Geez, I'm sick of all this bitching about the K7's release schedule. Dammit people, they are in competition with one of the biggest microprocessor production companies on this planet, they manufacture several lines of chips in a single fabrication facility, not to mention trying to build a new processor from scratch and not just improving parts of an existing model. They have a hard road ahead of them, they are building their second factory right now, releasing a brand new processor, and facing the brunt of market fluctuations. I think they are doing very well in the face of adversity.
It also pisses me off when I see posts that are so anti-intel that they are nearly bursting with energy to rant. The next time you want to rant about Intel, count to ten, turn your computer off, and walk away. Who cares if Intel makes their chips expensive, don't buy them, you have that ability. Stop being anti-everything monkeys, it just makes you closed minded. Intel has advantages and so does AMD, use whatever works best for your situation or your checkbook. Making up your mind to like one company or one product makes you overlook anything produced by another company, even if it is a better product. Think before you rant.
You as a "technical" person should know that the K7 doesnt USE 200mhz RAM. The system bus runs at 100mhz, but the chip itself runs it's own mini-bus at 200mhz. This results in a much faster pipelining and betting communication with the memory bus than traditional architectures. Similar to the Kensington Quickchips that have their own on-chip multipliers and such so you can stick a 300mhz chip into a 66mhz motherboard with a 3.5 multiplier and still end up with 300mhz. If you compare these to the G3/G4 and Alpha's you're going to be sorely disappointed. G3's and Alphas are both RISC and the Alpha is a full 64bit chip, so it's naturally goingto perform tasks faster than an x86 chip. In most environments the bottom line IS the price tag, get a clue. It's all about price tag whenever you're buying for your company and even for your home computers unless you're one of those "independantly wealthy" people. Real technical users get paid to make logical descisions which will benefit their employer or themselves to the fullest, not to rant because they found a keybaord on their desk.
The reason the Webzter Jr doesnt have a CD and a floppy is because they want you to buy software from them and just download it. Which if you have a cable modem, DSL, ISDN,ect. it's not terribly difficult, on their "fast 56k" it becomes a little more tedious, but a not terribly bad idea. It's not a damned wrokstation, if you're hellbent on having a good system, dont buy from a vendor, build it! These kinda things are for the other 99% of the population who doesnt care or know what a kernel is, and isn't sure what the real difference between a gigabyte and a megabyte is it's just confusing numbers. The MediaGX and 32 megs of ram is just fine for most wp operations and for getting on the net.
This is ANOTHER thing i scratched on some notebook paper. I'm gonna have to lock up my notebooks from now on... Even though I wasn't able to build one first, it's still a great idea. Not only does it give linux some rather good publicity but providing they have a USB port (great for accessorizing) or two it would also lead to some hardware manufacturers helping out with linux drivers for their products. It's very profitable too, a MediaGX processor (which Microwerkz loves), FlashROM or a small hard disk, some memory and mobo and such would probably run them about 150-170$ which means they make at least a 30$ profit off these, 10,000 * 30$ = enough to build a nice little production facility. If I can network it and plug it into my gateway I'll buy one for my parents.
This is probably a little off topic, but I hate when people compare the PowerPC or G3 chip to an Intel chip "at the same mhz". Simple fact: PowerPC == fully RISC G3 == fully RISC PII/PIII == CISC with specialized RISC instruction sets It's like comparing a MIPS and PIII, it just doesnt work right. RISC is naturally faster than CISC at comparable clockspeeds simply because it doesnt use as much chip overhead to process, it uses a handful of small instruction sets rather than large variable length instruction sets. It's easier to read a paragraph composed of small short words than it is to read one that says the same thing with more colorful language.
As for cuddletech, cute needs to be powerful or people wont buy it. But it also has to be cheap so people can afford it. I like the iMac, it's a well designed machine that is very easy for a new users to get working with. For serious users who know whut they're doing an iMac probably isnt the best idea. But with the PC industry trying to copy the iMac's popularity they are missing the point. The iMac is cheap and cute. It's icons are cuter, it's boot screen is cuter, it's made to make you want to hug it, hence the name cuddletech. The Z1 probably wont catch on, Windows 98 isn't cute, it's expensive, and it has "cool factor" but no cute. I'm not going to buy one, I like beige boxes that I can tear apart and rebuild with as few proprietary parts as possible.
is something with a little more room for me to do my work. I dont WANT a pocket device to do work on or read my email and/or web pages. Something with a screen maybe the size of the Sharp Tripad, I dont need million of colors but at least 16bit color. Keyboard? No. I'd rather write and use handwriting recognition or have a virtual keyboard. As for overall size, about the size of a regular paper notebook would be great. This is what i would pay a few hundred dollars for. It wouldnt be that hard to build one comparable to a wintel desktop, especially if you used a MediaGX processor, a small hard drive (a PCMCIA hard drive would work fine, especially if you were using linux or maybe BeOS), and a decent amount of RAM (32 megs). Thats what I would pay money for. Something with decent size and capability that I could use without bending myself to it's ergonomic will.
Sigh, I've been watching this happen for years as have the rest of you. Pretty soon a handful of companies will own all our forms of media disribution, everything we read, hear, and see will be at the behest of our corporate masters. Microsoft and AOL are tugging it out in the high speed access/cable tv arena. Now companies are merging in the telephone industry again. Remember AT&T? We're going to end up with entire portiton of the internet owned by one or two companies (yes I realize that now many backbones are operating by a handful of companies but that number is going to get much smaller) and all of our broadcast television is going to end up whatever Microsoft or AOL wishes us to see. All of our content will be provided by Fox and radi owill remain in the hands of CBS, NBC, and ABC. Everything will be censored according to the particular company's user policy. Big corporations win, we lose. Without the ability to choose between one provider and anaother we'll end up with the kind of treatment AT&T provided before being broken up. You have to have one of their techs install a new phone (or cable box or any other medium of data exchange), if you have a problem with the service...oh well. You're no longer a person, just a marketing statistic, you always have been and for the forseeable future always will be.
I want you to get up, get up right now and go to the window. I want you to stick your head out the window and yell at the top of your lungs, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Well probably not...but maybe they saw some of the notes scribbled in my notebooks. I've been working on a design for *nix based NC's for a few months. My idea is alot similar to theirs (booting from a flash ROM, more than a dumb terminal less than a PC). But I see a problem here, it's too damned expencive. I didn't see a white paper on this thing but they sure charge you up the ass for it. I could build my own box and only pay about 4-500$ each. I'm gonna keep working on my design because I have always enjoyed setting up slim/thin clients for people. I like central administration better than taking care of tons of PC's in an office.
For those of you who keep talking about fat clients with hard drives and floppies and such, remember that they are very expencive, in the short run they are cheaper, but in order to stay current and competitive with the rest of the business world you need to upgrade about every 20 months or so. If I have a thin client that will last me for 5-9 years (thats 500$ or 600 if you're bying a WYSE thin client and only once every 5-9 years excluding server upgrades which should be done every 3 years or so to keep up the speed) as opposed to 600$ every 20 months for PC's which muct be administered all the time (can we say overtime?) you start to see the TCO savings. With a thin client I need to upgrade the software on the server (probably Appliware or Star Office if it's a corporate office) which takes me a fraction of the time it takes me to upgrade dozens of PC's.
When someone says Flash memory that means a ROM that can be changed. So when a new kernel comes out or a patch is relased they just have all the clients load the new patch. It's not anymore difficult that having a bunch of fat clients doing it off an NFS.
The US gov't has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on toilet seats, different OSes wouldnt cost them much more. Ever heard of not putting all your eggs in one basket? If you drop it you break all of your eggs, Windows 9x is like a basket with a big hole in the bottom. Yes it would cost alot primarily to have multiple OSes in an office, but the long term benefits would highly outweigh the short term cost. When a new linux kernel patch is released, or an entirely new kernel for that matter, a hardware upgrade is rarely if ever needed. The upgrade from Windows 3.1 to 95 in most cases took a major hardware upgrade. If you put OSS unices on some of your computers, you have a large initial cost but your TCO is much lower than your Wintel machines, and when you need to upgrade your wintel machines you can recycle the old ones by putting an OSS unix on it.
Java is used in EVERYTHING not just PCs. It will run on everything from embeded systems to super computers, the same binary on all of them. It doesnt need need native hooks, those are in the java VM program, not the binary.
Why have multipurpose computers, and especially PCs become so popular? Because for a relatively low price, one person can do many many many many tasks without using a time share device (anyone ever use one of these, I mean the REALLY old ones from the 70's). Software is what made the computer industry take off, you can word processes, build a database, run spreadsheets, play pong, all on the same machine. This is what has made the PC (Personal Computer) so popular recently. PC's will continue to exist because of the wide variety of things that can be done on them with little or no modification. Many people have forgotten this, they see their computer as just another tool, when it's really a toolbox. Devices like WebTV and those are for people who want something quick and easy and arent worried about productivity, thats fine with me, it's better they get something user friendly than calling me at 7 am asking me what a general protection error is. The PC will be around for a bit longer because of it's wide range of uses. Sure Sony can release a console system that can serve up graphics as fast as some PCs, but when you really look at it, it's not that spectacular. Look at the original Nintendo, it had some pretty rad games on it for it's time and Rob the robot. Did PCs of the time have any of that? No, most were still CLI boxes used for word processing. Did the PCs quickly become more powerful at graphical applications than the Nintendo? Yes.
Another matter is what do you actually define as a PC (Personal Computer)? Is a PalmPilot a PC? It's personal and it computes. Or d oyou see a PC as a desktop tower with an obscenely heavy monitor and a bunch of cables sticking out the back? It's personal (for the most part) and it computes. Devices like tablets, handhelds, set top boxes ect. can all be considered Personal Computers. Ever seen the Toshiba Libretto? it's a 2lb sub notebook that can run Win98 or NT, it's innards could easily fit into a tablet sized device, you could have a fully functional workstation the size and weight of a notebook (a paper one, remember those?). Why hasnt this been done quite yet? Expense. The LCD monitors for portable devices are really nice...but expensive. Someone (I think it was Cyrix) released a tablet for surfing the web using their MediaGX processor, this is a step in the right direction for tablet devices. But is that considered a PC? Hell, I would love to have one of those, I could take notes in class in an appropriately sized screen instead of a little PalmIII. That would make it much easier to convert my scrible into a.doc file for inclusion in a thesis paper. I would say thats a personal computer, a type which we're going to see more of as hardware prices drop.
I would rather not rely on a remote server to store files, I like keeping them local thank you. I dislike all the "everything on the internet" comments I have read. Don't you pay attention in the news? Do you read the articles on slashdot? Very large companies, who dont give a rat's ass about you the consumer and who only see you as a potential dollar value, are buying up as many forms of media as they can. They want to control the flow of information coming into your PSX2's and HDTV's. If a handful of large overpowering companies own a majority of media forms, or just the majority of distrobution mediums, what makes you think that your rights of free speech and al those other nifty ones are going to count anymore? I can almost assure you that they wont count for jack crap. And what about privacy policies, do the companies hosting your data have access to it? If I write up a text file describing the ultimate domathingy, and I store it on a remote server thats owned by someone, say Microsoft, can they take my idea and use it without me seeing a dime of the profits or without getting any credit for it's invention? No I would rather have my own hard drive.
Anyone here ever hear of Jini? I can almost see some Java developers' ears perk up. It's a little toy created by Bill Joy of Sun to enable anything with a network interface and a processor of some sort to become a shared device. That means Jonny Jackoff can log onto my home network (saying I give him permission) and turn on my microwave, and watch my fishtank with a Java enables webcam, and all sorts of other stuff. Thats a very good technology and no offence to it's creators, I won't use it. I wont for the same reason I dont want my personal diskspace to be on some remote server, I don't want any script kiddies playing with my files or some dipshit admin to spill his Frappucino on the RAID controller frying both my data and his friend who beat him in a D&D match that weekend. If I do something stupid, or forget to setup a firewall and my data is lost, thats great, but I dont want some bonehead to do it for me and then be the victim of some subparagraphsectionarticlefineprintEncyclopediaBri tainiccaontheheadofapin legalese part of my license agreement that says the server was not responsible for my data.
So to finally stop ranting, yes I believe the desktop as we know it is slowly going to die out in the mainstream consumer market, the iMac and IBM's latest little iCandy treats are giving us an idea where the consumer market is going, Cuddletech. Do I think the Personal Computer is going to die out? Not within the next couple decades, we're just going to see them become alot more streamlined with the way we work, the power of a desktop in the size of a pad of paper that DOESNT use a keyboard. As for infinite bandwidth and all that unhip lingo, read Farenheight 451. Wall sized TV's, "interactive" television that makes you want to take one too many sleeping pills, it's all streaming mass media. No one sits down to read anything. Reading may seem like some sort of archism in this MTV-You'vegotmail-Starbuckscoffe-acidtechno-everyo ne'sgotissues freak show that we find ourselves embroiled in, but it's one of the most effective forms of communication. Reading requires no burning of fossil fuels in order to pump up your 100 watt stereo speakers, depening on the type of paper used a book has an uptime of several hundred years, it's not terribly harsh on the eyes, it can be done almost anywhere, and anyone can write. You dont need to know a technical language, you can write in the vernacular about anything your underloved, over stressed, hypercaffinated heart desires.
Sun is one of the best super duper high end dynamic made for the web serving thousands of happy users a day operating systems ever made. cdrom.com does jack to prove FreeBSD reliable for big tasks, it's a bunch of static FTP requests and sends, big whoop. If you want to point to FreeBSD reliability (I like FreeBSD dont get me wrong) then point out the special effects for Matrix were done with a big prallel (29 nodes I think) system running on FreeBSD.
I could easily write a perl script that would delete a users $HOME directory. No one would htink that was very funny, they might think they were running a text editor or something. I could insert the code inside other variables and then make a bunch of calls to them. So right off the bat you wouldnt see that it did anything wrong. You could so the same with shell scripts.
Iomega even makes an automated backup utility for it's Zip now. It runs in the background on Windows and will back up choosen directories at intervals you set. I wish more people would use stuff like this.
You would think with the wasted billions on the military in the past that MAYBE they could have funneled some of theat into creating a working OS and communication system. I mean really, it's the military, you would think they could do better than Windows for security. Maybe their own BSD version or something like that. I don't feel very safe knowing my military relies on Windows.
I wish I could moderate this up. I for a fact know that most people don't really care about what OS they use at work, as long as they get their job done and get a paycheck. I dislike windows for many reasons, but I wont force someone to use linux because I like it better. I think that admins or techies need to take a bashing if they are vehemently for Windows without really knowing why, but some basic users really doesnt need to. They just wanna use the computer for whatever wirk they are doing, if it costs them money, oh well, at least they get the job done. Not everyone can edit their kernel to get it working great on their system, most people dont even know what inside their system.
Many of your criticisms about windows seem more idealogical then totally factual. Sure Windows isn't the greatest OS in the world, but it is much simpler to use (at the cost of quality) right off the bat than linux is. Windows is widely supported for two reasons: 1. It gave a set standard of it's API for hardware and software developers to use. While it's not open it's a more focused model than linux has been in the past (notice I said past, the libraries have become alot more standardized and developing for linux has become much easier) 2. They grabbed up a huge market share, so hardware vendors decided they would go with the short term winner in the desktop OS race. Theres lots of hardware that will never work with windows because it's designed for SPARC or MIPS computers or some other processor/chipset/OS. Windows has the desktop market for now so thats why hardware developers wrote drivers for it.
Intel's lawsuit is going to fizzle out, I think they are just throwing some FUD into the fan. Personally i'm not impressed by a 133mhz bus or even a 200mhz bus. I wont upgrade to a 133mhz intel board using RAMBUS because it's more expensive then SDRAM for not very much of a performance gain. Why would I want a 533 or 566 PIII for close to 1000$ when i could get a dual motherbaord and two PII 450s for the same price and have 900mhz total (which is what I'm building right now). I'd like to see the DDR-SDRAM become more popular because it's alot faster than RAMBUs and is an open technology, so I wont pay insane amounts of money for 128 megs of ram.
As a sign that linux is getting much easier to use with the GUIs is that yesterday I sat my mom down at my computer and asked her to type up a small something or other and print it. She isn't very knowlegable with computers can and do the same job I asked of her in Windows using M$ Office 97. I have StarOffice and Applixware and use KDE with kwm. She sat down and quickly found Applix, opened up the word processor, typed and printed what she typed. The actual usage of linux is getting much easier for untrained users because of GUI projects like KDE and GNOME. Now when a distro becomes painfully easy to install where my mom can do it, then I'll say linux has come a long way. Thats where Windows has a one-up on linux, it's relatively easy to install things. And no one mention RPM, I hate RPM.
I don't think M$ has gone after BeOS yet because they dont see them as much of a threat as they see linux as, no one really pays any attention to Be in the news, but they are all in a tissy about linux (to all you media people, Red Hat is NOT the only linux distro and in NOT linux).
As for BSD being the most ported OS in the cosmo, yes it is. NetBSD, yeah it will run on that.
Thats why NT is inherently bad, when you buy a linux distro you can almost always choose the server or workstation installation. Each one installs a different set of programs just like NT does. The NT Server version has more management tools and comes with IIS pre-installed along with some other network managers. Workstation doesnt.
because alot of times people see unix/linux as just the server OS. I use linux as a workstation, not a server. If I were building a server I would probably run a BSD on it merely because BSDs generally perform better in the server roles for high volume sites than linux does. Thats just that I've seen, it isnt the rule. It's the opposite of M$'s marketing on Windows NT, they offer it as a workstation (work being keeping it running for a few hours) and in a server flavor. Same kernel, same OS, different tools, same crappiness. I's like to see linux or one of the BSD's get a bigger workstation share, they are much better at it than NT.
If I'm supposed to buy...
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a low foot print PC how about putting the processor and components in the base of the LCD display or something. Low footprint PCes arent meant for me or you to upgrade, they are for businesses of users that need as much usable space on their desk as possible. Maybe some of you also looked in the back of PC magazines and remember the keyboard footprint PC. All the components fit inside the keyboard and would run Windows or Linux. How about something like this inside the base of an LCD or something, my desk is covered in hardware, a monitor, tower, printer, cable modem, ect.
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It also pisses me off when I see posts that are so anti-intel that they are nearly bursting with energy to rant. The next time you want to rant about Intel, count to ten, turn your computer off, and walk away. Who cares if Intel makes their chips expensive, don't buy them, you have that ability. Stop being anti-everything monkeys, it just makes you closed minded. Intel has advantages and so does AMD, use whatever works best for your situation or your checkbook. Making up your mind to like one company or one product makes you overlook anything produced by another company, even if it is a better product. Think before you rant.
You as a "technical" person should know that the K7 doesnt USE 200mhz RAM. The system bus runs at 100mhz, but the chip itself runs it's own mini-bus at 200mhz. This results in a much faster pipelining and betting communication with the memory bus than traditional architectures. Similar to the Kensington Quickchips that have their own on-chip multipliers and such so you can stick a 300mhz chip into a 66mhz motherboard with a 3.5 multiplier and still end up with 300mhz. If you compare these to the G3/G4 and Alpha's you're going to be sorely disappointed. G3's and Alphas are both RISC and the Alpha is a full 64bit chip, so it's naturally goingto perform tasks faster than an x86 chip. In most environments the bottom line IS the price tag, get a clue. It's all about price tag whenever you're buying for your company and even for your home computers unless you're one of those "independantly wealthy" people. Real technical users get paid to make logical descisions which will benefit their employer or themselves to the fullest, not to rant because they found a keybaord on their desk.
The reason the Webzter Jr doesnt have a CD and a floppy is because they want you to buy software from them and just download it. Which if you have a cable modem, DSL, ISDN ,ect. it's not terribly difficult, on their "fast 56k" it becomes a little more tedious, but a not terribly bad idea. It's not a damned wrokstation, if you're hellbent on having a good system, dont buy from a vendor, build it! These kinda things are for the other 99% of the population who doesnt care or know what a kernel is, and isn't sure what the real difference between a gigabyte and a megabyte is it's just confusing numbers. The MediaGX and 32 megs of ram is just fine for most wp operations and for getting on the net.
This is ANOTHER thing i scratched on some notebook paper. I'm gonna have to lock up my notebooks from now on...
Even though I wasn't able to build one first, it's still a great idea. Not only does it give linux some rather good publicity but providing they have a USB port (great for accessorizing) or two it would also lead to some hardware manufacturers helping out with linux drivers for their products. It's very profitable too, a MediaGX processor (which Microwerkz loves), FlashROM or a small hard disk, some memory and mobo and such would probably run them about 150-170$ which means they make at least a 30$ profit off these, 10,000 * 30$ = enough to build a nice little production facility. If I can network it and plug it into my gateway I'll buy one for my parents.
This is probably a little off topic, but I hate when people compare the PowerPC or G3 chip to an Intel chip "at the same mhz". Simple fact:
PowerPC == fully RISC
G3 == fully RISC
PII/PIII == CISC with specialized RISC instruction sets
It's like comparing a MIPS and PIII, it just doesnt work right. RISC is naturally faster than CISC at comparable clockspeeds simply because it doesnt use as much chip overhead to process, it uses a handful of small instruction sets rather than large variable length instruction sets. It's easier to read a paragraph composed of small short words than it is to read one that says the same thing with more colorful language.
As for cuddletech, cute needs to be powerful or people wont buy it. But it also has to be cheap so people can afford it. I like the iMac, it's a well designed machine that is very easy for a new users to get working with. For serious users who know whut they're doing an iMac probably isnt the best idea. But with the PC industry trying to copy the iMac's popularity they are missing the point. The iMac is cheap and cute. It's icons are cuter, it's boot screen is cuter, it's made to make you want to hug it, hence the name cuddletech. The Z1 probably wont catch on, Windows 98 isn't cute, it's expensive, and it has "cool factor" but no cute. I'm not going to buy one, I like beige boxes that I can tear apart and rebuild with as few proprietary parts as possible.
is something with a little more room for me to do my work. I dont WANT a pocket device to do work on or read my email and/or web pages. Something with a screen maybe the size of the Sharp Tripad, I dont need million of colors but at least 16bit color. Keyboard? No. I'd rather write and use handwriting recognition or have a virtual keyboard. As for overall size, about the size of a regular paper notebook would be great. This is what i would pay a few hundred dollars for. It wouldnt be that hard to build one comparable to a wintel desktop, especially if you used a MediaGX processor, a small hard drive (a PCMCIA hard drive would work fine, especially if you were using linux or maybe BeOS), and a decent amount of RAM (32 megs). Thats what I would pay money for. Something with decent size and capability that I could use without bending myself to it's ergonomic will.
Sigh, I've been watching this happen for years as have the rest of you. Pretty soon a handful of companies will own all our forms of media disribution, everything we read, hear, and see will be at the behest of our corporate masters. Microsoft and AOL are tugging it out in the high speed access/cable tv arena. Now companies are merging in the telephone industry again. Remember AT&T? We're going to end up with entire portiton of the internet owned by one or two companies (yes I realize that now many backbones are operating by a handful of companies but that number is going to get much smaller) and all of our broadcast television is going to end up whatever Microsoft or AOL wishes us to see. All of our content will be provided by Fox and radi owill remain in the hands of CBS, NBC, and ABC. Everything will be censored according to the particular company's user policy. Big corporations win, we lose. Without the ability to choose between one provider and anaother we'll end up with the kind of treatment AT&T provided before being broken up. You have to have one of their techs install a new phone (or cable box or any other medium of data exchange), if you have a problem with the service...oh well. You're no longer a person, just a marketing statistic, you always have been and for the forseeable future always will be.
I want you to get up, get up right now and go to the window. I want you to stick your head out the window and yell at the top of your lungs, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Support your local destablizing element.
Well probably not...but maybe they saw some of the notes scribbled in my notebooks. I've been working on a design for *nix based NC's for a few months. My idea is alot similar to theirs (booting from a flash ROM, more than a dumb terminal less than a PC). But I see a problem here, it's too damned expencive. I didn't see a white paper on this thing but they sure charge you up the ass for it. I could build my own box and only pay about 4-500$ each. I'm gonna keep working on my design because I have always enjoyed setting up slim/thin clients for people. I like central administration better than taking care of tons of PC's in an office.
For those of you who keep talking about fat clients with hard drives and floppies and such, remember that they are very expencive, in the short run they are cheaper, but in order to stay current and competitive with the rest of the business world you need to upgrade about every 20 months or so. If I have a thin client that will last me for 5-9 years (thats 500$ or 600 if you're bying a WYSE thin client and only once every 5-9 years excluding server upgrades which should be done every 3 years or so to keep up the speed) as opposed to 600$ every 20 months for PC's which muct be administered all the time (can we say overtime?) you start to see the TCO savings. With a thin client I need to upgrade the software on the server (probably Appliware or Star Office if it's a corporate office) which takes me a fraction of the time it takes me to upgrade dozens of PC's.
When someone says Flash memory that means a ROM that can be changed. So when a new kernel comes out or a patch is relased they just have all the clients load the new patch. It's not anymore difficult that having a bunch of fat clients doing it off an NFS.
The US gov't has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on toilet seats, different OSes wouldnt cost them much more. Ever heard of not putting all your eggs in one basket? If you drop it you break all of your eggs, Windows 9x is like a basket with a big hole in the bottom. Yes it would cost alot primarily to have multiple OSes in an office, but the long term benefits would highly outweigh the short term cost. When a new linux kernel patch is released, or an entirely new kernel for that matter, a hardware upgrade is rarely if ever needed. The upgrade from Windows 3.1 to 95 in most cases took a major hardware upgrade. If you put OSS unices on some of your computers, you have a large initial cost but your TCO is much lower than your Wintel machines, and when you need to upgrade your wintel machines you can recycle the old ones by putting an OSS unix on it.
Java is used in EVERYTHING not just PCs. It will run on everything from embeded systems to super computers, the same binary on all of them. It doesnt need need native hooks, those are in the java VM program, not the binary.
I am NINJABOT, invisible mechanical warrior, bringer of death to you and your comrades. Prepare to become sushi!
Damn, it's the Onion, ever heard of it? Shut up.
Why have multipurpose computers, and especially PCs become so popular? Because for a relatively low price, one person can do many many many many tasks without using a time share device (anyone ever use one of these, I mean the REALLY old ones from the 70's). Software is what made the computer industry take off, you can word processes, build a database, run spreadsheets, play pong, all on the same machine. This is what has made the PC (Personal Computer) so popular recently. PC's will continue to exist because of the wide variety of things that can be done on them with little or no modification. Many people have forgotten this, they see their computer as just another tool, when it's really a toolbox. Devices like WebTV and those are for people who want something quick and easy and arent worried about productivity, thats fine with me, it's better they get something user friendly than calling me at 7 am asking me what a general protection error is. The PC will be around for a bit longer because of it's wide range of uses. Sure Sony can release a console system that can serve up graphics as fast as some PCs, but when you really look at it, it's not that spectacular. Look at the original Nintendo, it had some pretty rad games on it for it's time and Rob the robot. Did PCs of the time have any of that? No, most were still CLI boxes used for word processing. Did the PCs quickly become more powerful at graphical applications than the Nintendo? Yes.
Another matter is what do you actually define as a PC (Personal Computer)? Is a PalmPilot a PC? It's personal and it computes. Or d oyou see a PC as a desktop tower with an obscenely heavy monitor and a bunch of cables sticking out the back? It's personal (for the most part) and it computes. Devices like tablets, handhelds, set top boxes ect. can all be considered Personal Computers. Ever seen the Toshiba Libretto? it's a 2lb sub notebook that can run Win98 or NT, it's innards could easily fit into a tablet sized device, you could have a fully functional workstation the size and weight of a notebook (a paper one, remember those?). Why hasnt this been done quite yet? Expense. The LCD monitors for portable devices are really nice...but expensive. Someone (I think it was Cyrix) released a tablet for surfing the web using their MediaGX processor, this is a step in the right direction for tablet devices. But is that considered a PC? Hell, I would love to have one of those, I could take notes in class in an appropriately sized screen instead of a little PalmIII. That would make it much easier to convert my scrible into a .doc file for inclusion in a thesis paper. I would say thats a personal computer, a type which we're going to see more of as hardware prices drop.
I would rather not rely on a remote server to store files, I like keeping them local thank you. I dislike all the "everything on the internet" comments I have read. Don't you pay attention in the news? Do you read the articles on slashdot? Very large companies, who dont give a rat's ass about you the consumer and who only see you as a potential dollar value, are buying up as many forms of media as they can. They want to control the flow of information coming into your PSX2's and HDTV's. If a handful of large overpowering companies own a majority of media forms, or just the majority of distrobution mediums, what makes you think that your rights of free speech and al those other nifty ones are going to count anymore? I can almost assure you that they wont count for jack crap. And what about privacy policies, do the companies hosting your data have access to it? If I write up a text file describing the ultimate domathingy, and I store it on a remote server thats owned by someone, say Microsoft, can they take my idea and use it without me seeing a dime of the profits or without getting any credit for it's invention? No I would rather have my own hard drive.
Anyone here ever hear of Jini? I can almost see some Java developers' ears perk up. It's a little toy created by Bill Joy of Sun to enable anything with a network interface and a processor of some sort to become a shared device. That means Jonny Jackoff can log onto my home network (saying I give him permission) and turn on my microwave, and watch my fishtank with a Java enables webcam, and all sorts of other stuff. Thats a very good technology and no offence to it's creators, I won't use it. I wont for the same reason I dont want my personal diskspace to be on some remote server, I don't want any script kiddies playing with my files or some dipshit admin to spill his Frappucino on the RAID controller frying both my data and his friend who beat him in a D&D match that weekend. If I do something stupid, or forget to setup a firewall and my data is lost, thats great, but I dont want some bonehead to do it for me and then be the victim of some subparagraphsectionarticlefineprintEncyclopediaBri tainiccaontheheadofapin legalese part of my license agreement that says the server was not responsible for my data.
So to finally stop ranting, yes I believe the desktop as we know it is slowly going to die out in the mainstream consumer market, the iMac and IBM's latest little iCandy treats are giving us an idea where the consumer market is going, Cuddletech. Do I think the Personal Computer is going to die out? Not within the next couple decades, we're just going to see them become alot more streamlined with the way we work, the power of a desktop in the size of a pad of paper that DOESNT use a keyboard. As for infinite bandwidth and all that unhip lingo, read Farenheight 451. Wall sized TV's, "interactive" television that makes you want to take one too many sleeping pills, it's all streaming mass media. No one sits down to read anything. Reading may seem like some sort of archism in this MTV-You'vegotmail-Starbuckscoffe-acidtechno-everyo ne'sgotissues freak show that we find ourselves embroiled in, but it's one of the most effective forms of communication. Reading requires no burning of fossil fuels in order to pump up your 100 watt stereo speakers, depening on the type of paper used a book has an uptime of several hundred years, it's not terribly harsh on the eyes, it can be done almost anywhere, and anyone can write. You dont need to know a technical language, you can write in the vernacular about anything your underloved, over stressed, hypercaffinated heart desires.
Sun is one of the best super duper high end dynamic made for the web serving thousands of happy users a day operating systems ever made. cdrom.com does jack to prove FreeBSD reliable for big tasks, it's a bunch of static FTP requests and sends, big whoop. If you want to point to FreeBSD reliability (I like FreeBSD dont get me wrong) then point out the special effects for Matrix were done with a big prallel (29 nodes I think) system running on FreeBSD.
I could easily write a perl script that would delete a users $HOME directory. No one would htink that was very funny, they might think they were running a text editor or something. I could insert the code inside other variables and then make a bunch of calls to them. So right off the bat you wouldnt see that it did anything wrong. You could so the same with shell scripts.
Iomega even makes an automated backup utility for it's Zip now. It runs in the background on Windows and will back up choosen directories at intervals you set. I wish more people would use stuff like this.
You would think with the wasted billions on the military in the past that MAYBE they could have funneled some of theat into creating a working OS and communication system. I mean really, it's the military, you would think they could do better than Windows for security. Maybe their own BSD version or something like that. I don't feel very safe knowing my military relies on Windows.
I wish I could moderate this up. I for a fact know that most people don't really care about what OS they use at work, as long as they get their job done and get a paycheck. I dislike windows for many reasons, but I wont force someone to use linux because I like it better. I think that admins or techies need to take a bashing if they are vehemently for Windows without really knowing why, but some basic users really doesnt need to. They just wanna use the computer for whatever wirk they are doing, if it costs them money, oh well, at least they get the job done. Not everyone can edit their kernel to get it working great on their system, most people dont even know what inside their system.
Many of your criticisms about windows seem more idealogical then totally factual. Sure Windows isn't the greatest OS in the world, but it is much simpler to use (at the cost of quality) right off the bat than linux is. Windows is widely supported for two reasons:
1. It gave a set standard of it's API for hardware and software developers to use. While it's not open it's a more focused model than linux has been in the past (notice I said past, the libraries have become alot more standardized and developing for linux has become much easier) 2. They grabbed up a huge market share, so hardware vendors decided they would go with the short term winner in the desktop OS race. Theres lots of hardware that will never work with windows because it's designed for SPARC or MIPS computers or some other processor/chipset/OS. Windows has the desktop market for now so thats why hardware developers wrote drivers for it.
Intel's lawsuit is going to fizzle out, I think they are just throwing some FUD into the fan. Personally i'm not impressed by a 133mhz bus or even a 200mhz bus. I wont upgrade to a 133mhz intel board using RAMBUS because it's more expensive then SDRAM for not very much of a performance gain. Why would I want a 533 or 566 PIII for close to 1000$ when i could get a dual motherbaord and two PII 450s for the same price and have 900mhz total (which is what I'm building right now). I'd like to see the DDR-SDRAM become more popular because it's alot faster than RAMBUs and is an open technology, so I wont pay insane amounts of money for 128 megs of ram.
I don't think M$ has gone after BeOS yet because they dont see them as much of a threat as they see linux as, no one really pays any attention to Be in the news, but they are all in a tissy about linux (to all you media people, Red Hat is NOT the only linux distro and in NOT linux).
As for BSD being the most ported OS in the cosmo, yes it is. NetBSD, yeah it will run on that.
Thats why NT is inherently bad, when you buy a linux distro you can almost always choose the server or workstation installation. Each one installs a different set of programs just like NT does. The NT Server version has more management tools and comes with IIS pre-installed along with some other network managers. Workstation doesnt.
because alot of times people see unix/linux as just the server OS. I use linux as a workstation, not a server. If I were building a server I would probably run a BSD on it merely because BSDs generally perform better in the server roles for high volume sites than linux does. Thats just that I've seen, it isnt the rule. It's the opposite of M$'s marketing on Windows NT, they offer it as a workstation (work being keeping it running for a few hours) and in a server flavor. Same kernel, same OS, different tools, same crappiness. I's like to see linux or one of the BSD's get a bigger workstation share, they are much better at it than NT.
a low foot print PC how about putting the processor and components in the base of the LCD display or something. Low footprint PCes arent meant for me or you to upgrade, they are for businesses of users that need as much usable space on their desk as possible. Maybe some of you also looked in the back of PC magazines and remember the keyboard footprint PC. All the components fit inside the keyboard and would run Windows or Linux. How about something like this inside the base of an LCD or something, my desk is covered in hardware, a monitor, tower, printer, cable modem, ect.