We had computers in elementary school. Apple ][e's. Did they teach me ANYTHING? Nothing other than I dispised monochrome screens. Later we got newer systems with some computer program that was like a historical game or something. I dont remember, I didnt learn anything from that either. In high school we had a computer lab, a bunch of Mac 960 or some arcane number series. Did I learn anything from those? Nothing more than I hated MacOS 7.x. If schools really want to get any productivity out of computers they need to put them in the hands of the teachers along with some basic training.
The high school where I learned to hate MacOS 7 asked me to come back and consult for them because they were getting beacoup cash for making their school "digital". So I spent many hours and researching and writing up a very good report (IMHO) that would cost them well under budget and get two computers in every classroom, most of the teachers a laptop, a projector in all of the rooms with laptops, DVD players for the language department (watching popular movies in Spanish and French is a good way to get exposed to said language), a TV and VCR in every room, and a very nice set of thin clients in the library for browsing or printing files. My proposal was rejected. Why? Because the teachers in charge of the computer lab (read: in charge of the "digital" money) are Mac users and really want to push PowerPCs with PC adapter cards. My proposal called for PCs which they dont like. My proposal would have gotten them alot more bang for their buck, they want 3000$ Macs in every room, no one gets projectors or anything else now.
The point of that rather long rant is that teachers and administration should NOT be in charge of the purchase of computer hardware and softwware. School boards should hire professional consultants for all computers and computer related purchases. The REASON they dont buy enough software that the SIIA complains about is many teachers don't have the background or technical training to make sound IT decsions. Why do companies hire IT consultants and managers instead of making any Jonny Comelately for IT issues? Because they know what they are doing, their livlihood depends on doing their job wel land under budget. They can also be called upon for technical support and trouble shooting.
Sigh, the RIAA keep trying to make me hate them more, it's going to get to the point where I can't dispise their existance any longer. They do not give a rats ass about the music's creators or performers, they want these royalties to buy themselves a new yacht. The RIAA is run by the heads of it's member companies, they are the rich of the rich. If I thought maybe they cared about the artists on their labels this wouldn't be such a horrible thing to do, but they don't care. These record companies are just a logo and some accountants, they own the key steps that an artist needs to release a CD. They feel threatened by MP3 because it allows anyone with a few bucks to build a decent recording studio. It's all about money. The record companies want more of it and damn everyone else.
I would love to see Nintendo try to make a legal case that would stand up in a court of law procing that ROM copies were illegal. When you pay 60-70$ for a cartidge you're paying for royalties, licencing, the media itself, and a single copy of the software. But you can backup the software onto a different form of media legally. The law nowhere states where you have to store that archival copy. If you happen to store it on a remote server which happens to have FTP or HTTP access and someone downloads your archived file that is not illegal. If you intentionally sold a copy of the software to someone that would be illegal. If Nintendo's ROMs had a form of encryption that allowed the media ONLY to be read by an N64 yet you cracked the encryption and archived the ROM it still would not be illegal because Nintendo doesnt own the patent on the encryption. Why is Mario mad? Because he didn't get a big fat license fee for the download of a ROM. Nintendo also cannot say that an emulator is illegal because it uses their bytecode. They use old R4000 MIPS chips as their main processors. The R4000 is made by our friends at SGI (with the new crappy logo). They also dont own the actual ROM manufacturing process or the semiconductor memory inside their machines. Nintendo is only a licensing and development company. Their patents are on SOFTWARE not hardware. If you managed to hex edit one of their binaries that they fully owned the right to they MIGHT be able to take legal action, but copying a ROM and making a bytecode emulation program is NOT illegal.
Microsoft is doing it's damnest to kill the open source (read: free alternative to it's products) movement and is picking linux first because it's most dangerous to them in the short run. Bill Gates sees us the same way he saw all the unix gurus and creators way back in the 70's. "Why would anyone NOT want to charge obscene amounts of money for their software?" It's simple, Freedom to Innovate. Microsoft's survey on their website asking if they should be allowed to "innovate" without intervention by an outside party. We can all see right through this scam, they don't care about innovation, just information control. They want to stamp out linux and the entire open source community because it shows people what "Freedom to innovate" really means. Let them make an anti-linux group, it will make more people open their eyes and take a look at us. The more money they throw at us trying to make us back down the more they look like the evil empire. Like many others have also said, their critiques are excellent for us. It gives us a clear direction to move in. Microsoft can point out a bug or a feature that isnt supported and within weeks or months it will be fixed or added. Thats the beauty of open source, you literally have the intelligence of thousands of developers working for you. You're more of a real community when you can share source code and ideas for programs, not some artificial world that you're thrown into to give you a semblence of community and comraderie.
To illustrate the point, think about all of slashdot's users. Many if not all of us work with computers for a living. Many are very talented programmers, others are great at graphics or other multimedia, some may be good at basic design, ect.. If we all worked with each other towards a single goal, in true GNU open source fashion, we could beat the hell out of any Microsoft product. Why? Because it's a labor of love (for many of us) to work towards making systems run faster or better. We also have less limits than a single company with billions of dollars and 96 Compaq Proliant webservers. if you think about it, our livlihood (unless you program, design, ect.) doesn't rest on the product we're making, we can bring in any help we need (free of charge) from the outside, and since it's a community effort, everyone's stregnths are utilized. This is why open source works and works well, the brain pool is basically unlimited, you don't worry about someone else stealing your ideas, and if you do something wrong you dont worry about being fired, or made to work on Windows 3.1 with an 80 MB hard drive.
My scenario already exists, it IS the open source movement. Microsoft, you can't kill the open source movement. Throughout history it's been proven that a good idea and people willing to take up arms (perverbial or literal) to defend it wins out in the end.
Thanks Richard, you've given me something to rant about. LONG LIVE GNU/GPL!!!!.
It seems to me that the main cost would be if your server went down when you switched over cuz you (or someone else) did something wrong. I wonder if you mean replacing your current hardware with cheaper hardware...or just putting linux on your current hardware. If you have a decent server-hot swapable drive or at least removeable drives-set up linux on a remote box on a removeable hard drive, write the kernel for the server box then slide the hard drive into the server. It ought to switch over nicely.
It also depends on your current hardware. Do you have SMP systems with big RAIDs? Or single processor systmems with a few SCSI hard drives? Or less? Linux doesnt SMP too well but NT is pretty good at it. From what i understand ext2 isn't the best FS for a large RAID (it's not the best for my tiny 2 gig). If you wanna switch to a free *nix go with FreeBSD or OpenBSD (for lots of security). FreeBSD handles SMP rather well and it's FS has never given me many problems, but you could probably use UFS (Unix File System) for a RAID and put the kernel and such on a smaller drive. If you want LOTS of power and corporate support go with Solaris, on an SMP system it really shines.
Theres lots of alternatives to linux, pick one and move cautiously. I wouldnt suggest changing the user workstations over to linux without first giving all the users a good intro to linux and unix in general. This can be quite costly because it requires them to learn on the job and therefore not really be working or to work overtime. Xwindows and Gnome-CDE-KDE are nice for new users, but without a good understanding of how unix works they'll be lost.
for a long time now, to replace magnetic media with EPROMs or non-volatile RAM or some other incarnation. So instead of having a 9 gig magnetic disk you have a chuck-o-semi-conductors. This would replace IDE and SCSI in a matter of years if it didnt fissle out. You could have a gig of ram that stores your operating system and programs in RAM and then use the same RAM to operate in. These systems wouldn't be limited yb disk access and R/W times. Depending on the bus width and clock you could have several gigabyte per second data transfer. Not to mention instant on with your BIOS stored on the main RAM bank, sort of like a disk's boot sector. DAMN yummy.
a gel or foam insulation between the outer casing and interior casing. This would distribute and dissipate the kinetic energy from a fall or impact. If you used an insulating foam or gel it would also help the interior survive heat and cold much better. If I were gonna build one of these I would use a magnesium alloy case with gel insulation between the case and the interior case and I would also put a large guage plastic sheet behind and in front of the LCD display. This would prevent one of the worst forms of damage to your laptop, death of the LCD. The thick plastic would been the LCD mechanism secure between the sheets-the damage occurs when the LCD is bent-and would also keep people from pushing too hard on the screen and making you slap their hands. BTW, the being run over with a HUMVEE isnt THAT spectacular, the weight is distributed over most of the area of the case. I'm more impressed when they drop it onto concrete with no damage.
You want rugged? How about a 40 pound steel monster made by our friends at Northgate. Yeaaaaaaaaaah.
Re:But you can't SMP K6 processors...
on
Quake3 to go SMP
·
· Score: 1
Win 98 isnt multi threaded like NT is. Don't plug in a second CPU into a Win 98 system unless you want a naughty kernel failure.
Spending the thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on amazing fast and powerful hardware that these benchmarks were performed on I wouldnt use linux. I would use Solaris, which excels at high slient loads, scales really well even on non-native systems and has a much better native file system. I think one of the main problems with the poor performance of the UNIX variants is their file system and process by which the file were served. They were using Samba which is basically trying to port Microsoft's file serving methods to unix. Not to mention that NTFS is a very efficient file system even for the largest drives and has impressed me when I have used it. If they were using a native serving system I would guess that the performance would be alot better than it was. The REAL problems in the web serving loads wasnt linux, it was Apache which processes each send request in a different process instead of a thread of a process (AFAIK). ISS performs all serving requests as a threat inside a process, which is a little more stable under very high loads. What I would like to see improved in linux is it's file system, change the native system to a journaling file system, ever had your power die while linux was running and then reboot? fsck took half an hour to check out my 4 gig hdd. This may have been due to my hardware or something I had set wrong, but I would imagine a large RAID system would be killer.
Like the article says, this isn't really NT beating linux. It's more of NT/ISS beating linux/Apache/Samba.
The flaws as the article says are mostly with Apache and NOT linux. NT is for people with money to waste and want to keep themselves busy by constantly worrying if their precious server is going to go down hard. Linux is more stable and versatile that NT is not to mention much cheaper. It was design mainly for somputer that small businesses and individuals can afford. I dont have a Alphaserver in my garage, and I dont know many people with a quad processor computers either. A majority of linux servers are these single processor servers. As far as I'm concerned linux is a real player as you state it.
That isn't impressed by VMWare? It's nothing personal, their technology just doesnt make me want to run out and pay 99 or even 75 dollars to run two operating systems at once. It's just a virtual machine created in the server OS which the client is run inside. Java does the same thing under your native OS. Not much is new about that. If I want to run Windows I think I can go through the hassle of rebooting. While some seem to really mind rebooting, I don't. And if I cant play games, use video and sound stuff...why use Windows?
I think it's great that Compaq and SGI are starting to play nice with linux, it gives the rest of us a nice boost in support. But it shouldn't be world domination, just give everyone (not just geeks) a M$ alternative. OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, IRIX and half a dozen others can all do things linux cant, or do some things better. OpenBSD has über-security, NetBSD is rather portable and so forth. Linux can also do things better then all of them or some things they cant (like work the first time I install it unlike FreeBSd which didn't like my computer for whatever reason). What I hope happens is the companies that support linux add some of their features to linux, stuff they are good at. A journaling file system, better SMP support, ect.. I think that would lead to linux becoming a better all around OS, while still allowing for plenty of other operating systems. Heck, even MacOS and Windohs have their good sides. MacOS is obscenely easy for new users ad makes everything fluffy and cute while Windows drives more people to use unix.
I hate huge downloads...
on
Netscape 4.6
·
· Score: 1
So I still have Navigator 4.01 (I have communicator 4.51 in linux). I dispise it at times and love it at times. I cant think of a time it hasn't crashed when it's loaded a Java applet. Suprisingly I have had very few problems with IE 4.whatever.version.i.have, although IE doesnt like to read CSS scripting in DHTML pages very well. In Win98 I use Outlook98 for mailing purposes. I rather like it dispite what many people have said about it. It handles mutiple accounts decently and is rather stable. In linux I use Communicator for the web and Messanger to mail. When Opera comes out for linux I'll be very happy. It's one of the best browsers I have ever used. It's truely a browser, it doesnt have al lthe superflous crap that makes IE and Communicator into bloatware packages. It's a browser plain and simple. If they decide to add Java support and an XML parser to it...it will be perfect IMHO.
I like some notebooks I found with circuit boards as covers. Anyways else ever seen them? They are fscking heavy though. But rather geeky. I also have my Yoda watch that got turned into a necklace cuz the strap broke. I also have a Pikachu on my Jaz drive.
I dont think SGI is just going to phase out IRIX as yet. They do still make MIPS based boxes, which like to use IRIX very much, it makes them happy. They are now offering linux (as many have pointed out) for their new Intel based line. They initially offered NT...but some people want a unix OS instead of M$. This is good for linux as one anonymous coward pointed out, it just puts linux in another place to help it become an all around OS. They could have used a BSD or spent alot of money developing IRIX for x86 architecture but why bother when there's already a nice workstation OS around: linux. The whole point of having a x86 line of workstations is to give people without alot of MIPS/IRIX experience to be interested in an SGI workstation. If I had the 4000 bucks I would buy one. Have you seen the specs on them? They may be x86 but they really kick ass. 64 bit PCI bus, video I/O, huge AGP bus bandwidth. mmmmmmmmmmmmm
Network Solutions' monopoly going to be broken up? I could have sworn I heard that the registering of domain names was going to be made public forum... Maybe we should get a band of rioters together and storm the NSI headquarters with pitchforks and torches. Or we could try to convince the DOJ to look into it.
Microsquishy has turned this into a huge PR deal. If I knew how to set up web servers could I would offer to participate in the new benchmark. But I dont. But I know there are plenty of you who do, why not offer your services. This is a great opertunity to give M$ what for.
M$ posted some harsh words about linux on their new page. Someone suggested making this alot more fair by setting a price ceiling on hardware and software. Set the limit about 100,000 and see what kind of machine you can build. They say NT is 26% more cost effective then linux is, make them prove that.
It's time for the Linux folks to step up to the challenge and prove that Linux is capable of achieving better results than Windows NT Server. After all, this is the real issue.
that VM ware uses a virtual machine for each operating system. This is similar to JVM. It allows each OS to run natively on the same computer using it's resources without conflicting with the others. What *I* want to know is disk partitions/file systems. Do you need a different partition for each OS? Or a different drive entirely.
Not all theaters. Only the ones that signed limit deals and such were allowed pre-release sales. In California I know Edwards Cinemas was allowed to and so was another one...but I forgot. Anyways I know AMC wasnt allowed to. I got my tickets at Edwards 22 in Ontario, the AMC across the parking lot was practically empty. But they got to presale for Titanic so it works out doesnt it?
The idea of "infinite virtual space" is rubbish. A virtual space is only as infinite as the storage/communication medium of which it exists. Someone pointed out in order to have infinite virtual space you would need an infinite ammount of bits and so forth. This is true. As for virtual existance, I find that no matter how screwed up it seems, I rather enjoy this world I live on in my own private perception of reality. I wouldnt want to live in a virtual world. No way no how. I may have an eBay account, an email address and do forth...but does that mean I have a virtual life? I dont think so. It just means I tried to sell some software online once. And I prefer free electronic mail that never gets run over by my mail (wo)man. This is a question that popped up in the early 90s when Virtual Reality was introduced to the public. they wondered then if you make a univwerse boundless if it truely was infinite. Infinity cant be counted, computers count. Therefore computers can't reproduce infinity without being infinite themselves which means they no longer have physical substance, being infinite and all. So it becomes a paradox that lasts off into infinity...which can't be calculated. So there.
Re:My wonderfull virtual life on the net
on
Infinite Space
·
· Score: 1
Ok...this may get me yelled at..but that is JUST the kind of talk that was force fed down everyone's throat in the 1950s. Who in the hell wants to live in front of their computer? I dont want to go virtual skiing, I want to fall down in real snow. I'd like to play REAL basketball not something a programmer came up with. If I want to talk to my friends I'll go over to their house or we can go out and do something, in meatspace. in the 50s it was said in the future everything would be automated, thats where I draw the anaology. I dont want everything to be automated. I would much rather "waste" all the energy to go to my friend's house then talk to him on ICQ or email him. Sure I'd like to be able to play games with a real fast conenction and download web pages all snappy like...but I also want a REAL life that I can touch, smell, taste, see and hear with the only electrons involved are the ones that keep my protons and the protons of those around me from dispersing into the infinity of the universe.
or rather, it would be nifty if ALL backbones used these. But with all these OC connections you run into a problem being discussed over on the IPv4 thread, not enough IPs to go around. But all problems solved it would be a rad system. But if you had a terabit network hooked up to anything smaller than a super computer it would explode. A gigabit network comes real close to maxing out your average PCs bus architecture terabits would make my little 66mhz bus melt:(
As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong please) but coax doesnt need a hub, it only comes in token ring style. I like coax personally, i have my home network using coax, it's cheap and I wasnt worried about running it through my attic (which is a frieghtening place for me, my poor 10BaseT cable would be scared to death). Fiber would be cool...but I think the main problem with fiber right now is they need to make the strands out of very high quality fibers which are expensive to produce (even in mass production). It would be cool to have a multiplexed fiber network though. Every bank of computers could be a different frequency. You could add more nodes (with a new frequency) without a loss in overall bandwidth, unless you were maxing out the server's PCI throughput.
Slashdot Mirror
We had computers in elementary school. Apple ][e's. Did they teach me ANYTHING? Nothing other than I dispised monochrome screens. Later we got newer systems with some computer program that was like a historical game or something. I dont remember, I didnt learn anything from that either. In high school we had a computer lab, a bunch of Mac 960 or some arcane number series. Did I learn anything from those? Nothing more than I hated MacOS 7.x. If schools really want to get any productivity out of computers they need to put them in the hands of the teachers along with some basic training.
The high school where I learned to hate MacOS 7 asked me to come back and consult for them because they were getting beacoup cash for making their school "digital". So I spent many hours and researching and writing up a very good report (IMHO) that would cost them well under budget and get two computers in every classroom, most of the teachers a laptop, a projector in all of the rooms with laptops, DVD players for the language department (watching popular movies in Spanish and French is a good way to get exposed to said language), a TV and VCR in every room, and a very nice set of thin clients in the library for browsing or printing files. My proposal was rejected. Why? Because the teachers in charge of the computer lab (read: in charge of the "digital" money) are Mac users and really want to push PowerPCs with PC adapter cards. My proposal called for PCs which they dont like. My proposal would have gotten them alot more bang for their buck, they want 3000$ Macs in every room, no one gets projectors or anything else now.
The point of that rather long rant is that teachers and administration should NOT be in charge of the purchase of computer hardware and softwware. School boards should hire professional consultants for all computers and computer related purchases. The REASON they dont buy enough software that the SIIA complains about is many teachers don't have the background or technical training to make sound IT decsions. Why do companies hire IT consultants and managers instead of making any Jonny Comelately for IT issues? Because they know what they are doing, their livlihood depends on doing their job wel land under budget. They can also be called upon for technical support and trouble shooting.
Ok, I'm done
Sigh, the RIAA keep trying to make me hate them more, it's going to get to the point where I can't dispise their existance any longer. They do not give a rats ass about the music's creators or performers, they want these royalties to buy themselves a new yacht. The RIAA is run by the heads of it's member companies, they are the rich of the rich. If I thought maybe they cared about the artists on their labels this wouldn't be such a horrible thing to do, but they don't care. These record companies are just a logo and some accountants, they own the key steps that an artist needs to release a CD. They feel threatened by MP3 because it allows anyone with a few bucks to build a decent recording studio. It's all about money. The record companies want more of it and damn everyone else.
I would love to see Nintendo try to make a legal case that would stand up in a court of law procing that ROM copies were illegal. When you pay 60-70$ for a cartidge you're paying for royalties, licencing, the media itself, and a single copy of the software. But you can backup the software onto a different form of media legally. The law nowhere states where you have to store that archival copy. If you happen to store it on a remote server which happens to have FTP or HTTP access and someone downloads your archived file that is not illegal. If you intentionally sold a copy of the software to someone that would be illegal. If Nintendo's ROMs had a form of encryption that allowed the media ONLY to be read by an N64 yet you cracked the encryption and archived the ROM it still would not be illegal because Nintendo doesnt own the patent on the encryption. Why is Mario mad? Because he didn't get a big fat license fee for the download of a ROM. Nintendo also cannot say that an emulator is illegal because it uses their bytecode. They use old R4000 MIPS chips as their main processors. The R4000 is made by our friends at SGI (with the new crappy logo). They also dont own the actual ROM manufacturing process or the semiconductor memory inside their machines. Nintendo is only a licensing and development company. Their patents are on SOFTWARE not hardware. If you managed to hex edit one of their binaries that they fully owned the right to they MIGHT be able to take legal action, but copying a ROM and making a bytecode emulation program is NOT illegal.
Microsoft is doing it's damnest to kill the open source (read: free alternative to it's products) movement and is picking linux first because it's most dangerous to them in the short run. Bill Gates sees us the same way he saw all the unix gurus and creators way back in the 70's. "Why would anyone NOT want to charge obscene amounts of money for their software?" It's simple, Freedom to Innovate. Microsoft's survey on their website asking if they should be allowed to "innovate" without intervention by an outside party. We can all see right through this scam, they don't care about innovation, just information control. They want to stamp out linux and the entire open source community because it shows people what "Freedom to innovate" really means. Let them make an anti-linux group, it will make more people open their eyes and take a look at us. The more money they throw at us trying to make us back down the more they look like the evil empire. Like many others have also said, their critiques are excellent for us. It gives us a clear direction to move in. Microsoft can point out a bug or a feature that isnt supported and within weeks or months it will be fixed or added. Thats the beauty of open source, you literally have the intelligence of thousands of developers working for you. You're more of a real community when you can share source code and ideas for programs, not some artificial world that you're thrown into to give you a semblence of community and comraderie.
To illustrate the point, think about all of slashdot's users. Many if not all of us work with computers for a living. Many are very talented programmers, others are great at graphics or other multimedia, some may be good at basic design, ect.. If we all worked with each other towards a single goal, in true GNU open source fashion, we could beat the hell out of any Microsoft product. Why? Because it's a labor of love (for many of us) to work towards making systems run faster or better. We also have less limits than a single company with billions of dollars and 96 Compaq Proliant webservers. if you think about it, our livlihood (unless you program, design, ect.) doesn't rest on the product we're making, we can bring in any help we need (free of charge) from the outside, and since it's a community effort, everyone's stregnths are utilized. This is why open source works and works well, the brain pool is basically unlimited, you don't worry about someone else stealing your ideas, and if you do something wrong you dont worry about being fired, or made to work on Windows 3.1 with an 80 MB hard drive.
My scenario already exists, it IS the open source movement. Microsoft, you can't kill the open source movement. Throughout history it's been proven that a good idea and people willing to take up arms (perverbial or literal) to defend it wins out in the end.
Thanks Richard, you've given me something to rant about. LONG LIVE GNU/GPL!!!!.
It seems to me that the main cost would be if your server went down when you switched over cuz you (or someone else) did something wrong. I wonder if you mean replacing your current hardware with cheaper hardware...or just putting linux on your current hardware. If you have a decent server-hot swapable drive or at least removeable drives-set up linux on a remote box on a removeable hard drive, write the kernel for the server box then slide the hard drive into the server. It ought to switch over nicely.
It also depends on your current hardware. Do you have SMP systems with big RAIDs? Or single processor systmems with a few SCSI hard drives? Or less? Linux doesnt SMP too well but NT is pretty good at it. From what i understand ext2 isn't the best FS for a large RAID (it's not the best for my tiny 2 gig). If you wanna switch to a free *nix go with FreeBSD or OpenBSD (for lots of security). FreeBSD handles SMP rather well and it's FS has never given me many problems, but you could probably use UFS (Unix File System) for a RAID and put the kernel and such on a smaller drive. If you want LOTS of power and corporate support go with Solaris, on an SMP system it really shines.
Theres lots of alternatives to linux, pick one and move cautiously. I wouldnt suggest changing the user workstations over to linux without first giving all the users a good intro to linux and unix in general. This can be quite costly because it requires them to learn on the job and therefore not really be working or to work overtime. Xwindows and Gnome-CDE-KDE are nice for new users, but without a good understanding of how unix works they'll be lost.
for a long time now, to replace magnetic media with EPROMs or non-volatile RAM or some other incarnation. So instead of having a 9 gig magnetic disk you have a chuck-o-semi-conductors. This would replace IDE and SCSI in a matter of years if it didnt fissle out. You could have a gig of ram that stores your operating system and programs in RAM and then use the same RAM to operate in. These systems wouldn't be limited yb disk access and R/W times. Depending on the bus width and clock you could have several gigabyte per second data transfer. Not to mention instant on with your BIOS stored on the main RAM bank, sort of like a disk's boot sector. DAMN yummy.
a gel or foam insulation between the outer casing and interior casing. This would distribute and dissipate the kinetic energy from a fall or impact. If you used an insulating foam or gel it would also help the interior survive heat and cold much better. If I were gonna build one of these I would use a magnesium alloy case with gel insulation between the case and the interior case and I would also put a large guage plastic sheet behind and in front of the LCD display. This would prevent one of the worst forms of damage to your laptop, death of the LCD. The thick plastic would been the LCD mechanism secure between the sheets-the damage occurs when the LCD is bent-and would also keep people from pushing too hard on the screen and making you slap their hands. BTW, the being run over with a HUMVEE isnt THAT spectacular, the weight is distributed over most of the area of the case. I'm more impressed when they drop it onto concrete with no damage.
You want rugged? How about a 40 pound steel monster made by our friends at Northgate. Yeaaaaaaaaaah.
Win 98 isnt multi threaded like NT is. Don't plug in a second CPU into a Win 98 system unless you want a naughty kernel failure.
Amptron makes some inexpensive and from what I hear pretty good single and dual Slot 1 boards.
Spending the thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on amazing fast and powerful hardware that these benchmarks were performed on I wouldnt use linux. I would use Solaris, which excels at high slient loads, scales really well even on non-native systems and has a much better native file system. I think one of the main problems with the poor performance of the UNIX variants is their file system and process by which the file were served. They were using Samba which is basically trying to port Microsoft's file serving methods to unix. Not to mention that NTFS is a very efficient file system even for the largest drives and has impressed me when I have used it. If they were using a native serving system I would guess that the performance would be alot better than it was. The REAL problems in the web serving loads wasnt linux, it was Apache which processes each send request in a different process instead of a thread of a process (AFAIK). ISS performs all serving requests as a threat inside a process, which is a little more stable under very high loads. What I would like to see improved in linux is it's file system, change the native system to a journaling file system, ever had your power die while linux was running and then reboot? fsck took half an hour to check out my 4 gig hdd. This may have been due to my hardware or something I had set wrong, but I would imagine a large RAID system would be killer.
Like the article says, this isn't really NT beating linux. It's more of NT/ISS beating linux/Apache/Samba.
Anyone want to buy me 96 Proliant 5500s?
The flaws as the article says are mostly with Apache and NOT linux. NT is for people with money to waste and want to keep themselves busy by constantly worrying if their precious server is going to go down hard. Linux is more stable and versatile that NT is not to mention much cheaper. It was design mainly for somputer that small businesses and individuals can afford. I dont have a Alphaserver in my garage, and I dont know many people with a quad processor computers either. A majority of linux servers are these single processor servers. As far as I'm concerned linux is a real player as you state it.
That isn't impressed by VMWare? It's nothing personal, their technology just doesnt make me want to run out and pay 99 or even 75 dollars to run two operating systems at once. It's just a virtual machine created in the server OS which the client is run inside. Java does the same thing under your native OS. Not much is new about that. If I want to run Windows I think I can go through the hassle of rebooting. While some seem to really mind rebooting, I don't. And if I cant play games, use video and sound stuff...why use Windows?
I think it's great that Compaq and SGI are starting to play nice with linux, it gives the rest of us a nice boost in support. But it shouldn't be world domination, just give everyone (not just geeks) a M$ alternative. OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, IRIX and half a dozen others can all do things linux cant, or do some things better. OpenBSD has über-security, NetBSD is rather portable and so forth. Linux can also do things better then all of them or some things they cant (like work the first time I install it unlike FreeBSd which didn't like my computer for whatever reason). What I hope happens is the companies that support linux add some of their features to linux, stuff they are good at. A journaling file system, better SMP support, ect.. I think that would lead to linux becoming a better all around OS, while still allowing for plenty of other operating systems. Heck, even MacOS and Windohs have their good sides. MacOS is obscenely easy for new users ad makes everything fluffy and cute while Windows drives more people to use unix.
So I still have Navigator 4.01 (I have communicator 4.51 in linux). I dispise it at times and love it at times. I cant think of a time it hasn't crashed when it's loaded a Java applet. Suprisingly I have had very few problems with IE 4.whatever.version.i.have, although IE doesnt like to read CSS scripting in DHTML pages very well. In Win98 I use Outlook98 for mailing purposes. I rather like it dispite what many people have said about it. It handles mutiple accounts decently and is rather stable. In linux I use Communicator for the web and Messanger to mail. When Opera comes out for linux I'll be very happy. It's one of the best browsers I have ever used. It's truely a browser, it doesnt have al lthe superflous crap that makes IE and Communicator into bloatware packages. It's a browser plain and simple. If they decide to add Java support and an XML parser to it...it will be perfect IMHO.
I like some notebooks I found with circuit boards as covers. Anyways else ever seen them? They are fscking heavy though. But rather geeky. I also have my Yoda watch that got turned into a necklace cuz the strap broke. I also have a Pikachu on my Jaz drive.
I dont think SGI is just going to phase out IRIX as yet. They do still make MIPS based boxes, which like to use IRIX very much, it makes them happy. They are now offering linux (as many have pointed out) for their new Intel based line. They initially offered NT...but some people want a unix OS instead of M$. This is good for linux as one anonymous coward pointed out, it just puts linux in another place to help it become an all around OS. They could have used a BSD or spent alot of money developing IRIX for x86 architecture but why bother when there's already a nice workstation OS around: linux. The whole point of having a x86 line of workstations is to give people without alot of MIPS/IRIX experience to be interested in an SGI workstation. If I had the 4000 bucks I would buy one. Have you seen the specs on them? They may be x86 but they really kick ass. 64 bit PCI bus, video I/O, huge AGP bus bandwidth. mmmmmmmmmmmmm
Network Solutions' monopoly going to be broken up? I could have sworn I heard that the registering of domain names was going to be made public forum...
Maybe we should get a band of rioters together and storm the NSI headquarters with pitchforks and torches. Or we could try to convince the DOJ to look into it.
Microsquishy has turned this into a huge PR deal. If I knew how to set up web servers could I would offer to participate in the new benchmark. But I dont. But I know there are plenty of you who do, why not offer your services. This is a great opertunity to give M$ what for.
M$ posted some harsh words about linux on their new page. Someone suggested making this alot more fair by setting a price ceiling on hardware and software. Set the limit about 100,000 and see what kind of machine you can build. They say NT is 26% more cost effective then linux is, make them prove that.
It's time for the Linux folks to step up to the challenge and prove that Linux is capable of achieving better results than Windows NT Server. After all, this is the real issue.
that VM ware uses a virtual machine for each operating system. This is similar to JVM. It allows each OS to run natively on the same computer using it's resources without conflicting with the others. What *I* want to know is disk partitions/file systems. Do you need a different partition for each OS? Or a different drive entirely.
Not all theaters. Only the ones that signed limit deals and such were allowed pre-release sales. In California I know Edwards Cinemas was allowed to and so was another one...but I forgot. Anyways I know AMC wasnt allowed to. I got my tickets at Edwards 22 in Ontario, the AMC across the parking lot was practically empty. But they got to presale for Titanic so it works out doesnt it?
The idea of "infinite virtual space" is rubbish. A virtual space is only as infinite as the storage/communication medium of which it exists. Someone pointed out in order to have infinite virtual space you would need an infinite ammount of bits and so forth. This is true. As for virtual existance, I find that no matter how screwed up it seems, I rather enjoy this world I live on in my own private perception of reality. I wouldnt want to live in a virtual world. No way no how. I may have an eBay account, an email address and do forth...but does that mean I have a virtual life? I dont think so. It just means I tried to sell some software online once. And I prefer free electronic mail that never gets run over by my mail (wo)man. This is a question that popped up in the early 90s when Virtual Reality was introduced to the public. they wondered then if you make a univwerse boundless if it truely was infinite. Infinity cant be counted, computers count. Therefore computers can't reproduce infinity without being infinite themselves which means they no longer have physical substance, being infinite and all. So it becomes a paradox that lasts off into infinity...which can't be calculated. So there.
Ok...this may get me yelled at..but that is JUST the kind of talk that was force fed down everyone's throat in the 1950s. Who in the hell wants to live in front of their computer? I dont want to go virtual skiing, I want to fall down in real snow. I'd like to play REAL basketball not something a programmer came up with. If I want to talk to my friends I'll go over to their house or we can go out and do something, in meatspace. in the 50s it was said in the future everything would be automated, thats where I draw the anaology. I dont want everything to be automated. I would much rather "waste" all the energy to go to my friend's house then talk to him on ICQ or email him. Sure I'd like to be able to play games with a real fast conenction and download web pages all snappy like...but I also want a REAL life that I can touch, smell, taste, see and hear with the only electrons involved are the ones that keep my protons and the protons of those around me from dispersing into the infinity of the universe.
or rather, it would be nifty if ALL backbones used these. But with all these OC connections you run into a problem being discussed over on the IPv4 thread, not enough IPs to go around. But all problems solved it would be a rad system. But if you had a terabit network hooked up to anything smaller than a super computer it would explode. A gigabit network comes real close to maxing out your average PCs bus architecture terabits would make my little 66mhz bus melt :(
As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong please) but coax doesnt need a hub, it only comes in token ring style. I like coax personally, i have my home network using coax, it's cheap and I wasnt worried about running it through my attic (which is a frieghtening place for me, my poor 10BaseT cable would be scared to death). Fiber would be cool...but I think the main problem with fiber right now is they need to make the strands out of very high quality fibers which are expensive to produce (even in mass production). It would be cool to have a multiplexed fiber network though. Every bank of computers could be a different frequency. You could add more nodes (with a new frequency) without a loss in overall bandwidth, unless you were maxing out the server's PCI throughput.