A recently released Gartner Dataquest report, sponsored by several companies including Microsoft, found that just 8.6 percent of server shipments in the U.S. during the third quarter of 2000 were Linux-based.
I don't really have any trouble beleiving that Gartner's survey is probably correct, as long as you don't take it to mean "Linux makes up 8.6 percent of all servers currently on the internet." They seem to have established that 8.6 percent of servers sold by major vendors have Linux preinstalled. This is an important measure, but does fully speak to the larger question of Linux's server market share, or the rate at which it is growing. It is also important to realize that the server market has changed somewhat in the last year, and that those changes can be expected to distort sales figures somewhat.
The things that it clearly does not take into account are:
Servers that come with Windows (or some other OS) that people wipe and install Linux on. Keep in mind that many vendors do not provide Linux as a pre-installed option, and (thanks to Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts) often do not offer to sell unconfigured systems. The result is that many companies who want to run Linux on their servers must buy Windows licenses anyway.
Many companies and organizations build their servers from scratch. If you assume that all servers are purchased from vendors and OEMs, these servers will seem to materialize out of thin air. Also, people who are savvy enough to build a server from scratch are also more likely to make an informed decision about what type of server to use (and thus, be more likely to go with Linux or BSD).
"Recycled" servers. In many companies, it is common practice to move aging desktop systems (especially the more powerful ones) into low-end server roles. For instance, intranet servers in small to medium sized companies. If the IT people know what they are doing, these former desktops will get formatted and rebuilt, and there's a good chance they'll get rebuilt with Linux, since one of the strong points of Linux is its ability to make good use of older hardware.
Beleive it or not, some people dual-boot servers. This is especially convenient when you put the bootable image on a hot-swap drive sled. This may sound odd, but it is partiularly convenient for production enviornments, where you might only need a server up for a night or two after a commit cycle. It's also conveinent with large database enviornmetns, where you need to do periodic aggrigations. I really, really doubt that you'd be able to find this option on a vendor's configuration page.
"Junker" servers, often built from aincent hardware. People save themselves piles of money by using 386's and such for routers and firewalls instead of paying for custom hardware. This is a good solution for many people, especially since Linux does a good job of utilizing older harware. This is different from "recycled" servers because routers and firewalls tend to be transparant peices of network infastructure. However, no one would despute that they are important.
There are probably a few situations that I'm leaving out. The point is, how important are vendor statistics for measuring the Linux market share?
It seems to me that the only way to make informed statements about server market share is to gather statistics at the source. Put together a statistically significant sample of companies, individuals and organizations, and ask them for a list of the servers they use, a description of of each (including OS), and an explanation of their choices. This seems like the only way to actually answer the bigger question of server OS market share. The answer might not make anyone happy, but at least it would be an answer.
This could establish a whole new trend for the enviornmental movement - the protection of non-life. In all probability, there is no life on mars, and if there ever was, it's probably dead and gone.
So, wouldn't you have to establish a Wildlifeless Preserve, to uh, preserve the natural state of wildlife on Mars (which is to say, either dead or never alive)?
I guess it might make sense, but you'd have to sort of redefine preservation a little. Most nature preservation efforts and laws focus on things that are either alive, were once alive, or somehow relate to things that are alive. After all, nearly every square inch of Earth's surface contains life for some sort, so that's our bias. Even Antarctica - although not exactly in teaming multitudes or anything.
So what might this mean here on Earth? If there were a truely lifeless place on Earth, would it be better (in therms of the enviornment) to try to keep it that way, or do we have something of an obligation as living organizms to try to spread life to new places?
Sort of reminds me of some stuff from schismatrix.
I used to live at a place called Harbor Point (formerly Columbia Point) in Boston. It used to be a "project" neighborhood, but a few years ago, a big realestate tycoon bought it up and turned it into a semi-luxury apartments and townhouses.
When we moved in, my roommates and I decided to set up a DSL line for out local LAN. Just like you said, the line test put us within the range for DSL - about 300 - 200 feet from the CO. Unfortunatly, Versizon (then Bell Atlantic) had aparantly added a coil of fiber inside the CO. That's right - according to Covad, there was fiber inside the CO, being used roughly as a patch cable. Thus, the whole Harbor Pont development (5000+ units, if I remember correctly) was unable to get DSL from anyone. Because of a patch-job that Bell Atlantic woudn't fix, Covad didn't have access to, and Flashcom... well, Flashcom didn't seem to be able to find it's butt with both hands, so they responded by opening three new accounts.
However, our tale of woe had a happy ending. Before Bell Atlandic owned up to the fiber thing, Covad came and installed a modem, and the thing couldn't find a link. So they came and installed it again, this time drilling more holes in our walls and breaking the phone patch box so that we didn't have a landline for a week. When the whole thing finally turned out to be impossible, we called Covad to give them their modem back. Covad told us that the modem belonged to Flashcom (which didn't sound right, since Covad was in charge of the actual installation). Flashcom told us that it belonged to ConcentricDSL. Concentric had no idea who the hell we were, so we started over with Covad, and repeated the cycle. After getting the runnaround again, we put it up on eBay, got $200 for it, and treated outselves to a nice dinner.
Not to be outdone, Sun announced that it would no longer be supplying its desktops and workstations with rubber footies, which they have replaced with antigravity levitation devices.
First the floppy, now the CRT - where will it stop?
That wasn't my point at all. At the present state of technology, manned space flight is exceedingly expensive, so I question wheather it should be done at all. In that context, sending tourists into space (to the ISS or otherwise) is blowing resources on something that produces no gain. Even if they pay their way, even at a profit for the space agency, the agency still must dedicate resources to filling the order. Resources that should, IMHO, be dedicated to science and engineering.
If you want to make the comparison of manned spaceflight to the internet, then you would have to consider the current state of the art in manned spaceflight to be equivelant to the early days of ARPANET. In which case, of course it makes sense to restrict access to it. It's a relatively untested, unreliable technology that hasn't even reached its infancy. It costs tens of millions of dollars per person, and takes the efforts of thousands of skilled engineers to make it work. It should be done only when there's no other way to get the job done, which certainly debars the public, at least for now.
BTW - I did read the article. If you read my post, perhapse you would have realized that I mentioned the fact that it wasn't on the ISS. In my opinion, the fact that it's a purely Russian effort stengthens, not weakens, my argument. The Russians have fewer resources to squander.
I'm all for space turism - I've wanted to play around in microgravity since I was five, and would probably drop most of my net worth for a chance to get into space.
However, the ISS is a research station. They're supposed to be doing science and enginering stuff up there that will [someday, I hope] benifit all of us stuck down here in the gravity well. It somehow doesen't sit right with me that the Russians, however cash strapped they are, let a guy pay his way onto the ISS, and are planning to expand this (even if there won't be any more actual ISS visits). It would be like if CERN or Fermilab turned over their accelerators to someone who's willing to pay tons of cash to blow the hell out of a banana.
The ISS has been sucking huge amounts of money out of space programs that could do better science. For the price of the ISS, you could do hundreds of unmanned missions to Mars, and they would yeild mountains of real scientific data that would truely enhance our knowledge about, well, everything. If the ISS can't produce the same bang for the buck, it shouldn't be funded.
Space turism for the ultra-rich on or off the ISS strongly suggests that the scientific value of these manned missions is dubious.
Again, don't get me wrong here - I want to have humans in space, and if I could, I would jump at the chance to be one of them. But research money is a limited resource, and untill we have the technologies to do it economically, we should be spending out cash on either pure science or developing those technologies.
No that couldn't be it. The course would be way off course -- the headline would be "Voyager 2 probe crashes into ranch in Texas, kills 3 head of steer." They probably went to the dealership to get the steering aligned, and now they're surprised that the damn thing won't go streight anymore.
That new nothing-but-pork-rines diet is really working for Rosane Bar, so the mass of the Earth-Moon-Rosane system is considerably less than the NASA estimates took into account.
Well, yes - that does exist, in effect. When you apply for a patent, it takes a long, long time for it to get processed (unless, of course, you know how, and have the cash, to grease the wheels a little). During that period, your patent applications is public record, but since it has been filed, it has precidence. During this interm period, you have marginal legal protection, although not a full patent. That's why you see the term "Patent Pending" stamped on things - to let you know that a patent is in the works, so if you copy the idea, they can come after you once the patent is granted. Of course, filing a patent isn't a sure deal, so "Patent Pending" isn't the same legally as "Patent No. 2020343".
During that time, anyone can look up your patent and contest it. There is a formal procedure for challenging a patent prior to aproval. While it isn't exactly like prospective patents are posted on the avenues and streets of Washington for public discussion, they are available for review, and you can challenge them if you like.
The US and most industial nations have treaties that give patents issued in one contry certain legal viability in others. For instance, most contries recognize the legitimacy of US patents and trademarks, and will uphold them even if it is not registered in their own IP system. The WTO also provides for some additional legal reciprocity between its signatories.
Could this ruling actually be in violation with treaties signed with the US and the WTO? I Hope not, but if it is, I hope Japan will hold its ground. A concervative aporach to patents is the only way to insure that they will actually do what they are supposed to - encourage inovation, not protect (and indirectly subsidize) research investments.
True - this is a point of infinite contension I have with my grandmother. She wants me to go to Isrial (to visit, to work, go to school...), and I've decided I will only go after they establish a workable arrangement with the Palistinians. It's not so much that I'm concerned for my own safety - it is, after all, more dangerous for me to walk around my school in Boston than in just about any place in Isrial. I guess I empathize too much with the Palistinians (note - Arafat != "the Palistinians") to be comfortable with the Isrieli government is doing to them.
Any idea how one would go about going to grad school in Japan? I stayed there for a summer in high school, and I've always wanted to go back. Well, not for high school, anyway - I think my head would have exploded. I'm going to have my BS in computer science in 20 months, and I'd like to know what procedures I would have to go through and what schools I should look at.
(Sorry, I know this is a bit off topic - please humor me)
If you are Jewish, Isriel has a birthright program. Not only are you automatically qualified for citizenship, but they will also pay for your moving and transportation expenses.
I'm not altogether sure what criterion they use for deciding who is Jewish - it's not religious practice, and I don't think they follow the Orthodox rule that your mother must be Jewish.
Once you're there, there are rather extensive [government financed] support services to teach you Hebrew, locate housing, find a job, and so forth. Isrial has a well developed and rapidly growing technology sector, and I'm sure you could find a pretty cool job there. The only drawback to it is that Isrial is almost completely dominated by Microsoft products - aparantly, Hebrew language support was a long time comming in most other OS's. Perhapse you can do some good for the country by bringing knowledge of some decent software.
I think that anyone would be lucky to be held so dear to so many people as to receive even a fraction of the empathy shown here.
This is horrible news, but perhapse there's a small silver lining to it - most authors have to wait until after their deaths to be recognized for thier contributions to literature. No one, I'm sure, is glad to see him go, but perhapse some progress can be made to establish comedic writing (especially his) as bona fide literature. Even if much of it was written to bring a laugh, Adams' work had more to say about philosiphy, morality and life than anything I've read before.
It has more of a place in classrooms, anyway, than the 19th centrury drivel most kids have to read in high school. So what if it isn't "serious" - it's brilliant work. Brilliant work is important in its own right. I don't think Douglas Adams would have wanted us to elevate him to the pantheon of the Greats - after all, so much of his best humor focused on mocking such pretension. By drawing out and making sport of our own absurdity, Adams' subtle message is simply to be reasonable. Reasonably speaking, he was a damn good author.
I know of at least 4 companys that build systems on the PPC platform - Apple, IBM, a couple of defense contractors like Murcury. Be used to build the BeBox, but that was a long time ago. Do all of them build their own chipsets and motherboards?
Maybe the big problem is a lack of snazzy, clear cases on the open market - IBM might not want to go public with the news that the G4 won't work unless its in a spiffy clear case or a cruise missile.
Ha! I'd pay good money to watch RMS bust out his arsenal of bushio-kung-foo rhetoric. It would be awsome! He'd probably convert the Microsoft enterage on the spot, and in three months they'd be seen sporting beards and sandals amongst the masses, doing pennace for thier sins.
Sadly, Microsoft is smart enough to know what a bad idea this would be, coolness notwithstanding. It provide RMS an opportunity to give his Sermon On the Mount on national TV, and we all know he'd rise to the occation. It would be an event of epic proportions.
Yes, folks, there's a war on. The Enemy is dangerous, determined and powerful. No one can promise that this will be anything but a long, difficult and exhausting struggle. But It must be fought if we are to live in a Free World.
This is a call to arms!
But we must all remember - Microsoft will never be beaten by words, so save them. If you want to put the scoundrels in Redmond in their place in history's dustbin, head out to your bookstore and pick up those tech books you've been meaning to read. Get started on that project you've been meaning to do. Squash those bugs in your source repositories. Finish writing that How-To, or think about redoing the documentation of your project. There are great projects out there that need your help, so fire up your build enviornment and lend a hand! It's time to fight, not argue - and our power lies in the strength of the software that we write.
So, the time has come to ask not what Free Software can do for you, but what you can do for Free Software!
And perhapse most importantly, help the nubies get on board! Get on those newsgroups, web forums and chat rooms! Start lending a hand and spreading what you know! That has always been what has made our community strong - where the documentation fails, the community lends its strength and know-how.
Everyone has something to contribute - even if you're not a coder, a 133t h4ker, or a bearded guru, you can still help your friends with configurations, installations and setups. This is, after all, our software.
IBM had exactly this problem with mainframes. Once they managed to dominate the market, they set about selling as many mainframes as they could. For a while, it was a growth industry. After a while, everyone who ever would buy a mainframe had one. Up until that point, IBM was making money selling hardware, and basically giving away the service and support aspect of their buisiness.
Once they saturated the market, it wasn't possible to make a real profit on mainframes becase the market was actually shrinking. So, they deftly turned things around by putting the emphasis on the service side of the business. It turned out that IBM is still making a tidy profit on their Big Iron even though the industry is shrinking every year.
Maybe Microsoft envisions the same thing happening to its Windows franchise, or at least the server aspect of it. They need to keep the revenue stream moving, so subscription-based licenses make sense for that. The real signs of trouble from Microsoft will be if they start going around saying that they want to stress "Customer Satisfaction" and start rolling out extensive service packages. I'd guess they would call them something weak like "Enterprise Premium Support" or some such managmenet-speak.
Well, if you really wanted to squeze the life out of your battary, you could replace the hard drive with a flash disk, like the ones M Systems builds. Just stick some extra RAM in there and use RAMfs for your/proc/var and/tmp filesystems, so you don't kill your FlashDisk too quick.
Well, I don't know if it's exactly in the wrong direction. It might be a step in an odd direction, but I think there's some wisdom to it if you consider how they intend their CPU's to be used. Transmeta doesn't want to build the fastest chip, or the most powerful chip. If they tried that, they would be stupid - Intel would grind them into the dust. Intel has money to burn on maufacturing technology and speed tweaking thier designs. Speed and power are brut force engineering problems, to some extent - if you're willing to spend more money than the other guy, you can build a faster CPU than they can. Intel (and, to a lesser extent, AMD) can amorize their costs over zillions of units, so Transmeta has no hope whatsoever of winning in a contest based mainly on capital expenditures. So, they have to be clever, and go somewhere where they can actually make a better product than Intel for a given purpose.
Since there is no real point in Transmeta going after Intel and AMD (at least not this year), they have instead elected to do something rather clever, and go after a market that Intel and AMD aren't serving very well - the mobile market.
By sacrificing a little performace, Crusoe chips could potentially bring some truely spectacular battary life to portable computers - and with lower power consumption, you can have smaller battaries, which are lighter... et cetera. And for mobile applications, you really don't need a powerful CPU - I've been using my Dell Latitude with a 366 MHz processor as my Linux workstation, and I have yet to encouter a situation when I really needed even that much power. I'd much rather it be smaller and lighter and last longer than be more powerfull. Don't get me wrong - power is good, but there are other parts of the equation that decide what a CPU is good for. Intel and AMD are going after a different part of the curve than Transmeta. That very fact shows that Transmeta has, at the very least, a compotent management team. Their success, should they find any, will show whether or not they are more than just compotent.
One of the neater ideas for using Crusoe processors would be to put them in servers (or, at least in servers where CPU performace isn't absolutely critical) that have to be up 24-7. If people are going to (wrongly) blame the power crisis in Califonia on technology companies and servers running all the time, the industry could at least take something positive from this and deploy less power-hungry servers.
For a web site that needs high bandwith but has uneven bandwith requirements (ie - gets a big rush in the middle of the day), you could configure a load balancer to point to Transmetta powered servers when the load was light, and allow the bigger UtraSparc or Xeon servers to go into standby mode. When the hits start to exceed te capacity of the Transmetta servers, the load balacer could wake up the bigger iron to handle the heavier load. No loss of capacity or increase in latency (well, not much, anyway), and dramatically reduced power consumption.
I can't imagine I'm the first person to think of this...
Um, did you read the article, or is this supposed to be funny? I'm a little confused.
You do realize that the tubing they are talking about has been sitting in the ground and buildings for more than 100 years? That they aren't talking about putting in any new tubing?
Just checking. I didn't know if I should mod this as Funny or Flaimbait, so I declined to do either.
As far as I have had experience, all interfaces between the public and a big company are like this. Just try to buy a house, or a car, or argue with the credit bureao.
Yes, technical support often does suck - but it's usually the general "customer service" that sucks the most. Many/. readers will know this from experience with Covad and other DSL providers. Once you got a technical person on the phone, you'd probably get your problem solved (or if not, you'd at least find out what it was and what to do about it). The runaround usually seem to come from the incopenence of people in billing, accouts, or some other such nonsense.
The same seems to be true everywhere I go. When my bank screws things up, it's much worse to try to get them to remove the chages than it is to get Dell or Gateway to fix something under warentee.
The only difference, I think, between the screwups and hastle that result from "hi tech" stuff is that people love to point out the irony of a sophisticated peice of hardware that inexplicably doesn't work. There's nothing new or interesting about how much paperwork you have to go through to buy a house, and there's nothing surprising about the how nasty banks are. But it is a surprise when a company otherwise eager to please fails to do so.
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The things that it clearly does not take into account are:
- Servers that come with Windows (or some other OS) that people wipe and install Linux on. Keep in mind that many vendors do not provide Linux as a pre-installed option, and (thanks to Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts) often do not offer to sell unconfigured systems. The result is that many companies who want to run Linux on their servers must buy Windows licenses anyway.
- Many companies and organizations build their servers from scratch. If you assume that all servers are purchased from vendors and OEMs, these servers will seem to materialize out of thin air. Also, people who are savvy enough to build a server from scratch are also more likely to make an informed decision about what type of server to use (and thus, be more likely to go with Linux or BSD).
- "Recycled" servers. In many companies, it is common practice to move aging desktop systems (especially the more powerful ones) into low-end server roles. For instance, intranet servers in small to medium sized companies. If the IT people know what they are doing, these former desktops will get formatted and rebuilt, and there's a good chance they'll get rebuilt with Linux, since one of the strong points of Linux is its ability to make good use of older hardware.
- Beleive it or not, some people dual-boot servers. This is especially convenient when you put the bootable image on a hot-swap drive sled. This may sound odd, but it is partiularly convenient for production enviornments, where you might only need a server up for a night or two after a commit cycle. It's also conveinent with large database enviornmetns, where you need to do periodic aggrigations. I really, really doubt that you'd be able to find this option on a vendor's configuration page.
- "Junker" servers, often built from aincent hardware. People save themselves piles of money by using 386's and such for routers and firewalls instead of paying for custom hardware. This is a good solution for many people, especially since Linux does a good job of utilizing older harware. This is different from "recycled" servers because routers and firewalls tend to be transparant peices of network infastructure. However, no one would despute that they are important.
There are probably a few situations that I'm leaving out. The point is, how important are vendor statistics for measuring the Linux market share?It seems to me that the only way to make informed statements about server market share is to gather statistics at the source. Put together a statistically significant sample of companies, individuals and organizations, and ask them for a list of the servers they use, a description of of each (including OS), and an explanation of their choices. This seems like the only way to actually answer the bigger question of server OS market share. The answer might not make anyone happy, but at least it would be an answer.
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So, wouldn't you have to establish a Wildlifeless Preserve, to uh, preserve the natural state of wildlife on Mars (which is to say, either dead or never alive)?
I guess it might make sense, but you'd have to sort of redefine preservation a little. Most nature preservation efforts and laws focus on things that are either alive, were once alive, or somehow relate to things that are alive. After all, nearly every square inch of Earth's surface contains life for some sort, so that's our bias. Even Antarctica - although not exactly in teaming multitudes or anything.
So what might this mean here on Earth? If there were a truely lifeless place on Earth, would it be better (in therms of the enviornment) to try to keep it that way, or do we have something of an obligation as living organizms to try to spread life to new places?
Sort of reminds me of some stuff from schismatrix.
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When we moved in, my roommates and I decided to set up a DSL line for out local LAN. Just like you said, the line test put us within the range for DSL - about 300 - 200 feet from the CO. Unfortunatly, Versizon (then Bell Atlantic) had aparantly added a coil of fiber inside the CO. That's right - according to Covad, there was fiber inside the CO, being used roughly as a patch cable. Thus, the whole Harbor Pont development (5000+ units, if I remember correctly) was unable to get DSL from anyone. Because of a patch-job that Bell Atlantic woudn't fix, Covad didn't have access to, and Flashcom... well, Flashcom didn't seem to be able to find it's butt with both hands, so they responded by opening three new accounts.
However, our tale of woe had a happy ending. Before Bell Atlandic owned up to the fiber thing, Covad came and installed a modem, and the thing couldn't find a link. So they came and installed it again, this time drilling more holes in our walls and breaking the phone patch box so that we didn't have a landline for a week. When the whole thing finally turned out to be impossible, we called Covad to give them their modem back. Covad told us that the modem belonged to Flashcom (which didn't sound right, since Covad was in charge of the actual installation). Flashcom told us that it belonged to ConcentricDSL. Concentric had no idea who the hell we were, so we started over with Covad, and repeated the cycle. After getting the runnaround again, we put it up on eBay, got $200 for it, and treated outselves to a nice dinner.
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First the floppy, now the CRT - where will it stop?
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If you want to make the comparison of manned spaceflight to the internet, then you would have to consider the current state of the art in manned spaceflight to be equivelant to the early days of ARPANET. In which case, of course it makes sense to restrict access to it. It's a relatively untested, unreliable technology that hasn't even reached its infancy. It costs tens of millions of dollars per person, and takes the efforts of thousands of skilled engineers to make it work. It should be done only when there's no other way to get the job done, which certainly debars the public, at least for now.
BTW - I did read the article. If you read my post, perhapse you would have realized that I mentioned the fact that it wasn't on the ISS. In my opinion, the fact that it's a purely Russian effort stengthens, not weakens, my argument. The Russians have fewer resources to squander.
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However, the ISS is a research station. They're supposed to be doing science and enginering stuff up there that will [someday, I hope] benifit all of us stuck down here in the gravity well. It somehow doesen't sit right with me that the Russians, however cash strapped they are, let a guy pay his way onto the ISS, and are planning to expand this (even if there won't be any more actual ISS visits). It would be like if CERN or Fermilab turned over their accelerators to someone who's willing to pay tons of cash to blow the hell out of a banana.
The ISS has been sucking huge amounts of money out of space programs that could do better science. For the price of the ISS, you could do hundreds of unmanned missions to Mars, and they would yeild mountains of real scientific data that would truely enhance our knowledge about, well, everything. If the ISS can't produce the same bang for the buck, it shouldn't be funded.
Space turism for the ultra-rich on or off the ISS strongly suggests that the scientific value of these manned missions is dubious.
Again, don't get me wrong here - I want to have humans in space, and if I could, I would jump at the chance to be one of them. But research money is a limited resource, and untill we have the technologies to do it economically, we should be spending out cash on either pure science or developing those technologies.
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I'm sorry - that was cheap.
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During that time, anyone can look up your patent and contest it. There is a formal procedure for challenging a patent prior to aproval. While it isn't exactly like prospective patents are posted on the avenues and streets of Washington for public discussion, they are available for review, and you can challenge them if you like.
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Could this ruling actually be in violation with treaties signed with the US and the WTO? I Hope not, but if it is, I hope Japan will hold its ground. A concervative aporach to patents is the only way to insure that they will actually do what they are supposed to - encourage inovation, not protect (and indirectly subsidize) research investments.
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(Sorry, I know this is a bit off topic - please humor me)
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I'm not altogether sure what criterion they use for deciding who is Jewish - it's not religious practice, and I don't think they follow the Orthodox rule that your mother must be Jewish.
Once you're there, there are rather extensive [government financed] support services to teach you Hebrew, locate housing, find a job, and so forth. Isrial has a well developed and rapidly growing technology sector, and I'm sure you could find a pretty cool job there. The only drawback to it is that Isrial is almost completely dominated by Microsoft products - aparantly, Hebrew language support was a long time comming in most other OS's. Perhapse you can do some good for the country by bringing knowledge of some decent software.
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This is horrible news, but perhapse there's a small silver lining to it - most authors have to wait until after their deaths to be recognized for thier contributions to literature. No one, I'm sure, is glad to see him go, but perhapse some progress can be made to establish comedic writing (especially his) as bona fide literature. Even if much of it was written to bring a laugh, Adams' work had more to say about philosiphy, morality and life than anything I've read before.
It has more of a place in classrooms, anyway, than the 19th centrury drivel most kids have to read in high school. So what if it isn't "serious" - it's brilliant work. Brilliant work is important in its own right. I don't think Douglas Adams would have wanted us to elevate him to the pantheon of the Greats - after all, so much of his best humor focused on mocking such pretension. By drawing out and making sport of our own absurdity, Adams' subtle message is simply to be reasonable. Reasonably speaking, he was a damn good author.
We'll all miss you, Douglas.
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Maybe the big problem is a lack of snazzy, clear cases on the open market - IBM might not want to go public with the news that the G4 won't work unless its in a spiffy clear case or a cruise missile.
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Sadly, Microsoft is smart enough to know what a bad idea this would be, coolness notwithstanding. It provide RMS an opportunity to give his Sermon On the Mount on national TV, and we all know he'd rise to the occation. It would be an event of epic proportions.
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This is a call to arms!
But we must all remember - Microsoft will never be beaten by words, so save them. If you want to put the scoundrels in Redmond in their place in history's dustbin, head out to your bookstore and pick up those tech books you've been meaning to read. Get started on that project you've been meaning to do. Squash those bugs in your source repositories. Finish writing that How-To, or think about redoing the documentation of your project. There are great projects out there that need your help, so fire up your build enviornment and lend a hand! It's time to fight, not argue - and our power lies in the strength of the software that we write.
So, the time has come to ask not what Free Software can do for you, but what you can do for Free Software!
And perhapse most importantly, help the nubies get on board! Get on those newsgroups, web forums and chat rooms! Start lending a hand and spreading what you know! That has always been what has made our community strong - where the documentation fails, the community lends its strength and know-how.
Everyone has something to contribute - even if you're not a coder, a 133t h4ker, or a bearded guru, you can still help your friends with configurations, installations and setups. This is, after all, our software.
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Once they saturated the market, it wasn't possible to make a real profit on mainframes becase the market was actually shrinking. So, they deftly turned things around by putting the emphasis on the service side of the business. It turned out that IBM is still making a tidy profit on their Big Iron even though the industry is shrinking every year.
Maybe Microsoft envisions the same thing happening to its Windows franchise, or at least the server aspect of it. They need to keep the revenue stream moving, so subscription-based licenses make sense for that. The real signs of trouble from Microsoft will be if they start going around saying that they want to stress "Customer Satisfaction" and start rolling out extensive service packages. I'd guess they would call them something weak like "Enterprise Premium Support" or some such managmenet-speak.
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Since there is no real point in Transmeta going after Intel and AMD (at least not this year), they have instead elected to do something rather clever, and go after a market that Intel and AMD aren't serving very well - the mobile market.
By sacrificing a little performace, Crusoe chips could potentially bring some truely spectacular battary life to portable computers - and with lower power consumption, you can have smaller battaries, which are lighter... et cetera. And for mobile applications, you really don't need a powerful CPU - I've been using my Dell Latitude with a 366 MHz processor as my Linux workstation, and I have yet to encouter a situation when I really needed even that much power. I'd much rather it be smaller and lighter and last longer than be more powerfull. Don't get me wrong - power is good, but there are other parts of the equation that decide what a CPU is good for. Intel and AMD are going after a different part of the curve than Transmeta. That very fact shows that Transmeta has, at the very least, a compotent management team. Their success, should they find any, will show whether or not they are more than just compotent.
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For a web site that needs high bandwith but has uneven bandwith requirements (ie - gets a big rush in the middle of the day), you could configure a load balancer to point to Transmetta powered servers when the load was light, and allow the bigger UtraSparc or Xeon servers to go into standby mode. When the hits start to exceed te capacity of the Transmetta servers, the load balacer could wake up the bigger iron to handle the heavier load. No loss of capacity or increase in latency (well, not much, anyway), and dramatically reduced power consumption.
I can't imagine I'm the first person to think of this...
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You do realize that the tubing they are talking about has been sitting in the ground and buildings for more than 100 years? That they aren't talking about putting in any new tubing?
Just checking. I didn't know if I should mod this as Funny or Flaimbait, so I declined to do either.
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Yes, technical support often does suck - but it's usually the general "customer service" that sucks the most. Many /. readers will know this from experience with Covad and other DSL providers. Once you got a technical person on the phone, you'd probably get your problem solved (or if not, you'd at least find out what it was and what to do about it). The runaround usually seem to come from the incopenence of people in billing, accouts, or some other such nonsense.
The same seems to be true everywhere I go. When my bank screws things up, it's much worse to try to get them to remove the chages than it is to get Dell or Gateway to fix something under warentee.
The only difference, I think, between the screwups and hastle that result from "hi tech" stuff is that people love to point out the irony of a sophisticated peice of hardware that inexplicably doesn't work. There's nothing new or interesting about how much paperwork you have to go through to buy a house, and there's nothing surprising about the how nasty banks are. But it is a surprise when a company otherwise eager to please fails to do so.
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