> > I had to buy a MacOS 8 CD on eBay. Paid a lot > more than one dollar for that. >
And not only that, you really should be buying 14 more copies - even if that was a still sealed retail copy of the software that had never been installed on the seller's machine, the license terms would almost certainly restrict it's application to a single computer.
This is exactly the same situation as the Cisco or NetApp examples from the article. What you pay for the software includes costs for supporting the machine it's running on. It costs more to support 15 computers than one. Even if you know what you're doing and never call Apple, the price you paid for the OS license assumes that some people need support and others don't.
All this said, the Cisco example goes well past this support cost argument which I think most people could see, even if they don't agree. In their case, Cisco isn't just trying to make sure their support costs are covered, but are trying to stifle the secondary market with their $850 "inspection fee". Now, validating that a product hasn't been modified or fitted with non-certified parts can be tough and expensive, but $850 of inspection on a $2300 router is just gamesmanship on Cisco's part and it really is there to provide a block to eBay resales.
The Phaser "wax" printers were originally popularized (and I believe developed at) Tektronix. They got out of the printer biz some years back and the Phaser is now sold by Xerox.
They still have a number of models, mostly still in the high-end departmental area.
There are certain tasks where the Phaser output is pretty nice. Because the wax-based pigments are opaque the colors are really saturated. Cost and mess factors are very low relative to inkjet printing. All these things make these printers continue to be a pretty strong choice for printing business graphics (charts, graphs, etc.). And as the RIP hardware has gotten much faster, it's not quite as long a lifetime to wait for output as in the old days.
But in terms of capability, I don't think they can touch the flexibility of inkjets. These days there are choices for pigment-based or dye-based inks so you can print opaque or transparently. And inkjets have much higher resolution, more flexibility on printing media, and are cheaper too.
> Samsung's ML-1650 offers Linux compatability > and Postscript level III as an option. All for > around $300.
I'm sure it's a very nice printer, but the original poster was looking for a *color* printer - and that's something that this one most definitely does not do.
I haven't seen FW or USB mentioned in any in-car electronics yet, but the upcoming new BMW 5-series has the second generation iDrive system which supposedly includes a Bluetooth radio.
You know the first generation iDrive from the (odd looking) current BMW 745i. It has literally hundreds of functions integrated under the control of a big aluminum knob that's actually a haptic controller. It acts as a joystick, "clicks" like a mouse, and servos in the knob allow it to "feel" like it has stops, detents, and variable drag. Sounds like a great idea, but if you actually sit and play with the demonstrator at a BMW dealership, you quickly realize that they did a horrible job of integrating all that stuff together. It literally feels like about 20 teams worked on the different functions and implemented everything their own way. Most memorable bad experience - you navigate between the various functions (climate control, radio, navigation) by using the knob like a big joystick. Once you're on the ventilation page, you need to manipulate things in 2-D on the in-car display, but now, you're not supposed to rock the joystick - you access the functions by turning the knob to scroll the highlight through the buttons. Maybe it makes more sense when you're in the car, but I doubt it.
Some of this stuff is supposed to be fixed in the new 5-series iDrive which has more hard buttons and uses the knob more intelligently. One of the cool functions is supposed to be a Bluetooth connection to the system. This means that you can use the car's voice-recognition system to dial your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. It would be interesting if you could do things like review your contacts or calendar from your PDA or phone on the onboard display.
In practice, it'll be interesting to see if this will work at all, or whether BMW will only support some particular handset (likely, I fear). And what happens when 3 guys get in the car?
I've got the OnStar handsfree phone in my new SUV and it actually works really well. But I don't want another cell # to deal with, so I haven't used it since my free trial minutes were used up.
In a side note, in a modern car there are many computers and sensors, and they talk via a ethernet-like protocol on a single wire. Different manufacturers use different protocols, but I believe that the 802 group actually defines the core protocol standard.
Re:My iPod is super!
on
Pods Unite
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· Score: 2, Funny
> Hey I have a bettle and an iPod.. Grrr.... > mine is black with flames painted on the side. > It doesn't look gay anymore
You had your iPod painted black then had them add little tiny flames on the sides and you don't think that seemed gay?
ScaryBubbles? If that's not a developmental kernel codename, I don't know what is. Of course, the full power of the open source community will probably come up with something much more pointed and insulting than that...
More than 600 postings on this thread, and (at the top level at least) nobody's mentioned indemnification yet...
SCO thought they'd be smart today, pull the plug on IBM and the AIX installed base and let all those multi-billions of dollars of customers force IBM to it's knees. Oh please... A standard part of the (megabuck) license agreement that the AIX licensees sign is that IBM will indemnify them against patent and copyright infringement committed by IBM in constructing the product. IP infringements do happen, intentional or not, and it's only reasonable for a licensee to expect the licensor to stand behind their product. That's indemnification - it frees the person who's purchased the license from having to defend against an embedded IP infraction. In addition to IBM indemnifying their own code, they would normally ask indemnification against infringements by the licensee if they make mods.
Now, if you're buying software from me, I can promise indemnification and buy and insurance policy. But you won't buy from me, because the IBM salesman also paid you a call, and explained that his ability to stand behind his product legally is unmatched by anyone else, probably in the world. More lawyers, more patents, more money and more lethal force than anybody else is packing.
I've mentioned it in earlier postings, and it's popped up in this thread too. Little gnats often pop up and try to suck some blood from IBM. They are crushed quietly and behind the curtain by IBM's IP portfolio and legal muscle. Usually the customers don't even hear about the problem, which is the way they like it. Nothing probably makes the IBM contract management group more angry than having a SCO make a ruckus in public and cause them to have to call their gazillion licensee to tell them that there's no problem.
The only question on how this will turn out is whether IBM will take SCO out for a ride in their limo before fitting them with concrete boots or whether they get it in broad daylight at the toll booth.
Which leads to the worst job in the world (yes, even worse than yours). I remember reading an article that mentioned that only 3 SCO employees are focused on the lawsuit (yes, many many more non-employees), while the other couple of hundred continue on their path of innovation, the Caldera way.
I think everybody realizes that this is going to take a while. The guy you *don't* want to be is the VP of Sales as SCO. Now, you might have been jazzed that your company was going to squeak, IBM would buy it to make the problem go away, and you'd go home with your $20 million bucks. Only it didn't work that way. Not only is IBM not going to buy you a mansion, they're not going to even acknowledge your squeaking. You might have felt a buzz of pride thinking that IBM would have to rename AIX to "SCO AIX". Now, IBM has about 3000 people talking to every client in the world telling them how their enormous company is going to crush your clueless company.
Then the SCO CEO comes into your office, says "This isn't as easy as I thought it was going to be" and tell you that it will be really important that you maintain SCO's revenue stream since it will be too damn obvious if Microsoft gives SCO anymore money.
When SCO makes a sales call today, do you think anybody *doesn't* laugh at them? That's a job that sucks.
Oh well, I guess you can hope that Microsoft buys you before the end of the quarter. In two weeks...
I totally agree with you on this which actually is bad in the (often stupid) court system.
IBM can't afford not to audit and maintin source code that they licensed in a total clean-room situation. If an IBM employee violated that contract, then IBM could be in a bad hole (but see more below). Engineers may make mistakes, but organizationally, IBM "knows better" than to allow a breach like this to get out the door.
A slimy SCO lawyer will certainly point out that IBM has extensive code reviews specifically to prevent this sort of breach, therefore this violation must have been intentional and systemic from IBM management - a more serious situation.
Of course, IBM doesn't mess around with little worms like SCO on something like this. In addition to the group that's working on a direct defense, there's a small army of IP specialists that at IBM that are working on kneecapping SCO before they even get to the courtroom. IBM has tens of thousands (might well be over 100,000 these days) of patents that cover every aspect of computing since they were a cash register company. Now, maybe SCO has been totally clean and not infringed or violated some juicy patent from 1945. Maybe SCO has added so little that there's no conflict anywhere.
But if they haven't carefully been reviewing everything that IBM has patented since before their engineering department was born, there's a pretty good chance that the may be in violation of a good amount of IBM's IP. Then SCO will get a nice letter from IBM with about 30 pages of infringments from their crappy installer and perhaps they'd like to sit down and set up a cross-licensing agreement to resolve these issues before they commit themselves to a literal lifetime of defending themselves in court.
*That's* how an IBM or Microsoft plays ball. And there will be no FUD in the halls of SCO when IBMs says it time to quit playing.
I never thought about the site as "Prisoner" like but indeed it is. These large structures are very visible from the 101 freeway that runs right by the base, but you can't really appreciate the sheer size of these structures until you're on the base right next to them.
I live in Cupertino, just a couple of miles away. Back when Moffett Field was an active Naval Air Station, there was a yearly Air Show usually featuring the Blue Angels, acrobatic planes, military planes on display on the ground, etc. It was mostly P-3 Orion sub tracking planes flying in and out of there, but there were a lot of big C-130 and C-5 cargo planes going in and out as well. You don't realize how big a C-5 is until you're standing on the cargo deck (they can carry multiple tanks). Or a B-52, or B-1... Totally on a different scale than the fighter planes you see in a movie like Top Gun.
These airshows would attract over 250,000 people a day, and one of the fun things that they did was open up the blimp hangars as well. They are the most visible landmark of Moffett - it housed pre-WWII-era dirigibles which were the old sub-hunters. They too were much larger than the Goodyear/Fuji blimps you see today. The blimp hangar is among the largest on the West Coast. The doors roll open on railroad tracks, and one year, there were a bunch of hot air balloon rides running INSIDE the hangar - it's over 200 feet tall.
Sadly, there's been talk recently that Hangar One is contaminated with PCB-like chemicals in the lubricants used there over the decades and that it too might need to be torn down.
After the military left and handed most of Moffett Field over to NASA, there was a NASA-sponsored open house in the spirit of the old air shows. You could tell that something was "wrong" even as you arrived - they expected 70,000 people and got something like 300,000. One of the cool things they did during that open house was that they had the big wind tunnel open for tours, something that didn't occur during the military air shows. It's unbelievably cool in a "this-must-be-a-movie" way. I believe the entire interior was done in wood, like a fancy boat, but it's like a wood-lined warehouse. The fans are something like 30 feet in diameter and there was a big array of about six of them. They had examples of instrumented model planes that were tested there in maybe 1/10th scale, and a Space Shuttle model too.
Well, enough blathering. There may not really be good reasons to keep it open anymore, and keeping this all around as a playground for locals is pointless, but it will certainly be missed if this stuff goes.
And this time, let's do it right - Elizabeth Hurley as Saavik to get his pon faar off...
Seriously, this is a pretty interesting story from a scientific standpoint. Can there possibly be a more extreme barrier to survival than this?
Of course, the conspiricist would wonder about the safety of all the other experimental residue that they were carrying. That's not to suggest that everything that goes up should be independently reentry-proof, but I wonder how well NASA could identify the parts of the vehicle and payload that I really wouldn't want to be near?
So that basically disqualifies just about every CEO, CFO, COO from the boards, since most of them are crooks
:-)
Actually, most of the "chiefs" are stand up guys I think. Can a system that's mostly corrupt really operate? Did I really just ask that?
In fact however, the pool of people that are drawn up for corporate boards is extremely insular, just as the investment and executive "clubs" are. If you make a lot of money for somebody (a VC or other investor), the practice in the past was that they would give you an opportunity to serve on the boards of their other companies. Nominally, a successful exec at Company A can (and does) give a lot of real-world knowlege to nascent Company B. But mostly, the guy went to get a big chunk of pre-IPO stock at Company B.
In the past, when you're on the board of directors of even a small company, you get a fairly small amount of cash, your travel and expenses covered, and you spend 1 day every month or two at a board meeting. Oh yes, there's also that 0.25-1.00% of shares that might be allocated to you for your participation. In the boom times, that could easily be tens of MILLIONS of buck$ if the company made it to liquidity. It's good work if you can find it.
The abuses of Enron, Worldcom and others are really putting a cramp in the wallets of these guys these days. Now, there's a focus on more external directors - people who don't actually work at the company. Less compensation for the board members and more liability as well. But since there's no IPOs and no liquidity these days, it's not a big deal. When those things return - even if not to dot-com boom days, you'll see the abuses sneaking back in I'm sure.
Wrong kind of director (well, probably anyway). There are officers of the company that serve on the board of directors. The board serves an advisory role to the executive staff; nominally, the CEO "reports" to the Chairman of the Board, but it's only nominal as the CEO works at the company and the board doesn't really.
I believe this position was the *other* kind of director - a high middle management position, typically a direct report to a vice president. The VP is considered an officer of the company and is privy to what the SEC considers inside information as a part of his job duties. A director typically isn't an officer.
If you're convicted of a felony, or even certain types of misdemeanors related to financial mishandling, then you often cannot legally serve on a board of directors or even executive staff (the CEO, COO, CFO, and top VPs). This may even extend to having had personal bankruptcy or declaring bankruptcy at a company at which you were previously an officer. I don't think a credit check is typical here, but would not be inappropriate, especially these days.
Most board of director-type seats are delivered via the old-boys-club-in-a-smoky-room, so until recently, a lot of these technical formalities were just blown off.
I believe the most common case where the BSA "busts" somebody is when they have legally purchased 400 licenses for [your software here, but it's seems to usually be MS Office, AutoCAD, or Photoshop] but their internal procedure has allowed that to be installed on 1200 machines.
You just need to decide at this point whether those 800 illegal installs are "illegally pirated software" or not (I genuinely don't know where you'd place this from your post).
The case of 100 copies of Photoshop but nobody purchased a single legit copy in the entire company is an easy one for the BSA or software publisher, but the big money for the publisher is getting the incremental licensing fees for all those second copies that an Alcoa or Bechtel installed on all the corporate laptops. They're looking for a company that's big enough to cough up the big, big bucks not some little guy.
In big companies, when you receive the initial letter, your corporate counsel will ask the execs whether they've done an internal audit, and make and attempt to get in line. So the BSA has had giant bang for almost no effort. Big companies really would prefer to be clean from a licensing standpoint if the publisher gives them any chance to do that (e.g. 20,000 copies of MS Office better not cost 20,000*$500, and in fact, it doesn't).
This response is much stronger if I could dig up the name of the company that this popped up on a couple of years ago. I believe it was a company that was operating maybe 4x the number of AutoCAD seats that they were paying for. This was an especially blatant case, as (unlike Windows or Office) I don't think it's trivial to do multiple installs of AutoCAD.
The discussion on this thread seems to have already nailed what's going on - RCA has cut a deal with Gemstar for data access equivalent to the Tivo or Replay "lifetime" subscriptions.
I have a couple of ATI All-In-Wonder cards of various vintage and they've always included a PC-client version of Guide Plus with no monthly fee as well. Works very nicely - you do a once-a-week download of program info, tailored to your local service. There's an app that lets you scroll through this info, similar to what you see at tvguide.com, but better actually since it's local data - you can very quickly scroll through times and days in the 1 week range.
The All-In-Wonder includes PVR functionality, although I must admit that even with generic installation, it seems to work quite poorly for me. The GuidePlus+ app works very nicely - if you want to tell the PVR to record something, you just select it in the TV grid and you're happening.
There are also include a number of other interesting functions that fall out of doing this on a computer. The TV view overlays the program title as you scroll through the channels - nice to be able to tell which Tremors movie you're seeing when you flip to the Tremors Channel - oops, Sci-Fi Channel.:-) It also does some interesting non-GuidePlus+ like capturing the close caption info into a window or file on the fly, etc. Geek stuff, you know.
ATI even includes this free GuidePlus+ functionality in their standalone TV Wonder tuner cards. These cards only run $50, so it's clearly a steal.
I do a lot of videotaping and have a couple of Sony VCRs that include GuidePlus+ and it's a really good thing - a huge leap in friendliness over VCRPlus+. Had I realized that this feature would disappear from all VCRs (along with all quality VCRs going away!), I would have bought more of them. On these VCRs (Sony SLV-M20HF), the GuidePlus info is also provided for free and is delivered to the VCR when it's turned off in the blanking interval of some channel.
> It's likely that SCSI drives are identical to > IDE drives apart from the interface.
Uh huh. Well, why don't you send me a couple of those 15K rpm IDE drives and we'll see how they compare. Oh there aren't any? OK, I'll take some 10K drives then? None of those either? You do have 7200 rpm ATA drives? Darn, there's hasn't been a 7200 rpm SCSI drive for a couple of years now...
Yes, they must be exactly the same...
SCSI drives cost more because these days most of them end up in server or enterprise level applications and are optimized for that world. So there's higher rotational speed, faster transfer and cache, higher head seek speed, and probably beefier construction.
I'll add into the affirmative chorus here. I started with the first edition right when Linux was starting to really gather momentum in the tinkerer world. I was 7 years past some solid unix user experience, but no significant hands-on admin experience.
Got a set of CDs (geez, this was also before residential high bandwidth or CD burners) and this book at the recommendation of a friend. Really awesome and accessible if you can wander around unix a bit but have never configured a daemon before.
Actually, I remember now that I had to bum a boot floppy off my bud as well, as CDs weren't bootable back then (at least my system didn't do that).
The great thing about this book is that it's logically laid out without being 3" thick. If you want to try something and don't get it, you often can type in an example from the book to get rolling, which gives you the confidence to really muck yourself up AND the confidence to put it back.
I got a later edition (brown instead of the original teal) and there were many improvements, so I'm sure the latest would be an excellent update.
From the Department of Odd Coincidences. I've never seen the Palm Tungsten banner ad on Slashdot before, but it seems to be hanging out on top of this thread right now...
Just so I'm not completely off-topic, I have a Palm IIIx which I don't use anymore. The calendar/reminder features were nice, but my latest cell phone is a much better repository for contact info, even if it's hard to sync. Otherwise the lame Palm software was a turn off (yes, I guess I should have tried the million bad shareware apps, but I've played that stupid game on every desktop computer I've had and don't want to play anymore).
I replaced the Palm with a Compaq iPAQ. Now, this is plenty powerful, still good with the syncing (yes, pretty much requires desktop Windows, but I pretty much use desktop Windows so this is a non-issue for me). It's fun to carry music and pictures of my kid. But the darn thing is so battery-hungry that it would never make it through a day away from my desk, so I rarely use it now either.
Probably much too serious of a answer to a wry question, but I suspect that they have the run divided into many subgroups that are pre-counted. If an entire subgroup falls then that's added to the tally. If a subgroup breaks the chain and don't all fall, then they can easily count the ones that did fall in the subgroup. And so on...
OK, now that I've *really* read the article, I can see that this ISN'T a turbine generator.
Duh.
OK, how *does* this work then? Like a jet helicopter with a gearbox?
Turbine GENERATOR - sorry to pop your bubble...
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Jet Turbine Locomotives
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I guess they could be clearer, but I doubt this locomotive uses the jet engine for propulsion, rather it uses the jet engine to generate electricity that drives the same gigantic electric motor that moves the train today. Although the engine is a much higher-tech device to maintain than a diesel engine, it should be cleaner and possibly quieter as well.
You can go faster because a turbine engine that generates the same kilowatts as a conventional diesel does will be lighter. Less weight can equal more speed.
All that said, I'm not sure that "less weight" is a priority for most locomotives. If I remember correctly, the enormous weight of the locomotives is critical in pulling literally miles of loaded box cars up an incline. Of course, passenger trains are packed with very low density compared to freight, so maybe that's what this is for.
Geez, whatever you do, please don't do the lead experiment referenced in the original article. Not only was the original experiment foolhardy, but the later ones with liquid N2 (and shattered teeth) are even worse.
OK, when I was in maybe 10th grade, I went to some sort of statewide science symposium. Of course, the first night, we had a professor give a talk that included a lot of exactly these sorts of graphic examples of chemistry and physics for entertainment.
The big show stopper at the end of his lecture was amazing. There was some sort of chemical reaction - I have no memory of the reaction whatsoever, but he went through it fully on the blackboard beforehand. It had a metal reaction chamber, manufactured such that it made a quiet whistle as the reaction went on - must have been the evolution of gases. Perhaps there was some sort of glow or light as well. He asked that everybody (hundreds of us in the lecture hall) be very quiet, and they turned off the lights as well. At first not much happened, then it started to whistle, and got quieter and quieter. Everybody is sitting in suspense - you could hear a pin drop other than the whistle.
When the whistle was almost inaudible (which meant that the reaction had run to completion) there was some other combination that occurred. With the result of an incredibly, mind-shatteringly loud and unexpected BANG accompanied by a powerful flash of light. I clearly remember seeing the professor's grinning face in the flash.
Whatever it was, it was great. Didn't convince me to be a chemist, but surely made me think about it.
Anybody know what this was? It seems like this might have been something that was separating hydrogen and oxygen from water, then explosively recombining. Or perhaps it was something about activation energy - the original solution decomposes into stable components until the original material isn't present anymore, then the temp climbs and kapow!
> Say they have 10% penetration in the Wintel > land, (this is very generous), and lets give > Wintel 90% marketshare for consumer PC's (this > might be accurate in europe and america, > dubious worldwide), now you have 9% > marketshare. > >Lets add 10% of the Mac users out there, you > gain 1/2%. > >Now lets calculate the percent change in > marketshare. Looks to be 5.5555555..%, seems > to me they have gained prety close to the > proposed 5% market penetration. This means for > every 19 customers you have, you could have > one more.
Actually, this is amazingly close to the proof of why they *don't* support alternate OSes.
Start with a realistic market penetration for satellite connectivity - probably 0.1%, which is still probably generous. I don't even think DSL or cable have 10% each.
At this point, the mathematical argument you make could conceivably hold true - add a 5% platform and get 5% more users. But numerically, that number is really small and you gain them at very high cost. You have to pay to develop a new version of software and keep developing it as the world and the platform move forward (this is a big deal in the brave new world of OS X), provide technical support to these new users (along with all the people that aren't upgrading along the way), documentation, advertising so that anybody knows it exists, etc., etc.
If all these numbers were in the millions, then you might at least try to make a go at it - the per head cost might not look great, but it's not ridiculous. But these numbers are probably in the 10s of thousands for the Windows platform, and you probably would have to battle for even a couple of thousand Mac users. With a million users, $500K for software and support infrastructure might work - for 2000 Mac users, it would just be stupid.
When you try to sell this to your boss, he'll say, "we only have 0.1% market share with our existing product and support which targets the biggest mass market. Wouldn't be be better off spending the half-mil on advertisting for the current product? Couldn't we double our market share [e.g., tens of thousands more customers]?".
This was the textbook that we had in my college introductory physics back at the dawn of time... I don't know if students in this decade/millenium (youch) still us it, but it was a classic back in 1980 (double youch). Fundamentals of Physics, by Halliday and Resnick.
Online at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471 105597/qid=1031606157/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_3/102-784615 7-6024945?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
It didn't cost $125 back then though.
I didn't do the entire freshman physics course, but thought this was a good text with regard to not crushing me with advanced calculus that I was learning simultaneously in another class. It didn't seem gentle at the time, but I took a physical chemistry class later that proved to me that I had no future in math at all after about 3 sessions.
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You've got to be kidding right?
My god, I expected this to be signed "a recently unemployed power grid manager in Ohio"...
>
> I had to buy a MacOS 8 CD on eBay. Paid a lot > more than one dollar for that.
>
And not only that, you really should be buying 14 more copies - even if that was a still sealed retail copy of the software that had never been installed on the seller's machine, the license terms would almost certainly restrict it's application to a single computer.
This is exactly the same situation as the Cisco or NetApp examples from the article. What you pay for the software includes costs for supporting the machine it's running on. It costs more to support 15 computers than one. Even if you know what you're doing and never call Apple, the price you paid for the OS license assumes that some people need support and others don't.
All this said, the Cisco example goes well past this support cost argument which I think most people could see, even if they don't agree. In their case, Cisco isn't just trying to make sure their support costs are covered, but are trying to stifle the secondary market with their $850 "inspection fee". Now, validating that a product hasn't been modified or fitted with non-certified parts can be tough and expensive, but $850 of inspection on a $2300 router is just gamesmanship on Cisco's part and it really is there to provide a block to eBay resales.
The Phaser "wax" printers were originally popularized (and I believe developed at) Tektronix. They got out of the printer biz some years back and the Phaser is now sold by Xerox.
They still have a number of models, mostly still in the high-end departmental area.
There are certain tasks where the Phaser output is pretty nice. Because the wax-based pigments are opaque the colors are really saturated. Cost and mess factors are very low relative to inkjet printing. All these things make these printers continue to be a pretty strong choice for printing business graphics (charts, graphs, etc.). And as the RIP hardware has gotten much faster, it's not quite as long a lifetime to wait for output as in the old days.
But in terms of capability, I don't think they can touch the flexibility of inkjets. These days there are choices for pigment-based or dye-based inks so you can print opaque or transparently. And inkjets have much higher resolution, more flexibility on printing media, and are cheaper too.
> Samsung's ML-1650 offers Linux compatability
> and Postscript level III as an option. All for
> around $300.
I'm sure it's a very nice printer, but the original poster was looking for a *color* printer - and that's something that this one most definitely does not do.
I haven't seen FW or USB mentioned in any in-car electronics yet, but the upcoming new BMW 5-series has the second generation iDrive system which supposedly includes a Bluetooth radio.
You know the first generation iDrive from the (odd looking) current BMW 745i. It has literally hundreds of functions integrated under the control of a big aluminum knob that's actually a haptic controller. It acts as a joystick, "clicks" like a mouse, and servos in the knob allow it to "feel" like it has stops, detents, and variable drag. Sounds like a great idea, but if you actually sit and play with the demonstrator at a BMW dealership, you quickly realize that they did a horrible job of integrating all that stuff together. It literally feels like about 20 teams worked on the different functions and implemented everything their own way. Most memorable bad experience - you navigate between the various functions (climate control, radio, navigation) by using the knob like a big joystick. Once you're on the ventilation page, you need to manipulate things in 2-D on the in-car display, but now, you're not supposed to rock the joystick - you access the functions by turning the knob to scroll the highlight through the buttons. Maybe it makes more sense when you're in the car, but I doubt it.
Some of this stuff is supposed to be fixed in the new 5-series iDrive which has more hard buttons and uses the knob more intelligently. One of the cool functions is supposed to be a Bluetooth connection to the system. This means that you can use the car's voice-recognition system to dial your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. It would be interesting if you could do things like review your contacts or calendar from your PDA or phone on the onboard display.
In practice, it'll be interesting to see if this will work at all, or whether BMW will only support some particular handset (likely, I fear). And what happens when 3 guys get in the car?
I've got the OnStar handsfree phone in my new SUV and it actually works really well. But I don't want another cell # to deal with, so I haven't used it since my free trial minutes were used up.
In a side note, in a modern car there are many computers and sensors, and they talk via a ethernet-like protocol on a single wire. Different manufacturers use different protocols, but I believe that the 802 group actually defines the core protocol standard.
> Hey I have a bettle and an iPod.. Grrr....
> mine is black with flames painted on the side.
> It doesn't look gay anymore
You had your iPod painted black then had them add little tiny flames on the sides and you don't think that seemed gay?
ScaryBubbles? If that's not a developmental kernel codename, I don't know what is. Of course, the full power of the open source community will probably come up with something much more pointed and insulting than that...
More than 600 postings on this thread, and (at the top level at least) nobody's mentioned indemnification yet...
SCO thought they'd be smart today, pull the plug on IBM and the AIX installed base and let all those multi-billions of dollars of customers force IBM to it's knees. Oh please... A standard part of the (megabuck) license agreement that the AIX licensees sign is that IBM will indemnify them against patent and copyright infringement committed by IBM in constructing the product. IP infringements do happen, intentional or not, and it's only reasonable for a licensee to expect the licensor to stand behind their product. That's indemnification - it frees the person who's purchased the license from having to defend against an embedded IP infraction. In addition to IBM indemnifying their own code, they would normally ask indemnification against infringements by the licensee if they make mods.
Now, if you're buying software from me, I can promise indemnification and buy and insurance policy. But you won't buy from me, because the IBM salesman also paid you a call, and explained that his ability to stand behind his product legally is unmatched by anyone else, probably in the world. More lawyers, more patents, more money and more lethal force than anybody else is packing.
I've mentioned it in earlier postings, and it's popped up in this thread too. Little gnats often pop up and try to suck some blood from IBM. They are crushed quietly and behind the curtain by IBM's IP portfolio and legal muscle. Usually the customers don't even hear about the problem, which is the way they like it. Nothing probably makes the IBM contract management group more angry than having a SCO make a ruckus in public and cause them to have to call their gazillion licensee to tell them that there's no problem.
The only question on how this will turn out is whether IBM will take SCO out for a ride in their limo before fitting them with concrete boots or whether they get it in broad daylight at the toll booth.
Which leads to the worst job in the world (yes, even worse than yours). I remember reading an article that mentioned that only 3 SCO employees are focused on the lawsuit (yes, many many more non-employees), while the other couple of hundred continue on their path of innovation, the Caldera way.
I think everybody realizes that this is going to take a while. The guy you *don't* want to be is the VP of Sales as SCO. Now, you might have been jazzed that your company was going to squeak, IBM would buy it to make the problem go away, and you'd go home with your $20 million bucks. Only it didn't work that way. Not only is IBM not going to buy you a mansion, they're not going to even acknowledge your squeaking. You might have felt a buzz of pride thinking that IBM would have to rename AIX to "SCO AIX". Now, IBM has about 3000 people talking to every client in the world telling them how their enormous company is going to crush your clueless company.
Then the SCO CEO comes into your office, says "This isn't as easy as I thought it was going to be" and tell you that it will be really important that you maintain SCO's revenue stream since it will be too damn obvious if Microsoft gives SCO anymore money.
When SCO makes a sales call today, do you think anybody *doesn't* laugh at them? That's a job that sucks.
Oh well, I guess you can hope that Microsoft buys you before the end of the quarter. In two weeks...
David Fung
I totally agree with you on this which actually is bad in the (often stupid) court system.
IBM can't afford not to audit and maintin source code that they licensed in a total clean-room situation. If an IBM employee violated that contract, then IBM could be in a bad hole (but see more below). Engineers may make mistakes, but organizationally, IBM "knows better" than to allow a breach like this to get out the door.
A slimy SCO lawyer will certainly point out that IBM has extensive code reviews specifically to prevent this sort of breach, therefore this violation must have been intentional and systemic from IBM management - a more serious situation.
Of course, IBM doesn't mess around with little worms like SCO on something like this. In addition to the group that's working on a direct defense, there's a small army of IP specialists that at IBM that are working on kneecapping SCO before they even get to the courtroom. IBM has tens of thousands (might well be over 100,000 these days) of patents that cover every aspect of computing since they were a cash register company. Now, maybe SCO has been totally clean and not infringed or violated some juicy patent from 1945. Maybe SCO has added so little that there's no conflict anywhere.
But if they haven't carefully been reviewing everything that IBM has patented since before their engineering department was born, there's a pretty good chance that the may be in violation of a good amount of IBM's IP. Then SCO will get a nice letter from IBM with about 30 pages of infringments from their crappy installer and perhaps they'd like to sit down and set up a cross-licensing agreement to resolve these issues before they commit themselves to a literal lifetime of defending themselves in court.
*That's* how an IBM or Microsoft plays ball. And there will be no FUD in the halls of SCO when IBMs says it time to quit playing.
Nice to see a post from a local in this thread.
I never thought about the site as "Prisoner" like but indeed it is. These large structures are very visible from the 101 freeway that runs right by the base, but you can't really appreciate the sheer size of these structures until you're on the base right next to them.
I live in Cupertino, just a couple of miles away. Back when Moffett Field was an active Naval Air Station, there was a yearly Air Show usually featuring the Blue Angels, acrobatic planes, military planes on display on the ground, etc. It was mostly P-3 Orion sub tracking planes flying in and out of there, but there were a lot of big C-130 and C-5 cargo planes going in and out as well. You don't realize how big a C-5 is until you're standing on the cargo deck (they can carry multiple tanks). Or a B-52, or B-1... Totally on a different scale than the fighter planes you see in a movie like Top Gun.
These airshows would attract over 250,000 people a day, and one of the fun things that they did was open up the blimp hangars as well. They are the most visible landmark of Moffett - it housed pre-WWII-era dirigibles which were the old sub-hunters. They too were much larger than the Goodyear/Fuji blimps you see today. The blimp hangar is among the largest on the West Coast. The doors roll open on railroad tracks, and one year, there were a bunch of hot air balloon rides running INSIDE the hangar - it's over 200 feet tall.
Sadly, there's been talk recently that Hangar One is contaminated with PCB-like chemicals in the lubricants used there over the decades and that it too might need to be torn down.
After the military left and handed most of Moffett Field over to NASA, there was a NASA-sponsored open house in the spirit of the old air shows. You could tell that something was "wrong" even as you arrived - they expected 70,000 people and got something like 300,000. One of the cool things they did during that open house was that they had the big wind tunnel open for tours, something that didn't occur during the military air shows. It's unbelievably cool in a "this-must-be-a-movie" way. I believe the entire interior was done in wood, like a fancy boat, but it's like a wood-lined warehouse. The fans are something like 30 feet in diameter and there was a big array of about six of them. They had examples of instrumented model planes that were tested there in maybe 1/10th scale, and a Space Shuttle model too.
Well, enough blathering. There may not really be good reasons to keep it open anymore, and keeping this all around as a playground for locals is pointless, but it will certainly be missed if this stuff goes.
And this time, let's do it right - Elizabeth Hurley as Saavik to get his pon faar off...
Seriously, this is a pretty interesting story from a scientific standpoint. Can there possibly be a more extreme barrier to survival than this?
Of course, the conspiricist would wonder about the safety of all the other experimental residue that they were carrying. That's not to suggest that everything that goes up should be independently reentry-proof, but I wonder how well NASA could identify the parts of the vehicle and payload that I really wouldn't want to be near?
Actually, most of the "chiefs" are stand up guys I think. Can a system that's mostly corrupt really operate? Did I really just ask that?
In fact however, the pool of people that are drawn up for corporate boards is extremely insular, just as the investment and executive "clubs" are. If you make a lot of money for somebody (a VC or other investor), the practice in the past was that they would give you an opportunity to serve on the boards of their other companies. Nominally, a successful exec at Company A can (and does) give a lot of real-world knowlege to nascent Company B. But mostly, the guy went to get a big chunk of pre-IPO stock at Company B.
In the past, when you're on the board of directors of even a small company, you get a fairly small amount of cash, your travel and expenses covered, and you spend 1 day every month or two at a board meeting. Oh yes, there's also that 0.25-1.00% of shares that might be allocated to you for your participation. In the boom times, that could easily be tens of MILLIONS of buck$ if the company made it to liquidity. It's good work if you can find it.
The abuses of Enron, Worldcom and others are really putting a cramp in the wallets of these guys these days. Now, there's a focus on more external directors - people who don't actually work at the company. Less compensation for the board members and more liability as well. But since there's no IPOs and no liquidity these days, it's not a big deal. When those things return - even if not to dot-com boom days, you'll see the abuses sneaking back in I'm sure.
Wrong kind of director (well, probably anyway). There are officers of the company that serve on the board of directors. The board serves an advisory role to the executive staff; nominally, the CEO "reports" to the Chairman of the Board, but it's only nominal as the CEO works at the company and the board doesn't really.
I believe this position was the *other* kind of director - a high middle management position, typically a direct report to a vice president. The VP is considered an officer of the company and is privy to what the SEC considers inside information as a part of his job duties. A director typically isn't an officer.
If you're convicted of a felony, or even certain types of misdemeanors related to financial mishandling, then you often cannot legally serve on a board of directors or even executive staff (the CEO, COO, CFO, and top VPs). This may even extend to having had personal bankruptcy or declaring bankruptcy at a company at which you were previously an officer. I don't think a credit check is typical here, but would not be inappropriate, especially these days.
Most board of director-type seats are delivered via the old-boys-club-in-a-smoky-room, so until recently, a lot of these technical formalities were just blown off.
Well, I guess this is sort of semantics.
I believe the most common case where the BSA "busts" somebody is when they have legally purchased 400 licenses for [your software here, but it's seems to usually be MS Office, AutoCAD, or Photoshop] but their internal procedure has allowed that to be installed on 1200 machines.
You just need to decide at this point whether those 800 illegal installs are "illegally pirated software" or not (I genuinely don't know where you'd place this from your post).
The case of 100 copies of Photoshop but nobody purchased a single legit copy in the entire company is an easy one for the BSA or software publisher, but the big money for the publisher is getting the incremental licensing fees for all those second copies that an Alcoa or Bechtel installed on all the corporate laptops. They're looking for a company that's big enough to cough up the big, big bucks not some little guy.
In big companies, when you receive the initial letter, your corporate counsel will ask the execs whether they've done an internal audit, and make and attempt to get in line. So the BSA has had giant bang for almost no effort. Big companies really would prefer to be clean from a licensing standpoint if the publisher gives them any chance to do that (e.g. 20,000 copies of MS Office better not cost 20,000*$500, and in fact, it doesn't).
This response is much stronger if I could dig up the name of the company that this popped up on a couple of years ago. I believe it was a company that was operating maybe 4x the number of AutoCAD seats that they were paying for. This was an especially blatant case, as (unlike Windows or Office) I don't think it's trivial to do multiple installs of AutoCAD.
The discussion on this thread seems to have already nailed what's going on - RCA has cut a deal with Gemstar for data access equivalent to the Tivo or Replay "lifetime" subscriptions.
:-) It also does some interesting non-GuidePlus+ like capturing the close caption info into a window or file on the fly, etc. Geek stuff, you know.
I have a couple of ATI All-In-Wonder cards of various vintage and they've always included a PC-client version of Guide Plus with no monthly fee as well. Works very nicely - you do a once-a-week download of program info, tailored to your local service. There's an app that lets you scroll through this info, similar to what you see at tvguide.com, but better actually since it's local data - you can very quickly scroll through times and days in the 1 week range.
The All-In-Wonder includes PVR functionality, although I must admit that even with generic installation, it seems to work quite poorly for me. The GuidePlus+ app works very nicely - if you want to tell the PVR to record something, you just select it in the TV grid and you're happening.
There are also include a number of other interesting functions that fall out of doing this on a computer. The TV view overlays the program title as you scroll through the channels - nice to be able to tell which Tremors movie you're seeing when you flip to the Tremors Channel - oops, Sci-Fi Channel.
ATI even includes this free GuidePlus+ functionality in their standalone TV Wonder tuner cards. These cards only run $50, so it's clearly a steal.
I do a lot of videotaping and have a couple of Sony VCRs that include GuidePlus+ and it's a really good thing - a huge leap in friendliness over VCRPlus+. Had I realized that this feature would disappear from all VCRs (along with all quality VCRs going away!), I would have bought more of them. On these VCRs (Sony SLV-M20HF), the GuidePlus info is also provided for free and is delivered to the VCR when it's turned off in the blanking interval of some channel.
> It's likely that SCSI drives are identical to
> IDE drives apart from the interface.
Uh huh. Well, why don't you send me a couple of those 15K rpm IDE drives and we'll see how they compare. Oh there aren't any? OK, I'll take some 10K drives then? None of those either? You do have 7200 rpm ATA drives? Darn, there's hasn't been a 7200 rpm SCSI drive for a couple of years now...
Yes, they must be exactly the same...
SCSI drives cost more because these days most of them end up in server or enterprise level applications and are optimized for that world. So there's higher rotational speed, faster transfer and cache, higher head seek speed, and probably beefier construction.
I'll add into the affirmative chorus here. I started with the first edition right when Linux was starting to really gather momentum in the tinkerer world. I was 7 years past some solid unix user experience, but no significant hands-on admin experience.
Got a set of CDs (geez, this was also before residential high bandwidth or CD burners) and this book at the recommendation of a friend. Really awesome and accessible if you can wander around unix a bit but have never configured a daemon before.
Actually, I remember now that I had to bum a boot floppy off my bud as well, as CDs weren't bootable back then (at least my system didn't do that).
The great thing about this book is that it's logically laid out without being 3" thick. If you want to try something and don't get it, you often can type in an example from the book to get rolling, which gives you the confidence to really muck yourself up AND the confidence to put it back.
I got a later edition (brown instead of the original teal) and there were many improvements, so I'm sure the latest would be an excellent update.
From the Department of Odd Coincidences. I've never seen the Palm Tungsten banner ad on Slashdot before, but it seems to be hanging out on top of this thread right now...
Just so I'm not completely off-topic, I have a Palm IIIx which I don't use anymore. The calendar/reminder features were nice, but my latest cell phone is a much better repository for contact info, even if it's hard to sync. Otherwise the lame Palm software was a turn off (yes, I guess I should have tried the million bad shareware apps, but I've played that stupid game on every desktop computer I've had and don't want to play anymore).
I replaced the Palm with a Compaq iPAQ. Now, this is plenty powerful, still good with the syncing (yes, pretty much requires desktop Windows, but I pretty much use desktop Windows so this is a non-issue for me). It's fun to carry music and pictures of my kid. But the darn thing is so battery-hungry that it would never make it through a day away from my desk, so I rarely use it now either.
Actually (and slightly more seriously), the Napster name has been sold to Roxio, who makes EZ CD Creator.
From P2P music distribution to the software that copies CDs... I don't think that's the smartest thing that I've ever heard of, but what the heck...
So, I guess you'll have to go elsewhere for the vibrating butt plug.
Probably much too serious of a answer to a wry question, but I suspect that they have the run divided into many subgroups that are pre-counted. If an entire subgroup falls then that's added to the tally. If a subgroup breaks the chain and don't all fall, then they can easily count the ones that did fall in the subgroup. And so on...
DF
Oh poo.
OK, now that I've *really* read the article, I can see that this ISN'T a turbine generator.
Duh.
OK, how *does* this work then? Like a jet helicopter with a gearbox?
I guess they could be clearer, but I doubt this locomotive uses the jet engine for propulsion, rather it uses the jet engine to generate electricity that drives the same gigantic electric motor that moves the train today. Although the engine is a much higher-tech device to maintain than a diesel engine, it should be cleaner and possibly quieter as well.
You can go faster because a turbine engine that generates the same kilowatts as a conventional diesel does will be lighter. Less weight can equal more speed.
All that said, I'm not sure that "less weight" is a priority for most locomotives. If I remember correctly, the enormous weight of the locomotives is critical in pulling literally miles of loaded box cars up an incline. Of course, passenger trains are packed with very low density compared to freight, so maybe that's what this is for.
OK, when I was in maybe 10th grade, I went to some sort of statewide science symposium. Of course, the first night, we had a professor give a talk that included a lot of exactly these sorts of graphic examples of chemistry and physics for entertainment.
The big show stopper at the end of his lecture was amazing. There was some sort of chemical reaction - I have no memory of the reaction whatsoever, but he went through it fully on the blackboard beforehand. It had a metal reaction chamber, manufactured such that it made a quiet whistle as the reaction went on - must have been the evolution of gases. Perhaps there was some sort of glow or light as well. He asked that everybody (hundreds of us in the lecture hall) be very quiet, and they turned off the lights as well. At first not much happened, then it started to whistle, and got quieter and quieter. Everybody is sitting in suspense - you could hear a pin drop other than the whistle.
When the whistle was almost inaudible (which meant that the reaction had run to completion) there was some other combination that occurred. With the result of an incredibly, mind-shatteringly loud and unexpected BANG accompanied by a powerful flash of light. I clearly remember seeing the professor's grinning face in the flash.
Whatever it was, it was great. Didn't convince me to be a chemist, but surely made me think about it.
Anybody know what this was? It seems like this might have been something that was separating hydrogen and oxygen from water, then explosively recombining. Or perhaps it was something about activation energy - the original solution decomposes into stable components until the original material isn't present anymore, then the temp climbs and kapow!
David Fung
> Say they have 10% penetration in the Wintel
> land, (this is very generous), and lets give
> Wintel 90% marketshare for consumer PC's (this
> might be accurate in europe and america,
> dubious worldwide), now you have 9%
> marketshare.
>
>Lets add 10% of the Mac users out there, you
> gain 1/2%.
>
>Now lets calculate the percent change in
> marketshare. Looks to be 5.5555555..%, seems
> to me they have gained prety close to the
> proposed 5% market penetration. This means for
> every 19 customers you have, you could have
> one more.
Actually, this is amazingly close to the proof of why they *don't* support alternate OSes.
Start with a realistic market penetration for satellite connectivity - probably 0.1%, which is still probably generous. I don't even think DSL or cable have 10% each.
At this point, the mathematical argument you make could conceivably hold true - add a 5% platform and get 5% more users. But numerically, that number is really small and you gain them at very high cost. You have to pay to develop a new version of software and keep developing it as the world and the platform move forward (this is a big deal in the brave new world of OS X), provide technical support to these new users (along with all the people that aren't upgrading along the way), documentation, advertising so that anybody knows it exists, etc., etc.
If all these numbers were in the millions, then you might at least try to make a go at it - the per head cost might not look great, but it's not ridiculous. But these numbers are probably in the 10s of thousands for the Windows platform, and you probably would have to battle for even a couple of thousand Mac users. With a million users, $500K for software and support infrastructure might work - for 2000 Mac users, it would just be stupid.
When you try to sell this to your boss, he'll say, "we only have 0.1% market share with our existing product and support which targets the biggest mass market. Wouldn't be be better off spending the half-mil on advertisting for the current product? Couldn't we double our market share [e.g., tens of thousands more customers]?".
And you know that he'd be right, don't you?
David Fung
This was the textbook that we had in my college introductory physics back at the dawn of time... I don't know if students in this decade/millenium (youch) still us it, but it was a classic back in 1980 (double youch).
1 105597/qid=1031606157/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_3/102-784615 7-6024945?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Fundamentals of Physics, by Halliday and Resnick.
Online at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/047
It didn't cost $125 back then though.
I didn't do the entire freshman physics course, but thought this was a good text with regard to not crushing me with advanced calculus that I was learning simultaneously in another class. It didn't seem gentle at the time, but I took a physical chemistry class later that proved to me that I had no future in math at all after about 3 sessions.