...that the good folks at the NSA (and/or the FBI, CIA, DHS, ATF, etc., as well as their counterparts in other nations) have been exploiting this for years.
Ultimately, after a phone call to the CEO, I got service restored quickly. Evidently, during the problems, one of my hard drives developed a problem. I recovered the data from my RAID and everything seems to be getting back to normal now. So, in the end, theplanet.com came through for me.
I maintain two servers at this facility. One was down for a few days and then came back up; it then went down again after their generator failed, but now it is back up again. The second server has been down since last Saturday. Theplanet.com refuses-- absolutely REFUSES-- to give the slightest amount of specific information on the status of this second server. They won't tell me why it's down but the other server is up. They won't give me an ETA for when it will come up. They won't tell me jack shit. I've submitted several trouble tickets, called at least three or four times, and talked to their techs via the chat feature on their website three or four times. They refuse to provide any specifics whatsoever. Meanwhile, I've not had access to my email for around five days now...
These assholes are just as customer-hostile as any other company. All they give you is nice-sounding bullshit like 'we are working on the problem as quickly as we can'; they refuse to give any specific information whatsoever. I'm starting to completely loathe these people.
I'm sick of people Slashvertising these devices. You cannot buy them. Quoted from their own goddamned page: "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers.". Period, full stop, end of sentence. You can't buy them. Maybe the company you work for can buy them... presumably, if they want to buy many of them. But you, the consumer, the individual geek hobbyist, can't buy one to mess around with.
Spot on. Seriously, guys, this sort of usability testing should have been done LONG ago. Linux is around 15 years old; GNU/Linux-based systems have been out there a LONG time, and these basic usability issues shoul dhave been solved aaaaaages ago.
Their 'for customers' page (here) clearly states: "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers."
In other words, this device is "available"... if you're a company rich enough to buy many of them. It's not "available" if you just want to buy one to play around with at home.
These companies refuse to sell directly to consumers, presumably because they don't want to maintain a consumer-facing customer-service department. However, this is small comfort to those of us geeks who don't need a customer-service department...
There's only one feature of our Solar System that's remotely interesting: Earth. Sure, the other planets are pretty, and may hold promise as sources for raw materials and-- much later-- targets for terraforming. But what makes our solar system "like ours" is Earth, period. The rest of the planets seem completely mundane.
When I read the headline, I was somewhat shocked-- "So they finally were able to resolve an exoplanet that was small, warm, rocky and bore the signature of water?" But no, it's Yet Another Exoplanet System With Big Gas Giants.
Yawn.
While this sort of thing may be of interest to the scientists and obsessive space fans who collect lists of exoplanets, as for me, wake me when they find an exo-Earth. I'm getting bored stiff of exo-Jupiters and exo-Saturns...
Srsly, folks. This is IBM we're talking about. They aren't foolish or desperate enough to give up complete control of one of the more useful features of an OS that they've already declined to open up. And MS is involved here... puh-lease. Not gonna happen. Give it up.
I looked into that stuff. It was so un-user-friendly as to be worthless. I can manage sendmail... this stuff is harder to use and more opaque than sendmail.
I've worked with Nuance's server product in the Dragon NaturallySpeaking line as a developer. Their API is confusing, their speech recognition SUCKS, and their software bugs out in bizarre ways. It's also slow as a dog, and advanced functionality (like recognizing from wav files, as opposed to from a live audio stream) is so poorly implemented as to seem bolted on.
And the worst part? Nuance has a virtual monopoly in realistically priced (read: "in a budget that a normal small-to-medium-sized business can afford") general-purpose speech recognition systems. If I recall correctly, they bought out Lernout and Hauspie's speech recognition products and IBM's old consumer-level speech-recognition stuff. So you can't take your business elsewhere; there is no "elsewhere".
This technology sounds wonderful. I'd absolutely adore batteries to last ten times longer than they do at present. It would be amazing... imagine 20 or 30 hours of 'real life' battery life on a laptop instead of 2-3 hours. However, I'm really getting tired of stories on Slashdot that basically can be summarised as "Scientists promise [amazing product] using [amazing technology]". Nanotech, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, micro-scale fission power plants, exotic materials... whatever. You know what? I'm sick of reading stories about theoretically possible things that might (but probably won't) make it into an actual product some time in the near future.
Slashdot ought to have a section for "navel-gazing scientific speculation". Seriously, this sort of "we can make [x] perform [10, 100, 1000...] times better!" bullshit belongs right alongside the "in [10, 20, 50] years, everyone will be in flying cars!" type of crap which has filled Scientific American for, well, forever.
It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).
The realm of 'wearable computing' seems particularly prone to vapourware. For example, check out this awesome device, which has been babbled about for years, and which you still can't buy in stores. And this PMP thing... well, you can't buy it in stores yet either.
Yawn. Wake me when it's available for immediate shipment, with an actual price tag.
Seriously, I'm sick and tired of Slashdot stories slashvertising gadgets that ARE NOT EVEN AVAILABLE YET and may, in fact, never be. Like this damned thing.
I take issue with the claim that investments in IT do not create a strategic advantage because when one company starts using a new technology, so will its competitors. Isn't the same true of, oh, business strategies? Humans are, after all, primates-- and, as they say, "monkey see, monkey do". Anyone who hasn't noticed that large companies tend to emulate each others' strategies isn't paying much attention. So is the C[EIF]O career path dead too? How about the janitorial career path? After all, every company's janitor cleans shit stains out of the toilet in the same exact ways... so should companies stop investing in janitors?
Finally, the REAL reason why just about every phone nowadays comes with a built-in GPS receiver...... so the phone can tell the carrier-- and thus the government-- where it is.......
And I say that as an Apple user. Seriously, I never in a kerjillion years would have expected this kind of patriotic drivel from an Apple employee. Our broken-ass patent system is "the best in the world"? Nothing's wrong with it? Hoo boy. Seriously, WTF?
I believe a different pricing scheme could net them billions more dollars & millions more users.
Wait, so you're trying to tell one of the richest corporations on the planet how to make money? Where's the (+1, Funny) moderation option when you need it?!;)
I hate MS as much as the next Slashdotter... but Jumpin' Jesus, if there's ONE thing they know, it's making money by the boatload!
I hate Microsoft. I hate them with a passion. I don't own a single Windows machine.
But OpenOffice.org is an absolute piece of shit compared to Microsoft Office.
Mind you, I use OO.o over Office-- because I'd feel filthy using Office. But I fucking hate the thing. It's bloated, poorly designed, and butt-ugly. Compatibility issues aside-- since I know quite well that reverse-engineering Microsoft's convoluted file formats is far from simple or easy-- OO.o is a crappy program, not the be-all, end-all of word processing that it's marketed as. As quirky as MS Office is, OO.o crosses the line from 'quirky' into 'crappy'.
Frankly, what do I think is the best office suite? Office 97 or 2000. Everything after that just went downhill.
But I digress.
Most of the time, when I have to edit a letter, or a resume, or something else vaguely simple, I just whip open TextEdit. OpenOffice is a bloated sack of crap, MS Office makes me feel like I need to take a bath, and the rest of the contenders for 'best office suite' crown are nonstarters.
When the only serious choices for office suite are 'bloated piece of crap' and 'creepy Microsoft Borgware', it's only due to my distaste for the latter that I use the former. And I avoid even that whenever possible.
Slashdot Mirror
...that the good folks at the NSA (and/or the FBI, CIA, DHS, ATF, etc., as well as their counterparts in other nations) have been exploiting this for years.
Ultimately, after a phone call to the CEO, I got service restored quickly. Evidently, during the problems, one of my hard drives developed a problem. I recovered the data from my RAID and everything seems to be getting back to normal now. So, in the end, theplanet.com came through for me.
I call bullshit.
I maintain two servers at this facility. One was down for a few days and then came back up; it then went down again after their generator failed, but now it is back up again. The second server has been down since last Saturday. Theplanet.com refuses-- absolutely REFUSES-- to give the slightest amount of specific information on the status of this second server. They won't tell me why it's down but the other server is up. They won't give me an ETA for when it will come up. They won't tell me jack shit. I've submitted several trouble tickets, called at least three or four times, and talked to their techs via the chat feature on their website three or four times. They refuse to provide any specifics whatsoever. Meanwhile, I've not had access to my email for around five days now...
These assholes are just as customer-hostile as any other company. All they give you is nice-sounding bullshit like 'we are working on the problem as quickly as we can'; they refuse to give any specific information whatsoever. I'm starting to completely loathe these people.
I'd love that. Do it. Then we'll talk.
That is highly non-trivial, and you know it. Begone, troll.
I'm sick of people Slashvertising these devices. You cannot buy them. Quoted from their own goddamned page: "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers.". Period, full stop, end of sentence. You can't buy them. Maybe the company you work for can buy them... presumably, if they want to buy many of them. But you, the consumer, the individual geek hobbyist, can't buy one to mess around with.
Spot on. Seriously, guys, this sort of usability testing should have been done LONG ago. Linux is around 15 years old; GNU/Linux-based systems have been out there a LONG time, and these basic usability issues shoul dhave been solved aaaaaages ago.
Their 'for customers' page (here) clearly states: "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers."
In other words, this device is "available"... if you're a company rich enough to buy many of them. It's not "available" if you just want to buy one to play around with at home.
This is like those nifty SSD devices which are also not being sold directly to consumers.
These companies refuse to sell directly to consumers, presumably because they don't want to maintain a consumer-facing customer-service department. However, this is small comfort to those of us geeks who don't need a customer-service department...
There's only one feature of our Solar System that's remotely interesting: Earth. Sure, the other planets are pretty, and may hold promise as sources for raw materials and-- much later-- targets for terraforming. But what makes our solar system "like ours" is Earth, period. The rest of the planets seem completely mundane.
When I read the headline, I was somewhat shocked-- "So they finally were able to resolve an exoplanet that was small, warm, rocky and bore the signature of water?" But no, it's Yet Another Exoplanet System With Big Gas Giants.
Yawn.
While this sort of thing may be of interest to the scientists and obsessive space fans who collect lists of exoplanets, as for me, wake me when they find an exo-Earth. I'm getting bored stiff of exo-Jupiters and exo-Saturns...
Or, in other words: GAS GIANTS ARE BORING.
Srsly, folks. This is IBM we're talking about. They aren't foolish or desperate enough to give up complete control of one of the more useful features of an OS that they've already declined to open up. And MS is involved here... puh-lease. Not gonna happen. Give it up.
I looked into that stuff. It was so un-user-friendly as to be worthless. I can manage sendmail... this stuff is harder to use and more opaque than sendmail.
I've worked with Nuance's server product in the Dragon NaturallySpeaking line as a developer. Their API is confusing, their speech recognition SUCKS, and their software bugs out in bizarre ways. It's also slow as a dog, and advanced functionality (like recognizing from wav files, as opposed to from a live audio stream) is so poorly implemented as to seem bolted on.
And the worst part? Nuance has a virtual monopoly in realistically priced (read: "in a budget that a normal small-to-medium-sized business can afford") general-purpose speech recognition systems. If I recall correctly, they bought out Lernout and Hauspie's speech recognition products and IBM's old consumer-level speech-recognition stuff. So you can't take your business elsewhere; there is no "elsewhere".
I loathe those guys.
This technology sounds wonderful. I'd absolutely adore batteries to last ten times longer than they do at present. It would be amazing... imagine 20 or 30 hours of 'real life' battery life on a laptop instead of 2-3 hours. However, I'm really getting tired of stories on Slashdot that basically can be summarised as "Scientists promise [amazing product] using [amazing technology]". Nanotech, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, micro-scale fission power plants, exotic materials... whatever. You know what? I'm sick of reading stories about theoretically possible things that might (but probably won't) make it into an actual product some time in the near future.
Slashdot ought to have a section for "navel-gazing scientific speculation". Seriously, this sort of "we can make [x] perform [10, 100, 1000...] times better!" bullshit belongs right alongside the "in [10, 20, 50] years, everyone will be in flying cars!" type of crap which has filled Scientific American for, well, forever.
It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).
So where's the "NotGonnaHappen" tag?
The realm of 'wearable computing' seems particularly prone to vapourware. For example, check out this awesome device, which has been babbled about for years, and which you still can't buy in stores. And this PMP thing... well, you can't buy it in stores yet either.
Yawn. Wake me when it's available for immediate shipment, with an actual price tag.
Seriously, I'm sick and tired of Slashdot stories slashvertising gadgets that ARE NOT EVEN AVAILABLE YET and may, in fact, never be. Like this damned thing.
I take issue with the claim that investments in IT do not create a strategic advantage because when one company starts using a new technology, so will its competitors. Isn't the same true of, oh, business strategies? Humans are, after all, primates-- and, as they say, "monkey see, monkey do". Anyone who hasn't noticed that large companies tend to emulate each others' strategies isn't paying much attention. So is the C[EIF]O career path dead too? How about the janitorial career path? After all, every company's janitor cleans shit stains out of the toilet in the same exact ways... so should companies stop investing in janitors?
Finally, the REAL reason why just about every phone nowadays comes with a built-in GPS receiver...... so the phone can tell the carrier-- and thus the government-- where it is.......
Has anyone ever noticed that the justice system in America seems to be tilted towards 'the bad guys' lately?
Jews don't generally suicide-bomb things. (Spoken as a Jew-- full disclosure)
And I say that as an Apple user. Seriously, I never in a kerjillion years would have expected this kind of patriotic drivel from an Apple employee. Our broken-ass patent system is "the best in the world"? Nothing's wrong with it? Hoo boy. Seriously, WTF?
I demand a Mac OS X port! And a Linux port! The FBI is being unfair! ;)
It's like a Mac, but minus all the cool!
*dodges Linux fanboys* Aieee!
Wait, so you're trying to tell one of the richest corporations on the planet how to make money? Where's the (+1, Funny) moderation option when you need it?!
I hate MS as much as the next Slashdotter... but Jumpin' Jesus, if there's ONE thing they know, it's making money by the boatload!
Uh, it's a British term. It means "drinking", not "peeing".
Not detecting any conservative bias here. Nope. Nope, not one bit.
I hate Microsoft. I hate them with a passion. I don't own a single Windows machine.
But OpenOffice.org is an absolute piece of shit compared to Microsoft Office.
Mind you, I use OO.o over Office-- because I'd feel filthy using Office. But I fucking hate the thing. It's bloated, poorly designed, and butt-ugly. Compatibility issues aside-- since I know quite well that reverse-engineering Microsoft's convoluted file formats is far from simple or easy-- OO.o is a crappy program, not the be-all, end-all of word processing that it's marketed as. As quirky as MS Office is, OO.o crosses the line from 'quirky' into 'crappy'.
Frankly, what do I think is the best office suite? Office 97 or 2000. Everything after that just went downhill.
But I digress.
Most of the time, when I have to edit a letter, or a resume, or something else vaguely simple, I just whip open TextEdit. OpenOffice is a bloated sack of crap, MS Office makes me feel like I need to take a bath, and the rest of the contenders for 'best office suite' crown are nonstarters.
When the only serious choices for office suite are 'bloated piece of crap' and 'creepy Microsoft Borgware', it's only due to my distaste for the latter that I use the former. And I avoid even that whenever possible.