Even if that disaster recovery plan is nothing other than a copy of a book on political history (e.g., lots of mistakes to avoid, Free humans are happier and productive, look how long the Dark Age lasted, etc. etc. etc.).
As a side-note, the moon would become an asteroid if the Earth got hit by Texas again (once is bad enough as it is), so I wouldn't have too much hope for the Lunar Colony. Mars would be okay, though.
...we're working on a major project to re-architect our core application platform so that the different systems can be de-coupled and hosted separately.
Whenever I hear sentences like this, my mind's application platform fault-tolerant BS sensornet activates and plays soothing music to save me from becoming de-coupled myself.
Macs don't play well with PC networks, even with OS X on them. As we are implelmenting things like Active Directory,...
Your choices for network infrastructure are the reason "Macs don't play well," which weakens most of your points. Why not choose open standards like NFS, LDAP, IMAP, etc.? Even samba can be useful across UNIX and Windows machines. You could have a Sun Fire server, a Linux server, a Mac server, whatever, and the other computers on the network would really not care one bit.
People tell themselves "Microsoft is what everyone uses" or "Microsoft has so much money how can they make bad products" or whatever, and they believe it just like all those people believed before drinking that kool-aid...
If you went to a smart school, you would see the types of computers various people need for their work. Depending on where you were in my university, you'd see Sun workstations, Macs, SGI workstations, PCs, etc., where engineers mostly got Suns and Macs, business majors mostly got PCs, liberal arts got PCs and Macs, and science majors just got a bit of everything. All the students ran either Windows or Linux, and pretty much everyone was happy.
Take it away you 'Flash is a bad technology because it is abused by a few clueless web designers' merchants.
Does any PDA have the CPU and RAM required to run Flash at a respectable speed? It really does take multi-hundred-megahertz desktop CPUs and make them grind to a halt, even on systems with really good process schedulers. This leads me to wonder how low-power PDA CPUs will cope, unless, of course, we are talking only about future PDAs that don't exist, yet. I suppose when we have 1-watt 3GHz CPUs, this will all be moot.
Windows XP certainly would be a part of that 384MB. However, instead of Java, consider memory required for 3-D data structures, AI data structures, sound buffers, UI widget structures, etc., all of which go beyond the frame buffers and texture memory. As software gets more sophisticated, it has its way of nickle-and-diming your RAM to death.
Linspire's DVD player is essentially just XINE with an alleged "commercial license" to utilize the DVD libraries.
This is one way companies like Lindows can be of service. There are many people out there who are sitting on the legal fence wondering about playing DVDs or using GIF files, etc., and, by buying a commercial distribution, many of these issues just get washed away. They can benefit simultaneously from open source and commercial licensing, and this is where centrist individuals would feel most comfortable.
This is one thing I like about Solaris. I actually bought my RTU license from Sun, so I know everything in my Solaris distribution is legit (dozens of Sun lawyers can't be wrong...right?). If someone asks about a Gif file, I can say "I made it under Solaris, go away." Of course, I would prefer PNGs, but Gifs aren't the only example of patent wierdness: OpenGL Microsoft patents, SCO IP claims, and JPEG shenanigans are someother things I can think of.
When I log into citibankcards.com (using mozilla of course) there is a message in bright red that comes up warning users that they should not use IE. It seems to come up no matter what browser I use.
This is probably because Citibank was specifically targeted by that password-sniffing exploit of IE that came up recently. The exploit installed something via IE that send passwords directly via HTTP, which would bypass firewalls entirely. The security problems in IE have finally become dangerous to their users--this is beyond simple spyware or adware, this is real no-holds-barred computer crime.
I admit that I read only a few novels per year. However, I wish I had time to read more, as some of the brightest humans to have ever lived communicate through novels. The memories I have from video games and TV just don't measure up to those from novels, perhaps because novels engage the imagination to a much greater degree. Oh well, back to reading API specs, on-line news, and source code.
Riiiight. It costs so much to walk down to the local public library and check out a few books every now and again. Remember, if you return them on time they're FREE!
My relatives that live in high-tax high-population-density areas have absolutely incredible libraries. I live in a rural county, and our library is, well, quaint. Also, while libraries are great for fiction, history, and other general non-fiction, libraries have always never been able to stock current technical material outside of the magazine rack. This is where the WWW steps in.
Large companies have a tendency to acquire smaller companies and keep them as a separate department, but they inevitably get phased out over time and absorbed into the larger entity.
Or the products get integrated into some bizarre hugely complex product portfolio that drives former customers crazy. I recall something a former employer used that was bought out by Computer Associates, changed names a couple times, and was given the full vaguely-worded "Enterprise" makeover. Just trying to find documentation on the website became a challenge. Sometimes, small is just better (not always...sometimes).
Automaking: Big 3, at least 5 in Japan, a couple in Korea, a few more in Germany, Italy, France, UK, etc. Several will drop out due to cross-ownership, but there's a dozen or so big automakers world-wide.
Microprocessors: Intel, IBM, Sun, Motorola, VIA, Texas Instruments, Transmeta, and others. There's probably about a dozen world-wide, also.
Operating Systems: Microsoft, Sun (Solaris), IBM (AIX, mainframes), HPaq (HP-UX), Linux, *BSD, and a few others. About a dozen there, too.
HOWEVER, we cannot forget the huge web of suppliers, suppliers to suppliers, and suppliers to suppliers to suppliers, etc. General Motors doesn't manufacture it's own copper wiring or tires, for example, nor does Sun write its own SSH implementation. There are still a ton of companies out there, even in mature industries; it's just that we generally don't hear about them.
Definately one of the poorest software article's I've seen in a while
There was another article a while ago at osnews.com about DTrace. If I recall, one of Sun's engineers was responding in the forum. I haven't used DTrace, yet, but there is a lot of non-Sun positive responses out there to help corroberate the Register article.
Under Solaris, I try setting the PAGER environment variable to '/usr/bin/less -isrm' or something similar in your startup scripts. This will change man's behaviour.
Sometimes I just read the info files in vi, as the table of contents is often broken or certain files just aren't visible to the info program.
Another nice thing about the BSD man program is that it consistently understands many vi commands, and it is actually much better than the one shipped with Solaris. For certain things, the BSDs just got it right.
I'm no psychologist, but I do wonder why people are driven to collect things, and, very often, they are driven to the point of mental illness. For example, people went nuts over those McDonalds Beanie Babies a while ago. Trash cans were filled with Happy Meals discarded uneaten, because people wanted only that 15-cent imported toy. Visiting every Starbucks is no different, where a person spends personal resources just playing catch-up to someone else's marketing scheme. I wish people were more resistent to this "collector's disease."
In the US you can write off unreimbursed work expenses.
Any expenses, or is there a minimum limit like there is for medical expenses? Sometimes, you can't write stuff off unless it is X percent of income.
I think that these managers are upset with their bottome line but want to cut employee payroll before they cut their own. If a company understands the value of a 24/7 sysadmin, then they really do need to pay for the pager, at a minimum, and allow people to get reimbursed for portions of their phone bills and internet bills for work-related things.
...but you don't have the time or patience to install a video capture card and beyondTV from snapstream?
Computers are general purpose machines. So, what if someone doesn't have time for doing CFD simulations or HAM radio or 3D animation for the heck of it? Are they a loser because of that? Equipping a PC for every specialized task that it can do (this-and-that cards, special printers, CD/DVD burners, ad infinitum) costs a lot of money, too.
There is absolutely no way to stay 100% current, unless you are a designer yourself, and even then, your wardrobe will always be off by about 3 seasons.
I hope people don't lose sleep over these fast product cycles. Living and striving just to look like everyone else doesn't seem very fufilling, especially as it is other people choosing the standards (kinda sad, actually). If someone has a choice between spending money on a new digital camera or a weekend trip with family, I'd recommend the trip. Oh, and just having some savings in the bank is a good option, too.
No, they *are*not* good service plans. It is better to avoid buying electronics with non-replacable batteries in the first place. Batteries will fail, almost always. Sony knows that and ajusts their warranty accordingly, and Best Buy knows that and prices their warranty accordingly. The customer who buys the plan loses (expensive PDA, expensive warranty, downtime due to failed battery).
Er, people use those machines the same reason they use coffee machines - not because they're faster than any other method, but because they're fire-and-forget.
I have found that making decent iced tea is much easier than making decent coffee, and the process of assembling and cleaning up the iced-tea machine is as time-consuming as using the microwave. In my opinion, making good coffee is more dependent on having a machine that achieves the right temperature and timing, which is hard to do manually. Also, I'm talking about generic American iced tea--I hope few people take iced tea as seriously as hot tea or coffee.
Regardless, the toast-buttering robot was a better example of wasted technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Because we need a disaster recovery plan.
Even if that disaster recovery plan is nothing other than a copy of a book on political history (e.g., lots of mistakes to avoid, Free humans are happier and productive, look how long the Dark Age lasted, etc. etc. etc.).
As a side-note, the moon would become an asteroid if the Earth got hit by Texas again (once is bad enough as it is), so I wouldn't have too much hope for the Lunar Colony. Mars would be okay, though.
...we're working on a major project to re-architect our core application platform so that the different systems can be de-coupled and hosted separately.
Whenever I hear sentences like this, my mind's application platform fault-tolerant BS sensornet activates and plays soothing music to save me from becoming de-coupled myself.
Macs don't play well with PC networks, even with OS X on them. As we are implelmenting things like Active Directory,...
Your choices for network infrastructure are the reason "Macs don't play well," which weakens most of your points. Why not choose open standards like NFS, LDAP, IMAP, etc.? Even samba can be useful across UNIX and Windows machines. You could have a Sun Fire server, a Linux server, a Mac server, whatever, and the other computers on the network would really not care one bit.
People tell themselves "Microsoft is what everyone uses" or "Microsoft has so much money how can they make bad products" or whatever, and they believe it just like all those people believed before drinking that kool-aid...
If you went to a smart school, you would see the types of computers various people need for their work. Depending on where you were in my university, you'd see Sun workstations, Macs, SGI workstations, PCs, etc., where engineers mostly got Suns and Macs, business majors mostly got PCs, liberal arts got PCs and Macs, and science majors just got a bit of everything. All the students ran either Windows or Linux, and pretty much everyone was happy.
Take it away you 'Flash is a bad technology because it is abused by a few clueless web designers' merchants.
Does any PDA have the CPU and RAM required to run Flash at a respectable speed? It really does take multi-hundred-megahertz desktop CPUs and make them grind to a halt, even on systems with really good process schedulers. This leads me to wonder how low-power PDA CPUs will cope, unless, of course, we are talking only about future PDAs that don't exist, yet. I suppose when we have 1-watt 3GHz CPUs, this will all be moot.
Windows XP certainly would be a part of that 384MB. However, instead of Java, consider memory required for 3-D data structures, AI data structures, sound buffers, UI widget structures, etc., all of which go beyond the frame buffers and texture memory. As software gets more sophisticated, it has its way of nickle-and-diming your RAM to death.
Linspire's DVD player is essentially just XINE with an alleged "commercial license" to utilize the DVD libraries.
This is one way companies like Lindows can be of service. There are many people out there who are sitting on the legal fence wondering about playing DVDs or using GIF files, etc., and, by buying a commercial distribution, many of these issues just get washed away. They can benefit simultaneously from open source and commercial licensing, and this is where centrist individuals would feel most comfortable.
This is one thing I like about Solaris. I actually bought my RTU license from Sun, so I know everything in my Solaris distribution is legit (dozens of Sun lawyers can't be wrong...right?). If someone asks about a Gif file, I can say "I made it under Solaris, go away." Of course, I would prefer PNGs, but Gifs aren't the only example of patent wierdness: OpenGL Microsoft patents, SCO IP claims, and JPEG shenanigans are someother things I can think of.
When I log into citibankcards.com (using mozilla of course) there is a message in bright red that comes up warning users that they should not use IE. It seems to come up no matter what browser I use.
This is probably because Citibank was specifically targeted by that password-sniffing exploit of IE that came up recently. The exploit installed something via IE that send passwords directly via HTTP, which would bypass firewalls entirely. The security problems in IE have finally become dangerous to their users--this is beyond simple spyware or adware, this is real no-holds-barred computer crime.
You put Motorola and VIA in there, but lumped AMD into "others". Why?
I just listed the first ones that came to mind. AMD certainly isn't small potatoes, and I didn't mean to imply that.
I admit that I read only a few novels per year. However, I wish I had time to read more, as some of the brightest humans to have ever lived communicate through novels. The memories I have from video games and TV just don't measure up to those from novels, perhaps because novels engage the imagination to a much greater degree. Oh well, back to reading API specs, on-line news, and source code.
Riiiight. It costs so much to walk down to the local public library and check out a few books every now and again. Remember, if you return them on time they're FREE!
My relatives that live in high-tax high-population-density areas have absolutely incredible libraries. I live in a rural county, and our library is, well, quaint. Also, while libraries are great for fiction, history, and other general non-fiction, libraries have always never been able to stock current technical material outside of the magazine rack. This is where the WWW steps in.
Large companies have a tendency to acquire smaller companies and keep them as a separate department, but they inevitably get phased out over time and absorbed into the larger entity.
Or the products get integrated into some bizarre hugely complex product portfolio that drives former customers crazy. I recall something a former employer used that was bought out by Computer Associates, changed names a couple times, and was given the full vaguely-worded "Enterprise" makeover. Just trying to find documentation on the website became a challenge. Sometimes, small is just better (not always...sometimes).
Automaking: Big 3, at least 5 in Japan, a couple in Korea, a few more in Germany, Italy, France, UK, etc. Several will drop out due to cross-ownership, but there's a dozen or so big automakers world-wide.
Microprocessors: Intel, IBM, Sun, Motorola, VIA, Texas Instruments, Transmeta, and others. There's probably about a dozen world-wide, also.
Operating Systems: Microsoft, Sun (Solaris), IBM (AIX, mainframes), HPaq (HP-UX), Linux, *BSD, and a few others. About a dozen there, too.
HOWEVER, we cannot forget the huge web of suppliers, suppliers to suppliers, and suppliers to suppliers to suppliers, etc. General Motors doesn't manufacture it's own copper wiring or tires, for example, nor does Sun write its own SSH implementation. There are still a ton of companies out there, even in mature industries; it's just that we generally don't hear about them.
Definately one of the poorest software article's I've seen in a while
There was another article a while ago at osnews.com about DTrace. If I recall, one of Sun's engineers was responding in the forum. I haven't used DTrace, yet, but there is a lot of non-Sun positive responses out there to help corroberate the Register article.
For instance one thing that I've never been able to figure out is how to backtrace a file lock to the owner process.
man fuser
Also, for the masochistic out there, it is possible to look at the pfiles output for every process and match inodes.
Under Solaris, I try setting the PAGER environment variable to '/usr/bin/less -isrm' or something similar in your startup scripts. This will change man's behaviour.
Very interesting. Thanks for the tip.
Sometimes I just read the info files in vi, as the table of contents is often broken or certain files just aren't visible to the info program.
Another nice thing about the BSD man program is that it consistently understands many vi commands, and it is actually much better than the one shipped with Solaris. For certain things, the BSDs just got it right.
I'm no psychologist, but I do wonder why people are driven to collect things, and, very often, they are driven to the point of mental illness. For example, people went nuts over those McDonalds Beanie Babies a while ago. Trash cans were filled with Happy Meals discarded uneaten, because people wanted only that 15-cent imported toy. Visiting every Starbucks is no different, where a person spends personal resources just playing catch-up to someone else's marketing scheme. I wish people were more resistent to this "collector's disease."
In the US you can write off unreimbursed work expenses.
Any expenses, or is there a minimum limit like there is for medical expenses? Sometimes, you can't write stuff off unless it is X percent of income.
I think that these managers are upset with their bottome line but want to cut employee payroll before they cut their own. If a company understands the value of a 24/7 sysadmin, then they really do need to pay for the pager, at a minimum, and allow people to get reimbursed for portions of their phone bills and internet bills for work-related things.
...but you don't have the time or patience to install a video capture card and beyondTV from snapstream?
Computers are general purpose machines. So, what if someone doesn't have time for doing CFD simulations or HAM radio or 3D animation for the heck of it? Are they a loser because of that? Equipping a PC for every specialized task that it can do (this-and-that cards, special printers, CD/DVD burners, ad infinitum) costs a lot of money, too.
There is absolutely no way to stay 100% current, unless you are a designer yourself, and even then, your wardrobe will always be off by about 3 seasons.
I hope people don't lose sleep over these fast product cycles. Living and striving just to look like everyone else doesn't seem very fufilling, especially as it is other people choosing the standards (kinda sad, actually). If someone has a choice between spending money on a new digital camera or a weekend trip with family, I'd recommend the trip. Oh, and just having some savings in the bank is a good option, too.
they *are* pretty good service plans
No, they *are*not* good service plans. It is better to avoid buying electronics with non-replacable batteries in the first place. Batteries will fail, almost always. Sony knows that and ajusts their warranty accordingly, and Best Buy knows that and prices their warranty accordingly. The customer who buys the plan loses (expensive PDA, expensive warranty, downtime due to failed battery).
I'm practically a traitor to the South.
Only if the tea is less than one-third sugar. Watching people make sweet tea sends my pancreas into hiding.
Er, people use those machines the same reason they use coffee machines - not because they're faster than any other method, but because they're fire-and-forget.
I have found that making decent iced tea is much easier than making decent coffee, and the process of assembling and cleaning up the iced-tea machine is as time-consuming as using the microwave. In my opinion, making good coffee is more dependent on having a machine that achieves the right temperature and timing, which is hard to do manually. Also, I'm talking about generic American iced tea--I hope few people take iced tea as seriously as hot tea or coffee.
Regardless, the toast-buttering robot was a better example of wasted technology.
It's not "SuffErage", it's SUFFRAGE; it's has nothing to do with the word "suffer".
It was a typo due to forgetting the spelling but not the meaning.