You will also never get the same performance using six 12-way boxes that you can get from one 72-way box. The bus speeds and I/O throughput capabilities are much higher.
Agreed.
I have never seen an application that requires that extra boost and can jusitify the additional cost, but the capacity is there regardless.
I have. Large, monolithic OLTP databases, such as the ones that banks and telcos use. When you have to track every single phone call made or received by every cellphone subscriber in the US in one huge billing database, you need that kind of horsepower on a single system.
Granted, this use is becoming less and less common, but I predict that Sun will continue to sell well on the extreme high-end, which is what the banks and telcos, and other high-volume OLTP shops need.
Perhaps you don't understand what "broadcast" means. "Broadcast" infers that the information is sent out for any and all to access. My system doesn't "broadcast" anything. My IP is available, but only to the people that I choose. I can and do use my firewalls (hardware and software) to isolate myself from certain parties. Whenever I choose I can refresh my DHCP information and get a new IP address. The processor ID served no useful purpose.
OK, well, I'll give you that. Let me give you another example of a unique identifier that already exists in every device connnected to the internet from anywhere: Your MAC address! Better start pulling all your ethernet cards and burning them in a big bonfire... Big Brother will track you down via your MAC address and send you to Guantanamo bay!
Some might label me as an AMD fanboy because I haven't bought an Intel chip since the P2-300 and because I have sworn off Intel because of the P3's processor ID fiasco.
Oh... You're one of those wackos... Well, hey, if you're that paranoid about the processor ID, I got news for you:
[BLINKY ANNOYING POPUP] Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!!! [/BLINKY ANNOYING POPUP]
Jesus Christ, my router/firewall alone is a 333PII, which, for the average luser is WAY more than enough.
The '90s called... They want their cliche back. Get with the times. Joe six pack not only wants to browse the web and email, now he wants to edit digital video.
I downloaded a program for Toshibas thats runs the fan all the time - keeps the laptop cooler - uses a bit more juice I suppose - but who really uses bateries for anything more than shoulder strain?
You know, there once was a time when Intel based laptops got 3-4 hours of battery life and you actually could get some useful work out of them while on the road. I think it was 1999:-)
Since then they've become huge, bloated, heat-producing, power-sucking monsters and I'm frankly quite surprised to hear statements like the one above. I guess all the Intel users out there just accept it that they'll never be able to watch a DVD on an airplane without swapping batteries halfway through the movie.
For the rest of us that actually want to have some battery life from their portable computers, I recommend a nice alternative like these.
Medicalizing everything is a specialty of psychology in general.
You just negated your own argument. Medicalizing has nothing whatsoever to do with psychology. Psychiatry is the field that prescribes medicine to help overcome mental disorders. A psychologist can talk to you and try to help you work through your issues; a psychiatrist is more like to treat your issues pharmacologically.
If psychology is so effective, why do women go to shrinks and get drugs rather than undergo Freudian psychoanalysis?
Again, a psychologist, or "shrink" as you put it, cannot prescribe drugs. They're not medical doctors. I think you're just talking out of your ass and spouting some nonsense that you heard.
If you really think that "mental health disorders" are such a crock, why is it that millions of americans have been effectively treated for depression by using these drugs? If they weren't working, they would not be used any more.
I have had personal experiences with this, because my mom has bipolar disorder. If you're trying to tell me that there isn't something medically wrong with her, I call bullshit because I've personally witnessed her behavior and it could only be caused by a biological or chemical imbalance in her brain.
has it occured to anyone else that gmail might save space by not storing individual copies of spam, chain letters, mailing list items, etc? just md5 every message (then check content if theres a match, just in case) and store pointers in people's mailboxes. 50000 people get the same spam, gmail uses 50000*n+1*N space instead of 50000*N (n is a small pointer, N is a big message) space.
This won't work for the vast majority of spam. Most spammers have started inserting random data into the payload of their spam messages just to get around spam filters that are already using MD5 hashes of messages to detect potential spam. For example, Hotmail has the "report this as spam" button, which, when a user clicks it, takes an MD5 of the message and tries to find duplicates system-wide, in other mailboxes, or adds that MD5 to their spam table to check new inbound messages against it.
Good idea though; it just seems like the arms race between spammers and anti-spammers will keep going forever.
Face it, everyone, there's not going to be any record company that's ever going to say, "Oh, I guess the world wants freely-distributable music, let's give it to them." If that's what you're going for, then it's not worth it.
I hate to break it to you, but red-book audio CDs are already freely-distributable and have no DRM.
Fuck, if they dumb down the screen savers anymore I won't even watch it. Sometimes they cover semi-interesting shit like a few days ago when Kevin Rose told you how to use an OpenGL desktop on KDE and OpenGL desktop switching 'ala Expose in Linux... Occasionally there are good articles like that, but then they'll have 45 minutes of "What size hard disk do I need to buy to upgrade my computer???" and I just cringe.... The truth is, 90% of the questions they are asked could be solved by typing the question, word for word, into Google and clicking "I Feel Lucky!". That is boring television, honestly, but I watch it anyway sometimes just because I'm a geek I guess. Whatever.
Kevin Rose was genuinely knowledgeable - although a Mac hater in most regards
How can Kevin Rose be a Mac hater when he owns an iBook and an iPod? He also said he uses the iTMS on a regular basis. The rest of your analysis was pretty accurate. I wish they would bring back Sumi Das too. She was not only very knowledgeable and did great product reviews, she was hot too!
Because IBM has one too. Didn't stop them from being sued. Indeed, SCO claimed they would never have agreed to a "perpetual, irrevocable" license (which may be true, but it was AT&T who agreed to it, not SCO.)
IBM does not have a perpetual Unix license. They renew their's annually I believe, thus the dispute with SCO. SCO believes they violated the terms of their licensing agreement and therefore their license is being pulled.
Have you not seen the Sun ads where Sun chose to indemnify all of their customers against potential lawsuits? The nature of their perpetual license is what allows them to do this.
Until someone creates a nanotech factory with the following instructions:
Very insightful. Wish I had some mod points. This is exactly what will happen eventually. Sure, some of the initial inventors might be private corporations, but eventually this tech will filter it's way down to someone that is altruistic enough to give it away to the people and there will be nothing that can stop it at that point.
Now I can build a server that is twice as fast as a $10k sun for $300 if I search pricewatch long enough.
Haha... This comment just pretty much proves the lack of real-world experience that I've come to expect from Slashdot. Talk to me in 10 years from now after you've moved out of your parent's basement and actually spent some time as a sysadmin on a real Unix box. You'll understand why companies don't trust their data to $300 of miscellaneous taiwanese parts.
As for the parts of Solaris that Linux doesn't have, Sun has basically two choices. They can either merge it all into Linux and give it away to the world, which seems unlikely but whether they do or not is largely irrelevant because everyone else is doing this and anything that's in Solaris and not in Linux will be in there, in some form or another, sooner or later.
Your comment shows a total lack of understanding of both the industry, and Unix in general. Sun purchased a perpetual Unix System V license from AT&T back in the day. They do not own most of that base code; they only own extra features that they add to it. Sure, they have a right to use that code in Solaris, but it is not their code to give away. If Sun even tried to release System V code under the GPL they would be sued by SCO so fast it would make your head spin. And SCO would definitely have a case.
So, no Solaris is not going to go away. There are still a lot of things it does that Linux can't do (yet). The close bundling of hardware and software that Sun offers is very similar to Apple and they can achieve great stability that way.
Saying Sun should kill Solaris and use Linux on all hardware is like saying Apple should kill OS X and run Linux on all of their hardware. How many people would like to see that happen?
Sun is a Unix vendor. SCO is suing people with any connection to Unix.
You're misinformed. Sun purchased a perpetual Unix license from AT&T back in the day. They are the one and only Unix vendor that would not be affected adversely if SCO won their lawsuits with IBM.
If Apple chose to use their own format, as opposed to FLAC, there could be a number of reasons
Actually, I think it's probably due to the fact that the algorithm needs to be optimized to run on the iPod's slower processor. Finding a compression algorithm that will run on a PC is easy, but it could be that they tried to port FLAC to the iPod and it just took too much CPU power.
Apple is all about using open standards and formats. I don't think they'd make a new proprietary format unless they were forced to.
The benefits of ALE (Apple Lossless Encoding) are great. A lot of audiophiles are buying iPods now and they've been using AIFF encoding because it's lossless by default. Now they have twice as much space on their iPods. 192 kbps AAC is good enough for me, but those goddamn audiophiles; they can't stand to lose one bit of pristine digital audio...:-)
1. Nested lists: so I could have one list that says "if genre = rock", then a sublist that just has "if My Rating is > 3" or "if year published is 2" and the other "if My Rating is > 3" (which I use to differentiate between "Background work music" and "Driving kick ass music".
Have you not heard of Smart Playlists? It's been in iTunes since 4.0. It allows you to do exactly what you're talking about. You can say "If Genre = Rock AND if Rating > 3 AND if year published = 1960-1980", pick 25 of these songs and shuffle them.
I've never understood why the Open Source community is so quick to praise Sun
Well, without OpenOffice, which was given to the open source community by Sun, Linux wouldn't have any hope of consideration as a desktop platform. I never understood why so many slashbots think Sun is evil. They've practically created the very Unix that Linux tries to emulate.
I'll buy a "proper" SSL cert when I need to. For all needed purposes, a self signed cert is sufficient.
Well, maybe for your purposes, a self-signed cert is sufficient, but I prefer to know that the company I am trusting with my email has a DUNS number (Dun and Bradstreet) and their address and location has been verified. An SSL cert does this. Sure, it's not really a high level of security, but it at least lets me know that I'm not trusting my personal email and privacy to a server located in Nigeria, where the 419 scammers that run it plan on harvesting my email for credit card information or other personal details.
No storage limits as long as you don't treat it like a file server.
Please don't take this as a personal insult; I think you must be the creator/owner of this site since the URL is listed as your homepage.
Somehow, I just don't trust that a site that can't even afford to buy a proper SSL cert is going to be able to store a gigabyte of mail for me and several million other users out there.
BTW, I own an HDTV that I specifically made sure had none of this BS on board. Same goes for my HD Direc TV receiver.
I hate to break the bad news to you, but in a few years you're going to be wishing you had a DVI input with HDCP support on your TV. If you purchased your TV any time in the last two years I'm surprised you didn't research this. Already HBO and Showtime are turning on the DVI-HDCP copy protection flag, which encrypts the DVI stream between the TV and STB. It's only a matter of time before they start downrezzing or turning off the component outputs on all pay channels. Sure it sucks, but what are you going to do? We are at the mercy of the content cartels.
Buying a new HDTV without any support for DVI-HDCP or HDMI is like buying a car that isn't street legal. Sure you can say "I specifically made sure that my car had none of those BS safety features on board", but if you want to drive it on the same roads that everyone else uses, you're SOL.
The Nano-ITX cpu/chipset from VIA also does HD mpeg decoding in hardware. Getting technical docs out of VIA is a blood/stone issue, but the existing community peeps have managed to get the SD HW mpeg decoder working, and you'd expect it to be substantially similar.... You'll need an HD MPEG capture card though because the chip's nowhere near fast enough to do it in software
Actually, if you combined that with a cable HD set top box with Firewire output, you could capture the MPEG transport stream with very little horsepower to disk, and use the HW decoder to playback. Voila, DIY HDTivo. As of April 1st, all cable companies are required to provide a Firewire port on their set top boxes to any customer that requests it. You get the raw transport stream fed directly from the Firewire, so there is no quality loss like you might have with an MPEG capture card.
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You will also never get the same performance using six 12-way boxes that you can get from one 72-way box. The bus speeds and I/O throughput capabilities are much higher.
Agreed.
I have never seen an application that requires that extra boost and can jusitify the additional cost, but the capacity is there regardless.
I have. Large, monolithic OLTP databases, such as the ones that banks and telcos use. When you have to track every single phone call made or received by every cellphone subscriber in the US in one huge billing database, you need that kind of horsepower on a single system.
Granted, this use is becoming less and less common, but I predict that Sun will continue to sell well on the extreme high-end, which is what the banks and telcos, and other high-volume OLTP shops need.
Perhaps you don't understand what "broadcast" means. "Broadcast" infers that the information is sent out for any and all to access. My system doesn't "broadcast" anything. My IP is available, but only to the people that I choose. I can and do use my firewalls (hardware and software) to isolate myself from certain parties. Whenever I choose I can refresh my DHCP information and get a new IP address. The processor ID served no useful purpose.
OK, well, I'll give you that. Let me give you another example of a unique identifier that already exists in every device connnected to the internet from anywhere: Your MAC address! Better start pulling all your ethernet cards and burning them in a big bonfire... Big Brother will track you down via your MAC address and send you to Guantanamo bay!
Some might label me as an AMD fanboy because I haven't bought an Intel chip since the P2-300 and because I have sworn off Intel because of the P3's processor ID fiasco.
Oh... You're one of those wackos... Well, hey, if you're that paranoid about the processor ID, I got news for you:
[BLINKY ANNOYING POPUP]
Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!!!
[/BLINKY ANNOYING POPUP]
Jesus Christ, my router/firewall alone is a 333PII, which, for the average luser is WAY more than enough.
The '90s called... They want their cliche back. Get with the times. Joe six pack not only wants to browse the web and email, now he wants to edit digital video.
I downloaded a program for Toshibas thats runs the fan all the time - keeps the laptop cooler - uses a bit more juice I suppose - but who really uses bateries for anything more than shoulder strain?
:-)
You know, there once was a time when Intel based laptops got 3-4 hours of battery life and you actually could get some useful work out of them while on the road. I think it was 1999
Since then they've become huge, bloated, heat-producing, power-sucking monsters and I'm frankly quite surprised to hear statements like the one above. I guess all the Intel users out there just accept it that they'll never be able to watch a DVD on an airplane without swapping batteries halfway through the movie.
For the rest of us that actually want to have some battery life from their portable computers, I recommend a nice alternative like these.
Medicalizing everything is a specialty of psychology in general.
You just negated your own argument. Medicalizing has nothing whatsoever to do with psychology. Psychiatry is the field that prescribes medicine to help overcome mental disorders. A psychologist can talk to you and try to help you work through your issues; a psychiatrist is more like to treat your issues pharmacologically.
If psychology is so effective, why do women go to shrinks and get drugs rather than undergo Freudian psychoanalysis?
Again, a psychologist, or "shrink" as you put it, cannot prescribe drugs. They're not medical doctors. I think you're just talking out of your ass and spouting some nonsense that you heard.
If you really think that "mental health disorders" are such a crock, why is it that millions of americans have been effectively treated for depression by using these drugs? If they weren't working, they would not be used any more.
I have had personal experiences with this, because my mom has bipolar disorder. If you're trying to tell me that there isn't something medically wrong with her, I call bullshit because I've personally witnessed her behavior and it could only be caused by a biological or chemical imbalance in her brain.
has it occured to anyone else that gmail might save space by not storing individual copies of spam, chain letters, mailing list items, etc? just md5 every message (then check content if theres a match, just in case) and store pointers in people's mailboxes. 50000 people get the same spam, gmail uses 50000*n+1*N space instead of 50000*N (n is a small pointer, N is a big message) space.
This won't work for the vast majority of spam. Most spammers have started inserting random data into the payload of their spam messages just to get around spam filters that are already using MD5 hashes of messages to detect potential spam. For example, Hotmail has the "report this as spam" button, which, when a user clicks it, takes an MD5 of the message and tries to find duplicates system-wide, in other mailboxes, or adds that MD5 to their spam table to check new inbound messages against it.
Good idea though; it just seems like the arms race between spammers and anti-spammers will keep going forever.
Face it, everyone, there's not going to be any record company that's ever going to say, "Oh, I guess the world wants freely-distributable music, let's give it to them." If that's what you're going for, then it's not worth it.
I hate to break it to you, but red-book audio CDs are already freely-distributable and have no DRM.
Fuck, if they dumb down the screen savers anymore I won't even watch it. Sometimes they cover semi-interesting shit like a few days ago when Kevin Rose told you how to use an OpenGL desktop on KDE and OpenGL desktop switching 'ala Expose in Linux... Occasionally there are good articles like that, but then they'll have 45 minutes of "What size hard disk do I need to buy to upgrade my computer???" and I just cringe.... The truth is, 90% of the questions they are asked could be solved by typing the question, word for word, into Google and clicking "I Feel Lucky!".
That is boring television, honestly, but I watch it anyway sometimes just because I'm a geek I guess. Whatever.
Kevin Rose was genuinely knowledgeable - although a Mac hater in most regards
How can Kevin Rose be a Mac hater when he owns an iBook and an iPod? He also said he uses the iTMS on a regular basis. The rest of your analysis was pretty accurate. I wish they would bring back Sumi Das too. She was not only very knowledgeable and did great product reviews, she was hot too!
Because IBM has one too. Didn't stop them from being sued. Indeed, SCO claimed they would never have agreed to a "perpetual, irrevocable" license (which may be true, but it was AT&T who agreed to it, not SCO.)
IBM does not have a perpetual Unix license. They renew their's annually I believe, thus the dispute with SCO. SCO believes they violated the terms of their licensing agreement and therefore their license is being pulled.
Have you not seen the Sun ads where Sun chose to indemnify all of their customers against potential lawsuits? The nature of their perpetual license is what allows them to do this.
Only the US will have the wealth to create nanofactories on a mass market scale.
You forgot one thing: Nano-factories can replicate themselves just as easy as they can make other goods.
Until someone creates a nanotech factory with the following instructions:
Very insightful. Wish I had some mod points. This is exactly what will happen eventually. Sure, some of the initial inventors might be private corporations, but eventually this tech will filter it's way down to someone that is altruistic enough to give it away to the people and there will be nothing that can stop it at that point.
Now I can build a server that is twice as fast as a $10k sun for $300 if I search pricewatch long enough.
Haha... This comment just pretty much proves the lack of real-world experience that I've come to expect from Slashdot. Talk to me in 10 years from now after you've moved out of your parent's basement and actually spent some time as a sysadmin on a real Unix box. You'll understand why companies don't trust their data to $300 of miscellaneous taiwanese parts.
One out of two ain't bad.
What the hell are you talking about? Sun created both of those.
As for the parts of Solaris that Linux doesn't have, Sun has basically two choices. They can either merge it all into Linux and give it away to the world, which seems unlikely but whether they do or not is largely irrelevant because everyone else is doing this and anything that's in Solaris and not in Linux will be in there, in some form or another, sooner or later.
Your comment shows a total lack of understanding of both the industry, and Unix in general. Sun purchased a perpetual Unix System V license from AT&T back in the day. They do not own most of that base code; they only own extra features that they add to it. Sure, they have a right to use that code in Solaris, but it is not their code to give away. If Sun even tried to release System V code under the GPL they would be sued by SCO so fast it would make your head spin. And SCO would definitely have a case.
So, no Solaris is not going to go away. There are still a lot of things it does that Linux can't do (yet). The close bundling of hardware and software that Sun offers is very similar to Apple and they can achieve great stability that way.
Saying Sun should kill Solaris and use Linux on all hardware is like saying Apple should kill OS X and run Linux on all of their hardware. How many people would like to see that happen?
Sun is a Unix vendor. SCO is suing people with any connection to Unix.
You're misinformed. Sun purchased a perpetual Unix license from AT&T back in the day. They are the one and only Unix vendor that would not be affected adversely if SCO won their lawsuits with IBM.
If Apple chose to use their own format, as opposed to FLAC, there could be a number of reasons
:-)
Actually, I think it's probably due to the fact that the algorithm needs to be optimized to run on the iPod's slower processor. Finding a compression algorithm that will run on a PC is easy, but it could be that they tried to port FLAC to the iPod and it just took too much CPU power.
Apple is all about using open standards and formats. I don't think they'd make a new proprietary format unless they were forced to.
The benefits of ALE (Apple Lossless Encoding) are great. A lot of audiophiles are buying iPods now and they've been using AIFF encoding because it's lossless by default. Now they have twice as much space on their iPods. 192 kbps AAC is good enough for me, but those goddamn audiophiles; they can't stand to lose one bit of pristine digital audio...
1. Nested lists: so I could have one list that says "if genre = rock", then a sublist that just has "if My Rating is > 3" or "if year published is 2" and the other "if My Rating is > 3" (which I use to differentiate between "Background work music" and "Driving kick ass music".
Have you not heard of Smart Playlists? It's been in iTunes since 4.0. It allows you to do exactly what you're talking about. You can say "If Genre = Rock AND if Rating > 3 AND if year published = 1960-1980", pick 25 of these songs and shuffle them.
I've never understood why the Open Source community is so quick to praise Sun
Well, without OpenOffice, which was given to the open source community by Sun, Linux wouldn't have any hope of consideration as a desktop platform. I never understood why so many slashbots think Sun is evil. They've practically created the very Unix that Linux tries to emulate.
please, no more mod points for this drivel.
Please, no more AC trolls.
I'll buy a "proper" SSL cert when I need to. For all needed purposes, a self signed cert is sufficient.
Well, maybe for your purposes, a self-signed cert is sufficient, but I prefer to know that the company I am trusting with my email has a DUNS number (Dun and Bradstreet) and their address and location has been verified. An SSL cert does this. Sure, it's not really a high level of security, but it at least lets me know that I'm not trusting my personal email and privacy to a server located in Nigeria, where the 419 scammers that run it plan on harvesting my email for credit card information or other personal details.
No storage limits as long as you don't treat it like a file server.
Please don't take this as a personal insult; I think you must be the creator/owner of this site since the URL is listed as your homepage.
Somehow, I just don't trust that a site that can't even afford to buy a proper SSL cert is going to be able to store a gigabyte of mail for me and several million other users out there.
BTW, I own an HDTV that I specifically made sure had none of this BS on board. Same goes for my HD Direc TV receiver.
I hate to break the bad news to you, but in a few years you're going to be wishing you had a DVI input with HDCP support on your TV. If you purchased your TV any time in the last two years I'm surprised you didn't research this. Already HBO and Showtime are turning on the DVI-HDCP copy protection flag, which encrypts the DVI stream between the TV and STB. It's only a matter of time before they start downrezzing or turning off the component outputs on all pay channels. Sure it sucks, but what are you going to do? We are at the mercy of the content cartels.
Buying a new HDTV without any support for DVI-HDCP or HDMI is like buying a car that isn't street legal. Sure you can say "I specifically made sure that my car had none of those BS safety features on board", but if you want to drive it on the same roads that everyone else uses, you're SOL.
The Nano-ITX cpu/chipset from VIA also does HD mpeg decoding in hardware. Getting technical docs out of VIA is a blood/stone issue, but the existing community peeps have managed to get the SD HW mpeg decoder working, and you'd expect it to be substantially similar.... You'll need an HD MPEG capture card though because the chip's nowhere near fast enough to do it in software
Actually, if you combined that with a cable HD set top box with Firewire output, you could capture the MPEG transport stream with very little horsepower to disk, and use the HW decoder to playback. Voila, DIY HDTivo. As of April 1st, all cable companies are required to provide a Firewire port on their set top boxes to any customer that requests it. You get the raw transport stream fed directly from the Firewire, so there is no quality loss like you might have with an MPEG capture card.