Didn't they already do this?? .. there was the Ewoks and the Magic Sunberries in the mid 80s, and I seem to recall something with one of the olympic teams or ice capades in the late 70s somewhere around the Donny and Marie specials on network TV

I stopped reading this thread when I saw "blaw .. blaw AGI

yeah .. the huge one that blots out what's left of the Sun (pun intended) ..

(somewhat paraphrased conversation between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein relayed by Humphrey Carpenter that I like)

CS Lewis: "Myths are lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."
JRR Tolkein: "They are not lies. Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power of evil."

anyhow - read Joseph Pearce's article on the conversation and back story .. quite interesting .. http://catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0107.html

too lazy to login .. don't slash dots much anymore these days

actually thinking about this more .. what really throws radiocarbon dating off now (IIUC) is the nuclear testing and bombs that were dropped to end WWII - who's to say that previous civilizations didn't reach similar states in the past and perhaps wipe themselves out? Atlantis anyone?

the overall point being that every belief system has some degree of "evidence" and there's always some amount of faith involved in accepting said "evidence" and there's still a lot that we don't know.

no .. yesterday's wasn't biased enough and had too much data

Of course .. Because every office needs a Tom Smykowski

It has to do with honesty and the perception that the person you're talking to has your best interest at heart. People are generally pretty good at smelling a rat, and if your engineer is in the same boat as your customer - then there's a trust that's there that's generally pretty easy to work with. The problem breaks down if the engineer or sales person doesn't have a broader view of the coming problems, or architecture changes that might be necessary as this typically comes from pure experience.

Working for a large consulting arm of a large (now mostly defunct) technical company .. we really turned a corner when we convinced our mgmt that it was bad practice to always have to recommend our companies products - particularly when there were better products out there .. this also enabled us to work more closely with the backline engineers to either make things better, or eliminate dead weight. Honesty can go a long way in developing trust, and can help you either really believe in your product or take you to the place where you can help others understand what needs to be done for customers to believe in your product.

dude .. Stallman doesn't use the internet .. he might connect to send/receive email, but that's about it:
http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

of course you could also just cross-mount NFS, or setup a central networked fileserver .. as network begins to surpass native FC speeds - it's not a bad option (but needs a bit of tuning, care and feeding)

I played a bit with zfs-fuse too for doing this sort of thing (along with native zfs on opensolaris), but with a stall in cross platform development here i ended up upgrading my pools and obsoleting the fuse versions .. (note: also a bit tricky given the panic on detach model)

The real thing missing that Solaris engineers took pretty seriously at a time (IMHO) is kernel panics and kernel debugging. Shapiro and Cantrill's work on mdb (and later DTrace) was huge at helping developers prove or identify key behavioural (and philosophical) aspects of the kernel and develop fixes pretty quickly. It also helped to identify key parts of the kernel that could be stripped out to prevent the amount of bloat that's quickly creeping into linux

just a thought

I see Cantrill just updated this page yesterday .. it's still surprising to me that so many drivers that vendors open sourced for linux and worked with Sun to help develop or port are still closed .. I guess some of this just echoes from an earlier time before linux had some of the commercial vendor support and there was still a large amount of vendor FUD (and corporate FUD) around open sourcing some of your key underlying IP. After 12 years in the Sun bubble you really begin to see that innovation really comes from freedom and just a few talented developers (not armies) .. here's to hoping that Oracle doesn't stifle that freedom in the interest of improving Larry's boats.

easy .. to screw Oracle over (who was in turn screwing over their customers to turn more licensing revenue on CMT, HT, containers etc) .. if you look at statements McGnarly made just this past spring (before the IBM deal fell through) you'll find his references of Oracle as a cheap heroin dealer - which falls in line with their misguided tactic to try and take on the oracle empire .. of course now that they've accepted Larry's "drug money" - i don't understand why they don't just spin the whole thing off again .. unless they can't afford to, or there's no other tinkerbell investors who believe enough with their wallet ..

yeah - you can see the remnants of the original building from the older looking roof - i believe the windvane is still on top there .. there were train tracks that ran a separate line behind the laboratory, and yes - the octagonal shape i believe is the foundation for the tower that was blown up by the US Army in 1917 (they were worried that the Germans might use it either for a landmark for their submarines or as some sort of communication device) .. it was rumored that it took multiple attempts to actually destroy the tower given the solid construction and size of the wooden beams that were used.

It looks like much of the connecting area between the laboratory and the tower where the tunnels/connections should be are now filled in .. presumably AGFA was dumping their toxic photographic chemicals there - i guess filling it all in with cement constitutes their long cleanup ..

stinginess is the main reason for me personally ..

but OSS isn't without it's share of frustrations too - i'm reminded of the many times i've caught myself before kicking in my old pentium servers after multiple complex kernel hacks trying to get poorly written and undocumented driver code to compile cleanly