I'd be worried about some drunk kids riding in their cars as they're being parked (hell, I'm sober and I think it'd be pretty cool) and getting decapitated or something. Imagine the lawsuits coming from that one.
Oh, no need for something quite as dramatic as decapitation. The real problem is anyone riding in the vehicle - because how, then, would they get themselves OUT of the garage, especially if retrieval is through magnetic card system (so calling a friend to come retrieve your car wouldn't work). I'm assuming that a robotic car garage would be a fairly unfriendly place for someone to play obstacle course in....
.... yes, okay, the manager popped a fuse and started telling her what he actually thought. He could have and should have responded differently, but.... I guess I'm relating too much to the frazzled manager.
We spend a lot of time training people how to be good customer service agents, but little time training people how to be good customers. I'm willing to talk to anyone who can express their concerns, no matter how serious or dire, in language that isn't designed to target ME personally. If they can speak rationally and reasonably, then that's fine. I'm 100% positive that that wasn't the approach this woman followed. Instead, she went "locked-and-loaded" because she didn't understand the conditions of using this service, and fucked up. Her ignorance is now suddenly supposed to be of concern to a business.
[devil's advocate: of course, given how much time I'm sure this woman consumed and grief caused, it would have been easier if there was a way to do so to recover her files, allow her to transfer to a different service, and THEN cancel her account]
For operational managers of especially IT concerns, these sort of conversations are extremely damaging, and over years of such abuse, erode the necessary "service" muscle. Heat and pressure don't always make diamonds; sometimes they collapse bridges. Part of this is PHBs expecting their technically gifted system architects to somehow also be a smooth and urbane diplomat of the highest order. Yes, I think this is a little much to expect of technical resources (I don't know whether this guy was or wasn't, but it seems like he's no longer suited for the realities of his position).
Tell that to anyone who's been running an OS9-based G4, who then upgrades to the latest version of OSX.
I just did this on a friend's Dual 500MHz G4, taking it from OS9 to 10.4.8. This machine had as you mentioned, 256MB of RAM. My friend was very happy with the speed - 16MB VRAM in this guy, 1024x768, it worked fine, eyecandy included.
I think your statement WOULD have been true up until 10.4 - on that release, even my kids' old 400MHz G3 iMac DV was seeing an improvement over OS 9 (subjectively - life's too rich to muck about with benchmarks on 6-year-old machines).
With a great article title like "Linux 2.6.20-rc6 Kernel Performance", I figured there must be something really notable about this release - and yet, there isn't. Summary: some things a neglible amount faster, some a negligible amount slower. If the "firehose" feature I've seen is anything like a preview of how submitted articles are reviewed for publication, I'd say an important part of this process would be at least a review of the linked content to determine whether or not it satisfies any reasonable criteria of newsworthiness.
makes it really difficult for end-users to decide how to rank a message.
Nah. On the web, your default setting should be distrust, especially with unsolicited communication.
Which is in direct variance with the marketing spiel surrounding the PC industry. So easy! So fun! Get online and get hip! Safer! More secure! Trust us!
1) Too long to do initial install.
This one gives it away from the start. You only install once. But this is at the top of the list. I can't remember how long it took me to install Gentoo on this server, but it was probably 2 days or something. Who cares? That's what time I take installing *any* server. You don't just whack it together and put it into production. You install, you read, you test, you frig around some more. What's wrong with that? The author is no server administrator.
I suppose our perspectives are a little different. When I buy servers in quantities of 100, 2 days installation per server is not going to fly. In essence, we've boiled down 6 years of best-practice and configuration files into a set of kickstarts, config channel subscriptions, PXEBOOT, and locally generated RPMs. 2 days installation per server? Try 20 minutes for 100. RedHat Network and Satellite are the only reasons we really run RedHat - because it is central deployment and patch update for large batches of servers. We're by no means anywhere close to largest installation - 600 servers total, most of my datacenter neighbors are either much larger and universally known brand names, or much smaller startups- but we keep hopping and we serve about 500 million page turns and 13 billion SQL queries a month on our production load. I don't think Gentoo is likely the best tool for this scenario (managing large numbers of servers), though I'm sure enterprising Gentoo gurus could and have crafted solutions.
.... I think at the time, the title of "webmaster" seemed roughly analogous to the role of email "postmaster" - effectively, the admin of the web system. When it turned out that the job was really much more content delivery and publishing than "tuning the knobs" that the good postmaster did/does, that job went to better qualified persons for the changed role.
According to the linked article, the message isn't customizable by you at all - you simply have to give Mini USA typical marketing demographic info, sign up for their spam, and then THEY get to choose the message.
... that won't fit in most people's entryways (do YOU have a 48" wide door?).
A bit silly. Obviously, ways around it (garage, unbox on the street) - but... I thought most companies had this solved by at least making packages that were thinner on one axis than entryways....
... gotta figure that, overall, most accounts on iTunes have been around for a bit, and after one buys the music they're after - why would they keep buying? I've got the music I wanted, I haven't discovered anything compelling enough for me to shill out more.
Okay, patent application submitted 2000. I distinctly recall my human-computer interaction class in *1997* wherein one assignment was to create a phone interface. This was an undergraduate class, and the topic didn't seem all that revolutionary even then.
Not to detract from the importance of the issue of a free press - but I really don't understand what this has to do with "news for nerds". There are many venues of discussion in which this sort of conversation is apropos, but it's not what I envision slashdot being for.
When SGI released their O2, they specifically mentioned that it doesn't stand for anything , and even though the 2 was subscripted, had no relationship to any molecule of oxygen. I'm sure you can find many more stupid and senseless marketing redos, in logos, product names, etc. Marketing doesn't need reasons or facts.
In the case of the 360, perhaps you can argue that it's the "complete" gaming solution. yah, whatever. I wonder the same thing about Yahoo's 360. The link between 360 and the Revolution seems possible, too - which might have been why Nintendo changed the name to (the still incredibly weird) Wii.
* Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Sony Batteries.
* Caution: Sony Batteries may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
* Sony Batteries Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
* Do not use Sony Batteries on concrete.
Discontinue use of Sony Batteries if any of the following occurs:
* Itching
* Vertigo
* Dizziness
* Tingling in extremities
* Loss of balance or coordination
* Slurred speech
* Temporary blindness
* Profuse sweating
* Heart palpitations
If Sony Batteries begin to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
Sony Batteries may stick to certain types of skin.
When not in use, Sony Batteries should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration...
Failure to do so relieves the makers of Sony Batteries, Sony Corporation, of any and all liability.
Ingredients of Sony Batteries include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
Sony Batteries have been shipped to our troops in Afghanistan and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
Seriously. Many of his products seem to engender a love-hate relationship - either you really HATE the design, or you think it's amazingly cool. With such extremes, debate and dialogue is natural - and talking about a product is corporate PR nirvana, is it not? And here I'm going to do just that.
With the exception of the original iMac, I haven't been that wowed by Jonathan's minimalist approach - sometimes, because it seems he's shooting for minimal controls but not for minimal real estate. For example, consider the PowerBook 17" waste of keyboard space - why not tack on a numeric keypad and shift the speakers to left and right of the trackpad? Because it disturbs some sense of symmetry? I dunno....
Then the new iMac... ugh. That huge white space below the monitor (speakers???? anything???), and because of side placement of CD/DVD, inability of the unit to be placed within narrow enclosures... am I out-of-step here with the general design sensibilities of society? Do people genuinely love the iMac's design? If so - honestly, why?
It seems to me like Linux could be very healthy with second place, if market share approached 30% of its primary market - server space. That's enough penetration that it can't be ignored for interoperability.
We may be comparing different articles - the article I was looking at was the second linked in the OA. The first I ignored - it's on a site called OpEdNews, of course it's just someone's rhetoric. The second linked article is much more substantive, and is what I was defending. The only thing said by EPA deputy press secretary Jessica Edmonds in your Library Journal article was that a stated budget decrease of 80% that was being reported in some outlets was incorrect, and that they are defending the closures by indicating they are moving agency materials online. That doesn't strike me as being the same as EPA claiming "sensationalism."
#1: CSS, XML, (X)/HTML, ECMAscript (JavaScript), DOM. A good start. #2: Um... write better code. Code reviews. Smoketests. Purify. Seriously, that's what Computer Engineering's all about - writing robust and scalable code. #3: Native look-and-feel. Support for the drag-and-drop methods of their respective OS'. Support for their native text rendering and printing facilities. Adoption of that OS' accessibility functionality. #4: don't understand that question.
Much as I love MacOS X, Apple is clearly committed to a war on the desktop front, not the server space. For boring ol' mission-critical server apps, Linux is likely to keep its fingers in that particular pie for some time to come, wrestling with Windows.
Whoever marked the parent +5 informative, please have a hanker at the two articles referenced. CXI's article is very light. The PEER article outlines concerns primarily from the enforcement branch of the EPA. Of the two articles referenced, the PEER article articulates concerns presented by the very people who use the library. The Library Journal article CXI references indicates that the EPA is moving to enact budgetary proposals that have not been approved by Congress. While it is possible that Bush had nothing to do with this decision, he does appoint and presumably broadly direct the head of the EPA, Stephen Johnson.
While it appears to be true that an initiative to digitize and make available some documents (this will surely cost more than 2 million dollars in labor, storage costs, and network overhead related to retrieval and backup), it appears that only EPA-generated documentation will be available through interlibrary loan (I don't know how much of the library's content is EPA-generated documentation, and how much is third party documentation).
You are correct that not all libraries are closing. 10 out of 26 libraries are being closed, and other regional library services and hours are being reduced. These actions appear to be consistent with Bush's unwillingness to tighten environmental standards or actively seek prosecution of environmental polluters.
Please give me a fucking break. I am so tired of this attitude that unless you've got 5-goddamned tiers to your network, IDS, HDS, auditing every single packet that enters or leaves your network, keeping logs through perpetuity, or whatever "best practice" some shill came up with, you are conscripted to the incompetent bin of sysadmins.
How about you make your policy, and I'll make mine? Finite budgets require finite solutions.
I agree. We're really just talking about the transport layer, since the targets can be whatever kind of device the host supports and that the target unit makes available. So, AoE seems a little - redundant, I'd guess. The SCSI standard is well-defined, been around forever, so I'm not sure why a re-implementation using an ATA command set would make much sense.
Slashdot Mirror
.... yes, okay, the manager popped a fuse and started telling her what he actually thought. He could have and should have responded differently, but .... I guess I'm relating too much to the frazzled manager.
We spend a lot of time training people how to be good customer service agents, but little time training people how to be good customers. I'm willing to talk to anyone who can express their concerns, no matter how serious or dire, in language that isn't designed to target ME personally. If they can speak rationally and reasonably, then that's fine. I'm 100% positive that that wasn't the approach this woman followed. Instead, she went "locked-and-loaded" because she didn't understand the conditions of using this service, and fucked up. Her ignorance is now suddenly supposed to be of concern to a business.
[devil's advocate: of course, given how much time I'm sure this woman consumed and grief caused, it would have been easier if there was a way to do so to recover her files, allow her to transfer to a different service, and THEN cancel her account]
For operational managers of especially IT concerns, these sort of conversations are extremely damaging, and over years of such abuse, erode the necessary "service" muscle. Heat and pressure don't always make diamonds; sometimes they collapse bridges. Part of this is PHBs expecting their technically gifted system architects to somehow also be a smooth and urbane diplomat of the highest order. Yes, I think this is a little much to expect of technical resources (I don't know whether this guy was or wasn't, but it seems like he's no longer suited for the realities of his position).
sloth jr
I think your statement WOULD have been true up until 10.4 - on that release, even my kids' old 400MHz G3 iMac DV was seeing an improvement over OS 9 (subjectively - life's too rich to muck about with benchmarks on 6-year-old machines).
sloth jr
With a great article title like "Linux 2.6.20-rc6 Kernel Performance", I figured there must be something really notable about this release - and yet, there isn't. Summary: some things a neglible amount faster, some a negligible amount slower. If the "firehose" feature I've seen is anything like a preview of how submitted articles are reviewed for publication, I'd say an important part of this process would be at least a review of the linked content to determine whether or not it satisfies any reasonable criteria of newsworthiness.
sloth jr
.... I think at the time, the title of "webmaster" seemed roughly analogous to the role of email "postmaster" - effectively, the admin of the web system. When it turned out that the job was really much more content delivery and publishing than "tuning the knobs" that the good postmaster did/does, that job went to better qualified persons for the changed role.
sloth jr
According to the linked article, the message isn't customizable by you at all - you simply have to give Mini USA typical marketing demographic info, sign up for their spam, and then THEY get to choose the message.
Bleah.
... that won't fit in most people's entryways (do YOU have a 48" wide door?).
... I thought most companies had this solved by at least making packages that were thinner on one axis than entryways....
A bit silly. Obviously, ways around it (garage, unbox on the street) - but
... gotta figure that, overall, most accounts on iTunes have been around for a bit, and after one buys the music they're after - why would they keep buying? I've got the music I wanted, I haven't discovered anything compelling enough for me to shill out more.
Without getting all McLaughlin Group on you, http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes /ustax.shtml
Maximum tax in 1954 was 87% of income (this number is shockingly gross).
Reduced taxes would of course leave you more money. Being able to buy a car for $2000 certainly helped as well, or a new house for $18,000.
Okay, patent application submitted 2000. I distinctly recall my human-computer interaction class in *1997* wherein one assignment was to create a phone interface. This was an undergraduate class, and the topic didn't seem all that revolutionary even then.
Surely, a patent that deserves to be dismissed.
sloth jr
President Cheney....
Because Oracle commits tons of code to the mainline linux kernel, unlike RedHat....
/usr/src/linux /usr/src/linux
Oracle seems to support Oracle - like ocfs2, which so far as I can tell, is the only substantial Oracle contribution in mainline.
grep -r oracle.com
grep -r redhat.com
RedHat has invested in major contributors by putting them on staff. Oracle? Not so much.
Not to detract from the importance of the issue of a free press - but I really don't understand what this has to do with "news for nerds". There are many venues of discussion in which this sort of conversation is apropos, but it's not what I envision slashdot being for.
Stupid marketing doesn't need reasons.
When SGI released their O2, they specifically mentioned that it doesn't stand for anything , and even though the 2 was subscripted, had no relationship to any molecule of oxygen. I'm sure you can find many more stupid and senseless marketing redos, in logos, product names, etc. Marketing doesn't need reasons or facts.
In the case of the 360, perhaps you can argue that it's the "complete" gaming solution. yah, whatever. I wonder the same thing about Yahoo's 360. The link between 360 and the Revolution seems possible, too - which might have been why Nintendo changed the name to (the still incredibly weird) Wii.
sloth jr
* apologies to Happy Fun Ball/SNL
Sony Batteries
-only $14.95-
* Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Sony Batteries.
* Caution: Sony Batteries may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
* Sony Batteries Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
* Do not use Sony Batteries on concrete.
Discontinue use of Sony Batteries if any of the following occurs:
* Itching
* Vertigo
* Dizziness
* Tingling in extremities
* Loss of balance or coordination
* Slurred speech
* Temporary blindness
* Profuse sweating
* Heart palpitations
If Sony Batteries begin to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
Sony Batteries may stick to certain types of skin.
When not in use, Sony Batteries should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration...
Failure to do so relieves the makers of Sony Batteries, Sony Corporation, of any and all liability.
Ingredients of Sony Batteries include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
Sony Batteries have been shipped to our troops in Afghanistan and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
Do not taunt Sony Batteries.
Sony Batteries come with a lifetime guarantee.
Sony Batteries
ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!
Seriously. Many of his products seem to engender a love-hate relationship - either you really HATE the design, or you think it's amazingly cool. With such extremes, debate and dialogue is natural - and talking about a product is corporate PR nirvana, is it not? And here I'm going to do just that.
With the exception of the original iMac, I haven't been that wowed by Jonathan's minimalist approach - sometimes, because it seems he's shooting for minimal controls but not for minimal real estate. For example, consider the PowerBook 17" waste of keyboard space - why not tack on a numeric keypad and shift the speakers to left and right of the trackpad? Because it disturbs some sense of symmetry? I dunno....
Then the new iMac... ugh. That huge white space below the monitor (speakers???? anything???), and because of side placement of CD/DVD, inability of the unit to be placed within narrow enclosures... am I out-of-step here with the general design sensibilities of society? Do people genuinely love the iMac's design? If so - honestly, why?
sloth jr
It seems to me like Linux could be very healthy with second place, if market share approached 30% of its primary market - server space. That's enough penetration that it can't be ignored for interoperability.
We may be comparing different articles - the article I was looking at was the second linked in the OA. The first I ignored - it's on a site called OpEdNews, of course it's just someone's rhetoric. The second linked article is much more substantive, and is what I was defending. The only thing said by EPA deputy press secretary Jessica Edmonds in your Library Journal article was that a stated budget decrease of 80% that was being reported in some outlets was incorrect, and that they are defending the closures by indicating they are moving agency materials online. That doesn't strike me as being the same as EPA claiming "sensationalism."
#1: CSS, XML, (X)/HTML, ECMAscript (JavaScript), DOM. A good start.
#2: Um... write better code. Code reviews. Smoketests. Purify. Seriously, that's what Computer Engineering's all about - writing robust and scalable code.
#3: Native look-and-feel. Support for the drag-and-drop methods of their respective OS'. Support for their native text rendering and printing facilities. Adoption of that OS' accessibility functionality.
#4: don't understand that question.
sloth jr
Much as I love MacOS X, Apple is clearly committed to a war on the desktop front, not the server space. For boring ol' mission-critical server apps, Linux is likely to keep its fingers in that particular pie for some time to come, wrestling with Windows.
Whoever marked the parent +5 informative, please have a hanker at the two articles referenced. CXI's article is very light. The PEER article outlines concerns primarily from the enforcement branch of the EPA. Of the two articles referenced, the PEER article articulates
concerns presented by the very people who use the library. The Library Journal article CXI references indicates that the EPA is moving to enact budgetary proposals that have not been approved by Congress. While it is possible that Bush had nothing to do with this decision, he does appoint and presumably broadly direct the head of the EPA, Stephen Johnson.
While it appears to be true that an initiative to digitize and make available some documents (this will surely cost more than 2 million dollars in labor, storage costs, and network overhead related to retrieval and backup), it appears that only EPA-generated documentation will be available through interlibrary loan (I don't know how much of the library's content is EPA-generated documentation, and how much is third party documentation).
You are correct that not all libraries are closing. 10 out of 26 libraries are being closed, and other regional library services and hours are being reduced. These actions appear to be consistent with Bush's unwillingness to tighten environmental standards or actively seek prosecution of environmental polluters.
sloth jr
Please give me a fucking break. I am so tired of this attitude that unless you've got 5-goddamned tiers to your network, IDS, HDS, auditing every single packet that enters or leaves your network, keeping logs through perpetuity, or whatever "best practice" some shill came up with, you are conscripted to the incompetent bin of sysadmins.
How about you make your policy, and I'll make mine? Finite budgets require finite solutions.
I agree. We're really just talking about the transport layer, since the targets can be whatever kind of device the host supports and that the target unit makes available. So, AoE seems a little - redundant, I'd guess. The SCSI standard is well-defined, been around forever, so I'm not sure why a re-implementation using an ATA command set would make much sense.
sloth jr