Summarizing, if you don't give the binaries, you don't have to give the source.
Correct. And the select few (in this case, university people) who get the distribution are free to redistribute, so expect second-hand availability soon.
Is Linux's customizability, especially in the GUI arena, a detriment for the average PC user, or is this just a hurdle people will eventually understand?
Not a problem. Remember the changes dos->win3.0 and win3.1->win95? Very different indeed. People were confused for a while, and recovered. A change to linux isn't bigger than that, provided that the user don't have to install himself. And you can get the close button in the same place as MS, pick the correct distribution or have the shop customize it in that direction. People use linux at work (in spite of the company "standardizing" on MS) and don't get in trouble as the boss don't see the difference when he walks by.
Even suits have hobbies. Some play golf. This one seems to have a computer hobby. Unusual perhaps, but being a geek suit is possible - doing suit work for money while also knowing computers.
And what's so strange about ditching powerpoint? He got rid of it even before trying linux. HTML takes time to learn, but so does powerpoint. Suit types aren't born with powerpoint knowledge either.
When Windows 95 was being reviewed one of the Microsoft project leaders defined a very simple metric: "can my mother use this?"
My mother asked me what linux distribution would be easiest to give a try.
Some people seems to assume that every user out there is an idiot. It isn't so bad, because most of the "idiots" know a helpful kid or something, and it all works out.
Those who can't do the simplest things in linux can't use the control panel in windows <I>at all</I> either. And registry editing is a black art they haven't heard about. So they get help - by paying or relying on "the guy in the office who knows about computers". I have seen the sort - he didn't believe he had a "start button". Uh - all I have is this accounting package...
So what if linux becomes mainstream? No problem for computer experts. The self-learned hobbyists will learn a new os. The bright kids who knows a few trick will know a few linux tricks instead. And the truely dumb will buy everything preinstalled and bring the computer to the shop in order to have a new printer connected, like he does today with windows. Or ask one of those bright kids for help, if he knows one.
You have way more power in Linux. Most of the apps are open source. Why even bother with a scripting language, use C and fix the app itself. More power and speed. And fame too, if you add something really useful.
You can turn the device on or off by pushing the odd cobalt atom around, but surely attempting a read operation on the device would cause its state to alter? Does anyone have ideas as to how they would avoid this?
They can read it already - you see the mirage in the image in the LA Times article. Of course "detecting" the mirage will produce side-effects, no problem if those effects aren't enough to push around the real atom. Don't be confused by the uncertainity principle - it doesn't mean you can't detect stuff on the quantum level. It is merely a limit on how much information (of different kinds) you can get simultaneously.
I wonder what the fate of transmeta would have been without Torvalds. would anyone even had given them a second look without such a powerful name? They certainly appear to have a great product, but would we even be hearing about them if it weren't for him?
Sure. Anybody who make/sell a x86 compatible chip get some press. Here, in pc magazines, in places like Tom's hardware, and so on. Cyrix didn't have Linus, we heard about them too. Transmeta even have a x86 compatible chip using unusually little power, and with some cool technology too. I am sure slashdot would cover the release even without Linus.
Why the hell would the Chinese government do this?
The propaganda value may be dubious, but then there's the military value. Yes, I know they have ICBM's already. They may want their own GPS system (the US can turn theirs off in a war), their own anti-missile defense, a set of spy satellites, and so on. All that require some rocketry but will be kept secret. The experimental phase may be used for launching some people, hiding the intent for a while as a propaganda stunt.
Nothing better than making the world believe they are merely motivating their own people and/or impressing neighbours.
IIRC, back some time ago in history, Communist *were* deemed as a separate race By ignorants perhaps.
(I think they called them Bolsheviks or something). The Bolsheviks was merely a political group that seized power in the early soviet union. They only got 1/4 of the votes (yes, there was an attempt at democracy) and decided the peoples opinion wasn't that important after all.
Anyway, when the "Red scare" occured, many people (such as ethnic Slavs) were persecuted Such shit happens with ignorant masses. Communism is still an ideology only, easily supported by the number of different races trying or having tried communism. There are Asian communists, African communists, European communists....
Is it just me or does anybody think that Transmeta is using Linux+Linus as a way to sell their chips?
Sure, but there don't seem to be anything wrong with it. They pay Linus, but let him work on linux development on company time. It is only reasonable that they get something back, such as image.
Not to mention that global warming causes ocean levels to fall and not rise. This is the biggest misconception they try to pullover on you. take a glass with 3 or so ice cubes and mark the water level. cover it and let it set a few hours. When you come back you'll find the level has sunk. "Well gee Mr. Wizard, why is that?"
A glass? Evaporation! Floating ice won't change the water level at all. Sure - the ice shrinks as it melts, but the shrinking is exactly the part of ice that was above water before melting.
So melting the north pole ice won't change the water level at all. Melting glaciers resting on land, such as the south pole icecap, will definitely raise the seas, but nowhere near a "waterworld" scenario.
I mean, seriously... ad companies specialize in one thing, ads. They don't want to blackmail you because you've been buying diamond jewlery online for your mistress, and buying your wife cheap wal-mart stuff.
They don't want to. Some private investigator might. He breaks in or gets a short-lasting job at the ad company. Then he collects info on thousands of people to find good blackmail candidates. Or maybe he finds the proof your wife hired him to find. Or he calls up the ad company claiming to be a online jewellry seller and could he please buy the dataset for people who have bought at least once?
Consider commercials versus tele-marketers. I can't just say "I don't wanna hear it, so I won't answer the phone.
You can - with caller ID. With ISDN you may even set the pc up as a selective answering machine. You can have the pc identify telemarketers by their number and deliver a rude message, while letting the phone ring normally for others. Whenever a new telemarketer get through - add their number to your own datbase. Databases can work for "the little man" too.
Building huge data bases on people is extrmley scary, and at present laws don't really exist to protect peoples privacy, or information.
Laws exists where I live. Anyone wanting to build a database with information about identifiable persons must get a permission from the authorities. The law was made because of computer databases, but applies to other media as well.
Of course there are exceptions for obvious stuff, a company may, for example, keep a payroll without applying for permission.
The law also states that you may demand to see your own record in anybody's database, and you can tell them to delete it. I tell telemarketers to delete me from their lists, as required by law. They really don't call back - until the next edition of the phone directory is scanned. (Or whatever they use.)
No, no, please! That would be a disaster!! The hole point of this architecture is to get rid of this compability mess.
Well, someone will still have to suffer the incompatibility mess: Those who write morphing sw for various cpu's. This will surely be more than just Transmeta, if the concept takes off.
The x86 instruction set isn't necessarily the best for this chip. Someone could make up a different one (perhaps something that use 32 registers or so) make a compiler for it, and have better performance than x86 code on the same chip.
This would have to be rewritten for another chip, but rewriting the instruction emulator is a lot less effort than recompiling the os and all apps. Still, someone must do it.
So, am I missing something? Are there situations where 4x is really not 4x?
4x may be 4x, if the number is correct. The nice thing with scsi though, is that all the advantages with disks (multiple commands etc) may apply to burners too. Sending several commands to the burner in one go means it is much less likely to run out of data. When one command completes there are several more already in the drive while your program start making/transferring the next chunk of data.
IDE burning has a problem if the drive being read from is on the same ide chain as the writer. No such problem with scsi.
You may get lucky and have a stable IDE burning setup, but I have met enough people that just says "don't TOUCH the machine - I'm burning a CD!" And they need 600M of disk space because they need to have a pre-made disk image. Can't afford to do any processing while burning.
I have burned cd's on a 2x scsi burner. I had no pre-made image, the iso filesystem was being made during burning from files in selected sessions on a multisession cdrom. It completed in 40 minutes, which means I really got the 300kB/s 2x is capable of. The processor? A 486 with 12M. Seeing someone try that with IDE would be interesting.
2.The multitasking restriction is that IDE cannot issue more than 1 io request at a time, but this doesn't matter for single disk systems.
Yes, this matters for single-disk systems. You send several requests to the disk. The disk will then process request 2 while transferring the data read in request 1 (or while receiving the data you are writing for request 1)
This improves your read bandwidth a lot, particularly when using good read-ahead algorithms. It makes a difference. It will also improve write bandwith in high-load situations, i.e. when you're writing at the platter bandwith for long enough time to fill the on-disk ram cache and more.
3.The only essential difference between a SCSI HD and an IDE one is the drive electronics, they are physically identical.
Sure. The scsi advantage is in the interface. Now, if at least one manufacturer would see the light and sell them at the same price... IDE would be gone in a few years, and they would save money on not developing IDE anymore.
A SCSI channel does _not_ have 15 devices. It has 8 or 16 devices, depending on wether you use wide or narrow devices. This includes the controller, so you can usually have 7 or 15.
Wouldn't we cry foul if MS decided to hold a W2K media-fest the day 2.4 came out?
They can't possibly know that before it happens. Linus don't set a date. He may say stuff like "We'll try for that particular month" but there won't be a release if it isn't ready. And then he suddenly says "here it is" instead of yet another pre-release. So MS cannot do this unless they are holding back some product for this purpose.
Even then it wouldn't do much damage. First, not many people care about kernel releases. They care about distro releases instead. Second, linux doesn't depend on "product-of-this-day/week" hype either.
I recall seeing a recent (post-Findings of Fact) poll that said that something like 66% of Americans see him as the embodiment of the American Dream.
That doesn't necessarily mean he's popular. Many people envy the rich and successful. And even without envy there is no reason to like a guy at all just because you want to be like him but can't.
Contrary to belief, pornography isn't dangerous. A kid isn't damaged by seeing it. There is a lot of people who don't like it though. They hate accidentally stumbling onto a terminal someone left with a porn image on it (which is precisely why people leave such images...) And they get embarrased when kids use nasty words. So they try censorship and anything else to protect themselves from being embarrased about sexual questions.
Kids sometimes looks for porn because it is taboo and cool. (Still taboo in places where it is fully legal, due to embarassed adults.) They tire of it quickly though, until they reach puberty. That's how I remember it anyway.
The censorship people always drag out the worst stuff imaginable saying "do you want kids to see THIS?" When 99% of porn is just plain naked people having fun, damaging nobody whatever their age. Then they block not only the really nasty stuff but all the plain stuff too, and medical books etc. too. Stupidity at work.
we can only be offline for ten minutes every month"
You can have that, and keep up with new kernels also. Install every stable kernel that comes along, while keeping a copy of the running one. Just don't reboot.
Now, if the machine have to boot anyway (such as power failure, or the new kernel have something you must have) then you get the newest kernel. If that turns out bad, reboot to the old one that you kept.
There's a big difference between a comic strip and laughing at a person.
Exactly! Teachers and tech support are not supposed to mock you in real life. They can do so in a cartoon though, and that may indeed be funny. Nothing wrong with having a nasty or outright evil cartoon character.
I don't mean to sound argumentative, but if your NT server issued a STOP every week or two you neeed to investigate your operating environment.
This argument pop up from time to time, and is no good. The OS must not crash merely because we run a few extra unnecessary apps! This is were NT fails!
Unnecessary stuff on a server may eat some performance, which is reason enough to get rid of it. But it shouldn't crash the os - ever.
Anti-linux folks will probably say that you can crash linux with a bad app too, but it won't happen with something innocent. You can run memory eating stress-test software or let the machine run DOS attacks against itself, but that's not what a company does. (And it would hurt performance seriously long before you crash the OS anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
Summarizing, if you don't give the binaries, you don't have to give the source.
Correct. And the select few (in this case, university people) who get the distribution are free to redistribute, so expect second-hand availability soon.
Is Linux's customizability, especially in the GUI arena, a detriment for the average PC user, or is this just a hurdle people will eventually understand?
Not a problem. Remember the changes dos->win3.0 and win3.1->win95? Very different indeed. People were confused for a while, and recovered. A change to linux isn't bigger than that, provided that the user don't have to install himself. And you can get the close button in the same place as MS, pick the correct distribution or have the shop customize it in that direction. People use linux at work (in spite of the company "standardizing" on MS) and don't get in trouble as the boss don't see the difference when he walks by.
Even suits have hobbies. Some play golf. This one seems to have a computer hobby. Unusual perhaps, but being a geek suit is possible - doing suit work for money while also knowing computers.
And what's so strange about ditching powerpoint? He got rid of it even before trying linux. HTML takes time to learn, but so does powerpoint. Suit types aren't born with powerpoint knowledge either.
When Windows 95 was being reviewed one of the Microsoft project leaders defined a very simple metric: "can my mother use this?"
My mother asked me what linux distribution would be easiest to give a try.
Some people seems to assume that every user out there is an idiot. It isn't so bad, because most of the "idiots" know a helpful kid or something, and it all works out.
Those who can't do the simplest things in linux can't use the control panel in windows <I>at all</I> either. And registry editing is a black art they haven't heard about. So they get help - by paying or relying on "the guy in the office who knows about computers". I have seen the sort - he didn't believe he had a "start button". Uh - all I have is this accounting package...
So what if linux becomes mainstream? No problem for computer experts. The self-learned hobbyists will learn a new os. The bright kids who knows a few trick will know a few linux tricks instead. And the truely dumb will buy everything preinstalled and bring the computer to the shop in order to have a new printer connected, like he does today with windows. Or ask one of those bright kids for help, if he knows one.
You have way more power in Linux. Most of the apps are open source. Why even bother with a scripting language, use C and fix the app itself. More power and speed. And fame too, if you add something really useful.
You can turn the device on or off by pushing the odd cobalt atom around, but surely attempting a read operation on the device would cause its state to alter? Does anyone have ideas as to how they would avoid this?
They can read it already - you see the mirage in the image in the LA Times article. Of course "detecting" the mirage will produce side-effects, no problem if those effects aren't enough to push around the real atom. Don't be confused by the uncertainity principle - it doesn't mean you can't detect stuff on the quantum level. It is merely a limit on how much information (of different kinds) you can get simultaneously.
I wonder what the fate of transmeta would have been without Torvalds. would anyone even had given them a second look without such a powerful name? They certainly appear to have a great product, but would we even be hearing about them if it weren't for him?
Sure. Anybody who make/sell a x86 compatible chip get some press. Here, in pc magazines, in places like Tom's hardware, and so on. Cyrix didn't have Linus, we heard about them too. Transmeta even have a x86 compatible chip using unusually little power, and with some cool technology too. I am sure slashdot would cover the release even without Linus.
Why the hell would the Chinese government do this?
The propaganda value may be dubious, but then there's the military value. Yes, I know they have ICBM's already. They may want their own GPS system (the US can turn theirs off in a war), their own anti-missile defense, a set of spy satellites, and so on. All that require some rocketry but will be kept secret. The experimental phase may be used for launching some people, hiding the intent for a while as a propaganda stunt.
Nothing better than making the world believe they are merely motivating their own people and/or impressing neighbours.
IIRC, back some time ago in history, Communist *were* deemed as a separate race
By ignorants perhaps.
(I think they called them Bolsheviks or something). The Bolsheviks was merely a political group that seized power in the early soviet union. They only got 1/4 of the votes (yes, there was an attempt at democracy) and decided the peoples opinion wasn't that important after all.
Anyway, when the "Red scare" occured, many people (such as ethnic Slavs) were persecuted
Such shit happens with ignorant masses. Communism is still an ideology only, easily supported by the number of different races trying or having tried communism. There are Asian communists, African communists, European communists....
Is it just me or does anybody think that Transmeta is using Linux+Linus as a way to sell their chips?
Sure, but there don't seem to be anything wrong with it. They pay Linus, but let him work on linux development on company time. It is only reasonable that they get something back, such as image.
Not to mention that global warming causes ocean levels to fall and not rise. This is the biggest misconception they try to pullover on you. take a glass with 3 or so ice cubes and mark the water level. cover it and let it set a few hours. When you come back you'll find the level has sunk. "Well gee Mr. Wizard, why is that?"
A glass? Evaporation!
Floating ice won't change the water level at all. Sure - the ice shrinks as it melts, but the shrinking is exactly the part of ice that was above water before melting.
So melting the north pole ice won't change the water level at all. Melting glaciers resting on land, such as the south pole icecap, will definitely raise the seas, but nowhere near a "waterworld" scenario.
I mean, seriously... ad companies specialize in one thing, ads. They don't want to blackmail you because you've been buying diamond jewlery online for your mistress, and buying your wife cheap wal-mart stuff.
They don't want to. Some private investigator might. He breaks in or gets a short-lasting job at the ad company. Then he collects info on thousands of people to find good blackmail candidates. Or maybe he finds the proof your wife hired him to find. Or he calls up the ad company claiming to be a online jewellry seller and could he please buy the dataset for people who have bought at least once?
Consider commercials versus tele-marketers.
I can't just say "I don't wanna hear it, so I won't answer the phone.
You can - with caller ID. With ISDN you may even set the pc up as a selective answering machine. You can have the pc identify telemarketers by their number and deliver a rude message, while letting the phone ring normally for others. Whenever a new telemarketer get through - add their number to your own datbase. Databases can work for "the little man" too.
Building huge data bases on people is extrmley scary, and at present laws don't really exist
to protect peoples privacy, or information.
Laws exists where I live. Anyone wanting to build a database with information about identifiable persons must get a permission from the authorities. The law was made because of computer databases, but applies to other media as well.
Of course there are exceptions for obvious stuff, a company may, for example, keep a payroll without applying for permission.
The law also states that you may demand to see your own record in anybody's database, and you can tell them to delete it. I tell telemarketers to delete me from their lists, as required by law. They really don't call back - until the next edition of the phone directory is scanned. (Or whatever they use.)
No, no, please! That would be a disaster!! The hole point of this architecture is to get rid of this compability mess.
Well, someone will still have to suffer the incompatibility mess: Those who write morphing sw for various cpu's. This will surely be more than just Transmeta, if the concept takes off.
The x86 instruction set isn't necessarily the best for this chip. Someone could make up a different one (perhaps something that use 32 registers or so) make a compiler for it, and have better performance than x86 code on the same chip.
This would have to be rewritten for another chip, but rewriting the instruction emulator is a lot less effort than recompiling the os and all apps. Still, someone must do it.
So, am I missing something? Are there situations where 4x is really not 4x?
4x may be 4x, if the number is correct. The nice thing with scsi though, is that all the advantages with disks (multiple commands etc) may apply to burners too. Sending several commands to the burner in one go means it is much less likely to run out of data. When one command completes there are several more already in the drive while your program start making/transferring the next chunk of data.
IDE burning has a problem if the drive being read from is on the same ide chain as the writer. No such problem with scsi.
You may get lucky and have a stable IDE burning setup, but I have met enough people that just says "don't TOUCH the machine - I'm burning a CD!" And they need 600M of disk space because they need to have a pre-made disk image. Can't afford to do any processing while burning.
I have burned cd's on a 2x scsi burner. I had no pre-made image, the iso filesystem was being made during burning from files in selected sessions on a multisession cdrom. It completed in 40 minutes, which means I really got the 300kB/s 2x is capable of. The processor? A 486 with 12M.
Seeing someone try that with IDE would be interesting.
2.The multitasking restriction is that IDE cannot issue more than 1 io request at a time, but this doesn't matter for single disk systems.
Yes, this matters for single-disk systems. You send several requests to the disk. The disk will then process request 2 while transferring the data read in request 1 (or while receiving the data you are writing for request 1)
This improves your read bandwidth a lot, particularly when using good read-ahead algorithms. It makes a difference. It will also improve write bandwith in high-load situations, i.e. when you're writing at the platter bandwith for long enough time to fill the on-disk ram cache and more.
3.The only essential difference between a SCSI HD and an IDE one is the drive electronics, they are physically identical.
Sure. The scsi advantage is in the interface. Now, if at least one manufacturer would see the light and sell them at the same price...
IDE would be gone in a few years, and they would save money on not developing IDE anymore.
A SCSI channel does _not_ have 15 devices.
It has 8 or 16 devices, depending on wether you use wide or narrow devices. This includes the controller, so you can usually have 7 or 15.
Wouldn't we cry foul if MS decided to hold a W2K media-fest the day 2.4 came out?
They can't possibly know that before it happens. Linus don't set a date. He may say stuff like "We'll try for that particular month" but there won't be a release if it isn't ready. And then he suddenly says "here it is" instead of yet another pre-release. So MS cannot do this unless they are holding back some product for this purpose.
Even then it wouldn't do much damage. First, not many people care about kernel releases. They care about distro releases instead. Second, linux doesn't depend on "product-of-this-day/week" hype either.
I recall seeing a recent (post-Findings of Fact) poll that said that something like 66% of Americans see him as the embodiment of the American Dream.
That doesn't necessarily mean he's popular. Many people envy the rich and successful. And even without envy there is no reason to like a guy at all just because you want to be like him but can't.
Contrary to belief, pornography isn't dangerous. A kid isn't damaged by seeing it. There is a lot of people who don't like it though. They hate accidentally stumbling onto a terminal someone left with a porn image on it (which is precisely why people leave such images...) And they get embarrased when kids use nasty words. So they try censorship and anything else to protect themselves from being embarrased about sexual questions.
Kids sometimes looks for porn because it is taboo and cool. (Still taboo in places where it is fully legal, due to embarassed adults.) They tire of it quickly though, until they reach puberty. That's how I remember it anyway.
The censorship people always drag out the worst stuff imaginable saying "do you want kids to see THIS?" When 99% of porn is just plain naked people having fun, damaging nobody whatever their age. Then they block not only the really nasty stuff but all the plain stuff too, and medical books etc. too. Stupidity at work.
we can only be offline for ten minutes every month"
You can have that, and keep up with new kernels also. Install every stable kernel that comes along, while keeping a copy of the running one. Just don't reboot.
Now, if the machine have to boot anyway (such as power failure, or the new kernel have something you must have) then you get the newest kernel. If that turns out bad, reboot to the old one that you kept.
There's a big difference between a comic strip and laughing at a person.
Exactly! Teachers and tech support are not supposed to mock you in real life. They can do so in a cartoon though, and that may indeed be funny. Nothing wrong with having a nasty or outright evil cartoon character.
Gimme a break. Tech Support extremely frustrating and thankless? Try being a cop or a nurse, or a collections agent or telemarketer for a day
Please don't try being a telemarketer. They are annoying and serve no useful function, unlike the cop, nurse or tech staff.
I don't mean to sound argumentative, but if your NT server issued a STOP every week or two you neeed to investigate your operating environment.
This argument pop up from time to time, and is no good. The OS must not crash merely because we run a few extra unnecessary apps! This is were NT fails!
Unnecessary stuff on a server may eat some performance, which is reason enough to get rid of it. But it shouldn't crash the os - ever.
Anti-linux folks will probably say that you can crash linux with a bad app too, but it won't happen with something innocent. You can run memory eating stress-test software or let the machine run DOS attacks against itself, but that's not what a company does. (And it would hurt performance seriously long before you crash the OS anyway.)