1. No sneaky business tactics. No adware, etc. 2. Stability of product line. 3. Cross-platform.
#3 is the real killer. I have a lot of Macintosh clients who have a PC too because of work, or want Linux because they're curious. LimeWire makes it VERY easy to share a home folder between all of them.
Sometime last year I lost all by bookmarks and now all I do is compulsively read Slashdot. Really.
I wish I remembered the cool sites I used to go to, I'm slowly building a new list of things to do on the net besides Slashdot, but it's still no good.
The worst thing is that the more often you refresh the main page, the less amazed you are. I don't think I've been 'engaged' by the main page in at least three months. Back when I only got to read/. twice a week I really liked it.
I only lock-out the users at their own request, usually after having to reimage them more than once. The cost to them for me to reimage is about $90, and they get upset when I have to rescue them twice a year. I offer to 'protect them from themselves' (or their children, guests, etc.) and they often jump on it thinking that they wanted tha from the get-go anyway. For more advanced users I show them how to log into an administrator account for installs, and explain how it helps prevent spyware installs much like freezing a credit card in a cube of ice prevents impulse buys.
Often I can provide them with a similar-functioning OSS or shareware product that gets the same job done without the adware and spyware. They want popup-blocking, I set them up with Mozilla, they want P2P, I purchase a LimeWire Pro license ($10/6 months) and bill when I renew it, and update them remotely.
Most of my clients WANT a managed solution for their homes, they are doctors, real-estate agents, lawyers, and home-business owners. These users don't want to bother with updates, adware, downtime, and frustration. I sell them that solution and they're more than happy to pay a small fee for me to provide it. I also sell remote backups, which let them do what they need to do and not worry about redundancy.
Coddling users might not seem a great long-term idea, but I think it really is, some users are better off paying a small fee for hand-holding than twice-yearly reimaging.
And yet they will click 'yes' ten times to install spyware/adware that purports to block popups. 'Average users' are truly a special breed. My policy is to totally lock them down, even the home users who install spyware (clients for my freelancing). If they need to install something they can call me up and I'll do it for them via VNC and it'll be done right.
I actually got two calls to my home line from clients after these commercials aired, they wanted to can plans for WiFi networks and get 'centrinos' instead, because they thought they wouldn't have to go through the trouble of rigging up their houses with access points. Intel commercials make me want to barf.
A giant piece of mylar with many thin support rods providing shape would be quite impact-resistant, as the debris punches little holes in the mylar you just replace or patch the sheet. There would be quite a bit of maintainance, but replacing mylar sheets every few years is nothing compared to the upkeep on fossil-fuel plants.
That's the most back-ass reasoning I've ever heard. Companies don't just hoarde their savings, they spend it on shit they want but can't have without savings in other areas.
IBM isn't going to bank the savings from this Linux stuff, they're going to roll it into R&D (jobs), growth (jobs), and some bonuses for executives (trickle-down jobs, hopefully).
If we all played by your reasoning we'd have a really... Amish way of life right now.
Plus, this will create LINUX jobs instead of IBM-proprietary jobs, how can you argue against that?
Right, but since the G3 and G4 split several years ago the parity has been less and less. If IBM implemented a 750+SIMD it would be VERY different under a microscope (and to a compiler) than a motorola G4. IBM has their own homegrown SIMD logic, and their G3 chips have seen a lot more evolution.
Every morning when I traverse a major merge-with-a-left-exit-soon on I-95 in Providence I do this along the merging lanes, letting about 30 cars that need to merge in, the people behind me go NUTS but as soon as the 'pressure' is relieved farther ahead the traffic picks up to about 65MPH. I've had a friend stand on an overpass and tell me via cellphone if I help out the overall situation when I do this, and he said I singlehandedly clear the mess for several-hundred cars. Idiots jam themselves back up in under a minute though.
If everyone left a few spaces in front of them and got to their lane ASAP there'd be little or no stop-and-go traffic.
Could all this activity be caused by a colission of some object into the sun? I'm just wondering if the sun got pounded by some asteroids a few weeks ago and they screwed up the balance of the surface, causing geyser-like effects.
Is the sun moving into some more active part of the galaxy recently, are we in the tail of some massive previous event? Are other stars in the neighborhood showing signs of duress?
Really? I can have a working WindowMaker system from stage-1 overnight on my Athlon-XP 1800+.
Don't forget that you can run the stage-1 to stage-2 process on ANY working linux system by using the 'stager' tools (builds a working stage2 from downloaded portage snapshot and stage1 tarball).
Also, if you 'emerge gnome' you're going to get ALL of GNOME, when you probably only need parts of it. I know I only need KDE-base, none of the other crap included in 'emerge kde'
Honestly, I've had Gentoo installs that take less time than Mandrake installs, because with Gentoo I get what I want, the way I want it, and with Mandrake I had to adjust a billion things to get it right.
Ha! I just booted a Gentoo system with 16MB RAM, and it had 2MB left for disk cache! I had to bring my roommate down to 64MB on her Gentoo/KDE3 machine for a few days while selling memory/ordering new stuff and she was fine, just noted that it was a bit laggier than her usual 512MB.
I did it just for shits and giggles, but building your own system from a core set of utilities can really produce a much more streamlined experience. I've always felt that the RPM-based distros were pretty bloaty, the maintainers essentially turn 'everything' on because they know someone will ask. I on the other hand don't want KDE support in WindowMaker or XMMS, or crypto and PERL in GAIM, so I turn it off.
Nope, sorry. The G4 in the new iBooks is actually a Motorola 74xx G4. Apple's not being specific about it because when they DO move to something from IBM they don't want to blow a hole in their branding by having to ditch the G4 name.
IBM hasn't even begun production of an AltiVec-enabled 750-series CPU (codename 'Mojave'). The only thing IBM is admiting to right now is the 750GX, which is really nothing special, just a beefier 750FX.
The new iBooks have 'real' G4s in them, nothing else exists. People HAVE opened them up and gawked the CPU, they're Motorola 7455s or 7457s, IIRC.
I'd never actually SEEN it anywhere either, but then I started working as a field tech, and it really is running a LOT of school districts, etc. The Bank here uses it, our dual-PII/233 file server has about 978 concurrent connections -RIGHT NOW-.
And yes, we're trying our damndest to find a way to move to AD, which is a mistake IMO.
You don't seem to understand the problem the way it was meant. I have a big monitor, I like to run at high resolution, but text is TINY, so I make the fonts bigger, but then everything is out-of-whack in terms of widget sizes and images.
What we're talking about is a VECTOR-based display, so 'increasing the size' won't make it any less readable. In a vector-based system EVERYTHING gets scaled up, you could run the big monitor at 1600x1200 or 512x384 and the elements on the screen would be the same actual size (meaured by a ruler) but the higher-res monitor would just look a hell of a lot better.
Now there ARE some issues that need to get worked out for this, a web browser, for example has to be prepared to have a bitmap GIF 'blown up', and it has to be done well enough to look decent but not take too much CPU power.
NEXT had this, Aqua has the underpinning of it, I think GNUStep is coming along with it, Longhorn is going to have it. I don't see the XFree86 folks picking this up, I think the toolkit folks and KDE/GNOME will have to implement it themselves because the XFree folks are really conservative.
But Linus IS much better at it. I had linux permissions figured out in a few days, and a few days more to make sure everything held tight on the network. Meanwhile I can spend forever dealing with Microsoft policies, and then deal with how local and global policies interact on the AD. Because Unix is a bazillion itty-bitty programs swarming into a functional system, and not a monolithic interface it is inherently easier to lock users down.
I don't quite understand what you mean. The G3 series isn't capable of running native altivec floating-point code, but it's a great all-around CPU for desktop use, it's a kick-ass compiler and workhorse, but lacks with video editing and scientific modeling.
Apple's original G4 was just a G3 with a Motorola-brand AltiVec unit strapped to it. Over the years the G4 has integrated more and matured, and so has the G3, but IBM makes the G3 now, and they have their OWN breed of AltiVec. I would think IBM could take the most commonly used/important logic from their AltiVec implementation and add it to the G3 for a different 'genus' of G4.
Since the G3 was built from day-one to be alow-temperature, fanless CPU I think it would make a great laptop CPU and would also do well in video-game consoles.
Who thinks that IBM is going to turn around and sell these things to Aplle as the CPU for the G5 laptop?
This bodes VERY well for IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and anyone else interested in low-power-draw PowerPC systems. It sucks for Motorola, but they lost my favor years ago, and they really charge ludicrous prices for their wares.
Also, Could IBM be developing their G3+AltiVec chip for this? It seems to me that if the G3 series was dead IBM would stop working on it, but there are 750GX CPUs due soon (just a 750FX with 1MB on-die cache), and rumors of a G3 with SIMD coming down the pipe. It seems to me that if IBM bastardized some of the SIMD logic from the 970 and strapped it to the 750 they'd have a pretty decent low-power SIMD chip that Apple could market as a 'G3', 'G4' or a 'G5.'
Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, but the G3 was the CPU best-suited for what I do, and I hope it doesn't disappear. I have little use for SIMD, and I really appreciate running a CPU without a fan strapped to it, it's just so... elegant.
And the physical mechanics of the hole-punchers and of scantron machines aren't understood by average Joe and Jane either. What they DO know is that somewhere there's a piece of paper with a hole or a blotch of ink next to the name of the guy they meant to vote for.
The average Joe or Jane doesn't understand that you can have a button labeled 'X' and have it digitally routed to 'Y' in software, they just don't get that that's how things work.
I think a GREAT showing would be some way to hack diebold ATM machines to spit out twice the money you ask for, but print a reciept for the desired amount, that'll get press AND show people that the back-end of any computer is inherently untrustable.
As for open-source in voting machines, I think they'd be cheaper, and you could REALLY strip out a lot of the stuff that wouldn't be needed, reducing security risks. I don't see it happening though, because someone needs to actually BUILD the things, and they cost a mint to produce.
I also buy PC3200 RAM and run it at PC2100, because it's cool to the touch, and I replaced my first-gen radeon card (the ones with a fan) with a later-model one that has a GPU that doesn't need a fan. The specs on my card are the same, no performance difference, but that's one less fan in there, and it's a lot cooler in my 'computer cabinet' since the upgrade.
I might underclock my CPU, but I want the most bang for each cycle, so I got the latest athlon-XP with a bigger L2 cache and SSE. I get MUCH better performance than I would with a similarly clocked celeron or duron, but my energy use and heat output are on-par with the low-power CPUs.
Also, I'm much more interested in trouble-free computing than in fast computing, I think an underclocked, cooler system will ultimately cause me less headache down the line.
I for one don't need the horsepower of a top-end CPU. I have a KT266a-based board (max FSB=133/266) and I put an Athlon-xp 2500/333 into it.
My CPU is underclocked from 1.83G to 1.46G, it dissipates about 45W, which is about the same as a G4, and HALF what a modern P4 drops. It's stable as all hell and I'm very happy with the speed.
I do the same thing to my G3/450, I use it as a fileserver so the 450MHz is totally wasted. I turned it down to 300MHz with less than 2% 'real world' performance difference from the client machines. It also generates less heat and uses less power now.
Any of you living on your own and paying electric bills would be well-served by underclocking, as the VAST majority of our CPU cycles go to waste anyway.
Dear ColMustard,
I was wondering why my Ford Escort doesn't get good pickup when I've got it packed with bricks. It goes fine when it's just me and the seats, but once I pile those bricks in it's so laggy! Do you think I should put brighter headlights in, or should I change the blinker fluid?
Slashdot Mirror
1. No sneaky business tactics. No adware, etc.
2. Stability of product line.
3. Cross-platform.
#3 is the real killer. I have a lot of Macintosh clients who have a PC too because of work, or want Linux because they're curious. LimeWire makes it VERY easy to share a home folder between all of them.
Sometime last year I lost all by bookmarks and now all I do is compulsively read Slashdot. Really.
/. twice a week I really liked it.
I wish I remembered the cool sites I used to go to, I'm slowly building a new list of things to do on the net besides Slashdot, but it's still no good.
The worst thing is that the more often you refresh the main page, the less amazed you are. I don't think I've been 'engaged' by the main page in at least three months. Back when I only got to read
What terrible addictive behavior!
I only lock-out the users at their own request, usually after having to reimage them more than once. The cost to them for me to reimage is about $90, and they get upset when I have to rescue them twice a year. I offer to 'protect them from themselves' (or their children, guests, etc.) and they often jump on it thinking that they wanted tha from the get-go anyway. For more advanced users I show them how to log into an administrator account for installs, and explain how it helps prevent spyware installs much like freezing a credit card in a cube of ice prevents impulse buys.
Often I can provide them with a similar-functioning OSS or shareware product that gets the same job done without the adware and spyware. They want popup-blocking, I set them up with Mozilla, they want P2P, I purchase a LimeWire Pro license ($10/6 months) and bill when I renew it, and update them remotely.
Most of my clients WANT a managed solution for their homes, they are doctors, real-estate agents, lawyers, and home-business owners. These users don't want to bother with updates, adware, downtime, and frustration. I sell them that solution and they're more than happy to pay a small fee for me to provide it. I also sell remote backups, which let them do what they need to do and not worry about redundancy.
Coddling users might not seem a great long-term idea, but I think it really is, some users are better off paying a small fee for hand-holding than twice-yearly reimaging.
And yet they will click 'yes' ten times to install spyware/adware that purports to block popups. 'Average users' are truly a special breed. My policy is to totally lock them down, even the home users who install spyware (clients for my freelancing). If they need to install something they can call me up and I'll do it for them via VNC and it'll be done right.
I actually got two calls to my home line from clients after these commercials aired, they wanted to can plans for WiFi networks and get 'centrinos' instead, because they thought they wouldn't have to go through the trouble of rigging up their houses with access points. Intel commercials make me want to barf.
A giant piece of mylar with many thin support rods providing shape would be quite impact-resistant, as the debris punches little holes in the mylar you just replace or patch the sheet. There would be quite a bit of maintainance, but replacing mylar sheets every few years is nothing compared to the upkeep on fossil-fuel plants.
That's the most back-ass reasoning I've ever heard. Companies don't just hoarde their savings, they spend it on shit they want but can't have without savings in other areas.
IBM isn't going to bank the savings from this Linux stuff, they're going to roll it into R&D (jobs), growth (jobs), and some bonuses for executives (trickle-down jobs, hopefully).
If we all played by your reasoning we'd have a really... Amish way of life right now.
Plus, this will create LINUX jobs instead of IBM-proprietary jobs, how can you argue against that?
Right, but since the G3 and G4 split several years ago the parity has been less and less. If IBM implemented a 750+SIMD it would be VERY different under a microscope (and to a compiler) than a motorola G4. IBM has their own homegrown SIMD logic, and their G3 chips have seen a lot more evolution.
Every morning when I traverse a major merge-with-a-left-exit-soon on I-95 in Providence I do this along the merging lanes, letting about 30 cars that need to merge in, the people behind me go NUTS but as soon as the 'pressure' is relieved farther ahead the traffic picks up to about 65MPH. I've had a friend stand on an overpass and tell me via cellphone if I help out the overall situation when I do this, and he said I singlehandedly clear the mess for several-hundred cars. Idiots jam themselves back up in under a minute though.
If everyone left a few spaces in front of them and got to their lane ASAP there'd be little or no stop-and-go traffic.
Could all this activity be caused by a colission of some object into the sun? I'm just wondering if the sun got pounded by some asteroids a few weeks ago and they screwed up the balance of the surface, causing geyser-like effects.
Is the sun moving into some more active part of the galaxy recently, are we in the tail of some massive previous event? Are other stars in the neighborhood showing signs of duress?
Really? I can have a working WindowMaker system from stage-1 overnight on my Athlon-XP 1800+.
Don't forget that you can run the stage-1 to stage-2 process on ANY working linux system by using the 'stager' tools (builds a working stage2 from downloaded portage snapshot and stage1 tarball).
Also, if you 'emerge gnome' you're going to get ALL of GNOME, when you probably only need parts of it. I know I only need KDE-base, none of the other crap included in 'emerge kde'
Honestly, I've had Gentoo installs that take less time than Mandrake installs, because with Gentoo I get what I want, the way I want it, and with Mandrake I had to adjust a billion things to get it right.
Ha! I just booted a Gentoo system with 16MB RAM, and it had 2MB left for disk cache! I had to bring my roommate down to 64MB on her Gentoo/KDE3 machine for a few days while selling memory/ordering new stuff and she was fine, just noted that it was a bit laggier than her usual 512MB.
I did it just for shits and giggles, but building your own system from a core set of utilities can really produce a much more streamlined experience. I've always felt that the RPM-based distros were pretty bloaty, the maintainers essentially turn 'everything' on because they know someone will ask. I on the other hand don't want KDE support in WindowMaker or XMMS, or crypto and PERL in GAIM, so I turn it off.
Ultra-rough math:
.0014 light-years away.
the Voyager is 12.5 light-hours from earth, I call it 12.
12 is 1/2 of one day, there are about 730 half-days in a year.
voyager is
Nope, sorry. The G4 in the new iBooks is actually a Motorola 74xx G4. Apple's not being specific about it because when they DO move to something from IBM they don't want to blow a hole in their branding by having to ditch the G4 name.
IBM hasn't even begun production of an AltiVec-enabled 750-series CPU (codename 'Mojave'). The only thing IBM is admiting to right now is the 750GX, which is really nothing special, just a beefier 750FX.
The new iBooks have 'real' G4s in them, nothing else exists. People HAVE opened them up and gawked the CPU, they're Motorola 7455s or 7457s, IIRC.
I'd never actually SEEN it anywhere either, but then I started working as a field tech, and it really is running a LOT of school districts, etc. The Bank here uses it, our dual-PII/233 file server has about 978 concurrent connections -RIGHT NOW-.
And yes, we're trying our damndest to find a way to move to AD, which is a mistake IMO.
You don't seem to understand the problem the way it was meant. I have a big monitor, I like to run at high resolution, but text is TINY, so I make the fonts bigger, but then everything is out-of-whack in terms of widget sizes and images.
What we're talking about is a VECTOR-based display, so 'increasing the size' won't make it any less readable. In a vector-based system EVERYTHING gets scaled up, you could run the big monitor at 1600x1200 or 512x384 and the elements on the screen would be the same actual size (meaured by a ruler) but the higher-res monitor would just look a hell of a lot better.
Now there ARE some issues that need to get worked out for this, a web browser, for example has to be prepared to have a bitmap GIF 'blown up', and it has to be done well enough to look decent but not take too much CPU power.
NEXT had this, Aqua has the underpinning of it, I think GNUStep is coming along with it, Longhorn is going to have it. I don't see the XFree86 folks picking this up, I think the toolkit folks and KDE/GNOME will have to implement it themselves because the XFree folks are really conservative.
But Linus IS much better at it. I had linux permissions figured out in a few days, and a few days more to make sure everything held tight on the network. Meanwhile I can spend forever dealing with Microsoft policies, and then deal with how local and global policies interact on the AD. Because Unix is a bazillion itty-bitty programs swarming into a functional system, and not a monolithic interface it is inherently easier to lock users down.
I don't quite understand what you mean. The G3 series isn't capable of running native altivec floating-point code, but it's a great all-around CPU for desktop use, it's a kick-ass compiler and workhorse, but lacks with video editing and scientific modeling.
Apple's original G4 was just a G3 with a Motorola-brand AltiVec unit strapped to it. Over the years the G4 has integrated more and matured, and so has the G3, but IBM makes the G3 now, and they have their OWN breed of AltiVec. I would think IBM could take the most commonly used/important logic from their AltiVec implementation and add it to the G3 for a different 'genus' of G4.
Since the G3 was built from day-one to be alow-temperature, fanless CPU I think it would make a great laptop CPU and would also do well in video-game consoles.
Who thinks that IBM is going to turn around and sell these things to Aplle as the CPU for the G5 laptop?
This bodes VERY well for IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and anyone else interested in low-power-draw PowerPC systems. It sucks for Motorola, but they lost my favor years ago, and they really charge ludicrous prices for their wares.
Also, Could IBM be developing their G3+AltiVec chip for this? It seems to me that if the G3 series was dead IBM would stop working on it, but there are 750GX CPUs due soon (just a 750FX with 1MB on-die cache), and rumors of a G3 with SIMD coming down the pipe. It seems to me that if IBM bastardized some of the SIMD logic from the 970 and strapped it to the 750 they'd have a pretty decent low-power SIMD chip that Apple could market as a 'G3', 'G4' or a 'G5.'
Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, but the G3 was the CPU best-suited for what I do, and I hope it doesn't disappear. I have little use for SIMD, and I really appreciate running a CPU without a fan strapped to it, it's just so... elegant.
The gripe is that when left to arbitrarily choose, DARPA will fall back on their human instinct for familiarity.
The race will be amongst the 20 percent of vehicles that seem most like the ones around today. Lame.
They should lobby some major corps for some small grants to have a preliminary event, and put the winner into the 'big race'
And the physical mechanics of the hole-punchers and of scantron machines aren't understood by average Joe and Jane either. What they DO know is that somewhere there's a piece of paper with a hole or a blotch of ink next to the name of the guy they meant to vote for.
The average Joe or Jane doesn't understand that you can have a button labeled 'X' and have it digitally routed to 'Y' in software, they just don't get that that's how things work.
I think a GREAT showing would be some way to hack diebold ATM machines to spit out twice the money you ask for, but print a reciept for the desired amount, that'll get press AND show people that the back-end of any computer is inherently untrustable.
As for open-source in voting machines, I think they'd be cheaper, and you could REALLY strip out a lot of the stuff that wouldn't be needed, reducing security risks. I don't see it happening though, because someone needs to actually BUILD the things, and they cost a mint to produce.
I also buy PC3200 RAM and run it at PC2100, because it's cool to the touch, and I replaced my first-gen radeon card (the ones with a fan) with a later-model one that has a GPU that doesn't need a fan. The specs on my card are the same, no performance difference, but that's one less fan in there, and it's a lot cooler in my 'computer cabinet' since the upgrade.
I might underclock my CPU, but I want the most bang for each cycle, so I got the latest athlon-XP with a bigger L2 cache and SSE. I get MUCH better performance than I would with a similarly clocked celeron or duron, but my energy use and heat output are on-par with the low-power CPUs.
Also, I'm much more interested in trouble-free computing than in fast computing, I think an underclocked, cooler system will ultimately cause me less headache down the line.
Several reasons:
1. Twice the L2 cache.
2. Lower heat dissipation/energy use when underclocked.
3. upgrade path. (my next motherboard will most likely be a KT600, my CPU and RAM are already up to the task.
4. Price difference was only $10 where I got it.
I for one don't need the horsepower of a top-end CPU. I have a KT266a-based board (max FSB=133/266) and I put an Athlon-xp 2500/333 into it.
My CPU is underclocked from 1.83G to 1.46G, it dissipates about 45W, which is about the same as a G4, and HALF what a modern P4 drops. It's stable as all hell and I'm very happy with the speed.
I do the same thing to my G3/450, I use it as a fileserver so the 450MHz is totally wasted. I turned it down to 300MHz with less than 2% 'real world' performance difference from the client machines. It also generates less heat and uses less power now.
Any of you living on your own and paying electric bills would be well-served by underclocking, as the VAST majority of our CPU cycles go to waste anyway.
Dear ColMustard,
I was wondering why my Ford Escort doesn't get good pickup when I've got it packed with bricks. It goes fine when it's just me and the seats, but once I pile those bricks in it's so laggy! Do you think I should put brighter headlights in, or should I change the blinker fluid?