A bad 12 months for Microsoft...
on
Linux Win In Schools
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think that a number of events may conspire to give Linux a possibility of entering the mainstream market over the next few years, the most prominent events events being...
a) MS tightening up on casual user piracy by actively preventing multiple user installs.
b) added cost of licensing MS products under the new scheme, this will mean that companies will think twice about paying for MS when a similar amount of bucks buys you a single RH Linux disk and a fairly hefty admin staff.
c) some (currently small) demonstrations that Linux now has the capability to function in school and public service environments
d) KDE and Gnome genuinely appear to offer almost everything on the desktop that Windows does (OK the Office suite for KDE is not there yet, but real progress has been made).
..Gator programmers and company officers if they enter the UK in a similar manner to Skylarov ?
Surely Gator breaches the UK Computer Misuse Act and/or the Data Protection Act in some way.
Actually that would be quite a good laugh, we could show the US the stupidity of the DMCA as well as bollux a rather insiduous program, which to me seems little different from a form of virus.
I'm already packing for the party
on
Linux Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Funny
Suitcase contents:
Stake
Holy Water
Crossbow
Sig-Sauer with carbon fibre bullets (Ultraviolet has much better weapons!!)
Ancient volumes on Vampires, Demons and other creatures of the night..
Oh, damn thats Sunnydale not SunnyVale.
Anyway, why did a vampire who gets sunburn very easily, decide to live in California ? Maine or Seattle whould be much better for his complexion.Ah, that explains Microsoft!!:-)
I too wrote 6502 (also 6800,6809 and Z80) assembler, and the learning curve wasn't so steep there, mainly 'cos the processor was a bit limited.
Anyway, the world decided in favour of 80x86 and to a certain extent Z80 series processors although I still confess the reason why is still IMO one of the Great Mysteries Of All Time....
Re:They are targeting set tops, etc.
on
X-server for PS2
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· Score: 1
Yes, but you are forgetting that a PS2 is a relatively clean design with (IIRC) a 128 bit data bus all round the system, compared to a PC which has to support all sorts of legacy stuff at a crippling cost in speed, with buses from 8 through 64 bits.
Also the CPU of a PS/2 is a nice RISC processor and comparing clock to clock doesn't cut it.I think you should regard the processor as about equivalent to 700MHz or perhaps even 1GHz equivalent in terms of clock warzzz.
I also forget to mention that the register set of a 68K is much nicer than that of an 80x86 to play with, as the 68K doesn't tell you (much) that you can only perform certain operations with certain registers. The 68K only had data registers (D0-D7) and address registers (A0-A7)- none of this AX - accumulator, BX pointer, CX counter, DX secondary accumulator s**t.
This probably was part of the reason that 68K programs seemed much more reliable than there 80x86 brethrenm even without memory management, protected addressing and all that stuff.
We don't need no steenking MMU...
on
X-server for PS2
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· Score: 1
Care to try justifying that 680x0 chips ran 2x faster than x86? Hell, the 680x0 didn't even have an MMU until 1988!
Probably true, but the PC didn't have really sexy graphics cards around that time - we were still talking fairly basic VGA, whereas the Amiga (for example) did have some quite nifty graphics chips for the time.
I'm also not sure whether you are using some form of 'standardised' MIPs, or whether you are just counting the number of instructions per second that each processor could run; in any event, since I was assembly programming both 80286 and 68K devices at the time I generally came away with the impression that a 68K smoked an 80286 every time.
Probably one of the reasons was that most of the programs I wrote for the 80286 had to be in 8086 code for an IBM PC target, and therefore I couldn't use the full features of an 80286. The nice thing about a 68K was that there was very little difference between the processors and a program which ran on the bog standard 68K ran pretty much unaltered but faster on a 68020. The 68K was designed to be a 32 bit processor all the time, whereas the 80286 had to pretend to be a 8/16 bit processor most of the time in its default environment.
Yes, but serial chips are surface mounted onto the motherboard now, and in some cases UART and buffers are built into the main motherboard control chip; gone are the days when you could get your chip extractor and pull a fried 74LS(244/255?) and replace it with a new buffer IC at a cost of about $0.50.
Yes, it is widely used, especially amongst Telcos for managing their networks. A lot of telecommunications equipment is managed by and supports SNMP. I've managed to stay clear of having to bother with it despite the fact I write network management software as my job (which I think is a minor miracle)
As far as computers go, I was under the impression you could manage computers running Windows (and maybe even Linux and Unix) using SNMP, so maybe someone can provide more detail.
Dell Customer support, however, I've generally found to be excellent, which was one factor in me deciding to go for one.
My brother had a monitor defect whilst under warranty, and two further 15" monitors supplied to him were also defective, so they upgraded him to a 17" free of charge by way of an apology. [This was when the price differntial was significant]
And my personal experience of thier backup and support has been quite pleasing, although up to now it's only been for Windows systems.
..but if your aardvark is at an infinite distance from Earth it has already escaped, and technically won't ever fall to earth (which is lucky for the ardvaark, as even freeze-dried it'll be mincemeat if it hits the Earth at 11.2km/s, to say nothing of the fact that it won't taste very good after being carbonised due to entry into the Earths atmosphere)!!
I have bought genuine issues of Windows from 3.0 to '98 SE2, although I confess that I have upgraded my current machine base with every issue.
I have also paid for all my Office software ('95 and 2000, skipped '97). So that's a fairly large truckload of money in Microsofts direction, especially if you add the fact I also bought the '95 and '98 Plus packs and a number of MS games.
Against that, my first Linux (RH 4.1 came on the front of a magazine (a big thanks to UK Personal Computer World). I bought RH 6.1, but subsequent upgrades to 7.1 have been CheapBytes style copies.
I will probably buy another real version (RH 8.0?) if enough changes have occurred that makes a new set of manuals worthwhile. If so I'll purchase them directly from RH to maximise contribution to my preferred Linux supplier.
I sent Dell asking whether I could dual boot their laptops into Windows and Linux. Got no response.
Also AFAIK, their UK website made no mention about offering Linux installed on their systems. It certainly didn't appear as a purchase option (Select Operating System:Linux -50UKPounds) when I went through the options in order to buy one.
In short, if you don't advertise or even offer the option on your website, you are unlikely to get any demand.
I don't want to install JUST Linux on my laptop, as I still need Office tools and want to play Diablo II occasionally.
Not too sure about the Shadow series - like most people here I am a great fan of the Ender books, especially the first two (Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead).
I read the Shadow series, but kept feeling that political events within them happened a bit too 'deus ex machina' i.e. some of the events within them did not relate so well. Although Bean himself is extremely well developed, Achilles ability to control several governments is a little overstretched.
I hope the third book in the series has a more realistic development of Peter's rise to power.
Moving more offtopic, but in a related fashion, you could also read 'Who's Afraid of Beowulf?' by Tom Holt, a book where a group of Viking heroes reawake in the current era.
You're being a little inconsistent here aren't you?
On the one hand you are criticising lawyers about the 'be quiet, you peasant' attitude to everyone else discussing law, yet on the other hand when Compulawyer (who may be a lawyer or may be just out of short trousers) makes what appear to be perfectly respectable comments you are rather derogatory.
I personally post to a whole range of topics, some of which I know almost less than nothing about, but I still believe my opinion should be expressed and hopefully heard.
Jokes aside, a lot of engineering calculations before the advent of computers were performed in precisely this way i.e. by approximating known irrational numbers to integers.
It is still part of engineering to calculate an error budget, to ensure that whatever you are designing can handle whatever errors you introduced when designing you new gadget. Its just that computers have allowed us to make the margin for error that much smaller.
I think Granny Weatherwax was beaten to the idea by Douglas Adams (RIP) in Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy. The Infinite Improbability Drive worked on the exact same principle.
(Actually I think my sig is derived from some philosopher or other too).
It occurs to me that for games along the lines of Black and White.... Instead of gesturing with the mouse, you gesture with your hand -- and actually THROW that fireball at those infidel dogs.
If you have a digital glove (I forget the make) Black and White already supports gesturing using the device - see the instruction book!!
No, you won't, as hand dexterity far exceeds the relatively coarse and slow control you'll have with this thing. Provided he sticks to the multifunction joystick he knows and loves he will still probably kick the (virtua) crap out of you!!
There are a number of other O'Reilly books available in complete form online, but I have still bought the book nevertheless.
For one thing, as another poster has pointed ot, O'Reilly does tend to produce high quality books which do last, whereas a ring binder printout soon turns into a mass of out of sequence torn pages.
For another thing, depending on what I'm doing, I find that dead tree documentation is at times more readable for some strange reason than viewing it onscreen. For example, when you're computer is totally screwed up, reading an online form of 'Unix System Administration' is not going to happen!
For the reasons above I have only regretted buying one of the 15 O'Reilly books I have in my possession [The one on SQL and Oracle is the crap one IMO].
MODERATORS: Comment #10 is a troll. It may be a troll, but its a sufficiently interesting point of view not to mod it down, so I'm not going to waste my mod points by doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that a number of events may conspire to give Linux a possibility of entering the mainstream market over the next few years, the most prominent events events being...
a) MS tightening up on casual user piracy by actively preventing multiple user installs.
b) added cost of licensing MS products under the new scheme, this will mean that companies will think twice about paying for MS when a similar amount of bucks buys you a single RH Linux disk and a fairly hefty admin staff.
c) some (currently small) demonstrations that Linux now has the capability to function in school and public service environments
d) KDE and Gnome genuinely appear to offer almost everything on the desktop that Windows does (OK the Office suite for KDE is not there yet, but real progress has been made).
..Gator programmers and company officers if they enter the UK in a similar manner to Skylarov ?
Surely Gator breaches the UK Computer Misuse Act and/or the Data Protection Act in some way.
Actually that would be quite a good laugh, we could show the US the stupidity of the DMCA as well as bollux a rather insiduous program, which to me seems little different from a form of virus.
Suitcase contents:
:-)
Stake
Holy Water
Crossbow
Sig-Sauer with carbon fibre bullets (Ultraviolet has much better weapons!!)
Ancient volumes on Vampires, Demons and other creatures of the night..
Oh, damn thats Sunnydale not SunnyVale.
Anyway, why did a vampire who gets sunburn very easily, decide to live in California ? Maine or Seattle whould be much better for his complexion.Ah, that explains Microsoft!!
I too wrote 6502 (also 6800,6809 and Z80) assembler, and the learning curve wasn't so steep there, mainly 'cos the processor was a bit limited.
Anyway, the world decided in favour of 80x86 and to a certain extent Z80 series processors although I still confess the reason why is still IMO one of the Great Mysteries Of All Time....
Yes, but you are forgetting that a PS2 is a relatively clean design with (IIRC) a 128 bit data bus all round the system, compared to a PC which has to support all sorts of legacy stuff at a crippling cost in speed, with buses from 8 through 64 bits.
Also the CPU of a PS/2 is a nice RISC processor and comparing clock to clock doesn't cut it.I think you should regard the processor as about equivalent to 700MHz or perhaps even 1GHz equivalent in terms of clock warzzz.
I also forget to mention that the register set of a 68K is much nicer than that of an 80x86 to play with, as the 68K doesn't tell you (much) that you can only perform certain operations with certain registers. The 68K only had data registers (D0-D7) and address registers (A0-A7)- none of this AX - accumulator, BX pointer, CX counter, DX secondary accumulator s**t.
This probably was part of the reason that 68K programs seemed much more reliable than there 80x86 brethrenm even without memory management, protected addressing and all that stuff.
1982 - 80286. Supports virtual address space (Basic MMU). Addresses 16 Megs. 12.5 MHz, 2.7 MIPS.
1984 - Macintosh w/68000. Address 16 Megs. 8 MHz, 0.7 MIPS.
....
Care to try justifying that 680x0 chips ran 2x faster than x86? Hell, the 680x0 didn't even have an MMU until 1988!
Probably true, but the PC didn't have really sexy graphics cards around that time - we were still talking fairly basic VGA, whereas the Amiga (for example) did have some quite nifty graphics chips for the time.
I'm also not sure whether you are using some form of 'standardised' MIPs, or whether you are just counting the number of instructions per second that each processor could run; in any event, since I was assembly programming both 80286 and 68K devices at the time I generally came away with the impression that a 68K smoked an 80286 every time.
Probably one of the reasons was that most of the programs I wrote for the 80286 had to be in 8086 code for an IBM PC target, and therefore I couldn't use the full features of an 80286. The nice thing about a 68K was that there was very little difference between the processors and a program which ran on the bog standard 68K ran pretty much unaltered but faster on a 68020. The 68K was designed to be a 32 bit processor all the time, whereas the 80286 had to pretend to be a 8/16 bit processor most of the time in its default environment.
Yes, but serial chips are surface mounted onto the motherboard now, and in some cases UART and buffers are built into the main motherboard control chip; gone are the days when you could get your chip extractor and pull a fried 74LS(244/255?) and replace it with a new buffer IC at a cost of about $0.50.
So fried UART = fried MB chipset = screwed PC!!
Yes, it is widely used, especially amongst Telcos for managing their networks. A lot of telecommunications equipment is managed by and supports SNMP. I've managed to stay clear of having to bother with it despite the fact I write network management software as my job (which I think is a minor miracle)
As far as computers go, I was under the impression you could manage computers running Windows (and maybe even Linux and Unix) using SNMP, so maybe someone can provide more detail.
We are Borg
Resistance Is Futile
Prepare To Be Assimilated
[had to get that in before someone else does]
Dell Customer support, however, I've generally found to be excellent, which was one factor in me deciding to go for one.
My brother had a monitor defect whilst under warranty, and two further 15" monitors supplied to him were also defective, so they upgraded him to a 17" free of charge by way of an apology. [This was when the price differntial was significant]
And my personal experience of thier backup and support has been quite pleasing, although up to now it's only been for Windows systems.
..but if your aardvark is at an infinite distance from Earth it has already escaped, and technically won't ever fall to earth (which is lucky for the ardvaark, as even freeze-dried it'll be mincemeat if it hits the Earth at 11.2km/s, to say nothing of the fact that it won't taste very good after being carbonised due to entry into the Earths atmosphere)!!
Just being picky!
I have bought genuine issues of Windows from 3.0 to '98 SE2, although I confess that I have upgraded my current machine base with every issue.
I have also paid for all my Office software ('95 and 2000, skipped '97). So that's a fairly large truckload of money in Microsofts direction, especially if you add the fact I also bought the '95 and '98 Plus packs and a number of MS games.
Against that, my first Linux (RH 4.1 came on the front of a magazine (a big thanks to UK Personal Computer World). I bought RH 6.1, but subsequent upgrades to 7.1 have been CheapBytes style copies.
I will probably buy another real version (RH 8.0?) if enough changes have occurred that makes a new set of manuals worthwhile. If so I'll purchase them directly from RH to maximise contribution to my preferred Linux supplier.
I sent Dell asking whether I could dual boot their laptops into Windows and Linux. Got no response.
Also AFAIK, their UK website made no mention about offering Linux installed on their systems. It certainly didn't appear as a purchase option (Select Operating System:Linux -50UKPounds) when I went through the options in order to buy one.
In short, if you don't advertise or even offer the option on your website, you are unlikely to get any demand.
I don't want to install JUST Linux on my laptop, as I still need Office tools and want to play Diablo II occasionally.
Not too sure about the Shadow series - like most people here I am a great fan of the Ender books, especially the first two (Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead).
I read the Shadow series, but kept feeling that political events within them happened a bit too 'deus ex machina' i.e. some of the events within them did not relate so well. Although Bean himself is extremely well developed, Achilles ability to control several governments is a little overstretched.
I hope the third book in the series has a more realistic development of Peter's rise to power.
Moving more offtopic, but in a related fashion, you could also read 'Who's Afraid of Beowulf?' by Tom Holt, a book where a group of Viking heroes reawake in the current era.
Quite an amusing read.
You're being a little inconsistent here aren't you?
On the one hand you are criticising lawyers about the 'be quiet, you peasant' attitude to everyone else discussing law, yet on the other hand when Compulawyer (who may be a lawyer or may be just out of short trousers) makes what appear to be perfectly respectable comments you are rather derogatory.
I personally post to a whole range of topics, some of which I know almost less than nothing about, but I still believe my opinion should be expressed and hopefully heard.
..arcade games have no street cred when kids realise their grandad could've been doing the same thing.
Jokes aside, a lot of engineering calculations before the advent of computers were performed in precisely this way i.e. by approximating known irrational numbers to integers.
It is still part of engineering to calculate an error budget, to ensure that whatever you are designing can handle whatever errors you introduced when designing you new gadget. Its just that computers have allowed us to make the margin for error that much smaller.
I think Granny Weatherwax was beaten to the idea by Douglas Adams (RIP) in Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy. The Infinite Improbability Drive worked on the exact same principle.
(Actually I think my sig is derived from some philosopher or other too).
Huh... I thought pi was a movie
Only when pi is written in the US. Now its got a sequel - American Pi^2!!
It occurs to me that for games along the lines of Black and White.... Instead of gesturing with the mouse, you gesture with your hand -- and actually THROW that fireball at those infidel dogs.
If you have a digital glove (I forget the make) Black and White already supports gesturing using the device - see the instruction book!!
No, you won't, as hand dexterity far exceeds the relatively coarse and slow control you'll have with this thing. Provided he sticks to the multifunction joystick he knows and loves he will still probably kick the (virtua) crap out of you!!
There are a number of other O'Reilly books available in complete form online, but I have still bought the book nevertheless.
For one thing, as another poster has pointed ot, O'Reilly does tend to produce high quality books which do last, whereas a ring binder printout soon turns into a mass of out of sequence torn pages.
For another thing, depending on what I'm doing, I find that dead tree documentation is at times more readable for some strange reason than viewing it onscreen. For example, when you're computer is totally screwed up, reading an online form of 'Unix System Administration' is not going to happen!
For the reasons above I have only regretted buying one of the 15 O'Reilly books I have in my possession [The one on SQL and Oracle is the crap one IMO].
MODERATORS: Comment #10 is a troll.
It may be a troll, but its a sufficiently interesting point of view not to mod it down, so I'm not going to waste my mod points by doing so.