We have played with these for quite some time. They're a great way to minimze TCO, because you have only one (or a handful) of operating systems and system configurations to manage. You can also do "hotdesking" and clusters, so while you're patching one box, jobs keep running for everyone. It's sweet.
The ONLY limitation we have run into WRT SunRays were the Solaris, then Linux operating systems they depend on. While they're great for running SPSS/SAS and other Unix software, not to mention web browsers and OpenOffice, these platforms are truly horrendous at dealing with "multimedia," particularly MPEG-4 streaming. Yeah, yeah, there's open sorce stuff, but it all sucks relative to QuickTime, or even WIMP (ugh). We gave it a lot of work, far more than we typically do, because we truly dig the SunRay concept. The Solaris/Linux desktop just isn't there, for these applications. Yet. I keep crossing my fingers, hoping this will change.
We might still use a few in kiosks out in our halls/cybercafe. They're great for running a browser (and Flash support is getting better).
Since "thinking machines" were naturally forbidden, the hrethgir used human slaves to compute their equations. The upside was that humans sometimes made mistakes, and mistakes sometimes had beneficial consequences (but usually the slaves fared no better).
People living in this universe are, sadly, limited to 3 spatial dimensions. You can pinpoint any point in 3-space with 3 scalars. (And for that matter we only have 2 ears, perhaps because we live mostly on the surface of the earth)
Three scalars give you triangulation, which will help you locate a specific location along TWO dimensions. This is how the "location" feature of digital cell phones works, how a surveyor's transit works, etc. For 3 dimensions, you add the "Z axis," which requires another set of points against which to triangulate. This is the point of 10.1 (which I have experienced personally) and 13.1. Current 5/7.1 systems leave the Z axis entirely out.
For that matter, why is 7.1 "better" than 5.1? Easy. Audio perception is far more directional than 5.1 can accommodate. The "mid-left" and "mid-rear" channels fill in the gaps that 5.1 leaves.
With that said, I'm quite happy to listen to South Park in 5.1 in my living room. Theatrical presentations will benefit from 7.1, and to the extent that presenters hope to achieve accurate reproduction of the original environment (so called "room shaping"), 10.1 and 13.1 are an absolute requirement. You can't reproduce the reverberations from a particular concert hall without accommodating the Z axis...
Now we don't just have a bunch of US/UK/whatever bloggers boring us with their mundane personal crap, now we have to find out about a few billion other people's issues with dairy products, their take on Episode III and other nonsense...
IBM has become, at Gerstner's direction, a "global services juggernaut." Their support of Linux is not directly tied to a plan to sell more Linux servers. It is tied directly to their capability to provide comprehensive services through their Global Services division. It's a good strategy. That division is the bane of just about every other major tech services provider.
The programming language is mostly irrelevant. WebObjects uses Java simply because that's better known by programmers. What WebObjects brings to the table is exactly what OS X does - ridiculously complete and versatile object frameworks. Who cares what code glues together these objects? It's the richness of the framekworks that matters. Anybody who does J2EE or.Net should really look into it. Every application we have reviewed lately that was built on WebObjects works great. We even bought one of them.
IIRC, the USPS uses WebObjects for a number of systems. I sure love their new "automated postal systems."
The Russians already sent up the "big pieces" in expendable boosters (similar to the Saturn V). The Shuttle was incapable of lifting some primary components, such as the Zvezda service module (delivered by Proton rocket), and of course, people and supplies (Progress and Soyuz).
The Shuttle is a clever system, and it still has uses, but we put too many eggs in that basket. We should have been developing every possible alternative. Instead, we find ourselves indebted to the Russians for our continued presence in space.
Yes, they do. The prevailing motor designs are solid fuel motors and liquid fuel motors.
The Space Shuttle system employs both. The SRM's (Solid Rocket Motors) are the big, pointy things attached to either side of the big brown liquid fuel tank. They make a ton of smoke when lit. When expendable rockets are used to carry very heavy loads, they will usually strap a few SRMs to the main rocket body.
The small motors at the back of the "shuttle" part (behind the tail fin) are liquid fuel motors. They use cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen. When they burn, they produce water vapor. Many other liquid motors use other sorts of fuels and oxidizers (organic hydrazine and all sorts of funky, nasty stuff).
Why both types? SRMs are cheaper and provide a lot of power. But, they're not very controllable. With the Shuttle SRMs, it's basically "light and forget." The only thing you can do after they're lit is eject them. Liquid motors, on the other hand, can be steerable (technically "on a gimbal") and thrust can be moderated. This is kind of important when you care about where you're going.
The Russians are damn clever when it comes to liquid rocket motors. Since US aerospace adopted their designs, our lifting capabilities have improved dramatically. In fact, the planned "Shuttle replacements" are built around rockets that incorporate their designs.
They have the only heavy lift vehicles in continuous development and operation that could make this happen. We already use their liquid fuel motors (Boeing and LockMart both licensed Russian motors in their rockets).
They're using University (state) owned equipment, bandwidth, etc.. There are rules about how they can use it. Making money is not allowed, unless they are set up as an "Auxiliary Enterprise" (as with the University's public radio station, KUT). That requires all sorts of funny stuff, like business plans, auditing and picking up the tab for their operation costs (e.g. KUT hosts their site and streams from a private ISP). I wonder if this status has been obtained.
Employment for a state U typically involves what's known as "work for hire." There's no way that any work you do as a part of your duties for the U, that you get to claim ownership of our work. The only exception is if you are a member of the faculty, then you may own a portion of your work, or even all of it, but generally the U keeps permanent, non-exclusive rights to use it.
I'm feeling pessimistic about the future of the platform now that Apple is embracing Intel and abandoning the few remaining 'Mac' technologies (like the PowerPC and OpenTransport) left to the platform.
This is just stupid. "PowerPC" doesn't make the Mac. Otherwise, IBM would be a big seller of Macintoshes. Open Transport is just a poor attempt at reinventing the wheel. It made sense before TCP/IP was the only game in town, but it belongs in the bit bucket, in favor of modern network stacks built around IP.
With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance.
Sorry, but this is just as stupid. Once again, what is OS X, if not Carbon and (especially) Cocoa? Lots of developers code for X, not because it runs on PowerPC, but because, well, it's cool. Powerful apps are quite easy when you're provided a good set of frameworks.
Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'
You definitely don't get it. Mac is the frameworks. Intel changes none of this.
At the presentation, they mentioned the G5's potential, but noted that it was closer to the Intel architecture in the sense that each CPU shared a memory controller (but it's not hampered by the bus). The Opteron's HyperTransport model is simply more scalable. Apple got the point, but whether they will address this deficiency in their Xserves (particularly the Cluster Nodes, where it makes sense for massively parallel systems) remains to be seen. All I know is that *I* love the performance of our G5 systems, Xserve and desktop alike.
is merely a revenue grab. The only programs that will work are those that involve someone actually being made to recycle something. Examples include the prepaid "return to sender for recycling" progams that Lexmark and other printer cartridge manufacturers created.
The effect of Coffee Shoppe Culture is a well-understood phenomenon. Basically, the place will attract whatever type of miscreant the culture the shop projects. Obviously "Free WiFi" was a principal attractant for this shop. Ergo, the huge number of loser pedophiles stacking the deck. If the place actually attracted people because of, hmm, let's say, GOOD COFFEE, then they wouldn't have to worry about this.
I drink at Little City. First, I come for the coffee. I hang around and buy more stuff because of the WiFi and music.
This is an annual subscription. You get automatic updates via RHN (plus a lot of other crunch RHN goodness). I believe you might even be able to set up a local satellite server for updates. It's quite a good deal.
People who post to slashdot because something didn't work out the way they hoped, or some organization, corporation or agency made a misstep. Rather than contacting them and asking for assistance, they go whine to the/. community...
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just hope they don't run IIS!
We have played with these for quite some time. They're a great way to minimze TCO, because you have only one (or a handful) of operating systems and system configurations to manage. You can also do "hotdesking" and clusters, so while you're patching one box, jobs keep running for everyone. It's sweet.
The ONLY limitation we have run into WRT SunRays were the Solaris, then Linux operating systems they depend on. While they're great for running SPSS/SAS and other Unix software, not to mention web browsers and OpenOffice, these platforms are truly horrendous at dealing with "multimedia," particularly MPEG-4 streaming. Yeah, yeah, there's open sorce stuff, but it all sucks relative to QuickTime, or even WIMP (ugh). We gave it a lot of work, far more than we typically do, because we truly dig the SunRay concept. The Solaris/Linux desktop just isn't there, for these applications. Yet. I keep crossing my fingers, hoping this will change.
We might still use a few in kiosks out in our halls/cybercafe. They're great for running a browser (and Flash support is getting better).
Since "thinking machines" were naturally forbidden, the hrethgir used human slaves to compute their equations. The upside was that humans sometimes made mistakes, and mistakes sometimes had beneficial consequences (but usually the slaves fared no better).
Not as good as his dad's stuff, but OK. Get it in paperback.
Three scalars give you triangulation, which will help you locate a specific location along TWO dimensions. This is how the "location" feature of digital cell phones works, how a surveyor's transit works, etc. For 3 dimensions, you add the "Z axis," which requires another set of points against which to triangulate. This is the point of 10.1 (which I have experienced personally) and 13.1. Current 5/7.1 systems leave the Z axis entirely out.
For that matter, why is 7.1 "better" than 5.1? Easy. Audio perception is far more directional than 5.1 can accommodate. The "mid-left" and "mid-rear" channels fill in the gaps that 5.1 leaves.
With that said, I'm quite happy to listen to South Park in 5.1 in my living room. Theatrical presentations will benefit from 7.1, and to the extent that presenters hope to achieve accurate reproduction of the original environment (so called "room shaping"), 10.1 and 13.1 are an absolute requirement. You can't reproduce the reverberations from a particular concert hall without accommodating the Z axis...
Now we don't just have a bunch of US/UK/whatever bloggers boring us with their mundane personal crap, now we have to find out about a few billion other people's issues with dairy products, their take on Episode III and other nonsense...
IBM has become, at Gerstner's direction, a "global services juggernaut." Their support of Linux is not directly tied to a plan to sell more Linux servers. It is tied directly to their capability to provide comprehensive services through their Global Services division. It's a good strategy. That division is the bane of just about every other major tech services provider.
The programming language is mostly irrelevant. WebObjects uses Java simply because that's better known by programmers. What WebObjects brings to the table is exactly what OS X does - ridiculously complete and versatile object frameworks. Who cares what code glues together these objects? It's the richness of the framekworks that matters. Anybody who does J2EE or .Net should really look into it. Every application we have reviewed lately that was built on WebObjects works great. We even bought one of them.
IIRC, the USPS uses WebObjects for a number of systems. I sure love their new "automated postal systems."
The only people who need to worry are those that create "dotcode" and similar systems - with RSS feeds, you can see the new articles without the ads :)
Searching is looking for something specific. Feeds are for "what's new." These are quite different activities.
The Russians already sent up the "big pieces" in expendable boosters (similar to the Saturn V). The Shuttle was incapable of lifting some primary components, such as the Zvezda service module (delivered by Proton rocket), and of course, people and supplies (Progress and Soyuz).
The Shuttle is a clever system, and it still has uses, but we put too many eggs in that basket. We should have been developing every possible alternative. Instead, we find ourselves indebted to the Russians for our continued presence in space.
Yes, they do. The prevailing motor designs are solid fuel motors and liquid fuel motors.
The Space Shuttle system employs both. The SRM's (Solid Rocket Motors) are the big, pointy things attached to either side of the big brown liquid fuel tank. They make a ton of smoke when lit. When expendable rockets are used to carry very heavy loads, they will usually strap a few SRMs to the main rocket body.
The small motors at the back of the "shuttle" part (behind the tail fin) are liquid fuel motors. They use cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen. When they burn, they produce water vapor. Many other liquid motors use other sorts of fuels and oxidizers (organic hydrazine and all sorts of funky, nasty stuff).
Why both types? SRMs are cheaper and provide a lot of power. But, they're not very controllable. With the Shuttle SRMs, it's basically "light and forget." The only thing you can do after they're lit is eject them. Liquid motors, on the other hand, can be steerable (technically "on a gimbal") and thrust can be moderated. This is kind of important when you care about where you're going.
The Russians are damn clever when it comes to liquid rocket motors. Since US aerospace adopted their designs, our lifting capabilities have improved dramatically. In fact, the planned "Shuttle replacements" are built around rockets that incorporate their designs.
They have the only heavy lift vehicles in continuous development and operation that could make this happen. We already use their liquid fuel motors (Boeing and LockMart both licensed Russian motors in their rockets).
They're using University (state) owned equipment, bandwidth, etc.. There are rules about how they can use it. Making money is not allowed, unless they are set up as an "Auxiliary Enterprise" (as with the University's public radio station, KUT). That requires all sorts of funny stuff, like business plans, auditing and picking up the tab for their operation costs (e.g. KUT hosts their site and streams from a private ISP). I wonder if this status has been obtained.
Employment for a state U typically involves what's known as "work for hire." There's no way that any work you do as a part of your duties for the U, that you get to claim ownership of our work. The only exception is if you are a member of the faculty, then you may own a portion of your work, or even all of it, but generally the U keeps permanent, non-exclusive rights to use it.
This is just stupid. "PowerPC" doesn't make the Mac. Otherwise, IBM would be a big seller of Macintoshes. Open Transport is just a poor attempt at reinventing the wheel. It made sense before TCP/IP was the only game in town, but it belongs in the bit bucket, in favor of modern network stacks built around IP.
With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance.
Sorry, but this is just as stupid. Once again, what is OS X, if not Carbon and (especially) Cocoa? Lots of developers code for X, not because it runs on PowerPC, but because, well, it's cool. Powerful apps are quite easy when you're provided a good set of frameworks.
Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'
You definitely don't get it. Mac is the frameworks. Intel changes none of this.
you could get an email account with, say, a 2GB quota and you basically just "archived" emails instead of deleting them?
Maybe one of the big tech companies could come up with something like this!
At the presentation, they mentioned the G5's potential, but noted that it was closer to the Intel architecture in the sense that each CPU shared a memory controller (but it's not hampered by the bus). The Opteron's HyperTransport model is simply more scalable. Apple got the point, but whether they will address this deficiency in their Xserves (particularly the Cluster Nodes, where it makes sense for massively parallel systems) remains to be seen. All I know is that *I* love the performance of our G5 systems, Xserve and desktop alike.
is merely a revenue grab. The only programs that will work are those that involve someone actually being made to recycle something. Examples include the prepaid "return to sender for recycling" progams that Lexmark and other printer cartridge manufacturers created.
The effect of Coffee Shoppe Culture is a well-understood phenomenon. Basically, the place will attract whatever type of miscreant the culture the shop projects. Obviously "Free WiFi" was a principal attractant for this shop. Ergo, the huge number of loser pedophiles stacking the deck. If the place actually attracted people because of, hmm, let's say, GOOD COFFEE, then they wouldn't have to worry about this.
I drink at Little City. First, I come for the coffee. I hang around and buy more stuff because of the WiFi and music.
He should learn about the Golden Path, before humanity is doomed forever!
They have already done this for other types of "reaching out and touching animals."
This is an annual subscription. You get automatic updates via RHN (plus a lot of other crunch RHN goodness). I believe you might even be able to set up a local satellite server for updates. It's quite a good deal.
Soylent Red, on the other hand, is quite crisp in acidiy, with a bold body and mild tannins...
The same Dawn Kawamoto who wrote about the vulernabilities on CNET on the 9th has now written about the new release.
People who post to slashdot because something didn't work out the way they hoped, or some organization, corporation or agency made a misstep. Rather than contacting them and asking for assistance, they go whine to the /. community...
...on your robotic hedge clipper!