Last I heard, Pixar uses mostly Mac workstations, but still uses x86 render farms. I would expect that to change when XServes are updated to G5. But also keep in mind that Steve Jobs isn't a stupid businessman -- he's not going to do something with Pixar that isn't a wise investment just to throw some business Apple's way.
Proponents have long argued that because biometrics cannot be forgotten, like a password, or lost or stolen...
I heard a rumor that the CIA used to use finger print scanners as a security measure. The problem was that their agents were being killed and their hands cut off to gain access to secure areas/information. Whether or not the rumor is true, the problem is still real. Biometrics can be stolen, it's just a bit more gruesome.
[Alpha] had more going for it than Opteron ever did, and generations earlier.
Maybe from an engineering perspective, but one thing Opteron has that Alpha doesn't is compatibility with existing x86 applications. That's going to mean a lot to a lot of people because they think it will reduce the cost of a transition. Whether or not it is actually cheaper is irrelevant if customers think Opteron will make it cheaper.
The stats I've seen show the G5 at 2 Ghz capable of emulating an Intel P3 at approximately 400 Mhz.
I'm curious as to where these stats came from (see my sig). It wasn't VirtualPC, as it won't run on a G5. It requires the G4's ability to swap byte-ordering in the processor. Any other x86 emulator (e.g. Bochs) is just too dog slow to be used for anything performance intensive.
VirtualPC isn't all that snappy either. I have a G4 800 with VirtualPC 6 and it pretty much feels like I'm working on a 486 when I use it.
Theoretically, Microsoft could use the x86 emulation technology from VirtualPC to emulate a processor for xbox1 games, but I don't thing things will work out. It's more likely that if they were to offer backward compatibility it would be with an add-on card as someone else pointed out.
...I could protect myself from the most common form on data failure - a disk crash.
In my experience, the most common form of data loss is not hardware failure, but user error. RAID is great for protecting against hardware failure, but be sure to still make backups to prevent against accidental deletion.
This is a set of APIs which are completely proprietary to MacOS and which bring a program no closer to Linux than a program which uses the Windows API program does.
Actually, a program using Windows APIs is much closer to Linux because of winelib.
I'm a CS major and recently switched from a Palm to an iPaq. Microsoft's PDA OS is so much better than Palm's, it's hard to imagine using anything else. At first I thought the $500 price tag was outrageous, but it has helped with my studies and organization tremendously. Bash MS all you want, but their PDA OS is by far the most versitile on the market today.
Would you care to elaborate? Basically all you said is that it is better. How is it better?
The only thing that really worries me personally, as a MacOSX user, is that Apple has based it's browser on Trolltech's Qt toolkit. If Trolltech is indeed owned by Canopy (stupid fucks, how could they let that happen), then it could very well be yet another bait. KDE might have some huge potential problems comming up as well.
Reread the article -- they got out of TrollTech and never had control of it anyway. Also, Safari is NOT based on Qt. It's based on Konquerer's HTML rendering engine and uses shim code for any Qt API calls. And the Vista.com deal is pretty irrelevant (I used to work there). SCO gets to resell Vista's web offering and Vista switches over to SCO Unix from RedHat and NT.
The thing looks like it's built around a $100 racing seat from Summit. Those are definitely not very comfortable, and I can't imagine they're ergonimically correct for typing.
Handling connection/disconnection is your automounter daemon "autofs".
He was talking about disconnected operation, not automounting. Disconnected or offline operation means you can still access the data without connecting to the server (or a peer as the case may be). Totally different from automounting. As far as I know you can't do this with NFS.
You want to break millions of lines of code just because you're bothered seeing deprecated classes and methods in the JavaDocs? Are you insane???
It's more than just deprecated things. But since we're on the subject...
It's more than compiler warnings or javadocs. It's not just aesthetics. Things are deprecated for a reason. Usually it's because there are serious problems, like with Thread.stop(). Sometimes it's because there's a better way to do it. Sometimes it's just to make things more consistent, like with Color constants (which are fixed in 1.4).
Modify the JavaDoc generator to filter them out if you care that much but leave my legacy alone, will you?
Who's going to force you to upgrade? You could keep using JDKs up to 1.5 which is backwards compatible to JDK 1.0.
My vote would be to freeze the Java language (perhaps after 1.5) and concentrate on the following:
* memory footprint
* runtime efficiency...
Leave it alone (the sooner the better) except for improvements in the implementation.
This is a good idea. However, my vote is to concentrate on Java3. Screw backwards compatibility going forward and fix the standard library. Throw out the crap that has come along from JDK 1.0-1.1 and make the platform consistent. Why do we have both Enumerations and Iterators? Why are constants mostly UPPERCASE but sometimes lowercase (see java.awt.Color)? What about Thread.stop()?
This cruft is never going to go away until Sun releases a version of Java that isn't backwards compatible. Perl and Python do it. Java should too. It makes for a much cleaner language for new projects. Old projects may get stuck on a Java2 platform until the owners invest the time to convert them, but that's the way things go. It's time to clean out the cobwebs in Java and make better use of the new features.
Once all the old crap is gone, then it will be time to freeze the language and standard library.
From the article: The best usability I get is from Windows XP... The user environment does what I expect it to do at any time. 95% of the applications carry out user-interactivity actions exactly like another Windows app would do it... It is just the 'standard', we like it or not.
Ok, this bugs me. The author is basing usability on what he's used to, not necessarily what is most usable. I can't dispute the fact that Windows apps tend to be consistent -- consistency is one of the most important components of usability). But if something is consistently crappy, it's still crappy. Just because someone is trained on one interface and is used to it doesn't make it highly usable from an objective point of view.
It reminds me of a story about a lady who always cut the ends off of the ham before she baked it. One day her kid asked her why she did it. She answered, "because that's the way my mother always did it." She got curious about it though, so she called her mother. Her mother said that she cut off the ends of the ham because that's the way she used to do it. So the lady called her mother's mother, who told her that she cut off the ends of the ham because it wouldn't fit in the pan otherwise.
All that to say that just because you're used to something doesn't mean it is the best way to do it.
What does licensing revenue have to do with open source?
Have you ever even looked at the definition of open source? The Free Distribution section is what leads to the lost licensing revenue. If our software was open source, we couldn't stop a customer from buying 10 licenses and running it on 10,000 computers. The Source Code section is what leads to lost maintenance revenue. If the customer has the source code, they are less likely to pay us to fix bugs or add features.
you said that you can't open source your application because you'd lose licensing revenue, which implies that you believe the two are mutually exclusive.
The fact that my company's revenue would be significantly reduced by open sourcing our software in no way suggests that open source and commercial software are mutually exclusive. I never said they were, so stop putting words in my mouth.
Red Hat, JBoss Group, Apple and IBM are all companies that make money off of open source one way or another. Their business models do not fit every business. Many businesses would not be able to stay profitable if they open sourced their software. The company I work for is one of them. If we made most of our money from hardware, consulting or some other services, sure we could open source our stuff and still turn a profit. But we make money by licensing our software to customers and even resellers. It just doesn't fit our business model.
So what's to stop you from providing open-source versions of your software, and getting paid for the consulting and maintenance?
Many millions of dollars in licensing revenue.
> even if governments have to consider open source software, they're not likely going to go after something that doesn't have a commercial backing of some sort.
Again, a product being open-source doesn't preclude it from being commercial.
I didn't mean to say open-source and commercial are mutually exclusive. I meant to say that a government isn't going to say "Oh, I can get this open source stuff for free and save the tax payers millions," but instead that they will look to companies like Red Hat that back open source software.
I think it's good that governments consider open source. But at the same time, the government buying comercial software supports my family.
The company I work for sells a lot of software to state governments, the federal government, and foreign governments. At a time when most businesses are tightening their belts, government sales have become more important to keeping the company in the black. If sales drop too much, I could lose my job. So while I like the idea of the government considering all the options, I also like the idea of the government supporting the software industry.
One other thing to note: we sell very litte software without consulting and maintenance attached to it. Our customers don't want to dink around with stuff without support. They want someone to come in and set it up for them. So even if governments have to consider open source software, they're not likely going to go after something that doesn't have a commercial backing of some sort.
you can do anything you want to, if you put your mind to it.
If that's the case, then why do people need to pirate Windows to get a job as you suggested before?
So, it was illegal and unethical for me, as a Canadian, to have an interest in American TV? I put it to you that when I was pirating DirecTV last year at this time it was neither.
You can have an interest in whatever the heck you want; there are no laws against that. Pirating satellite TV is probably illegal, even if you're in Canada, and definitely unethical.
Exactly. And while we're excluding low wage earners from getting higher-status jobs, I'd like to also do the same to trailer trash, euro trash, and people from outside my country's borders. Actually, I'd like to ensure that only people that look and act like me can enjoy a good job! Where's them Indians with their caste system when you need 'em?
[ Ugh, having to work with those dirty poor people sucks. I think I'll make having windows experience part of my requirements to work here. ]
Life's not fair. Get over it. I want to be a race car driver. Guess what? You have to have money to get into the sport, or you could steal all your gear. I also want to be an NBA player. Guess what? You have to be really good at basketball. Not everyone can do do any job. You just have to play the cards life deals you.
But who says a drug dealer sells to children? Only an idiot drug dealer would do that, like the ones most US propaganda shows you. Real drug dealers are a hell of a lot more intelligent than that.
This is a bit OT, but I had a few friends in high school who did drugs. Guess where they got their drugs? Other high schoolers. Guess where those dealers got their drugs? Other high schoolers. I knew the largest crack supplier in the county. She was 17. Out of the whole ring of dealers I was aware of, nobody was over 25. Don't tell me dealers don't sell to kids.
Selling crack to kids and pirating software are one and the same?
Yes, from the standpoint of they are both illegal and unethical. That's all that I was trying to say.
you compare selling crack to kids with steeling software from the richest man in the world.
yah I can see how both those things are equally bad.
I was waiting for someone to comment on that. The point isn't "which is worse," but that both are wrong. "Equally bad" is irrelevant. I could have used shop-lifting instead of drug dealing and the point would be the same. The point is: poor circumstances do not justify crime.
And it's not just stealing software from the richest man in the world. It's stealing from everyone who works for Microsoft, even indirectly. It's stealing from the engineers who work on the software. It's stealing from the janitor who mops the floor. It's stealing from the construction worker who adds on to the campus. It's stealing from the high-schooler who works at the espresso stand across from the campus. If Microsoft were bringing in millions more in revenue, all those people would be getting a slice of that, however small it may be.
Anyone should have the right to counteract the effects of abusive monopoly practices.
No, those in authority have the responsibility to counteract the problems, just as the Tiwanese government has done. What you are calling for is anarchy.
The copyrights on Windows and Office should be NULL and void.
Why, because they are popular? Granted, Microsoft has abused a monopoly power, but that does not warrant robbing them of the work they have done. The punishment must fit the crime. If you work 20 years compiling a dictionary and it becomes so popular that it's the de facto standard, but you start charging too much for it, should your dictionary suddenly be thrown into the public domain?
Like I pointed out before, there are alternatives that serve the same function. You can use OpenOffice on Linux with WINE and do virtually anything you could do with Office and Windows.
now suppose you can't get a job unless you have cable.
sounds like you would be forced to get cable, or starve.
So these people need to have Windows for survival? I see your point, but I don't think it's valid. It would have to be a very strange set of circumstances for one to say "I had to pirate Windows or I would die," wouldn't it?
Suppose for a job that a person has chosen, that person has to have Windows. What's stopping that person from looking for a different job that doesn't require them to pirate software?
Say you have a guy who grew up in the inner city and for whatever reason dropped out of high school. He's broke and can't find a job. Maybe this person should become a drug dealer. It's not ethical, and it's definitely not legal, but the guy can't seem to find a job anywhere else. Does that make it alright to sell crack to kids? No!
It's not that much different. These circumstances are no excuse for pirating software.
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Last I heard, Pixar uses mostly Mac workstations, but still uses x86 render farms. I would expect that to change when XServes are updated to G5. But also keep in mind that Steve Jobs isn't a stupid businessman -- he's not going to do something with Pixar that isn't a wise investment just to throw some business Apple's way.
Proponents have long argued that because biometrics cannot be forgotten, like a password, or lost or stolen...
I heard a rumor that the CIA used to use finger print scanners as a security measure. The problem was that their agents were being killed and their hands cut off to gain access to secure areas/information. Whether or not the rumor is true, the problem is still real. Biometrics can be stolen, it's just a bit more gruesome.
[Alpha] had more going for it than Opteron ever did, and generations earlier.
Maybe from an engineering perspective, but one thing Opteron has that Alpha doesn't is compatibility with existing x86 applications. That's going to mean a lot to a lot of people because they think it will reduce the cost of a transition. Whether or not it is actually cheaper is irrelevant if customers think Opteron will make it cheaper.
The stats I've seen show the G5 at 2 Ghz capable of emulating an Intel P3 at approximately 400 Mhz.
I'm curious as to where these stats came from (see my sig). It wasn't VirtualPC, as it won't run on a G5. It requires the G4's ability to swap byte-ordering in the processor. Any other x86 emulator (e.g. Bochs) is just too dog slow to be used for anything performance intensive.
VirtualPC isn't all that snappy either. I have a G4 800 with VirtualPC 6 and it pretty much feels like I'm working on a 486 when I use it.
Theoretically, Microsoft could use the x86 emulation technology from VirtualPC to emulate a processor for xbox1 games, but I don't thing things will work out. It's more likely that if they were to offer backward compatibility it would be with an add-on card as someone else pointed out.
...I could protect myself from the most common form on data failure - a disk crash.
In my experience, the most common form of data loss is not hardware failure, but user error. RAID is great for protecting against hardware failure, but be sure to still make backups to prevent against accidental deletion.
... some of the technical details, such as the version of Mac OS X used...
According to this press release (at the very bottom), they're using Linux, not OS X.
Statistics are dumb.
Not all statistics are dumb. Just 82% of them.
You can't copyright a name, but you can trademark it.
This is a set of APIs which are completely proprietary to MacOS and which bring a program no closer to Linux than a program which uses the Windows API program does.
Actually, a program using Windows APIs is much closer to Linux because of winelib.
I'm a CS major and recently switched from a Palm to an iPaq. Microsoft's PDA OS is so much better than Palm's, it's hard to imagine using anything else. At first I thought the $500 price tag was outrageous, but it has helped with my studies and organization tremendously. Bash MS all you want, but their PDA OS is by far the most versitile on the market today.
Would you care to elaborate? Basically all you said is that it is better. How is it better?
The only thing that really worries me personally, as a MacOSX user, is that Apple has based it's browser on Trolltech's Qt toolkit. If Trolltech is indeed owned by Canopy (stupid fucks, how could they let that happen), then it could very well be yet another bait. KDE might have some huge potential problems comming up as well.
Reread the article -- they got out of TrollTech and never had control of it anyway. Also, Safari is NOT based on Qt. It's based on Konquerer's HTML rendering engine and uses shim code for any Qt API calls. And the Vista.com deal is pretty irrelevant (I used to work there). SCO gets to resell Vista's web offering and Vista switches over to SCO Unix from RedHat and NT.
The thing looks like it's built around a $100 racing seat from Summit. Those are definitely not very comfortable, and I can't imagine they're ergonimically correct for typing.
Handling connection/disconnection is your automounter daemon "autofs".
He was talking about disconnected operation, not automounting. Disconnected or offline operation means you can still access the data without connecting to the server (or a peer as the case may be). Totally different from automounting. As far as I know you can't do this with NFS.
You want to break millions of lines of code just because you're bothered seeing deprecated classes and methods in the JavaDocs? Are you insane???
It's more than just deprecated things. But since we're on the subject...
It's more than compiler warnings or javadocs. It's not just aesthetics. Things are deprecated for a reason. Usually it's because there are serious problems, like with Thread.stop(). Sometimes it's because there's a better way to do it. Sometimes it's just to make things more consistent, like with Color constants (which are fixed in 1.4).
Modify the JavaDoc generator to filter them out if you care that much but leave my legacy alone, will you?
Who's going to force you to upgrade? You could keep using JDKs up to 1.5 which is backwards compatible to JDK 1.0.
My vote would be to freeze the Java language (perhaps after 1.5) and concentrate on the following:
...
* memory footprint
* runtime efficiency
Leave it alone (the sooner the better) except for improvements in the implementation.
This is a good idea. However, my vote is to concentrate on Java3. Screw backwards compatibility going forward and fix the standard library. Throw out the crap that has come along from JDK 1.0-1.1 and make the platform consistent. Why do we have both Enumerations and Iterators? Why are constants mostly UPPERCASE but sometimes lowercase (see java.awt.Color)? What about Thread.stop()?
This cruft is never going to go away until Sun releases a version of Java that isn't backwards compatible. Perl and Python do it. Java should too. It makes for a much cleaner language for new projects. Old projects may get stuck on a Java2 platform until the owners invest the time to convert them, but that's the way things go. It's time to clean out the cobwebs in Java and make better use of the new features.
Once all the old crap is gone, then it will be time to freeze the language and standard library.
I've not yet noticed many Perl-run pages that have been slashdotted so successfully as PHP.
Due in large part to the fact that PHP is used a whole lot more than Perl for web sites. I doubt the language has all that much to do with it.
Most performance problems in dynamic (Java/PHP/Perl) websites that I've seen are because the database isn't indexed properly.
From the article:
The best usability I get is from Windows XP... The user environment does what I expect it to do at any time. 95% of the applications carry out user-interactivity actions exactly like another Windows app would do it... It is just the 'standard', we like it or not.
Ok, this bugs me. The author is basing usability on what he's used to, not necessarily what is most usable. I can't dispute the fact that Windows apps tend to be consistent -- consistency is one of the most important components of usability). But if something is consistently crappy, it's still crappy. Just because someone is trained on one interface and is used to it doesn't make it highly usable from an objective point of view.
It reminds me of a story about a lady who always cut the ends off of the ham before she baked it. One day her kid asked her why she did it. She answered, "because that's the way my mother always did it." She got curious about it though, so she called her mother. Her mother said that she cut off the ends of the ham because that's the way she used to do it. So the lady called her mother's mother, who told her that she cut off the ends of the ham because it wouldn't fit in the pan otherwise.
All that to say that just because you're used to something doesn't mean it is the best way to do it.
What does licensing revenue have to do with open source?
Have you ever even looked at the definition of open source? The Free Distribution section is what leads to the lost licensing revenue. If our software was open source, we couldn't stop a customer from buying 10 licenses and running it on 10,000 computers. The Source Code section is what leads to lost maintenance revenue. If the customer has the source code, they are less likely to pay us to fix bugs or add features.
you said that you can't open source your application because you'd lose licensing revenue, which implies that you believe the two are mutually exclusive.
The fact that my company's revenue would be significantly reduced by open sourcing our software in no way suggests that open source and commercial software are mutually exclusive. I never said they were, so stop putting words in my mouth.
Red Hat, JBoss Group, Apple and IBM are all companies that make money off of open source one way or another. Their business models do not fit every business. Many businesses would not be able to stay profitable if they open sourced their software. The company I work for is one of them. If we made most of our money from hardware, consulting or some other services, sure we could open source our stuff and still turn a profit. But we make money by licensing our software to customers and even resellers. It just doesn't fit our business model.
So what's to stop you from providing open-source versions of your software, and getting paid for the consulting and maintenance?
Many millions of dollars in licensing revenue.
> even if governments have to consider open source software, they're not likely going to go after something that doesn't have a commercial backing of some sort.
Again, a product being open-source doesn't preclude it from being commercial.
I didn't mean to say open-source and commercial are mutually exclusive. I meant to say that a government isn't going to say "Oh, I can get this open source stuff for free and save the tax payers millions," but instead that they will look to companies like Red Hat that back open source software.
I think it's good that governments consider open source. But at the same time, the government buying comercial software supports my family.
The company I work for sells a lot of software to state governments, the federal government, and foreign governments. At a time when most businesses are tightening their belts, government sales have become more important to keeping the company in the black. If sales drop too much, I could lose my job. So while I like the idea of the government considering all the options, I also like the idea of the government supporting the software industry.
One other thing to note: we sell very litte software without consulting and maintenance attached to it. Our customers don't want to dink around with stuff without support. They want someone to come in and set it up for them. So even if governments have to consider open source software, they're not likely going to go after something that doesn't have a commercial backing of some sort.
If that's the case, then why do people need to pirate Windows to get a job as you suggested before?
So, it was illegal and unethical for me, as a Canadian, to have an interest in American TV? I put it to you that when I was pirating DirecTV last year at this time it was neither.
You can have an interest in whatever the heck you want; there are no laws against that. Pirating satellite TV is probably illegal, even if you're in Canada, and definitely unethical.
Life's not fair. Get over it. I want to be a race car driver. Guess what? You have to have money to get into the sport, or you could steal all your gear. I also want to be an NBA player. Guess what? You have to be really good at basketball. Not everyone can do do any job. You just have to play the cards life deals you.
But who says a drug dealer sells to children? Only an idiot drug dealer would do that, like the ones most US propaganda shows you. Real drug dealers are a hell of a lot more intelligent than that.
This is a bit OT, but I had a few friends in high school who did drugs. Guess where they got their drugs? Other high schoolers. Guess where those dealers got their drugs? Other high schoolers. I knew the largest crack supplier in the county. She was 17. Out of the whole ring of dealers I was aware of, nobody was over 25. Don't tell me dealers don't sell to kids.
Selling crack to kids and pirating software are one and the same?
Yes, from the standpoint of they are both illegal and unethical. That's all that I was trying to say.
I was waiting for someone to comment on that. The point isn't "which is worse," but that both are wrong. "Equally bad" is irrelevant. I could have used shop-lifting instead of drug dealing and the point would be the same. The point is: poor circumstances do not justify crime.
And it's not just stealing software from the richest man in the world. It's stealing from everyone who works for Microsoft, even indirectly. It's stealing from the engineers who work on the software. It's stealing from the janitor who mops the floor. It's stealing from the construction worker who adds on to the campus. It's stealing from the high-schooler who works at the espresso stand across from the campus. If Microsoft were bringing in millions more in revenue, all those people would be getting a slice of that, however small it may be.
If you need to read Office documents, see OpenOffice. Or even Microsoft's free viewers.
Anyone should have the right to counteract the effects of abusive monopoly practices.
No, those in authority have the responsibility to counteract the problems, just as the Tiwanese government has done. What you are calling for is anarchy.
The copyrights on Windows and Office should be NULL and void.
Why, because they are popular? Granted, Microsoft has abused a monopoly power, but that does not warrant robbing them of the work they have done. The punishment must fit the crime. If you work 20 years compiling a dictionary and it becomes so popular that it's the de facto standard, but you start charging too much for it, should your dictionary suddenly be thrown into the public domain?
Like I pointed out before, there are alternatives that serve the same function. You can use OpenOffice on Linux with WINE and do virtually anything you could do with Office and Windows.
now suppose you can't get a job unless you have cable.
sounds like you would be forced to get cable, or starve.
So these people need to have Windows for survival? I see your point, but I don't think it's valid. It would have to be a very strange set of circumstances for one to say "I had to pirate Windows or I would die," wouldn't it?
Suppose for a job that a person has chosen, that person has to have Windows. What's stopping that person from looking for a different job that doesn't require them to pirate software?
Say you have a guy who grew up in the inner city and for whatever reason dropped out of high school. He's broke and can't find a job. Maybe this person should become a drug dealer. It's not ethical, and it's definitely not legal, but the guy can't seem to find a job anywhere else. Does that make it alright to sell crack to kids? No!
It's not that much different. These circumstances are no excuse for pirating software.