Excuse me, but... where's the risk? Anything the OP wanted to do to "trash the system" could have been done before he handed his notice in.
Nobody said that instantly cutting off someone's
access to computer systems was a perfect way of
completely eliminating the risk. But, they are
doing what they can to minimize the risk.
Yes, if you knew you were going to lose access
at the moment when you informed them you were
resigning, then you could do the damage
beforehand. But you might not know that, so
you might choose to wait until what you expect
your last day would be. The point is, it
doesn't totally eliminate your opportunity,
but it does reduce your opportunity to do
something like that, so it has some value.
What he's probably dealing with is the feeling of rejection: if they could drop him on a days notice was he really needed? He'll just have to be honest with himself about that but he will just have to get over that himself.
Luckily for him, that'll probably be an easy thing
to deal with, because he resigned from a position as
a system administrator.
Chances are, he's going to get a phone call sometime
in the next few weeks asking him for some key piece
of knowledge they didn't even know they needed.
It may
even be something he explained to them numerous
times but they just ignored.
At which point, he can respond in one of three
ways, any of which
will soothe the pain of rejection quite
adequately:
Just give 'em the information. Knowing
they asked means you have the last laugh, so
why rub it in?
"I'm sorry, what company did you say you're
with? Hmm, no, as a matter of fact
that doesn't ring a bell at all.
And you're sure I worked there?
Recently, you say? Why, that's remarkable."
"Your e-mail address is still $foo, right?
Ah, OK, good. I'm sending you an e-mail
with my rate card right now."
If they don't want to be spidered, let them turn on the robots.txt. Sheesh! Since they can control what Google has for them in their search results, I fail to see how Google is responsible for that.
Besides, if you're selling content, don't you want people to know you have it? How are they supposed to know that they can buy it otherwise?
In other words, they are getting free advertising --
something most companies would
love to have -- but they
say they are unhappy about it.
They claim the reason they're unhappy about it
is that Google gets money as a result of giving
them free advertising. But that's not the real
reason. If their product were featured in
a positive way in a hit Hollywood movie at
no cost to them, they
wouldn't complain that the movie studio made
money off the movie. Nope, they'd be
absolutely thrilled.
So the reason they say they don't like it
is not the real reason. But what is the
real reason? The real reason they don't like it
is that
their competitors' products are also
getting free advertising, and some of their
competitors have lower prices. (Some give
it away for free.)
Their complaint is just an excuse, possibly
meant as a rallying cry to try to put the
genie back in the bottle by convincing other
news outlets that they're being shafted and
they need to withdraw stuff in order to kill
Google News. Either that or they realize
change is happening and they don't like it,
but they're too dumb to understand what's
going on, so they are just attacking Google
in hopes that that will make things better,
even though it's not rational.
So? RHEL is a support contract. I doubt Sun is handing out service contracts for free or even price matching RH.
Perhaps you should start comparing prices, then:
Sun Support
is available in three levels: Basic,
Standard, and Premium. The prices are $120/yr,
$240/yr, and $360/yr for a single processor-socket
system. $360/yr gets you unlimited live phone
support 24/7.
Meanwhile, Red Hat offers a wider variety of support plans,
including
separate workstation and server plans. The cheapest
server plan is $349/yr and the most expensive is
$2499/yr. You'd have to get the $2499 plan to get
24/7 phone support.
So, it would appear that Sun's support prices are
actually lower rather than beating Red Hat's.
In fact, for one of Sun's cheapest server systems,
you can get Platinum support for $2304 for three
years. Platinum
support includes both 24/7 software support and
24/7 two-hour response time on-site hardware
support.
That's cheaper then one year
of Red Hat's software-only 24/7 support.
Sun hardware is getting competitive, which is a good thing but 'dirt cheap'? Put down the crackpipe.
Again, compare prices:
You can buy a 1U, Opteron server system from
Sun for $745.00. It doesn't have a disk, but you can
add one for $150, bringing the price to $895.
Meanwhile, the cheapest rack mount server of
any kind you can get from Dell
will cost you $999. It does include a disk,
but its processor is a Celeron with 256K cache.
So, the Sun server may not be as cheap as building
a system out of spare parts lying around in your
basement, but it really is pretty cheap compared
to the competition in that space.
As others have pointed out, the reasoning in this
article is mostly wrong. More popular stuff should
cost less because of economies of scale, but
they're suggesting the opposite.
However, having said that, most mass-market music
is total crap, and most of the really good music
is not very popular. Yes, there are exceptions,
but on average this pricing scheme would probably
reduce the price of worthwhile stuff and increase
the price of the total crap "music"
that the marketing
machines spit out.
So, I'm all in favor of any system that raises
the price on crap and lowers the price on the
good stuff. I think they should go with this
recommendation.
Get a beter comforter. Even the machines in the maxtix knew the usefulness of body heat.
Actually, I have a reasonably good comforter (not
down or anything, but still reasonably warm),
and a thermal blanket, and a microfiber blanket.
But the great thing about the heated mattress pad
is that at night I can turn the central
heat almost completely OFF. Since the heated
mattress pad is rated to draw only about 70W
maximum, I don't really care if I leave it on
all night, since its presence means I can turn
off the central heat, which uses waaaay more
electricity, largely because it's heating the
entire apartment rather than just the bed.
... that it is possible to make a
heatedmattress pad
where you can't feel the wires under your body.
By the way, for those who aren't familiar, heated
mattress pads are a lot like electric blankets.
But, they can't be hogged by your MOTAS or
accidentally untucked (leaving your feet cold)
or kicked off. And they seem to do a
more thorough job of heating since warm air rises.
The wires aren't particularly annoying right now,
but if they could be made imperceptible, they'd
be virtually the ideal thing.
The open solaris license looks like a nice open source license but there seem to be some conflicts when you go to download Solaris 10 binary CDs or the DVD and must agree to additional licensing terms
Sun owns the copyright on the code for Solaris.
As the copyright holder, they can license it under
one license, or they can license it under multiple
different licenses. As a licensee (i.e. user),
you can choose which license you wish to license
it under.
Sun has, for many years, released Solaris under
a closed-source, binary-only license. That
is one way to get the code. When you
downloaded the CDs you downloaded, you choose
that license. Sun has the right (unlike anyone
else) to offer it on those licensing terms because
they own the copyright.
However, if you want, you are free to download
the source code and compile it yourself. In
that case, it would seem that none of those
restrictions would apply to you.
Honestly, I have to admit that using the same
boilerplate binary license that Sun has used
for years and years is not the most appropriate
thing for binaries that have been produced
from open source code. But the fact remains
that the license only covers the binaries and
does not restrict you from doing whatever you
like with binaries produced from the source
code.
And honestly, since in principle you could produce
basically those same binaries yourself, I can't
see how it would really restrict those either.
It just seems like a bit of an anachronistic
quirk. Maybe Sun needs to write a more
appropriate binary license (if any?) for
those files.
The license is deliberately GPL incompatible. So you can't use anything from opensolaris for any other project.
Because all other open source projects under
the planet are licensed under the GPL, presumably?
On the planet where I live, not all open source
projects are under the GPL.
Most significantly, it doesn't honor the most important freedom of Free software - independence from the vendor. If Sun decides to shut the playground gates tomorrow, that's it. If you've grown to depend on any of it, you're stuck inside.
Whose ass did you pull that idea out of?
The FAQ for the CDDL (the license under which OpenSolaris is released) says this:
Can Sun ever take away the OpenSolaris source code?
No. The code is available to the community forever.
Are you saying the FAQ misrepresents what the
license allows you to do? If so, could you
explain specifically how?
If they don't want to port it to architecture X (that you need to run it on), you can't fork it. Decision made.
You seem to have a wide assortment of
readily-available asses out of which to
pull "creative" new ideas. If it can't be
ported to another architecture, then why is
there already a
project to port it to
PowerPC?
Also, on what do you base the idea that you can't fork it?
You're forgetting that Mozilla is dual licensed under the MPL and GPL.
Nope, I'm not forgetting that. To be pedantic, they are working on
triply-licensing stuff under MPL, GPL, and LGPL. But why is that
relevant? BSD stuff isn't under the GPL. Are you saying it's bad to license code purely under the
BSD license? As far as I can tell, the CDDL is
more supportive of keeping the software
open since the CDDL requires changes to the
source to be publish (if the binaries are
published) but the BSD license does not.
In fact, if someone had their own source for a
new project that they
wanted to release and they were considering
either the CDDL or the BSD license, can you
make any kind of argument (other than
"the BSD license existed first") that the BSD
license isn't worse for maintaining
the principles of open source software than
the CDDL is?
And what about Apache? That's licensed under
the Apache License, and it says on apache.org
that "The Apache Software Foundation is still trying to determine if this version [the current version] of the Apache License is compatible with the GPL."
And what about PHP? It's not licensed under the
GPL either. It uses the PHP License. php.net
has an FAQ that says:
Why is PHP 4 not dual-licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) like PHP 3 was?
GPL enforces many restrictions on what can and cannot be done with the licensed code.
I really can't see what is wrong with the CDDL.
In the end, the only real problem I see
with OpenSolaris
being truly open is the patent issue.
Unmodified files definitely have authorization
to use any Sun patents, but modified files might
or might not. This is not a problem with the
CDDL, but it might be a problem with the OpenSolaris
code base if you think Sun is going to sue
anyone for using patents in derived works.
The Sun ZX is what I referred to here as being dropped in two versions, my mistake.
We couldn't afford too many 24-bit video cards
back in the sun4m days, but from what I could
dig up on the net, it would appear that the
ZX frambuffer was first supported in a hardware
update to release 2.3. And support lasted
from then until 2.6. So that's 2.3, 2.4, 2.5,
2.5.1, and 2.6 that officially supported it.
That's 5 versions, not 2.
If it really was open as it was meant to be, they'd not play the same game with hardware and just "lose" code for the 32bit side as well as the hardware that those machines used. Sure you arent going to have an ss2 running Sol10, but I bet you could have an SS10, an SS5/170 (DVMA bug could be fixed, the *right* way), or a quad Ross 200(which could make a run for the minimally supported Ultra2) run those with some decent framebuffers and a lot of other useful hardware.
...
Even if the licensing is friendly, this is from the company that doesnt mind dropping hardware support in 2 versions.
Dropping support after two versions? If I recall
correctly, a SPARCstation 10 can run SunOS 4.1.3,
SunOS 4.1.3_U1, SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 7, 8, and 9. It may very
well also be able to run Solaris 2.0 through 2.2,
since it was the new hotness right around the
time they were releasing Solaris 2.
So that's
11 versions it can run for sure, and 3 others
it's quite likely to be able to run.
As for the SPARCstation 20, the support is not as
wide, but it can run SunOS 4.1.4 and I'm fairly
sure 4.1.3_U1 as well. It may require
Solaris 2.5 or newer, and possibly hardware update
versions of 2.5 (especially for those 200 MHz
Ross CPU modules) but it is also supported all the
way from 2.5 up through 2.5.1, 2.6, 7, 8, and up
to 9. So, that's 6 or 7 versions.
The story for the SPARCstation 5 is similar. I
never tried the 170 MHz version, but I had 110 MHz
version on my desk 8 years ago running Solaris 2.5,
and it's supported all the way up through Solaris 9
as well. I'm fairly sure some Sparc 5 systems
can run SunOS 4.1.4, although it's been so long
I can't recall.
So yeah, none of these systems can run Solaris 10,
but they are all also machines that were introduced
over 10 years ago. It would be nice if Sun had
released the source for versions older than
Solaris 10, but it seems to have been a fairly big
hassle to go over the lineage of all that code
and ensure they really had rights to open source
100% of what they did, so I don't blame them for
only wanting to go through that process on a single
version.
There are companies that truly believe in open source and its philosophy and there are companies like sun. This is a hail-marry effort to stop their impending demise. Their market share has been dwindling for years and it's starting to tank even more, especially with the linux options
I can see where you're coming from, and honestly,
it feels a bit like that to me as well. Sun didn't
make their fortune on open source (although they
have been involved with open software and open
standards for quite some time), so I suspect the
attitude towards it is mixed.
In fact, I recently went to an OpenSolaris users'
group meeting at my local Sun facility, and one
of the Sun people did mention that open sourcing
Solaris was kind of a hard sell with the
management, but that the "a rising tide benefits
us all" argument did eventually win out. So, are
they true believers? Undoubtedly, many Sun
employees are, and surely some are skeptical.
But even if 100% of them aren't behind it, you
have to give them credit for being willing
to try new things.
Now, on to the question of whether this is a
Hail Mary. My own opinion is that if it were
just this one thing in isolation, that wouldn't
be a good sign. But, over the last year, Sun
has done lots of things that kick ass. Solaris
10 kicks ass. ZFS, which they've just released,
kicks ass[1]. (As the ZFS slides say, "ZFS
Objective: End the Suffering", and that refers
to the tedium of storage management on ALL
platforms.)
Sun is already working on projects
and starting new projects to
address
shortcomings with Solaris on the
desktop. Though they of course support gcc, the newest version of their own
proprietary compiler (and dev environment), Sun Studio 11, is now free as in beer. And it's
available for both Solaris and Linux, and pretty
clearly generates better code on SPARC and is
pretty competitive on x86.
Some of their new Opteron hardware
is quite cool and cost competitive with similar
Dell systems[2]. And they also have their 8-core,
4-simultaneous-hardware-thread Niagara chips.
The point is, like in years past, it can once
again be said that Sun is doing cool stuff.
So if you want to go with the
football analogies, it could be a Hail Mary,
or it could be that halftime has just ended,
Sun has just studied the films to see what
they need to adjust, and they're back on the
field and ready to make something happen.
[2] In fact, compare the cheapest
1U Dell server with the cheapest 1U Sun server.
The Dell has a Celeron with 256KB cache
in a
server (!!!),
and the Sun has an Opteron with 1MB cache.
And the Sun is
$745, whereas the Dell is $999.
The only negative with
the Sun is that it has no disk, but that
option is $150, leaving it at $895, still
over $100 cheaper than the Dell. Oh yeah,
and the Sun hardware is qualified to run
RHEL, SUSE Linux, Solaris 10, or Windows.
The sooner religious types retreat back to the big bang and say that God did that and set everything else in motion, the sooner they can stop being humiliated by science at every step of the way on this inevitable course. The less publically humiliated they are, the more gullible people they can recruit.
Neither seems to be very popular anymore, though.
One possible reason is that the idea that God no
longer intervenes in the Universe is not very
satisfying, or at least not very comforting,
and therefore not very appealing as a belief.
whats so good about blackberry when you have generic mobile devices which can access email though a browser and supports most trivial tasks you already do on a desktop...
The Blackberry is a single-purpose device and as
such is cheaper. Sure, I can play MP3s on a
Palm device, but if all I want to do is
play MP3s, then an MP3 player is cheaper, does
the job, and is probably simpler to use precisely
because it does less.
Also, precisely because the Blackberry is
simple and cheap and not general purpose, it is
more widely supported by mobile carriers.
Mobile carriers are specifically not set up to
handle support of a general-purpose computing
device, and they don't want to be in that business.
For example, mobile carriers will sell you a Java
game for your phone, but they don't provide you
any way to back up the software, to reinstall it
if you wipe the memory, or to transfer software
to a new phone when you upgrade. Meanwhile, with
a PDA, you can buy software, back it up, back
up the data it manages, transfer it to your new
PDA when you upgrade, call or e-mail for support
when it's broken, etc.
In effect, all computing
you do on a cell phone is disposable
computing,
meaning that the software and its data is not
considered to have real long-term value. It's
also channel-oriented, in that the cell phone
company owns the distribution channel, and they
don't want you running arbitrary software on
the device because they don't want to support it.
And the software they do distribute through
their channel is carefully qualified so that it
generates an absolute minimum of support calls.
(Some Palm OS developers have told me that if
you try to sell your software to e.g. Palm
Treo phone
users through a wireless carrier, the wireless
carrier will come back to you with a list of
10 or 20 bugs that you never even suspected
the existence of
despite having written every line of code
yourself.)
So the bottom line is, the answer is that
the Blackberry is successful because it fits
in well with the wireless carriers' way of
dealing with computing devices. What benefit
this has to the end user is questionable
(except maybe that you can get the device
for cheap because of economies of scale
and deals that carriers and the phone
manufacturers make), but it does make the
Blackberry a great product for RIM.
Look, it's simple. The only thing science and religion have in common with each other is that they're both methods people use to try to make sense of the world around us. Period, full stop, end of the matter.
Science holds most dear that which can be objectively, repeatedly, independently verified. Religion, on the other hand...religion is nothing without faith.
And a person with faith is one who makes conclusions about that which he has concluded is inconclusive, has knowledge about that which she knows is unknowable. Faith is not ``willful ignorance,'' but rather ``willful insanity'' or ``willful idiocy.'' Faith is a thing deserving not praise and respect, but pity and scorn.
This kind of attitude is exactly why we have wars
and other similar bullshit. What really deserves
pity and scorn is the willful ignorance of
how others think, the refusal to try to
put yourself in others' shoes, and the attitude
that your views are right
whereas
others' are
dumb.
To wit, you seem like a vaguely intelligent person,
but you have grossly misapprehended what faith
is about, possibly on purpose or possibly just
because you've been given bad information and
haven't made the effort to dig deeper.
Yes, there are some people who practice
faith the way you described it, just as there
are people who think
computer programming consists of copying code
out of books and then posting their compiler's
error messages to Usenet with the subject
"Urgent problem!! Please help!!!". But that
does not mean that faith (or programming) is
as simple as that.
As near as I can tell, you are claiming that
faith means intentionally believing arbitrary
things without any basis whatsoever. I don't
think most people who claim to have faith would
agree with that definition. It's a matter of
there being more than one kind of basis for
belief. You may only be comfortable with
rational, logical reasoning as a basis for
belief, but that does not mean faith doesn't
have any basis; instead, it has a different
kind of basis: divine revelation.
Now, naturally if you take it as a given that
there is no such thing as the divine, then
that kind of a basis for belief would be
an invalid
basis. But, whether there is such a thing as
the divine is a disputed point.
Much more to the point, people often take it
as axiomatic that there is a divine element
or that there is not. Different sets of
axioms lead to different sets of conclusions.
Naturally, it's not good reasoning to say that
someone who doesn't share your axioms is
insane or idiotic because they haven't come to
your conclusions. The best way to evaluate
it is to consider their axioms and see
if their beliefs are reasonable and consistent
given those axioms. (For example, if a person's
axioms include that there is -- or might be --
a divine element, then is it reasonable for them
to allow that divine revelation might be a valid
basis for belief? I think so.)
Unfortunately, this kind of evaluation rarely
happens as it should. Just as empiricists often
mock faith because they claim it avoids the
plain facts,
religious people often mock empiricism because
they see it as a way of willfully avoiding
what the
divine element is trying to communicate
through revelation.
The ultimate question is which set of axioms
is correct. But that's a philosophical
question that has been debated for thousands
of years, and neither of us is likely to
produce an argument that will settle the
issue.
Having said all that, I do agree that it's
dumb to equate science and religion. They
are very different from each other, and
equating them is at best a gross
oversimplification. On the other hand,
in my opinion
it would not be reasonable for public
schools to promote one as valid and
the other as invalid. That would mean
taking sides on an open
philosophical/religious
issue and asserting one point of view
as truth, which is (in my opinion)
specifically what the government
is not
Free WiFi while significant portions of their population are still displaced and / or homeless.
Perhaps their priorities are a bit backward?
If the only goal is economic development, then
yes, this is kind of a waste of money. Yes,
if all the major stuff is taken care of,
people would enjoy a perk like this, but it
should be way down on the to-do list.
On the other hand, if you view this as a tool
that can help in the reconstruction process,
then it could be immensely valuable. A month
or so ago, I read in the newspaper that there
was a lot of contract work clearing
debris and doing construction and repair
getting businesses open again, and that all
these people looking for jobs and looking to
hire people were doing it all over CB radio.
The point being, it seems like in a chaotic
situation like this, web sites and other
internet services could be an
awesome tool to let people coordinate
and communicate about
things. Job boards, discussion
boards for people dealing with common issues,
ordering stuff online from Home Depot, etc.
craigslist.com and nola.com are already playing
that role, as are many others. With wireless
access, anyone who is part of the reconstruction
effort can get a laptop and a car charger and
access all this stuff from large parts of the
city. That seems valuable.
Ever wondered why meeting people is easier when tipsy? It makes your brain shut up.
If you can make that statement, it's apparent your
brain and mine don't work exactly alike. When I
drink enough to get tipsy, all it does is make me
less aware of my surroundings. My brain is still
racing at 90 miles an hour. In fact, to get it
to "shut up", usually I need to have quite
a lot of alcohol. It's hard to meet people when
you're so drunk you can't stand up.
I work as a government electronics contractor onboard U.S. Navy ships....some of the smaller ones have a similar urinal installed. It just collects urine until a certain amount has been collected (about 2 pisses or one really long one) and a level switch trips a vacuum suction device that sucks it away.
Well then, it's not all that similar then, because
the one described in the summary has a "floating
layer of oily liquid". It sounds like the US Navy
ships' urinals that you're describing let the
urine sit there in contact with the open air
for indefinite period of time, whereas in these
toilets, the oily liquid serves as a barrier
between the urine and the air. Presumably
this prevents certain volatile (meaning prone
to evaporation, as opposed to unpredictable)
chemicals from evaporating and smelling up
the place.
The point being, although they may be similar,
it seems like the oily liquid is a key
difference.
Let me firstly say that I like your show as entertainment. However, I do not like it as a form of true skepticism or as science. What you do is fun and interesting, but it is not rigorous. I'm thinking particularly of the time you tried to flip a taxi with a jet engine, which failed on your show, but which actually happened in real life. So it's not obvious that a failure on your show means anything.
I agree, and I wouldn't mind so much if they didn't
always sound so authoritative when they say a myth
is definitely busted. To give them some credit,
they are always so emphatic about it that the
emphatic part seems scripted. It's almost as if
the tech people know that their simple tests aren't
conclusive and would prefer to say that but someone
in production decided it makes better television
if they are very confident and enthusiastic
about their results every time and they never
say they're uncertain, even if they are.
Of course, you have to remember that it is a TV
show. Even if these guys want to give all the
technical details and the real scoop on what
the implications are of their research, there
is no way that the network actually is going
to allow them to go into "boring" stuff like
that. If you look at Discovery Channel and
TLC and all the other learning-oriented networks
(including some of the PBS stuff) honestly,
you'll see that it is a very shallow kind of
learning. Yes, you can pick up some real
information from these shows, but not very
much of it considering the time you spend.
Often, I think the goal of these network is
not for the viewer to learn something but for
the viewer to feel like they are
learning something. Because it feels good
to think you've learned something, even if
you haven't. (On the other hand, if you
actually do end up learning something, I don't
think the networks have a problem with that.)
A while ago there was some research into giant tinfoil equipped satellites which could redirect sunlight onto the earth during darkness. Applications included agricultural (think world's biggest hydroponic setup) and emergency situations requiring 24hr illumination.
I don't know what happened, however between this and Solar Power Satellites transmitting solar generated electricity to earth via microwave I wonder if the research has hurricane implications.
You know, putting those two together brings up
an interesting idea. One of the big negatives
of a Solar power satellite beaming power back
to earth via microwave is what happens if the
beam gets off course. (All of us who've played
Sim City know this can be disastrous.) But,
suppose we just combine those two ideas and
put the photovoltaics on the ground somewhere,
then reflect light on them via satellite.
Yes, you have to worry about clouds and such,
but it does have a few advantages.
First of
all, the dangerous beam of microwave is
eliminated. You are reflecting sunlight at
the Earth, but doubling the amount of sunlight
we already have is just about the worst case,
and that doesn't seem too disastrous. Second,
the satellites are much simpler and lighter
and cheaper and reliable, since all
they have to do is passively reflect sunlight
onto Earth rather than collecting it,
converting it, and transmitting it as
microwaves. And third, if the solar cells
are on the ground, they will receive light
naturally for a good part of the day, and
while they are getting natural light, the
satellite can service a solar cell farm on
the opposite side of the Earth where it's
dark. Then 12 hours later, that solar cell
farm is in natural light, and the satellite
switches to the one that's now in darkness.
I thought Professor Lucas had once and for all established that measuring midichlorian counts in the child's blood are the only true way to determine if said child is in fact a prodigy. Please see the Jedi archives for further reading on the subject.
I tried to, but I went to my local
Presbyterian
Church and they wouldn't give me access.
What am I doing wrong?
Re:Intelligence isn't everything. Not even close.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I know a lot of very smart people. Unfortunately, most of them will not amount to much. I mean, they'll be moderately successful, but they won't make the news or anything like that. Why? They have no ambition and no work ethic.
Unless your parents make you do LOTS of chores,
the vast majority of your work up until your
teens is learning. Your job is to learn, and
it is pretty much a full-time job.
If you are a really gifted kid, the learning
you're typically called on to do is easy.
Even trivial.
For example (not to toot my own horn), in
elementary school, I was recognized for academic
achievement at some kind of school-wide assembly.
The principal or whoever was presenting said
something like, "I bet you spend
a lot of time studying, don't you?". And I said,
"Not really." He got annoyed (I wasn't setting
a good example or he thought I was being flip),
but I was just telling the truth.
Anyway, the point is, if most of the "work"
you're called on to do for the first 15 years
of your life is trivially easy, then you
don't establish very good work habits. You have
no need to. Necessity is the mother of
invention, and the necessity doesn't exist.
So, in my mind, that is one reason why a gifted
kid program could be valuable: they can present
you with mental tasks that are difficult enough
that you do learn to work. With some
luck, you'll establish good habits.
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Nobody said that instantly cutting off someone's access to computer systems was a perfect way of completely eliminating the risk. But, they are doing what they can to minimize the risk.
Yes, if you knew you were going to lose access at the moment when you informed them you were resigning, then you could do the damage beforehand. But you might not know that, so you might choose to wait until what you expect your last day would be. The point is, it doesn't totally eliminate your opportunity, but it does reduce your opportunity to do something like that, so it has some value.
Luckily for him, that'll probably be an easy thing to deal with, because he resigned from a position as a system administrator.
Chances are, he's going to get a phone call sometime in the next few weeks asking him for some key piece of knowledge they didn't even know they needed. It may even be something he explained to them numerous times but they just ignored. At which point, he can respond in one of three ways, any of which will soothe the pain of rejection quite adequately:
In other words, they are getting free advertising -- something most companies would love to have -- but they say they are unhappy about it.
They claim the reason they're unhappy about it is that Google gets money as a result of giving them free advertising. But that's not the real reason. If their product were featured in a positive way in a hit Hollywood movie at no cost to them, they wouldn't complain that the movie studio made money off the movie. Nope, they'd be absolutely thrilled.
So the reason they say they don't like it is not the real reason. But what is the real reason? The real reason they don't like it is that their competitors' products are also getting free advertising, and some of their competitors have lower prices. (Some give it away for free.)
Their complaint is just an excuse, possibly meant as a rallying cry to try to put the genie back in the bottle by convincing other news outlets that they're being shafted and they need to withdraw stuff in order to kill Google News. Either that or they realize change is happening and they don't like it, but they're too dumb to understand what's going on, so they are just attacking Google in hopes that that will make things better, even though it's not rational.
Perhaps you should start comparing prices, then:
So, it would appear that Sun's support prices are actually lower rather than beating Red Hat's. In fact, for one of Sun's cheapest server systems, you can get Platinum support for $2304 for three years. Platinum support includes both 24/7 software support and 24/7 two-hour response time on-site hardware support. That's cheaper then one year of Red Hat's software-only 24/7 support.
Again, compare prices:
So, the Sun server may not be as cheap as building a system out of spare parts lying around in your basement, but it really is pretty cheap compared to the competition in that space.
As others have pointed out, the reasoning in this article is mostly wrong. More popular stuff should cost less because of economies of scale, but they're suggesting the opposite.
However, having said that, most mass-market music is total crap, and most of the really good music is not very popular. Yes, there are exceptions, but on average this pricing scheme would probably reduce the price of worthwhile stuff and increase the price of the total crap "music" that the marketing machines spit out.
So, I'm all in favor of any system that raises the price on crap and lowers the price on the good stuff. I think they should go with this recommendation.
Actually, I have a reasonably good comforter (not down or anything, but still reasonably warm), and a thermal blanket, and a microfiber blanket. But the great thing about the heated mattress pad is that at night I can turn the central heat almost completely OFF. Since the heated mattress pad is rated to draw only about 70W maximum, I don't really care if I leave it on all night, since its presence means I can turn off the central heat, which uses waaaay more electricity, largely because it's heating the entire apartment rather than just the bed.
By the way, for those who aren't familiar, heated mattress pads are a lot like electric blankets. But, they can't be hogged by your MOTAS or accidentally untucked (leaving your feet cold) or kicked off. And they seem to do a more thorough job of heating since warm air rises. The wires aren't particularly annoying right now, but if they could be made imperceptible, they'd be virtually the ideal thing.
Sun owns the copyright on the code for Solaris. As the copyright holder, they can license it under one license, or they can license it under multiple different licenses. As a licensee (i.e. user), you can choose which license you wish to license it under.
Sun has, for many years, released Solaris under a closed-source, binary-only license. That is one way to get the code. When you downloaded the CDs you downloaded, you choose that license. Sun has the right (unlike anyone else) to offer it on those licensing terms because they own the copyright.
However, if you want, you are free to download the source code and compile it yourself. In that case, it would seem that none of those restrictions would apply to you.
Honestly, I have to admit that using the same boilerplate binary license that Sun has used for years and years is not the most appropriate thing for binaries that have been produced from open source code. But the fact remains that the license only covers the binaries and does not restrict you from doing whatever you like with binaries produced from the source code.
And honestly, since in principle you could produce basically those same binaries yourself, I can't see how it would really restrict those either. It just seems like a bit of an anachronistic quirk. Maybe Sun needs to write a more appropriate binary license (if any?) for those files.
Because all other open source projects under the planet are licensed under the GPL, presumably? On the planet where I live, not all open source projects are under the GPL.
Whose ass did you pull that idea out of? The FAQ for the CDDL (the license under which OpenSolaris is released) says this:
Are you saying the FAQ misrepresents what the license allows you to do? If so, could you explain specifically how?
You seem to have a wide assortment of readily-available asses out of which to pull "creative" new ideas. If it can't be ported to another architecture, then why is there already a project to port it to PowerPC?
Also, on what do you base the idea that you can't fork it?
Nope, I'm not forgetting that. To be pedantic, they are working on triply-licensing stuff under MPL, GPL, and LGPL. But why is that relevant? BSD stuff isn't under the GPL. Are you saying it's bad to license code purely under the BSD license? As far as I can tell, the CDDL is more supportive of keeping the software open since the CDDL requires changes to the source to be publish (if the binaries are published) but the BSD license does not.
In fact, if someone had their own source for a new project that they wanted to release and they were considering either the CDDL or the BSD license, can you make any kind of argument (other than "the BSD license existed first") that the BSD license isn't worse for maintaining the principles of open source software than the CDDL is?
And what about Apache? That's licensed under the Apache License, and it says on apache.org that "The Apache Software Foundation is still trying to determine if this version [the current version] of the Apache License is compatible with the GPL."
And what about PHP? It's not licensed under the GPL either. It uses the PHP License. php.net has an FAQ that says:
I really can't see what is wrong with the CDDL. In the end, the only real problem I see with OpenSolaris being truly open is the patent issue. Unmodified files definitely have authorization to use any Sun patents, but modified files might or might not. This is not a problem with the CDDL, but it might be a problem with the OpenSolaris code base if you think Sun is going to sue anyone for using patents in derived works.
We couldn't afford too many 24-bit video cards back in the sun4m days, but from what I could dig up on the net, it would appear that the ZX frambuffer was first supported in a hardware update to release 2.3. And support lasted from then until 2.6. So that's 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.5.1, and 2.6 that officially supported it. That's 5 versions, not 2.
Dropping support after two versions? If I recall correctly, a SPARCstation 10 can run SunOS 4.1.3, SunOS 4.1.3_U1, SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 7, 8, and 9. It may very well also be able to run Solaris 2.0 through 2.2, since it was the new hotness right around the time they were releasing Solaris 2. So that's 11 versions it can run for sure, and 3 others it's quite likely to be able to run.
As for the SPARCstation 20, the support is not as wide, but it can run SunOS 4.1.4 and I'm fairly sure 4.1.3_U1 as well. It may require Solaris 2.5 or newer, and possibly hardware update versions of 2.5 (especially for those 200 MHz Ross CPU modules) but it is also supported all the way from 2.5 up through 2.5.1, 2.6, 7, 8, and up to 9. So, that's 6 or 7 versions.
The story for the SPARCstation 5 is similar. I never tried the 170 MHz version, but I had 110 MHz version on my desk 8 years ago running Solaris 2.5, and it's supported all the way up through Solaris 9 as well. I'm fairly sure some Sparc 5 systems can run SunOS 4.1.4, although it's been so long I can't recall.
So yeah, none of these systems can run Solaris 10, but they are all also machines that were introduced over 10 years ago. It would be nice if Sun had released the source for versions older than Solaris 10, but it seems to have been a fairly big hassle to go over the lineage of all that code and ensure they really had rights to open source 100% of what they did, so I don't blame them for only wanting to go through that process on a single version.
I can see where you're coming from, and honestly, it feels a bit like that to me as well. Sun didn't make their fortune on open source (although they have been involved with open software and open standards for quite some time), so I suspect the attitude towards it is mixed.
In fact, I recently went to an OpenSolaris users' group meeting at my local Sun facility, and one of the Sun people did mention that open sourcing Solaris was kind of a hard sell with the management, but that the "a rising tide benefits us all" argument did eventually win out. So, are they true believers? Undoubtedly, many Sun employees are, and surely some are skeptical. But even if 100% of them aren't behind it, you have to give them credit for being willing to try new things.
Now, on to the question of whether this is a Hail Mary. My own opinion is that if it were just this one thing in isolation, that wouldn't be a good sign. But, over the last year, Sun has done lots of things that kick ass. Solaris 10 kicks ass. ZFS, which they've just released, kicks ass[1]. (As the ZFS slides say, "ZFS Objective: End the Suffering", and that refers to the tedium of storage management on ALL platforms.) Sun is already working on projects and starting new projects to address shortcomings with Solaris on the desktop. Though they of course support gcc, the newest version of their own proprietary compiler (and dev environment), Sun Studio 11, is now free as in beer. And it's available for both Solaris and Linux, and pretty clearly generates better code on SPARC and is pretty competitive on x86.
Some of their new Opteron hardware is quite cool and cost competitive with similar Dell systems[2]. And they also have their 8-core, 4-simultaneous-hardware-thread Niagara chips.
The point is, like in years past, it can once again be said that Sun is doing cool stuff. So if you want to go with the football analogies, it could be a Hail Mary, or it could be that halftime has just ended, Sun has just studied the films to see what they need to adjust, and they're back on the field and ready to make something happen.
[1] Check out the (PDF) slides about it, or either of the two demos, or some of the other documentation.
[2] In fact, compare the cheapest 1U Dell server with the cheapest 1U Sun server. The Dell has a Celeron with 256KB cache in a server (!!!), and the Sun has an Opteron with 1MB cache. And the Sun is $745, whereas the Dell is $999. The only negative with the Sun is that it has no disk, but that option is $150, leaving it at $895, still over $100 cheaper than the Dell. Oh yeah, and the Sun hardware is qualified to run RHEL, SUSE Linux, Solaris 10, or Windows.
Looks pretty open to me. I can browse the source online or I can go download it.
And it's all under a license which is quite similar to the Mozilla Public License.
If you think this is "not very" open, could you be more specific about why and how?
Congratulations on having just reinvented Deism or at least the Clockmaker Hypothesis. :-)
Neither seems to be very popular anymore, though. One possible reason is that the idea that God no longer intervenes in the Universe is not very satisfying, or at least not very comforting, and therefore not very appealing as a belief.
The Blackberry is a single-purpose device and as such is cheaper. Sure, I can play MP3s on a Palm device, but if all I want to do is play MP3s, then an MP3 player is cheaper, does the job, and is probably simpler to use precisely because it does less.
Also, precisely because the Blackberry is simple and cheap and not general purpose, it is more widely supported by mobile carriers. Mobile carriers are specifically not set up to handle support of a general-purpose computing device, and they don't want to be in that business. For example, mobile carriers will sell you a Java game for your phone, but they don't provide you any way to back up the software, to reinstall it if you wipe the memory, or to transfer software to a new phone when you upgrade. Meanwhile, with a PDA, you can buy software, back it up, back up the data it manages, transfer it to your new PDA when you upgrade, call or e-mail for support when it's broken, etc.
In effect, all computing you do on a cell phone is disposable computing, meaning that the software and its data is not considered to have real long-term value. It's also channel-oriented, in that the cell phone company owns the distribution channel, and they don't want you running arbitrary software on the device because they don't want to support it. And the software they do distribute through their channel is carefully qualified so that it generates an absolute minimum of support calls. (Some Palm OS developers have told me that if you try to sell your software to e.g. Palm Treo phone users through a wireless carrier, the wireless carrier will come back to you with a list of 10 or 20 bugs that you never even suspected the existence of despite having written every line of code yourself.)
So the bottom line is, the answer is that the Blackberry is successful because it fits in well with the wireless carriers' way of dealing with computing devices. What benefit this has to the end user is questionable (except maybe that you can get the device for cheap because of economies of scale and deals that carriers and the phone manufacturers make), but it does make the Blackberry a great product for RIM.
This kind of attitude is exactly why we have wars and other similar bullshit. What really deserves pity and scorn is the willful ignorance of how others think, the refusal to try to put yourself in others' shoes, and the attitude that your views are right whereas others' are dumb.
To wit, you seem like a vaguely intelligent person, but you have grossly misapprehended what faith is about, possibly on purpose or possibly just because you've been given bad information and haven't made the effort to dig deeper. Yes, there are some people who practice faith the way you described it, just as there are people who think computer programming consists of copying code out of books and then posting their compiler's error messages to Usenet with the subject "Urgent problem!! Please help!!!". But that does not mean that faith (or programming) is as simple as that.
As near as I can tell, you are claiming that faith means intentionally believing arbitrary things without any basis whatsoever. I don't think most people who claim to have faith would agree with that definition. It's a matter of there being more than one kind of basis for belief. You may only be comfortable with rational, logical reasoning as a basis for belief, but that does not mean faith doesn't have any basis; instead, it has a different kind of basis: divine revelation.
Now, naturally if you take it as a given that there is no such thing as the divine, then that kind of a basis for belief would be an invalid basis. But, whether there is such a thing as the divine is a disputed point. Much more to the point, people often take it as axiomatic that there is a divine element or that there is not. Different sets of axioms lead to different sets of conclusions.
Naturally, it's not good reasoning to say that someone who doesn't share your axioms is insane or idiotic because they haven't come to your conclusions. The best way to evaluate it is to consider their axioms and see if their beliefs are reasonable and consistent given those axioms. (For example, if a person's axioms include that there is -- or might be -- a divine element, then is it reasonable for them to allow that divine revelation might be a valid basis for belief? I think so.) Unfortunately, this kind of evaluation rarely happens as it should. Just as empiricists often mock faith because they claim it avoids the plain facts, religious people often mock empiricism because they see it as a way of willfully avoiding what the divine element is trying to communicate through revelation.
The ultimate question is which set of axioms is correct. But that's a philosophical question that has been debated for thousands of years, and neither of us is likely to produce an argument that will settle the issue.
Having said all that, I do agree that it's dumb to equate science and religion. They are very different from each other, and equating them is at best a gross oversimplification. On the other hand, in my opinion it would not be reasonable for public schools to promote one as valid and the other as invalid. That would mean taking sides on an open philosophical/religious issue and asserting one point of view as truth, which is (in my opinion) specifically what the government is not
If the only goal is economic development, then yes, this is kind of a waste of money. Yes, if all the major stuff is taken care of, people would enjoy a perk like this, but it should be way down on the to-do list.
On the other hand, if you view this as a tool that can help in the reconstruction process, then it could be immensely valuable. A month or so ago, I read in the newspaper that there was a lot of contract work clearing debris and doing construction and repair getting businesses open again, and that all these people looking for jobs and looking to hire people were doing it all over CB radio.
The point being, it seems like in a chaotic situation like this, web sites and other internet services could be an awesome tool to let people coordinate and communicate about things. Job boards, discussion boards for people dealing with common issues, ordering stuff online from Home Depot, etc. craigslist.com and nola.com are already playing that role, as are many others. With wireless access, anyone who is part of the reconstruction effort can get a laptop and a car charger and access all this stuff from large parts of the city. That seems valuable.
If you can make that statement, it's apparent your brain and mine don't work exactly alike. When I drink enough to get tipsy, all it does is make me less aware of my surroundings. My brain is still racing at 90 miles an hour. In fact, to get it to "shut up", usually I need to have quite a lot of alcohol. It's hard to meet people when you're so drunk you can't stand up.
Well then, it's not all that similar then, because the one described in the summary has a "floating layer of oily liquid". It sounds like the US Navy ships' urinals that you're describing let the urine sit there in contact with the open air for indefinite period of time, whereas in these toilets, the oily liquid serves as a barrier between the urine and the air. Presumably this prevents certain volatile (meaning prone to evaporation, as opposed to unpredictable) chemicals from evaporating and smelling up the place.
The point being, although they may be similar, it seems like the oily liquid is a key difference.
Texas has also given us the integrated circuit, without which we wouldn't be discussing this right now...
I agree, and I wouldn't mind so much if they didn't always sound so authoritative when they say a myth is definitely busted. To give them some credit, they are always so emphatic about it that the emphatic part seems scripted. It's almost as if the tech people know that their simple tests aren't conclusive and would prefer to say that but someone in production decided it makes better television if they are very confident and enthusiastic about their results every time and they never say they're uncertain, even if they are.
Of course, you have to remember that it is a TV show. Even if these guys want to give all the technical details and the real scoop on what the implications are of their research, there is no way that the network actually is going to allow them to go into "boring" stuff like that. If you look at Discovery Channel and TLC and all the other learning-oriented networks (including some of the PBS stuff) honestly, you'll see that it is a very shallow kind of learning. Yes, you can pick up some real information from these shows, but not very much of it considering the time you spend. Often, I think the goal of these network is not for the viewer to learn something but for the viewer to feel like they are learning something. Because it feels good to think you've learned something, even if you haven't. (On the other hand, if you actually do end up learning something, I don't think the networks have a problem with that.)
You know, putting those two together brings up an interesting idea. One of the big negatives of a Solar power satellite beaming power back to earth via microwave is what happens if the beam gets off course. (All of us who've played Sim City know this can be disastrous.) But, suppose we just combine those two ideas and put the photovoltaics on the ground somewhere, then reflect light on them via satellite. Yes, you have to worry about clouds and such, but it does have a few advantages.
First of all, the dangerous beam of microwave is eliminated. You are reflecting sunlight at the Earth, but doubling the amount of sunlight we already have is just about the worst case, and that doesn't seem too disastrous. Second, the satellites are much simpler and lighter and cheaper and reliable, since all they have to do is passively reflect sunlight onto Earth rather than collecting it, converting it, and transmitting it as microwaves. And third, if the solar cells are on the ground, they will receive light naturally for a good part of the day, and while they are getting natural light, the satellite can service a solar cell farm on the opposite side of the Earth where it's dark. Then 12 hours later, that solar cell farm is in natural light, and the satellite switches to the one that's now in darkness.
I tried to, but I went to my local Presbyterian Church and they wouldn't give me access. What am I doing wrong?
Unless your parents make you do LOTS of chores, the vast majority of your work up until your teens is learning. Your job is to learn, and it is pretty much a full-time job. If you are a really gifted kid, the learning you're typically called on to do is easy. Even trivial.
For example (not to toot my own horn), in elementary school, I was recognized for academic achievement at some kind of school-wide assembly. The principal or whoever was presenting said something like, "I bet you spend a lot of time studying, don't you?". And I said, "Not really." He got annoyed (I wasn't setting a good example or he thought I was being flip), but I was just telling the truth.
Anyway, the point is, if most of the "work" you're called on to do for the first 15 years of your life is trivially easy, then you don't establish very good work habits. You have no need to. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity doesn't exist.
So, in my mind, that is one reason why a gifted kid program could be valuable: they can present you with mental tasks that are difficult enough that you do learn to work. With some luck, you'll establish good habits.
I, for one, welcome our new prodigiously intelligent overlords.