No, the relationship, or lack thereof, between Mozilla and Google is *NOT* the most important difference. Maybe that is so in your personal opinion of what is good; I can't debate that. But it is not so in the law.
Product tying is perfectly legal and normal. It would be fine even if Firefox and Google were produced by the same company. The *ONLY* thing that makes it illegal is that MS has been convicted of abusing their monopoly powers with product tying. That conviction is the important difference. Note that it takes an actual conviction to trigger that limitation on tying. Even if one were to argue that FireFox and Google were in market-dominating positions, there would be no restriction on tying unless they were convicted in court of abusing a monopoly position. That restriction is a very special and unusual case; it is not the norm.
(and other games). I'm serious. I've got several Macs at home... and a collection of Windows&Linux boxes, some dual boot. The newest of the Windows boxes is adequate for Oblivion, but marginally so. I'm darned tempted to get a new Intel iMac (in addition to the G5 iMac I already have) just because it looks like a decent piece of hardware to run Windows games on. In particular, I like the way that Apple too a fairly decent graphics card and underclocked it enough so that it can run fanless. The result obviously won't match to top-of-the-line cards, or even the fannned versions of the same basic card, but it appears to nicely beat most anythnig that you can get fannless off the shelf. The "off-the-shelf" part is important there; one of the nice things about the Mac is that the system integration work is done, and done well. I've built enough of my own boxes from components to appreciate that system integration is nontrivial. And I despise noisy fan with a passion.
I basically have 2 things on my Windows boxes.
1. Games.
2. Quicken/TurboTax. There is a Mac version of Quicken, but it sucks. It sucks worse than using Windows, which is saying a lot. And there is nothing else that interfaces with my financial institutions as well as Quicken. There are rumors that the next Mac version of Quicken might be based on the Windows one and thus be half decent. We'll see. The current Mac Quicken shares almost nothing but the name with the Windows version; it is actually of unrelated vintage.
TFA reads an awful lot like something straight from the vendor's marketting folk. It spends at least as much time talking about Lenovo as about the requirement. It even references Lenovo's web site instead of anything at the university for more information.
Thus, I'd be a bit hesitant to read anything much into the statement that Levorno is "preferred" unless I had something more specific from an impartial source. Note that "preferred" is not particularly close to "required". It might well mean nothing more than that the university has some special purchase deal with Lenovo and/or recommends them to students that don't have any idea what to choose. I just can't tell from thie article.
Not that I have anything in particular against Lenovo (other than being a stupid name). For a windows laptop, its not a bad choice. I have plenty against mandating any particular vendor, but it isn't clear to me that that is the case here, as much as TFA tries to make it sound like that.
I'm glad that the 'totally new' was in quotes to clue me into the fact that this was introducing a new definition of the phrase: only half a billion years old.:-)
I know it is a bit much to expect from a slashdot posting, but those of us who can read English learned long ago that there is a difference between "has started shipping", which is what the slashdot posting says, versus "will begin shipping", which is what the article actually says.
Yes, the article said "this week", which is pretty soon. But I still maintain that there is a difference between the future an dthe past. Conventional of me, I know.
So... Only one day after an article about the top vaporware products, we have an article wondering why Apple didn't bet their whole Mac line on waiting for a chip that isn't even scheduled for at least a year? Perhaps one reason why there are so many vaporware products is that there are so many people who are a little slow to learn the lessons.
The subject line really surprised me, as I was sure that those stcoks had been on Nasdaq since they went public. (Pretty much everything is on Nasdaq). I guess I should have known better than to trust a slashdot subject line. The Nasdaq-100 is not the same thing as the Nasdaq.
Sort of reminds me of all the management types here at work who don't know that ISO means anything other than ISO 9000.
The widespread adoption of English over the past 5 years has been driven by the demonstrable productivity and quality of projects where it has been used to communicate instead of just to write meaningless words.:-)
Programmer testing? That means testing programmers, as in certifying them? Apparently not.
From the article, it is clear that they are referring more to testing of programs. Of course, then one might wonder who would think that nobody ever tested any programs prior to 5 years ago.
Reading a bit more carefully, it appears to really mean testing of programs using a particular testing paradigm.
I am quite serious in my observation that clearly written documentation is a huge benefit in getting programs to actually work. Clearly and accurately documenting what the program is supposed to do is a huge first step. For example, program documentation needs to be a whole lot more clearly written than the subject article.
Games and emulation just don't go together. That applies to pretty much all kinds of emulation - VMWare, Virtual PC, whatever. Games just tend to require performance that emulation can't deliver. Plus games are often picky about hardware such as video cards.
Of course, this overgeneralizes. If you have some text-based game, or even a graphics one old enough to not strain current hardware, then maybe. But generally speaking, assume that games won't work acceptably.
I've used VMWare (though it has been a while). It worked fine for my technical applications. Allowed me to run Windows compilers and make Windows executables of my programs for ussers that wanted such. But forget games.
1. We are not within many orders of magnitude of being able to build a space elevator. Its a great concept, and maybe someday. But not now. We don't even have a concrete direction of research to procede towards it now. One might as well suggest that NASA start a project to, oh... build a time machine. Maybe they are even possible; I won't argue the point. But I sure know that we don't know what to do to even start working towards one.
2. One of NASA's most severe problems in recent years is starting projects that have no real chance of being sucessful. This has resulted in endless series of project cancellations. NASP (National Aerospace plane) was probably the worst, but there has been a long series of them. I find it a great relief to see a major new project that looks like it can actually work. Its been too long. And it is sorely needed if NASA is to ever produce anything new other than paper.
The author of this piece makes the people who started the previously cancelled programs look like down-to-earth practical types.
3. And finally. If the cost was anywhere close to 6 billion, there would be no need for NASA to be involved. Private industry could and would afford it. But since nobody has even a clue how to build such a thing, any cost estimate at all is nothing but fantasy. Heck, for the same 6 billion dollars you could solve world hunger and ensure world peace. I just made that estimate up, and I claim it has as much basis as any space elevator cost estimate. Heck, my estimate probably has more basis. At least I know how many people are involved. (If you want to quibble that 1$ per person is a bit low, that's just a small detail.)
There are plenty of good reasons to go to Vegas for business meetings. Good airline connections, decent hotels at reasonable rates. Good food. All subsidized by those fools who go there and leave their money on the tables.
Now if you go there to gamble, that's a different matter. But other people should continue to do that in order to keep subsidizing my meetings.:-)
The first line of the article is a big caveat - "If Sun gets very serious about...". Sun recently seems to be having an identity crisis. They can't really figure out what their niche is, and they keep changing directions. That's a big burden for them. Even if they did come up with something great, how many people are going to jump on their bandwagon without waiting to see if it will last more than 3 years.
And then reading the rest of the article, I'd summarize it as: Solaris 10 is nowhere near ready for routine production use today. You have to fight to make it work on even very common configurations. But if it ever does get to be a good product, then it might be a good product, because it has a few nice features. Sorry, but I don't find that very convincing.
Note, by the way, the lack of any mention of significant numbers of people that actually *ARE* jumping on this particular bandwagon. Nothing but one user's abstract thoughts about some features.
The system that I see that noticeable numbers of actual Linux users *ARE* moving to is OS X. I have, and I know of many others who have. I've done Sun (and many others) in the past, and I've done Linux. Still do Linux. But I'm currently moving on. I now do both Linux and OS X. I'm not alone. In my case, note the "moving on" rather than "moving back". I see nothing here to tempt me back to Sun. I don't think I'm alone.
And as others have said, so what anyway? If Sun does really come through with a better product, then that's great. I like better products, and I'll use them. I'm far more interested in seeing better products that do my job better than I am in defending any particular religion... I mean OS.
In the early '70s, I thought that CDC systems were great.... and I still think that I was right.... for the times. I've been though quite a few different favorite systems since then. Silly to think that I might never see a new favorite someday. Or maybe it would be sad instead of silly. Whatever.
And the upcoming x86 switch is exactly why I choose the mini. Before the x86 announcement, I had been planning to get a 20" iMac, but I decided that I didn't want to drop $2000 on and end-of-line product. The $600 I spent on the mini, however, is low enough for me to accept as a temporary system.
Maybe in a few years I'll get a more powerful x86 Mac and turn the mini into a media jukebox or some such thing. I'm sure I'll be able to find some use for it, if only to give away to a relative on a tighter budget. A few years of use is plenty for $600.
I didn't say "a few orders of magnitude". I said "many". My wording choice was intentional; there is a difference between "a few" and "many". Though I don't recall the numbers in any detail, I certainly remamber that getting within anything that I'd call a few orders of magnitude would have counted as pretty close.
In addition to this being old news, as noted by others...
Let me just note that cold fusion works and always has. This has been known since the 1920's; it is called quantum tunneling. This isn't even a matter of debate. The only "small" issue is the many orders of magnitude difference between the yield obtainable in practice and what is needed for breakeven.
So just saying that cold fusion was achieved is no data at all. The question of whether the technique scales to the breakeven point is absolutely critical.
(Though as I recall, this particular application wasn't touted as being an approach to energy generation anyway).
That AC comment, however, is hilarious in its self-referential contradiction. After all, if the original comment was worthless, then it must be even more worthless to say so. Therefore, if the original comment was the most worthless ever, then pointing out that fact made it no longer true.
So you thought "the PS3 would spank the Xbox 360." Do you have to have both consoles to run that game? And is it X rated?:-)
Or I guess the rating I'm asking about is NC-17 these days. My mention of X ratings probably shows the time frame in which I saw much of that kind of flick.:-)
I tried to use my passport instead of my driver's license to get onto an air force base (where I work). Didn't work. I was amused that the US air force wouldn't accept a US passport as adequate identification, but would accept a state driver's license. It wasn't just one guard either; they had specific instructions that passprts weren't acceptable.
Absolutely agree. In fact, the only thing that I find startling is that the writer of the article found the results starting.:-) That tells me that the writer didn't really have much of a clue.
This principle is old as the hills. If you find yourself irrevocably commited to a particular vendor, then you have a problem. The costs might have been lower before, but how long do you expect them to stay low once the vendor figures out that you are stuck?
Been there. Done that. Keep seeing it happen over and over because people don't learn.
Actually, it isn't necessarily even directly related to open-source vs proprietary. It is all about vendor tie-in. You can use proprietary software without getting vendor tie-in. I'm big into the business of programming language standards, and that's a lot of what they are about. If you have standard-conforming code, then you are a lot less likely to be tied into a vendor because you can switch to another vendor, either proprietary or open source. Of course, the specifics will vary with the situation - programming languages are a different game than vertically integrated applications. But the sam ebroad principles apply.
And yes, things like the pain of dealing with a non-responsive vendor count as part of the TCO. SOmetimes that's a very big part.
Geneforge. My 14-year-old daughter won't touch most computer RPGs (and she chides me when I play them:-)), partly because of this issue. Geneforge passes her test on this score (and the fact that it has a Mac version doesn't hurt either, as she prefers her Mac to her XP box).
Slashdot Mirror
This gives new meaning to the term "skin". Or is it old meaning? :-)
That's an insult to rocks. :-)
No, the relationship, or lack thereof, between Mozilla and Google is *NOT* the most important difference. Maybe that is so in your personal opinion of what is good; I can't debate that. But it is not so in the law.
Product tying is perfectly legal and normal. It would be fine even if Firefox and Google were produced by the same company. The *ONLY* thing that makes it illegal is that MS has been convicted of abusing their monopoly powers with product tying. That conviction is the important difference. Note that it takes an actual conviction to trigger that limitation on tying. Even if one were to argue that FireFox and Google were in market-dominating positions, there would be no restriction on tying unless they were convicted in court of abusing a monopoly position. That restriction is a very special and unusual case; it is not the norm.
(and other games). I'm serious. I've got several Macs at home... and a collection of Windows&Linux boxes, some dual boot. The newest of the Windows boxes is adequate for Oblivion, but marginally so. I'm darned tempted to get a new Intel iMac (in addition to the G5 iMac I already have) just because it looks like a decent piece of hardware to run Windows games on. In particular, I like the way that Apple too a fairly decent graphics card and underclocked it enough so that it can run fanless. The result obviously won't match to top-of-the-line cards, or even the fannned versions of the same basic card, but it appears to nicely beat most anythnig that you can get fannless off the shelf. The "off-the-shelf" part is important there; one of the nice things about the Mac is that the system integration work is done, and done well. I've built enough of my own boxes from components to appreciate that system integration is nontrivial. And I despise noisy fan with a passion.
I basically have 2 things on my Windows boxes.
1. Games.
2. Quicken/TurboTax. There is a Mac version of Quicken, but it sucks. It sucks worse than using Windows, which is saying a lot. And there is nothing else that interfaces with my financial institutions as well as Quicken. There are rumors that the next Mac version of Quicken might be based on the Windows one and thus be half decent. We'll see. The current Mac Quicken shares almost nothing but the name with the Windows version; it is actually of unrelated vintage.
TFA reads an awful lot like something straight from the vendor's marketting folk. It spends at least as much time talking about Lenovo as about the requirement. It even references Lenovo's web site instead of anything at the university for more information.
Thus, I'd be a bit hesitant to read anything much into the statement that Levorno is "preferred" unless I had something more specific from an impartial source. Note that "preferred" is not particularly close to "required". It might well mean nothing more than that the university has some special purchase deal with Lenovo and/or recommends them to students that don't have any idea what to choose. I just can't tell from thie article.
Not that I have anything in particular against Lenovo (other than being a stupid name). For a windows laptop, its not a bad choice. I have plenty against mandating any particular vendor, but it isn't clear to me that that is the case here, as much as TFA tries to make it sound like that.
I'm glad that the 'totally new' was in quotes to clue me into the fact that this was introducing a new definition of the phrase: only half a billion years old. :-)
I know it is a bit much to expect from a slashdot posting, but those of us who can read English learned long ago that there is a difference between "has started shipping", which is what the slashdot posting says, versus "will begin shipping", which is what the article actually says.
Yes, the article said "this week", which is pretty soon. But I still maintain that there is a difference between the future an dthe past. Conventional of me, I know.
Yes.
So... Only one day after an article about the top vaporware products, we have an article wondering why Apple didn't bet their whole Mac line on waiting for a chip that isn't even scheduled for at least a year? Perhaps one reason why there are so many vaporware products is that there are so many people who are a little slow to learn the lessons.
"I think the NYT had a fare review."
:-)
"Are you saying they got PAID for this review?"
No, I think he means it was in the food section.
The subject line really surprised me, as I was sure that those stcoks had been on Nasdaq since they went public. (Pretty much everything is on Nasdaq). I guess I should have known better than to trust a slashdot subject line. The Nasdaq-100 is not the same thing as the Nasdaq.
Sort of reminds me of all the management types here at work who don't know that ISO means anything other than ISO 9000.
The widespread adoption of English over the past 5 years has been driven by the demonstrable productivity and quality of projects where it has been used to communicate instead of just to write meaningless words. :-)
Programmer testing? That means testing programmers, as in certifying them? Apparently not.
From the article, it is clear that they are referring more to testing of programs. Of course, then one might wonder who would think that nobody ever tested any programs prior to 5 years ago.
Reading a bit more carefully, it appears to really mean testing of programs using a particular testing paradigm.
I am quite serious in my observation that clearly written documentation is a huge benefit in getting programs to actually work. Clearly and accurately documenting what the program is supposed to do is a huge first step. For example, program documentation needs to be a whole lot more clearly written than the subject article.
Games and emulation just don't go together. That applies to pretty much all kinds of emulation - VMWare, Virtual PC, whatever. Games just tend to require performance that emulation can't deliver. Plus games are often picky about hardware such as video cards.
Of course, this overgeneralizes. If you have some text-based game, or even a graphics one old enough to not strain current hardware, then maybe. But generally speaking, assume that games won't work acceptably.
I've used VMWare (though it has been a while). It worked fine for my technical applications. Allowed me to run Windows compilers and make Windows executables of my programs for ussers that wanted such. But forget games.
1. We are not within many orders of magnitude of being able to build a space elevator. Its a great concept, and maybe someday. But not now. We don't even have a concrete direction of research to procede towards it now. One might as well suggest that NASA start a project to, oh... build a time machine. Maybe they are even possible; I won't argue the point. But I sure know that we don't know what to do to even start working towards one.
2. One of NASA's most severe problems in recent years is starting projects that have no real chance of being sucessful. This has resulted in endless series of project cancellations. NASP (National Aerospace plane) was probably the worst, but there has been a long series of them. I find it a great relief to see a major new project that looks like it can actually work. Its been too long. And it is sorely needed if NASA is to ever produce anything new other than paper.
The author of this piece makes the people who started the previously cancelled programs look like down-to-earth practical types.
3. And finally. If the cost was anywhere close to 6 billion, there would be no need for NASA to be involved. Private industry could and would afford it. But since nobody has even a clue how to build such a thing, any cost estimate at all is nothing but fantasy. Heck, for the same 6 billion dollars you could solve world hunger and ensure world peace. I just made that estimate up, and I claim it has as much basis as any space elevator cost estimate. Heck, my estimate probably has more basis. At least I know how many people are involved. (If you want to quibble that 1$ per person is a bit low, that's just a small detail.)
There are plenty of good reasons to go to Vegas for business meetings. Good airline connections, decent hotels at reasonable rates. Good food. All subsidized by those fools who go there and leave their money on the tables.
:-)
Now if you go there to gamble, that's a different matter. But other people should continue to do that in order to keep subsidizing my meetings.
The first line of the article is a big caveat - "If Sun gets very serious about...". Sun recently seems to be having an identity crisis. They can't really figure out what their niche is, and they keep changing directions. That's a big burden for them. Even if they did come up with something great, how many people are going to jump on their bandwagon without waiting to see if it will last more than 3 years.
And then reading the rest of the article, I'd summarize it as: Solaris 10 is nowhere near ready for routine production use today. You have to fight to make it work on even very common configurations. But if it ever does get to be a good product, then it might be a good product, because it has a few nice features. Sorry, but I don't find that very convincing.
Note, by the way, the lack of any mention of significant numbers of people that actually *ARE* jumping on this particular bandwagon. Nothing but one user's abstract thoughts about some features.
The system that I see that noticeable numbers of actual Linux users *ARE* moving to is OS X. I have, and I know of many others who have. I've done Sun (and many others) in the past, and I've done Linux. Still do Linux. But I'm currently moving on. I now do both Linux and OS X. I'm not alone. In my case, note the "moving on" rather than "moving back". I see nothing here to tempt me back to Sun. I don't think I'm alone.
And as others have said, so what anyway? If Sun does really come through with a better product, then that's great. I like better products, and I'll use them. I'm far more interested in seeing better products that do my job better than I am in defending any particular religion... I mean OS.
In the early '70s, I thought that CDC systems were great.... and I still think that I was right.... for the times. I've been though quite a few different favorite systems since then. Silly to think that I might never see a new favorite someday. Or maybe it would be sad instead of silly. Whatever.
According to the article, the PC generates "literally no noise" and you have to put your ear right up next to the case to hear it.
This is apparently the Orwellian definition of "literally", where it is used with the meaning of "not literally".
Me, for one. I just did - the $599 model.
And the upcoming x86 switch is exactly why I choose the mini. Before the x86 announcement, I had been planning to get a 20" iMac, but I decided that I didn't want to drop $2000 on and end-of-line product. The $600 I spent on the mini, however, is low enough for me to accept as a temporary system.
Maybe in a few years I'll get a more powerful x86 Mac and turn the mini into a media jukebox or some such thing. I'm sure I'll be able to find some use for it, if only to give away to a relative on a tighter budget. A few years of use is plenty for $600.
I didn't say "a few orders of magnitude". I said "many". My wording choice was intentional; there is a difference between "a few" and "many". Though I don't recall the numbers in any detail, I certainly remamber that getting within anything that I'd call a few orders of magnitude would have counted as pretty close.
In addition to this being old news, as noted by others...
Let me just note that cold fusion works and always has. This has been known since the 1920's; it is called quantum tunneling. This isn't even a matter of debate. The only "small" issue is the many orders of magnitude difference between the yield obtainable in practice and what is needed for breakeven.
So just saying that cold fusion was achieved is no data at all. The question of whether the technique scales to the breakeven point is absolutely critical.
(Though as I recall, this particular application wasn't touted as being an approach to energy generation anyway).
That AC comment, however, is hilarious in its self-referential contradiction. After all, if the original comment was worthless, then it must be even more worthless to say so. Therefore, if the original comment was the most worthless ever, then pointing out that fact made it no longer true.
So you thought "the PS3 would spank the Xbox 360." Do you have to have both consoles to run that game? And is it X rated? :-)
:-)
Or I guess the rating I'm asking about is NC-17 these days. My mention of X ratings probably shows the time frame in which I saw much of that kind of flick.
I tried to use my passport instead of my driver's license to get onto an air force base (where I work). Didn't work. I was amused that the US air force wouldn't accept a US passport as adequate identification, but would accept a state driver's license. It wasn't just one guard either; they had specific instructions that passprts weren't acceptable.
Absolutely agree. In fact, the only thing that I find startling is that the writer of the article found the results starting. :-) That tells me that the writer didn't really have much of a clue.
This principle is old as the hills. If you find yourself irrevocably commited to a particular vendor, then you have a problem. The costs might have been lower before, but how long do you expect them to stay low once the vendor figures out that you are stuck?
Been there. Done that. Keep seeing it happen over and over because people don't learn.
Actually, it isn't necessarily even directly related to open-source vs proprietary. It is all about vendor tie-in. You can use proprietary software without getting vendor tie-in. I'm big into the business of programming language standards, and that's a lot of what they are about. If you have standard-conforming code, then you are a lot less likely to be tied into a vendor because you can switch to another vendor, either proprietary or open source. Of course, the specifics will vary with the situation - programming languages are a different game than vertically integrated applications. But the sam ebroad principles apply.
And yes, things like the pain of dealing with a non-responsive vendor count as part of the TCO. SOmetimes that's a very big part.
Geneforge. My 14-year-old daughter won't touch most computer RPGs (and she chides me when I play them :-)), partly because of this issue. Geneforge passes her test on this score (and the fact that it has a Mac version doesn't hurt either, as she prefers her Mac to her XP box).