I've got a B&W G3 with the stock R128 and a V3 card in it now. I'd love to replace both with a PCI Geforce2 w/ DVD. Any news from the expo about nVidia or their remarketers selling cards outside of the box?
Many of us chose Linux because of it's reputation for technical excellence--if RedHat can't stand the heat, they need to leave the kitchen.
You've got to be kidding. I've run Linux for years and it's my preferred OS for just about everything, including my day-to-day desktop use but I'd never claim that as a whole product it's 'technically excellent'. There are parts that are spectacular. There are parts that need serious work.
The BEST thing about Linux is exactly what has happened here and is why the back-handed comment in the original post about not having to wait for a service pack/system upgrade/whatever from your OS distributor was quite appropriate, imho. A bug was found. It was fixed. The next day it's available to EVERYONE. That's the number one reason why the stability of many Linux bits have grown faster than other platforms do (can?).
Maybe some of these things are boneheaded, but at least they are admitting them and fixing them pronto. If a distro didn't, I'd start to worry. And when they get quiet, they'd better either be getting ready for a major release or their distro better be damn near perfect, which I've never encountered yet.
And yes, I am running RH7, _.0_, no less. Which worked with all my brand-spanking hardware right out the box (SMP, CD-RW, UltraATA, etc.) without ANY special configuration by me. I've compiled kernels and several SRPMS, used NVIDIA's kick-ass drivers, enjoyed my 100Mbps LAN connection, reduced my data faster than I've ever before, burned a few CDs, played a few GL games. And, oh yeah, I spent about 2 minutes updating my system with their tool. Gosh it really messed up my day... And guess what? It all seems to work. Just like it did with RH6.2 and Mandrake 7.1/2. And probably does with Deb and Turbo and... life goes on.
Another point I'd like to make (started by a small error in the inital/. posting) is that intergalactic neutral hydrogen has been studied for a long time by the exact same techniques used by Tripp, Jenkins, & Savage: looking at very distant, bright objects like quasars and finding neutral hydrogen spectral lines along the line of sight to the object.
What's new here is that they have detected highly-ionized oxygen without a substantial neutral couterpart. There must be a substantial amount of ionized hydrogen that is associated as a result.
Unlike star-forming regions (like the Orion nebula) where ionized hydrogen is more easily detected, the ionized hydrogen associated with this state of oxygen (it's missing 5 electrons!) is extremely difficult to detect directly. The high temperatures and low densities in these regions keep the protons and electrons from easily rejoining and producing the tell-tale cascade of light from an ionized gas that illuminates star-forming regions. Any neutral hydrogen which does manage to form is quickly rammed by high speed particles and re-ionized, escaping our detection by other techniques.
As a sidenote, these kinds of highly-ionized regions are found close by in our own galaxy. In the most obvious cases the gas has been heated to great temperatures by supernovae explosions. The sun is actually sitting in one, affectionately known as the Local Bubble.
These new regions found in intergalactic space may be fossil remants of early, vigorous star-formation in distant galaxies that has been ejected into intergalactic space. Or, they maybe something entirely new!
Read the press release carefully. This discovery only helps us account for the matter we know how to detect directly at the present time. Dark matter is necessary at many levels: from the local environment near the sun to galactic structure to the fate of the universe. Dark matter is expected to exist due to observed effects of it's mass: it creates impressive graviational dynamics that cannot be explained by visible matter alone.
I wasn't very explict I guess. What I'm really lamenting is a pervasive, cross-platform, in-sync environment to RUN java apps in. I do understand where it has been really successful as a language/platform. As another example, it will be exciting to see if Mac OS X really succeeds in fully integrating it as a first-class development language in a popular OS.
However, many spiffy add-on APIs (not only from Sun) are only really supported on those platforms that Sun supports. Admittedly some are inherently difficult to support well cross-platform (Java3D for example), but without even core Java in sync across platforms even simpler packages quickly fall away from non-Sun platforms.
As a mostly high-level language programmer, I really enjoy programming in Java. It also had (has?) the potential to close the cross-platform app gap. Aside from some gee-wiz items and small utilities, that vision (delusion?) seems to be mostly dead for now. It certainly has been a success, but just not where I was looking:)
It's so disappointing to still see Java so fragmented across platforms. The 'Linux' release is only officially supported on one processor and increasing the officially supported OS's by 50% has been like pulling teeth. It's not the end-all-be-all of languages, but two years ago I had hopes that by now it would be faster and more pervasive than it has become--especially outside the browser cage. Such a shame... mh
I was more annoyed by the 'Intel' part, but it's a great beginning. I'd love to see them see this through to the other Linux arch's. I've gotten really spoiled by source releases... -mh-
Slashdot Mirror
It wast the only good commercial of the whole night, as far as I saw. What a waste of money! :)
mh
You've got to be kidding. I've run Linux for years and it's my preferred OS for just about everything, including my day-to-day desktop use but I'd never claim that as a whole product it's 'technically excellent'. There are parts that are spectacular. There are parts that need serious work.
The BEST thing about Linux is exactly what has happened here and is why the back-handed comment in the original post about not having to wait for a service pack/system upgrade/whatever from your OS distributor was quite appropriate, imho. A bug was found. It was fixed. The next day it's available to EVERYONE. That's the number one reason why the stability of many Linux bits have grown faster than other platforms do (can?).
Maybe some of these things are boneheaded, but at least they are admitting them and fixing them pronto. If a distro didn't, I'd start to worry. And when they get quiet, they'd better either be getting ready for a major release or their distro better be damn near perfect, which I've never encountered yet.
And yes, I am running RH7, _.0_, no less. Which worked with all my brand-spanking hardware right out the box (SMP, CD-RW, UltraATA, etc.) without ANY special configuration by me. I've compiled kernels and several SRPMS, used NVIDIA's kick-ass drivers, enjoyed my 100Mbps LAN connection, reduced my data faster than I've ever before, burned a few CDs, played a few GL games. And, oh yeah, I spent about 2 minutes updating my system with their tool. Gosh it really messed up my day... And guess what? It all seems to work. Just like it did with RH6.2 and Mandrake 7.1/2. And probably does with Deb and Turbo and ... life goes on.
mh
Another point I'd like to make (started by a small error in the inital /. posting) is that intergalactic neutral hydrogen has been studied for a long time by the exact same techniques used by Tripp, Jenkins, & Savage: looking at very distant, bright objects like quasars and finding neutral hydrogen spectral lines along the line of sight to the object.
What's new here is that they have detected highly-ionized oxygen without a substantial neutral couterpart. There must be a substantial amount of ionized hydrogen that is associated as a result.
Unlike star-forming regions (like the Orion nebula) where ionized hydrogen is more easily detected, the ionized hydrogen associated with this state of oxygen (it's missing 5 electrons!) is extremely difficult to detect directly. The high temperatures and low densities in these regions keep the protons and electrons from easily rejoining and producing the tell-tale cascade of light from an ionized gas that illuminates star-forming regions. Any neutral hydrogen which does manage to form is quickly rammed by high speed particles and re-ionized, escaping our detection by other techniques.
As a sidenote, these kinds of highly-ionized regions are found close by in our own galaxy. In the most obvious cases the gas has been heated to great temperatures by supernovae explosions. The sun is actually sitting in one, affectionately known as the Local Bubble.
These new regions found in intergalactic space may be fossil remants of early, vigorous star-formation in distant galaxies that has been ejected into intergalactic space. Or, they maybe something entirely new!
mh
Read the press release carefully. This discovery only helps us account for the matter we know how to detect directly at the present time. Dark matter is necessary at many levels: from the local environment near the sun to galactic structure to the fate of the universe. Dark matter is expected to exist due to observed effects of it's mass: it creates impressive graviational dynamics that cannot be explained by visible matter alone.
mh
This is a reply to most of the replies to mine :)
:)
I wasn't very explict I guess. What I'm really lamenting is a pervasive, cross-platform, in-sync environment to RUN java apps in. I do understand where it has been really successful as a language/platform. As another example, it will be exciting to see if Mac OS X really succeeds in fully integrating it as a first-class development language in a popular OS.
However, many spiffy add-on APIs (not only from Sun) are only really supported on those platforms that Sun supports. Admittedly some are inherently difficult to support well cross-platform (Java3D for example), but without even core Java in sync across platforms even simpler packages quickly fall away from non-Sun platforms.
As a mostly high-level language programmer, I really enjoy programming in Java. It also had (has?) the potential to close the cross-platform app gap. Aside from some gee-wiz items and small utilities, that vision (delusion?) seems to be mostly dead for now. It certainly has been a success, but just not where I was looking
mh
It's so disappointing to still see Java so fragmented across platforms. The 'Linux' release is only officially supported on one processor and increasing the officially supported OS's by 50% has been like pulling teeth. It's not the end-all-be-all of languages, but two years ago I had hopes that by now it would be faster and more pervasive than it has become--especially outside the browser cage. Such a shame... mh
I was more annoyed by the 'Intel' part, but it's a great beginning. I'd love to see them see this through to the other Linux arch's. I've gotten really spoiled by source releases... -mh-