In that case I'd just build a stripped down server to do what I needed. Would have limited accepted inputs and outputs and definitely would not support the entire HTTP protocol.
I thought the idea of hailstorm was not to centralize the data storage but to unify the client used to look it up. Make one standard to get all the data and it doesn't matter where the data is stored in the end.
My question is why would you put a web server on your Toaster or Refridgerator anyways. I found it funny that you broght up those specific security holes.
The stuff you really need to worry about on a client machine is still a problem under linux or any other OS. Buffer overruns happen in linux and open source won't help against them because updating the firmware in a toaster won't be as easy as on a computer, might even be impossible.
In this particular case I think you would be best off grabbing one of the embedded OS's in the world and go with that. If you want to talk simple then it might even be better to run the applications on the bare metal. Not like a houshold appliance needs much in the way of a filesystem or changable hardware drivers.
As far as SetTop boxes go for i-net and such the key to making that work is either work exactly like what the person uses on thier PC (which would be windows in 75% of the cases) or make it so blatently easy that noone needs to work to learn it. For the former you might as well just use a flavor of windows, for the latter you might as well program bare to the metal and not have an OS per se.
If you saw how the department of transportation was run in WA you would take back that statement. If the Govt funded and constructed i-net access in the states we would all be on dialups running at half speed and paying $2 a minute in taxes on the damn thing.
Moreover we would need a union employee overseeing every character we type and 6 others watching the characters as they travel through the network.
If we could ever get past the infrastructure cost I think that private supplied broadband would be wildly accepted. People first need to get over the "I only want to pay $25 a month" mentality.
I could see the government subsidising the broadband infrastructure builders like they did with the telephone infrastructure builders 30 years ago and so and might even still do today.
This is the kind of thing that happens in a boardroom at a lower level of volume all the time in software companies. The benifit that software companies have is that after hearing all the arguments its up to one person to make the decision and the responsibility is on that person whether the decisions is right or wrong.
The problem (and I know very little about these arguments so take this with a few grains of salt) seems to be that gnome has no "leader". Democracy tends to be very inefficient and swayed by the masses who don't always have knowledge of what is best so process for change is not really the answer either. Gnome needs a leader who has final authority and also final responsibility. It has to be someone with the skills to lead the product to success while keeping the contributors happy in the process. This isn't an easy person to find which is why so many companies go by the way side and will be why many open source projects do the same.
There is a bacteria capable of digesting gold as well. They experimented with its use as a more environmentally friendly way to extract gold from ore than arsenic and friends.
The idea is you have the batceria eat all the gold, then you capture all the batceria and disolve the organic parts and what is left is just the gold.
I think you just have bad programmers on the MS side of the house. That or you are passing harder problems to thier side.
I have found nothing inherent about MS that requires more development time to create a solution. While it is true that some things are just not best done on MS the same can be said about non-MS solutions. I'd be willing to put my dollars on the fact that the team I work with that develops on the windows platform can preform equal work to your non-windows buddies where you work.
Also I would like to bring up the artical that I can no longer find that posted several major companies that had to double thier IT budgets in order to incorporate linux into thier infrastructure. They cited increased support costs. You just can't hire a dummy to use unix but you can get along ok with a dummy setting up NT. This is unfortunate for NT because if the smart people of the world would set it up and use it, it would probably preform much better than it currently does for the people that currently use it.
Its fairly common knowledge that a great deal of NT is based on OS/2. I am pretty sure that one of the big wig OS/2 developers jumped ship from IBM back when there was rough relations between the two companies and they split ways on development of OS/2 and moved to MS where NT was started.
I thought the point of open source software was to futher innovation by not making every person reinvent the wheel. I think it would be silly for any company to not use the BSD stacks as a basis unless there were compelling reasons to write your own, possibly security or performance reasons. The GPL doesn't allow this without imposing vast limitations on your distribution scheme which is why I don't much like it.
Its funny that you worry about the XBox company selling out to MS when from the articals on the page XBox is a company thats all about asking other companies to sell out to them. XBox is an aquisitions company and you can only imagine how evil and cuthroat they are. Looks like thier purpose on life is to run around looking for floundering companies with potential and buy them up for rediculously cheap prices before they blow up and become something big.
Getting cash from MS just to change the name of thier company just fits in to thier plan. I love how you guys berate MS no matter what they do but when another evil corporation comes into view you think they are all good stuff. Blah.
The people that I had to teach computer skills to, my parents included, hated doing these things because they felt they were a "waste of time". They wait until they have a critical job to do and then they want instant results. Its nice if you have a group of people that is willing to just take the time to learn a few skills, it pays off in the end if they only realize it.
What I was trying to state and did so so poorly is that "goodness" is not measured by his opinion or my opinion but by something else. Moreover I was saying that if a song is truely good (or humor for that matter) then it won't matter what the popular opinion of the times is, that song or humor will have a following and will also still be good.
I disagree with your premise. How "good" a song is can be measured many different ways. Its obvious that the qualities that the song had when it was popular are still present today, I mean the music did not change. The value that people assign to those qualities however has changed.
In the end people that have real quality music will have a certain amount of popularity for the rest of time like Elvis. The same thing goes for quality humor like Month Python.
I have long subscribed to the philosophy that you can get away with absolutely anything if it looks like you are supposed to be doing it. I walked in and out of my college with workstations all the time and noone paid any attention to me. Its not like any of them really knew who I was or whether I should be taking the computers or not.
I only got questioned twice, both times by a janitor. The first time I just said "I'm supposed to have this computer." and the janitor replied "Oh ok, I was just checking". The second time the janitor looked at me strange and then left. Moments later a security guy showed up and asked me a billion questions with a flashlight pointed in my face (it was 4am). I knew all the passwords and security codes of course because I worked in the lab and after a few minutes of questioning he let me go saying "Make sure to lock the place up when you go."
Anyways if you come in, go straight to a terminal, unplug it authoritatively and put it on a cart and haul it off noone will think twice, and if they do you just have to say a few correct sounding phrases and you are off.
My school had a rear projection screen for thier computer that is like 20feet across and 15feet high or something and they have had it for 4 years. Granted its not a CRT but unless they pump the resolution on this monitor it won't be any better than the screen at school.
I've always wanted to play quake on that big screen at school, would be great having the enemy be bigger than life:)
XP does NOT rewrite anything. Its more like they overlay a transparancy on the page that has pointers to more information. Moreover you can turn it all off or change it to point to things you want it to.
I would love to have "external" links added to many of the pages I browse so I can see alternative opinions and articles on similar subjects to what I am reading. The web has turned in to a mess of marketing and this is something that could allow it to be a web of information that I control again.
I will give you this, the defaults will certainly all pull you into microsoft sites and a great deal of them will have to be changed. All that is needed now is little "update-packs" distributed by other vendors (slashdot for instance) that changes the XML that drives smart tags and points me to other things than MS.
I love how MS makes a feature that lets the user control and heavily customize his computer and they get railed for trying to dominate a users experience.
I think this will be good when they pump the resolution up to having color at 300dpi or better. It will be nice to lower the cost of Laptop and PDA screens though. These guys look like they will beat organic lcd's to market so lets see what happens.
I think the reason that MS wouldn't write office for Linux is just that it would require a new code base (porting is not an option because like 1/2 the OS would need to be ported as well since there are so many COM dlls in the OS that are used by the windows apps not to mention that Office uses OLE to render many of the objects in a word file or other type of file). The revenue necessary to warrent a new code base has to be immense and with the mindset of Linux users/promoters being that software should be free(as in beer) would seem to not support a large revenue stream.
"a far more capable graphics library"
Um?.NET has access to GDI+ as well as DirectX which seems to me to give it all the graphics capability that you could ever want.
It seems that moreover.NET is a philosophy of program development. You did a great job of explaining the.NET framework and CLR and such but you left out the whole idea that the.NET is about computing anywhere, anytime, on any device and having a rich user centered experience.
This is accomplished by the web services using XML to transfer data between all the apps and devices. Its about the experience more than its about the way to develop that experience.
Along these same lines you could do a lot of good teaching the entire class on a bunch of 486's or something. Especially if LOGO or some other simple programming environment is your goal. Considering you can pick up these older computers for like $10 each you could have all sorts of interesting fun on them without costing the program tons of money.
I got totally hooked on computers playing a few nifty computer games and messing with basic on Commodore PET and Apple II computers ages ago.
Don't fall into the trap that the only useful computer experience is on the newest and best computers. Its often far better for young people to find out that they control the computer and should not be afraid of it. The biggest mistake I think parents make with computers is dropping $2000 on the computer and then they never let the kid do ANYTHING with it because they are so damn afaid of losing the $2000 investment. I can guarentee that my children will be starting out with an oldie 8bit computer and some interesting games the first second they show interest in computers. That way there is nothing that they can "break" and they will be free to do any experimentation that might interest them. Some of my best experiences came from when I did something that messed up the entire system (like changed lines in a file or deleted a file that was necessary) and then had to figure out how to make it work again. Fixing problems like that gives you confidence and control where as working with a more complex system can make you a slave to the interface and you never get past that.
If people would only understand that forking over $400 for a PC would get them PLENTY of performance and better compatability with current software than you would get for $300 on an appliance. The big problem is computer store salesmen, and magazines, and geeks like you, keep telling people that if you don't have the very fastest computer on the market you can't do anything.
A 300mhz pentium class machine with 64meg of ram, 8gig hd space, dvd-drive, resonable 3d accelerator (like TNT2 or VooDoo 3 or ATI based something), and 15" monitor would be incredibly cheap. I've seen systems like this for UNDER $300. They would do all the home computer stuff that anyone wanted and do it in a standard way.
Thats why I think the PS2 can never catch on as a computer replacement. People think to do computer tasks you have to have the newest, fastest, fanciest computer there is. They will always perceive the PS2 (or any other Web Applicance or productivity appliance) as "limited" and so will go get a "real computer". Until we get rid of that sort of stigma created by marketing applicances will never catch on, and when we do get rid of that stigma people will realize that real computers can be purchased just as cheaply as the appliance equivalents and so they still won't catch on.
The only hope for an internet applicance or productivity appliance is turnkey functionality. That means you put in the internet disk, or word processing disk, or whatever then turn on the machine and that program runs and then when you are done you can just turn off the machine. It has to be so simple that a braindead potatoe could do it and then you have a hope of selling the product. AOL and Sony are the companies to accomplish this unfortunately for the world. They are also the type of companies that will suck all the dollars out of the pockets of people that use these sorts of systems and the people won't even know it. AOL/Sony will make Microsoft look like the saviors of the world, you mark my words.
Re:Finally, a Linux gaming platform!
on
PS2 As PC
·
· Score: 2
UM what???
PS2 games run bare to the metal. Just because you can run a certain OS on hardware doesn't mean that suddenly all the games for that hardware now use the OS. Using your logic all games that can run on the PC are linux games.
Also, unless there is a HUGE rewrite of all the libraries for the ps2 linux getting a 3d game built for linux to run on the system is going to be hacky if you can do it at all (so I don't think q3a will run or if it does it will run unplayably slow).
From what I've heard the API for the ps2 is difficult to use because you need to program using the ps2 paradigm in order to get a resonable level of performance out of it. I doubt having an OS between you and the hardware will help with performance one bit.
The short stroke is games for the PS2 will continue to run bare to the metal as always. They will not be linux games. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case I'd just build a stripped down server to do what I needed. Would have limited accepted inputs and outputs and definitely would not support the entire HTTP protocol.
I thought the idea of hailstorm was not to centralize the data storage but to unify the client used to look it up. Make one standard to get all the data and it doesn't matter where the data is stored in the end.
The stuff you really need to worry about on a client machine is still a problem under linux or any other OS. Buffer overruns happen in linux and open source won't help against them because updating the firmware in a toaster won't be as easy as on a computer, might even be impossible.
In this particular case I think you would be best off grabbing one of the embedded OS's in the world and go with that. If you want to talk simple then it might even be better to run the applications on the bare metal. Not like a houshold appliance needs much in the way of a filesystem or changable hardware drivers.
As far as SetTop boxes go for i-net and such the key to making that work is either work exactly like what the person uses on thier PC (which would be windows in 75% of the cases) or make it so blatently easy that noone needs to work to learn it. For the former you might as well just use a flavor of windows, for the latter you might as well program bare to the metal and not have an OS per se.
Moreover we would need a union employee overseeing every character we type and 6 others watching the characters as they travel through the network.
If we could ever get past the infrastructure cost I think that private supplied broadband would be wildly accepted. People first need to get over the "I only want to pay $25 a month" mentality.
I could see the government subsidising the broadband infrastructure builders like they did with the telephone infrastructure builders 30 years ago and so and might even still do today.
The problem (and I know very little about these arguments so take this with a few grains of salt) seems to be that gnome has no "leader". Democracy tends to be very inefficient and swayed by the masses who don't always have knowledge of what is best so process for change is not really the answer either. Gnome needs a leader who has final authority and also final responsibility. It has to be someone with the skills to lead the product to success while keeping the contributors happy in the process. This isn't an easy person to find which is why so many companies go by the way side and will be why many open source projects do the same.
The idea is you have the batceria eat all the gold, then you capture all the batceria and disolve the organic parts and what is left is just the gold.
I have found nothing inherent about MS that requires more development time to create a solution. While it is true that some things are just not best done on MS the same can be said about non-MS solutions. I'd be willing to put my dollars on the fact that the team I work with that develops on the windows platform can preform equal work to your non-windows buddies where you work.
Also I would like to bring up the artical that I can no longer find that posted several major companies that had to double thier IT budgets in order to incorporate linux into thier infrastructure. They cited increased support costs. You just can't hire a dummy to use unix but you can get along ok with a dummy setting up NT. This is unfortunate for NT because if the smart people of the world would set it up and use it, it would probably preform much better than it currently does for the people that currently use it.
I thought the point of open source software was to futher innovation by not making every person reinvent the wheel. I think it would be silly for any company to not use the BSD stacks as a basis unless there were compelling reasons to write your own, possibly security or performance reasons. The GPL doesn't allow this without imposing vast limitations on your distribution scheme which is why I don't much like it.
Getting cash from MS just to change the name of thier company just fits in to thier plan. I love how you guys berate MS no matter what they do but when another evil corporation comes into view you think they are all good stuff. Blah.
The people that I had to teach computer skills to, my parents included, hated doing these things because they felt they were a "waste of time". They wait until they have a critical job to do and then they want instant results. Its nice if you have a group of people that is willing to just take the time to learn a few skills, it pays off in the end if they only realize it.
What I was trying to state and did so so poorly is that "goodness" is not measured by his opinion or my opinion but by something else. Moreover I was saying that if a song is truely good (or humor for that matter) then it won't matter what the popular opinion of the times is, that song or humor will have a following and will also still be good.
In the end people that have real quality music will have a certain amount of popularity for the rest of time like Elvis. The same thing goes for quality humor like Month Python.
Funny that they allow hotmail on the AOL airline. Hmmmmmmmm
I have long subscribed to the philosophy that you can get away with absolutely anything if it looks like you are supposed to be doing it. I walked in and out of my college with workstations all the time and noone paid any attention to me. Its not like any of them really knew who I was or whether I should be taking the computers or not.
I only got questioned twice, both times by a janitor. The first time I just said "I'm supposed to have this computer." and the janitor replied "Oh ok, I was just checking". The second time the janitor looked at me strange and then left. Moments later a security guy showed up and asked me a billion questions with a flashlight pointed in my face (it was 4am). I knew all the passwords and security codes of course because I worked in the lab and after a few minutes of questioning he let me go saying "Make sure to lock the place up when you go."
Anyways if you come in, go straight to a terminal, unplug it authoritatively and put it on a cart and haul it off noone will think twice, and if they do you just have to say a few correct sounding phrases and you are off.
I've always wanted to play quake on that big screen at school, would be great having the enemy be bigger than life :)
I would love to have "external" links added to many of the pages I browse so I can see alternative opinions and articles on similar subjects to what I am reading. The web has turned in to a mess of marketing and this is something that could allow it to be a web of information that I control again.
I will give you this, the defaults will certainly all pull you into microsoft sites and a great deal of them will have to be changed. All that is needed now is little "update-packs" distributed by other vendors (slashdot for instance) that changes the XML that drives smart tags and points me to other things than MS.
I love how MS makes a feature that lets the user control and heavily customize his computer and they get railed for trying to dominate a users experience.
I think this will be good when they pump the resolution up to having color at 300dpi or better. It will be nice to lower the cost of Laptop and PDA screens though. These guys look like they will beat organic lcd's to market so lets see what happens.
Better yet, enclose $80 with every letter and demand a copy for linux. Money talks and if you get enough of it one place things happen.
I think the reason that MS wouldn't write office for Linux is just that it would require a new code base (porting is not an option because like 1/2 the OS would need to be ported as well since there are so many COM dlls in the OS that are used by the windows apps not to mention that Office uses OLE to render many of the objects in a word file or other type of file). The revenue necessary to warrent a new code base has to be immense and with the mindset of Linux users/promoters being that software should be free(as in beer) would seem to not support a large revenue stream.
"a far more capable graphics library" Um? .NET has access to GDI+ as well as DirectX which seems to me to give it all the graphics capability that you could ever want.
This is accomplished by the web services using XML to transfer data between all the apps and devices. Its about the experience more than its about the way to develop that experience.
I got totally hooked on computers playing a few nifty computer games and messing with basic on Commodore PET and Apple II computers ages ago.
Don't fall into the trap that the only useful computer experience is on the newest and best computers. Its often far better for young people to find out that they control the computer and should not be afraid of it. The biggest mistake I think parents make with computers is dropping $2000 on the computer and then they never let the kid do ANYTHING with it because they are so damn afaid of losing the $2000 investment. I can guarentee that my children will be starting out with an oldie 8bit computer and some interesting games the first second they show interest in computers. That way there is nothing that they can "break" and they will be free to do any experimentation that might interest them. Some of my best experiences came from when I did something that messed up the entire system (like changed lines in a file or deleted a file that was necessary) and then had to figure out how to make it work again. Fixing problems like that gives you confidence and control where as working with a more complex system can make you a slave to the interface and you never get past that.
liquid nitrogen at 75-80K (-198 to 193oC) I want to see liquid nitrogen at 193C :) They must have incredible pressure in thier cables.
A 300mhz pentium class machine with 64meg of ram, 8gig hd space, dvd-drive, resonable 3d accelerator (like TNT2 or VooDoo 3 or ATI based something), and 15" monitor would be incredibly cheap. I've seen systems like this for UNDER $300. They would do all the home computer stuff that anyone wanted and do it in a standard way.
Thats why I think the PS2 can never catch on as a computer replacement. People think to do computer tasks you have to have the newest, fastest, fanciest computer there is. They will always perceive the PS2 (or any other Web Applicance or productivity appliance) as "limited" and so will go get a "real computer". Until we get rid of that sort of stigma created by marketing applicances will never catch on, and when we do get rid of that stigma people will realize that real computers can be purchased just as cheaply as the appliance equivalents and so they still won't catch on.
The only hope for an internet applicance or productivity appliance is turnkey functionality. That means you put in the internet disk, or word processing disk, or whatever then turn on the machine and that program runs and then when you are done you can just turn off the machine. It has to be so simple that a braindead potatoe could do it and then you have a hope of selling the product. AOL and Sony are the companies to accomplish this unfortunately for the world. They are also the type of companies that will suck all the dollars out of the pockets of people that use these sorts of systems and the people won't even know it. AOL/Sony will make Microsoft look like the saviors of the world, you mark my words.
UM what???
PS2 games run bare to the metal. Just because you can run a certain OS on hardware doesn't mean that suddenly all the games for that hardware now use the OS. Using your logic all games that can run on the PC are linux games.
Also, unless there is a HUGE rewrite of all the libraries for the ps2 linux getting a 3d game built for linux to run on the system is going to be hacky if you can do it at all (so I don't think q3a will run or if it does it will run unplayably slow).
From what I've heard the API for the ps2 is difficult to use because you need to program using the ps2 paradigm in order to get a resonable level of performance out of it. I doubt having an OS between you and the hardware will help with performance one bit.
The short stroke is games for the PS2 will continue to run bare to the metal as always. They will not be linux games. Sorry.