I can't believe that SCO really wants to sue the Hollywood studios for using Linux software. I think they forget that the entertainment companies retain VERY powerful lawyers who have far more experience with intellectual property rights than SCO will ever have (and then some).
This a major losing proposition for SCO, to say the least.
I think one of the big issues that is holding back Linux for desktop users is the fact the OS still does not completely support automatic configuration of hardware, especially hot-docked devices through the USB and IEEE-1394 ports. This is something that Windows has done pretty well, especially with Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Home/Professional.
I'm hoping that Linux will incorporate the Open Source equivalent of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) which has been used since Windows 98.
There are actually three things that could do a lot to speed up computer systems without going the route of getting a faster CPU.
First, get as much RAM as you can afford. Nowadays, you want at least 384 MB of RAM installed, which drastically reduces the need of the operating system to do virtual memory swapping to and from the hard drive. With Linux running a full Gnome or KDE environment or running Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Home/Professional, you probably want at least 512 MB of RAM installed (overkill? Not with the cheap price of RAM nowadays).
Second, get yourself the fastest hard drive you can afford. You want at bare minimum a 7200 rpm drive with ATA-33 interface (ATA-100/133 drives can run in ATA-33 mode) with 2 MB of buffer RAM on the drive itself. The newer drives often sport 8 MB of buffer RAM, which speeds up drive performance a little bit more in most cases.
Finally, get yourself the fastest graphics card your system can support. This is especially true if you're running games or play back full-screen or near full-screen video files.
There are some circumstances where going to a faster CPU does make sense. This is especially true for multimedia editing work, where CPU processing power is at a premium and you want access to CPU multimedia extensions such as Intel's SSE/SSE2 and/or AMD's 3Dnow!/3DNow! Professional.
An interesting tidbit about David Letterman--his popularity from doing The Late Show with David Letterman coincided with the first rise of VCR popularity in the early 1980's. According to Bill Carter's book The Late Shift, Nielsen Media Research noted Letterman's show was among the most videotaped shows on TV at that time.
I think the major networks should have taken the warning writer Alvin Toffler mentioned some 34 years ago in his most famous book, The Third Wave.
In that book, Toffler mentioned that as communications technology improves, this drastically increases the choices for people wanting their entertainment and information, and as a result the high ratings of TV networks in the past will never happen again; he called this concept the demassification of the media.
Since 1979 (the year The Third Wave as published), we've had the following:
1. Videocasette recorders (and now increasingly personal video recorders) effectively destroying the concept of prime time. Why stay up to watch The Late Show with David Letterman when you can watch it the next morning from a recording?
2. Cable TV with its 60-plus channels and direct-broadcast satellite TV with its 200-plus channels has allow for much more niche programming aimed at specific smaller audiences.
3. The rise of pre-recorded home videos, first on videocassettes in the 1980's and now on DVD since 1997 has allowed home viewers to see recent movie hits and even complete TV seasons!
4. The rise of the public Internet since the early 1990's has taken away a LOT of TV viewers, especially since the Internet can be considered a true interactive medium.
Small wonder why the TV networks are suffering nowadays.
I don't think Microsoft will push the demands for Longhorn that high.
It's more realistic that Longhorn will probably need at least an Intel Pentium 4/Celeron CPU running at 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon XP CPU running at 2500+ speeds, about 1 GB of RAM, 512 GB hard drive, graphics card with performance about that of the ATI Radeon 9600 card, and 100Base-T Ethernet (NOT 10Base-T Ethernet).
I think people need to realize that Windows Longhorn is still quite a ways from making it to beta release!
People conveniently forget that Microsoft made MANY changes during the alpha phase of Windows 4.0 before settling on the interface and features that became the Windows 95 beta program.
I don't expect the beta program for Longhorn to start until at earliest February 2004 when Microsoft has completed the features freeze for the new operating system. Besides the WinFS file system, it appears that Microsoft will come up with a completely new interface that will be totally different than the interface look and feel that has been around since Windows 95 (Windows XP today is still in many ways very similar to the original Win95 interface).
The reason why the US SST program didn't make sense was the fact that 1) the plane was going to be hideously expensive to build due to heavy use of titanium alloys, 2) the engines used on the original SST design would have used fuel at a exorbitant rate and definitely not meet even ICAO Stage III noise standards, and 3) the range of the plane would have prevented transpacific operations.
However, the NASA/Boeing High-Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) research program of the 1990's have shown we are within technological to build an SST that could fly non-stop from Los Angeles to Tokyo, not to mention meeting today's strict regulations on jet engine noise and exhaust emissions.
There is still one hurdle left, and that is finding a way to reduce and/or eliminate the sonic boom that accompanies supersonic flight. Recent tests by Northrup Grumman using an F-5E with a reprofiled fuselage has shown that by very careful aerodynamic design, we can minimize the pressure wave buildup that causes the sonic boom in the first place and/or direct the sonic boom energy skyward away from the ground.
I personally think that if airplane designers are willing to limit the top speed to around Mach 1.7, we are within technological reach of building a second-generation SST that 1) could seat around 300 passengers, 2) will have a range as far as 6,600 nautical miles, which makes transpacific operations practical, 3) meet today's jet engine regulations and 4) will have very little or no sonic boom at flight altitudes at speed.
1. AMD Athlon XP CPU's are so cheap nowadays you might as well get a 2000+ to 2400+ CPU.
2. Forget about using a GeForce MX400 board. You're better off getting the boards that use the ATI Radeon 9000/9000 Pro chipset (I'd would rather splurge a little for a board that uses the ATI Radeon 9600 chipset, if only to play games that use DirectX 9.0 reasonably fast).
3. You really want 512 MB of system RAM, especially if you're running the latest games. Most of the newest games are major system hogs.
I think people are assuming all kinds of wrong things about Ximian's Mono project.
Look at it this way: why is Microsoft not really putting down Mono? The reason is simple: if Mono does become highly successful, it means that the Open Source crowd will be running Web services almost identical to what Microsoft plans with their.NET initiative. In short, the basic.NET concepts become widely adopted quickly by two very large user bases (Windows and now increasingly Linux/FreeBSD).
This is particularly bad news for Sun Microsystems, because the wide adoption of Mono will put a quick kibosh to the much-touted Liberty Alliance web services project, a project that has Sun as its biggest supporter.
I think keyboards are usually the oldest pieces of hardware that most computer users still tend to use, mostly because you can get adapters that convert the PS/2 keyboard connector to the larger DIN connector used on older keyboards. In fact, that's how I still have an old Maxiswitch keyboard that I can plug into my system that runs a Celeron 500 MHz CPU.:-)
This is why the old Northgate OmniKey 102 keyboards are still in high demand, mostly because they do work with today's computers that still sport PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors.
Mouse pointers could have been among the older hardware used by computer users, but the issue of clogged rollers inside mechanical mouse pointers and the fact that many new software don't support mouse pointers connected to a serial port has obseleted older mouse pointers.
Gee, your suggestions may sound like what Windows Longhorn maybe like when it is finally released. It wouldn't be far-fetched that Windows Longhorn runs on top of the BSD kernel, since the so-called Windows File System could actually be an adaptation of what is now available for some UNIX variants.
Besides, running it on top of the BSD kernel might make it possible to have Windows Longhorn variants that run on the Intel IA-32, Intel IA-64 and AMD X86-64 CPU architectures with almost no code changes at the application level.:-)
Actually, support for x86-64 type CPU's and IPv6 support could come as part of a Windows XP Second Edition that might be released in the second half of 2004.
But since Windows Longhorn will get a totally new file system to replace NTFS 5 and will likely get an all-new interface, they won't be available as Windows XP point releases.
I think the reasons why Microsoft is aiming Windows Longhorn for 2006 release are:
1. Windows will get a new file system (WinFS). This is something that is completely different than NTFS 5 used in Windows 2000/XP and will take time to debug.
2. Windows will likely get a completely new interface from the ground up. Even the current Luna interface used in Windows XP is essentially a derivative of the interface pioneered by Windows 95. That means the Taskbar with its Start button will be replaced by something completely new.
3. Windows will be written so it fully takes advantage of the latest desktop CPU technology. This means CPU's based on Intel's Prescott CPU core, the AMD Hammer (Athlon64/Opteron) core, and most likely a future version of CPU's based on the Intel Itanium core.
4. Windows will now include native support for IPv6 addressing.
I mean, think about it: does the Linux driver for the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card equal the functionality of the Windows 2000/XP driver? It's not even close. The same applies for the latest ATI or nVidia graphics chipsets, though that situation is starting to change.
Besides, I'm not really certain can Linux support true hot-docked device connections through the USB or IEEE-1394 port quite yet. I believe there are are Open Source projects to implement Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) in Linux; once that occurs Linux will finally a true alternate to Windows, which has enjoyed extremely wide hardware support through device drivers.
I still think that 16:9 aspect widescreen displays should be the wave of the future. That way, you get many of the benefits of a dual-monitor display without hogging desk space that a dual-monitor setup tends to do (even with today's flat panel displays). I wouldn't be surprised that Microsoft officially sanctions 16:9 displays (starting with Windows XP Service Pack 2).
One thing a 16:9 display could do is with the right monitor you can pivot the display 90 degrees for a portrait mode display. This could make web page design or DTP much easier to do.
Why do I have this feeling that Microsoft will pay Eolas US$400 million to buy the technology lock, stock and barrel? Given Microsoft's huge liquid cash reserves such a payment would be pocket change to the company.
Mind you, if MS does buy out Eolas they could cause no end of trouble for Netscape, Konqueror and Opera, since the non-MS browsers loads plugins in a very similar fashion.
There is one other possibility: Valve Software may have gotten the code for an incremental release to DirectX 9.0 (DirectX 9.1?) and possibility they are on the beta program for Windows Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP.
Maybe when Half-Life 2 is finally released in possibly June-July 2004 it will support the features of the next incremental release of DirectX, and possibly the program code will be easily be able to run under Longhorn when that is released some time afterwards?
I think there is one place where the DiVX codec could have a major impact: a hard disk-based personal video recorder (PVR).
One of the most vexing issues with PVR's such as TiVo is the fact you need very large capacity hard disks to store over 80 hours of video at standard quality. By combining TiVo boxes with DiVX technology, we can either use a substantially smaller hard drive (which could reduce the size of the TiVo box quite a bit) or increase the storage capacity by a factor of three or more. Imagine a future TiVo unit being able to store over 300 hours of recorded video on a single hard drive that now can record 80 hours in standard quality mode!:-)
China has said that Shenzhou 5, the next launch of the Shenzhou spacecraft, will likely carry a single taikonaut (Chinese for astronaut) some time this fall--probably in October. My guess is that the rocket with the Shenzhou spacecraft on top is in final assembly now and will be ready to launch by the third week of October 2003.
Mind you, Shenzhou is not much more than a highly-modified and modernized Soyuz spacecraft, in my humble opinion.
I think that Scaled Composites may be in the lead to get something into low Earth orbit (LEO), too.
Remember, what SpaceShipOne demonstrates is only the beginning; what is learned from this vehicle could make it possible to build something that is launched on top of a modified 747 fitted with rocket motor within ten years, and such a vehicle will likely carry 4-6 astronauts into a high enough LEO to dock with the International Space Station.:-)
I think it was obvious from the the start that once Burt Rutan's company unveiled its project it was going to be in the lead to win the X-Prize. =)
Remember, when Scaled Composites unveiled the Proteus high-altitude airplane back in the mid 1990's everyone knew it wouldn't take much of a technological leap for the company to build an airplane that could launch something to very high altitudes soon afterward. Essentially, the White Knight carrier plane bases a lot of its technology on what Proteus pioneered.
Unless Carmack's company (Armadillo Aerospace) suddenly gets a major breakthrough for its rocket engine, the prize is now essentially for Burt Rutan to claim--possibly as early as late November 2003!
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I can't believe that SCO really wants to sue the Hollywood studios for using Linux software. I think they forget that the entertainment companies retain VERY powerful lawyers who have far more experience with intellectual property rights than SCO will ever have (and then some).
This a major losing proposition for SCO, to say the least.
Actually, you can use the time between the first and second movie discs to do the call of nature, so there. ;-)
I think one of the big issues that is holding back Linux for desktop users is the fact the OS still does not completely support automatic configuration of hardware, especially hot-docked devices through the USB and IEEE-1394 ports. This is something that Windows has done pretty well, especially with Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Home/Professional.
I'm hoping that Linux will incorporate the Open Source equivalent of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) which has been used since Windows 98.
I think Symantec is going to find out real fast what it's like to be a defendant in a First Amendment lawsuit.
There are actually three things that could do a lot to speed up computer systems without going the route of getting a faster CPU.
First, get as much RAM as you can afford. Nowadays, you want at least 384 MB of RAM installed, which drastically reduces the need of the operating system to do virtual memory swapping to and from the hard drive. With Linux running a full Gnome or KDE environment or running Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Home/Professional, you probably want at least 512 MB of RAM installed (overkill? Not with the cheap price of RAM nowadays).
Second, get yourself the fastest hard drive you can afford. You want at bare minimum a 7200 rpm drive with ATA-33 interface (ATA-100/133 drives can run in ATA-33 mode) with 2 MB of buffer RAM on the drive itself. The newer drives often sport 8 MB of buffer RAM, which speeds up drive performance a little bit more in most cases.
Finally, get yourself the fastest graphics card your system can support. This is especially true if you're running games or play back full-screen or near full-screen video files.
There are some circumstances where going to a faster CPU does make sense. This is especially true for multimedia editing work, where CPU processing power is at a premium and you want access to CPU multimedia extensions such as Intel's SSE/SSE2 and/or AMD's 3Dnow!/3DNow! Professional.
An interesting tidbit about David Letterman--his popularity from doing The Late Show with David Letterman coincided with the first rise of VCR popularity in the early 1980's. According to Bill Carter's book The Late Shift, Nielsen Media Research noted Letterman's show was among the most videotaped shows on TV at that time.
I think the major networks should have taken the warning writer Alvin Toffler mentioned some 34 years ago in his most famous book, The Third Wave.
In that book, Toffler mentioned that as communications technology improves, this drastically increases the choices for people wanting their entertainment and information, and as a result the high ratings of TV networks in the past will never happen again; he called this concept the demassification of the media.
Since 1979 (the year The Third Wave as published), we've had the following:
1. Videocasette recorders (and now increasingly personal video recorders) effectively destroying the concept of prime time. Why stay up to watch The Late Show with David Letterman when you can watch it the next morning from a recording?
2. Cable TV with its 60-plus channels and direct-broadcast satellite TV with its 200-plus channels has allow for much more niche programming aimed at specific smaller audiences.
3. The rise of pre-recorded home videos, first on videocassettes in the 1980's and now on DVD since 1997 has allowed home viewers to see recent movie hits and even complete TV seasons!
4. The rise of the public Internet since the early 1990's has taken away a LOT of TV viewers, especially since the Internet can be considered a true interactive medium.
Small wonder why the TV networks are suffering nowadays.
I don't think Microsoft will push the demands for Longhorn that high.
It's more realistic that Longhorn will probably need at least an Intel Pentium 4/Celeron CPU running at 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon XP CPU running at 2500+ speeds, about 1 GB of RAM, 512 GB hard drive, graphics card with performance about that of the ATI Radeon 9600 card, and 100Base-T Ethernet (NOT 10Base-T Ethernet).
Folks,
I think people need to realize that Windows Longhorn is still quite a ways from making it to beta release!
People conveniently forget that Microsoft made MANY changes during the alpha phase of Windows 4.0 before settling on the interface and features that became the Windows 95 beta program.
I don't expect the beta program for Longhorn to start until at earliest February 2004 when Microsoft has completed the features freeze for the new operating system. Besides the WinFS file system, it appears that Microsoft will come up with a completely new interface that will be totally different than the interface look and feel that has been around since Windows 95 (Windows XP today is still in many ways very similar to the original Win95 interface).
The reason why the US SST program didn't make sense was the fact that 1) the plane was going to be hideously expensive to build due to heavy use of titanium alloys, 2) the engines used on the original SST design would have used fuel at a exorbitant rate and definitely not meet even ICAO Stage III noise standards, and 3) the range of the plane would have prevented transpacific operations.
However, the NASA/Boeing High-Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) research program of the 1990's have shown we are within technological to build an SST that could fly non-stop from Los Angeles to Tokyo, not to mention meeting today's strict regulations on jet engine noise and exhaust emissions.
There is still one hurdle left, and that is finding a way to reduce and/or eliminate the sonic boom that accompanies supersonic flight. Recent tests by Northrup Grumman using an F-5E with a reprofiled fuselage has shown that by very careful aerodynamic design, we can minimize the pressure wave buildup that causes the sonic boom in the first place and/or direct the sonic boom energy skyward away from the ground.
I personally think that if airplane designers are willing to limit the top speed to around Mach 1.7, we are within technological reach of building a second-generation SST that 1) could seat around 300 passengers, 2) will have a range as far as 6,600 nautical miles, which makes transpacific operations practical, 3) meet today's jet engine regulations and 4) will have very little or no sonic boom at flight altitudes at speed.
You're almost there, but a couple of things:
1. AMD Athlon XP CPU's are so cheap nowadays you might as well get a 2000+ to 2400+ CPU.
2. Forget about using a GeForce MX400 board. You're better off getting the boards that use the ATI Radeon 9000/9000 Pro chipset (I'd would rather splurge a little for a board that uses the ATI Radeon 9600 chipset, if only to play games that use DirectX 9.0 reasonably fast).
3. You really want 512 MB of system RAM, especially if you're running the latest games. Most of the newest games are major system hogs.
Folks,
.NET initiative. In short, the basic .NET concepts become widely adopted quickly by two very large user bases (Windows and now increasingly Linux/FreeBSD).
I think people are assuming all kinds of wrong things about Ximian's Mono project.
Look at it this way: why is Microsoft not really putting down Mono? The reason is simple: if Mono does become highly successful, it means that the Open Source crowd will be running Web services almost identical to what Microsoft plans with their
This is particularly bad news for Sun Microsystems, because the wide adoption of Mono will put a quick kibosh to the much-touted Liberty Alliance web services project, a project that has Sun as its biggest supporter.
I think keyboards are usually the oldest pieces of hardware that most computer users still tend to use, mostly because you can get adapters that convert the PS/2 keyboard connector to the larger DIN connector used on older keyboards. In fact, that's how I still have an old Maxiswitch keyboard that I can plug into my system that runs a Celeron 500 MHz CPU. :-)
This is why the old Northgate OmniKey 102 keyboards are still in high demand, mostly because they do work with today's computers that still sport PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors.
Mouse pointers could have been among the older hardware used by computer users, but the issue of clogged rollers inside mechanical mouse pointers and the fact that many new software don't support mouse pointers connected to a serial port has obseleted older mouse pointers.
Gee, your suggestions may sound like what Windows Longhorn maybe like when it is finally released. It wouldn't be far-fetched that Windows Longhorn runs on top of the BSD kernel, since the so-called Windows File System could actually be an adaptation of what is now available for some UNIX variants.
:-)
Besides, running it on top of the BSD kernel might make it possible to have Windows Longhorn variants that run on the Intel IA-32, Intel IA-64 and AMD X86-64 CPU architectures with almost no code changes at the application level.
Actually, support for x86-64 type CPU's and IPv6 support could come as part of a Windows XP Second Edition that might be released in the second half of 2004.
But since Windows Longhorn will get a totally new file system to replace NTFS 5 and will likely get an all-new interface, they won't be available as Windows XP point releases.
I think the reasons why Microsoft is aiming Windows Longhorn for 2006 release are:
1. Windows will get a new file system (WinFS). This is something that is completely different than NTFS 5 used in Windows 2000/XP and will take time to debug.
2. Windows will likely get a completely new interface from the ground up. Even the current Luna interface used in Windows XP is essentially a derivative of the interface pioneered by Windows 95. That means the Taskbar with its Start button will be replaced by something completely new.
3. Windows will be written so it fully takes advantage of the latest desktop CPU technology. This means CPU's based on Intel's Prescott CPU core, the AMD Hammer (Athlon64/Opteron) core, and most likely a future version of CPU's based on the Intel Itanium core.
4. Windows will now include native support for IPv6 addressing.
You are correct in your assessments.
I mean, think about it: does the Linux driver for the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card equal the functionality of the Windows 2000/XP driver? It's not even close. The same applies for the latest ATI or nVidia graphics chipsets, though that situation is starting to change.
Besides, I'm not really certain can Linux support true hot-docked device connections through the USB or IEEE-1394 port quite yet. I believe there are are Open Source projects to implement Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) in Linux; once that occurs Linux will finally a true alternate to Windows, which has enjoyed extremely wide hardware support through device drivers.
I still think that 16:9 aspect widescreen displays should be the wave of the future. That way, you get many of the benefits of a dual-monitor display without hogging desk space that a dual-monitor setup tends to do (even with today's flat panel displays). I wouldn't be surprised that Microsoft officially sanctions 16:9 displays (starting with Windows XP Service Pack 2).
One thing a 16:9 display could do is with the right monitor you can pivot the display 90 degrees for a portrait mode display. This could make web page design or DTP much easier to do.
I still think Microsoft is right now quietly negotiating with Eolas for a buyout.
The final price? Somewhere between US$400 million and US$600 million. Chump change for a company that has over US$50 billion in liquid assets.
Why do I have this feeling that Microsoft will pay Eolas US$400 million to buy the technology lock, stock and barrel? Given Microsoft's huge liquid cash reserves such a payment would be pocket change to the company.
Mind you, if MS does buy out Eolas they could cause no end of trouble for Netscape, Konqueror and Opera, since the non-MS browsers loads plugins in a very similar fashion.
There is one other possibility: Valve Software may have gotten the code for an incremental release to DirectX 9.0 (DirectX 9.1?) and possibility they are on the beta program for Windows Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP.
Maybe when Half-Life 2 is finally released in possibly June-July 2004 it will support the features of the next incremental release of DirectX, and possibly the program code will be easily be able to run under Longhorn when that is released some time afterwards?
I think there is one place where the DiVX codec could have a major impact: a hard disk-based personal video recorder (PVR).
:-)
One of the most vexing issues with PVR's such as TiVo is the fact you need very large capacity hard disks to store over 80 hours of video at standard quality. By combining TiVo boxes with DiVX technology, we can either use a substantially smaller hard drive (which could reduce the size of the TiVo box quite a bit) or increase the storage capacity by a factor of three or more. Imagine a future TiVo unit being able to store over 300 hours of recorded video on a single hard drive that now can record 80 hours in standard quality mode!
China has said that Shenzhou 5, the next launch of the Shenzhou spacecraft, will likely carry a single taikonaut (Chinese for astronaut) some time this fall--probably in October. My guess is that the rocket with the Shenzhou spacecraft on top is in final assembly now and will be ready to launch by the third week of October 2003.
Mind you, Shenzhou is not much more than a highly-modified and modernized Soyuz spacecraft, in my humble opinion.
I think that Scaled Composites may be in the lead to get something into low Earth orbit (LEO), too.
:-)
Remember, what SpaceShipOne demonstrates is only the beginning; what is learned from this vehicle could make it possible to build something that is launched on top of a modified 747 fitted with rocket motor within ten years, and such a vehicle will likely carry 4-6 astronauts into a high enough LEO to dock with the International Space Station.
I think it was obvious from the the start that once Burt Rutan's company unveiled its project it was going to be in the lead to win the X-Prize. =)
Remember, when Scaled Composites unveiled the Proteus high-altitude airplane back in the mid 1990's everyone knew it wouldn't take much of a technological leap for the company to build an airplane that could launch something to very high altitudes soon afterward. Essentially, the White Knight carrier plane bases a lot of its technology on what Proteus pioneered.
Unless Carmack's company (Armadillo Aerospace) suddenly gets a major breakthrough for its rocket engine, the prize is now essentially for Burt Rutan to claim--possibly as early as late November 2003!