hmm yeah - I'm no expert on Mainframe architecture, but from what I've read - it's down to pure I/O width, and massive redundancy/hotswap, belt&braces style robustness.
I also agree with you that "desktop" style machines running something like Linux *can* offer similar levels of reliabilty and performance, but in a completely different way. In a nutshell - instead of one ultra-robust machine with multiple redundant sub-systems, you go for multiple redundant machines (although you could define the cluster as the machine - in which case it's no different...hmm:-/)
I've successfully applied this pet theory of mine over the last 3 years wherever possible. Even things like ethernet switches - we used to buy Cisco 550X chassis which come with 2 of everything important, like PSU, routing module, supervisor module, backbone interfaces and so on, but they cost £35K each for the config we typically buy. Sure they hardly ever fail, and if a component fails, there's a backup. However - recently we started buying smaller cheaper swicthes - but lots of them - typically 3 where 1 would do: total cost about £15K for the same scenario
Web servers lend themselves easily to this too (especially if you use Apache and Tomcat (or whatever it's called this week:P) - we stopped buying huge multi CPU boxes, to handle a specific load - and re-designed our web server clusters to use many smaller (1U) rackabble boxes for all tiers of the system from front end caches, load balancers, firewalls, JSP processors and even the database nodes (with shared disk arrays). Need more back end database? Clone a few more 1U DB servers and connect em up! This meant we could stop worrying about how much traffic we would be getting to the sites so much - if it turned out we'd underspecced, we could add some more quite easily.
I always thought that IBM continued developing the Mainframe to support existing OS/390 customers with large complicated mission critical apps on them - I can see some use for a mainframe running Linux (and I bet their are more Linux savvy techies otu there than z/OS - which would help with recruiting admins for the box), but I still feel that the multiple-smaller-boxes-running-linux solution is a better bet - as it can be any size you want within reason - start off small for dev/testing, and then pile on the hardware for production.
Well yes - and that was the point he was making really. If you've got your $2000 to spend, why would you buy the inferior performing product?
I think this goes for just about any product you care to mention which involves easily measurable specifications - the budget is king.
Strangely, when trying to sell a server solution to the pointy haired ones, I may as well be saying "The gobi desert went out for a hamburger" - they just look at you like you just announced you'd be nailing banana skins to the office walls for the next 2 days. "Look at the report - it's free, goes faster and stays up longer." "yeah but why bananas?" is all you'll get back...:)
I imagine I would get the same repsonse if I said - "look - we don't have to buy Pentium based servers - check out the Athlons, we buy lots of cheaper servers rather than one monolithic 8 way pentium - which gives vastly dimnishing returns on the number of CPUs" PHBs: "What? power our new e-commerce project with hotdogs? What do you mean?!?"...
"Do they pay the authors of these tomes by the pound? "
Almost. I wrote a few chapters for an "Unleashed" Linux book by Sams which they canned unfortunateley, and they pay by the chapter which has to be around the 20 page mark (given a standard font, ruler settings etc.). They don't pay very much either - it was about $600/chapter back in 1999 (and they never paid anyway)and it was taking me about a week to 10 days to do one - as it's not like you're just offering your $.02 in a web forum - every claim, and fact has to be checked as much as possible.
Yes indeed - C is still C when it's in a Linux environment. I think there is a place for these "lets cover everything" books but I think it's more appropriate at the "introduction" end of the market - I have a copy of Wrox's "Beggining Linux Programing" and its good - I still look in now if I need to see how to do soemthing simple in a language I don't really use that often - say like "what's the syntax of an if statement in Perl then?" a quicj flick through to an example will often provide the answers.
Yes - the funky animal books are more in line with what I want: just the facts.
A friend of mine installed the phone system down at Ferrari some years ago, and he was appalled at the way the 18 year old lads in the factory were assembling the things with large mallets, and larger boot toecaps.... Hehe I had visions of old white haired master craftsmen taking months to hone every part of every car to perfection:)
Indeed - I agree with everything you've said there - and I do have more non-MS servers and browsers than MS ones - but I do have them. I was merely trying to point out that claiming in a court of law thats its all so unfair is not the way to go.
You've put it rather more eloquently than I did, but your point is essentailly the same - how *did* the rest of the computing world let it get this far? "It's not as if it happened overnight" Perhaps if they spent more time actually competing, rather than complaining to the courts that whlst they've done very little to stop it, MS just shouldn't be allowed to have so many customers.
It bothers me too - and I take composer777's point about the need for some sort of regulation, but this seems all too often to tbe the competing corporations' first thought - not "how can we convince people to use *our* product?" but "I bet we can sue them and force people to use our crappy offering instead.
I wonder what a succesful corporation is meant to do once they are in danger of breaching thse laws, to avoid being sued? Give away large chunks of cash to competitors? Or copyright material? Can you honestly see any corporaion doing this unless so ordered by a court of law?
You also have to question the motives of the coporations filing these lawuits - they are doing it so *they* can get a bigger slice of the pie. Anyone think AOL TW would stop if they got to the same position MS is in now?
As for the world's economy depending on a healthy Microsoft - thats a rather silly suggestion. If it dissappeared Today - there would be a some disruption for sure, but business would get over it in a few months.
As I said, I don't disagree with your arguments but I do think it's a sad sad world, when companies compete through the courts instead of in the marketplace.
And don't get this anti-competitive lawsuit thing that happens in the USA - what are they saying? IE is so good it's not fair? What a load of BS!
MS had more money to develop it? So what - were they just going to say "oh well of course it wouldn't be *fair* to use all the cash from all the other products that people queued up to buy would it" why? Hardly a free economy, if a company can just sue its competitors when they do better.
Sure - MS leverage their other products such as VBscript and.NET to make their own browser more capable - why shouldn't they? They offer a new thing for the server side, and damm well make sure the client side supports it.
It's no use moaning and whinging about it - it's not as if this all happened overnight now is it?
Its not as if someone handed MS the desktop OS thing on a plate either - there *were* competitive products all the way from Apple, IBM, Sun et al but they *failed*. They made it, and *we* bought it - by the bucket load.
I like the Monopoly analogy - but one difference is that nobody forced Netscape to play with the $1500 - they could have gotten any amount of money from anti MS corporations - and indeed - look it's AOL TW - I'm sure they could fund some hefty development of both the browser and some "Netscape first" server side products of their own.
But no - they chose to whinge and moan that it's "not fair".
I don't get this about America - the American way is held up as a shining star of "may the best man win" and free competition, but when there is a clear winner - the other guys claim it's unlawful!!
I don't fancy a world totally ruled by MS either - but then I can hardly moan about it when I buy their products and use their browser.
AOL have a huge client base - surely they could put pressure on web sites that want their custoners' traffic to make them compliant with W3C standards.
That'd be those guys that do that "Internet For Idiots" service? They advertise it on TV claiming it somehow gives people soemthing that other ISPs do not. What? Like AOL's own web site? When you've got the entire Internet and a dozen or more search engines and 100's of portals what could they possibly bring to the party then? That'd be why I'm not a customer.
On top of that - it doesn't appear to actually provide full network connection to the 'net - odds on if a Quake2 player turns up for practice, and they start locking up and complaining - the answer to the question: "sigh - you're using AOL aren't you?" is "yes". (if it's not the next question is "you have a software modem don't you?").
So - I can only forsee darkness down that road. It would be an incredible irony though wouldn't it? An idiot product driven by a geek OS?
Someone else pointed out that they can already have RedHat (the OS) under the GPL so why bother?
Well - I guess the question is almost it's own answer - they don't give 2 figs for the OS - they just want the name - they need any old OS to avoid Mr and Mrs AOL having to load windows just to get AOL going, RedHat is probably the only Linux based OS that Mr and Mrs Denominator have heard of, so they attach themselves to the RedHat name, and then quietly drop it - leaving AOL the OS that just does what Joe punter mostly wants - browse the web - watch streaming video/audio, do stuff with Joe's home vids and photos, and so on. Most of these people buying PCs these days for home, don't give a sh*t about MS Office - forget it! They just want to browse endless eye candy sites, from a nice "day-Time TV" themed Portal. It's a stepping stone to the next generation - "The AOL Appliance" which will sit on top of your ageing VCR. MS has the X box to play with for that - the Tivo has been out for a while and I'll be surprised if Tivo II doesn't have web/email capabilities - so no surprise that AOL TW are making moves to come up with their own box.
This means very little to those of us with serious computing tasks to do - so if this does come to pass, I'll be switching our servers away from RedHat to one of the others.
Indeed - as a home user - one of my boxes is still running a 2.0 kernel - as it hasn't suddenly become unable to perform it's function (dial up Internet, collect mail, send mail, swap usenet news with isp news server, run crude firewall, samba etc) I mean - it's still running libc5 ffs! I feel no urge to upgrade it - it's working now already. It sits in the corner and gathers dust in it's ye olde AT style case with P150 cpu with just power, network and modem attached to it.
I think if Linus/Alan are guilty of anything here, it is merely of perhaps not sticking to the version numbering as strictly as they might have. But people were clamouring for a 2.4 stable release, and perhaps they were swayed by that.
Yeah - indeed - if you run it on NT4 SP6a it falls over all on it's own sometimes. You get some warning - depending on how much virtual memory you have.
Unbreakable my arse! It'd be something if they'd just stick to one plan for more than 6 months, let alone aiming for "unbreakable".
I agree - I just installed the basic player (it came on a CD with some ".rm" files and it was needed to play them).
I'd not bothered with Real Player before (never had to) but in 2 minutes it became apparent that the main purpose of real player was to put lots of advertising on my dekstop.
As I'm not an "average" user - it only took me a few minutes of persistent beatings to remove the excessive start-up rubbish (why the hell do you need a "start centre" anyway - won't the file extensions/MIME codes decide what plays what?). But still it comes at me with "channels" and other such rubbish "well hey here's an idea - what about the file I clicked on - can I just see that?" Only after a prolonged battle...
It is slightly easier to download than QuickTime though (but at least Quicktime are using port 80 now for their un-necessary "download installer" thing). What happened to downlaoding a self-extracting.exe ? At least then you only had to get it once... Internet bandwidth is being swallowed by people downloading this crap over and over...:P
LOL - I find all these "consultants" do this. The scenario goes like this:-
PHB A wants technology X (eg "we need an MQ server cluster - anyone know anything about MQ?")
I (as chief tech architect) say "well erm no, actually we dodn't have any actual experince in implementing that - but how hard can it be?"
PHB A:"well I want experienced people in to do it"
Me "OK"
2 *weeks* or more later IBM (or whoever) supply some guy with a label saying "MQ Expert" on him and he enters the room:-
MQ Guy: "Stand back, I'm certified."
He then, as Barry reports, proceeds to read the manual that came in the box, call tech. support and general arse about for 4 days - whilst charging us the Earth per day.
Eventually, I sidle over and start to chat to him about the various issues, and reading the help/book over hist shoulder get a handle on how it all fits together. I try giving him subtle hints that he's barking up the wrong tree, and he needs to try something or other to prove premise Y and so on but he doggedly tries to follow the instructions...
Eventually, MQ guy announces that he must go away to confer with more MQ guys back at base. "Fine" say I. I then install the product and make it work in 2 hours, and cancel MQ guy.
MQ was just one example - it *always* happens like this and the PHB's never learn - they still want to pay someone big bucks for nothing. Same thing happned with Lotus Notes (although the answer to that one is just "Don't"), Oracle this and that, and a myriad of more obscure technologies.
You have to marvel at anyone who claims to be able to "fix Windows" though....
Dude - it's a humourous piece - not scientific fact, and yes - he's not bought XP yet - that's the point of the article - windows has never changed over the last umpteen releases in terms of reliability - but somehow he still feels ready to beleive the statements about it being more relible this time around and that it will somehow be different than the last 10 times they said this, and the last 10 times he felt this one was gonna be different.
I mean you said it yourself "uptimes of weeks" - this is not something to be proud of - and neither is having to restart the entire machine to apply a patch.
The point is, most people have come to accept that their computer will crash on a regaular basis (as opposed to say, their VCR or Washing machine) and this is becuase of Windows - there's no denying it's history. Yes NT is more stable than Win9x but most folks' experience is of Win9x and it's ancestors.
I thought it was overall, a good effort - but then afterwards I did think that perhaps it only seemed OK to me because having read the book a couple of times, I was able to fill in the blanks in the story/charcters etc. So I can see what you mean - it was kinda like watching the story in fast forward. Then again - I just got to the end of reading Fellowship again, and to be honest - thats what happens - there's very little else apart from being chased, escaping, or being chased, and being rescued by the next saviour (Tom Bombadil, Strider, Galadriel). The extra bits are purely descriptive - and well - that's sort of redundant in a movie.
I think you have to keep in mind that it was the first 3 hours of what will be a 9 hour film - my girlfriend (who had not read the book) was surprised when it just ended - she said "when do they get to Mt. Doom then?" "er" says I "In 2004:)"
However, having said that - even if you read LOTR from start to finish, you may still be none the wiser as to where the charcters came from (ie those with multi-1000 year lifespans) for that - you need to read the back end of The Silmarillion - which describes in concise format where Elrond, Gandalf, Isildur et al came from and what they did beforehand. Facts such as - who has the 3 elven rings exactly then? Just do not come out (Elrond, Galadriel, and Mithrandir (Gandalf's real name) have them). hehe whilst reading that yesterday after seing the movie - I realised Arwen and Aragorn have common ancestors - nowt like a bit of inbreeding eh?
So to summarise, I guess what I'm getting at is that whilst I agree that the film does lack character description/progression - it may not be the fault of the film maker - maybe it was never there in the book either. Or perhaps, with so much to get over to the audience, without the film being 6 hours long, they cut the touchy feely bits, after all there are whole chapters of the book on farmer Maggot, Tom Bombadil (although to be honest, that was redundent in the book too), Bree, and so on. The chracters that were very will described and fleshed out in the book are of course the hobbits - and most of this was indeed cut from the movie - the day to day chit chat, that reveals the family feud with the Sackville Bagginses, etc and the whole moving to Buckland cover was never touched upon. It seemed from the movie that Frodo leaves Bagend shortly after Bilbo does, whereas in the book, it is many years between those events (in fact Frodo is some 50 odd years of age when he leaves on the quest - he looks about 12 in the film...). Whilst these scenes would not have moved on the "main good vs evil plot" they would have told a neophyte audience what Hobbits were all about. As I said at the top - not a problem if you read the book already.
Jackson concentrates on the corrupting influence of the Ring, and on the whole, I think he has done a good job - it was always going to be a mammoth task, and whilst it does seem to just rush headlong from one scrape to the next - I don't believe he strayed too far from the text.
(and at least he didn't include any of the poetry - god help us if someone ever makes a musical).
I dont think so though - I think it makes Wirth the computer, his pen and paper the BIOS etc etc. He "ran" the compiler on his "cpu/brain" and output the results onto/dev/notepad:-)
I can beleive this - those boys were mad - remember they weren't so much interested in the practical uses of programming languages - people like Wirth were far more interested in the aethetics of the language and some sort of logical purity - so it would have been important to him, that his compiler was not tainted by another....
Hmm interesting article - but having the compiler compile itself does not help you to do this - you could introduce such trojans to the compiler and then compile it with some other compiler - the result would be the same.
I totally agree with you on this - I have found over the years, that it's much easier to teach a good communicator the basic technical skills than to teach a tech-savvy person good comunication skills, which are essential for user support. The users just want to feel some sympathy, and to be kept informed - even if there is nothing new to report - Just make sure you call them and tell them what's going on every 30 minutes.
I spent 2.5 years contracting in the UK after being made redundant from my senior technical position with a large aggregate company (usual story - merger), and as several people have already commented - they can pretty much fire you without giving any reason. What totally surprised me though is the the amazing stories they feel compelled to invent - I even got accused of going off for a nap on one contract! (I mean the job was boring as hell but even so) when all they had to say was "your face doesn't fit - goodbye" which is fair enough - if a bit childish. As a another poster commented - there *will* be some reason why *someone* wants to get rid of this guy and I found that these reasons are often down to feelings of insecurity - someone feels threatened by your knowledge, skill or something.
This is one of main reasons I took a "permanent" post again 3 years ago (that and changes to UK tax laws which eliminated most of the benefits of running your own Ltd co. ). Ironically, I took a position at a company that I originally came to on a 6 month contract, which was later bought by another company and closed down. In a further twist of fate, I'm still there a year later - there's just 2 of us in the entire 200 seat building keeping the systems ticking over (amazing how many people's jobs we managed to replace with a 20 line script after they went:-).
If I've learnt anything in the last 3 years, it's been how to operate in these politically motivated arenas - mainly from my boss - the IT director who turned out to be a master at it. Keeping my job *after* the company has closed I reckon is proof that I learned a couple of moves: support your Boss, solve his problems and help him get up the ladder, so you can stand on the rung he's on right now.
Yeah indeed - I mean It's cool that someone ported my all time favourite game to the pocket PC - but if you think you have are playing Quake II and you are not using a mouse and a keyboard then you're 'avin a *LARF* mate.
I saw Pocket GLQuake on an iPaq and it was amusing to see (but not as amusing as TTYquake:0 )but really - it wasn't playable by any serious definition.
Of much more interest and amusement this week was the Generations mod. for QIII - lets you play with the weapons and physics of Doom, Q1,2,3 and some other thing whih I suspect they made up:-/
Yeah but when does that ever happen with MS? Who exactly at MS do you call?
As far as I'm concerned (and I have a number of NT servers to look after for my sins) there is effectivley no support for NT - apart from the knowledgebase web site - which is, I have to say reasonably good. The product is provided "as seen". I know you can buy expensive support contracts - but these don't come from MS - they come from resellers, whos only qualification is that their staff have got a bit of paper with "MCSE" written on it - which doesn't impress me at all.
Microsoft are not alone in this approach - ever tried calling Oracle with a question? They are not as bad as MS, but you are always better off using the online support such as Metalink - which is much the same as a usenet group - although Oracle employees occasionally pitch in and answer questions.
Linux has better online support both from official OS publishers' web sites and from the likes of LDP, freshmeat and so on.
"Embedded Windows" - an oxymoron if ever there was one. It's GUI oriented - and quite a number of embedded appliances will not require one.
Linux will still boot and run off of a floppy which is a lot smaller than 4.8Mb!
And as for MS claiming that the ability to playback multi-media content such as movies, sound etc is somehow part of the OS is ludicrous - these are applications. I know MS likes eveyone to believe that everything they see on the desktop is somehow provided soley by the OS (IE for eg) but this broaches new levels of stupidity even for them - check out the "tour" on Windows XP - you'd think they'd just invented everything - including the Internet, and that it's all new in XP - and only XP.
And as for XP having a "proven" track record of reliabilty and stability - Guys - you are in danger of looking more than a little bit thick here - how can a product that's been out 5 minutes have a proven track record? Not to mention it s based on past products with a proven track record for disaster, inflexibility, and a "can't do" attititude.
Slashdot Mirror
hmm yeah - I'm no expert on Mainframe architecture, but from what I've read - it's down to pure I/O width, and massive redundancy/hotswap, belt&braces style robustness.
:-/)
:P) - we stopped buying huge multi CPU boxes, to handle a specific load - and re-designed our web server clusters to use many smaller (1U) rackabble boxes for all tiers of the system from front end caches, load balancers, firewalls, JSP processors and even the database nodes (with shared disk arrays). Need more back end database? Clone a few more 1U DB servers and connect em up! This meant we could stop worrying about how much traffic we would be getting to the sites so much - if it turned out we'd underspecced, we could add some more quite easily.
I also agree with you that "desktop" style machines running something like Linux *can* offer similar levels of reliabilty and performance, but in a completely different way. In a nutshell - instead of one ultra-robust machine with multiple redundant sub-systems, you go for multiple redundant machines (although you could define the cluster as the machine - in which case it's no different...hmm
I've successfully applied this pet theory of mine over the last 3 years wherever possible. Even things like ethernet switches - we used to buy Cisco 550X chassis which come with 2 of everything important, like PSU, routing module, supervisor module, backbone interfaces and so on, but they cost £35K each for the config we typically buy. Sure they hardly ever fail, and if a component fails, there's a backup. However - recently we started buying smaller cheaper swicthes - but lots of them - typically 3 where 1 would do: total cost about £15K for the same scenario
Web servers lend themselves easily to this too (especially if you use Apache and Tomcat (or whatever it's called this week
I always thought that IBM continued developing the Mainframe to support existing OS/390 customers with large complicated mission critical apps on them - I can see some use for a mainframe running Linux (and I bet their are more Linux savvy techies otu there than z/OS - which would help with recruiting admins for the box), but I still feel that the multiple-smaller-boxes-running-linux solution is a better bet - as it can be any size you want within reason - start off small for dev/testing, and then pile on the hardware for production.
Well yes - and that was the point he was making really. If you've got your $2000 to spend, why would you buy the inferior performing product?
:)
...
I think this goes for just about any product you care to mention which involves easily measurable specifications - the budget is king.
Strangely, when trying to sell a server solution to the pointy haired ones, I may as well be saying "The gobi desert went out for a hamburger" - they just look at you like you just announced you'd be nailing banana skins to the office walls for the next 2 days. "Look at the report - it's free, goes faster and stays up longer." "yeah but why bananas?" is all you'll get back...
I imagine I would get the same repsonse if I said - "look - we don't have to buy Pentium based servers - check out the Athlons, we buy lots of cheaper servers rather than one monolithic 8 way pentium - which gives vastly dimnishing returns on the number of CPUs" PHBs: "What? power our new e-commerce project with hotdogs? What do you mean?!?"
"Do they pay the authors of these tomes by the pound? "
Almost. I wrote a few chapters for an "Unleashed" Linux book by Sams which they canned unfortunateley, and they pay by the chapter which has to be around the 20 page mark (given a standard font, ruler settings etc.). They don't pay very much either - it was about $600/chapter back in 1999 (and they never paid anyway)and it was taking me about a week to 10 days to do one - as it's not like you're just offering your $.02 in a web forum - every claim, and fact has to be checked as much as possible.
Yes indeed - C is still C when it's in a Linux environment. I think there is a place for these "lets cover everything" books but I think it's more appropriate at the "introduction" end of the market - I have a copy of Wrox's "Beggining Linux Programing" and its good - I still look in now if I need to see how to do soemthing simple in a language I don't really use that often - say like "what's the syntax of an if statement in Perl then?" a quicj flick through to an example will often provide the answers.
Yes - the funky animal books are more in line with what I want: just the facts.
A friend of mine installed the phone system down at Ferrari some years ago, and he was appalled at the way the 18 year old lads in the factory were assembling the things with large mallets, and larger boot toecaps.... Hehe I had visions of old white haired master craftsmen taking months to hone every part of every car to perfection :)
LOL :))
Hehe and anyway - unless he strapped a turbocharger or supercharger to it at the time he dumped the carbs it's *still* naturally aspirated.
Indeed - I agree with everything you've said there - and I do have more non-MS servers and browsers than MS ones - but I do have them. I was merely trying to point out that claiming in a court of law thats its all so unfair is not the way to go.
You've put it rather more eloquently than I did, but your point is essentailly the same - how *did* the rest of the computing world let it get this far? "It's not as if it happened overnight" Perhaps if they spent more time actually competing, rather than complaining to the courts that whlst they've done very little to stop it, MS just shouldn't be allowed to have so many customers.
It bothers me too - and I take composer777's point about the need for some sort of regulation, but this seems all too often to tbe the competing corporations' first thought - not "how can we convince people to use *our* product?" but "I bet we can sue them and force people to use our crappy offering instead.
I wonder what a succesful corporation is meant to do once they are in danger of breaching thse laws, to avoid being sued? Give away large chunks of cash to competitors? Or copyright material? Can you honestly see any corporaion doing this unless so ordered by a court of law?
You also have to question the motives of the coporations filing these lawuits - they are doing it so *they* can get a bigger slice of the pie. Anyone think AOL TW would stop if they got to the same position MS is in now?
As for the world's economy depending on a healthy Microsoft - thats a rather silly suggestion. If it dissappeared Today - there would be a some disruption for sure, but business would get over it in a few months.
As I said, I don't disagree with your arguments but I do think it's a sad sad world, when companies compete through the courts instead of in the marketplace.
And don't get this anti-competitive lawsuit thing that happens in the USA - what are they saying? IE is so good it's not fair? What a load of BS!
.NET to make their own browser more capable - why shouldn't they? They offer a new thing for the server side, and damm well make sure the client side supports it.
MS had more money to develop it? So what - were they just going to say "oh well of course it wouldn't be *fair* to use all the cash from all the other products that people queued up to buy would it" why? Hardly a free economy, if a company can just sue its competitors when they do better.
Sure - MS leverage their other products such as VBscript and
It's no use moaning and whinging about it - it's not as if this all happened overnight now is it?
Its not as if someone handed MS the desktop OS thing on a plate either - there *were* competitive products all the way from Apple, IBM, Sun et al but they *failed*. They made it, and *we* bought it - by the bucket load.
I like the Monopoly analogy - but one difference is that nobody forced Netscape to play with the $1500 - they could have gotten any amount of money from anti MS corporations - and indeed - look it's AOL TW - I'm sure they could fund some hefty development of both the browser and some "Netscape first" server side products of their own.
But no - they chose to whinge and moan that it's "not fair".
I don't get this about America - the American way is held up as a shining star of "may the best man win" and free competition, but when there is a clear winner - the other guys claim it's unlawful!!
I don't fancy a world totally ruled by MS either - but then I can hardly moan about it when I buy their products and use their browser.
AOL have a huge client base - surely they could put pressure on web sites that want their custoners' traffic to make them compliant with W3C standards.
I can only guess I've missed the point somewhere
LOL so did I - cheating must be rife in Counterstrike if just seeing "CS" and "cheat" triggers that off in my brain.
Mind you - I don't think we use the term "CS course" in the UK - there all called things like MIS (Managment Information Systems) or just "Computing".
Hmm I see what you mean, but then why have a web page if you didn't want visitors? Surely if visitors=good, then lots of visitors=verygood?
Thanks for the links - I might keep those handy for times when I need to explain to the uninitiated waht the
That'd be those guys that do that "Internet For Idiots" service? They advertise it on TV claiming it somehow gives people soemthing that other ISPs do not. What? Like AOL's own web site? When you've got the entire Internet and a dozen or more search engines and 100's of portals what could they possibly bring to the party then? That'd be why I'm not a customer.
On top of that - it doesn't appear to actually provide full network connection to the 'net - odds on if a Quake2 player turns up for practice, and they start locking up and complaining - the answer to the question: "sigh - you're using AOL aren't you?" is "yes". (if it's not the next question is "you have a software modem don't you?").
So - I can only forsee darkness down that road. It would be an incredible irony though wouldn't it? An idiot product driven by a geek OS?
Someone else pointed out that they can already have RedHat (the OS) under the GPL so why bother?
Well - I guess the question is almost it's own answer - they don't give 2 figs for the OS - they just want the name - they need any old OS to avoid Mr and Mrs AOL having to load windows just to get AOL going, RedHat is probably the only Linux based OS that Mr and Mrs Denominator have heard of, so they attach themselves to the RedHat name, and then quietly drop it - leaving AOL the OS that just does what Joe punter mostly wants - browse the web - watch streaming video/audio, do stuff with Joe's home vids and photos, and so on. Most of these people buying PCs these days for home, don't give a sh*t about MS Office - forget it! They just want to browse endless eye candy sites, from a nice "day-Time TV" themed Portal. It's a stepping stone to the next generation - "The AOL Appliance" which will sit on top of your ageing VCR. MS has the X box to play with for that - the Tivo has been out for a while and I'll be surprised if Tivo II doesn't have web/email capabilities - so no surprise that AOL TW are making moves to come up with their own box.
This means very little to those of us with serious computing tasks to do - so if this does come to pass, I'll be switching our servers away from RedHat to one of the others.
Indeed - as a home user - one of my boxes is still running a 2.0 kernel - as it hasn't suddenly become unable to perform it's function (dial up Internet, collect mail, send mail, swap usenet news with isp news server, run crude firewall, samba etc) I mean - it's still running libc5 ffs! I feel no urge to upgrade it - it's working now already. It sits in the corner and gathers dust in it's ye olde AT style case with P150 cpu with just power, network and modem attached to it.
I think if Linus/Alan are guilty of anything here, it is merely of perhaps not sticking to the version numbering as strictly as they might have. But people were clamouring for a 2.4 stable release, and perhaps they were swayed by that.
"The real thing" [Coca-Cola] - I feel that I am pretty real, maybe it should be "A real thing"
:)
Or considering that it originally contained some sort of cocaine derived compound - but now does not, I would say that it *isn't* the real thing
(or even A real thing, or a thing that is as real as it used to be or.. dammit!)
Yeah - indeed - if you run it on NT4 SP6a it falls over all on it's own sometimes. You get some warning - depending on how much virtual memory you have.
Unbreakable my arse! It'd be something if they'd just stick to one plan for more than 6 months, let alone aiming for "unbreakable".
I agree - I just installed the basic player (it came on a CD with some ".rm" files and it was needed to play them).
.exe ? At least then you only had to get it once... Internet bandwidth is being swallowed by people downloading this crap over and over...:P
I'd not bothered with Real Player before (never had to) but in 2 minutes it became apparent that the main purpose of real player was to put lots of advertising on my dekstop.
As I'm not an "average" user - it only took me a few minutes of persistent beatings to remove the excessive start-up rubbish (why the hell do you need a "start centre" anyway - won't the file extensions/MIME codes decide what plays what?). But still it comes at me with "channels" and other such rubbish "well hey here's an idea - what about the file I clicked on - can I just see that?" Only after a prolonged battle...
It is slightly easier to download than QuickTime though (but at least Quicktime are using port 80 now for their un-necessary "download installer" thing). What happened to downlaoding a self-extracting
LOL - I find all these "consultants" do this. The scenario goes like this:-
:"well I want experienced people in to do it"
PHB A wants technology X (eg "we need an MQ server cluster - anyone know anything about MQ?")
I (as chief tech architect) say "well erm no, actually we dodn't have any actual experince in implementing that - but how hard can it be?"
PHB A
Me "OK"
2 *weeks* or more later IBM (or whoever) supply some guy with a label saying "MQ Expert" on him and he enters the room:-
MQ Guy: "Stand back, I'm certified."
He then, as Barry reports, proceeds to read the manual that came in the box, call tech. support and general arse about for 4 days - whilst charging us the Earth per day.
Eventually, I sidle over and start to chat to him about the various issues, and reading the help/book over hist shoulder get a handle on how it all fits together. I try giving him subtle hints that he's barking up the wrong tree, and he needs to try something or other to prove premise Y and so on but he doggedly tries to follow the instructions...
Eventually, MQ guy announces that he must go away to confer with more MQ guys back at base. "Fine" say I. I then install the product and make it work in 2 hours, and cancel MQ guy.
MQ was just one example - it *always* happens like this and the PHB's never learn - they still want to pay someone big bucks for nothing. Same thing happned with Lotus Notes (although the answer to that one is just "Don't"), Oracle this and that, and a myriad of more obscure technologies.
You have to marvel at anyone who claims to be able to "fix Windows" though....
Dude - it's a humourous piece - not scientific fact, and yes - he's not bought XP yet - that's the point of the article - windows has never changed over the last umpteen releases in terms of reliability - but somehow he still feels ready to beleive the statements about it being more relible this time around and that it will somehow be different than the last 10 times they said this, and the last 10 times he felt this one was gonna be different.
I mean you said it yourself "uptimes of weeks" - this is not something to be proud of - and neither is having to restart the entire machine to apply a patch.
The point is, most people have come to accept that their computer will crash on a regaular basis (as opposed to say, their VCR or Washing machine) and this is becuase of Windows - there's no denying it's history. Yes NT is more stable than Win9x but most folks' experience is of Win9x and it's ancestors.
I thought it was overall, a good effort - but then afterwards I did think that perhaps it only seemed OK to me because having read the book a couple of times, I was able to fill in the blanks in the story/charcters etc. So I can see what you mean - it was kinda like watching the story in fast forward. Then again - I just got to the end of reading Fellowship again, and to be honest - thats what happens - there's very little else apart from being chased, escaping, or being chased, and being rescued by the next saviour (Tom Bombadil, Strider, Galadriel). The extra bits are purely descriptive - and well - that's sort of redundant in a movie.
:)"
I think you have to keep in mind that it was the first 3 hours of what will be a 9 hour film - my girlfriend (who had not read the book) was surprised when it just ended - she said "when do they get to Mt. Doom then?" "er" says I "In 2004
However, having said that - even if you read LOTR from start to finish, you may still be none the wiser as to where the charcters came from (ie those with multi-1000 year lifespans) for that - you need to read the back end of The Silmarillion - which describes in concise format where Elrond, Gandalf, Isildur et al came from and what they did beforehand. Facts such as - who has the 3 elven rings exactly then? Just do not come out (Elrond, Galadriel, and Mithrandir (Gandalf's real name) have them). hehe whilst reading that yesterday after seing the movie - I realised Arwen and Aragorn have common ancestors - nowt like a bit of inbreeding eh?
So to summarise, I guess what I'm getting at is that whilst I agree that the film does lack character description/progression - it may not be the fault of the film maker - maybe it was never there in the book either. Or perhaps, with so much to get over to the audience, without the film being 6 hours long, they cut the touchy feely bits, after all there are whole chapters of the book on farmer Maggot, Tom Bombadil (although to be honest, that was redundent in the book too), Bree, and so on. The chracters that were very will described and fleshed out in the book are of course the hobbits - and most of this was indeed cut from the movie - the day to day chit chat, that reveals the family feud with the Sackville Bagginses, etc and the whole moving to Buckland cover was never touched upon. It seemed from the movie that Frodo leaves Bagend shortly after Bilbo does, whereas in the book, it is many years between those events (in fact Frodo is some 50 odd years of age when he leaves on the quest - he looks about 12 in the film...). Whilst these scenes would not have moved on the "main good vs evil plot" they would have told a neophyte audience what Hobbits were all about. As I said at the top - not a problem if you read the book already.
Jackson concentrates on the corrupting influence of the Ring, and on the whole, I think he has done a good job - it was always going to be a mammoth task, and whilst it does seem to just rush headlong from one scrape to the next - I don't believe he strayed too far from the text.
(and at least he didn't include any of the poetry - god help us if someone ever makes a musical).
LOL :)
/dev/notepad :-)
I dont think so though - I think it makes Wirth the computer, his pen and paper the BIOS etc etc. He "ran" the compiler on his "cpu/brain" and output the results onto
I can beleive this - those boys were mad - remember they weren't so much interested in the practical uses of programming languages - people like Wirth were far more interested in the aethetics of the language and some sort of logical purity - so it would have been important to him, that his compiler was not tainted by another....
Hmm interesting article - but having the compiler compile itself does not help you to do this - you could introduce such trojans to the compiler and then compile it with some other compiler - the result would be the same.
I totally agree with you on this - I have found over the years, that it's much easier to teach a good communicator the basic technical skills than to teach a tech-savvy person good comunication skills, which are essential for user support. The users just want to feel some sympathy, and to be kept informed - even if there is nothing new to report - Just make sure you call them and tell them what's going on every 30 minutes.
:-).
I spent 2.5 years contracting in the UK after being made redundant from my senior technical position with a large aggregate company (usual story - merger), and as several people have already commented - they can pretty much fire you without giving any reason. What totally surprised me though is the the amazing stories they feel compelled to invent - I even got accused of going off for a nap on one contract! (I mean the job was boring as hell but even so) when all they had to say was "your face doesn't fit - goodbye" which is fair enough - if a bit childish. As a another poster commented - there *will* be some reason why *someone* wants to get rid of this guy and I found that these reasons are often down to feelings of insecurity - someone feels threatened by your knowledge, skill or something.
This is one of main reasons I took a "permanent" post again 3 years ago (that and changes to UK tax laws which eliminated most of the benefits of running your own Ltd co. ). Ironically, I took a position at a company that I originally came to on a 6 month contract, which was later bought by another company and closed down. In a further twist of fate, I'm still there a year later - there's just 2 of us in the entire 200 seat building keeping the systems ticking over (amazing how many people's jobs we managed to replace with a 20 line script after they went
If I've learnt anything in the last 3 years, it's been how to operate in these politically motivated arenas - mainly from my boss - the IT director who turned out to be a master at it. Keeping my job *after* the company has closed I reckon is proof that I learned a couple of moves: support your Boss, solve his problems and help him get up the ladder, so you can stand on the rung he's on right now.
You need to re-evaluate your life.
Yeah indeed - I mean It's cool that someone ported my all time favourite game to the pocket PC - but if you think you have are playing Quake II and you are not using a mouse and a keyboard then you're 'avin a *LARF* mate.
:0 )but really - it wasn't playable by any serious definition.
:-/
I saw Pocket GLQuake on an iPaq and it was amusing to see (but not as amusing as TTYquake
Of much more interest and amusement this week was the Generations mod. for QIII - lets you play with the weapons and physics of Doom, Q1,2,3 and some other thing whih I suspect they made up
It is a absolute blast.
Go Chundra! :)
Yeah but when does that ever happen with MS? Who exactly at MS do you call?
As far as I'm concerned (and I have a number of NT servers to look after for my sins) there is effectivley no support for NT - apart from the knowledgebase web site - which is, I have to say reasonably good. The product is provided "as seen". I know you can buy expensive support contracts - but these don't come from MS - they come from resellers, whos only qualification is that their staff have got a bit of paper with "MCSE" written on it - which doesn't impress me at all.
Microsoft are not alone in this approach - ever tried calling Oracle with a question? They are not as bad as MS, but you are always better off using the online support such as Metalink - which is much the same as a usenet group - although Oracle employees occasionally pitch in and answer questions.
Linux has better online support both from official OS publishers' web sites and from the likes of LDP, freshmeat and so on.
"Embedded Windows" - an oxymoron if ever there was one. It's GUI oriented - and quite a number of embedded appliances will not require one.
Linux will still boot and run off of a floppy which is a lot smaller than 4.8Mb!
And as for MS claiming that the ability to playback multi-media content such as movies, sound etc is somehow part of the OS is ludicrous - these are applications. I know MS likes eveyone to believe that everything they see on the desktop is somehow provided soley by the OS (IE for eg) but this broaches new levels of stupidity even for them - check out the "tour" on Windows XP - you'd think they'd just invented everything - including the Internet, and that it's all new in XP - and only XP.
And as for XP having a "proven" track record of reliabilty and stability - Guys - you are in danger of looking more than a little bit thick here - how can a product that's been out 5 minutes have a proven track record? Not to mention it s based on past products with a proven track record for disaster, inflexibility, and a "can't do" attititude.