And that's why you don't use a one-armed man to scare someone.

A guy being treated for a decade for pancreatic cancer, certainly has more need for a handicapped spot than 90% of the folks I see using them.

The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.

And the information will remain highly secure - right up until someone takes a non-secure camera and points it at the secure smartphone so they can get their job done.

1st Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: It always costs more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Hofstadter's original law actually only applies to time (not money). Typical usage: A couple years ago the NYC MTA Canarsie line "next train" countdown signs, originally a two year project, were running a couple years behind, and projected to take 5 years to complete.

It used to be "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.".

The moral for today in my industry (semigovernmental in CIO strategy) is all about corporate brand names. i.e. if there is no corporate big brand name attached it has no chance. If there is a corporate big brand name then by definition it's OK and let into the starting gate.

IBM is still in the arena but there's a bunch other names at least in the US: Oracle, Microsoft, Computer Associates, (don't get me started on CA and their bleed-the-customer-dry strategy) or any of the major government/defense contractors.

I've been fiendish a couple of times since Oracle bought MySQL, and the only way I got MySQL into the solution (and the solution did not need any fancy pants database features!) was by arguing that since Oracle owns it, it'll be OK to do it that way.

Took me a while to decode the original article because it manages to wander all over the place.

Synopsis: The Scunthorpe Problem all over again

Geeze... going back in time... a 1.5 Mbit T1 connection, while actually a continuous 1.5 Mbit connection, never quite delivered that much speed when it was hooked to "the internet" and expected to move TCP/IP traffic. Same for 10 Mbit Ethernet (and that was never a true bidirectional 10 Mbits to begin with).

Protocol overhead always nibbles away at the edges.

The Americurium-241 (about 1 microgram) in a smoke detector is pretty securely packaged up inside a little disc inside a housing that strongly encourages you to not throw it away in the normal trash but instead treat it as recycleable hazardous waste. It's an alpha emitter and the little plastic disc and housing very thoroughly stops the alpha particles from getting out and getting to your skin. That said, pulling the disc out and trying to get the Americurium out is pretty stupid and although the 1 microgram is perfectly safe in its little disc housing (probably even if you swallowed it), removing/scraping the Americurium and getting it under your skin or in your digestive system or lungs would be a bad idea. Conceivably it could mess up family or neighbors. Ingesting, inhaled, or absorbed in blood alpha emitters (even accidentally) is a bad idea. I'm 99% sure that if he was charged with anything, it would be not properly storing or disposing of hazardous waste.

I tend to keep my linux development machines on the bleeding edge of the distro and there is rarely a problem. To be fair I doubt that any distro would put Java 7 in its bleeding edge. The bleeding edge of any distro has some kind of QC process already.

The most astounding thing:

In his original complaint http://www.spamsuite.com/webfm_send/357 the guy running E360 presented as fact, that Spamhaus had blocked at least 27,345,357 unique messages from E360.

This is like saying, oh, I killed 37 people (and here's a list of who I killed) and that's why the cops are ganging up on me so I'm suing them.

The Mongolian cluster-fuck that the Intel-HP-Oracle triangle centered around Itanium has become, was spotted way way before any of their management drank the Kool-Aid. (And oh man, they were guzzling the Itanium Kool-Aid by the gallon). Google "Itanic".

If linux kernels had microsoft marketing setting the names, we wouldn't have decimal points etc.

It would be "Linux NT", "Linux 95", "Linux Server 2003", "Linux XP", "Linux Vista", "Linux 7".

Just think how much more marketable Linux could be and how much more the suits would want to buy it.

The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone.

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. -- Robert X. Cringley

Wow, I thought Gnome and KDE etc. were X11 Window Managers.

I go look at how people talk about them, and they seem to be lifestyle choices now.