"Receiving training on the CLI in OS X will make us de facto Unix sysadmins..."
In your dreams. It might make you de facto UNIX operations workers, capable of swapping tapes and adding users, but it will NOT make you a sysadmin.
That said, the best way to retain employees after training is to pay them much, much more. An employer can try to contract the employee to pay for the training if he leaves before a set date, but most other employers will be happy to pay off the debt as a signing bonus.
I want to be able to tell it to send event notifications to my pager's email address and not my actual email address, without having to set up some sort of forwarding of the email on another server or via my email client.
This will allow me to always show up for meetings and such without actually having to input all of the data into my pager.
I also want to be able to tell it to ignore all events posted by certain people who have the ability (And gall.) to invite me to events that I will not actually attend.
Rock on! This means when our new president decides that he just isn't living up to his daddy's presidency, and starts some crazy war, and begins drafting American men because armed forces enlistment is lower than ever (Given the quality of politicians in America, it isn't surprising. Who would want to fight for these jokers?), I can run to Canada where I will be able to both dodge the draft AND get cheap DSL!
"Hopefully Creative takes up the bulk of the slack"
Unlikely, given that 3DFX royally pissed off 3DFX when they pulled the Voodoo license from creative after 3DFX decided to make their own cards. Creative lost a ton of money because of that, and has since bought up a huge chunk of Nvidia.
"And by the way, Quantum 3D had a kick-ass SLI product on store shelves then, too."
Actually, that Quantum board was pretty crappy. It was designed to combine two Voodoo 2s into a single card, but design flaws resulted in mediocre framrates compared to using two Voodoo 2s, which had become a cheaper solution by the time the Quantum board shipped. Sales were horrible, and the card was pulled off the market.
"either Mac users who didn't want to wait for ATI to make a Mac Radeon"
ATI was ready to release the Mac Radeon long before they did. Apple refused to use it for an extended period to punish ATI for leaking information.
"Or people who thought that FSAA in hardware was more important than hardware T&L, and bought one before Nvidia/ATI put software FSAA into their drivers. "
NVidia had FSAA running before the GeForce 2 shipped, not to mention before the Voodoo 4/5, and it runs in hardware, on the card, not in software.
"Besides mentioning Slashdot, he brings to the general public many of the points that have been made here."
C|Net readers are the general public? I don't think so. C|Net is nearly as geeky as Slashdot, but far more commercial (As can be seen by its television shows, which sure as hell never garner mainstream timeslots). C|Net tries to report on other stuff, but in the long run C|Net is by techies for techies, and the general public doesn't have a clue that it exists.
Playboy magazine did an excellent article on the failure that is DARE in October 1998, Page 44. It brings up several studies taht showed DARE students are MORE likely to use drugs than those who do not take the DARE classes.
There was also a well publicized case several years ago when the Department of Justice comissioned a study that confirmed such reports by smaller studies, and decided to try and cover up the resultes after a lawsuit by the DARE foundation.
And if that isn't enough, more food for thought: DARE was started by infamous LAPD chief Darrel Gates, the same man who create SWAT teams (The LAPD SWAT teams were used to attack peaceful protestors at the 2000 Democratic National convention in LA) and was known for allowing racism in the police force, which lead to his resignation after his tolerance of violence towards blacks was exposed in the Rodney King trials.
Dare is a load of crap, nothing more than an example of political pork.
"Why do people choose to live with their head in the sand?"
Because authority teaches them to live that way. That is why nations have flags, and monuments, anthems, pledges of allegiance, etc. Convince people that they are part of a group, and that the group has leaders. Next, convince them that questioning leaders is wrong via religion and state-sponsored education.
After that, greet those who attempt to make their views known with destructive criticism and violence. When they protest organizations and political parites, beat them, jail them, etc.
People want to speak up, but they are afraid to. Just like a gay man might be afraid to come out of the closet, dissidents are afraid as well.
"That kind of thing is sufficient for servers only."
No it isn't. What if you work with high end 3D design on Sun and need the space to store your really big meshes before sending it all off to the renderfarm? Or what if you work with big databases that don't need to be/can't be placed on a server?
Not everyone uses desktops for simple games and word processing. Some of us use them for all kinds of huge, crazy shit that requires nutty peripherals, gobs of disk space, etc., that PC's just don't have. That is why Sun makes an entire line of Sparc desktops. And they ROCK!
My ass they are. Sparc boxes make great UNIX desktops for people who need more reliability/features than one gets from a PC. Do you know how hard it is to attach a massive disk array to a PC? I have no problem hooking one up to the old SparcStations we use here as desktops.
Mmmm... Must have one of these. I'm about to switch to a new employer, I wonder if I can get them to order one and have it there for me by the time I start?
Seriously though, these are some damned fine CPUs. Given that most Intel based servers are in the 600-800 mHz range right now, it looks like Sun will be staying competitive for a good while (Not that Sun doesn't sell out 100% of what they can produce now!). Hopefully Sun can keep these things moving forward to compete with Sledgehammer and Itanium *snicker* and not end up taking so long to move out the next architecture once these things start to look slow (Not that the current Sun batch really was slow to begin with, but Sun's 450 mHz VS. an Intel 750 mHz for a tenth the cost doesn't impress management...).
"Which I'm afraid leads me to just one conclusion: Lucus has given up on movie theatre experiences, and is targeting this for home DVD playback."
Why shouldn't he? This is what I get at a movie theater:
1 - Waiting in line to buy a ticket from some dipshit teenager with so little ambition he can't even find a decent job at a video game store.
2 - $8.00 Tickets, unless I want to go to an afternoon matinee and have the movie ruined by hundreds of screaming children.
3 - Having any whispered dialogue ruined by the asshole three rows up that thinks a beeping pager makes him look important, and didn't just leave his in the car like the rest of us.
4 - Overpriced, crappy food.
5 - Cramped seats that don't give me enough room to stretch my legs out, causing my knees to ache the next day.
6 - No beer.
7 - The sound will either be:
"As an example, Pinochet (as in Chiles dictator in the 70s and 80s) was supported by the Kissinger people to help get rid of "communist" Allende..."
I'm not going to argue that point. But don't forget that Pinochet didn't do it alone. He still had the armed forced behind him, just like happens with all military dictators. The idiotic troops trained to protect a country and its government blindly follow their generals in extreme actions. If the government took the time to teach these troops to have some common sense at the same time they were teaching the troops how to murder people, the troops might have forseen the consequences of helping tyrants.
All the money and weapons in the world are no good if you don't have people to use them.
"How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries"
Ever wonder why people blow them up? Because they are poorly educated, and follow charasmatic leaders like sheep. Show them that the goal of America isn't to wipe out all other cultures and this wouldn't happen.
"...if you had a 4 or 5 year degree with a job bringing in $80k or more would you want to run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year? I didn't think so."
So what exactly are you advocating here? That we purposely underfund some schools so that the quality of education is poor, and those people turn to the military to live? Sounds like you think we should be exploiting people who grow up poor as cannon fodder. Wouldn't it make more sense to just work toward a better world where people don't have to "run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year??"
Education. Show the entire world the value of the kind of tranquility and tolerance (Not that we don't need to improve on the latter.) we enjoy in the USA. Especially tolerance. Imagine how much better things would be if we could convince all of the Muslims/Jews/Christians in Europe/Africa/Asia/The Middle East to stop fighting over their different interpretations of the same God.
Not to mention teaching people all over the world to stop following mindlessly. One of the biggest problems all around is when a bunch of idiots elect a corrupt moron, who then pisses of the military, who stage a coup with the power the generals get from all the morons who follow them, creating a military dictatorship.... and so on. This happens over and over again all over the world, from Cuba to Iraq to Indonesia to half the countries in Africa. Better educated people will make better decisions and stop electing lunatics.
"...only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate."
Escalating doesn't do any good. All it does is waste money for both sides. The United states built up a 3 trillion dollar national debt because Ronald Reagan was convinced that America needed to be able to wipe out the entire surface of the earth several times over just because the CCCP could. In the end it was just a pissing contest, because there was never any plan to use any of those weapons, which are now just a source of dangerous toxic waste. When the Soviets kept up with us in turn, it essentially bankrupt and destabilized the whole nation, causing it to collapse into numerous smaller states and a horribly managed big one.
"War - What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHING!"
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
"We ought to put NASA under the DoD and give it a similar budget - afterall, this IS about defense - it is defense against mother nature."
Given all the money we blow on missile defense systems that don't work (And by the time they do, we could have just applied all of that money/effort to world peace/unilateral nuclear disarmament.), and the extremely low chance of ever needing them, you are quite correct. If nothing else, asteroids would be far easier to blast out of space than missiles, given that most of the ones we really need to worry about are pretty damned big (Relatively, anyway.).
Slashdot Mirror
"the ones you can hack (Tivo and Indrema) and the ones you can't (may they see the light)"
can't hack my ass. What are they going to do, drag people to court for posting documentation and utilities on the web?
Oh wait... damned DMCA... Sometimes I envy people living in free countries, unlike us poor SOBs in the good old USofA.
The article states that there will be 30 games at launch, but has anyone seen any evidence that there will really be any indrema games?
"But hopefully this is the end of the issue on Slashdot."
No one ever made you post about this. You control your editorial policies. You could have left it alone.
You made this an issue on Slashdot, and you can stop it anytime you wish to.
"Receiving training on the CLI in OS X will make us de facto Unix sysadmins..."
In your dreams. It might make you de facto UNIX operations workers, capable of swapping tapes and adding users, but it will NOT make you a sysadmin.
That said, the best way to retain employees after training is to pay them much, much more. An employer can try to contract the employee to pay for the training if he leaves before a set date, but most other employers will be happy to pay off the debt as a signing bonus.
I want to be able to tell it to send event notifications to my pager's email address and not my actual email address, without having to set up some sort of forwarding of the email on another server or via my email client.
This will allow me to always show up for meetings and such without actually having to input all of the data into my pager.
I also want to be able to tell it to ignore all events posted by certain people who have the ability (And gall.) to invite me to events that I will not actually attend.
Rock on! This means when our new president decides that he just isn't living up to his daddy's presidency, and starts some crazy war, and begins drafting American men because armed forces enlistment is lower than ever (Given the quality of politicians in America, it isn't surprising. Who would want to fight for these jokers?), I can run to Canada where I will be able to both dodge the draft AND get cheap DSL!
Glide was released as Open Source. Write your own driver and skip the wrapper entirely.
"Hopefully Creative takes up the bulk of the slack"
Unlikely, given that 3DFX royally pissed off 3DFX when they pulled the Voodoo license from creative after 3DFX decided to make their own cards. Creative lost a ton of money because of that, and has since bought up a huge chunk of Nvidia.
"And by the way, Quantum 3D had a kick-ass SLI product on store shelves then, too."
Actually, that Quantum board was pretty crappy. It was designed to combine two Voodoo 2s into a single card, but design flaws resulted in mediocre framrates compared to using two Voodoo 2s, which had become a cheaper solution by the time the Quantum board shipped. Sales were horrible, and the card was pulled off the market.
"either Mac users who didn't want to wait for ATI to make a Mac Radeon" ATI was ready to release the Mac Radeon long before they did. Apple refused to use it for an extended period to punish ATI for leaking information. "Or people who thought that FSAA in hardware was more important than hardware T&L, and bought one before Nvidia/ATI put software FSAA into their drivers. " NVidia had FSAA running before the GeForce 2 shipped, not to mention before the Voodoo 4/5, and it runs in hardware, on the card, not in software.
"Besides mentioning Slashdot, he brings to the general public many of the points that have been made here."
C|Net readers are the general public? I don't think so. C|Net is nearly as geeky as Slashdot, but far more commercial (As can be seen by its television shows, which sure as hell never garner mainstream timeslots). C|Net tries to report on other stuff, but in the long run C|Net is by techies for techies, and the general public doesn't have a clue that it exists.
Playboy magazine did an excellent article on the failure that is DARE in October 1998, Page 44. It brings up several studies taht showed DARE students are MORE likely to use drugs than those who do not take the DARE classes.
There was also a well publicized case several years ago when the Department of Justice comissioned a study that confirmed such reports by smaller studies, and decided to try and cover up the resultes after a lawsuit by the DARE foundation.
And if that isn't enough, more food for thought: DARE was started by infamous LAPD chief Darrel Gates, the same man who create SWAT teams (The LAPD SWAT teams were used to attack peaceful protestors at the 2000 Democratic National convention in LA) and was known for allowing racism in the police force, which lead to his resignation after his tolerance of violence towards blacks was exposed in the Rodney King trials.
Dare is a load of crap, nothing more than an example of political pork.
"Why do people choose to live with their head in the sand?"
Because authority teaches them to live that way. That is why nations have flags, and monuments, anthems, pledges of allegiance, etc. Convince people that they are part of a group, and that the group has leaders. Next, convince them that questioning leaders is wrong via religion and state-sponsored education.
After that, greet those who attempt to make their views known with destructive criticism and violence. When they protest organizations and political parites, beat them, jail them, etc.
People want to speak up, but they are afraid to. Just like a gay man might be afraid to come out of the closet, dissidents are afraid as well.
Alright everyone! Start making those campaign contributions! America has the best government money can buy, let's all get to work!
Fund Dick Armey and his buddies to take down carnivore!
1 Sony Glasstron: Geeky as hell, but still really cool looking. For the ladies: give your man these and he will let you use the TV! .co m/vaio_direct/76/33/942.default.html
http://www.sonystyle
2 Action Figures! www.spawn.com
3 For the hard-core 64-Bit geek in all of us, anything running on a Sun Ultrasparc-III!www.sun.com/store
4 Beer! (No link needed!)Knights of the Dinner Table
Stop buying Dreamcast games! Fight censorship!
Support your local bootlegger!!!
"That kind of thing is sufficient for servers only."
No it isn't. What if you work with high end 3D design on Sun and need the space to store your really big meshes before sending it all off to the renderfarm? Or what if you work with big databases that don't need to be/can't be placed on a server?
Not everyone uses desktops for simple games and word processing. Some of us use them for all kinds of huge, crazy shit that requires nutty peripherals, gobs of disk space, etc., that PC's just don't have. That is why Sun makes an entire line of Sparc desktops. And they ROCK!
"Sparc machines are good as servers only."
My ass they are. Sparc boxes make great UNIX desktops for people who need more reliability/features than one gets from a PC. Do you know how hard it is to attach a massive disk array to a PC? I have no problem hooking one up to the old SparcStations we use here as desktops.
"...Windows users generally ARE clueless newbies. That's kinda M$'s market no?"
M$'s market is everyone, everywhere. They just depend on clueless managers to force the smart people into using Windows at work, and then at home.
Mmmm... Must have one of these. I'm about to switch to a new employer, I wonder if I can get them to order one and have it there for me by the time I start?
Seriously though, these are some damned fine CPUs. Given that most Intel based servers are in the 600-800 mHz range right now, it looks like Sun will be staying competitive for a good while (Not that Sun doesn't sell out 100% of what they can produce now!). Hopefully Sun can keep these things moving forward to compete with Sledgehammer and Itanium *snicker* and not end up taking so long to move out the next architecture once these things start to look slow (Not that the current Sun batch really was slow to begin with, but Sun's 450 mHz VS. an Intel 750 mHz for a tenth the cost doesn't impress management...).
"Which I'm afraid leads me to just one conclusion: Lucus has given up on movie theatre experiences, and is targeting this for home DVD playback."
Why shouldn't he? This is what I get at a movie theater:
1 - Waiting in line to buy a ticket from some dipshit teenager with so little ambition he can't even find a decent job at a video game store.
2 - $8.00 Tickets, unless I want to go to an afternoon matinee and have the movie ruined by hundreds of screaming children.
3 - Having any whispered dialogue ruined by the asshole three rows up that thinks a beeping pager makes him look important, and didn't just leave his in the car like the rest of us.
4 - Overpriced, crappy food.
5 - Cramped seats that don't give me enough room to stretch my legs out, causing my knees to ache the next day.
6 - No beer.
7 - The sound will either be:
"As an example, Pinochet (as in Chiles dictator in the 70s and 80s) was supported by the Kissinger people to help get rid of "communist" Allende..."
I'm not going to argue that point. But don't forget that Pinochet didn't do it alone. He still had the armed forced behind him, just like happens with all military dictators. The idiotic troops trained to protect a country and its government blindly follow their generals in extreme actions. If the government took the time to teach these troops to have some common sense at the same time they were teaching the troops how to murder people, the troops might have forseen the consequences of helping tyrants.
All the money and weapons in the world are no good if you don't have people to use them.
"How about exploding US embassies in foreign countries"
Ever wonder why people blow them up? Because they are poorly educated, and follow charasmatic leaders like sheep. Show them that the goal of America isn't to wipe out all other cultures and this wouldn't happen.
"...if you had a 4 or 5 year degree with a job bringing in $80k or more would you want to run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year? I didn't think so."
So what exactly are you advocating here? That we purposely underfund some schools so that the quality of education is poor, and those people turn to the military to live? Sounds like you think we should be exploiting people who grow up poor as cannon fodder. Wouldn't it make more sense to just work toward a better world where people don't have to "run off to some third world shithole and fight for $24k a year??"
"How do you apply money to world peace?"
Education. Show the entire world the value of the kind of tranquility and tolerance (Not that we don't need to improve on the latter.) we enjoy in the USA. Especially tolerance. Imagine how much better things would be if we could convince all of the Muslims/Jews/Christians in Europe/Africa/Asia/The Middle East to stop fighting over their different interpretations of the same God.
Not to mention teaching people all over the world to stop following mindlessly. One of the biggest problems all around is when a bunch of idiots elect a corrupt moron, who then pisses of the military, who stage a coup with the power the generals get from all the morons who follow them, creating a military dictatorship.... and so on. This happens over and over again all over the world, from Cuba to Iraq to Indonesia to half the countries in Africa. Better educated people will make better decisions and stop electing lunatics.
"...only an idiot would deal with them without some way of escalating if they escalate."
Escalating doesn't do any good. All it does is waste money for both sides. The United states built up a 3 trillion dollar national debt because Ronald Reagan was convinced that America needed to be able to wipe out the entire surface of the earth several times over just because the CCCP could. In the end it was just a pissing contest, because there was never any plan to use any of those weapons, which are now just a source of dangerous toxic waste. When the Soviets kept up with us in turn, it essentially bankrupt and destabilized the whole nation, causing it to collapse into numerous smaller states and a horribly managed big one.
"War - What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHING!"
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
"We ought to put NASA under the DoD and give it a similar budget - afterall, this IS about defense - it is defense against mother nature."
Given all the money we blow on missile defense systems that don't work (And by the time they do, we could have just applied all of that money/effort to world peace/unilateral nuclear disarmament.), and the extremely low chance of ever needing them, you are quite correct. If nothing else, asteroids would be far easier to blast out of space than missiles, given that most of the ones we really need to worry about are pretty damned big (Relatively, anyway.).