We're not talking about some pithy little 3rd-world nation like Afganistan, here; IIRC, China has the largest standing army in the world, and while I don't think there's any real chance that they would march on the North American continent, it wouldn't be the kind of one-sided battle that the US fights these days.
I mean, c'mon! In the last set of raids in Afganistan, *eight* US soldiers died, compared to several hundred Taliban/Al Quaida/"whatever poor bastards happened to be non-American, and in the area" casualties. That isn't a war, it's a massacre. Yes, our soldiers may be "brave fighting men," but they're also immensely better-equipped and nourished, and being constantly resupplied by the rich motherland.
I'm really getting tired of the argument that a single OS should be targetted at every imaginable application. That's exactly the kind of thinking that has turned Windows into the painful environment it is for any system administrator or programmer.
For example, the attributes that make a great gaming platform (low latency, lots of multimedia device support, good graphics libraries, easy single-user setup and configuration) are not the same as those that define the server market (high reliability, clustering and RAID, easily automated and administered remotely). Why should Linux (or any single OS) be the "One True Way" for both of these, much less for any and every potential market out there?
Personally, I'd rather boot into something like OpenBeOS (once it's ready, of course) for media work, switch to Linux when I'm doing network code development, and maybe leave a copy of OpenBSD around for the times I'm feeling paranoid.
Oh, yeah; the US has a great history of being very understanding about the desire of a minority segment of the population wanting to secede and become their own nation. Ever heard of the Civil War? You ought to look into it some time, and think about how much *more* aggressive the federal government has become in the intervening 150 years.
No industrialized, capitalistic nation in the world is going to sit by and let a significant piece of their most productive citizens form an independent governing body. You'd be better off joining (or starting) some major corporation; they're definately going to have a lot more real power in the world political scene than any democratically-elected council.
Actually, China has a bigger army. We do way more international trade though, so we hold more sway over the business world.
Our army is only really effective as a deterrant against, say, civil-war and invasion-racked third-world countries who have no real defenses to offer. Any of the G7-class nations would tell us to go stick our head in the sand, if military power were the only thing being weighed, especially since we wouldn't be able to move on them without attracting the ire of their allies.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that the network infrastructure level is the place for security to go. Ignoring 802.11 because WEP is ineffective would be like saying that Ethernet or TCP/IP are inherently broken because you can sniff any packet on the wire.
We have to get the connections up and running first, though. Once you have the wire-level link up, *then* you can worry about security. Set up a VPN link through your personal firewall, or do everything over SSH port tunelling.
Of course, a network with no users is inherently the most secure. It's also pretty damn boring.
So, Apple buys a multi-user UNIX workstation OS with no major multimedia tricks to offer, instead of a fast, lean media system. They pay twice as much, and basically waste three years trying to get the two groups of programmers to speak to each other. (I can just imagine the OS development team meetings: "Okay, we're going to use AppleScript for this utility."..."No, you're not! It's csh or nothing!")
They release this two-headed monster, and after four updates and two CPU speed bumps, it is actually responsive enough to keep die-hard Mac fans from complaining endlessly. Of course, you still have to enter a password to install new screensaver, and there still isn't a Photoshop port, but if you're a UNIX weenie with a hardware fetish, it's a pretty fun system to play around with.
Conclusion: the Jobs personality cult cost Apple's users the possiblity of a sane upgrade to their beloved OS, and instead gave them an ugly duckling which may eventually reclaim most of the usability of the "Classic" MacOS.
That's only really true if you're trying to target the same market as current PCs. Personally, I think that the idea that the same machine, running the same OS, should stretch to cover every possible user and application is rediculous. The system that would make me happy while coding (customizable, UNIXy, lots of programming tools) would make my grandmother miserable when she just wants to type a letter or check her email.
Look at Palm -- they started completely from scratch, and continue to beat MS soundly at the platform vendor game, despite the fact that neither Word, Excel, or IE run on PalmOS. How can this be? Simple: the target applications and environments that a Palm is well-suited for are not the same as those a full-size desktop PC is good for.
Be actually started out gunning for a very specific market: multimedia content producers. They wanted to be where Apple is now, with a fast, single-user OS that had great audio, video, and graphics tools. Unfortunately, they didn't lure enough developers to the BeOS before the public unveiling, and their hardware hit the market just at the PC clone wars were really dropping prices through the floor.
If Be had been able to offer people a killer app along with their OS, they might have hung on long enough to grab a safe niche position in the market. Final Cut Pro on a modern BeBox would be a beautiful thing, indeed.
Personally, I think the single person responsible for killing Be was Steve Jobs. If Apple had bought Be, instead of his pet project NeXT, and used BeOS as the core of OS X (or its equivalent), it could have been on the market three years earlier, and would be better-suited for Apple's core market (single-user installations for media pros and students).
Now, it just remains to be seen if Palm can do a better job than Apple did of integrating two wildly different operating systems into a new hybrid design. Unfortunately, they don't have a lot of time; Microsoft is going to keep shoving Windows down the throat of every hardware manufacturer on the planet as long as they have the chance, and right now Palm is getting seriously outclassed by Compaq in the hardware arena.
I think that marketing is the one thing that's allowed Apple to keep their head above water in recent years. Have you been inside an Apple store? The internal design is open, they have machines set up and running (gasp!) actual software, just like you could do at home, and they have a bunch of attentive, friendly salespeople who know what the hell they're talking about roaming the store to answer questions, etc.
Sure, it might not appeal to a hard-core, alpha geek who prefers to build their own boxes from parts they buy at a dark, warehouse-sized discount store, but to your average consumer it's like a breath of fresh air. Also, their print ads (at least since the B&W G3s came out) have been consistently well done.
At this point, anyone other than Microsoft, IBM, and Dell who can stay in the PC game without whoring themselves out to the beige-cubicle-box market deserves some serious respect. Most Wintel manufacturers practically can't give away new PCs to home users, while Apple has actually managed to coax new customers over to their side of the fence, and keep them consistently upgrading every couple of years.
I think the secret is actually just that Apple manages to make their new designs look and feel truly new, rather than just cramming twice the clock speed and RAM into the same, boring machine. When you buy a new Mac, every part, from the case, to the OS, to the mouse, is at least slightly improved, in appearance if not in functionality, than it was on the last one.
Don't let yourself get confused about the respective roles of marketing and sales. Marketing is all about listening to what your customers are asking for, predicting trends, and shaping your product to meet their needs. The sales guys are the ones responsible for pushing the finished product to customers. Apple's level of polish and "consumer touch" in their products, stores, and ads shows that they definately understand how to market their products. If they've failed significantly, it's in the area of sales, where you pretty much have to give up on any sense of quality or design if it means you can ship a few more boxes.
Most PC manufacturers go that route; hence the total lack of attention paid to the physical design of their product. Whether you buy a Wintel from Compaq, Gateway, HP, eMachine, Dell, or some mom-and-pop clone builder, you're going to get more or less the same machine, with a nearly identical case, monitor, peripherials, software, etc.
Of course, Microsoft should get some of the blame for this; it's hard to make your product truly distinctive when you are absolutely required to make it support the newest versions of Windows and Office, no questions asked. The kind of risks that Apple takes periodically (moving to PowerPC chips, ditching the floppy drive, and totally re-writing their OS) would give any Wintel company's entire board of directors heart attacks.
That's right: most computers are sold as consumer products, not industrial tools. The readership of/. may forget this, but "mom and pop" customers probably won't notice the difference.
Ideals don't last long in a real capitalist market. You profit more, and you win. Game over.
Unfortunately, "credible" in this context may boil down to, "defended by the most expensive lawyers/lobbying on earth". The only real hope that the GPL has may be defense from folks like IBM, not the FSF, or any of the small, independent developers or software houses using it.
Common sense and existing law may say that making a single digital copy of a piece of music, software, etc. should fall under "fair use," but the RIAA and MPAA can still get trash like the DMCA made into law, and defended in court. Remember, this is America, where money == power, period.
Personally, I don't have much of a vested interest in who distributes MySQL, since I don't use it, and probably won't any time soon. However, as one of the first court cases to test the enforceability of the GPL, it think that it's critical that MySQL AB win. If they can't take on another small company over a GPL violation, how in the hell can we expect anyone to be able to stand up to a BigCo that decides to rip off their GPL'd code?
I think that government agencies are more interested in having the potential to know whay any single person or group is doing, rather than literally needing to know what everyone is doing, all of the time.
What worries me is the possibility that corporations could have effectively the same amount of power, with none of the public scrutiny, accountability, or mission to "protect" (at least in theory) those they watch. As you say, individuals can (and do) protect their privacy in dealings with each other, with or without the threat of government intervention. Massive corporations, OTOH, are effectively immune to any power less than the largest national governments.
My school had a similar setup -- fast Ethernet in the dorms, somthing like three T3 connections to the net, Alpha web and file servers, and no firewall blocking connections to student machines. This meant that everyone with a hard drive bigger than 1 gig was running their own Napster/warez/whatever server, and downloading everything they could get their hands on. Even with only 1200 students, the effective bandwidth was slightly worse than I get at home with a 128Kbps DSL line.
I second the recommendation, but if the money is burning a hole in your pocket, spend it on an 802.11 access point, not the fast Ethernet router. If you ever use a laptop or PDA, you'll thank yourself later.
My old school had a campus radio station, and about 1200 students. Last I heard, they were considering an on-campus-only webcast of the radio broadcast (since the signal was to weak to reach many parts of campus, especially the many "basement" work and rec rooms). So, assuming even 10% listenership, and the cheapest licensing schedule (for non-CPB-funded "public" stations) their fees would look something like this:
That's right, folks, a college radio station with just over a hundred listeners could reasonably pay over $500 per day just for the privilege of putting their broadcast on the web.
Pick up a bunch of refurb iPaq 3600/3700 handhelds ($350-400 ea.), slap Familiar on them, and you should be ready to go. Oh yeah, they do ad-hoc 802.11, too, so in non-emergency situations you can do normal community networking with them.
I'm not even going to try to evaluate the technology Cringely keeps rolling out week after week: IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), and between the UWB debate last week, and now wavelets for networking, I'm throwing in the towel.
However, he keeps talking about how all these new technologies are going to roll out any day now, with no increase in cost. That's simply wrong. From the cable (or telco, ISP, etc.) point of view, they have basically no reason to drop the prices on their current services more than a pittance -- people are still queueing up on six-month waiting lists for good ol' 256Kbit DSL, so why should they turn around and offer 1-10Gbit for the same price?
You could argue that competition will drive prices down, but that would be naive as well. The telecommunications market isn't open: it's a cabal, just like the recording industry, and other favorite/. demons. Collusion between the few big players will keep any new technology carefully overpriced until the last possible drop of profit has been squeezed out of the old.
So, what about Red Hat's version of Postgres?
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Oracle Switching To Linux
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If Oracle is going to be working with Red Hat to offer an "official" Linux version of their database, does that mean the end of the (admittedly rather pricy) Red Hat-branded version of PostgreSQL? If not, are they going to offer a migration path for users who start with the Postgres package, and eventually decide that they need the replication/Java support/marketspeak-compilance of an Oracle solution?
But, looking at Apple's DVD-R compatibility list, they say that a PS2 works fine.
Unfortunately, I'm sure that Sony won't allow redistribution of their accellerated X server; otherwise, you might be able to ship pure Linux game packages on DVD-R.
Sorry, but Wine only works on x86 boxes, not anything running Linux. You could run Bochs, but from the performance I've seen it put out on a 500MHz G4 system, I wouldn't recommend it.
Unfortunately, you're going to have a hard time with a lot of normal Linux apps on one of these bad boys, given the extremely limited (and poorly expandable) RAM.
I have an old PowerBook G3 that I'd been planning on subjecting to a similar conversion to the first item (the old radio case) mentioned, but hadn't figured out an appropriately anachronistic mechanism for the CD-ROM drive. I'm not sure if the pop-out internal drive can be adapted to a vertical orientation, but since it's one of the "old school" models that actually holds the CD in place, I just might be able to pull it off.
My basic plan had been to mount the thing in a largish jewelry box, replacing the lower storage compartments with the mainboard, keyboard and trackpad (painted to match, of course), and mounting the LCD on the underside of the lid. That would do prevent the classic fresnel lens for the display, of course, but it would mean that the whole thing would sort of "disappear" when placed on an end-table or desk.
First, let me say that I think this is a commendable idea -- I grew up in towns of one to three thousand people, well outside of major urban areas, and any access I had to computers prior to high school was a special experience. As the technology needed to do highly mobile, Internet-connected computing gets smaller, cheaper, and more reliable, this kind of thing just becomes more and more appealing.
As far as the actual equipment used is concerned, I think there are better ways to go than a big truck full of gear. I think the best example to follow might be the sort of "mobile lab" starting to be used by a lot of schools: inexpensive laptops for each student, with 802.11 connecting them to a "server on wheels", which in turn handles user profiles/home directories, Internet connectivity, etc. If there's not going to be reliable hard-wired net connections in many of the areas, look into business wireless service; a number of digital cellular networks are starting to offer ~128Kb/sec dialup connections, which can certainly (with a proxy cache or compressed VNC gateway running on the classroom server) handle serving 15-20 students for basic email and browsing.
For hardware, if you're looking at new purchases, I think you'd be hard pressed to find better machines than the recent iBooks: they're sturdy, compact, fairly inexpensive (especially with Apple's educational discounts), and can run either OS-X or Linux without a hitch. With a decent KDE or GNOME setup, they could look and feel to the user eerily like a Win2k/XP machine, but you save $500+ on application licenses for each box.
Go for it, but don't forget that things have progressed well past the point where computing requires big iron and lots of space.
The biggest problem that I have with JSP/Servlet/EJB development is that very, very few people using those APIs actually do a decent job of implementing a "great OO design," and all the additional overhead built in to the J2EE platform just bogs the thing down. The whole point of the J2EE spec is to create an environment in which the programmer can't screw up a transaction, write non-thread-safe (or even multi-threaded) code, or hack together their own improvised patch for a certain type of database, browser, etc. You might as well be writing in Cold Fusion for all the freedom and flexibility you get.
For a really large application, with dozens/hundreds of developers, hundreds of thousands of users, and millions of transactions being processed regularly, the over-engineering of the J2EE framework can pay off. For anything that totals less than about 50,000 lines of code, or that doesn't need a lot of built-in industrial-strength transaction processing and legacy system integration, though, it's just overkill. And every time your JSP wants a single variable from an EJB, something like the following happens on the backend:
Client makes request for http://someserver/content/dyn_page.jsp?sessionId=" xjfoi490fijs"&username="foobar"...
Web server forwards request to J2EE app server
App server checks security context, last update time of JSP source file, request data, etc.
JSP, running as a servlet, receives the request data
The output contains a value pulled from an EJB, so a JNDI lookup and CORBA call is performed to locate the EJB server
A stub proxy for the EJB is loaded, and a CORBA connection is opened between the servlet and EJB servers
The method request is made, and its result is serialized, passed over IIOP to the servlet container, and deserialized
Finally, the servlet finishes writing the output, and returns control to the web server, which replies to the client
And yes, in theory J2EE apps are portable between application and web servers, as well as underlying operating system. However, that assumes that every vendor supports the full spec, (which almost no one does) that they use the same version, (which they certainly don't) and that the developers can resist using any of the oh-so-tempting add-ons, native libraries, and convenience methods that each of the app server vendors dangle in front of them.
Finally, JSPs are just about the biggest letdown of any dynamic web tech I've used. They actually discourage the seperation of static content, dynamically-updated portions, and application logic. You get an equal amount of support for OO design in ePerl, and have to jump through far fewer hoops. If you want compiled "add-on" components, use the Apache module APIs (in C, Perl, Python, etc.). Both the development process and the finished application will be faster and easier to maintain, and won't require a wall of brand-new Sun Enterprise boxes to run.
And yes, I know of which I speak. My last major programming project was a J2EE-based web application that, though fairly well optimized (with a lot of quick shortcut code, PL/SQL procedures handling much of the business logic, and Apache providing all of the static content) could bring a brand-new four-processor Sun to its knees when all ten people in the office tried to "load test" it.
My advice to those who want a high-performance web application toolkit is to do what developers have been doing for a long time: find a starting point that already does some of what you need, and build on it. Don't drop $50k on a license for WebLogic if 85% of its functionality is going to go wasted.
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We're not talking about some pithy little 3rd-world nation like Afganistan, here; IIRC, China has the largest standing army in the world, and while I don't think there's any real chance that they would march on the North American continent, it wouldn't be the kind of one-sided battle that the US fights these days.
I mean, c'mon! In the last set of raids in Afganistan, *eight* US soldiers died, compared to several hundred Taliban/Al Quaida/"whatever poor bastards happened to be non-American, and in the area" casualties. That isn't a war, it's a massacre. Yes, our soldiers may be "brave fighting men," but they're also immensely better-equipped and nourished, and being constantly resupplied by the rich motherland.
The spec is called OLE Compound Documents, and an open source import/export library was recently added to the Apache Jakarta stable of projects.
I'm really getting tired of the argument that a single OS should be targetted at every imaginable application. That's exactly the kind of thinking that has turned Windows into the painful environment it is for any system administrator or programmer.
For example, the attributes that make a great gaming platform (low latency, lots of multimedia device support, good graphics libraries, easy single-user setup and configuration) are not the same as those that define the server market (high reliability, clustering and RAID, easily automated and administered remotely). Why should Linux (or any single OS) be the "One True Way" for both of these, much less for any and every potential market out there?
Personally, I'd rather boot into something like OpenBeOS (once it's ready, of course) for media work, switch to Linux when I'm doing network code development, and maybe leave a copy of OpenBSD around for the times I'm feeling paranoid.
Oh, yeah; the US has a great history of being very understanding about the desire of a minority segment of the population wanting to secede and become their own nation. Ever heard of the Civil War? You ought to look into it some time, and think about how much *more* aggressive the federal government has become in the intervening 150 years.
No industrialized, capitalistic nation in the world is going to sit by and let a significant piece of their most productive citizens form an independent governing body. You'd be better off joining (or starting) some major corporation; they're definately going to have a lot more real power in the world political scene than any democratically-elected council.
Actually, China has a bigger army. We do way more international trade though, so we hold more sway over the business world.
Our army is only really effective as a deterrant against, say, civil-war and invasion-racked third-world countries who have no real defenses to offer. Any of the G7-class nations would tell us to go stick our head in the sand, if military power were the only thing being weighed, especially since we wouldn't be able to move on them without attracting the ire of their allies.
Umm...corporations have social security numbers. In a painfully literal, legal sense, they're as "alive" as you or I.
(Well, as alive as I am, anyway; no offence, but I don't know you from a grad student's AI project.)
I'm sorry, but I don't think that the network infrastructure level is the place for security to go. Ignoring 802.11 because WEP is ineffective would be like saying that Ethernet or TCP/IP are inherently broken because you can sniff any packet on the wire.
We have to get the connections up and running first, though. Once you have the wire-level link up, *then* you can worry about security. Set up a VPN link through your personal firewall, or do everything over SSH port tunelling.
Of course, a network with no users is inherently the most secure. It's also pretty damn boring.
So, Apple buys a multi-user UNIX workstation OS with no major multimedia tricks to offer, instead of a fast, lean media system. They pay twice as much, and basically waste three years trying to get the two groups of programmers to speak to each other. (I can just imagine the OS development team meetings: "Okay, we're going to use AppleScript for this utility."..."No, you're not! It's csh or nothing!")
They release this two-headed monster, and after four updates and two CPU speed bumps, it is actually responsive enough to keep die-hard Mac fans from complaining endlessly. Of course, you still have to enter a password to install new screensaver, and there still isn't a Photoshop port, but if you're a UNIX weenie with a hardware fetish, it's a pretty fun system to play around with.
Conclusion: the Jobs personality cult cost Apple's users the possiblity of a sane upgrade to their beloved OS, and instead gave them an ugly duckling which may eventually reclaim most of the usability of the "Classic" MacOS.
Stupid Steve.
That's only really true if you're trying to target the same market as current PCs. Personally, I think that the idea that the same machine, running the same OS, should stretch to cover every possible user and application is rediculous. The system that would make me happy while coding (customizable, UNIXy, lots of programming tools) would make my grandmother miserable when she just wants to type a letter or check her email.
Look at Palm -- they started completely from scratch, and continue to beat MS soundly at the platform vendor game, despite the fact that neither Word, Excel, or IE run on PalmOS. How can this be? Simple: the target applications and environments that a Palm is well-suited for are not the same as those a full-size desktop PC is good for.
Be actually started out gunning for a very specific market: multimedia content producers. They wanted to be where Apple is now, with a fast, single-user OS that had great audio, video, and graphics tools. Unfortunately, they didn't lure enough developers to the BeOS before the public unveiling, and their hardware hit the market just at the PC clone wars were really dropping prices through the floor.
If Be had been able to offer people a killer app along with their OS, they might have hung on long enough to grab a safe niche position in the market. Final Cut Pro on a modern BeBox would be a beautiful thing, indeed.
Personally, I think the single person responsible for killing Be was Steve Jobs. If Apple had bought Be, instead of his pet project NeXT, and used BeOS as the core of OS X (or its equivalent), it could have been on the market three years earlier, and would be better-suited for Apple's core market (single-user installations for media pros and students).
Now, it just remains to be seen if Palm can do a better job than Apple did of integrating two wildly different operating systems into a new hybrid design. Unfortunately, they don't have a lot of time; Microsoft is going to keep shoving Windows down the throat of every hardware manufacturer on the planet as long as they have the chance, and right now Palm is getting seriously outclassed by Compaq in the hardware arena.
I think that marketing is the one thing that's allowed Apple to keep their head above water in recent years. Have you been inside an Apple store? The internal design is open, they have machines set up and running (gasp!) actual software, just like you could do at home, and they have a bunch of attentive, friendly salespeople who know what the hell they're talking about roaming the store to answer questions, etc.
Sure, it might not appeal to a hard-core, alpha geek who prefers to build their own boxes from parts they buy at a dark, warehouse-sized discount store, but to your average consumer it's like a breath of fresh air. Also, their print ads (at least since the B&W G3s came out) have been consistently well done.
At this point, anyone other than Microsoft, IBM, and Dell who can stay in the PC game without whoring themselves out to the beige-cubicle-box market deserves some serious respect. Most Wintel manufacturers practically can't give away new PCs to home users, while Apple has actually managed to coax new customers over to their side of the fence, and keep them consistently upgrading every couple of years.
I think the secret is actually just that Apple manages to make their new designs look and feel truly new, rather than just cramming twice the clock speed and RAM into the same, boring machine. When you buy a new Mac, every part, from the case, to the OS, to the mouse, is at least slightly improved, in appearance if not in functionality, than it was on the last one.
Don't let yourself get confused about the respective roles of marketing and sales. Marketing is all about listening to what your customers are asking for, predicting trends, and shaping your product to meet their needs. The sales guys are the ones responsible for pushing the finished product to customers. Apple's level of polish and "consumer touch" in their products, stores, and ads shows that they definately understand how to market their products. If they've failed significantly, it's in the area of sales, where you pretty much have to give up on any sense of quality or design if it means you can ship a few more boxes.
Most PC manufacturers go that route; hence the total lack of attention paid to the physical design of their product. Whether you buy a Wintel from Compaq, Gateway, HP, eMachine, Dell, or some mom-and-pop clone builder, you're going to get more or less the same machine, with a nearly identical case, monitor, peripherials, software, etc.
Of course, Microsoft should get some of the blame for this; it's hard to make your product truly distinctive when you are absolutely required to make it support the newest versions of Windows and Office, no questions asked. The kind of risks that Apple takes periodically (moving to PowerPC chips, ditching the floppy drive, and totally re-writing their OS) would give any Wintel company's entire board of directors heart attacks.
Hmm...sounds a lot like the AltiVec engine that's been in G4 chips for the last, what, two years?
Wow, what will those "innovators" at AMD and Intel think of next?
That's right: most computers are sold as consumer products, not industrial tools. The readership of /. may forget this, but "mom and pop" customers probably won't notice the difference.
Ideals don't last long in a real capitalist market. You profit more, and you win. Game over.
Unfortunately, "credible" in this context may boil down to, "defended by the most expensive lawyers/lobbying on earth". The only real hope that the GPL has may be defense from folks like IBM, not the FSF, or any of the small, independent developers or software houses using it.
Common sense and existing law may say that making a single digital copy of a piece of music, software, etc. should fall under "fair use," but the RIAA and MPAA can still get trash like the DMCA made into law, and defended in court. Remember, this is America, where money == power, period.
Personally, I don't have much of a vested interest in who distributes MySQL, since I don't use it, and probably won't any time soon. However, as one of the first court cases to test the enforceability of the GPL, it think that it's critical that MySQL AB win. If they can't take on another small company over a GPL violation, how in the hell can we expect anyone to be able to stand up to a BigCo that decides to rip off their GPL'd code?
I think that government agencies are more interested in having the potential to know whay any single person or group is doing, rather than literally needing to know what everyone is doing, all of the time.
What worries me is the possibility that corporations could have effectively the same amount of power, with none of the public scrutiny, accountability, or mission to "protect" (at least in theory) those they watch. As you say, individuals can (and do) protect their privacy in dealings with each other, with or without the threat of government intervention. Massive corporations, OTOH, are effectively immune to any power less than the largest national governments.
My school had a similar setup -- fast Ethernet in the dorms, somthing like three T3 connections to the net, Alpha web and file servers, and no firewall blocking connections to student machines. This meant that everyone with a hard drive bigger than 1 gig was running their own Napster/warez/whatever server, and downloading everything they could get their hands on. Even with only 1200 students, the effective bandwidth was slightly worse than I get at home with a 128Kbps DSL line.
I second the recommendation, but if the money is burning a hole in your pocket, spend it on an 802.11 access point, not the fast Ethernet router. If you ever use a laptop or PDA, you'll thank yourself later.
My old school had a campus radio station, and about 1200 students. Last I heard, they were considering an on-campus-only webcast of the radio broadcast (since the signal was to weak to reach many parts of campus, especially the many "basement" work and rec rooms). So, assuming even 10% listenership, and the cheapest licensing schedule (for non-CPB-funded "public" stations) their fees would look something like this:
120 "listeners" * 18hr./day programming * 12 "performances"/hr. * $0.02/"performance" ==> $518.40/day.
That's right, folks, a college radio station with just over a hundred listeners could reasonably pay over $500 per day just for the privilege of putting their broadcast on the web.
Ain't (lobbyist-directed) beurocracy grand?
Pick up a bunch of refurb iPaq 3600/3700 handhelds ($350-400 ea.), slap Familiar on them, and you should be ready to go. Oh yeah, they do ad-hoc 802.11, too, so in non-emergency situations you can do normal community networking with them.
I'm not even going to try to evaluate the technology Cringely keeps rolling out week after week: IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), and between the UWB debate last week, and now wavelets for networking, I'm throwing in the towel.
/. demons. Collusion between the few big players will keep any new technology carefully overpriced until the last possible drop of profit has been squeezed out of the old.
However, he keeps talking about how all these new technologies are going to roll out any day now, with no increase in cost. That's simply wrong. From the cable (or telco, ISP, etc.) point of view, they have basically no reason to drop the prices on their current services more than a pittance -- people are still queueing up on six-month waiting lists for good ol' 256Kbit DSL, so why should they turn around and offer 1-10Gbit for the same price?
You could argue that competition will drive prices down, but that would be naive as well. The telecommunications market isn't open: it's a cabal, just like the recording industry, and other favorite
If Oracle is going to be working with Red Hat to offer an "official" Linux version of their database, does that mean the end of the (admittedly rather pricy) Red Hat-branded version of PostgreSQL? If not, are they going to offer a migration path for users who start with the Postgres package, and eventually decide that they need the replication/Java support/marketspeak-compilance of an Oracle solution?
But, looking at Apple's DVD-R compatibility list, they say that a PS2 works fine.
Unfortunately, I'm sure that Sony won't allow redistribution of their accellerated X server; otherwise, you might be able to ship pure Linux game packages on DVD-R.
Sorry, but Wine only works on x86 boxes, not anything running Linux. You could run Bochs, but from the performance I've seen it put out on a 500MHz G4 system, I wouldn't recommend it.
Unfortunately, you're going to have a hard time with a lot of normal Linux apps on one of these bad boys, given the extremely limited (and poorly expandable) RAM.
I have an old PowerBook G3 that I'd been planning on subjecting to a similar conversion to the first item (the old radio case) mentioned, but hadn't figured out an appropriately anachronistic mechanism for the CD-ROM drive. I'm not sure if the pop-out internal drive can be adapted to a vertical orientation, but since it's one of the "old school" models that actually holds the CD in place, I just might be able to pull it off.
My basic plan had been to mount the thing in a largish jewelry box, replacing the lower storage compartments with the mainboard, keyboard and trackpad (painted to match, of course), and mounting the LCD on the underside of the lid. That would do prevent the classic fresnel lens for the display, of course, but it would mean that the whole thing would sort of "disappear" when placed on an end-table or desk.
First, let me say that I think this is a commendable idea -- I grew up in towns of one to three thousand people, well outside of major urban areas, and any access I had to computers prior to high school was a special experience. As the technology needed to do highly mobile, Internet-connected computing gets smaller, cheaper, and more reliable, this kind of thing just becomes more and more appealing.
As far as the actual equipment used is concerned, I think there are better ways to go than a big truck full of gear. I think the best example to follow might be the sort of "mobile lab" starting to be used by a lot of schools: inexpensive laptops for each student, with 802.11 connecting them to a "server on wheels", which in turn handles user profiles/home directories, Internet connectivity, etc. If there's not going to be reliable hard-wired net connections in many of the areas, look into business wireless service; a number of digital cellular networks are starting to offer ~128Kb/sec dialup connections, which can certainly (with a proxy cache or compressed VNC gateway running on the classroom server) handle serving 15-20 students for basic email and browsing.
For hardware, if you're looking at new purchases, I think you'd be hard pressed to find better machines than the recent iBooks: they're sturdy, compact, fairly inexpensive (especially with Apple's educational discounts), and can run either OS-X or Linux without a hitch. With a decent KDE or GNOME setup, they could look and feel to the user eerily like a Win2k/XP machine, but you save $500+ on application licenses for each box.
Go for it, but don't forget that things have progressed well past the point where computing requires big iron and lots of space.
For a really large application, with dozens/hundreds of developers, hundreds of thousands of users, and millions of transactions being processed regularly, the over-engineering of the J2EE framework can pay off. For anything that totals less than about 50,000 lines of code, or that doesn't need a lot of built-in industrial-strength transaction processing and legacy system integration, though, it's just overkill. And every time your JSP wants a single variable from an EJB, something like the following happens on the backend:
And yes, in theory J2EE apps are portable between application and web servers, as well as underlying operating system. However, that assumes that every vendor supports the full spec, (which almost no one does) that they use the same version, (which they certainly don't) and that the developers can resist using any of the oh-so-tempting add-ons, native libraries, and convenience methods that each of the app server vendors dangle in front of them.
Finally, JSPs are just about the biggest letdown of any dynamic web tech I've used. They actually discourage the seperation of static content, dynamically-updated portions, and application logic. You get an equal amount of support for OO design in ePerl, and have to jump through far fewer hoops. If you want compiled "add-on" components, use the Apache module APIs (in C, Perl, Python, etc.). Both the development process and the finished application will be faster and easier to maintain, and won't require a wall of brand-new Sun Enterprise boxes to run.
And yes, I know of which I speak. My last major programming project was a J2EE-based web application that, though fairly well optimized (with a lot of quick shortcut code, PL/SQL procedures handling much of the business logic, and Apache providing all of the static content) could bring a brand-new four-processor Sun to its knees when all ten people in the office tried to "load test" it.
My advice to those who want a high-performance web application toolkit is to do what developers have been doing for a long time: find a starting point that already does some of what you need, and build on it. Don't drop $50k on a license for WebLogic if 85% of its functionality is going to go wasted.