1/12/02 is for many people totally Y2K compliant, but has some irrelevant Y1.9K problems. To me (someone who never deals with old dates, and lives in Hong Kong) 1/12/02 is unambiguously 2nd December 2001.
I have had similar experiences. NT falls over frequently doing almost any task except one - running SQL Server. The two are very stable together. Try introducing anything else to the machine, though, and you are in trouble. The speed of NT on an Alpha is pathetic, though. You have this really hot 64 bit machine, with a lame 32 bit OS. The Alpha ends up running no faster than a Pentium.
The only one of those sites I access with some regularity is Compaq. Its one of the quirkiest, most trouble prones sites I know. FTPing update packs from there is about as hit and miss as it gets.
These discussions keep bringing up medicine. Its totally inappropriate. Free markets (real real ones, not monopolies, cartels, etc.) work quite well for most things, so long as you have reasonable regulations to limit co-lateral damage (e.g. pollution control laws).
The medical industry is different. People want preventions, but will only pay a lot for a cure. With the cost of clinical trials to get something approved so high, the only things industry will develop through to clinical use are products for common problems that the cure won't fix too quickly. The structure of this industry is all screwed up.
Of course, the pharmacy business is full of nasty practices like any other industry - e.g. monitoring world famines to work out when to hike vitamin prices - but few freely operating industries have motivations so far out of line with customer benefit.
Remember that the 64 bit parts of NT are a botched on afterthought. It ran from day one on the best 64 bit machine you can buy (in my opinion) - the Alpha - and made it run like molasses, 100% 32 bit.
Microsoft have a track record of always being an integer length behind the hardware. As we are moving to 64 bits Windows 98 is still riddled with bits of 16 bit code. NT seems like its intended to follow the same trend. I guess someone will have to launch a 128 bit CPU before Microsoft take 64 bits seriously.
Take a tiny company that starts in a garage, but is treated like Rolls Royce from day one. Run it for half a century as the darling of all its users, and the envy of all its competitors. See it grow steadily to a substantial size. Run it so well is survives the end of the cold war, when most instrumentation companies fell into chapter 11. Watch the misfortune of letting the company fall into the hands of incompetant management, and then LET THEM CHOOSE THEIR OWN SUCCESSORS.
Why doesn't corporate America ever FIRE cretins in top jobs? How does this bunch of losers end up as winners, retiring comfortably, when the good guys loose their jobs with minimum payout packages?
Why isn't Mr Platt already in possession of the customary two warning letters, saying his performance is inadequate?
Wavelet compression is not entirely unrelated to fractal compression. Like the fractal approach the artefacts are more in sympathy with the way the brain works than are the artefacts of 2D Fourier based approaches, like JPEG. It is not, therefore, entirely incorrect to say that files are both smaller and better. You can make the wavelet file smaller than a JPEG file before a mathematical measurement says the loss is similar. However, when you look at the results the wavelet picture still looks considerably better, as the artefacts are more in sympathy with the way our eyes work.
Wavelet and fractal compressors have been around for at least a decade, for audio and other data as well as for images. They have previously been highly asymmetric in their compute requirements - they need huge compute power for compression, but very little for decompression. This has previously made them impractical for applications like mini-DV cam-corders - the key reason MPEG-2 is still 2-D Fourier based. Tricks for getting the compute requirements down are now coming through. The next MPEG standard may change to wavelets, and I understand the next JPEG standard definitely will.
Castlewood claim an MTBF 50% better than the competition. From my experiences with the IOMEGA equivalent, that means they should last about 3 months. I don't know how IOMEGA can keep handing out new replacement drives and stay in business. Has anyone seen a JAZ get through its warranty period (out of the box, and in use, that is)?
For the Gartner group this is praise indeed for Linux. This is the group that tells you that if you buy a stamp you have to allow at least a million dollars in support costs to get it stuck on an envelope.
I know support costs are far higher that purchase costs, but some of the figures they quote are ludicrous. I think they include the total salary of a computer's user as part of its support costs.
They are right on the mark about opportunistic support, though. I wouldn't trust any of the major vendors who recently announced support for Linux to follow through.
Until there is an army of people with something like the (pathetic but recognised) MCSE certificate to wave at the non-technical, the non-technical have no support. You can get lots of rapid useful feedback for Linux technical problems, but you need some technical competance to make use of it. Most MCSEs may be able to do little more than get NT installed and staggering along, poorly configured, but that represents an insurmountable hurdle for most people. There aren't enough Unix support people around to switch to Linux support. This is an area where quality may be less important than quantity.
There are TWO critical issues for good software - programmer quality and motivation.
Its amazing the good work you can get from fairly average people who are highly motivated. On the other hand, I'm sometimes amazed at the crap I have produced when I couldn't give a damn about the outcome.
Those of us who look at sites in languages other than English have far more annoyance with character sets. A large percentage of non-English pages don't specify the character set, so you have to keep telling the browser how to decode the pages. Don't the site designers ever browse their own sites? Maybe they only ever browse their own site, and have their default character set set to the appropriate value. Its just one more example of sloppiness, that makes the Web a pain to browse, and a far from idiot-proof medium.
I don't think anyone should claim impartial editorial opinion. Its an oxymoron, like "unbiased opinion". In fact its a double oxymoron. "Impartial" with either "editorial" or "opinion" forms an oxymoron.
Toys-R-Pus have a bit of a point, and so does Gus. On the other hand Gus is playing with fire by treading on the toes of someone with more more expensive lawyers.
What really annoyed me recently was to find thousands of surnames grabbed by a bunch in Canada.
My surname is Underwood. I did a check for underwood.com - that was taken by a Jenny Underwood. Fair enough, she got there first. Then I tries underwood.org, and found it registered to the "Underwood E-mail" service in Vancouver. I tried underwood.net, and they had that one too. Then I tried some other surnames, and found every one taken by ".... E-mail Service", with the same address, administrator, name server, etc. If you go to their web site they are trying to sell you a third level doamin, based on your surname for $4.95 a year.
Now in some ways they are helping to share out these domains amongst a lot of people with the same surname. It seems too much like a scam, though. I feel content that I lost out on underwood.com to a real Underwood. I feel these other people are just trying to exploit me, though. If they were genuinely trying to run a business providing a service for people of the same name they wouldn't have registered all the.net names too.
I thought many American programmer were already out of work. Statistics show only a small percentage of people who program when they leave college still doing it 20 years on.
A lot of work certainly has moved abroad, and cheap labour is imported. I've spent quite a bit of time in Bangalore over the past year. Every street has some well known western companies, and each is employing 500 to 1000 people there. Nobody seems to bother with a small operation. It only makes sense to go off-shore if you do it big time.
The results people get with these off-shore operations is very variable. Some of the best stuff in the world comes out of Bangalore - mostly software, but some chip design too. Some really low quality, low productivity work is also done there. Perhaps the results people get out of these operations reflect the effort they put into them.
Now Hydrabad is on the rise, with thousands of prgrammers doing mundane Y2K work there. Chip design is also building up in Bangalore, Madras and Hydrabad.
In Bangalore a reasonable programmer gets US$500 to US$800 a month. Even if they were not as productive as some other countries they would still offer could value.
Cheap well educated people who speak good English sounds like an investor's dream come true. Perhaps the migration to India will gather pace now it has been seen to be successful. On the other hand it may be capped by a limited of suitable people. Prices have certainly soared in Bangalore in the past five years.
Hey, wake up guys. We are talking about a CPU not a computer system. The serial number doesn't get sent anywhere on its own. Its just readable and usable by the system and applications software. If that software chooses to use or abuse the number it can.
It has absolutely no value whatsoever for e-commerce. It is another red herring, like encryption control laws. A dishonest person is not going to use the standard products. They will use software which doesn't use the serial number in the CPU, and which uses the very best encryption.
This isn't really a big brother issue. Its one of those "if you can't do something useful, do something easy" things. These are usually promoted with statements like "its not perfect, but at least we are doing something about the problem". In fact, as in the serial number case, they are doing something irrelevant to the e-commerce problem.
Example of using a fast PII fully under Windows 95, 98 or NT:
1. Start the CPU monitor 2. Put your mouse pointer over a large window's header bar 3. Press the left button, and keep is pressed. 4. Wiggle the mouse from side to side, and watch the CPU monitor.
That can keep a PII/400 fully occupied. It even keeps a high end Alpha running NT 4.0 about 70% occupied. Even with the latest video accelerator cards Windows still requires huge compute power for crisp display update. NT3.51 required only a fraction of that power. Sure a slower processor works, but the feel of the machine is much better with the faster processor. Everything is so jerky with a more mundance CPU.
I think the article is looking in the wrong direction for Intel's "spreading too thin" problem.
Their sudden and unpredicted need to churn out a series of Celeron parts must have screwed up all their other schedules. A year ago there were just realising the problem. They quickly introduced a crippled processor everyone laughed at. They had to do a better one real quick. Now they can't make any money from it, as the package costs a bomb (or is that too much of the BOM?), so they have to put more effort into Socket 7, er, Socket 370 (is that like an IBM 370?).
AMD's sales are small compared to Intel, but it seems that to a substantial extent AMD is now driving Intel's development plans.
Everyone called Intel the one product company. Now they are fighting this claim with a host of fragmented product lines.
When you compare Intel with a broad line supplier like AMD, the "spread too thin" argument doesn't hold water. From must lower total revenues AMD finances the development not only of their x86 series, but of a wide range of other products. Intel makes the CPUs, the supporting chip sets, and just a few other PC related parts. They keep pulling out of other activities, like their microcontrollers.
There are lots of complaints here about the students wording, as thought the poster's suggested wording is the natural opposite. Pro-Linux is NOT the natural opposite of Pro-Microsoft.
If the student's main message is "Microsoft is bad" that is exactly what they should say. If their message is "Linux is wonderful", implying that OpenBSD, ALL Windows software suppliers, and all the others in the industry, should be dismissed, that is what they should say.
To tell others what to say is to assume you fully understand their position. However, if you don't understand their position after reading their leaflet, I guess that leaflet shows severe weaknesses.
MD5 produces a string which is characteristic of the file that produced, and quite hard to fake. However, if the crook can give you the file and the MD5 string all you will see is a correct match when you try to reproduce that MD5 string. Security usually comes from a two stage process - you get a public key from the author in a way you feel comfortable with (e.g. direct from the RedHat site - i.e. from a name and place you know and trust). Then whenever you find a package from that supplier, whichever mirror or other source it comes from, you can check it using the the key you got in advance. One of the nice things about RPMs is they let you make this check a no-brain use of a simple command line operation.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I tried to "come to France" the whole damned country went on strike!
1/12/02 is for many people totally Y2K compliant, but has some irrelevant Y1.9K problems. To me (someone who never deals with old dates, and lives in Hong Kong) 1/12/02 is unambiguously 2nd December 2001.
4 digit dates are pretty damned ambiguous. I wouldn't dream of using a system that doesn't qualify the year with AD or BC.
I have had similar experiences. NT falls over frequently doing almost any task except one - running SQL Server. The two are very stable together. Try introducing anything else to the machine, though, and you are in trouble. The speed of NT on an Alpha is pathetic, though. You have this really hot 64 bit machine, with a lame 32 bit OS. The Alpha ends up running no faster than a Pentium.
The only one of those sites I access with some regularity is Compaq. Its one of the quirkiest, most trouble prones sites I know. FTPing update packs from there is about as hit and miss as it gets.
Since 5.9.7 won't even install or upgrade on an Alpha I guess 6.1 will be on its way soon.
I had a physics teacher at school who used to keep saying that "nothing's obvious". Maybe he taught the patent office people.
These discussions keep bringing up medicine. Its totally inappropriate. Free markets (real real ones, not monopolies, cartels, etc.) work quite well for most things, so long as you have reasonable regulations to limit co-lateral damage (e.g. pollution control laws).
The medical industry is different. People want preventions, but will only pay a lot for a cure. With the cost of clinical trials to get something approved so high, the only things industry will develop through to clinical use are products for common problems that the cure won't fix too quickly. The structure of this industry is all screwed up.
Of course, the pharmacy business is full of nasty practices like any other industry - e.g. monitoring world famines to work out when to hike vitamin prices - but few freely operating industries have motivations so far out of line with customer benefit.
Remember that the 64 bit parts of NT are a botched on afterthought. It ran from day one on the best 64 bit machine you can buy (in my opinion) - the Alpha - and made it run like molasses, 100% 32 bit.
Microsoft have a track record of always being an integer length behind the hardware. As we are moving to 64 bits Windows 98 is still riddled with bits of 16 bit code. NT seems like its intended to follow the same trend. I guess someone will have to launch a 128 bit CPU before Microsoft take 64 bits seriously.
Take a tiny company that starts in a garage, but is treated like Rolls Royce from day one. Run it for half a century as the darling of all its users, and the envy of all its competitors. See it grow steadily to a substantial size. Run it so well is survives the end of the cold war, when most instrumentation companies fell into chapter 11. Watch the misfortune of letting the company fall into the hands of incompetant management, and then LET THEM CHOOSE THEIR OWN SUCCESSORS.
Why doesn't corporate America ever FIRE cretins in top jobs? How does this bunch of losers end up as winners, retiring comfortably, when the good guys loose their jobs with minimum payout packages?
Why isn't Mr Platt already in possession of the customary two warning letters, saying his performance is inadequate?
Wavelet compression is not entirely unrelated to fractal compression. Like the fractal approach the artefacts are more in sympathy with the way the brain works than are the artefacts of 2D Fourier based approaches, like JPEG. It is not, therefore, entirely incorrect to say that files are both smaller and better. You can make the wavelet file smaller than a JPEG file before a mathematical measurement says the loss is similar. However, when you look at the results the wavelet picture still looks considerably better, as the artefacts are more in sympathy with the way our eyes work.
Wavelet and fractal compressors have been around for at least a decade, for audio and other data as well as for images. They have previously been highly asymmetric in their compute requirements - they need huge compute power for compression, but very little for decompression. This has previously made them impractical for applications like mini-DV cam-corders - the key reason MPEG-2 is still 2-D Fourier based. Tricks for getting the compute requirements down are now coming through. The next MPEG standard may change to wavelets, and I understand the next JPEG standard definitely will.
In the UK, if you swear on the telephone, the telephone company has technically broken the law. They have the same legal status as a publisher.
Castlewood claim an MTBF 50% better than the competition. From my experiences with the IOMEGA equivalent, that means they should last about 3 months. I don't know how IOMEGA can keep handing out new replacement drives and stay in business. Has anyone seen a JAZ get through its warranty period (out of the box, and in use, that is)?
For the Gartner group this is praise indeed for Linux. This is the group that tells you that if you buy a stamp you have to allow at least a million dollars in support costs to get it stuck on an envelope.
I know support costs are far higher that purchase costs, but some of the figures they quote are ludicrous. I think they include the total salary of a computer's user as part of its support costs.
They are right on the mark about opportunistic support, though. I wouldn't trust any of the major vendors who recently announced support for Linux to follow through.
Until there is an army of people with something like the (pathetic but recognised) MCSE certificate to wave at the non-technical, the non-technical have no support. You can get lots of rapid useful feedback for Linux technical problems, but you need some technical competance to make use of it. Most MCSEs may be able to do little more than get NT installed and staggering along, poorly configured, but that represents an insurmountable hurdle for most people. There aren't enough Unix support people around to switch to Linux support. This is an area where quality may be less important than quantity.
I thought one of the key features of these "learned" journals was peer review. Maybe OSS could teach them what that means.
There are TWO critical issues for good software - programmer quality and motivation.
Its amazing the good work you can get from fairly average people who are highly motivated. On the other hand, I'm sometimes amazed at the crap I have produced when I couldn't give a damn about the outcome.
Those of us who look at sites in languages other than English have far more annoyance with character sets. A large percentage of non-English pages don't specify the character set, so you have to keep telling the browser how to decode the pages. Don't the site designers ever browse their own sites? Maybe they only ever browse their own site, and have their default character set set to the appropriate value. Its just one more example of sloppiness, that makes the Web a pain to browse, and a far from idiot-proof medium.
I don't think anyone should claim impartial editorial opinion. Its an oxymoron, like "unbiased opinion". In fact its a double oxymoron. "Impartial" with either "editorial" or "opinion" forms an oxymoron.
Toys-R-Pus have a bit of a point, and so does Gus. On the other hand Gus is playing with fire by treading on the toes of someone with more more expensive lawyers.
.net names too.
What really annoyed me recently was to find thousands of surnames grabbed by a bunch in Canada.
My surname is Underwood. I did a check for underwood.com - that was taken by a Jenny Underwood. Fair enough, she got there first. Then I tries underwood.org, and found it registered to the "Underwood E-mail" service in Vancouver. I tried underwood.net, and they had that one too. Then I tried some other surnames, and found every one taken by ".... E-mail Service", with the same address, administrator, name server, etc. If you go to their web site they are trying to sell you a third level doamin, based on your surname for $4.95 a year.
Now in some ways they are helping to share out these domains amongst a lot of people with the same surname. It seems too much like a scam, though. I feel content that I lost out on underwood.com to a real Underwood. I feel these other people are just trying to exploit me, though. If they were genuinely trying to run a business providing a service for people of the same name they wouldn't have registered all the
I thought many American programmer were already out of work. Statistics show only a small percentage of people who program when they leave college still doing it 20 years on.
A lot of work certainly has moved abroad, and cheap labour is imported. I've spent quite a bit of time in Bangalore over the past year. Every street has some well known western companies, and each is employing 500 to 1000 people there. Nobody seems to bother with a small operation. It only makes sense to go off-shore if you do it big time.
The results people get with these off-shore operations is very variable. Some of the best stuff in the world comes out of Bangalore - mostly software, but some chip design too. Some really low quality, low productivity work is also done there. Perhaps the results people get out of these operations reflect the effort they put into them.
Now Hydrabad is on the rise, with thousands of prgrammers doing mundane Y2K work there. Chip design is also building up in Bangalore, Madras and Hydrabad.
In Bangalore a reasonable programmer gets US$500 to US$800 a month. Even if they were not as productive as some other countries they would still offer could value.
Cheap well educated people who speak good English sounds like an investor's dream come true. Perhaps the migration to India will gather pace now it has been seen to be successful. On the other hand it may be capped by a limited of suitable people. Prices have certainly soared in Bangalore in the past five years.
Hey, wake up guys. We are talking about a CPU not a computer system. The serial number doesn't get sent anywhere on its own. Its just readable and usable by the system and applications software. If that software chooses to use or abuse the number it can.
It has absolutely no value whatsoever for e-commerce. It is another red herring, like encryption control laws. A dishonest person is not going to use the standard products. They will use software which doesn't use the serial number in the CPU, and which uses the very best encryption.
This isn't really a big brother issue. Its one of those "if you can't do something useful, do something easy" things. These are usually promoted with statements like "its not perfect, but at least we are doing something about the problem". In fact, as in the serial number case, they are doing something irrelevant to the e-commerce problem.
Example of using a fast PII fully under Windows 95, 98 or NT:
1. Start the CPU monitor
2. Put your mouse pointer over a large window's header bar
3. Press the left button, and keep is pressed.
4. Wiggle the mouse from side to side, and watch the CPU monitor.
That can keep a PII/400 fully occupied. It even keeps a high end Alpha running NT 4.0 about 70% occupied. Even with the latest video accelerator cards Windows still requires huge compute power for crisp display update. NT3.51 required only a fraction of that power. Sure a slower processor works, but the feel of the machine is much better with the faster processor. Everything is so jerky with a more mundance CPU.
I think the article is looking in the wrong direction for Intel's "spreading too thin" problem.
Their sudden and unpredicted need to churn out a series of Celeron parts must have screwed up all their other schedules. A year ago there were just realising the problem. They quickly introduced a crippled processor everyone laughed at. They had to do a better one real quick. Now they can't make any money from it, as the package costs a bomb (or is that too much of the BOM?), so they have to put more effort into Socket 7, er, Socket 370 (is that like an IBM 370?).
AMD's sales are small compared to Intel, but it seems that to a substantial extent AMD is now driving Intel's development plans.
Everyone called Intel the one product company. Now they are fighting this claim with a host of fragmented product lines.
When you compare Intel with a broad line supplier like AMD, the "spread too thin" argument doesn't hold water. From must lower total revenues AMD finances the development not only of their x86 series, but of a wide range of other products. Intel makes the CPUs, the supporting chip sets, and just a few other PC related parts. They keep pulling out of other activities, like their microcontrollers.
There are lots of complaints here about the students wording, as thought the poster's suggested wording is the natural opposite. Pro-Linux is NOT the natural opposite of Pro-Microsoft.
If the student's main message is "Microsoft is bad" that is exactly what they should say. If their message is "Linux is wonderful", implying that OpenBSD, ALL Windows software suppliers, and all the others in the industry, should be dismissed, that is what they should say.
To tell others what to say is to assume you fully understand their position. However, if you don't understand their position after reading their leaflet, I guess that leaflet shows severe weaknesses.
MD5 produces a string which is characteristic of the file that produced, and quite hard to fake. However, if the crook can give you the file and the MD5 string all you will see is a correct match when you try to reproduce that MD5 string. Security usually comes from a two stage process - you get a public key from the author in a way you feel comfortable with (e.g. direct from the RedHat site - i.e. from a name and place you know and trust). Then whenever you find a package from that supplier, whichever mirror or other source it comes from, you can check it using the the key you got in advance. One of the nice things about RPMs is they let you make this check a no-brain use of a simple command line operation.