The government bailed out Iriduim (sp?) satellite phone system
"Insightful"?! Inaccurate is more like it.
Your statement is factually completely incorrect. Read an economic analysis of Iridium here.
Iridium LLC, which set up the service at a cost of nearly $5B, filed Chapter 11 in 1999. In 2000, a private group bought it for $25M. They have a significant DoD contract at this time, sure, but that's not a bail-out. Ask the creditors in that Chap11 how much they got out of this.
Re:Libraries are terrible, terrible institutions.
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You must be new here.
>>gkuz (706134)
>>ScentCone (795499)
This joke only works if your UID is lower.
Re:To the rag that is the Wash. Times: Let them sc
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So next time, prepend your commentary with "irrelevant nitpick"
That's a great idea. Maybe we can spread it a bit more widely. Let's see, given the venue, what other kinds of tags can we use? How about "uninformed speculation"? "Gratuitous insult"? "Right-wing nonsense"? "Reflexive Microsoft-bashing"?
This is Slashdot. I won't pretend to add meaningfully to the conversation if you don't pretend you're coming here for meaningful conversation, OK? And maybe start with the decaf tomorrow morning.
Re:Libraries are terrible, terrible institutions.
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I hear there are places where there are shelves after shelves of books, conveniently organized for quick reference, all at the disposal of the public, free of charge.
While I support public libraries, they are not "free of charge." Sure, you can borrow a book without taking cash out of your pocket at the checkout desk, but the employees are paid somehow, and new books are purchased somehow. In most communities in the US, at least, those efforts are funded by local taxes. So you do pay for the libraries, whether you use them or not.
Re:To the rag that is the Wash. Times: Let them sc
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· Score: 2, Informative
The other is only slightly better than a tabloid.
Tabloid is a term of size, or physical format. It has nothing to do with content. Not having seen the paper in question, I can't say which it is, but, for instance, The New York Times is a broadsheet, and The New York Post is a tabloid.
They seem to have taken a page out of the book of WordPerfect (back in the day, say 10-15 years ago): Let users use Opera for free at home/ work, then make money off of Support/ Embedded Opera in Portable devices.
Which is pretty much the opposite of WordPerfect's business model "back in the day". It was an expensive word processing program, but they prided themselves on unlimited free (and toll-free) support. They even had a DJ on the hold line, spinning tunes and telling everyone how deep the queues were. They got killed on this, since it cost them a fortune. That's what made them vulnerable to take-over.
The latest viruses are getting pretty creepy. On the public network where I work, we recently plugged a Windows XP laptop in that had just been installed without anti-virus.
What in the world does this have to do with a Cisco IOS vulnerability?
If the format is properly documented and the documentation is available, it is only a matter of getting someone to write an appropriate viewer or conversion tool.
So it should be no problem for you to read my EBCDIC-encoded data on 7-track 800-bpi tape reels?
Let's not assume so quickly that anything other than paper will be easily readable in 25 years.
I did. Call me stupid, but I have a history of actually paying for licenses according to the publisher's terms if the software is useful and the license terms are reasonable. Otherwise I don't use the software.
This dates way back to paying Vern Buerg for LIST, paying for ProCOMM, etc., etc.
But what happened to other mainframe companies such as Digitial VAX, Prime Computer, How well are other companies such as Sun Micrososystems. Besides most of the "Mainframes" systems are more closely to normal PC's Servers with Larger Raid Disks attached to them.
Clearly you know nothing about mainframes.
Digital, Prime and Sun are not/were not mainframe companies (well, maybe certain VAXen were close), they were minicomputer companies.
Architecturally or OS-wise, a mainframe is nothing at all like a PC server with large RAID. MVS is not like PC OSes (yes, I know you can run Linux on the new big boxes), and there's no good analogue to CICS, VTAM, TSO...
And saying they are not as critical as they used to be just demonstrates your lack of knowledge conclusively. Do you have a bank account? Do you ever make an airline reservation? What do you think is behind those? Waht systems handle 10,000 SSL transactions per second?
Like Desktops and Laptops replaces the old mainframes.
Don't tell IBM they've been replaced. How else could they explain the >$5 billion in annual revenue attributable to mainframes (while they sold off their PC business).
It's now over 40 years for the S/360 architecture, and going strong. Think iPods will be around in 40 years? Think Apple will?
As to it being foolish: There is some slim chance that someone may have gotten one of these abysmal certifications on a dare, or while drunk or stoned, but people who buy meaningless validation strike me as opportunists.
Or, maybe, they got the certification because a current or previous employer required (and paid for) it so that the employer could fulfill a contract requirement, or help them win a bid with someone who placed more stock in them than you do. If an employer tells me "take this test at our expense, it'll help us stay in business", and I do (and pass), how exactly is that opportunism?
Your CCNA is going to be a very basic written test. If you've got a basic knowledge of networking (can you subnet?), you can probably read some documentation and pass without a problem.
Have you taken the CCNA exam lately? In the last couple of years, it's gotten surprisingly hard, and with a cut score around 850 (out of 1000) there's little margin for error. I've met knowledgeable, experienced people who got bitch-slapped when they sat for their re-cert.
Is it just me, or has the Times's editing just gone to shit these last few years?
That may very well be true, but the error this time (as is pretty much customary) is Slashdot's, which is just chronically incapable of understandint the its/it's distinction.
Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, agrees on that point [about Apple supporting WMA, I guess]. "If Apple opened up their standards, they would sell more, not less,"
Isn't that "open it up to sell more" argument the one poor Ms. Rosen went down in flames fighting against?
Regardless of Massport's assertions of safety or interference and whatnot, the FCC will tell Massport to stuff it.
Only trouble is, Massport is the landlord and Continental is the tenant, and while very few of us have read TFA, I bet nobody on/. has read the actual lease. So this may very well not be an FCC dispute but a landlord-tenant matter. Massport still look like assholes, but they may actually have a legal leg to stand on.
Maybe the masses ought to be "intimidated", not in the sense of being pushed around, but in the sense of having to confront their ignorance of computers.
Do you drive a car? Do you do your own machine work? Do you re-program the fuel injection system controller? How about the automatic transmission's shift points? Why not, are you intimidated by those tasks?
Just as the vast majority of users of automobiles have NO F'ING IDEA what goes on inside, but can successfully drive to work and to the grocery store, so most users of Wintel computers can (and probably should) have no f'ing idea what goes on inside.
If your car required 5% of the level of maintenance a typical Linux desktop requires, you'd consider it broken.
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"Insightful"?! Inaccurate is more like it.
Your statement is factually completely incorrect. Read an economic analysis of Iridium here.
Iridium LLC, which set up the service at a cost of nearly $5B, filed Chapter 11 in 1999. In 2000, a private group bought it for $25M. They have a significant DoD contract at this time, sure, but that's not a bail-out. Ask the creditors in that Chap11 how much they got out of this.
>>gkuz (706134)
>>ScentCone (795499)
This joke only works if your UID is lower.
That's a great idea. Maybe we can spread it a bit more widely. Let's see, given the venue, what other kinds of tags can we use? How about "uninformed speculation"? "Gratuitous insult"? "Right-wing nonsense"? "Reflexive Microsoft-bashing"?
This is Slashdot. I won't pretend to add meaningfully to the conversation if you don't pretend you're coming here for meaningful conversation, OK? And maybe start with the decaf tomorrow morning.
While I support public libraries, they are not "free of charge." Sure, you can borrow a book without taking cash out of your pocket at the checkout desk, but the employees are paid somehow, and new books are purchased somehow. In most communities in the US, at least, those efforts are funded by local taxes. So you do pay for the libraries, whether you use them or not.
Tabloid is a term of size, or physical format. It has nothing to do with content. Not having seen the paper in question, I can't say which it is, but, for instance, The New York Times is a broadsheet, and The New York Post is a tabloid.
Uh, no. Level(3) is way bigger, which is why all the crying you hear is from Cogent and Cogent's customers.
Which is pretty much the opposite of WordPerfect's business model "back in the day". It was an expensive word processing program, but they prided themselves on unlimited free (and toll-free) support. They even had a DJ on the hold line, spinning tunes and telling everyone how deep the queues were. They got killed on this, since it cost them a fortune. That's what made them vulnerable to take-over.
What in the world does this have to do with a Cisco IOS vulnerability?
I don't know what's funnier, this troll or the fact that somebody actually modded it "Informative".
So it should be no problem for you to read my EBCDIC-encoded data on 7-track 800-bpi tape reels?
Let's not assume so quickly that anything other than paper will be easily readable in 25 years.
This dates way back to paying Vern Buerg for LIST, paying for ProCOMM, etc., etc.
Clearly you know nothing about mainframes.
Digital, Prime and Sun are not/were not mainframe companies (well, maybe certain VAXen were close), they were minicomputer companies.
Architecturally or OS-wise, a mainframe is nothing at all like a PC server with large RAID. MVS is not like PC OSes (yes, I know you can run Linux on the new big boxes), and there's no good analogue to CICS, VTAM, TSO...
And saying they are not as critical as they used to be just demonstrates your lack of knowledge conclusively. Do you have a bank account? Do you ever make an airline reservation? What do you think is behind those? Waht systems handle 10,000 SSL transactions per second?
Don't tell IBM they've been replaced. How else could they explain the >$5 billion in annual revenue attributable to mainframes (while they sold off their PC business).
It's now over 40 years for the S/360 architecture, and going strong. Think iPods will be around in 40 years? Think Apple will?
Or, maybe, they got the certification because a current or previous employer required (and paid for) it so that the employer could fulfill a contract requirement, or help them win a bid with someone who placed more stock in them than you do. If an employer tells me "take this test at our expense, it'll help us stay in business", and I do (and pass), how exactly is that opportunism?
Have you taken the CCNA exam lately? In the last couple of years, it's gotten surprisingly hard, and with a cut score around 850 (out of 1000) there's little margin for error. I've met knowledgeable, experienced people who got bitch-slapped when they sat for their re-cert.
Bzzzt, no. But thanks for playing.
As GP said, this one is attributed to Abe, not Mark Twain. You could look it up, of course.
That may very well be true, but the error this time (as is pretty much customary) is Slashdot's, which is just chronically incapable of understandint the its/it's distinction.
Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, agrees on that point [about Apple supporting WMA, I guess]. "If Apple opened up their standards, they would sell more, not less,"
Isn't that "open it up to sell more" argument the one poor Ms. Rosen went down in flames fighting against?
No.
"I didn't RTFA. Could somebody please read it for me?"
Never use spell check, and never learn elementary-school English grammar, either.
Regardless of Massport's assertions of safety or interference and whatnot, the FCC will tell Massport to stuff it.
Only trouble is, Massport is the landlord and Continental is the tenant, and while very few of us have read TFA, I bet nobody on /. has read the actual lease. So this may very well not be an FCC dispute but a landlord-tenant matter. Massport still look like assholes, but they may actually have a legal leg to stand on.
Lotus? Pushing their own GUI? I must have slept through that part -- what was that product name?
Do you drive a car? Do you do your own machine work? Do you re-program the fuel injection system controller? How about the automatic transmission's shift points? Why not, are you intimidated by those tasks?
Just as the vast majority of users of automobiles have NO F'ING IDEA what goes on inside, but can successfully drive to work and to the grocery store, so most users of Wintel computers can (and probably should) have no f'ing idea what goes on inside.
If your car required 5% of the level of maintenance a typical Linux desktop requires, you'd consider it broken.
I suppose actually going to the site linked in the submission would be too hard? There you can read that it really is a F/OSS, GNU/Linux-based system.