Yeah, I agree. I wish I hadn't lost my StarTac on a business Trip, otherwise I'd likely still be using that damn thing. Since then I've used a Motorola V60i (what a royal piece of shit), and a Motorala Black Razr. I like the Razr, but no where as much as that StarTac.
The StarTac was simple, straight forward, had great reception and just worked. The razr is nice, but the cuteness factors outweigh the ease of organizing phone numbers, and the camera on it, while useless forces me to leave it in my car when I have to enter secured facilities.
Comon Motorloa, let's hope this product sells well, and if you could, bring back an updated StarTac? (Say, put an LED flashlight on it, Bluetooth (for wireless headsets, and keep the nice old Black & White Screen, and ease of use).
The reason for me is quite simple. I can't keep buying new PC's and video cards to keep up with the latest and greatest requirement for the next new game. And then the other thing... I don't have as much time anymore to play games.
I've been running the earlier versions of NeoOffice for some time now, and it may be slow to start, but once up and running, it does quite good. And it's been easy enough for my mom to use it on her mac mini. (That's saying quite a bit, as mom still can't set the clock on the VCR)
Now there's a way for the slashdot editors to help pick story submissions better. They can use this technology to sift through the queue and post those hot stories quicker.:)
What I think this particular story means is that the Star Trek universe wants to stop moving forward. In time, I mean. The creators of Star Trek have - starting with Enterprise and continuing until now - lost the guts to do anything but cash in on past glories and old history. There's no drive to create NEW history. Old Star Trek is popular still - yeah, because it's old. New Old Star Trek will get nowhere. "Rebooting" the Star Trek universe from Kirk and Spock will get nowhere. They need to go forward. REALLY forward. Five hundred years beyond TNG. Build an absolutely perfect Federation and then hurl seriously gigantic threats at it. Go to the limits of current science fiction and use the cream. Transhumanism and stuff!
There ya go, and a perfect new enemy--the cylons!:)
Honestly though I think you're going along the right vein. But I still believe the franchise needs a rest, and when it comes back, Berman shouldn't have a damn thing to do with it. Personally I like what Exeter Studios have done with Starship Exeter
And that's total bullshit. OS X is arguably easier to learn for someone who's new to computers altogether, but anyone who has only ever used Windows before, faced with a Mac, is going to have a terribly frustrating time just trying to resize a window ("I click on the left edge and drag, to make it wider, and the window moves instead! What's with that?"), let alone figuring out how on earth the Dock is supposed to work.
no, actually THAT'S total bullshit. anyone who doesn't learn the basics of OSX in about five minutes is a retard. and I'm not a mac fanboy, in fact a lot of their stuff is a little bit annoying in always trying to make things too easy, and in the process making them harder (or atleast more onerous and time-consuming). but to say that the dock for instance is not a brilliant and very intuitive tool is simply not true.
I agree, for x-mas I gave my mother a Mac Mini. She had used my mac once when she visited me, and said how she liked using it over her windows 98 pc at home, or her work pc. Nevermind she can't set the clock on her VCR, so being able to pick up OS X's GUI without a problem is a huge leap.
Seems like most IT Depts have one problem or another. Sometimes there's no structure to be able to get things done. Sometimes the management doesn't care, and hence can't get approval to get anything done. Or management cares too much, and you're spinning your wheels in meetings for most of the shift and can't get anything done.
Personally I'm considering getting out of the field. I love technology, I love playing with multi-million dollar servers, I enjoy helping users out of a problem (as long as they're reasonable about their problem. If they're not reasonable, they find the BOFH in me.) But the endless rat race in the IT field definatley wears on ya.
Yeah, SBC sucks, to put it nicely. It was always a living hell when you needed to ask a question or get an issue resolved. I just learned not to bother them. I started out with 768K down and 384K up, and over the years SBC cut my upstream bandwidth (without saying a word), so at the end I still had 768K down and only 128K up. (I had business class DSL so I could have static IP's and host my website and mailserver.)
Then when I left Toledo it took them 3 months to get me an accurate final bill. (ie they kept trying to charge me a month of service that I didn't have--ala my service was disconnected before their billing of that service occured.)
I loathe SBC enough that I will never do business with them again. In fact right now at my new apartment I have RoadRunner and it's been wonderful. I also got my parents to get RoadRunner also, and it's been working well for them. Of course for them, it certinatley beats 26.4K dialup.
Oh, and as for SBC's service. I noted in my DSL Router's syslog it would show disconnects at 3am lasting for somewhere between a few seconds and 15 minutes. And then early on there were lots of hiccups with the service--which thankfully settled down. So a rule of thumb when it comes to SBC--the less you have to deal with them, the better off you are.
Heh, I guess that explains why I still use my Palm Pilot Personal and have a 486 running as my web server and mail server. And also why I still keep my Apple IIgs in running condition.
At least I can point to my Palm Pilot and say to people I was using this before it was "cool" to have a pda. And yes, I still have data in it going back to 1997.
Gee, this is news? Yeah, I know all about the IT job losses this 3rd Q of 04...especially as I was laid off from my old job. I wound up getting a similar job--in West Virginia. Nevermind I was working in Michigan.
But then it doesn't help that the IT field has attracted so many idiots. At a previous job I was interviewing for a Jr. UNIX Admin, and we had a guy in for a second interview and my boss loved him. I was there for a tech interview--found out this guy knew nothing--yet demanded a large salary--just cause he somehow managed to get a Master's in CS. I even quized him on some basic things, and all I usually got in response was a blank stare. *sigh*
Yeah, there is IT work in Ohio. It's becomming extinct--unless you're a consultant or contractor or really love windoze. Hell I lost my job a few months ago and found another one--in another state.
Companies like Lexis / Nexis are an exception in Ohio rather than the norm.
Okay, so Sybase finally released a new version of their database for linux. They had released Adapative Server Enterprise 11.5 and 11.9.2 *years* ago for Linux. Yes, it was under a developer's license back then, hence you couldn't legally use it for production. But, honestly, I don't remember the database being crippled in any way. My former employer was a Sybase shop, and they used Sybase on Linux for our development work and then used Sybase on Solaris and HP/UX for production. My personal test machine, at the time, was a dual Pentium Pro with a half a gig of RAM--I had that due to acting as the primary DBA.
There's also a real reason that Micro$oft's SQL Server uses Tranact-SQL just like Sybase's Dataservers....who do you think M$ bought their database technology from? In fact M$ bought the name "SQL Server" from Sybase too, hence why Sybase's dataservers are called Adaptive Server Enterprise.
Sounds better than this one firewall vendor my old company tried to deal with...they insisted on per IP-address the firewall protected. Which in the case of the old company was an entire class A ipv4 network. Mind you the old company only had 63 employees. So the cost for that firewall was outrageous. Needless to say we went to another vendor, since this one wouldn't bend from their licensing scheme (where even un-used ip's were considered protected).
I've seen far better descriptions of products on ebay than this site. Looking at this storage rack, the only picture of it is the rack with thr front door closed. So you have no idea what type of disk arrays are inside. Given the age of the 10k's listed nearby I would have to assume these are at best D1000's or going as far back as SPARCstorage arrays. Also given the age the HHD sizes are most likely 9gigs or smaller, so not much space to store your videos, but you could set up a nice RAID array. Since we don't know what arrays are in the storage rack, we don't know what it would take to use them. It could be a simple wide-SCSI or ultrawide-SCSI attach, or more complicated such as a fibre attach.
So anyway, with such a poor description and supporting evidence, they should give me $200 to take it off their hands.
As for the backgrounds in Project Looking Glass, most were donated images by various Sun Employees, I personally donated one of "The Garden of the Gods" that I took in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I'm also intending on taking panoramic pictures to donate on my various travels.
So, there's no conspiracy. You can take the tin foil hat off now. Besides if you have heard of the founding of Sun, and how Sun got it's name, you would know it was a take-off of "Stanford University Network" aka SUN. Besides my picture that I donated was of a National Natual Landmark, as designated by the US Dept of the Interior's National Park Service
Looking Glass doesn't require panoramic backgrounds, but they definatley help with the idea of 3D space.
I wound up doing something similar once to my little sister. I had re-installed her PC twice, and after the second time I told her that she was on her own from here on out. Sure enough she hosed the install, and my parents being helpful called a mobile pc repair shop. Needless to say they got billed $600 for stuff that I had been doing for free. My parents learned, they now never install *anything* without first running it past me--including security updates. So needless to say my parent's computers work great. My sis however, she hasn't fully learned yet...she just calls me and cries in my ear when she did what Dell tech support said to do, and in the process lost all of her files. *sigh*
Bullshit. Software *always* has bugs, and it *always* has security holes.
I think the previous author meant release critical bugs. Debian *will not* make a stable release until they are happy that there are no release critical bugs, and things work together. Of course there will be serious bugs and security compromises found--but that's why Debian does the security updates as well as point releases every few months or so.
"Debian has a *VERY* firm concept of a release - that is, a Debian relase is *STABLE*."
Translation: Debian doesn't regularly release with fresh packages. Their only releases are filled with stale packages like GNOME 1.4 and KDE 2. Their "testing" release is actually an ongoing release which constantly changes.
Let's see Debian doesn't have to meet any ridgidly imposed deadlines, so they don't have to relase a shoddy product, and then quickly have to follow up their release with a slew of patches/service packs/errata. Show me a commerical software vendor that releases fresh packages that don't have a mile long patch list shortly after release. Our buddies at Microsoft? Nope, they always have a service pack shortly after release of a new product. RedHat...nope, same thing. Sun Microsystems? Well they still ship GNOME 1.4 with Solaris 9, so no, not exactly fresh.
Sorry, Debian nuts. Your favorite distro frankly sucks from a business sense.
Oh really? How so?
If you want to run modern packages in a business setting, Debian makes it far more difficult to keep every system in sync. With Fedora, you can run Fedora Core 1 on every system and recieve security updates as they are released - just as you can with Windows. With Debian, you have to run Stable if you want a single set of packages with only security upgrades.
The whole "Stable"/"Unstable"/"Testing" thing runs completely counter to the rest of the industry. Microsoft releases a new OS every few years and then only releases incremental bug-fixes and security upgrades. Thus, when you are running "Windows XP", you are running a specific set of packages with a specific configuration system and specific interface. How is a business supposed to get support for "Debian Unstable"? Are they supposed to thell the support company the versions of every package on their system? What if they want to get security upgrades without signifigantly changing their system?
With Debian, a business would be forced to use Stable if they wanted a stable, supported platform. Unfortunately, stable is filled with old packages. Fedora Core 1 is tested and stable. You can call up LinuxCare (or another corporation), tell them that you are using "Fedora Core 1", and get support for configuration and other issues. You can't do that with Debian Unstable.
"That said, this is why most people in the know *do* run Debian Unstable and apt-get update && upgrade daily, because it is desktop where stability is not as mission critical."
I personally work with a few Fortune 500 companies, and the thing they tell me they want over everything is stability, uptime and reliability. They do *NOT* want cutting edge. They will *NOT* install patches that haven't been out for at least two months, unless it's a patch for a bug they've encountered or a security update. And even then that patch has to be soaked and tested in their development environment for at least two weeks before it gets approved to be applied in their production environment. So if you work in an environment with any sort of real change control, just blindly applying updates is not acceptiable.
So, for a corporate setting, with real change control policies, Debian Stable makes perfect sense. It follows the same protocols that you would have from a true commerical vendor. Long release cycles, and security and bug fixes during the life of said re
I have to totally disagree with you here. I'm offically listed as a "Work from Home Employee." I'm currently wearing my pajamas as I type this, and for most mornings I'm typically on-line with work like this.
I find I get quite a bit more done here than I did before either at the office or when I was assigned full-time to a customer site.
It also works out well for my customers, I live within an hour drive of all of them, yet my office is further away...about an hour and a half to two hours depending on traffic. So that saves my company mileage since I live close to my customers, and I can provide better service to them. And if I need to visit them I can totally bypass rush hour traffic and show up in late morning or early afternoon--when most of my customers have time to work with me.
To be honest, the telecommuting thing has a lot to do with the corporate management. Where I work, your boss may be in another city, state, or even country. So there's little of managing by looking over your shoulder. And there is also a big corporate push to have people work at home. Part of that whole work-life balance that my company tries to strike (and frankly I think they're doing a good job at this point).
In fact, yes my job could be outsourced, but I've had a couple of customers call my boss and expressed how happy there were with my service versus the outsourced guy, I feel pretty comfortable with my job security.
To quote "Office Space" Gates needs to be sent to Federal "Pound Me In The Ass" Prision, then he'd learn what it really feels like to have to use Micro$oft products. Otherwise you know if he got jail time, he'd go to some posh celebrity "prison" aka a resort.
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Yeah, I agree. I wish I hadn't lost my StarTac on a business Trip, otherwise I'd likely still be using that damn thing. Since then I've used a Motorola V60i (what a royal piece of shit), and a Motorala Black Razr. I like the Razr, but no where as much as that StarTac.
The StarTac was simple, straight forward, had great reception and just worked. The razr is nice, but the cuteness factors outweigh the ease of organizing phone numbers, and the camera on it, while useless forces me to leave it in my car when I have to enter secured facilities.
Comon Motorloa, let's hope this product sells well, and if you could, bring back an updated StarTac? (Say, put an LED flashlight on it, Bluetooth (for wireless headsets, and keep the nice old Black & White Screen, and ease of use).
The reason for me is quite simple. I can't keep buying new PC's and video cards to keep up with the latest and greatest requirement for the next new game. And then the other thing... I don't have as much time anymore to play games.
I've been running the earlier versions of NeoOffice for some time now, and it may be slow to start, but once up and running, it does quite good. And it's been easy enough for my mom to use it on her mac mini. (That's saying quite a bit, as mom still can't set the clock on the VCR)
If I had moderator points, I'd mod up the parent post.
And why would I want this?
Now there's a way for the slashdot editors to help pick story submissions better. They can use this technology to sift through the queue and post those hot stories quicker. :)
There ya go, and a perfect new enemy--the cylons!
Honestly though I think you're going along the right vein. But I still believe the franchise needs a rest, and when it comes back, Berman shouldn't have a damn thing to do with it. Personally I like what Exeter Studios have done with Starship Exeter
I wonder if their software will follow the three laws of robotics?
I agree, for x-mas I gave my mother a Mac Mini. She had used my mac once when she visited me, and said how she liked using it over her windows 98 pc at home, or her work pc. Nevermind she can't set the clock on her VCR, so being able to pick up OS X's GUI without a problem is a huge leap.
Yeah, and just like he thought Jar Jar was a great addition to Episode 1. Hell, I'd rather see more Ewoks... at least they could act. :)
Seems like most IT Depts have one problem or another. Sometimes there's no structure to be able to get things done. Sometimes the management doesn't care, and hence can't get approval to get anything done. Or management cares too much, and you're spinning your wheels in meetings for most of the shift and can't get anything done.
Personally I'm considering getting out of the field. I love technology, I love playing with multi-million dollar servers, I enjoy helping users out of a problem (as long as they're reasonable about their problem. If they're not reasonable, they find the BOFH in me.) But the endless rat race in the IT field definatley wears on ya.
Yeah, SBC sucks, to put it nicely. It was always a living hell when you needed to ask a question or get an issue resolved. I just learned not to bother them. I started out with 768K down and 384K up, and over the years SBC cut my upstream bandwidth (without saying a word), so at the end I still had 768K down and only 128K up. (I had business class DSL so I could have static IP's and host my website and mailserver.)
Then when I left Toledo it took them 3 months to get me an accurate final bill. (ie they kept trying to charge me a month of service that I didn't have--ala my service was disconnected before their billing of that service occured.)
I loathe SBC enough that I will never do business with them again. In fact right now at my new apartment I have RoadRunner and it's been wonderful. I also got my parents to get RoadRunner also, and it's been working well for them. Of course for them, it certinatley beats 26.4K dialup.
Oh, and as for SBC's service. I noted in my DSL Router's syslog it would show disconnects at 3am lasting for somewhere between a few seconds and 15 minutes. And then early on there were lots of hiccups with the service--which thankfully settled down. So a rule of thumb when it comes to SBC--the less you have to deal with them, the better off you are.
Do you seriously think that Chinese companies can't make products as good as those made by IBM in America?
Okay, an example....(well of the industry in general)
The Netgear WG511 made in China will *not* work under linux.
*However*, the Netgear WG511 made in Taiwan does work under linux.
Figure that one out...
Some of the contractors in FL must be the same ones that keep severing lines in Ohio...remember when someone cut a few fibre lines and hosed the net? (Page down to "oops")
Heh, I guess that explains why I still use my Palm Pilot Personal and have a 486 running as my web server and mail server. And also why I still keep my Apple IIgs in running condition.
At least I can point to my Palm Pilot and say to people I was using this before it was "cool" to have a pda. And yes, I still have data in it going back to 1997.
Gee, this is news? Yeah, I know all about the IT job losses this 3rd Q of 04...especially as I was laid off from my old job. I wound up getting a similar job--in West Virginia. Nevermind I was working in Michigan.
But then it doesn't help that the IT field has attracted so many idiots. At a previous job I was interviewing for a Jr. UNIX Admin, and we had a guy in for a second interview and my boss loved him. I was there for a tech interview--found out this guy knew nothing--yet demanded a large salary--just cause he somehow managed to get a Master's in CS. I even quized him on some basic things, and all I usually got in response was a blank stare. *sigh*
Yeah, there is IT work in Ohio. It's becomming extinct--unless you're a consultant or contractor or really love windoze. Hell I lost my job a few months ago and found another one--in another state.
Companies like Lexis / Nexis are an exception in Ohio rather than the norm.
Okay, so Sybase finally released a new version of their database for linux. They had released Adapative Server Enterprise 11.5 and 11.9.2 *years* ago for Linux. Yes, it was under a developer's license back then, hence you couldn't legally use it for production. But, honestly, I don't remember the database being crippled in any way. My former employer was a Sybase shop, and they used Sybase on Linux for our development work and then used Sybase on Solaris and HP/UX for production. My personal test machine, at the time, was a dual Pentium Pro with a half a gig of RAM--I had that due to acting as the primary DBA.
There's also a real reason that Micro$oft's SQL Server uses Tranact-SQL just like Sybase's Dataservers....who do you think M$ bought their database technology from? In fact M$ bought the name "SQL Server" from Sybase too, hence why Sybase's dataservers are called Adaptive Server Enterprise.
Sounds better than this one firewall vendor my old company tried to deal with...they insisted on per IP-address the firewall protected. Which in the case of the old company was an entire class A ipv4 network. Mind you the old company only had 63 employees. So the cost for that firewall was outrageous. Needless to say we went to another vendor, since this one wouldn't bend from their licensing scheme (where even un-used ip's were considered protected).
I've seen far better descriptions of products on ebay than this site. Looking at this storage rack, the only picture of it is the rack with thr front door closed. So you have no idea what type of disk arrays are inside. Given the age of the 10k's listed nearby I would have to assume these are at best D1000's or going as far back as SPARCstorage arrays. Also given the age the HHD sizes are most likely 9gigs or smaller, so not much space to store your videos, but you could set up a nice RAID array. Since we don't know what arrays are in the storage rack, we don't know what it would take to use them. It could be a simple wide-SCSI or ultrawide-SCSI attach, or more complicated such as a fibre attach.
So anyway, with such a poor description and supporting evidence, they should give me $200 to take it off their hands.
As for the backgrounds in Project Looking Glass, most were donated images by various Sun Employees, I personally donated one of "The Garden of the Gods" that I took in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I'm also intending on taking panoramic pictures to donate on my various travels.
So, there's no conspiracy. You can take the tin foil hat off now. Besides if you have heard of the founding of Sun, and how Sun got it's name, you would know it was a take-off of "Stanford University Network" aka SUN. Besides my picture that I donated was of a National Natual Landmark, as designated by the US Dept of the Interior's National Park Service
Looking Glass doesn't require panoramic backgrounds, but they definatley help with the idea of 3D space.
I wound up doing something similar once to my little sister. I had re-installed her PC twice, and after the second time I told her that she was on her own from here on out. Sure enough she hosed the install, and my parents being helpful called a mobile pc repair shop. Needless to say they got billed $600 for stuff that I had been doing for free. My parents learned, they now never install *anything* without first running it past me--including security updates. So needless to say my parent's computers work great. My sis however, she hasn't fully learned yet...she just calls me and cries in my ear when she did what Dell tech support said to do, and in the process lost all of her files. *sigh*
I think the previous author meant release critical bugs. Debian *will not* make a stable release until they are happy that there are no release critical bugs, and things work together. Of course there will be serious bugs and security compromises found--but that's why Debian does the security updates as well as point releases every few months or so.
Let's see Debian doesn't have to meet any ridgidly imposed deadlines, so they don't have to relase a shoddy product, and then quickly have to follow up their release with a slew of patches/service packs/errata. Show me a commerical software vendor that releases fresh packages that don't have a mile long patch list shortly after release. Our buddies at Microsoft? Nope, they always have a service pack shortly after release of a new product. RedHat...nope, same thing. Sun Microsystems? Well they still ship GNOME 1.4 with Solaris 9, so no, not exactly fresh.
Oh really? How so?
I personally work with a few Fortune 500 companies, and the thing they tell me they want over everything is stability, uptime and reliability. They do *NOT* want cutting edge. They will *NOT* install patches that haven't been out for at least two months, unless it's a patch for a bug they've encountered or a security update. And even then that patch has to be soaked and tested in their development environment for at least two weeks before it gets approved to be applied in their production environment. So if you work in an environment with any sort of real change control, just blindly applying updates is not acceptiable.
So, for a corporate setting, with real change control policies, Debian Stable makes perfect sense. It follows the same protocols that you would have from a true commerical vendor. Long release cycles, and security and bug fixes during the life of said re
I have to totally disagree with you here. I'm offically listed as a "Work from Home Employee." I'm currently wearing my pajamas as I type this, and for most mornings I'm typically on-line with work like this.
I find I get quite a bit more done here than I did before either at the office or when I was assigned full-time to a customer site.
It also works out well for my customers, I live within an hour drive of all of them, yet my office is further away...about an hour and a half to two hours depending on traffic. So that saves my company mileage since I live close to my customers, and I can provide better service to them. And if I need to visit them I can totally bypass rush hour traffic and show up in late morning or early afternoon--when most of my customers have time to work with me.
To be honest, the telecommuting thing has a lot to do with the corporate management. Where I work, your boss may be in another city, state, or even country. So there's little of managing by looking over your shoulder. And there is also a big corporate push to have people work at home. Part of that whole work-life balance that my company tries to strike (and frankly I think they're doing a good job at this point).
In fact, yes my job could be outsourced, but I've had a couple of customers call my boss and expressed how happy there were with my service versus the outsourced guy, I feel pretty comfortable with my job security.
To quote "Office Space" Gates needs to be sent to Federal "Pound Me In The Ass" Prision, then he'd learn what it really feels like to have to use Micro$oft products. Otherwise you know if he got jail time, he'd go to some posh celebrity "prison" aka a resort.