It's more of a case where the open source way of life has turned many people into self-centered brats who refuse to understand any situation outside of what they personally desire.
Well, you're certainly welcome to write your own drivers for something that had to be held back in OpenSolaris due to a 3rd-party's constraints which are external to Sun. Come on, isn't that one of the beloved Linux mantras?
The thing cynical/. posters seem to be missing here is that Sun/did/ look at the GPL... they didn't outright dismiss it. Sun found that they were encumbered by 3rd-party constraints which the GPL was incompatible with and so they had to short-circuit to the next best thing - the CDDL. There's no single magic wand waving that can make that catch go away.
Solaris is an awesome technology. You would be - no pun intended - CLOSING yourself off if you think being able to look at and use the Solaris source is irrelevant. But lots of people here seem to be taking after Henry Ford, in that your open source is painted "any color that he wants, so long as it is black" (read: Linux/GPL)
I'm one of the two people here at UMBC who run the core servers for the campus.
We use AFS here for everyone's home directory, mail spool, web space, and other things. To maintain this, we currently have about 6 servers with direct-attached storage serving everyone's AFS home directory volumes. These servers are a mix of Dell and Sun gear running Linux and Solaris. Both platforms have run well over the years, but each server's direct-attached SCSI storage is limitting and, well, aging.
So we can better use our storage and improve things for everyone in general, I'm in the process of rolling out a fiber channel SAN with new servers and RAID arrays to replace what's currently running. The new server gear we chose? Sun's V20z Opteron server running Solaris 10 . Linux is right out.
Why no more Linux, or rather, why Solaris? A few reasons. Solaris's storage management is TONS easier to deal with and do interesting things with than what is available in Linux. Namely, we've found and have been fustrated by Linux's software RAID. Yeah, it works... but that's about it. Weee look, I can make a mirror! Solaris's SVM (aka DiskSuite) is no VxVM, but it does allow us to do things such as disk sets to share between hosts and monitor our metadevices in detail. Linux's raidutils on the other hand are poorly documented and toublesome (usage options don't match reality, etc)
Another aspect on Linux vs. Solaris in mass storage is (as far as I know) a lack of multi-pathing in Linux. Multi-pathing is a no-brainer especially in the context of Fiber Channel networks and Solaris's MPxIO is in-built and works quite well.
But I'm just poo-pooing Linux here on this specific point. We offer Linux workstations in every one of our computing labs. Linux replaced SGI/IRIX workstations there many moons ago and work well for that purpose. Linux servers also are used for our general shell login servers. But on the backend, where we need reliable features, consistency, and heavy-lifting... we're enthralled with Sun x86 servers and Solaris 10. The V20z Opteron hardware actually is cheaper (for us) than a Dell 2650 and offers a ton more features all-alround.
There is an irony, though. The service processor on the Sun V20zs run Linux. Ah well;)
I tried the minijack output once when I first got it, just to see how it sounded. It wasn't bad. I mean, it's not like poo suddenly oozed out of my yamaha/bose cube system and covered my floor with a mess.
If you're playing from a lossy source, any quality misgivings about the DAC in the APEX probably dwarf what you're missing because of a lossy source in the first place.
What kind of system do you have that you're so anal about eeking the best sound possible out of whatever you're hooking up to it?
I output via S/PDIF from my APEX, but the S/PDIF signalling is also done by the DAC chip that the APEX uses.
Google to the rescue... here's the DAC the APEX uses: http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print /pcm270 5.html
Sure, it's no Focusrite DAC, but it's adequate enough for my tastes. When it's purest audio I want to hear, I don't put my music over the APEX... I use my Metric Halo 2882 and KRK V8 monitors:)
iTunes sends the audio to a Airport Express formatted in the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). It does this with everything.
For example, say you have a whole bunch of 128k MP3 songs you're playing in iTunes. iTunes will decompress those to standard PCM audio, and then re-encode that to ALAC and send it to the APEX. So the quality of sound you hear on whatever your APEX is plugged into will be as low (or as high) in quality that your original source is.
Here is a movie I just made (3ivx 4.5, 528KB) of the possible orbital dance that Earth and 2004 MN4 may have in April - May 2029.
I made this video using the 2004 MN4 orbital data from the NASA NEO site. The program I used, Starry Night, doesn't take into account things such as gravitational attraction, but it's a reasonable view showing just how close we'll be to 2004 MN4 when it comes around in 2029
Solaris 10 is not meant to run on grandma's Pii Celeron.
You're missing the whole point, and showing your overall ingorance of, Solaris 10. Because of what you said, I greatly doubt that you've even tried to use Solaris 10 in its intended environment and are talking just as Linus did - based on anecdotes which are greatly dated and no longer valid.
It's designed to run on modern, high-end SPARC, x86, and now AMD64 platforms. Does it run on a hacked up Intel box where the average age of the components varies between 5-8 years? Hell no, and I'm glad Sun isn't wasting resources trying to make sure it does.
I used to own and live in a house on the 2600 block of Calvert. A wonderful place, it was.
A few months after I moved in, everyone's sewers on my side of the street were backing up. Finally, Public Works came out and, tadaaaa, found a complete set of skeletal remains in the sewer under a manhole right in back of my house in the alley. No telling how long it had been there.
There is no such thing as a "Altivextreme" card. Dual 2.5Ghz G5s even with 4GB of ram do not cost $12,000. Someone who does use Logic doesn't refer to their stuff as a "music file". There is no DMA enable/disable in MacOS, and it is enabled by default. And running Logic on a G3 iMac... what did you expect??
This is just a AC posting negative drivel out his bum for whatever reason./dale
APR is a library which, at its basic level, provides wrapper functions to syscalls of many different operating systems. Why? because the same syscall on one OS sometimes behaves differently, have bugs, or take slightly different arguments from the same syscall on other OSes.
APR addresses these differences and provides you, the app developer, with a common set of functions.
So if you're say coding your own FTP server project and you main development platform is linux or what have you, if you use APR's wrtite() or APR's sendfile(), you know that your call to that will also work on Solaris, FreeBSD, Darwin, etc... because APR takes care of all the abstraction at compile time./dale
The later-model Atlas rockets were pulled from their silos as they were decommissioned in the 70's and 80's and reconfigured to launch satellites. These were rechristened as "Atlas 2" rockets.
No new Atlas 2 rockets were buit - they were all retrofits and moderizations of the old ICBM models.
So yes, technically there were only 63 Altas 2 flights, but many more if you also count the prior launches of the ICBM models before the left-overs became Atlas 2's./dale
The Atlas 2 rockets were the first widely-deployed nuclear-tipped ICBMs in the US arsenal.
They were both tower and silo launched. Many of the old Altas silos are abandoned today, with a few being opened as museums, and in some cases, homes./dale
The Altas 5 can be launched in light, medium, and heavy configurations with different types of strap-on boosters and main engine configurations, all interchangable.
This brings the US more in-line in competing with the French/ESA Araiane rockets./dale
So what you're saying is that because the Windows UI sucks, it is O.K. for anything else to suck as much, too?
Why is it that the first reaction of some people here is to make an excuse?
A UI that is intuitive to navigate is getting more and more important. The reason why Windows is and has been the way it has been since its conception is tha commercial companies don't like to rock the boat. I'm sure MS has come up with tons of ways to improve the Windows UI, but implementing these changes may in their eyes, upset too many customers who are used to it. I still remember certain people getting upitty when the taskbar and Start button were added in Windows 95.
Free software, OTOH, has quite a bit more maneuvering room in this area.
For GUI applications, the UI layout is can no-longer be considered by programmers as the sole kindom of the {Photoshop|GIMP} guy sitting over there and pass all worry of it on to him or her. Just as programmers want good APIs in their code, the Human -> Computer "API" is just as critical to good and satisfactory program and user function./dale
AAC is the audio codec used in the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standard. Yes, AAC is the same codec used for audio on those DVD movies you own.
MPEG-4's AAC is essentially the same as the AAC defined in MPEG-2, but with some extra capabilities added to make it more useable in the mobile world (such as the 3GPP multimedia format for mobiles phones)
AAC has been with us for a good while... it's nothing new... and it's good to see that it's going to be around for a good while more and has edged out WMA.
Read all about it here. The election comissioner here stated in January, I believe, that she had full confidence in the reliability of the Diebold equipment. Foot -> Mouth.
The reasons you give for your dismissal of the AAC format (which, by the way, is the same audio codec used in MPEG-2 movies - ergo DVDs and VCDs. MPEG-4's AAC is the same thing with some added features) are generally vague and uninformed.
If you'd like to further develop your argument, lossy encoding formats of any type "just won't cut it." With LAME and Fh-encoded MP3s, the midrange is slopped up a good bit.
Pick your poison, but singling out AAC in a way which makes you sound like a fool isn't going to earn you cred. As it is right now, AAC has the best combination of properties of any audio codec in terms of quality, accetpance, and extensibility.
They have *applied* for this patent, so they don't actually have it yet. The poster needs to read a bit more before frothing at the mouth.
This means that the USPTO could still be contacted and instances of prior art be submitted.
Re:Hotel WiFi - Even in the middle of nowhere
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 1
Well, yeah, I mean "Free broadband access"
The r key selectively escaped my fingers there.
Hotel WiFi - Even in the middle of nowhere
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Just this past week, as a part of my Baltimore -> San Francisco roadtrip, I stayed at a Days Inn in Farmington, New Mexico. This is a small town up in the way remote area of north-western New Mexico.
I was going to stay at the Holiday Inn there, but what made me change my mind when I rolled into town at 12am was the big banner on the side of the Days Inn which touted "Fee broadband access."
Who would pass that up? Days Inn got my business, and my PowerBook got a open WAP with a great signal in the hotel room. The Days Inn seemed to have a rather decent ADSL connection from local provider digii.net
If you're feeling "guilty" about using a particular OS over another one, you need to ask yourself what you're using the OS in question for in the first place. Because it suites your needs or because it/is/ or/is not/ something else?
If you buy something like a Mac and then feel guilty about using OSX on it, geez man, it's time to get a lithium prescription unless you really feel like running Linux on it would give you something that OSX can't, other than any perceived or actual ethical/theological dogma.
Slashdot Mirror
The contract into 2008 is likely because Apple needs current and future PPC processors to fulfill support agreements.
You didn't actually think that Apple would cut off PPC users the moment that the last Mac model is moved to Intel, did you?
I wouldn't say "Open source sucks."
It's more of a case where the open source way of life has turned many people into self-centered brats who refuse to understand any situation outside of what they personally desire.
Well, you're certainly welcome to write your own drivers for something that had to be held back in OpenSolaris due to a 3rd-party's constraints which are external to Sun. Come on, isn't that one of the beloved Linux mantras?
/. posters seem to be missing here is that Sun /did/ look at the GPL... they didn't outright dismiss it. Sun found that they were encumbered by 3rd-party constraints which the GPL was incompatible with and so they had to short-circuit to the next best thing - the CDDL. There's no single magic wand waving that can make that catch go away.
The thing cynical
Solaris is an awesome technology. You would be - no pun intended - CLOSING yourself off if you think being able to look at and use the Solaris source is irrelevant. But lots of people here seem to be taking after Henry Ford, in that your open source is painted "any color that he wants, so long as it is black" (read: Linux/GPL)
The term "myopic" comes to mind.
I'm one of the two people here at UMBC who run the core servers for the campus.
;)
We use AFS here for everyone's home directory, mail spool, web space, and other things. To maintain this, we currently have about 6 servers with direct-attached storage serving everyone's AFS home directory volumes. These servers are a mix of Dell and Sun gear running Linux and Solaris. Both platforms have run well over the years, but each server's direct-attached SCSI storage is limitting and, well, aging.
So we can better use our storage and improve things for everyone in general, I'm in the process of rolling out a fiber channel SAN with new servers and RAID arrays to replace what's currently running. The new server gear we chose? Sun's V20z Opteron server running Solaris 10 . Linux is right out.
Why no more Linux, or rather, why Solaris? A few reasons. Solaris's storage management is TONS easier to deal with and do interesting things with than what is available in Linux. Namely, we've found and have been fustrated by Linux's software RAID. Yeah, it works... but that's about it. Weee look, I can make a mirror! Solaris's SVM (aka DiskSuite) is no VxVM, but it does allow us to do things such as disk sets to share between hosts and monitor our metadevices in detail. Linux's raidutils on the other hand are poorly documented and toublesome (usage options don't match reality, etc)
Another aspect on Linux vs. Solaris in mass storage is (as far as I know) a lack of multi-pathing in Linux. Multi-pathing is a no-brainer especially in the context of Fiber Channel networks and Solaris's MPxIO is in-built and works quite well.
But I'm just poo-pooing Linux here on this specific point. We offer Linux workstations in every one of our computing labs. Linux replaced SGI/IRIX workstations there many moons ago and work well for that purpose. Linux servers also are used for our general shell login servers. But on the backend, where we need reliable features, consistency, and heavy-lifting... we're enthralled with Sun x86 servers and Solaris 10. The V20z Opteron hardware actually is cheaper (for us) than a Dell 2650 and offers a ton more features all-alround.
There is an irony, though. The service processor on the Sun V20zs run Linux. Ah well
I tried the minijack output once when I first got it, just to see how it sounded. It wasn't bad. I mean, it's not like poo suddenly oozed out of my yamaha/bose cube system and covered my floor with a mess.
If you're playing from a lossy source, any quality misgivings about the DAC in the APEX probably dwarf what you're missing because of a lossy source in the first place.
What kind of system do you have that you're so anal about eeking the best sound possible out of whatever you're hooking up to it?
-dale
I output via S/PDIF from my APEX, but the S/PDIF signalling is also done by the DAC chip that the APEX uses.
t /pcm270 5.html
:)
Google to the rescue... here's the DAC the APEX uses:
http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/prin
Sure, it's no Focusrite DAC, but it's adequate enough for my tastes. When it's purest audio I want to hear, I don't put my music over the APEX... I use my Metric Halo 2882 and KRK V8 monitors
-dale
No, they aren't.
iTunes sends the audio to a Airport Express formatted in the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). It does this with everything.
For example, say you have a whole bunch of 128k MP3 songs you're playing in iTunes. iTunes will decompress those to standard PCM audio, and then re-encode that to ALAC and send it to the APEX. So the quality of sound you hear on whatever your APEX is plugged into will be as low (or as high) in quality that your original source is.
-dale
Here is a movie I just made (3ivx 4.5, 528KB) of the possible orbital dance that Earth and 2004 MN4 may have in April - May 2029.
I made this video using the 2004 MN4 orbital data from the NASA NEO site. The program I used, Starry Night, doesn't take into account things such as gravitational attraction, but it's a reasonable view showing just how close we'll be to 2004 MN4 when it comes around in 2029
Solaris 10 is not meant to run on grandma's Pii Celeron.
/dale
You're missing the whole point, and showing your overall ingorance of, Solaris 10. Because of what you said, I greatly doubt that you've even tried to use Solaris 10 in its intended environment and are talking just as Linus did - based on anecdotes which are greatly dated and no longer valid.
It's designed to run on modern, high-end SPARC, x86, and now AMD64 platforms. Does it run on a hacked up Intel box where the average age of the components varies between 5-8 years? Hell no, and I'm glad Sun isn't wasting resources trying to make sure it does.
Hell, anything can happen in Baltimore.
/dale
I used to own and live in a house on the 2600 block of Calvert. A wonderful place, it was.
A few months after I moved in, everyone's sewers on my side of the street were backing up. Finally, Public Works came out and, tadaaaa, found a complete set of skeletal remains in the sewer under a manhole right in back of my house in the alley. No telling how long it had been there.
Ah, Baltimore.
Mod this down.
/dale
There is no such thing as a "Altivextreme" card. Dual 2.5Ghz G5s even with 4GB of ram do not cost $12,000. Someone who does use Logic doesn't refer to their stuff as a "music file". There is no DMA enable/disable in MacOS, and it is enabled by default. And running Logic on a G3 iMac... what did you expect??
This is just a AC posting negative drivel out his bum for whatever reason.
You have the wrong idea of what APR is.
/dale
APR is a library which, at its basic level, provides wrapper functions to syscalls of many different operating systems. Why? because the same syscall on one OS sometimes behaves differently, have bugs, or take slightly different arguments from the same syscall on other OSes.
APR addresses these differences and provides you, the app developer, with a common set of functions.
So if you're say coding your own FTP server project and you main development platform is linux or what have you, if you use APR's wrtite() or APR's sendfile(), you know that your call to that will also work on Solaris, FreeBSD, Darwin, etc... because APR takes care of all the abstraction at compile time.
The later-model Atlas rockets were pulled from their silos as they were decommissioned in the 70's and 80's and reconfigured to launch satellites. These were rechristened as "Atlas 2" rockets.
No new Atlas 2 rockets were buit - they were all retrofits and moderizations of the old ICBM models.
So yes, technically there were only 63 Altas 2 flights, but many more if you also count the prior launches of the ICBM models before the left-overs became Atlas 2's.
The Atlas 2 rockets were the first widely-deployed nuclear-tipped ICBMs in the US arsenal.
They were both tower and silo launched. Many of the old Altas silos are abandoned today, with a few being opened as museums, and in some cases, homes.
The Atlas 5 is replacing the 2.
The Altas 5 can be launched in light, medium, and heavy configurations with different types of strap-on boosters and main engine configurations, all interchangable.
This brings the US more in-line in competing with the French/ESA Araiane rockets.
So what you're saying is that because the Windows UI sucks, it is O.K. for anything else to suck as much, too?
/dale
Why is it that the first reaction of some people here is to make an excuse?
A UI that is intuitive to navigate is getting more and more important. The reason why Windows is and has been the way it has been since its conception is tha commercial companies don't like to rock the boat. I'm sure MS has come up with tons of ways to improve the Windows UI, but implementing these changes may in their eyes, upset too many customers who are used to it. I still remember certain people getting upitty when the taskbar and Start button were added in Windows 95.
Free software, OTOH, has quite a bit more maneuvering room in this area.
For GUI applications, the UI layout is can no-longer be considered by programmers as the sole kindom of the {Photoshop|GIMP} guy sitting over there and pass all worry of it on to him or her. Just as programmers want good APIs in their code, the Human -> Computer "API" is just as critical to good and satisfactory program and user function.
On the Telesat website.
...that epoxy factory in Japan burned to the ground in the mid-late 90s?
/ek
I remember all the talking heads saying RAM prices would be exhorbinate for YEARS to come.
Supply problems are short-lived, really.
What is AAC?
AAC is the audio codec used in the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standard. Yes, AAC is the same codec used for audio on those DVD movies you own.
MPEG-4's AAC is essentially the same as the AAC defined in MPEG-2, but with some extra capabilities added to make it more useable in the mobile world (such as the 3GPP multimedia format for mobiles phones)
AAC has been with us for a good while... it's nothing new... and it's good to see that it's going to be around for a good while more and has edged out WMA.
Read all about it here. The election comissioner here stated in January, I believe, that she had full confidence in the reliability of the Diebold equipment. Foot -> Mouth.
The reasons you give for your dismissal of the AAC format (which, by the way, is the same audio codec used in MPEG-2 movies - ergo DVDs and VCDs. MPEG-4's AAC is the same thing with some added features) are generally vague and uninformed.
If you'd like to further develop your argument, lossy encoding formats of any type "just won't cut it." With LAME and Fh-encoded MP3s, the midrange is slopped up a good bit.
Pick your poison, but singling out AAC in a way which makes you sound like a fool isn't going to earn you cred. As it is right now, AAC has the best combination of properties of any audio codec in terms of quality, accetpance, and extensibility.
They have *applied* for this patent, so they don't actually have it yet. The poster needs to read a bit more before frothing at the mouth.
This means that the USPTO could still be contacted and instances of prior art be submitted.
Well, yeah, I mean "Free broadband access"
The r key selectively escaped my fingers there.
Just this past week, as a part of my Baltimore -> San Francisco roadtrip, I stayed at a Days Inn in Farmington, New Mexico. This is a small town up in the way remote area of north-western New Mexico.
I was going to stay at the Holiday Inn there, but what made me change my mind when I rolled into town at 12am was the big banner on the side of the Days Inn which touted "Fee broadband access."
Who would pass that up? Days Inn got my business, and my PowerBook got a open WAP with a great signal in the hotel room. The Days Inn seemed to have a rather decent ADSL connection from local provider digii.net
If you're feeling "guilty" about using a particular OS over another one, you need to ask yourself what you're using the OS in question for in the first place. Because it suites your needs or because it
If you buy something like a Mac and then feel guilty about using OSX on it, geez man, it's time to get a lithium prescription unless you really feel like running Linux on it would give you something that OSX can't, other than any perceived or actual ethical/theological dogma.