Nah. IBM had a 603e-based Thinkpad that would run NT, AIX and (get this) OS/400. They've since discontinued it (no more 603e...it wasn't as popular or long-lived as the 604, and RS/6000 didn't do G3) but we might see a return if they embrace the G4 for their low-end RS/6000 line.
Heh...they're gonna need -something- to replace Alpha. The way things have been going, I'd expect to see Sledgehammer hit before Itanium(snicker) or Itanium Pro or Itanium II or Itanium: The Revenge (whatever they're gonna rename McKinley, widely acknowledged as being the first -useable- generation of IA-64. It's also still up in the air whether it will have x86 compatibility in addition to PA-RISC compatibility. HP ain't interested in pushing low-ball boxes to legacy windows drones.)
Is this the same Papows who is compelled to lie extravagantly over almost every part of his personal life? Decorated Gulf War combat ace (was a radar operater in the reserves, and never left the states), Tai Kwon Do black-belt (attended three classes before he quit) and orphan (his upper-middle class parents bought him his own horse.)
The WSJ had a -very- interesting expose on Mr. Papows earlier this year...
Then again, it sounds as if the govermental turkey was fibbing more than a bit, too. Probably wanted to pick an industry figurehead who's denials wouldn't be believed when he fabricated his "indistry support" song and dance...
A complete MacOS 8.6 install takes around eight minutes on my old PowerbookG3/250mhz with a 24x CD. It's easy enough a marketing director can do it by himself, and harmless enough where all of your old programs and system enhancements run like a charm.
Hell, if you need to wipe the old OS off your Mac and re-install the System software due to data corruption, it will carefully copy all of your old settings, and let you decide what to do with 'em. And you -still- won't need to re-install your old applications (unless it's MS Office...)
System upgrades (like from 8.5 to 8.6) takes three minutes or so.
In extreme contrast, installing Solaris 2.7 is an all-afternoon prospect on an older Sun system with an 8x CD-ROM.
There are various programs (Like folderbolt) that "lock" files and folders (directories in Unix speak)...even entire disks. Like with Unix, you can attribute different levels of access...deny all, read only, write only, etc.
To kick it to the next level, every directory or file can have its own password. Once you are in on a Unix box as root, you have the keys to the candy store.
So if a wily cracker were able to take advantage of a mythical overflow, and by some miracle managed to upload executeable code, when it tries to modify the read-only files, the system it will prompt for a password. Recieving none, it trips all sorts of alarms.
Some of these security programs can also encrypt/decrypt on the fly.
So, the MacOS, alone, is more secure than all but the most carefully audited Unix box. Add something like folderbolt, and security is no longer an issue...even for the Army.
This is because I seriously doubt that there is -one- machine running the website. There are probably half a dozen performance-tuned Macs. (Like performance tuning a Honda: you -can- do it, even if it isn't as cool as hot-rodding a V8 muscle car). I reloaded www.army.mil a couple of times, and it always came right up (I'm on a T1).
Way back when the web was new, Mac OS boxes running Webstar were configured into a "RAIC", or "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers" were very commong for high-traffic sites. We call 'em server arrays today, but the concept is the same. Lots of small computers all mirroring one another, with a slick DNS server set-up to handle load balancing/distribution. Then NT came along, and webmasters suffered greatly. Now the pendulum is swinging back, and the Mac and Linux are where it is -at-...
I used to work for a small company who employed almost exclusively older workers (35 and up; I was by far the youngest person in the company at 23), and paid them commensurate with their experience.
These programmers, technicians and engineers worked reasonable hours, and seemed to work at a relaxed pace. Yet our products were consistently two to three generations ahead of the competition, with a broader range of applications and a warranty twice as long. We also did custom engineering for large accounts, and consistently came in under-time and under-budget.
I talked with the general manager and CTO about this and they admitted that they will hire an older engineer over a younger one. Their edge over the competition was hiring staff who knew what they were doing: every shortcut, dirty trick and brilliant hack was discovered, exploited and perfected by experienced engineers early in their careers. Now, later in life, older engineers could produce more with less effort. The CTO drew a diagram (wish I had copied it down) that showed older engineers were worse than young ones in terms of lines of code produced, hours put in on a project, and turnaround time on prototypes. However, if you used total project time, quality of design and development budget requirements, older engineers consistently out performed younger ones by an order of magnitude. Also, the General Manager said that the older engineers were less likely to pull up and move on after a couple of years, so hiring and retaining new staff wasn't as much of a problem as it was for their competitors.
Smart companies hire old engineers. (But young sysadmins. B) )
Preffered, but not only. MacTCP (the precursor to Open Transport) ran spiffily under 6.0.x, and you could dial into the 'net with MacSLIP. MacTCP was a "control panel" (similar in concept to a configuarable daemon with a GUI, for you Linux fans) to the system software, and not built into the core operating system, tho.
The Mac Portable, released in 1990, came with a built-in modem and a TCP/IP stack that could download sound-clips in a variety of file-formats from the internet and play them in 8-bit mono. It ran off of batteries, and you could take it with you wherever you went (if you wanted to build strong muscle tone).
The Powerbook 170, released in 1992, could replay audio files downloaded from the internet in 16-bit stereo (CD-quality), ran for two hours off of a battery, and could fit in a small satchel or briefcase.
Well, here we have it. Another definitive reason why almost unlimited access to proprietary software source code is not "open source."
Apple now has two options to comply 100% with open source purists: they can 1) send Steve Jobs to prison for breaking export law and allow Apple to be fined out of existance by the Govt. or 2) Not release any source code so you can go back to griping about how nobody in the corporate community really takes Open Source seriously.
The third option is to tell the lot of you to take your OSD and do something pysiologically impossible with it.
It is very interesting to note that the Gnu/Lickers are almost entirely responsibe for the "backlash". Most of us *BSD types are ecstatic that we get a chance to see what Apple has done with Mach and BSD.
I expect there will be a lot of cross-polination of ideas and fixes to nagging problems on both sides, and that both Apple and *BSD will prosper from the arrangement.
I expect long-harried Mac/NeXT MIS staff and developers will be thrilled at a chance to hack away at their favorite system's foundations.
I expect the Gnu/Lickers to continue sniveling about evil corporations, and spending countless hours trying to reverse engineer the Win/98 "look and feel" in another desktop enviroment and/or window manager.
If the ASPL isn't open source, then Open Source is dead, strangled by those who loved it best. What is left isn't totally free software, but it -is- software that allows for more freedom than anyone had ever expected from a major corporation.
So screw OSD. Screw Open Source (TM). Screw SIP. Screw FSF. Screw RMS, ESR, BP, and any other free-software swami I left off the list.
WE DON'T NEED YOU ANYMORE.
William Gibson wrote that "The street finds its own uses for things". We found our own use for open source, and if it is at odds with your narrow political agenda, then too fucking bad.
Silly rabbit. Apple doesn't -need- to agitate on public forums,because us rabid, wild-eyed, sway-toothed mac-marine evangelistas are all too ready and willing to do it for them. We were doing the platform fanatacist thang long before you Linux lovers showed up. B)
What you are noticing is that the Mac user tends to be very interested in computers and computing beyond our beloved Macintosh. We put be on the map. A year ago, according to the linux journal the second most popular Linux distro (after Red Hat) was Apple's MKLinux.
Mac users like diversity. We like Amigans. We like Atari fans (what few of them are left). We like Unix gurus, yes, Linux gurus included. It tends to ROYALLY piss us off when the respect isn't returned...and we're better at arguing than you are. Bp
Apple isn't going open source in order to provide leech^H^H^H^H^H non-customers a free ride, they are posting it in order to 1) return to the open source community the work they have done with open source tools like Mach and BSD 2) provide a means of modify ing and fixing the underlying OS in order to adapt new technologies beyond aple's R&D scope or to squish bugs that made it through QA. This is the model IBM and the other mainframe companies used back before everything went top-secret proprietary in the mid-eighties. It is a return to openess and a community approach to the installed base of high-end hardware. (coming soon...look for a possible sneak preview at NAB. Watch yer ass, SGI...)
If you want more from sugar daddy Apple, you gotta give some sweetness yourself. Get coding, and whine loudly about all the bugs you could be fixing if you had the yellow box code. B)
The very first company to throw open the underpinnings of its OS to public scrutiny, and you guys go beserk with condemnation. Great way to encourage companies to open up. I have long since lost my patience with the Open/Free/Slashdot crowd. The end result that will be embraced by developers is -not- software you don't have to pay for...but they will show you how it works if you are willing to show them how to make it better. This is a trade-off...the only other option is for Apple to clamp down and give -NOTHING- back to the development community.
Regarding the first point: the license under which Mach and other components integrated into MacOS X Server specifically permit anyone to use the code for any purpose and slap whatever license on it they see fit. Not apple's fault...blame the original project leads. Kind of like how Sun appropriated BSD code for its own proprietary OS.
Regarding the second point: IBM and Apple needed to do this in order to avoid humoungous lawsuits. Like with Netscape and IBM, MacOS X developers do -not- own their code, and the only reasons to code for it is to add features to MacOS X the developer wants/needs.
Like it or not, Apple published its source code. This makes it open source regardless of whether or not you lie the license, whether or not you like the Mac, or whether or not you like Apple. It is a step in the right direction, and should be encouraged. The alternative is -not- totally free software from a major coporate developer, but -NO- source code made available at all, to anyone, for any reason.
Apple doesn't -have- to do shit. They can leech off open licenses as much as they like, and not give anything at all back. They -chose- to make available, for free, detailed source code of the changes they made to Mach, BSD, etc. Thet should be applauded for making this choice, and encouraged to do more.
Encouragement != nasty bitching and infighting between open source advocates of minutae of the description of "open source". Encouragement is downloading a copy, hacking around with it, and showing Apple that opening up the source code even more would be benefiial for you -and- them.
Timne for all of you college kids to grow the %&$# up
I used to work for one of their competitors...the entire reason for a VME PowerPC board is to shove a bunch of them in a VME rack to tackle obscenely high-performance computational applications...like radar or sonar imaging systems. Eight of these bad boys go in a VME chassis. Four VME chassis rackmount into a computer cabinet. For three square feet of floorspace, you have a Linux-based Beowulf cluster that will outrun the big boys...128 400mhz Cu G3s, with the system boards talking to each other at speeds better than 250MegaBYTES (not bits) per second. Forget bargain-basement alpha desktops and 100base-T hack jobs...this here's the real deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, Linux has just hit the big time...big time.
Now...what will these VME-based system boards do for the home hobbyist and workstation afficionado looking for a cheaper way to run quake faster? Nothing. This ain't a toy, junior...go buy a refurbished imac and get crakin' on the USB drivers. I figure each one of those boards will cost better than five grand. Worth it, if you need to model molecular decay in your new wonderdrug. Not worth it, if you need to ask mommy to buy your computer for you.
Even if it means I have to live for the rest of my life in a shack deep in the wilderness with nothing but a set of rusty weasel traps and my Powerbook, it will be a -very- cold day in hell before I allow myself to be tagged, branded, and monitored via my deck.
If IBM and Motorola jump on this bandwagon, I'm moving to Alpha. If Alpha Inc. goes over to the darkside, I'll go Sun. If all the chip manufacturers decide to make themselves complicit in foisting this orwellian nightmare on the world, I'll stockpile old PowerMac clones and toss on another node to the Beowolf cluster when it looks like I'm lagging behind the performance curve.
Never. Ever. Will I submit to being branded like cattle because I use a computer.
If you hate Apple, buy AMD peecees. Buy Alphas. Buy Netwinders. Screw Intel.
I don't like weapons, either. But I do realize that a lot of the technological innovation to come out of the latter half of the 20th century...internet included...derived from military R&D. The implication that breaking news in science or technology dealing with the military may not be appropriate to report in slashdot if there is no immediate and obvious civillian benefit is chilling.
I find it distressing that/. editors see fit to censor the technical news they post based on political, rather than technical, merit.
While I can see market for net-based storage beyond stupid e-mail tricks, at least the bastards could have set up a 10 meg Appleshare IP account...this web based crap has -got- to go.
SGI's Ric Bleuzzo has made it abundantly clear that he is moving everything from MiPS to IA-64 at the high end. IRIX is going to be ported to IA-64, and workstations will all be IA-32 running NT. This was supposed to happen with the advent of merced, and it was supposed to have already happened, but it looks like he'll have to wait until late next year when (if) McKinley comes out.
I wonder where SGI will get fab space to build those R14000s if MiPS tells them to go screw? MiPS is a very succesful company, and supplies their low end chips everywhere...it's not as if they are hurting for buisines...
Take a closer look. The dead products are the Ultra30 (replaced by the Ultra60), the Ultra-1 (Which is OLD, the UltraSPARC 1 is three generations back!) and the SparcStation 5 (REALLY Old...FOUR generations back.)
Sun is selling its new Darwin systems, and they are selling better than any workstation line in Sun's history. The Sun Ultra5 is the low end system, you can pick one up for less than $3000 if you shop carefully, the Ultra10 is the next level up, and cloned by Tatung and a few others, and the Ultra60 is the latest and greatest and outruns Xeon like a bullet train outruns a steam locomotive.
Even -BETTER- news for Linux fans are the UltraSPARC-II AX motherboards...roll your own UltraPenguin system for less than 2 grand! Put it in that Black Archy case from colorcases.com...
SoupIsGood Food
Half the power at twice the price of a Mac!WooHoo!
on
SGI's Visual PC
·
· Score: 1
The new PowerMac G3s start at $1599. SGI starts at twice that with an identical configuration. (OK. No SCSI card...easily remedied for under $300.)
With the exception of the militant Trekkers who boycotted them as a matter of principal, everyone on/. went and paid sixteen bux to go see three movies they could rent for $4.50.
This is beacuse Star Wars is escapism. Technofetishists dig science fiction and fantasy because it can elevate them beyond their world and into a "real life" that actually interests them. By default such a "real life" deals with The Next Big Thing in technologies and science, or magic, which is technology by other means.
Escapism isn't a bad thing. It's been driving the pace of technical innovation for the past hundred years or so: hard core coders do what they do with visions of Neuromancer and Snowcrash dancing in their heads. Since the technofetishist, as a "geek", lives in a dystopia by default the socio-political ramifications of cyberpunk don't register as much as jacking in to a unified network and cyborg chicks in leather. By the same token, the space program was feuled in america by the fecundity of pulps that doubtlessly influenced NASA engineers when they were young, and also the SF reneisance in the sixties that kept the wonder alive.
Generation X and its follow on generations of slackers and technofetishists are also driven by escapist literature and film. The penultimate example of the genre is the Star Wars trilogy. It is a fairy-tale, pure and simple, with wizards, damsels in distress, rites of passage, knights errant, and heroic rogues. It is a fast-paced romp through wonder, with charachters that become real to the viewer, and events so poingiant they form a private history shared only with other technofetishists.
Saving Private Ryan? Happiness? They were good movies, but they didn't epitomize all the hopes and aspirations the geek has for the cinema.
As for TV shows: Buffy is a soap opera about all the people the average Technofetishist despised in highschool. It is only of interest because it offers a babe-fest for those who just can't stomach Baywatch and need to temper the onslaught of whiny beautiful people with gothic horror. (Gidget horror?)
For a poingiant, intellectually stimulating and fiercely addictive television series, Babylon 5 has any other TV show beat. No any other genre TV show, but any other show, period. The simpsons, celebrating yet another year of unparraleled post-modern absurdist hilarity, comes in a close second.
You're the media expert. I shouldn't have to be explaining this to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. IBM had a 603e-based Thinkpad that would run NT, AIX and (get this) OS/400. They've since discontinued it (no more 603e...it wasn't as popular or long-lived as the 604, and RS/6000 didn't do G3) but we might see a return if they embrace the G4 for their low-end RS/6000 line.
SoupIsGood Food
Heh...they're gonna need -something- to replace Alpha. The way things have been going, I'd expect to see Sledgehammer hit before Itanium(snicker) or Itanium Pro or Itanium II or Itanium: The Revenge (whatever they're gonna rename McKinley, widely acknowledged as being the first -useable- generation of IA-64. It's also still up in the air whether it will have x86 compatibility in addition to PA-RISC compatibility. HP ain't interested in pushing low-ball boxes to legacy windows drones.)
SoupIsGood Food
Is this the same Papows who is compelled to lie extravagantly over almost every part of his personal life? Decorated Gulf War combat ace (was a radar operater in the reserves, and never left the states), Tai Kwon Do black-belt (attended three classes before he quit) and orphan (his upper-middle class parents bought him his own horse.)
The WSJ had a -very- interesting expose on Mr. Papows earlier this year...
Then again, it sounds as if the govermental turkey was fibbing more than a bit, too. Probably wanted to pick an industry figurehead who's denials wouldn't be believed when he fabricated his "indistry support" song and dance...
SoupisGood Food
A complete MacOS 8.6 install takes around eight minutes on my old PowerbookG3/250mhz with a 24x CD. It's easy enough a marketing director can do it by himself, and harmless enough where all of your old programs and system enhancements run like a charm.
Hell, if you need to wipe the old OS off your Mac and re-install the System software due to data corruption, it will carefully copy all of your old settings, and let you decide what to do with 'em. And you -still- won't need to re-install your old applications (unless it's MS Office...)
System upgrades (like from 8.5 to 8.6) takes three minutes or so.
In extreme contrast, installing Solaris 2.7 is an all-afternoon prospect on an older Sun system with an 8x CD-ROM.
SoupIsGood Food
There are various programs (Like folderbolt) that "lock" files and folders (directories in Unix speak)...even entire disks. Like with Unix, you can attribute different levels of access...deny all, read only, write only, etc.
To kick it to the next level, every directory or file can have its own password. Once you are in on a Unix box as root, you have the keys to the candy store.
So if a wily cracker were able to take advantage of a mythical overflow, and by some miracle managed to upload executeable code, when it tries to modify the read-only files, the system it will prompt for a password. Recieving none, it trips all sorts of alarms.
Some of these security programs can also encrypt/decrypt on the fly.
So, the MacOS, alone, is more secure than all but the most carefully audited Unix box. Add something like folderbolt, and security is no longer an issue...even for the Army.
SoupIsGood Food
This is because I seriously doubt that there is -one- machine running the website. There are probably half a dozen performance-tuned Macs. (Like performance tuning a Honda: you -can- do it, even if it isn't as cool as hot-rodding a V8 muscle car). I reloaded www.army.mil a couple of times, and it always came right up (I'm on a T1).
Way back when the web was new, Mac OS boxes running Webstar were configured into a "RAIC", or "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers" were very commong for high-traffic sites. We call 'em server arrays today, but the concept is the same. Lots of small computers all mirroring one another, with a slick DNS server set-up to handle load balancing/distribution. Then NT came along, and webmasters suffered greatly. Now the pendulum is swinging back, and the Mac and Linux are where it is -at-...
SoupIsGood Food
Makes keeping the kind of specs needed to get Linux running on high end gear hard to keep secret... SoupIsGood Food
I used to work for a small company who employed almost exclusively older workers (35 and up; I was by far the youngest person in the company at 23), and paid them commensurate with their experience.
These programmers, technicians and engineers worked reasonable hours, and seemed to work at a relaxed pace. Yet our products were consistently two to three generations ahead of the competition, with a broader range of applications and a warranty twice as long. We also did custom engineering for large accounts, and consistently came in under-time and under-budget.
I talked with the general manager and CTO about this and they admitted that they will hire an older engineer over a younger one. Their edge over the competition was hiring staff who knew what they were doing: every shortcut, dirty trick and brilliant hack was discovered, exploited and perfected by experienced engineers early in their careers. Now, later in life, older engineers could produce more with less effort. The CTO drew a diagram (wish I had copied it down) that showed older engineers were worse than young ones in terms of lines of code produced, hours put in on a project, and turnaround time on prototypes. However, if you used total project time, quality of design and development budget requirements, older engineers consistently out performed younger ones by an order of magnitude.
Also, the General Manager said that the older engineers were less likely to pull up and move on after a couple of years, so hiring and retaining new staff wasn't as much of a problem as it was for their competitors.
Smart companies hire old engineers.
(But young sysadmins. B) )
SoupIsGood Food
Preffered, but not only. MacTCP (the precursor to Open Transport) ran spiffily under 6.0.x, and you could dial into the 'net with MacSLIP. MacTCP was a "control panel" (similar in concept to a configuarable daemon with a GUI, for you Linux fans) to the system software, and not built into the core operating system, tho.
SoupIsGood Food
The Mac Portable, released in 1990, came with a built-in modem and a TCP/IP stack that could download sound-clips in a variety of file-formats from the internet and play them in 8-bit mono. It ran off of batteries, and you could take it with you wherever you went (if you wanted to build strong muscle tone).
The Powerbook 170, released in 1992, could replay audio files downloaded from the internet in 16-bit stereo (CD-quality), ran for two hours off of a battery, and could fit in a small satchel or briefcase.
Doncha just loooove prior art?
Well, here we have it. Another definitive reason why almost unlimited access to proprietary software source code is not "open source."
Apple now has two options to comply 100% with open source purists: they can 1) send Steve Jobs to prison for breaking export law and allow Apple to be fined out of existance by the Govt. or 2) Not release any source code so you can go back to griping about how nobody in the corporate community really takes Open Source seriously.
The third option is to tell the lot of you to take your OSD and do something pysiologically impossible with it.
It is very interesting to note that the Gnu/Lickers are almost entirely responsibe for the "backlash". Most of us *BSD types are ecstatic that we get a chance to see what Apple has done with Mach and BSD.
I expect there will be a lot of cross-polination of ideas and fixes to nagging problems on both sides, and that both Apple and *BSD will prosper from the arrangement.
I expect long-harried Mac/NeXT MIS staff and developers will be thrilled at a chance to hack away at their favorite system's foundations.
I expect the Gnu/Lickers to continue sniveling about evil corporations, and spending countless hours trying to reverse engineer the Win/98 "look and feel" in another desktop enviroment and/or window manager.
If the ASPL isn't open source, then Open Source is dead, strangled by those who loved it best. What is left isn't totally free software, but it -is- software that allows for more freedom than anyone had ever expected from a major corporation.
So screw OSD. Screw Open Source (TM). Screw SIP. Screw FSF. Screw RMS, ESR, BP, and any other free-software swami I left off the list.
WE DON'T NEED YOU ANYMORE.
William Gibson wrote that "The street finds its own uses for things". We found our own use for open source, and if it is at odds with your narrow political agenda, then too fucking bad.
Silly rabbit. Apple doesn't -need- to agitate on public forums,because us rabid, wild-eyed, sway-toothed mac-marine evangelistas are all too ready and willing to do it for them. We were doing the platform fanatacist thang long before you Linux lovers showed up. B)
What you are noticing is that the Mac user tends to be very interested in computers and computing beyond our beloved Macintosh. We put be on the map. A year ago, according to the linux journal the second most popular Linux distro (after Red Hat) was Apple's MKLinux.
Mac users like diversity. We like Amigans. We like Atari fans (what few of them are left). We like Unix gurus, yes, Linux gurus included. It tends to ROYALLY piss us off when the respect isn't returned...and we're better at arguing than you are. Bp
Apple isn't going open source in order to provide leech^H^H^H^H^H non-customers a free ride, they are posting it in order to 1) return to the open source community the work they have done with open source tools like Mach and BSD 2) provide a means of modify ing and fixing the underlying OS in order to adapt new technologies beyond aple's R&D scope or to squish bugs that made it through QA. This is the model IBM and the other mainframe companies used back before everything went top-secret proprietary in the mid-eighties. It is a return to openess and a community approach to the installed base of high-end hardware. (coming soon...look for a possible sneak preview at NAB. Watch yer ass, SGI...)
If you want more from sugar daddy Apple, you gotta give some sweetness yourself. Get coding, and whine loudly about all the bugs you could be fixing if you had the yellow box code. B)
SoupIsGood Food
I'm my own damn shill.
Give.
Me.
A.
Break.
The very first company to throw open the underpinnings of its OS to public scrutiny, and you guys go beserk with condemnation. Great way to encourage companies to open up. I have long since lost my patience with the Open/Free/Slashdot crowd. The end result that will be embraced by developers is -not- software you don't have to pay for...but they will show you how it works if you are willing to show them how to make it better. This is a trade-off...the only other option is for Apple to clamp down and give -NOTHING- back to the development community.
Regarding the first point: the license under which Mach and other components integrated into MacOS X Server specifically permit anyone to use the code for any purpose and slap whatever license on it they see fit. Not apple's fault...blame the original project leads. Kind of like how Sun appropriated BSD code for its own proprietary OS.
Regarding the second point: IBM and Apple needed to do this in order to avoid humoungous lawsuits. Like with Netscape and IBM, MacOS X developers do -not- own their code, and the only reasons to code for it is to add features to MacOS X the developer wants/needs.
Like it or not, Apple published its source code. This makes it open source regardless of whether or not you lie the license, whether or not you like the Mac, or whether or not you like Apple. It is a step in the right direction, and should be encouraged. The alternative is -not- totally free software from a major coporate developer, but -NO- source code made available at all, to anyone, for any reason.
Apple doesn't -have- to do shit. They can leech off open licenses as much as they like, and not give anything at all back. They -chose- to make available, for free, detailed source code of the changes they made to Mach, BSD, etc. Thet should be applauded for making this choice, and encouraged to do more.
Encouragement != nasty bitching and infighting between open source advocates of minutae of the description of "open source". Encouragement is downloading a copy, hacking around with it, and showing Apple that opening up the source code even more would be benefiial for you -and- them.
Timne for all of you college kids to grow the %&$# up
SoupIsGood Food.
Perhaps if you needed to pick your nose during the install...
And I prefer Mountain Dew to set up my Mac server, thankyew very much.
SoupIsGood Food
Actually, it would.
I used to work for one of their competitors...the entire reason for a VME PowerPC board is to shove a bunch of them in a VME rack to tackle obscenely high-performance computational applications...like radar or sonar imaging systems. Eight of these bad boys go in a VME chassis. Four VME chassis rackmount into a computer cabinet. For three square feet of floorspace, you have a Linux-based Beowulf cluster that will outrun the big boys...128 400mhz Cu G3s, with the system boards talking to each other at speeds better than 250MegaBYTES (not bits) per second. Forget bargain-basement alpha desktops and 100base-T hack jobs...this here's the real deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, Linux has just hit the big time...big time.
Now...what will these VME-based system boards do for the home hobbyist and workstation afficionado looking for a cheaper way to run quake faster? Nothing. This ain't a toy, junior...go buy a refurbished imac and get crakin' on the USB drivers. I figure each one of those boards will cost better than five grand. Worth it, if you need to model molecular decay in your new wonderdrug. Not worth it, if you need to ask mommy to buy your computer for you.
SoupIsGood Food
Even if it means I have to live for the rest of my life in a shack deep in the wilderness with nothing but a set of rusty weasel traps and my Powerbook, it will be a -very- cold day in hell before I allow myself to be tagged, branded, and monitored via my deck.
If IBM and Motorola jump on this bandwagon, I'm moving to Alpha. If Alpha Inc. goes over to the darkside, I'll go Sun. If all the chip manufacturers decide to make themselves complicit in foisting this orwellian nightmare on the world, I'll stockpile old PowerMac clones and toss on another node to the Beowolf cluster when it looks like I'm lagging behind the performance curve.
Never. Ever. Will I submit to being branded like cattle because I use a computer.
If you hate Apple, buy AMD peecees. Buy Alphas. Buy Netwinders. Screw Intel.
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I don't like weapons, either. But I do realize that a lot of the technological innovation to come out of the latter half of the 20th century...internet included...derived from military R&D. The implication that breaking news in science or technology dealing with the military may not be appropriate to report in slashdot if there is no immediate and obvious civillian benefit is chilling.
/. editors see fit to censor the technical news they post based on political, rather than technical, merit.
I find it distressing that
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While I can see market for net-based storage beyond stupid e-mail tricks, at least the bastards could have set up a 10 meg Appleshare IP account...this web based crap has -got- to go.
Feh.
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SGI's Ric Bleuzzo has made it abundantly clear that he is moving everything from MiPS to IA-64 at the high end. IRIX is going to be ported to IA-64, and workstations will all be IA-32 running NT. This was supposed to happen with the advent of merced, and it was supposed to have already happened, but it looks like he'll have to wait until late next year when (if) McKinley comes out.
I wonder where SGI will get fab space to build those R14000s if MiPS tells them to go screw? MiPS is a very succesful company, and supplies their low end chips everywhere...it's not as if they are hurting for buisines...
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Take a closer look. The dead products are the Ultra30 (replaced by the Ultra60), the Ultra-1 (Which is OLD, the UltraSPARC 1 is three generations back!) and the SparcStation 5 (REALLY Old...FOUR generations back.)
Sun is selling its new Darwin systems, and they are selling better than any workstation line in Sun's history. The Sun Ultra5 is the low end system, you can pick one up for less than $3000 if you shop carefully, the Ultra10 is the next level up, and cloned by Tatung and a few others, and the Ultra60 is the latest and greatest and outruns Xeon like a bullet train outruns a steam locomotive.
Even -BETTER- news for Linux fans are the UltraSPARC-II AX motherboards...roll your own UltraPenguin system for less than 2 grand! Put it in that Black Archy case from colorcases.com...
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The new PowerMac G3s start at $1599. SGI starts at twice that with an identical configuration. (OK. No SCSI card...easily remedied for under $300.)
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Best movie of the year: the Star Wars trilogy.
/. went and paid sixteen bux to go see three movies they could rent for $4.50.
With the exception of the militant Trekkers who boycotted them as a matter of principal, everyone on
This is beacuse Star Wars is escapism. Technofetishists dig science fiction and fantasy because it can elevate them beyond their world and into a "real life" that actually interests them. By default such a "real life" deals with The Next Big Thing in technologies and science, or magic, which is technology by other means.
Escapism isn't a bad thing. It's been driving the pace of technical innovation for the past hundred years or so: hard core coders do what they do with visions of Neuromancer and Snowcrash dancing in their heads. Since the technofetishist, as a "geek", lives in a dystopia by default the socio-political ramifications of cyberpunk don't register as much as jacking in to a unified network and cyborg chicks in leather. By the same token, the space program was feuled in america by the fecundity of pulps that doubtlessly influenced NASA engineers when they were young, and also the SF reneisance in the sixties that kept the wonder alive.
Generation X and its follow on generations of slackers and technofetishists are also driven by escapist literature and film. The penultimate example of the genre is the Star Wars trilogy. It is a fairy-tale, pure and simple, with wizards, damsels in distress, rites of passage, knights errant, and heroic rogues. It is a fast-paced romp through wonder, with charachters that become real to the viewer, and events so poingiant they form a private history shared only with other technofetishists.
Saving Private Ryan? Happiness? They were good movies, but they didn't epitomize all the hopes and aspirations the geek has for the cinema.
As for TV shows: Buffy is a soap opera about all the people the average Technofetishist despised in highschool. It is only of interest because it offers a babe-fest for those who just can't stomach Baywatch and need to temper the onslaught of whiny beautiful people with gothic horror. (Gidget horror?)
For a poingiant, intellectually stimulating and fiercely addictive television series, Babylon 5 has any other TV show beat. No any other genre TV show, but any other show, period. The simpsons, celebrating yet another year of unparraleled post-modern absurdist hilarity, comes in a close second.
You're the media expert. I shouldn't have to be explaining this to you.
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