Hmm. Tricky, this. I don't think we necessarily need provably n-scalable code (or whatever it's called) for everything. Let's be pragmatic for a little while.
In the widget-set example, processing/drawing the widgets in parallell could still provide better than 1-scalable code. Maybe it's 0.8n-scalable. When we're talking about 8 processors, that would still be a solid improvement. The remaining 0.2n would be available to (say) file sharing network, garbage collector, application or whatever else running.
Let's not consider too many hardware limitations. For our theoretical shift in paradigms, we theorize that hardware limitations are as minimal as they can be. Maybe the graphic card even accepts pseudo-concurrent blit commands. If we rerouted all the focus on ever faster processors into improving multiprocessor architecture (and/or making the technology used on mainframes and SGI stations more affordable), I bet we could do a bit better than following the uniprocessor paradigm. After all, if smp-boxes became a commodity, wouldn't we have more hacker brainpower available to figure out how to use them more efficiently?
Ok. I'm probably boring you silly with my abstract , non-rigorous thinking. I'll stop now. Good bumping brains with you.
I'm defintely not arguing that this is tricky. However, some of the multithreading might be possible to do behind the scenes. Let's consider GTK or Swing. By introducing some (hidden) complexity, wouldn't it be feasible to have multiple threads painting and manipulating widgets and windows? If we had some communications between components and "layout manager", you could have the "layout manager" assign tasks to children, since it should be able to figure out the sizes needed for the widgets.
Am I stumbling here? I haven't dealt that much parallelism, really.. (About to, though, but that's a different story)
Moz doesn't seem to be doing this by multi-threading, at least not native threads. Try monitoring the number of threads on Moz when you download a page.
Seriously, did the airport security increase that much post 911? The wage is still so low that the airport security corporations compete with McDonalds for manpower.
If you start to think about it, wouldn't you say that the Bush administration should be thankful for the 911 attack? Now, Bush can do what he does best, show strong leadership. We all remember his campaign speeches, right?
However, what kinds of strong leadership has he given? He has reconfirmed his alliance with Pakistan, the country run by a general that got his power in a military coup, under the banner of "protecting freedom". He needed to do this in order to punish the Taliban.
Now, his poor judgement may very well be biting him in his ass. Pakistan has long offered support for the resistance movement in India-controlled Kashmir. How this support has manifested itself in real life is a matter of debate. However, India does not think Pakistan has done enough to crack down on the separatists in Kashmir after the attack on the Indian parliament in December. Consider it comparable to a band of terrorists attempting to storm capital hill, and then have the nation the terrorists came from refusing to stop supporting the same forces.
What else goes on in Pakistan? Ever once in a while, you'll see small or large reports about how parts of the Pakistani intelligence service is sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Wonder how Mullah Omar got away? He travelled with a pile of money, paying off warlords that the USA trusted for free passage.
Rather than effectively fighting terrorism abroad, your government seems to favor disclosing every non-specific, non-corroborated terrorist threat, complete with security checkpoints that close down this or that because of a suspicious package.
It's looking bleak, folks. Any good conspiracy theorist (or reader of 1984 by G. Orwell) will tell you that keeping people afraid is a good way of controlling their ability to think rationally.
Oh, and would you like to know what I believe to be the ultimate terrorist strike? Trigger a landslide off the continental shelf along the Californian coast. According to Discovery Channel, the ground shows signs of previous landslides. One or more large-scale landslides could trigger a huge tsunami that could wipe out portions of the coastal areas along the Californian coast. What materials are required? Honestly, I don't know, but I'm guessing a few recreational boats with primitive depth charges or timed mines would have a pretty good chance of triggering something if they had a good geological report.
I hope I didn't make any Californians piss their pants. I'm just speculating. And I hope I won't have any government agency knocking on my door tonite.
Then again, the most effective portion of the WTC attack might be the fallout. America is marginalizing itself, giving the rest of us ever fewer reasons to really like the American government. (I like Americans, btw).
CPU cooling is much more relevant to performance than a 2% memory bandwidth gain.
Basically, CPU cooling has been hitting us for a good while.
From an
article about a bigass Beowulf cluster running Transmeta processors, you have Wu-chun Feng of the Los Alamos Labs stating
The continued tracking of Moore's law will result in the microprocessor of 2010 having over one billion transistors and dissipating over one kilowatt of thermal energy; this is considerably more energy per square centimeter than even a nuclear reactor.
Oh my. So - what else can we do to stop this trend? Relatively slow multi-processor machines. If we keep working on multi-threading our applications, we might be able to make a computer with 8 1ghz efficient chips outperform an 8ghz Moore-compatible Intel hype-chip-based system. Really. Multi-processor machines have traditionally been too expensive for the desktop. The software people have not spent a lot of time making sure that the regular end-user applications scale well across several processors.
Take something like a web browser. Given a bit of wizardry (obviously, we need to consider concurrency and critical sections), you could have separate images downloaded and processed by separate processors. Your flash ad would run on another processor.
Frankly, I'm wondering what's stopping us from using this approach to increasing performance? Is this like the fact that OEMs equip the low-end PCs with too little RAM so that Joe Shmoe will buy a new one as quickly as possible, since he does not know that spending 100 bucks on more RAM will make his computer last another year or two?
And, really, as long as the focus is on the gigahertz, do the chip makers really concentrate on making their designs as efficient as possible?
Man. Those MS worms take up a lot of bandwidth. Charging extra for running windows as an advance penalty for future bandwidth hogging seems much fairer.
Given that oil became unavailable, our most realistic bet would be electricity generated by nuclear power.
Granted, we'd need very strict rationing of the oil on reserve. All cars off the roads, only buses and bikes. (Hey, we'd lose a few pounds in the process), and transportation of essentials.
Reroute all available oil reserves into transporting and manufacturing power plants (nuclear, wind, hydro). Making a wind power plant is not rocket science. Making an efficient wind power plant is trickier, but not technologically impossible. You have plenty of steel plants. Use them as much as possible.
Heating can also be provided by burning trees. Yes - I advocate burning trees when the going gets tough. Trees contain carbon that is already actively part of the carbon cycle, so burning trees is more environmentally friendly than burning coal or oil. Trees are also renewable. Plant one. Watch it grow.
Hot shower? You get black rubber hosing that you run across your roof. Sun-powered. Just take a shower when you get home from work, rather than the moment you wake up.
I think we can live without oil given that we prioritize the moment it disappears. If we're given advance warning, we might even do better.
On the other hand, if all oil was immediately destroyed, we would be in much greater trouble. Then again, we're already overpopulated. Biology class with population biology is an eye-opener, folks.
If you took this technology, made it match on too many faces and then had someone manually double-check the potential match, you would have a kick-ass system.
Like all powerful technology, its use must be ethical.
Actually, good friends tell good friends when they think they're fucking up. That is why Europe and America are currently being pretty damned good friends, and we would be good friends of Lucent to tell them to straighten up.
The problem arises when the friends can't figure out which one is fucking up, and get annoyed with each other.
Seriously, though. It's just a training program for nerds before they get out into the real world. Figure out how much work it is to get laid the hard way, how much time keeping a tidy apartment takes, etc etc etc.
Then, it's back to online nudity and pizza boxes with alien life forms forming.
So, I'll let your obvious fundamental faith in Christianity slip by - humans have been around for much longer than 7000 years. Let's see what's happened to Africa in the past 500 years?
Oh. Colonialism. Slave trading. Infighting. I'm not saying they behaved better pre-whites, but we sure haven't made it any easier for them to prevail. We introduce concepts like nations, but draws the borders according to river streams and just using a ruler if we can't find a proper river to use, disregarding any socio-political matters like tribes. We borrow them money, but will not buy their produce. We still get more money from them by interest than we give them in terms of aid. So, without our so-called help they might be have been able to arrange running water for themselves.
That being said, anthropologists theorize that the reasons why the west has come to rule is bad weather and winter. In Africa, it was for a long time relatively feasible to live hand-to-mouth. They didn't have cold, cold winters where food got scarce. They didn't have overpopulation that required ever increasing levels of food output. Being too organized in terms of housing might have proven a disadvantage when there was confrontation. Lots of theories.
So, if we had been invaded by space aliens who used us for dumb labor force, oppressed us, and made Al Qaeda share a country with republicans, would you really expect us to produce a lot of good for the benefit of mankind?
By the way, the Sierra Leone elections give me hope. Holding democratic, peaceful elections after 10 years of civil war is an inspiration. Maybe they just benefitted mankind in terms of inspiration?;)
While the background information on the writing process of his now famous letter is intriguing, as well as the fact that this guy is a lawyes who has been with the OSS crowd for 6 years, I would have liked more eloquence directly from the horses mouth.
What intrigues me about the entire software industry, is that they charge relatively different prices around the work. In Europe, a copy of XP is maybe 1 week of average pay. In inner Africa, a copy of XP runs well into the months. Asking companies there to pay full price is plain ridiculous. When I'm rich and famous at 35, I'll go to Africa to teach them how to unleash the then awe-inspiring power of the Penguin. Hopefully, I'll be many years too late.
Finally someone has started to look at the historical implications of cooperating with Microsoft. If any one console wins a monopoly, it is bad news for the game developers, since the monopolist will be able to charge lots of dough for development tools. That would probably mean more expensive games for us.
I wouldn't even be surprised to see Sony and Nintendo coordinating attacks on Microsoft if XBox starts to gain too much momentum.
The current chemistry works nicely. Why change it?
From the Sun pages:And as always, education customers can receive copies of the StarOffice 6.0 office suite for the cost of media and shipping. . I assume this would make the Chinese deal less shocking. It's not totally free, but it looks like students or parents looking to pinch pennies can pinch a few thousand.
Of course, if you're content with openoffice.org, then download and burn for free.
We don't live in a free market society. We live in a heavily legislated society where the most effective way of conducting competition can be in the courtroom. We live in a society where branding and commercials and spin form the basis of our spending decisions. It is extremely hard to enter a fully consolidated market.
It's imperfect. But until the courtrooms start to reject more cases, and lawmakers start to limit the right to sue, this is what we're stuck with.
I would have laughed at Ashcroft having the statue of a "topless" woman representing justice covered up, were it not for the fact that nobody has ever covered her up before. That means that your Secretary of Justice is the most conservative Secretary of Justice since the statue was erected (30s?). At least when it comes to nudity.
Or maybe he was uncomfortable promiting his shady agenda under her direct, righteous innocence.
And why do _you_ think intelligent people fall into deep depression and kill themselves?
As long as we are like you describe, we as a society is fundamentally, deeply fucked. You're digging your own grave, sir. When you fuck others given the necessity (and after fucking once, the necessity treshold empirically tends to dwindle), others will fuck you when they have to. So basically, you're fucking yourself in the ass.
When you feel your moral is being compromized, it's time to get outa there. Face it - if they are unethical enough to force you to break your own morals, do you think they will treat you well when push comes to shove?
Most of the big thinkers envisioned direct competition in an intelligent marketplace. However, history has proven they companies prefer to create incompatibilities to avoid competition. There was a time when each company had a different dimension and set of tools for simple nuts and bolts.
However, today these items are largely standardized, to the enjoyment of the customers.
Microsoft is actively fighting direct competition. They are trying to prevent competitors from using the same nuts and bolts (Lindows, as an example), or at least punishing them when they use their nuts and bolts without asking permission.
Basically, greed got in the way of capitalism. Rather than celebrating the very ideas that makes capitalism work, there seems to be a drift towards anti-capitalistic regulations - strong IP legislation, for once.
Also, you could argue that most markets are so consolidated that entering them is a possibility only for monopolists with extreme bank accounts. Look at the franchising frenzy that has set back innovation and localized service - I studied in Grand Forks. It has several good local restaurants, but people really, really wished TGIF and Olive Garden would come to town.
Hmm. I'm done rambling now. Too bad this wasn't as cohesive as yours.
Well - is it? If the boards will be 600 bucks in december, they'll start coming down around the time they need cheap boards for PS3. I'm guessing about 2004-2005?
As a matter of fact, taxing Big Wheels to fund road s is an excellent idea. It would mean they would invest in technologies to reduce road wear.
Furthermore, those of us that don't like cars but do nicely without no longer would have to subsidize something we view as largely unnecessary and destructive.
It is great to hear the Internet2 is still developing. Hopefully, grid computing and VR will be two killer apps for Internet2. With that speed, we can probably run our games on a remote server, only receiving a bit-by-bit dump that we stream directly to our monitor, almost completely eliminating the need for a video card.
Seriously, though. Extreme bandtwidth like this can benefit the Unix crowd, by making thin clients a more feasible technology. PS2 with broadband internet and X11 should be able to run remotely run heavy apps. Anybody tried yet?
Try Mandrake. But I also encourage you to check up with the graphics board manufacturer web site, and find out about your monitor timings - escpecially if your hardware is new.
I have had minimal problems installing Mandrake - until I came across a laptop with an nvidia board. I went to nvidia.com, found the linux section, and followed the detailed instructions. Pretty much a piece of cake!
Slackware is still good for learning the nitty gritties and having a rock stable system, but it is not for the command line interface challenged. It is not intended to be.
This would indicate that there is a "fellowship university". However, their lack of presence on the net indicates either that they are ludites, or that the university has been disbanded.
However, I commend you for posting this anonymously.
There is no clear dividing line between where a particular block of "middleware" ends and the rest of the operating system begins
You just have to wonder what kind of moron would come up with something like this. No wonder Windows has trailed the Unix word when it comes to stability.
I'll admit that win2k is a decent piece of software. It does what it should do, fairly cleanly and it's pretty stable too. However, this is only a recent development after Microsoft realized that they were threatened from below by the OSS movement.
Microsoft has a long history of doing its best work (IE3&4 were quite good from a user point of view) when it is in a direct competitive situation. It is clearly in our best interest that they are forced to compete.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Tricky, this. I don't think we necessarily need provably n-scalable code (or whatever it's called) for everything. Let's be pragmatic for a little while.
In the widget-set example, processing/drawing the widgets in parallell could still provide better than 1-scalable code. Maybe it's 0.8n-scalable. When we're talking about 8 processors, that would still be a solid improvement. The remaining 0.2n would be available to (say) file sharing network, garbage collector, application or whatever else running.
Let's not consider too many hardware limitations. For our theoretical shift in paradigms, we theorize that hardware limitations are as minimal as they can be. Maybe the graphic card even accepts pseudo-concurrent blit commands. If we rerouted all the focus on ever faster processors into improving multiprocessor architecture (and/or making the technology used on mainframes and SGI stations more affordable), I bet we could do a bit better than following the uniprocessor paradigm. After all, if smp-boxes became a commodity, wouldn't we have more hacker brainpower available to figure out how to use them more efficiently?
Ok. I'm probably boring you silly with my abstract , non-rigorous thinking. I'll stop now. Good bumping brains with you.
I'm defintely not arguing that this is tricky. However, some of the multithreading might be possible to do behind the scenes. Let's consider GTK or Swing. By introducing some (hidden) complexity, wouldn't it be feasible to have multiple threads painting and manipulating widgets and windows? If we had some communications between components and "layout manager", you could have the "layout manager" assign tasks to children, since it should be able to figure out the sizes needed for the widgets.
Am I stumbling here? I haven't dealt that much parallelism, really.. (About to, though, but that's a different story)
Moz doesn't seem to be doing this by multi-threading, at least not native threads. Try monitoring the number of threads on Moz when you download a page.
I dunno about IE or Opera, though. They might.
If you start to think about it, wouldn't you say that the Bush administration should be thankful for the 911 attack? Now, Bush can do what he does best, show strong leadership. We all remember his campaign speeches, right?
However, what kinds of strong leadership has he given? He has reconfirmed his alliance with Pakistan, the country run by a general that got his power in a military coup, under the banner of "protecting freedom". He needed to do this in order to punish the Taliban.
Now, his poor judgement may very well be biting him in his ass. Pakistan has long offered support for the resistance movement in India-controlled Kashmir. How this support has manifested itself in real life is a matter of debate. However, India does not think Pakistan has done enough to crack down on the separatists in Kashmir after the attack on the Indian parliament in December. Consider it comparable to a band of terrorists attempting to storm capital hill, and then have the nation the terrorists came from refusing to stop supporting the same forces.
What else goes on in Pakistan? Ever once in a while, you'll see small or large reports about how parts of the Pakistani intelligence service is sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Wonder how Mullah Omar got away? He travelled with a pile of money, paying off warlords that the USA trusted for free passage.
Rather than effectively fighting terrorism abroad, your government seems to favor disclosing every non-specific, non-corroborated terrorist threat, complete with security checkpoints that close down this or that because of a suspicious package.
It's looking bleak, folks. Any good conspiracy theorist (or reader of 1984 by G. Orwell) will tell you that keeping people afraid is a good way of controlling their ability to think rationally.
Oh, and would you like to know what I believe to be the ultimate terrorist strike? Trigger a landslide off the continental shelf along the Californian coast. According to Discovery Channel, the ground shows signs of previous landslides. One or more large-scale landslides could trigger a huge tsunami that could wipe out portions of the coastal areas along the Californian coast. What materials are required? Honestly, I don't know, but I'm guessing a few recreational boats with primitive depth charges or timed mines would have a pretty good chance of triggering something if they had a good geological report.
I hope I didn't make any Californians piss their pants. I'm just speculating. And I hope I won't have any government agency knocking on my door tonite.
Then again, the most effective portion of the WTC attack might be the fallout. America is marginalizing itself, giving the rest of us ever fewer reasons to really like the American government. (I like Americans, btw).
Basically, CPU cooling has been hitting us for a good while.
From an article about a bigass Beowulf cluster running Transmeta processors, you have Wu-chun Feng of the Los Alamos Labs stating
Oh my. So - what else can we do to stop this trend? Relatively slow multi-processor machines. If we keep working on multi-threading our applications, we might be able to make a computer with 8 1ghz efficient chips outperform an 8ghz Moore-compatible Intel hype-chip-based system. Really. Multi-processor machines have traditionally been too expensive for the desktop. The software people have not spent a lot of time making sure that the regular end-user applications scale well across several processors.Take something like a web browser. Given a bit of wizardry (obviously, we need to consider concurrency and critical sections), you could have separate images downloaded and processed by separate processors. Your flash ad would run on another processor.
Frankly, I'm wondering what's stopping us from using this approach to increasing performance? Is this like the fact that OEMs equip the low-end PCs with too little RAM so that Joe Shmoe will buy a new one as quickly as possible, since he does not know that spending 100 bucks on more RAM will make his computer last another year or two?
And, really, as long as the focus is on the gigahertz, do the chip makers really concentrate on making their designs as efficient as possible?
Man. Those MS worms take up a lot of bandwidth. Charging extra for running windows as an advance penalty for future bandwidth hogging seems much fairer.
Given that oil became unavailable, our most realistic bet would be electricity generated by nuclear power.
Granted, we'd need very strict rationing of the oil on reserve. All cars off the roads, only buses and bikes. (Hey, we'd lose a few pounds in the process), and transportation of essentials.
Reroute all available oil reserves into transporting and manufacturing power plants (nuclear, wind, hydro). Making a wind power plant is not rocket science. Making an efficient wind power plant is trickier, but not technologically impossible. You have plenty of steel plants. Use them as much as possible.
Heating can also be provided by burning trees. Yes - I advocate burning trees when the going gets tough. Trees contain carbon that is already actively part of the carbon cycle, so burning trees is more environmentally friendly than burning coal or oil. Trees are also renewable. Plant one. Watch it grow.
Hot shower? You get black rubber hosing that you run across your roof. Sun-powered. Just take a shower when you get home from work, rather than the moment you wake up.
I think we can live without oil given that we prioritize the moment it disappears. If we're given advance warning, we might even do better.
On the other hand, if all oil was immediately destroyed, we would be in much greater trouble. Then again, we're already overpopulated. Biology class with population biology is an eye-opener, folks.
Where were you guys in stats class?
If you took this technology, made it match on too many faces and then had someone manually double-check the potential match, you would have a kick-ass system.
Like all powerful technology, its use must be ethical.
Actually, good friends tell good friends when they think they're fucking up. That is why Europe and America are currently being pretty damned good friends, and we would be good friends of Lucent to tell them to straighten up.
The problem arises when the friends can't figure out which one is fucking up, and get annoyed with each other.
I got two words for you : nudity patch.
Seriously, though. It's just a training program for nerds before they get out into the real world. Figure out how much work it is to get laid the hard way, how much time keeping a tidy apartment takes, etc etc etc.
Then, it's back to online nudity and pizza boxes with alien life forms forming.
GNU/Colombia or Colombia of the Wilderbeest?
I think the GNU name is silly, when you could have an awesome name like Wilderbeest. Same logo, awesome name. RMS - you read this?
So, I'll let your obvious fundamental faith in Christianity slip by - humans have been around for much longer than 7000 years. Let's see what's happened to Africa in the past 500 years?
;)
Oh. Colonialism. Slave trading. Infighting. I'm not saying they behaved better pre-whites, but we sure haven't made it any easier for them to prevail. We introduce concepts like nations, but draws the borders according to river streams and just using a ruler if we can't find a proper river to use, disregarding any socio-political matters like tribes. We borrow them money, but will not buy their produce. We still get more money from them by interest than we give them in terms of aid. So, without our so-called help they might be have been able to arrange running water for themselves.
That being said, anthropologists theorize that the reasons why the west has come to rule is bad weather and winter. In Africa, it was for a long time relatively feasible to live hand-to-mouth. They didn't have cold, cold winters where food got scarce. They didn't have overpopulation that required ever increasing levels of food output. Being too organized in terms of housing might have proven a disadvantage when there was confrontation. Lots of theories.
So, if we had been invaded by space aliens who used us for dumb labor force, oppressed us, and made Al Qaeda share a country with republicans, would you really expect us to produce a lot of good for the benefit of mankind?
By the way, the Sierra Leone elections give me hope. Holding democratic, peaceful elections after 10 years of civil war is an inspiration. Maybe they just benefitted mankind in terms of inspiration?
What intrigues me about the entire software industry, is that they charge relatively different prices around the work. In Europe, a copy of XP is maybe 1 week of average pay. In inner Africa, a copy of XP runs well into the months. Asking companies there to pay full price is plain ridiculous. When I'm rich and famous at 35, I'll go to Africa to teach them how to unleash the then awe-inspiring power of the Penguin. Hopefully, I'll be many years too late.
Finally someone has started to look at the historical implications of cooperating with Microsoft. If any one console wins a monopoly, it is bad news for the game developers, since the monopolist will be able to charge lots of dough for development tools. That would probably mean more expensive games for us.
I wouldn't even be surprised to see Sony and Nintendo coordinating attacks on Microsoft if XBox starts to gain too much momentum.
The current chemistry works nicely. Why change it?
Of course, if you're content with openoffice.org, then download and burn for free.
We don't live in a free market society. We live in a heavily legislated society where the most effective way of conducting competition can be in the courtroom. We live in a society where branding and commercials and spin form the basis of our spending decisions. It is extremely hard to enter a fully consolidated market.
It's imperfect. But until the courtrooms start to reject more cases, and lawmakers start to limit the right to sue, this is what we're stuck with.
I would have laughed at Ashcroft having the statue of a "topless" woman representing justice covered up, were it not for the fact that nobody has ever covered her up before. That means that your Secretary of Justice is the most conservative Secretary of Justice since the statue was erected (30s?). At least when it comes to nudity.
Or maybe he was uncomfortable promiting his shady agenda under her direct, righteous innocence.
And why do _you_ think intelligent people fall into deep depression and kill themselves?
As long as we are like you describe, we as a society is fundamentally, deeply fucked. You're digging your own grave, sir. When you fuck others given the necessity (and after fucking once, the necessity treshold empirically tends to dwindle), others will fuck you when they have to. So basically, you're fucking yourself in the ass.
When you feel your moral is being compromized, it's time to get outa there. Face it - if they are unethical enough to force you to break your own morals, do you think they will treat you well when push comes to shove?
Most of the big thinkers envisioned direct competition in an intelligent marketplace. However, history has proven they companies prefer to create incompatibilities to avoid competition. There was a time when each company had a different dimension and set of tools for simple nuts and bolts.
However, today these items are largely standardized, to the enjoyment of the customers.
Microsoft is actively fighting direct competition. They are trying to prevent competitors from using the same nuts and bolts (Lindows, as an example), or at least punishing them when they use their nuts and bolts without asking permission.
Basically, greed got in the way of capitalism. Rather than celebrating the very ideas that makes capitalism work, there seems to be a drift towards anti-capitalistic regulations - strong IP legislation, for once.
Also, you could argue that most markets are so consolidated that entering them is a possibility only for monopolists with extreme bank accounts. Look at the franchising frenzy that has set back innovation and localized service - I studied in Grand Forks. It has several good local restaurants, but people really, really wished TGIF and Olive Garden would come to town.
Hmm. I'm done rambling now. Too bad this wasn't as cohesive as yours.
Well - is it? If the boards will be 600 bucks in december, they'll start coming down around the time they need cheap boards for PS3. I'm guessing about 2004-2005?
As a matter of fact, taxing Big Wheels to fund road s is an excellent idea. It would mean they would invest in technologies to reduce road wear.
Furthermore, those of us that don't like cars but do nicely without no longer would have to subsidize something we view as largely unnecessary and destructive.
It is great to hear the Internet2 is still developing. Hopefully, grid computing and VR will be two killer apps for Internet2. With that speed, we can probably run our games on a remote server, only receiving a bit-by-bit dump that we stream directly to our monitor, almost completely eliminating the need for a video card.
Seriously, though. Extreme bandtwidth like this can benefit the Unix crowd, by making thin clients a more feasible technology. PS2 with broadband internet and X11 should be able to run remotely run heavy apps. Anybody tried yet?
Try Mandrake. But I also encourage you to check up with the graphics board manufacturer web site, and find out about your monitor timings - escpecially if your hardware is new.
I have had minimal problems installing Mandrake - until I came across a laptop with an nvidia board. I went to nvidia.com, found the linux section, and followed the detailed instructions. Pretty much a piece of cake!
Slackware is still good for learning the nitty gritties and having a rock stable system, but it is not for the command line interface challenged. It is not intended to be.
However, I commend you for posting this anonymously.
You just have to wonder what kind of moron would come up with something like this. No wonder Windows has trailed the Unix word when it comes to stability.
I'll admit that win2k is a decent piece of software. It does what it should do, fairly cleanly and it's pretty stable too. However, this is only a recent development after Microsoft realized that they were threatened from below by the OSS movement.
Microsoft has a long history of doing its best work (IE3&4 were quite good from a user point of view) when it is in a direct competitive situation. It is clearly in our best interest that they are forced to compete.