We'll have to disagree here. I think you have led a sheltered life if you think Apple takes any kind of major heat like other vendors have to deal with.
I'm a unix guy so I have no love for MS. Most of the criticism they have endured over the years has been well targeted. That said, for the most part they respond well.
OTOH, say anything against Apple and people like you come out and brand the source as fringe zealots.
I didn't say all Apple products are crap; I said sometimes they make crap and they absolutely will not admit to it. I think in this case, one of their design compromises has come back to bite in a way they did not expect. Their first reaction is to deny despite mounting evidence.
C'mon... this is a consumer product issue and Apple's record for admitting to problems is not good. The iphone is a great product but 4 has a real issue re: signal strength and shielding.
Their usual response to a design flaw is that it is the users problem. Thats when the Apple Apologists come out of the woodwork and complain about "the usual" pissing on Apple. On the contrary, Apple gets a pretty free and cushy ride most of the time. Most reviews of Apple products gloss over flaws that would result in crucifixtion if it came from Redmond.
I like my 3GS and I like a lot of Apple products but let's face it, they make some real crap too. eg: iTunes (inconsistant, many db bugs, slow, bloated) and Safari (slow, bloated, buggy eyecandy) come to mind on the software side. Arguably, pre ios4 versions have been buggy and wanting as well. I have noticed the Bluetooth driver still has a number of issues (not noticable if you have only one BT device).
On the hardware side, I remember overheating Macs, monitors with wavy screens and of course there is the battery life of the iphone which has led to a large amount of profit for the battery folk. All of these problems get pawned off as "user generated problems" by Apple support.
Hey... they're no worse than anyone else and anybody who has experience in mass production of consumer devices can understand how these things happen. iPhones are a pretty impressive piece of technology. However, Apple products are not sacred.
I just think Apple needs to stand up and say "Yeah, we screwed up" and come out with an engineering fix, a timeline for repair, and a plan to replace the defective product. Just like Detroit.
Cripes... somebody posts a claim that appeals to the majority (even though it is patently false ie: taxpayer funded networks) and gets modded 5 for insightful.
Anyone who rightfully calls shenanigans and asks for support for the claim gets tagged as a troll or flamebait. Just mod me -1 by default.
And why sidetrack the discussion just because someone commenting is AC? You can see from AC's words that he/she is likely Canadian.
Anyways, I'm with AC on this. I really don't want the CRTC getting complicating things when there already is sufficient legislation to deal with the issues. (1993 Telecommunications Act)
Bullcrap. What government money? Bell, Shaw, Rogers, TELUS [the largest Canadian providers] are private companies and their networks have been built with shareholder dollars. Are you a shareholder? Then you have shareholder rights.
The only money you've paid for these guys is via your monthly bill, and that is not a subsidy.
Hey... that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize them.
Hey pnewhook, you're trolling here... or perhaps AC knows more than you;->
If we all took your attitude we would never send out a Mars rover. troll troll troll
I think AC is correct in saying there is nothing very interesting or cool about attaching a camera and sending it up. Pretty lame for science/engineering but OK for Youtube. These stories are coming in from Universities so shouldn't we expect more?
The packages have about a 500 to 800 gram limit if a high altitude is to be achieved. It would be hard to build a useful, sophisticated instrument but not impossible.
Stabilization, remote control, GPS info would make a camera launch more interesting.
Power management and operational reliability are issues that recognize the harsh environment being explored... but they are not show stoppers.
Contrary to your IR view, there is a temperature gradient through the atmosphere and it is not a consistent linear decline. Inversions happen and also there are interesting heat vs temperature situations. The temperature gradients currently plotted by NWS launches are very significant. It would be useful to extend the reach of the measurement beyond the narrow path followed by the balloon ascent. Certainly an area to explore.
UV measurements could be interesting as well. Likely easy to implement.
Uhhh... and lasers don't have to be in the visible range. Automated cloud cover instruments and visibility measurements have used lasers. Putting these into a small, disposable, lightweight package should be doable. Making the measurement meaningful would be hard but worthwhile.
Balloon to balloon communication isn't necessary if they are just going to send back data for post processing. However, it would enable measurements between the balloons. Don't think 802.11; instead it could be a coded infrared link that also measured visibility and distance. Or it could be something completely different depending on what is to be measured or explored.
I think those were just suggestions off the top. There's lots of things that could be done instead of throwing a camera away in hopes of getting five minutes of fame on the web.
UAV launches from balloons are not new but they are another opportunity to build something interesting. It all depends on what you do with it.
Why not toss in something useful yourself instead of ranting and trolling?
At least that guy in Colorado is trying to measure something.
.. but most freaking industrial apps are essentially single threaded and the best speed I can get on SPARC is 2.6 G or so ( for mucho $$$)... and Sun is not going anywhere with the h/w research. IBM meanwhile has P6 cpus at 4.7 GHz and much higher in the works. Sun won't survive on Jave, DTrace, and sentimentality.
The T series rock for web and other// processing needs, and they are low power (relatively) but most times I'm better off looking at RH and a Dell.
So... Sun h/w is dying, the Solaris o/s ain't so special anymore (kudos to linux and BSD flavours), and Sun has just been bought by a company headed by a bigger freak than Scott McNealy. And: Oracle doesn't speak o/s or h/w development.
A lot of our vendors are tied specifically to Solaris and SPARC. We're telling them to find another mainstream platform: Linux/x86 or AIX/P. Oracle has a window of opportunity while a lot of apps are still tied to Solaris but those apps are more and more available on alternate platforms or specialized industrial apps without much market effect.
Sad, but Sun and the SPARC/Solaris products are in various stages of death.
Uh.. this really shouldn't be a Troll. At least +1 for informative and another for heartfelt tears. Eh Slashdotters probably aren't familiar enough with TTTE.
...a market whose value was inflated beyond what the economics should dictate. eg: music/video distribution or long-distance telephony. The technology has matured and there is critical mass in distributed knowledge experts (ie slashdot readers), ubiquitous access to high speed data communications, and cheap hardware.
The "$60 billion" value sounds like "a street value of"
my 2c
Well, if we're doing silly analogies: I don't stuff cash into my banker's pillowcase; I find a safe place for it, which may be a bank. Email inboxes are potentially volatile on-line storage. A pillowcase, not a bank.
The statement is still valid: your email server is not and cannot be a reliable long term archive. You are foolish if you leave VALUABLE information on it that you don't ever want to lose or have compromised:
1. Most access is plain text and subject to snooping/hijacking (passwd/userid/content) 2. Email is the most abused internet protocol (my opinion) by zombots, spammers, and virus/trojan propagators. ISPs do a lot to counter spam and threatening content but sometimes they get hosed. Or your home machine gets compromised and the ISP will do things to clean up. 3. Grooming accounts for stale accounts, unauthorized accounts, and stale/large data is a reality on most messaging systems. "Ooops"s happen. Usually stated as "sxxt happens"
Whatever your feelings of outrage are, common sense says put your important stuff somewhere close at hand and under your own control.
SCO has had several years in court and nothing that they have come up with in terms of a legal theory to support their position has had any lift to it. This is hardly "mob justice". If anything, there should be complaints that Judge K give them too much slack.
It is about time that the slow turning wheels of justice move to end the long suffering of IBM, Novell, the linux community, and open source in general.
As usual with newspaper reports of research there is not enough information to know how the summary was arrived at. You would have to see the questions and the stats to understand the correlations. So you can not tell if there were or were not questions that show a cause-effect relationship between p2p and purchases. On the face of the news report the conclusion is not supportable... but experienced researchers likely have included a lot more in there poll then is reported.
Retro-tube data drivers with shaped-anode 12AT7s in a balanced push-pull configuration yields a more pleasing data stream. The rounded bitshapes harken back to a time when mobile data was delivered to your '57 Chevy by pretty girls on roller-skates.
There is nothing new here; it has always been cheaper to work out your own storage solution than to buy a commercial unit. Same goes for servers/desktops etc. Why buy a Sun (or Dell, or IBM or whatever) when you can get your local guy to put a system together for half the price?
If you are an individual or even a small business with limited capital then DIY is often the best (only?) way to go but you also get to deal with flakey controllers, incompatible drivers, and warranty returns all on your own. The integration of components, performance management, and the harmony of the complete system is all yours.
At some point, either because of the scale or the criticality of the system, it is worth the bucks to pay someone who has researched the issues and built a solid product to provide you with a solution that you can (hopefully) trust. Your sysadmins and techies can spend their time on ROI generating projects instead of figuring out why a component does wild and whacky crap every full moon. Tech support can be a very good thing.
Even open source has its commercial providers. Personally, I have always liked Slackware but if we are deploying servers it's going to be Red Hat.
I think homebrew is super: put your system together and do some benchmarking, then publish it for the rest of us to benefit!
Uh.. I know this is obvious but it is the media that throws the "cure" spin onto research reports. Makes better headlines. Don't put down the researchers.
The relationship between nervous system functioning and immune response is hugely interesting and should have significance across a broad range of medical research, far beyond diabetes. What is particularly interesting is the simplicity of the observation and the decision by the researchers to do something that I am sure others overlooked because of built-in prejudice about how the body systems function.
Slashdot Mirror
We'll have to disagree here. I think you have led a sheltered life if you think Apple takes any kind of major heat like other vendors have to deal with.
I'm a unix guy so I have no love for MS. Most of the criticism they have endured over the years has been well targeted. That said, for the most part they respond well.
OTOH, say anything against Apple and people like you come out and brand the source as fringe zealots.
I didn't say all Apple products are crap; I said sometimes they make crap and they absolutely will not admit to it. I think in this case, one of their design compromises has come back to bite in a way they did not expect. Their first reaction is to deny despite mounting evidence.
C'mon... this is a consumer product issue and Apple's record for admitting to problems is not good. The iphone is a great product but 4 has a real issue re: signal strength and shielding.
Their usual response to a design flaw is that it is the users problem. Thats when the Apple Apologists come out of the woodwork and complain about "the usual" pissing on Apple. On the contrary, Apple gets a pretty free and cushy ride most of the time. Most reviews of Apple products gloss over flaws that would result in crucifixtion if it came from Redmond.
I like my 3GS and I like a lot of Apple products but let's face it, they make some real crap too. eg: iTunes (inconsistant, many db bugs, slow, bloated) and Safari (slow, bloated, buggy eyecandy) come to mind on the software side. Arguably, pre ios4 versions have been buggy and wanting as well. I have noticed the Bluetooth driver still has a number of issues (not noticable if you have only one BT device).
On the hardware side, I remember overheating Macs, monitors with wavy screens and of course there is the battery life of the iphone which has led to a large amount of profit for the battery folk. All of these problems get pawned off as "user generated problems" by Apple support.
Hey... they're no worse than anyone else and anybody who has experience in mass production of consumer devices can understand how these things happen. iPhones are a pretty impressive piece of technology. However, Apple products are not sacred.
I just think Apple needs to stand up and say "Yeah, we screwed up" and come out with an engineering fix, a timeline for repair, and a plan to replace the defective product. Just like Detroit.
IMHO, Wednesdays suck. It IS "hump" day, but that only counts at quitting time. I don't like mail on Wednesdays.
I vote: Keep Saturday and turf Wednesday.
That way the postie foot patrols have work weeks that average only 2.5 days. Who could possibly object?
...if some guy's kid was accidentally carried aloft and took the pictures: THAT would be a story!
Yes, back then I had to get off the sofa to channel surf.
Progress is real.
Actually, this is an ancient symbol for "Organic Free Range Omega".
The first marketing campaign.
Its about time those oval-eyed, crop-circle forming, et b*st*rds stopped eavesdropping on us. They should pay for their own cable.
So... if I painted my AK-47 fluorescent lime green, yellow and orange, then no one would think it was a real gun?
Cripes... somebody posts a claim that appeals to the majority (even though it is patently false ie: taxpayer funded networks) and gets modded 5 for insightful.
Anyone who rightfully calls shenanigans and asks for support for the claim gets tagged as a troll or flamebait. Just mod me -1 by default.
And why sidetrack the discussion just because someone commenting is AC? You can see from AC's words that he/she is likely Canadian.
Anyways, I'm with AC on this. I really don't want the CRTC getting complicating things when there already is sufficient legislation to deal with the issues. (1993 Telecommunications Act)
"Their pipes" were built with government money.
Bullcrap. What government money? Bell, Shaw, Rogers, TELUS [the largest Canadian providers] are private companies and their networks have been built with shareholder dollars. Are you a shareholder? Then you have shareholder rights.
The only money you've paid for these guys is via your monthly bill, and that is not a subsidy.
Hey... that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize them.
BTW, this is kind of wasteful. Helium is a scarce resource.
This is more useful than all the helium filled birthday and random holiday balloons
True but still wasteful... although safe.
Hey pnewhook, you're trolling here ... or perhaps AC knows more than you ;->
If we all took your attitude we would never send out a Mars rover. troll troll troll
I think AC is correct in saying there is nothing very interesting or cool about attaching a camera and sending it up. Pretty lame for science/engineering but OK for Youtube. These stories are coming in from Universities so shouldn't we expect more?
The packages have about a 500 to 800 gram limit if a high altitude is to be achieved. It would be hard to build a useful, sophisticated instrument but not impossible.
Stabilization, remote control, GPS info would make a camera launch more interesting.
Power management and operational reliability are issues that recognize the harsh environment being explored... but they are not show stoppers.
Contrary to your IR view, there is a temperature gradient through the atmosphere and it is not a consistent linear decline. Inversions happen and also there are interesting heat vs temperature situations. The temperature gradients currently plotted by NWS launches are very significant. It would be useful to extend the reach of the measurement beyond the narrow path followed by the balloon ascent. Certainly an area to explore.
UV measurements could be interesting as well. Likely easy to implement.
Uhhh... and lasers don't have to be in the visible range. Automated cloud cover instruments and visibility measurements have used lasers. Putting these into a small, disposable, lightweight package should be doable. Making the measurement meaningful would be hard but worthwhile.
Balloon to balloon communication isn't necessary if they are just going to send back data for post processing. However, it would enable measurements between the balloons. Don't think 802.11; instead it could be a coded infrared link that also measured visibility and distance. Or it could be something completely different depending on what is to be measured or explored.
I think those were just suggestions off the top. There's lots of things that could be done instead of throwing a camera away in hopes of getting five minutes of fame on the web.
UAV launches from balloons are not new but they are another opportunity to build something interesting. It all depends on what you do with it.
Why not toss in something useful yourself instead of ranting and trolling?
At least that guy in Colorado is trying to measure something.
.. but most freaking industrial apps are essentially single threaded and the best speed I can get on SPARC is 2.6 G or so ( for mucho $$$)... and Sun is not going anywhere with the h/w research. IBM meanwhile has P6 cpus at 4.7 GHz and much higher in the works. Sun won't survive on Jave, DTrace, and sentimentality.
The T series rock for web and other // processing needs, and they are low power (relatively) but most times I'm better off looking at RH and a Dell.
So... Sun h/w is dying, the Solaris o/s ain't so special anymore (kudos to linux and BSD flavours), and Sun has just been bought by a company headed by a bigger freak than Scott McNealy. And: Oracle doesn't speak o/s or h/w development.
A lot of our vendors are tied specifically to Solaris and SPARC. We're telling them to find another mainstream platform: Linux/x86 or AIX/P. Oracle has a window of opportunity while a lot of apps are still tied to Solaris but those apps are more and more available on alternate platforms or specialized industrial apps without much market effect.
Sad, but Sun and the SPARC/Solaris products are in various stages of death.
Almost makes Nortel look good.
Uh.. this really shouldn't be a Troll. At least +1 for informative and another for heartfelt tears. Eh Slashdotters probably aren't familiar enough with TTTE.
You really don't know your TTTE series! George and Ringo were the best.
...a market whose value was inflated beyond what the economics should dictate. eg: music/video distribution or long-distance telephony. The technology has matured and there is critical mass in distributed knowledge experts (ie slashdot readers), ubiquitous access to high speed data communications, and cheap hardware. The "$60 billion" value sounds like "a street value of" my 2c
Kudos to Weird Al
Well, if we're doing silly analogies: I don't stuff cash into my banker's pillowcase; I find a safe place for it, which may be a bank. Email inboxes are potentially volatile on-line storage. A pillowcase, not a bank.
The statement is still valid: your email server is not and cannot be a reliable long term archive. You are foolish if you leave VALUABLE information on it that you don't ever want to lose or have compromised:
1. Most access is plain text and subject to snooping/hijacking (passwd/userid/content)
2. Email is the most abused internet protocol (my opinion) by zombots, spammers, and virus/trojan propagators. ISPs do a lot to counter spam and threatening content but sometimes they get hosed. Or your home machine gets compromised and the ISP will do things to clean up.
3. Grooming accounts for stale accounts, unauthorized accounts, and stale/large data is a reality on most messaging systems. "Ooops"s happen. Usually stated as "sxxt happens"
Whatever your feelings of outrage are, common sense says put your important stuff somewhere close at hand and under your own control.
My 2 cents FWIW
SCO has had several years in court and nothing that they have come up with in terms of a legal theory to support their position has had any lift to it. This is hardly "mob justice". If anything, there should be complaints that Judge K give them too much slack.
It is about time that the slow turning wheels of justice move to end the long suffering of IBM, Novell, the linux community, and open source in general.
As usual with newspaper reports of research there is not enough information to know how the summary was arrived at. You would have to see the questions and the stats to understand the correlations. So you can not tell if there were or were not questions that show a cause-effect relationship between p2p and purchases. On the face of the news report the conclusion is not supportable... but experienced researchers likely have included a lot more in there poll then is reported.
Retro-tube data drivers with shaped-anode 12AT7s in a balanced push-pull configuration yields a more pleasing data stream. The rounded bitshapes harken back to a time when mobile data was delivered to your '57 Chevy by pretty girls on roller-skates.
Data today is just too harsh.
There is nothing new here; it has always been cheaper to work out your own storage solution than to buy a commercial unit. Same goes for servers/desktops etc. Why buy a Sun (or Dell, or IBM or whatever) when you can get your local guy to put a system together for half the price?
If you are an individual or even a small business with limited capital then DIY is often the best (only?) way to go but you also get to deal with flakey controllers, incompatible drivers, and warranty returns all on your own. The integration of components, performance management, and the harmony of the complete system is all yours.
At some point, either because of the scale or the criticality of the system, it is worth the bucks to pay someone who has researched the issues and built a solid product to provide you with a solution that you can (hopefully) trust. Your sysadmins and techies can spend their time on ROI generating projects instead of figuring out why a component does wild and whacky crap every full moon. Tech support can be a very good thing.
Even open source has its commercial providers. Personally, I have always liked Slackware but if we are deploying servers it's going to be Red Hat.
I think homebrew is super: put your system together and do some benchmarking, then publish it for the rest of us to benefit!
Uh.. I know this is obvious but it is the media that throws the "cure" spin onto research reports. Makes better headlines. Don't put down the researchers.
The relationship between nervous system functioning and immune response is hugely interesting and should have significance across a broad range of medical research, far beyond diabetes. What is particularly interesting is the simplicity of the observation and the decision by the researchers to do something that I am sure others overlooked because of built-in prejudice about how the body systems function.
Kudos to the Toronto team.
You can write Santa and ask:
Santa Claus
North Pole
Canada
H0H 0H0
No kidding.