True. I wouldn't use linux to run anything large-scale. However, I think it's much more flexible than solaris, though slightly less (and I mean very slightly)less robust, or at least has been so in my experience. Which brings to mind a question: if their respective companies had developed and promoted them as desktop systems, would the various UNIX flavors grabbed a serious market share? I know there were some 386 ports of various OSes, but they never seemed to get wide distribution...
I don't think this new corporate ownership is necessarily a Bad Thing. Granted, corporations exist to make money, but I don't think that makes them by nature unethical; a problem, however, that this article points out, is the new public nature of these companies. An IPO doesn't produce free money, it means a change in ownership, and no matter what the management says now, their responsibility now lies to a large extent with their shareholders. It would be unethical of THEM to not take this into account, even if it means dictating/. policy. Of course, freedom of the press issues enter into it as well, but as long as I'm allowed to say what I want, I can accept a slight VA bias in the stories presented. As for the market valuation, of course VA is overvalued, but not as much as Red Hat I think, since they at least have a hardware component, rather than just packaging freely available software...
You know, I don't really think it's taken all that long for linux to be adapted at the university level; I mean, it's not really that old an operating system, and these things take time to gain acceptance (unless, of course, your os is the only thing that fits the hardware, i.e. MS/Apple in the 80's). And most college CS departments I've encountered have tended to use either a UNIX flavor or VMS; linux isn't really a quantum leap here. I also wonder how much of this is a result of college linux users graduating and moving into the technical/administrative ranks of universities...
The main problem is how our elected officials consistently allow corporations to write and interpret laws; this is, in my opinion, where the incredibly oppressive copyright restrictions placed upon even the most mundane software package comes from. It's the corporate entities who wrote these laws, rather than our representatives, and it's the corporate entities who prosecute whoever they deem to be a threat. Prosecutors, judges, and legislators just go along with them, even though they usually have no idea what exactly is going on. I don't think the situation is quite as serious as the author of the quoted article is saying, though. The enormous influx of money into both open source companies, as well as new internet commerce sites like MP3.com, will hopefully provide some targets that aren't quite as easily stifled as the individual hacker. As for the DVD suit, we've seen it before with the introduction of the VCR, or the introduction of the cassette tape. The industry organizations usually lose; hopefully it'll happen again this time.
well, yes, that's one of the things I like about the X-files..Scully was a well-developed character. Hopefully it'll be the same for the new female lead.
The show used to be a lot better, in the first and second seasons, or at least it seems that way to me. That was back before the whole conspiracy storyline began to dominate, when the characters would investigate events that, in the end, weren't explained satisfactorily. The atmosphere was better, I think, because so much was hidden from viewer; an alien staring straight at the camera isn't nearly as frightening as a shadowy figure slipping by the darkness...
It's interesting how Fox, being Fox, feels the need to put in a "competing theorist in the form of a beautiful young woman". While I have absolutely nothing against beautiful women, I wish they'd put as much thought into creating a believable character as they do on their wardrobe. It seems that every science or science fiction-oriented show seems to have that beautiful, 23-year old nuclear physicist who doesn't act or sound like a scientist, who is put in just so she can be seduced by the male protagonist, the tough, working-class, cerebrally -challenged all-American guy.
I agree that not everyone needs a high degree of customization, I'm just a little apprehensive as to the possibility of a general movement towards these applications and away from desktops. Be moving towards BeIA and away from BeOS (at least that's what it appears to be) might be a smart move for the company in terms of economy (I sense that offering FreeBeOS is a realization that it would be almost impossible to grab a share of the pay-OS market), but I would guess BeOS development is going to be slowed because of it. Don't get me wrong,I like being able to check my mail or browse the web on my cell phone. But I wouldn't like to see desktop development slow down because everyone's pouring their resources into web appliances. Of course, get enough feature creep and these appliances just might come around full circle and end up as full computers themselves...
You can also find more at http://www.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,151 34,00.html Am I the only one who is a little uncomfortable with this whole anticipated move towards web appliances? Seems to take away the greatest strengths of PCs, like flexibility. What's the point of buying a computing device if you can't customize it? Electronic organizers have been around for decades, but they didn't really come into wide use until palm computing, where you could actually do something with them beyond what the designers envisioned. Or look at TV design; hasn't changed much in 50 years; without flexibility there's little impetus to improve these kinds of things...
You've been able to buy these kind of images from a number of sources for several years now, though Space Imaging's pricing seems to be better. The resolution isn't really that impressive, so I don't really think privacy is much of an issue; at that scale, everything will just look like boxes...The main appeal seems to be the time frame (though I'm not sure how they can have pictures the next day if the revisit time is 2.9 days), though to actually search for anything over a large area would cost a lot of money with these guys (at least you could save on the software costs by using open source remote sensing tools: http://www.remotesensing.org)
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True. I wouldn't use linux to run anything large-scale. However, I think it's much more flexible than solaris, though slightly less (and I mean very slightly)less robust, or at least has been so in my experience. Which brings to mind a question: if their respective companies had developed and promoted them as desktop systems, would the various UNIX flavors grabbed a serious market share? I know there were some 386 ports of various OSes, but they never seemed to get wide distribution...
I don't think this new corporate ownership is necessarily a Bad Thing. Granted, corporations exist to make money, but I don't think that makes them by nature unethical; a problem, however, that this article points out, is the new public nature of these companies. An IPO doesn't produce free money, it means a change in ownership, and no matter what the management says now, their responsibility now lies to a large extent with their shareholders. It would be unethical of THEM to not take this into account, even if it means dictating /. policy. Of course, freedom of the press issues enter into it as well, but as long as I'm allowed to say what I want, I can accept a slight VA bias in the stories presented. As for the market valuation, of course VA is overvalued, but not as much as Red Hat I think, since they at least have a hardware component, rather than just packaging freely available software...
You know, I don't really think it's taken all that long for linux to be adapted at the university level; I mean, it's not really that old an operating system, and these things take time to gain acceptance (unless, of course, your os is the only thing that fits the hardware, i.e. MS/Apple in the 80's). And most college CS departments I've encountered have tended to use either a UNIX flavor or VMS; linux isn't really a quantum leap here. I also wonder how much of this is a result of college linux users graduating and moving into the technical/administrative ranks of universities...
The main problem is how our elected officials consistently allow corporations to write and interpret laws; this is, in my opinion, where the incredibly oppressive copyright restrictions placed upon even the most mundane software package comes from. It's the corporate entities who wrote these laws, rather than our representatives, and it's the corporate entities who prosecute whoever they deem to be a threat. Prosecutors, judges, and legislators just go along with them, even though they usually have no idea what exactly is going on. I don't think the situation is quite as serious as the author of the quoted article is saying, though. The enormous influx of money into both open source companies, as well as new internet commerce sites like MP3.com, will hopefully provide some targets that aren't quite as easily stifled as the individual hacker. As for the DVD suit, we've seen it before with the introduction of the VCR, or the introduction of the cassette tape. The industry organizations usually lose; hopefully it'll happen again this time.
The question now is, what am I going to do with a 1 ghz processor? I guess I could take up raytracing again......
well, yes, that's one of the things I like about the X-files..Scully was a well-developed character. Hopefully it'll be the same for the new female lead.
The show used to be a lot better, in the first and second seasons, or at least it seems that way to me. That was back before the whole conspiracy storyline began to dominate, when the characters would investigate events that, in the end, weren't explained satisfactorily. The atmosphere was better, I think, because so much was hidden from viewer; an alien staring straight at the camera isn't nearly as frightening as a shadowy figure slipping by the darkness...
It's interesting how Fox, being Fox, feels the need to put in a "competing theorist in the form of a beautiful young woman". While I have absolutely nothing against beautiful women, I wish they'd put as much thought into creating a believable character as they do on their wardrobe. It seems that every science or science fiction-oriented show seems to have that beautiful, 23-year old nuclear physicist who doesn't act or sound like a scientist, who is put in just so she can be seduced by the male protagonist, the tough, working-class, cerebrally -challenged all-American guy.
I agree that not everyone needs a high degree of customization, I'm just a little apprehensive as to the possibility of a general movement towards these applications and away from desktops. Be moving towards BeIA and away from BeOS (at least that's what it appears to be) might be a smart move for the company in terms of economy (I sense that offering FreeBeOS is a realization that it would be almost impossible to grab a share of the pay-OS market), but I would guess BeOS development is going to be slowed because of it. Don't get me wrong,I like being able to check my mail or browse the web on my cell phone. But I wouldn't like to see desktop development slow down because everyone's pouring their resources into web appliances. Of course, get enough feature creep and these appliances just might come around full circle and end up as full computers themselves...
You can also find more at http://www.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,151 34,00.html Am I the only one who is a little uncomfortable with this whole anticipated move towards web appliances? Seems to take away the greatest strengths of PCs, like flexibility. What's the point of buying a computing device if you can't customize it? Electronic organizers have been around for decades, but they didn't really come into wide use until palm computing, where you could actually do something with them beyond what the designers envisioned. Or look at TV design; hasn't changed much in 50 years; without flexibility there's little impetus to improve these kinds of things...
You've been able to buy these kind of images from a number of sources for several years now, though Space Imaging's pricing seems to be better. The resolution isn't really that impressive, so I don't really think privacy is much of an issue; at that scale, everything will just look like boxes...The main appeal seems to be the time frame (though I'm not sure how they can have pictures the next day if the revisit time is 2.9 days), though to actually search for anything over a large area would cost a lot of money with these guys (at least you could save on the software costs by using open source remote sensing tools: http://www.remotesensing.org)