Did you, yourself, have to go through many psychological and social trials and tribulations before achieving your competence in computers? Did people point and laugh at you, call you names? Did people of the opposite sex consiously avoid you, showed no interest in you, because they knew that hanging out with you would mean ostracising themselves from their own social circle? As a matter of fact yes that happened to me and I have an X and Y chromosome, funny how geeks all share common social status whether they're male or female. When you were in college did you avoid discussing politics or technology with women? Did you talk to them at all other than when trying to come on to them? Actually I prefer talking about politics and technology with women because they're much more up for a conversation than the typical guy. I've never come onto a girl I'd just been talking to about random politics or some such. You're not helping break stereotypes dude.
I've sorta been hoping for the demise of ATA/IDE and then THIS news comes along. Of course other people have said it but I will too. IDE is a naturally inferior device interface in these times of lots of internal drives and massive amounts of storage. IDE has been one of the key determining factors in the shape and design of current PCs. Mid-towers are by far the most popular case design out now and even the desktop design before that only had four internal bays, as do most towers you can find now. There are only four bays because that is the limit on IDE drives unless you have an IDE expension card. ATA-100 is just stupid in my opinion, with a limit of devices per channel there's no way in hell to max out a channel's bandwidth unless you have a solid state drive. Even IF you maxed out two drives their internal transfer doesn't even come close to the max amount of bandwidth you have available. Not only is there a bunch of bandwidth wasted each drive needs an IRQ and DMA address, SCSI/FireWire only need a single DMA and IRQ since addressing is done between the devices and the controller. I've been chanting for IEEE 1394 to take over internal and external higher bandwidth devices and relagating USB to interfaces and small bandwidth outputs. Having one 400Mb/s (approx 50MB/s) bus would be really efficient for internal drives. Your 10x DVD and 7200rpm hard drive MIGHT fill up the wire but they'd need to be running full transfer at the same time. Even then you could just put other devices on another wire (like the S-ATA shematic). I support FireWire systems in the future for several reasons: less internal addresses used, super duper simple installation, fault tolerance, identical internal and external interface. Less internal addresses is good for the person who buys a full tower and fills it up with toys, easy installation helps everyone, fault tolerance means a loose cable won't totalfuck your RAID, and identical interfaces means removable drives or easily transportable devices that natively support hot swapping. As for USB 2.0 whoopdefrick.
Firewire is scores different from USB. All Firewire devices work independant of the processor meaning my camcorder can transfer video directly to my hard drive while my processor is busy handling other tasks. USB on the otherhand needs the processor in order to communicate between two devices which ends up slowing the system down with large file transfers. Bandwidth isn't everything. Because Firewire drives have hteir own mini-processors you can have two devices (lets say a camcorder and FW hard drive) that can communicate without even needing a computer. The camcorder could just transfer the video to the hard drive by plugging the two together. USB devices will not work in such ways. Besides the licensing fee Apple charges to use the name "FireWire" is 25 per device (or port) which is negligible and that is because Apple owns the term "FireWire", Sony doesn't have to pay anything by calling their IEEE 1394 port the i.Link.
The Lombard (Bronze Keyboard) 333 and 400s also had dual display with video mirroring. I've used it several times, like the time I hooked it up to the 56" TV in the dorm at my friend's school.
so you all know, at Intel's processor forum going on they were running the Powerpoint presentation on a Willamette. I think it was running at 1.1ghz rather than 1.5 though, while theres a 400mhz speed difference it showed the validity of the chip's ability.
the author has a perfectly valid point, it seems no one can be critical of Linux without a thousand kids emailing them and being immature. Even saying Linux users are immature in this post is seen as some kind of posturing that MUST be a flame. I've seen dozens of articles linked to/. that people whined and cried over because the author of the story didn't hail Saint Linus and keep a copy of the Cathdral and the Bazaar under their pillow. The same thing happens when you go into a Linux IRC channel or usenet group, people make fun of you and become smart asses when you ask a simple question. The collumists are not hurting Linux by giving it free airtime, the people hurting Linux and the validity of Open Source are the whiners that flame authors up the wazoo. Never trust a zealot, they're in it for themselves.
has anyone ever proposed a DNS system similar to that on Usenet? I think it would be pretty cool for websites to be able to have any name they wanted with no suffix but instead a prefix. The good points would be you could make any prefix you wanted or use a number of commodity prefixes. Slashdot would be something like org.slashdot with subdomains org.slashdot.apache, org.slashdot.askslashdot, ect. The key to this DNS system would be the fact that one company wouldn't be given initial control over it which means competition would be high and prices for domain registrations would be cheap and it could be backwards compatible with the current DNS system.
Comparing Linux to NT isn't quite as fair as comparing NT to 98 or Linux 2.2.3 to 1.3.2. I mean they are completely different OS structures and are both programmed in different ways. They're both called to perform the same task but their differences make them hard to actually compare. With Linux you can customize the kernel to fit your hardware exactly, NT has to be run on the hardware right out of the box. If you compared NT to 98 it would kick its ass, same with comparing an older Linux kernel with the newest ones.
ought to contract someone to build them some PPC based laptops running a *nix. P3 and Celeron based laptops take up too much power in my opinion, you have to remember you're running these things in a very closed environment with limited power. My Powerbook uses 7 less WPH than a comparable Dell Inspirion, most of the difference is the processor. I bet NASA could get IBM to build them some since they have both PPC licenses and have pretty good working knowlege of both Linux and AIX. I hope whatever they go with runs a Unix variant, especially an open one like Linux. Linux would mazimize the hardware on the notebooks and allow the astronauts and engineers to edit it to their needs.
Sony anymore, not because of media fiascos like the DVD crap but because the VAIO I owned caused me nothing but trouble. It was a VAIo desktop, not notebook but they's the same company. The specs could be a desktop replacement but I'd like to see it work for a few hours first. The Sonys I do think are cool are the subnotebooks which are pretty decently priced at 1499$ IMHO.
lets apply a logical process. Windows is distributed as binaries in non-incremental fashion. Linux on the other hand is released in small upgrade increments, the kernel gets patched all the time and so do many of its programs. Windows NT is not a kernel and a command shell, its comparable to a distrobution in size and complexity. I would laugh my ass off if anyone suggested any distro of Linux had no bugs. Has anyone counted the lines of code in Redhat's distro lately? I would imagine it in up there in number. I'm not trying to defend Microsoft as much as I'm trying to make a bunch of prima donas think for themselves and stop the "Me too!" posts. Of course Win2k has alot of bugs but most of these bugs will probably not be seen by users if they are even an interfacable bug. As many other people have said bugs to Microsoft can be anyhting from obfuscated code to a missing funtion or bad library call. Any complex system is bound to have errors, thats just how things work out statistically. When I see a Linux distro with absolutely no bugs and really clean code with lots of comments and documentation and no hard coding single solution functions I'll be really impressed and I will commend the amazing power of open source but until then stop bashing the work of other programmers. Microsoft the corporation didn't program Windows 2000, a group of programmers employed by Microsoft the corporation did. A programmer is a programmer, you're all doing the same things towards the same goal. Have some professional respect.
After seeing Episode 1 for the second time and watching Darth Maul beat some ass I got to thinking a rad character would be a female Sith. In the books the evil females were some of the better characters. I'd really like to see a little more in-depth look at the Sith and Dark Jedi in general, we've all heard warning about the Dark Side but come on, it would be cool to have the second Episode delve into the history of the Sith and maybe some about the Jedi too. Flashback scenes to several thousand years prior to the story might even be a cool idea. Oh well, I can only hope.
I have a Powerbook G3, I also happen to have a Playstation and a couple games I like to play. My brother plays on the Playstation much more than I do because I'm at school most of the freakin day. I've been waiting for this lawsuit to pan out so I wouldn't buy a product with an injuction on it. But not I probably will end up getting a copy, being able to play my favourite PSX games on the run with my laptop will be a really nice change. I'll finally get the chance to enter the time condensed realm and beat the damn game. I can see the point of Sony's case but I don't think it holds water especially since Connectix isn't doing or suggesting anything illegal. If Sony were smart they would have already released their own PSX emulator for the PC and Mac. When PSX was released it kicked the pants out of all the computers out at the time but the way we work with PC hardware the PSX was so longer cutting edge. The same will happen to the PSX2, PC hardware will eventually catch up and surpass it. If Sony had released a software emulator a year or so ago they could have made a killing, not only do they have every single little spec on the PSX but they also had a user base of millions of people. Bottom line, development would be nearly free which means the price of the program would be all gravy.
this all rather entertaining. These people should be given a medal for exemplifying problems that needed solving. The first part of the problem is a bunch of Windows users on their spiffy new cable modems without following directions and leaving file sharing on and not installing a firewall of some sort. To aid the script kiddies' attacks most people with really high bandwidth connections don't take the proper precautions security wise and leave themselves very open to trojans that the kiddies can use for DoS attacks. The second problem is the fact that these supposedly high power high profile websites don't have adquate security and/or fault tolderant systems so a backup could be brought online if an attack was taking place.
No offense at all but a good book is Linux for Dummies published by IDG. If you prefer you can pick up Unix for Dummies which has general Unix knowlege along with Linux commands that correspond to ones for say Solaris or FreeBSD. Both books are pretty good and written with a sense of humour. They talk more about using Linux rather than admining it, there are admin books though, I would imagine IDG publishes several of them.
while controversial because people envision asteroids raining down on us like in so many movies is a very viable solution to the problems of raw resources. Lets saw we push a 500m (thats cubic meters and is pretty small compared to Ceres or Pallas) asteroid into the Earth or Moon's orbit for mining, there are many tons of raw materials just sitting there. Lets say it was a rocky asteroid (95% silicates) it could be ground up and used for any number of materials. Silicon structures (aerogel) are very light and very strong and would be easy to make from raw silicon. An iron cored asteroid would give us oodletons of ultra high quality steel, the metal would form a prime crystalize structure in microgravity and be about 5 times stronger than theb est steel made here on Earth, not to mention its production would be virtually pollution free. Besides raw material a hollowed out asteroid would make a really nice shell for a space station since the layer of rock would absorb a good deal of the solar radiation humans don't particularly like and provide a prefab superstructure. Once the infrastructure for space-mining is in place it will provide a very clean and very profitable business. The Sun spits out plenty of energy to use for smelting, factory power, material reclamation, ect. And for those Deep Impact fearing folk, we could set up specific zones for certain size asteroids, big ones wouldn't be allowed in certain orbits.
Even if the stell balls don't have the energy to explode when they impact they do have the energy to go right through most structures. A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State building would go right through someone's body. It would be for the most part a psychological weapon, a rain of high velocity steel pellets would mutilate a city.
Negligible dingleberry, Eros is very large, the probe landing on it it very very very very small by comparison. It will have a similar effect to you headbutting Mt. Everest.
needs to take some jounralism classes, you can hardly read the article because his personal bias is laid on so thick. How come everyone is clamouring for the death of Intel? If it weren't for the x86 series of processors computer technology would not be where it is today, at least night in my livingroom. I think Intel did make a major mistake with Merced/Itanium. The VLIW structure works with the Crusoe which isn't touted as a powerhouse processor but it is a joke with a processor as complex as Itanium. I think with the Itanium Intel out to have taken a que from MIPS and designed a specialized core to do a given number of instructions very very fast. Of course doing so would mean no software you have now would work on it but that would be a bonus in the long run. The intelligent thing would be to make only a recompile necassary to run the software, maybe even add a little emulator in the BIOS that would allow for using x86 code. If all of the processor's instructions were SIMD capable they could easily build an ass kicking chip where the compiler would batch processes together and allow for branch prediction to keep the pipeline full. A simple chip architecture would mean alot less heat and alot cheaper chips which would do well to increase the profit margins on said chips.
If the next version per se of the internet is funded mostly by corporations like AT&T, MCI, and the Ministry of Truth you can expect it to look like a larger version of AOL. AOL is a great example for us NOT to be. The network uses proprietary protocols and formats and is open only to paying members and since the network is owned by a single entity it can censor, supress, and control every aspect of the network. The internet we all know and surf grew from a relatively small network of academic and government computers. The original architects designed the system to be naturally open in order to get funding from the government to build the network. It was also built in a web-like model to increase survivability in case of nuclear war which meant that everyone had to speak the same language in order to pass data packets through. There were standards put in place that everyone could build off of, if you have a connection and the right communication protocols you can speak to anyone on the network. The next version however is being funded by corporations and not the national government. If three companies put up the cash to build some high speed lines and distribute them to people's houses who the hell are we to complain they ought to open up their network to us when we aren't paying them for their services. I suppose the execs at the major telcoms haven't seen the light of Stallman economics. Instead of bitching we ought to figure out a way to build an open network not owned by one or two companies. If any of you read Wired a few years back it reminds me of the Andersen COnsulting ads with the school of fish swimming in the shape of a shark. A thousand pebbles weigh as much as one rock.
I've been waiting for Be to come out with something like this. Dispite what all the hardcore (downloaded Redhat 3 months ago and think they're l33t now) Linux guys have to say about it, BeOS rocks bunnies. It was inevitable the system would end up on internet appliances. Besides the really nice kernel design and programming environment the GUI is really nicely designed. Look at the other desktops you have to choose from, Windows has a taskbar that takes up a nice little portion of the screen and lots of wasted space in the typical app window. MacOS has a similar problem but has a little less clutter inside the window itself. Be on the otherhand is like using X with a WM without a DE, which is the way I like to work in X. There's a minimal amount of clutter which would lend itself to working on smaller LCD screens well. The most important part of an internet appliance isn't processing power or the size of the files it can handle, it's the ease of use and neatness of the GUI. Look at Win CE on handheld devices like the Cassiopea (sp?). The GUI is a major drawback to the usability of them because M$ tried to squeeze Explorer onto a tiny screen. CE doesn't look too bad on things like the Jornada but it could still use some work. Be has an innovative interface while still being familiar to Windows and Mac users and would look nice on the lower resolutions (640x480, 800x600) of many internet appliances. If the desktop people like K and GNOME want to make their stuff really user friendly they will scrap together 80$ for a copy of BeOS and play around on it a bit.
I want a 1Ghz chip that costs 5$ that runs MacOS X.
I just KNOW that Intel will go out of business soon.
Linux is the best thing ever, heeeeeey you meanie head open up your source code cuz we said so! Geez this topic is like a giant whine fest. The Crusoe is a good processor that will be able to hold its own against Intel's mobile chips. Big deal. This doesn't mean Intel is going to close its doors next year or that anything you buy now won't ever be obsolete. Everything eventually becomes obsolete in the computer world merely by obeying Moore's law. Intel's monkey clogging all the gears in the 32-bit x86 instruction set. Just look at the Athlon if you need convincing. The Athlon needs a ton of extra die to take care of x86 instruction handling, even Intel's chips have a rough time with x86. In my opinion x86 has FAR outlived its usefulness as an ISA. Sure we have 800Mhz Athlons but compare these to other entirely RISC based processors and you'll find that clock speed isn't everything. The thing that impressed me most with the Crusoe wasn't its handling of x86 code but the fact that Transmeta looked up RISC in a technical dictionary and actually followed the RISC ideology. Intel needs to do something similar and completely reengineer an existing chip, not revamp and speed up an old design. The Merced/Itanium was supposed to do this but everyone is still waiting for a real scoop on that project. The Crusoe achieved lower power consumption cutting down the die size while the Coppermine achieved lower power consumption by shrinking the transistor size. A chip I would be impressed by is one that was a happy medium between the two lines of thought. A 64/128-bit RISC processor that kept code translation down to a minimum (maybe with JIT instance specific compiling or compiling strait to machine code a la Java) AND most importantly had tiny transistors on a pretty small die. I would be very happy with a processor that could get me 3Gops and only dissipate 2-3 watts of power. That kind of chip is not even far fetched right this minute, it will just be whoever figures out how to balance egos and ideology. I think this can be compared in part to American cars in the 70s. For years American dealers were building behemoths that sucked gas but had pretty damn good power, then along came Honda and the other Japanese cars that were really fuel efficient but sacrificed a bit of power to get that. Eventually the American car makers tried more fuel efficient cars but ended up proving they needed to rethink their engineering philosophy. Now you can expect a decent priced car to have a good amount of power while still getting 20-25mpg in the city.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you, yourself, have to go through many psychological and social trials and tribulations before achieving your competence in computers? Did people point and laugh at you, call you names? Did people of the opposite sex consiously avoid you, showed no interest in you, because they knew that hanging out with you would mean ostracising themselves from their own social circle? As a matter of fact yes that happened to me and I have an X and Y chromosome, funny how geeks all share common social status whether they're male or female. When you were in college did you avoid discussing politics or technology with women? Did you talk to them at all other than when trying to come on to them? Actually I prefer talking about politics and technology with women because they're much more up for a conversation than the typical guy. I've never come onto a girl I'd just been talking to about random politics or some such. You're not helping break stereotypes dude.
I've sorta been hoping for the demise of ATA/IDE and then THIS news comes along. Of course other people have said it but I will too. IDE is a naturally inferior device interface in these times of lots of internal drives and massive amounts of storage. IDE has been one of the key determining factors in the shape and design of current PCs. Mid-towers are by far the most popular case design out now and even the desktop design before that only had four internal bays, as do most towers you can find now. There are only four bays because that is the limit on IDE drives unless you have an IDE expension card. ATA-100 is just stupid in my opinion, with a limit of devices per channel there's no way in hell to max out a channel's bandwidth unless you have a solid state drive. Even IF you maxed out two drives their internal transfer doesn't even come close to the max amount of bandwidth you have available. Not only is there a bunch of bandwidth wasted each drive needs an IRQ and DMA address, SCSI/FireWire only need a single DMA and IRQ since addressing is done between the devices and the controller. I've been chanting for IEEE 1394 to take over internal and external higher bandwidth devices and relagating USB to interfaces and small bandwidth outputs. Having one 400Mb/s (approx 50MB/s) bus would be really efficient for internal drives. Your 10x DVD and 7200rpm hard drive MIGHT fill up the wire but they'd need to be running full transfer at the same time. Even then you could just put other devices on another wire (like the S-ATA shematic). I support FireWire systems in the future for several reasons: less internal addresses used, super duper simple installation, fault tolerance, identical internal and external interface. Less internal addresses is good for the person who buys a full tower and fills it up with toys, easy installation helps everyone, fault tolerance means a loose cable won't totalfuck your RAID, and identical interfaces means removable drives or easily transportable devices that natively support hot swapping. As for USB 2.0 whoopdefrick.
Firewire is scores different from USB. All Firewire devices work independant of the processor meaning my camcorder can transfer video directly to my hard drive while my processor is busy handling other tasks. USB on the otherhand needs the processor in order to communicate between two devices which ends up slowing the system down with large file transfers. Bandwidth isn't everything. Because Firewire drives have hteir own mini-processors you can have two devices (lets say a camcorder and FW hard drive) that can communicate without even needing a computer. The camcorder could just transfer the video to the hard drive by plugging the two together. USB devices will not work in such ways. Besides the licensing fee Apple charges to use the name "FireWire" is 25 per device (or port) which is negligible and that is because Apple owns the term "FireWire", Sony doesn't have to pay anything by calling their IEEE 1394 port the i.Link.
The Lombard (Bronze Keyboard) 333 and 400s also had dual display with video mirroring. I've used it several times, like the time I hooked it up to the 56" TV in the dorm at my friend's school.
so you all know, at Intel's processor forum going on they were running the Powerpoint presentation on a Willamette. I think it was running at 1.1ghz rather than 1.5 though, while theres a 400mhz speed difference it showed the validity of the chip's ability.
the author has a perfectly valid point, it seems no one can be critical of Linux without a thousand kids emailing them and being immature. Even saying Linux users are immature in this post is seen as some kind of posturing that MUST be a flame. I've seen dozens of articles linked to /. that people whined and cried over because the author of the story didn't hail Saint Linus and keep a copy of the Cathdral and the Bazaar under their pillow. The same thing happens when you go into a Linux IRC channel or usenet group, people make fun of you and become smart asses when you ask a simple question. The collumists are not hurting Linux by giving it free airtime, the people hurting Linux and the validity of Open Source are the whiners that flame authors up the wazoo. Never trust a zealot, they're in it for themselves.
has anyone ever proposed a DNS system similar to that on Usenet? I think it would be pretty cool for websites to be able to have any name they wanted with no suffix but instead a prefix. The good points would be you could make any prefix you wanted or use a number of commodity prefixes. Slashdot would be something like org.slashdot with subdomains org.slashdot.apache, org.slashdot.askslashdot, ect. The key to this DNS system would be the fact that one company wouldn't be given initial control over it which means competition would be high and prices for domain registrations would be cheap and it could be backwards compatible with the current DNS system.
Comparing Linux to NT isn't quite as fair as comparing NT to 98 or Linux 2.2.3 to 1.3.2. I mean they are completely different OS structures and are both programmed in different ways. They're both called to perform the same task but their differences make them hard to actually compare. With Linux you can customize the kernel to fit your hardware exactly, NT has to be run on the hardware right out of the box. If you compared NT to 98 it would kick its ass, same with comparing an older Linux kernel with the newest ones.
ought to contract someone to build them some PPC based laptops running a *nix. P3 and Celeron based laptops take up too much power in my opinion, you have to remember you're running these things in a very closed environment with limited power. My Powerbook uses 7 less WPH than a comparable Dell Inspirion, most of the difference is the processor. I bet NASA could get IBM to build them some since they have both PPC licenses and have pretty good working knowlege of both Linux and AIX. I hope whatever they go with runs a Unix variant, especially an open one like Linux. Linux would mazimize the hardware on the notebooks and allow the astronauts and engineers to edit it to their needs.
Sony anymore, not because of media fiascos like the DVD crap but because the VAIO I owned caused me nothing but trouble. It was a VAIo desktop, not notebook but they's the same company. The specs could be a desktop replacement but I'd like to see it work for a few hours first. The Sonys I do think are cool are the subnotebooks which are pretty decently priced at 1499$ IMHO.
lets apply a logical process. Windows is distributed as binaries in non-incremental fashion. Linux on the other hand is released in small upgrade increments, the kernel gets patched all the time and so do many of its programs. Windows NT is not a kernel and a command shell, its comparable to a distrobution in size and complexity. I would laugh my ass off if anyone suggested any distro of Linux had no bugs. Has anyone counted the lines of code in Redhat's distro lately? I would imagine it in up there in number. I'm not trying to defend Microsoft as much as I'm trying to make a bunch of prima donas think for themselves and stop the "Me too!" posts. Of course Win2k has alot of bugs but most of these bugs will probably not be seen by users if they are even an interfacable bug. As many other people have said bugs to Microsoft can be anyhting from obfuscated code to a missing funtion or bad library call. Any complex system is bound to have errors, thats just how things work out statistically. When I see a Linux distro with absolutely no bugs and really clean code with lots of comments and documentation and no hard coding single solution functions I'll be really impressed and I will commend the amazing power of open source but until then stop bashing the work of other programmers. Microsoft the corporation didn't program Windows 2000, a group of programmers employed by Microsoft the corporation did. A programmer is a programmer, you're all doing the same things towards the same goal. Have some professional respect.
After seeing Episode 1 for the second time and watching Darth Maul beat some ass I got to thinking a rad character would be a female Sith. In the books the evil females were some of the better characters. I'd really like to see a little more in-depth look at the Sith and Dark Jedi in general, we've all heard warning about the Dark Side but come on, it would be cool to have the second Episode delve into the history of the Sith and maybe some about the Jedi too. Flashback scenes to several thousand years prior to the story might even be a cool idea. Oh well, I can only hope.
I have a Powerbook G3, I also happen to have a Playstation and a couple games I like to play. My brother plays on the Playstation much more than I do because I'm at school most of the freakin day. I've been waiting for this lawsuit to pan out so I wouldn't buy a product with an injuction on it. But not I probably will end up getting a copy, being able to play my favourite PSX games on the run with my laptop will be a really nice change. I'll finally get the chance to enter the time condensed realm and beat the damn game. I can see the point of Sony's case but I don't think it holds water especially since Connectix isn't doing or suggesting anything illegal. If Sony were smart they would have already released their own PSX emulator for the PC and Mac. When PSX was released it kicked the pants out of all the computers out at the time but the way we work with PC hardware the PSX was so longer cutting edge. The same will happen to the PSX2, PC hardware will eventually catch up and surpass it. If Sony had released a software emulator a year or so ago they could have made a killing, not only do they have every single little spec on the PSX but they also had a user base of millions of people. Bottom line, development would be nearly free which means the price of the program would be all gravy.
this all rather entertaining. These people should be given a medal for exemplifying problems that needed solving. The first part of the problem is a bunch of Windows users on their spiffy new cable modems without following directions and leaving file sharing on and not installing a firewall of some sort. To aid the script kiddies' attacks most people with really high bandwidth connections don't take the proper precautions security wise and leave themselves very open to trojans that the kiddies can use for DoS attacks. The second problem is the fact that these supposedly high power high profile websites don't have adquate security and/or fault tolderant systems so a backup could be brought online if an attack was taking place.
No offense at all but a good book is Linux for Dummies published by IDG. If you prefer you can pick up Unix for Dummies which has general Unix knowlege along with Linux commands that correspond to ones for say Solaris or FreeBSD. Both books are pretty good and written with a sense of humour. They talk more about using Linux rather than admining it, there are admin books though, I would imagine IDG publishes several of them.
Geez you have horrible spelling. No offense.
while controversial because people envision asteroids raining down on us like in so many movies is a very viable solution to the problems of raw resources. Lets saw we push a 500m (thats cubic meters and is pretty small compared to Ceres or Pallas) asteroid into the Earth or Moon's orbit for mining, there are many tons of raw materials just sitting there. Lets say it was a rocky asteroid (95% silicates) it could be ground up and used for any number of materials. Silicon structures (aerogel) are very light and very strong and would be easy to make from raw silicon. An iron cored asteroid would give us oodletons of ultra high quality steel, the metal would form a prime crystalize structure in microgravity and be about 5 times stronger than theb est steel made here on Earth, not to mention its production would be virtually pollution free. Besides raw material a hollowed out asteroid would make a really nice shell for a space station since the layer of rock would absorb a good deal of the solar radiation humans don't particularly like and provide a prefab superstructure. Once the infrastructure for space-mining is in place it will provide a very clean and very profitable business. The Sun spits out plenty of energy to use for smelting, factory power, material reclamation, ect. And for those Deep Impact fearing folk, we could set up specific zones for certain size asteroids, big ones wouldn't be allowed in certain orbits.
Even if the stell balls don't have the energy to explode when they impact they do have the energy to go right through most structures. A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State building would go right through someone's body. It would be for the most part a psychological weapon, a rain of high velocity steel pellets would mutilate a city.
Negligible dingleberry, Eros is very large, the probe landing on it it very very very very small by comparison. It will have a similar effect to you headbutting Mt. Everest.
needs to take some jounralism classes, you can hardly read the article because his personal bias is laid on so thick. How come everyone is clamouring for the death of Intel? If it weren't for the x86 series of processors computer technology would not be where it is today, at least night in my livingroom. I think Intel did make a major mistake with Merced/Itanium. The VLIW structure works with the Crusoe which isn't touted as a powerhouse processor but it is a joke with a processor as complex as Itanium. I think with the Itanium Intel out to have taken a que from MIPS and designed a specialized core to do a given number of instructions very very fast. Of course doing so would mean no software you have now would work on it but that would be a bonus in the long run. The intelligent thing would be to make only a recompile necassary to run the software, maybe even add a little emulator in the BIOS that would allow for using x86 code. If all of the processor's instructions were SIMD capable they could easily build an ass kicking chip where the compiler would batch processes together and allow for branch prediction to keep the pipeline full. A simple chip architecture would mean alot less heat and alot cheaper chips which would do well to increase the profit margins on said chips.
If the next version per se of the internet is funded mostly by corporations like AT&T, MCI, and the Ministry of Truth you can expect it to look like a larger version of AOL. AOL is a great example for us NOT to be. The network uses proprietary protocols and formats and is open only to paying members and since the network is owned by a single entity it can censor, supress, and control every aspect of the network. The internet we all know and surf grew from a relatively small network of academic and government computers. The original architects designed the system to be naturally open in order to get funding from the government to build the network. It was also built in a web-like model to increase survivability in case of nuclear war which meant that everyone had to speak the same language in order to pass data packets through. There were standards put in place that everyone could build off of, if you have a connection and the right communication protocols you can speak to anyone on the network. The next version however is being funded by corporations and not the national government. If three companies put up the cash to build some high speed lines and distribute them to people's houses who the hell are we to complain they ought to open up their network to us when we aren't paying them for their services. I suppose the execs at the major telcoms haven't seen the light of Stallman economics. Instead of bitching we ought to figure out a way to build an open network not owned by one or two companies. If any of you read Wired a few years back it reminds me of the Andersen COnsulting ads with the school of fish swimming in the shape of a shark. A thousand pebbles weigh as much as one rock.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
I've been waiting for Be to come out with something like this. Dispite what all the hardcore (downloaded Redhat 3 months ago and think they're l33t now) Linux guys have to say about it, BeOS rocks bunnies. It was inevitable the system would end up on internet appliances. Besides the really nice kernel design and programming environment the GUI is really nicely designed. Look at the other desktops you have to choose from, Windows has a taskbar that takes up a nice little portion of the screen and lots of wasted space in the typical app window. MacOS has a similar problem but has a little less clutter inside the window itself. Be on the otherhand is like using X with a WM without a DE, which is the way I like to work in X. There's a minimal amount of clutter which would lend itself to working on smaller LCD screens well. The most important part of an internet appliance isn't processing power or the size of the files it can handle, it's the ease of use and neatness of the GUI. Look at Win CE on handheld devices like the Cassiopea (sp?). The GUI is a major drawback to the usability of them because M$ tried to squeeze Explorer onto a tiny screen. CE doesn't look too bad on things like the Jornada but it could still use some work. Be has an innovative interface while still being familiar to Windows and Mac users and would look nice on the lower resolutions (640x480, 800x600) of many internet appliances. If the desktop people like K and GNOME want to make their stuff really user friendly they will scrap together 80$ for a copy of BeOS and play around on it a bit.
Give me one good reason why Be should open their source. And "because Linux geeks will use it" is not a good reason.
I want a 1Ghz chip that costs 5$ that runs MacOS X.
I just KNOW that Intel will go out of business soon.
Linux is the best thing ever, heeeeeey you meanie head open up your source code cuz we said so!
Geez this topic is like a giant whine fest. The Crusoe is a good processor that will be able to hold its own against Intel's mobile chips. Big deal. This doesn't mean Intel is going to close its doors next year or that anything you buy now won't ever be obsolete. Everything eventually becomes obsolete in the computer world merely by obeying Moore's law. Intel's monkey clogging all the gears in the 32-bit x86 instruction set. Just look at the Athlon if you need convincing. The Athlon needs a ton of extra die to take care of x86 instruction handling, even Intel's chips have a rough time with x86. In my opinion x86 has FAR outlived its usefulness as an ISA. Sure we have 800Mhz Athlons but compare these to other entirely RISC based processors and you'll find that clock speed isn't everything. The thing that impressed me most with the Crusoe wasn't its handling of x86 code but the fact that Transmeta looked up RISC in a technical dictionary and actually followed the RISC ideology. Intel needs to do something similar and completely reengineer an existing chip, not revamp and speed up an old design. The Merced/Itanium was supposed to do this but everyone is still waiting for a real scoop on that project. The Crusoe achieved lower power consumption cutting down the die size while the Coppermine achieved lower power consumption by shrinking the transistor size. A chip I would be impressed by is one that was a happy medium between the two lines of thought. A 64/128-bit RISC processor that kept code translation down to a minimum (maybe with JIT instance specific compiling or compiling strait to machine code a la Java) AND most importantly had tiny transistors on a pretty small die. I would be very happy with a processor that could get me 3Gops and only dissipate 2-3 watts of power. That kind of chip is not even far fetched right this minute, it will just be whoever figures out how to balance egos and ideology.
I think this can be compared in part to American cars in the 70s. For years American dealers were building behemoths that sucked gas but had pretty damn good power, then along came Honda and the other Japanese cars that were really fuel efficient but sacrificed a bit of power to get that. Eventually the American car makers tried more fuel efficient cars but ended up proving they needed to rethink their engineering philosophy. Now you can expect a decent priced car to have a good amount of power while still getting 20-25mpg in the city.