It may be 'kick ass', but the utility as of right now is pretty limited.
Consider: To process any character in the English language, you need only eight bits. That's it. That's one-quarter a register in a 32-bit machine.
And, unless you or the assembler uses a decent amount of technical trickery, that's all you can get in there.
(Case: Intel processors have four main registers: EAX, EBX, ECX, and EDX. These have a high word and a low word (the low words are AX, BX, CX, DX for reverse compatibility with 16 bit code). Each low word has a high bit [ABCD]H and a low bit [ABCD]L. )
Addionally, for numbers.. There ain't too many folks that need to process numbers on the order of 2 to the 128th power, or floats that have, what? twenty digits? thirty digits of precision?
When the numbers get that detailed, you're better off with a quantum system anyway.
If my friend Ace were a slashdotter, I know that's probably where the Funny came from.
Else, it's probably the second paragraph mentioning Can O' Crap, The Mystery Meat You Gotta Eat (tm), aka the Windows OS you must needs buy with a computer. (Please, no flames about naked systems or MS Rebate.)
For a more correct analogy, let's look at things this way.
When you use the GPL, you are obliged to share if and only if you make the program externally-available. (Under the GPL, if you create a proram and ue it only internally, you can technically be GPL-compliant so long as it is never made available to the public.)
In the beginning, you have the raw elements and the sun providing energy. Plants come in, take in some of the elements and create beneficial compounds (compilers, linkers, languages, which equate to the O2 and sugars). Plant-eating animals come in, they take up the basic compounds and turn it into their own bodies biologically, or archetipical, core, or alpha software depending. Higher animals come in, and use what has been built to build their own muscle, fat, and code, and so on and so on. If an animal (project) dies for some reason, the code is there to be re-used by the decomposers and students and budding neo-hackers.
Microsoft's system, on the other hand, wants to become a vacuum cleaner, or a factory. THat's a little better. The rest of the ecosystem exists to an extent, but once in a while, an animal is 'collected' (either a corpse collected or created), processed, and then sold as Can O' Crap, The Mystery Meat You Gotta Eat(tm). This diminishes the rest of the ecosystem. Not to mention the pollution that such a factory does kills off species and projects that aren't defended, both in the processing and in the waste products.
In the beginning, copyright was created as a sort of an agreement; in exchange for protection of a limited time (originally 14 years), the author had a protected right to profit from his/her work. This is similar to patents.
Also similar to patent protection, copyright was intended as a defensive measure. I doubt that the framers of the Constitution intended for America to be so goddamned litigious. Copyrights and patents have been perverted into an offensive weapon, q.v. the DMCA. (Why do you think the GPL includes the patent clause?)
(plug) I'd say join GeekPAC, because I am. Enough voices together drown a concert. (/plug)
Now, before you Napsterites respond...
on
Sharing Doesn't Hurt
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
..there is a CRUCIAL difference between what this author did, the Smashing Pumpkins asked for on "Machina 2: The Machines of the Gods" (their last album which was released as 50 acetates to good friends and one Chicago radio station which MP#'d it and let it roll), the way the Grateful Dead dealt with bootlegs (trade 'em, don't sell 'em I think was the gist of it) and what a lot of file-traders do with Metallica, Boobie Spears, et al.
This guy owned the copyright to his works and chose to share. I like that. Now, the labels and/or the artists (depending on who owns the copyright) chose NOT to share.
Now, I've never used any such services, mainly because, quite frankly, most US music sucks thanks to the fact we have only five real record labels, and I prefer my criminality to be more significant, like d/l'ing DeCSS or otherwise defeating copyright controls.
the easiest way to get a favorable review is to include a deck of cards?
I mean, hell, everyone loves swag..
On a more serious note, assuming that the OS and GUI are suficiently easy to get to work, then it's a Good Thing. More *nixers the better, I say. (This is a reason I love OS X. )
Right now, I'm using my state's anti-spam laws to choke it off.
In Illinois, there is a civil penalty of $10 per offense as long as the server and the user are both in IL and you have never had a business relationship with the spammer.
So far, it has worked successfully on a couple spammers. Now, I found out one is based in Chicago.
If you live in a large enough major metro area, you could always check out liquidation auctions...
I've gone to the Homelife auction, the iXL.com and Pencom.com auction, and the prices for laptops were prety low. Granted, some were broken, but the ones that worked were only, like, a hundred twenty bucks or so.
I got some good harware cheap, like a desktop Compaq 233MMX with no ram and no optical drive for twenty bucks. Saw a Thinkpad sell for $50, a Libretto for 60, etc.
I hate to keep repeating Aristotle's line about there being only so many ideas.
The idea of a plague is in many films and shows, like in "12 Monkeys", in which the survivors live in a hermetically sealed underground world and go back in time to figure out how it started. In an episode of "The Outer Limits", a time protection organization goes back to prevent a plague, only to discover that they were in fact its source.
I'll be frank, I have ideas that are WAY to the 49th weird, out there. However, until we have some way to get past the funks we're in, folks are going to recycle the same ol' ideas in newer and hopefully more interesting and more realistic forms.
Hey cool. It looks like the Kevlar may have been worth it.
At least you have the sense to utilize your system to its maximum. Most people play the masturbatory waste of time called Solitaire and lose half their work in MS Office. Sad state of affairs.
I'm not sure whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing. Lemme elaborate.
Disclamer: I have never been part of SETI@home; I feel that statistically it's a collossal waste of time. I've been part of both the GIMPS project and the distributed.net RC5-64 projects for about four years now. I've got the Kevlar body armor halfway on.
The good, I guess, is that there's such a collossal interest in this. I mean, hell, if KzAplOcQQ and boB are sharing the Encyclopaedia Galactica (or the Hitchikers' Guide, whatever) over radio waves, then we'll eventually find it hopefully in something that resembles paEr Unicode.
However, I see a great many downsides to this.
First off, if the aforementioned theoretical KzAplocQQ and boB of the paEr race have to use radio waves, then there's a pretty good chance they haven't been able to go superphotonic, in which case we're going to have a long wait before we can even think of going to their New York and flipping them the left tentacle.
Secondly, how will we be able to decode a xenic dataset, much less their language? I mean, what if they can transmit trits or quaytes while we're looking for bits or bytes? How do we know what a newline would appear? Hell, do we even know if it would even be necessary? And what about the characters? What if the Chinese language is easier to interpret than paEr?
Third, there are much better uses of free cycles, at least fiscally. GIMPS will provide a hundred kilobucks to the first person to successfully find a ten megadigit Mersenne prime. distributed.net provides a two kilobuck prize and a large donation to the FSF, EFF, or other worthy charities. Even the commercial distributed computing projects at least pay for the use of your rig.
(PS: paEr is a theoretical name for a xenic (alien) species, contrived from randomly entering characters on the number pad. KzAplocQQ is an unpronouncable name, unless you're lucky or high. boB just sounds funny.)
Re:What Happens When Marketing Gets Involved
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
You threw down the gauntlet, I'm picking it up.
One. I never used the word 'gun' in my rant. At worst, misspellings occurred because I was in the middle of a skull-rending headache which caused the room to spin and prevented me from STANDING UP.
Two. If you can take that Microsoft man-meat out of your posterior, take a moment to review the following from The Jargon File:
(Square is the ANSI name. Mesh is from INTERCAL, or 'Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'.)
Three. C-OCTOTHORPE is NOT the 'logical progression' of C++. C was the successor of a language called B. The '++' designation is a well-known chorthand for incrementation. It was felt by the developers of C++ that it was a small progression from C. Syntax from C can be used in C++ without difficulty. Significant changes, though, like 'new' instead of 'malloc()' and easier function declaration made it a small improvement. C-THUD, though, rips off the C style of coding and has no native libraries; it is dependant on the dot-net libraries for existance, like the dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" were dependant on lysine to stay alive. Beisdes, a half-step isn't the next possible or logical step froma note. Eastern music has quarter, eighth, and even smaller stepwise increments.
Three. J-SPLAT looks to be another VD, err. VB. (However, the diseaes reference seems to be better. VB infects programmers to think pretty is better than functional.)
Dunno about you, but the last few major scientific releases have been first through a journal then to the world. Successful cloning, stem cell research, and most recently the artificial womb.
Right now, there's increasing pressure for scientists to close themselves off, mainly coming from their employers (companies).
What's happening to science is what happened to software. At first, the source was available, because the supplier didn't know if you could run the binaries and besides, you probably could help improve the code as well. Then, Ma Bell shut off the flow of source and caused the balkanization of Unices. After that, almost all software was binary for a particular platform.
Science started with open information sharing, and is perilously progressing towards a proprietarization of knowledge. Trade secrets are becoming more popular than patents because secrets are more protected. (Trade secrets are highly protected as long as no one else figures out how to do what you can do independantly, whereas patents are open to public inspection and expire. )
What Happens When Marketing Gets Involved
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm sure a lot of us slashdotters have queried what this dot-net thing was. Anyone with a Hotmail account was aquainted with the chintzy logo in the upper-right corner. eBay is starting to suggest a 'Passport login', which so far has been the most that em-cash has seemed to provide. I've been to trade shows, Microsoft (free hardware swag for false info? that's a steal!)and non-Microsoft pitches and antipitches, and no one has provided an answer.
At least, a good one.
This overview is great from a technical angle (the one me and most slashdotters usually have interest in) and decent from a more mundane perspective (the one you pose as in an em-cash or other sales-derived presentation;)
It's hazardous to your health as a hacker. It looks like a great way to encapsulate any data in a format which is sufficiently protected under the DMCA. (Yet another reason for that law- and the 99 senators who ayed the vote- to be burned at the stake.)
It's also bad for anyone on a non-MS platform; two of the languages are extremely MS-centric, Visual Basic and C-hash (something that should only be done right before you smoke it).
It's bad - all right, worse - for Java fiends. Bad enough Microsoft feels Java is the worst thing to happen to it since the Wicked Witch of the West was introduced to the business end of a water gone, now they're pulling out all the stops with the theoretically embraced and extended J-hash.
Right now, I just wish there was a way to stop those pricks at Microsoft.. besides a HERF bomb in Redmond, WA:)
Apple holds a MUCH larger market share than Sun on the large desktop market.
This statement from my original post) came almost verbatim from the MIT Technology Review, Oct 01.
Apple, Industry Shift, and Brazil Nuts
on
LWCE Reports Continue
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't know if anyone here recalls the Brazil Nut theory of Economics. In a nutshell (unintentional humor), it parallels the unusual and easily reproducible fact that in a can of mixed nuts, if you shake it long enough, the brail nuts (the largest ones) rise to the top. I've seen this phenomenon in piggy banks as well. In economics, what this means is that certain companies eventually will rise to the top of the corporate world.
VA Linux^H^H^H^H^H Systems, IMHO, should've tried to duke it out a little more in the hardware market. Now it's a company basing itself on software and intellectual property (like, oh, Slashdot and other Andover.net aquisitions). Penguin is starting to feel the crunch of smaller margins in this commodity market. Oracle's probably taking a breather before Comdex, or maybe it's laying off the trade show circuit to save some $$ (after all, upholding a legally and ethically built monopoy takes a little work to hold together).
One of the things to keep in mind about trade shows is that, oh, they are intended FOR THE TRADE. They are pitching their products and services to organizations that could potentially purchase them. So you won't see the Linux-based PDA's except as an item to be resold or maybe as a remote network monitoring tool (think a Sharp Zaurus with an 802.11b CF card).
Something that slightly itches at me like an Asian Ladybug's bite.. Is Apple there? I know some people are belligerent over the BSD vs GNU/Linux thing, but right now Apple is the world's leading supplier of Unixish systems thanks to the miracle of OS X. (My next system is going to be an iMac2 with OS X.1 and PPC SuSE dual-boot.)
I don't know how many of you know about Mancow, a nationally syndicated broadcaster beaming out of Chicago, but he did a better job of messing with the media.
He sent out a press release stating that, to publicize his program, a set of billboard ads depicting the Juniors from last years' election (that would be Al Gore, Jr. and George Bush, Jr.) sparking up the large-sized blunts, to steal a line from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.
He watched the media report on this; to his amazement, Fox News Channel, CNN, and all the local network affiliate newscasts all repeated, word-for-word, this news release.
Problem was, of course, it was untrue.
Now, before you say 'it's another cold fusion insident', think about fuel cell technology. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if any of the scientists who are currently working on fuel cells at least had a pilot light under their ass because of the concept of cold fusion. After all, fuel cells create energy from hydrogen and run cool, right?
I own a site which could, for all intents and purposes could be called a 'lost site'. It's a domain which is virtually inactive (mainly because, quite frankly, I'm a lazy bastard).
Most of the time, don't give genius the credit when stupidity could do.
Now, I've been atacked by these spamholes as well. There's nothing like hijacking a DNS server.. oops..
I've been thinking about this long and hard (for about a second and a half) and as thinking what this could mean for other religious festivals...
The Muslims already have a head start.. emacs can do the calendar conversions in its code to the lunar year, thus killing the debate on which day Ramadan starts on. exactly. (There as debate on whether it was the 16th or the 17th of Nov. when it started.) Oh, as long as everything is in
Zulu.
It would help out the Orthodox Jews, who are forbidden from the use of anything technologic on the Sabbath. After all, they did nothing; the system did it all by itself. The menorah would be lit at the right time every night of Hanukkah, and the best part is that there's a decreased risk of fire with LED lights.
Now, how to help the pagans... webcamming the ceremonies may increase their cash stock.. especially if their the dead sexy ones that celebrate nude..;)
Note: I am not a professional analyst. I am a slashdotter par excellance whose abilities in this arena lead into the real world. These are justifiable positions that I am putting in bit form here; however, prove me wrong and win a prize. (Prize to be disclosed later.)
In the US and increasingly in the EU as far as I saw at the HAL2001 conference, the trend in portables is the 'portable workstation', also known as the 'why, indeed it HAS a kitchen sink' version. Look at the local high-end low-cost provider of hardware; no system is without at LEAST a 20 speed CD, and that's only on the most baseline of systems. Almost every system has a DVD drive, and some have combo drives. Even though the floppy is on the way out according to some analysts, it's also standard equipment.
The screens on these laptops is a minimum of a 13 inch diagonal. The keyboards are full-size 87 keys.
The ultraportables' market is in Japan and for those who want the small rigs. Not many in the US do, as the cost is significantly higher; the screens considerably smaller; and the needed peripherals often absent or very clunky.
Battery life is increased in most ultras, especially the Crusoes, but the performance numbers stink badly. Sorry Linus, love the OS, but dislike the hardware.
Hell.. most US systems can get up to 5 hours of life out of them (with extra batteries). Large systems with the same potential battery life as the ultras.. and the bigrigs are cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be 'kick ass', but the utility as of right now is pretty limited.
Consider: To process any character in the English language, you need only eight bits. That's it. That's one-quarter a register in a 32-bit machine.
And, unless you or the assembler uses a decent amount of technical trickery, that's all you can get in there.
(Case: Intel processors have four main registers: EAX, EBX, ECX, and EDX. These have a high word and a low word (the low words are AX, BX, CX, DX for reverse compatibility with 16 bit code). Each low word has a high bit [ABCD]H and a low bit [ABCD]L. )
Addionally, for numbers.. There ain't too many folks that need to process numbers on the order of 2 to the 128th power, or floats that have, what? twenty digits? thirty digits of precision?
When the numbers get that detailed, you're better off with a quantum system anyway.
If my friend Ace were a slashdotter, I know that's probably where the Funny came from.
Else, it's probably the second paragraph mentioning Can O' Crap, The Mystery Meat You Gotta Eat (tm), aka the Windows OS you must needs buy with a computer. (Please, no flames about naked systems or MS Rebate.)
For a more correct analogy, let's look at things this way.
When you use the GPL, you are obliged to share if and only if you make the program externally-available. (Under the GPL, if you create a proram and ue it only internally, you can technically be GPL-compliant so long as it is never made available to the public.)
In the beginning, you have the raw elements and the sun providing energy. Plants come in, take in some of the elements and create beneficial compounds (compilers, linkers, languages, which equate to the O2 and sugars). Plant-eating animals come in, they take up the basic compounds and turn it into their own bodies biologically, or archetipical, core, or alpha software depending. Higher animals come in, and use what has been built to build their own muscle, fat, and code, and so on and so on. If an animal (project) dies for some reason, the code is there to be re-used by the decomposers and students and budding neo-hackers.
Microsoft's system, on the other hand, wants to become a vacuum cleaner, or a factory. THat's a little better. The rest of the ecosystem exists to an extent, but once in a while, an animal is 'collected' (either a corpse collected or created), processed, and then sold as Can O' Crap, The Mystery Meat You Gotta Eat(tm). This diminishes the rest of the ecosystem. Not to mention the pollution that such a factory does kills off species and projects that aren't defended, both in the processing and in the waste products.
In the beginning, copyright was created as a sort of an agreement; in exchange for protection of a limited time (originally 14 years), the author had a protected right to profit from his/her work. This is similar to patents.
Also similar to patent protection, copyright was intended as a defensive measure. I doubt that the framers of the Constitution intended for America to be so goddamned litigious. Copyrights and patents have been perverted into an offensive weapon, q.v. the DMCA. (Why do you think the GPL includes the patent clause?)
(plug)
I'd say join GeekPAC, because I am. Enough voices together drown a concert.
(/plug)
..there is a CRUCIAL difference between what this author did, the Smashing Pumpkins asked for on "Machina 2: The Machines of the Gods" (their last album which was released as 50 acetates to good friends and one Chicago radio station which MP#'d it and let it roll), the way the Grateful Dead dealt with bootlegs (trade 'em, don't sell 'em I think was the gist of it) and what a lot of file-traders do with Metallica, Boobie Spears, et al.
This guy owned the copyright to his works and chose to share. I like that. Now, the labels and/or the artists (depending on who owns the copyright) chose NOT to share.
Now, I've never used any such services, mainly because, quite frankly, most US music sucks thanks to the fact we have only five real record labels, and I prefer my criminality to be more significant, like d/l'ing DeCSS or otherwise defeating copyright controls.
the easiest way to get a favorable review is to include a deck of cards?
I mean, hell, everyone loves swag..
On a more serious note, assuming that the OS and GUI are suficiently easy to get to work, then it's a Good Thing. More *nixers the better, I say. (This is a reason I love OS X. )
I think I've mentioned this before as well.
:)
Right now, I'm using my state's anti-spam laws to choke it off.
In Illinois, there is a civil penalty of $10 per offense as long as the server and the user are both in IL and you have never had a business relationship with the spammer.
So far, it has worked successfully on a couple spammers. Now, I found out one is based in Chicago.
At least it's easier to serve papers.
You know, this is getting re-goddamned-diculous. Couldn't.. everyone.. come up with a, schedule for mock releases?
I mean, everyone expects this drek today. But, what if you released things, say, on 7 August? Or 20 November? Hmm?
Can't. Violates Copyright law.
</sarcasm>
AFAIK, it's only on digital cable and minidish systems.
fyi
If you live in a large enough major metro area, you could always check out liquidation auctions...
I've gone to the Homelife auction, the iXL.com and Pencom.com auction, and the prices for laptops were prety low. Granted, some were broken, but the ones that worked were only, like, a hundred twenty bucks or so.
I got some good harware cheap, like a desktop Compaq 233MMX with no ram and no optical drive for twenty bucks. Saw a Thinkpad sell for $50, a Libretto for 60, etc.
I hate to keep repeating Aristotle's line about there being only so many ideas.
The idea of a plague is in many films and shows, like in "12 Monkeys", in which the survivors live in a hermetically sealed underground world and go back in time to figure out how it started. In an episode of "The Outer Limits", a time protection organization goes back to prevent a plague, only to discover that they were in fact its source.
I'll be frank, I have ideas that are WAY to the 49th weird, out there. However, until we have some way to get past the funks we're in, folks are going to recycle the same ol' ideas in newer and hopefully more interesting and more realistic forms.
Hey cool. It looks like the Kevlar may have been worth it.
At least you have the sense to utilize your system to its maximum. Most people play the masturbatory waste of time called Solitaire and lose half their work in MS Office. Sad state of affairs.
I'm not sure whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing. Lemme elaborate.
Disclamer: I have never been part of SETI@home; I feel that statistically it's a collossal waste of time. I've been part of both the GIMPS project and the distributed.net RC5-64 projects for about four years now. I've got the Kevlar body armor halfway on.
The good, I guess, is that there's such a collossal interest in this. I mean, hell, if KzAplOcQQ and boB are sharing the Encyclopaedia Galactica (or the Hitchikers' Guide, whatever) over radio waves, then we'll eventually find it hopefully in something that resembles paEr Unicode.
However, I see a great many downsides to this.
First off, if the aforementioned theoretical KzAplocQQ and boB of the paEr race have to use radio waves, then there's a pretty good chance they haven't been able to go superphotonic, in which case we're going to have a long wait before we can even think of going to their New York and flipping them the left tentacle.
Secondly, how will we be able to decode a xenic dataset, much less their language? I mean, what if they can transmit trits or quaytes while we're looking for bits or bytes? How do we know what a newline would appear? Hell, do we even know if it would even be necessary? And what about the characters? What if the Chinese language is easier to interpret than paEr?
Third, there are much better uses of free cycles, at least fiscally. GIMPS will provide a hundred kilobucks to the first person to successfully find a ten megadigit Mersenne prime. distributed.net provides a two kilobuck prize and a large donation to the FSF, EFF, or other worthy charities. Even the commercial distributed computing projects at least pay for the use of your rig.
(PS: paEr is a theoretical name for a xenic (alien) species, contrived from randomly entering characters on the number pad. KzAplocQQ is an unpronouncable name, unless you're lucky or high. boB just sounds funny.)
One. I never used the word 'gun' in my rant. At worst, misspellings occurred because I was in the middle of a skull-rending headache which caused the room to spin and prevented me from STANDING UP.
Two. If you can take that Microsoft man-meat out of your posterior, take a moment to review the following from The Jargon File:
(Square is the ANSI name. Mesh is from INTERCAL, or 'Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'.)
Three. C-OCTOTHORPE is NOT the 'logical progression' of C++. C was the successor of a language called B. The '++' designation is a well-known chorthand for incrementation. It was felt by the developers of C++ that it was a small progression from C. Syntax from C can be used in C++ without difficulty. Significant changes, though, like 'new' instead of 'malloc()' and easier function declaration made it a small improvement. C-THUD, though, rips off the C style of coding and has no native libraries; it is dependant on the dot-net libraries for existance, like the dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" were dependant on lysine to stay alive. Beisdes, a half-step isn't the next possible or logical step froma note. Eastern music has quarter, eighth, and even smaller stepwise increments.
Three. J-SPLAT looks to be another VD, err. VB. (However, the diseaes reference seems to be better. VB infects programmers to think pretty is better than functional.)
Dunno about you, but the last few major scientific releases have been first through a journal then to the world. Successful cloning, stem cell research, and most recently the artificial womb.
Right now, there's increasing pressure for scientists to close themselves off, mainly coming from their employers (companies).
What's happening to science is what happened to software. At first, the source was available, because the supplier didn't know if you could run the binaries and besides, you probably could help improve the code as well. Then, Ma Bell shut off the flow of source and caused the balkanization of Unices. After that, almost all software was binary for a particular platform.
Science started with open information sharing, and is perilously progressing towards a proprietarization of knowledge. Trade secrets are becoming more popular than patents because secrets are more protected. (Trade secrets are highly protected as long as no one else figures out how to do what you can do independantly, whereas patents are open to public inspection and expire. )
I'm sure a lot of us slashdotters have queried what this dot-net thing was. Anyone with a Hotmail account was aquainted with the chintzy logo in the upper-right corner. eBay is starting to suggest a 'Passport login', which so far has been the most that em-cash has seemed to provide. I've been to trade shows, Microsoft (free hardware swag for false info? that's a steal!)and non-Microsoft pitches and antipitches, and no one has provided an answer.
;)
:)
At least, a good one.
This overview is great from a technical angle (the one me and most slashdotters usually have interest in) and decent from a more mundane perspective (the one you pose as in an em-cash or other sales-derived presentation
It's hazardous to your health as a hacker. It looks like a great way to encapsulate any data in a format which is sufficiently protected under the DMCA. (Yet another reason for that law- and the 99 senators who ayed the vote- to be burned at the stake.)
It's also bad for anyone on a non-MS platform; two of the languages are extremely MS-centric, Visual Basic and C-hash (something that should only be done right before you smoke it).
It's bad - all right, worse - for Java fiends. Bad enough Microsoft feels Java is the worst thing to happen to it since the Wicked Witch of the West was introduced to the business end of a water gone, now they're pulling out all the stops with the theoretically embraced and extended J-hash.
Right now, I just wish there was a way to stop those pricks at Microsoft.. besides a HERF bomb in Redmond, WA
Well.. there are far more desktop machines than mainframes. The distintion is moot.
I mean, a large company may have a thousand desktops per mainframe.
Nope.
Apple holds a MUCH larger market share than Sun on the large desktop market.
This statement from my original post) came almost verbatim from the MIT Technology Review, Oct 01.
I don't know if anyone here recalls the Brazil Nut theory of Economics. In a nutshell (unintentional humor), it parallels the unusual and easily reproducible fact that in a can of mixed nuts, if you shake it long enough, the brail nuts (the largest ones) rise to the top. I've seen this phenomenon in piggy banks as well. In economics, what this means is that certain companies eventually will rise to the top of the corporate world.
VA Linux^H^H^H^H^H Systems, IMHO, should've tried to duke it out a little more in the hardware market. Now it's a company basing itself on software and intellectual property (like, oh, Slashdot and other Andover.net aquisitions). Penguin is starting to feel the crunch of smaller margins in this commodity market. Oracle's probably taking a breather before Comdex, or maybe it's laying off the trade show circuit to save some $$ (after all, upholding a legally and ethically built monopoy takes a little work to hold together).
One of the things to keep in mind about trade shows is that, oh, they are intended FOR THE TRADE. They are pitching their products and services to organizations that could potentially purchase them. So you won't see the Linux-based PDA's except as an item to be resold or maybe as a remote network monitoring tool (think a Sharp Zaurus with an 802.11b CF card).
Something that slightly itches at me like an Asian Ladybug's bite.. Is Apple there? I know some people are belligerent over the BSD vs GNU/Linux thing, but right now Apple is the world's leading supplier of Unixish systems thanks to the miracle of OS X. (My next system is going to be an iMac2 with OS X.1 and PPC SuSE dual-boot.)
I don't know how many of you know about Mancow, a nationally syndicated broadcaster beaming out of Chicago, but he did a better job of messing with the media.
He sent out a press release stating that, to publicize his program, a set of billboard ads depicting the Juniors from last years' election (that would be Al Gore, Jr. and George Bush, Jr.) sparking up the large-sized blunts, to steal a line from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.
He watched the media report on this; to his amazement, Fox News Channel, CNN, and all the local network affiliate newscasts all repeated, word-for-word, this news release.
Problem was, of course, it was untrue.
Now, before you say 'it's another cold fusion insident', think about fuel cell technology. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if any of the scientists who are currently working on fuel cells at least had a pilot light under their ass because of the concept of cold fusion. After all, fuel cells create energy from hydrogen and run cool, right?
Umm.. no.
If you have a sufficiently large or sufficiently smart company, they WILL read the license agreement, be it a EULA or a Site LA.
These are CONTRACTS. They offer it, and by using the software, you agree to it. They offer a way out for compensation.
Legalia isn't something you just 'pray it goes OK'. You have to read and scrutinize anything that's got the smell of the law dialect.
I own a site which could, for all intents and purposes could be called a 'lost site'. It's a domain which is virtually inactive (mainly because, quite frankly, I'm a lazy bastard).
Most of the time, don't give genius the credit when stupidity could do.
Now, I've been atacked by these spamholes as well. There's nothing like hijacking a DNS server.. oops..
I've been thinking about this long and hard (for about a second and a half) and as thinking what this could mean for other religious festivals...
;)
The Muslims already have a head start.. emacs can do the calendar conversions in its code to the lunar year, thus killing the debate on which day Ramadan starts on. exactly. (There as debate on whether it was the 16th or the 17th of Nov. when it started.) Oh, as long as everything is in
Zulu.
It would help out the Orthodox Jews, who are forbidden from the use of anything technologic on the Sabbath. After all, they did nothing; the system did it all by itself. The menorah would be lit at the right time every night of Hanukkah, and the best part is that there's a decreased risk of fire with LED lights.
Now, how to help the pagans... webcamming the ceremonies may increase their cash stock.. especially if their the dead sexy ones that celebrate nude..
I was thinking more along the lines of the Alpha port of Linux, personally.
Appreciate the sentiment, however.
Note: I am not a professional analyst. I am a slashdotter par excellance whose abilities in this arena lead into the real world. These are justifiable positions that I am putting in bit form here; however, prove me wrong and win a prize. (Prize to be disclosed later.)
In the US and increasingly in the EU as far as I saw at the HAL2001 conference, the trend in portables is the 'portable workstation', also known as the 'why, indeed it HAS a kitchen sink' version. Look at the local high-end low-cost provider of hardware; no system is without at LEAST a 20 speed CD, and that's only on the most baseline of systems. Almost every system has a DVD drive, and some have combo drives. Even though the floppy is on the way out according to some analysts, it's also standard equipment.
The screens on these laptops is a minimum of a 13 inch diagonal. The keyboards are full-size 87 keys.
The ultraportables' market is in Japan and for those who want the small rigs. Not many in the US do, as the cost is significantly higher; the screens considerably smaller; and the needed peripherals often absent or very clunky.
Battery life is increased in most ultras, especially the Crusoes, but the performance numbers stink badly. Sorry Linus, love the OS, but dislike the hardware.
Hell.. most US systems can get up to 5 hours of life out of them (with extra batteries). Large systems with the same potential battery life as the ultras.. and the bigrigs are cheaper.
Sorta kills the edge.