should be the universal system of choice but there are cultural problems in America that keep us from moving to metric. Most of it has to do with old ideas of individualism. People want to be individualistic yet want to communicate with the rest of the world. Scientific measurements cant besome roll your own system used exclusively in your country, come on NASA get with it.
When it comes down to it, its all about what you like to use on your computer. Saying your favorite OS is better is trying to make your opinion into a fact. Saying linux is better than Windows is the exact same as saying Windows is better than linux. A good OS in my opinion needs to be fast, stable, as small as possible, and most importantly intuitive and powerful at the same time. Mac OS does a good job at being untuitive and powerful, while you may complain that a GUI doesn't give you much control over the system, that's not the fault of the GUI or OS but due to the programmer not thinking clearly which someone else stated earlier. Linux falls into the catagory of small fast and stable. Windows tries to be a jack of all trades but does none of the jobs effectively. I think when Mac OS and OS X converge which is being worked on right now to give Mac the robustness of unix but friendly enough to slap on an iMac it will be a very good day for Mac and all desktop unicies. Do I think any OS has met my demands to be good? I think one is very close to being a great OS. Palm OS. It's fast, stable (at least I've never seen it crash), small, easy to use yet useful and best of all, transparent. When an application on your Palm runs you're hardly aware of an OS behind everything, you just turn it on and go. I really think thats where everything is heading towards in the PC market, you turn it on and go and not spend any time administering your system unless you absolutely need to.
og the GeForce is really cool in my opinion but I see it more as a transition technology rather than an end in itself. Up until now your CPU has taken the role of code operator, physics engine, and scene controller while your video card just rasterized the scene, which means the CPU needed to be really fast to render a complex scene. The GeForce is supposed to take over the job of scene controller which means your CPU has less to do while the video card is more utilized, no games are programmed this way yet because the system is so new. But the GeForce won't be the last word in new graphics chipsets or even graphics processing, it's just the first step into a different way of doing things.
You look at it's scrores compared to the TNT2 and see only an 8fps increase in certain tests, remember those 8 extra frames are another 6 million texels. You also have to take into account that you're not utilizingf all aspects of the chipset, the T&L on hardware isn't being utilized and neither is it's control of the scene so you can't really compare apples to oranges here. It's actually like the P3 and Apple's G4, at the same clock speed as the old chips running the same software they are only marginally faster but when you actually use their features to their fullest you have a much faster result.
As for being a transition technology thats exactly what I think it is, soon you'll see S3 and 3Dfx do something similar if not better, then nVidia will come out with a more powerful GeForce and so on and so forth. One area I really think this kind of technology will do alot of good is in the console market. If you look at the N64 and Dreamcast they both have a super fast CPU (relatively) and then a powerful graphics chip for the actual rendering, theres not alot of technological different between the two besides word size and the number of transitors. On the the other hand if you used a technology like GeForce in a console you'd have a much more versatile machine that would be cheaper to manufacture. Your CPU handles the game code and does the physics calculations using a standardized chip that can preform just about any task you assign it and then your graphics card uses a part of it's chip for scene control and another part for lighting and textures and then a final part for the actual rendering of a scene. Each job is done on a specialized processor on the chip which means it can be done faster and more efficiently than can be done on a general purpose chip. This means consoles can more easily run complex code and physics because the processor isn't as tied up with the graphics processing not to mention run application style programs with heavy graphical content without a dip in performance. This would give future consoles more leverage when it comes down to a choice between a full fledged PC or a console that has much of the funtionality but less hassle.
open source projects ask for talented programmers, not people who just understand the basics of cout and cin but people who really have skill at programming. While programmers are a dime a dozen, good programmers are not and then to lower that number ask for talented programmers with the free time to work on an open source project. Some do but many don't and this ratio doesnt magically change, this would be why I think the numbers on projects don't change logarithmically.
more schools wouldn't think this way, especially public schools that have a very limited supply of techs and money to pay for computer hardware. Like many people have pointed out, it's much easier and cheaper to maintain and you have real 24 hour support. Something else that I haven't seen is the fact it's also much easier to use. Now Solaris isn't the begeinners' OS but the server can be anything you'd like it to be. This means you can buy a Windows NT TSE box and use that from each of the terminals. So that means many Windows apps can be run on the servers and because NT and 98 have a very similar operating environment you can teach students Windows without ten dozen Windows boxes (if thats the sort of thing you're teaching). What Sun did was make the Sun Ray work with more than just their hardware and software, a Java mentality I suppose.
In case you didn't know (you probably didn't) you can rent the SunRay and server from sun for a few bucks per client. Why? It won't go out of date very quickly so it's value remains high and then when the lease is up it can be resold or released.
someone who worked for Earthlink, I would think this is a good thing, most customers means more and more money. I don't work for Earthlink, I'm one of their customers and I think this is really shitty. This means more people sucking bandwidth on my cable modem and taking up the dialup modems. The only reason I cant see that Mindspring and Earthlink would merge is to stop confusing people when they end up on a Mindspring domain, the two companies have been borrowing each other's dialups for years now. Eh oh well, I'm just complaining.
Dvorak hit the mark pretty well with his article. If it seems like he's baiting linux users, you're right. If you act suprised ytou need to kick yourself. Dvorak isn't a Microsoft agent as many people claim, and it's not FUD about linux, it's real world observations. You can't go around touting your opinions like they're fact. This reply is opinion (hence I think...) and I don't expect it to be taken factually. Linux is a very stable and well designed system and works great in the medium server class but because it was designed for PCs (thats Personal Computers) from the beginning trying to patch it onto a huge server probably is going to be alot harder than using something like a BSD. On the otherhand using FreeBSD as your desktop is a bit of a waste of computing power since Unix was originally designed for very large computers, BSD being able to work on such large computers. FreeBSD had the advantage of high-end knowlege but it also had the knowlege to be able to get it down to a desktop. Linux has had to start from the small PC and work it's way up to the huge high end servers. I highly doubt the Capt. Kernel Torvalds will ever try to get it up to the level of Solaris or AIX, at least not with Linux itself. Don't badmouth Dvorak because he hit a nerve, thats what he's paid to do.
Unix started off as a project to get a desktop unix implementation because Minix just didn't work for Linux. Desktops are notoriously single user, yet unix is multiuser, this means using Linux as a server is somethat CAN be done but probably CANT be done in a very large scale (Hotmail running on linux most likely wouldn't work without a complete kernel rewrite). The BSDs are based off, you guessed it, the actual BSD version of unix which was based off the original code that popped out of Bell Labs. FreeBSD in particular has an advantage over linux in the speed/stability area because of this. Linux is damn fast and damn stable but you'll be damned if you can use it on a 4 processor box without frustration. Something else FreeBSD has over linux is that it's maintained by a single relatively small group of people, whereas linux is maintained by oodles of noodles of people. Even though all kernel changes are overseen by Linus, just about everything else it up for grabs. This is just my opinion though, I don't care if you don't agree with me.
can easily be revised to handle a few more than 4 billion addresses without a completely new infrastructure and more to the point, why the hell does my microwave need an IP address? IPv6 might have trillions upon trillions of addresses available, but it's overly complex IMO and needs too much work done in the background before it's even viable. IPv4 has 4 billion available addresses but thats assuming every address only uses a single port to connect with. You have the option of 65500 some ports to connect through which raises the potential number of addresses greatly. This shouldn't be new information to anyone. The NAT boxes are great because you can have hundreds of computers all on the same IP address and if you wanted to give each their own individual identity you could always assign each node a port that the outside user can connect to that node with now every IP address can have 65500 or so individual identities. Lets say IPv6 was made a standard tomorrow and everyone had five years to convert or even ten years. Every router would have to be replaced with the cost being put now on the major backbone providers. Then every server and embeded system on the internet would have to be replaced by people like MCI and Aletnet. That means high speed access companies and ISPs who rent their services have to pay higher prices, and all the people that utilize their services have to pay a higher fee to make up for it. It comes down to a 40$ monthly dialup bill. My suggestion? Keep your microwave and toaster off the internet and think up more effective uses for NATs and network configurations.
at the lack of logic or thought in alot of the comments I've read not to mention those in the article. Sun has never said "lets move to linux", they've merely announced linux binaries will run in Solaris. You're confusing SGI and Sun. SGI is abandoning IRIX in favour of linux so they can save money on software development costs. Sun isn't going to abandon Solaris any time soon to move to linux. Solaris is a well matured and very powerful OS that can kick linux's ass in several respects. And when has Sun NOT wanted to make everyone'se house/office Sun centric? Java was released on the pretense that you would have a bunch of relatively dumb client machines with a single server with Java apps on it. The Sun Ray is typical of Sun's view of how computers should work, you have a client box with no storage of it's own and then you have a Sun server with all the apps and data on it and never have to worry about maintaining the systems but this computing model isn't for everyone. It's also a model thats highly out of date since whole computers have become as expensive as the Java client boxes. Sun is comparable in many ways to Microsoft, they want their software running on everyone's computer and they want all your computing needs served by them.
I wasted so much money on this game so many years ago, I can't wait to waste some more on a re-release. Even if you didn't want to really play the game, the cards themselves were hilarious and sometimes all too true.
So you can play out Star Trek in your house. Dictating your report for the boss whgile listening to mp3s and surfing all at the same time on the same computer. More realistic games are another option, maybe first person shooters but also ultra real racing and flying games, detective games with super realistic environments.
Pentium chips still run 16bit code. Lets try to enter the realm of fully 32bit architecture (NT, MacOS, Linux, ect.) and leave 16bit behind. Having a fully 64bit system will be nice and all but it's not quite needed yet for the home or office, unless of course your business includes high performance servers or giant 3D workstations. As seen with many flavours of Unix-linux included-a 32bit architecture works fine for most applications. The rise in 32bit Xeon servers and Pentium workstations shows that 32bit isn't obsolete yet and can do the same job as it's 64bit counterparts sometimes for much less money. And just two things for you to think about, keeping CISC on a RISC chip and comparing it to a 32 and 64bit core complaining about performance issues is comparing Apple and oranges. Having the ability to process 32bit code on a 64bit chip if anything increases the speed because you can have two 32bit instructions run every cycle rather than a single 64bit instruction. This means the 32bit code is run at twice the speed as if it were run on a 32bit chip. Second of all Motorola already makes 64bit chips, these funny things called PowerPC chips. IBM and Apple use them, Apple runs 32bit code on the 64bit chip and now the 750 which is 128bit much faster than it ran on older chips.
Andrew Tridgell should be nominated, whether or not Samba outperforms Windows of any flavour. Samaba is one of those things that SOMEONE would eventually do but he did it first. Everyone uses it, it comes packaged with just about any form of Unix you can get ahold of, Sun even uses it with Solaris. What if he AHDN'T decided to hack M$'s SMB protocols? Someone would have done it but it probably would have been Novell or Sun or some other M$ competitor which wouldnt have released it to the public and that wouldn't do anyone any good and would probably mean M$ could really institute their all-M$ offices and computer labs, since only M$ products could communicate with M$ products, you'd have to use their products.
That's completely asanine logic on your part, maybe it's because you haven't coded by hand before? Wow 99$ for VB 6.0, thats great and cool, no wait, VB programs will only work on a MS platform and only if all the comps have the same VB runtimes. No thanks. Visual C++ is such a POS, it adds alot of complexity to code which should be really simple. I won't even get into Visual J. And because M$ gives their software away cheap it will make people use Unix/linux more? That's just stupid. Whats the point of 5 different operating systems anyways? I really feel sorry for you if you only have one comp and have to reboot constantly.
Apple was the first company with an iCEO, Amiga should be the first company with an aiCEO. It's the perfect idea for a tech company, they take a bunch of spare parts and slap together their new CEO to something reminicent of HAL onboard the Discovery loaded with a couple RunCompany algorithms not to mention they can make him as good looking as they want, just change their desktop theme. SGI should think about this too, it would be alot cheaper. As long as it was user friendly and intuitive they wouldn't need a PR department further saving them money.
the internet like some sort of new form of everything. Communication is communication. How is selling your wares over Yahoo any different than putting an ad in the newspaper? Senator Hollings just wants to put a big chunk of change into some pet project he started. Person-to-person transactions should not for any reason be taxed, not only would it be wrong, it would also drive e-commerce under the floorboards.
Say for instance Joe Ebay is always cruising around auction sites looking for good deals. He spends alot of money on these auctions because it's almost always below retail and tax free. But then comes along a universal net tax, it's a 15% chunk added onto whatever he is going to buy. "Wow" says Joe Ebay, "I think I'll go down to an outlet mall or salvation army instead, since I live in California I only have to pay a 7.75% sales tax." So ends Joe Ebay's auction days.
Suzy Ecommerce owns her own home business, she is pretty savvy when it comes to computers and she has a few of them. Her little site sells hommade trinkets and assorted cute goodies. She doesn't make a terrible amount of money but it does bring a few extra dollars into the household. She decides she wants to buy a new computer system, hers is really old and she can't find the programs she needs to do the business work she needs. She goes online to gateway.com. There she finds the perfect system for her, it even comes with some small business software. "This is great" thinks Suzy. Oh but wait, besides it's 2000$ price tag it's going to cost her another 300$. That sure is alot of tax but she figures it's worth it, she'll just use the money from her site to pay it off. A few weeks later when she is doing her books, she notices the income of her little site are going down drastically. She thinks for a minute why, it's the extra 15% net tax tacked onto every purchase. Her little trinkets may have been worth a few dollars plus the meager shipping charges, but no one wants to pay an added 15% for small cute trinkets. Suzy soon goes out of business and can't pay for her 2300$ computer.
These are just a few examples of how a universal net tax would completely ruin e-commerce. The point of e-commerce is that it's quick and easy but beyond that it's cheaper on the average than going down to the mall or store and looking for the stuff yourself and because there's no amazingly high sales tax included. The internet shouldnt be treated any differently than other communication mediums. Whats the REAL difference between conducting a small transaction over the telephone or over e-mail? Is it that hard to see the distinction isn't really that great?
They use a higher density structure than CDs. You can probably think of it as a Mode 3 CD-ROM. Whereas Mode 1 is 650 megabytes and Mode 2 is 740 megabytes. On a normal CD the pits near the center of the disk are much closer together than the ones on the outer layer. Why is this so? Because the first CD-ROMs were single speed, the servo that spun the disc couldnt go from 4x to 6x which means the farther out on the disc you go the slower you have to spin it in order to be able to read the data. So they made the outer layers less dense so they would only need a single speed motor, this kept the price relatively low. Newer CD-ROMs have multi speed motors that can slow down on the outside and speed up on the inside, this is allows them to read Mode 2 CDs, which have a little higher density than Mode 1 CDs. Sega's GD-ROM packs the outside of the disc as densly as the inside of the disc and has a very good variable speed motor. This is what enables a regular CD-ROM to read the first track of a GD.
I've been saying this for months, even before Sun bought out Star Division. Sun does have a pretty wide market in the server realm, but it has almost no real presence in the home. Sun is now going to compete openly with Microsoft for your home office or desk. Unknown to many people, Sun is a company of comparable size to Microsoft. I'm not sure what to think of this, I knew Sun was going to do it but that doesn't mean I think they should. It would be nice if you could buy a cheap web terminal that could do more than just browse the web but when companies start touting products as the end-all be-all of home computing, I lose faith in their ability to make quality products. Thin clients have been tried before and have failed miserably, mainly because of terribly slow connections to the servers from home. But now home users have something they didn't have 5 years ago, broadband. Will Sun partner with a broadband access company to prive you with high speed connections for your new thin client?
I would like to see you justify that statement. If people come in under contract they essencially work for the company, so the execs paying their contracts need to be more diligent about making them diligent in their documentation and such. It's not the contractor's fault he wants to do a good job in a short amount of time. But if he's paid to do the extra administrative tasks he will.
that I wouldn't call Apple a bad apple if they ended up doing. Why would I condone it? Because Apple would lose a hell of alot of money if people could upgrade their G3's to G4's using third party hardware. Not only from the standpoint of not making money on their own upgrade kits, they also lose money because as long as you don't break any warrenty rules they still have to provide Joe Mac user with tech support which costs them money. I've also seen some examples of the third party G3 upgrades for the 7100 and 8100, they worked so horribly the old board had to be put back in. Macs are things you buy with the knowlege that upgrading it is going to be difficult if not impossible simply because of their design philosophy. In my experience Macs were the computers that didn't need to be replaced every year to keep up with the OS and software where PCs need extreme updates after a year. I think part of it is due to the fewer commercial available Mac programs, they don't push the hardware as much as new PC programs do, which is both a curse and a blessing.
with it's dimensions. It's considerably smaller than the original Gameboy. I'm not impressed with the screen though. The Gameboy's screen was pretty small and this one's is too. I'd settle for less displayable colours if the screen was just larger. I'd also like to see it come with a FlashROM inside with a game (Tetris would be nice) and organizer software. The fact that it's bcakwards compatible with all previous Gameboy games is a boon but I sold or gave my games away years ago. Recently I've been thinking about a Gameboy Color but it's still alot more than I'm willing to pay. The Gameboy Advanced might catch my eye if I could see the screen easier and wouldn't have to plug in a cartrige to play a game all the time.
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if fibre lines were marked the same way gas lines are marked in cities. hmmm....
should be the universal system of choice but there are cultural problems in America that keep us from moving to metric. Most of it has to do with old ideas of individualism. People want to be individualistic yet want to communicate with the rest of the world. Scientific measurements cant besome roll your own system used exclusively in your country, come on NASA get with it.
When it comes down to it, its all about what you like to use on your computer. Saying your favorite OS is better is trying to make your opinion into a fact. Saying linux is better than Windows is the exact same as saying Windows is better than linux. A good OS in my opinion needs to be fast, stable, as small as possible, and most importantly intuitive and powerful at the same time. Mac OS does a good job at being untuitive and powerful, while you may complain that a GUI doesn't give you much control over the system, that's not the fault of the GUI or OS but due to the programmer not thinking clearly which someone else stated earlier. Linux falls into the catagory of small fast and stable. Windows tries to be a jack of all trades but does none of the jobs effectively. I think when Mac OS and OS X converge which is being worked on right now to give Mac the robustness of unix but friendly enough to slap on an iMac it will be a very good day for Mac and all desktop unicies. Do I think any OS has met my demands to be good? I think one is very close to being a great OS. Palm OS. It's fast, stable (at least I've never seen it crash), small, easy to use yet useful and best of all, transparent. When an application on your Palm runs you're hardly aware of an OS behind everything, you just turn it on and go. I really think thats where everything is heading towards in the PC market, you turn it on and go and not spend any time administering your system unless you absolutely need to.
You look at it's scrores compared to the TNT2 and see only an 8fps increase in certain tests, remember those 8 extra frames are another 6 million texels. You also have to take into account that you're not utilizingf all aspects of the chipset, the T&L on hardware isn't being utilized and neither is it's control of the scene so you can't really compare apples to oranges here. It's actually like the P3 and Apple's G4, at the same clock speed as the old chips running the same software they are only marginally faster but when you actually use their features to their fullest you have a much faster result.
As for being a transition technology thats exactly what I think it is, soon you'll see S3 and 3Dfx do something similar if not better, then nVidia will come out with a more powerful GeForce and so on and so forth. One area I really think this kind of technology will do alot of good is in the console market. If you look at the N64 and Dreamcast they both have a super fast CPU (relatively) and then a powerful graphics chip for the actual rendering, theres not alot of technological different between the two besides word size and the number of transitors. On the the other hand if you used a technology like GeForce in a console you'd have a much more versatile machine that would be cheaper to manufacture. Your CPU handles the game code and does the physics calculations using a standardized chip that can preform just about any task you assign it and then your graphics card uses a part of it's chip for scene control and another part for lighting and textures and then a final part for the actual rendering of a scene. Each job is done on a specialized processor on the chip which means it can be done faster and more efficiently than can be done on a general purpose chip. This means consoles can more easily run complex code and physics because the processor isn't as tied up with the graphics processing not to mention run application style programs with heavy graphical content without a dip in performance. This would give future consoles more leverage when it comes down to a choice between a full fledged PC or a console that has much of the funtionality but less hassle.
open source projects ask for talented programmers, not people who just understand the basics of cout and cin but people who really have skill at programming. While programmers are a dime a dozen, good programmers are not and then to lower that number ask for talented programmers with the free time to work on an open source project. Some do but many don't and this ratio doesnt magically change, this would be why I think the numbers on projects don't change logarithmically.
more schools wouldn't think this way, especially public schools that have a very limited supply of techs and money to pay for computer hardware. Like many people have pointed out, it's much easier and cheaper to maintain and you have real 24 hour support. Something else that I haven't seen is the fact it's also much easier to use. Now Solaris isn't the begeinners' OS but the server can be anything you'd like it to be. This means you can buy a Windows NT TSE box and use that from each of the terminals. So that means many Windows apps can be run on the servers and because NT and 98 have a very similar operating environment you can teach students Windows without ten dozen Windows boxes (if thats the sort of thing you're teaching). What Sun did was make the Sun Ray work with more than just their hardware and software, a Java mentality I suppose.
In case you didn't know (you probably didn't) you can rent the SunRay and server from sun for a few bucks per client. Why? It won't go out of date very quickly so it's value remains high and then when the lease is up it can be resold or released.
someone who worked for Earthlink, I would think this is a good thing, most customers means more and more money. I don't work for Earthlink, I'm one of their customers and I think this is really shitty. This means more people sucking bandwidth on my cable modem and taking up the dialup modems. The only reason I cant see that Mindspring and Earthlink would merge is to stop confusing people when they end up on a Mindspring domain, the two companies have been borrowing each other's dialups for years now. Eh oh well, I'm just complaining.
Dvorak hit the mark pretty well with his article. If it seems like he's baiting linux users, you're right. If you act suprised ytou need to kick yourself. Dvorak isn't a Microsoft agent as many people claim, and it's not FUD about linux, it's real world observations. You can't go around touting your opinions like they're fact. This reply is opinion (hence I think...) and I don't expect it to be taken factually. Linux is a very stable and well designed system and works great in the medium server class but because it was designed for PCs (thats Personal Computers) from the beginning trying to patch it onto a huge server probably is going to be alot harder than using something like a BSD. On the otherhand using FreeBSD as your desktop is a bit of a waste of computing power since Unix was originally designed for very large computers, BSD being able to work on such large computers. FreeBSD had the advantage of high-end knowlege but it also had the knowlege to be able to get it down to a desktop. Linux has had to start from the small PC and work it's way up to the huge high end servers. I highly doubt the Capt. Kernel Torvalds will ever try to get it up to the level of Solaris or AIX, at least not with Linux itself. Don't badmouth Dvorak because he hit a nerve, thats what he's paid to do.
Unix started off as a project to get a desktop unix implementation because Minix just didn't work for Linux. Desktops are notoriously single user, yet unix is multiuser, this means using Linux as a server is somethat CAN be done but probably CANT be done in a very large scale (Hotmail running on linux most likely wouldn't work without a complete kernel rewrite). The BSDs are based off, you guessed it, the actual BSD version of unix which was based off the original code that popped out of Bell Labs. FreeBSD in particular has an advantage over linux in the speed/stability area because of this. Linux is damn fast and damn stable but you'll be damned if you can use it on a 4 processor box without frustration. Something else FreeBSD has over linux is that it's maintained by a single relatively small group of people, whereas linux is maintained by oodles of noodles of people. Even though all kernel changes are overseen by Linus, just about everything else it up for grabs. This is just my opinion though, I don't care if you don't agree with me.
can easily be revised to handle a few more than 4 billion addresses without a completely new infrastructure and more to the point, why the hell does my microwave need an IP address? IPv6 might have trillions upon trillions of addresses available, but it's overly complex IMO and needs too much work done in the background before it's even viable. IPv4 has 4 billion available addresses but thats assuming every address only uses a single port to connect with. You have the option of 65500 some ports to connect through which raises the potential number of addresses greatly. This shouldn't be new information to anyone. The NAT boxes are great because you can have hundreds of computers all on the same IP address and if you wanted to give each their own individual identity you could always assign each node a port that the outside user can connect to that node with now every IP address can have 65500 or so individual identities.
Lets say IPv6 was made a standard tomorrow and everyone had five years to convert or even ten years. Every router would have to be replaced with the cost being put now on the major backbone providers. Then every server and embeded system on the internet would have to be replaced by people like MCI and Aletnet. That means high speed access companies and ISPs who rent their services have to pay higher prices, and all the people that utilize their services have to pay a higher fee to make up for it. It comes down to a 40$ monthly dialup bill. My suggestion? Keep your microwave and toaster off the internet and think up more effective uses for NATs and network configurations.
at the lack of logic or thought in alot of the comments I've read not to mention those in the article. Sun has never said "lets move to linux", they've merely announced linux binaries will run in Solaris. You're confusing SGI and Sun. SGI is abandoning IRIX in favour of linux so they can save money on software development costs. Sun isn't going to abandon Solaris any time soon to move to linux. Solaris is a well matured and very powerful OS that can kick linux's ass in several respects. And when has Sun NOT wanted to make everyone'se house/office Sun centric? Java was released on the pretense that you would have a bunch of relatively dumb client machines with a single server with Java apps on it. The Sun Ray is typical of Sun's view of how computers should work, you have a client box with no storage of it's own and then you have a Sun server with all the apps and data on it and never have to worry about maintaining the systems but this computing model isn't for everyone. It's also a model thats highly out of date since whole computers have become as expensive as the Java client boxes. Sun is comparable in many ways to Microsoft, they want their software running on everyone's computer and they want all your computing needs served by them.
I wasted so much money on this game so many years ago, I can't wait to waste some more on a re-release. Even if you didn't want to really play the game, the cards themselves were hilarious and sometimes all too true.
So you can play out Star Trek in your house. Dictating your report for the boss whgile listening to mp3s and surfing all at the same time on the same computer. More realistic games are another option, maybe first person shooters but also ultra real racing and flying games, detective games with super realistic environments.
Pentium chips still run 16bit code. Lets try to enter the realm of fully 32bit architecture (NT, MacOS, Linux, ect.) and leave 16bit behind. Having a fully 64bit system will be nice and all but it's not quite needed yet for the home or office, unless of course your business includes high performance servers or giant 3D workstations. As seen with many flavours of Unix-linux included-a 32bit architecture works fine for most applications. The rise in 32bit Xeon servers and Pentium workstations shows that 32bit isn't obsolete yet and can do the same job as it's 64bit counterparts sometimes for much less money. And just two things for you to think about, keeping CISC on a RISC chip and comparing it to a 32 and 64bit core complaining about performance issues is comparing Apple and oranges. Having the ability to process 32bit code on a 64bit chip if anything increases the speed because you can have two 32bit instructions run every cycle rather than a single 64bit instruction. This means the 32bit code is run at twice the speed as if it were run on a 32bit chip. Second of all Motorola already makes 64bit chips, these funny things called PowerPC chips. IBM and Apple use them, Apple runs 32bit code on the 64bit chip and now the 750 which is 128bit much faster than it ran on older chips.
Andrew Tridgell should be nominated, whether or not Samba outperforms Windows of any flavour. Samaba is one of those things that SOMEONE would eventually do but he did it first. Everyone uses it, it comes packaged with just about any form of Unix you can get ahold of, Sun even uses it with Solaris. What if he AHDN'T decided to hack M$'s SMB protocols? Someone would have done it but it probably would have been Novell or Sun or some other M$ competitor which wouldnt have released it to the public and that wouldn't do anyone any good and would probably mean M$ could really institute their all-M$ offices and computer labs, since only M$ products could communicate with M$ products, you'd have to use their products.
That's completely asanine logic on your part, maybe it's because you haven't coded by hand before? Wow 99$ for VB 6.0, thats great and cool, no wait, VB programs will only work on a MS platform and only if all the comps have the same VB runtimes. No thanks. Visual C++ is such a POS, it adds alot of complexity to code which should be really simple. I won't even get into Visual J. And because M$ gives their software away cheap it will make people use Unix/linux more? That's just stupid. Whats the point of 5 different operating systems anyways? I really feel sorry for you if you only have one comp and have to reboot constantly.
Apple was the first company with an iCEO, Amiga should be the first company with an aiCEO. It's the perfect idea for a tech company, they take a bunch of spare parts and slap together their new CEO to something reminicent of HAL onboard the Discovery loaded with a couple RunCompany algorithms not to mention they can make him as good looking as they want, just change their desktop theme. SGI should think about this too, it would be alot cheaper. As long as it was user friendly and intuitive they wouldn't need a PR department further saving them money.
Say for instance Joe Ebay is always cruising around auction sites looking for good deals. He spends alot of money on these auctions because it's almost always below retail and tax free. But then comes along a universal net tax, it's a 15% chunk added onto whatever he is going to buy. "Wow" says Joe Ebay, "I think I'll go down to an outlet mall or salvation army instead, since I live in California I only have to pay a 7.75% sales tax." So ends Joe Ebay's auction days.
Suzy Ecommerce owns her own home business, she is pretty savvy when it comes to computers and she has a few of them. Her little site sells hommade trinkets and assorted cute goodies. She doesn't make a terrible amount of money but it does bring a few extra dollars into the household. She decides she wants to buy a new computer system, hers is really old and she can't find the programs she needs to do the business work she needs. She goes online to gateway.com. There she finds the perfect system for her, it even comes with some small business software. "This is great" thinks Suzy. Oh but wait, besides it's 2000$ price tag it's going to cost her another 300$. That sure is alot of tax but she figures it's worth it, she'll just use the money from her site to pay it off. A few weeks later when she is doing her books, she notices the income of her little site are going down drastically. She thinks for a minute why, it's the extra 15% net tax tacked onto every purchase. Her little trinkets may have been worth a few dollars plus the meager shipping charges, but no one wants to pay an added 15% for small cute trinkets. Suzy soon goes out of business and can't pay for her 2300$ computer.
These are just a few examples of how a universal net tax would completely ruin e-commerce. The point of e-commerce is that it's quick and easy but beyond that it's cheaper on the average than going down to the mall or store and looking for the stuff yourself and because there's no amazingly high sales tax included. The internet shouldnt be treated any differently than other communication mediums. Whats the REAL difference between conducting a small transaction over the telephone or over e-mail? Is it that hard to see the distinction isn't really that great?
They use a higher density structure than CDs. You can probably think of it as a Mode 3 CD-ROM. Whereas Mode 1 is 650 megabytes and Mode 2 is 740 megabytes. On a normal CD the pits near the center of the disk are much closer together than the ones on the outer layer. Why is this so? Because the first CD-ROMs were single speed, the servo that spun the disc couldnt go from 4x to 6x which means the farther out on the disc you go the slower you have to spin it in order to be able to read the data. So they made the outer layers less dense so they would only need a single speed motor, this kept the price relatively low. Newer CD-ROMs have multi speed motors that can slow down on the outside and speed up on the inside, this is allows them to read Mode 2 CDs, which have a little higher density than Mode 1 CDs. Sega's GD-ROM packs the outside of the disc as densly as the inside of the disc and has a very good variable speed motor. This is what enables a regular CD-ROM to read the first track of a GD.
You could write dreamcast programs as easily as writing a Win CE program, the problem comes when it's time to compile.
I've been saying this for months, even before Sun bought out Star Division. Sun does have a pretty wide market in the server realm, but it has almost no real presence in the home. Sun is now going to compete openly with Microsoft for your home office or desk. Unknown to many people, Sun is a company of comparable size to Microsoft. I'm not sure what to think of this, I knew Sun was going to do it but that doesn't mean I think they should. It would be nice if you could buy a cheap web terminal that could do more than just browse the web but when companies start touting products as the end-all be-all of home computing, I lose faith in their ability to make quality products. Thin clients have been tried before and have failed miserably, mainly because of terribly slow connections to the servers from home. But now home users have something they didn't have 5 years ago, broadband. Will Sun partner with a broadband access company to prive you with high speed connections for your new thin client?
I would like to see you justify that statement. If people come in under contract they essencially work for the company, so the execs paying their contracts need to be more diligent about making them diligent in their documentation and such. It's not the contractor's fault he wants to do a good job in a short amount of time. But if he's paid to do the extra administrative tasks he will.
that I wouldn't call Apple a bad apple if they ended up doing. Why would I condone it? Because Apple would lose a hell of alot of money if people could upgrade their G3's to G4's using third party hardware. Not only from the standpoint of not making money on their own upgrade kits, they also lose money because as long as you don't break any warrenty rules they still have to provide Joe Mac user with tech support which costs them money. I've also seen some examples of the third party G3 upgrades for the 7100 and 8100, they worked so horribly the old board had to be put back in. Macs are things you buy with the knowlege that upgrading it is going to be difficult if not impossible simply because of their design philosophy. In my experience Macs were the computers that didn't need to be replaced every year to keep up with the OS and software where PCs need extreme updates after a year. I think part of it is due to the fewer commercial available Mac programs, they don't push the hardware as much as new PC programs do, which is both a curse and a blessing.
with it's dimensions. It's considerably smaller than the original Gameboy. I'm not impressed with the screen though. The Gameboy's screen was pretty small and this one's is too. I'd settle for less displayable colours if the screen was just larger. I'd also like to see it come with a FlashROM inside with a game (Tetris would be nice) and organizer software. The fact that it's bcakwards compatible with all previous Gameboy games is a boon but I sold or gave my games away years ago. Recently I've been thinking about a Gameboy Color but it's still alot more than I'm willing to pay. The Gameboy Advanced might catch my eye if I could see the screen easier and wouldn't have to plug in a cartrige to play a game all the time.