for the guys working on TeleDisc? TeleDisc is a constellation of LEO satillites that will provide high speed internet acess wherever you are in the world (supposedly). It's supposed to work with low power nodes (mobile stuff) and higher power nodes (homes, businesses). I think it would be rad to have a single high speed internet connection that I could take on the road with me when I was out with my laptop. Now I'm wondering if Iridium's failure is going to scare off other satillite based communication ventures.
some positive news for NASA. I've become tired of seeing negative press about NASA, people complain about things like they could do any better. Whenever I hear someone bad-mouthing NASA I point Galileo out to them, functioning well dispite being three years past it's operational parameters, same with the Pioneers and Voyagers. I'm really hoping Cassini will be a huge success so the Pluto project will perk some eyebrows and hopefully get launched.
Technically the ion-drive isn't "slow" it merely has a low delta-v. Because an ion-drive can accelerate for very long periods of time the only real velocity limitation is the amount of fuel you have (which tells you how long you could run the engine). If you had an ion drive of a spacecraft and kept a constant acceleration of 9.6 m/s after a while you'd approach c. I think the approximate time is a year but I don't remember and don't feel like recalculating it. Of course once you hit about an 1/8 c you'd run into relativistic problems that would make you severely uncomfortable.
Separating the kernel and apps makes the system more stable, a fault in the game code won't necassarily bring down the whole system if the processes are separate. Every try to write a raw program that ran on some embedded system with no kernel or anything? Your program is responsible for EVERYTHING which increases it's complexity and hence makes it more prone to error. You would also have the problem os one software company doesn't write decent system operation code and the whole thing slows down.
if people are ignorant of the world around them or if they just ignore it. In America there are few people alive that remember a time of true disparity. We have individuals in the country that have personal bank accounts that are larger than the GNP of some countries. Even poor people in this country are more prosperous than the middle-class of several countries. People living on welfare aren't forced to drink from the same water they forced to shit in. The pompousness bred by this country makes me sick at times, people are dying from the common cold and we're wondering how they can get internet access. Every generation since those born in the 1940s has known a level of prosperity never seen before in the history of human civilization and they let this prosperity cloud their thought processes and colour their opinion of the rest of the world. Besides the fact that most people on the planet have absolutely no use for the internet, how would they use it if they could? The internet is predominantly English, ASCII isn't exactly designed for non-roman character sets. Don't mention Unicode please, until every web page in the world is written with Unicode rather than ASCII it is a moot point. There is the technological language barrier and a literacy barrier, many people in the world have no formal education so they don't even read their native language well if at all. How in the hell are these people supposed to read a webpage? I say if you're going to give anything to poor nations to benefit them how about fresh drinking water and some healthcare, efficient housing and a way to be self sufficient wouldn't hurt either.
if people are ignorant of the world around them or if they just ignore it. In America there are few people alive that remember a time of true disparity. We have individuals in the country that have personal bank accounts that are larger than the GNP of some countries. Even poor people in this country are more prosperous than the middle-class of several countries. People living on welfare aren't forced to drink from the same water they forced to shit in. The pompousness bred by this country makes me sick at times, people are dying from the common cold and we're wondering how they can get internet access. Every generation since those born in the 1940s has known a level of prosperity never seen before in the history of human civilization and they let this prosperity cloud their thought processes and colour their opinion of the rest of the world. Besides the fact that most people on the planet have absolutely no use for the internet, how would they use it if they could? The internet is predominantly English, ASCII isn't exactly designed for non-roman character sets. Don't mention Unicode please, until every web page in the world is written with Unicode rather than ASCII it is a moot point. There is the technological language barrier and a literacy barrier, many people in the world have no formal education so they don't even read their native language well if at all. How in the hell are these people supposed to read a webpage? I say if you're going to give anything to poor nations to benefit them how about fresh drinking water and some healthcare, efficient housing and a way to be self sufficient wouldn't hurt either.
because of all the damn frivolous patent/trademark/copyright lawsuits lately it seems like people are jumping all over Apple for defending their design. In my opinion Apple has every right to defend their original design. When I first saw the eOne I laughed my ass off because I thought "wow what an iMac knock-off". It isn't like Apple is trying to patent the all-in-one computer idea, they are merely trying to prevent market confusion. Look at the Toyota Celica and the Mitsubishi Eclipse, depending on what model you see it can be hard to tell the two cars apart, which creates product confusion. Whichever company came up with the design's shape first could conceivably say "Hands off dude, no dinero no toke" and file a lawsuit.
I find it a bit poetic that a system with so much hype turned out to be a bit of a fiasco. The PS2 seems to me a bit doomed from the start, I haven't seen anything for it that impressed me and they have a fight with Sega with the Dreamcast. I'll end up having to buy a PS2 so I can get FF10 and 11, I'm sick like that. Other than Final Fantasy I can't think of any other reasons why I would actually want a PS2, to me it is just more of the same. In another 2 years I'll put together a PC (or equivilent) that will be as or more powerful than the PS2. The same thing happened with the PSX, when it was released it beat the crap out of the PC gaming makret, people were still running around in Doom on the PC. Now the average PC whoops on the PSX's ass. It would be impressive to me if it had some sort of 3D projector aparatus so Squall and Rinoa were 3 feet tall and had a 120 degree viewing angle or something, that would have been really spectacular.
I'm a bit worried about the story for this movie, the FF games have had stories comparable to novels while the brief diddy on the site doesn't lend itself well to a story. I'm going to go see it either way. I am impressed with the 100% CG animation of the movie, George Lucas eat your heart out. I think it would be really funny to find out it was rendered on a processor farm on PS2s. As for translations (into Japanese among other languages) I think it might be possible to re-synch the lips to the other languages if Sony wanted to spend a few bucks to do it. Pixar re-rendered Bug's Life to fit into the 4:3 aspect ratio for the videos, Sony could do something similar so it won't look like a bad kung-fu movie. I say they should have the blue text boxes in any case!
COntrary to what many people have said, I think it is a good thing that hardware manufacturers are building their own distrobutions and kernels for Linux. Thinking that there ought to be a single Linux distro that should work on all systems equally well means it will work equally crappy on all systems. Every processor and chipset is a different beast and should have customized code to run it at its highest level of efficiency. A single kernel recompiled to run on different types of processors doesn't make alot of sense to me because some processors and chipsets behave so differently. What I would not like to see if the fragmentation that UNIX suffered between the versions the colleges were releasing and the versions Bell Labs continued to work on. There's already arguments about which is a better distro (which is two people arguing that the sky is blue), what isn't needed is different design philosophies.
Well since the government wants to keep tabs on its citizens I say the tabs ought to start at the top. Every website visited by every government employee ought to be logged and made public record, this information should be turned into a database that could be searched to find ought who was going where and when. IRS auditors should have their name and home address on the paperwork they give out. Lastly, Bill should install a PresCam webcam in the oval office. If we can't have anonimity or privacy then the government shouldn't either. This bullshit goes to show how ignorant the current administration is regarding technology of any form. During the industrial revolution the government sat by while entire forests were cut down in order to build a spoon factory with tons of industrial waste being poured into locals water supplies. It isn't like no one understood environmental impact back then, they just ignored it. Our current rulers have also decided to let big companies tell them what to do by supporting these stupid measures. Someone pointed out sexual abuse FAQs and other such things, without online anonimity it would make the situation worse for anyone trying to access such material. It would be a boon to companies like DoubleClick that want to build a gigantic database of your surfing habits. It's just a step closer to having a bar code in the back of your neck.
Any intelligent and savvy CIO will naturally fight UCITA, shrinkwrap licenses and licenses that can be changed at any time are a company's mortal enemy. If UCITA passes in your state it would mean patent and licensing laws would be a standard part of CIS curriculums in colleges.
Since the marketing people at Dell, Compaq, and Gateway realize their consumer base is composed of idiots and buffoons they hype up these "ultra-fast" processors and tell people it will last them into the next geological epoch. However people with a little more technical savvy and reasoning skills (we also tie our shoes without help from our mommies, most of us anyways) realize that higher speed doesnt mean better performance. The anaology between a Ferarri and a Beetles is that both will get you there but one will get you there faster, that may be so but the Beetle will be able to go farther because it doesn't use as much gas and run for a longer time because it's less likely to break down because of less stress on the engine. Where consumers ought to start looking isn't faster processors, merely a larger number of them. Multiple processor setups will greatly increase the speed and efficiency of programs if they're written with multi-threading in mind. People who build servers and mainframes like Sun and IBM have realized this already. Now all it will take is a trickling down of the technology to the average consumer. The price/performance rate is much better on a dual setup than buying a 1Ghz processor. Be has really excellent SMP performance because all of it's apps are designed with SMP in mind, only a handful of Windows apps are and Linux apps usually need some code tweaking to work correctly. I'd love to see consumer SMP boxes, especially from people like Apple who are really creaming over media editing on personal systems (Be has already worked through this idea). While we're migrating to SMP set-ups, lets kill off ATA please.
I'm so sick of morons asking for dual Crusoe motherboards/setups. Are you people retarded? The Crusoe is designed for low power low profile devices, this means it is designed for things the size of laptops, not 2' beige towers! A dual Crusoe would mean a complete rework on the VLIW translation code and the ability to buy these things retail not to metnino MORE POWER. You're not going to buy these retail, they're going to be supplied by OEMs. Dual machines come from the need for beacoup processing power, the Crusoe is not designed for beaucoup processing power.
Bundles are something they have been needed for a long time from a user standpoint. New users almost always nuke a needed linked library or some file because they didn't recognize it and therefore didn't think it was important. I have missed the Extentions folder several times on my PB because of the trackpad and my big fingers. Windows and Linux devheads ought to take a que and try to incorpoarate a similar system into their apps. Windows 98 had CABs which were never much implimented by developers and therefore never seen by much of anyone. XML is another nice choice for congifuration, especially with the parser embedded in the core of the OS. Aqua on the otherhand bothers me, it seems like a nice idea and it is cute but is it going to get in the way of people like me who use professional apps like Photoshop? I don't want to fight with the UI when I want to apply a filter or scale something. I'd like OS X's stability and robustness but I really don't want a massive GUI hogging up my Powerbook's resources just to minimize a window. This was much longer but IE refreshed and nuked it.
is a CHEAP routing box that will hook up to a DSL or cable and have work without me messing with it. I really don't enjoy treaking my Linux box by edinig ASCII conf files and then have to reboot all the Windows machines to change the network settings. Oh yeah, if I pay for something I intend to own it, not pay to borrow it from IBM.
but more to the point. My friend and I had a discussion about this yesterday, it's easy to find all the new singles from different bands since thats what people hear on the radio and go download. What you don't find a good deal of is B-sides, smaller bands (even "big" punk bands), and the tracks from the middle of the CD. Look for a full album of Pink Floyd or The Addicts, they are HARD to find as mp3s. Maybe the piracy crap was just reverse psychology...
of the Unices' GUI is also a very glaring weakness. X is a great system when you want to allow people terminal access to a machine with some pictures. X isn't the best program in the world for personal systems though. For starters it can be a big security risk even if you know how to configure it. Second of all it has no intrinsic configuration or control and lacks "user friendly" features. If you look at Explorer for Windows it is a WM, DE and windoing system all rolled into one. This many people would argue is a bad thing but for users who don't enjoy 3 hours of configuration and bad suncing problems it is handy. I think X could be supplimented by a non-networked GUI that had window managers and desktop environments installed as modules on top of the base GUI. A modular system would allow for customization but being a single program it would't have undue complexity that people have to deal with. It's difficult explain to someone the concept of an X server and X client. X also suffers from obfuscation, people can use it for years without knowing all the configuration utilities for it. All aspects of the program should be configurable from a SINGLE utility, not 400.
I hope that's a typo because I wouldn't want to be the guy paying the utility bills for a U-SPARC datacenter. I think the SPARC is being out performed by other cheaper processors but I also think alot of people are forgetting something. SPARC boxes running Solaris will crawl at times with a single processor but as you add processors the system's speed increases dramatically. Try building a 16 processor Xeon box running Linux, without a major kernel overhaul it won't run very well. Solaris runs right out of the box on as many processors as you want. Anyways, back to the processor. That thing is a monster using a.25 micron die. Using such a huge die (compared to MPPC and x86 processors) has the disadvantage of producing alot of heat. Sun needs to invest in shrinking down their die sizes to get more computational power for the same price instead of just making things more complex. Maybe even a.22 or.18 micron SPARC? If it were my datacenter I think I might go with the U-SPARC 3. Oh and for you people calling Sun/SPARC/Solaris slow because you used an Ultra 5, grab some more RAM, a graphics adapter add-on, and use something other than CDE and I think you'll see a performance boost.
of a wireless office/home/world bothers me a bit. Anyone who knows the first thing about EM radiation is that it WILL interact with matter. As it happens 2.4ghz is the resonant frequency of water which is why microwave ovens use it to heat up food. Lets say a 20 year old uses 2.4ghz devices his entire life, it's entirely probable that he will develope some form of cancer due to the RF he used his whole life. I think the 2.4ghz band ought to have been blocked off until sufficient testing could be done so we know exactly how reactive our neurons are to RFI. Yeah I might sound paranoid but I don't want my house or office to be a health hazard because I want to tidy up my wiring. If BLuetooth takes off stupendously most of the toys you buy will be spitting out 1mW of microwaves. That isn't terrible but you need to think in long term exposure, especially for the true geeks that would use these kind of things constantly. Don't get me wrong, I like wireless technologies but like anything else there needs to be a logical process applied to them.
I find it amusing that people talk of UI and suddenly get into fights about CLI and GUI. The problem with Linux is NOT its interface. How many years did completely non-technical people use DOS for their every day jobs? Plenty. Linux's problem lies in the fact that it lacks something Windows and MacOS both have. Both systems have a single guiding influence, they have control over all the utilities and interfaces and all of that stuff that gets packaged into their OS. I have yet to see a Linux distro release an entire distrobution with the only reused code being the code in the kernel itself. Distros just repack a bunch of utilities written by various people or groups and maybe write some software themselves to include. Just look at the difference between vi and emacs, they can both do many of the same things but they act almost completely different. Regular users like a single style of interface, a square will always be a square and always act like a square even if it's put on top of a circle. The community OS and the corporate OS will by definition always have to remain separate. That has been my major criticism of Linux, it has excellent capabilities but it lacks a common style throughout. For Linux to become a permenant part of the business world it will have to go from being a community OS to a corporate OS which no one in the community wants. This might be off-topic but it does have to do with what people are responding to Connell with.
You hit the nail right on the head. Linux itself is easy to install, you push a few buttons and utilities do everything for you. Because Linux is a group effort that isn't really guided by any one person or charter there tends to be a great deal of difference in the way things work. Just look at CLI email programs, elm and pine have completely different interfaces and a way of acting. Emacs and vi also have immensely different interfaces that can be very confusing to people. I know people that have been using Unix variants for year but have never touched vi because it's so backwards from things like pico and emacs. For the most part two Windows programs will interface and behave in very similar ways so a user can figure out one interface style and be able to use that for every program they use. Until Linux sees some more work in this area many people will stay clear of it.
Slashdot Mirror
for the guys working on TeleDisc? TeleDisc is a constellation of LEO satillites that will provide high speed internet acess wherever you are in the world (supposedly). It's supposed to work with low power nodes (mobile stuff) and higher power nodes (homes, businesses). I think it would be rad to have a single high speed internet connection that I could take on the road with me when I was out with my laptop. Now I'm wondering if Iridium's failure is going to scare off other satillite based communication ventures.
some positive news for NASA. I've become tired of seeing negative press about NASA, people complain about things like they could do any better. Whenever I hear someone bad-mouthing NASA I point Galileo out to them, functioning well dispite being three years past it's operational parameters, same with the Pioneers and Voyagers. I'm really hoping Cassini will be a huge success so the Pluto project will perk some eyebrows and hopefully get launched.
Technically the ion-drive isn't "slow" it merely has a low delta-v. Because an ion-drive can accelerate for very long periods of time the only real velocity limitation is the amount of fuel you have (which tells you how long you could run the engine). If you had an ion drive of a spacecraft and kept a constant acceleration of 9.6 m/s after a while you'd approach c. I think the approximate time is a year but I don't remember and don't feel like recalculating it. Of course once you hit about an 1/8 c you'd run into relativistic problems that would make you severely uncomfortable.
Separating the kernel and apps makes the system more stable, a fault in the game code won't necassarily bring down the whole system if the processes are separate. Every try to write a raw program that ran on some embedded system with no kernel or anything? Your program is responsible for EVERYTHING which increases it's complexity and hence makes it more prone to error. You would also have the problem os one software company doesn't write decent system operation code and the whole thing slows down.
if people are ignorant of the world around them or if they just ignore it. In America there are few people alive that remember a time of true disparity. We have individuals in the country that have personal bank accounts that are larger than the GNP of some countries. Even poor people in this country are more prosperous than the middle-class of several countries. People living on welfare aren't forced to drink from the same water they forced to shit in. The pompousness bred by this country makes me sick at times, people are dying from the common cold and we're wondering how they can get internet access. Every generation since those born in the 1940s has known a level of prosperity never seen before in the history of human civilization and they let this prosperity cloud their thought processes and colour their opinion of the rest of the world.
Besides the fact that most people on the planet have absolutely no use for the internet, how would they use it if they could? The internet is predominantly English, ASCII isn't exactly designed for non-roman character sets. Don't mention Unicode please, until every web page in the world is written with Unicode rather than ASCII it is a moot point. There is the technological language barrier and a literacy barrier, many people in the world have no formal education so they don't even read their native language well if at all. How in the hell are these people supposed to read a webpage? I say if you're going to give anything to poor nations to benefit them how about fresh drinking water and some healthcare, efficient housing and a way to be self sufficient wouldn't hurt either.
if people are ignorant of the world around them or if they just ignore it. In America there are few people alive that remember a time of true disparity. We have individuals in the country that have personal bank accounts that are larger than the GNP of some countries. Even poor people in this country are more prosperous than the middle-class of several countries. People living on welfare aren't forced to drink from the same water they forced to shit in. The pompousness bred by this country makes me sick at times, people are dying from the common cold and we're wondering how they can get internet access. Every generation since those born in the 1940s has known a level of prosperity never seen before in the history of human civilization and they let this prosperity cloud their thought processes and colour their opinion of the rest of the world.
Besides the fact that most people on the planet have absolutely no use for the internet, how would they use it if they could? The internet is predominantly English, ASCII isn't exactly designed for non-roman character sets. Don't mention Unicode please, until every web page in the world is written with Unicode rather than ASCII it is a moot point. There is the technological language barrier and a literacy barrier, many people in the world have no formal education so they don't even read their native language well if at all. How in the hell are these people supposed to read a webpage? I say if you're going to give anything to poor nations to benefit them how about fresh drinking water and some healthcare, efficient housing and a way to be self sufficient wouldn't hurt either.
because of all the damn frivolous patent/trademark/copyright lawsuits lately it seems like people are jumping all over Apple for defending their design. In my opinion Apple has every right to defend their original design. When I first saw the eOne I laughed my ass off because I thought "wow what an iMac knock-off". It isn't like Apple is trying to patent the all-in-one computer idea, they are merely trying to prevent market confusion. Look at the Toyota Celica and the Mitsubishi Eclipse, depending on what model you see it can be hard to tell the two cars apart, which creates product confusion. Whichever company came up with the design's shape first could conceivably say "Hands off dude, no dinero no toke" and file a lawsuit.
I find it a bit poetic that a system with so much hype turned out to be a bit of a fiasco. The PS2 seems to me a bit doomed from the start, I haven't seen anything for it that impressed me and they have a fight with Sega with the Dreamcast. I'll end up having to buy a PS2 so I can get FF10 and 11, I'm sick like that. Other than Final Fantasy I can't think of any other reasons why I would actually want a PS2, to me it is just more of the same. In another 2 years I'll put together a PC (or equivilent) that will be as or more powerful than the PS2. The same thing happened with the PSX, when it was released it beat the crap out of the PC gaming makret, people were still running around in Doom on the PC. Now the average PC whoops on the PSX's ass. It would be impressive to me if it had some sort of 3D projector aparatus so Squall and Rinoa were 3 feet tall and had a 120 degree viewing angle or something, that would have been really spectacular.
yeah save your comment for the other thousand people who did NOT see the intentional error ;)
I'm a bit worried about the story for this movie, the FF games have had stories comparable to novels while the brief diddy on the site doesn't lend itself well to a story. I'm going to go see it either way. I am impressed with the 100% CG animation of the movie, George Lucas eat your heart out. I think it would be really funny to find out it was rendered on a processor farm on PS2s. As for translations (into Japanese among other languages) I think it might be possible to re-synch the lips to the other languages if Sony wanted to spend a few bucks to do it. Pixar re-rendered Bug's Life to fit into the 4:3 aspect ratio for the videos, Sony could do something similar so it won't look like a bad kung-fu movie. I say they should have the blue text boxes in any case!
COntrary to what many people have said, I think it is a good thing that hardware manufacturers are building their own distrobutions and kernels for Linux. Thinking that there ought to be a single Linux distro that should work on all systems equally well means it will work equally crappy on all systems. Every processor and chipset is a different beast and should have customized code to run it at its highest level of efficiency. A single kernel recompiled to run on different types of processors doesn't make alot of sense to me because some processors and chipsets behave so differently. What I would not like to see if the fragmentation that UNIX suffered between the versions the colleges were releasing and the versions Bell Labs continued to work on. There's already arguments about which is a better distro (which is two people arguing that the sky is blue), what isn't needed is different design philosophies.
Well since the government wants to keep tabs on its citizens I say the tabs ought to start at the top. Every website visited by every government employee ought to be logged and made public record, this information should be turned into a database that could be searched to find ought who was going where and when. IRS auditors should have their name and home address on the paperwork they give out. Lastly, Bill should install a PresCam webcam in the oval office. If we can't have anonimity or privacy then the government shouldn't either. This bullshit goes to show how ignorant the current administration is regarding technology of any form. During the industrial revolution the government sat by while entire forests were cut down in order to build a spoon factory with tons of industrial waste being poured into locals water supplies. It isn't like no one understood environmental impact back then, they just ignored it. Our current rulers have also decided to let big companies tell them what to do by supporting these stupid measures. Someone pointed out sexual abuse FAQs and other such things, without online anonimity it would make the situation worse for anyone trying to access such material. It would be a boon to companies like DoubleClick that want to build a gigantic database of your surfing habits. It's just a step closer to having a bar code in the back of your neck.
Any intelligent and savvy CIO will naturally fight UCITA, shrinkwrap licenses and licenses that can be changed at any time are a company's mortal enemy. If UCITA passes in your state it would mean patent and licensing laws would be a standard part of CIS curriculums in colleges.
Since the marketing people at Dell, Compaq, and Gateway realize their consumer base is composed of idiots and buffoons they hype up these "ultra-fast" processors and tell people it will last them into the next geological epoch. However people with a little more technical savvy and reasoning skills (we also tie our shoes without help from our mommies, most of us anyways) realize that higher speed doesnt mean better performance. The anaology between a Ferarri and a Beetles is that both will get you there but one will get you there faster, that may be so but the Beetle will be able to go farther because it doesn't use as much gas and run for a longer time because it's less likely to break down because of less stress on the engine. Where consumers ought to start looking isn't faster processors, merely a larger number of them. Multiple processor setups will greatly increase the speed and efficiency of programs if they're written with multi-threading in mind. People who build servers and mainframes like Sun and IBM have realized this already. Now all it will take is a trickling down of the technology to the average consumer. The price/performance rate is much better on a dual setup than buying a 1Ghz processor. Be has really excellent SMP performance because all of it's apps are designed with SMP in mind, only a handful of Windows apps are and Linux apps usually need some code tweaking to work correctly. I'd love to see consumer SMP boxes, especially from people like Apple who are really creaming over media editing on personal systems (Be has already worked through this idea). While we're migrating to SMP set-ups, lets kill off ATA please.
I'm so sick of morons asking for dual Crusoe motherboards/setups. Are you people retarded? The Crusoe is designed for low power low profile devices, this means it is designed for things the size of laptops, not 2' beige towers! A dual Crusoe would mean a complete rework on the VLIW translation code and the ability to buy these things retail not to metnino MORE POWER. You're not going to buy these retail, they're going to be supplied by OEMs. Dual machines come from the need for beacoup processing power, the Crusoe is not designed for beaucoup processing power.
Bundles are something they have been needed for a long time from a user standpoint. New users almost always nuke a needed linked library or some file because they didn't recognize it and therefore didn't think it was important. I have missed the Extentions folder several times on my PB because of the trackpad and my big fingers. Windows and Linux devheads ought to take a que and try to incorpoarate a similar system into their apps. Windows 98 had CABs which were never much implimented by developers and therefore never seen by much of anyone. XML is another nice choice for congifuration, especially with the parser embedded in the core of the OS. Aqua on the otherhand bothers me, it seems like a nice idea and it is cute but is it going to get in the way of people like me who use professional apps like Photoshop? I don't want to fight with the UI when I want to apply a filter or scale something. I'd like OS X's stability and robustness but I really don't want a massive GUI hogging up my Powerbook's resources just to minimize a window. This was much longer but IE refreshed and nuked it.
is a CHEAP routing box that will hook up to a DSL or cable and have work without me messing with it. I really don't enjoy treaking my Linux box by edinig ASCII conf files and then have to reboot all the Windows machines to change the network settings. Oh yeah, if I pay for something I intend to own it, not pay to borrow it from IBM.
but more to the point. My friend and I had a discussion about this yesterday, it's easy to find all the new singles from different bands since thats what people hear on the radio and go download. What you don't find a good deal of is B-sides, smaller bands (even "big" punk bands), and the tracks from the middle of the CD. Look for a full album of Pink Floyd or The Addicts, they are HARD to find as mp3s. Maybe the piracy crap was just reverse psychology...
of the Unices' GUI is also a very glaring weakness. X is a great system when you want to allow people terminal access to a machine with some pictures. X isn't the best program in the world for personal systems though. For starters it can be a big security risk even if you know how to configure it. Second of all it has no intrinsic configuration or control and lacks "user friendly" features. If you look at Explorer for Windows it is a WM, DE and windoing system all rolled into one. This many people would argue is a bad thing but for users who don't enjoy 3 hours of configuration and bad suncing problems it is handy. I think X could be supplimented by a non-networked GUI that had window managers and desktop environments installed as modules on top of the base GUI. A modular system would allow for customization but being a single program it would't have undue complexity that people have to deal with. It's difficult explain to someone the concept of an X server and X client. X also suffers from obfuscation, people can use it for years without knowing all the configuration utilities for it. All aspects of the program should be configurable from a SINGLE utility, not 400.
I hope that's a typo because I wouldn't want to be the guy paying the utility bills for a U-SPARC datacenter. I think the SPARC is being out performed by other cheaper processors but I also think alot of people are forgetting something. SPARC boxes running Solaris will crawl at times with a single processor but as you add processors the system's speed increases dramatically. Try building a 16 processor Xeon box running Linux, without a major kernel overhaul it won't run very well. Solaris runs right out of the box on as many processors as you want. Anyways, back to the processor. That thing is a monster using a .25 micron die. Using such a huge die (compared to MPPC and x86 processors) has the disadvantage of producing alot of heat. Sun needs to invest in shrinking down their die sizes to get more computational power for the same price instead of just making things more complex. Maybe even a .22 or .18 micron SPARC? If it were my datacenter I think I might go with the U-SPARC 3. Oh and for you people calling Sun/SPARC/Solaris slow because you used an Ultra 5, grab some more RAM, a graphics adapter add-on, and use something other than CDE and I think you'll see a performance boost.
You moron
The 450mhz G4 processor keeps up and at times top a 700mhz Athlon, megahertz is frequency not processing power.
of a wireless office/home/world bothers me a bit. Anyone who knows the first thing about EM radiation is that it WILL interact with matter. As it happens 2.4ghz is the resonant frequency of water which is why microwave ovens use it to heat up food. Lets say a 20 year old uses 2.4ghz devices his entire life, it's entirely probable that he will develope some form of cancer due to the RF he used his whole life. I think the 2.4ghz band ought to have been blocked off until sufficient testing could be done so we know exactly how reactive our neurons are to RFI. Yeah I might sound paranoid but I don't want my house or office to be a health hazard because I want to tidy up my wiring. If BLuetooth takes off stupendously most of the toys you buy will be spitting out 1mW of microwaves. That isn't terrible but you need to think in long term exposure, especially for the true geeks that would use these kind of things constantly. Don't get me wrong, I like wireless technologies but like anything else there needs to be a logical process applied to them.
I find it amusing that people talk of UI and suddenly get into fights about CLI and GUI. The problem with Linux is NOT its interface. How many years did completely non-technical people use DOS for their every day jobs? Plenty. Linux's problem lies in the fact that it lacks something Windows and MacOS both have. Both systems have a single guiding influence, they have control over all the utilities and interfaces and all of that stuff that gets packaged into their OS. I have yet to see a Linux distro release an entire distrobution with the only reused code being the code in the kernel itself. Distros just repack a bunch of utilities written by various people or groups and maybe write some software themselves to include. Just look at the difference between vi and emacs, they can both do many of the same things but they act almost completely different. Regular users like a single style of interface, a square will always be a square and always act like a square even if it's put on top of a circle. The community OS and the corporate OS will by definition always have to remain separate. That has been my major criticism of Linux, it has excellent capabilities but it lacks a common style throughout. For Linux to become a permenant part of the business world it will have to go from being a community OS to a corporate OS which no one in the community wants. This might be off-topic but it does have to do with what people are responding to Connell with.
You hit the nail right on the head. Linux itself is easy to install, you push a few buttons and utilities do everything for you. Because Linux is a group effort that isn't really guided by any one person or charter there tends to be a great deal of difference in the way things work. Just look at CLI email programs, elm and pine have completely different interfaces and a way of acting. Emacs and vi also have immensely different interfaces that can be very confusing to people. I know people that have been using Unix variants for year but have never touched vi because it's so backwards from things like pico and emacs. For the most part two Windows programs will interface and behave in very similar ways so a user can figure out one interface style and be able to use that for every program they use. Until Linux sees some more work in this area many people will stay clear of it.