"Well, if you want the current top of the line 32-bit performance, why not?"
I haven't checked, but won't a P4 system give me better "speed per dollar"?
For me personally I couldn't care less about speed. With me the "weakest link" it's usually my brain or ocassionally the internet connection.
What I would care about more is a silent and small (think book sized) system. When I say _silent_ (not just almost silent), I mean that it won't need a CPU fan, no power source fan and that it would be based around a 1GB compact flash card. I would quite like a decent (not great) graphics card. And a 1 gig ethernet port. That way the fileserver can be under the stairs.
P.S. "speed per dollar" is a not very scientific term, I agree. But I don't now how to amalgamate GFLOPS, data troughput, L1, L2 caches etc. into one thing?
Well not that I'm buying one anytime soon, but it's nice to know that once I buy one, I'll get a Linux distro, that is compiled & optimized for a 64bit CPU. So for me only Mathematica will run in the 32bit (slower) mode. But Gimp, mplayer, video editing apps, hell even twm and xclock, will be compiled for 64bit CPUs.
I was wondering how is this going to be sorted out by application vendors on PCs? Are they going to release 64bit and 32bit versions? Is every CD going to contain both? What about 3rd party plugins? I've been asking the same question actually about Apple's G5, but www.apple.com (and I didn't search too carefuly) is bit short on nasty details like this. Is it really worth getting a 64bit machine without planning to use Linux?
Why on Earth is this insightful? This has nothing to do with Banglore.
Fact one Banglore is more than call centres. Call centres are not R&D. Fact two, you get a lot of Asian techies who work directly in the UK and US. Fact three when an Indian is speaking to an Indian they don't have trouble understanding each other because of accent. Fact four: hell, understanding Americans is sometimes so difficult, because their words have a different meaning then they do here (UK). Try: "damn mate, my car got nicked last night!" Totally different meaning. So much for misunderstanding.
The reason why Banglore is on its way up is that software development is becoming, in a sense, more "labour intensive" than manufacturing (you need programs to drive robots). Nowadays an OS, database and one custom application does not cut it any more. You have dozens of custom apps. They have to integrate with several databases well. They all have to interact with each other, not to mention customers. Result: a _lot_ of people needed for bugfixing, support etc. They don't have to be rocket scientists, just clever and quick.
On the other hand Silicon Valley is on its way down, because companies don't have as much money to invest into research as they used to have. Besides a lot of R&D has been done in the 90s, now it there is a lot to be reaped just from polishing things.
No one is really talking about unifying the API. That's the bit that developers are most mentally attached to. As we all know GTK vs. QT is rather different in the style of writing code, different mindset even, so it wouldn't work for either side to unify the API. With unified API we'll have loads of unhappy QT _and_ GTK developers!
OTOH this (unifying themes, i.e. one theme working for both QT & GTK) is the first step in the right direction, of making the two indistiunguishable to the user. Next would be _perfect_ cut & paste, including HTML pages, pictures, vector graphics etc. AFAIK freedesktop.org has come a long way working on cut & paste (drag & drop) and apparently all it needs now is more polish.
Final stage would be using kparts in GTK apps and bonobo components in KDE. There are cautious steps in that direction. And then there is OpenOffice (check out cukoo) of course and Mozilla and GNUStep... long way to go till everything is perfect. Then it will be the job of distributors like Mandrake & Xandros to give us the perfect desktop linux. Or our job, for those who like to tweak and fiddle with things. I'm looking forward to all this! (and I hope I'll be seeing less and less GNOME (KDE) sucks!!! style flamewars everywhere. Hey, I don't care whether I'm using Rhythmbox (where the file open dialog is still a joke) or Juk (which uses arts for the sound backend and arts sucks _and_ is a joke), I'll settle for either of the two as soon as it'll be perfect:-))!
Well, for the last two years, I had the feeling that this is exactly the way things are going to work out. This is why after completing my Computer Science BSc. I decided to learn Mathematics properly instead. So now, I'm 6 months away from completing my MSc. in Pure Mathematics and I know that I have learnt things that mostly have not changed for the last 100 years and are not going to change for the next 100 years all that much and so I don't need to worry about what the _next_ big thing will be, because mathematics will always be relevant. It will never be BIG in the same sense as aviation industry was once big and in the same sense as the dot com rush, but it will always be OK.
Of course this does not stop me from getting employed as a programmer if I wanted to.
The article in general didn't seem to be too Slashdot worthy, so to speak.
I mean, for the general public it might be big news that writing viruses, especially nowadays with MS Outlook everywhere, has become a challenge just about only for a few teenagers. The article didn't mention anything about even the possibility of someone writing viruses for some ill purpose e.g. creating spam drones, preparing for a DDoS attack or whatever.
In a typical psychologist style there were general statements like "viruses written by hackers are more complex". Who's a hacker? For me it's Linus and Alan Cox etc. not someone running "nmap" and waiting for a new exploit to be published. The point is there is no clear definition of a"hacker" and the statement becomes plain meaningless. What does "typical of their age mean"? Oh nevermind.
Btw. Also I'm not sure what she meant by "participating in the local community". Does that mean slashdot?
As far as I know, you're the only person suggesting professional DJ's are going to "... ditch their pair of 1200s and a huge collectio of vinyl...". They're sure going to be interested in it though, as/. says, if only for the purpose of laughing at anyone using it. But that's what all professionals.
Everyone already has a barcode on them! And what's worse you can't really remove it! No M'am! And who's done this evil thing to us? What is it? I hear some of you scream? It's this scary DNA thing. Oh yes pretty much in every cell of our bodies. Damn! Who's done this to us? Is GOD evil? Are ID's evil? Well if the GOD has put ID's on every one of us, surely ID's can't be evil!
I'm waiting for a test* kernel with working software suspend. I've tried test2 and that didn't work, test3 worked about 2/3 times and so maybe test4 will be OK. There are mdk packages out there with test4 so maybe I'll give it a try.
The rich are still getting richer, the poor are still getting poorer...
This is not true! The number of people living below the povery line is decreasing and has been for a while. And it's decreasing both in absolute numbers and as percentage of the population. Now this does not mean that they are still not very poor or that there are no people that are actually getting poorer, but on the whole... Well that's the actual statistics and you can look it up say on the Economist website.
I don't why do people still believe this, even Marx used it as one of his arguments and even 150 years ago it was not true even then. He was using outdated statistics, I wouldn't want to accuse him of doing it knowingly, but it's entirely possible.
Apart from this, I agree with your insightful, if sligtly offtopic, comment.
I'm no lawyer and that's why I probably find this rather odd:
They haven't proved to anyone yet that they have any right to charge for licenses for the Linux kernel. Since they haven't proved yet, that any code coverd by their ownership of AT&T Unix, and not developed at Berkley as part of BSD, is in the Linux kernel. So far they have not convinced a single court. And yet they are allowed to sue people for not paying them for a license.
It's a bit like if I started suing say British Airways, trying to claim that all of the 747's they are using are in fact mine!
As I said I'm no lawyer but to me it would make sense if the courts said: OK we'll wait for you to prove your case against IBM and _then_ we'll look at your cases suing Linux end users.
As far as I know all the people who started doing Phd _just_ to improve their career oportunities did not finish. Why? It has something to do with motivation:-) Finishing a Phd requires a very different mindset from just doing an MSc. You actually have to get trough dozens of situations when you're honestly stuck, or even worse when someone else has published the solution of the problem you have been working on etc.
So I would suggest not doing a Phd, unless you really want to do a Phd for the sake of research and being in academia.
Besides having a real job, and doing it well, for 3-5 years can really advance your career much more than a Phd.
That said I've got friends who have stared Phd's for their interest in the subject (one doing DPS, one AI) and they have completed them and now they both have really interesting jobs, which they probably won't find were it not for their degrees.
How about going the way Apple did with OS X? That is to have something framebuffer / OpenGL based to display stuff on a local display and then have X11 sit on top of this layer for all the old/legacy applications. Now as far as I know GTK and QT already have framebuffer support, so all that would be needed is a hack that would allow QT/GTK to check if a local framebuffer is available and then use it, or if not then just use X11. This would take care of both KDE and GNOME for a start. IMHO X11 is usefull and I use it quite often so Im totally against dropping it. Besides VNC or Citrix don't provide the same functionality: they won't let you run just a _single_ application, say Mathematica, remotely and all the other ones, say xmms visualisation plugins, locally.
Well, Microsoft _could_ have avoided this years ago by releasing a signed Linux bootloader _and_ charging some $$$ for the bootloader, so that they actually make a profit on selling the Xbox hw and the bootloader.
Any sensible person, no matter how much they dislike Microsoft, should be able to understand that they can't expect Microsoft to give away PC's (cluster nodes, storage devices, whatever you call a Linux Xbox) whilst losing some $40 (or whatever the real number is) on each unit. Now, _if_ they charged $50 for the bootloader then the profit could be (say) $10 and everyone could be reasonably happy.
I'd agree with you in the case of a simple utility, say a sound recording program.
However once the application we're talking about is huge and the user is going to use only this program for hours and days, I don't think it's such a big deal. An example might a sound mixing, processing, on-the-fly editing program.
I use JBuilder quite a lot and I think it's no big deal that it behaves nothing like my KDE desktop. I mean yes CPW that mimic the behaviour of the platfrom are nice, but they just are too much hassle and in the end a decision must be made about what is feasable.
As for the Adobe example, they are not trying to support UNIX/Linux deskotp. Being consistent and pleasing everyone is almost impossible. What "native" behavior should it emulate? KDE? GNOME? Motif? WindowMaker? Just try running Acrobat Reader on Linux and see how out of place it looks.
As for standart behaviour for each platform, that can be coded right into the application, e.g. any program can support the basic GNU/Emacs shortcuts (JBuilder does:-) ).
Your argument is fair enough, but it also lets me make a point. As a user I don't care why I don't have viruses on my system. If the way to go is using obscure OS, that I'm happy using, then that's fine. Second point is that if there was no monopoly in the first place, then virii writers will have a harder time. And the last point is that whils the first worm / virus might have been a UNIX one I believe that UNIX is not inherently prone to virii while Windows is. Btw. look at netcraft.com's statistics. If UNIX / Apache virii were easy enough to make there is a "market share" for them. Windows web servers are only second.
Oh wow, so it is then just me who has not noticed and Nimbda and I Love you viruses for Linux.
If Windows caught up some years ago what are the viruses still doing there lurking around?
For me Linux (Mandrake, but I guess that's not that important) is about two things:
1, Stability and that includes no viruses, thank you very much. And this also includes suspend / unsuspend feature on my laptop. I did not have to turn it off for more than two months, simply because I just suspend it or unsuspend it moving between home and university. That way I don't care about boot times. 3-5s is fine by me.
2, Install and configure once, run forever. Even though some RPMS take a few dependencies to sort out I don't have to reinstall the system every other weekend. Besides "urpmi", the Mandrake update tool is fairly decent and if you stick to Mandrake RPMS you'll hardly get into any RPM dependency conflicts.
I did finally manage to set a high refresh rate, but only after taking a technical step that's equivalent to jumping off a cliff without knowing for sure if there's a safety net below.
All they wanted me to use was this obscure sequence of menu commands and dialog boxes, going something like "Configure Desktop->Settings>Graphics System->Monitor". I was really scared and that is exactly how I feel when using the Control Panel in Windows. God and Bill only know what's going on down below, not to mention the safety net that might not have ever been there. No really, I feel much safer using xf86cfg, than control panel. Luckily I parted with Control Panel some years ago. Then again Control Panel might be easy to use nowdays.
ironical adj 1: characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is; "madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker"; "it was ironical that the well-planned scheme failed so completely" [syn: ironic]
2: humorously sarcastic or mocking; "dry humor"; "an ironic remark often conveys an intended meaning obliquely"; "an ironic novel"; "an ironical smile"; "with a wry Scottish wit" [syn: dry, ironic, wry]
Was this meant to be ironical? I really can't tell, whether you were serious or just flaming. Have you ever heard of GCC? Both RH and SuSe support GCC quite a bit. Mandrake and SuSe support KDE (some full and part time developers).
The KDE Java Script engine was developed by the KDE people not Apple, they are just saying that if they happen to improve it, they will make the changes available to KDE people. So they are not contributing a nice JScript engine.
Can someone explain how Aqua contributes to the OSS community? I believe that that's as proprietary as it get.
In the article it says, that they will only release the source code, but that they will sell the binary distributuins. I guess that means no more downloading of ISO installation images.
I'm wondering, though, what would they do if someone just decided to download the source code (I guess SRPMS), compile them and the install program and bang it all on a install CD?
Apart from that I like the United Linux idea. The guy has a point about not competing in an area where there's no differentiator between the different distributions. I mean Apache will still be Apache, Squid will be Squid and Postfix..., you get the idea, no matter who packages it (I know that they sometimes apply extra patches, but on the whole, if it's important then all will have it).
How about if the EULA on Windows XP 2 (or NET or whatever they call the new version) said:
Thou shalt not develop programs for other systems than those with Windows. Please visit www.microsoft.com to purchase a developers license at the appropriate cost.
I'm a x86 computer owner, but I don't think the upgrade philosophy works very well any more. There are just way too many improvements in too short time to justify modular computers.
e.g. 1, Want a new graphics card? But your motherboard can only do 4x AGP. That's not good enough...
2, Got old Pentium II processor? Like the sound of Pentium 4? Well sorry it won't fit into socket A... btw. thats about equivalent of upgrading from G3 to G4 processors
3, RAM, OK upgrading RAM is easy and arguably helps most, but... you can do that with PC, iMac, iBook or laptop.
So in the end I think that modular design makes only sense for computers where you are likely to add 2nd sound card, TV card, SCSI card etc... If you have to upgrade motherboard, CPU, graphics, then you might as well get a new comp, and put the old one under the stairs to be mp3 / internet access server, or give it to your sister, girlfriend, housemate... New computer will be quiter (fans not worn out yet) and with guarantee.
You can fry eggs on the bottom of pretty much any new(er) laptop. My Dell Celeron 433 gets quite hot when I run some Mathematica simulations.
Anyway my point is that proteins (trick question: what is egg-white?) can't handle temperature of much more than 40 degrees Celsius. So 40 degrees is enough to fry eggs if you are the patient type.
But the guy has got a point. Our department's IBM S/390 (meant to be super relieable) had to be turned off numerous times just because of the cooling system in the server room failing. All the antient SPARC machines kept running happily. In the end there is a link between power consumption and uptime.
Still Apple cube had the best designe ever. Because it was like a chimney the fan had to be rarely used. There is nothing like natural convection when it comes to cooling.
I know that Octave is not quite Matlab, but it's definitely enough for all the assignments an average student gets. There is a fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/octav e) package. And I believe it's definitely worth a look, instead of stealing Matlab from Gnutella.
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, if you want the current top of the line 32-bit performance, why not?"
I haven't checked, but won't a P4 system give me better "speed per dollar"?
For me personally I couldn't care less about speed. With me the "weakest link" it's usually my brain or ocassionally the internet connection.
What I would care about more is a silent and small (think book sized) system. When I say _silent_ (not just almost silent), I mean that it won't need a CPU fan, no power source fan and that it would be based around a 1GB compact flash card. I would quite like a decent (not great) graphics card. And a 1 gig ethernet port. That way the fileserver can be under the stairs.
P.S. "speed per dollar" is a not very scientific term, I agree. But I don't now how to amalgamate GFLOPS, data troughput, L1, L2 caches etc. into one thing?
Well not that I'm buying one anytime soon, but it's nice to know that once I buy one, I'll get a Linux distro, that is compiled & optimized for a 64bit CPU. So for me only Mathematica will run in the 32bit (slower) mode. But Gimp, mplayer, video editing apps, hell even twm and xclock, will be compiled for 64bit CPUs.
I was wondering how is this going to be sorted out by application vendors on PCs? Are they going to release 64bit and 32bit versions? Is every CD going to contain both? What about 3rd party plugins? I've been asking the same question actually about Apple's G5, but www.apple.com (and I didn't search too carefuly) is bit short on nasty details like this. Is it really worth getting a 64bit machine without planning to use Linux?
Why on Earth is this insightful? This has nothing to do with Banglore.
Fact one Banglore is more than call centres. Call centres are not R&D. Fact two, you get a lot of Asian techies who work directly in the UK and US. Fact three when an Indian is speaking to an Indian they don't have trouble understanding each other because of accent. Fact four: hell, understanding Americans is sometimes so difficult, because their words have a different meaning then they do here (UK). Try: "damn mate, my car got nicked last night!" Totally different meaning. So much for misunderstanding.
The reason why Banglore is on its way up is that software development is becoming, in a sense, more "labour intensive" than manufacturing (you need programs to drive robots). Nowadays an OS, database and one custom application does not cut it any more. You have dozens of custom apps. They have to integrate with several databases well. They all have to interact with each other, not to mention customers. Result: a _lot_ of people needed for bugfixing, support etc. They don't have to be rocket scientists, just clever and quick.
On the other hand Silicon Valley is on its way down, because companies don't have as much money to invest into research as they used to have. Besides a lot of R&D has been done in the 90s, now it there is a lot to be reaped just from polishing things.
No one is really talking about unifying the API. That's the bit that developers are most mentally attached to. As we all know GTK vs. QT is rather different in the style of writing code, different mindset even, so it wouldn't work for either side to unify the API. With unified API we'll have loads of unhappy QT _and_ GTK developers!
:-))!
OTOH this (unifying themes, i.e. one theme working for both QT & GTK) is the first step in the right direction, of making the two indistiunguishable to the user. Next would be _perfect_ cut & paste, including HTML pages, pictures, vector graphics etc. AFAIK freedesktop.org has come a long way working on cut & paste (drag & drop) and apparently all it needs now is more polish.
Final stage would be using kparts in GTK apps and bonobo components in KDE. There are cautious steps in that direction. And then there is OpenOffice (check out cukoo) of course and Mozilla and GNUStep... long way to go till everything is perfect. Then it will be the job of distributors like Mandrake & Xandros to give us the perfect desktop linux. Or our job, for those who like to tweak and fiddle with things. I'm looking forward to all this! (and I hope I'll be seeing less and less GNOME (KDE) sucks!!! style flamewars everywhere. Hey, I don't care whether I'm using Rhythmbox (where the file open dialog is still a joke) or Juk (which uses arts for the sound backend and arts sucks _and_ is a joke), I'll settle for either of the two as soon as it'll be perfect
Well, for the last two years, I had the feeling that this is exactly the way things are going to work out. This is why after completing my Computer Science BSc. I decided to learn Mathematics properly instead. So now, I'm 6 months away from completing my MSc. in Pure Mathematics and I know that I have learnt things that mostly have not changed for the last 100 years and are not going to change for the next 100 years all that much and so I don't need to worry about what the _next_ big thing will be, because mathematics will always be relevant. It will never be BIG in the same sense as aviation industry was once big and in the same sense as the dot com rush, but it will always be OK.
Of course this does not stop me from getting employed as a programmer if I wanted to.
The article in general didn't seem to be too Slashdot worthy, so to speak.
I mean, for the general public it might be big news that writing viruses, especially nowadays with MS Outlook everywhere, has become a challenge just about only for a few teenagers. The article didn't mention anything about even the possibility of someone writing viruses for some ill purpose e.g. creating spam drones, preparing for a DDoS attack or whatever.
In a typical psychologist style there were general statements like "viruses written by hackers are more complex". Who's a hacker? For me it's Linus and Alan Cox etc. not someone running "nmap" and waiting for a new exploit to be published. The point is there is no clear definition of a"hacker" and the statement becomes plain meaningless. What does "typical of their age mean"? Oh nevermind.
Btw. Also I'm not sure what she meant by "participating in the local community". Does that mean slashdot?
As far as I know, you're the only person suggesting professional DJ's are going to "... ditch their pair of 1200s and a huge collectio of vinyl...". They're sure going to be interested in it though, as /. says, if only for the purpose of laughing at anyone using it. But that's what all professionals.
Everyone already has a barcode on them! And what's worse you can't really remove it! No M'am! And who's done this evil thing to us? What is it? I hear some of you scream? It's this scary DNA thing. Oh yes pretty much in every cell of our bodies. Damn! Who's done this to us? Is GOD evil? Are ID's evil? Well if the GOD has put ID's on every one of us, surely ID's can't be evil!
-------------------
Privacy is a myth!
I'm waiting for a test* kernel with working software suspend. I've tried test2 and that didn't work, test3 worked about 2/3 times and so maybe test4 will be OK. There are mdk packages out there with test4 so maybe I'll give it a try.
The rich are still getting richer, the poor are still getting poorer...
This is not true! The number of people living below the povery line is decreasing and has been for a while. And it's decreasing both in absolute numbers and as percentage of the population. Now this does not mean that they are still not very poor or that there are no people that are actually getting poorer, but on the whole... Well that's the actual statistics and you can look it up say on the Economist website.
I don't why do people still believe this, even Marx used it as one of his arguments and even 150 years ago it was not true even then. He was using outdated statistics, I wouldn't want to accuse him of doing it knowingly, but it's entirely possible.
Apart from this, I agree with your insightful, if sligtly offtopic, comment.
I'm no lawyer and that's why I probably find this rather odd:
They haven't proved to anyone yet that they have any right to charge for licenses for the Linux kernel. Since they haven't proved yet, that any code coverd by their ownership of AT&T Unix, and not developed at Berkley as part of BSD, is in the Linux kernel. So far they have not convinced a single court. And yet they are allowed to sue people for not paying them for a license.
It's a bit like if I started suing say British Airways, trying to claim that all of the 747's they are using are in fact mine!
As I said I'm no lawyer but to me it would make sense if the courts said: OK we'll wait for you to prove your case against IBM and _then_ we'll look at your cases suing Linux end users.
Is a job the only reason why you want a Phd?
As far as I know all the people who started doing Phd _just_ to improve their career oportunities did not finish. Why? It has something to do with motivation :-) Finishing a Phd requires a very different mindset from just doing an MSc. You actually have to get trough dozens of situations when you're honestly stuck, or even worse when someone else has published the solution of the problem you have been working on etc.
So I would suggest not doing a Phd, unless you really want to do a Phd for the sake of research and being in academia.
Besides having a real job, and doing it well, for 3-5 years can really advance your career much more than a Phd.
That said I've got friends who have stared Phd's for their interest in the subject (one doing DPS, one AI) and they have completed them and now they both have really interesting jobs, which they probably won't find were it not for their degrees.
How about going the way Apple did with OS X? That is to have something framebuffer / OpenGL based to display stuff on a local display and then have X11 sit on top of this layer for all the old/legacy applications. Now as far as I know GTK and QT already have framebuffer support, so all that would be needed is a hack that would allow QT/GTK to check if a local framebuffer is available and then use it, or if not then just use X11. This would take care of both KDE and GNOME for a start. IMHO X11 is usefull and I use it quite often so Im totally against dropping it. Besides VNC or Citrix don't provide the same functionality: they won't let you run just a _single_ application, say Mathematica, remotely and all the other ones, say xmms visualisation plugins, locally.
Well, Microsoft _could_ have avoided this years ago by releasing a signed Linux bootloader _and_ charging some $$$ for the bootloader, so that they actually make a profit on selling the Xbox hw and the bootloader.
Any sensible person, no matter how much they dislike Microsoft, should be able to understand that they can't expect Microsoft to give away PC's (cluster nodes, storage devices, whatever you call a Linux Xbox) whilst losing some $40 (or whatever the real number is) on each unit. Now, _if_ they charged $50 for the bootloader then the profit could be (say) $10 and everyone could be reasonably happy.
I'd agree with you in the case of a simple utility, say a sound recording program.
However once the application we're talking about is huge and the user is going to use only this program for hours and days, I don't think it's such a big deal. An example might a sound mixing, processing, on-the-fly editing program.
I use JBuilder quite a lot and I think it's no big deal that it behaves nothing like my KDE desktop. I mean yes CPW that mimic the behaviour of the platfrom are nice, but they just are too much hassle and in the end a decision must be made about what is feasable.
As for the Adobe example, they are not trying to support UNIX/Linux deskotp. Being consistent and pleasing everyone is almost impossible. What "native" behavior should it emulate? KDE? GNOME? Motif? WindowMaker? Just try running Acrobat Reader on Linux and see how out of place it looks.
As for standart behaviour for each platform, that can be coded right into the application, e.g. any program can support the basic GNU/Emacs shortcuts (JBuilder does :-) ).
Your argument is fair enough, but it also lets me make a point. As a user I don't care why I don't have viruses on my system. If the way to go is using obscure OS, that I'm happy using, then that's fine. Second point is that if there was no monopoly in the first place, then virii writers will have a harder time. And the last point is that whils the first worm / virus might have been a UNIX one I believe that UNIX is not inherently prone to virii while Windows is. Btw. look at netcraft.com's statistics. If UNIX / Apache virii were easy enough to make there is a "market share" for them. Windows web servers are only second.
Oh wow, so it is then just me who has not noticed and Nimbda and I Love you viruses for Linux.
If Windows caught up some years ago what are the viruses still doing there lurking around?
For me Linux (Mandrake, but I guess that's not that important) is about two things:
1, Stability and that includes no viruses, thank you very much. And this also includes suspend / unsuspend feature on my laptop. I did not have to turn it off for more than two months, simply because I just suspend it or unsuspend it moving between home and university. That way I don't care about boot times. 3-5s is fine by me.
2, Install and configure once, run forever. Even though some RPMS take a few dependencies to sort out I don't have to reinstall the system every other weekend. Besides "urpmi", the Mandrake update tool is fairly decent and if you stick to Mandrake RPMS you'll hardly get into any RPM dependency conflicts.
No really, I feel much safer using xf86cfg, than control panel. Luckily I parted with Control Panel some years ago. Then again Control Panel might be easy to use nowdays.
Quoting:
WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]
ironical
adj 1: characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is; "madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker";
"it was ironical that the well-planned scheme failed so completely" [syn: ironic]
2: humorously sarcastic or mocking; "dry humor"; "an ironic remark often conveys an intended meaning obliquely"; "an ironic novel"; "an ironical smile"; "with a wry Scottish wit" [syn: dry, ironic, wry]
Was this meant to be ironical? I really can't tell, whether you were serious or just flaming. Have you ever heard of GCC? Both RH and SuSe support GCC quite a bit. Mandrake and SuSe support KDE (some full and part time developers).
The KDE Java Script engine was developed by the KDE people not Apple, they are just saying that if they happen to improve it, they will make the changes available to KDE people. So they are not contributing a nice JScript engine.
Can someone explain how Aqua contributes to the OSS community? I believe that that's as proprietary as it get.
In the article it says, that they will only release the source code, but that they will sell the binary distributuins. I guess that means no more downloading of ISO installation images.
I'm wondering, though, what would they do if someone just decided to download the source code (I guess SRPMS), compile them and the install program and bang it all on a install CD?
Apart from that I like the United Linux idea. The guy has a point about not competing in an area where there's no differentiator between the different distributions. I mean Apache will still be Apache, Squid will be Squid and Postfix..., you get the idea, no matter who packages it (I know that they sometimes apply extra patches, but on the whole, if it's important then all will have it).
How about if the EULA on Windows XP 2 (or NET or whatever they call the new version) said:
Thou shalt not develop programs for other systems than those with Windows. Please visit www.microsoft.com to purchase a developers license at the appropriate cost.
I'm a x86 computer owner, but I don't think the upgrade philosophy works very well any more. There are just way too many improvements in too short time to justify modular computers.
e.g.
1, Want a new graphics card? But your motherboard can only do 4x AGP. That's not good enough...
2, Got old Pentium II processor? Like the sound of Pentium 4? Well sorry it won't fit into socket A... btw. thats about equivalent of upgrading from G3 to G4 processors
3, RAM, OK upgrading RAM is easy and arguably helps most, but ... you can do that with PC, iMac, iBook or laptop.
So in the end I think that modular design makes only sense for computers where you are likely to add 2nd sound card, TV card, SCSI card etc... If you have to upgrade motherboard, CPU, graphics, then you might as well get a new comp, and put the old one under the stairs to be mp3 / internet access server, or give it to your sister, girlfriend, housemate... New computer will be quiter (fans not worn out yet) and with guarantee.
You can fry eggs on the bottom of pretty much any new(er) laptop. My Dell Celeron 433 gets quite hot when I run some Mathematica simulations.
Anyway my point is that proteins (trick question: what is egg-white?) can't handle temperature of much more than 40 degrees Celsius. So 40 degrees is enough to fry eggs if you are the patient type.
But the guy has got a point. Our department's IBM S/390 (meant to be super relieable) had to be turned off numerous times just because of the cooling system in the server room failing. All the antient SPARC machines kept running happily. In the end there is a link between power consumption and uptime.
Still Apple cube had the best designe ever. Because it was like a chimney the fan had to be rarely used. There is nothing like natural convection when it comes to cooling.
I know that Octave is not quite Matlab, but it's definitely enough for all the assignments an average student gets. There is a fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/octav e) package. And I believe it's definitely worth a look, instead of stealing Matlab from Gnutella.