Windows repeatedly cancels menus you're trying to navigate. When the entire OS revolves around a giant heirarchial menu. For fuck's sake, a program loading itself into the toolbar causes this!)
In fact, I can then hit apple-space and type "Mail", use the down arrow and enter key to select it and launch Mail.app, and read+respond to email in my inbox. Still haven't touched my (multibutton) mouse. How about that...
How can a NIC decrease the latency in any noticable way?
It can't. It is most likely doing some traffic shaping tricks to make it look like ping times are lower.
If you want lower latency and you're using a custom firewall- make sure polling is off on the cards so packet processing is interrupt driven, and check what timer value the kernel is using. Turn off polling on the gaming system as well, but increased interrupts may hurt performance in-game.
This will, however, result in so little improvement it will most likely be unnoticeable.
The United States Department of Justice says that the 2nd amendment is an individual right
The United Stated Department of Justice also says that the Patriot Act is legal and a wonderful, necessary tool.
The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch. It's not their job to "interpret" law or the constitution. It is their job to execute the law of the land. Did you flunk middle school and high school history/civics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_power s_under_the_United_States_Constitution#Executive_p ower
Christ. Half the problem with this country is American's basic inability to understand the simplest concepts of the US government.