Deregulating the prices that power companies can charge us just left the door wide open for things like this to happen. Is it just me, or does it not make any sense for us to sell off our land and our resources to companies who just sell back what they're taking from what was originally our land? But that's not neccessarily the issue at hand. What we have here is a refusal to come to a common ground on both parts. And while I don't neccessarily agree with regulating in general (a free market tends to equal out things over time, innovations come about as a result of it), I also refuse to play privy to some CEO's fund-raising tea party.
Our society has brought about an economic structure where the end-user, who is inevitably the most valuable asset a company, -including- a power company, has. Without us, there is no one to sell their power to. And without them, there would be no readily resellable power. Things work both ways, but they need to be balanced well in order for them to work smoothly.
On one hand people scream for environmental friendliness, which is, in fact, an important issue. They whine about building dams, but they want to be able to run as many lights and computers as they can get their hands on. They don't want us to build more nuclear power plants for fear of radiation and cancerous mutations, but they are perfectly content to chat away on their cellular telephones for hours and hours. I just don't understand it, I live in California myself, and, unfortunately, things seem to be out of wack half the time.
And not to mention with our newest president-elect, George 'dubayah' Bush sitting in the white house, I honestly don't see gas or oil prices moving anywhere but up. Did anyone overlook the fact that he (and quite probably) his accomplices and cronies are all in the oil business with him? Now look at that and take a guess at where our oil prices are about to head.
We want electricity companies to lower the bills, and yet we refuse to come to a compromise on what can be done to seek alternative power supplies. Compromise is sorely in need, and it has to be on both ends.
Just a note, but that's for sure, not an E-450... an E-450 is a.) purple, grey and black and b.) quite a -bit- larger than a couple of breadboxen... that case in Enemy of the State is what holds an Ultra-10, or a few of the other Ultra series workstations...
Not to mention that it clocks in at just over 200 lbs =o)
Personally, I see this as a win for a company like Cobalt to be taken in by Sun. Cobalt has some wonderful products, and Sun has always been a leader in the industry. Besides, a company like Sun has a lot to offer to Cobalt, and this way, with any luck, the Qubes will continue living their cute, little, blue existance.
Even if it's a loss for the linux community, and sadly it may end up being since Sun is in the business of bolstering Solaris' market share, it's still good for Cobalt because you may just end up seeing a wider adoption of their products simply because of the "Sun stamp".
And we may even be wrong, they may continue things as they have been and continue to run linux, as a way for Sun to enter that market as well. (I'm using SGI as a potential reference here with their Intel-based hardware, and since my experience with Solaris x86 hasn't been wonderful...) But on either side of the fence, it's a good way for Sun to enter the small appliance market and for Cobalt's engineers to continue development of their hardware.
I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but SGI might as well create a new fork of the kernel. The advantage to the Open Source Model has always been the ability to create the right tool for the job.
Provided they aren't competing with the other kernel maintainers, then it doesn't seem like it would be much of a problem to let them do it their way provided they keep up with the new features in later kernel versions. Besides, the kernel that powers a Cray should have different / more / better options than that which supports a i3/4/586 simply because there are more complex and advanced features on the Cray.
As long as SGI keeps with the program and doesn't start adding all kinds of "closed source" mumbo jumbo in their version of the kernel, then all should be happy.
Anyway, thats my two cents..
Getting old in the information Industry
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
By the time you are age fifty, you will, most likely, have found other things that hold your interest in life. Even if you haven't found that certain something, you will have spent a lot more time in the field than the new kids on the block, and will probably be able to keep up on a lot of things in the industry if thats where you stay. In addition to finding something along the road, if you continue to work in the IT industry, you will probably (depending upon your investments and spending habits) have enough money to retire before you are 50 anyhow, in which case, it doesn't matter so much what you do.:) Just make sure you enjoy what you do, since 40 hours a week is probably close to half of your waking hours in that week;)
When will the world come to realize that there isn't always someone to blame for things going wrong... almost any event is affected by a thousand tiny things in the outside world, unless it is an extremely controlled test environment (and even then I'm sure there are external variables). I know thats a scary thought to most people, but life is like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Deregulating the prices that power companies can charge us just left the door wide open for things like this to happen. Is it just me, or does it not make any sense for us to sell off our land and our resources to companies who just sell back what they're taking from what was originally our land? But that's not neccessarily the issue at hand. What we have here is a refusal to come to a common ground on both parts. And while I don't neccessarily agree with regulating in general (a free market tends to equal out things over time, innovations come about as a result of it), I also refuse to play privy to some CEO's fund-raising tea party.
Our society has brought about an economic structure where the end-user, who is inevitably the most valuable asset a company, -including- a power company, has. Without us, there is no one to sell their power to. And without them, there would be no readily resellable power. Things work both ways, but they need to be balanced well in order for them to work smoothly.
On one hand people scream for environmental friendliness, which is, in fact, an important issue. They whine about building dams, but they want to be able to run as many lights and computers as they can get their hands on. They don't want us to build more nuclear power plants for fear of radiation and cancerous mutations, but they are perfectly content to chat away on their cellular telephones for hours and hours. I just don't understand it, I live in California myself, and, unfortunately, things seem to be out of wack half the time.
And not to mention with our newest president-elect, George 'dubayah' Bush sitting in the white house, I honestly don't see gas or oil prices moving anywhere but up. Did anyone overlook the fact that he (and quite probably) his accomplices and cronies are all in the oil business with him? Now look at that and take a guess at where our oil prices are about to head.
We want electricity companies to lower the bills, and yet we refuse to come to a compromise on what can be done to seek alternative power supplies. Compromise is sorely in need, and it has to be on both ends.
Just a note, but that's for sure, not an E-450... an E-450 is a.) purple, grey and black and b.) quite a -bit- larger than a couple of breadboxen ... that case in Enemy of the State is what holds an Ultra-10, or a few of the other Ultra series workstations...
/ enterprise-450.htm
Not to mention that it clocks in at just over 200 lbs =o)
Quick link: http://www.qassociates.co.uk/sun-products/servers
just FYI
Personally, I see this as a win for a company like Cobalt to be taken in by Sun. Cobalt has some wonderful products, and Sun has always been a leader in the industry. Besides, a company like Sun has a lot to offer to Cobalt, and this way, with any luck, the Qubes will continue living their cute, little, blue existance.
Even if it's a loss for the linux community, and sadly it may end up being since Sun is in the business of bolstering Solaris' market share, it's still good for Cobalt because you may just end up seeing a wider adoption of their products simply because of the "Sun stamp".
And we may even be wrong, they may continue things as they have been and continue to run linux, as a way for Sun to enter that market as well. (I'm using SGI as a potential reference here with their Intel-based hardware, and since my experience with Solaris x86 hasn't been wonderful...) But on either side of the fence, it's a good way for Sun to enter the small appliance market and for Cobalt's engineers to continue development of their hardware.
I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but SGI might as well create a new fork of the kernel. The advantage to the Open Source Model has always been the ability to create the right tool for the job.
Provided they aren't competing with the other kernel maintainers, then it doesn't seem like it would be much of a problem to let them do it their way provided they keep up with the new features in later kernel versions. Besides, the kernel that powers a Cray should have different / more / better options than that which supports a i3/4/586 simply because there are more complex and advanced features on the Cray.
As long as SGI keeps with the program and doesn't start adding all kinds of "closed source" mumbo jumbo in their version of the kernel, then all should be happy.
Anyway, thats my two cents..
By the time you are age fifty, you will, most likely, have found other things that hold your interest in life. Even if you haven't found that certain something, you will have spent a lot more time in the field than the new kids on the block, and will probably be able to keep up on a lot of things in the industry if thats where you stay. In addition to finding something along the road, if you continue to work in the IT industry, you will probably (depending upon your investments and spending habits) have enough money to retire before you are 50 anyhow, in which case, it doesn't matter so much what you do. :) Just make sure you enjoy what you do, since 40 hours a week is probably close to half of your waking hours in that week ;)
When will the world come to realize that there isn't always someone to blame for things going wrong... almost any event is affected by a thousand tiny things in the outside world, unless it is an extremely controlled test environment (and even then I'm sure there are external variables). I know thats a scary thought to most people, but life is like that.