I'm still not convinced that ATA is suitable for enterprise use, by any manufacturer.
SATA is just fine. It's almost as fast as SCSI and as far as the seagate barracuda drives go, the SATA disk is identical (well 7200 rpm anyway) to the SCSI disk, except it is cheaper. The rub is the RAID controller though. A good SATA raid controller is every bit as reliable as a SCSI RAID controller. A crappy SATA RAID controller (aka Dell CERC) will sour your experience with SATA. Our Apple Xserve RAID is all ATA (PATA even, although the new one is SATA) and it has proven to be extremely reliable.
I'm afraid the headstart would be practically nothing. Obtaining orbit isn't a matter of altitude but rather speed. Shaving 30 miles off the distance is going to make no difference to the final speed you'll have to obtain get into orbit. And accelerating from 0 to 17,500 mph is still going to require almost as much fuel and oxidizer as it does now. Our best bet is to either a) try to find a way to push something into orbit without attaching a flying fuel tank by way of a mass driver, or to b) figure out more efficient rocket designs that can produce the same thrust with less fuel. Of course with a specific impulse rocket motor, there's only so much economy we can get anyway. Flying from a runway to space isn't really useful either, since the plane actually would require more fuel than a rocket to get to orbit, although maybe if we can harvest most of the oxidizer we need from the air, the extra fuel might be lighter than the rocket's LOX+fuel.
Two words: Ambient light. Paper can never be brighter than the ambient light (or the light that's shining on it. Thus under most circumstances, the paper is easy on the eyes since the light being reflected off the paper is not greater than the light that your eyes are already adjusted to see comfortably. Contrast this with a dark room and a bright, light-emitting monitor. The harsh glare off the monitor (really no different than any other kind of glare you see in nature on a bright sunny day) can really make your eyes strain and hurt. There's a reason why we wear sunglasses outside.
I long for the day when we can have hires virtual paper that's 100% reflective. Then electronic books will actually be desirable.
Somehow I don't think ubuntu can hold a candle to MacOS for her. Besides, MacOS runs so much nicer on her iBook than linux does. Which brings up another linux advocacy point. Sometimes we promote linux just to promote linux, even though it is not a good fit for some, like my sister.
There's no doubt about it that Linux really is in the stone age as far as managing software goes. Every time I help a newbie install Linux I dread the next question: "How do I install software." "Well it's easy. We just edit this source.list file here and add these repositories from dag, freshrpms, etc, and then you can just apt-get it. isn't that simple?" And they go running back to Windows. The point is that as developers and programmers and even tech-savvy people we can deal with this kind of thing, and in the end find it much faster than in the windows world.
Although there are times when it really is annoying. For example, I run Fedora Core, but I don't want to have upgrade the whole dang OS every 6 months. Once a year is almost too much. I tried to get beagle running, which required a patched kernel which is no big deal. Then I tried to install the latest mono libraries. They depended on a newer version of GTK than I had, so I upgraded that (used a SRPM). Then I found the gnome-sharp and other gnome-related bindings only worked with a newer version of these libraries. OF course to install those rpms would have required upgrading the whole OS to FC4 (dependency hell all the way back to glibc). So we've replaced DLL hell with dependency hell. Neither is good. If I could have somehow installed these newer libraries alongside my older ones, just for the newer apps to use, that would have been ideal. But package managers make that difficult (but not impossible).
Autopackage is a step in the right direction, but there are too many concerns about it (as mentioned in the previous posts) that either have not been addressed yet, or have been refused by the autopackage developers, including package signing, etc.
Watching my sister download and install software for her Mac really makes me ashamed to show anyone how stuff is done on linux. I wonder if the MacOS model might provide some insight into how to make things work. I'm not talking just about AppBundles, but also about Frameworks. Like linux, apple puts a lot of small libraries in/usr/lib. These libraries are really the domain of the system and so users should never mess with them (the old trust the distro idea, override them in the appbundle if necessary). However, large-scale application fromework libraries and dlls go into the/System/Library/Frameworks directory where you can install multiple versions. For example, I have Java 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5(5) all installed. Mono, GTK, Gnome libraries and similar things should also go in this place. If I need an app that needs the gnoem 2.12 libraries, I should be able to install them alongside the 2.10 libraries, but in a clean, modular way that can avoid dll hell. Then as far as app distribution goes, anything that is not a framework, but is a dependency of the app should go into the app bundle. There are some weaknesses to this approach, but it is worth thinking about anyway. Of particular note is that our build systems just don't want to deal with anything other than the standar/lib/usr/bin/ etc/ share/ directory structure. This fact does limit this endeavor greatly.
Judging by the comments on the blogs about autopackage by the ubuntu folks, they are pretty happy staying with the current state of things. I guess they don't really care if Linux goes beyond being a niche OS that only developers and techies use. Of course sometimes I feel the same way.
It's a tough problem and to date not a single OS or distribution of an OS (including MacOS, Linux, BSD, Windows) has yet to come up with a good solution.
The real reason windows can do updates without rebooting is that you can't replace in-use files since NTFS doesn't allow it. On unix, we've always had the idea of a reference-counted inode which we can replace at any time without killing the existing users of the file. Sounds from the article that this reboot manager is just a cludge to get around the fact that you still can't replace in-use files in Windows Longhorn.
It's a matter of cost. And not just in terms of money. To build a router out of gumstix, you would need to buy the main module, then buy the compact flash module so you can run a compact flash 802.11 card in it. Then you still don't have 5 ports and we're already up to $250 or so. Add to that having to build the OS (cross-compile it). Of course it is at that point a 400 mHZ, expandable machine. But the convenience (even with having to set up custom firmware) of having the linksys box already set up is what most people really want.
On buy.com, the WRT54GS is actually cheaper than the WRT54GL, and has more RAM and more flash (4mb and 32 mb respectively). Seems kind of lame that they take the same device that used to sell for $45 and jack the price to $70, just to take advantage of the "linux" thing.
So to anyone looking to buy this router, consider the WRT54GS. With more ram and storage, you can do more things with it. All for about the same price.
Also, avoid Sveasoft at all costs. They are slimy. I still haven't been refunded my money after I canceled my automatically-renewing annual protect, I mean firmware access, fee. They promised they would, but a month later and several unanswered e-mails and I'm still out my $20 bucks. Next week I'll lodge a complaint with paypal.
For the best capabilities, use openwrt. it rocks! I've done so much more with it than I did with sveasoft, thanks to having a small writable partition to place scripts and so forth, instead of just having to use the nvram.
Where I can I find the original story? This is interesting to me, but I'd rather not be maniupulated into driving traffic to some blog site like Mr. Roland Piquepaille likes to do (haven't seen any of his posts in a while, thank goodness). Not trying to troll here.
There was an episode of Futurama where companies would insert advertising into your dreams. Absolutely no escape there! Fry finds himself in the dream where he discovers that he's in class only wearing his underwear. Of course it's a particular brand of underwear.
No there is no NAT in IPv6. You simply don't need it. If you want security, you need to do proper firewalling. For example in my organization, outbound traffic will flow on IPv6 directly (which is the same effect that NAT has) but the firewall will prevent any direct connections back in. Even ping can be rejected, minimizing exposure. Honestly this is the more correct way to do it anyway. NAT is broken, plain and simple. And the sooner we can get rid of it the better.
True story. At our local unix user's group we had an older couple attend for the first time. We all introduced ourselves and told a little bit about why we were interested in linux or unix. When the couple had their turn to introduce themselves, they said they were trying to learn how to run linux because they had recently been under government mind control and they had discovered the MindGuard(tm) program and needed to run it. As the mindguard website states, MindGuard is not provided in a win32 version due to Windows being under government influence. So they needed to learn how to use linux to run it. It was all we could do to just nod politely and get on with the day's presentation. They left about half-way through (I guess Linux was a little overwhelming for them). After the presentation we spent a while going over the MindGuard source and enjoying the author's wit. Who would have though that the rand() function was actually a mind-control defeating function!
We have never again heard anything from these people. I hope they are still free from mind control.
Yes. This was exactly my point. The same reasoning can be applied to all religions that have similar beliefs. Thus to call for change within the organization to certain core beliefs is really an admission that one believes it to be false anyway. Now changing the structure of an organization to adapt to the needs of a society is another thing. Anyway I have to wonder sometimes why certain folks stay in their belief system if they feel so strongly that a core dogma is wrong, as the entire belief system has been invalidated by their arguments.
If I understand catholicism, the Pope is supposed to be Peter's successor, who communicates God's will to people. If that is what catholics believe, then asking for the Pope to change the dogma or doctrine of catholicism is an interesting proposition indeed.
Agreed. I read the first part of the article and was pretty excited since my powerbook 12" is coming up for replacement next year. I'd love to replace it with an intel pb 12". Then I read the entire model is going away. This is disappointing. I don't mind the look of the iBook (I think they are still keeping the 12" but adding a 13" wide-screen), but it's not near as classy as the powerbook. I hope they reconsider. the PB 12" is a perfect size for me with a full-size keyboard yet compact and quite light.
To each his own. The vast majority of users seem to prefer heavy anti-aliasing these days. I admit I didn't love it at first, but after using OS X (and it's heavy anti-aliasing) for some time, going back to windows even with cleartype is so painful. The fonts are the wrong contrast and the shapes are all wrong. So I install the webfonts on my linux box like you, but then I turn on full anti-aliasing with hinting turned completely off. And even without the webfonts package, Fedora Core looks pretty good out of the box this way. AA with subpixel rendering and no hinding does wonders to make fonts look good.
Since you've received few answers to you actual question, getting xen into the kernel means the xen patches required to run the linux kernel in a xen hypervisor (both as a guest and a host) will be a part of the mainstream kernel and be able to be built trivially. RedHat ships 3 different kernels now with FC4. One is a normal kernel available in both smp and non-smp configurations. Then we have the XenU kernel, which is a kernel designed to boot in a guest xen session. The Xen0 kernel is the kernel that you'd actually boot on top of xen and use as your main OS.
Once the Xen0 kernel is running on top of xen, you have basically a normal linux kernel running that does all the hardware support. Then you load up Xen guest machines running the Xen0 kernel and these run their in their own virtual machines complete with their own disk images and linux distro. So xen doesn't really have anything to do with running elf binaries on the other machine. If you ran FreeBSD in the guest, it would run those binaries inside of that OS and that libc. When Xen 3.0 comes out, if you have the new intel or amd chips that support on-chip virtualization, then Windows XP can even run as a guest underneath the linux kernel-Xen0 host.
In this case it doesn't matter where we get the electricity to make the hydrogen. This application is not about generating energy, but really about making a better battery. The hydrogen is just a container for the electricity that you'd normally have put in a lithium-ion battery. Hopefully the fuel-cell will have a much higher energy density than a conventional battery, finally allowing decent runtimes.
Giving incentives to "go green" is noble, but I wonder if such incentives really make sense economically and if they really are making the right kind of difference in terms of the environment. The fact that given the choice of sticking with your current vehicle, already paid for, and switching to a hybrid or newer car involves a cost that wouldn't be recovered for something like 100,000 miles for the average car owner. Furthermore efforts such as electic or even hybrid cars, as popular as the media makes them out to be, are not making car manufacturers much money. GM has all but canceled its hybrid program. The irony with GM is that the only place where hybrid made any sense at all is in the big SUVs.
Another big problem with "going green," though is that even if a large percentage of the population bought in, we still wouldn't be reducing gas mileage or green-house gases by very much due to all the older cars still on the road. For example, one 1960 or 1970s car could emit as much pollution (and guzzle gas) as 10 newer cars! Even cars in the 80s (big station wagons anyone?) burned more gas and were dirtier than cars today, which, as dirty as they are, have never been cleaner. So even though most of us drive fairly new cars, the old cars still compete for emission totals rather well.
So my point is that "going green" is a good idea, but we have to work on the underlying economics of it all. There are lots of little things that can dramatically reduce emissions and lower gas consumption right now with existing technology. Besides getting rid of old vehicles, the new systems that shut the car off at a red light can increase fuel efficiency by almost 20%, some studies have shown. That increase alone brings a non-hybrid car almost on par with a hybrid, at least for average driving, but makes it significantly more cost-effective than hybrid. Another study once showed that just altering people's driving habits (mostly impossible) to drive less agressively can also reap significant gas and emissions benefits. You've seen drivers that punch off the green light just in time to slam on the breaks at the next red light.
Biodiesel might have something; we'll just have to see. In the meantime we can do a lot to cut our fuel consumption and emissions, even without incentives, or even buying a new vehicle.
Gaim's WIMP theme (installed by default) seems to pick up all the theming cues from Windows XP just fine. Using the luna theme is looks pretty good. So while the look of the app is just fine, there are some "feel" issues that will never be resolved since GTK has its own set of feel policies. So I don't know what you are talking about with the windows 2000 visual style. Such a style hasn't been the default in 2 or 3 years.
My code is almost always xhtml compliant. And IE does a very poor job of rendering it. In fact I don't think IE 6 even supports the strict xhtml doctype. And CSS *does* suck on IE because if I code to the standards, things just don't work as one should expect. The box model is wrong, the alignment system is not consistant, etc. So if one was to sit down with a CSS and xhtml book and try to write a decent web page according to the specs, you just can't do it in IE unless you code for the bugs, which of course breaks the page on all other browsers. Even if all you ever do is use IE, CSS is broken enough so as to make it painful to use, even when you know about the IE bugs.
This next-generation kahuna interface makes extensive use of CSS, something IE totally sucks at. I would be interested to hear what the developers have to say about using CSS and these other technologies in IE and compared to Firefox. Pretty much every major web development house I know of develops on Firefox first, then hacks in the crap needed to make it run on IE. MS's team would obviously do it in reverse. I'd love to hear their comments on browser standards and IE 7's compliance with the standards that make this type of web application possible.
Definitely. A great circle route should go from tokyo to NY over northern canada. I'm sure there are some environmentalists who will complain, but there are way less people up there who will complain. By the time the plane is over the more populated parts of Quebec or even Newfoundland it would slow down to subsonic speed. Or fly out a bit farther over labrador and come into NY from the ocean, allowing supersonic speed to be maintained a while longer. I'll have to pull out my globe to get a better look at this. Supersonic travel may or may not be financially feasible, but it's fun to think about.
For me cross-platform has little to do with anything. It's about the development tools (no not Visual Studio). If a gnome app can be developed quicker with C# than C or C++, more power to you. Java just never has quite felt at home on Linux. It was always a slightly alien world that never quite integrated at all. Mono and C# seem to do a better job because it is easier to interface with existing C libraries, and the GTK (and probably QT) bindings are superb. The Mono/Gnome stack just has a better feel to it than Java. Unscientific, I know.
Even though cross-platform isn't my number one issue, having mono available on many platforms (unix, linux, mac, windows), is a plus. I'm not totally locked down and I can move when I want to. Finding Java for my embedded arm linux PDA, HPUX, or any other esoteric platform is very difficult. At least with mono it is possible.
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SATA is just fine. It's almost as fast as SCSI and as far as the seagate barracuda drives go, the SATA disk is identical (well 7200 rpm anyway) to the SCSI disk, except it is cheaper. The rub is the RAID controller though. A good SATA raid controller is every bit as reliable as a SCSI RAID controller. A crappy SATA RAID controller (aka Dell CERC) will sour your experience with SATA. Our Apple Xserve RAID is all ATA (PATA even, although the new one is SATA) and it has proven to be extremely reliable.
I'm afraid the headstart would be practically nothing. Obtaining orbit isn't a matter of altitude but rather speed. Shaving 30 miles off the distance is going to make no difference to the final speed you'll have to obtain get into orbit. And accelerating from 0 to 17,500 mph is still going to require almost as much fuel and oxidizer as it does now. Our best bet is to either a) try to find a way to push something into orbit without attaching a flying fuel tank by way of a mass driver, or to b) figure out more efficient rocket designs that can produce the same thrust with less fuel. Of course with a specific impulse rocket motor, there's only so much economy we can get anyway. Flying from a runway to space isn't really useful either, since the plane actually would require more fuel than a rocket to get to orbit, although maybe if we can harvest most of the oxidizer we need from the air, the extra fuel might be lighter than the rocket's LOX+fuel.
Two words: Ambient light. Paper can never be brighter than the ambient light (or the light that's shining on it. Thus under most circumstances, the paper is easy on the eyes since the light being reflected off the paper is not greater than the light that your eyes are already adjusted to see comfortably. Contrast this with a dark room and a bright, light-emitting monitor. The harsh glare off the monitor (really no different than any other kind of glare you see in nature on a bright sunny day) can really make your eyes strain and hurt. There's a reason why we wear sunglasses outside.
I long for the day when we can have hires virtual paper that's 100% reflective. Then electronic books will actually be desirable.
Somehow I don't think ubuntu can hold a candle to MacOS for her. Besides, MacOS runs so much nicer on her iBook than linux does. Which brings up another linux advocacy point. Sometimes we promote linux just to promote linux, even though it is not a good fit for some, like my sister.
There's no doubt about it that Linux really is in the stone age as far as managing software goes. Every time I help a newbie install Linux I dread the next question: "How do I install software." "Well it's easy. We just edit this source.list file here and add these repositories from dag, freshrpms, etc, and then you can just apt-get it. isn't that simple?" And they go running back to Windows. The point is that as developers and programmers and even tech-savvy people we can deal with this kind of thing, and in the end find it much faster than in the windows world.
/usr/lib. These libraries are really the domain of the system and so users should never mess with them (the old trust the distro idea, override them in the appbundle if necessary). However, large-scale application fromework libraries and dlls go into the /System/Library/Frameworks directory where you can install multiple versions. For example, I have Java 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5(5) all installed. Mono, GTK, Gnome libraries and similar things should also go in this place. If I need an app that needs the gnoem 2.12 libraries, I should be able to install them alongside the 2.10 libraries, but in a clean, modular way that can avoid dll hell. Then as far as app distribution goes, anything that is not a framework, but is a dependency of the app should go into the app bundle. There are some weaknesses to this approach, but it is worth thinking about anyway. Of particular note is that our build systems just don't want to deal with anything other than the standar /lib /usr /bin/ etc/ share/ directory structure. This fact does limit this endeavor greatly.
Although there are times when it really is annoying. For example, I run Fedora Core, but I don't want to have upgrade the whole dang OS every 6 months. Once a year is almost too much. I tried to get beagle running, which required a patched kernel which is no big deal. Then I tried to install the latest mono libraries. They depended on a newer version of GTK than I had, so I upgraded that (used a SRPM). Then I found the gnome-sharp and other gnome-related bindings only worked with a newer version of these libraries. OF course to install those rpms would have required upgrading the whole OS to FC4 (dependency hell all the way back to glibc). So we've replaced DLL hell with dependency hell. Neither is good. If I could have somehow installed these newer libraries alongside my older ones, just for the newer apps to use, that would have been ideal. But package managers make that difficult (but not impossible).
Autopackage is a step in the right direction, but there are too many concerns about it (as mentioned in the previous posts) that either have not been addressed yet, or have been refused by the autopackage developers, including package signing, etc.
Watching my sister download and install software for her Mac really makes me ashamed to show anyone how stuff is done on linux. I wonder if the MacOS model might provide some insight into how to make things work. I'm not talking just about AppBundles, but also about Frameworks. Like linux, apple puts a lot of small libraries in
Judging by the comments on the blogs about autopackage by the ubuntu folks, they are pretty happy staying with the current state of things. I guess they don't really care if Linux goes beyond being a niche OS that only developers and techies use. Of course sometimes I feel the same way.
It's a tough problem and to date not a single OS or distribution of an OS (including MacOS, Linux, BSD, Windows) has yet to come up with a good solution.
The real reason windows can do updates without rebooting is that you can't replace in-use files since NTFS doesn't allow it. On unix, we've always had the idea of a reference-counted inode which we can replace at any time without killing the existing users of the file. Sounds from the article that this reboot manager is just a cludge to get around the fact that you still can't replace in-use files in Windows Longhorn.
It's a matter of cost. And not just in terms of money. To build a router out of gumstix, you would need to buy the main module, then buy the compact flash module so you can run a compact flash 802.11 card in it. Then you still don't have 5 ports and we're already up to $250 or so. Add to that having to build the OS (cross-compile it). Of course it is at that point a 400 mHZ, expandable machine. But the convenience (even with having to set up custom firmware) of having the linksys box already set up is what most people really want.
On buy.com, the WRT54GS is actually cheaper than the WRT54GL, and has more RAM and more flash (4mb and 32 mb respectively). Seems kind of lame that they take the same device that used to sell for $45 and jack the price to $70, just to take advantage of the "linux" thing.
So to anyone looking to buy this router, consider the WRT54GS. With more ram and storage, you can do more things with it. All for about the same price.
Also, avoid Sveasoft at all costs. They are slimy. I still haven't been refunded my money after I canceled my automatically-renewing annual protect, I mean firmware access, fee. They promised they would, but a month later and several unanswered e-mails and I'm still out my $20 bucks. Next week I'll lodge a complaint with paypal.
For the best capabilities, use openwrt. it rocks! I've done so much more with it than I did with sveasoft, thanks to having a small writable partition to place scripts and so forth, instead of just having to use the nvram.
Where I can I find the original story? This is interesting to me, but I'd rather not be maniupulated into driving traffic to some blog site like Mr. Roland Piquepaille likes to do (haven't seen any of his posts in a while, thank goodness). Not trying to troll here.
There was an episode of Futurama where companies would insert advertising into your dreams. Absolutely no escape there! Fry finds himself in the dream where he discovers that he's in class only wearing his underwear. Of course it's a particular brand of underwear.
No there is no NAT in IPv6. You simply don't need it. If you want security, you need to do proper firewalling. For example in my organization, outbound traffic will flow on IPv6 directly (which is the same effect that NAT has) but the firewall will prevent any direct connections back in. Even ping can be rejected, minimizing exposure. Honestly this is the more correct way to do it anyway. NAT is broken, plain and simple. And the sooner we can get rid of it the better.
True story. At our local unix user's group we had an older couple attend for the first time. We all introduced ourselves and told a little bit about why we were interested in linux or unix. When the couple had their turn to introduce themselves, they said they were trying to learn how to run linux because they had recently been under government mind control and they had discovered the MindGuard(tm) program and needed to run it. As the mindguard website states, MindGuard is not provided in a win32 version due to Windows being under government influence. So they needed to learn how to use linux to run it. It was all we could do to just nod politely and get on with the day's presentation. They left about half-way through (I guess Linux was a little overwhelming for them). After the presentation we spent a while going over the MindGuard source and enjoying the author's wit. Who would have though that the rand() function was actually a mind-control defeating function!
We have never again heard anything from these people. I hope they are still free from mind control.
Yes. This was exactly my point. The same reasoning can be applied to all religions that have similar beliefs. Thus to call for change within the organization to certain core beliefs is really an admission that one believes it to be false anyway. Now changing the structure of an organization to adapt to the needs of a society is another thing. Anyway I have to wonder sometimes why certain folks stay in their belief system if they feel so strongly that a core dogma is wrong, as the entire belief system has been invalidated by their arguments.
If I understand catholicism, the Pope is supposed to be Peter's successor, who communicates God's will to people. If that is what catholics believe, then asking for the Pope to change the dogma or doctrine of catholicism is an interesting proposition indeed.
Agreed. I read the first part of the article and was pretty excited since my powerbook 12" is coming up for replacement next year. I'd love to replace it with an intel pb 12". Then I read the entire model is going away. This is disappointing. I don't mind the look of the iBook (I think they are still keeping the 12" but adding a 13" wide-screen), but it's not near as classy as the powerbook. I hope they reconsider. the PB 12" is a perfect size for me with a full-size keyboard yet compact and quite light.
AMD uses the DEC Alpha bus architecture on all the latest athlon chips. And it works very well.
To each his own. The vast majority of users seem to prefer heavy anti-aliasing these days. I admit I didn't love it at first, but after using OS X (and it's heavy anti-aliasing) for some time, going back to windows even with cleartype is so painful. The fonts are the wrong contrast and the shapes are all wrong. So I install the webfonts on my linux box like you, but then I turn on full anti-aliasing with hinting turned completely off. And even without the webfonts package, Fedora Core looks pretty good out of the box this way. AA with subpixel rendering and no hinding does wonders to make fonts look good.
Since you've received few answers to you actual question, getting xen into the kernel means the xen patches required to run the linux kernel in a xen hypervisor (both as a guest and a host) will be a part of the mainstream kernel and be able to be built trivially. RedHat ships 3 different kernels now with FC4. One is a normal kernel available in both smp and non-smp configurations. Then we have the XenU kernel, which is a kernel designed to boot in a guest xen session. The Xen0 kernel is the kernel that you'd actually boot on top of xen and use as your main OS.
Once the Xen0 kernel is running on top of xen, you have basically a normal linux kernel running that does all the hardware support. Then you load up Xen guest machines running the Xen0 kernel and these run their in their own virtual machines complete with their own disk images and linux distro. So xen doesn't really have anything to do with running elf binaries on the other machine. If you ran FreeBSD in the guest, it would run those binaries inside of that OS and that libc. When Xen 3.0 comes out, if you have the new intel or amd chips that support on-chip virtualization, then Windows XP can even run as a guest underneath the linux kernel-Xen0 host.
In this case it doesn't matter where we get the electricity to make the hydrogen. This application is not about generating energy, but really about making a better battery. The hydrogen is just a container for the electricity that you'd normally have put in a lithium-ion battery. Hopefully the fuel-cell will have a much higher energy density than a conventional battery, finally allowing decent runtimes.
Giving incentives to "go green" is noble, but I wonder if such incentives really make sense economically and if they really are making the right kind of difference in terms of the environment. The fact that given the choice of sticking with your current vehicle, already paid for, and switching to a hybrid or newer car involves a cost that wouldn't be recovered for something like 100,000 miles for the average car owner. Furthermore efforts such as electic or even hybrid cars, as popular as the media makes them out to be, are not making car manufacturers much money. GM has all but canceled its hybrid program. The irony with GM is that the only place where hybrid made any sense at all is in the big SUVs.
Another big problem with "going green," though is that even if a large percentage of the population bought in, we still wouldn't be reducing gas mileage or green-house gases by very much due to all the older cars still on the road. For example, one 1960 or 1970s car could emit as much pollution (and guzzle gas) as 10 newer cars! Even cars in the 80s (big station wagons anyone?) burned more gas and were dirtier than cars today, which, as dirty as they are, have never been cleaner. So even though most of us drive fairly new cars, the old cars still compete for emission totals rather well.
So my point is that "going green" is a good idea, but we have to work on the underlying economics of it all. There are lots of little things that can dramatically reduce emissions and lower gas consumption right now with existing technology. Besides getting rid of old vehicles, the new systems that shut the car off at a red light can increase fuel efficiency by almost 20%, some studies have shown. That increase alone brings a non-hybrid car almost on par with a hybrid, at least for average driving, but makes it significantly more cost-effective than hybrid. Another study once showed that just altering people's driving habits (mostly impossible) to drive less agressively can also reap significant gas and emissions benefits. You've seen drivers that punch off the green light just in time to slam on the breaks at the next red light.
Biodiesel might have something; we'll just have to see. In the meantime we can do a lot to cut our fuel consumption and emissions, even without incentives, or even buying a new vehicle.
Gaim's WIMP theme (installed by default) seems to pick up all the theming cues from Windows XP just fine. Using the luna theme is looks pretty good. So while the look of the app is just fine, there are some "feel" issues that will never be resolved since GTK has its own set of feel policies. So I don't know what you are talking about with the windows 2000 visual style. Such a style hasn't been the default in 2 or 3 years.
My code is almost always xhtml compliant. And IE does a very poor job of rendering it. In fact I don't think IE 6 even supports the strict xhtml doctype. And CSS *does* suck on IE because if I code to the standards, things just don't work as one should expect. The box model is wrong, the alignment system is not consistant, etc. So if one was to sit down with a CSS and xhtml book and try to write a decent web page according to the specs, you just can't do it in IE unless you code for the bugs, which of course breaks the page on all other browsers. Even if all you ever do is use IE, CSS is broken enough so as to make it painful to use, even when you know about the IE bugs.
This next-generation kahuna interface makes extensive use of CSS, something IE totally sucks at. I would be interested to hear what the developers have to say about using CSS and these other technologies in IE and compared to Firefox. Pretty much every major web development house I know of develops on Firefox first, then hacks in the crap needed to make it run on IE. MS's team would obviously do it in reverse. I'd love to hear their comments on browser standards and IE 7's compliance with the standards that make this type of web application possible.
Definitely. A great circle route should go from tokyo to NY over northern canada. I'm sure there are some environmentalists who will complain, but there are way less people up there who will complain. By the time the plane is over the more populated parts of Quebec or even Newfoundland it would slow down to subsonic speed. Or fly out a bit farther over labrador and come into NY from the ocean, allowing supersonic speed to be maintained a while longer. I'll have to pull out my globe to get a better look at this. Supersonic travel may or may not be financially feasible, but it's fun to think about.
For me cross-platform has little to do with anything. It's about the development tools (no not Visual Studio). If a gnome app can be developed quicker with C# than C or C++, more power to you. Java just never has quite felt at home on Linux. It was always a slightly alien world that never quite integrated at all. Mono and C# seem to do a better job because it is easier to interface with existing C libraries, and the GTK (and probably QT) bindings are superb. The Mono/Gnome stack just has a better feel to it than Java. Unscientific, I know.
Even though cross-platform isn't my number one issue, having mono available on many platforms (unix, linux, mac, windows), is a plus. I'm not totally locked down and I can move when I want to. Finding Java for my embedded arm linux PDA, HPUX, or any other esoteric platform is very difficult. At least with mono it is possible.