By definition, a RAM disk is kept in RAM. Therefore, you'd be swapping out of RAM... into RAM. It's the same as if you would put a divider in a storage shed because you were running out of room. You can move stuff on either side of it, but in the end, you still only have a fixed amount of space.
I realize that on the surface this seems like an intuitive assumption, but it's empirically unfounded and incorrent. Swap is more than just "virtual memory"--it's a mechanism for juggling cached data and executable code based on frequency and recency of access. Also bear in mind that some operating systems more than others aggressively allocate physical RAM. By virtualizing swap with a RAM disk, one simultaneously enjoys the benefits of swap and the speed of RAM.
Implementation of swap varies among operating systems, so at some point it's important to acknowledge the OS-specific issues involved when debating the swap vs. no-swap issue. Although many of the points raised in the discussion on kerneltrap.org are of general interest, some of them are Linux-centric. Suffice it to say that Windows manages swap comparitively poorly, and tends to page to disk more often than necessary. For that and other reasons, I would hypothesize that Windows machines have more room to benefit from volatile swap than Linux does.
I'm very surprised about the consistently positive things people have to say about Vonage, but I also noticed that the "reviews" are very glib, and don't go into any detail about service issues (good or bad).
I'll try to break it down for readability:
1. Call quality - Varies. With some calls, I hear an echo of myself on the line, while other calls are fine. This seems only to be a problem on my end of the line.
Of course, call quality will suffer if you infringe on the amount of bandwidth the VoIP service needs. Basically, if you're using up most of your downstream bandwidth, you'll hear a stutter on the other end of the call; if you're using up most of your upstream, the other party will hear a stutter.
2. Hardware - Up until a few months ago, Vonage sold its customers the Cisco ATA 186 VoIP appliances. These were good units, but expensive. Now Vonage has replaced them with the cheaper, flimsier Motorola VT1005 MTA. My main problem with the VT1005 is that such common phenomena as port scans are enough to bring it down. To make matters worse, Vonage encourages users to keep their routers downstream of the Voice Terminal appliance, which means that a simple port scan is enough to take your entire network offline.
I circumvented this problem by putting the voice terminal downstream of the router. However, even thought the device supports static IP addressing, I can't connect to its web interface using its assigned IP address. If I want to reconfigure it, I have to hard-reset it to reenable DHCP support, and then access it on a DHCP-enabled LAN. Imagine a lay person trying to cope with these issues.
3. Customer Service - This is arguably the worst thing about Vonage. The sporadic service problems and billing issues would be much easier to cope with if customer servic gave two shits. Vonage has some of the worst customer service I've ever dealt with. The support people are ineffective and, in my experience, the calls go nowhere. Don't expect promised callbacks to happen.
4. Loss of service - A notorious problem for Vonage users is you attempt to make a call, and you're greeted with nothing but a fast busy signal. I was once unable to place or receive calls for three days.
5. Spam - Not only does Vonage spam its own customers regularly, they actually started calling customers at home with prerecorded messages encouraging people to refer others to Vonage.
6. Service package - The service package is robust. You can even check (and toggle) your voicemail from a website with a decent interface. The website logs all call activity with timestamps. Very nice. The web site control panel gives you a lot of options. This is definitely a strong point of the service. Unfortunately, the voicemail system has some bugs, but once it's setup its fine.
7. Fax - Vonage charges $10 for a fax line. I don't need a separate fax line, but I use my fax modem occasionally. Oops, Vonage don't play dat. I tried for an hour to send a fax through Vonage without success. If you want to send or receive faxes with Vonage at all, you need to pay them an additional $10/month, regardless of whether you want a separate line to do it.
8. Setup and billing - If you already have a landline and you want to keep your old phone number, switching to Vonage is not fun. Expect to pay concurrently for both your POTS and Vonage service until Vonage and your old telco get around to transferring your phone number. This takes weeks if you're lucky, and months if Vonage screws it up, as in my case. Vonage starts billing you from day one, even if you don't actually have service yet (which you won't).
While Vonage tripped over its own feet, I paid SBC and Vonage for three months of service... except I only hav
These 'games' are great at imparting the creator's bias.
Absolutely. Considering that the textbooks themselves are already extremely problematic in the strong cultural bias they represent, creating a video game that simply reinforces the same kind of misinformation is hardly the answer.
At first glance I wondered if this headline meant that Italy approved a special, separate prison for P2P users. Which would be kinda cool in a way... the P2P jails would be the ones where prisoners are constantly trading single cigarettes and stolen pudding.
This might have something to do with it (quoted from the news.com article): "The Justice Department would receive an extra $2 million for the fiscal year beginning in October."
My advice is the same as Faust7's with these additions: spend some of that money on a really nice keyboard, wrist-rest and/or maybe a nice monitor. You are going to be needing all three. If there are any left over funds, get some really nice tea. I suggest Twinnings English Breakfast or Prince of Wales, if you're going to go bagged.
And then get some really nice bath toys and a really nice beanbag chair, and if you can, one of those little stands that holds bananas up so they stay fresh longer (a really nice one) if you're going to do the whole "banana" thing.
Older games, such as card games, chess, go, and the like have established terminology -- "playing cards/go/chess/etc." and "gambling." "Gaming" almost never involved gambling with money, unlike Poker. Even computer variants of old games aren't typically counted. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion.
Good ol' baseless assumptions. Actually, in the US, 'gaming' is an industry term which insiders find preferable to the word 'gambling'. 'Gaming' in the casino sense and 'gaming' in the video game sense are different and mutually exclusive terms.
Health Canada recommends that adults limit their consumption of caffeine to 400 mg daily the equivalent of about four small cups of coffee.
So Canadians think it's ok to drink 33% more than is healthy? And yet, they try not to call it caffine addiction. Interesting.
These are both very good points, and I certainly agree that the article reflects a cultural bias favoring caffeine. Note how the author puts the word 'addictive' in double quotes--as if the fact that caffeine is chemically addictive is somehow a special case, and not to be regarded at all seriously.
If caffeine were only consumed by, say, teenaged Hispanic males, then it would probably be the focus of numerous demonizing news segments on ABC and CNN.
Many of us live in arbitrarily fast-paced societies fueled by stimulants. To concede that caffeine is an addictive chemical--and that products containing caffeine secure far more consumer interest than they otherwise would--is to admit that a substantial percentage of "normal" people have a socially-sanctioned chemical addition. That's a lot for some people to swallow...
Emulation looks like one of the few things for which it might be decent--assuming the gamepad feels ok. Locking users into a specific version of an operating system running at a low screen resolution with a gamepad interface severely limits the number of games that would be playable on this unit.
Attempting to play ScummVM games with a stylus on a Clié PEG-N760C was hard enough.
'We find the intelligent civilization. We can communicate.' As agents of free-will, the aliens are self-aware of good and evil, thus convertible to some terrestrial religion.
There are so many things wrong with these presumptions, one could not being to list them all. In brief, we're expected to assume a priori that...
1.... a European definition of free-will tautologically linked to 'awareness of good and evil' is accurate
2.... all 'terrestial religions' accept (or even acknowledge) the very notions of good and evil
3.... 'good and evil' exist
4...., even though any evaluation of human behavior is based on cultural value systems and is rooted in group survival instincts, an E.T. species could find our evaluations not only comprehensible, but relevant to their own lives
5.... 'religion' as defined in most Western societies is part of a universally-accepted paradigm, even though many major cultural traditions on Earth find the concept incompatible with their culture and worldview
6.... agency automatically brings with it an evaulation of one's own thoughts and actions as being right or wrong
7.... an E.T.'s self-conception as an autonomous agent is compatible with the notion of subjecting one's will to an external, transcendental will
8.... in some cases, an E.T.'s ontology has room for the idea of a transcendental being that lives dimensionally outside of the phenomenal universe
9.... all extraterrestrials have gender and two essential sexes
10.... Western hegemony stands a chance of extending beyond Earth
...is making the leap of becoming a member of another nation truly worth it? For example, an important question would be: does Canada value freedom and speech in all the same ways as the USA does?
Wow, that sounds really triumphalist and ethnocentric. Who can imagine wanting to live anywhere else because the US is the best nation in the world, right? And imagine the horrors of being exposed to strange, inferior cultures that haven't been trampled by Americanism! Why, the very thought of subjection to ideologies that don't concur "in all the same ways" with the ostensible ideals of mainstream America... it's almost too nightmarish to think about!!
I can do without the rhetoric about freedom which is so selectively, hypocritically, oxymoronically, and contradictively applied.
Microsoft makes good consumer Wi-Fi equipment but is exiting the market...
It was my understanding that their appliances were very easy to configure, but the performance is poor and the feature set is wanting. Still, I suppose this is somewhat disappointing since there is a need for easy-to-use gateways. Many users looking for uncomplicated solutions will probably turn to Linksys products instead, which are arguably worse.
But most users don't "choose" EIDE either. To that end, popularity among vendors is tantamount to popularity on the desktop, as in the case with nearly all Macintosh generations; Macs had SCSI through the G3 line, albeit sometimes alongside ATA hosts.
As you rightfully observe, the price point has historically been the prohibitive factor. Generally, SCSI's TCO is higher, and relatively few home computers are SCSI-ready, but it looks like SAS will bring a lower price point and a lower TCO.
An inexpensively bridgable bus type could help diminish the perception of SCSI as a niche market, since any SATA-equipped computer can accomodate SAS with less expense and expertise than was previously necessary to add a SCSI chain to an ATA-based PC.
By eliminating the cable/adapter insanity, not only would SAS make SCSI easier to support and less complex, it also foregoes many of the expenses and availability problems associated with SCSI. Most popular retail chains offer either no SCSI products, or only a handful of products at incredibly exhorbitant prices.
Hopefully these factors will prompt OEMs to crank out higher production volumes, resulting in lower prices and more unit sales for desktops.
Also, remember that many technologies once associated only with servers and high-end workstations have since been realized on the desktop--affordably. SMP will soon be de facto on the desktop, we've had high-capacity removable storage for years, HP already offers competitively-priced 64-bit notebooks, and my $70 mainboard has onboard SATA RAID; so maybe it wouldn't be so weird for SAS to open up SCSI to the masses.
I was a little surprised by the internetnews.com article about Gentoo being used in the enterprise. Kurt Lieber (of Gentoo) even claims that "Gentoo is being widely used in corporations today", although his definition of "widely used" may be different than mine.
As great as Gentoo is, it's not high on the list of distros that I would have guessed the business world would embrace. Granted, Gentoo's flexibility does seem to make it well-suited for certain enterprise-level applications; and if Debian can be adapted for commercial consumption in the form of distributions like Xandros, then I suppose Gentoo could as well.
Lieber's target market is a niche market. While I certainly agree that Linux' future shouldn't be arbitrated by one or two vendors, I'm not convinced that the enterprise niche Lieber describes is best served by a commercial version of Gentoo. Regardless, it's unclear from the article whether or not he would actually commercialize Gentoo given the chance.
But the popularization of Gentoo's approach could have other connotations. It's easy to relegate Portage to the realm of Linux curiosities that never could have mainstream appeal. On the surface, it seems that way. But this is exactly the sort of system I would expect to see standardized once our network infrastructure and home computer technology matures to the point at which package acquisition and build time are negligible.
But for the time being, we're still a point at which we're trying to establish some solid standards in the Linux world, and as much as I want RPM to go away, it won't any time soon. So while I don't foresee Portage triggering any revolutions within the next few years, the concept will evolve and its day will come.
Re:Why MySQL is more popular than Postgres
on
Why MySQL Grew So Fast
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's definitely a big part of it, but not the whole story. PostgreSQL's lack of adequate software support extends to the client side as well. There are very few options for PGSQL front-ends now (although some of them are quite good), but four years ago the selection was downright threadbare. One thing that can be said of MySQL is that MySQL AB at least offers free GUI clients.
But, I think many people are swayed by the argument that MySQL has a much bigger grassroots support base. While technically that's true, look at the nature of the support base: thousands of redundant questions, many of which are directly related to the lack of features that supposedly makes MySQL great. We're not just talking about views and subselects here: until v4.x, MySQL even lacked UNIONs for god's sake. Fledgling developes may not be able to ask for these features by name, but that doesn't mean they don't feel the lack.
Since working with MySQL means developing with half of the SQL9x spec tied behind your back, and considering that MySQL's documentation is inadequate (and occasionally inaccurate or misleading), it's no wonder that such a huge support base is necessary.
Yes, it's that most paradoxical of phenomena: a system for managing relational databases which--at the same time--is not a relational database management system.
One irritating thing about VMWare Workstation is that it's only officially supported with a few very specific kernel versions with standard configurations. In my experience, sometimes it's a problem, sometimes it's not. Serenity reportedly supports all 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.
On another note, VMware released several versions of their software before they finally included such important features as USB support. Even though it's still unclear whether such features will make it into the first official release of Serenity, one wonders how soon an open source project of this magnitude will be able to match VMware Workstation 4.x's performance and core feature set--especially considering that Serenity's supported OS's already rival VMware's.
If Serenity is more responsive in windowed mode than VMware Workstation, then that's already a big plus.
The argument here isn't that the schools on the list only made it because they're small thus making reliable service easier to provide; just speculation about how much of a weighted factor this was.
One must also consider that some schools--such as UT and Harvard--are more likely to host a higher percentage of students and faculty who are interested in wireless access. So maybe Intel ranked Harvard lower because the wireless access there fails to meet student demand? (Building age and construction materials also are callenges, as others have pointed-out.)
UT/Austin is the one of the only schools on the list who's presence didn't surprise me. So the question here is, given the comparitively large student population, why wasn't UT/Austin #1 if the signal saturation is as complete as you claim (assuming that the signal was equally reliable in all buildings, which is a big assumption)?
For one thing, if Intel's methodology was objective, then maybe access in key UT buildings isn't so hot.
Further, Bloomington's population is only about 60,000, so the student population is probably considerably smaller than UT's. University size has to be gauged both in terms of student population and the cumulative campus area. So, while serving a smaller population, Bloomington's campus is very sparse and appears to cover more area than UT's much more condensed main campus.
Preceded by the work of tech artist Joe Davis?
on
The Sound of Cells
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Joe Davis is an artist and research affiliate at MIT's Department of Biology. He and other MIT students and faculty assembled a similar system ca. 1999-2000.
Davis is an interesting guy who's gotten a fair amount of professional and media attention for his intriguing work in genetic and biological postmodern art.
Slashdot Mirror
By definition, a RAM disk is kept in RAM. Therefore, you'd be swapping out of RAM... into RAM. It's the same as if you would put a divider in a storage shed because you were running out of room. You can move stuff on either side of it, but in the end, you still only have a fixed amount of space.
I realize that on the surface this seems like an intuitive assumption, but it's empirically unfounded and incorrent. Swap is more than just "virtual memory"--it's a mechanism for juggling cached data and executable code based on frequency and recency of access. Also bear in mind that some operating systems more than others aggressively allocate physical RAM. By virtualizing swap with a RAM disk, one simultaneously enjoys the benefits of swap and the speed of RAM.
Implementation of swap varies among operating systems, so at some point it's important to acknowledge the OS-specific issues involved when debating the swap vs. no-swap issue. Although many of the points raised in the discussion on kerneltrap.org are of general interest, some of them are Linux-centric. Suffice it to say that Windows manages swap comparitively poorly, and tends to page to disk more often than necessary. For that and other reasons, I would hypothesize that Windows machines have more room to benefit from volatile swap than Linux does.
I'm very surprised about the consistently positive things people have to say about Vonage, but I also noticed that the "reviews" are very glib, and don't go into any detail about service issues (good or bad).
I'll try to break it down for readability:
1. Call quality - Varies. With some calls, I hear an echo of myself on the line, while other calls are fine. This seems only to be a problem on my end of the line.
Of course, call quality will suffer if you infringe on the amount of bandwidth the VoIP service needs. Basically, if you're using up most of your downstream bandwidth, you'll hear a stutter on the other end of the call; if you're using up most of your upstream, the other party will hear a stutter.
2. Hardware - Up until a few months ago, Vonage sold its customers the Cisco ATA 186 VoIP appliances. These were good units, but expensive. Now Vonage has replaced them with the cheaper, flimsier Motorola VT1005 MTA. My main problem with the VT1005 is that such common phenomena as port scans are enough to bring it down. To make matters worse, Vonage encourages users to keep their routers downstream of the Voice Terminal appliance, which means that a simple port scan is enough to take your entire network offline.
I circumvented this problem by putting the voice terminal downstream of the router. However, even thought the device supports static IP addressing, I can't connect to its web interface using its assigned IP address. If I want to reconfigure it, I have to hard-reset it to reenable DHCP support, and then access it on a DHCP-enabled LAN. Imagine a lay person trying to cope with these issues.
3. Customer Service - This is arguably the worst thing about Vonage. The sporadic service problems and billing issues would be much easier to cope with if customer servic gave two shits. Vonage has some of the worst customer service I've ever dealt with. The support people are ineffective and, in my experience, the calls go nowhere. Don't expect promised callbacks to happen.
4. Loss of service - A notorious problem for Vonage users is you attempt to make a call, and you're greeted with nothing but a fast busy signal. I was once unable to place or receive calls for three days.
5. Spam - Not only does Vonage spam its own customers regularly, they actually started calling customers at home with prerecorded messages encouraging people to refer others to Vonage.
6. Service package - The service package is robust. You can even check (and toggle) your voicemail from a website with a decent interface. The website logs all call activity with timestamps. Very nice. The web site control panel gives you a lot of options. This is definitely a strong point of the service. Unfortunately, the voicemail system has some bugs, but once it's setup its fine.
7. Fax - Vonage charges $10 for a fax line. I don't need a separate fax line, but I use my fax modem occasionally. Oops, Vonage don't play dat. I tried for an hour to send a fax through Vonage without success. If you want to send or receive faxes with Vonage at all, you need to pay them an additional $10/month, regardless of whether you want a separate line to do it.
8. Setup and billing - If you already have a landline and you want to keep your old phone number, switching to Vonage is not fun. Expect to pay concurrently for both your POTS and Vonage service until Vonage and your old telco get around to transferring your phone number. This takes weeks if you're lucky, and months if Vonage screws it up, as in my case. Vonage starts billing you from day one, even if you don't actually have service yet (which you won't).
While Vonage tripped over its own feet, I paid SBC and Vonage for three months of service... except I only hav
These 'games' are great at imparting the creator's bias.
Absolutely. Considering that the textbooks themselves are already extremely problematic in the strong cultural bias they represent, creating a video game that simply reinforces the same kind of misinformation is hardly the answer.
James Loewen breaks down some of these issues in the excellent (and highly readable) Lies my Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History Textbook Got Wrong . The audio CD version of this book is also exceptionally well done.
Italy Approves Jail for P2P Users
At first glance I wondered if this headline meant that Italy approved a special, separate prison for P2P users. Which would be kinda cool in a way... the P2P jails would be the ones where prisoners are constantly trading single cigarettes and stolen pudding.
Why make more work for the courts/government?
This might have something to do with it (quoted from the news.com article): "The Justice Department would receive an extra $2 million for the fiscal year beginning in October."
My advice is the same as Faust7's with these additions: spend some of that money on a really nice keyboard, wrist-rest and/or maybe a nice monitor. You are going to be needing all three. If there are any left over funds, get some really nice tea. I suggest Twinnings English Breakfast or Prince of Wales, if you're going to go bagged.
And then get some really nice bath toys and a really nice beanbag chair, and if you can, one of those little stands that holds bananas up so they stay fresh longer (a really nice one) if you're going to do the whole "banana" thing.
Older games, such as card games, chess, go, and the like have established terminology -- "playing cards/go/chess/etc." and "gambling." "Gaming" almost never involved gambling with money, unlike Poker. Even computer variants of old games aren't typically counted. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion.
Good ol' baseless assumptions. Actually, in the US, 'gaming' is an industry term which insiders find preferable to the word 'gambling'. 'Gaming' in the casino sense and 'gaming' in the video game sense are different and mutually exclusive terms.
Ok so 300 is the upper limit. But...
Health Canada recommends that adults limit their consumption of caffeine to 400 mg daily the equivalent of about four small cups of coffee.
So Canadians think it's ok to drink 33% more than is healthy? And yet, they try not to call it caffine addiction. Interesting.
These are both very good points, and I certainly agree that the article reflects a cultural bias favoring caffeine. Note how the author puts the word 'addictive' in double quotes--as if the fact that caffeine is chemically addictive is somehow a special case, and not to be regarded at all seriously.
If caffeine were only consumed by, say, teenaged Hispanic males, then it would probably be the focus of numerous demonizing news segments on ABC and CNN.
Many of us live in arbitrarily fast-paced societies fueled by stimulants. To concede that caffeine is an addictive chemical--and that products containing caffeine secure far more consumer interest than they otherwise would--is to admit that a substantial percentage of "normal" people have a socially-sanctioned chemical addition. That's a lot for some people to swallow...
Emulation looks like one of the few things for which it might be decent--assuming the gamepad feels ok. Locking users into a specific version of an operating system running at a low screen resolution with a gamepad interface severely limits the number of games that would be playable on this unit.
Attempting to play ScummVM games with a stylus on a Clié PEG-N760C was hard enough.
Thanks to schnofler, any person using an Operational System with Java can participate.
:)
'Operational System'... that's cute.
'We find the intelligent civilization. We can communicate.' As agents of free-will, the aliens are self-aware of good and evil, thus convertible to some terrestrial religion.
... a European definition of free-will tautologically linked to 'awareness of good and evil' is accurate
... all 'terrestial religions' accept (or even acknowledge) the very notions of good and evil
... 'good and evil' exist
..., even though any evaluation of human behavior is based on cultural value systems and is rooted in group survival instincts, an E.T. species could find our evaluations not only comprehensible, but relevant to their own lives
... 'religion' as defined in most Western societies is part of a universally-accepted paradigm, even though many major cultural traditions on Earth find the concept incompatible with their culture and worldview
... agency automatically brings with it an evaulation of one's own thoughts and actions as being right or wrong
... an E.T.'s self-conception as an autonomous agent is compatible with the notion of subjecting one's will to an external, transcendental will
... in some cases, an E.T.'s ontology has room for the idea of a transcendental being that lives dimensionally outside of the phenomenal universe
... all extraterrestrials have gender and two essential sexes
... Western hegemony stands a chance of extending beyond Earth
:(
There are so many things wrong with these presumptions, one could not being to list them all. In brief, we're expected to assume a priori that...
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
And on and on...
...is making the leap of becoming a member of another nation truly worth it? For example, an important question would be: does Canada value freedom and speech in all the same ways as the USA does?
Wow, that sounds really triumphalist and ethnocentric. Who can imagine wanting to live anywhere else because the US is the best nation in the world, right? And imagine the horrors of being exposed to strange, inferior cultures that haven't been trampled by Americanism! Why, the very thought of subjection to ideologies that don't concur "in all the same ways" with the ostensible ideals of mainstream America... it's almost too nightmarish to think about!!
I can do without the rhetoric about freedom which is so selectively, hypocritically, oxymoronically, and contradictively applied.
Microsoft makes good consumer Wi-Fi equipment but is exiting the market...
It was my understanding that their appliances were very easy to configure, but the performance is poor and the feature set is wanting. Still, I suppose this is somewhat disappointing since there is a need for easy-to-use gateways. Many users looking for uncomplicated solutions will probably turn to Linksys products instead, which are arguably worse.
But most users don't "choose" EIDE either. To that end, popularity among vendors is tantamount to popularity on the desktop, as in the case with nearly all Macintosh generations; Macs had SCSI through the G3 line, albeit sometimes alongside ATA hosts.
As you rightfully observe, the price point has historically been the prohibitive factor. Generally, SCSI's TCO is higher, and relatively few home computers are SCSI-ready, but it looks like SAS will bring a lower price point and a lower TCO.
An inexpensively bridgable bus type could help diminish the perception of SCSI as a niche market, since any SATA-equipped computer can accomodate SAS with less expense and expertise than was previously necessary to add a SCSI chain to an ATA-based PC.
By eliminating the cable/adapter insanity, not only would SAS make SCSI easier to support and less complex, it also foregoes many of the expenses and availability problems associated with SCSI. Most popular retail chains offer either no SCSI products, or only a handful of products at incredibly exhorbitant prices.
Hopefully these factors will prompt OEMs to crank out higher production volumes, resulting in lower prices and more unit sales for desktops.
Also, remember that many technologies once associated only with servers and high-end workstations have since been realized on the desktop--affordably. SMP will soon be de facto on the desktop, we've had high-capacity removable storage for years, HP already offers competitively-priced 64-bit notebooks, and my $70 mainboard has onboard SATA RAID; so maybe it wouldn't be so weird for SAS to open up SCSI to the masses.
Since Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is supposedly bridgable to SATA, I'm hoping that SAS marks a resurgance in SCSI popularity among home users.
Wow, it seems like only yesterday they were up from 33K to 56K.
I was a little surprised by the internetnews.com article about Gentoo being used in the enterprise. Kurt Lieber (of Gentoo) even claims that "Gentoo is being widely used in corporations today", although his definition of "widely used" may be different than mine.
As great as Gentoo is, it's not high on the list of distros that I would have guessed the business world would embrace. Granted, Gentoo's flexibility does seem to make it well-suited for certain enterprise-level applications; and if Debian can be adapted for commercial consumption in the form of distributions like Xandros, then I suppose Gentoo could as well.
Lieber's target market is a niche market. While I certainly agree that Linux' future shouldn't be arbitrated by one or two vendors, I'm not convinced that the enterprise niche Lieber describes is best served by a commercial version of Gentoo. Regardless, it's unclear from the article whether or not he would actually commercialize Gentoo given the chance.
But the popularization of Gentoo's approach could have other connotations. It's easy to relegate Portage to the realm of Linux curiosities that never could have mainstream appeal. On the surface, it seems that way. But this is exactly the sort of system I would expect to see standardized once our network infrastructure and home computer technology matures to the point at which package acquisition and build time are negligible.
But for the time being, we're still a point at which we're trying to establish some solid standards in the Linux world, and as much as I want RPM to go away, it won't any time soon. So while I don't foresee Portage triggering any revolutions within the next few years, the concept will evolve and its day will come.
Similar stories from Slashdot past:
CD-R Lifespan - Is It The Label?
Say Goodbye To Your CD-Rs In Two Years?
That's definitely a big part of it, but not the whole story. PostgreSQL's lack of adequate software support extends to the client side as well. There are very few options for PGSQL front-ends now (although some of them are quite good), but four years ago the selection was downright threadbare. One thing that can be said of MySQL is that MySQL AB at least offers free GUI clients.
But, I think many people are swayed by the argument that MySQL has a much bigger grassroots support base. While technically that's true, look at the nature of the support base: thousands of redundant questions, many of which are directly related to the lack of features that supposedly makes MySQL great. We're not just talking about views and subselects here: until v4.x, MySQL even lacked UNIONs for god's sake. Fledgling developes may not be able to ask for these features by name, but that doesn't mean they don't feel the lack.
Since working with MySQL means developing with half of the SQL9x spec tied behind your back, and considering that MySQL's documentation is inadequate (and occasionally inaccurate or misleading), it's no wonder that such a huge support base is necessary.
...it is NOT a relational DBMS.
Yes, it's that most paradoxical of phenomena: a system for managing relational databases which--at the same time--is not a relational database management system.
Well, I'll be damned!
mouth(foot);
One irritating thing about VMWare Workstation is that it's only officially supported with a few very specific kernel versions with standard configurations. In my experience, sometimes it's a problem, sometimes it's not. Serenity reportedly supports all 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.
On another note, VMware released several versions of their software before they finally included such important features as USB support. Even though it's still unclear whether such features will make it into the first official release of Serenity, one wonders how soon an open source project of this magnitude will be able to match VMware Workstation 4.x's performance and core feature set--especially considering that Serenity's supported OS's already rival VMware's.
If Serenity is more responsive in windowed mode than VMware Workstation, then that's already a big plus.
The argument here isn't that the schools on the list only made it because they're small thus making reliable service easier to provide; just speculation about how much of a weighted factor this was.
One must also consider that some schools--such as UT and Harvard--are more likely to host a higher percentage of students and faculty who are interested in wireless access. So maybe Intel ranked Harvard lower because the wireless access there fails to meet student demand? (Building age and construction materials also are callenges, as others have pointed-out.)
UT/Austin is the one of the only schools on the list who's presence didn't surprise me. So the question here is, given the comparitively large student population, why wasn't UT/Austin #1 if the signal saturation is as complete as you claim (assuming that the signal was equally reliable in all buildings, which is a big assumption)?
For one thing, if Intel's methodology was objective, then maybe access in key UT buildings isn't so hot.
Further, Bloomington's population is only about 60,000, so the student population is probably considerably smaller than UT's. University size has to be gauged both in terms of student population and the cumulative campus area. So, while serving a smaller population, Bloomington's campus is very sparse and appears to cover more area than UT's much more condensed main campus.
Joe Davis is an artist and research affiliate at MIT's Department of Biology. He and other MIT students and faculty assembled a similar system ca. 1999-2000.
Davis is an interesting guy who's gotten a fair amount of professional and media attention for his intriguing work in genetic and biological postmodern art.
...is of course named for the pointy hats Picard used to wear to crack up Wharf.