We don't want people knowing how much crap happens at a typical bridge, or airport. So only autherized personal should have access to the data. Hmm, my ignorance is comforting as I type this.
I think MS is pretty clear on what they categorize as what. By definition critical updates are ones that enable a hacker to take over or completely crash the system. Anything shy of that is less important (not saying it won't kill you business, but the server is still "yours").
It would be interesting if they would be liable if there was a bug that left the system easy to hack. I mean your wife finding out your thoughts about her friend, are can't wait for our date this Friday, probably wouldn't go over too well. And the user could agrue they made personal information available that they didn't wish to disclose. Damages: ~50% of life time salary, ouch.
At least at time of writting:) Reading brains? Do they really need that to tell that their GUI just pissed you off. Wouldn't throwing a "Windows.Keyboard.Bashed" event work just as well?
You could be right. However, when was the last time you saw a Sun flame session on./ or heard one at work. How about people that are irate that Norton charges for their software? No people like to gripe about MS because they are a big target, and in most of the FOSS communities eyes, they are proprietary software incarnate.
My problem with.Net is how it was marketed. I seem to recall in the early days MS was saying that it would be platform independant like Java. However, MS hasn't made any effort to make it work on anything but MS platforms. I really like the work that the mono project has done, but the project shouldn't have to exist, MS should be leading the way to evanglize their platform. The last time I checked Office and Visual Studio where an order of magnitude more expensive then windows. Why isn't MS trying to get Linux or Mac users to use their software? They seem to have an all or nothing mentality which I think is going to hurt them.
As an example of the weirdness created by the.Net idea, a company I might end up working for uses Visual Studio as their IDE, but code the GUIs using Qt so they have platform independence. In my opinion this shouldn't be necessary. At this company you are free to use whichever hardware and software you want as their program runs on Linux, UNIX, Mac and Windows. MS could have tied them in by offering a superior IDE "and" a proprietary platform independant framework like Qt. Instead they left them flexible to move to a tool of their choice, which is indicative of the nearsightedness mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Yeah but "IP Invovations filed claim against Red Hat for using KDE, one of their user interface systems, for infringing on patented GUI functionality" doesn't sound as cool.
The mass media still doesn't get it, that Red Hat, or Novell, or whatever isn't Linux. For the most part what they are selling is stuff on top of Linux and support, but that isn't the way people are used to thinking of the industry. The media doesn't try to inform so much as entertain.
Are we at war with our climate? We seem to get what we want for the most part. Green house gases? Not our problem burn that s***. It is the classic sheep hearder problem. You win by having the most sheep you can, you lose because everyone tries to do that and there isn't enough food.
Windows is usually easier to find someone that has a "fix". Usually it is reboot, and see if it still happens. When you have a real problem though, say a corrupted boot sector or something, few people will know how to fix it. You can find out if you can get on the internet and find it, but wait a minute your computer is broke right? (Incidentally, who has gone to work and spent hours reading up on troubleshooting tips to try to fix their home computer?)
Anyways, in my experience, in Windows land, you have a user with a crapped out computer, and you tell them the harddrive is corrupted and you need to reinstall, they suck it up. But if you talked them into running linux, and their filesystem craps out, they blame it on linux, or you. That is just the way it is. The mathmatics of friends and family tech support:
I couldn't agree more. I also agree with MS on this. You don't want people screwing around with custom builds of the framework. Then something stops working and you end up being a flamebait for the mass media. I suspect must have seen the 20 min, or 3 page articles in newspaper/TV. In this case it would be like:
Blah, blah,.Net causes crashes, crashes caused airline reservation system to fail, medical devices weren't working... etc. Somewhere near the bottom, users were using Uberfast.Net 3.0 an opensource distrobution of the.Net Framework. MS refused to comment. The end result would be that MS gets blamed for bugs that aren't theirs. Their is plenty of flamebait from MS already, it is good to see they are trying to be helpful without risking themselves to more. What is going to be hard, is being able to propose a fix, if you see a bug. If they won't let you compile it, how do you know your fix would work?
I wonder if they will try to "rail" launch it? The rails will guide if for the first 10 ft or so, giving all engines time to kick in. One would presume with a project this size, there is a bunch of amateur rocketeers in the mix to pick apart the launch. Either it flies which would be pretty cool, or it blows up, or crashes into the ground. Either way a pretty cool You-Tube video (I'm hoping for the fire ball, more entertaining:)
Sorry it probably goes without saying, the idea behind this would be to get start ups familar with your products, so when they are profitable they continue to buy the products. If the company doesn't work out, you don't make the sale. But the bonus is, you still have had an impact on the customer, they know how to code in.Net say. They go somewhere else, and are more likely to recommend your solution (and you get revenue from their employer/consultee etc).
In my limited experience in the U.S., there are two kinds of shops, ones that are good about not stealing software and the other that steals as they see fit. In the case of the shop that steals, they generally swing into compliance if the business takes off. Exactly. So sad we can't trust people. It would be great if there was a freeware until you can afford it type of licensing. Maybe a profit-sharing solution? I propose:
License: You have use of this software, blah blah, which has a value of 300US in todays dollars. Present value shall be amortized at the going federal reverve rate. Payments shall be made at a rate of no less than 10% of the buyers profit per annum until software is paid off. Supporting documentation of the corporations revenue shall be provided, if complete payment for outstanding purchase amount isn't made in any given calendar year.
I think something similar to this could work. If the company is really small they won't have a lot of software and probably will be able to pay it off within the first year (otherwise they would be forced to go back to their "real job"). If your at the point where you need expensive software (exchange server, SQL Server licenses etc), you "should" be at the point where you can turn a profit.
The HPC community(which up to recently were pretty much the only ones interested in multi processor, shy of the server market) has always been this way, both with hardware and software. Eg. One of the early supercomputers, used 10k single bit processors, the cray used massive vector processing. Which one was better? We it depends. At the time communications were faster than the processors so the 1bit processor was an easier to develop solution. The cray could do data parallel problems really fast (think multiply matrix A by matrix B). It really depended on your budget and your problem which you went with.
The same goes with the API's/languages. Which one is better? Well it depends on the problem, Fortran 95 might be good for most things, but some little known langauge might blow it out of the water for your particular problem/hardware. What is worse for HPC developers, is the "best language" can change quickly. Say you go with a Intel x86 solution, but a couple years later you get a huge grant from Sun to make a SPARC cluster. Everything changes. register, RAM, bus latecies and bandwidths, supported hardware operations, etc. When big government labs consider HPC systems, price tag is usually the deciding factor. The developers are stuck finding, and learning the best language for the hardware that they get given.
The good news I think is that within the next 5 years, we will see the majority of the parallel programming being targetted for desktop/production server markets. Here the systems will be a lot closer to similarities (probably x86, probably DRR or whatever the standard RAM is at the time etc). It will become shaping the language to the logical problem to be solved not the hardware, and I think a lot of the big HPC company sponsored languages won't gain a foothold in the market, or those companies won't bother releasing x86 versions. The clutter will clean itself up a bit.
In the long term, I'm looking forward to a good parallel compiler (some exist already but they don't work that well). IMHO the compiler should make the decisions on how to order the instructions for the hardware that it is compiled on, rather than the developer have to figure it out. Unfortunately Intel/AMD have been pretty closed about the innards of their hardware, this would have to change. We need to not only know that an instruction exists, but how many clock cycles to execute, latencies to other components within the socket, etc, so that we can make intelligent decisions on how to either code in a parallel language, or write a compiler to make those decisions.
Good throughput, but notice they used 10 processes to get the peak bandwidth. Assuming the ~80MB per process is the max you'd get with a single process, this doesn't beat high end disk for throughput. I have a new server with 15k SAS, the drives are "rated" at 160MB/s. They've actually tested at 140MB/s so they would smoke this device for single process.
What is interesting is that this device seems to favor situations where you can throw multiple simultaneous I/O's at it. This should be perfect for database, rendering and high performance computing. It will be a while I think before the standard user has enough going on, for them to have their nice shiny quad core or whatever chewing out a peice of this. By then, these puppies will probably be cheap enough, say 1k for 80GB. I'd pay that if I was doing a lot of video editing. You pump your current project into this device, churn and write back to spinning disk sequentially after offline.
And how much of the graphics card or CPU is used while browsing the internet? He should only be accounting for the difference between 'idle' and browsing/downloading. That I'd suspect would be in the single digits for downloading, and low double digit watts while say streaming video. Unless the claim is "people have computers on for the sole reason of the internet, and leave them on all night to save themselves 30 seconds in the morning before they can browse.".
I'm I to assume that he crunched the numbers excluding stuff not needed for the internet? If not this sounds like bogus crap. Yeah you need a device to connect to the internet, yeah you need routers and servers. But attributing say 200W to my desktop because it is an internet device doesn't make sense. Say I leave it on all night, I'm connected but not using the internet (LAN). Does that count? I'd guesstimate that the average user is only using the internet for 1-2hrs a day. The rest of the time there computer might be on, but they are gaming, or even reading the content that they downloaded (you aren't using bandwidth, the data has already been sent, so you might as well be reading it using word rather than IE/Firefox). Counting all the power used by IT as for the internet is retarded. This would be analogous to saying that the average person spends 100 a week for transportation to the bar (cost of car, insurance gas, for the whole week).
Your post highlights the difficulty in making sure that the software will work on Windows well. Why would vendors add to that Linux?
You know you can't update system files except via the installer, and you know they'll have libX11 installed and the API is pretty fixed. After that, you've got a subset of options (GTK or another widget set) and possibly some kernel glue (2.6+ only) but mostly you just use libUSB for consumer-grade hardware. Installed where, what is the installer, what shells are installed. As an aside, X11 sucks big time, yet the *NIX community continues to rely on it.
There is no way that a company selling a device for a few hundred is going to hire support staff for both windows and linux. Examples of Google, IBM, etc are lame, because they are already heavy users of LAMP so have other reasons to justify having the in house expertise.
If you're LSB compliant you're probably set. Target Ubuntu for desktop apps, Redhat for enterprise. Everybody using something else is smart enough to figure it out (or read the support forums). This thinking is what keeps Linux from going mainstream. First off, Ubuntu is based off of Debian which isn't LSB compliant.
Secondly, how many people check the compliance of their distro before they start using it? My experience is people go to a friend, the friend says something to the effect "wow Debian is so cool, I'll help you install it". Most likely the system is a dual boot, so if something doesn't work for them in Linux, no problem they just use Windows for it. Or if they really like the distro, they figure out how to make their stuff work, they aren't bothering to see if their distro, is 100% compliant with X11, installer etc.
Lastly, why does the user have to spend hours of their time to figure out how to make things work on their distro? They paid for the product, were told it would work with Linux, and now have to figure out what mods they have to make to port it to their flavor on their own?
How does this benifit a device manufacturer though? They've already made the sale, now like it or not they are in the "support as cheaply as possible" part of the transaction. These aren't devices that people have paid 10k+ for and have SLA's on, just warantees. Plus, the vendor doesn't want to get into a situation where they have to mandate what you install. Eg. I work in the health industry, our vendors tell us the OS to run, right down to which patches to install. So they can know what they are getting into, and test it in their lab. Letting users use a *NIX box of their choosing is asking for headaches.
Unfortunately, they don't have to support Linux for two reasons:
1) It is not a large market
2) Most people dual boot, or have an windows box anyways, so if they don't like it they can suck it up and by the windows version.
I'm supprised that their support for linux isn't just, 'if you don't like your current firmware, here is how you switch it to running windows'.
True, but it is kind of hard to guess what it would be. The only thing we can go by is current short term growth rate (I'm not inclined to getting a advanced degree in population dynamics to give a more accurate answer on a forum). However, the point is, our growth rate is out pacing the US growth rate so as t->large values... A large part of it is I think Canada has a more open immigration policy than the US. With companies like MS outsourcing jobs to Canada, and Canada being willing to take immigrants, we can solve the problem of overseas outsourcing as the workers will be close to home for the US companies. Although, our dollar being equal or greater in value than the US won't help that, perhaps we'll be forced to buy the US companies:)
I think your bang on here. Linux is just too hard, because in windows land you only have to worry about 2k, XP, and Vista, in linux land you have people with custom hacks to the kernel, not to mention the flavor of the month for installers, development environments, compilers etc. There is just too many choices to be made, and they'd rather come across as offering great support to 99% of their users, than fight to try and help the 1%, and then have the occasional screw up.
Also, Linux users IMHO tend to be more tech savy, they'd be the ones that would post on blogs everywhere, 'this company sucks they couldn't figure out how to make their code work on my custom MySql engine, I hacked directly into this random distro, what kind of losers are they?' Answer: the kind that aren't coding for a hobby but a paycheck.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't want people knowing how much crap happens at a typical bridge, or airport. So only autherized personal should have access to the data. Hmm, my ignorance is comforting as I type this.
I think MS is pretty clear on what they categorize as what. By definition critical updates are ones that enable a hacker to take over or completely crash the system. Anything shy of that is less important (not saying it won't kill you business, but the server is still "yours").
2005 article, a company called Mercury created 7U dual cell servers. 2.8TFLOP, they claim a 6ft rack will pack over 16TFLOP of processing power.
It would be interesting if they would be liable if there was a bug that left the system easy to hack. I mean your wife finding out your thoughts about her friend, are can't wait for our date this Friday, probably wouldn't go over too well. And the user could agrue they made personal information available that they didn't wish to disclose. Damages: ~50% of life time salary, ouch.
At least at time of writting :) Reading brains? Do they really need that to tell that their GUI just pissed you off. Wouldn't throwing a "Windows.Keyboard.Bashed" event work just as well?
My problem with .Net is how it was marketed. I seem to recall in the early days MS was saying that it would be platform independant like Java. However, MS hasn't made any effort to make it work on anything but MS platforms. I really like the work that the mono project has done, but the project shouldn't have to exist, MS should be leading the way to evanglize their platform. The last time I checked Office and Visual Studio where an order of magnitude more expensive then windows. Why isn't MS trying to get Linux or Mac users to use their software? They seem to have an all or nothing mentality which I think is going to hurt them.
As an example of the weirdness created by the .Net idea, a company I might end up working for uses Visual Studio as their IDE, but code the GUIs using Qt so they have platform independence. In my opinion this shouldn't be necessary. At this company you are free to use whichever hardware and software you want as their program runs on Linux, UNIX, Mac and Windows. MS could have tied them in by offering a superior IDE "and" a proprietary platform independant framework like Qt. Instead they left them flexible to move to a tool of their choice, which is indicative of the nearsightedness mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The mass media still doesn't get it, that Red Hat, or Novell, or whatever isn't Linux. For the most part what they are selling is stuff on top of Linux and support, but that isn't the way people are used to thinking of the industry. The media doesn't try to inform so much as entertain.
Are we at war with our climate? We seem to get what we want for the most part. Green house gases? Not our problem burn that s***. It is the classic sheep hearder problem. You win by having the most sheep you can, you lose because everyone tries to do that and there isn't enough food.
You can gamble. When the online casino tries to collect, tell them that it would be breaking the law for you to transfer money to them :)
Anyways, in my experience, in Windows land, you have a user with a crapped out computer, and you tell them the harddrive is corrupted and you need to reinstall, they suck it up. But if you talked them into running linux, and their filesystem craps out, they blame it on linux, or you. That is just the way it is. The mathmatics of friends and family tech support:
windows = easy = my problem
linux = your idea = your problem
This object costs more than a monster cable. We are in a free market. Thus, these cables are clearly better. So me the money :)
I wonder if they will try to "rail" launch it? The rails will guide if for the first 10 ft or so, giving all engines time to kick in. One would presume with a project this size, there is a bunch of amateur rocketeers in the mix to pick apart the launch. Either it flies which would be pretty cool, or it blows up, or crashes into the ground. Either way a pretty cool You-Tube video (I'm hoping for the fire ball, more entertaining :)
Sorry it probably goes without saying, the idea behind this would be to get start ups familar with your products, so when they are profitable they continue to buy the products. If the company doesn't work out, you don't make the sale. But the bonus is, you still have had an impact on the customer, they know how to code in .Net say. They go somewhere else, and are more likely to recommend your solution (and you get revenue from their employer/consultee etc).
License: You have use of this software, blah blah, which has a value of 300US in todays dollars. Present value shall be amortized at the going federal reverve rate. Payments shall be made at a rate of no less than 10% of the buyers profit per annum until software is paid off. Supporting documentation of the corporations revenue shall be provided, if complete payment for outstanding purchase amount isn't made in any given calendar year.
I think something similar to this could work. If the company is really small they won't have a lot of software and probably will be able to pay it off within the first year (otherwise they would be forced to go back to their "real job"). If your at the point where you need expensive software (exchange server, SQL Server licenses etc), you "should" be at the point where you can turn a profit.
The same goes with the API's/languages. Which one is better? Well it depends on the problem, Fortran 95 might be good for most things, but some little known langauge might blow it out of the water for your particular problem/hardware. What is worse for HPC developers, is the "best language" can change quickly. Say you go with a Intel x86 solution, but a couple years later you get a huge grant from Sun to make a SPARC cluster. Everything changes. register, RAM, bus latecies and bandwidths, supported hardware operations, etc. When big government labs consider HPC systems, price tag is usually the deciding factor. The developers are stuck finding, and learning the best language for the hardware that they get given.
The good news I think is that within the next 5 years, we will see the majority of the parallel programming being targetted for desktop/production server markets. Here the systems will be a lot closer to similarities (probably x86, probably DRR or whatever the standard RAM is at the time etc). It will become shaping the language to the logical problem to be solved not the hardware, and I think a lot of the big HPC company sponsored languages won't gain a foothold in the market, or those companies won't bother releasing x86 versions. The clutter will clean itself up a bit.
In the long term, I'm looking forward to a good parallel compiler (some exist already but they don't work that well). IMHO the compiler should make the decisions on how to order the instructions for the hardware that it is compiled on, rather than the developer have to figure it out. Unfortunately Intel/AMD have been pretty closed about the innards of their hardware, this would have to change. We need to not only know that an instruction exists, but how many clock cycles to execute, latencies to other components within the socket, etc, so that we can make intelligent decisions on how to either code in a parallel language, or write a compiler to make those decisions.
The Mac guy is moonlighting as a stone mason.
What is interesting is that this device seems to favor situations where you can throw multiple simultaneous I/O's at it. This should be perfect for database, rendering and high performance computing. It will be a while I think before the standard user has enough going on, for them to have their nice shiny quad core or whatever chewing out a peice of this. By then, these puppies will probably be cheap enough, say 1k for 80GB. I'd pay that if I was doing a lot of video editing. You pump your current project into this device, churn and write back to spinning disk sequentially after offline.
And how much of the graphics card or CPU is used while browsing the internet? He should only be accounting for the difference between 'idle' and browsing/downloading. That I'd suspect would be in the single digits for downloading, and low double digit watts while say streaming video. Unless the claim is "people have computers on for the sole reason of the internet, and leave them on all night to save themselves 30 seconds in the morning before they can browse.".
I'm I to assume that he crunched the numbers excluding stuff not needed for the internet? If not this sounds like bogus crap. Yeah you need a device to connect to the internet, yeah you need routers and servers. But attributing say 200W to my desktop because it is an internet device doesn't make sense. Say I leave it on all night, I'm connected but not using the internet (LAN). Does that count? I'd guesstimate that the average user is only using the internet for 1-2hrs a day. The rest of the time there computer might be on, but they are gaming, or even reading the content that they downloaded (you aren't using bandwidth, the data has already been sent, so you might as well be reading it using word rather than IE/Firefox). Counting all the power used by IT as for the internet is retarded. This would be analogous to saying that the average person spends 100 a week for transportation to the bar (cost of car, insurance gas, for the whole week).
There is no way that a company selling a device for a few hundred is going to hire support staff for both windows and linux. Examples of Google, IBM, etc are lame, because they are already heavy users of LAMP so have other reasons to justify having the in house expertise.
If you're LSB compliant you're probably set. Target Ubuntu for desktop apps, Redhat for enterprise. Everybody using something else is smart enough to figure it out (or read the support forums). This thinking is what keeps Linux from going mainstream. First off, Ubuntu is based off of Debian which isn't LSB compliant.Secondly, how many people check the compliance of their distro before they start using it? My experience is people go to a friend, the friend says something to the effect "wow Debian is so cool, I'll help you install it". Most likely the system is a dual boot, so if something doesn't work for them in Linux, no problem they just use Windows for it. Or if they really like the distro, they figure out how to make their stuff work, they aren't bothering to see if their distro, is 100% compliant with X11, installer etc.
Lastly, why does the user have to spend hours of their time to figure out how to make things work on their distro? They paid for the product, were told it would work with Linux, and now have to figure out what mods they have to make to port it to their flavor on their own?
Unfortunately, they don't have to support Linux for two reasons:
1) It is not a large market
2) Most people dual boot, or have an windows box anyways, so if they don't like it they can suck it up and by the windows version. I'm supprised that their support for linux isn't just, 'if you don't like your current firmware, here is how you switch it to running windows'.
True, but it is kind of hard to guess what it would be. The only thing we can go by is current short term growth rate (I'm not inclined to getting a advanced degree in population dynamics to give a more accurate answer on a forum). However, the point is, our growth rate is out pacing the US growth rate so as t->large values ... A large part of it is I think Canada has a more open immigration policy than the US. With companies like MS outsourcing jobs to Canada, and Canada being willing to take immigrants, we can solve the problem of overseas outsourcing as the workers will be close to home for the US companies. Although, our dollar being equal or greater in value than the US won't help that, perhaps we'll be forced to buy the US companies :)
Also, Linux users IMHO tend to be more tech savy, they'd be the ones that would post on blogs everywhere, 'this company sucks they couldn't figure out how to make their code work on my custom MySql engine, I hacked directly into this random distro, what kind of losers are they?' Answer: the kind that aren't coding for a hobby but a paycheck.