I'm pretty disappointed. The Jackie Chan joke could have been done so well with a little effort. "Wow, sounds like a good book. I didn't like the movie much, but then again I'm not a huge Jackie Chan fan." Bam, 20 seconds; you're still in the running for first post, and you might even get some positive mods. Such a waste.
Wednesday January 22, 2003 - [ 08:18 PM GMT ] Print this Article Topic - GNU/Linux
- By Robin 'Roblimo' Miller - I'm posting this LinuxWorld missive a little after 2 p.m., and I'll add to the post later today and tonight. Since most specific product announcements are being covered by others or have companion press releases we're running verbatim, please check our NewsVac section for that kind of thing. In my show diary, I will give you personal impressions of what's going on here, and if you have any specific areas you'd like me to cover tomorrow and Friday, please let me know (through comments on this story). Update posted 11:10 p.m. Wednesday. See below... Advertisement Click Here! Click Here!
Financial Services are hot-hot
Two years ago a friend of mine thought a seminar or conference about Linux and Open Source for financial service companies -- like banks, stock brokerages, and mutual funds -- would be a good idea. It flopped. Today, at at LinuxWorld, there's a sign in front of the room where the first seminar in the "Financial Services Summit" is being held that says:
Due to overwhelming response, the LinuxWorld Financial Summits are first serve, first seated sessions
The place is full of managers and IT types from banks and brokerage houses, and IT consultants that cater to this industry. Part of this is no doubt the New York location -- the Jacob Javits Convention Center is only a 15 or 30 minute cab ride (depending on traffic) from Wall Street.
But you didn't see this crowd at previous New York LinuxWorlds. NewsForge readers have noticed articles about brokerage houses and banks adopting Linux. Well, just a few minutes ago a reporter from a New York daily newspaper was sitting at a computer next to the one I'm using in the show press room. I wasn't trying to be nosy, just stretching my back and neck a little, and I happened to notice that he was typing notes about Linux and Wall Street.
It looks like Linux is going to be be coming to a bank or brokerage near you Real Soon Now -- if it's not there already.
Why do I see so many "Start" buttons?
For some reason an awful lot of hardware vendors that push Linux on servers seem to feel it's just fine to have lots of Windows screens on the computers they use in their booths to run slide shows or demonstrate their products. Personally, I have always thought this was silly. I actually asked a booth person for a company I will not name, "Does this mean you show Linux desktops at Windows-oriented shows?"
The answer this person gave: "Well, our software runs on all platforms -- Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris... I'm a sales guy, not an engineer, so I don't know how to run Linux and I stick to Windows 'cause that's what I know."
At least HP had a laptop in their booth running Linux. Yes, folks, this is the first time I have seen a laptop in an HP booth with Linux on it -- or at least mostly on it; the person who brought it said its sound didn't work (with Red Hat 8.0, and he didn't care because he was only using it to demonstrate printers.)
All other laptops visible in the HP booth ran Windows. Desktops and server terminals were a mixed bag, with a majority of them running Linux.
We'll give IBM good marks here: they had more Linux visible on laptops and desktops than any other major hardware vendor I saw at the show.
Not only that, an IBM employee I know personally gave me quite a rant about how I (and other journalists) ought to badger the people in Microsoft's booth unmercifully. "They're only here to tear down Linux," my IBM buddy said. "They hate Linux. They want to ruin us all. They don't belong here."
Update @ 11:10 p.m. US EST
I walked around the show floor a bit, then went to an interview appointment with several Dell execs, then out to supper with some friends. Now I'm back in my hotel room, typing this...
Talking with Dell about Linux
My first real question boiled down to, "When will I be able to buy a reasonably-priced Dell laptop with Linux on it?"
Brent Schroeder, Dell's director of engineering and Linux strategy, said the company had already tried to sell laptops pre-loaded with Linux, and that they had sold poorly. I pointed out that they were high-priced laptops with many mandatory options, including a built-in three year service contract, rather than the low-cost units Linux users were likely to buy.
His second answer was that Dell's big problem with selling Linux laptops -- and desktops -- was that whichever distribution they chose, it seemed most customers wanted another one; that if they settled on Red Hat, they'd get calls for SuSE, you might say, and if they chose SuSE, they'd get screams about not offering Debian, and so on. All this more or less boiled down to Linux users not being able to make up their minds and all demand one distribution and set of software packages. When that happens, sure, Dell will talk about Linux, okay? If, that is, they see enough demand to make it worth their while.
Carol Gittinger, a Dell corporate marketing person, said she monitors online forums, including Slashdot "and responses on the news sites" to gauge the depth of Linux demand fo laptops and desktops from corporate customers. She allowed that she saw some demand, and was aware that many customers bought Dell computers and immediately installed Linux on them, but echoed Schroeder's comments about how it is impossible to please all Linux users all of the time, so Dell was not likely to start selling user-level Linux computers until there was more Linux standardization.
I suggested that Dell needn't support a dozen different Linux distributions, just make sure drivers were available, so perhaps they should just sell Linux-compatible hardware, if only so the sysadmins taking care of the Linux servers Dell is hot to sell could use Linux-loaded Dell products to administer them.
"Servers" is the big word for Dell at LinuxWorld, and they were happy to get the conversation back into an area they wanted to push instead of answering questions about laptops. So they spieled me about how Dell servers, running Linux, offer a superior value proposition. The words "focus" and "execute" were used more than once. They also used the phrase "proof points" -- a new one for me -- to describe what they thought conservative, mainstream companies wanted to see before they started going heavily with Linux, and they told me Dell considers 2003 the year Linux will become really and truly mainstream, now that early adopters have tested it and made sure it works in corporate mission-critical applications and have provided... here it comes... proof points that less adventurous managers can use as guidance when they consider Linux.
Since HP, IBM, and others also offer Linux servers and support for them, I kept asking the Dell people why theirs were better. They kept talking about their "value proposition," and mentioned that they offered a one-stop shop for hardware and software, direct from Dell, without going through distributors, anywhere in the world. I asked why an enterprise-level customer would want Linux support from Dell when IBM, HP, and Red Hat -- among others -- offer comprehensive Linux support and have well-known kernel hackers and other experts on their payrolls. The Dell answer was that Dell partners with -- among others -- Red Hat and Oracle to provide support, so theirs is as good as any, possibly better than most.
We kept coming back to the "value" discussion and talk of "meeting mass demand." I asked if this didn't mean, boiled down to its essence, waiting until IBM, Sun, HP, and any number of other hardware vendors established a market, then moving in and undercutting their prices. One of the two Dell PR people in the room rephrased this tactic as "broadening the market." Okay. Sounds better that way, so we'll let it stand.
Later, my friend Peter Gallagher of DevIS said he liked Dell's servers a lot and has bought a bunch of them. He said their support was the best he got from any hardware vendor. He said his people always removed Dell's preinstalled Red Hat immediately and installed Debian, so he had never gone to Dell for Linux support, only for help with hardware, so he couldn't really offer an opinion about their Linux tech support, just hardware stuff, where -- he noted again -- he considered them top-notch.
Anyway, besides keeping commercial server customers like Peter happy, Dell's Schroeder said they see a huge market helping corporate customers migrate from Unix to Linux, and that Dell has plenty of expertise in this area. I asked if -- for example -- Sun, an old-line Unix shop now moving into the Linux marketplace, might not be a better choice for Unix-to-Linux migration assistance. Schroeder trotted out the "value proposition" phrase again. Okay, fine. Dell sells for less. Let's just say so. Nothing wrong with that, right?
The Golden Penguin Bowl is still a kick
This has been a perennial LinuxWorld feature, and it's still fun even at a conference where most of the attendees are business people, not the "Geeks" and "Nerds" represented by the two Bowl teams engaged in a trivia contest somewhat like the TV show "The Weakest Link" except funnier and more warm-hearted, with Slashdot and TechTV star Chris DiBona (now vp of a new and very cool online gaming venture, Damage Studios) as host.
Chris is not thin-lipped and sarcastic, but warm and funny. I say this not only because he was one of our OSDN coworkers before he left to co-found Damage Studios. He's really a funny and interesting guy, totally in his element asking questions like which port is usually used by OpenSSL, and what "CSS" stands for when talking about DVDs.
Sadly, CEO keynotes now outdraw hacker-type features like The Golden Penguin Bowl at LinuxWorld. I mean, here we are with Slashdot founder Rob Malda (another funny guy, and I don't say this just because we work together, honest) as one of the judges, and a bunch of fine, fun-loving geeks and nerds as contestants, and the auditorium was less than half-full, but was packed earlier in the day when the corporate chiefs held forth.
That's enough for tonight. It's after 11 p.m. here in New York, time to hit the sack and get ready for another active LinuxWorld day tomorrow.
If you have to pay ten cents for each ad on TV, or pay one dollar each time some telmarketer rang you up, you'd be fscking livid.
By that same token, if you only had to pay a tiny fraction of a penny for each ad you saw on TV, you probably wouldn't care. You have to consider the other side of the coin, which is that spam is orders of magnitude cheaper in resources and time than any existing form of intrusive advertising (snail-spam and telemarketing). Just my 2 cents.
I don't care what anyone says, Monster Hut has the best monster anywhere. Nice and thick, with plenty of sauce, and cheese that's gooey but not too stringy.
Now I'm making myself hungry. I think I'll order up some monster for lunch.
It's good to finally see some legislation on this. If we had had age limits on violent video games, I would have never made the mistake of playing Duke Nukem 3D last week. I don't know if I'll ever recover.
It's disgusting that in this day and age we still have companies who don't understand that girls can understand computers too.
Will Guildhall address cross-platform issues?
on
Guildhall at SMU Q&A
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
First, I want to thank you for doing this program. It sounds like a great way to infuse the game industry with some "new blood," and I anticipate many wasted hours enjoying the fruits of your labor.:)
One question I have is whether, or in what manner, the issues of cross-platform game development and portability will be taught. I know there are a lot more materials out there on learning DirectX as opposed to SDL, so will the Guildhall teach straight Windows game programming, or will students be encouraged to target multiple platforms? Also, how do you see Linux fit into the game industry as a whole, specifically for new programmers?
Wow, great to see IBM getting into the PDA market. For those who don't remember, they pretty much set the gold standard in the laptop industry, and we still live with the benefits today. But while this sounds like a good toy for geeks, I have to wonder about some of the choices made in the design of this device.
PDAs typically use processors designed specifically for embedded environments. They're built from the ground up for low power consumption in preference to blazing speed. The PowerPC is exactly the opposite, as anyone who has sat down at a recent G4 can tell you -- these things scream.
Furthermore, Linux is specifically architectured for the server market, which is why it's seen so much success in the enterprise. Trying to tweak it to run on a PDA is an excercise in feudalism. The choice could also be bad news for Linux, as people will start to think of the OS as suitable for only small devices.
It's a good idea, but I'd like to see them take a more sensible approach.
Hey, don't dis Mappy Land. The music alone makes it worth playing, and it's not a bad action-puzzler besides. After Alfred Chicken it's probably one of my favorite NES games.
It's always great to see some competition in the stagnant console market. Also, I wonder if they've given any thought to releasing a Linux distro for this sucker. If I read the article correctly, it has support for Ethernet, so this might make a cool little X terminal for mom.
Supporting Linux would be a key advantage over existing console makers, who go out of their way to prevent customers from running a real OS on their devices.
Maybe this time next year I'll be posting this comment from a GNU/Phantom boxin! Here's hoping they see the light.
I'm sort of impressed to see people still plugging away at the Bayesian spam filter problem. It's admirable to see that kind of preserverance in programmers.
For those coming late to the story, Joel Sponsky demonstrated in his well known column recently that Bayesian filtering of spam is an intractible problem. Until we have quantum computers, we're stuck with black lists, which work pretty well anyway.
But keep plugging away guys. Who knows, maybe Joel's wrong.
Yes, I was not the first to mention "old ladies," but I was the first to point out that San Francisco has a bunch of hills, which was the whole point of the comment. "Redundant" my ass. If you want Redundant, here's something you've probably heard before: LAY OFF THE CHEAP $3 CRACK. Thx.
Pretty sensationalist headline for the Journal. For those who didn't read the article, it's about whether the X-Men figurines are toys or dolls. Obviously the status of fictional characters as "human" or not is completely absurd, and not at all what the case was about.
X-Men fans should stop whining and go play with their dolls.
I was going to kill myself because I hate the world but then I was like wait maybe there is something out there worth living for. Not everyone is a weird freak I can't relate to, right? So I loaded up Slashdot and I read this story and I've decided that killing myself is the right choice after all. Bye.
Any word on whether these babies will run Linux? That's probably going to be the single biggest factor in deciding which 64-bit server CPU dominates the marketplace.
How has the growing popularity of Linux improved computer security? Conversely, how has the continuing success of Windows harmed security as a whole and encouraged hackers?
I bought a hard drive that used to be shared by a bunch of Slashbots. It contained hundreds of variations on a joke about buying CmdrTaco's old hard drive and finding duplicate stories.
This device is of no use to me. I don't speak a word of Garmin.
mixed blessing?
on
Reflections
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
It's great to hear that technology is improving. I almost dread getting calls from my friends with cellular phones, because the sound quality is so bad and they frequently get disconnected.
But I'm a little skittish about jumping into this hole, hog. We still haven't seen any unbiased studies on the effects of cellular phones on the brain (where people hold their phones while talking) and the reproductive organs (where they keep them when they're not).
I don't know if we want to double, treble, or quadruple their radiation emissions before we know what the effects on living tissue will be. What government department does this sort of thing fall under? The FCC? If there isn't one, then one should be created. Just my two cents.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also been determined that the discussion in a typical Slashdot story compresses to less than half of a percent of its original size.
How long before someone whips up a perl script and starts crapflooding the Senate? We might finally get some decent legislation for a change.
I'm pretty disappointed. The Jackie Chan joke could have been done so well with a little effort. "Wow, sounds like a good book. I didn't like the movie much, but then again I'm not a huge Jackie Chan fan." Bam, 20 seconds; you're still in the running for first post, and you might even get some positive mods. Such a waste.
Wednesday January 22, 2003 - [ 08:18 PM GMT ] Print this Article
Topic - GNU/Linux
- By Robin 'Roblimo' Miller -
I'm posting this LinuxWorld missive a little after 2 p.m., and I'll add to the post later today and tonight. Since most specific product announcements are being covered by others or have companion press releases we're running verbatim, please check our NewsVac section for that kind of thing. In my show diary, I will give you personal impressions of what's going on here, and if you have any specific areas you'd like me to cover tomorrow and Friday, please let me know (through comments on this story). Update posted 11:10 p.m. Wednesday. See below...
Advertisement
Click Here! Click Here!
Financial Services are hot-hot
Two years ago a friend of mine thought a seminar or conference about Linux and Open Source for financial service companies -- like banks, stock brokerages, and mutual funds -- would be a good idea. It flopped. Today, at at LinuxWorld, there's a sign in front of the room where the first seminar in the "Financial Services Summit" is being held that says:
Due to overwhelming response, the LinuxWorld Financial Summits are first serve, first seated sessions
The place is full of managers and IT types from banks and brokerage houses, and IT consultants that cater to this industry. Part of this is no doubt the New York location -- the Jacob Javits Convention Center is only a 15 or 30 minute cab ride (depending on traffic) from Wall Street.
But you didn't see this crowd at previous New York LinuxWorlds. NewsForge readers have noticed articles about brokerage houses and banks adopting Linux. Well, just a few minutes ago a reporter from a New York daily newspaper was sitting at a computer next to the one I'm using in the show press room. I wasn't trying to be nosy, just stretching my back and neck a little, and I happened to notice that he was typing notes about Linux and Wall Street.
It looks like Linux is going to be be coming to a bank or brokerage near you Real Soon Now -- if it's not there already.
Why do I see so many "Start" buttons?
For some reason an awful lot of hardware vendors that push Linux on servers seem to feel it's just fine to have lots of Windows screens on the computers they use in their booths to run slide shows or demonstrate their products. Personally, I have always thought this was silly. I actually asked a booth person for a company I will not name, "Does this mean you show Linux desktops at Windows-oriented shows?"
The answer this person gave: "Well, our software runs on all platforms -- Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris... I'm a sales guy, not an engineer, so I don't know how to run Linux and I stick to Windows 'cause that's what I know."
At least HP had a laptop in their booth running Linux. Yes, folks, this is the first time I have seen a laptop in an HP booth with Linux on it -- or at least mostly on it; the person who brought it said its sound didn't work (with Red Hat 8.0, and he didn't care because he was only using it to demonstrate printers.)
All other laptops visible in the HP booth ran Windows. Desktops and server terminals were a mixed bag, with a majority of them running Linux.
We'll give IBM good marks here: they had more Linux visible on laptops and desktops than any other major hardware vendor I saw at the show.
Not only that, an IBM employee I know personally gave me quite a rant about how I (and other journalists) ought to badger the people in Microsoft's booth unmercifully. "They're only here to tear down Linux," my IBM buddy said. "They hate Linux. They want to ruin us all. They don't belong here."
Update @ 11:10 p.m. US EST
I walked around the show floor a bit, then went to an interview appointment with several Dell execs, then out to supper with some friends. Now I'm back in my hotel room, typing this...
Talking with Dell about Linux
My first real question boiled down to, "When will I be able to buy a reasonably-priced Dell laptop with Linux on it?"
Brent Schroeder, Dell's director of engineering and Linux strategy, said the company had already tried to sell laptops pre-loaded with Linux, and that they had sold poorly. I pointed out that they were high-priced laptops with many mandatory options, including a built-in three year service contract, rather than the low-cost units Linux users were likely to buy.
His second answer was that Dell's big problem with selling Linux laptops -- and desktops -- was that whichever distribution they chose, it seemed most customers wanted another one; that if they settled on Red Hat, they'd get calls for SuSE, you might say, and if they chose SuSE, they'd get screams about not offering Debian, and so on. All this more or less boiled down to Linux users not being able to make up their minds and all demand one distribution and set of software packages. When that happens, sure, Dell will talk about Linux, okay? If, that is, they see enough demand to make it worth their while.
Carol Gittinger, a Dell corporate marketing person, said she monitors online forums, including Slashdot "and responses on the news sites" to gauge the depth of Linux demand fo laptops and desktops from corporate customers. She allowed that she saw some demand, and was aware that many customers bought Dell computers and immediately installed Linux on them, but echoed Schroeder's comments about how it is impossible to please all Linux users all of the time, so Dell was not likely to start selling user-level Linux computers until there was more Linux standardization.
I suggested that Dell needn't support a dozen different Linux distributions, just make sure drivers were available, so perhaps they should just sell Linux-compatible hardware, if only so the sysadmins taking care of the Linux servers Dell is hot to sell could use Linux-loaded Dell products to administer them.
"Servers" is the big word for Dell at LinuxWorld, and they were happy to get the conversation back into an area they wanted to push instead of answering questions about laptops. So they spieled me about how Dell servers, running Linux, offer a superior value proposition. The words "focus" and "execute" were used more than once. They also used the phrase "proof points" -- a new one for me -- to describe what they thought conservative, mainstream companies wanted to see before they started going heavily with Linux, and they told me Dell considers 2003 the year Linux will become really and truly mainstream, now that early adopters have tested it and made sure it works in corporate mission-critical applications and have provided... here it comes... proof points that less adventurous managers can use as guidance when they consider Linux.
Since HP, IBM, and others also offer Linux servers and support for them, I kept asking the Dell people why theirs were better. They kept talking about their "value proposition," and mentioned that they offered a one-stop shop for hardware and software, direct from Dell, without going through distributors, anywhere in the world. I asked why an enterprise-level customer would want Linux support from Dell when IBM, HP, and Red Hat -- among others -- offer comprehensive Linux support and have well-known kernel hackers and other experts on their payrolls. The Dell answer was that Dell partners with -- among others -- Red Hat and Oracle to provide support, so theirs is as good as any, possibly better than most.
We kept coming back to the "value" discussion and talk of "meeting mass demand." I asked if this didn't mean, boiled down to its essence, waiting until IBM, Sun, HP, and any number of other hardware vendors established a market, then moving in and undercutting their prices. One of the two Dell PR people in the room rephrased this tactic as "broadening the market." Okay. Sounds better that way, so we'll let it stand.
Later, my friend Peter Gallagher of DevIS said he liked Dell's servers a lot and has bought a bunch of them. He said their support was the best he got from any hardware vendor. He said his people always removed Dell's preinstalled Red Hat immediately and installed Debian, so he had never gone to Dell for Linux support, only for help with hardware, so he couldn't really offer an opinion about their Linux tech support, just hardware stuff, where -- he noted again -- he considered them top-notch.
Anyway, besides keeping commercial server customers like Peter happy, Dell's Schroeder said they see a huge market helping corporate customers migrate from Unix to Linux, and that Dell has plenty of expertise in this area. I asked if -- for example -- Sun, an old-line Unix shop now moving into the Linux marketplace, might not be a better choice for Unix-to-Linux migration assistance. Schroeder trotted out the "value proposition" phrase again. Okay, fine. Dell sells for less. Let's just say so. Nothing wrong with that, right?
The Golden Penguin Bowl is still a kick
This has been a perennial LinuxWorld feature, and it's still fun even at a conference where most of the attendees are business people, not the "Geeks" and "Nerds" represented by the two Bowl teams engaged in a trivia contest somewhat like the TV show "The Weakest Link" except funnier and more warm-hearted, with Slashdot and TechTV star Chris DiBona (now vp of a new and very cool online gaming venture, Damage Studios) as host.
Chris is not thin-lipped and sarcastic, but warm and funny. I say this not only because he was one of our OSDN coworkers before he left to co-found Damage Studios. He's really a funny and interesting guy, totally in his element asking questions like which port is usually used by OpenSSL, and what "CSS" stands for when talking about DVDs.
Sadly, CEO keynotes now outdraw hacker-type features like The Golden Penguin Bowl at LinuxWorld. I mean, here we are with Slashdot founder Rob Malda (another funny guy, and I don't say this just because we work together, honest) as one of the judges, and a bunch of fine, fun-loving geeks and nerds as contestants, and the auditorium was less than half-full, but was packed earlier in the day when the corporate chiefs held forth.
That's enough for tonight. It's after 11 p.m. here in New York, time to hit the sack and get ready for another active LinuxWorld day tomorrow.
Post a new comment
If you have to pay ten cents for each ad on TV, or pay one dollar each time some telmarketer rang you up, you'd be fscking livid.
By that same token, if you only had to pay a tiny fraction of a penny for each ad you saw on TV, you probably wouldn't care. You have to consider the other side of the coin, which is that spam is orders of magnitude cheaper in resources and time than any existing form of intrusive advertising (snail-spam and telemarketing). Just my 2 cents.
I don't care what anyone says, Monster Hut has the best monster anywhere. Nice and thick, with plenty of sauce, and cheese that's gooey but not too stringy.
Now I'm making myself hungry. I think I'll order up some monster for lunch.
It's good to finally see some legislation on this. If we had had age limits on violent video games, I would have never made the mistake of playing Duke Nukem 3D last week. I don't know if I'll ever recover.
You beat me to it, did it better, and got first post.
Time to kill myself.
I certainly will never use anything from them ever again.
Does that include Linux?
It's disgusting that in this day and age we still have companies who don't understand that girls can understand computers too.
First, I want to thank you for doing this program. It sounds like a great way to infuse the game industry with some "new blood," and I anticipate many wasted hours enjoying the fruits of your labor. :)
One question I have is whether, or in what manner, the issues of cross-platform game development and portability will be taught. I know there are a lot more materials out there on learning DirectX as opposed to SDL, so will the Guildhall teach straight Windows game programming, or will students be encouraged to target multiple platforms? Also, how do you see Linux fit into the game industry as a whole, specifically for new programmers?
Wow, great to see IBM getting into the PDA market. For those who don't remember, they pretty much set the gold standard in the laptop industry, and we still live with the benefits today. But while this sounds like a good toy for geeks, I have to wonder about some of the choices made in the design of this device.
PDAs typically use processors designed specifically for embedded environments. They're built from the ground up for low power consumption in preference to blazing speed. The PowerPC is exactly the opposite, as anyone who has sat down at a recent G4 can tell you -- these things scream.
Furthermore, Linux is specifically architectured for the server market, which is why it's seen so much success in the enterprise. Trying to tweak it to run on a PDA is an excercise in feudalism. The choice could also be bad news for Linux, as people will start to think of the OS as suitable for only small devices.
It's a good idea, but I'd like to see them take a more sensible approach.
How much for the chair?
Hey, don't dis Mappy Land. The music alone makes it worth playing, and it's not a bad action-puzzler besides. After Alfred Chicken it's probably one of my favorite NES games.
It's always great to see some competition in the stagnant console market. Also, I wonder if they've given any thought to releasing a Linux distro for this sucker. If I read the article correctly, it has support for Ethernet, so this might make a cool little X terminal for mom.
Supporting Linux would be a key advantage over existing console makers, who go out of their way to prevent customers from running a real OS on their devices.
Maybe this time next year I'll be posting this comment from a GNU/Phantom boxin! Here's hoping they see the light.
I'm sort of impressed to see people still plugging away at the Bayesian spam filter problem. It's admirable to see that kind of preserverance in programmers.
For those coming late to the story, Joel Sponsky demonstrated in his well known column recently that Bayesian filtering of spam is an intractible problem. Until we have quantum computers, we're stuck with black lists, which work pretty well anyway.
But keep plugging away guys. Who knows, maybe Joel's wrong.
Yes, I was not the first to mention "old ladies," but I was the first to point out that San Francisco has a bunch of hills, which was the whole point of the comment. "Redundant" my ass. If you want Redundant, here's something you've probably heard before: LAY OFF THE CHEAP $3 CRACK. Thx.
San Francisco is very hilly. No doubt they anticipated old ladies being run down by out-of-control Segwii and decided to knit the problem in the butt.
Pretty sensationalist headline for the Journal. For those who didn't read the article, it's about whether the X-Men figurines are toys or dolls. Obviously the status of fictional characters as "human" or not is completely absurd, and not at all what the case was about.
X-Men fans should stop whining and go play with their dolls.
I was going to kill myself because I hate the world but then I was like wait maybe there is something out there worth living for. Not everyone is a weird freak I can't relate to, right? So I loaded up Slashdot and I read this story and I've decided that killing myself is the right choice after all. Bye.
Any word on whether these babies will run Linux? That's probably going to be the single biggest factor in deciding which 64-bit server CPU dominates the marketplace.
How has the growing popularity of Linux improved computer security? Conversely, how has the continuing success of Windows harmed security as a whole and encouraged hackers?
I bought a hard drive that used to be shared by a bunch of Slashbots. It contained hundreds of variations on a joke about buying CmdrTaco's old hard drive and finding duplicate stories.
This device is of no use to me. I don't speak a word of Garmin.
It's great to hear that technology is improving. I almost dread getting calls from my friends with cellular phones, because the sound quality is so bad and they frequently get disconnected.
But I'm a little skittish about jumping into this hole, hog. We still haven't seen any unbiased studies on the effects of cellular phones on the brain (where people hold their phones while talking) and the reproductive organs (where they keep them when they're not).
I don't know if we want to double, treble, or quadruple their radiation emissions before we know what the effects on living tissue will be. What government department does this sort of thing fall under? The FCC? If there isn't one, then one should be created. Just my two cents.