What is interesting tho, is the mention of "taxpayers' dollars", with Uni saying it doesn't want to spend them on purschasing expensive anti-piracy software or modifying network to keep records on DHCP addresses, and RIAA retorting by saying Uni is wasting them(dollars) via bandwidth costs the pirates are using.
I am pretty sure they are not the only organisms that reproduce asexually and still mutate. What about viruses, bacteria etc?
Original article states: "Bdelloids (the "b" is silent) reproduce through parthenogenesis, which generates offspring with essentially the same genome as their mother from unfertilized eggs. Biologists have yet to find males, hermaphrodites, or any trace of meiosis--the process that creates sex cells--challenging the long-held assumption that evolutionary success requires genetic exchange."
So, essentially as I understand, offsprings have the same genes as parent. Still, natural selection works across millions and millions of years, plenty of spacetime for genes shuffling due to radiation and whatnot, for one thing.
If I recall it correctly, on the MS job application form it states that "3 years of experience in the field counts as 1 year of higher education".
As regards Cheap vs Quality -- the sense that if something is more expensive, it is neccessarily better, is what drives luxuries business, and is, unfortunately, by no means true. We do get the perception of cheap unskilled Indian (pick your choice of non-US country here) IT labour... and we were reading the same horror stories about US companies during the Internet bubble.
Actually there is NFS client support in "Windows Services for Unix" Win package, should work on Win2000 and up. The package is downloadable, I think, free of charge from MS website, and is included in MSDN subscriptions.
Obviously MS doesn't particularly ADVERTISE it, but theoretically it is there. Reminds me of Word'95 actually. MS DID have an importer/exporter made for Word6.0 that could read/write W'95 files... they just didn't mention it, but if you knew, you could go get it for free.
Only prob... I actually tried to use Windoes Services for Unix to access NFS shares. As long as I had it installed it made UNC paths and net mapping tries produce a BSOD every time. Since it was not imperative that I get it working, I just deinstalled the stuff.
And then it got revoked quietly and quickly, when ISPs made a united front... I mean, honestly, what would be the _costs_ alone to comply with it, I don't even NEED to mention privacy and other legal issues.
Basically, storing packets is already a pretty insurmountable burden (coupled with having to store them -indefinitely-), if you want to add analyzing packets for which ones are chat log, which web requests etc... why don't you become Google while you're at it then?
I would rather much see individual division of taxes.
It was actually described in a short sci-fi story of 1970ies I believe, but I don't remember the author.
Basically, when you pay your taxes, you know the total amount you have to fork, but YOU decide how much goes to which division like healthcare, defense, education etc.
Technically already doable, I think, but I wouldn't bet on the results.
So how many of the bleeding edge proponents have to support more than 50 systems?
Package management, rpm, dpkg, all came out in response to the shortcomings of compile-yourself approach we can dearly remember from the days Slackware was about the only Linux distro.
I was there. I was the young sysadmin who had to support 2 Linux servers and who was excited by the performance gain I was supposed to get from compiling stuff yourself. In truth, I never noticed it - and I bet 90% of others don't notice it either and 9% see the gain there because they believe in it.
That was around 11 years ago. By the time Gentoo came out I was dealing with RPMs and blessing them. Nowadays package management software on SuSE, Ubuntu or others even lets you upgrade running system to next release while running.
Do I want to spend hours of my time tweaking compile parameters and wondering why some of them don't work? Do I need "bleeding edge" or stability? For production systems my answer is clear. Yes, there will cases when you want to squeeze the top speed out of the system, so it is good that something like Gentoo is there, too. But I am fairly certain those cases are rare, and in majority of them an upgraded piece of hardware is usually required in the end.
How about... people win Nobel prizes when they are ALREADY a part of a sample which survived (long enough)?
Correct me, if wrong, but the mortality rates depending on age aren't quite uniform. There's a bunch of people dying as infants, and the next big wave is around 18-22 afai remember (all the stupid tricks you wanted to show off in your car, etc).
I don't expect many people get their Nobel in their mid-twenties, so of course they tend to live longer... they already did before they got the prize!
If I am a manager, and I ask somebody for an answer, and I get an evasive answer, if the person doesn't step up and say his opinion on the subject (of his supposed area of expertise) when it is discussed, it all gives me the impression that he is simply not participating in solving the particular problem, and would rather be somewhere else.
While I can appreciate the fact that some people are loath to express their opinion without sufficient data or are just afraid to speak publicly (even in small groups), the first is solved by asking clarifying questions, and the second needs to be dealt with, in some way, in order to actually do _part_ of one's job.
I don't know about discrimination, but appearance is carrying and I believe will always carry a weight, too. If one wants to be perceived seriously, he has to show that, too.
This feels somewhat linked to an attitude I have experienced from some (esp. younger) women: I want you to do X or behave Y, but I won't tell you that, you must feel/guess it!
I don't know who is the "we" you refer to, but in my (granted, not very extensive, but >10 years in IT - in a bank, state telco and a couple private companies) experience I have yet to see any particular usage of some kind of direct links between mail/groupware program and office. What exactly are you referring to?
> I don't know how much the guy relies on Pegasus for his income
Somewhat redundant due to my previous comment a bit above, but still - afai remember there was a good working product for DOS/Novell (mebbe Win3.x too don't remember), and then people started to ask for more features, Win9x support and so he decided to continue develop it and offer for free, and make his living on support agreements, and that became his only source of income for the past 7+ years.
Well, this is where I think, David's message might give the wrong impression.
Both the email client and the server were available and working quite well (IMO) circa 1995. David, if I remember it correctly, only started to think of making the mail system his prime and only source of income when there was a pressure for development of Windows Pmail and Windows Mercury. Both products existed prior to that -- Pmail for DOS (and afai remember Pmail for Win3.x, too) and Mercury for Netware 3.x. Those products were definitely not created for the goal of being an income stream since David wasn't selling support back then.
Then David accepted the task of continuing to develop the two systems, and they did become - as far as I understand - his _only_ source of income and continued to be such for almost a decade. I do not think you can describe that exactly as having the goal to be an income stream, rather it is a bit different way of caring for a product enough to make it a fulltime _job_.
Perhaps it was not the best decision. Perhaps David did not see some opportunities. Then again, situation may be a bit different in New Zealand. Eg. regarding having free time outside employment to work on your pet project, and many other things. Also most of the currently great open-source products weren't even born, so there was little experience to look towards when deciding how to support this while retaining it as freeware.
And then you have a number of support contracts and people tell you which features they want and like... and you have a job working on a great product you already made. I think, in fact, that while "general public" may think of different and perhaps better ways of doing this now, Pegasus as a product (and a freeware product, if not open-source) has been quite a success and endured longer than most of the stuff we might yet see. I wouldn't blame David for his choices.
Then again, my quote seems to be rather proverbial. I wouldn't mind subsituting Nazi reference for something else on the same lines, but I haven't heard anything as recognizable yet.
Dunno. I would say "Linux on the desktop" happened some time ago already, it is just not that loud a thing for people to have noticed.
Basically, if 3 years ago I couldn't really recommend Linux desktops for people, now I am pretty confident that for 80% of what I think as typical office use it works very well.
As it is, at work I can run all the desktop stuff on Ubuntu Linux - I have Openoffice, use Exchange via web client, etc. At home I use Windows for the sole reason that some of the games I play aren't ported to Linux (World of Warcraft, anyone?).
The exceptions where developers/vendors haven't thought about Linux yet, are some specific programs which only have been developed for Windows -- a typical example would be accounting software. Such things probably could run under some emulation layer, but of course that is not optimal.
> If you think all of the massive online media sites (think Flickr, for example) have backups of all of your photos, you're probably mistaken. They certainly have basic protection against single disk failure, but that's not always going to save the data in the event of a catastrophe.
It might depend on business model. I am acquainted with the technical setup of our national 'friendster-alike' (national because it is the only one big enough in the country and everybody is on it), which let's you have as many pics and videos as you can, but you pay a once-time fee of around $0.01 per pic; they do backup all of their users' pics and videos every day. Granted, the scale is not such as flickr, still we are talking about terabytes of pics/videos at the moment, and growing all the time.
Backup is actually cheap, provided you can afford the initial investment of an industrial-level backup system. The service hosts their servers in datacenter and buy their backup needs, even so they can afford it easily.
Well, I tried Palm for some time around 2 years ago, then I tried something similar from I think Fujitsu, that ran some sort of Pocket Windows (WinCE?). Basically, I was quite upset... at the GUI.
It seemed that MS tried to copy as much as they could, from Windows GUI to palmtop level. Well, I would say it didn't work well. It requires much more clicking and stylus bashing to work with WinCE device, than it did with Palm. Basically wherever with PalmOS you could use 1 click, with WinCE you had to do 2-3 (I am exaggarating, but not a lot).
Everything about the WinCE device, from the way the menu buttons work, to character recognition, I would say, was sub-par, compared to PalmOS, plus the device was slower despite having supposedly better processor and more memory. Palm's interface was much more elegant, intuitive and FASTER to use. And I am a person who uses Windows on a desktop in my everyday life, so I don't have any learning curves going handheld Win.
Since then, I moved to a usual mobile with Bluetooth, big enough clear screen (Samsung D-820), and Java support. It runs SSH, it has large enough screen so I could do admining, and the only thing I want now is a bluetooth foldable/projectible keyboard. Still I remember my Palm with fond memories, and WinCE with shuddering.
> I have a job that puts me in the top percentile of people in the world, but to have that job I have to pay the top percentile of living expenses -----
You just don't appreciate how expensive those things are then. It seems you are actually paying a lot for the stuff that you just take for granted.
Yes, sorry, I missed the part earlier that started talking about possibility of same things in Britain.
However, the phones manufactured in SU followed the Soviet GOSTs ("gosudarstvennij standart" - state standard), which, even though I am not sure, I would be willing to bet didn't have anything to do with BABT, because they didn't care.
Interoperability? Well, the fact that in the SU, if you wanted to call overseas (and in fact even other republics in the USSR), you had to subscribe for a long-distance call and go to a Post Office to make it, where they had special booths (and possibly routinely recorded everything), could tell something.
Hell, my apartment phone back then was double-linked with my neighbours. I don't know the technical term for that - I think in Latvian it was "blokators" - but when they were making phone calls, we couldn't use phone, and vice versa -- and I remember every now and then my hooked-up phone emitting chirping noises when my neighbours' phone was ringing. And also sometimes if you took your phone off-hook, you could actually hear their conversation, and sometimes even participate, even tho this wasn't something that was supposed to happen even according to that "double-linked phones" description.
Slashdot Mirror
in the media on the subject.
2 348353 shows the university as the guilty party. If you would only read that article, you would think university is squirming uncomfortably.
For example, "Omaha Media Herald" http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=
What is interesting tho, is the mention of "taxpayers' dollars", with Uni saying it doesn't want to spend them on purschasing expensive anti-piracy software or modifying network to keep records on DHCP addresses, and RIAA retorting by saying Uni is wasting them(dollars) via bandwidth costs the pirates are using.
I am pretty sure they are not the only organisms that reproduce asexually and still mutate. What about viruses, bacteria etc?
Original article states: "Bdelloids (the "b" is silent) reproduce through parthenogenesis, which generates offspring with essentially the same genome as their mother from unfertilized eggs. Biologists have yet to find males, hermaphrodites, or any trace of meiosis--the process that creates sex cells--challenging the long-held assumption that evolutionary success requires genetic exchange."
So, essentially as I understand, offsprings have the same genes as parent. Still, natural selection works across millions and millions of years, plenty of spacetime for genes shuffling due to radiation and whatnot, for one thing.
If I recall it correctly, on the MS job application form it states that "3 years of experience in the field counts as 1 year of higher education".
As regards Cheap vs Quality -- the sense that if something is more expensive, it is neccessarily better, is what drives luxuries business, and is, unfortunately, by no means true. We do get the perception of cheap unskilled Indian (pick your choice of non-US country here) IT labour... and we were reading the same horror stories about US companies during the Internet bubble.
Actually there is NFS client support in "Windows Services for Unix" Win package, should work on Win2000 and up.
The package is downloadable, I think, free of charge from MS website, and is included in MSDN subscriptions.
Obviously MS doesn't particularly ADVERTISE it, but theoretically it is there. Reminds me of Word'95 actually. MS DID have an importer/exporter made for Word6.0 that could read/write W'95 files... they just didn't mention it, but if you knew, you could go get it for free.
Only prob... I actually tried to use Windoes Services for Unix to access NFS shares. As long as I had it installed it made UNC paths and net mapping tries produce a BSOD every time. Since it was not imperative that I get it working, I just deinstalled the stuff.
They actually passed a law like that in Latvia.
And then it got revoked quietly and quickly, when ISPs made a united front... I mean, honestly, what would be the _costs_ alone to comply with it, I don't even NEED to mention privacy and other legal issues.
Basically, storing packets is already a pretty insurmountable burden (coupled with having to store them -indefinitely-), if you want to add analyzing packets for which ones are chat log, which web requests etc... why don't you become Google while you're at it then?
I would rather much see individual division of taxes.
It was actually described in a short sci-fi story of 1970ies I believe, but I don't remember the author.
Basically, when you pay your taxes, you know the total amount you have to fork, but YOU decide how much goes to which division like healthcare, defense, education etc.
Technically already doable, I think, but I wouldn't bet on the results.
Apparently there is much more talent around than previously thought?
So how many of the bleeding edge proponents have to support more than 50 systems?
Package management, rpm, dpkg, all came out in response to the shortcomings of compile-yourself approach we can dearly remember from the days Slackware was about the only Linux distro.
I was there. I was the young sysadmin who had to support 2 Linux servers and who was excited by the performance gain I was supposed to get from compiling stuff yourself. In truth, I never noticed it - and I bet 90% of others don't notice it either and 9% see the gain there because they believe in it.
That was around 11 years ago. By the time Gentoo came out I was dealing with RPMs and blessing them.
Nowadays package management software on SuSE, Ubuntu or others even lets you upgrade running system to next release while running.
Do I want to spend hours of my time tweaking compile parameters and wondering why some of them don't work? Do I need "bleeding edge" or stability? For production systems my answer is clear. Yes, there will cases when you want to squeeze the top speed out of the system, so it is good that something like Gentoo is there, too. But I am fairly certain those cases are rare, and in majority of them an upgraded piece of hardware is usually required in the end.
How about... people win Nobel prizes when they are ALREADY a part of a sample which survived (long enough)?
Correct me, if wrong, but the mortality rates depending on age aren't quite uniform.
There's a bunch of people dying as infants, and the next big wave is around 18-22 afai remember (all the stupid tricks you wanted to show off in your car, etc).
I don't expect many people get their Nobel in their mid-twenties, so of course they tend to live longer... they already did before they got the prize!
If I am a manager, and I ask somebody for an answer, and I get an evasive answer, if the person doesn't step up and say his opinion on the subject (of his supposed area of expertise) when it is discussed, it all gives me the impression that he is simply not participating in solving the particular problem, and would rather be somewhere else.
While I can appreciate the fact that some people are loath to express their opinion without sufficient data or are just afraid to speak publicly (even in small groups), the first is solved by asking clarifying questions, and the second needs to be dealt with, in some way, in order to actually do _part_ of one's job.
I don't know about discrimination, but appearance is carrying and I believe will always carry a weight, too. If one wants to be perceived seriously, he has to show that, too.
This feels somewhat linked to an attitude I have experienced from some (esp. younger) women: I want you to do X or behave Y, but I won't tell you that, you must feel/guess it!
I don't know who is the "we" you refer to, but in my (granted, not very extensive, but >10 years in IT - in a bank, state telco and a couple private companies) experience I have yet to see any particular usage of some kind of direct links between mail/groupware program and office. What exactly are you referring to?
> I don't know how much the guy relies on Pegasus for his income
Somewhat redundant due to my previous comment a bit above, but still - afai remember there was a good working product for DOS/Novell (mebbe Win3.x too don't remember), and then people started to ask for more features, Win9x support and so he decided to continue develop it and offer for free, and make his living on support agreements, and that became his only source of income for the past 7+ years.
Well, this is where I think, David's message might give the wrong impression.
Both the email client and the server were available and working quite well (IMO) circa 1995. David, if I remember it correctly, only started to think of making the mail system his prime and only source of income when there was a pressure for development of Windows Pmail and Windows Mercury. Both products existed prior to that -- Pmail for DOS (and afai remember Pmail for Win3.x, too) and Mercury for Netware 3.x. Those products were definitely not created for the goal of being an income stream since David wasn't selling support back then.
Then David accepted the task of continuing to develop the two systems, and they did become - as far as I understand - his _only_ source of income and continued to be such for almost a decade. I do not think you can describe that exactly as having the goal to be an income stream, rather it is a bit different way of caring for a product enough to make it a fulltime _job_.
Perhaps it was not the best decision. Perhaps David did not see some opportunities. Then again, situation may be a bit different in New Zealand. Eg. regarding having free time outside employment to work on your pet project, and many other things. Also most of the currently great open-source products weren't even born, so there was little experience to look towards when deciding how to support this while retaining it as freeware.
And then you have a number of support contracts and people tell you which features they want and like... and you have a job working on a great product you already made. I think, in fact, that while "general public" may think of different and perhaps better ways of doing this now, Pegasus as a product (and a freeware product, if not open-source) has been quite a success and endured longer than most of the stuff we might yet see. I wouldn't blame David for his choices.
Your mileage varies.
Ran for 5 years on Novell 3.12 without a glitch, and then on Win2000 and on, in different places. Never lost a mail.
I am not exactly a fan of Pmail/Mercury, but as far as I was working with it, it was a good, robust system in my experience.
:)
Then again, my quote seems to be rather proverbial.
I wouldn't mind subsituting Nazi reference for something else on the same lines, but I haven't heard anything as recognizable yet.
Funny, that's just what Eichmann said at his trial.
Dunno. I would say "Linux on the desktop" happened some time ago already, it is just not that loud a thing for people to have noticed.
Basically, if 3 years ago I couldn't really recommend Linux desktops for people, now I am pretty confident that for 80% of what I think as typical office use it works very well.
As it is, at work I can run all the desktop stuff on Ubuntu Linux - I have Openoffice, use Exchange via web client, etc. At home I use Windows for the sole reason that some of the games I play aren't ported to Linux (World of Warcraft, anyone?).
The exceptions where developers/vendors haven't thought about Linux yet, are some specific programs which only have been developed for Windows -- a typical example would be accounting software. Such things probably could run under some emulation layer, but of course that is not optimal.
> If you think all of the massive online media sites (think Flickr, for example) have backups of all of your photos, you're probably mistaken. They certainly have basic protection against single disk failure, but that's not always going to save the data in the event of a catastrophe.
It might depend on business model. I am acquainted with the technical setup of our national 'friendster-alike' (national because it is the only one big enough in the country and everybody is on it), which let's you have as many pics and videos as you can, but you pay a once-time fee of around $0.01 per pic; they do backup all of their users' pics and videos every day. Granted, the scale is not such as flickr, still we are talking about terabytes of pics/videos at the moment, and growing all the time.
Backup is actually cheap, provided you can afford the initial investment of an industrial-level backup system. The service hosts their servers in datacenter and buy their backup needs, even so they can afford it easily.
Well, I tried Palm for some time around 2 years ago, then I tried something similar from I think Fujitsu, that ran some sort of Pocket Windows (WinCE?). Basically, I was quite upset
It seemed that MS tried to copy as much as they could, from Windows GUI to palmtop level. Well, I would say it didn't work well. It requires much more clicking and stylus bashing to work with WinCE device, than it did with Palm. Basically wherever with PalmOS you could use 1 click, with WinCE you had to do 2-3 (I am exaggarating, but not a lot).
Everything about the WinCE device, from the way the menu buttons work, to character recognition, I would say, was sub-par, compared to PalmOS, plus the device was slower despite having supposedly better processor and more memory. Palm's interface was much more elegant, intuitive and FASTER to use. And I am a person who uses Windows on a desktop in my everyday life, so I don't have any learning curves going handheld Win.
Since then, I moved to a usual mobile with Bluetooth, big enough clear screen (Samsung D-820), and Java support. It runs SSH, it has large enough screen so I could do admining, and the only thing I want now is a bluetooth foldable/projectible keyboard. Still I remember my Palm with fond memories, and WinCE with shuddering.
In that case, anybody may as well argue that OO simply is not able to save well in .doc format and lay the blame there.
Well, to make it a cleaner experiment you should have actually copy/pasted the document into Word and saved it from there. ;P
> I have a job that puts me in the top percentile of people in the world, but to have that job I have to pay the top percentile of living expenses
-----
You just don't appreciate how expensive those things are then. It seems you are actually paying a lot for the stuff that you just take for granted.
Yes, sorry, I missed the part earlier that started talking about possibility of same things in Britain.
However, the phones manufactured in SU followed the Soviet GOSTs ("gosudarstvennij standart" - state standard), which, even though I am not sure, I would be willing to bet didn't have anything to do with BABT, because they didn't care.
Interoperability? Well, the fact that in the SU, if you wanted to call overseas (and in fact even other republics in the USSR), you had to subscribe for a long-distance call and go to a Post Office to make it, where they had special booths (and possibly routinely recorded everything), could tell something.
Hell, my apartment phone back then was double-linked with my neighbours. I don't know the technical term for that - I think in Latvian it was "blokators" - but when they were making phone calls, we couldn't use phone, and vice versa -- and I remember every now and then my hooked-up phone emitting chirping noises when my neighbours' phone was ringing. And also sometimes if you took your phone off-hook, you could actually hear their conversation, and sometimes even participate, even tho this wasn't something that was supposed to happen even according to that "double-linked phones" description.
> This is a requirement for BABT compliance.
And since when had the USSR cared about "British Approvals Board of Telecommunications"?