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· Score: 1
I think a great application for this would be a QNX-Demo-Disk type linux disk.. Basically, a low cost / low requirement Internet Appliance. The size/overhead/requirements of an X11 environment make this very difficult. But, if one could get a basic linux machine running, with framebuffer applications to provide the essentials (WWW, E-Mail, ?).
Do it on a boot CD, or add network loading of other applications, and it could be a pretty slick little system.
Yes, CS will be a relatively difficult course of study, on par with any engineering degree.
But, think before you make a jump to an easier program for the short term benefit of more free time. Challenging yourself now will pay dividends the rest of your professional life. The CS degree provides you the fundamentals that everything in computers are built on. Learn that stuff well, and you can take your career whatever direction you want.
Who let that pompous idiot up on the soapbox in the first place?
His famous "I am rich now" article was my favorite.. But, I haven't seen any from him lately. According to the Insider information on Yahoo, he got 160K shares of VA. That was worth $33.5 Million this time last year. As of Dec. 7, it is now worth $1.1M.
He has really proven his value on that one. His vision has really led them in the right direction.
They said they will be licensing their technology. If they do that well, it will be incorporated into other devices, live DVD players, Tivo Hardware, Home PC's, Internet Appliances, etc..
I read this as meaning they are concerned about Sony's attempt to be the home Network/Media portal, and are trying to compete by partnering. Kinda reminiscent of Apple hardware vs. Miscrosoft licensing.
Come one.. this is where free software started. Any decent University has been an "Open Source University" from day one. Partly because the governmental funding required them to be open & release the results of their funded work. Also, research universities generally have that community feeling toward development, which encourages people to contribute their share for all.
Uhh.. Who are you stealing from by doing this? The cable networks don't get paid by the cable carriers, they get paid by the advertisers. Their goal is to get the highest possible viewership, to increase their value to advertisers. And the cable or satellite companies do not have some inherent right to my business. If I want to get the shows from their competitor, that's my choice. If this were done a bit more ligitimately, it would be much better for the networks than broadcast. It would allow them to easily gather viewing metrics, the biggest challenge they all face. I think this is a great idea.. In need of some legitimate business relationships with the networks, and MUCH better infrastructure. The site looks amateur, and their status messages tout moving to Windows 2000 as the answer to their problems!
You can't blame them for trying to stop a money losing situation.. Their business model does not involve subsidizing cool Linux boxes.
But, They could have solved the situation without alienating Linux hackers. They could offer an open platform (maybe with a standard IDE port) available at a decent profit to them. Then they could offer two levels of service, one cheaper with the ISP service bundled, one more expensive but allowing the user to choose their ISP AND/OR modify the box.
This would help them with the major gripe about their service (lock-in to them as an ISP) and keep them on good terms with the influential Linux communnity.
It could also immediately increase their cash flow (very important to a young company), and increase their volumes on the hardware, which could help their costs.
Hopefully someone like VIA is watching this, and sees the opportunity for cool Linux appliances.
I would like to see something modular (upgradeable).
I think you're right, the only way to justify the 21B price tag is if they can use this to position themselves better as THE Internet Certificate Authority, and speed acceptance of their technology.
The concept of using DNS as a certificate distribution mechanism has been around for years. This would get over one of the major hurdles to PKI acceptance and implementation.
So, this COULD be a good thing... if it's done right. That is, openly.
But, I'm very concerned that this is not what would happen. Why would they pay 20B to speed open adoption in which all their competitors had equal access? DNS is too important to be used as a tool in someone's business plan.
This is all a result of the huge screwup where NSI was allowed to be a for-profit monopoly over DNS. ICANN should have went much further to correct this situation.
Actually, that's 70 Million per year. The NSI registration is $70 for two years and $35 per year after that.
I think the number of domains is closer to 8 Million, which would put them at $280M. That's a decent business, but certainly not worth 20 Billion!!
Take a look at their fundamentals on quote.yahoo.com. They had sales of 220M last year, and Income of 27M. That's a 12% Profit Margin. Certainly not one of your high flying Internet stocks. And it definitely does not have the potential for exponential growth as some other Internet businesses do. Are we going to wake up tomorrow and find that 80 Million new domain names are needed, or 800 Million? I doubt it.
He talks about making upgrades of all documents standard procedure. The example he gives is upgrading all documents from Word 95 to Word 97.
But, isn't this missing the point?
The problem exists because products like Word build in incompatibilities to force consumers to always purchase the newest product. We don't have to accept this.
The solution is to promote open document standards for everything. This should be part of the decision process when organizations are choosing applications.
Hopefully, in the near future, we will be able to choose an office suite that stores everything in XML format, and uses open object types like PNG or JPG images.
Also, exporting images to a format like PDF or PostScript would solve a lot of problems. Open Source applications exist for both of these formats, ensuring that you are not at the mercy of the application vendor.
I'm the first guy to push for competition in the processor sector. And I run AMD K6-2's in both of my Linux server boxes. But, that article was too ridiculously biased to be considered "good stuff", or even worthy of reading.
I have seen this trend in a few articles from Tom's lately. While they go out of their way to be objective in other comparisons such as video cards.
This is great news! A Journaling File System is what Linux needs to push enterprise acceptance. With some recent power problems in my apartment, a JFS is exactly what I need too (that, and the APC UPS I recently bought).
But, with several alternatives it would be nice to see a full analysis done of each of them, and an ongoing tracker of the current state of each. This would be a great article for Linux World, or one of the other Linux peridicals.
Scalability counted for 20% of the total, NT scored 8, RH scored 6. Probably due to the problems mentioned about the RH system under load
Security was 10%, NT got a 9 here. Maybe due to the encrypted file capabilities in NT2000?
I think they could have used a little finer grained ranking mechanism. But, overall it looks like a fair evaluation.
What I would like to see is a comparison of NOS's on mid to low end systems. I think that is where Linux really shines, in the small office all-in-one server.
A. Exotic emulation technology allows it to run any architecture. Maybe.. But the only architecture they have done anything with, shown any interest in, and advertised as a key benefit is x86. If you only want x86, there are more efficient ways to do it.
B. Low Power Consumption. Yes, lower than x86. But, not lower than other architectures like the ARM. They acknowledged this in the webcast.
C. Compatibility. Yes, x86 compatible. I can dual boot it between Linux x86, NT, Win98. My Celeron does this today.. wow.
What we have here is an x86 processor with good power consumption. In the webcast they were saying something around 20-30% better power consumption than existing chips. That's nice, but not exactly revolutionary..
Well... Sort of..
The net effect is the same, but the way I interpret the information from Sega is that the complete "Operating System" is loaded from the CD when a game boots. So, there is nothing on the system that enables the ethernet (or modem).
The older games will have the older Sega OS, which has support for the modem, but uses TCP/IP for game communication.
These games would use the same communications procedures, but they don't recognize the new hardware (ethernet).
The newer games will have the ethernet hardware driver built in.
As we all know, the ethernet card has been demo'd for about a year now... So, I'll cross my fingers and hope that Sega had the foresight to include ethernet drivers in their relatively new 2K1 sports series (especially NFL 2K1).
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I think a great application for this would be a QNX-Demo-Disk type linux disk.. Basically, a low cost / low requirement Internet Appliance. The size/overhead/requirements of an X11 environment make this very difficult. But, if one could get a basic linux machine running, with framebuffer applications to provide the essentials (WWW, E-Mail, ?). Do it on a boot CD, or add network loading of other applications, and it could be a pretty slick little system.
SMB Mount my Linux file server & have access to my complete MP3 library.
Yes, CS will be a relatively difficult course of study, on par with any engineering degree. But, think before you make a jump to an easier program for the short term benefit of more free time. Challenging yourself now will pay dividends the rest of your professional life. The CS degree provides you the fundamentals that everything in computers are built on. Learn that stuff well, and you can take your career whatever direction you want.
Who let that pompous idiot up on the soapbox in the first place?
His famous "I am rich now" article was my favorite.. But, I haven't seen any from him lately. According to the Insider information on Yahoo, he got 160K shares of VA. That was worth $33.5 Million this time last year. As of Dec. 7, it is now worth $1.1M.
He has really proven his value on that one. His vision has really led them in the right direction.
They said they will be licensing their technology. If they do that well, it will be incorporated into other devices, live DVD players, Tivo Hardware, Home PC's, Internet Appliances, etc..
I read this as meaning they are concerned about Sony's attempt to be the home Network/Media portal, and are trying to compete by partnering. Kinda reminiscent of Apple hardware vs. Miscrosoft licensing.
Come one.. this is where free software started. Any decent University has been an "Open Source University" from day one. Partly because the governmental funding required them to be open & release the results of their funded work. Also, research universities generally have that community feeling toward development, which encourages people to contribute their share for all.
Uhh.. Who are you stealing from by doing this? The cable networks don't get paid by the cable carriers, they get paid by the advertisers. Their goal is to get the highest possible viewership, to increase their value to advertisers. And the cable or satellite companies do not have some inherent right to my business. If I want to get the shows from their competitor, that's my choice. If this were done a bit more ligitimately, it would be much better for the networks than broadcast. It would allow them to easily gather viewing metrics, the biggest challenge they all face. I think this is a great idea.. In need of some legitimate business relationships with the networks, and MUCH better infrastructure. The site looks amateur, and their status messages tout moving to Windows 2000 as the answer to their problems!
But, They could have solved the situation without alienating Linux hackers. They could offer an open platform (maybe with a standard IDE port) available at a decent profit to them. Then they could offer two levels of service, one cheaper with the ISP service bundled, one more expensive but allowing the user to choose their ISP AND/OR modify the box.
This would help them with the major gripe about their service (lock-in to them as an ISP) and keep them on good terms with the influential Linux communnity.
It could also immediately increase their cash flow (very important to a young company), and increase their volumes on the hardware, which could help their costs.
Hopefully someone like VIA is watching this, and sees the opportunity for cool Linux appliances.
I would like to see something modular (upgradeable).
The concept of using DNS as a certificate distribution mechanism has been around for years. This would get over one of the major hurdles to PKI acceptance and implementation.
So, this COULD be a good thing... if it's done right. That is, openly.
But, I'm very concerned that this is not what would happen. Why would they pay 20B to speed open adoption in which all their competitors had equal access? DNS is too important to be used as a tool in someone's business plan.
This is all a result of the huge screwup where NSI was allowed to be a for-profit monopoly over DNS. ICANN should have went much further to correct this situation.
I think the number of domains is closer to 8 Million, which would put them at $280M. That's a decent business, but certainly not worth 20 Billion!!
Take a look at their fundamentals on quote.yahoo.com. They had sales of 220M last year, and Income of 27M. That's a 12% Profit Margin. Certainly not one of your high flying Internet stocks. And it definitely does not have the potential for exponential growth as some other Internet businesses do. Are we going to wake up tomorrow and find that 80 Million new domain names are needed, or 800 Million? I doubt it.
But, isn't this missing the point?
The problem exists because products like Word build in incompatibilities to force consumers to always purchase the newest product. We don't have to accept this.
The solution is to promote open document standards for everything. This should be part of the decision process when organizations are choosing applications.
Hopefully, in the near future, we will be able to choose an office suite that stores everything in XML format, and uses open object types like PNG or JPG images.
Also, exporting images to a format like PDF or PostScript would solve a lot of problems. Open Source applications exist for both of these formats, ensuring that you are not at the mercy of the application vendor.
I have seen this trend in a few articles from Tom's lately. While they go out of their way to be objective in other comparisons such as video cards.
But, with several alternatives it would be nice to see a full analysis done of each of them, and an ongoing tracker of the current state of each. This would be a great article for Linux World, or one of the other Linux peridicals.
There is also a bit on their methodologies at http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2 000/0124how.html
Tuning Parameters http://www.nwfusion.com/rev iews/2000/0124revtuning.html
And, the results In MS Excel format! http://www2.nwfusion.com/download/012 4nos.xls
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0 124ipv4.html
Scalability counted for 20% of the total, NT scored 8, RH scored 6. Probably due to the problems mentioned about the RH system under load
Security was 10%, NT got a 9 here. Maybe due to the encrypted file capabilities in NT2000?
I think they could have used a little finer grained ranking mechanism. But, overall it looks like a fair evaluation.
What I would like to see is a comparison of NOS's on mid to low end systems. I think that is where Linux really shines, in the small office all-in-one server.
B. Low Power Consumption. Yes, lower than x86. But, not lower than other architectures like the ARM. They acknowledged this in the webcast.
C. Compatibility. Yes, x86 compatible. I can dual boot it between Linux x86, NT, Win98. My Celeron does this today.. wow.
What we have here is an x86 processor with good power consumption. In the webcast they were saying something around 20-30% better power consumption than existing chips. That's nice, but not exactly revolutionary..
Well... Sort of..
The net effect is the same, but the way I interpret the information from Sega is that the complete "Operating System" is loaded from the CD when a game boots. So, there is nothing on the system that enables the ethernet (or modem).
The older games will have the older Sega OS, which has support for the modem, but uses TCP/IP for game communication.
These games would use the same communications procedures, but they don't recognize the new hardware (ethernet).
The newer games will have the ethernet hardware driver built in.
As we all know, the ethernet card has been demo'd for about a year now... So, I'll cross my fingers and hope that Sega had the foresight to include ethernet drivers in their relatively new 2K1 sports series (especially NFL 2K1).