that only the RIAA record companies (there's only six of them AFAIK) really givea rat's ass about SDMI. The companies that don't have much to gain from supporting SDMI because the big six would buy them out or subsidize them are beginning to support the open formats (MP3 and 4). I just think this really proves that the RIAA has no one's interest but their own when they propose all these closed formats. Down with the RIAA! Free Antarctica!
do not need internet access!!!! They need fresh running water, sanitary plumbing, and health care of some sort. They do not need to check e-mail like all of the living room dunderheads in America with AOL and WebTV. Besides the fact that they need a utility infrastructure before they need an information infrastructure, I am not paying for some kid in the middle of South America to cruise AOL chat rooms saying he is a 13 year old girl looking for hot guys.
Railgun. A railgun can fire a projectile with no recoil because there's no explosive force, only magnetic fields. It would only need enough power for one shot and that could be stored in a high power capacitor.
Just as a point of correction, an ADSL line is a direct connection to the ISP by way of the phone lines, you're not sharing it with all of your neighbors like with cable modems, the only thing you're really sharing is the bandwidth of the server you're connected to, which ISP's usually keep ahead of the demand for that bandwidth. But as for free bandwidth, thats something that is hard to predict the future of. ISDN's were super fast compared to the modems they were competing against Back in the Day, but for that speed you not only paid a monthly service charge but you also paid hourly like early ISP's (remember when the $19.95 flat rate was the exception to the rule?). Now ADSL and cable modems are for the most part unlimited bandwidth (although my cable connection's been killed after long transfers from the school servers) but thats because high bandwidth connections needed for the servers is relatively inexpensive and the slack bandwidth can be put to use by selling it off to co-locations or hosting services. But who knows if these services are going to become constricted as they become more popular. I certainly hope not, unlimited bandwidth means freedom of sorts by notm aking you worry if you're going to run over your quota and have an extra ten bucks added to your bill per hour. This would most likely lead to Joe Average going back to their v.90 connection simply because they dont have limits on their bandwidth.
Bill has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. What really pisses me off is he gets caught doing bad things and then has the audacity to get mad about it. If you read anything he said from the 70's and 80's about software you can tell he believes all software should come from him for some divine reason only he knows about. I really hope this case is influencial in the DOJ case against M$. For too long they have been stomping out every other company thats had a unique idea simply so all software will come from them. Bill was never really a hacker in the first place like so many Unix heroes were/are, he just funded projects and used other people's work to his advantage. Buying out every company with an idea and forcing companies to use only your products isn't "Freedom to Innovate" Bill.
This is NOT a PC, geez, everything with a CPU is not a PC. It's a media recording device, and you would be hard pressed to run a spreadsheet on it. The "special" hard drives they are using in the Tivo and such are SCSI and are only about 4 gigs or so. Ever looked up the price of a 10000 rpm hard drive? You're f**kin nuts if you think you're goingto build a cost effective PC that can do the same thing as this. BTW what is a "real-time kernel"?
If Tivo and such become more popular or their upgraded unproduced cousins become popular, production companies will have to find other ways for their shows to make money. The easiest way to do this? Let sponsors put their products in the TV show. There is technology available now to go back and add labels and such in post production, even after the final cuts to video have been made. Ever watch a sport on TV and see an add seemingly painted in the grass, but it changes every so often? This is one example of how to get the money to pay for sports and TV shows when people are fast forwarding through your normal commercials. Movies do this alot, a Pepsi can here, a store's logo there. They get paid for that. I think on demand broadcasting is nice but I hate when people want to use regular internet backbones for it. Backbones are already taxed with RealVideo and other streaming media, how do you think they would hold up to every yahoo with a TV getting a 1.5mb video stream? TCP/IP just isn't what they should use. Local providers should transmit the data to you by way of satillite (expensive) or by coax (cheap). It's not terribly difficult to fit a 2mb/s into a coax, and then give each household their own frequency. Thats what's being done with cable modems, there's lots of frequencies and channels available, and if you need more just put people on a different wire, so you can use the same frequencies and channels on each wire. The digital format should probably be the MPEG-2 digital standard, but the actual transmission protocols should be similar to direct cable transfers. The modem in the box upstreams and tells the provider what to send, and it sends it. The main server wouldnt need to be terribly complex or expensive, and the video could be stored on large RAIDs which would lower the cost. You could even have different content providers, Blockbuster ad Warehouse could open up digital video rental and provide their own equipment to the local providers.
ease of use. People have been exposed to Windows for several years now, when they see a Windows desktop they realize how it operates and can use it semi-effectively. Linux has just recently gotten the attention of the mainstream press and your average Windows user. It will be a little longer before we start seeing it pop up on people's desktops, simply because it's not designed as a basic user's desktop OS. But many groups such as the GNOME peoples and our friends from KDE are working to make it easier for the average Joe to see a desktop and be able to sit down and use it. As for open source, most people could care less. They have always paid for software, I had a teacher that looked at me like I was some sort of demented psycho when I explained the GPL license. I don't do alot of C coding so most programs' source code means little to me, whether it's precompiled or I have to compile it, it's all good as long as I dont have tio pay for it.
I don't really care much about it's application, it's just cool. Of course it is good for business, brighter cheaper LCD's would make me plenty happy, or an LCD that doesnt rob the life out of poor laptop batteries. I see people bitching about GPL science and all the like, but I'm sorry, everything shouldn't be open source. Some people like to share their research with lots of people, and some like to work on it privately, it's their choice. Geez, damn fanatics. All fanatics must die.
Is people jumping on the linux "bandwagon", people who want to seem all cool and geeky and use linux, then become fanatical about it. Or the anti-everything people, to whom all closed source, corporations, microsoft products are just the work of the devil. It is a set of software that runs an unintelligent machine that responds to some commands to issue into it by whatever means to prefer, it is not a new way to experience Nirvana. Open-source is cool, but open source didnt start and wont end with linux, it has been around longer than linux (long live Emacs) and will continue to exist even after Linus and fellows get tired of writing new kernels. The most damaging aspect I see are the fanatic people in the "linux community" who seem like they are willing to die for source code, and the so called pundits in the media who really know little of linux intrinsically yet rant, rave and praise it beyond comprehension. Neither group are doing much to make linux any more stable or do much in the way of improving it. They are the ones Joe Average sees on TV of reads about then pictures all linux users as such, which makes them all look rather silly. It's these types that tend to make the linux "industry" clash with the "community", at least thats what I've seen. Someone releases a program in linux but heaven save us from the closed source devils, oh know it's time for some prayers to the gods of open source. Geez, get a grip. People need to make money to do basic things like eat in our society. I would pay for a closed source linux program if it was worth the money, partially because it's something I need and second it's a respect thing, they have a good idea thats useful to you so you support them by buying what they make. Whats so wrong with that? When they start pressuring companies to only use their product and ignore all other alternatives, then you can complain. The linux "industry" still helps out where fanatic ranters do not, they learn to do things with the OS that some people may have never thought of, the open nature of hte kernel means they can make a very stable and secure product, make suggestions on development to the elder gods of kernal hacking, donate money to open source projects which benefit them, help develop for open source projects. This is all being done by someone somewhere. Fanaticism also leads to letting yourself become blind to alternatives, only using open source, only using GNOME or KDE, or the like. These all make you blind to the credits of the alternative. All fanatics must die.
But i think if they upgraded to IPv6 they should make it's structure compared to IPv4 similar to Unicode's structure compared to ASCII. It would make things alot simpler, make it backwards compatible with the 32bit addresses but then let you also use 128bit addresses. So each domain of the address would go from 0 to 65000 or so. which means all current adressing using IPv4 would be compatible with the IPv6 addressing. It should be as simple as possible but not simpler, everyone should have the ability to use the internet, not just those who have the money to buy new hardware and software.
Electronic ink isn't going to replace TFT for a long time if ever. LEP (light emitting polymers) will miost likely be the LCD's replacement in displays once the technology becomes more refined. Which are like 10th the price of an LCD for the same size display AFAIK.
But in Windows i use Outlook 98 for e-mail. It has support for PGP...which I have found is the easiest way to share crypto stuff. PGP integrates rather well in my experience...if you DO use Outlook it's a nice way to keep big brother from reading your plans to kill people or whatever scheme they say everyone is now planning through e-mail.
How do you REALLY measure productivity when comes to computers? I mean in some areas it's easy, anyone who word processes you can measure the time it takes for them to finish something with a computer and a typewriter and see which takes longer. But many times it's difficult. Do you use quantity or quality as your yardstick and is quality due to the person's skill or due to the computer program? Take a publication program for example, it lets a relatively unskilled user make a professional looking document in a relatively short amount of time, but then a more adept publisher might be hampered by the ease of use of the publication program. It all depends on how the user adapts to the technology. Palm Pilots are no different. If I buy a Palm V and suddenly I'm never late for a meeting and I always remember my appointments where with a pen and paper dayplanner I was late and couldn't remember where I was supposed to be half the time, then yes I've become more productive and efficient. But lets say i bought my Palm and I had trouble using it right off the bat, it wouldn't make me more productive. I think this is really the question of technology making everything "more productive", is the technology easy for someone to incorporate. If you put a computer in front of someone and suddenly expect production to increase or your business to become more organized you're an idiot and deserve bankruptcy. Productivity tools need to be simple to incorporate into the users daily life. Thats what makes a tool more effective, when the rock was tied to a stick it had a handling surface and a utensil surface, making it more efficient and useful. The Palm has done well to add handles to make it more efficient. It's succeeded where the notebook computer failed, the notebook was meant for people to be able to be more organized and work everywhere but it's complexity and lack of useability features (short battery life, weight, difficulty to adapt to using due to a miniature keyboard) meant that it was mainly used for a portable office when you have time to sit down, or something to store your data on and take home where the Palm is a tool you can carry around with you and be more productive because of it's utility features. So the longwinded rambled answer is YES the Palm is a tool in the hands of someone who uses it as a tool.
Why does everyone expect AMD to magically get cash and resources put into their pocket? AMD has a single fabrication facility, in which they make several lines of CPU's. Intel has many more in which they make many lines of CPU's. How the hell do you think AMD is going to get their chip prices lower? And why is it that the K6-III is seen as a competitor for the Celeron. It's not! The Celeron is a budget chip, it has a small onboard cache and uses the PII's processor core, therefore it doesnt cost nearly as much as a PII (SRAM is very expensive). The K6-III is not a budget chip and hasn't been marketed it as one, it's supposed to compete with the PII not the Celeron. I can't stand how people expect AMD to just come up from behind and hit Intel with a shovel. Only recently have OEM's started using AMD's chips in their machines. A year ago how many new computers could you find with an AMD chip in them? Not very many. Seeing as how AMD has just begun to really give Intel some competition why not calm yourselves and stop talking about bankruptcy and get off AMD's case for a minute. When their new fab facility is finished we're probably going to see a marginal drop in their chip prices because then they will be able to produce more chips and let the price drop on them.
The chief reason why hard disks are "slow" (ever used a tape as your ownly means of storage? or how about floppies?) is the RPM of the disk itself. 10,000 RPM drives are much faster than 5400 RPM drives ect.. If you really want to increase performance of your hard disk use a RAID system, either EIDE or SCSI. SCSI will be much faster, but DMA/33-66 makes EIDE relatively fast. When more FireWire drives come out we'll probably see nice and fast FireWire RAID setups too, which would be alot faster than SCSI because all the drives run peer-to-peer which means you dont have to bother with the SCSI controller spreading data around. Until we start seeing affordable RAM drives we're going to be stuck with out solid state magnetic media. BTW, my bottleneck has usually been my internet connection, even my cable needs a modem for upstream.
If you have ever taken apart a hard drive (some of use have) you'd see that the arms are much too long to fit more than one in there without whacking each other. And if you start to say "make the arms smaller" stop and count to five, if the arm cant reach the inside of the disk then it's going to have a rough time reading the boot sector. And with more than one head you're going to have lots of fragmentation.
XML is not for display! It's for the backend. You put your info into XML format and then a parser adds a style sheet to it to make it purdy. The style sheet AFAIK is also extensible to an extent so you can make your info do some awesome stuff. It uses HTML/DHTML/PHP3 for the front end display. So lets work on an office suite that will produce XML/HTML documents that can be read by anyone with an XML parser.
Re:Static page requests, BAH! So what?!!
on
NT vs. Linux: Again
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· Score: 1
NT probably COULD run Hotmail, it wouldj ust require a much larger investment of time and money than they want to put into it. microsoft.com runs 96 Compaq Proliants and has a good deal of files to throw around, Hotmail would be about the same size, so it would require another 96 Proliants for Hotmail, an investment I dont think M$ is going to make. AFAIK Hotmail uses FreeBSD not Solaris.
this test STILL wouldnt make me want to fork out the $$$ for NT. If you look at the tests, NT and linux on a single processor performed rather well (I would assume linux's lower performance might be due to the multithreading plateau mentioned in the article) but on a quad processor system it was much slower. We know linux isn't the best at multithreading as of yet, which is being worked on as I type. This time im not angry about how the tests were performed, many people still might say that MS cheated, but I think this time the test is much more credible. NT beat linux, yet as soon as it did work was begun on improving the kernel using the results of the tests to point out shortcomings, we'll probably see the stable 2.3 kernel released this summer. If linux had beaten NT do you think NT would have the improvements so soon? No, they would just tweak their Win2000 server a bit and make you pay a few thousand dollars of software for your upgrade.
A test I would like to see now is a "real world" test. Using the same techniques as in these tests, but set a price cap on all tested items. Say the cap was 10,000$ or so. This is alot more realistic because this is how real companies operate, they are on a budget and can't always afford 25k worth of hardware and software. This 10k would have to be used for hardware AND software at fair market value, the same price a business has to pay for it. If you could only afford a dual processor NT system and a quad processor linux system then so be it. Besides a price cap, how about a longer testing period, say about a week and a half under constant high loads. If the system crashes you can reboot it, but the final results will be a total of pages served in the given time frame. A test like this would see which system would give you the biggest bang for your buck, if your web server or file server crashes and is down for a long time then you're going to lose money, every page not viewed is a dollar not going into your wallet and your file server is usually critical to your company, if your people can't view and work with the documents they need on the server then you're going to lose alot of productivity.
The price cap would severly limit the power of your hardware but it would do so within reasonable levels. The test would be less of a pure performance test and more of a price/performance test. This is where the free unicies excel, they are excellent operating systems yet cost you nothing more than download time or the price of media. Maybe other free unicies should be thrown into the mix, which would give a little more variety in the comparisons. That kind of test would turn my head if I were a sys admin, or even the owner of a business where every dollar counts and if I'm wasting my money on NT because it has a better marketing pitch I can change my ways the next hardware upgrade or just replace NT with linux on my servers.
XML isn't a display language like HTML. So "Save as XML" would mean stuff like mail merge or the mini-databases you can insert into Word would be made into XML and then the display format would probably be in parser code. But even that would be good, it would alow anyone with a parser (included in most recent browsers) to read the files and backend datafields. BTW, XML isn't ASCII it's Unicode
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that only the RIAA record companies (there's only six of them AFAIK) really givea rat's ass about SDMI. The companies that don't have much to gain from supporting SDMI because the big six would buy them out or subsidize them are beginning to support the open formats (MP3 and 4). I just think this really proves that the RIAA has no one's interest but their own when they propose all these closed formats. Down with the RIAA! Free Antarctica!
rather have the fish in my ear. Next thing you know they will try to come up with a replacement for towels...
do not need internet access!!!! They need fresh running water, sanitary plumbing, and health care of some sort. They do not need to check e-mail like all of the living room dunderheads in America with AOL and WebTV. Besides the fact that they need a utility infrastructure before they need an information infrastructure, I am not paying for some kid in the middle of South America to cruise AOL chat rooms saying he is a 13 year old girl looking for hot guys.
Railgun. A railgun can fire a projectile with no recoil because there's no explosive force, only magnetic fields. It would only need enough power for one shot and that could be stored in a high power capacitor.
Just as a point of correction, an ADSL line is a direct connection to the ISP by way of the phone lines, you're not sharing it with all of your neighbors like with cable modems, the only thing you're really sharing is the bandwidth of the server you're connected to, which ISP's usually keep ahead of the demand for that bandwidth.
But as for free bandwidth, thats something that is hard to predict the future of. ISDN's were super fast compared to the modems they were competing against Back in the Day, but for that speed you not only paid a monthly service charge but you also paid hourly like early ISP's (remember when the $19.95 flat rate was the exception to the rule?). Now ADSL and cable modems are for the most part unlimited bandwidth (although my cable connection's been killed after long transfers from the school servers) but thats because high bandwidth connections needed for the servers is relatively inexpensive and the slack bandwidth can be put to use by selling it off to co-locations or hosting services. But who knows if these services are going to become constricted as they become more popular. I certainly hope not, unlimited bandwidth means freedom of sorts by notm aking you worry if you're going to run over your quota and have an extra ten bucks added to your bill per hour. This would most likely lead to Joe Average going back to their v.90 connection simply because they dont have limits on their bandwidth.
Bill has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. What really pisses me off is he gets caught doing bad things and then has the audacity to get mad about it. If you read anything he said from the 70's and 80's about software you can tell he believes all software should come from him for some divine reason only he knows about. I really hope this case is influencial in the DOJ case against M$. For too long they have been stomping out every other company thats had a unique idea simply so all software will come from them. Bill was never really a hacker in the first place like so many Unix heroes were/are, he just funded projects and used other people's work to his advantage. Buying out every company with an idea and forcing companies to use only your products isn't "Freedom to Innovate" Bill.
This is NOT a PC, geez, everything with a CPU is not a PC. It's a media recording device, and you would be hard pressed to run a spreadsheet on it. The "special" hard drives they are using in the Tivo and such are SCSI and are only about 4 gigs or so. Ever looked up the price of a 10000 rpm hard drive? You're f**kin nuts if you think you're goingto build a cost effective PC that can do the same thing as this. BTW what is a "real-time kernel"?
If Tivo and such become more popular or their upgraded unproduced cousins become popular, production companies will have to find other ways for their shows to make money. The easiest way to do this? Let sponsors put their products in the TV show. There is technology available now to go back and add labels and such in post production, even after the final cuts to video have been made. Ever watch a sport on TV and see an add seemingly painted in the grass, but it changes every so often? This is one example of how to get the money to pay for sports and TV shows when people are fast forwarding through your normal commercials. Movies do this alot, a Pepsi can here, a store's logo there. They get paid for that.
I think on demand broadcasting is nice but I hate when people want to use regular internet backbones for it. Backbones are already taxed with RealVideo and other streaming media, how do you think they would hold up to every yahoo with a TV getting a 1.5mb video stream? TCP/IP just isn't what they should use. Local providers should transmit the data to you by way of satillite (expensive) or by coax (cheap). It's not terribly difficult to fit a 2mb/s into a coax, and then give each household their own frequency. Thats what's being done with cable modems, there's lots of frequencies and channels available, and if you need more just put people on a different wire, so you can use the same frequencies and channels on each wire. The digital format should probably be the MPEG-2 digital standard, but the actual transmission protocols should be similar to direct cable transfers. The modem in the box upstreams and tells the provider what to send, and it sends it. The main server wouldnt need to be terribly complex or expensive, and the video could be stored on large RAIDs which would lower the cost. You could even have different content providers, Blockbuster ad Warehouse could open up digital video rental and provide their own equipment to the local providers.
ease of use. People have been exposed to Windows for several years now, when they see a Windows desktop they realize how it operates and can use it semi-effectively. Linux has just recently gotten the attention of the mainstream press and your average Windows user. It will be a little longer before we start seeing it pop up on people's desktops, simply because it's not designed as a basic user's desktop OS. But many groups such as the GNOME peoples and our friends from KDE are working to make it easier for the average Joe to see a desktop and be able to sit down and use it. As for open source, most people could care less. They have always paid for software, I had a teacher that looked at me like I was some sort of demented psycho when I explained the GPL license. I don't do alot of C coding so most programs' source code means little to me, whether it's precompiled or I have to compile it, it's all good as long as I dont have tio pay for it.
I don't really care much about it's application, it's just cool. Of course it is good for business, brighter cheaper LCD's would make me plenty happy, or an LCD that doesnt rob the life out of poor laptop batteries. I see people bitching about GPL science and all the like, but I'm sorry, everything shouldn't be open source. Some people like to share their research with lots of people, and some like to work on it privately, it's their choice. Geez, damn fanatics. All fanatics must die.
Is people jumping on the linux "bandwagon", people who want to seem all cool and geeky and use linux, then become fanatical about it. Or the anti-everything people, to whom all closed source, corporations, microsoft products are just the work of the devil. It is a set of software that runs an unintelligent machine that responds to some commands to issue into it by whatever means to prefer, it is not a new way to experience Nirvana. Open-source is cool, but open source didnt start and wont end with linux, it has been around longer than linux (long live Emacs) and will continue to exist even after Linus and fellows get tired of writing new kernels. The most damaging aspect I see are the fanatic people in the "linux community" who seem like they are willing to die for source code, and the so called pundits in the media who really know little of linux intrinsically yet rant, rave and praise it beyond comprehension. Neither group are doing much to make linux any more stable or do much in the way of improving it. They are the ones Joe Average sees on TV of reads about then pictures all linux users as such, which makes them all look rather silly. It's these types that tend to make the linux "industry" clash with the "community", at least thats what I've seen. Someone releases a program in linux but heaven save us from the closed source devils, oh know it's time for some prayers to the gods of open source. Geez, get a grip. People need to make money to do basic things like eat in our society. I would pay for a closed source linux program if it was worth the money, partially because it's something I need and second it's a respect thing, they have a good idea thats useful to you so you support them by buying what they make. Whats so wrong with that? When they start pressuring companies to only use their product and ignore all other alternatives, then you can complain. The linux "industry" still helps out where fanatic ranters do not, they learn to do things with the OS that some people may have never thought of, the open nature of hte kernel means they can make a very stable and secure product, make suggestions on development to the elder gods of kernal hacking, donate money to open source projects which benefit them, help develop for open source projects. This is all being done by someone somewhere. Fanaticism also leads to letting yourself become blind to alternatives, only using open source, only using GNOME or KDE, or the like. These all make you blind to the credits of the alternative. All fanatics must die.
But i think if they upgraded to IPv6 they should make it's structure compared to IPv4 similar to Unicode's structure compared to ASCII. It would make things alot simpler, make it backwards compatible with the 32bit addresses but then let you also use 128bit addresses. So each domain of the address would go from 0 to 65000 or so. which means all current adressing using IPv4 would be compatible with the IPv6 addressing. It should be as simple as possible but not simpler, everyone should have the ability to use the internet, not just those who have the money to buy new hardware and software.
Electronic ink isn't going to replace TFT for a long time if ever. LEP (light emitting polymers) will miost likely be the LCD's replacement in displays once the technology becomes more refined. Which are like 10th the price of an LCD for the same size display AFAIK.
But in Windows i use Outlook 98 for e-mail. It has support for PGP...which I have found is the easiest way to share crypto stuff. PGP integrates rather well in my experience...if you DO use Outlook it's a nice way to keep big brother from reading your plans to kill people or whatever scheme they say everyone is now planning through e-mail.
How do you REALLY measure productivity when comes to computers? I mean in some areas it's easy, anyone who word processes you can measure the time it takes for them to finish something with a computer and a typewriter and see which takes longer. But many times it's difficult. Do you use quantity or quality as your yardstick and is quality due to the person's skill or due to the computer program? Take a publication program for example, it lets a relatively unskilled user make a professional looking document in a relatively short amount of time, but then a more adept publisher might be hampered by the ease of use of the publication program.
It all depends on how the user adapts to the technology. Palm Pilots are no different. If I buy a Palm V and suddenly I'm never late for a meeting and I always remember my appointments where with a pen and paper dayplanner I was late and couldn't remember where I was supposed to be half the time, then yes I've become more productive and efficient. But lets say i bought my Palm and I had trouble using it right off the bat, it wouldn't make me more productive. I think this is really the question of technology making everything "more productive", is the technology easy for someone to incorporate.
If you put a computer in front of someone and suddenly expect production to increase or your business to become more organized you're an idiot and deserve bankruptcy. Productivity tools need to be simple to incorporate into the users daily life. Thats what makes a tool more effective, when the rock was tied to a stick it had a handling surface and a utensil surface, making it more efficient and useful. The Palm has done well to add handles to make it more efficient. It's succeeded where the notebook computer failed, the notebook was meant for people to be able to be more organized and work everywhere but it's complexity and lack of useability features (short battery life, weight, difficulty to adapt to using due to a miniature keyboard) meant that it was mainly used for a portable office when you have time to sit down, or something to store your data on and take home where the Palm is a tool you can carry around with you and be more productive because of it's utility features. So the longwinded rambled answer is YES the Palm is a tool in the hands of someone who uses it as a tool.
Why does everyone expect AMD to magically get cash and resources put into their pocket? AMD has a single fabrication facility, in which they make several lines of CPU's. Intel has many more in which they make many lines of CPU's. How the hell do you think AMD is going to get their chip prices lower? And why is it that the K6-III is seen as a competitor for the Celeron. It's not! The Celeron is a budget chip, it has a small onboard cache and uses the PII's processor core, therefore it doesnt cost nearly as much as a PII (SRAM is very expensive). The K6-III is not a budget chip and hasn't been marketed it as one, it's supposed to compete with the PII not the Celeron. I can't stand how people expect AMD to just come up from behind and hit Intel with a shovel. Only recently have OEM's started using AMD's chips in their machines. A year ago how many new computers could you find with an AMD chip in them? Not very many. Seeing as how AMD has just begun to really give Intel some competition why not calm yourselves and stop talking about bankruptcy and get off AMD's case for a minute. When their new fab facility is finished we're probably going to see a marginal drop in their chip prices because then they will be able to produce more chips and let the price drop on them.
The chief reason why hard disks are "slow" (ever used a tape as your ownly means of storage? or how about floppies?) is the RPM of the disk itself. 10,000 RPM drives are much faster than 5400 RPM drives ect.. If you really want to increase performance of your hard disk use a RAID system, either EIDE or SCSI. SCSI will be much faster, but DMA/33-66 makes EIDE relatively fast. When more FireWire drives come out we'll probably see nice and fast FireWire RAID setups too, which would be alot faster than SCSI because all the drives run peer-to-peer which means you dont have to bother with the SCSI controller spreading data around. Until we start seeing affordable RAM drives we're going to be stuck with out solid state magnetic media. BTW, my bottleneck has usually been my internet connection, even my cable needs a modem for upstream.
RAID
If you have ever taken apart a hard drive (some of use have) you'd see that the arms are much too long to fit more than one in there without whacking each other. And if you start to say "make the arms smaller" stop and count to five, if the arm cant reach the inside of the disk then it's going to have a rough time reading the boot sector. And with more than one head you're going to have lots of fragmentation.
Um...Apple didn't invent SCSI or FireWire...
Sorry but i can't respond to what I can't read ;\
XML is not for display! It's for the backend. You put your info into XML format and then a parser adds a style sheet to it to make it purdy. The style sheet AFAIK is also extensible to an extent so you can make your info do some awesome stuff. It uses HTML/DHTML/PHP3 for the front end display. So lets work on an office suite that will produce XML/HTML documents that can be read by anyone with an XML parser.
NT probably COULD run Hotmail, it wouldj ust require a much larger investment of time and money than they want to put into it. microsoft.com runs 96 Compaq Proliants and has a good deal of files to throw around, Hotmail would be about the same size, so it would require another 96 Proliants for Hotmail, an investment I dont think M$ is going to make. AFAIK Hotmail uses FreeBSD not Solaris.
A test I would like to see now is a "real world" test. Using the same techniques as in these tests, but set a price cap on all tested items. Say the cap was 10,000$ or so. This is alot more realistic because this is how real companies operate, they are on a budget and can't always afford 25k worth of hardware and software. This 10k would have to be used for hardware AND software at fair market value, the same price a business has to pay for it. If you could only afford a dual processor NT system and a quad processor linux system then so be it. Besides a price cap, how about a longer testing period, say about a week and a half under constant high loads. If the system crashes you can reboot it, but the final results will be a total of pages served in the given time frame. A test like this would see which system would give you the biggest bang for your buck, if your web server or file server crashes and is down for a long time then you're going to lose money, every page not viewed is a dollar not going into your wallet and your file server is usually critical to your company, if your people can't view and work with the documents they need on the server then you're going to lose alot of productivity.
The price cap would severly limit the power of your hardware but it would do so within reasonable levels. The test would be less of a pure performance test and more of a price/performance test. This is where the free unicies excel, they are excellent operating systems yet cost you nothing more than download time or the price of media. Maybe other free unicies should be thrown into the mix, which would give a little more variety in the comparisons. That kind of test would turn my head if I were a sys admin, or even the owner of a business where every dollar counts and if I'm wasting my money on NT because it has a better marketing pitch I can change my ways the next hardware upgrade or just replace NT with linux on my servers.
XML isn't a display language like HTML. So "Save as XML" would mean stuff like mail merge or the mini-databases you can insert into Word would be made into XML and then the display format would probably be in parser code. But even that would be good, it would alow anyone with a parser (included in most recent browsers) to read the files and backend datafields.
BTW, XML isn't ASCII it's Unicode