I find it interesting that so many readers take the Slashdot-editor opinion as being holy, even though Slashdot's parent company directly competes with MS.
Could it be that what's really good for MS is automatically really bad for VA, and not necessarily really bad for the user?
And you're telling me neither of these 3 steps fail for you?
Last time I tried to compile WineX, it bitched about me not having a.h file. I then had to find that.h file for some SGI library. Last time I tried to configure mplayer, it listed off about 5 things I needed to manually download.
These are all configure/make problems. Make install are the worst, since if you EVER get rid of the source directory, you can't make uninstall. And many apps do not support make uninstall. Linux file/library management is in every respect sloppier than Windows.
"Prudence suggests that since it's our money funding the research, we ought to make sure the public gets some return from the endeavor."
I agree. US and foreign companies pay taxes too (property, sales, income, etc.). Furthermore, investors who pay capital gains taxes also deserve a return from their funding of said research. You prevent companies from being able to use code although they paid for its development, just because somebody decides they want to make their code GPL? Even though their code was developed for the government and paid for with government funds? You are preventing tax-paying corporations and investors from getting a return on their investment that you claim you deserve. You could argue that the companies always have the "choice" of using the GPL if they wish to, but the GPL is still less about Freedom and more about the lack of it. "Pay taxes so that we can spend your money, or else", followed by "if you want to use the code that YOU paid for, you're going to have to GPL your ENTIRE codebase."
So, if the government develops code or pays for source code to be developed for the government, shouldn't the code be made public domain as long as opening its source does not threaten national security -- just like anything else the government publishes? Since when did GPL supporters believe that code should be treated differently than other forms of published material?
AMD isn't a new company either, nor is their superiority a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, only AMDs answer to the pentium (k5, k6, k6-2, k6-3) were weak compared to intel counterparts(though by sheer brute force, the later K6-2 and K6-3s were better than the 200MMXs from Intel, even in the FP department). Their 386 and 486 were measurably faster at the same clock speeds than Intel counterparts.
This isn't true. The K6/K6-2/K6-3 competed with the Pentium MMX/Pentium 2/Pentium 3 line of processors. Their floating point sucked. They used plain old socket 7, with slow cache. Their FPU was not properly pipelined. Yes, the K6 did eventually manage to have SIMD FP, but if you weren't coding for their instructions (and they had no robust compiler for developers to use), you would never see the performance gain. And it's looking pretty obvious that AMD is abandoning 3DNow! completely in favor of SSE2.
Many of Apple's computers are sold at a loss, or at breakeven (the older iMac, as well as the Cube which they scrapped), because they're deathly afraid of losing even more marketshare. Remember, Amiga answered many of their users' demands, and had a cult following that continued to use their hardware, but eventually they fell too far behind the technology curve because they were tied to a certain way of doing things. While Apple is not tied to a platform as bad as the Amiga, and may even be able to port its OS to x86 in the future (which would not be intelligent for them at all, as they saw when the Apple clones caused all kinds of hell to break loose.... imagine Apple clones on x86....), it has the same kind of vulnerabilities and protections that Amiga has against the x86 world: a "loyal" user base, and a divergent hardware architecture. History isn't too kind to desktop box manufacturers with the same kind of setups.
Well, then realistically you're all for Linux NOT being for mom and dad. Mom and Dad don't like gcc, X, or bash. Mom and Dad HATE it when they can't get Abi-Word to install because something is screwy in their X-Server configuration (yeah, the default Redhat 7.2 X configuration).
If you want an OS that mom and dad like, you have to get rid of layers, which means you have to get rid of choice. Get comfortably being 0.3% of the desktop market.
What, pray you, do you think is a better player -- especially when you are comparing EASE OF INSTALLATION (the most important factor in the popularity of a video player, since people will use the codecs that everyone else uses -- including a grandmother).
I just took a look at several video players I could find on freshmeat, and I wasn't impressed at all. Most listed frequent crashing bugs. MPlayer spends more time describing why gcc 2.96 is bad than telling you how to install or workaround various issues. Oh yeah, and if I want a GUI with MPlayer, I have to not only download a separate skin, but also change a compiler flag.
In the meantime, my grandmother could run Windows Media Player (because it's installed in every version of Windows), play virtually every codec out there (and download the ones she doesn't have, automagically), get excellent performance (sorry, but video on Linux sucks), and wonder why I'm looking at MPlayer's header files trying to debug the goddamn makefile.
If you're talking about other Windows players, I don't see why you wouldn't use WMA, Quicktime, or Realplayer. How are they buggy, or badly-designed? What are you comparing it to?
I'm not sure how Quicktime is necessarily relevant from Linux, but I know that Linux could use all the help it can get in the movie department.
I have been running three Linux servers (good 'ol LAMP) and a Win2K desktop for the past year or so, and decided that the only way I could learn more about my servers is if I immersed myself in Linux all the time. After installing RedHat 7.2 on my desktop, everything for the most part worked great, EXCEPT for the video.
Frames were constantly being lost or being frozen. I had incredible difficulty resolving dependencies when COMPILING FROM SOURCE (this isn't an example of rpm problems). And about half of the MPEG's I have simply don't play. I don't know whether this is due to "proprietary" MPEG formats that Windows Media Player supports, or if it's just a matter of me not having the right codecs, but it's frusturating as all hell, and I feel it's one of the biggest issues preventing Linux from becoming a viable desktop OS, even for the not-entirely-newbie of us.
It would be interesting to know where exactly he is going to work. Do you know what the cost of living in the country is, typically? While I don't know of any resources, you might find it easier to do some comparisons with your current income/cost of living, the overseas nation, and compare it to other places that you know of. I would also factor in the general pain in the ass of living overseas.:)
NSParadox
Unfortunately, Netscape needs to generate noise now, and has been doing almost nothing for itself or its parent companies until the release of Netscape 6. They really had no choice to release Netscape 6. If they hadn't done it soon, Netscape would have become a company with absolutely no return on investment, a company that just spent wildly on an open-source program that was neither profitable or marketable.
I guess they were finally able to pull off the "marketable" web browser, although they loaded it up with such a huge amount of crap that many users may be wary of installing it (not to mention the installation problems, slowness in comparision to IE, etc.). I think waiting would have been ideal, but I don't think it would have been releastic for Netscape. I honestly think they waited until they felt they could afford to put their name on the browser without losing face.
Right. You can make, say, a small amount of SRAM this way. Either way, you will still eventually have to fetch from an external source. So unless you're spending at least 100x as much time processing information as fetching it, I don't see how this could be useful.
It seems to me that this technology could be incredibly useful, but only for a limited number of things. Sure, you can do all sorts of internal stuff at 750Gb/s, but then you have the problem of interfacing with your input or output at normal semiconductor/optical speeds, far below 750Gb/s. It also seems a lot of complicated computations could not be carried out unless this IC had an INSANE amount of cache, because communicating with memory would be so cycle-expensive.
With their example of network switching, I wonder how exactly switch at that speed, and then not run into delivery bottlenecks. Does anyone who knows more about networking than I have any additional insight on how this could be accomplished?
It's funny that the author wants to somehow modify the concept of software so that not all current programs or utilities are considered software, and yet he keeps on comparing hardware to software, two COMPLETELY different things.
Hardware HAS to be re-analyzed and re-engineered because hardware exists in a very real world of electron migration, clock skew, and timing delays as parasitic resistors and capacitors hold back electrons from flying through pathways we construct using circuits, and these electrons occasionally jump out of the circuit because we think of the entire circuit as behaving in a linear fashion when it really behaves in a quantum fashion. Talk about poor engineering! (Note: this is sarcasm. I'm merely pointing out that hardware isn't as fail-proof as we all think). Also, hardware implements only the most basic of functionality. In the time it takes a coder to make an implementation of the RSA algorithm, a hardware engineer might only be able to make a very primitive implementation of a 32-bit Arithmetic Logic Unit that can now add or apply logical operations to numbers. That takes a long time to do a lot less, and is far easier to test. Some things need to be developed quickly, and are complicated nature.
A lot of the stuff in hardware can be logically proven correct, and a lot of software simply cannot. Even then, hardware still runs in to unforseen failures. I can't remember if it was a poster or the author, but someone stated that hardware engineers are less prone to mistakes because they know that once their circuit is printed, it's all over. That's not entirely true. Many complex microprocessors and other pieces of hardware include BIOS functionality that can be updated via flashing. Who knows if Intel could have ever gotten the Pentium 3 to perform with as few errors as it has without microcode updates.
Sorry, but the author just doesn't convince me about anything here. I believe both the quality of hardware and software have greatly improved. Nowadays, we have a Microsoft operating system that doesn't crash all that much (Win2K), an accessible UNIX (Linux with KDE or GNOME), applications I can teach my mother how to use easily (Microsoft Hotmail, Microsoft Word, Solitaire), and development tools that are far superior to what we had in the 1970's that allow us to make more error-free code. Sounds like progress to be, and it doesn't sound like "suckage".
NSParadox
Has anyone seen someone who purely uses Hurd as an operating system, or can say that they find Hurd more useful than linux or Solaris for anything? I think installing operating systems just to add another operating system is kind of silly. I like some of the technology Hurd brings (object-oriented source, distributed computing, etc.), but why fragment the market further when there are operating systems out there with new when operating systems when others have significantly larger market presence and real utility.
I guess it's good that they are shipping it with linux as well. Kind of makes you wonder why they are even shipping Hurd anyway. Methinks it's just to be (one of?) the first computer company out there to try to market it.
Hmmm, it seems more likely to me that Bowie is "creating" a bank to receive money or media attention. After all, he supposedly made $55 million from the selling of his catalog "stock". I'm sure he didn't just donate all of the $55 million he made to some artistic or humanitarian non-profit foundation. I doubt many would disagree that a lot of what fans like about Bowie is his ability to really stand out, and as far as I know this definitely makes him stand out more than any other musician. What other musician has started a banking service? This is especially divergent when you consider that many musicians and the public accuse each other of "selling out". I would be cautious in glorifying an action of somebody's when they are very likely to receive a substantial profit.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it interesting that so many readers take the Slashdot-editor opinion as being holy, even though Slashdot's parent company directly competes with MS.
Could it be that what's really good for MS is automatically really bad for VA, and not necessarily really bad for the user?
And you're telling me neither of these 3 steps fail for you?
.h file. I then had to find that .h file for some SGI library. Last time I tried to configure mplayer, it listed off about 5 things I needed to manually download.
Last time I tried to compile WineX, it bitched about me not having a
These are all configure/make problems. Make install are the worst, since if you EVER get rid of the source directory, you can't make uninstall. And many apps do not support make uninstall. Linux file/library management is in every respect sloppier than Windows.
Your comment very much needed to be said. I wish I could mod you up.
OK. So what other operating system has been given this certification, and how long did it take?
Oh, wait. You didn't have a point.
"Prudence suggests that since it's our money funding the research, we ought to make sure the public gets some return from the endeavor."
I agree. US and foreign companies pay taxes too (property, sales, income, etc.). Furthermore, investors who pay capital gains taxes also deserve a return from their funding of said research. You prevent companies from being able to use code although they paid for its development, just because somebody decides they want to make their code GPL? Even though their code was developed for the government and paid for with government funds? You are preventing tax-paying corporations and investors from getting a return on their investment that you claim you deserve. You could argue that the companies always have the "choice" of using the GPL if they wish to, but the GPL is still less about Freedom and more about the lack of it. "Pay taxes so that we can spend your money, or else", followed by "if you want to use the code that YOU paid for, you're going to have to GPL your ENTIRE codebase."
So, if the government develops code or pays for source code to be developed for the government, shouldn't the code be made public domain as long as opening its source does not threaten national security -- just like anything else the government publishes? Since when did GPL supporters believe that code should be treated differently than other forms of published material?
Hrm, I thought standard Ethernet was synchronous, using Manchester encoding to include the clock signal with the data signal.
Maybe my memory doesn't serve me correctly.
AMD isn't a new company either, nor is their superiority a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, only AMDs answer to the pentium (k5, k6, k6-2, k6-3) were weak compared to intel counterparts(though by sheer brute force, the later K6-2 and K6-3s were better than the 200MMXs from Intel, even in the FP department). Their 386 and 486 were measurably faster at the same clock speeds than Intel counterparts.
This isn't true. The K6/K6-2/K6-3 competed with the Pentium MMX/Pentium 2/Pentium 3 line of processors. Their floating point sucked. They used plain old socket 7, with slow cache. Their FPU was not properly pipelined. Yes, the K6 did eventually manage to have SIMD FP, but if you weren't coding for their instructions (and they had no robust compiler for developers to use), you would never see the performance gain. And it's looking pretty obvious that AMD is abandoning 3DNow! completely in favor of SSE2.
Imagine it being 10x slower in Java. Yech.
They've been losing money. Lots of it.
Oh yeah, and Dell has remained profitable.
Many of Apple's computers are sold at a loss, or at breakeven (the older iMac, as well as the Cube which they scrapped), because they're deathly afraid of losing even more marketshare. Remember, Amiga answered many of their users' demands, and had a cult following that continued to use their hardware, but eventually they fell too far behind the technology curve because they were tied to a certain way of doing things. While Apple is not tied to a platform as bad as the Amiga, and may even be able to port its OS to x86 in the future (which would not be intelligent for them at all, as they saw when the Apple clones caused all kinds of hell to break loose.... imagine Apple clones on x86....), it has the same kind of vulnerabilities and protections that Amiga has against the x86 world: a "loyal" user base, and a divergent hardware architecture. History isn't too kind to desktop box manufacturers with the same kind of setups.
You're my hero. No joke.
If you want an OS that mom and dad like, you have to get rid of layers, which means you have to get rid of choice. Get comfortably being 0.3% of the desktop market.
I just took a look at several video players I could find on freshmeat, and I wasn't impressed at all. Most listed frequent crashing bugs. MPlayer spends more time describing why gcc 2.96 is bad than telling you how to install or workaround various issues. Oh yeah, and if I want a GUI with MPlayer, I have to not only download a separate skin, but also change a compiler flag.
In the meantime, my grandmother could run Windows Media Player (because it's installed in every version of Windows), play virtually every codec out there (and download the ones she doesn't have, automagically), get excellent performance (sorry, but video on Linux sucks), and wonder why I'm looking at MPlayer's header files trying to debug the goddamn makefile.
If you're talking about other Windows players, I don't see why you wouldn't use WMA, Quicktime, or Realplayer. How are they buggy, or badly-designed? What are you comparing it to?
Thank you for the advice on media players. I'll give them a whirl.
NSParadox
I have been running three Linux servers (good 'ol LAMP) and a Win2K desktop for the past year or so, and decided that the only way I could learn more about my servers is if I immersed myself in Linux all the time. After installing RedHat 7.2 on my desktop, everything for the most part worked great, EXCEPT for the video.
Frames were constantly being lost or being frozen. I had incredible difficulty resolving dependencies when COMPILING FROM SOURCE (this isn't an example of rpm problems). And about half of the MPEG's I have simply don't play. I don't know whether this is due to "proprietary" MPEG formats that Windows Media Player supports, or if it's just a matter of me not having the right codecs, but it's frusturating as all hell, and I feel it's one of the biggest issues preventing Linux from becoming a viable desktop OS, even for the not-entirely-newbie of us.
NSParadox
It would be interesting to know where exactly he is going to work. Do you know what the cost of living in the country is, typically? While I don't know of any resources, you might find it easier to do some comparisons with your current income/cost of living, the overseas nation, and compare it to other places that you know of. I would also factor in the general pain in the ass of living overseas. :)
NSParadox
Unfortunately, Netscape needs to generate noise now, and has been doing almost nothing for itself or its parent companies until the release of Netscape 6. They really had no choice to release Netscape 6. If they hadn't done it soon, Netscape would have become a company with absolutely no return on investment, a company that just spent wildly on an open-source program that was neither profitable or marketable.
I guess they were finally able to pull off the "marketable" web browser, although they loaded it up with such a huge amount of crap that many users may be wary of installing it (not to mention the installation problems, slowness in comparision to IE, etc.). I think waiting would have been ideal, but I don't think it would have been releastic for Netscape. I honestly think they waited until they felt they could afford to put their name on the browser without losing face.
NSParadox
NSParadox
It seems to me that this technology could be incredibly useful, but only for a limited number of things. Sure, you can do all sorts of internal stuff at 750Gb/s, but then you have the problem of interfacing with your input or output at normal semiconductor/optical speeds, far below 750Gb/s. It also seems a lot of complicated computations could not be carried out unless this IC had an INSANE amount of cache, because communicating with memory would be so cycle-expensive.
With their example of network switching, I wonder how exactly switch at that speed, and then not run into delivery bottlenecks. Does anyone who knows more about networking than I have any additional insight on how this could be accomplished?
NSParadox
It's funny that the author wants to somehow modify the concept of software so that not all current programs or utilities are considered software, and yet he keeps on comparing hardware to software, two COMPLETELY different things.
Hardware HAS to be re-analyzed and re-engineered because hardware exists in a very real world of electron migration, clock skew, and timing delays as parasitic resistors and capacitors hold back electrons from flying through pathways we construct using circuits, and these electrons occasionally jump out of the circuit because we think of the entire circuit as behaving in a linear fashion when it really behaves in a quantum fashion. Talk about poor engineering! (Note: this is sarcasm. I'm merely pointing out that hardware isn't as fail-proof as we all think). Also, hardware implements only the most basic of functionality. In the time it takes a coder to make an implementation of the RSA algorithm, a hardware engineer might only be able to make a very primitive implementation of a 32-bit Arithmetic Logic Unit that can now add or apply logical operations to numbers. That takes a long time to do a lot less, and is far easier to test. Some things need to be developed quickly, and are complicated nature.
A lot of the stuff in hardware can be logically proven correct, and a lot of software simply cannot. Even then, hardware still runs in to unforseen failures. I can't remember if it was a poster or the author, but someone stated that hardware engineers are less prone to mistakes because they know that once their circuit is printed, it's all over. That's not entirely true. Many complex microprocessors and other pieces of hardware include BIOS functionality that can be updated via flashing. Who knows if Intel could have ever gotten the Pentium 3 to perform with as few errors as it has without microcode updates.
Sorry, but the author just doesn't convince me about anything here. I believe both the quality of hardware and software have greatly improved. Nowadays, we have a Microsoft operating system that doesn't crash all that much (Win2K), an accessible UNIX (Linux with KDE or GNOME), applications I can teach my mother how to use easily (Microsoft Hotmail, Microsoft Word, Solitaire), and development tools that are far superior to what we had in the 1970's that allow us to make more error-free code. Sounds like progress to be, and it doesn't sound like "suckage". NSParadox
Has anyone seen someone who purely uses Hurd as an operating system, or can say that they find Hurd more useful than linux or Solaris for anything? I think installing operating systems just to add another operating system is kind of silly. I like some of the technology Hurd brings (object-oriented source, distributed computing, etc.), but why fragment the market further when there are operating systems out there with new when operating systems when others have significantly larger market presence and real utility.
I guess it's good that they are shipping it with linux as well. Kind of makes you wonder why they are even shipping Hurd anyway. Methinks it's just to be (one of?) the first computer company out there to try to market it.
Hmmm, it seems more likely to me that Bowie is "creating" a bank to receive money or media attention. After all, he supposedly made $55 million from the selling of his catalog "stock". I'm sure he didn't just donate all of the $55 million he made to some artistic or humanitarian non-profit foundation. I doubt many would disagree that a lot of what fans like about Bowie is his ability to really stand out, and as far as I know this definitely makes him stand out more than any other musician. What other musician has started a banking service? This is especially divergent when you consider that many musicians and the public accuse each other of "selling out". I would be cautious in glorifying an action of somebody's when they are very likely to receive a substantial profit.