You can almost be certain that some little Chinese manufacturer(s) will produce some little PVR device or even a PCI card that has some secret backdoor (up, down, left, right, hold down B and press start) that will make the device ignore the flag. All it takes is a couple of these devices to make it into the US or Canada or where ever and CSI.NewYork.2x06-1080i.avi.torrent will be available to everyone and their grandma.
Or the other situation that is just as likely is Hauppauge releases their PVR-550 or whatever and some dude(tte) with a hex editor "fixes" the firmware that is loaded when the driver loads.
The main problem I see with complicated A/V systems is that each device stores its own state and the remote is completely unaware of what state each device is in. If one device is out of sync your 25 step macro button is worthless.
This is where that Harmony remote shines. It effectively "remembers" what state a device is in. I've had one of these remotes for about a year and it's awesome. It's the first remote that my wife can actually use. No more "we have $4000 worth of electronics and i can't use any of it" conversations. Unfortunately, it still takes some technical prowess to get it working 100%.
So many of these remote problems could be solved by a simple common serial protocol that all a/v components (of any brand) talk. Ideally, you add device to your system and it autonegotiates with the recevier and the TV so the TV knows what input it's on and the receiver knows what input it is on. It blows me a away that something like this hasn't been done. Infact, there has been ZERO progress in this area since I've started playing with stereos 20 years ago. It's sad.
The other problem I see with newer devices is the incredibly bad UI in most of the menu screens. In the last 2 years, I've bought 2 Toshiba TV's (one HDTV, one analog set) a Toshiba VCR and a Toshiba DVD player. All the menus on all those devices are completely different. Different "widgets", different methods of accessing sub-menus, different everything.
I'm sure I'm oversimplifying things, but I don't see how it would be possible to emulate a P3 700 class CPU on a 1.xGHz processor of a completely different archecture. They don't even share endianess (is that a word?)
When IBM and ATI announced they be supplying the parts I thought right away there would be no backwards compatibility.
I love it to death, even have my family converted (unknowingly... changed the big blue E to point at firefox instead) but that graph doesn't paint a nice picture.
I've spent a week or so using spatial nautilus, after previously disabling it, and I'm starting to get the hang of it.
However, lots of my file are on NFS mounts several levels deep. How is someone supposed to deal with that? I can't seem to make shortcuts in the "Computer" place or anything like that. How does one make shortcuts? (making symlinks on the command line doesn't count)
Just because a linux kernel can read UFS doesn't mean it's GPL'd. Almost any unix including commercial ones like Solaris can use UFS. In fact it is the default filesystem used by Solaris. Nowhere does Sun distribute the source to their UFS implementation.
I grew up playing video games (mostly during the winter months). I had a Coleco, NES, Genesis and later played a lot of PC games at college. (Doom, Quake, etc). Looking back at it now, I just can't believe I wasted as much time as I did.
Things are even worse now that games are getting to be so complicated. Unless I can pick up a game, figure it out in 10 minutes, I don't want to play it. I refuse to commit large chunks of time to games anymore. Which is why I still play Tetris and all the classics on a Game Boy when I have a few minutes to kill on a commute or something.
It seems like the lack of innovation has simply spawned more and more complicated games that people don't want to bother with.
Gentoo's install is unbelievably frustrating? Give me a break. In the last 2 years i've done it 4 times total on 4 different machines with different hardware, one being a laptop and it's gone perfectly fine every time.
Seriously. Look at this: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-qui ckinsta ll.xml
Unless you're a setup.exe jockey, and/or you can't read, there is nothing hard about it. 75% of what is on the page is code snippets that can be copy and pasted right into an SSH session.
It's kinda of sad that something this cool gets so little discussion on a site like Slashdot. I guess it will be news when CARP gets ported to linux and iptables gets ip state sync'ing across hosts.
I don't know anything about US tax law, but i'm guessing this donation has something to do with a big fat tax write-off, which is why Michael made a joke about the 1000 point markup. So it could potentially impact the bottom line.
Most "real engineers" I work with and know personally seem to have spent more time learning about how they're better than everyone else than actually aquiring any skills.
This is why they usually end up getting pushed into management, so they get out of the way of the people who actually know what they're doing.
A: I don't worry about it. I'm a long-term shareholder. I'm letting it all ride. A long time ago I stopped doing this to make myself super rich. I am in this to provide a great return for the long-term shareholders, to provide a great alternative to what I think is an incredibly important problem to solve.
It's like they sent in some intern(s) with a bunch of canned questions to do the interview and didn't tell the poor bastard that McNeally is a dick.
Why does this seem to be the common perception? In my opinion, it's false.
Becoming a competent unix admin takes essentially the same amount of training and experience as becoming a competent Windows admin. The reason why Windows admins are cheaper is because by and large they are way less experienced and there is a whole lot more of them simply due to the ubiquity of the Windows OS.
An experienced and competent Windows admin is probably more rare and expensive than an equivalent unix administrator. I'm going to go as far as to say that in my 11 years as a sysadmin (working for gov't and a large telco), I have yet to meet a "Windows Guru". It seems as though once a person reaches a state where they have a fairly good grasp of the underpinnings of the Windows OS, they realize how clunky and mysterious it is and instead go down the unix admin path.
From my experience, once you have a decent basic unix skill set and know how to use some of the basic tools, learning how to do more advanced things on unix is far easier than MS Windows.
I've been a daily Mozilla user for 2 years now. I love it and in my opinion, it's superior to IE6 in a lot of ways.
As good as Moz is, it won't unseat IE anytime soon. IE could degenerate to a festering piece of donkey dung and it will still remain the most widely used browser.
Have a look at that:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
For the majority of those IE6 users, IE is synonymous with "The Internet" Unless there is some radical new browser related technology that MS is unable to embrace and extend befofe the little guy's get their implementation out, IE will be around for a long long time.
YES! My father is an implement dealer in the area where he farms and a friend of mine works for Cargil in that area. Percy Schmeiser is a crooked son of a bitch.
I would like to see some of those 1400+ and faster low voltage chips in a desktop machine. I know there are relatively low power alternatives like the VIA C3/EDEN processors and the tualatin-based Celerons, but for some things like games and high-res video, those processors are kind of lacking oomph.
As a rather frivolous example, with neither mplayer+Quicktime dlls, nor the Quicktime player for Windows, my 1.0 GHz Celeron could not play the 1024x464 trailer of the Matrix Reloaded without dropping every 2nd or 3rd frame. A 1.533GHz (1800XP) Athlon chewed through the Quicktime with mplayer without any problems at all.
That machine however, uses significantly more power, generates way more heat and requires more noisy cooling gear.
Those low voltage cpus would be the cats ass for building a small, quiet, cool and still very powerful desktop machine that is a little easier on the power bill. Anything that uses less power is good in my mind.
A lot of people are going to be saying "just one example of how Sun is dying", but coming from a place that runs several hundred Sun machines (and being a Sun fanboy), I can understand why they made this switch. For shere processing power on-the-cheap, the x86 world has had a lead on Sun and other big UNIX vendors for a few years. Having a decent OS (linux) to run on those machines, makes it even easier to switch.
It's about using the right tool for the job, and now that x86/linux/bsd has matured to a point where it can be used for some professional applications, it only makes sense to see things like this happen.
Sun is going to be around for a long time. As many other people have pointed out, they're just retreating somewhat to more a of niche market, where they are the right tool for the job.
If you're interested in small webservers, fnord is another one. It even does CGI, vhosts and directory listings and it's only 18K. It requires tcpserver though.
I finally ditched my Compact Flash MP3 player for a Sony mz-n505 minidisc player. Best thing I ever did. I have yet to try out the NetMD feature on it but, what I like is I can record 2 hour long DJ sets and have the unit automatically stick in 5 minute markers so I can easily skip through the set.
Also I loathe any kind of DRM, the way I use it, the DRM built into it hasn't stop me from doing anything. I don't even know what kind of DRM features it has.
The record time doesn't matter to me. I just plug it in and let it go.
The media is cheap. It's a very mature and solid format.
I compiled Apache 2.0 and then PHP 4.2.1 as a DSO on Solaris 8 (latest patch cluster) without a single issue. It was as simple as./configure; make; make install. I was expecting big headaches but it went smooth! I haven't tried anything beyond simple web pages, but it seems to work.
Slashdot Mirror
You can almost be certain that some little Chinese manufacturer(s) will produce some little PVR device or even a PCI card that has some secret backdoor (up, down, left, right, hold down B and press start) that will make the device ignore the flag. All it takes is a couple of these devices to make it into the US or Canada or where ever and CSI.NewYork.2x06-1080i.avi.torrent will be available to everyone and their grandma.
Or the other situation that is just as likely is Hauppauge releases their PVR-550 or whatever and some dude(tte) with a hex editor "fixes" the firmware that is loaded when the driver loads.
It's pointless.
The main problem I see with complicated A/V systems is that each device stores its own state and the remote is completely unaware of what state each device is in. If one device is out of sync your 25 step macro button is worthless.
This is where that Harmony remote shines. It effectively "remembers" what state a device is in. I've had one of these remotes for about a year and it's awesome. It's the first remote that my wife can actually use. No more "we have $4000 worth of electronics and i can't use any of it" conversations. Unfortunately, it still takes some technical prowess to get it working 100%.
So many of these remote problems could be solved by a simple common serial protocol that all a/v components (of any brand) talk. Ideally, you add device to your system and it autonegotiates with the recevier and the TV so the TV knows what input it's on and the receiver knows what input it is on. It blows me a away that something like this hasn't been done. Infact, there has been ZERO progress in this area since I've started playing with stereos 20 years ago. It's sad.
The other problem I see with newer devices is the incredibly bad UI in most of the menu screens. In the last 2 years, I've bought 2 Toshiba TV's (one HDTV, one analog set) a Toshiba VCR and a Toshiba DVD player. All the menus on all those devices are completely different. Different "widgets", different methods of accessing sub-menus, different everything.
I'm sure I'm oversimplifying things, but I don't see how it would be possible to emulate a P3 700 class CPU on a 1.xGHz processor of a completely different archecture. They don't even share endianess (is that a word?)
When IBM and ATI announced they be supplying the parts I thought right away there would be no backwards compatibility.
Maybe they'll sneak an XBox1-on-a-chip in there?
uh huh.
e rs.gif
check out this: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
and more specifically this: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/may04_brows
I love it to death, even have my family converted (unknowingly... changed the big blue E to point at firefox instead) but that graph doesn't paint a nice picture.
I've spent a week or so using spatial nautilus, after previously disabling it, and I'm starting to get the hang of it.
However, lots of my file are on NFS mounts several levels deep. How is someone supposed to deal with that? I can't seem to make shortcuts in the "Computer" place or anything like that. How does one make shortcuts? (making symlinks on the command line doesn't count)
I think you need to do some homework.
/usr/src/sys/ufs ./*
Just because a linux kernel can read UFS doesn't mean it's GPL'd. Almost any unix including commercial ones like Solaris can use UFS. In fact it is the default filesystem used by Solaris. Nowhere does Sun distribute the source to their UFS implementation.
And then there is this:
$ uname -a
FreeBSD xxxx.xxx 5.2.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE
$ pwd
$ grep -ir GPL
$
So are the BSD guys violating too? Not likely.
I grew up playing video games (mostly during the winter months). I had a Coleco, NES, Genesis and later played a lot of PC games at college. (Doom, Quake, etc). Looking back at it now, I just can't believe I wasted as much time as I did.
Things are even worse now that games are getting to be so complicated. Unless I can pick up a game, figure it out in 10 minutes, I don't want to play it. I refuse to commit large chunks of time to games anymore. Which is why I still play Tetris and all the classics on a Game Boy when I have a few minutes to kill on a commute or something.
It seems like the lack of innovation has simply spawned more and more complicated games that people don't want to bother with.
Gentoo's install is unbelievably frustrating? Give me a break. In the last 2 years i've done it 4 times total on 4 different machines with different hardware, one being a laptop and it's gone perfectly fine every time.
i ckinsta ll.xml
Seriously. Look at this:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-qu
Unless you're a setup.exe jockey, and/or you can't read, there is nothing hard about it. 75% of what is on the page is code snippets that can be copy and pasted right into an SSH session.
This is totally true. Scott must have done something to piss Larry off.
Maybe an Oracle techie/insider can debunk these rumors coming from the sales droids.
1) 10g was made for linux, all other versions are a "port"
2) At Oracle you need Larry's signature on the PO if you want to order a Sun box.
If either of these rumors are true, that's pretty bad news for Sun.
It's kinda of sad that something this cool gets so little discussion on a site like Slashdot. I guess it will be news when CARP gets ported to linux and iptables gets ip state sync'ing across hosts.
I don't know anything about US tax law, but i'm guessing this donation has something to do with a big fat tax write-off, which is why Michael made a joke about the 1000 point markup. So it could potentially impact the bottom line.
Most "real engineers" I work with and know personally seem to have spent more time learning about how they're better than everyone else than actually aquiring any skills.
This is why they usually end up getting pushed into management, so they get out of the way of the people who actually know what they're doing.
No, I do the same. I clock my Athlon 1800XP down to 1150MHz (100MHz bus) from 1533MHz. I then 7 volt my fans and I basically don't hear the machine.
The unit now runs at 48 degrees at idle instead of 58 at the stock speed which is an added bonus.
WTF is this?
Q: Are you happy?
A: What does happy have to do with anything?
Q: Well, you said your wife was happy.
A: Am I happy with what?
Q: Your stock price?
A: I don't worry about it. I'm a long-term shareholder. I'm letting it all ride. A long time ago I stopped doing this to make myself super rich. I am in this to provide a great return for the long-term shareholders, to provide a great alternative to what I think is an incredibly important problem to solve.
It's like they sent in some intern(s) with a bunch of canned questions to do the interview and didn't tell the poor bastard that McNeally is a dick.
Why does this seem to be the common perception? In my opinion, it's false.
Becoming a competent unix admin takes essentially the same amount of training and experience as becoming a competent Windows admin. The reason why Windows admins are cheaper is because by and large they are way less experienced and there is a whole lot more of them simply due to the ubiquity of the Windows OS.
An experienced and competent Windows admin is probably more rare and expensive than an equivalent unix administrator. I'm going to go as far as to say that in my 11 years as a sysadmin (working for gov't and a large telco), I have yet to meet a "Windows Guru". It seems as though once a person reaches a state where they have a fairly good grasp of the underpinnings of the Windows OS, they realize how clunky and mysterious it is and instead go down the unix admin path.
From my experience, once you have a decent basic unix skill set and know how to use some of the basic tools, learning how to do more advanced things on unix is far easier than MS Windows.
I've been a daily Mozilla user for 2 years now. I love it and in my opinion, it's superior to IE6 in a lot of ways.
As good as Moz is, it won't unseat IE anytime soon. IE could degenerate to a festering piece of donkey dung and it will still remain the most widely used browser.
Have a look at that:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
For the majority of those IE6 users, IE is synonymous with "The Internet" Unless there is some radical new browser related technology that MS is unable to embrace and extend befofe the little guy's get their implementation out, IE will be around for a long long time.
Isn't the excellent NFS implementation sold by Network Appliance the work of mostly ex-SGI'ers?
The amount of money the company I work for spends on NetApps could practically keep SGI in business.
YES! My father is an implement dealer in the area where he farms and a friend of mine works for Cargil in that area. Percy Schmeiser is a crooked son of a bitch.
I would like to see some of those 1400+ and faster low voltage chips in a desktop machine. I know there are relatively low power alternatives like the VIA C3/EDEN processors and the tualatin-based Celerons, but for some things like games and high-res video, those processors are kind of lacking oomph.
As a rather frivolous example, with neither mplayer+Quicktime dlls, nor the Quicktime player for Windows, my 1.0 GHz Celeron could not play the 1024x464 trailer of the Matrix Reloaded without dropping every 2nd or 3rd frame. A 1.533GHz (1800XP) Athlon chewed through the Quicktime with mplayer without any problems at all.
That machine however, uses significantly more power, generates way more heat and requires more noisy cooling gear.
Those low voltage cpus would be the cats ass for building a small, quiet, cool and still very powerful desktop machine that is a little easier on the power bill. Anything that uses less power is good in my mind.
A lot of people are going to be saying "just one example of how Sun is dying", but coming from a place that runs several hundred Sun machines (and being a Sun fanboy), I can understand why they made this switch. For shere processing power on-the-cheap, the x86 world has had a lead on Sun and other big UNIX vendors for a few years. Having a decent OS (linux) to run on those machines, makes it even easier to switch.
It's about using the right tool for the job, and now that x86/linux/bsd has matured to a point where it can be used for some professional applications, it only makes sense to see things like this happen.
Sun is going to be around for a long time. As many other people have pointed out, they're just retreating somewhat to more a of niche market, where they are the right tool for the job.
Are HP and SGI porting HP-UX and Irix and all the associated apps to IA64 or are they focusing on Linux for this platform?
What about IBM and Power4? What OS (AIX?) and applications run on that platform?
I think an equally important and even more interesting aspect in this luming 64 bit war is going to be the software.
If you're interested in small webservers, fnord is another one. It even does CGI, vhosts and directory listings and it's only 18K. It requires tcpserver though.
I finally ditched my Compact Flash MP3 player for a Sony mz-n505 minidisc player. Best thing I ever did. I have yet to try out the NetMD feature on it but, what I like is I can record 2 hour long DJ sets and have the unit automatically stick in 5 minute markers so I can easily skip through the set.
Also I loathe any kind of DRM, the way I use it, the DRM built into it hasn't stop me from doing anything. I don't even know what kind of DRM features it has.
The record time doesn't matter to me. I just plug it in and let it go.
The media is cheap. It's a very mature and solid format.
"If it's 2.4.18 with the vm subsystem from 2.4.9, DON'T CALL THE KERNEL 2.4.9!"
i'm assuming you mean "if it's a 2.4.9 with the vm subsystem from 2.4.10+ don't call it 2.4.9"
oh you have no idea how much i banged my head because of this. if i had the choice, i'd never use RH again.
I compiled Apache 2.0 and then PHP 4.2.1 as a DSO on Solaris 8 (latest patch cluster) without a single issue. It was as simple as ./configure; make; make install. I was expecting big headaches but it went smooth! I haven't tried anything beyond simple web pages, but it seems to work.