Heh.

I didn't hang out on Multiply at first. But once I did move over, I found it to be fine. In fact, I bought a premium membership, because I want them to succeed, and not have the pressure to sell out the way Facebook did.

Another vote for Multiply. I have found it to be pretty good, and really enjoy the company there.

Microsoft has a history of writing code to screw over customers of non-Microsoft products. It's a position you can take only if you are so big that fucking over a few small customers doesn't hurt you in the long run.

But some of us small customers still have long memories.

We just converted from Xiotech to NetApp, and the NetApp is crap. "High end" isn't how we would describe NetApp. And their sales people lied to us (er, said things that may technically be true but are about as honest as 'pigs CAN fly with sufficient initial velocity'). They also claimed that de-dupe would save us 50% storage space. Lies.

It was a huge mistake. If it weren't for the political loss of face of having spent so much money, we would scrap it all and start over with any vendor other than NetApp.

A sixteen year ROI is never worth it. In fifteen years, the technology to replace it will be FAR advanced, and cheaper, and you will still have another year left to break even on this sucker.

The only saving grace to blowing this sort of money on a project, is that you are funding R&D for the company to develop it - assuming that the NEXT consumer gets a price break because the development has already been paid for. Otherwise, you are just lining the pockets of the Friends Of Bureaucrats.

I've used "Navigate to (name of store or gas station brand)" many times (probably more than a hundred, and I'm no road warrior). It is amazingly good at this three word task. Speaking home addresses is less successful, but that is partly because your average street address in another city is six terms, and pauses in speaking are interpreted as a 'finished' signal. With a person over the phone, the practice is to pause after the street, so the person digests it before you move on to the town. The machine wants to get on with it, and does.

I agree with you - it is nice to see the manufacturer design it in (and supposedly figure out how to extend the design in a way that makes computing pervasive within the cabin). However, I would prefer some sort of docking station for my Droid / iPod. My Droid will soon be a MiFi, and is already a super GPS. And speech-to-SMS box. And car radio. And law-enforcement-style video recorder. And eventually, a Hulu streamer.

My point is that with a dock for a general purpose device, I could do far more, and, not be locked into a monthly fee for a service my general purpose device (will soon) already provide.

I need a dock that provides a charging station without clumsy cables, line of sight to the GPS, a place where I can see the on-screen map, provide aux-in to the stereo, and an unobstructed view out the front windshield, and cooling. If you want to route an HDMI cable to the back passenger media station(s), that's a good idea too.

I mention cooling because in GPS mode my device tends to run hot. It is doing a lot, so this makes sense. I don't think it needs refrigeration, per se, but a fan might be nice. It is probably overheating due to the car mount, which wraps around the box and traps heat.

That may be what he did; I don't know. In my old NetWare days, I disliked adding another disk spindle because it adds to the brittleness. But with a SAN, I suppose there is so much redundancy built in that the likelihood of failure is near zero.

We are putting in a new SAN now, and that sort of replication is supposed to be something we can do. However all I hear from the guys involved with the project is a lot of angst that we picked the wrong vendor. There have been a TON of "oh by the way"'s that make us want to reverse our decision to buy from them. Had they told us these things before we wrote the check, we never would have bought from them. We would probably junk the whole project and just start fresh next year if it weren't for the political fallout.

But as bad as it is, they do have command-line tools that you can use from an SSH session. Undercover. ;-)

Humor is pain, purposely inflicted, when everyone understands it's a joke. Obviously, there is an element of the recipients point of view. If everyone recognizes that the pain was not meant to be taken seriously, then the joke is funny. However, there are some personality types that enjoy inflicting pain and then try to pass it off as 'hey, I was just making a joke'.

So, not all "jokes" are funny. It is a question of whether the intent was hateful. Sorry I had not gotten that explanation to you earlier.

OK - you win. I'm completely convinced that GNNA style posts* are appropriate and normal for Slashdot. Congratulations, you've truly made Slashdot a better place with your behaviour and your defense of your behaviour.

*off-topic posts with the intent to ridicule.

I said that the .sig in question WAS POSTED to the thread, not that it is A POSTING to the thread.

This is a distinction without a difference. You read the .sig as a part of the entire thread. You lobbed in a comment about murder. Damn_registrars (and myself) thought WTF?

And the fact that it was posted to the thread is undeniable. It's a given. Everyone here accepts it as true.

You state unequivocally that "Everyone here accepts it as true." I don't accept it as true. I think a lot of people would refuse that as false.

It is normal to gloss over a person's .sig, because it is almost never relevant to the thread. Slashdot has a huge number of threads. Looks like the current message count is thirty two million plus. I would be willing to bet that less than 10,000 messages actually had meaningful content related to the user's .sig. Ignoring the .sig as content is normal. (because really, it is 99.9995% identity and 0.0005% applicable content to the posting of the moment).

But heck, I'll even defer to the community.

Care to put the question to a Slashdot poll?

Slashdot .sig contents:
* part of the thread
* identifying information outside the thread
* All your contents are belong to Cowboy Neal

Obviously, it is your site. I put the odds of you running such a poll at 1:15 against. If you lose, well... I'll just say that you seem to put a very high value on not losing. If you win, all you would get is an apology from me for stating that you should consider the .sig to be external to threads. That's an awful big "lose" for a minor "win".

And the fact that it was posted to the thread is undeniable. It's a given.

Really? The database record for message ID 32047104 has the text of damn_registrar's .sig in it? Do ANY of the database records that make up the thread have anyone's .sig them? Did damn_registrars have a checkbox next to "No Karma Bonus" that says "Don't attach .sig"?

Do you think people edit their profiles per thread to include or exclude their .sig from the thread? Do you think people change their profiles per thread to include a relevant .sig on every thread?

My point is that in the real practice of people posting to this site, the .sig isn't a choice per thread, nor is it in the message store as such.

I do disagree with you that attacks on a person due to the identity they choose are valid tangents to discourse.

It appears that you don't know the difference between a joke and a sneer. Do you want to know? I could explain it if you want, and weren't purposefully obstinate.