The study was based on PC/Macs in the workplace, not the home. I used to administer a small NT network for a small engineering company. My main role at the place was being a CAD technician and I did the admin stuff as needed.
To "save money" they bought the cheap homemade boxes and they were nothing but a nightmare. Cheap cards and drives that constantly went out and were nearly impossible to find drivers for.
After much nashing of teeth by everybody, the boss decided to get rid of the crap boxes and go with Compaq workstations. It was the best decision that could have been made. I spent my time doing my normal job and going home at night rather than replacing parts and fixing things.
The $400 boxes belong in the dumpster and no self-respecting company would run their business on them.
Before you reply with "What about using Macs?" there is ZERO software in the civil engineering field to be used on Macs so it wasn't an option. I took enough heat for being a Mac user at home anyway:o)
...do we care how Anakin got pissed off and turned to the Dark Side?...
Yes we care. Can't you remember when you were a kid and wondered how Anakin Skywalker turned into Darth Vader? Aren't you still wondering how Anakin/Darth becomes half machine?
I swear to God it's some en vogue thing to bash Star Wars. Jon, how would you tell the story of the birth of Darth Vader without showing what led up to it? It's not like people go bad by turning on a switch, it's usually small transgressions over time that make the next one easier to commit.
Bah, I'm rambling. Was Phantom Menace a decent movie. No. Was Attack of the Clones? Yes.
Really, is it so far fetched? How far off until a chip is capable of processing and sorting information quickly enough to accomodate some real brute-force AI?
Then again, I'm probably over-simplifying the issueby thinking it's raw speed that a true thinking machine needs.
When will they learn that these memos always come back to haunt them...
Hmmm. I'm betting that all the memos in the world won't amount to a hill of beans when we see the sentencing of Micros~1 come to play.
It does get us Linux/Unix/Mac people all fired up though and gives us an ideological reason on top of the technological reasons we use these alternative OSes.
Does this mean that if Windows wants to compete with Linux by giving it away for free, it could? I mean really, they could give Windows away for free for like 5 years or something and crush anything else out there. Kinda like they did with Netscape.
Not that I think it would ever happen but it could theoretically.
I notice all of these settings revert to their previous values upon a reboot. How do I set this up so the settings you gave get set automatically upon startup?
I'm guessing setting it up as a script to be executed by that cron thingy. As you can tell, I'm not exactly versed in unix. Anybody care to show me how this would be done?
Really, when it comes down to it some of the greatest stories ever told are variations on a theme...good vs. evil. Good struggles versus evil, evil rises in power and looks like the hands down favorite for winner...but wait! Good makes a comeback and defeats evil. The end.
Sound familiar? It should, much of our entertainment, history and culture is intertwined with this concept. Examples? Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible (or many other religions, ancient and contemporary, for that matter), The Lord of the Rings, Erin Brockovich...the list goes on.
The fact that Star Wars is similar to previous works is rather inconsequential since prior art for most anything can be traced very, very, far back.
No, you're not getting it. I passed no judgement on whether or not I liked the judgement or not. You have somehow injected that into my post yourself. I could give a rat's ass if they have legalized drugs and prostitution over there.
It's like me saying that it's not suprising the Rams beat the Bengals last Sunday given that the Rams are undefeated and the Bengals are the worst team in the NFL. Nowhere did I mention a preference to either team. I based my prediction on historical precedence.
Go back to reading your High Times. You won't find an argument from me on the merits of drug (and/or prostitution) legalization, if that's what you're trolling for.
Errr...chill. It was tongue-in-cheek. To break it down what I meant to imply was that a country that has such a liberal interpretation of what's right and wrong...well it's no suprise that they came back with the ruling they did.
Will this directly affect and improve Mozilla on non-Linux platforms? Would it have a use flagging the leaks in the Linux code and then making the code corrections on the OS X platform?
I agree, Mozilla is very S-L-O-O-W on OS X. I ran concurrent sessions of IE and Mozilla to test plugin performance. Went to Apple and downloaded the new Star Wars EPII trailer. In IE, I downloaded the and watched the trailed _twice_ before Mozilla even had a measly 10% of the trailer downloaded. Plus scrolling nears the threshold of pain.
I'm really excited about this browser because I want to see AOL adopt it (in the interest of web standards). I also want to be able to run Microsoft-free for idealogical reasons. The OS X community is not there yet but I hope we're getting closer. Maybe OmniWeb will get better with rendering and standards compliance before Mozilla becomes useful.
...but deep down we all knew it would end up this way. The Department of Justice grabbed Microsoft by their already huge balls and coated them in brass. Now we have a Microsoft with his brass balls which will become even more brazen with their monopoly practices.
Sad but true - Steve Jobs knew the outcome before the trial started. That's why he refused to testify and sent Avie Tevanian in his place.
Back when I was in college in my 20's I bought a lot of CD's. Now I'm in my 30's and I don't buy near as many CD'sas I did when I was in my 20's. There was, however, a brief increase in my CD buying when Napster was around. I hate all of our local radio stations so I'd look at the playlists of websites that played music I did like. I couldn't hear the music though. With Napster, I had the ability to preview the songs which usually then meant going on to Amazon.com and buying the CD's. Now, for one reason or another, Napster is gone and I just don't buy CD's anymore. I know I could use Limewire or some other sharing program but I don't. I can say for a fact that Napster caused me to buy more CD's. My friends have similar testimonies.
I downloaded AbiWord for OS X. Maybe I'm picky but the fonts displayed on my powerbook by X11 SUCK. Put it in italics and it's nearly unreadable.
I won't buy MS Office but I'll try like hell to find a decent office replacements for OS X that don't have such an abysmal font display. I suspect I may not be the only one that feels this way either.
Good points. I won't argue the specfp95. I'm a Mac user but not so much of a zealot that I can't see a 2GHz P4 smoking a 733 MHz G4 in most normal tasks. I use a 1.5 GHz P4 Xeon at work and it's clearly faster than my 667 MHz G4 at home. Not a fair comparison, but you and I both know there are Mac zealots that would claim otherwise.
Anyhoo, true, Altivec is useful in only certain applications but it's usefulness isn't limited to a few Photoshop filters as you imply. I may be wrong, but DVD encoding and more importantly, 3D rendering are applications that Altivec can exploit. If I had to make a rendering farm on the cheap, G4's with Altivec would definitely be competitive.
I've noticed many are pooh-pooing Mac clusters vs. Linux clusters due to cost issues. I agree that, in general, if I was setting up a brand new cluster I'd probably use AMD boxes because of price BUT there may be three exceptions that would change my mind.
1. I already have a bunch of old Macs laying around. Why not use them. Macs have a significant presence in the science/reasearch arena that will only increase with the advent of OS X, so there are bound to be old Macs laying around in companies that are most likely to utilize a cluster.
2. The type of number crunching I require lends itself well to the 128-bit vector processing unit on the G4 (Apple calls it Velocity Engine). x86 chips cannot compete head-to-head with a G4 when it comes to tasks that can be optimed for Velocity Engine.
3. Perhaps I'm in a situation where I'd rather spend my money on buying more expensive hardware up front than, for a week, re-tasking my big dollar scientists/engineers/IT guys while they figure out setting up a Linux cluster for a week when they are needed elsewhere, like their normal jobs.
...Apple should have changed business models long ago and gone after the commodity computer market where 2.2 Ghz processors run email clients and web browsers.
Like Gateway. Or Compaq. Or Hewlett-Packard.
Man. Imagine where they'd be now.
Oh well. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say. I guess I'll grudgingly continue using 1% of the CPU in my beautiful Titanium PowerBook browsing the web rather than 0.5% if I had a beige Apple box with a 2.2Ghz P4.
Seems to have everything the average computer user would need
Hmmm. I thought this was the done already, and done far better. It was called the Cube from Apple. Of course, everybody complained about the inability to expand it, no PCI slots, middle-of-the-road video card, middle-of-the-road CPU due to heat concerns. But hey! If it's not Apple and I can build it, then it's just what most people need!
I find these gems cuter than any iMac I've ever seen
Puhleese. It's a beige case shrunk down. I still think it's pretty cool, but it's not even close to being in the same league as the iMac aesthetically. But then again, the iMac and this appeal to completely different demographics. There is nothing wrong with a utilitarian approach to computing, but this is the same mentality that keeps X-Windows around, chunky fonts, blocky grey widgets, and one of the reasons Linux has been held back from expanding on the desktop at a greater rate than it has.
On that note, if I were building a beige box, this is definitely the case I would use.
...another piece of open-source software that poorly mimics an established commercial variant. It has become apparent that where open source is concerned, the ratio of cheap-knockoff to innovative software is highly lopsided.
Go ahead and mod me down as a troll but you know it's true.
Slashdot Mirror
The study was based on PC/Macs in the workplace, not the home. I used to administer a small NT network for a small engineering company. My main role at the place was being a CAD technician and I did the admin stuff as needed.
:o)
To "save money" they bought the cheap homemade boxes and they were nothing but a nightmare. Cheap cards and drives that constantly went out and were nearly impossible to find drivers for.
After much nashing of teeth by everybody, the boss decided to get rid of the crap boxes and go with Compaq workstations. It was the best decision that could have been made. I spent my time doing my normal job and going home at night rather than replacing parts and fixing things.
The $400 boxes belong in the dumpster and no self-respecting company would run their business on them.
Before you reply with "What about using Macs?" there is ZERO software in the civil engineering field to be used on Macs so it wasn't an option. I took enough heat for being a Mac user at home anyway
Yes we care. Can't you remember when you were a kid and wondered how Anakin Skywalker turned into Darth Vader? Aren't you still wondering how Anakin/Darth becomes half machine?
I swear to God it's some en vogue thing to bash Star Wars. Jon, how would you tell the story of the birth of Darth Vader without showing what led up to it? It's not like people go bad by turning on a switch, it's usually small transgressions over time that make the next one easier to commit.
Bah, I'm rambling. Was Phantom Menace a decent movie. No. Was Attack of the Clones? Yes.
Really, is it so far fetched? How far off until a chip is capable of processing and sorting information quickly enough to accomodate some real brute-force AI?
Then again, I'm probably over-simplifying the issueby thinking it's raw speed that a true thinking machine needs.
Hmmm. I'm betting that all the memos in the world won't amount to a hill of beans when we see the sentencing of Micros~1 come to play.
It does get us Linux/Unix/Mac people all fired up though and gives us an ideological reason on top of the technological reasons we use these alternative OSes.
Does this mean that if Windows wants to compete with Linux by giving it away for free, it could? I mean really, they could give Windows away for free for like 5 years or something and crush anything else out there. Kinda like they did with Netscape.
Not that I think it would ever happen but it could theoretically.
Thank you. I found a file in /etc called rc.common. I pasted the above commands into it, restarted and voila! They were set upon startup.
Thanks again. Mozilla doesn't seem like a dog now.
I notice all of these settings revert to their previous values upon a reboot. How do I set this up so the settings you gave get set automatically upon startup?
I'm guessing setting it up as a script to be executed by that cron thingy. As you can tell, I'm not exactly versed in unix. Anybody care to show me how this would be done?
So how were the sex scenes in this movie?
HAHAHAHA! Yeah, that was pretty good. Sex scenes in a movie about Linux. I forgot this is a documentary film, not fiction or fantasy.
I suppose they could show ESR flogging the dolphin in front of his pr0n-loaded Linux box. Mmmmmaybe not.
I should know, my TiBook (Apple Powerboook G4) gets less than 100 ft. of reception from my 802.11b wireless router.
Really, when it comes down to it some of the greatest stories ever told are variations on a theme...good vs. evil. Good struggles versus evil, evil rises in power and looks like the hands down favorite for winner...but wait! Good makes a comeback and defeats evil. The end.
Sound familiar? It should, much of our entertainment, history and culture is intertwined with this concept. Examples? Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible (or many other religions, ancient and contemporary, for that matter), The Lord of the Rings, Erin Brockovich...the list goes on.
The fact that Star Wars is similar to previous works is rather inconsequential since prior art for most anything can be traced very, very, far back.
No, you're not getting it. I passed no judgement on whether or not I liked the judgement or not. You have somehow injected that into my post yourself. I could give a rat's ass if they have legalized drugs and prostitution over there.
It's like me saying that it's not suprising the Rams beat the Bengals last Sunday given that the Rams are undefeated and the Bengals are the worst team in the NFL. Nowhere did I mention a preference to either team. I based my prediction on historical precedence.
Go back to reading your High Times. You won't find an argument from me on the merits of drug (and/or prostitution) legalization, if that's what you're trolling for.
Errr...chill. It was tongue-in-cheek. To break it down what I meant to imply was that a country that has such a liberal interpretation of what's right and wrong...well it's no suprise that they came back with the ruling they did.
Didn't intend it to be flamebait.
this is the Netherlands where they smile on drug use and prostitution. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Will this directly affect and improve Mozilla on non-Linux platforms? Would it have a use flagging the leaks in the Linux code and then making the code corrections on the OS X platform?
I agree, Mozilla is very S-L-O-O-W on OS X. I ran concurrent sessions of IE and Mozilla to test plugin performance. Went to Apple and downloaded the new Star Wars EPII trailer. In IE, I downloaded the and watched the trailed _twice_ before Mozilla even had a measly 10% of the trailer downloaded. Plus scrolling nears the threshold of pain.
I'm really excited about this browser because I want to see AOL adopt it (in the interest of web standards). I also want to be able to run Microsoft-free for idealogical reasons. The OS X community is not there yet but I hope we're getting closer. Maybe OmniWeb will get better with rendering and standards compliance before Mozilla becomes useful.
...but deep down we all knew it would end up this way. The Department of Justice grabbed Microsoft by their already huge balls and coated them in brass. Now we have a Microsoft with his brass balls which will become even more brazen with their monopoly practices.
Sad but true - Steve Jobs knew the outcome before the trial started. That's why he refused to testify and sent Avie Tevanian in his place.
Mandrake 8.2, currently in Beta as this article explains, claims to support airport.
Back when I was in college in my 20's I bought a lot of CD's. Now I'm in my 30's and I don't buy near as many CD'sas I did when I was in my 20's. There was, however, a brief increase in my CD buying when Napster was around. I hate all of our local radio stations so I'd look at the playlists of websites that played music I did like. I couldn't hear the music though. With Napster, I had the ability to preview the songs which usually then meant going on to Amazon.com and buying the CD's. Now, for one reason or another, Napster is gone and I just don't buy CD's anymore. I know I could use Limewire or some other sharing program but I don't. I can say for a fact that Napster caused me to buy more CD's. My friends have similar testimonies.
I downloaded AbiWord for OS X. Maybe I'm picky but the fonts displayed on my powerbook by X11 SUCK. Put it in italics and it's nearly unreadable.
I won't buy MS Office but I'll try like hell to find a decent office replacements for OS X that don't have such an abysmal font display. I suspect I may not be the only one that feels this way either.
Moron. Apple hasn't included an ADB keyboard with it's systems for almost five years now.
Good points. I won't argue the specfp95. I'm a Mac user but not so much of a zealot that I can't see a 2GHz P4 smoking a 733 MHz G4 in most normal tasks. I use a 1.5 GHz P4 Xeon at work and it's clearly faster than my 667 MHz G4 at home. Not a fair comparison, but you and I both know there are Mac zealots that would claim otherwise.
Anyhoo, true, Altivec is useful in only certain applications but it's usefulness isn't limited to a few Photoshop filters as you imply. I may be wrong, but DVD encoding and more importantly, 3D rendering are applications that Altivec can exploit. If I had to make a rendering farm on the cheap, G4's with Altivec would definitely be competitive.
I've noticed many are pooh-pooing Mac clusters vs. Linux clusters due to cost issues. I agree that, in general, if I was setting up a brand new cluster I'd probably use AMD boxes because of price BUT there may be three exceptions that would change my mind.
1. I already have a bunch of old Macs laying around. Why not use them. Macs have a significant presence in the science/reasearch arena that will only increase with the advent of OS X, so there are bound to be old Macs laying around in companies that are most likely to utilize a cluster.
2. The type of number crunching I require lends itself well to the 128-bit vector processing unit on the G4 (Apple calls it Velocity Engine). x86 chips cannot compete head-to-head with a G4 when it comes to tasks that can be optimed for Velocity Engine.
3. Perhaps I'm in a situation where I'd rather spend my money on buying more expensive hardware up front than, for a week, re-tasking my big dollar scientists/engineers/IT guys while they figure out setting up a Linux cluster for a week when they are needed elsewhere, like their normal jobs.
...Apple should have changed business models long ago and gone after the commodity computer market where 2.2 Ghz processors run email clients and web browsers.
Like Gateway. Or Compaq. Or Hewlett-Packard.
Man. Imagine where they'd be now.
Oh well. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say. I guess I'll grudgingly continue using 1% of the CPU in my beautiful Titanium PowerBook browsing the web rather than 0.5% if I had a beige Apple box with a 2.2Ghz P4.
Seems to have everything the average computer user would need
Hmmm. I thought this was the done already, and done far better. It was called the Cube from Apple. Of course, everybody complained about the inability to expand it, no PCI slots, middle-of-the-road video card, middle-of-the-road CPU due to heat concerns. But hey! If it's not Apple and I can build it, then it's just what most people need!
I find these gems cuter than any iMac I've ever seen
Puhleese. It's a beige case shrunk down. I still think it's pretty cool, but it's not even close to being in the same league as the iMac aesthetically. But then again, the iMac and this appeal to completely different demographics. There is nothing wrong with a utilitarian approach to computing, but this is the same mentality that keeps X-Windows around, chunky fonts, blocky grey widgets, and one of the reasons Linux has been held back from expanding on the desktop at a greater rate than it has.
On that note, if I were building a beige box, this is definitely the case I would use.
...another piece of open-source software that poorly mimics an established commercial variant. It has become apparent that where open source is concerned, the ratio of cheap-knockoff to innovative software is highly lopsided.
Go ahead and mod me down as a troll but you know it's true.