I'm pretty sure that Amazon's ever-increasing girth is due to the fact that they're
a) trying to make a profit, and do it through volume
b) trying to grow as fast as possible so as to keep out competition. If they didn't sell garden stuff, someone else would.
Amazon is trying to create the infrastructure to become the online version of Target and the other large, general purpose stores.
I wouldn't want to be tagged an un-American when the next McCarthy goes through and weeds out Open Source users.
After work I'll have to stick around and reformat my linux workstation with Windows 2000.
You'd think this would increase the MTBF for drives in heavy usage situations, like web servers, compute servers, TiVo ("always recording"), etc. Statistically speaking, dumping 70% of moving (and therefore more-fragile) parts, you MTBF should increase as well.
The announcers were almost the worst part of it. I've grown accustomed to announcers talking about the game, the plays, the strategy... not about the cheerleaders and how bland, wrap-them-up-by-the-legs tackles deserve a "He smacked him down!!" in the announcer's best primitive grunts.
I watched a bit of the NY/NJ vs. Las Vegas game. One pass was deflected by a defender into the hands of a Wide Receiver for a TD. The play-by-play announcer (not Ventura) called it "sloppy seconds". I wonder how many parents heard, "Daddy, what does sloppy seconds mean?" "Uhh, it's, um, when a ball is deflected for a touchdown. Yeah, that's it".
The TV work & quality reminded me of cable-access broadcasts of HS games, the quality of football looked like nonconference division III football, and the announcers reminded me why I'd rather watch "Touched By An Angel" than "Smackdown". Guess I'll have to let NFL2k1 run live simulations of games if I want to watch football between February and August.
"And the recent security problems with Linux, coupled with the lack of key enterprise elements in the new kernel, really call into question whether Linux should be used at all," Miller added.
Oh, because clearly, Windows' kernel has been feature complete since Win95/NT3.1, and there's *never* been any security problems in Windows boxen, especially now with Win2k. Jeez. Pure FUD.
Powerful movie, but the best part came later
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 3
When I got home from the movie, I immediately phoned home to let my parents know that they should go see it... good stuff. I knew my dad had been drafted into the Army and station at Ft. Hood, Texas at the same time as the missile crisis, so I figured it would be interesting to him.
He proceeded to tell me his account of the entire thing from his perspective: from the day they loaded up his entire division and shipped them to Georgia (they got to listen to JFK and LBJ speak to them), to when they were sent to Florida and told to set up camp for 2 days at a Horseracing Track, to when they were all loaded up into large beach invasion type boats to set sail. He said they were floating out there for a day or 2 (out of sight from Florida, even) and being given maps and invasion plans of their sections of beaches when they got the word that they were dismantling the missles.
Well, that happened 5 years before my parents got married, and I wasn't born until '76...
So maybe Costner's character wasn't as powerful as the movie portrayed... I'm just glad cooler heads prevailed in that one.
Q. Will NBA and NFL, Quake III and other games that are already out support broadband adaptor? What are the games that will support it?
A. At this time, the "Dreamcast Broadband Adapter" supports "Quake III(TM) Arena," "Pod(TM) 2," and "Unreal Tournament(TM)." More great games shipping in 2001 will support the "Dreamcast Broadband Adapter." All games supporting the BB Adapter will be labeled as such at retail.
This movie either had:
a) a small budget
b) someone under payroll in the props department who had used Linux/GNOME before and could customize the hell out of it to get the look they were after.
I'd guess b. Besides, Gnome/Linux's Openness lends itself nicely to customizations, something the producers wouldn't have been able to do under Windows, aside from changing the background image and bar location.
*sigh*, I had a big elaborate response but Netscape 4.75 on Linux had the big core dump. Ugh.
To sum up my aborted post, Cray has been evolving from the single processor Cray-1, to the Multi-processor Cray YMP, to the massively distributed T3E. Seymour and Cray Computer Corp. (spun off of CRI in the late 80's or so) failed because they couldn't push as much performance through a smaller number of processors. Eventually the physical laws of silicon (Seymour even tried GaAs to get more performance) take over, and you must expand the number of processing units to get greater and greater performance.
The T3E is a 3D toroidal-constructed system. SGI's Origin uses the Hypercube. Sun uses whatever Cray's Business Unit did back in the day before SGI sold the Starfire, renamed the Sun UltraEnterprise 10000, to Sun (SMP I guess). The model works. That's not disputed.
The High-End market that Cray and Hitachi serves is fairly stagnant (growing slightly more than inflation) at around 1 Billion USD/year (IIRC). It doesn't grow 40% per year like standard PCs, handhelds, or the streaming video & porn market. The pie is only so big, so IBM and Sun choose the bigger market; they're exploiting the internet. ASCI projects don't make much money. They're done for the press they receive. I've heard of companies exploiting Cray's extreme I/O bandwidth for file archivers to tape robots, but that's about it for general purpose. You wouldn't buy an SV1 or a Hitachi to run Apache, that's for sure.
As Durinia pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, Ford and other auto companies still use Cray Vector machines, as well as other research labs, etc. Vector use isn't dead in the US. It's just not the centerpiece, I guess.
The Top500 is the listing of the top 500 fastest computers "in theory". This is not the same as sustained performance. I hate to quote more press releases, but I think this would help explain some more stuff:
The `Top500' rankings are based on Linpack, a standard benchmark test designed to compare the processor (CPU) performance of many types of computer systems. Linpack is not designed to test other system attributes that can significantly affect the actual performance of supercomputers.
``We look forward to more-rigorous tests of the capabilities of high-end supercomputers,'' said Cray Inc. president and CEO Jim Rottsolk. ``Along with our customers, we applaud current efforts to develop and introduce these more-demanding tests that can complement Linpack in the future.''
So, basically, Linpack looks at raw performance if the processors/vector pipes aren't starved. Cray's non-vector box, the T3E (again, 1994) has the highest sustained real-world benchmarks, just over 1 TFLOPS/s. Don't preach theoretical. That's for academics. Most supercomputer applications don't consist of small loops of code that runs everything out of registers. You're kidding yourself if you think they do.
Yes, the Hitachi box is damn fast. I'm not going to begin to argue that. I will argue the fact that I don't see any Athlons on the Top500 either. Hasn't anyone put 900 athlons together on a network yet? Disappointing.
To Cray's defense, however, I'm going to have to argue a couple of points. First off, the fact that the SV1 is the "budget" vector box follow-on to the J90, while the SV2 (2002) is the follow-on to the T90 and the T3E has to say something. J90's architecture was defined in 1994. It's a bit long in the tooth. SV1 might not achieve the absolute performance, but the GFLOPS/$$ aren't too shabby these days. Secondly, SGI's assimilation of CRI in the mid 90's didn't bode well for their Vector roadmap. SGI was more interested in stripping the MPP parts (You would too if everyone kept buying T3{D/E}s instead of Origin 2000s) from Cray and casting the rest off. Now that they've been cast off, I'm hoping everything gets righted again.
You've got to understand that Cray's not in the business of kluging together 4000 4-Way SMP Linux boxes with 100BaseT and some duct tape. That cluster model blows away the first 6 Top500 "supercomputers". #7 is the first 'honest' supercomputer in that it was designed for that performance, not just a cluster of similar high-theoretical peak boxes connected by bottlenecks. Cray @ #10 is the next one. Ironically, the T3E1200 in #10 was also originally released to the public in 1994. That's a while ago. For historical record, that's pre-SGI. Let's see what happens post-SGI with the totally redesigned SV2, as well.
Oh? A little company by the name of Cray Inc. (American company) is still in the business of Vector Supercomputing. In fact, they just announced the SV1ex. Look here for the press release. I'll take a snip for those who just feel like browsing:
The Cray SV1ex multi-streaming vector processors are 50 percent faster at 7.2 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) each, sustained memory bandwidth effectively doubles to 40 gigabytes per second, cache latency improves by 50 percent, and maximum memory size jumps four-fold to 128 gigabytes--all without affecting industry-leading Cray SV1 reliability (MTTI) averaging more than one year between interrupts.
They're comparing the SV1ex to the original SV1. More from the page:
Cray SV1ex systems will be available with:
* 8 to 32 processors, 32 gigabytes (GB) of main memory, and 32 to 96 GB of SSD memory. Groups of four 1.8-gigaflop processors can be run as a 7.2-gigaflop multi-streaming processor.
* A powerful suite of clustering tools that allow multiple Cray SV1ex nodes to be combined to form terascale superclusters[tm] of up to 1,024 processors (1.8 teraflops).
* The company's fifth-generation CMOS architecture (0.12 micron copper), SDRAM DIMM and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technologies.
The funny thing is that the SV1 line is a continuation of the J90, Cray's "budget" line (these start at $700k USD). The next no-holds-barred vector machine out of Cray Inc. will be the SV2 due out in 2002.
I assure you, Vector computing in the US is not dead.
Let's assume that Patents are handed out like AOL CDs. I can't imagine that smaller business could risk going after patent infringers if they're afraid it was a lame patent. Companies shouldn't have to fight over patents after they're granted; the fight should be before they're granted!
Face it: My idea of a lame patent can be someone else's life-long dream. I guess I think of 1-Click Shopping as a useless gimmick, as I'd never want to Click-and-automagically-buy something anyway, but Amazon puts it around their core sales strategy. So, they try to patent it.
My point is this: Companies try to patent everything they can due to the fact that they've had to pay for their employees to think up such things. Not everyone has the ideals of the FSF and all of the OSS developers. Businesses need to differentiate themselves, whether it be through functionality, appearance, etc.
That's why businesses need patent protection - ensure that their good idea makes themselves money, not their competitors. I don't see how we can blame Amazon. They're trying to discover their boundaries. Who here hasn't pushed the rules to check how far they could go, with sports, work, overclocking, etc?
<opinion>
Don't blame Amazon. Blame the Patent Office for giving Amazon an overly large protected space in which to operate.
</opinion>
As a hardware guy, I kind of enjoyed Michael's
comments
about taking the time to understand things down to the metal.
It seems that in the PC gaming world, there are many "disjointed" efforts that haphazardly come together to make a game; programmers optimizing their code (or not) for the latest in OpenGL or Direct3D, then you've got the API handlers written by NVIDIA, ATI, 3dfx, et al translating them as best as possible to the graphic chipsets' native language.
And, of course, all of this works on top of Microsoft's OS. That's 3 pretty big things that are unable to be tuned properly. They must have generic interfaces due to the plug-n-play nature of the PC business. The solution has always been to say stuff like "Pentium II 300MHz, 64MB RAM, 3D Card w/16MB required". With the Xbox, it seems like the designers will have control of 2 of the 3 items listed above, and with a standard set of hardware, optimizing 3d engine/game code has got to become a lot easier. Suddenly the requirements can easily transform from a PII 300 to a Pentium 166, the 64MB RAM turns into 16 MB RAM, and the Video Memory gets to drop considerably as well considering the target is NTSC/PAL output.
Of course, like the Dreamcast, we'll be seeing VGA output boxes so we can play the newest games on our 21" monitors. And since NTSC resolution is hard on the eyes on a 21" monitor, the Xbox will need variable resolutions, forcing faster processors, bigger 3D cards, and more RAM, bringing us full circle to where we started.:P I think the Xbox will be wildly successful if users treat it as what it is: a closed-box console used for gaming, not general applications + games.
Re:This sounds just like the University of Wiscons
on
Disconnected
·
· Score: 3
For some reason I'd have never thought that the campus in my hometown would ever get mentioned on/. Call me crazy.:P
The state of Wisconsin does have quite a few Public University campuses... Let's see, my favorite is UW-Madison, a place I spent 4 great years studying to be an EE _as_well_as_ rooting on Ron Dayne and the rest of the Badgers.;-)
Then there's all the UW State Schools-> UW-Stevens Point, UW-LaCrosse, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Eau Claire, Stout, Superior, Green Bay, Whitewater, Park Side, Platteville, (is that all?) and that doesn't even include the numerous UW Centers around the state. Many apologies to the campuses I've forgotten.
Wasn't it... 320x480x16 was what it displayed, but you had to edit/create one at 640x480 as it was horizontally halved (640 -> 320) at runtime. It didn't runtime alias real well either.:P It took a while before I figured out that I should edit at 320x480, then double it, then let windows shrink it.
I'd prefer my CPU and RAM bus, and soon I/O (networking) to have bandwidth that's a lot higher than a simple "Universal" Serial Bus. Itanium has a 64-bit datapath... why put a 1-bit serial path to memory? That would mean that USB would have to run over 64 (serial.. must have start/stop bits to frame the message) times the speed. Pentium 4 is supposed to clock in at 1.4Ghz. Know anyone who can make a 90 Ghz silicon chip? Me neither.
USB is a Universal bus. CPUs and Memory subsystems are not the target of this general purpose bus in the desktop world.
I work for a supercomputer design company in the Midwest that was founded back in the 70's. Offices were the norm, as the only engineering clubicles (11 total out of ~150 engineers) we've got in the entire place were put into large offices that used to be reserved for upper management; they became open when we were purchased by a company out in Seattle a few months ago.
Granted, these aren't the largest offices you'll ever see, but it comfortably fits 2 fullsize desks and a couple of bookshelves.
So where am I going with this? Offices are great. IMO, having an office with 4 walls that go all the way up to the ceiling, a window that lets actual sun shine in, and a door lets you know that your employer cares about you, and wants to give you a great environment to work in. On an emotional off-day, one can close their door and work in peace. That's a really nice option to have. Downside? When everybody has offices, it *really* sucks when you're (ok, so I am) the junior member of the group, and get a gray-walled cube in a large corner office. *cough*
Doesn't seem to be much more than a Palm clone. The page says it's got "easy-to-use handwriting recognition" and you can "write on the entire screen". The RAM/Flash is a little roomier on the Agenda models, however. I do kinda like the fact that you can do IR transfers to/from Palms too. That'll help keep this from being a 'fork' in the PDA market. It's just another way of doing things, and variety is good.
So the 'cool' factor is there, but how long will it take to get the wide variety of software that the PalmOS does?
Why does every PR start with "(company name), The Leading Developer of (products that 15 other companies make) today..."? I mean, seriously. I wanna see the next Andover.net PR speak of Slashdot not as the "Leading Open Source news/discussion blah blah" but the "Leading source of Trolls focusing on Natalie Portman, Hot Grits, and various species of Birds".
Why can't these companies call 'em as the market sees 'em, not as their mission statement reads??
Oh but wait, it gets better when they set up napster and w4r3z servers on all the Carnivore boxen they dissect. Heh, hotmail.com, yahoo, and more of the net's companies with the fattest pipes will become home to the latest RIAA CD and Id Software game.
Yeah, just wait until there's a DNA version of Melissa/ILoveYou/(insert the latest virus craze here) that can get introduced through tap water. This time, instead of spamming your inbox, it alters the DNA-based DriveCar() and TalkToManager() functions. Ack!
All that static-collecting plastic with PVC pipes and Lexan plexiglass? I don't think so.
1) Your 900MHz phone would sound funny if you got a nice 900MHz Athlon/P3 due to all the radiated crap. 2) Without the conductive metal case, the static charge built up on the plastic while moving your case could easily remove the "magic smoke" from ICs on the motherboard, etc if you were to grab one, then touch the other... Bzzzt!
But what happens if your favorite artists don't have small labels, and you really don't want to get into the whole philosophical Napster usage debate? If my little cousin wants to buy the latest Britney CD, she's got no choice. The Small Labels plea is best kept for the artists, not the consumers. (And for some reason I just can't see Britney reading/. )
Slashdot Mirror
a) trying to make a profit, and do it through volume
b) trying to grow as fast as possible so as to keep out competition. If they didn't sell garden stuff, someone else would.
Amazon is trying to create the infrastructure to become the online version of Target and the other large, general purpose stores.
I wouldn't want to be tagged an un-American when the next McCarthy goes through and weeds out Open Source users. After work I'll have to stick around and reformat my linux workstation with Windows 2000.
You'd think this would increase the MTBF for drives in heavy usage situations, like web servers, compute servers, TiVo ("always recording"), etc. Statistically speaking, dumping 70% of moving (and therefore more-fragile) parts, you MTBF should increase as well.
I watched a bit of the NY/NJ vs. Las Vegas game. One pass was deflected by a defender into the hands of a Wide Receiver for a TD. The play-by-play announcer (not Ventura) called it "sloppy seconds". I wonder how many parents heard, "Daddy, what does sloppy seconds mean?" "Uhh, it's, um, when a ball is deflected for a touchdown. Yeah, that's it".
The TV work & quality reminded me of cable-access broadcasts of HS games, the quality of football looked like nonconference division III football, and the announcers reminded me why I'd rather watch "Touched By An Angel" than "Smackdown". Guess I'll have to let NFL2k1 run live simulations of games if I want to watch football between February and August.
When I got home from the movie, I immediately phoned home to let my parents know that they should go see it... good stuff. I knew my dad had been drafted into the Army and station at Ft. Hood, Texas at the same time as the missile crisis, so I figured it would be interesting to him.
He proceeded to tell me his account of the entire thing from his perspective: from the day they loaded up his entire division and shipped them to Georgia (they got to listen to JFK and LBJ speak to them), to when they were sent to Florida and told to set up camp for 2 days at a Horseracing Track, to when they were all loaded up into large beach invasion type boats to set sail. He said they were floating out there for a day or 2 (out of sight from Florida, even) and being given maps and invasion plans of their sections of beaches when they got the word that they were dismantling the missles.
Well, that happened 5 years before my parents got married, and I wasn't born until '76...
So maybe Costner's character wasn't as powerful as the movie portrayed... I'm just glad cooler heads prevailed in that one.
This movie either had:
a) a small budget
b) someone under payroll in the props department who had used Linux/GNOME before and could customize the hell out of it to get the look they were after.
I'd guess b. Besides, Gnome/Linux's Openness lends itself nicely to customizations, something the producers wouldn't have been able to do under Windows, aside from changing the background image and bar location.
To sum up my aborted post, Cray has been evolving from the single processor Cray-1, to the Multi-processor Cray YMP, to the massively distributed T3E. Seymour and Cray Computer Corp. (spun off of CRI in the late 80's or so) failed because they couldn't push as much performance through a smaller number of processors. Eventually the physical laws of silicon (Seymour even tried GaAs to get more performance) take over, and you must expand the number of processing units to get greater and greater performance.
The T3E is a 3D toroidal-constructed system. SGI's Origin uses the Hypercube. Sun uses whatever Cray's Business Unit did back in the day before SGI sold the Starfire, renamed the Sun UltraEnterprise 10000, to Sun (SMP I guess). The model works. That's not disputed.
The High-End market that Cray and Hitachi serves is fairly stagnant (growing slightly more than inflation) at around 1 Billion USD/year (IIRC). It doesn't grow 40% per year like standard PCs, handhelds, or the streaming video & porn market. The pie is only so big, so IBM and Sun choose the bigger market; they're exploiting the internet. ASCI projects don't make much money. They're done for the press they receive. I've heard of companies exploiting Cray's extreme I/O bandwidth for file archivers to tape robots, but that's about it for general purpose. You wouldn't buy an SV1 or a Hitachi to run Apache, that's for sure.
As Durinia pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, Ford and other auto companies still use Cray Vector machines, as well as other research labs, etc. Vector use isn't dead in the US. It's just not the centerpiece, I guess.
So, basically, Linpack looks at raw performance if the processors/vector pipes aren't starved. Cray's non-vector box, the T3E (again, 1994) has the highest sustained real-world benchmarks, just over 1 TFLOPS/s. Don't preach theoretical. That's for academics. Most supercomputer applications don't consist of small loops of code that runs everything out of registers. You're kidding yourself if you think they do.
To Cray's defense, however, I'm going to have to argue a couple of points. First off, the fact that the SV1 is the "budget" vector box follow-on to the J90, while the SV2 (2002) is the follow-on to the T90 and the T3E has to say something. J90's architecture was defined in 1994. It's a bit long in the tooth. SV1 might not achieve the absolute performance, but the GFLOPS/$$ aren't too shabby these days. Secondly, SGI's assimilation of CRI in the mid 90's didn't bode well for their Vector roadmap. SGI was more interested in stripping the MPP parts (You would too if everyone kept buying T3{D/E}s instead of Origin 2000s) from Cray and casting the rest off. Now that they've been cast off, I'm hoping everything gets righted again.
You've got to understand that Cray's not in the business of kluging together 4000 4-Way SMP Linux boxes with 100BaseT and some duct tape. That cluster model blows away the first 6 Top500 "supercomputers". #7 is the first 'honest' supercomputer in that it was designed for that performance, not just a cluster of similar high-theoretical peak boxes connected by bottlenecks. Cray @ #10 is the next one. Ironically, the T3E1200 in #10 was also originally released to the public in 1994. That's a while ago. For historical record, that's pre-SGI. Let's see what happens post-SGI with the totally redesigned SV2, as well.
The funny thing is that the SV1 line is a continuation of the J90, Cray's "budget" line (these start at $700k USD). The next no-holds-barred vector machine out of Cray Inc. will be the SV2 due out in 2002.
I assure you, Vector computing in the US is not dead.
Let's assume that Patents are handed out like AOL CDs. I can't imagine that smaller business could risk going after patent infringers if they're afraid it was a lame patent. Companies shouldn't have to fight over patents after they're granted; the fight should be before they're granted!
Face it: My idea of a lame patent can be someone else's life-long dream. I guess I think of 1-Click Shopping as a useless gimmick, as I'd never want to Click-and-automagically-buy something anyway, but Amazon puts it around their core sales strategy. So, they try to patent it.
My point is this: Companies try to patent everything they can due to the fact that they've had to pay for their employees to think up such things. Not everyone has the ideals of the FSF and all of the OSS developers. Businesses need to differentiate themselves, whether it be through functionality, appearance, etc.
That's why businesses need patent protection - ensure that their good idea makes themselves money, not their competitors. I don't see how we can blame Amazon. They're trying to discover their boundaries. Who here hasn't pushed the rules to check how far they could go, with sports, work, overclocking, etc?
<opinion>
Don't blame Amazon. Blame the Patent Office for giving Amazon an overly large protected space in which to operate.
</opinion>
It seems that in the PC gaming world, there are many "disjointed" efforts that haphazardly come together to make a game; programmers optimizing their code (or not) for the latest in OpenGL or Direct3D, then you've got the API handlers written by NVIDIA, ATI, 3dfx, et al translating them as best as possible to the graphic chipsets' native language.
And, of course, all of this works on top of Microsoft's OS. That's 3 pretty big things that are unable to be tuned properly. They must have generic interfaces due to the plug-n-play nature of the PC business. The solution has always been to say stuff like "Pentium II 300MHz, 64MB RAM, 3D Card w/16MB required". With the Xbox, it seems like the designers will have control of 2 of the 3 items listed above, and with a standard set of hardware, optimizing 3d engine/game code has got to become a lot easier. Suddenly the requirements can easily transform from a PII 300 to a Pentium 166, the 64MB RAM turns into 16 MB RAM, and the Video Memory gets to drop considerably as well considering the target is NTSC/PAL output.
Of course, like the Dreamcast, we'll be seeing VGA output boxes so we can play the newest games on our 21" monitors. And since NTSC resolution is hard on the eyes on a 21" monitor, the Xbox will need variable resolutions, forcing faster processors, bigger 3D cards, and more RAM, bringing us full circle to where we started. :P I think the Xbox will be wildly successful if users treat it as what it is: a closed-box console used for gaming, not general applications + games.
For some reason I'd have never thought that the campus in my hometown would ever get mentioned on /. Call me crazy. :P
;-)
The state of Wisconsin does have quite a few Public University campuses... Let's see, my favorite is UW-Madison, a place I spent 4 great years studying to be an EE _as_well_as_ rooting on Ron Dayne and the rest of the Badgers.
Then there's all the UW State Schools-> UW-Stevens Point, UW-LaCrosse, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Eau Claire, Stout, Superior, Green Bay, Whitewater, Park Side, Platteville, (is that all?) and that doesn't even include the numerous UW Centers around the state. Many apologies to the campuses I've forgotten.
I would assume wireless modems much like what already exists.
Wasn't it... 320x480x16 was what it displayed, but you had to edit/create one at 640x480 as it was horizontally halved (640 -> 320) at runtime. It didn't runtime alias real well either. :P It took a while before I figured out that I should edit at 320x480, then double it, then let windows shrink it.
USB is a Universal bus. CPUs and Memory subsystems are not the target of this general purpose bus in the desktop world.
Granted, these aren't the largest offices you'll ever see, but it comfortably fits 2 fullsize desks and a couple of bookshelves.
So where am I going with this? Offices are great. IMO, having an office with 4 walls that go all the way up to the ceiling, a window that lets actual sun shine in, and a door lets you know that your employer cares about you, and wants to give you a great environment to work in. On an emotional off-day, one can close their door and work in peace. That's a really nice option to have. Downside? When everybody has offices, it *really* sucks when you're (ok, so I am) the junior member of the group, and get a gray-walled cube in a large corner office. *cough*
So the 'cool' factor is there, but how long will it take to get the wide variety of software that the PalmOS does?
Why can't these companies call 'em as the market sees 'em, not as their mission statement reads??
Oh but wait, it gets better when they set up napster and w4r3z servers on all the Carnivore boxen they dissect. Heh, hotmail.com, yahoo, and more of the net's companies with the fattest pipes will become home to the latest RIAA CD and Id Software game.
Yeah, just wait until there's a DNA version of Melissa/ILoveYou/(insert the latest virus craze here) that can get introduced through tap water. This time, instead of spamming your inbox, it alters the DNA-based DriveCar() and TalkToManager() functions. Ack!
1) Your 900MHz phone would sound funny if you got a nice 900MHz Athlon/P3 due to all the radiated crap.
2) Without the conductive metal case, the static charge built up on the plastic while moving your case could easily remove the "magic smoke" from ICs on the motherboard, etc if you were to grab one, then touch the other... Bzzzt!
But what happens if your favorite artists don't have small labels, and you really don't want to get into the whole philosophical Napster usage debate? If my little cousin wants to buy the latest Britney CD, she's got no choice. The Small Labels plea is best kept for the artists, not the consumers. (And for some reason I just can't see Britney reading /. )