There are some instances where it can be difficult to categorize things. And what if I don't feel the need for the library I just set up to have a "Queer" section? Or what if I'd like a "Travel" section? Huh? Huh?;)
That said, I can say that it does do some cool stuff. Plug in an ISBN, and 9+ times out of 10, it'll auto-populate the rest of the indexing information, even grabbing a review off Amazon about it.
Virtual PC includes a license for whatever version of Windows you opt for. I bought Virtual PC 6 XP Pro, for example, and I had to type in the frickin' product key and all that when I installed it, just like on a PC.
Virtual PC costs about $200-$240, depending on which flavor of Windows you want to run on it. Not particularly cheap, but probably cheaper than a PC running anything other than Lindows. And since it includes Windows, it includes the things Windows includes, like IE and media player. It doesn't include extra apps that might be bundled with a new PC, though.
If you want to do this with a Mac old enough that it didn't come with OS 9 or OS X, and you haven't already upgraded to OS 9 or OS X (almost every Mac capable of running Virtual PC is capable of running OS X) then yes, I suppose you'd need to get OS 9 or OS X as well. I can't really comment on what version of MacOS schools are using, these days.
From a school's position, an eMac with a reasonable amount of RAM and Virtual PC with whatever Windows OS they like should be under $1K. Given educational discounts and bulk discounts, I'd say significantly under, probably closer to $500 than to $1K, but I'm really guessing. And for that, they get a Mac that runs most or all of their existing Mac apps (hey, if they've got System 5 stuff, all bets are off;) and Windows, and DOS, and various things from the UNIX/Linux world, yadda yadda.
(Oh, and of course, once you've got VirtualPC installed, I'm pretty sure you can take whatever OS install CD's you've got lying around for PC's, and set those other OSes up under it, too. I think I've got some Linux CD's somewhere here, maybe I'll put that hypothesis to the test right now.)
It has also been stated previously that about half of the pre-orders are for Dual 2.0GHz systems.
So... they'll need 50,000+ chips (for that many single-CPU systems) running at 1.6 or 1.8GHz, and 100,000+ chips (for 50,000+ dual-CPU systems) running at 2.0GHz. No wonder the slower ones are shipping first.
Oh, and at the base prices, not counting all those extra-cost build-to-order options, that works out to over $100,000,000 worth of 1.6/1.8GHz pre-orders, and $150,000,000 worth of 2.0GHz dual pre-orders, for a total of $250,000,000 in top-line sales.
Yes, yes, of course people are doing the Linux thing when they need a compute cluster, render farm, or whatever. (Well, maybe not the render farm, since OS support for the Mac's 128-bit vector processing unit might sway things a bit in that case.)
But... people, be they K-12 students or scientists, generally don't have cyberpunk neural implants directly linked to those compute clusters, render farms, or whatever, just yet. That means they use one of those things we quaintly call a (fanfare) desktop computer.
Unlike a compute cluster node, that so-called desktop computer typically does all sorts of silly things that would make it a lousy compute cluster node. Like running one or more displays, handling a GUI, spending lots of time waiting for user input, and so on.
And, be they students or scientists, odds are those users want to do various and sundry things with those desktop computers. They probably receive documents, or have to create documents, in a format that Microsoft Office likes (whether they want to or not), so being able to handle that is important. And they probably either know, or should learn, how to use Windows. But they probably also know, or should learn, how to use a Mac, and to some extent, UNIX. And their best bet for doing all those things on a single box is, currently, a Mac.
Any Mac under 2 years old with 256MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS X. And any native G3 or G4 with a CD-ROM and 192MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS 9. (And I'm talking Virtual PC 6, of course - latest and greatest.)
That means the schools can have their "single platform" in terms of hardware support -- yet also have diversity. OS X? Check -- and of course, you can run Office:X on it, if you want your students to learn to be mice, er, MOUSes. OS 9? Just start Classic. DOS? It's in Virtual PC. Any Windows version you like? Virtual PC. Linux? Probably Virtual PC - or if you just want to run apps, a lot of them are available through Fink. X Window apps? X11's already available for Jaguar, and I've heard it'll be built into Panther.
Schools aren't the only places that want a single platform. Scientific users have glommed onto OS X Macs because they can run "UNIX apps," Mac stuff and "Windows apps" on a single machine. It frees up desk space, and while a Mac may not be cheaper than a Windows PC, it's most certainly cheaper than a Mac plus a Windows PC plus a UNIX or Linux box.
Yeah, it'll get a little slow if they try to run it all at once on a G3, but oh well, don't do that, then. Unless you're going to do a screen capture of it.:)
The navy has somewhere around 50 "attack" subs, and 15 ballistic missile subs (counting ones that are on order or under construction, but have already been named).
So... if they were spread evenly across ALL the subs, we'd be looking at about 4 Xserves per sub. Whether they'd cluster all 4, or cluster 3 with 1 spare, or cluster 2 with 2 spare, I don't know.
(Personally, as someone who's clustered Linux a bit, I'd cluster all 4. It's a cluster, for crying out loud, it's supposed to be redundant, and if you have a failure, you've still got 3...)
Another interesting tidbit is that Burlington Coat Factory was, ten years ago, a relatively big Sequent Dynix/PTX shop. (I know this because in 1994, I worked at BCF headquarters as an MIS Unix operator, a few levels down from Mike Prince in the org-chart.) Even back then, their data warehouse was in the hundreds of gigabytes.
Of course, Sequent (and Dynix/PTX) happens to be what IBM bought, thus winding up with NUMA and stuff like that. IBM backed Linux... and (before? after? at the same time?) BCF made its big switch to Linux.
Pity "Sinbad" didn't get the focus of... er, people who buy movie tickets, and barely made back 10% of its budget on opening weekend. I hope all that Linux kept their costs down enough that they can afford for it to do as well as a typical pirate movie.
In April of 1990, I was visiting a friend at Utah State University in Logan, UT. The IBM rep (nice lady) came around to the computer center (which was nice of her) to try to sell everyone PS/2's - or at least PS/1's (which was less nice of her).
But she brought this one thing with her that looked kind of like an overgrown PS/2, and had a goshawfulbig monitor hooked to it... and was running UNIX. Being a geek even back then, I noticed this and asked what it was and if I could play with it.
'Twas some very early RS/6000 model, quite unstable at that point in time, OS-wise. I have no idea why she was allowed to bring it on campus. Maybe she was trying to convince them to move away from their Ultrix vaxen.
By IBM's timeline, that would have been a POWER (no numbers after it) chip, predating the PowerPC by a chunk of time. I never stopped to think about it before, though.
And of course there's always emulation!
on
Pac-Man Reloaded
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...which is how I enjoy playing classic games like Ms. Pac-Man, Arkanoid, Spy Hunter, Q-Bert and others... running under a Commodore 64 emulator called Frodo.
...which in my case is running on my Nokia 3650 cell phone.
...which (upgraded like mine) has 2,000 times the RAM of a Commodore 64, anyway. Lots of room for games!:)
As someone who routinely files about 10 pages worth of information - 1040, schedule(s) C, SE, 8829, section 179 stuff, multiple W2's, multiple 1099's, and so on - I suspect an S-corp's return might not be that much worse than mine.
NASA, Alcatel, Cisco, 3 phone companies (would that include Alcatel and Cisco, though?), Transmeta, Redhat, and OpenBSD? Hmm. Let's see...
The NASA bit, probably need to at least be IN college. The others... maybe, maybe not. OpenBSD and Redhat probably would take a high school kid if he hacked code well.
As for the others? Dot-com, dot-com, dot-com... given the economy the last few years, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see somone work for Transmeta, Alcatel and Cisco in a period of 18 months or less. Layoffs and whatnot, of course.
So... OpenBSD+Red Hat before college, NASA internship in college, drop out of college and work for Transmeta, Alcatel and Cisco... oh, and a phone company or two.
Not to say he isn't a troll, but given the "new economy" (joke that it is), people get to work a lot more places, for shorter periods of time, than they did a generation or two ago. One could rack up that list without even turning 25.
The local cinema chain (Wallace, I think) owns two facilities here in town - a multiplex of perhaps 8 screens at the mall, showing first-run stuff for US$5 and up ($5 is the matinee price, not to be confuse with a manatee price), and a second-run theater (2 screens, I think) in the historic downtown. Until recently, the second-run one was charging about $2 a show, but prices there just got slashed to $0.50 for matinees and $1.00 for evening shows.
This will definitely impact our interest in second-run shows. Even our 3-year-old will probably understand that blowing 50 cents on a little "ride-on" thing at the mall that lasts 5 minutes isn't as good a deal as getting to see a movie that lasts an hour or two for the same price.
Even if their current kid's fare is little more than regurgitated cartoon videos, it's hard to feel one's thrown money away at that price.
I knew I should have saved the PERL code I wrote (and used) back around 1997 when I was shag@emanon.net, which specifically did challenge-response spam-blocking for my inbox.
But folks in the know (names like Vixie come to mind) pointed out that such things were too antisocial and didn't scale well. (Which is still true, but anyway.)
(I later decided that there was no hope for that address, and put in a.forward that sent a vacation message with the contents of my mailspool -- all spam, of course -- to each new spammer.)
FireWire 400 is obviously slower than Gigabit Ethernet. As is FireWire 800. But the second-generation FireWire spec defines speeds up to 3200Mbps (3.2Gbps) over appropriate cables (fiber, I believe) and distances (short).
It remains to be seen whether FireWire will hit 3.2GBps before 10GBps Ethernet becomes affordable. (Even if it does, I'd really expect people to use it more for SANs and NAS than for ordinary networks.)
Holy cow... I actually did FORTRAN-77 programming on an AOS/VS II system (more recently than most people would admit, I'm sure!)... never tried that command, though.
One should note that although Microsoft might prefer its own "One media player to rule them all, and in Windows bind them" approach, it is a full member of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum.
So... they've left themselves an escape route, at the very least. Or perhaps they're just prepared to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" yet another industry standard.
"I still do consulting on the side and in the small to medium size business arena, at least in my experience, people just love the MS solution. They're usually already familiar with Outlook and Office and are ready to pay for a few Dells and an 2K server or two running Exchange and MS SQL."
I do consulting too, in roughly the same segment. (Don't worry, we live in different towns.;)
In my experience, that's not love you're seeing; it's resignation. I have yet to meet any end-user who is passionate about Microsoft applications. People just don't go on about how great those things are. They're commodities.
And the unlucky "in house" folks who really aren't qualified to fix stuff (read: can't tell a SCSI card from a parallel port card) yet get asked to do it anyway are definitely no fans of Microsoft. I enjoy nodding sagely at cluebies ranting about how if they turn their PC off, disconnect and reconnect the monitor, and boot back up, it gives them some sort of message about wanting a Windows disk...
Do they upgrade? Sure! Not because there's some great new feature or capability, but because they keep hoping that maybe this time, unlike last time and the time before it, things will suck less.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some instances where it can be difficult to categorize things. And what if I don't feel the need for the library I just set up to have a "Queer" section? Or what if I'd like a "Travel" section? Huh? Huh? ;)
That said, I can say that it does do some cool stuff. Plug in an ISBN, and 9+ times out of 10, it'll auto-populate the rest of the indexing information, even grabbing a review off Amazon about it.
Virtual PC costs about $200-$240, depending on which flavor of Windows you want to run on it. Not particularly cheap, but probably cheaper than a PC running anything other than Lindows. And since it includes Windows, it includes the things Windows includes, like IE and media player. It doesn't include extra apps that might be bundled with a new PC, though.
If you want to do this with a Mac old enough that it didn't come with OS 9 or OS X, and you haven't already upgraded to OS 9 or OS X (almost every Mac capable of running Virtual PC is capable of running OS X) then yes, I suppose you'd need to get OS 9 or OS X as well. I can't really comment on what version of MacOS schools are using, these days.
From a school's position, an eMac with a reasonable amount of RAM and Virtual PC with whatever Windows OS they like should be under $1K. Given educational discounts and bulk discounts, I'd say significantly under, probably closer to $500 than to $1K, but I'm really guessing. And for that, they get a Mac that runs most or all of their existing Mac apps (hey, if they've got System 5 stuff, all bets are off ;) and Windows, and DOS, and various things from the UNIX/Linux world, yadda yadda.
(Oh, and of course, once you've got VirtualPC installed, I'm pretty sure you can take whatever OS install CD's you've got lying around for PC's, and set those other OSes up under it, too. I think I've got some Linux CD's somewhere here, maybe I'll put that hypothesis to the test right now.)
It has also been stated previously that about half of the pre-orders are for Dual 2.0GHz systems.
So... they'll need 50,000+ chips (for that many single-CPU systems) running at 1.6 or 1.8GHz, and 100,000+ chips (for 50,000+ dual-CPU systems) running at 2.0GHz. No wonder the slower ones are shipping first.
Oh, and at the base prices, not counting all those extra-cost build-to-order options, that works out to over $100,000,000 worth of 1.6/1.8GHz pre-orders, and $150,000,000 worth of 2.0GHz dual pre-orders, for a total of $250,000,000 in top-line sales.
You're obviously forgetting Mat 5:5 - Blessed are the geeks: for they shall inherit the earth.
Yes, yes, of course people are doing the Linux thing when they need a compute cluster, render farm, or whatever. (Well, maybe not the render farm, since OS support for the Mac's 128-bit vector processing unit might sway things a bit in that case.)
But... people, be they K-12 students or scientists, generally don't have cyberpunk neural implants directly linked to those compute clusters, render farms, or whatever, just yet. That means they use one of those things we quaintly call a (fanfare) desktop computer.
Unlike a compute cluster node, that so-called desktop computer typically does all sorts of silly things that would make it a lousy compute cluster node. Like running one or more displays, handling a GUI, spending lots of time waiting for user input, and so on.
And, be they students or scientists, odds are those users want to do various and sundry things with those desktop computers. They probably receive documents, or have to create documents, in a format that Microsoft Office likes (whether they want to or not), so being able to handle that is important. And they probably either know, or should learn, how to use Windows. But they probably also know, or should learn, how to use a Mac, and to some extent, UNIX. And their best bet for doing all those things on a single box is, currently, a Mac.
Any Mac under 2 years old with 256MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS X. And any native G3 or G4 with a CD-ROM and 192MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS 9. (And I'm talking Virtual PC 6, of course - latest and greatest.)
That means the schools can have their "single platform" in terms of hardware support -- yet also have diversity. OS X? Check -- and of course, you can run Office:X on it, if you want your students to learn to be mice, er, MOUSes. OS 9? Just start Classic. DOS? It's in Virtual PC. Any Windows version you like? Virtual PC. Linux? Probably Virtual PC - or if you just want to run apps, a lot of them are available through Fink. X Window apps? X11's already available for Jaguar, and I've heard it'll be built into Panther.
Schools aren't the only places that want a single platform. Scientific users have glommed onto OS X Macs because they can run "UNIX apps," Mac stuff and "Windows apps" on a single machine. It frees up desk space, and while a Mac may not be cheaper than a Windows PC, it's most certainly cheaper than a Mac plus a Windows PC plus a UNIX or Linux box.
Yeah, it'll get a little slow if they try to run it all at once on a G3, but oh well, don't do that, then. Unless you're going to do a screen capture of it. :)
So... if they were spread evenly across ALL the subs, we'd be looking at about 4 Xserves per sub. Whether they'd cluster all 4, or cluster 3 with 1 spare, or cluster 2 with 2 spare, I don't know.
(Personally, as someone who's clustered Linux a bit, I'd cluster all 4. It's a cluster, for crying out loud, it's supposed to be redundant, and if you have a failure, you've still got 3...)
Of course, Sequent (and Dynix/PTX) happens to be what IBM bought, thus winding up with NUMA and stuff like that. IBM backed Linux... and (before? after? at the same time?) BCF made its big switch to Linux.
Fascinating.
Pity "Sinbad" didn't get the focus of... er, people who buy movie tickets, and barely made back 10% of its budget on opening weekend. I hope all that Linux kept their costs down enough that they can afford for it to do as well as a typical pirate movie.
But she brought this one thing with her that looked kind of like an overgrown PS/2, and had a goshawfulbig monitor hooked to it... and was running UNIX. Being a geek even back then, I noticed this and asked what it was and if I could play with it.
'Twas some very early RS/6000 model, quite unstable at that point in time, OS-wise. I have no idea why she was allowed to bring it on campus. Maybe she was trying to convince them to move away from their Ultrix vaxen.
By IBM's timeline, that would have been a POWER (no numbers after it) chip, predating the PowerPC by a chunk of time. I never stopped to think about it before, though.
Count me in for the lava, too.
And the fish and turtles... except that I take a camera with me.
As someone who routinely files about 10 pages worth of information - 1040, schedule(s) C, SE, 8829, section 179 stuff, multiple W2's, multiple 1099's, and so on - I suspect an S-corp's return might not be that much worse than mine.
The NASA bit, probably need to at least be IN college. The others... maybe, maybe not. OpenBSD and Redhat probably would take a high school kid if he hacked code well.
As for the others? Dot-com, dot-com, dot-com... given the economy the last few years, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see somone work for Transmeta, Alcatel and Cisco in a period of 18 months or less. Layoffs and whatnot, of course.
So... OpenBSD+Red Hat before college, NASA internship in college, drop out of college and work for Transmeta, Alcatel and Cisco... oh, and a phone company or two.
Not to say he isn't a troll, but given the "new economy" (joke that it is), people get to work a lot more places, for shorter periods of time, than they did a generation or two ago. One could rack up that list without even turning 25.
This will definitely impact our interest in second-run shows. Even our 3-year-old will probably understand that blowing 50 cents on a little "ride-on" thing at the mall that lasts 5 minutes isn't as good a deal as getting to see a movie that lasts an hour or two for the same price.
Even if their current kid's fare is little more than regurgitated cartoon videos, it's hard to feel one's thrown money away at that price.
But folks in the know (names like Vixie come to mind) pointed out that such things were too antisocial and didn't scale well. (Which is still true, but anyway.)
(I later decided that there was no hope for that address, and put in a .forward that sent a vacation message with the contents of my mailspool -- all spam, of course -- to each new spammer.)
I'll just go back to wondering why this warrants being pointed out by @Stake, let alone mention on Slashdot.
It remains to be seen whether FireWire will hit 3.2GBps before 10GBps Ethernet becomes affordable. (Even if it does, I'd really expect people to use it more for SANs and NAS than for ordinary networks.)
Half-Life 2 == Whole Life, but "Life" was already taken by a cellular automata game, and "Whole Life" sounded too insurance-oriented.
And here I was gonna say that the article was about tech jobs, and how on Earth did Win32 guys have anything to do with that? ;)
Or were you looking for something open-source that could be ported to _all kinds_ of UNIX? ;)
Holy cow... I actually did FORTRAN-77 programming on an AOS/VS II system (more recently than most people would admit, I'm sure!) ... never tried that command, though.
As is just about every major manufacturer of media player software, OSes, DVD players, cellular phones, and video cameras.
So... they've left themselves an escape route, at the very least. Or perhaps they're just prepared to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" yet another industry standard.
I do consulting too, in roughly the same segment. (Don't worry, we live in different towns. ;)
In my experience, that's not love you're seeing; it's resignation. I have yet to meet any end-user who is passionate about Microsoft applications. People just don't go on about how great those things are. They're commodities.
And the unlucky "in house" folks who really aren't qualified to fix stuff (read: can't tell a SCSI card from a parallel port card) yet get asked to do it anyway are definitely no fans of Microsoft. I enjoy nodding sagely at cluebies ranting about how if they turn their PC off, disconnect and reconnect the monitor, and boot back up, it gives them some sort of message about wanting a Windows disk...
Do they upgrade? Sure! Not because there's some great new feature or capability, but because they keep hoping that maybe this time, unlike last time and the time before it, things will suck less.
"Good grief, where does it end?" indeed!