The financial impact of the new VA Linux strategy will be significant. Historically, VA Linux has generated a significant majority of its revenues from the sale of its hardware products. VA expects its revenue to significantly decline with the elimination of the hardware segment.
Here's the gun, here's the bullet, now where's my foot again?
But one of the "new revenue streams" they're pursuing is this OSDN OnSite thing, which I guess gives people OSDN-like functionality on their own networks. Has anyone out there used this? Not just posted a project on OSDN, but actually paid for the OnSite product/service? Does it actually make your development more "efficient"? Do you use it to coordinate with development outside your corporate walls? Sounds like a neat idea, but are they really gonna make any money with it?
Why should IBM be labeled as hypocritical because two of its branches take different views about the importance of user freedom vs. restriction?
Because, when I buy a linux solution from IBM, my money is going into the corporate coffers which can support the CPRM division. It's kind of like buying a win2000 license gives money to MS, which allows them to push Passport on people.
If a corporation is doing something you don't agree with, it's important to refuse to support that corporation at all, regardless of whether you like their other products or not. That't the problem with corporate integration: the good parts and the bad parts are tied to one financial future.
Actually, I see no compelling differences to move beyond MSIE5.0. I haven't read anything suggesting an advancement in browser technology...
First of all, the later IE's (like 5.5) are a lot more stable than 5.0, so I hope you'll at least upgrade that far.
As for 6.0 having no advances: how about the genuine W3C standards-compliant rendering engine? The main obstacle to implementing this earlier (like in IE5.0) was that it breaks the of non-compliant webpages that have come up over the years. But with IE6, if you include a <DOCTYPE> tag at the top of your page, the browser will -gasp!- render it precisely according to the DTD you claim to be using.
And for backwards compatibility, they still have a copy of the 5.5 engine in there which is the default if you don't specify a doctype. Definitely a bloated approach to solving the problem, but at least it deals with the contradictory needs of a partially-standarized web...
Why not just avoid the problem by calling your software something like "WhizBang - an AIM compatible client for Linux" or something like that?
Amen. How about GNA ("Gna's Not AIM")?
But seriously. How about gM, for "gnu messenger?" I don't think General Motors could sue, because your client is probably not easy to confuse with a car:)
And of course the publishing companies are taking the easy way out (from the Washington Post article):
Publishers say the decision means they now must begin removing hundreds of thousands of articles, photos and drawings from their digital archives.
Yeah, or actually pay royalties to the freelancers. So it looks as if the net effect of this decision is going to be the removal of lots of valuable content from digital archives and not, in fact, increased revenue for freelance authors.
... who sit around on our asses typing all day? I doubt I'd store up enough energy for a day of mobile computing, just walking a block and a half from my car.
Maybe next they'll have piezoelectric seats to "harness the butt-pressure energy"?
... keep in mind that this could well pass, and might even make sense to future generations. Think about it: the Net as world-wide resource. Seems logical that it would be subject to every jurisdiction where it's viewable. Of course this would produce a network of homogenized, inoffensive, blase information, but probably lots of people already don't realize it's more than that. I mean, when you log on to AOL and read the AOL news and stream some AOL music, the only indication that there's anything marginally offensive on the net is that pesky pile of Porn-Spam in your inbox.
Despite all the objections we have, the main reason I see our legislators rejecting it is that it obligates US-based ISPs to be content police for every jursidiction on earth, which is clearly ridiculous. AOL, @Home, and Earthlink will scream bloody murder about this obligation, and they'll be fighting the good fight for once. If anything remotely like this is to be ratified, it should place the burden on China, Morocco, et al to reject content they find unacceptable, even if that means banning everything from outside thier borders... after all, I mean, if Morocco has a law against all depiction of nudity (for instance), I suppose I respect that law, but let THEM enforce it. That's not the job of my U.S.-based ISP, thank you very much.
Okay, but seriously. EVERYONE please contact these two and tell them how STUPID this is. Contact info:
Wyden: is a dick and doesn't even want to hear from anyone outside of Oregon. Too bad for him. Doesn't post his email address online, but hit his contact page and leave a note.
Gephardt: is actually a house member, not a senator. Also resists communication from citizens outside the 3rd district of MO. The only way I found to email him is to start at his contact page, click the "email" link, and pretend you're from that district.
Jesus! Anyone know an easier way to get through to these folks via email?!
Now, when I compiled it, I noticed that the filesize was a whopping 354K.
Alright, with an node size of (probably) 32K, that's like 12 nodes, ouch...
which can really shrink it's size. It did, but still left a whopping 71K.
Alright, down to 3 nodes now, cool!
This brought things down to a mere 12K.
Alright, down to one node!
Stripping this brought a final size reduction to 3276 bytes.
Whoo hoo, now we use... oh yeah, still one node.
As a result I cut the binary to less than 1% of it's original size.
Yes, and saved 11 nodes in the process. But the last step was basically useless, as it was already fitting in one disk block. And even 3 blocks wouldn't have been bad, except the 3rd one was almost totally unused...
My theory is, they're banking on the confusion of PHBs who read about "the latest RDBMS technology" and notice that the Redhat RDBMS is a whole bunch cheaper than Oracle.
Taking into consideration that the standard formula for driving is 20 over Posted...
Exactly! In some ways, I wouldn't mind if speed limits were -consistently- enforced. The way it is now, it's tacitly accepted that you go 10 over. But it's definitely illegal, so basically cops have the right to pull you over whenever they want because, hey, you WERE speeding.
It happened to me the other day. I was driving down the road and apparently I looked like a teenager who was "Cruising," so the cop, who started off very gruff and confrontational, relaxed substantially when he discovered that I was over 21 and NOT drunk. None of that changed the fact that I was going 10 over, but that's not the real reason he stopped me; I was getting passed by people who were clearly older than me.
Maybe it's naive to think that consistent speed limit enforcement would lead police to stop pullovers in which there was no probable cause. But at least, if speeding tickets were automatic no-brainers, it would be painfully obvious when a cop made a bullshit pullover, like DWB ("driving while black" in chicago) for instance.
It was a lot easier than Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech from "Romeo and Juliet," which I had to memorize back in High School -- that was 96 lines of Middle English
Okay, before the self-pity express takes off here, let's clarify a couple things about old-fashioned european languages.
First off, the English language as we know it has only existed for a few hundred years. Before it came "Olde Englishe," which was basically German with some French vocab thrown in (hence, the term "Anglo-saxon" to describe englishmen). It was really only English insofar as it was the language spoken in the place called England. But basically nothing like the language we know.
Middle English arose in the 13th and 14th centuries, when some particularly English idioms found their way into the vernacular. While you might recognize a passage written in middle english, you'd almost certainly need footnotes (at the rate of about 2 per line) to really get the gist of what was being said. For comparison, pick up a copy of the "original," non-modernized "Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer.
By the time Shakespeare was even born, Gutenberg was dead and the printing press was revolutionizing the way people thought of literature. Because identical copies of a text could be distributed ad infinitum, the language more or less became standardized, and eventually canonized into the Oxford English Dictionary. This is, more or less, the language we know today as "English." There were still some spelling issues to work out, and of course contemporary idioms always change, but the essential grammar and indeed much of the vocabulary has remained the same ever since.
So no, you didn't have to memorize any "middle english" to play Mercutio. If you got a printed copy of the play, you didn't even have trouble reading the glyphs, which might be a legitimate complaint of a modern Shakespeare scholar poring over the frist Folio. Sorry if you don't know what an "alderman" or "philome" are, but you could probably find out with a good dictionary. So, I'm sure you're a great actor, but PLEASE don't go around bragging about memorizing a hundred lines in an ancient language just because you had to read the freakin' queen mab speech.
If solar power was actually efficient enough in a power/acre manner to run a frickin' data center, don't you think they would have already done it?
a) see "solar host" response below,
b) I did a little investigating and discovered that there are Kyocera cells that claim to operate at around 126 watts/sq meter, DC, under ideal conditions (total sunlight, etc). So you need to shave a bit off for the inverter and to allow for un-ideal light, but even at about a 10% discount for EACH of those, you get about 400KW per acre. I don't know what kind of datacenters you'd be running, but an acre isn't really a huge site, and 400,000 watts is a freakin' lot of power.
It would be waaay too cost prohibitive for anyone to even think of doing it.
That, unfortunately, is a very good point. For an acre of the Kyocera cells I was referring to, it would cost a cool $2.1 million. Not gonna happen soon.
That hardly ruined much, all it is, is 4 cages on polls.
When I said "land is already ruined," I meant because of its proximity to a major highway. Between noise pollution and air pollution and construction equipment driving all over the shoulders every couple of years, the land immediately surrounding a highway is pretty much a wasteland. And no one wants to LIVE there, so how about some server farms?
Anyway, you also have to consider that most of that land is indian reservation
The only res on I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix is the Gila River community, and that only occupies about the first 20 miles south of Tempe. That leaves about 80 miles of non-res land. Of course much of that is already taken, but there are still huge swaths of empty space which could work for something like this.
Oh, man. I've been thinking for years that they ought to just cover the land in Arizona with solar-powered server farms and commodity solar "generators." At least along, for example, I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, where the sensitive ecosystem is already ruined (my first site nomination is that ludicrous abandoned amusment park near Eloy). With 300+ days of sun per year, the power supply would be rock solid as long as you had enough deep-cell batteries to get you through the monsoons. And you could probably collect way, way more power than you actually needed over the area of the server building, and actually push some back into the Grid.
Okay, let's take a couple of your points about the ignorant masses:
Why is the price of oil so high?
The real secret is: it's not. Relative to the rest of the world, spending 2 bucks on a gallon of gas is still a pretty good deal. You're right, the oil interests do run our country, but the real evidence for this is the fact that - you ready for this? - the price of gas is so low. Exxon et al. realize that, as long as they can keep gas prices at a reasonable level, people won't put any heart into looking for alternative fuels, and the oil companies will continue to dominate the market.
Personally, I think the only explanation for this is sloth. The oil companies could just as easily put some effort into R&D and be the first ones to come out with awesome fuel cells, but they'd rather just keep selling oil 'cuz it's easier. If only the government would subsidize oil-company research instead of the price of raw oil, the country would be a much cleaner place.
Why are term limits riduculous and un-democratic?
For the record, what's so undemocratic about letting people elect whoever they want? It's true that the incumbent candidate has more name recognition and the advantage of not having TOTALLY messed up the county/state/country in his last term, but a reasonably informed populace would still base its decision on the candidate's policies for the future. So, maybe a better question is, "why do we even need term limits at all?" That seems to be a better indicator of the lack of clue among people.
Why do Iranians and Guatamalans have contempt for the US?
After four years (or whatever) of intense calculations involving 300.000 computers, they have finally established the single first bit the 64 bit encryption key.
After they got pants'd on RC4, those bastards probably chose the key "FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF" for the 64 bit challenge, realizing distributed.net was just gonna chug away at the keys in order...
After they got pants'd on RC4, those bastards probably chose the key "FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF" for the 64 bit challenge, realizing distributed.net was just gonna chug away at the keys in order...
And if you look quick, you might even catch the price war over at Pricewatch. I've been debating the purchase of a new computer for the past week, and in that time, the price of the gigahertz Athlon chip has dropped 12%. In one week! So I'm going to get the motherboard and some ram delivered next week, and wait a bit to see how low the chip goes. It's already under 3 digits.
Fission products have an inherent environmental advantage over most other poisons. The mercury from the coal plant, the lead in old house paint, the arsenic in your well water... these things are toxic forever. Fission products decay away!
Yeah, except that neither coal, house paint, or well water produce additional toxins: they just shuffle around the stuff that's already there. Fission reactions, however, produce these hideous poisons not found in nature (on earth anyway) basically out of thin air.
And sure 50K years is not long by geological standards, but it could sure bung up our civilization, and the next 10 civilizations after ours. Here's hoping we can find a way to warn them about it...
Slashdot Mirror
The financial impact of the new VA Linux strategy will be significant. Historically, VA Linux has generated a significant majority of its revenues from the sale of its hardware products. VA expects its revenue to significantly decline with the elimination of the hardware segment.
Here's the gun, here's the bullet, now where's my foot again?
But one of the "new revenue streams" they're pursuing is this OSDN OnSite thing, which I guess gives people OSDN-like functionality on their own networks. Has anyone out there used this? Not just posted a project on OSDN, but actually paid for the OnSite product/service? Does it actually make your development more "efficient"? Do you use it to coordinate with development outside your corporate walls? Sounds like a neat idea, but are they really gonna make any money with it?
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Because, when I buy a linux solution from IBM, my money is going into the corporate coffers which can support the CPRM division. It's kind of like buying a win2000 license gives money to MS, which allows them to push Passport on people.
If a corporation is doing something you don't agree with, it's important to refuse to support that corporation at all, regardless of whether you like their other products or not. That't the problem with corporate integration: the good parts and the bad parts are tied to one financial future.
---
First of all, the later IE's (like 5.5) are a lot more stable than 5.0, so I hope you'll at least upgrade that far.
As for 6.0 having no advances: how about the genuine W3C standards-compliant rendering engine? The main obstacle to implementing this earlier (like in IE5.0) was that it breaks the of non-compliant webpages that have come up over the years. But with IE6, if you include a <DOCTYPE> tag at the top of your page, the browser will -gasp!- render it precisely according to the DTD you claim to be using.
And for backwards compatibility, they still have a copy of the 5.5 engine in there which is the default if you don't specify a doctype. Definitely a bloated approach to solving the problem, but at least it deals with the contradictory needs of a partially-standarized web...
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Amen. How about GNA ("Gna's Not AIM")?
But seriously. How about gM, for "gnu messenger?" I don't think General Motors could sue, because your client is probably not easy to confuse with a car :)
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Publishers say the decision means they now must begin removing hundreds of thousands of articles, photos and drawings from their digital archives.
Yeah, or actually pay royalties to the freelancers. So it looks as if the net effect of this decision is going to be the removal of lots of valuable content from digital archives and not, in fact, increased revenue for freelance authors.
Crap.
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Maybe next they'll have piezoelectric seats to "harness the butt-pressure energy"?
---
Despite all the objections we have, the main reason I see our legislators rejecting it is that it obligates US-based ISPs to be content police for every jursidiction on earth, which is clearly ridiculous. AOL, @Home, and Earthlink will scream bloody murder about this obligation, and they'll be fighting the good fight for once. If anything remotely like this is to be ratified, it should place the burden on China, Morocco, et al to reject content they find unacceptable, even if that means banning everything from outside thier borders... after all, I mean, if Morocco has a law against all depiction of nudity (for instance), I suppose I respect that law, but let THEM enforce it. That's not the job of my U.S.-based ISP, thank you very much.
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Wyden: is a dick and doesn't even want to hear from anyone outside of Oregon. Too bad for him. Doesn't post his email address online, but hit his contact page and leave a note.
Gephardt: is actually a house member, not a senator. Also resists communication from citizens outside the 3rd district of MO. The only way I found to email him is to start at his contact page, click the "email" link, and pretend you're from that district.
Jesus! Anyone know an easier way to get through to these folks via email?!
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Which I've always wanted to do, incidentally. :)
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Alright, with an node size of (probably) 32K, that's like 12 nodes, ouch...
which can really shrink it's size. It did, but still left a whopping 71K.
Alright, down to 3 nodes now, cool!
This brought things down to a mere 12K.
Alright, down to one node!
Stripping this brought a final size reduction to 3276 bytes.
Whoo hoo, now we use... oh yeah, still one node.
As a result I cut the binary to less than 1% of it's original size.
Yes, and saved 11 nodes in the process. But the last step was basically useless, as it was already fitting in one disk block. And even 3 blocks wouldn't have been bad, except the 3rd one was almost totally unused...
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Redhat Database Management System = RDBMS
Relational Database Management System = RDBMS
My theory is, they're banking on the confusion of PHBs who read about "the latest RDBMS technology" and notice that the Redhat RDBMS is a whole bunch cheaper than Oracle.
D'oh!
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Hypocrisy: Duplicitous behavior.
(Much respect.)
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Given the usual creedence of such speculation on Slashdot, I'd say probably not.
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Exactly! In some ways, I wouldn't mind if speed limits were -consistently- enforced. The way it is now, it's tacitly accepted that you go 10 over. But it's definitely illegal, so basically cops have the right to pull you over whenever they want because, hey, you WERE speeding.
It happened to me the other day. I was driving down the road and apparently I looked like a teenager who was "Cruising," so the cop, who started off very gruff and confrontational, relaxed substantially when he discovered that I was over 21 and NOT drunk. None of that changed the fact that I was going 10 over, but that's not the real reason he stopped me; I was getting passed by people who were clearly older than me.
Maybe it's naive to think that consistent speed limit enforcement would lead police to stop pullovers in which there was no probable cause. But at least, if speeding tickets were automatic no-brainers, it would be painfully obvious when a cop made a bullshit pullover, like DWB ("driving while black" in chicago) for instance.
---
Okay, before the self-pity express takes off here, let's clarify a couple things about old-fashioned european languages.
First off, the English language as we know it has only existed for a few hundred years. Before it came "Olde Englishe," which was basically German with some French vocab thrown in (hence, the term "Anglo-saxon" to describe englishmen). It was really only English insofar as it was the language spoken in the place called England. But basically nothing like the language we know.
Middle English arose in the 13th and 14th centuries, when some particularly English idioms found their way into the vernacular. While you might recognize a passage written in middle english, you'd almost certainly need footnotes (at the rate of about 2 per line) to really get the gist of what was being said. For comparison, pick up a copy of the "original," non-modernized "Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer.
By the time Shakespeare was even born, Gutenberg was dead and the printing press was revolutionizing the way people thought of literature. Because identical copies of a text could be distributed ad infinitum, the language more or less became standardized, and eventually canonized into the Oxford English Dictionary. This is, more or less, the language we know today as "English." There were still some spelling issues to work out, and of course contemporary idioms always change, but the essential grammar and indeed much of the vocabulary has remained the same ever since.
So no, you didn't have to memorize any "middle english" to play Mercutio. If you got a printed copy of the play, you didn't even have trouble reading the glyphs, which might be a legitimate complaint of a modern Shakespeare scholar poring over the frist Folio. Sorry if you don't know what an "alderman" or "philome" are, but you could probably find out with a good dictionary. So, I'm sure you're a great actor, but PLEASE don't go around bragging about memorizing a hundred lines in an ancient language just because you had to read the freakin' queen mab speech.
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a) see "solar host" response below,
b) I did a little investigating and discovered that there are Kyocera cells that claim to operate at around 126 watts/sq meter, DC, under ideal conditions (total sunlight, etc). So you need to shave a bit off for the inverter and to allow for un-ideal light, but even at about a 10% discount for EACH of those, you get about 400KW per acre. I don't know what kind of datacenters you'd be running, but an acre isn't really a huge site, and 400,000 watts is a freakin' lot of power.
It would be waaay too cost prohibitive for anyone to even think of doing it.
That, unfortunately, is a very good point. For an acre of the Kyocera cells I was referring to, it would cost a cool $2.1 million. Not gonna happen soon.
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When I said "land is already ruined," I meant because of its proximity to a major highway. Between noise pollution and air pollution and construction equipment driving all over the shoulders every couple of years, the land immediately surrounding a highway is pretty much a wasteland. And no one wants to LIVE there, so how about some server farms?
Anyway, you also have to consider that most of that land is indian reservation
The only res on I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix is the Gila River community, and that only occupies about the first 20 miles south of Tempe. That leaves about 80 miles of non-res land. Of course much of that is already taken, but there are still huge swaths of empty space which could work for something like this.
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It's win-win!
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Why is the price of oil so high?
The real secret is: it's not. Relative to the rest of the world, spending 2 bucks on a gallon of gas is still a pretty good deal. You're right, the oil interests do run our country, but the real evidence for this is the fact that - you ready for this? - the price of gas is so low. Exxon et al. realize that, as long as they can keep gas prices at a reasonable level, people won't put any heart into looking for alternative fuels, and the oil companies will continue to dominate the market.
Personally, I think the only explanation for this is sloth. The oil companies could just as easily put some effort into R&D and be the first ones to come out with awesome fuel cells, but they'd rather just keep selling oil 'cuz it's easier. If only the government would subsidize oil-company research instead of the price of raw oil, the country would be a much cleaner place.
Why are term limits riduculous and un-democratic?
For the record, what's so undemocratic about letting people elect whoever they want? It's true that the incumbent candidate has more name recognition and the advantage of not having TOTALLY messed up the county/state/country in his last term, but a reasonably informed populace would still base its decision on the candidate's policies for the future. So, maybe a better question is, "why do we even need term limits at all?" That seems to be a better indicator of the lack of clue among people.
Why do Iranians and Guatamalans have contempt for the US?
Now that's a good point.
---
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After they got pants'd on RC4, those bastards probably chose the key "FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF" for the 64 bit challenge, realizing distributed.net was just gonna chug away at the keys in order...
---
---
And if you look quick, you might even catch the price war over at Pricewatch. I've been debating the purchase of a new computer for the past week, and in that time, the price of the gigahertz Athlon chip has dropped 12%. In one week! So I'm going to get the motherboard and some ram delivered next week, and wait a bit to see how low the chip goes. It's already under 3 digits.
---
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Yeah, except that neither coal, house paint, or well water produce additional toxins: they just shuffle around the stuff that's already there. Fission reactions, however, produce these hideous poisons not found in nature (on earth anyway) basically out of thin air.
And sure 50K years is not long by geological standards, but it could sure bung up our civilization, and the next 10 civilizations after ours. Here's hoping we can find a way to warn them about it...
---