I don't think products such as Postgres or MySQL are up to the task of competing with Informix, Sybsase, Oracle, or IBM in their chosen markets. There's huge amounts of third party software and suppport available, as well. Plus legacy apps.
When there's a free alternative that includes all the features and scalability of the big name databases, maybe some interest will be seen, but I doubt it... Those are such complicated beasts that company's like to have the ability to lean on the vendors... even oracle, with their historically horrible support. Ever notice that they're the 2nd highest valued pure software company after Microsoft?
I tend to bring a different CD with me to work each day and rip it to my hard drive... Thanks to the wonders of hard drives capacity jumps, i've now got over 24 hours of music accessible to me at work... And it's all mine.
I also have another CD full of Mp3's (again, mine) that i burned from home... it's another 8 hours.
In the worst case scenario, just email them to yourself at work, supposing you've got the bandwidth to upload from home to Beam IT and download from Beam It to work, you cand do the same with your own files and alleviate the middleman that's causeing all the controversy
Is that if you have the CD, and you're too lazy to rip it to your hard drive and would rather drag it across the net at some arbitrary speed, with errors, and without knowing if the song is actually there, you've got issues.
If you own it, you're going to end up with a much better sounding song in about the same amount of time (or less)...
If you don't own it, you shouldn't even be downloading the songs in the first place, so stop fighting for Napster, Beam It, et al...
I don't think that Rob would need to patent anything about Slashdot as a defensive measure... Hundreds of thousands of people could go on record saying that this site has existed and done what it's done for several years if another company ever tried to patent any aspect of this site.
Of course, it'd be aweful if there were a sleath patent sitting out there that covered the entire basis of slashdot... But that's extremely unlikely.
I was glad to see that Perens viewed RSA's patent as a legitamate patent. Too often around here it seems that RSA's lumped into the same group as Amazon... When they indeed do real research and created something that had never been seen before in the private sector.
Yes, Amazon's patents lousy... Slashdot basically does the same thing, except I get to post comments without logining in everytime i visit this site.
I think if anything the patent system should be revised... Computer related patents definetly should have their time tables cut in half at the very least. Another glaring example is Unisys, whose LZW compression was used freely for a long time and then they came forward and started to demanding royalties.
When applying for a patent, a company or individual should have to decide right then and their if the patent is going to be royalty free or if it's going to need to be licensed, rather than let it be freely used until it hits critical mass and then switch licensing terms of everyone.
Well, for one, there are some binaries out there than are only compiled for x86... so if you just wanted to test the apps out, Mac users would have to spring for a PC.
For two, Mac's are fast enough to emulate x86's at reasonable speeds... So if you're not dying for the best performance possible, this would be okay.
And for three... It's much more convenient to just have to launch an application happens to be Linux, then to reformat and repartition your hard drive, install linux, and then have to reboot whenever you want to use your other operating system.
I think it'd be awesome for web developers, some who use mac's for graphics... You could do your graphics in photoshop or flash, transfer them to VPC, which would be running Apache and Perl, and you could get a genuine feel to how your site would work...
I'm still waiting for a PowerPC emulator for PowerPC's.... Like VMware. Mac users now have a few choices in OSes: OS 8.x, OS 9, OS X Server, OS X Consumer (soon), Linux PPC, MkLinux, MacBSD... It'd be nice to have a way to run them all without having to repartition drives....
Then again, it'd be nice if every OS vendor would be so kind as to let the user choose from among a variety of filesystems... But that's probably a pipedream.
The reasoning would go that if Redhat is allowed to do it, Apple is allowed to do it, then basically anyone can do it, which means why can't Microsoft do it?
Just want to point out that "no... you're wrong on that count".
1200 dpi is the minimum for line art (one color, solids). For halftones, you just double the linescreen of your imagesetter. Text books are around 133 to 150 lines per inch, meaning that you want 266-300 dots per inch. High quality books, like coffee table or artsy books, are around 180 - 200 lpi, so the maximum resolution you'd want out of a halftoned piece of art is 400 dpi... and that's an extreme measure.
1 GB/Second. That's what I heard Yahoo was dealing with when their site went down. That's like aiming a few bazooka's at a bank's front door. Are you going to be outraged when the bank gets blown to smithereens? oh... it wasn't blast proof.
Sites get slashdotted all the time. That's not even malicious... it's just caused by a few thousand people all tromping over at the same moment in time.
But that was beyond a slashdotting, what yahoo had to deal with... That's like 100 million people all requesting 10k files all once a second every second. How in the world can any site take that punishement? If there was a fix available, okay, maybe they (yahoo) were in the wrong... But it doesn't sound like there is one available.
But back to my original comparison... Say i break into your house tonight and take whatever I'd like. Will you call the police and press charges? I mean, if you really valued your stuff, you would have had armed guards ringed around your house. You also would have had dogs inside, tear gas cannisters triggered by the sound of breaking glass, etc...
I think many sites do all they can within their budgets and within the confines of http... They don't need to be punished "just to show it's possible".
It's a set top box meant for playing video games. Yhe OS that developers will target will be the one that ships on the machine. That will be whatever variant of Windows is on the machine. Ripping Windows out and installing Linux on it... You'll end up with a paperweight... Sure, maybe you'll be able to telnet using your TV as a monitor... But really. At this point in time, Windows beats Linux hands town in terms of game availability, features offered for developers, and just the sheer number of developers.
The low end model, $149, model will probably ship with a much slower CPU, 32 megs of RAM, and maybe a slower DVD drive...
Sega sells their boxes at a loss and makes up the difference quite nicely collecting royalties from developers. Microsofts got a hoard of cash, so they can absorb short term losses in order to push this thing out the door, if they wanted to.
But remember... When looking at computer ads, car ads, etc... "starting at" never means the model their displaying. It's the little brother to that model.
AMD would cannibalize so many of their own sales by releasing the absolute fastest processor they could, rather than incrementally upgrading speeds as they and intel are doing.
It's also in their best interests to slowly grow the market, rather than have everyone crawling all over one another in order to acquire one of their chips. Why? Because they can't make them fast enough, that's why. Kind of like what's happening now with Intel and their 800 Mhz systems. They announce them. Everyone lines up to order. People stall their purchases. Very few people get them...
They HAD to show off their fastest chips simply as proof that they can create them. If they'ed fallen silent after AMD's demo, then the world would stop looking to them as being the leaders in the x86 world.
Of course they're not going to go from 800 MHz to 1500 MHz overnight. There's much more money to be made selling the same people 800 MHz machiens, then 833 MHz, then 866 Mhz, etc...
I'm just curious as to what in the world you're doing with 900dpi images? I thought that in most cases 300 dpi is overkill.... Or are they 8 1/2 by 11's destinedd to be posters?
With all these analogies going on, lets' try this one on for size...
You have a house.
You keep your stuff in the house
You close and lock your doors at night.
One night a burglar smashes your window and steals all your stuff.
Are you to blame for using glass windows, rather than plexiglass windows or maybe not even having windows at all?
No.
i'm getting rather sick of people claiming to discover bugs in the current software and then releasing easy to use tools that exploits said bugs, under the guise of "we did it to show how easy it was".
Well, it wouldn't have been easy if they hadn't done it.
The internets not secure. We know this already. We don't need it proven over and over.
The thrust of the article seeemed by about using the various OSes as servers... So why in the world does Linux score points for being able to scale downward to run on a Palm Pilot, where as with Windows, you have to choose CE? That means absolutely nothing to the target market.
It's one of those little things, where Microsoft and Netscape use different settings for "small". If web authors make sure their page looks great in IE, they'll end up with a page that looks downright unreadable in Netscape. Too bad most web authoring packages insist on using either "small, normal, large...", "0, 1, 2, 3..." rather than measuring type in actual points or pixels.
You're absolutely crazy if you're going to a companies site looking for unbiased reviews! The entire point of a companies marketing department is to come up with reasons for you to purchase their product over that of the competition.
If you're looking for "unbiased", find a publication that you trust and read that. Don't go looking on Microsofts website for reasons that Windows 2000 may not be worth upgrading to, or for a top 10 list of how Solaris mops the floor with NT.
Supposedly the front end of Ebay is run on NT while the backend uses Sun/Oracle.
What got me in the in this article was that i was used to seeing all the Oracle ads, touting the fact that they supplied backend software to the 10 largest ecommerce sites on the net. Now Microsoft is claiming that Nt/IIS/SQL Server is running 6 of the 10 largest?
Or does large mean something besides most more transactions, more sales, more visitors?
And the answer they'll get is that many of the applications they want and require aren't yet available for Linux, and haven't even been announced as possiblilities.
You know, portable used to mean something more than simply "laptop"... It meant self contained, with handles. by that note, an imac could be considered a portable... it's not like they need to lug the machine around the shuttle... They just eneed small eonough boxes that they don't take up space that the rest of their equipment woudl be using.
Linux doesn't need to scale to high upwards on a laptop... How many dual processing notebooks have you seen on the market?
I do get your point about having a company standing behind the software though... It's too easy for red hat to pass the buck on some issues... I'd still question your choice of NT over Solaris or SCO, though.
Just because the kernel itself may not crash as often does not mean that questions and other issues won't arise. Support means much more than "i had to reboot my computer"... if it were that simple, 1/2 of the tech support world could probably find new jobs.
Linux is free to acquire, but in a setting such as NASA's, it still costs money to maintain.
Your gnome terminal crashed twice this morning and you're saying that NASA should go with it?!? Or, what would they use as their windowing interface with their FreeBSD laptops? Gnome and KDE are the two that seem to be drawing the largest amount of developers these days....
Please, when making arguments FOR linux or a member of the Unix family, refrain from mentioning how any part of said systems is unreliable... Makes you stick out like a sore thumb around here!:)
4000 laptops is far from large enough of an order to make it worth any company's time to develop a powerpc based laptop. Perhaps they could just buy the computers from apple (5 hrs/battery) and install Linux on those?
Of course, being a government agency, NASA could probably blow $20,000/laptop and just shrug their collective shoulders. The question would be would IBM be willing to develop a new product line for only a guarenteed $80,000,000 in sales? Let alone if they charged "market value" for laptops meaning $2,000/piece. $8,000,000 doesn't take you very in that scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think products such as Postgres or MySQL are up to the task of competing with Informix, Sybsase, Oracle, or IBM in their chosen markets. There's huge amounts of third party software and suppport available, as well. Plus legacy apps.
When there's a free alternative that includes all the features and scalability of the big name databases, maybe some interest will be seen, but I doubt it... Those are such complicated beasts that company's like to have the ability to lean on the vendors... even oracle, with their historically horrible support. Ever notice that they're the 2nd highest valued pure software company after Microsoft?
I tend to bring a different CD with me to work each day and rip it to my hard drive... Thanks to the wonders of hard drives capacity jumps, i've now got over 24 hours of music accessible to me at work... And it's all mine.
I also have another CD full of Mp3's (again, mine) that i burned from home... it's another 8 hours.
In the worst case scenario, just email them to yourself at work, supposing you've got the bandwidth to upload from home to Beam IT and download from Beam It to work, you cand do the same with your own files and alleviate the middleman that's causeing all the controversy
Is that if you have the CD, and you're too lazy to rip it to your hard drive and would rather drag it across the net at some arbitrary speed, with errors, and without knowing if the song is actually there, you've got issues.
If you own it, you're going to end up with a much better sounding song in about the same amount of time (or less)...
If you don't own it, you shouldn't even be downloading the songs in the first place, so stop fighting for Napster, Beam It, et al...
I don't think that Rob would need to patent anything about Slashdot as a defensive measure... Hundreds of thousands of people could go on record saying that this site has existed and done what it's done for several years if another company ever tried to patent any aspect of this site.
Of course, it'd be aweful if there were a sleath patent sitting out there that covered the entire basis of slashdot... But that's extremely unlikely.
I was glad to see that Perens viewed RSA's patent as a legitamate patent. Too often around here it seems that RSA's lumped into the same group as Amazon... When they indeed do real research and created something that had never been seen before in the private sector.
Yes, Amazon's patents lousy... Slashdot basically does the same thing, except I get to post comments without logining in everytime i visit this site.
I think if anything the patent system should be revised... Computer related patents definetly should have their time tables cut in half at the very least. Another glaring example is Unisys, whose LZW compression was used freely for a long time and then they came forward and started to demanding royalties.
When applying for a patent, a company or individual should have to decide right then and their if the patent is going to be royalty free or if it's going to need to be licensed, rather than let it be freely used until it hits critical mass and then switch licensing terms of everyone.
Well, for one, there are some binaries out there than are only compiled for x86... so if you just wanted to test the apps out, Mac users would have to spring for a PC.
For two, Mac's are fast enough to emulate x86's at reasonable speeds... So if you're not dying for the best performance possible, this would be okay.
And for three... It's much more convenient to just have to launch an application happens to be Linux, then to reformat and repartition your hard drive, install linux, and then have to reboot whenever you want to use your other operating system.
I think it'd be awesome for web developers, some who use mac's for graphics... You could do your graphics in photoshop or flash, transfer them to VPC, which would be running Apache and Perl, and you could get a genuine feel to how your site would work...
I'm still waiting for a PowerPC emulator for PowerPC's.... Like VMware. Mac users now have a few choices in OSes: OS 8.x, OS 9, OS X Server, OS X Consumer (soon), Linux PPC, MkLinux, MacBSD... It'd be nice to have a way to run them all without having to repartition drives....
Then again, it'd be nice if every OS vendor would be so kind as to let the user choose from among a variety of filesystems... But that's probably a pipedream.
The reasoning would go that if Redhat is allowed to do it, Apple is allowed to do it, then basically anyone can do it, which means why can't Microsoft do it?
It's appearing to be the norm of the industry...
Just want to point out that "no... you're wrong on that count".
1200 dpi is the minimum for line art (one color, solids). For halftones, you just double the linescreen of your imagesetter. Text books are around 133 to 150 lines per inch, meaning that you want 266-300 dots per inch. High quality books, like coffee table or artsy books, are around 180 - 200 lpi, so the maximum resolution you'd want out of a halftoned piece of art is 400 dpi... and that's an extreme measure.
1 GB/Second. That's what I heard Yahoo was dealing with when their site went down. That's like aiming a few bazooka's at a bank's front door. Are you going to be outraged when the bank gets blown to smithereens? oh... it wasn't blast proof.
Sites get slashdotted all the time. That's not even malicious... it's just caused by a few thousand people all tromping over at the same moment in time.
But that was beyond a slashdotting, what yahoo had to deal with... That's like 100 million people all requesting 10k files all once a second every second. How in the world can any site take that punishement? If there was a fix available, okay, maybe they (yahoo) were in the wrong... But it doesn't sound like there is one available.
But back to my original comparison... Say i break into your house tonight and take whatever I'd like. Will you call the police and press charges? I mean, if you really valued your stuff, you would have had armed guards ringed around your house. You also would have had dogs inside, tear gas cannisters triggered by the sound of breaking glass, etc...
I think many sites do all they can within their budgets and within the confines of http... They don't need to be punished "just to show it's possible".
It's a set top box meant for playing video games. Yhe OS that developers will target will be the one that ships on the machine. That will be whatever variant of Windows is on the machine. Ripping Windows out and installing Linux on it... You'll end up with a paperweight... Sure, maybe you'll be able to telnet using your TV as a monitor... But really. At this point in time, Windows beats Linux hands town in terms of game availability, features offered for developers, and just the sheer number of developers.
"up to 1 Gz" priced "as low as" $149
Those are the key words.
The low end model, $149, model will probably ship with a much slower CPU, 32 megs of RAM, and maybe a slower DVD drive...
Sega sells their boxes at a loss and makes up the difference quite nicely collecting royalties from developers. Microsofts got a hoard of cash, so they can absorb short term losses in order to push this thing out the door, if they wanted to.
But remember... When looking at computer ads, car ads, etc... "starting at" never means the model their displaying. It's the little brother to that model.
AMD would cannibalize so many of their own sales by releasing the absolute fastest processor they could, rather than incrementally upgrading speeds as they and intel are doing.
It's also in their best interests to slowly grow the market, rather than have everyone crawling all over one another in order to acquire one of their chips. Why? Because they can't make them fast enough, that's why. Kind of like what's happening now with Intel and their 800 Mhz systems. They announce them. Everyone lines up to order. People stall their purchases. Very few people get them...
They HAD to show off their fastest chips simply as proof that they can create them. If they'ed fallen silent after AMD's demo, then the world would stop looking to them as being the leaders in the x86 world.
Of course they're not going to go from 800 MHz to 1500 MHz overnight. There's much more money to be made selling the same people 800 MHz machiens, then 833 MHz, then 866 Mhz, etc...
I'm just curious as to what in the world you're doing with 900dpi images? I thought that in most cases 300 dpi is overkill.... Or are they 8 1/2 by 11's destinedd to be posters?
With all these analogies going on, lets' try this one on for size...
You have a house.
You keep your stuff in the house
You close and lock your doors at night.
One night a burglar smashes your window and steals all your stuff.
Are you to blame for using glass windows, rather than plexiglass windows or maybe not even having windows at all?
No.
i'm getting rather sick of people claiming to discover bugs in the current software and then releasing easy to use tools that exploits said bugs, under the guise of "we did it to show how easy it was".
Well, it wouldn't have been easy if they hadn't done it.
The internets not secure. We know this already. We don't need it proven over and over.
The thrust of the article seeemed by about using the various OSes as servers... So why in the world does Linux score points for being able to scale downward to run on a Palm Pilot, where as with Windows, you have to choose CE? That means absolutely nothing to the target market.
It's one of those little things, where Microsoft and Netscape use different settings for "small". If web authors make sure their page looks great in IE, they'll end up with a page that looks downright unreadable in Netscape. Too bad most web authoring packages insist on using either "small, normal, large...", "0, 1, 2, 3..." rather than measuring type in actual points or pixels.
You're absolutely crazy if you're going to a companies site looking for unbiased reviews! The entire point of a companies marketing department is to come up with reasons for you to purchase their product over that of the competition.
If you're looking for "unbiased", find a publication that you trust and read that. Don't go looking on Microsofts website for reasons that Windows 2000 may not be worth upgrading to, or for a top 10 list of how Solaris mops the floor with NT.
Supposedly the front end of Ebay is run on NT while the backend uses Sun/Oracle.
What got me in the in this article was that i was used to seeing all the Oracle ads, touting the fact that they supplied backend software to the 10 largest ecommerce sites on the net. Now Microsoft is claiming that Nt/IIS/SQL Server is running 6 of the 10 largest?
Or does large mean something besides most more transactions, more sales, more visitors?
And the answer they'll get is that many of the applications they want and require aren't yet available for Linux, and haven't even been announced as possiblilities.
You know, portable used to mean something more than simply "laptop"... It meant self contained, with handles. by that note, an imac could be considered a portable... it's not like they need to lug the machine around the shuttle... They just eneed small eonough boxes that they don't take up space that the rest of their equipment woudl be using.
Linux doesn't need to scale to high upwards on a laptop... How many dual processing notebooks have you seen on the market?
I do get your point about having a company standing behind the software though... It's too easy for red hat to pass the buck on some issues... I'd still question your choice of NT over Solaris or SCO, though.
What do you mean, no support???
Just because the kernel itself may not crash as often does not mean that questions and other issues won't arise. Support means much more than "i had to reboot my computer"... if it were that simple, 1/2 of the tech support world could probably find new jobs.
Linux is free to acquire, but in a setting such as NASA's, it still costs money to maintain.
Your gnome terminal crashed twice this morning and you're saying that NASA should go with it?!? Or, what would they use as their windowing interface with their FreeBSD laptops? Gnome and KDE are the two that seem to be drawing the largest amount of developers these days....
:)
Please, when making arguments FOR linux or a member of the Unix family, refrain from mentioning how any part of said systems is unreliable... Makes you stick out like a sore thumb around here!
4000 laptops is far from large enough of an order to make it worth any company's time to develop a powerpc based laptop. Perhaps they could just buy the computers from apple (5 hrs/battery) and install Linux on those?
Of course, being a government agency, NASA could probably blow $20,000/laptop and just shrug their collective shoulders. The question would be would IBM be willing to develop a new product line for only a guarenteed $80,000,000 in sales? Let alone if they charged "market value" for laptops meaning $2,000/piece. $8,000,000 doesn't take you very in that scenario.