Sun in the past has given access to their documentation but starting April 5th only contract customers will have access to the full site. Sadly, this includes the useful portions of the KnowledgeBase and the component lists. Read the annoucement here.
I don’t understand how limiting access improves things for Sun or its customers. It harms us hobbyists but then we don’t make them money in any direct measurable way. I would be surprised if simply cutting down on bandwidth usage and hardware was the motivation. Putting on my bean counter’s hat, I can conceive of the discussion going along these lines:
Bean counter #1: “Hmmm. Our support contracts are declining. How can we make more people sign up for these?”
Bean counter #2: “The value proposition of the contract alone just isn’t so good. Can we give extra support?”
Bean counter #1: “No, better support costs money and the hardware support is pretty good already. Anything we can throw in to make it look like we’re adding value?”
Bean counter #2: “Well, we have all our hardware documentation online and the KnowledgeBase. But it’s open to anyone.”
Bean counter #1: “That’s good! It won’t cost us anything and we can set up two tiers. Only the current contract holders can get the full monty. Nortel got away with it and we can too.”
Which would not be a bad idea five or ten years ago when Sun was ascendant. Now, it’s too late.
We decided to buy the Honda Pilot. Picked it up from Bay Ridge Honda tonight after work. Nice vehicle and the dealer made the whole car buying experience a very good one. When you are ready to part with your money
you want attention and you want a fair deal and we got both from them.
I do feel guilty about buying an SUV-ish thing that gets 22 mpg but our Labor Day smack up with the Volkswagen demonstrated that mass matters in a crash and the smaller vehicle loses. The Pilot is classified as a wagon
but I parallel parked it tonight and it is definitely sized like a truck. This will take some getting used to and so will pumping gas into it.
The Kleptones, From Detroit To J.A.. Brilliant. Get it while you can.
I get a lot of email at work and at home and I’m always deleting sections and
inlining responses so I decided that I needed a key binding in XEmacs to do
that work for me. Thanks to my growing familiarity with Scheme, writing elisp doesn’t seem so bad (well, as long as I have the XEmacs Lisp Reference Manual handy).
It’s ugly but it works and it’s my first useful creation in Lisp/Scheme:
(defun region-is-active () ;; stolen from eparker's dot file
(if (string-match "XEmacs" emacs-version)
(region-exists-p) mark-active) )
(defun whack () "text killer, region, to sig, or next paragraph"
(interactive)
(let ((start (point)))
(cond
((region-is-active) (delete-region (point) (mark)))
((re-search-forward "^--" nil t)
(forward-line -1) (delete-region start (point)))
(t (forward-paragraph) (delete-region start (point)))))
(insert " [snip]\n\n\n")
(forward-line -1))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x !") 'whack)
