I understand that you claim that a .sig is a posting to a thread. I disagree. A .sig is a part of a user's identity, just the same as the user ID is.

Just because your user ID is "pudge", does that open up the topic of fatso jokes? I think no, because the topic of discussion was the hypothetical situation required to get the northern states to secede from the union.

Your personal identity (the identifier you choose) is in fact personal, and attacks against it are personal. Personal attacks are (at best) off-topic, and at worst debase the attacker and victim.

Sneers based on identity, are 1) cruel, 2) stupid, 3) off-topic in the extreme. They would be personal attacks that only served an evil interest in inflicting pain.

What would that say about me? I think the answer would be horrifying to face.

The other part that makes a .sig "not a posting to this thread, but rather a part of personal identity" is that the .sig is fluid. I remember one time I was trying out a different .sig. A week earlier, I had managed a clever wrap-up that tied itself to my (previous) .sig. Went back to the thread, and my clever tie-in to liberty was completely dumb because the new .sig was a handy way to remember how to not mis-spell "definitely". One simple example of foolishness taught me to not consider the .sig as a part of the message. It is fluid and can change. Trying to tie a thread to a .sig is a mistake. Threads are un-alterable and (should) stick to the Subject. .sigs are alterable and (most all the time) apropos of nothing in the thread.

I do have sympathy to the frustration that builds when people pick on other people. I do see that people pick on you, a lot. Heck, I did it by pointing out that the murder tangent was off-topic.

But you don't help your status as someone-to-needle by insisting that you are irrefutably correct with every posting. That just invites more needling.

And it really doesn't help when you go off on a tangent about murder based on someone's chosen personal identity.

Next time you go to hit the Submit button on a reply, read the lines of text underneath "Important stuff". You violated the first two.

The proper place for personal attacks based on a person's .sig or username or email address is your personal JE. Trying to divert the topic of discussion to something off-topic doesn't give credence to you or your argument.

Which is more important? The discussion started under "Hypothetical" or the personal attack based on a participant's .sig?

I only visit /. about once every couple of weeks now, so I didn't read the story of Brandon until tonight. I do see that, in the public school system, boys being boys are deemed a failure. Certainly, the system will reap what it sows as it discourages boys from being happy.

The story about the teacher who was pushed beyond his limits was extremely sad. My youngest step-son went to prison for twelve years for crimes he did not do; but, at one point he was pushed beyond his limit of self-control, and that failure was spun into (so-called) evidence. (Boy would I ever rejoice if his step-mom and bio-dad died in a fire - but I digress).

What is obvious in both the Brandon example and the Peter Harvey example is a massive failure in leadership. The teacher, Peter Harvey, should not have had to put up with the abuse. President Truman said "the buck stops here". Did Mr. Harvey's boss ever say that? Did any of Brandon's teachers ever say that? No, they shifted the blame away from themselves, and chose to let wounds fester.

I think this is the new, modern age.

Part of it is based on big media: blame sells. There is a lot of money to be made pointing at (public personae) foibles. As the world gets more personal (more interconnected), blame can become a real worry at the individual level. Hell, I helped write an email-retention policy, and the local newspaper jumped on the news that someone might sue us for it. The (elected) District Attorney is far more worried about the number of bad guys he threw in prison instead of whether his oath of justice is being served. He won't get good press for doing the right thing, if it means an accused goes free.

Another part of it is greedy lawyers with greedy clients. Deep pockets are a gold mine. Some times it is just cheaper to settle than to prove that innocent little Johnny wasn't so innocent and deserved the punishment his teacher meted out. The buck should stop with Johnny's parents (the true failures in this equation); but instead the administration will buckle and the teachers will be told to suck it up.

Part of it is Government. (BTW, I'm a part of government). It's been said that Government is The Anti-Business, and that is really true. Businesses want customers, government doesn't* (every time the Police are called, somehow society failed). Business need to run at a profit or they are shut down. Governments should be non-profit and if the losses are too great, can instead levy taxes. Businesses can choose to go into an under-served market. Governments are required by law to serve. (Example: if enough new restaurants open, the Government is forced to hire more inspectors - the Government cannot tell the restaurant it cannot open because the restaurateur can sue. Same story for growing populations and sewer, water, fire, schools, etc). If a businesses employees are rude, the business loses money. If a government employee is rude, wait - wasn't that the norm? You, the client, are a burden after all....

My point is that in a business, The Buck Stops at whatever level it needs to**. If the customer service rep needs to be fired, that can happen. In Government, it might take a Grand Jury to convene. Absent criminal charges, certainly the unlawful termination lawyers are going to flock like vultures on carrion. Whole person-years can be spent passing the buck, trying to cut it smaller so that only an insignificant piece sticks.

I don't know squat about Star Trek canon.

Does The Prime Directive come with prison penalties? If that is the case, then I would give the nod to The Federation. But I don't see that happening.

If I had to bet which would make to space first, I'd bet on the Klingons. The buck stops with the Klingon who f****d up. In the Federation, James T Kirk beats the Kobayashi Maru by cheating. That buck went into the shredder like so many in the new, modern age do.

Progress is made by the guy that claims the buck, even if he fails. The guy that passes the buck never helped anything progress.

*OK - Government shouldn't, but if it grows the empire, then job security grows too.
**Hmmm - Goldman-Sachs: business or government? Certainly a business with govt. protection.

Pudge, you should know better than to consider a .sig to be a part of the discussion. If he changes his .sig (as slashcode does allow) to "Secretly, Kermit The Frog loves Miss Piggy", your commentary about murder is incomprehensible. You should know that, you helped write the code.

I've been on Multiply for a while now, since the migration of The Circle. I'm reasonably impressed. It hasn't been perfect, but it really has been pretty good. I spend more time there than I do Facebook. Though Facebook has the draw of more popularity. I would like it if my high-school friends found Multiply instead of Facebook.

Thank you for the link - that was an interesting paper. I did like the point he made about the theory of evolution being presented as a single package, when in fact it is two ideas: biology and philosophy. He makes a pretty good argument that Christians ought to be able to embrace the biological science and discard the philosophical propaganda.

dang it, have an error: "power down those blades for power savings" should be "power down the empty blades for power savings". Where's the 'edit my post button'?

It is one of those things that once you start using it, the benefits become apparent.

Here are some:

1) One application on one machine. No more wondering if application X has somehow messed up application Y. The writers of the software probably developed the application in a clean environment, and this lets you run it in a clean environment. Gets rid of vendor finger-pointing, too.

2) One application on one machine. If application X fouls the nest, you can reboot it and know that you are not also terminating applications Y, Z, A, and B.

3) Machine portability. The drivers in a VM guest are generic -and- uniform. Nothing inside the (guest) machine changes if you move the machine from a host with an Intel NIC to a host with a Broadcom NIC. The benefit here is that when hardware fails (and it will), it is pretty quick and easy to assign the boot disk to a different host, and boot the machine up. Think 10 - 30 minutes (per machine) to recover from a burned up power supply*.

4) Machine portability. There are some solutions that let you auto-fail-over to a new host when the guest stops responding. That burned up power supply could now be a two minute outage and NO emergency notification call.

5) Machine portability. Platespin lets you auto-migrate machines on a schedule to a few blades at night, power down those blades for power savings, and then power them up a little before business hours and migrate back. In a large data center, the electricity savings is enough to make it worth it.

6) Machine flexibility. Does application X not need much in the way of processing power? With the VM manager software, assign it one CPU and 256 MB RAM. Later find out that wasn't enough? Up the specs and reboot.

7) Reboot speed. In paravirtualized environments, the OS is already loaded in the host VM, so the guest VM just links and loads. I've seen entire machine reboots that take 16 seconds.

Along these lines, an anecdote from my life: How to add RAM to a server so nobody notices: virtualize

Hope this helps explain why some people are such a fan of virtualization.

*This is really a benefit that comes from disconnecting the machine from its disks, but VM and SAN go exceptionally well together.

For what it is worth, when a doctor commits thievery by submitting false claims to the government, the government pays them anyway. Because if we didn't, they wouldn't work for us, and that would eliminate our reason for being....

Private insurance needs to worry about remaining in business if they give all their cash away to thieves.

True reform is only possible if we vastly increase the number of doctors. Then the thieves could be left out in the cold, while new just-graduated-from-school doctors compete for the business.

60 Minutes did a story on this system a few months ago. As best I recollect:

1) The initial plan was vague. If you don't have an actual plan, then you won't ever have to call call the project done. This is good for Boeing, bad for the people paying the bills.

2) They finally decided that the plan would be that computers and cameras should surveil the area between towers, and, alert the people running the dispatch center of suspicious activity. "Suspicious activity" = people in the area. No person would be walking in these areas unless they were trying to cross the border illegally.

3) Boeing designed and delivered the initial system. THEN sat down the dispatch people at the consoles. Who promptly said it sucked and was worthless. You heard that right: Boeing did NOT bother to bring in the users who would use the system during the design phase. Also, it was here that the 'discovery' was made that the optics and cameras were WAY more expensive than Boeing originally said (because a web-cam is one thing, and camera that can resolve a clear picture at two miles is another). Of course, better optics means (a lot) more data (which the networks couldn't handle), larger storage requirements for the DVR, etc.

4) Re-work time.

5) Finally the trial tests. Oops. The heat seeking portion doesn't work in the heat of a desert. The radar kept triggering on wind-blown bushes and the occasional Rocket J. Squirrel. The radar didn't work for people sized targets in the rain. If you are a group of bad guys and see that that the camera is swiveling toward you, freeze for a bit (drop to your hands and knees and pretend to be the authorized Bullwinkle J. Moose). The camera will move on. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the heat. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the dust. The dust clogged gear was on the wrong end of very tall / difficult to climb towers.

6) In-truck computers. The Border Patrol was supposed to chase down people being guided by laptops hooked back to base. Except it is essentially impossible to drive around in the (extremely bumpy) desert AND work a computer at the same time.

Did I mention that a single World-War One style trench subverts the whole thing?

Nine towers and 28 miles in, the problems seem insurmountable. Boeing keeps saying they could deliver a system that works though. Just throw gobs more billion at it.... It's a 2,000 mile border.

Welcome to California, and please note that the numbers on the speed limit sign are a recommended minimum. Have a nice day!

Yeah - depends on your valuation of 'good'. "Better to make stronger products Good" - yes, Microsoft needs the competition. "Easier to rake in the money Good" - Microsoft would prefer to have less competition.

Although it would be good for consumers if the DOJ applied pressure to Microsoft, I don't see it happening in any administration in the next eight years.

You are correct - I meant the word systematic. Thanks.

The thing with Microsoft went further though. Specific coding by Microsoft to crash or hinder Novell software. Somewhere there is a list of five coding changes Microsoft did to make various Novell products crash or appear to fail.

I agree. It is all gain for Microsoft when Novell burns.

No more competition in the user directory space: Active Directory for the ultimate win. (Local data center) Email is down to Exchange versus Domino. MS SMS no longer has to compete with ZENworks. (Note that Novell has ZENworks for Linux now, too). The Google Wave server that Novell is working on will go down in the flames too.

Most of the migrations will be from SuSE to Red Hat - but some will be from SuSE to Windows. And all those Red Hat users will have to authenticate to Active Directory. It won't be any surprise when the Windows clients get right in to Windows servers, but the Red Hat boxen have inexplicable delays, random timeouts, and "what we have here... is a failure to... authenticate".

It's all win for Microsoft when their potential (hold-out) customers lose an alternative.

Novell was under systemic attack by Microsoft for decades. It worked, too.

When Novell is gone, Microsoft's only real competitors left in the corporate data center will be Red Hat and Solaris. Those people currently running SuSE will migrate to Red Hat, making them a bigger target for MS. Solaris is still there, but seems to be floundering a bit under Oracle. So one is a rising star, and the other, not. (I say that, but I don't know. OpenSolaris may be way more popular than I think).

Luckily for Red Hat, Microsoft is more worried about Google and the cloud at the moment. But that can easily change, if Microsoft has a few extra-lean quarters. Particularly if it is found that some large portions of the cloud run Red Hat.

The other lucky thing for Red Hat is that the hard-charging leader of Microsoft is gone, and the resultant internal squabbling keeps the MS VPs distracted. But that too can easily change, if Microsoft has a few extra-lean quarters. Taking it to extremes... if Bill Gates gets bored with the charity thing and comes back to 'rescue' Microsoft, I'd take short-sell positions on Red Hat.