Since distributed computing projects crank your CPU to 100%, there's definitely an associated energy and environmental cost to running that stuff. This will become increasingly true in the future, with the increasing prevelence of technologies like Intel's "SpeedStep" or AMD's "Cool And Quiet" that allow CPU clockspeeds to dynamically vary the clockspeed and power consumption of a processor. That will only increase the difference in power consumption between a CPU at rest and a CPU that's pegged at 100% crunching SETI units.
Distributed computing advocates always seem to neglect this. They think that all those unused CPU cycles are a vast, untapped resource just waiting to accomplish fabulous things. Well, as a guy who used to have a few boxes crunching RC5-64 for Distributed.net, I can tell you that it's not a free resource when you're the one paying the electric bill.
Joe Consumer isn't necessarily going to think this technology is a great idea when he realizes that he's paying an extra $10 a month on his electricity bill for the "privilege" of crunching numbers for some dubious cause.
And, let's face it. Not all distributed projects are dubious, but many are. The fundamental problem is that a lot of compute-intensive projects simply aren't embarassingly parallel like SETI or RC5-64. And a lot of other parallelizable applications require access to huge datasets that make them unsuitable for distributed work. For example, 3D rendering can be parallelized pretty well... but the datasets are huge. For your CPU to render a single frame of Pixar's latest movie, it would need access to anywhere from hundreds of MB to several GB of texture and geometry data. A lot of scientific applications are similarly constrained.
Back before Windows 95, OS/2 had a significantly better desktop environment than Microsoft Windows did. It ran Win16 applications, typically better than Windows itself did. I knew of a lot of Windows developers who did their development on OS/2 because of its better memory management, pre-emptive multitasking, and crash protection.
And what good did any of this do for OS/2?
Since OS/2 ran Windows apps "out of the box", it's easy to see how a lot of people saw OS/2 as a nice(r) way to run Windows apps rather than as a development target in its own right... I agree with what you're saying there.
Here's the key difference between OS/2 and OSX w/ Virtual PC or VMWare... OSX won't include them for free. OSX won't run Windows applications "out of the box" like OS/2 did.
For those who really want or need the functionality of running Windows applications on OSX, they have to pay for the emulation/virtualization software and a Windows license.
So, while OSX x86 will be able to run Windows applications very nicely for those who don't mind spending the extra cash for a Windows license, I don't see it becoming "a prettier way to run Windows apps" as you say.
Think about it from a developer's standpoint. In the OS/2 days, you could say "well, we'll just write a Win16 app and let the OS/2 people use that". I cannot imagine today's developers saying "we'll just write a Windows app and let the OSX users use that plus pay several hundred dollars for a Windows license and additional software".
You can translate Altivec into regular x86 instruction sequences.
128-bit SIMD instructions translated into regular x86 code? I think that will be slow enough as to be completely unusable... like multiple orders of magnitude slower in some cases.
Then again, perhaps some Altivec code could be directly translated to SSE1/2/3. Altivec is regarded as superior to SSE1/2/3; not sure how feasible that would be. I don't do that kind of programming myself so I can't say.
In addition, CNET's main answer to the insane technical issues that this would involve is, "Steve Jobs said it would work."
The technical issues really aren't that insane. Most high-level code PPC is only a recompile away from working on an x86. Development tools could easily support compilation to some sort of fat-binary (see: 68K-->PPC transition) or dual-binary scehe,.
The only technical sticking point would be Altivec code. Lot of manual work to translate it to SSE1/2/3. However, if Intel could support the Altivec instruction set in hardware... it could be a fairly seamless transition for developers. The technical aspects of supporting it in hardware wouldn't be too hard; I think the only challenges would be legal (patents, etc).
Apple has for some time been using Intel chips in their Xserve, and their may very well be additional products yet to be announced. However, think about this possibility: Apple has significant resources devoted to Altivec just about everywhere in the OS, functions that are not available in any currently shipping Intel chip. But imagine this: What if rather than OS X being run on x86, Intel were to produce a PPC chip with Altivec? I do not know what the current licensing agreements are with Apple, IBM and Motorola, but if the licensing were prohibitive, perhaps Apple certainly could help with the reverse engineering of such a chip.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Recompiling regular high-level (C, Obj-C, etc) for x86 or x86-64 is (relatively) freaking easy. Rewriting hand-tuned Altivec code to run on Intels SSE-2 or SSE-3 is a major, major issue for software developers both inside and outside of Apple... and supposedly, Altivec is superior to SSE1/2/3 in quite a few regards. It won't be a direct translation.
I like your "Intel producing PPC chips idea". If licensing agreements allow for it, that could be technically feasible. But... I highly doubt that Intel wants to produce chips based on an entirely new architecture. I think we can utterly rule this out.
What seems a lot more likely to me is Intel producing x86 chips with Altivec-equivalent instructions to ease the porting process. If Intel could add Altivec functionality to an x86 chip, compatibility could basically be a recompile away. (perhaps with some relatively minor adjustments for endian issues)
That doesn't seem like it would be a technical hurdle for Intel, if licensing agreements allow for it... I know the name "Altivec" is trademarked; I don't know if the actual instruction set is covered by IP law. (The name "Altivec" obviously doesn't matter because it ain't exactly a household word anyway; only the functionality matters)
Even Americans can't stick to a single mile (they have like 3 or 4) -- and this is what makes miles something really repulsive to me.
What? Could you please elaborate on this? I didn't know there were multiple versions of the mile. Then again, I've only been living in America for 28 years.
Doesn't work for me, either. Firefox 1.0.3, Windows XP SP2 here. I'm running Moox's build of Firefox; not sure if that affects anything.
It looks like the script is spoofing ftp.mozilla.org somehow. I made sure that "Allow Web Sites To Install Software" was enabled in Firefox's preferences, and I even added "ftp.mozilla.org" to the whitelist of allowed sites! Still didn't work.
Here's what happens when I load the page:
1. Fx appears to contact ftp.mozilla.org and downloads the harmless XPI referenced in the "exploit" script. This takes several seconds. 2. An error appears in the JavaScript console: "Error: install is not defined". No.bat file created at C:\.........
Either this "exploit" is B.S., or some other settings need to be in place for this to work.
Why? Because they stand up for their rights not to be libelled? That's a really stupid reason to decide your kids' educations. 'Hey son, you're not going to that good school, you have to go to a shit one instead, because the good one is suing someone who lied about them.' 'But Daddy, that shit school's full of bullies and incompetent teachers and drugs.' 'I'm sorry son, but people's right to libel people on the Internet comes before everything, even you.'
Right, your theory makes perfect sense because
1. All public schools are bad! 2. There are no other good schools besides those run by "Charter Schools USA" - it's either their schools, or crap! 3. There are no other charter schools besides those run by "Charter Schools USA" 4. These schools run by "Charter Schools USA" muuuuuust be good in the first place
Now, whenever somebody Googles for "Charter Schools USA", at least 9 of the top 10 search results will surely reference this questionable conduct. That's got to hurt their business in the long run.
I hope that parents will vote with their money and send their kids to school elsewhere.
I recently went through this at my own site, but we faired much better because we handled it with a lot more class than the owners of this Australian site. The result was a member community that has been exceptionally supportive and just a wonderful group of people.
"The SA forums have been doing this for years, and you know what? They're popular as hell"
I'd go so far as to say they're popular because of the small fee, not in spite of it. The big problem with webforums is the amount of people who just like to make trouble. When people have to pay for something, no matter how small the fee, they tend to act a little more responsibly. Most people aren't going to pay $5 just to act like an ass and see how quickly they can get banned. When you have a lot of "troublemakers", it overworks your mods and starts to drive away the good forum members. You can ban somebody but there's *nothing* preventing them from signing back up with another IP address!
The downside is that a fee definitely will reduce the amount of new members you get and some members will definitely feel indignent about having to pay for something they've been using for free. (And I don't blame them!)
At the site I run, we started out free, but I always made it clear the members were beta testers and that the site would be for-pay someday as opposed to suddenly going pay without warning. About three months ago we made the transition to a for-pay site. There was some grumbling (which I totally understand) but overall the atmosphere was highly supportive. To ease the transition, we've done the following:
* Early site members had the chance to earn free memberships if they completed all of the beta testing requirements * This was unintentional, but the beta testing phase stretched on about six months longer than initially planned, so everybody basically got a free six months anyway:P * Perks for paid members such as giveaways * Parts of the forums are still accessible for free * Free members can earn paid memberships by doing things like printing up flyers, etc. * Invite system allows paid members to give invites to their friends, entitling their friends to enjoy paid memberships without paying anything
All in all, I've probably given out 2x as many free memberships as have been paid for. I'm 100% okay with that because it's made the site better and that increases the number of people who want to by memberships in the long run. It's still an experiment in progress but it's been going well...
"Dude, what you're asking for is the single most ridiculous thing I've ever heard on/." -----
I agree completely.
I've been posting on Slashdot for around 7 years and I think this is my first "me too"-style post. Please forgive me. It's just that this question was so. fucking. ridiculous. Literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen posted on Slashdot.
CA is saying Linux doesn't need ANY drivers EXCEPT the ones CA wants to use.
Flaming aside, this is where I think you might have misunderstood the article. From the article:
"Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice president at Computer Associates International Inc., in Islandia, N.Y., said that while the kernel is evolving for the desktop, server and embedded markets, more and more technology is being included, and the kernel is "getting fatter. We are not interested in the game drivers and music drivers that are being added to the kernel. We are interested in a more stable kernel."
He's not complaining that Linux has drivers, he's complaining that these sorts of things are being added to the kernel itself. Please remember that "adding something to the kernel" is different than "adding something to the operating system".
The "kernel" refers to a single executable - in Linux's case, a monolithic kernel that might have lots and lots of drivers and other things compiled into it. This is different than Windows' approach in which drivers are loaded at runtime. Having lots of drivers available for the Windows operating system is technically very different from compiling lots of drivers directly into the Linux kernel.
I think, and I really do not say this to flame you, that you are a bit confused about the distinction between an operating system and a kernel. It's like the difference between a car and an engine. Cars have engines, but engines are not cars! And adding something to the engine is quite different from making it an optional feature on your car.
My point is there is NO DIFFERENCE between Windows doing this and Linux doing this. Therefore CA is wrong to complain about Linux.
It seems obvious that "wellllll Operating System XYZ does it too!" is a pretty flimsy supportive argument for anything. So that's it? That's your whole "point"? (I use the term loosely)
"wellllll Windows does it too!" would only be a sensible rebuttal to CA's complaints if CA was alleging that Linux was inferior to Windows (or even other OSs in general) in this regard.
But they weren't. CA was just (dubiously) charging that Linux's kernel was becoming too bloated; they weren't comparing it to Windows or QNX or the Space Shuttle's operating system or your grandmom's Colecovision.
That's why "welllll Windows does it tooooo!" doesn't belong in this conversation. It's logically irrelevant (as I pointed out in this post) and technically inaccurate (the install-time vs. normal operation distinction) and just plain stupid (just because another OS does anything doesn't mean that behavior is desireable).
Dynamically loading a lot of drivers during OS installation is way, way, waaaaaay different than having too many drivers compiled into the kernel, which is what the CA people seem to be complaining about.
First of all, Windows drivers aren't compiled into the kernel. Secondly, what Windows does during installation (no matter how wacky we both agree it is) is a totally different ballgame than what another OS does during normal operation.
It's like comparing the highway fuel efficiency of a Ford (normal operation) to the amount of energy expended on Chevy's production line (a one-time thing). It doesn't even make sense to compare that.
There are plenty of legit reasons to dispute CA's claims (you can just compile a kernel without the "bloat" they complain about, so I don't see their point!) but your comparison is just really misguided, non-useful, and inept.
Have you ever installed a late version of Windows?
Watch the installer load device drivers for every known weird form of RAID before it even begins to ask you how you want to install the OS?
That's only during the install, though. I agree that Windows' habit of loading all those bizzarre disk drivers into RAM during installation is kinda... crazy and inefficient, but that's only during installation!. It does not load "every known weird form of RAID" during normal operation.
Also, the amount of heat generated by an ATI 9600 would be considerably higher than that of the GPU that ships with the Mac Mini at the moment.
I don't know the exact thermals involved, but I'm not sure an appropriately-clocked 9600 would necessarily put out too much heat. I have a fanless 9600 in my Shuttle that produces very little heat.
Going from a 9200 to an equivalently-clocked 9600 (or a higher clocked 9600 on a smaller die process?) would give you more performance in the form of a wider data path and more advanced GPU programmability./speculation
The real question here is: Why would I give a crap about a free OS for a computer which already comes with a better one as a standard feature?
No, the real question is, "did you read the opening post?"
Not the linked article - the opening post. It clearly says, "This article from IBM looks at open source operating system options on this new contender in the embedded PowerPC platform space"
Key word here is "embedded", which implies a whole different ballgame compared to desktop or server computers. Google if you're unfamiliar with the term. A feature-rich GUI desktop OS is not ideal for the embedded market.
"In the past it use to be that if one of the parties involved with a transaction was under suspicion of fradulent activities, the funds in BOTH accounts were frozen and/or the accounts locked"
This wasn't my experience. In my case, they simply reversed the charges. Then again, I'm new to Paypal (about 1.5 months) and this was a relatively small dollar amount ($36). I don't know what they did in the past or how they might handle suspicious transactions involving larger dollar amounts.
Freezing both accounts is DEFINTELY ridiculous and I agree with you 100%.
"My advice if you are going to use Paypal is to keep only a minimum amount of money in there"
This helps to an extent, as I understand it. But should your PayPal balance actually go negative they are quick to EFT the money out of your bank account and/or send collection agencies after you if you don't quicky bring your PP account into the positive. From what I've read, anyway.
Yep. I started by accepting only PayPal on my site, and then started accepting credit cards as well. The credit card stuff is a huge hassle.
You can now accept credit card payments over PayPal as well, if you're a verified member and you have PayPal linked to a bank account. It's worked really well for my (very small) business... PayPal charges fees on each transaction, obviously, but it's a turnkey solution... none of the hassles described by the above poster, who had to deal with separate credit card merchants.
There are some downsides to PayPal, but those are well-documented all over the 'net. But most of the PayPal "horror stories" I've seen don't sound any worse than typical hassles you'd get with any credit card processor.
The typical PayPal "horror story" seems to go like this. "This guy PayPal'd me N dollars! Then PayPal reversed the payment because there was evidence of credit card fraud. Now I don't have my #)*&#)%%^ N dollars! WTF, (*&%*$% PAYPAL!"...Well, that definitely sucks, but guess what? That's a risk that you take as a merchant whenever credit cards are involved. People will commit credit card fraud. You will have charges reversed. PayPal or not.
My advice: if you do go with PayPal, take extra care to let your customers know they can pay with PayPal via credit card even if they don't have a PayPal account. The perception is that you have to sign up to pay with PayPal, and it's not true any more.
I've only been using them for a month, though. So take this very tentative endorsement with a grain of salt. But it was easy to implement and so far, so good. (And I *have* implemented e-commerce solutions from scratch before using other products like PayFlowPro, at previous jobs. Just FYI.)
That's my exact issue with GAIM - the convo windows appear offscreen. The convo placement algorithm seems to be: 1) Out of the entire monitor space, find the leftmost X coordinate 2) Out of the entire monitor space, find the upopermost Y coordinate 3) Place the window there
Of course in multimonitor setups, that coordinate might be offscreen. My solution was to use ATI's Hydravision tool... it's sort of a windowmanager enhancement that lets you "snap" apps to a certain monitor and has some other configurable options that prevented my "GAIM launches offscreen" problem. It's a free download on their site, separate from their driver packages. I believe Nvidia offers something very similar.
Slashdot Mirror
Since distributed computing projects crank your CPU to 100%, there's definitely an associated energy and environmental cost to running that stuff. This will become increasingly true in the future, with the increasing prevelence of technologies like Intel's "SpeedStep" or AMD's "Cool And Quiet" that allow CPU clockspeeds to dynamically vary the clockspeed and power consumption of a processor. That will only increase the difference in power consumption between a CPU at rest and a CPU that's pegged at 100% crunching SETI units.
Distributed computing advocates always seem to neglect this. They think that all those unused CPU cycles are a vast, untapped resource just waiting to accomplish fabulous things. Well, as a guy who used to have a few boxes crunching RC5-64 for Distributed.net, I can tell you that it's not a free resource when you're the one paying the electric bill.
Joe Consumer isn't necessarily going to think this technology is a great idea when he realizes that he's paying an extra $10 a month on his electricity bill for the "privilege" of crunching numbers for some dubious cause.
And, let's face it. Not all distributed projects are dubious, but many are. The fundamental problem is that a lot of compute-intensive projects simply aren't embarassingly parallel like SETI or RC5-64. And a lot of other parallelizable applications require access to huge datasets that make them unsuitable for distributed work. For example, 3D rendering can be parallelized pretty well... but the datasets are huge. For your CPU to render a single frame of Pixar's latest movie, it would need access to anywhere from hundreds of MB to several GB of texture and geometry data. A lot of scientific applications are similarly constrained.
Back before Windows 95, OS/2 had a significantly better desktop environment than Microsoft Windows did. It ran Win16 applications, typically better than Windows itself did. I knew of a lot of Windows developers who did their development on OS/2 because of its better memory management, pre-emptive multitasking, and crash protection. And what good did any of this do for OS/2?
Since OS/2 ran Windows apps "out of the box", it's easy to see how a lot of people saw OS/2 as a nice(r) way to run Windows apps rather than as a development target in its own right... I agree with what you're saying there.
Here's the key difference between OS/2 and OSX w/ Virtual PC or VMWare... OSX won't include them for free. OSX won't run Windows applications "out of the box" like OS/2 did.
For those who really want or need the functionality of running Windows applications on OSX, they have to pay for the emulation/virtualization software and a Windows license.
So, while OSX x86 will be able to run Windows applications very nicely for those who don't mind spending the extra cash for a Windows license, I don't see it becoming "a prettier way to run Windows apps" as you say.
Think about it from a developer's standpoint. In the OS/2 days, you could say "well, we'll just write a Win16 app and let the OS/2 people use that". I cannot imagine today's developers saying "we'll just write a Windows app and let the OSX users use that plus pay several hundred dollars for a Windows license and additional software".
I don't think the song has appeared here, other than a few news stories about how a ringtone is topping the charts in the UK.
:)
I take it this is not a musical masterpiece one should actively seek out?
You can translate Altivec into regular x86 instruction sequences.
128-bit SIMD instructions translated into regular x86 code? I think that will be slow enough as to be completely unusable... like multiple orders of magnitude slower in some cases.
Then again, perhaps some Altivec code could be directly translated to SSE1/2/3. Altivec is regarded as superior to SSE1/2/3; not sure how feasible that would be. I don't do that kind of programming myself so I can't say.
In addition, CNET's main answer to the insane technical issues that this would involve is, "Steve Jobs said it would work."
The technical issues really aren't that insane. Most high-level code PPC is only a recompile away from working on an x86. Development tools could easily support compilation to some sort of fat-binary (see: 68K-->PPC transition) or dual-binary scehe,.
The only technical sticking point would be Altivec code. Lot of manual work to translate it to SSE1/2/3. However, if Intel could support the Altivec instruction set in hardware... it could be a fairly seamless transition for developers. The technical aspects of supporting it in hardware wouldn't be too hard; I think the only challenges would be legal (patents, etc).
If
Apple has for some time been using Intel chips in their Xserve, and their may very well be additional products yet to be announced. However, think about this possibility: Apple has significant resources devoted to Altivec just about everywhere in the OS, functions that are not available in any currently shipping Intel chip. But imagine this: What if rather than OS X being run on x86, Intel were to produce a PPC chip with Altivec? I do not know what the current licensing agreements are with Apple, IBM and Motorola, but if the licensing were prohibitive, perhaps Apple certainly could help with the reverse engineering of such a chip.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Recompiling regular high-level (C, Obj-C, etc) for x86 or x86-64 is (relatively) freaking easy. Rewriting hand-tuned Altivec code to run on Intels SSE-2 or SSE-3 is a major, major issue for software developers both inside and outside of Apple... and supposedly, Altivec is superior to SSE1/2/3 in quite a few regards. It won't be a direct translation.
I like your "Intel producing PPC chips idea". If licensing agreements allow for it, that could be technically feasible. But... I highly doubt that Intel wants to produce chips based on an entirely new architecture. I think we can utterly rule this out.
What seems a lot more likely to me is Intel producing x86 chips with Altivec-equivalent instructions to ease the porting process. If Intel could add Altivec functionality to an x86 chip, compatibility could basically be a recompile away. (perhaps with some relatively minor adjustments for endian issues)
That doesn't seem like it would be a technical hurdle for Intel, if licensing agreements allow for it... I know the name "Altivec" is trademarked; I don't know if the actual instruction set is covered by IP law. (The name "Altivec" obviously doesn't matter because it ain't exactly a household word anyway; only the functionality matters)
Even Americans can't stick to a single mile (they have like 3 or 4) -- and this is what makes miles something really repulsive to me.
What? Could you please elaborate on this? I didn't know there were multiple versions of the mile. Then again, I've only been living in America for 28 years.
Doesn't work for me, either. Firefox 1.0.3, Windows XP SP2 here. I'm running Moox's build of Firefox; not sure if that affects anything.
.bat file created at C:\ .........
It looks like the script is spoofing ftp.mozilla.org somehow. I made sure that "Allow Web Sites To Install Software" was enabled in Firefox's preferences, and I even added "ftp.mozilla.org" to the whitelist of allowed sites! Still didn't work.
Here's what happens when I load the page:
1. Fx appears to contact ftp.mozilla.org and downloads the harmless XPI referenced in the "exploit" script. This takes several seconds.
2. An error appears in the JavaScript console: "Error: install is not defined". No
Either this "exploit" is B.S., or some other settings need to be in place for this to work.
Why? Because they stand up for their rights not to be libelled? That's a really stupid reason to decide your kids' educations.
'Hey son, you're not going to that good school, you have to go to a shit one instead, because the good one is suing someone who lied about them.'
'But Daddy, that shit school's full of bullies and incompetent teachers and drugs.'
'I'm sorry son, but people's right to libel people on the Internet comes before everything, even you.'
Right, your theory makes perfect sense because
1. All public schools are bad!
2. There are no other good schools besides those run by "Charter
Schools USA" - it's either their schools, or crap!
3. There are no other charter schools besides those run by "Charter Schools USA"
4. These schools run by "Charter Schools USA" muuuuuust be good in the first place
How's that reality working out for you?
Now, whenever somebody Googles for "Charter Schools USA", at least 9 of the top 10 search results will surely reference this questionable conduct. That's got to hurt their business in the long run.
I hope that parents will vote with their money and send their kids to school elsewhere.
I recently went through this at my own site, but we faired much better because we handled it with a lot more class than the owners of this Australian site. The result was a member community that has been exceptionally supportive and just a wonderful group of people.
:P
"The SA forums have been doing this for years, and you know what? They're popular as hell"
I'd go so far as to say they're popular because of the small fee, not in spite of it. The big problem with webforums is the amount of people who just like to make trouble. When people have to pay for something, no matter how small the fee, they tend to act a little more responsibly. Most people aren't going to pay $5 just to act like an ass and see how quickly they can get banned. When you have a lot of "troublemakers", it overworks your mods and starts to drive away the good forum members. You can ban somebody but there's *nothing* preventing them from signing back up with another IP address!
The downside is that a fee definitely will reduce the amount of new members you get and some members will definitely feel indignent about having to pay for something they've been using for free. (And I don't blame them!)
At the site I run, we started out free, but I always made it clear the members were beta testers and that the site would be for-pay someday as opposed to suddenly going pay without warning. About three months ago we made the transition to a for-pay site. There was some grumbling (which I totally understand) but overall the atmosphere was highly supportive. To ease the transition, we've done the following:
* Early site members had the chance to earn free memberships if they completed all of the beta testing requirements
* This was unintentional, but the beta testing phase stretched on about six months longer than initially planned, so everybody basically got a free six months anyway
* Perks for paid members such as giveaways
* Parts of the forums are still accessible for free
* Free members can earn paid memberships by doing things like printing up flyers, etc.
* Invite system allows paid members to give invites to their friends, entitling their friends to enjoy paid memberships without paying anything
All in all, I've probably given out 2x as many free memberships as have been paid for. I'm 100% okay with that because it's made the site better and that increases the number of people who want to by memberships in the long run. It's still an experiment in progress but it's been going well...
Google, of course, returns a ton of results for aspect-oriented programming. Does anybody have one in particular that they recommend?
I'm a fairly experienced coder, but I don't have any experience with AOP whatever. I don't even know what it is!
"Dude, what you're asking for is the single most ridiculous thing I've ever heard on /."
-----
I agree completely.
I've been posting on Slashdot for around 7 years and I think this is my first "me too"-style post. Please forgive me. It's just that this question was so. fucking. ridiculous. Literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen posted on Slashdot.
CA is saying Linux doesn't need ANY drivers EXCEPT the ones CA wants to use.
Flaming aside, this is where I think you might have misunderstood the article. From the article:
"Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice president at Computer Associates International Inc., in Islandia, N.Y., said that while the kernel is evolving for the desktop, server and embedded markets, more and more technology is being included, and the kernel is "getting fatter. We are not interested in the game drivers and music drivers that are being added to the kernel. We are interested in a more stable kernel."
He's not complaining that Linux has drivers, he's complaining that these sorts of things are being added to the kernel itself. Please remember that "adding something to the kernel" is different than "adding something to the operating system".
The "kernel" refers to a single executable - in Linux's case, a monolithic kernel that might have lots and lots of drivers and other things compiled into it. This is different than Windows' approach in which drivers are loaded at runtime. Having lots of drivers available for the Windows operating system is technically very different from compiling lots of drivers directly into the Linux kernel.
I think, and I really do not say this to flame you, that you are a bit confused about the distinction between an operating system and a kernel. It's like the difference between a car and an engine. Cars have engines, but engines are not cars! And adding something to the engine is quite different from making it an optional feature on your car.
My point is there is NO DIFFERENCE between Windows doing this and Linux doing this. Therefore CA is wrong to complain about Linux.
It seems obvious that "wellllll Operating System XYZ does it too!" is a pretty flimsy supportive argument for anything. So that's it? That's your whole "point"? (I use the term loosely)
"wellllll Windows does it too!" would only be a sensible rebuttal to CA's complaints if CA was alleging that Linux was inferior to Windows (or even other OSs in general) in this regard.
But they weren't. CA was just (dubiously) charging that Linux's kernel was becoming too bloated; they weren't comparing it to Windows or QNX or the Space Shuttle's operating system or your grandmom's Colecovision.
That's why "welllll Windows does it tooooo!" doesn't belong in this conversation. It's logically irrelevant (as I pointed out in this post) and technically inaccurate (the install-time vs. normal operation distinction) and just plain stupid (just because another OS does anything doesn't mean that behavior is desireable).
In short, shut up.
Dynamically loading a lot of drivers during OS installation is way, way, waaaaaay different than having too many drivers compiled into the kernel, which is what the CA people seem to be complaining about.
First of all, Windows drivers aren't compiled into the kernel. Secondly, what Windows does during installation (no matter how wacky we both agree it is) is a totally different ballgame than what another OS does during normal operation.
It's like comparing the highway fuel efficiency of a Ford (normal operation) to the amount of energy expended on Chevy's production line (a one-time thing). It doesn't even make sense to compare that.
There are plenty of legit reasons to dispute CA's claims (you can just compile a kernel without the "bloat" they complain about, so I don't see their point!) but your comparison is just really misguided, non-useful, and inept.
Have you ever installed a late version of Windows? Watch the installer load device drivers for every known weird form of RAID before it even begins to ask you how you want to install the OS?
That's only during the install, though. I agree that Windows' habit of loading all those bizzarre disk drivers into RAM during installation is kinda... crazy and inefficient, but that's only during installation!. It does not load "every known weird form of RAID" during normal operation.
Also, the amount of heat generated by an ATI 9600 would be considerably higher than that of the GPU that ships with the Mac Mini at the moment.
/speculation
I don't know the exact thermals involved, but I'm not sure an appropriately-clocked 9600 would necessarily put out too much heat. I have a fanless 9600 in my Shuttle that produces very little heat.
Going from a 9200 to an equivalently-clocked 9600 (or a higher clocked 9600 on a smaller die process?) would give you more performance in the form of a wider data path and more advanced GPU programmability.
Wouldn't that be emaculate?
No, he's talking about the text editor, emacs. So the word you want is emasculate, at least for vi users.
The real question here is: Why would I give a crap about a free OS for a computer which already comes with a better one as a standard feature?
No, the real question is, "did you read the opening post?"
Not the linked article - the opening post. It clearly says, "This article from IBM looks at open source operating system options on this new contender in the embedded PowerPC platform space"
Key word here is "embedded", which implies a whole different ballgame compared to desktop or server computers. Google if you're unfamiliar with the term. A feature-rich GUI desktop OS is not ideal for the embedded market.
when I was laid off, I signed another agreement stating I wasn't taking anything with me that belonged to the company.
Why'd you sign anything after they laid you off? What were they going to do if you didn't sign - let you go?
But I bet that watching it feels a lot like reading that article.
"In the past it use to be that if one of the parties involved with a transaction was under suspicion of fradulent activities, the funds in BOTH accounts were frozen and/or the accounts locked"
This wasn't my experience. In my case, they simply reversed the charges. Then again, I'm new to Paypal (about 1.5 months) and this was a relatively small dollar amount ($36). I don't know what they did in the past or how they might handle suspicious transactions involving larger dollar amounts.
Freezing both accounts is DEFINTELY ridiculous and I agree with you 100%.
"My advice if you are going to use Paypal is to keep only a minimum amount of money in there"
This helps to an extent, as I understand it. But should your PayPal balance actually go negative they are quick to EFT the money out of your bank account and/or send collection agencies after you if you don't quicky bring your PP account into the positive. From what I've read, anyway.
Yep. I started by accepting only PayPal on my site, and then started accepting credit cards as well. The credit card stuff is a huge hassle.
...Well, that definitely sucks, but guess what? That's a risk that you take as a merchant whenever credit cards are involved. People will commit credit card fraud. You will have charges reversed. PayPal or not.
You can now accept credit card payments over PayPal as well, if you're a verified member and you have PayPal linked to a bank account. It's worked really well for my (very small) business... PayPal charges fees on each transaction, obviously, but it's a turnkey solution... none of the hassles described by the above poster, who had to deal with separate credit card merchants.
There are some downsides to PayPal, but those are well-documented all over the 'net. But most of the PayPal "horror stories" I've seen don't sound any worse than typical hassles you'd get with any credit card processor.
The typical PayPal "horror story" seems to go like this. "This guy PayPal'd me N dollars! Then PayPal reversed the payment because there was evidence of credit card fraud. Now I don't have my #)*&#)%%^ N dollars! WTF, (*&%*$% PAYPAL!"
My advice: if you do go with PayPal, take extra care to let your customers know they can pay with PayPal via credit card even if they don't have a PayPal account. The perception is that you have to sign up to pay with PayPal, and it's not true any more.
I've only been using them for a month, though. So take this very tentative endorsement with a grain of salt. But it was easy to implement and so far, so good. (And I *have* implemented e-commerce solutions from scratch before using other products like PayFlowPro, at previous jobs. Just FYI.)
That's my exact issue with GAIM - the convo windows appear offscreen. The convo placement algorithm seems to be:
1) Out of the entire monitor space, find the leftmost X coordinate
2) Out of the entire monitor space, find the upopermost Y coordinate
3) Place the window there
Of course in multimonitor setups, that coordinate might be offscreen. My solution was to use ATI's Hydravision tool... it's sort of a windowmanager enhancement that lets you "snap" apps to a certain monitor and has some other configurable options that prevented my "GAIM launches offscreen" problem. It's a free download on their site, separate from their driver packages. I believe Nvidia offers something very similar.