Amazing the posting went all the way to 5, then down to 1. Me and my buddies ACTUALLY used to say that substitute during Mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in high school before I got brave enough to sit it out. This was back during Vietnam War days, when people caught all sorts of hell for not being good little patriots. Similar to the way it is now, but more extreme back then.
I really caught hell in high school for refusing to stand up for the pledge. Nationalism sucks big time, flags are stupid, and by the time I was in high school, it was fun to taunt the teacher into forcing me to stand up (he never did), but for a little kid in school, it is very different. Coercion works very will with little trusting kids. I'm glad they court made its decision.
Maybe you don't live in rural America, Bill, but I do and we all know we are rednecks and us insiders call it WallyWorld. I was there last night, in fact, trading in yet another failed EverStart Battery. The old one had a slip for August 2000, so I got my new one under pro-rated warranty for only $16.38. I was wearing a dirty t-shirt, shorts and hiking boots when I rolled into the automotive section with the old battery in a shopping cart.
Kate got a big bag of squirrel food on sale while I was there. Maybe there aren't a lot of spandex-wearing 250-lb. mother of five's running around anymore. Maybe those ladys don't have beehive hairdos, but styles change even out here.
WallyWorld sells cheap soda pop out of vending machines for only a quarter. Sometimes I drop by just to get a can or two on hot days.
Out here in the boonies, I figure a lot of computers will go to high-school age kids. WallyWorld needs to put them in their stores for the before school season or they'll lose out on a lot of sales. If they only offer them online, they'll lose out of first-time users, of which school kids of rednecks make a big segment. If people are shopping for computers online they already have one, right? And they'll likely go for the no-OS version before they'll get Linux.
Re:Visit these website forums for education on DAW
on
The State of PC Audio
·
· Score: 1
...M-Audio (Midiman) "Audiophile" which does true 24/96 recording. It is worthy of a recording studio and you can get one for around $150 street price.
Amen to that, Brother Driver. Forget about those gamer reviews of sound cards. Forget about how much CPU sound cards allegedly eat up. 24/96 is where its at, in and out.
You are a complete fool.
Proud to be a fool. Thankful I'm not a corporate troll.
1. Centralized servers are nice, except that they are centralized. In an office with no IT staff or experience, a single failure can easily mean the whole office is stopped, doing nothing. 25 machines means that even with a few broken machines (small offices usually have at least one person at a time whose PC is "down") that most people can work regardless of the server/network status. Centralized Citrix/X servers are very bad idea in a place with no real technical staff. Schools, libararies, etc are perfect. Small satellite offices with ad-hoc tech guys aren't. One problem with that server and bammo - no more work being done anywhere.
That was old-school. Current tech for redundant power supply, RAID, fall-over servers, and the over-all reliability of modern computers makes your fears obsolete. Any office with no IT staff has a local tech (private contractor) to call if they do have a breakdown. And if this example is so data-critical, what the hell are they doing without an IT pro in the first place? Reliable, centralized data processing is ubiquitous in this day and age. Can you honestly tell me that servers in your environment are crashing or having hardware failures?
2. There are a number of X-servers available for Windows.
Yes, and they all require a computer running Windows. Are you going to suggest that someone buy thin clients which netboot Windows just to slowly run an X server?
3. Citrix is just expensive, not slow.
Citrix is dead slow, the whole GUI architecture of Windows doesn't allow for the network transmission of graphics primitives the way X does. Add to that the gross eye-candy in the latest Windows (yet more bitmaps), the abysmal Windows use of shared libraries. Citrix may seem fast if you have nothing else to compare it to.
4. You can move a user's home directory to the server and "mount" it at startup. Its a very simple exerice. It is entirely transparent to the user.
Which is all the guy is going to be able to do in his Win98/2000 situation.
5. You can easily secure the system volume with permissions that disallow users from mucking about with it.
6. You can also use system policies to define which users can do what things: install software, do extraordinary stuff with printers, etc.
Not in Win 98. Are you suggesting that the person go out and buy a bunch of Win2000 or XP upgrades just to accommodate useful file shares?
Let's face it: you know nothing about Windows and have trolled to promote your pet OS. It is especially heinous because you're sarcastic remarks lead this poor non-technical guy down a road that could lead to absolute disaster.
Frankly, FUD is about all people have for a reason to encourage people to work with Win these days.
The easiest way is to get rid of those damn PCs and use X terminals. If you have 25 people in the office, this means you have 25 fewer disk drives, 25 fewer floppy drives and 25 fewer CDROM drives to fail. And you have 25 fewer operating system configuration headaches. Then simply back up your application/data server at will. You can use off-the-shelf boxes for X terminals. But wait, your only choice here would be to use slowpoke, expensive Citrix-style Windows software. Never mind.
Then why don't you simply move the user's home directory over to the server and mount it at startup. Then you mount the OS partition read-only so they can't go and mess up your plans. Oh, that's right. Windows needs the OS to be mounted read/write so it can write data to its root partition. Never mind.
I guess the answer is to trust that people will voluntarily mount a Windows network share and voluntarily use that share for their data. Good luck!
Not only that, the bandwidth of their networks are extremely undersaturated.
Their pricing schemes grow out of monopolization of the service. They should be regulated, instead of being 'deregulated' as is the current trend. I'd prefer that our internet pipe was treated like telephone service, with government-set rates. We should be able to just get a pipe and an IP number, just like our telephone service. I'm quite capable of running my own mail server and httpd and have plenty of room for my own webspace. We should the be able to choose the services we NEED at a price offered by competing providers. 'Deregulation' has severely limited our freedom of choice and is holding our personal internet capabilities captive to corporate totalitarianism.
What can we expect from a man who lost his last political contest to a dead man? But it amazes me how popular the befuddled president. I think he's the worst since Grover Cleveland.
3. Everyone has Windows and Office, much of that is to read documents that others (the Public) send us. Yes, I know OpenOffice could do that. That's what I'm using.
You mean that the federal government is procuring this software without securing competitive bids for other software with similar, if not identical capabilities?
Let me get this straight. The taxpayer gives the government money, and that government is buying expensive software instead of using free (Linux) or for hundreds of dollars less (office) per seat? This is the same government that all but dropped the anti-trust suit against Microsoft, the same government that appoints the director of the Office of Management and Budget via elected representative? And whoever gets elected gets there because their political party gets millions from corporate donors? And if the OMB keeps buying expensive software from Microsoft, then Microsoft keeps donating huge sums to the OMB's boss's political party? And all this could be changed if software procurement was open to competitive bidding?
Absolutely right. There is no reason to have binaries in one's home directory, and any that are there are probably only toys. Viral infection due to running an email binary attachment on a unix-based system is not very likely, (save as setuid root? can't be done except on the most lame of lame setups) and thus because of this the article did not mention the method of infection because there is none. I suggest that any panic over this virus be given from Windows users, who's system is completely open and writable systemwide.
Somebody estimated that the total hard-to-recycle waste of the US for the next 200 years could fit into an area roughly about 40 x 40 x 0.5 miles in the desert. I don't remember the exact numbers, but there is plenty of land just sitting there doing nothing.
I think they should put all that waste stacked into abandoned Kmarts. After all, very soon they will be sitting there doing nothing. There still could be crowds of people just standing in front doing nothing, just like they are now. Kmarts are already ugly, environmentally-controlled, storage boxes.
Sheesh. So many complex answers to such a simple question. Just put all the data on a Linux or BSD box and serve it with Samba and netatalk and nfs. Keep all the applications local, and use the fileserver for your data. When you save a file on the Mac, simply add a filename extension to the name. Netatalk handles Mac resource forks transparently and has been out for years and years.
Use imap for email clients and keep your email on the fileserver.
SiS will not release chip docs except under NDA. They are also NOT writing their own X Window driver. One person, Tom Winischofer is cobbling together support based on SiS's older X Window drivers. If you get a Xabre or have a 315 video card or SiS 740, 850-based motherboard, please download his drivers and test them for bugs.
Of course it is their fault. They, more than anyone, should know quite well that only an idiot would buy Micros**t SQL server. Surely, it follows that they can easily make sure it won't run without a root username and password.
They should have left the hard drive out and sold memory cards.
Agreed. This one piece of hardware is an expensive albatross around Micros**t's neck. As long as they don't sell a "Microsoft HomePC kit" to add on to the Xbox, it is a horrific waste.
I think the IA-64 has the potential to be exactly what is needed in an X86 replacement. Its performance isn't necessarily worse than X86, either.
Last time I saw SPECint marks, an 800MHz IA-64 actually outperformed an Athlon 1.4GHz in the SPECint-per-MHz deparment. Sure, such benchmarks are unreliable, and even moreso when you try to get per-MHz figures, but really, the IA-64 wasn't doing that bad.
What SPEC needs to benchmark is SPECInt-per-$. Considering that commodity Athlons, Pentiums, Celerons and Durons handily beat the extremely expensive Itanic in a straight SPECInt benchmark, what's the advantage of the IA64 performing more efficiently per mhz?
What IA-64 isn't doing well at is simple integer based desktop stuff like web browsing and word processing. The IA-32 compatibility is also painfully slow.
It was very silly of Intel to graft a 386 unit onto the IA64 chip, that's for sure. Fast int ops are important for running databases. They are essential in supporting that 64-bit I/O.
However, where it really matters, Itanium II might really shine. With much more cache, faster RAM, and some architectural bottlenecks nullified, you can bet this processor is going to smoke the competition if clocked high enough.
That's been Intel's promise since they announced the chip project many, many, many years ago. They also promised that the chip would be inexpensive. It isn't very fast, it isn't a good value compared to todays 32-bit commodity CPUs.
Itanium also scales very well.
From what I've read, the Itanic scales in a way very similar to the Hammer -- 8 CPUs at a time and if you want more than you have to run a pipe between each group of eight. Hammer claims a Hypertransport link between each set with a one cycle wait state (Intels simply calls their a pipe), but really, anything more than 8-way is still going to be the realm of POWER4, UltraSparc, etc. IMO. To tell the truth, the Itanic and the X86-64 will have very similar scaleability, the x86-64 is less than half the die size of the Itanic and better performing. It's NUMA setup gives greater throughput between multiple CPUs in an 8-way or less. It may be ugly on the inside, but both CPUs do the about same thing. And one will be faster and a whole lot cheaper. And don't forget AMD's 4-way chipset. The Taiwanese motherboard makers are going to be moving into that space with this chipset. Commoditization.
X86-64 really can't compete in the high end market. It will put up a fight on desktops, however. Intel is going to make a strong showing with Yamhill or IA-64 simply because of its clout.
Well, just take a 32-bit commodity CPU and kludge it to 64 bits, gain about 25% speedup in doing so and SELL IT FOR AROUND $400 maximum and you will quickly see that the Itanic is sinking! Sure the x86 instruction set is lame, but that's the roll of the dice. If the Motorola 68000 had been chosen by IBM for the PC, we would be singing the same tune. I think the x86 instruction set will be around ad infinitum. Just like the accellerator pedal is on the right side, the clutch is on the left and the brake pedal is in the middle. Totally arbitrary, but it somehow stuck.
Anyway, the original point of my post was just to dispute the fact that IA-64 is a "piece of crap architecture." I think most would agree that it's a very nice and interesting architecture with a lot of potential for performance, if not for success in the market place.
The Itanic wasn't a piece of crap 5 years ago, but it is obsolete today. Intel raves about its "266mhz" memory bus and its 66mhz-64-bit PCI support. You can get this in a commodity motherboard and two Athlon CPUs for around $600. You can get the Pentium 4 with 133mhz X4 quad-pumped memory bus nowadays. The Itanic's parallel execution method is nice, but why did they wait till the CPU was released before they began making compilers that took advantage of this? Completely useless without the right tools (assuming decent tools can be made).
Intel hasn't made any announcements about their Yamhill, and HPQ still seems to think that IA64 is a go. The new(!) Itanium II is supposed to make this pathetic architecture up to 50% faster. Then it will have integer op performance comparible to today's fastest Celeron.
Look for Sun and/or IBM to be selling 8-way Hammer machines by this time next year, according to my Spirit Guides.
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What is it like to compile vanilla UNIX apps under OSX? I used to run NeXTStep and most of the things compiled fine.
Amazing the posting went all the way to 5, then down to 1. Me and my buddies ACTUALLY used to say that substitute during Mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in high school before I got brave enough to sit it out. This was back during Vietnam War days, when people caught all sorts of hell for not being good little patriots. Similar to the way it is now, but more extreme back then.
So if you want to change the constitution, that is indeed an option. But you need a very, very big mob and lots of time to think about it.
of the United Snakes of America
And to the Republican
for which it stands
One corporation
invisible
under cash
with liberty and justice
for $ome
Amen
I wonder who is Berman's opponent in the upcoming Cong. race? I bet they would benefit from someone forwarding this Slashdot comments page to them.
Don't be too sure it won't pass. Elections are coming up and the Congress are all looking for money. Don't forget DMCA.
What's going on here? I can't get through to his site!
You're assuming that a clueless company that doesn't have clueful staff can merely call Caldera and they will get their problems fixed.
Kate got a big bag of squirrel food on sale while I was there. Maybe there aren't a lot of spandex-wearing 250-lb. mother of five's running around anymore. Maybe those ladys don't have beehive hairdos, but styles change even out here.
WallyWorld sells cheap soda pop out of vending machines for only a quarter. Sometimes I drop by just to get a can or two on hot days.
Out here in the boonies, I figure a lot of computers will go to high-school age kids. WallyWorld needs to put them in their stores for the before school season or they'll lose out on a lot of sales. If they only offer them online, they'll lose out of first-time users, of which school kids of rednecks make a big segment. If people are shopping for computers online they already have one, right? And they'll likely go for the no-OS version before they'll get Linux.
Amen to that, Brother Driver. Forget about those gamer reviews of sound cards. Forget about how much CPU sound cards allegedly eat up. 24/96 is where its at, in and out.
Proud to be a fool. Thankful I'm not a corporate troll.
1. Centralized servers are nice, except that they are centralized. In an office with no IT staff or experience, a single failure can easily mean the whole office is stopped, doing nothing. 25 machines means that even with a few broken machines (small offices usually have at least one person at a time whose PC is "down") that most people can work regardless of the server/network status. Centralized Citrix/X servers are very bad idea in a place with no real technical staff. Schools, libararies, etc are perfect. Small satellite offices with ad-hoc tech guys aren't. One problem with that server and bammo - no more work being done anywhere.
That was old-school. Current tech for redundant power supply, RAID, fall-over servers, and the over-all reliability of modern computers makes your fears obsolete. Any office with no IT staff has a local tech (private contractor) to call if they do have a breakdown. And if this example is so data-critical, what the hell are they doing without an IT pro in the first place? Reliable, centralized data processing is ubiquitous in this day and age. Can you honestly tell me that servers in your environment are crashing or having hardware failures?
2. There are a number of X-servers available for Windows.
Yes, and they all require a computer running Windows. Are you going to suggest that someone buy thin clients which netboot Windows just to slowly run an X server?
3. Citrix is just expensive, not slow.
Citrix is dead slow, the whole GUI architecture of Windows doesn't allow for the network transmission of graphics primitives the way X does. Add to that the gross eye-candy in the latest Windows (yet more bitmaps), the abysmal Windows use of shared libraries. Citrix may seem fast if you have nothing else to compare it to.
4. You can move a user's home directory to the server and "mount" it at startup. Its a very simple exerice. It is entirely transparent to the user.
Which is all the guy is going to be able to do in his Win98/2000 situation.
5. You can easily secure the system volume with permissions that disallow users from mucking about with it.
6. You can also use system policies to define which users can do what things: install software, do extraordinary stuff with printers, etc.
Not in Win 98. Are you suggesting that the person go out and buy a bunch of Win2000 or XP upgrades just to accommodate useful file shares?
Let's face it: you know nothing about Windows and have trolled to promote your pet OS. It is especially heinous because you're sarcastic remarks lead this poor non-technical guy down a road that could lead to absolute disaster.
Frankly, FUD is about all people have for a reason to encourage people to work with Win these days.
Then why don't you simply move the user's home directory over to the server and mount it at startup. Then you mount the OS partition read-only so they can't go and mess up your plans. Oh, that's right. Windows needs the OS to be mounted read/write so it can write data to its root partition. Never mind.
I guess the answer is to trust that people will voluntarily mount a Windows network share and voluntarily use that share for their data. Good luck!
Their pricing schemes grow out of monopolization of the service. They should be regulated, instead of being 'deregulated' as is the current trend. I'd prefer that our internet pipe was treated like telephone service, with government-set rates. We should be able to just get a pipe and an IP number, just like our telephone service. I'm quite capable of running my own mail server and httpd and have plenty of room for my own webspace. We should the be able to choose the services we NEED at a price offered by competing providers. 'Deregulation' has severely limited our freedom of choice and is holding our personal internet capabilities captive to corporate totalitarianism.
You mean that the federal government is procuring this software without securing competitive bids for other software with similar, if not identical capabilities?
Let me get this straight. The taxpayer gives the government money, and that government is buying expensive software instead of using free (Linux) or for hundreds of dollars less (office) per seat? This is the same government that all but dropped the anti-trust suit against Microsoft, the same government that appoints the director of the Office of Management and Budget via elected representative? And whoever gets elected gets there because their political party gets millions from corporate donors? And if the OMB keeps buying expensive software from Microsoft, then Microsoft keeps donating huge sums to the OMB's boss's political party? And all this could be changed if software procurement was open to competitive bidding?
Absolutely right. There is no reason to have binaries in one's home directory, and any that are there are probably only toys. Viral infection due to running an email binary attachment on a unix-based system is not very likely, (save as setuid root? can't be done except on the most lame of lame setups) and thus because of this the article did not mention the method of infection because there is none. I suggest that any panic over this virus be given from Windows users, who's system is completely open and writable systemwide.
I think they should put all that waste stacked into abandoned Kmarts. After all, very soon they will be sitting there doing nothing. There still could be crowds of people just standing in front doing nothing, just like they are now. Kmarts are already ugly, environmentally-controlled, storage boxes.
Use imap for email clients and keep your email on the fileserver.
How pedestrian can we get here?
Agreed. This one piece of hardware is an expensive albatross around Micros**t's neck. As long as they don't sell a "Microsoft HomePC kit" to add on to the Xbox, it is a horrific waste.
What SPEC needs to benchmark is SPECInt-per-$. Considering that commodity Athlons, Pentiums, Celerons and Durons handily beat the extremely expensive Itanic in a straight SPECInt benchmark, what's the advantage of the IA64 performing more efficiently per mhz?
It was very silly of Intel to graft a 386 unit onto the IA64 chip, that's for sure. Fast int ops are important for running databases. They are essential in supporting that 64-bit I/O.
That's been Intel's promise since they announced the chip project many, many, many years ago. They also promised that the chip would be inexpensive. It isn't very fast, it isn't a good value compared to todays 32-bit commodity CPUs.
From what I've read, the Itanic scales in a way very similar to the Hammer -- 8 CPUs at a time and if you want more than you have to run a pipe between each group of eight. Hammer claims a Hypertransport link between each set with a one cycle wait state (Intels simply calls their a pipe), but really, anything more than 8-way is still going to be the realm of POWER4, UltraSparc, etc. IMO. To tell the truth, the Itanic and the X86-64 will have very similar scaleability, the x86-64 is less than half the die size of the Itanic and better performing. It's NUMA setup gives greater throughput between multiple CPUs in an 8-way or less. It may be ugly on the inside, but both CPUs do the about same thing. And one will be faster and a whole lot cheaper. And don't forget AMD's 4-way chipset. The Taiwanese motherboard makers are going to be moving into that space with this chipset. Commoditization.
Well, just take a 32-bit commodity CPU and kludge it to 64 bits, gain about 25% speedup in doing so and SELL IT FOR AROUND $400 maximum and you will quickly see that the Itanic is sinking! Sure the x86 instruction set is lame, but that's the roll of the dice. If the Motorola 68000 had been chosen by IBM for the PC, we would be singing the same tune. I think the x86 instruction set will be around ad infinitum. Just like the accellerator pedal is on the right side, the clutch is on the left and the brake pedal is in the middle. Totally arbitrary, but it somehow stuck.
The Itanic wasn't a piece of crap 5 years ago, but it is obsolete today. Intel raves about its "266mhz" memory bus and its 66mhz-64-bit PCI support. You can get this in a commodity motherboard and two Athlon CPUs for around $600. You can get the Pentium 4 with 133mhz X4 quad-pumped memory bus nowadays. The Itanic's parallel execution method is nice, but why did they wait till the CPU was released before they began making compilers that took advantage of this? Completely useless without the right tools (assuming decent tools can be made).
Look for Sun and/or IBM to be selling 8-way Hammer machines by this time next year, according to my Spirit Guides.