I live in New Hampshire, the only state (to my knowledge) without a sales tax. To us, Internet tax is a non-issue. It should be that way for everyone.
Sales tax is unfair, expensive to collect and generally a pain. Why collect a portion of money as it flows out of a family when you are alredy collecting a portion when it flows in. If you need more money, just up the income tax. Income tax is (aguably) more fair, much more efficient to collect and eliminates pesky problems like the state's inability to tax interstate commerce.
Governments like to hide their income in lots of little places so it's hard for their citicens to figure out how much money they make (NH is notorious for having no big taxes but thousands of little ones). Hiding the truth is not a noble goal and voters shouldn't put up with it. Get rid of your sales taxes. They are a bad idea who's time is up.
But you still have a computer don't you. It's just better and backwards compatible. You can still play the games you bought for your 133 MHz PC on your new one but you have to keep the old N64 around.
The problem:
Why would I buy a high end gaming PC when a $200 console has as much power and I can sit on my couch and play on my big screen?
People see that the $200 consoles are better at gaming than the $1500 PC that's in the other room. Since PC's are generally lasting much longer now (450 mhz P2 are still fine for word processing and web browsing) and until recently the PC wasn't noticably better than an XBox or PS2 there isn't much reason for people to invest in a new gaming computer. That is changing.
Why it won't last:
The console's have a huge advantage in times of great change. The X-Box was released and instantly they had a game platform that was more powerful than 99% of the PC's out there. Most of the people that I know that have PC's don't spend a lot to configure them to play games, they just play games because they can. Since the expensive 3D chipsets aren't necessary for general purpose computing most people don't have them.
The computer's rapid advances have also made it really difficult for both game development and game playing. I think as the 3D accelerater world starts to stabalize and high end functionality starts to become cheap, the PC will regain it's gaming legs and take back that market share from the consoles and then some.
Eventually even the P2 450's will need to be replaced. High end 3D functionality will come with it. For $100 you can now buy a 3D card that is many times the speed of the X-Box chipset. Pair that with the new P4 + DDR's that are out and you have a nice cheap high power PC with much better graphics than either of the high end consoles.
This is a good place for the GPL. That way you can still sell it to other companies (if you customize or install it for them) and the original company doesn't have to pay over and over for the same thing just patched a little and re-compiled. If they need that software to do business they should hire you to write it without letting you extort money from them later. If you bid too little to do the job in hopes you could rip them off later that's your fault.
Would you buy a car if the dealership forced you to come back to them for repairs no matter how much they charged? It's a raw deal open to exploitation. Hopefully they don't want to do this all over in a few years when you get greedy and they are forced to eather pay up or yet again pay someone to develop a solution to the same problem from scratch.
This is a great example of why free licenses are good for software customers and proprietary licenses are bad.
I like riding in trains but trains usually don't make economic sense.
From an IEEE Spectrum article:
Hoping to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, US urban areas from Los Angeles to Sioux City (Iowa) are rushing to build new surface light rail systems. But despite claims to the contrary, light rail does not reduce traffic congestion, and is a highly expensive strategy..
US federal research indicates that quality bus systems are one-fifth the cost per passenger mile of light rail per passenger mile, can accommodate the volumes and operate as fast.
...
Advocates also claim that light rail is less costly than new highways, This is alleged by comparing the cost of a light rail line per mile to that of a six or eight lane freeway. This is an invalid, because the freeway carries such an enormously greater number of people. An eight lane freeway carries, on average, 16 times the volume of a new light rail line. In fact, total costs, public and private, per passenger mile of light rail averages seven times that of new urban freeways.
If the same ammount of money was spent on building new highways instead of new rail systems the results could carry 16 times as many people and really help to solve traffic congestion problems. Instead people throw money down the black hole that is trains. Highways are just simply more efficient.
To illustrate why go find a train track and look at it. Odds are, there isn't a train in sight. Now go find a highway...
I have been having spontaneous reboot problems with 2 MSI 694D Pro (V 1.0) motherboards which is almost certainly caused by these bad capacitors.
They each had completely different hardware and software configurations. One was my Linux server at home and the other was my Windows 2000 desktop at work. One had a single Celeron, the other 2 P3-866's. They had different sound cards, different network cards, different video cards, different RAM. The only thing they had in common was this MSI 694D Pro (V1.0) motherboard and they both had the same symptom, random spontaneous reboot without warning.
They both have black 2700uf 6.3V capacitors around the CPU sockets that have the tops bulged out with brown crusty stuff on top that smells nasty!
I troubleshot this problem for a long time and decided the problem must be something to do with the CPU power supply. Both of these boards now reboot once they get to the CPU-initialization part of boot when they have 2 CPU's in them (They have MSI DR-LED's so I can tell what part of the boot they are in.) One of the boards will run for a while with only a single Celeron 600 and all the on-board devices disabled. It runs a lot less stably with a P3-866 and won't get through the boot with a single P3-1ghz They both failed slowly, starting out rebooting just once then staying up for a month or so. All this is why I thought it had something to do with the CPU power supply. They started out rebooting every once in a while, then once a day, once an hour, now with 2 CPU's it's up to once a second.
I suspected it might have something to do with the capacitors but now that I've heard about this I'm sure that's what it is. It really bothers me since both machines were in nice, big, well-ventilated cases with good power supplies. I designed and built both machines with well-supported name brand parts. It has taken me a long time to track the problem down, and since the reboots were random I though I had them fixed many times. I have replaced one of the motherboards but the other system was using the RAID controller and I'm having a hard time finding a good replacement board. I can't believe MSI would use these shoddy capacitors in a high-end dual processor board. It cost me hours of down time, hours troubleshooting time, a new motherboard, and the time to install it, just to save a few dollars on parts! I will never buy a MSI part again!
I'm glad he patented this thing back in 1999. That means the patent will expire by 2024. I doubt any will be built by then. Lots of stupid obvious patents will expire in 25 years and no one will ever be able to patent them again.
I like this idea. I can see huge benefits to this over airplanes. Smaller numbers of people traveling faster, leaving more often, no runways needed, no taxying, no pilots, less waiting, less security, less money, closer parking. I'd use it!
I'd prefer it if the tubes were underground. I'd hate to have some moron park a barrel of fertilizer next to the tube and kill 100 people. Make 'em dig for it!:)
You could build it using a mini version of the diggers they made for the Chunnel. I'd suspend the tubes in water though. It leaks much slower than air and a thick water buffer around the tube would protect it against seismic shifts. What happens when it get's stuck and you have to go to the bathroom?
Why are there so many bad anti-SATA arguments being moderated up?
I'll counter some of the points made in posts here.
SCSI is faster:
No, it isn't. It's true that SCSI drives are currently faster and that high end SCSI is 320MB/s but speed of the bus isn't what's important, what matters is how fast you can get data to and from the drives.
Since no single drive can read or write at faster than 100 MB/s. The speed of the bus only comes into play with multiple drives and here is where SATA shines because each drive has it's own dedicated bandwith. Got 4 drives, that's 150x4=600MB/s. Got 8, 1.2GB/s. Got 32, 4.8GB/s (note that's GigaBYTES/Sec).
Then the argument comes that SCSI drives themselves are faster, have better seek times, faster transfer rates, longer warrenties, look better, blah blah, blah. This is a property of the drive mechanics, not of the interface. There wasn't enough demand for server class IDE drives to warrent manufacturers creating whole new lines for them. That won't be the case with SATA drives. There have alrady been server class SATA drives announced and only time will tell weather the ultra high end 15K RPM drives show up with SATA interfaces but I'd be surprised if they didn't.
Cable length:
Cable lenght of IDE *is* an issue in full towers and in large storage systems. Using more than 32 IDE drives in a IDE based storage system is very hard since you can't place that many within range of the controlers. 1 meter should increase the maximum number of drives within range to around 128 which makes for a very large storage server.
Connector size:
You can fit 8 SATA connectors in the space of 1 PATA connector. That's 4 times the port density of PATA. If you are doing hot-swap RAID each PATA port can only service one drive so this effectively gives 8 times the port density for IDE RAID controlers. I doubt anyone will build a 64 drive SATA RAID controler anytime soon but they could do it in the same space as an 8 drive controler.
Also, A motherboard manufacturer can fit 32 SATA ports in the space they used to take up with 4 IDE ports. They won't, of course, because no desktop machine needs that many SATA ports but I expect to see 8 (4 raid, 4 standard) or 6 standard.
One device per controller:
One device per controler helps in reliability, compatibility and bandwidth/drive. As I've said in other posts, SCSI and FCAL look fast until you fill the bus up and divide the available bandwidth by the number of drives.
This is also important for drive arrays since the device doesn't need to be configured as to which device it is. No master/slave. No SCSI id 12.
RAID5 transfer rates:
Hardware accellerated RAID 5 can read exceptionally fast and is preferred for read heavy applications where redundancy is needed (My desktop). The bandwidth of SATA is exceptionally helpful in doing RAID5 rebuilds while still using the drive array. Take for example a 12 drive RAID5 array doing a rebuild and a large file read. If the rebuild is reading from 11 drives and writing to one, each at 20MB/s the rebuild is using 240MB/s. Then the OS can be reading from the 11 good drives at 20MB/s using another 220 MB/s. You are then using a total of 460 MB/s which would swamp any SCSI bus. In an SATA system with dedicated bandwith for each drive that isn't the case.
SCSI, FCAL, Firewire and USB 2.0 all have issues that make them unusable in the desktop hard drive space:
SCSI/FCAL:
Both SCSI and FCAL are just too expensive. This is not, as many people claime, because of small volume. SCSI controler chips are built in high enough volume to take advantage of economies of scale. They are expensive for the same reason that fast 3D cards are expensive. They are just big and complicated and hard to make. I'd conservatively guess a SCSI chip is an order of magnitude more than SATA ($30 vs $3) but the difference is probably more. When you are selling your drive for $50 a $30 chip to attach it to the bus is not an option. FCAL's cost is even worse.
Also, When is the last time you had to compile the driver for your IDE controler into your kernel to get it to boot?
IDE is unique among all the storage types because the software interface is a standard. I'm not talking about he cabling or singlaling, I'm talking about the way the OS talks to the hardware. All other methods of attaching storage need some sort of hardware specific driver to talk to the OS. PATA has always had this and SATA maintains backwards compatibility. This is a huge feature that no other method of attaching storage has.
Firewire/USB:
Firewire and USB are unusable for system drives because the ID is dynamically assigned. There is no way to decide which drive comes first.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
Firewire and USB2 are both in the 40-48 MB/s range (400-480 Mb/s) which is too slow for modern drives (especially when attaching multiple drives). SATA is 3 times that speed at 150MB/s (1.5Gb/s) with dedicated bandwidth for each drive.
Someone please moderate me up! All these "SATA is stupid! We should all switch to a tin can and string. It's so much better!" arguments are making my head ache
Karma: Evil (Mostly the sum of smacking supid people upside the head)
Firewire is unusable for system drives because the ID is dynamically assigned. There is no way to decide which drive comes first.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
IDE is unique among all the storage types because the software interface is a standard. I'm not talking about he cabling or singlaling, I'm talking about the way the OS talks to the hardware. All other methods of attaching storage need some sort of hardware specific driver to talk to the OS. PATA has always had this and SATA maintains backwards compatibility. This is a huge feature that no other method of attaching storage has.
SCSI is not expensive "just because". It's expensive for the same reason that fast 3D cards are expensive, not because the volume is low but because the tecnology is complicated. Chips to talk using modern SCSI signaling protocols are extremely expensive to produce as compared to SATA. I'd conservatively guess an order of magnitude different ($4 vs $40) but the difference is probably more. When you are selling your drive for $50 a $40 chip to attach it to the bus is not an option. FCAL is worse.
Why are there so many bad anti-SATA arguments being moderated up?
To counter your points:
Cable length:
Cable lenght of IDE *is* an issue in full towers and in large systems. Using more than 32 IDE drives in a IDE based storage system is very hard since you can't place that many within range of the controlers. 1 meter should increase the maximum number of drives within range to around 128 which makes for a very large storage server.
Connector size:
You can fit 8 SATA connectors in the space of 1 PATA connector that can service 2 drives. If you are doing hot-swap RAID each PATA port can only service one drive because you can't hotswap in master/slave configurations so this effectively gives 8 times the port density for RAID controlers. I doubt anyone will build a 64 drive SATA RAID controler anytime soon but the point is they could do it in the same space as an 8 drive controler.
Also, A motherboard manufacturer can fit 32 SATA ports in the space they used to take up with those 4 IDE ports. They won't, of course, because no desktop machine needs that many SATA ports.
One device per controller:
One device per controler helps in reliability, compatibility and bandwidth/drive. As I've said in other posts, SCSI and Fiber channel look fast until you fill the bus up and divide the available bandwidth by the number of drives.
RAID5 transfer rates:
Hardware accellerated RAID 5 can read exceptionally fast and is preferred for read heavy applications where redundancy is needed (My desktop). The bandwidth is exceptionally helpful in doing RAID5 rebuilds while still using the drive array. Take for example a 12 drive RAID5 array doing a rebuild and a large file read. If the rebuild is reading from 11 drives and writing to one, each at 20MB/s the rebuild is using 240MB/s. Then the OS can be reading from the 11 good drives at 20MB/s using another 220 MB/s. You are then using a total of 460 MB/s which would swamp any SCSI bus. In an SATA system with dedicated bandwith for each drive that isn't the case.
Speed:
Firewire and USB2 are both in the 40-48 MB/s range (400-480 Mb/s) SATA is 3 times that speed at 150MB/s (1.5Gb/s)
SCSI, FCAL and Firewire all have issues that make them unusable in the desktop harddrive space:
SCSI/FCAL:
When is the last time you had to compile the driver for your IDE controler into your kernel to get it to boot?
IDE is unique among all the storage types because the software interface is a standard. I'm not talking about he cabling or singlaling, I'm talking about the way the OS talks to the hardware. All other methods of attaching storage need some sort of hardware specific driver to talk to the OS. PATA has always had this and SATA maintains backwards compatibility. This is a huge feature that no other method of attaching storage has.
Chips to talk using modern SCSI signaling protocols are extremely expensive to produce as compared to SATA. I'd conservatively guess an order of magnitude different ($4 vs $40) but the difference is probably more. When you are selling your drive for $50 a $40 chip to attach it to the bus is not an option. FCAL is worse.
Firewire:
Firewire is unusable for system drives because the ID is dynamically assigned. There is no way to decide which drive comes first.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
Someone please moderate me up! All these "SATA is stupid, a tin can and string is better!" arguments are making my head ache
Karma: Bad. (Mostly the sum of smacking supid people upside the head)
Firewire is unusable for system drives because the ID is dynamically assigned. There is no way to decide which comes first.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
From what I understand SATA will get SCA style backplanes.
The 3ware card's bandwith limitation is a property of that card, not of the SATA bus.
I've been working with IDE RAID for a few years now and I have to say, I grimmace whenever I see someone throwing buckets of money down the drain by putting together a SCSI system. I've seen IDE RAID machines performing 3+ times as fast for less money and then had to build one of the old SCSI style because we coudln't buy IDE RAID from one of the big server makers who provides global support. I personally have a 480GB array at home that cost me under $1000 to put together 6 months ago.
Soon, with the 320GB maxtors you will be able to create a 3.5 TB array in 3U using off the shelf hardware and $350 drives for under $10K. Spend that on a SCSI array and you get about 1/5th as much space.
SATA has a long way to go but SCSI is dying. The newest technology is no-longer introduced into the SCSI drive lines first. ATA drive lines are usually many months ahead of their SCSI counterparts.
Karma: Instant (Mostly the sum of being smacked for making stupid puns)
Heh. Here's a list of IDE's shortcomings SCSI makes worse:
cable size
interoperability issues caused by multiple drives per cable
bandwidth per drive
cost of the controllers
cost of the cables
cost of the drives
Low reliability caused by multiple devices physically attached to the same cable that can bring parts of the bus or the whole bus down
The bandwidth per drive thing is one of the great things that SATA brings to the table. With a modern large SCSI setup it seems like you have a lot of bandwidth but on a per drive basis you really don't. 160MB/s divided by 12 drives = 13MB/s (1980's speed). To contrast that look at a 12 drive 3Ware SATA controller. That has a full 150 MBytes/Sec to each of the 12 drives.
To see the usefulness of this take the example of a 12 drive RAID 5 array doing a rebuild while the server is trying to read from the drives. The controller has at it's disposal 1800 MB/s worth of bandwidth that it can use. It can run those drives as fast as they can go keeping the write buffer full on the drive it's rebuilding and using the leftover bandwidth to service the server's requests. Modern ATA drives can read at up to 56 MB/s. With 12 drives you get a total of 672 MB/s throughput which is far more than even the new Ultra320 SCSI is capable of. With newer faster drives and 16 drive RAID controllers this problem gets even worse.
> If more people used it, it would be a cheaper solution
SCSI is quite widely used. There is a lot more SCSI out there than SATA and yet a motherboard with a SATA raid controller costs about the same as one without it whereas a motherboard with a SCSI raid controller on it costs about 3 times as much. SCSI is simply an expensive, complicated technology to implement.
>15k rpm scsi drives get seek times in the low three range--that's three times faster than your average 5400 rpm ide hdd.
The low seek times are a result of expensive server class drive technology, not of the interface. Seagate could just as easily drop a SATA interface on those 15K Cheetah drives and I suspect in the near future they will because:
All of SCSI's shortcomings are fixed by Serial ATA
Yea, I know, it's a cheap shot but really SATA is poised to replace SCSI in most of the markets SCSI still occupies. SCSI was mostly popular in server systems because of it's hot swapablility and plug and play operation (no jumpers to set on 80 pin sca drives.) These are advantages that Serial ATA shares. Motherboard integrated SATA RAID will take over for SCSI RAID in server class systems because of cost, size, power and bandwidth issues. 8 - 16 drive SATA RAID arrays will take over the low to mid-size storage array market. (If you can count 4.8 Terabytes as mid size.) Fiber channel will be left for SANs and large storage arrays. SCSI will be relegated to connecting external drive systems but I imagine fiber channel will eventually take most of that market.
People who like SCSI will probably like SATA even more. It will be faster, much cheaper, more reliable, more compatible, and easier to maintain and troubleshoot. True, you won't be able to run a printer or scanner off it but I doubt there will be a lot of people missing that particular piece of SCSI functionality.
It's not about "wow" factor or buzzwords. Serial ATA is better. They can transmit 150 MB/sec over a single pair whereas PATA's 80 wire cables can only transmit 133 MB/s which is split between 2 drives. Now, with SerialATA, instead of having 66 MBytes/Sec/Drive you have more than double the bandwidth per drive and the cabling is smaller even with a separate cable for each drive.
I'm no communications expert but I believe most modern high speed serial connections could not be economically put in parallel since in parallel, all the bits need to be clocked together and the modern serial protocols are not designed to coordinate with anything but the other side of the connection. Instead you would need to multiplex the connections on a much higher level and that becomes difficult and expensive (ALA equal cost multipath routers).
I think what is happening is they are figuring out that it's cheaper to put seriously complicated technology on either end of a single pair of wires and keep the cabling small and simple.
SATA saves money in a bunch of ways:
o It keeps the pin count low on the chips
o It keeps the motherboard real estate down
o It keeps the cabling cost down.
It also has better features:
o It's faster
o It can be made hot-swappable
o Cables are smaller and can be longer and will be cheaper
o It has a more reliable hub and spoke architecture which should eliminate most interoperability issues.
I find for doing most complicated perl-type stuff (parsing text, dealing with large hashes, etc) perl is as fast as anything you would write in C. Granted, you *could* write faster stuff in C but you usually wouldn't because it takes so long.
Save yourself 6 months of programming, use perl and buy a slightly faster CPU.
Can you use apostrophes in acronyms when pluralizing them? Some people say yes, some people say no. I say yes! Here's why:
Purdue University has a nice blurb on how to properly use apostrophes. One of the uses is "Forming plurals of letters, numbers, and symbols" to avoid confusion.
This page says you can us an apostrophe when the acronym ends in S to avoid confusion. Their example was if you said "The DHSSs of Europe are getting together next week" it would look strange so you can use "The DHSS's of Europe are getting together next week"
This says use an Apostrophe whenever there is punctuation in the acronym. Many other publications say you can't.
Since acronyms and codes are getting more popular they have to get more complex to be unique. You wouldn't want someone getting confused between multiple Non-Maskable Interrupts and a Navy Manpower Information System. Why not make it NMI's instead of NMIs so it doesn't get confused with a NMIS.
Many people seem to agree that you shouldn't use apostrophes to pluralize acronyms but I don't. I think the "ends in S" rule is good but what about the "could be confused with another acronym which is this one with an s on the end" rule. How do you know there isn't an acronym out there that is that one with an S on the end? How do you know there won't be one tomorrow?
You cant!
The bottom line is that the purpose of language is to communicate effectively. If I can do that using 31337 sp33ch then that's ok. It's like the whole stupid he/she vs they thing. (They has always been acceptable as a singular gender neutral pronoun despite many people's assertions otherwise).
To sum it up:
Language rules are here to help us communicate and any rule that restricts our ability to do so effectively is invalid by definition no matter how much some know-it-all wants to convince you otherwise. It's the way it always has been and the way it always will be.
X Modelines have nothing do to with the kernel, they configure the X Server which runs in user space. Kernel level auto-detection is about the distribution not having to use insmod and modprobe to load drivers for hardware.
Every distribution comes with a program to auto-detect what devices exist on the PCI bus and load the proper kernel module for it. Users have no interaction with this feature. If I understand this right he's talking about taking this automatic functionality from user space programs that run at boot and moving it into the kernel. There really isn't any user benefit to doing that so therefore: "Nobody wanted it"
Popularity is both the best and the worst thing that could ever happen to Linux. It's like the old days of the internet. "Oh crap, here comes the Prodigy people" and the internet as I knew it was gone. Luckily, it'll be harder for the AOL users of the world to pollute Linux 'cause you can't participate if you can't program.:)
RedHat 8.0 doesn't have a 386/486 kernel so if you are using old hardware it's probably out of the question. It's also way too bloated and slow for old hardware.
Something is horribly wrong with RedHat 8.0
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Red Hat 8.0 Released
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I have a Dual P3 machine that has been running stably for 2 years and it won't even get through the install without crashing.
I tried to install it on an old 486-120 that I have just so I could poke around at it but it has no i386 or i486 kernel. It let me complete the install without installing a kernel.
I have another P3 that has also run for years that I installed 3 times and it hasn't been stable yet. It doesn't do the firstboot stuff until the second boot for some reason. It detected but didn't enable my Ensoniq AudioPCI (1371). It also didn't enable my Dlink 530TX network card until I ran Kudzu manually. The first install froze a few times so I figured something must be wrong. I reinstalled and had all the same problems.
The machine has locked up twice since then Once was a hard lock while in X (no mouse, numlock, pings nothing) and the other time it was pingable and the keyboard lights responded but it wouldn't respond past that.
XMMS silently refused to play any MP3 I threw at it on my first install and on my last one it Segfaulted and core dumped whenever I ran it.
The install is huge and slow. It takes about twice as long for a basic install than 7.2 did.
I really like the new Tetris game. I hope that becomes a permanent addition.
The GUI is slick. I really like the new login and the font antialiasing is finally looking good in RedHat. The new icons look really nice too. This is not ready for the average desktop yet but it's getting really close, much closer than 7.3 was.
I may have just had a run of bad luck but my guess is I won't be the only one that has problems getting 8.0 stable. 8.0 has all the problems of a typical RedHat x.0 release and then some. I think I will really like 8.2.
There is no way the EFF is going to compete against the RIAA's finantial resources. Find out if your local Senator/House Rep voted for this bill. Then find out if they took some money from the RIAA. If they did put a nice add in your local paper with those pieces of information. Use the words "sold our freedom" "Corrupt" and "Don't Re-ellect"
Polititions care about money but only in so far as it can get them more votes. If taking money from the RIAA for a bad law costs them more votes than it buys them, they won't do it next time.
The Pentium Pro 200 was 1000 times as fast. These things are about 15-20 times that speed. The current line of CPU's are about 10,000 times as fast as an 8086.
If I remember correctly, the jump between a 8086 and a 8286 was about 10x in speed with only a doubling of clock speed. The 286 was 5 times as fast per clock cycle as a 8086. The 386 was about 1.5 times as fast per clock cycle as 286. Same with 486 over 386 and I think with Pentium over 486, both 1.5x. I'm pretty sure that's where it stopped. Speed/clock on the new P4's is now slower than the P3's. I think the P4's are about the same speed/clock as a 486 or maybe a Pentium. It's somewhere around ther. Does anyone know?
We need to have a unit of measure which is speed/clock.
Ooh, but I forgot a few things. Maybe we should call it RedHat `rpm -q -a`/Linux.
There's no I in team. Someone needs to learn to play nicely with others.
Where do you draw the line? Is GCC is more important for Linux's success than all the other pieces. Or maybe it's BASH that Linux couldn't exist without. GNU isn't *that* important. If it were RMS wouldn't have to stoop to whining to try to get attention.
Does anyone actually know what percentage of the average ditsro is copyrighted to the FSF?
Don't give things away for free and expect something in return. Just be happy that you are making a usefull contribution to mankind. Most of us out here know that RMS most certainly is making a usefull contribution to mankind and thank him for it.
Just sign the agreement with the last name of "Doesntagree" or "Noway" or "Idontthinkso" or something bogus or write in an ammendment that sais something like "All my personal inventions will remain my own property and I am free to work for whomever I chose" basically nullifying the whole agreement. The company won't usually care until it's too late.
Someone should come up with boilerplate ammendments to employment contracts that we can just print out and staple in that neuters the whole thing so we peons can easily insist on some basic rights.
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I live in New Hampshire, the only state (to my knowledge) without a sales tax. To us, Internet tax is a non-issue. It should be that way for everyone.
Sales tax is unfair, expensive to collect and generally a pain. Why collect a portion of money as it flows out of a family when you are alredy collecting a portion when it flows in. If you need more money, just up the income tax. Income tax is (aguably) more fair, much more efficient to collect and eliminates pesky problems like the state's inability to tax interstate commerce.
Governments like to hide their income in lots of little places so it's hard for their citicens to figure out how much money they make (NH is notorious for having no big taxes but thousands of little ones). Hiding the truth is not a noble goal and voters shouldn't put up with it. Get rid of your sales taxes. They are a bad idea who's time is up.
But you still have a computer don't you. It's just better and backwards compatible. You can still play the games you bought for your 133 MHz PC on your new one but you have to keep the old N64 around.
The problem:
Why would I buy a high end gaming PC when a $200 console has as much power and I can sit on my couch and play on my big screen?
People see that the $200 consoles are better at gaming than the $1500 PC that's in the other room. Since PC's are generally lasting much longer now (450 mhz P2 are still fine for word processing and web browsing) and until recently the PC wasn't noticably better than an XBox or PS2 there isn't much reason for people to invest in a new gaming computer. That is changing.
Why it won't last:
The console's have a huge advantage in times of great change. The X-Box was released and instantly they had a game platform that was more powerful than 99% of the PC's out there. Most of the people that I know that have PC's don't spend a lot to configure them to play games, they just play games because they can. Since the expensive 3D chipsets aren't necessary for general purpose computing most people don't have them.
The computer's rapid advances have also made it really difficult for both game development and game playing. I think as the 3D accelerater world starts to stabalize and high end functionality starts to become cheap, the PC will regain it's gaming legs and take back that market share from the consoles and then some.
Eventually even the P2 450's will need to be replaced. High end 3D functionality will come with it. For $100 you can now buy a 3D card that is many times the speed of the X-Box chipset. Pair that with the new P4 + DDR's that are out and you have a nice cheap high power PC with much better graphics than either of the high end consoles.
This is a good place for the GPL. That way you can still sell it to other companies (if you customize or install it for them) and the original company doesn't have to pay over and over for the same thing just patched a little and re-compiled. If they need that software to do business they should hire you to write it without letting you extort money from them later. If you bid too little to do the job in hopes you could rip them off later that's your fault.
Would you buy a car if the dealership forced you to come back to them for repairs no matter how much they charged? It's a raw deal open to exploitation. Hopefully they don't want to do this all over in a few years when you get greedy and they are forced to eather pay up or yet again pay someone to develop a solution to the same problem from scratch.
This is a great example of why free licenses are good for software customers and proprietary licenses are bad.
From an IEEE Spectrum article:
The rest can be found here:
http://www.publicpurpose.com/ut-ieee.htm
If the same ammount of money was spent on building new highways instead of new rail systems the results could carry 16 times as many people and really help to solve traffic congestion problems. Instead people throw money down the black hole that is trains. Highways are just simply more efficient.
To illustrate why go find a train track and look at it. Odds are, there isn't a train in sight. Now go find a highway...
I have been having spontaneous reboot problems with 2 MSI 694D Pro (V 1.0) motherboards which is almost certainly caused by these bad capacitors.
They each had completely different hardware and software configurations. One was my Linux server at home and the other was my Windows 2000 desktop at work. One had a single Celeron, the other 2 P3-866's. They had different sound cards, different network cards, different video cards, different RAM. The only thing they had in common was this MSI 694D Pro (V1.0) motherboard and they both had the same symptom, random spontaneous reboot without warning.
They both have black 2700uf 6.3V capacitors around the CPU sockets that have the tops bulged out with brown crusty stuff on top that smells nasty!
I troubleshot this problem for a long time and decided the problem must be something to do with the CPU power supply. Both of these boards now reboot once they get to the CPU-initialization part of boot when they have 2 CPU's in them (They have MSI DR-LED's so I can tell what part of the boot they are in.) One of the boards will run for a while with only a single Celeron 600 and all the on-board devices disabled. It runs a lot less stably with a P3-866 and won't get through the boot with a single P3-1ghz They both failed slowly, starting out rebooting just once then staying up for a month or so. All this is why I thought it had something to do with the CPU power supply. They started out rebooting every once in a while, then once a day, once an hour, now with 2 CPU's it's up to once a second.
I suspected it might have something to do with the capacitors but now that I've heard about this I'm sure that's what it is. It really bothers me since both machines were in nice, big, well-ventilated cases with good power supplies. I designed and built both machines with well-supported name brand parts. It has taken me a long time to track the problem down, and since the reboots were random I though I had them fixed many times. I have replaced one of the motherboards but the other system was using the RAID controller and I'm having a hard time finding a good replacement board. I can't believe MSI would use these shoddy capacitors in a high-end dual processor board. It cost me hours of down time, hours troubleshooting time, a new motherboard, and the time to install it, just to save a few dollars on parts! I will never buy a MSI part again!
have the ability to learn new things.
I'm glad he patented this thing back in 1999. That means the patent will expire by 2024. I doubt any will be built by then. Lots of stupid obvious patents will expire in 25 years and no one will ever be able to patent them again.
:)
I like this idea. I can see huge benefits to this over airplanes. Smaller numbers of people traveling faster, leaving more often, no runways needed, no taxying, no pilots, less waiting, less security, less money, closer parking. I'd use it!
I'd prefer it if the tubes were underground. I'd hate to have some moron park a barrel of fertilizer next to the tube and kill 100 people. Make 'em dig for it!
You could build it using a mini version of the diggers they made for the Chunnel. I'd suspend the tubes in water though. It leaks much slower than air and a thick water buffer around the tube would protect it against seismic shifts. What happens when it get's stuck and you have to go to the bathroom?
Not all IDE drives are shipping with a 1 year warranty.
Maxtor's Enterprise Class IDE Drives for example still cary a 3 year warranty.
I'll counter some of the points made in posts here.
SCSI is faster:
No, it isn't. It's true that SCSI drives are currently faster and that high end SCSI is 320MB/s but speed of the bus isn't what's important, what matters is how fast you can get data to and from the drives.
Since no single drive can read or write at faster than 100 MB/s. The speed of the bus only comes into play with multiple drives and here is where SATA shines because each drive has it's own dedicated bandwith. Got 4 drives, that's 150x4=600MB/s. Got 8, 1.2GB/s. Got 32, 4.8GB/s (note that's GigaBYTES/Sec).
Then the argument comes that SCSI drives themselves are faster, have better seek times, faster transfer rates, longer warrenties, look better, blah blah, blah. This is a property of the drive mechanics, not of the interface. There wasn't enough demand for server class IDE drives to warrent manufacturers creating whole new lines for them. That won't be the case with SATA drives. There have alrady been server class SATA drives announced and only time will tell weather the ultra high end 15K RPM drives show up with SATA interfaces but I'd be surprised if they didn't.
Cable length:
Cable lenght of IDE *is* an issue in full towers and in large storage systems. Using more than 32 IDE drives in a IDE based storage system is very hard since you can't place that many within range of the controlers. 1 meter should increase the maximum number of drives within range to around 128 which makes for a very large storage server.
Connector size:
You can fit 8 SATA connectors in the space of 1 PATA connector. That's 4 times the port density of PATA. If you are doing hot-swap RAID each PATA port can only service one drive so this effectively gives 8 times the port density for IDE RAID controlers. I doubt anyone will build a 64 drive SATA RAID controler anytime soon but they could do it in the same space as an 8 drive controler.
Also, A motherboard manufacturer can fit 32 SATA ports in the space they used to take up with 4 IDE ports. They won't, of course, because no desktop machine needs that many SATA ports but I expect to see 8 (4 raid, 4 standard) or 6 standard.
One device per controller:
One device per controler helps in reliability, compatibility and bandwidth/drive. As I've said in other posts, SCSI and FCAL look fast until you fill the bus up and divide the available bandwidth by the number of drives.
This is also important for drive arrays since the device doesn't need to be configured as to which device it is. No master/slave. No SCSI id 12.
RAID5 transfer rates:
Hardware accellerated RAID 5 can read exceptionally fast and is preferred for read heavy applications where redundancy is needed (My desktop). The bandwidth of SATA is exceptionally helpful in doing RAID5 rebuilds while still using the drive array. Take for example a 12 drive RAID5 array doing a rebuild and a large file read. If the rebuild is reading from 11 drives and writing to one, each at 20MB/s the rebuild is using 240MB/s. Then the OS can be reading from the 11 good drives at 20MB/s using another 220 MB/s. You are then using a total of 460 MB/s which would swamp any SCSI bus. In an SATA system with dedicated bandwith for each drive that isn't the case.
SCSI, FCAL, Firewire and USB 2.0 all have issues that make them unusable in the desktop hard drive space:
SCSI/FCAL:
- Both SCSI and FCAL are just too expensive. This is not, as many people claime, because of small volume. SCSI controler chips are built in high enough volume to take advantage of economies of scale. They are expensive for the same reason that fast 3D cards are expensive. They are just big and complicated and hard to make. I'd conservatively guess a SCSI chip is an order of magnitude more than SATA ($30 vs $3) but the difference is probably more. When you are selling your drive for $50 a $30 chip to attach it to the bus is not an option. FCAL's cost is even worse.
Firewire/USB:Also, When is the last time you had to compile the driver for your IDE controler into your kernel to get it to boot?
IDE is unique among all the storage types because the software interface is a standard. I'm not talking about he cabling or singlaling, I'm talking about the way the OS talks to the hardware. All other methods of attaching storage need some sort of hardware specific driver to talk to the OS. PATA has always had this and SATA maintains backwards compatibility. This is a huge feature that no other method of attaching storage has.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
Firewire and USB2 are both in the 40-48 MB/s range (400-480 Mb/s) which is too slow for modern drives (especially when attaching multiple drives). SATA is 3 times that speed at 150MB/s (1.5Gb/s) with dedicated bandwidth for each drive.
Someone please moderate me up! All these "SATA is stupid! We should all switch to a tin can and string. It's so much better!" arguments are making my head ache
Karma: Evil (Mostly the sum of smacking supid people upside the head)
Firewire is unusable for system drives because the ID is dynamically assigned. There is no way to decide which drive comes first.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
IDE is unique among all the storage types because the software interface is a standard. I'm not talking about he cabling or singlaling, I'm talking about the way the OS talks to the hardware. All other methods of attaching storage need some sort of hardware specific driver to talk to the OS. PATA has always had this and SATA maintains backwards compatibility. This is a huge feature that no other method of attaching storage has.
SCSI is not expensive "just because". It's expensive for the same reason that fast 3D cards are expensive, not because the volume is low but because the tecnology is complicated. Chips to talk using modern SCSI signaling protocols are extremely expensive to produce as compared to SATA. I'd conservatively guess an order of magnitude different ($4 vs $40) but the difference is probably more. When you are selling your drive for $50 a $40 chip to attach it to the bus is not an option. FCAL is worse.
(Arguments recycled from my previous posts)
To counter your points:
Cable length:
Cable lenght of IDE *is* an issue in full towers and in large systems. Using more than 32 IDE drives in a IDE based storage system is very hard since you can't place that many within range of the controlers. 1 meter should increase the maximum number of drives within range to around 128 which makes for a very large storage server.
Connector size:
You can fit 8 SATA connectors in the space of 1 PATA connector that can service 2 drives. If you are doing hot-swap RAID each PATA port can only service one drive because you can't hotswap in master/slave configurations so this effectively gives 8 times the port density for RAID controlers. I doubt anyone will build a 64 drive SATA RAID controler anytime soon but the point is they could do it in the same space as an 8 drive controler.
Also, A motherboard manufacturer can fit 32 SATA ports in the space they used to take up with those 4 IDE ports. They won't, of course, because no desktop machine needs that many SATA ports.
One device per controller:
One device per controler helps in reliability, compatibility and bandwidth/drive. As I've said in other posts, SCSI and Fiber channel look fast until you fill the bus up and divide the available bandwidth by the number of drives.
RAID5 transfer rates:
Hardware accellerated RAID 5 can read exceptionally fast and is preferred for read heavy applications where redundancy is needed (My desktop). The bandwidth is exceptionally helpful in doing RAID5 rebuilds while still using the drive array. Take for example a 12 drive RAID5 array doing a rebuild and a large file read. If the rebuild is reading from 11 drives and writing to one, each at 20MB/s the rebuild is using 240MB/s. Then the OS can be reading from the 11 good drives at 20MB/s using another 220 MB/s. You are then using a total of 460 MB/s which would swamp any SCSI bus. In an SATA system with dedicated bandwith for each drive that isn't the case.
Speed:
Firewire and USB2 are both in the 40-48 MB/s range (400-480 Mb/s) SATA is 3 times that speed at 150MB/s (1.5Gb/s)
SCSI, FCAL and Firewire all have issues that make them unusable in the desktop harddrive space:
SCSI/FCAL:
When is the last time you had to compile the driver for your IDE controler into your kernel to get it to boot?
IDE is unique among all the storage types because the software interface is a standard. I'm not talking about he cabling or singlaling, I'm talking about the way the OS talks to the hardware. All other methods of attaching storage need some sort of hardware specific driver to talk to the OS. PATA has always had this and SATA maintains backwards compatibility. This is a huge feature that no other method of attaching storage has.
Chips to talk using modern SCSI signaling protocols are extremely expensive to produce as compared to SATA. I'd conservatively guess an order of magnitude different ($4 vs $40) but the difference is probably more. When you are selling your drive for $50 a $40 chip to attach it to the bus is not an option. FCAL is worse.
Firewire:
Firewire is unusable for system drives because the ID is dynamically assigned. There is no way to decide which drive comes first.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
Someone please moderate me up! All these "SATA is stupid, a tin can and string is better!" arguments are making my head ache
Karma: Bad. (Mostly the sum of smacking supid people upside the head)
Firewire is unusable for system drives because the ID is dynamically assigned. There is no way to decide which comes first.
More importantly for large systems, if a drive fails in a RAID array and you pull it out and plug a new one back in it will get a different ID than the old one and thus not be part of the array it should be part of.
From what I understand SATA will get SCA style backplanes.
The 3ware card's bandwith limitation is a property of that card, not of the SATA bus.
I've been working with IDE RAID for a few years now and I have to say, I grimmace whenever I see someone throwing buckets of money down the drain by putting together a SCSI system. I've seen IDE RAID machines performing 3+ times as fast for less money and then had to build one of the old SCSI style because we coudln't buy IDE RAID from one of the big server makers who provides global support. I personally have a 480GB array at home that cost me under $1000 to put together 6 months ago.
Soon, with the 320GB maxtors you will be able to create a 3.5 TB array in 3U using off the shelf hardware and $350 drives for under $10K. Spend that on a SCSI array and you get about 1/5th as much space.
SATA has a long way to go but SCSI is dying. The newest technology is no-longer introduced into the SCSI drive lines first. ATA drive lines are usually many months ahead of their SCSI counterparts.
Karma: Instant (Mostly the sum of being smacked for making stupid puns)
Heh. Here's a list of IDE's shortcomings SCSI makes worse:
The bandwidth per drive thing is one of the great things that SATA brings to the table. With a modern large SCSI setup it seems like you have a lot of bandwidth but on a per drive basis you really don't. 160MB/s divided by 12 drives = 13MB/s (1980's speed). To contrast that look at a 12 drive 3Ware SATA controller. That has a full 150 MBytes/Sec to each of the 12 drives.
To see the usefulness of this take the example of a 12 drive RAID 5 array doing a rebuild while the server is trying to read from the drives. The controller has at it's disposal 1800 MB/s worth of bandwidth that it can use. It can run those drives as fast as they can go keeping the write buffer full on the drive it's rebuilding and using the leftover bandwidth to service the server's requests. Modern ATA drives can read at up to 56 MB/s. With 12 drives you get a total of 672 MB/s throughput which is far more than even the new Ultra320 SCSI is capable of. With newer faster drives and 16 drive RAID controllers this problem gets even worse.
> If more people used it, it would be a cheaper solution
SCSI is quite widely used. There is a lot more SCSI out there than SATA and yet a motherboard with a SATA raid controller costs about the same as one without it whereas a motherboard with a SCSI raid controller on it costs about 3 times as much. SCSI is simply an expensive, complicated technology to implement.
>15k rpm scsi drives get seek times in the low three range--that's three times faster than your average 5400 rpm ide hdd.
The low seek times are a result of expensive server class drive technology, not of the interface. Seagate could just as easily drop a SATA interface on those 15K Cheetah drives and I suspect in the near future they will because:
All of SCSI's shortcomings are fixed by Serial ATA
Yea, I know, it's a cheap shot but really SATA is poised to replace SCSI in most of the markets SCSI still occupies. SCSI was mostly popular in server systems because of it's hot swapablility and plug and play operation (no jumpers to set on 80 pin sca drives.) These are advantages that Serial ATA shares. Motherboard integrated SATA RAID will take over for SCSI RAID in server class systems because of cost, size, power and bandwidth issues. 8 - 16 drive SATA RAID arrays will take over the low to mid-size storage array market. (If you can count 4.8 Terabytes as mid size.) Fiber channel will be left for SANs and large storage arrays. SCSI will be relegated to connecting external drive systems but I imagine fiber channel will eventually take most of that market.
People who like SCSI will probably like SATA even more. It will be faster, much cheaper, more reliable, more compatible, and easier to maintain and troubleshoot. True, you won't be able to run a printer or scanner off it but I doubt there will be a lot of people missing that particular piece of SCSI functionality.
It's not about "wow" factor or buzzwords. Serial ATA is better. They can transmit 150 MB/sec over a single pair whereas PATA's 80 wire cables can only transmit 133 MB/s which is split between 2 drives. Now, with SerialATA, instead of having 66 MBytes/Sec/Drive you have more than double the bandwidth per drive and the cabling is smaller even with a separate cable for each drive.
I'm no communications expert but I believe most modern high speed serial connections could not be economically put in parallel since in parallel, all the bits need to be clocked together and the modern serial protocols are not designed to coordinate with anything but the other side of the connection. Instead you would need to multiplex the connections on a much higher level and that becomes difficult and expensive (ALA equal cost multipath routers).
I think what is happening is they are figuring out that it's cheaper to put seriously complicated technology on either end of a single pair of wires and keep the cabling small and simple.
SATA saves money in a bunch of ways:
o It keeps the pin count low on the chips
o It keeps the motherboard real estate down
o It keeps the cabling cost down.
It also has better features:
o It's faster
o It can be made hot-swappable
o Cables are smaller and can be longer and will be cheaper
o It has a more reliable hub and spoke architecture which should eliminate most interoperability issues.
I find for doing most complicated perl-type stuff (parsing text, dealing with large hashes, etc) perl is as fast as anything you would write in C. Granted, you *could* write faster stuff in C but you usually wouldn't because it takes so long.
Save yourself 6 months of programming, use perl and buy a slightly faster CPU.
Chapter 7 is alternatives to XS. He talks about SWIG and Inline::C as well as some other lesser known things like PDL::PP.
Can you use apostrophes in acronyms when pluralizing them? Some people say yes, some people say no. I say yes! Here's why:
Purdue University has a nice blurb on how to properly use apostrophes. One of the uses is "Forming plurals of letters, numbers, and symbols" to avoid confusion.
This page says you can us an apostrophe when the acronym ends in S to avoid confusion. Their example was if you said "The DHSSs of Europe are getting together next week" it would look strange so you can use "The DHSS's of Europe are getting together next week"
This says use an Apostrophe whenever there is punctuation in the acronym. Many other publications say you can't.
Since acronyms and codes are getting more popular they have to get more complex to be unique. You wouldn't want someone getting confused between multiple Non-Maskable Interrupts and a Navy Manpower Information System. Why not make it NMI's instead of NMIs so it doesn't get confused with a NMIS.
Many people seem to agree that you shouldn't use apostrophes to pluralize acronyms but I don't. I think the "ends in S" rule is good but what about the "could be confused with another acronym which is this one with an s on the end" rule. How do you know there isn't an acronym out there that is that one with an S on the end? How do you know there won't be one tomorrow?
You cant!
The bottom line is that the purpose of language is to communicate effectively. If I can do that using 31337 sp33ch then that's ok. It's like the whole stupid he/she vs they thing. (They has always been acceptable as a singular gender neutral pronoun despite many people's assertions otherwise).
To sum it up:
Language rules are here to help us communicate and any rule that restricts our ability to do so effectively is invalid by definition no matter how much some know-it-all wants to convince you otherwise. It's the way it always has been and the way it always will be.
X Modelines have nothing do to with the kernel, they configure the X Server which runs in user space. Kernel level auto-detection is about the distribution not having to use insmod and modprobe to load drivers for hardware.
:)
Every distribution comes with a program to auto-detect what devices exist on the PCI bus and load the proper kernel module for it. Users have no interaction with this feature. If I understand this right he's talking about taking this automatic functionality from user space programs that run at boot and moving it into the kernel. There really isn't any user benefit to doing that so therefore: "Nobody wanted it"
Popularity is both the best and the worst thing that could ever happen to Linux. It's like the old days of the internet. "Oh crap, here comes the Prodigy people" and the internet as I knew it was gone. Luckily, it'll be harder for the AOL users of the world to pollute Linux 'cause you can't participate if you can't program.
RedHat 8.0 doesn't have a 386/486 kernel so if you are using old hardware it's probably out of the question. It's also way too bloated and slow for old hardware.
I have a Dual P3 machine that has been running stably for 2 years and it won't even get through the install without crashing.
I tried to install it on an old 486-120 that I have just so I could poke around at it but it has no i386 or i486 kernel. It let me complete the install without installing a kernel.
I have another P3 that has also run for years that I installed 3 times and it hasn't been stable yet. It doesn't do the firstboot stuff until the second boot for some reason. It detected but didn't enable my Ensoniq AudioPCI (1371). It also didn't enable my Dlink 530TX network card until I ran Kudzu manually. The first install froze a few times so I figured something must be wrong. I reinstalled and had all the same problems.
The machine has locked up twice since then Once was a hard lock while in X (no mouse, numlock, pings nothing) and the other time it was pingable and the keyboard lights responded but it wouldn't respond past that.
XMMS silently refused to play any MP3 I threw at it on my first install and on my last one it Segfaulted and core dumped whenever I ran it.
The install is huge and slow. It takes about twice as long for a basic install than 7.2 did.
I really like the new Tetris game. I hope that becomes a permanent addition.
The GUI is slick. I really like the new login and the font antialiasing is finally looking good in RedHat. The new icons look really nice too. This is not ready for the average desktop yet but it's getting really close, much closer than 7.3 was.
I may have just had a run of bad luck but my guess is I won't be the only one that has problems getting 8.0 stable. 8.0 has all the problems of a typical RedHat x.0 release and then some. I think I will really like 8.2.
-Eric
There is no way the EFF is going to compete against the RIAA's finantial resources. Find out if your local Senator/House Rep voted for this bill. Then find out if they took some money from the RIAA. If they did put a nice add in your local paper with those pieces of information. Use the words "sold our freedom" "Corrupt" and "Don't Re-ellect"
Polititions care about money but only in so far as it can get them more votes. If taking money from the RIAA for a bad law costs them more votes than it buys them, they won't do it next time.
-Eric
The Pentium Pro 200 was 1000 times as fast. These things are about 15-20 times that speed. The current line of CPU's are about 10,000 times as fast as an 8086.
If I remember correctly, the jump between a 8086 and a 8286 was about 10x in speed with only a doubling of clock speed. The 286 was 5 times as fast per clock cycle as a 8086. The 386 was about 1.5 times as fast per clock cycle as 286. Same with 486 over 386 and I think with Pentium over 486, both 1.5x. I'm pretty sure that's where it stopped. Speed/clock on the new P4's is now slower than the P3's. I think the P4's are about the same speed/clock as a 486 or maybe a Pentium. It's somewhere around ther. Does anyone know?
We need to have a unit of measure which is speed/clock.
-Eric
GNU software isn't the only thing that makes the Linux kernel useful. It's important but so is all the other free software included in the distros.
i nux
Maybe we should call it:
RedHat GNU/KDE/Apache/Perl/XFree86/MySQL/Sendmail/BIND/L
Ooh, but I forgot a few things. Maybe we should call it RedHat `rpm -q -a`/Linux.
There's no I in team. Someone needs to learn to play nicely with others.
Where do you draw the line? Is GCC is more important for Linux's success than all the other pieces. Or maybe it's BASH that Linux couldn't exist without. GNU isn't *that* important. If it were RMS wouldn't have to stoop to whining to try to get attention.
Does anyone actually know what percentage of the average ditsro is copyrighted to the FSF?
Don't give things away for free and expect something in return. Just be happy that you are making a usefull contribution to mankind. Most of us out here know that RMS most certainly is making a usefull contribution to mankind and thank him for it.
-Eric
Just sign the agreement with the last name of "Doesntagree" or "Noway" or "Idontthinkso" or something bogus or write in an ammendment that
sais something like "All my personal inventions will remain my own property and I am free to work for whomever I chose" basically nullifying the whole agreement. The company won't usually care until it's too late.
Someone should come up with boilerplate ammendments to employment contracts that we can just print out and staple in that neuters the whole thing so we peons can easily insist on some basic rights.