and we all know how well dvd-audio and sacd have been catching on. in the end, the adoption rates of any of the four formats will remain abysmally low for years to come, because 95% of consumers won't see any difference that justifies the price of a new player.
While you can upgrade across major versions in Redhat by upgrading your rpms, it is (from my somewhat dated experience) a royal pain in the ass, and usually just easier to reinstall and be done with it.
As for your second question, RPM can do this if the package is built properly- RPMs from the major distros pretty much never have hardcoded paths in them anymore. Of course, this may not be true of the RPMs that the writers of [random free software project] make available on their website, as packaging RPMs correctly can be a pain if you haven't done it much before.
Personally I've given up on package managent for the most part as I use FreeBSD as my *NIX of choice.
It protects the company from people renaming the product and selling it as their own
while most of what you said is right, this is not true. the company is (and always has been) already protected from people renaming the product and selling it as their own by copyright law. otherwise you would see these same sort of obnxious licenses on books, movies, plays, etc....
Most people don't know about Macrovision, CSS, Safeloc, etc., etc. So long as you understand what the rules were going into the game, and that those rules do not change, I don't have a problem with anything that content providers choose to do.
just because these systems are transparent to most users does not make them ok. examples.
macrovision: my friend and i went to best buy and each bought a $400 dvd player when dvd's were pretty much brand new. neither of us had rca inputs on our tv's at the time, so we hooked up our brand new dvd players the only way we could- we hooked up the rca cables to the video input on our vcrs. we could watch dvd's on my player acceptibly as my vcr mostly ignored the macrovision, but my friend's was unwatchable.
css: i knew better than to buy any movies while i was in europe on my honeymoon, but suppose i didn't? how many people have no clue that dvd's won't work on a player sold in a different country/region than the disc? (i am not even going to get into the whole issue of playing dvd's on linux)
why should the content providers have any right in either of those two cases to tell me i shouldn't be able to watch something i legally purchased? i'm all for letting the copyright holders do what is necessary (within the limits of the law) to enforce teir copyrights. but i see no reason why we should let them decide how we exercise our legal rights to use a product we have purchased. what if the movie makers decided that from now on you could only watch the movies they make on tv screens larger than 40 inches and 5+1 surround system, because anything less would do justice to their vision? by your logic, this is alright, as long as you they tell you up front. would you stop buying movies if this decision was made? or spend the money to upgrade to a full home theater system (assuming you don't already have one)?
as much as the various content providers right now can't stand the idea, it is your legal right to use something you purchase from them however you want (within the limits of the law) and resell it if you want. both of those are rights that have been established and upheld by the courts. and i see no reason we should be willing to give up those rights. in fact i think we should fight to take back some of the ones we have already lost....
There are PLENTY of things people can do in windows to protect themselves as much as they want. Suggesting moving to another operating system shows your real intentions here.
yes, there are planty of things people CAN do, but not many that most pc users ACTUALLY do. my dad was about to buy a brand new computer because his was too slow (p3 450 which he only uses for browsing the web and occasionally microsoft office.) i convinced him to ship it out to me so i could check it out before he bought a new one.
the first time i booted it up, it took over ten minutes before i could open a window because over a dozen little programs opened themselves up in the taskbar. (when i asked him about them, he said he didn't know where any of them came from) i couldn't even use internet explorer, because just loading the home page would popup about 6 popup windows, and for every one i closed, two more would open.
sure, i can go ahead and install ad-aware or some other spyware/adware detection tool (and somebody reccomended a program called geek superhero the other day, which looks interesting, but i think would only confuse my parents) but if he doesn't change how he uses the computer, it won't do any good in the log run.... he'll ed up right back where he started.
if not for the fact that 1) he needs to be able to use ms office on it to work from home, and i don't yet trust openoffice to properly handle all of his files 2) he needs to be able to set up his dsl (PPPoE) and printer after i send it back to him i would just install linux on it, and not worry about it any more. as it is, i'm doing everything i can think of to try and lock this computer down without doing so in a way that is likely to confuse my parents. somehow i'm not too confident on my chances for success.
Re:If/When Valve goes out of business...
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
I wasn't speaking of transactional integrity, or even relational integrity (which many other people have mentioned), but pure data integrity.
My experience with MySQL was that it would frequently (*) corrupt it's data files, requiring the corrupted data files to be deleted. From there, the table either had to be recreated (empty) or restored from a backup (**). We typically just truncated the table and started over- in our deployment, MySQL was used purely for its speed, and all critical data was aggregated from the MySQL servers onto one of two Oracle databases, so losing a MySQL database meant almost nothing (other than that the server would hang on queries until the corrupted file was deleted, which significantly increased our average response time).
(*) on average about once a week accross a deployment of about 16 MySQL servers, or about once every 3-4 months per server.
(**) regardless of how little effort backups require, you should never have to plan on using them. They should be there to protect against an unlikely situation that you hope never happens, not something that inevitably happens a couple times a month.
If i am reading the page correctly, that's just an IDE for ASP.NET, not a different web programming language/platform. No thanks, I'll stick with ViM. I have no interest in a drag-and-drop GUI web page creator, and all of its other features seem to me to be of dubious value.
I will admit to being mildly interested in ASP.NET, however, using ASP.NET would be my employers decision, not mine.
well, for one thing, it lacks basic data integrity.
while it's a bit of an exageration to say that MySQL has no place in the enterprise, i would say that it certainly has no place storing data that you would not mind losing or cannot easily restore from backup.
not many enterprises have a lot of data like that.
add to your list that it's also missing basic data integrity. i used to support MySQL databases, and I can't tell you how many times I've had to delete and restore the data files from a backup because they had become corrupted.
While Oracle does seem to be the most powerful database out there, I see no reason for it to be near as complicated as it is. My theory is that Oracle is trying to mainting the artificically high salaries of Oracle DBA's. (Don't get me wrong, a decent Oracle DBA earns every penny he's paid, but why should they even be necessary?)
I have used PHP, Perl, ASP, and a couple of others, all on large projects.
I would choose any of them over J2EE, for any size site. There are a variety of reasons, but for the most part, it boils down to this:
For any other web programming language, you create a file somewhere in your Document Root, and you have a web page. Simple as that. If you are using Java, you have to create an xml deployment descriptor, the files have to be in certain places in the directory hierarchy, and depending on your container, you may have to recompile for even the most trivial changes.
Up until recently, I used PHP almost exclusively. While I find the PHP language (pre 5- haven't used PHP 5 yet) to be obnoxious in more ways than I can count, the PHP platform is (IMO) far and away the best alternative for web development in *NIX. If somebody would write a web development platform that worked like PHP, but used a Java interpreter instead of the PHP langugage interpreter, I would use it in a heartbeat.
Lately, I've been programming in ASP using the JScript langugage. Although I'm not a fan of IIS as a web server, I really like using JavaScript as a server side programming language. I like the fact that ASP allows you to choose what language you want to write in (although why it defaults to VB, or why anyone would choose to use VB, is beyond me) I wish PHP would have followed this model with its development. Then somebody who actually knew a thing or two about programming language design could have replaced the PHP interpreter long ago with Python, Java, JavaScript, LISP (for those so inclined), or even Perl.
If you are interested in a first person shooter that is very non-linear, I reccommend you check out Operation Flashpoint. The technology is a bit dated, but the gameplay is (IMO) wonderful. The maps are expansive, and the mission objectives leave a lot of open-endedness about how to accomplish them. (For the most part. Unfortunately, your teammates may get in the way if you try to go about about certain missions in a way that was unanticipated by the level designers.) It also requires strategic planning, as you can only carry one or two weapons, and you often have to coordinate team attacks.
more seriously, i think that electric cars would probably get replaced more often than gasoline cars, as many people would just decide to "upgrade" the next time their battery pack lost half it's life. (about 3 years with current best battery technology)
the analogy "would you buy a new car when you ran out of gas" would have new meaning- we'd have to change it to "would you buy a new car when your battery pack no longer holds a charge". except that i think you would find a surprizing number of people who would say "yes!"
I have found that most companies in the Los Angeles area are looking for people with specific vendor-based skill sets. This probably the result of vendors selling systems to an organization rather than real solutions. There seems to be little or no interest in a generalist who can apply standards and industry best practices as opposed to vendor-specifc knowledge.
I noticed that when I was looking for jobs in Chicago as well. I don't think it's the vendors who are to blame though. The problem was that for more than 5 years, every high school graduate was told that the computer industry was going to be the "next bug thing". Thousands or maybe even millions of people who would otherwise have had no interest in computers got CS degrees and jobs because they saw easy money in their future.
In areas that were really big during the late 90's, there are now so many out of work programmers that companies can put extrmemly specific job requirements on their job listings, because there will be plenty of people that have specifically those skills. It helps them, because by listing very specific skillsets, it cuts down on the number of resumes that they have to go through. Also, people who are doing the hiring know that the majority of the people currently looking for jobs in the CS field are in the aforementioned group of people that were looking for easy money and have little interest and sometimes little talent in the actual job they are applying for. By listing very requiring very specific skills, not only do they save on training costs, they give themselves a little bit of protection- if they discover that their new hire isn't very good at what they want them to do, they can let them go claiming that they mis-represented themselves on their resume.
Unfortunately, while the economy does seem to be coming back, I don't think that is going to help our field that much in the near future. The job outlook for computer jobs won't improve substantially (IMO) until a lot of the people who got into computers for the easy money give up and start looking for jobs in other areas. It sucks, because it makes life that much harder for those of us that really like and excel at what we do, but that's the way I see it.
I had thought of doing that with my parents computer. They left it here with me the last time they visited for me to fix it up and perform a few hardware and software upgrades. My first thought was to set it up to dual boot windows and linux with the windows option hidden. If they would try Linux for two weeks and still couldn't figure it out, or do waht they needed to do, i would log in remotely and change the boot configuration to load windows by default.
Unfortunately, the hard disk on the computer isn't really big enough to dual boot effectively, and that's not one of the parts that my dad is paying to upgrade. I'd really like to have him running Linux (the reason it's here to be fixed is that he had so many stupid little programs running in the taskbar that the thing takes about 10 minutes to boot to a usable state, and every time you try to open Internet Explorer about 10-12 popup windows show up, making it almost completely unusable) but there are a few reasons I don't think I can:
1) he uses the computer mainly for word, excel, and powerpoint documents that he needs to be able to share with people at work. I'm not quite confident enough in OpenOffice's abilities to handle these documents flawlessly, much less my dad's ability to adapt to a slightly different program. (when I tried to explain to him that I want him to use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, he was totally lost. I didn't understand the confusion until some website hijacked his start page. He explained to me that "Something changed his web browser from netscape (http://home.netscape.com) to some page full of advertisements." To him, the "web browser" is the page that is displayed when he clicks on the Internet)
2) I live a long way away from my parents and will be shipping the computer back to them when I am done. My dad has to be able to set up his DSL (uses some sort of PPPoE) and printer himself when he gets the computer back. If I was going to be visiting them sometime soon, I would be willing to set those two things up for him under Linux, but I don't think I can make him figure out how to do those things himself.
So, on goes XP SP2, Ad-Aware, AVG anti-virus, and Firefox (although i may have to change the Firefox icon to a blue e to avoid confusion) and I'll have to cross my fingers and hope for the best...
Re:Still can't see how Sun will survive
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 1
Sure, that's why all those sites survive the slashdot effect.
This is almost completely irrelevant. A well written site could handle the full brunt of slashdot on a couple of P3's (one db, one or two webservers) if they had enough upstream bandwidth. A poorly written site would bring a Sun E5000 to its knees. (I have personally witnessed both cases)
Most people who get killed by the slashdot effect don't have enough upstream bandwitdh. The rest usually don't have the max connections parameter for their database set high enough to keep up when their webserver starts running full bore. (If you're using persistent db connections with apache, you should always make sure max connections is at least as high as the max processes in your apache configuration)
Neither of these two issues (which probably make up > 80% of slashdot victims) has anything to do with what processor arhitecture you are running your server on. Add to that the number of people who use a system that just won't scale well regardless of platform (e.g. cgi, where a new process must be started for every request) and you're well over 90%.
Not that I don't think Sun makes some great boxes, but for just about any web server, and for many databases as well, they can be cheaply and effectively replaced by one or a few cheap linux boxes.
Are you saying here that you think that Intel will never make cpus with integrated memory controllers
if they do, it would shorten the lifspan of the BTX form factor even further. AMD is already not likely to support BTX because the specification makes it hard to design a board for a processor with an integrated memory controller. why would intel put so much effort into this form factor if they were already planning to release a cpu that is not compatible with it.
Will future CPUs be less power hungry? No
they should (IMO, anyway.) there's no reason a desktop computer needs to draw 110 watts of power just for the cpu.
at any rate, there are a lot of improvements that could be made to the ATX desgin without moving to a new form factor. just the adoption of the CPU fan design from the BTX specification would go a long way towards cooling off current computers. in fact, if i do end up buying a new athlon64 when the nforce4 boards are out, i'll probably grab one of these "thermal modules" just to see if i can hack it into an atx case.
if i understand the article correctly, that single fan is blowing air accross the cpu and then out the front of the case. if you look at it that way, their heat diagram makes sense.
of course, i'm not sure exhausting your waste heat out the front of the computer is a good idea either...
Also, even some x86 manufacturers have been using air channels for some time now. i have a dell poweredge at home with dual xeon 500's that has a special air channel to exhaust hot air from around the cpus directly out the back of the case, and separate fans to provide cooling air for the rest of the components inside the computer. of course, those are custom cases, and i doubt they even remotely resemble an atx form factor, however, i don't see why this couldn't be done at least at a basic level without creating a whole new form factor.
Slashdot Mirror
that's funny. i don't remember having been forced to buy a single copy of any star wars movie. ever...
and we all know how well dvd-audio and sacd have been catching on. in the end, the adoption rates of any of the four formats will remain abysmally low for years to come, because 95% of consumers won't see any difference that justifies the price of a new player.
While you can upgrade across major versions in Redhat by upgrading your rpms, it is (from my somewhat dated experience) a royal pain in the ass, and usually just easier to reinstall and be done with it.
As for your second question, RPM can do this if the package is built properly- RPMs from the major distros pretty much never have hardcoded paths in them anymore. Of course, this may not be true of the RPMs that the writers of [random free software project] make available on their website, as packaging RPMs correctly can be a pain if you haven't done it much before.
Personally I've given up on package managent for the most part as I use FreeBSD as my *NIX of choice.
It protects the company from people renaming the product and selling it as their own
while most of what you said is right, this is not true. the company is (and always has been) already protected from people renaming the product and selling it as their own by copyright law. otherwise you would see these same sort of obnxious licenses on books, movies, plays, etc....
Most people don't know about Macrovision, CSS, Safeloc, etc., etc. So long as you understand what the rules were going into the game, and that those rules do not change, I don't have a problem with anything that content providers choose to do.
just because these systems are transparent to most users does not make them ok. examples.
macrovision:
my friend and i went to best buy and each bought a $400 dvd player when dvd's were pretty much brand new. neither of us had rca inputs on our tv's at the time, so we hooked up our brand new dvd players the only way we could- we hooked up the rca cables to the video input on our vcrs. we could watch dvd's on my player acceptibly as my vcr mostly ignored the macrovision, but my friend's was unwatchable.
css:
i knew better than to buy any movies while i was in europe on my honeymoon, but suppose i didn't? how many people have no clue that dvd's won't work on a player sold in a different country/region than the disc? (i am not even going to get into the whole issue of playing dvd's on linux)
why should the content providers have any right in either of those two cases to tell me i shouldn't be able to watch something i legally purchased? i'm all for letting the copyright holders do what is necessary (within the limits of the law) to enforce teir copyrights. but i see no reason why we should let them decide how we exercise our legal rights to use a product we have purchased. what if the movie makers decided that from now on you could only watch the movies they make on tv screens larger than 40 inches and 5+1 surround system, because anything less would do justice to their vision? by your logic, this is alright, as long as you they tell you up front. would you stop buying movies if this decision was made? or spend the money to upgrade to a full home theater system (assuming you don't already have one)?
as much as the various content providers right now can't stand the idea, it is your legal right to use something you purchase from them however you want (within the limits of the law) and resell it if you want. both of those are rights that have been established and upheld by the courts. and i see no reason we should be willing to give up those rights. in fact i think we should fight to take back some of the ones we have already lost....
umm.... i think that was the point of his comparison.
actually i would have figured turbo tax 2002 to be useless after april 15th, 2003. Hopefully Half-Life 2 will have a longer lifespan than that....
There are PLENTY of things people can do in windows to protect themselves as much as they want. Suggesting moving to another operating system shows your real intentions here.
yes, there are planty of things people CAN do, but not many that most pc users ACTUALLY do. my dad was about to buy a brand new computer because his was too slow (p3 450 which he only uses for browsing the web and occasionally microsoft office.) i convinced him to ship it out to me so i could check it out before he bought a new one.
the first time i booted it up, it took over ten minutes before i could open a window because over a dozen little programs opened themselves up in the taskbar. (when i asked him about them, he said he didn't know where any of them came from) i couldn't even use internet explorer, because just loading the home page would popup about 6 popup windows, and for every one i closed, two more would open.
sure, i can go ahead and install ad-aware or some other spyware/adware detection tool (and somebody reccomended a program called geek superhero the other day, which looks interesting, but i think would only confuse my parents) but if he doesn't change how he uses the computer, it won't do any good in the log run.... he'll ed up right back where he started.
if not for the fact that
1) he needs to be able to use ms office on it to work from home, and i don't yet trust openoffice to properly handle all of his files
2) he needs to be able to set up his dsl (PPPoE) and printer after i send it back to him
i would just install linux on it, and not worry about it any more. as it is, i'm doing everything i can think of to try and lock this computer down without doing so in a way that is likely to confuse my parents. somehow i'm not too confident on my chances for success.
sure, they'll be able to....
will they?
I wasn't speaking of transactional integrity, or even relational integrity (which many other people have mentioned), but pure data integrity.
My experience with MySQL was that it would frequently (*) corrupt it's data files, requiring the corrupted data files to be deleted. From there, the table either had to be recreated (empty) or restored from a backup (**). We typically just truncated the table and started over- in our deployment, MySQL was used purely for its speed, and all critical data was aggregated from the MySQL servers onto one of two Oracle databases, so losing a MySQL database meant almost nothing (other than that the server would hang on queries until the corrupted file was deleted, which significantly increased our average response time).
(*) on average about once a week accross a deployment of about 16 MySQL servers, or about once every 3-4 months per server.
(**) regardless of how little effort backups require, you should never have to plan on using them. They should be there to protect against an unlikely situation that you hope never happens, not something that inevitably happens a couple times a month.
If i am reading the page correctly, that's just an IDE for ASP.NET, not a different web programming language/platform. No thanks, I'll stick with ViM. I have no interest in a drag-and-drop GUI web page creator, and all of its other features seem to me to be of dubious value.
I will admit to being mildly interested in ASP.NET, however, using ASP.NET would be my employers decision, not mine.
well, for one thing, it lacks basic data integrity.
while it's a bit of an exageration to say that MySQL has no place in the enterprise, i would say that it certainly has no place storing data that you would not mind losing or cannot easily restore from backup.
not many enterprises have a lot of data like that.
add to your list that it's also missing basic data integrity. i used to support MySQL databases, and I can't tell you how many times I've had to delete and restore the data files from a backup because they had become corrupted.
While Oracle does seem to be the most powerful database out there, I see no reason for it to be near as complicated as it is. My theory is that Oracle is trying to mainting the artificically high salaries of Oracle DBA's. (Don't get me wrong, a decent Oracle DBA earns every penny he's paid, but why should they even be necessary?)
I have used PHP, Perl, ASP, and a couple of others, all on large projects.
I would choose any of them over J2EE, for any size site. There are a variety of reasons, but for the most part, it boils down to this:
For any other web programming language, you create a file somewhere in your Document Root, and you have a web page. Simple as that. If you are using Java, you have to create an xml deployment descriptor, the files have to be in certain places in the directory hierarchy, and depending on your container, you may have to recompile for even the most trivial changes.
Up until recently, I used PHP almost exclusively. While I find the PHP language (pre 5- haven't used PHP 5 yet) to be obnoxious in more ways than I can count, the PHP platform is (IMO) far and away the best alternative for web development in *NIX. If somebody would write a web development platform that worked like PHP, but used a Java interpreter instead of the PHP langugage interpreter, I would use it in a heartbeat.
Lately, I've been programming in ASP using the JScript langugage. Although I'm not a fan of IIS as a web server, I really like using JavaScript as a server side programming language. I like the fact that ASP allows you to choose what language you want to write in (although why it defaults to VB, or why anyone would choose to use VB, is beyond me) I wish PHP would have followed this model with its development. Then somebody who actually knew a thing or two about programming language design could have replaced the PHP interpreter long ago with Python, Java, JavaScript, LISP (for those so inclined), or even Perl.
yeah, cause i know my wife has to be careful not to get any nasty black stuff on her from her diamond ring....
If you are interested in a first person shooter that is very non-linear, I reccommend you check out Operation Flashpoint. The technology is a bit dated, but the gameplay is (IMO) wonderful. The maps are expansive, and the mission objectives leave a lot of open-endedness about how to accomplish them. (For the most part. Unfortunately, your teammates may get in the way if you try to go about about certain missions in a way that was unanticipated by the level designers.) It also requires strategic planning, as you can only carry one or two weapons, and you often have to coordinate team attacks.
maybe you need to stop buying american cars.
more seriously, i think that electric cars would probably get replaced more often than gasoline cars, as many people would just decide to "upgrade" the next time their battery pack lost half it's life. (about 3 years with current best battery technology)
the analogy "would you buy a new car when you ran out of gas" would have new meaning- we'd have to change it to "would you buy a new car when your battery pack no longer holds a charge". except that i think you would find a surprizing number of people who would say "yes!"
I have found that most companies in the Los Angeles area are looking for people with specific vendor-based skill sets. This probably the result of vendors selling systems to an organization rather than real solutions. There seems to be little or no interest in a generalist who can apply standards and industry best practices as opposed to vendor-specifc knowledge.
I noticed that when I was looking for jobs in Chicago as well. I don't think it's the vendors who are to blame though. The problem was that for more than 5 years, every high school graduate was told that the computer industry was going to be the "next bug thing". Thousands or maybe even millions of people who would otherwise have had no interest in computers got CS degrees and jobs because they saw easy money in their future.
In areas that were really big during the late 90's, there are now so many out of work programmers that companies can put extrmemly specific job requirements on their job listings, because there will be plenty of people that have specifically those skills. It helps them, because by listing very specific skillsets, it cuts down on the number of resumes that they have to go through. Also, people who are doing the hiring know that the majority of the people currently looking for jobs in the CS field are in the aforementioned group of people that were looking for easy money and have little interest and sometimes little talent in the actual job they are applying for. By listing very requiring very specific skills, not only do they save on training costs, they give themselves a little bit of protection- if they discover that their new hire isn't very good at what they want them to do, they can let them go claiming that they mis-represented themselves on their resume.
Unfortunately, while the economy does seem to be coming back, I don't think that is going to help our field that much in the near future. The job outlook for computer jobs won't improve substantially (IMO) until a lot of the people who got into computers for the easy money give up and start looking for jobs in other areas. It sucks, because it makes life that much harder for those of us that really like and excel at what we do, but that's the way I see it.
I had thought of doing that with my parents computer. They left it here with me the last time they visited for me to fix it up and perform a few hardware and software upgrades. My first thought was to set it up to dual boot windows and linux with the windows option hidden. If they would try Linux for two weeks and still couldn't figure it out, or do waht they needed to do, i would log in remotely and change the boot configuration to load windows by default.
Unfortunately, the hard disk on the computer isn't really big enough to dual boot effectively, and that's not one of the parts that my dad is paying to upgrade. I'd really like to have him running Linux (the reason it's here to be fixed is that he had so many stupid little programs running in the taskbar that the thing takes about 10 minutes to boot to a usable state, and every time you try to open Internet Explorer about 10-12 popup windows show up, making it almost completely unusable) but there are a few reasons I don't think I can:
1) he uses the computer mainly for word, excel, and powerpoint documents that he needs to be able to share with people at work. I'm not quite confident enough in OpenOffice's abilities to handle these documents flawlessly, much less my dad's ability to adapt to a slightly different program. (when I tried to explain to him that I want him to use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, he was totally lost. I didn't understand the confusion until some website hijacked his start page. He explained to me that "Something changed his web browser from netscape (http://home.netscape.com) to some page full of advertisements." To him, the "web browser" is the page that is displayed when he clicks on the Internet)
2) I live a long way away from my parents and will be shipping the computer back to them when I am done. My dad has to be able to set up his DSL (uses some sort of PPPoE) and printer himself when he gets the computer back. If I was going to be visiting them sometime soon, I would be willing to set those two things up for him under Linux, but I don't think I can make him figure out how to do those things himself.
So, on goes XP SP2, Ad-Aware, AVG anti-virus, and Firefox (although i may have to change the Firefox icon to a blue e to avoid confusion) and I'll have to cross my fingers and hope for the best...
Sure, that's why all those sites survive the slashdot effect.
This is almost completely irrelevant. A well written site could handle the full brunt of slashdot on a couple of P3's (one db, one or two webservers) if they had enough upstream bandwidth. A poorly written site would bring a Sun E5000 to its knees. (I have personally witnessed both cases)
Most people who get killed by the slashdot effect don't have enough upstream bandwitdh. The rest usually don't have the max connections parameter for their database set high enough to keep up when their webserver starts running full bore. (If you're using persistent db connections with apache, you should always make sure max connections is at least as high as the max processes in your apache configuration)
Neither of these two issues (which probably make up > 80% of slashdot victims) has anything to do with what processor arhitecture you are running your server on. Add to that the number of people who use a system that just won't scale well regardless of platform (e.g. cgi, where a new process must be started for every request) and you're well over 90%.
Not that I don't think Sun makes some great boxes, but for just about any web server, and for many databases as well, they can be cheaply and effectively replaced by one or a few cheap linux boxes.
Are you saying here that you think that Intel will never make cpus with integrated memory controllers
if they do, it would shorten the lifspan of the BTX form factor even further. AMD is already not likely to support BTX because the specification makes it hard to design a board for a processor with an integrated memory controller. why would intel put so much effort into this form factor if they were already planning to release a cpu that is not compatible with it.
Will future CPUs be less power hungry? No
they should (IMO, anyway.) there's no reason a desktop computer needs to draw 110 watts of power just for the cpu.
at any rate, there are a lot of improvements that could be made to the ATX desgin without moving to a new form factor. just the adoption of the CPU fan design from the BTX specification would go a long way towards cooling off current computers. in fact, if i do end up buying a new athlon64 when the nforce4 boards are out, i'll probably grab one of these "thermal modules" just to see if i can hack it into an atx case.
if i understand the article correctly, that single fan is blowing air accross the cpu and then out the front of the case. if you look at it that way, their heat diagram makes sense.
of course, i'm not sure exhausting your waste heat out the front of the computer is a good idea either...
apparently you did not read the article and look at the pretty pictures.
another heatsink/fan that blows accross the cpu into it: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article182-page1.htm l
Also, even some x86 manufacturers have been using air channels for some time now. i have a dell poweredge at home with dual xeon 500's that has a special air channel to exhaust hot air from around the cpus directly out the back of the case, and separate fans to provide cooling air for the rest of the components inside the computer. of course, those are custom cases, and i doubt they even remotely resemble an atx form factor, however, i don't see why this couldn't be done at least at a basic level without creating a whole new form factor.