For a render farm, you generally want the OS to stay the hell out of the way. There isn't much point in running muliple concurrent copies of an OS if one OS could do the job. There is also the problem that Mainframes are optimized for IO, not CPU.
For a render farm you'd be far better off with an bunch of SGI Origin 2K, or a room full of Alphas. Interestingly, in these types of applications, physical support costs for floor space, air conditioning, power, etc, can begin to be quite significant, so you have to start thinking about work/watt or work/m^3. --
1) It's a whole lot easier to set up and use "out of the box" than Linux.
I'll concede you the use, although that's only because it sucks in different ways than a Mac and a bit less than Linux, but setup on Windows is only easy because it comes preinstalled. Go install Windows9X off a cd onto a bare (unpartitioned, unformatted) harddrive and tell me how easy it is to set up, get networked etc, relative, say to Redhat 6.1. I did this on a dual boot system I built and was amazed that the Windows 98 CD did not boot off my CDROM drive (although my Redhat CD did) and that installation onto a bare harddrive did not automagically create partitions and format them but died midway through an error message saying I didn't have enough disk space. Configuration is fairly good for simple things, but I still detest having to reboot my computer for a change in DNS.
For extra credit install NT 4.0 (on a partition of less than 2GB of course), use the default browser (IE 2.0) to go to www.microsoft.com and be prepared for a suprise (for the uninitiated it gives the oh so helpful error message "The virtual directory / does not allow it's contents to be listed." and does not allow access to the site AT ALL). I know it's an old installer, but that's the point. In a competitive world, they would have released an upgraded installer long ago. Even now that Win2K is out, lots of people still need to install NT4, go through the arcane dance of the service packs etc.
2)Microsoft's office suite is damn good. Some may argue that it's "good" because of anti-competitive integration with the operating system, but regardless, objectively, it is a feature-rich, fast, and easy-to-use suite. Nobody I know has ever had a problem learning Word.
I find it is relatively easy to learn Word, but hard to be truly efficient in it. This is partly due to it's "feature richness" which effectively means, lots of features I don't need right now but which make it harder to find the one I do. And partly due to halfassed implementations, such as adding pictures to documents, captioning them and having text flow nicely without having to do document surgery. I have also been bit by more than my fair share of bugs, such as a document which was unprintable, and which made any document to which part of the uprintable document was pasted unprintabl (no macros, macros disabled in Word...OS integration at it's best no doubt.).
3)Breaking up Microsoft will have little effect on its day-to-day business. Sure, the overhead will increase, but I don't think it'll help foster competition. It shouldn't be allowed to unfairly push manufacturers, but breaking it up will have no effect on all this.
I actually agree with you here. Breaking up MS would be ineffective. It would be better, IMHO to force transparent pricing and licensing, since that's the big hammer MS has, and perhaps keep it from acquiring any more companies for some length of time, say 2-4 years.
4)Microsoft shouldn't be punished for having a better product. Netscape (which helped initiate the litigation) complains about IE, and although I agree it shouldn't be forcibly packaged without alternatives by OEMs, the fact remains that today IE is way better than Navigator. Shell integration aside, IE crashes on me less often than Navigator.
Ahh yes... but was this true at first bundling. Netscape obviously played a role in shooting themselves in the foot, but there revenue model (for what it was worth) was actively taken away, in legal (a better browser) and questionable (not letting OEMs ship netscape as default) ways.
To sum it up, the case seems like punishment for Microsoft for being too successful.
But you conceded that they shouldn't force OEMs to not bundle Navigator and otherwise "push manufactures". IMHO, it is this end of MS and no the "innovation" end that can and should be reformed by the court. Transparent and non-discriminatory pricing and licensing would be a start, with strong protections for letting OEMs change the boot sequence and initial configuration. --
There are very sensible reasons to include ed, vi, sed, awk, sh etc in the POSIX standard. They are small, simple, work over the stupidest and slowest interface and are scriptable. As a least common denominator they can be expected to exist to allow portable scripts, and are useful in disaster recovery. (Ever reconfigure a server over a 2400 baud wireless link at 2 in the morning? You will! Or at someone can).
And heck, you don't have to use the utilities. All they consume is disk space, around 10 MB in my Solaris installation. But they are there when somebody (other than yourself apparently) needs them.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was involved in a project at Harvey Mudd sponsored by Qualcomm to extend a service test system Globalstar. I do not own any Qualcomm stock (or any other stock for that matter).
Globalstar has a few things going for it. It's a much simpler technical challenge since the satellites themselves are relatively simple "bent pipe" repeaters unlike Iridium which had a lot of cross links (think cell sites in the sky, not routers in the sky). Per minute charges are usually cheaper and their regulatory battles have been easier because they use the public telephone network for most of the journey of the call. The handsets switch to CDMA/AMPS/Globalstar or GSM/Globalstar as appropriate so they are usable within urban areas.
In addition, Globalstar has made a big push for fixed installations, such as a payphone in a remote village. This is a huge market which is underserved and overpriced currently.
This doesn't mean they can't or won't fail.
I don't know much in detail about Teledesic, but I'm hoping it works if it means that I can someday telecommute while sailing around the South Pacific:-) --
Some moderator of questionable judgement marked the informative and ontopic parent of this post down to -1. In case anyone cares here it is...
I think someone has hacked into one of those. It was on geeknews.org a while ago. Go to/. to listen to nerdier than thow people argue about linux -- go some place else to hear the latest news.
(/me scrapes mud off face) But seriously, Compaq is not selling any more VAXen after September 2000 (although they will continue to support the platform). --
If you don't want to get rid of the NT box yet, couldn't you use a Sendmail your public server which would only do basic relay checking and then relay the mail to your NT box for actual delivery? That should be easier than moving your whole operation to Sendmail all at once.
The main advantage a new UNIX (or at least POSIX as in the case of BeOS) OS has is that there is a large base of open source utilites and apps that are already ported to a large number of architectures and (Unixlike) OSes. It is relatively easy to port these to a new kernel and/or libc and have a new OS, but only if the OS is Unixlike. This is advantageous for the OS maker because the initial investment is smaller, and advantageous for users since they can continue to use their open source apps and have a chance of convincing their closed source vendors to port things.
I doubt we'll ever see VMS on a non Digital/Compaq chip, and certainly not on a 32 bit one. --
Netpliance has all of the power in designing the contract, product, and terms of service. The consumer only has a choice of buying the product or not (they also have varying degrees of consumer protection rights depending on their state). The consumer should not have to question whether or not the company they are buying the product from is making a profit. They should only have to question whether the product and associated terms of service and future fees are worth it. Netpliance has the lawyers, accountants, and marketeers, let them set a good price for their service. Otherwise, where does it stop. Should a consumer not buy products from a money losing e-business? Should an ISP customer not use expensive POPs (such as UUNet) because the cost to the ISP exceeds $19.95 a month for normal users. Of course not. Thats the beauty of market capitalism, a great deal of information and business calculation that the consumer does not have to care anything about is embodied in the price.
I have no problem with Netpliance realizing that they made a mistake and changing their offer, but I also have no problem with customers taking advantage of a good deal. Given the imbalance of power, I also think that Netpliance should at least honor the deal that was advertised at the time of purchase. --
Look it's simple enough. It's normally the case that contracts are used to screw the little guy. In fact little guys are so used to getting screwed that marketing geniuses figure they don't even need a contract and the little guys will dutifully act as if they did. In this case (as in the case of MSN $400 rebate at Best Buy) there was no bulletproof contract, only an assumption that no consumer would be clever enough to get the better side of the deal. This despite the fact that the company had all the power in the deal. They had the lawyers and wrote (or could have written) the contract. All the consumer can do is buy the product under the terms of the contract (if any) or not buy it at all.
While it's a moral question as to whether one takes advantage of such a deal, I have a hard time feeling sorry for companies who make a calculation expecting consumers to be more stupid then they turn out to be. --
After buying Civ CTP which is unplayably slow for me with on a 300MHz celery, 64 MB ram, and a G200 due to excessive redraws (Apparently the problem also shows up in the Windows to a lesser degree) I will need a lot more convincing before I buy a game to "support Linux".
I'd much rather show that Linux users are willing to pay for quality rather than show that Linux users are willing to buy substandard crap. --
Primes are definitely not random. In fact it can be proven that they have a distribution such that the number of primes less than x is about x/log(x). Read more at http://www.utm.edu/research/ primes/howmany.shtml --
Since VAX is the hardware and not the OS, "VAX box" is redundant. "VMS box" would be the natural equivalent of Unix box. I tend to (incorrectly) call all VMS boxen "VAXen" although these days they are mostly Alphas. --
I would say from personal experience, that I found Linux more comfortable than FreeBSD coming from a Solaris background (or more specifically Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 with a GNU utils to replace the braindead Solaris ones).
That being said, I think/usr/ports is the coolest thing I have ever used on any platform and is the reason I plan to try FreeBSD again now that I have a better network connection.
All GlobalStar calls are routed through the public telephone network until it gets to a ground station in the same region (political and geographical) as the phone. This makes regulators happier since they can tax and tap as they always have. --
There are a few reasons, the simplest is that they are generally selling a metered service and don't make any money during downtime. Depending on the bandwidth of the link, and the price of the service, this can be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute (this is especially true of under-sea cables: see Neal Stephenson's article Mother Earth, Mother Board)
Second, these are industries that are or have been highly regulated, and while overregulation breeds inefficiency, at least part of that inefficiency is overengineering.
Finally, while Joe Average doesn't care too much about a busy signal for 5 minutes, big customers do and have quality of service and availability guarantees built into the contract. These customers will want to see that appropriate hardware is being used, since no matter how good the contract, it is unlikely to cover actual customer losses caused by an extended downtime, say for a financial institution.
As you point out, however, it doesn't necessarily make sense to route all calls over this kind of network, which is why voice over IP is growing more popular. It is cheaper because there are less gaurantees for availability and quality of service. --
Slashdot Mirror
PCS is just the name for the spectrum at 1900 MHz. Sprint PCS is actually CDMA encoded but there are also GSM providers in the PCS band.
--
Engineers use j instead of i.
--
Moe-Zir-ra
--
For a render farm, you generally want the OS to stay the hell out of the way. There isn't much point in running muliple concurrent copies of an OS if one OS could do the job. There is also the problem that Mainframes are optimized for IO, not CPU.
For a render farm you'd be far better off with an bunch of SGI Origin 2K, or a room full of Alphas. Interestingly, in these types of applications, physical support costs for floor space, air conditioning, power, etc, can begin to be quite significant, so you have to start thinking about work/watt or work/m^3.
--
Or they could one-up EDS.
Scene:
Images of a cat happily playing around in it's own happy world.
Zoom out of cat brain and see Matrix-like techno-hive with thousands of cats on feeder tubes, with electricity sparking around.
Voice Over:
Cat herding. It's what we do.
--
plagiary (play-jer-ree) (v.t.): To copy a misspelling without attribution.
--
I'll concede you the use, although that's only because it sucks in different ways than a Mac and a bit less than Linux, but setup on Windows is only easy because it comes preinstalled. Go install Windows9X off a cd onto a bare (unpartitioned, unformatted) harddrive and tell me how easy it is to set up, get networked etc, relative, say to Redhat 6.1. I did this on a dual boot system I built and was amazed that the Windows 98 CD did not boot off my CDROM drive (although my Redhat CD did) and that installation onto a bare harddrive did not automagically create partitions and format them but died midway through an error message saying I didn't have enough disk space. Configuration is fairly good for simple things, but I still detest having to reboot my computer for a change in DNS.
For extra credit install NT 4.0 (on a partition of less than 2GB of course), use the default browser (IE 2.0) to go to www.microsoft.com and be prepared for a suprise (for the uninitiated it gives the oh so helpful error message "The virtual directory / does not allow it's contents to be listed." and does not allow access to the site AT ALL). I know it's an old installer, but that's the point. In a competitive world, they would have released an upgraded installer long ago. Even now that Win2K is out, lots of people still need to install NT4, go through the arcane dance of the service packs etc.
I find it is relatively easy to learn Word, but hard to be truly efficient in it. This is partly due to it's "feature richness" which effectively means, lots of features I don't need right now but which make it harder to find the one I do. And partly due to halfassed implementations, such as adding pictures to documents, captioning them and having text flow nicely without having to do document surgery. I have also been bit by more than my fair share of bugs, such as a document which was unprintable, and which made any document to which part of the uprintable document was pasted unprintabl (no macros, macros disabled in Word...OS integration at it's best no doubt.).
I actually agree with you here. Breaking up MS would be ineffective. It would be better, IMHO to force transparent pricing and licensing, since that's the big hammer MS has, and perhaps keep it from acquiring any more companies for some length of time, say 2-4 years.
Ahh yes... but was this true at first bundling. Netscape obviously played a role in shooting themselves in the foot, but there revenue model (for what it was worth) was actively taken away, in legal (a better browser) and questionable (not letting OEMs ship netscape as default) ways.
But you conceded that they shouldn't force OEMs to not bundle Navigator and otherwise "push manufactures". IMHO, it is this end of MS and no the "innovation" end that can and should be reformed by the court. Transparent and non-discriminatory pricing and licensing would be a start, with strong protections for letting OEMs change the boot sequence and initial configuration.
--
There are very sensible reasons to include ed, vi, sed, awk, sh etc in the POSIX standard. They are small, simple, work over the stupidest and slowest interface and are scriptable. As a least common denominator they can be expected to exist to allow portable scripts, and are useful in disaster recovery. (Ever reconfigure a server over a 2400 baud wireless link at 2 in the morning? You will! Or at someone can).
And heck, you don't have to use the utilities. All they consume is disk space, around 10 MB in my Solaris installation. But they are there when somebody (other than yourself apparently) needs them.
--
In the interest of full disclosure, I was involved in a project at Harvey Mudd sponsored by Qualcomm to extend a service test system Globalstar. I do not own any Qualcomm stock (or any other stock for that matter).
:-)
Globalstar has a few things going for it. It's a much simpler technical challenge since the satellites themselves are relatively simple "bent pipe" repeaters unlike Iridium which had a lot of cross links (think cell sites in the sky, not routers in the sky). Per minute charges are usually cheaper and their regulatory battles have been easier because they use the public telephone network for most of the journey of the call. The handsets switch to CDMA/AMPS/Globalstar or GSM/Globalstar as appropriate so they are usable within urban areas.
In addition, Globalstar has made a big push for fixed installations, such as a payphone in a remote village. This is a huge market which is underserved and overpriced currently.
This doesn't mean they can't or won't fail.
I don't know much in detail about Teledesic, but I'm hoping it works if it means that I can someday telecommute while sailing around the South Pacific
--
--
Windows update is nice, but it only alerts the user after the fix is known, not when the bug is reported.
--
(/me scrapes mud off face)
But seriously, Compaq is not selling any more VAXen after September 2000 (although they will continue to support the platform).
--
If you don't want to get rid of the NT box yet, couldn't you use a Sendmail your public server which would only do basic relay checking and then relay the mail to your NT box for actual delivery?
That should be easier than moving your whole operation to Sendmail all at once.
--
The main advantage a new UNIX (or at least POSIX as in the case of BeOS) OS has is that there is a large base of open source utilites and apps that are already ported to a large number of architectures and (Unixlike) OSes. It is relatively easy to port these to a new kernel and/or libc and have a new OS, but only if the OS is Unixlike. This is advantageous for the OS maker because the initial investment is smaller, and advantageous for users since they can continue to use their open source apps and have a chance of convincing their closed source vendors to port things.
I doubt we'll ever see VMS on a non Digital/Compaq chip, and certainly not on a 32 bit one.
--
Netpliance has all of the power in designing the contract, product, and terms of service. The consumer only has a choice of buying the product or not (they also have varying degrees of consumer protection rights depending on their state). The consumer should not have to question whether or not the company they are buying the product from is making a profit. They should only have to question whether the product and associated terms of service and future fees are worth it. Netpliance has the lawyers, accountants, and marketeers, let them set a good price for their service. Otherwise, where does it stop. Should a consumer not buy products from a money losing e-business? Should an ISP customer not use expensive POPs (such as UUNet) because the cost to the ISP exceeds $19.95 a month for normal users. Of course not. Thats the beauty of market capitalism, a great deal of information and business calculation that the consumer does not have to care anything about is embodied in the price.
I have no problem with Netpliance realizing that they made a mistake and changing their offer, but I also have no problem with customers taking advantage of a good deal. Given the imbalance of power, I also think that Netpliance should at least honor the deal that was advertised at the time of purchase.
--
Look it's simple enough. It's normally the case that contracts are used to screw the little guy. In fact little guys are so used to getting screwed that marketing geniuses figure they don't even need a contract and the little guys will dutifully act as if they did. In this case (as in the case of MSN $400 rebate at Best Buy) there was no bulletproof contract, only an assumption that no consumer would be clever enough to get the better side of the deal. This despite the fact that the company had all the power in the deal. They had the lawyers and wrote (or could have written) the contract. All the consumer can do is buy the product under the terms of the contract (if any) or not buy it at all.
While it's a moral question as to whether one takes advantage of such a deal, I have a hard time feeling sorry for companies who make a calculation expecting consumers to be more stupid then they turn out to be.
--
After buying Civ CTP which is unplayably slow for me with on a 300MHz celery, 64 MB ram, and a G200 due to excessive redraws (Apparently the problem also shows up in the Windows to a lesser degree) I will need a lot more convincing before I buy a game to "support Linux".
I'd much rather show that Linux users are willing to pay for quality rather than show that Linux users are willing to buy substandard crap.
--
People under the age of 18 aren't real people and don't have real rights.
This is so when you are over 18 you are exceedingly happy with the limited rights you have.
--
Primes are definitely not random. In fact it can be proven that they have a distribution such that the number of primes less than x is about
x/log(x). Read more at http://www.utm.edu/research/ primes/howmany.shtml
--
Since VAX is the hardware and not the OS, "VAX box" is redundant. "VMS box" would be the natural equivalent of Unix box. I tend to (incorrectly) call all VMS boxen "VAXen" although these days they are mostly Alphas.
--
I would say from personal experience, that I found Linux more comfortable than FreeBSD coming from a Solaris background (or more specifically Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 with a GNU utils to replace the braindead Solaris ones).
/usr/ports is the coolest thing I have ever used on any platform and is the reason I plan to try FreeBSD again now that I have a better network connection.
That being said, I think
--
When the US was formed, English spelling had not been standardized. We standardized on one set of spellings, the British standardized on another.
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All GlobalStar calls are routed through the public telephone network until it gets to a ground station in the same region (political and
geographical) as the phone. This makes regulators happier since they can tax and tap as they always have.
--
It's hardly anonymity since anyone, not just the Post Office can decode the Zip+4 code.
--
There are a few reasons, the simplest is that they are generally selling a metered service and don't make any money during downtime. Depending on the bandwidth of the link, and the price of the service, this can be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute (this is especially true of under-sea cables: see Neal Stephenson's article Mother Earth, Mother Board)
Second, these are industries that are or have been highly regulated, and while overregulation breeds inefficiency, at least part of that inefficiency is overengineering.
Finally, while Joe Average doesn't care too much about a busy signal for 5 minutes, big customers do and have quality of service and availability guarantees built into the contract. These customers will want to see that appropriate hardware is being used, since no matter how good the contract, it is unlikely to cover actual customer losses caused by an extended downtime, say for a financial institution.
As you point out, however, it doesn't necessarily make sense to route all calls over this kind of network, which is why voice over IP is growing more popular. It is cheaper because there are less gaurantees for availability and quality of service.
--