One way to limit obesity is to cut back on entertainment, altogether. There are so many time sinks out there from TV to videogames to reading Slashdot, that dispensing with many of them is essential to getting by in life.
HR has to fight more to justify their existence than even IT. I recently applied for a job and they had me take a two-hour "personality profile" test. At my previous job, I had to talk to four people just to change my mailing address. Sigh.
Well, in spite of my obvious lack of insight into DST, the fact that it's only 60 days reinforces my point even more, almost as much, perhaps, as the original post!
For one Earth year, the total "savings" would be $219,000,000 per year. Still, that doesn't look like much in the grand scheme of things. A small fractional change in sales tax can turn up these kinds of numbers for one state.
One thing I think causes problems for Jonathan Schwartz is that he is saying something to appeal to a specific audience, but he says it to an overly broad audience. In this case, he is making a pitch to countries like Brazil, and his efforts are completely lost on Slashdot (obvious from the...um, variety...of comments being posted).
I have never seen any real indication that Sun is unfriendly towards open source. Being unfriendly towards specific things, like Red Hat, is different, because Red Hat is monetizing Linux as compeititon to Sun. Business is business, in this case. If Sun ever starts trash-talking Debian or Gentoo, then I will change my opinion.
Otherwise, Sun are striving to co-exist with Linux in a way that brings UNIX(tm) out into the open without teams of lawyers jumping down their throats. It's a delicate dance they have to do, but they say their teams of lawyers have been at it for five years, now, analyzing the problem. The result of their efforts is an apparently uninfringing codebase, called OpenSolaris, which, if infringements are found, will be indemnified by Sun themselves. This is the whole rationale beind the CDDL and Sun's earlier grant of patents into the OpenSolaris project. Their goal is to establish a foundation for OpenSolaris that can't be unseated by a one-man company with a patent. IMO, this is a wise move, which keeps Solaris as a formidable option for businesses who care about these things.
Again, I wasn't comparing sizes, only markets. Regarding chips, TI has typically been Sun's chip supplier. Semiconductors seems to be one area where Sun never got involved in.
Well, it depends on who you ask, what benchmark is cited, etc. For single-threaded applications, Opteron is better than SPARC, right now. For scaling applications, SPARC still holds its own, especially when factoring in things like total power consumption, scaling efficiency, etc.
On the whole, Sun is still very competitive. It's just that they have a lot of baggage to overcome from the boom era. They are doing that, now, and, in a few years, maybe Slashdot will have caught up with the times.
Go look at their pricing matrix for Solaris 10. Go look at their pricing for 1 to 4 way servers. Come back and say whether you can really maintain your statement.
And don't go and compare a Sun v490 to some 4-way pentium box from Dell. Compare a v40z or a v440.
Not proprietary, eh? So RedHat or Novell or Debian will be able to use Sun's Open Solaris code in thier distros?
Yes, just as long as they don't get linked into GPLed binaries. The CDDL is file-based, the GPL is not. Coexistence is just fine as long as the GPL is kept in its own space. If you are worried merely about not being able to cut-n-paste everything into the Linux kernel, then rethink what the meaning of OSS is. The GPL is not the cure to all problems.
By 'people', I mean the political party forming around Slashdot.
The pro IBM stance here is partly due to a patent dump of very debatable utility, but Slashdot cheers like teenage girls at a boy band concert. Yet Sun builds up the patent base in OpenSolaris with real legal analysis and backing and Slashdot gives them the finger.
How can Slashdot be so pro GPL, yet be so pro Apple (non-GPL Darwin + big proprietary layer)? Does the pretty packaging and UI mean that much? Does it mean nothing that Sun is _less_proprietary_ than Apple, by a huge margin?
How can Slashdot be so pro "freedom" when they verbally abuse anyone genuinely exercising that freedom? Sun is navigating their business needs and what their customers want and came up with the CDDL+OpenSolaris approach. Yet Slashdot has few nice things to say.
It just makes no sense. I really wonder if 90% of Slashdot are people still in college who don't work nor have families nor real responsibility beyond next week's exam. I also wonder if 90% of Slashdot have egos so fragile that a single dirty look by a stranger would send them into a month-long depression. My advice: grow up and get over the fact that the real world is bigger and more diverse than your world.
Of course IBM is bigger, but my point is that Sun and IBM pretty much compete directly on a market-by-market basis. The main differences are mainframes and that IBM is a Microsoft reseller. Sun offers re-hosting services for the former, and does not want to become the latter.
LOL, you really think so? Sun is on the short list of companies truly adapting to the evolving software economy. Sun has also set themselves up to be the lowest risk vendor out there (massive UNIX license, moving to OSS model, cross-platform, not a Microsoft reseller, and $7+ billion in the bank). Sun's here for the long haul.
In the big picture, I see only IBM as Sun's long-term competitor, because everyone is teaming up against Microsoft, now. IBM and Sun match almost one-to-one in their product line-ups and target nearly the same customer base. IMO, the IT industry is really starting to get interesting.
It's the same thing that scares the bejesus out of most proprietary software vendors.
Before the end of 2005, Sun will very largely _not_ be a proprietary software vendor. OpenSolaris in Q2, OpenOffice.org is already here, and they're already dropping hints about an OSS database and open sourcing their entire JES stack.
People try so very hard to paint Sun in an evil light, but it just doesn't work.
People should read the whole story, because this isn't an "attack" but "an observation." Schwartz is commenting on the _fact_ that many nations are nervous about IBM's intentions with the GPL.
If Sun were as anti-GPL as Slashdot tries to make them out to be, then please explain why the entire OpenOffice.org codebase is under the LGPL (dual licensed with the SISSL).
It is truly amazing how Slashdot whines when the GPL is criticised, but they are also the first to put up the battle standard when attacking other licenses or Microsoft (but not beloved IBM!). It's called a double standard.
Solaris 10 is really a huge leap. DTrace is useful right out of the box, no configuration needed, and there are lots of sample scripts in/usr/demo and appearing on websites. In practically no time at all (some reading of the manual, plus literally minutes of programming) I had a hacked-together script (based on a demo script) and was able to get a measure of the syscalls consuming the most total time in a program (not just counts of syscalls but the count _times_ the average time spent in each call). If a person gets enough knowledge to examine lots of kernel data directly in real-time, the potential of DTrace is mind-blowing (the *stat tools aren't even close).
So I should just hand my entire paycheck towards buying fragile laptops for schools, government contracts that produce nothing, and medicaid paying for weekly ER visits for mothers who have no physician, etc.? I'm all for good roads, good schools, preventitive health, etc., but there is a lot of waste due to tremendous amounts of tax dollars rolling in. If I earned $500K/year, my buying practices would most definitely change, I wouldn't care about sales, I would have the best stuff, and I wouldn't care about conservation nearly as much.
I was wondering about the morality of blocking pop-ups
There is no dilemma for me. I get tired of popups stealing focus, filling up the task bar, and the tricks they use occasionally hang my browser.
Really, there is nothing wrong at all with banner ads. It's no different than newspapers. What would you do if your newspaper started throwing wads of paper with ads on them at you, forcing you to go out of your way to dodge them, clean them up off of the floor, and fill up your trash can?
This is why I always get a little nervous seeing wireless routers stuck to the ceilings of some offices. Given the average security of most offices with wired networks, the outlook for un-wired networks isn't good, IMO.
Pulling cable is a PITA, but it is a layer of physical security that shouldn't be dismissed too soon.
Are companies in denial about the costs of lost productivity due to Windows-based outages? Labor accounting sort of sinks that information away, IMO, and is harder for businesses to quantify as an IT-related expense.
IIRC, Bill Gates himself said a while ago that companies lose two weeks per year per employee due to Windows' downtime. Having worked on a mixed UNIX and Windows network, this seems about right to me. The Sun's were rebooted a couple times a year for maintenance, and the Windows PCs got rebooted every day. Even on the Windows side of the place, they conceded to Solaris for all the infrastructure where they could, such as e-mail routing, scanning, DNS, etc. Still, that didn't help the Windows server "cluster" that served many of the user accounts.
Regarding longevity, I wonder if it depends on a person's Mystical Breakage Probability Field. In my decade+ of using PCs and UNIX workstations, the only components I've had fail were a 13 year old full-height SCSI drive, a super-cheap Pentium 75 motherboard, and a who-knows-how-old stick of generic RAM purchased used. Other people I know have had similar experiences with a hard drive here or a RAM stick there--really nothing extraordinary.
However, occasionally I'll read a post about someone defending extended warranties or AppleCare, and it seems every piece of electronics they touch turns to dust, explodes, or grows legs and attacks the family. Quite interesting, given my own anecdotal experience with electronics.
So, are the people defending extended warranties cursed by the MBPF...or do they work for the warranty underwriter?
I think big SUV owners pay through the nose plenty. Their 13MPG is just the beginning. They pay higher insurance premiums, they generally pay higher property taxes, their repair bills are higher, new tires are more expensive, and washing and waxing them is a PITA. I also wonder if SUV owners are more likely to lease them, meaning they are getting screwed there, too.
Every time I see some person driving alone in a 7,500lb SUV that obviously has never seen real work, I wonder how fragile their ego is, because all those expenses must be worth it to them.
Slashdot Mirror
One way to limit obesity is to cut back on entertainment, altogether. There are so many time sinks out there from TV to videogames to reading Slashdot, that dispensing with many of them is essential to getting by in life.
HR has to fight more to justify their existence than even IT. I recently applied for a job and they had me take a two-hour "personality profile" test. At my previous job, I had to talk to four people just to change my mailing address. Sigh.
Well, in spite of my obvious lack of insight into DST, the fact that it's only 60 days reinforces my point even more, almost as much, perhaps, as the original post!
$219,000,000 is the amount of money the Air Force might spend on a couple airplanes. It's nothing.
The U.S. economy is measured in the Trillions.
Stop listening to the republican on your television please.
Stop listening to the democrat on yours.
How about we stop listening to both of them and learn to think for ourselves?
60 days? What planet are you from?
For one Earth year, the total "savings" would be $219,000,000 per year. Still, that doesn't look like much in the grand scheme of things. A small fractional change in sales tax can turn up these kinds of numbers for one state.
One thing I think causes problems for Jonathan Schwartz is that he is saying something to appeal to a specific audience, but he says it to an overly broad audience. In this case, he is making a pitch to countries like Brazil, and his efforts are completely lost on Slashdot (obvious from the...um, variety...of comments being posted).
I have never seen any real indication that Sun is unfriendly towards open source. Being unfriendly towards specific things, like Red Hat, is different, because Red Hat is monetizing Linux as compeititon to Sun. Business is business, in this case. If Sun ever starts trash-talking Debian or Gentoo, then I will change my opinion.
Otherwise, Sun are striving to co-exist with Linux in a way that brings UNIX(tm) out into the open without teams of lawyers jumping down their throats. It's a delicate dance they have to do, but they say their teams of lawyers have been at it for five years, now, analyzing the problem. The result of their efforts is an apparently uninfringing codebase, called OpenSolaris, which, if infringements are found, will be indemnified by Sun themselves. This is the whole rationale beind the CDDL and Sun's earlier grant of patents into the OpenSolaris project. Their goal is to establish a foundation for OpenSolaris that can't be unseated by a one-man company with a patent. IMO, this is a wise move, which keeps Solaris as a formidable option for businesses who care about these things.
Again, I wasn't comparing sizes, only markets. Regarding chips, TI has typically been Sun's chip supplier. Semiconductors seems to be one area where Sun never got involved in.
Maybe they are wicked fast...
Well, it depends on who you ask, what benchmark is cited, etc. For single-threaded applications, Opteron is better than SPARC, right now. For scaling applications, SPARC still holds its own, especially when factoring in things like total power consumption, scaling efficiency, etc.
On the whole, Sun is still very competitive. It's just that they have a lot of baggage to overcome from the boom era. They are doing that, now, and, in a few years, maybe Slashdot will have caught up with the times.
Sun was always highly overpriced and overrated.
Go look at their pricing matrix for Solaris 10. Go look at their pricing for 1 to 4 way servers. Come back and say whether you can really maintain your statement.
And don't go and compare a Sun v490 to some 4-way pentium box from Dell. Compare a v40z or a v440.
Not proprietary, eh? So RedHat or Novell or Debian will be able to use Sun's Open Solaris code in thier distros?
Yes, just as long as they don't get linked into GPLed binaries. The CDDL is file-based, the GPL is not. Coexistence is just fine as long as the GPL is kept in its own space. If you are worried merely about not being able to cut-n-paste everything into the Linux kernel, then rethink what the meaning of OSS is. The GPL is not the cure to all problems.
By 'people', I mean the political party forming around Slashdot.
The pro IBM stance here is partly due to a patent dump of very debatable utility, but Slashdot cheers like teenage girls at a boy band concert. Yet Sun builds up the patent base in OpenSolaris with real legal analysis and backing and Slashdot gives them the finger.
How can Slashdot be so pro GPL, yet be so pro Apple (non-GPL Darwin + big proprietary layer)? Does the pretty packaging and UI mean that much? Does it mean nothing that Sun is _less_proprietary_ than Apple, by a huge margin?
How can Slashdot be so pro "freedom" when they verbally abuse anyone genuinely exercising that freedom? Sun is navigating their business needs and what their customers want and came up with the CDDL+OpenSolaris approach. Yet Slashdot has few nice things to say.
It just makes no sense. I really wonder if 90% of Slashdot are people still in college who don't work nor have families nor real responsibility beyond next week's exam. I also wonder if 90% of Slashdot have egos so fragile that a single dirty look by a stranger would send them into a month-long depression. My advice: grow up and get over the fact that the real world is bigger and more diverse than your world.
Of course IBM is bigger, but my point is that Sun and IBM pretty much compete directly on a market-by-market basis. The main differences are mainframes and that IBM is a Microsoft reseller. Sun offers re-hosting services for the former, and does not want to become the latter.
LOL, you really think so? Sun is on the short list of companies truly adapting to the evolving software economy. Sun has also set themselves up to be the lowest risk vendor out there (massive UNIX license, moving to OSS model, cross-platform, not a Microsoft reseller, and $7+ billion in the bank). Sun's here for the long haul.
In the big picture, I see only IBM as Sun's long-term competitor, because everyone is teaming up against Microsoft, now. IBM and Sun match almost one-to-one in their product line-ups and target nearly the same customer base. IMO, the IT industry is really starting to get interesting.
you can take, take, take and not have to give back anything.
Okay, Mr/Mrs Foobar, tell me what Sun hasn't given back. Tell me where their generosity has been lacking.
It's the same thing that scares the bejesus out of most proprietary software vendors.
Before the end of 2005, Sun will very largely _not_ be a proprietary software vendor. OpenSolaris in Q2, OpenOffice.org is already here, and they're already dropping hints about an OSS database and open sourcing their entire JES stack.
People try so very hard to paint Sun in an evil light, but it just doesn't work.
People should read the whole story, because this isn't an "attack" but "an observation." Schwartz is commenting on the _fact_ that many nations are nervous about IBM's intentions with the GPL.
If Sun were as anti-GPL as Slashdot tries to make them out to be, then please explain why the entire OpenOffice.org codebase is under the LGPL (dual licensed with the SISSL).
It is truly amazing how Slashdot whines when the GPL is criticised, but they are also the first to put up the battle standard when attacking other licenses or Microsoft (but not beloved IBM!). It's called a double standard.
Solaris 10 is really a huge leap. DTrace is useful right out of the box, no configuration needed, and there are lots of sample scripts in
So I should just hand my entire paycheck towards buying fragile laptops for schools, government contracts that produce nothing, and medicaid paying for weekly ER visits for mothers who have no physician, etc.? I'm all for good roads, good schools, preventitive health, etc., but there is a lot of waste due to tremendous amounts of tax dollars rolling in. If I earned $500K/year, my buying practices would most definitely change, I wouldn't care about sales, I would have the best stuff, and I wouldn't care about conservation nearly as much.
This is essentially an apparently legal scam to allow you to write it all off.
When it comes to reducing taxes, nothing is a scam if it is legal. Paying the lowest tax allowable by law is every citizen's duty to their country.
I was wondering about the morality of blocking pop-ups
There is no dilemma for me. I get tired of popups stealing focus, filling up the task bar, and the tricks they use occasionally hang my browser.
Really, there is nothing wrong at all with banner ads. It's no different than newspapers. What would you do if your newspaper started throwing wads of paper with ads on them at you, forcing you to go out of your way to dodge them, clean them up off of the floor, and fill up your trash can?
Pop up ads are evil, no ifs ands or buts.
This is why I always get a little nervous seeing wireless routers stuck to the ceilings of some offices. Given the average security of most offices with wired networks, the outlook for un-wired networks isn't good, IMO.
Pulling cable is a PITA, but it is a layer of physical security that shouldn't be dismissed too soon.
Are companies in denial about the costs of lost productivity due to Windows-based outages? Labor accounting sort of sinks that information away, IMO, and is harder for businesses to quantify as an IT-related expense.
IIRC, Bill Gates himself said a while ago that companies lose two weeks per year per employee due to Windows' downtime. Having worked on a mixed UNIX and Windows network, this seems about right to me. The Sun's were rebooted a couple times a year for maintenance, and the Windows PCs got rebooted every day. Even on the Windows side of the place, they conceded to Solaris for all the infrastructure where they could, such as e-mail routing, scanning, DNS, etc. Still, that didn't help the Windows server "cluster" that served many of the user accounts.
Regarding longevity, I wonder if it depends on a person's Mystical Breakage Probability Field. In my decade+ of using PCs and UNIX workstations, the only components I've had fail were a 13 year old full-height SCSI drive, a super-cheap Pentium 75 motherboard, and a who-knows-how-old stick of generic RAM purchased used. Other people I know have had similar experiences with a hard drive here or a RAM stick there--really nothing extraordinary.
However, occasionally I'll read a post about someone defending extended warranties or AppleCare, and it seems every piece of electronics they touch turns to dust, explodes, or grows legs and attacks the family. Quite interesting, given my own anecdotal experience with electronics.
So, are the people defending extended warranties cursed by the MBPF...or do they work for the warranty underwriter?
I think big SUV owners pay through the nose plenty. Their 13MPG is just the beginning. They pay higher insurance premiums, they generally pay higher property taxes, their repair bills are higher, new tires are more expensive, and washing and waxing them is a PITA. I also wonder if SUV owners are more likely to lease them, meaning they are getting screwed there, too.
Every time I see some person driving alone in a 7,500lb SUV that obviously has never seen real work, I wonder how fragile their ego is, because all those expenses must be worth it to them.