And the small, lean desktop apps of those days have been replaced with bloatware as well. Abiword and GNUCalc were fast and useful back in the GNOME days, Now they are a joke-- they crash as soon as you do anything with them.
Numerous little GNOME 1.4 applications existed (time trackers, media players and cd rippers) that were fast and light and that worked well. Every GNOME release one of these apps would get booted out in favor of some bloated project that was "new" and "great". The "new" and "great" always meant twice the memory size, unstable habits while running, and much less functionality-- provided in drop down windows and wizards.
GNOME ended up with HAL, BONOBO, and mono. And guess what? All that crap in 2.0 that they added over 10 years-- that is now going away again because it was all so piss poor to begin with. LOL.
Hopefully GNOME 3.x is more like GNOME 1.5x.
Hopefully GNOME stops trying to include default applications and goes back to providing the API's and the HID best user practices and requirements.
I don't want to hear that web browser X is out of GNOME, and IM client Y is now "blessed" to be in GNOME. That crap is retarded. When your GNOME package starts depending on this silly list of dorky applications it gets really annoying. Either the app meets the GNOME usability and code and API usage guidelines or it does not. Give it a gold star, or a silver star, or a black dot, or whatever. But making productivity apps a core part of the desktop, and then changing the apps in every release to reward whomever has kissed the most ass that release has pissed me off to no end these past 10 years.
I am happy with an old version of RatPoison for serious work. Less distractions, more focus on the task at hand, and plenty of scripts and plug ins to get the job done.
When I don't care about productivity, GNOME with bells and whistles keeps me amused. Although, I do miss the 1.4 days.
According to TTAC, the number #1 vehicle for unintended acceleration is the Lincoln TownCar. The Ford Police cruiser is one of the lowest, however. Funny thing is that, mechanically-- they are the same car. The difference is the people who drive them-- one group being highly trained with fast reaction times, and the other group-- well not so much.
It is not just age distribution that they need to look at with Toyota, it is the complete demographic of the Toyota owner. Car enthusiasts do not usually buy Toyota's these days. Toyota's are incredibly boring in appearance and they handle like slugs. The are anti-exciting, right up there with a root canal. The average Toyota driver is the person in the fast lane doing 45mph and texting someone at the same time. For the average user, unintended acceleration happens everytime they touch that strange scary pedal on the right. When you add in that their brakes are likely shot because they drag them all the damn time while talking on their i-phone going down the road-- and never do routine maintenance on their vehicle: it is no wonder they can't stop.
Toyota's main problem is that they decided to make cars for idiots and got bit by that (granted that is a large market share, just ask Microsoft).
I think I am going to sue them. I am sure I got brain cancer just from looking at the pictures. Even if I did not get cancer, I now have emotional trauma.
You are correct in assuming that the turbo addition will lower MPG, in your application of using a turbo solely for acceleration performance-- which is why they are used on gas consumer cars.
However, turbo's included in aviation and in diesel motors are used in place of a bigger motor because they do make a smaller motor more efficient. Aviation motors operate at 50-75% of their capacity continously (cruise on a small plane is 75% throttle). Diesels operate in a higher torque range per HP. In either case, the engine is always on boost with the turbo. Car motors operate at closer to 25% of red line-- where the turbo is still in VAC while cruising-- not boost. Thus the turbo never provides any advantage (a disadvantage actually as the vac setup causes loss of efficiency over normal aspiration)-- In the gas consumer car-- until the driver slams the pedal down, the turbo does nothing to improve power, which is why it always wastes more fuel than it could save (unless you drive your turbo sports car down the road at 70% redline, LOL).
The secret is: is the turbo boosting while cruising along? If so, it is more efficient than using a bigger motor, otherwise, it is a waste efficiency wise.
This article also compares Intel's announced CPU's with AMD's CPU's that you can actually buy. This is just a fluff piece-- same as the "Extreme Edition" that would overheat and that no one could buy for around 6 months.
If you look at yesterdays news, you will see that AMD is releasing dual core chips soon. So when both of these new chips actually are available in quantity-- then lets do a review. Hyperthreading will not look so good then.
Hyper Threading is an engineering solution to try and fix the problem created by Intel's marketing department-- when the company let them design the Pentium 4 to scale on Megahertz and not on performance. After that fiasco, Intel got its butt handed to it on just about all benchmarks by the Athlon. Intel management then panicked, and Intel's engineers salvaged the long processor pipeline with "Hyper Threading".
Dual cores (SMP) are the better solution. When dual cores come out, hyper threading looses most of its advantage.
Try HP zv5400 or Compaq R3000Z series, among many others.
I am posting from my Athlon3000+ 64bit laptop with its sick 1.6 GHZ BUS. I purchased this a month ago for $950 dollars from Staples. Yes 64bit laptops are out there-- and they can be found for cheap.
And, yes it is fast. And, yes it runs a 64bit OS-- debian pure64.
I would HATE to think of what I would have had to spend on this machine if I had gone with a Pentium 4 with HyperThreading. Compairing compiles with a friends Dell Pentium 4 is truly hillarious-- this thing murders it. The Athlon64 runs fairly cool too-- idles at 98 degrees in Linux.
First of all, how do you get a critical update? IE, hmmm. How do I get an update? apt-get over port 80, hmmmm. Maybe that is his point?
Web servers like Zope have software available that lets you edit Word docs through a web browser, version them, and share them. Ever access your email through a web browser? I do. No Outlook needed. Other Office apps... you can expect them to be replaced soon too.
So is Office 2006 vastly different from a web app? If had better not be if Microsoft wants to sell it to anyone.
There is a reason they call it OpenOffice.org instead of OpenOffice. It is not web centric yet, but you can expect it to be increasing integrated with the web browsing experience.
Eventually, everything is a web app or a firefox plugin. That really IS the point. The OS/computer is reduced to an appliance, a toaster. It is of no more consequence. It becomes no more complicated than your cell phone or DVR device, and is just as replaceable and interoperable.
Lets see, what could benefit our understanding of the world, or be useful...
1. Space Elevator
2. Hubble
What is a total waste of time and money, but allows jock pricks to cruise around the universe looking like "cool" Americans...
1. Going to the moon. (Yawn..)
2. Going to Mars. (Slightly more interesting to watch, but equally pointless...)
3. Space Shittle 2... The Next Mistake...
I vote for option C... defund NASA: Nerdy Assinine Subsidy for Assholes... and my GrandFather worked at Red Mountain and at Fort Bliss and helped found NASA. Sadly, it has no point anymore-- it is becoming a disgrace to the men who founded it. The Space Shittle was the turning point.
"but I think reading a website and deliberately blocking its adverts is akin to going into a shop, reading their newspaper, and putting it back on the shelf...and my student loan... covers the bills."
Umm... in my country using your student loans to finance a business is not only unethical, but illegal. In any case it is most probably a violation of your student loan contract and can cause you to default on the loan.
You see, unlike you, your users did not sign a contract when they went to your site. They did not agree to look at advertisements, despite whatever the hell you wanted or expected them to do.
YOU, however, signed a contract that you were taking out a loan to pay for school and your expenses as a student, and not for other purposes (Such as buying a car or starting a business). So why the hell are you are using student loan money to fund a failed business model? That is a question that is probably a public concern since said money usually comes from government sources- i.e. taxpayers.
It is stupid to listen to someone's explanation of business ethics, when they freely admit that they violate signed business contracts!
The WMD fiasco is nothing but a sideshow to keep you from seeing the real underlying issues here.
Ever since Vietnam the Presidents have totally pissed on the Constitution they swore to uphold. The President has NEVER had power to declare war, that was granted to the Congress. I don't recall Congress declaring war against Iraq, for whatever reason.
The Congress does not want the political heat of declaring war. So they attempt to push that over to Bush by signing a letter of "support for our troops". They can then blame the President for whatever goes wrong, or take credit for whatever goes right. This way, they keep their offices relatively unspotted in the view of the people. Offices which in reality consist largely of shoveling money towards corporate interests.
All this reeks of the same corruption that occurred when the Senators of the Roman Republic shoveled all their power over to Octavian... making him Caesar. Those Senators did not want to risk alienating the people by taking stands on issues, they would rather let Augustus do it, and then blame him when things went sour. Thus, those Senators could hide their incompetency and accountability from the people, while continuing their corrupt business dealings.
We read in Article I Section 8 that Congress has power...:
Article I Section 8 (Powers granted to Congress): "...To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;...."
In Section 1 or Article II we read:
Article II Section 1 (Executive branch, office of President): "...Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--"I do solemly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Now that Congress has no gumption and represents corporations instead of the people-- the President does whatever he wants. So we go to war at his say so, over whatever he wants us to fight and die for. The leaders of our country swore to uphold the Constitution, yet they piss on the balance of power that was built into it for their own political and personal gain.
And these people are going to bring "freedom" to Iraq. Physicians... heal thy selves.
"I'll liberate you peoples' fate
Spoke the Burnin' Bush
But the song of beasts
Growl with oil soaked teeth
Their dollar is mighty and true
Now the eagle soars the sky
Over refugee and child
And to all there is no end
Another day in perfect Hell"-- Flogging Molly
Gee... its too bad to hear that their costs went up. Perhaps the solutions they deployed were not well thought out? It would certainly seem so from the inconsistencies mentioned in the article. Folks who say that they have been running a one year old OS for two years in production, folks who blame their web application's instability while performing inserts on the underlying OS-- these are not the folks I would hire to architect my system. Nor would I solicit their opinions if I wanted any advice on how to deploy a system.
Too many people think that Linux/FOSS is "magic pixie dust". It isn't. But it is not Linux that burned these "inovative" people. Their own mistakes did. This is an uncomfortable fact for any manager... they want someone to blame besides their department. Someone outside who can take it... someone like IBM or Microsoft. "You never get fired for buying IBM...Microsoft... CISCO..."
In the end, if the product fails or does not work as advertised, you just blame the vendor and it is accepted because "everyone else uses them". Linux is not "the standard", so you must take it in the pants if something goes wrong.
And that is the real reason why these folks went back to windows. They are now comfortable again, they can blame their failures on someone else and not take responsiblity for them. Their careers are now safe!
Where I work, we have replaced almost all of our servers with Linux. We run our own web-based custom enrollment and billing system on linux. When we started development, Microsoft used to bring us brownies every week. They kept trying to convince our CEO to go back to Microsoft-- going over the CIO's head. When they sat down and did the final cost comparison with our CEO and CIO-- they admitted they could not match our numbers and left. We have not had brownies since. Too bad, they were very good brownies. Microsoft spared no expense. I'm sure they were paid for by those people who went back to windows, as Microsoft is not a charity.
As for our company, we would have never been able to afford to develop our intranet application had it not been for the availibility of FOSS tools. But insourcing requires capable folks who take responsibility for their actions, and that is missing in the corporate world. Thus everything is outsourced to someone else- to spread the blame.
Modern distribution should focus on a system for upgrading / installing which handles dependencies well, a base of hand-picked packages covering as many functions with quality software,... building a community and encouraging its members to provide well-written documentation and lobbying with hardware vendors for open drivers (e.g. ATI).
Sounds kinda like Debian with taskselect.
...making the installation process as easy and transparent as possible... Also, some professional-quality design work for the website and visual presentation wouldn't hurt...
Nevermind...
I think e-build and portage are a slick build system. It is nice to build optimized packages. But then again, I would just like normal binary packages to be sane in the first place-- so I don't have to compile anything. Other than for compiling and learning, gentoo has poor management capabilities.
Sorry gentoo, I don't want to build gnome, kde, ect. for 2 days straight for fun... I'd rather get something done. Trying to find gentoo prebuilts of these packages on the net also proved frustrating...and unless they are optimized, misses the point anyway.
And, sorry Debian, no I do not like being stuck with i386 binaries for everything. Why doesn't Debian spend its time on i686 and athlon builds instead of wasting time on the 286, Atari, Color Computer II, Commodore64, Sinclair, UNIVAC, CRAYI, Amiga backports? Shouldn't the time, disk space and bandwidth be used for something that more than 5 people are going to use?
And sorry Red Hat... but if I never see another.rpm file it is too soon. Right now I am going to go put tape over the R.P.M. on the tach in my car.
And sorry Suse but my experience with Yast2 was that it was a good idea with a horrible proprietary implementation. Deselect default KDE... default windowmanager GNOME. Starting KDE... NO... default GNOME... starting KDE... AGG! And the "feature" of clobbering changes I made to/etc files without asking me, while putting back the options it decided belonged there was just too much... Wow! Suse makes Linux like Windows, click some buttons to configure and it does what it wants anyway! Yeah the manual was nice and covered how to fix most things. But it easier for me to reinstall something else than to learn how to administer unix the "Suse" way with their buggy gui.
Slackware is great. If you know exactly what you are doing... and don't plan to update very often. But how many people fall into this category? My guess is, all the people using Slackware.
And the only distribution that has been consistently painless to upgrade and download whatever software I want on, without stupid proprietary configuration and dependency management issues-- is Debian. But is a pain to install, the new installer will help, but it is no Red Hat Anaconda. And the multimedia packages are slllooowww. i386 does not cut it. So I stick with Debian, and boot Gentoo for games and movies. If Debian's installer was "pretty", and its site and documentation were "pretty", and it had some marketing behind it to demonstrate its advantages... it could dominate the unix desktop world and corporate desktop rollouts. But those are alot of ifs and IBM is not endorsing any one party and Novell has its own ideas...
It is not so much that FOSS and Linux are not ready for the desktop, it is these poor distributions that are not ready-- they take perfectly good software and break it to "differentiate" their product and create lockin-- Yast2 being a prime example and RedHats use of experimental glic another. And I don't think another distro is going to help-- especially one using Yast with 50 separate versions. I don't want a new "distribution" to "upgrade" to- or change over into something else.. or figure out its quarks... I want a software installation and management system built into the OS that is standardized and that frees me from having
Yes, its true that Red Hat only spent $26 million on development and Sun and Microsoft spent 10 times more. So what? If someone does not spend money on one product, that does not mean that they cannot spend it on another. Lets stop looking at the amount spent on developing or purchasing software and look at the ROI on the software developed or purchased. Now we see that Red Hat Enterprise competes very favorably with Windows 2003 and Solaris. It provides incredible competition at a fraction of the price. Contrary to what the ISV software industry wants you to think, the real measurement of software value is what it can do for you, not the cash spent (often wasted) re-inventing the wheel, advertising it, and putting it in a pretty box.
These poor companies would also have us believe it is the end of innovation if they cannot make obscene profit margins. Baloney. The money saved by not buying Slick Willy's OS does not disappear into the ether-- it is available for investment elsewhere. It can be used to hire other programmers and quality support, that was previously unaffordable (this is why I am currently employed as a software engineer, on Linux). Without Linux, there is no way my company could afford to develop our products in house.
FOSS is the ultimate economy of scale, and this is what scares the bejeepers out of Sun and Microsoft. If it takes over ten times more cash to produce the same product as your competitor- then you are doomed. It is like the local general store trying to compete with Wall Mart. And now that the same corporate free-trade, merciless efficiency is being used against these big cushy companies, am I supposed to fear sorry for them? Hell no. They say they are "capitalists" who want to innovate-- so let them innovate a process efficiency, or let them die.
As for a solution to paying developers, for having business give back to the system instead of just trying to mooch a free lunch, that is a cultural change that has to occur in management. Management needs to realize that they really do not want the "code". They want the system designed to meet their needs and to have support for it, and that they still have to pay something for that-- albiet less as they are sharing the load with other interested parties. As the support structure continues to improve for FOSS, more money will continue to come in.
Other compilers for Linux (Try google before you troll):
TCC (tiny c compiler).
Compaq Alpha C compiler.
OpenWatcom C/C++ compiler
TenDra C/C++ compiler
egcs compiler (which merged into gcc- they saw that it had some advantages.)
ChEmbeddable
Cint c/c++ interpreter (not exactly a compiler)
CC65 Commodore C compiler
Absoft C/C++ Fortran compiler
lcc
These all run on linux. Some are open, some are not. GCC is used mainly because it is portable to just about anything-- so there goes your argument of GCC restricting choice. GCC exists to promote choice, and it does this.
Take your code written for Visual Studio and compile it on Sun. Can't do that with Visual Studio? No MFC on Sun? Your best bet will probably be good old GCC with WINE. So how are you restricted by gcc?
Now, if you want to make a cross compiler to compete with gcc- one with seperate front ends and back ends, so it can accept multiple languages, and can compile to just about every machine on earth-- then nothing is stopping you. Oh, what is that? Not interested. Neither is anyone else. Programers see no need to duplicate something that has been done well the first time. One good cross compiler is enough- GCC represents a NATURAL MONOPOLY.
In Italy this was called Corporatism, or Facism. The world being coined by Benito Mussolini. Today, corporations and neo-cons have convinced the Bible thumpers that support them that corporate facism is really free-enterprise. Sad...
Unfortunately, you are correct. But that is because we mistakenly call corporate fascism "capitalism".
Capitalism need not involve greedy corporations. Some of the most lassie-fair of people, the founders of the United States, did not believe in corporations being able to run a-muck the way they have today. Corporations were a privilege, and that privilege could be revoked if a corporation did not behave. The representatives of the country were to see to that, but the people fell asleep along time ago and corporate shills run the US Congress. So now we have Mussolini style fascism running around in G W Bush's US pretending to be capitalism, Corpratism is not so very different from communism in practice.
Corporatism: Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative representation is given to industries or professional and economic groups. Ostensibly, the entire society is to be run by decisions collectively made by these groups. It is a form of class collaboration put forward as an alternative to class conflict and was first proposed by Pope Leo XIII. In Italy, employers were organized into syndicates known as "corporations" according to their industries, and these groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni. According to various theorists corporatism was an attempt to create a "modern" version of feudalism by merging the "corporate" interests with those of the state
Communism: A scheme of equalizing the social conditions of life; specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of inequalities in the possession of property, as by distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all.
Fascism: a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)
Socialism: Socialism was first applied in England to Owen's theory of social reconstruction, and in France to those also of St. Simon and Fourier . . . The word, however, is used with a great variety of meaning, . . . even by economists and learned critics. The general tendency is to regard as socialistic any interference undertaken by society on behalf of the poor, . . . radical social reform which disturbs the present system of private property . . . The tendency of the present socialism is more and more to ally itself with the most advanced democracy.
No fascism and communism are not at opposite ends. First of all, fascism is authoritarian government, communism is an economic system, as you can see from the above.
However, you cannot separate communism in practice with fascist government. You can only remove property against the will of those holding it by force and authoritarian power.
In a democracy, where a vote occurs, you can willingly hand over property. Wherever a democracy has voted willingly to redistribute wealth, the movement has been considered socialism or democratic socialism, and not communism. While in principle they may share the same ideals of Marx, in practice they have been entirely different things.
In a democratic socialist government (England, most of Europe), a vote from an elected representative occurs before the government decides if it will redistribute wealth. Every communist country: China, Eastern Block, Russia has been a fascist farce and has paid nothing but lip service to Marxism. It has used Marxist philosophy as a tool to manipulate the proletariat, replacing previous tools such as religion, of which Marx so criticized.
All power comes from the point of a gun-- Chairman Mao
Slashdot Mirror
and we have no idea how old Minnie Mouse was when she married Mickey. The shame.
And the small, lean desktop apps of those days have been replaced with bloatware as well. Abiword and GNUCalc were fast and useful back in the GNOME days, Now they are a joke-- they crash as soon as you do anything with them.
Numerous little GNOME 1.4 applications existed (time trackers, media players and cd rippers) that were fast and light and that worked well. Every GNOME release one of these apps would get booted out in favor of some bloated project that was "new" and "great". The "new" and "great" always meant twice the memory size, unstable habits while running, and much less functionality-- provided in drop down windows and wizards.
GNOME ended up with HAL, BONOBO, and mono. And guess what? All that crap in 2.0 that they added over 10 years-- that is now going away again because it was all so piss poor to begin with. LOL.
Hopefully GNOME 3.x is more like GNOME 1.5x.
Hopefully GNOME stops trying to include default applications and goes back to providing the API's and the HID best user practices and requirements.
I don't want to hear that web browser X is out of GNOME, and IM client Y is now "blessed" to be in GNOME. That crap is retarded. When your GNOME package starts depending on this silly list of dorky applications it gets really annoying. Either the app meets the GNOME usability and code and API usage guidelines or it does not. Give it a gold star, or a silver star, or a black dot, or whatever. But making productivity apps a core part of the desktop, and then changing the apps in every release to reward whomever has kissed the most ass that release has pissed me off to no end these past 10 years.
I am happy with an old version of RatPoison for serious work. Less distractions, more focus on the task at hand, and plenty of scripts and plug ins to get the job done.
When I don't care about productivity, GNOME with bells and whistles keeps me amused. Although, I do miss the 1.4 days.
According to TTAC, the number #1 vehicle for unintended acceleration is the Lincoln TownCar. The Ford Police cruiser is one of the lowest, however. Funny thing is that, mechanically-- they are the same car. The difference is the people who drive them-- one group being highly trained with fast reaction times, and the other group-- well not so much.
It is not just age distribution that they need to look at with Toyota, it is the complete demographic of the Toyota owner. Car enthusiasts do not usually buy Toyota's these days. Toyota's are incredibly boring in appearance and they handle like slugs. The are anti-exciting, right up there with a root canal. The average Toyota driver is the person in the fast lane doing 45mph and texting someone at the same time. For the average user, unintended acceleration happens everytime they touch that strange scary pedal on the right. When you add in that their brakes are likely shot because they drag them all the damn time while talking on their i-phone going down the road-- and never do routine maintenance on their vehicle: it is no wonder they can't stop.
Toyota's main problem is that they decided to make cars for idiots and got bit by that (granted that is a large market share, just ask Microsoft).
Oh I see it has a Florida license plate, that explains everything.
I think I am going to sue them. I am sure I got brain cancer just from looking at the pictures. Even if I did not get cancer, I now have emotional trauma.
Volvo already did that, of course they marketed it towards women. That is Ford for you:
5 9
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/04/13372
You are correct in assuming that the turbo addition will lower MPG, in your application of using a turbo solely for acceleration performance-- which is why they are used on gas consumer cars.
However, turbo's included in aviation and in diesel motors are used in place of a bigger motor because they do make a smaller motor more efficient. Aviation motors operate at 50-75% of their capacity continously (cruise on a small plane is 75% throttle). Diesels operate in a higher torque range per HP. In either case, the engine is always on boost with the turbo. Car motors operate at closer to 25% of red line-- where the turbo is still in VAC while cruising-- not boost. Thus the turbo never provides any advantage (a disadvantage actually as the vac setup causes loss of efficiency over normal aspiration)-- In the gas consumer car-- until the driver slams the pedal down, the turbo does nothing to improve power, which is why it always wastes more fuel than it could save (unless you drive your turbo sports car down the road at 70% redline, LOL).
The secret is: is the turbo boosting while cruising along? If so, it is more efficient than using a bigger motor, otherwise, it is a waste efficiency wise.
This article also compares Intel's announced CPU's with AMD's CPU's that you can actually buy. This is just a fluff piece-- same as the "Extreme Edition" that would overheat and that no one could buy for around 6 months.
If you look at yesterdays news, you will see that AMD is releasing dual core chips soon. So when both of these new chips actually are available in quantity-- then lets do a review. Hyperthreading will not look so good then.
Hyper Threading is an engineering solution to try and fix the problem created by Intel's marketing department-- when the company let them design the Pentium 4 to scale on Megahertz and not on performance. After that fiasco, Intel got its butt handed to it on just about all benchmarks by the Athlon. Intel management then panicked, and Intel's engineers salvaged the long processor pipeline with "Hyper Threading".
Dual cores (SMP) are the better solution. When dual cores come out, hyper threading looses most of its advantage.
Sorry, it was Fahrenheit...
Try HP zv5400 or Compaq R3000Z series, among many others.
I am posting from my Athlon3000+ 64bit laptop with its sick 1.6 GHZ BUS. I purchased this a month ago for $950 dollars from Staples. Yes 64bit laptops are out there-- and they can be found for cheap.
And, yes it is fast. And, yes it runs a 64bit OS-- debian pure64.
I would HATE to think of what I would have had to spend on this machine if I had gone with a Pentium 4 with HyperThreading. Compairing compiles with a friends Dell Pentium 4 is truly hillarious-- this thing murders it. The Athlon64 runs fairly cool too-- idles at 98 degrees in Linux.
64 is the way to go, IMO.
First of all, how do you get a critical update? IE, hmmm. How do I get an update? apt-get over port 80, hmmmm. Maybe that is his point?
Web servers like Zope have software available that lets you edit Word docs through a web browser, version them, and share them. Ever access your email through a web browser? I do. No Outlook needed. Other Office apps... you can expect them to be replaced soon too.
So is Office 2006 vastly different from a web app? If had better not be if Microsoft wants to sell it to anyone.
There is a reason they call it OpenOffice.org instead of OpenOffice. It is not web centric yet, but you can expect it to be increasing integrated with the web browsing experience.
Eventually, everything is a web app or a firefox plugin. That really IS the point. The OS/computer is reduced to an appliance, a toaster. It is of no more consequence. It becomes no more complicated than your cell phone or DVR device, and is just as replaceable and interoperable.
Yes... and ratpoison's rudeness setting keeps you from having those popups steal window focus while you are trying to type.
http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison
Lets see, what could benefit our understanding of the world, or be useful...
1. Space Elevator
2. Hubble
What is a total waste of time and money, but allows jock pricks to cruise around the universe looking like "cool" Americans...
1. Going to the moon. (Yawn..)
2. Going to Mars. (Slightly more interesting to watch, but equally pointless...)
3. Space Shittle 2... The Next Mistake...
I vote for option C... defund NASA: Nerdy Assinine Subsidy for Assholes... and my GrandFather worked at Red Mountain and at Fort Bliss and helped found NASA. Sadly, it has no point anymore-- it is becoming a disgrace to the men who founded it. The Space Shittle was the turning point.
"but I think reading a website and deliberately blocking its adverts is akin to going into a shop, reading their newspaper, and putting it back on the shelf...and my student loan... covers the bills."
Umm... in my country using your student loans to finance a business is not only unethical, but illegal. In any case it is most probably a violation of your student loan contract and can cause you to default on the loan.
You see, unlike you, your users did not sign a contract when they went to your site. They did not agree to look at advertisements, despite whatever the hell you wanted or expected them to do.
YOU, however, signed a contract that you were taking out a loan to pay for school and your expenses as a student, and not for other purposes (Such as buying a car or starting a business). So why the hell are you are using student loan money to fund a failed business model? That is a question that is probably a public concern since said money usually comes from government sources- i.e. taxpayers.
It is stupid to listen to someone's explanation of business ethics, when they freely admit that they violate signed business contracts!
The WMD fiasco is nothing but a sideshow to keep you from seeing the real underlying issues here.
Ever since Vietnam the Presidents have totally pissed on the Constitution they swore to uphold. The President has NEVER had power to declare war, that was granted to the Congress. I don't recall Congress declaring war against Iraq, for whatever reason.
The Congress does not want the political heat of declaring war. So they attempt to push that over to Bush by signing a letter of "support for our troops". They can then blame the President for whatever goes wrong, or take credit for whatever goes right. This way, they keep their offices relatively unspotted in the view of the people. Offices which in reality consist largely of shoveling money towards corporate interests.
All this reeks of the same corruption that occurred when the Senators of the Roman Republic shoveled all their power over to Octavian... making him Caesar. Those Senators did not want to risk alienating the people by taking stands on issues, they would rather let Augustus do it, and then blame him when things went sour. Thus, those Senators could hide their incompetency and accountability from the people, while continuing their corrupt business dealings.
We read in Article I Section 8 that Congress has power...:
Article I Section 8 (Powers granted to Congress):
"...To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;...."
In Section 1 or Article II we read: Article II Section 1 (Executive branch, office of President):
"...Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--"I do solemly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Now that Congress has no gumption and represents corporations instead of the people-- the President does whatever he wants. So we go to war at his say so, over whatever he wants us to fight and die for. The leaders of our country swore to uphold the Constitution, yet they piss on the balance of power that was built into it for their own political and personal gain.
And these people are going to bring "freedom" to Iraq. Physicians... heal thy selves.
"I'll liberate you peoples' fate
Spoke the Burnin' Bush
But the song of beasts
Growl with oil soaked teeth
Their dollar is mighty and true
Now the eagle soars the sky
Over refugee and child
And to all there is no end
Another day in perfect Hell"-- Flogging Molly
Gee... its too bad to hear that their costs went up. Perhaps the solutions they deployed were not well thought out? It would certainly seem so from the inconsistencies mentioned in the article. Folks who say that they have been running a one year old OS for two years in production, folks who blame their web application's instability while performing inserts on the underlying OS-- these are not the folks I would hire to architect my system. Nor would I solicit their opinions if I wanted any advice on how to deploy a system.
Too many people think that Linux/FOSS is "magic pixie dust". It isn't. But it is not Linux that burned these "inovative" people. Their own mistakes did. This is an uncomfortable fact for any manager... they want someone to blame besides their department. Someone outside who can take it... someone like IBM or Microsoft. "You never get fired for buying IBM...Microsoft... CISCO..."
In the end, if the product fails or does not work as advertised, you just blame the vendor and it is accepted because "everyone else uses them". Linux is not "the standard", so you must take it in the pants if something goes wrong.
And that is the real reason why these folks went back to windows. They are now comfortable again, they can blame their failures on someone else and not take responsiblity for them. Their careers are now safe!
Where I work, we have replaced almost all of our servers with Linux. We run our own web-based custom enrollment and billing system on linux. When we started development, Microsoft used to bring us brownies every week. They kept trying to convince our CEO to go back to Microsoft-- going over the CIO's head. When they sat down and did the final cost comparison with our CEO and CIO-- they admitted they could not match our numbers and left. We have not had brownies since. Too bad, they were very good brownies. Microsoft spared no expense. I'm sure they were paid for by those people who went back to windows, as Microsoft is not a charity.
As for our company, we would have never been able to afford to develop our intranet application had it not been for the availibility of FOSS tools. But insourcing requires capable folks who take responsibility for their actions, and that is missing in the corporate world. Thus everything is outsourced to someone else- to spread the blame.
Sounds kinda like Debian with taskselect.
Also, some professional-quality design work for the website and visual presentation wouldn't hurt...
Nevermind...
I think e-build and portage are a slick build system. It is nice to build optimized packages. But then again, I would just like normal binary packages to be sane in the first place-- so I don't have to compile anything. Other than for compiling and learning, gentoo has poor management capabilities.
.rpm file it is too soon. Right now I am going to go put tape over the R.P.M. on the tach in my car.
/etc files without asking me, while putting back the options it decided belonged there was just too much... Wow! Suse makes Linux like Windows, click some buttons to configure and it does what it wants anyway! Yeah the manual was nice and covered how to fix most things. But it easier for me to reinstall something else than to learn how to administer unix the "Suse" way with their buggy gui.
Sorry gentoo, I don't want to build gnome, kde, ect. for 2 days straight for fun... I'd rather get something done. Trying to find gentoo prebuilts of these packages on the net also proved frustrating...and unless they are optimized, misses the point anyway.
And, sorry Debian, no I do not like being stuck with i386 binaries for everything. Why doesn't Debian spend its time on i686 and athlon builds instead of wasting time on the 286, Atari, Color Computer II, Commodore64, Sinclair, UNIVAC, CRAYI, Amiga backports? Shouldn't the time, disk space and bandwidth be used for something that more than 5 people are going to use?
And sorry Red Hat... but if I never see another
And sorry Suse but my experience with Yast2 was that it was a good idea with a horrible proprietary implementation. Deselect default KDE... default windowmanager GNOME. Starting KDE... NO... default GNOME... starting KDE... AGG! And the "feature" of clobbering changes I made to
Slackware is great. If you know exactly what you are doing... and don't plan to update very often. But how many people fall into this category? My guess is, all the people using Slackware.
And the only distribution that has been consistently painless to upgrade and download whatever software I want on, without stupid proprietary configuration and dependency management issues-- is Debian. But is a pain to install, the new installer will help, but it is no Red Hat Anaconda. And the multimedia packages are slllooowww. i386 does not cut it. So I stick with Debian, and boot Gentoo for games and movies. If Debian's installer was "pretty", and its site and documentation were "pretty", and it had some marketing behind it to demonstrate its advantages... it could dominate the unix desktop world and corporate desktop rollouts. But those are alot of ifs and IBM is not endorsing any one party and Novell has its own ideas...
It is not so much that FOSS and Linux are not ready for the desktop, it is these poor distributions that are not ready-- they take perfectly good software and break it to "differentiate" their product and create lockin-- Yast2 being a prime example and RedHats use of experimental glic another. And I don't think another distro is going to help-- especially one using Yast with 50 separate versions. I don't want a new "distribution" to "upgrade" to- or change over into something else.. or figure out its quarks... I want a software installation and management system built into the OS that is standardized and that frees me from having
Yes, its true that Red Hat only spent $26 million on development and Sun and Microsoft spent 10 times more. So what? If someone does not spend money on one product, that does not mean that they cannot spend it on another. Lets stop looking at the amount spent on developing or purchasing software and look at the ROI on the software developed or purchased. Now we see that Red Hat Enterprise competes very favorably with Windows 2003 and Solaris. It provides incredible competition at a fraction of the price. Contrary to what the ISV software industry wants you to think, the real measurement of software value is what it can do for you, not the cash spent (often wasted) re-inventing the wheel, advertising it, and putting it in a pretty box.
These poor companies would also have us believe it is the end of innovation if they cannot make obscene profit margins. Baloney. The money saved by not buying Slick Willy's OS does not disappear into the ether-- it is available for investment elsewhere. It can be used to hire other programmers and quality support, that was previously unaffordable (this is why I am currently employed as a software engineer, on Linux). Without Linux, there is no way my company could afford to develop our products in house.
FOSS is the ultimate economy of scale, and this is what scares the bejeepers out of Sun and Microsoft. If it takes over ten times more cash to produce the same product as your competitor- then you are doomed. It is like the local general store trying to compete with Wall Mart. And now that the same corporate free-trade, merciless efficiency is being used against these big cushy companies, am I supposed to fear sorry for them? Hell no. They say they are "capitalists" who want to innovate-- so let them innovate a process efficiency, or let them die.
As for a solution to paying developers, for having business give back to the system instead of just trying to mooch a free lunch, that is a cultural change that has to occur in management. Management needs to realize that they really do not want the "code". They want the system designed to meet their needs and to have support for it, and that they still have to pay something for that-- albiet less as they are sharing the load with other interested parties. As the support structure continues to improve for FOSS, more money will continue to come in.
TCC (tiny c compiler).
Compaq Alpha C compiler.
OpenWatcom C/C++ compiler
TenDra C/C++ compiler
egcs compiler (which merged into gcc- they saw that it had some advantages.)
ChEmbeddable
Cint c/c++ interpreter (not exactly a compiler)
CC65 Commodore C compiler
Absoft C/C++ Fortran compiler
lcc
These all run on linux. Some are open, some are not. GCC is used mainly because it is portable to just about anything-- so there goes your argument of GCC restricting choice. GCC exists to promote choice, and it does this.
Take your code written for Visual Studio and compile it on Sun. Can't do that with Visual Studio? No MFC on Sun? Your best bet will probably be good old GCC with WINE. So how are you restricted by gcc?
Now, if you want to make a cross compiler to compete with gcc- one with seperate front ends and back ends, so it can accept multiple languages, and can compile to just about every machine on earth-- then nothing is stopping you. Oh, what is that? Not interested. Neither is anyone else. Programers see no need to duplicate something that has been done well the first time. One good cross compiler is enough- GCC represents a NATURAL MONOPOLY.
In Italy this was called Corporatism, or Facism. The world being coined by Benito Mussolini. Today, corporations and neo-cons have convinced the Bible thumpers that support them that corporate facism is really free-enterprise. Sad...
Sorry, extra T.
Benevoltent Dictator...
Isn't that George W Bush's campaign platform?
Unfortunately, you are correct. But that is because we mistakenly call corporate fascism "capitalism".
t ism/
Capitalism need not involve greedy corporations. Some of the most lassie-fair of people, the founders of the United States, did not believe in corporations being able to run a-muck the way they have today. Corporations were a privilege, and that privilege could be revoked if a corporation did not behave. The representatives of the country were to see to that, but the people fell asleep along time ago and corporate shills run the US Congress. So now we have Mussolini style fascism running around in G W Bush's US pretending to be capitalism, Corpratism is not so very different from communism in practice.
Corporatism: Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative representation is given to industries or professional and economic groups. Ostensibly, the entire society is to be run by decisions collectively made by these groups. It is a form of class collaboration put forward as an alternative to class conflict and was first proposed by Pope Leo XIII. In Italy, employers were organized into syndicates known as "corporations" according to their industries, and these groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni. According to various theorists corporatism was an attempt to create a "modern" version of feudalism by merging the "corporate" interests with those of the state
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/corpora
Communism: A scheme of equalizing the social conditions of life; specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of inequalities in the possession of property, as by distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all.
Fascism: a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)
Socialism: Socialism was first applied in England to Owen's theory of social reconstruction, and in France to those also of St. Simon and Fourier . . . The word, however, is used with a great variety of meaning, . . . even by economists and learned critics. The general tendency is to regard as socialistic any interference undertaken by society on behalf of the poor, . . . radical social reform which disturbs the present system of private property . . . The tendency of the present socialism is more and more to ally itself with the most advanced democracy.
No fascism and communism are not at opposite ends. First of all, fascism is authoritarian government, communism is an economic system, as you can see from the above.
However, you cannot separate communism in practice with fascist government. You can only remove property against the will of those holding it by force and authoritarian power.
In a democracy, where a vote occurs, you can willingly hand over property. Wherever a democracy has voted willingly to redistribute wealth, the movement has been considered socialism or democratic socialism, and not communism. While in principle they may share the same ideals of Marx, in practice they have been entirely different things.
In a democratic socialist government (England, most of Europe), a vote from an elected representative occurs before the government decides if it will redistribute wealth. Every communist country: China, Eastern Block, Russia has been a fascist farce and has paid nothing but lip service to Marxism. It has used Marxist philosophy as a tool to manipulate the proletariat, replacing previous tools such as religion, of which Marx so criticized.
All power comes from the point of a gun-- Chairman Mao