Overpopulation is a problem that solves itself. The problem isn't that we'll end up running out of food/water/air and all dying, it's that we'll "die off" in huge numbers to get back to equilibrium.
The four horsemen will take care of overpopulation as it happens...
So who is going to buy these machines now, with the "In-box upgrade to IA-64" the only future for (some) current PA-RISC machines?
As it is, the uncertainty around the merger and the coming death of PA-RISC *must* have had a negative effect on sales of HP Unix machines. Anecdotally, the one customer I support who was on HP-UX and an HP 9000 has migrated over to Solaris on Sun hardware.
Any HP employees out there who can shed some light on this murky "strategy" ?
As I've stated elsewhere in the thread, I've got one. What you get for your $995 USD is pretty much the same guts as a Netra X1 (smaller HD and a different bus speed I believe) but much more suitable as a hobbyist's server than a Netra.
We use Netras extensively at work (they make very nice, reliable, and cheap, web servers especially if you are a Sun reseller) but for my home machine I wanted something that could drive a monitor, accept PCI cards and had a CD-ROM drive. For that reason I gave up the slightly faster bus speed, LOM features and dual NICs of the Netra, in favour of a Blade.
Yes, if you are looking for a workstation to replace a post-1999 Intel or PPC box you should probably look elsewhere, but if you want a nifty little home server that doubles as a workstation, it's hard to go wrong with a Blade.
I have a Blade 100. Of my three desktops (I also use an IBM Thinkpad A20P and a 950Mhz Athlon), it is definitely the slowest for interactive use - terrible graphics performance is the biggest culprit here, even when I use WindowMaker instead of CDE - and really loses the price/performance war to the other two machines.
If you "need" to have a Sparc machine, it's a nice option for the budget conscious, but I honestly have to say I think you'll be disappointed with it if you want to replace a relatively recent Intel or PPC machine
You'll have to spend a few more dollars than that to get a RISC workstation that will beat a $1000 Intel machine.
favOUrite?
Nice. You are a pompous british asshole.
Try Canadian.
Sorry that I may have misjudged you as being gay.
I'll live
And as far as my post being an ad hominem attack, or calling you an asshole being ad hominem. Well, calling those who enjoyed books like the Zahn trilogy mouth-breathers hardly helps your argument. You insult a group, you get insulted. That's the breaks.
Heh, yeah I guess I did. twice, actually. oops!
It had been about 7 years after jedi that Heir to the Empire(Zahn trilogy book one) was realeased. People were begging to be taken back to that fantasy world. The books were actually pretty well written and the story was interesting. Oh no! the books were successful and a mass market created!
I actually always figured it was children who were the target audience
Yes, many of the books written have been shit. Barbara Hambly's two books being prime examples of a godawful author with a star wars license.
Licensed material, as in "we'll sell the license instead of making a quality product" is usually garbage. This is my core point
Most of these books were written before The Jar-Jar movie hit the theaters. A time when we didn't quite realize what a slimeball Lucas is. The star wars universe was a nice escape and not so quickly associated with taco bell, n'sync, and 5 year-olds.
Irrelevant. I love Star Wars - see my post elsewhere in the thread about actually enjoying TPM.
One more thing, if star wars novels are somehow pushing your literary masterpieces off the shelves, try shopping at a bigger bookstore.
If it were really that easy.. the problem is that publishing is a zero-sum game. The more garbage that gets printed, the less of the "good stuff" that does.
Look at it this way. If a movie like "Dungeons and Dragons" had been a commercial success, there would be a lower probability that good stuff like "Fellowship of the Ring" gets made - if you can stuff shit down the audience's throats, why bother trying to find quality?
Yeah I actually read one of the Timothy Zahn books, a friend brought it on vacation and I got curious.
Dude it's crap. My review:Mortgage payment was due, eh Tim?
If you want some high quality action-adventure stuff try reading Zelazny's Amber series. Smart, funny, exciting, and all at an eighth grade reading level. That is much more the literary equivalent of Star Wars than any of those shitty novelizations.
blah, ad hominem attacks because you can't defend the dog shit you like to read beyond saying, "it's mass entertainment".
Listen, I like greasy kid stuff as much as the next guy. If you think the list of SF authors I named are "high brow" then you are indeed sadly misinformed. If I'd come in here and started telling you all that you are wasting your time unless you read a constant diet of obscure 20th century philosophers, you'd have an argument.. that would have been pompous. All I'm trying to say is let's demand some quality from our mass entertainment
I don't like cynical, mass-produced trash like the vast majority of movie and tv show novel tie-ins. If you people would stop buying anything that said fucking "star wars" on it, I might have a chance to read better books.
Fucking semi-literate mouth breathers with no functioning shit-detectors all want books in my favourite genre.. argh
Agreed, I've noticed that the last star wars film always seems to be the "worst one ever" until a few years go by. Hell, I remember when Empire came out, people were whining that it was a bad sequel and tarnished the original film, blah blah. Now many feel it's the strongest of the four. Similarly with Jedi, the Ewok backlash was huge.
Give it time, although I would put phantom menace at the bottom of the pile (slightly trailing Jedi) it's still a good enough flick that I'll fire it up on the occasional Sunday morning and watch it through.
bah. none of that stuff is canonical. Those books are the literary equivalent of deer hunter video games, they are just crap thrown together. I doubt lucas would blink at making them all anachronistic.
Think: Dragonlance "novels", Star Trek "novels", ad infinitum. I hate that stuff, it takes shelf space away from decent SF literature.
Here's an exercise for you.
Go into a bookstore, walk over to the science fiction section.
Measure the total shelf space given to Niven, Clarke, Heinlein, Bester, Simak, and Philip K. Dick. hell throw in lesser talents like Asimov, Tim Powers, Zelazny,John Campbell..
Now measure the total shelf space that's taken up by Star Wars novelizations, or Dragonlance books.
If you don't see a problem with that, kindly stop breathing now. No wonder people don't take science fiction or fantasy stuff seriously, it's audience is largely composed of mouth breathers who can't tell the difference between Tolkein and Terry Brooks
Of course, I am ignorant to how it originally sounded in it's Lost in Space (isn't that where it's from?) days, but in Army Of Darkness, I'd swear he was supposed to say:
The quote is from the over-rated 50's sci fi flick The Day The Earth Stood Still, not from the above mentioned 60's shit sandwich.
And I'm pretty sure it's Klaatu Verada Nikto but it's been decades since I saw the flick...
True, and (at least if you use the 10/01 media, which we are still using at my shop) if you try to upgrade Solaris 2.6 or 7, you must use Software CD 1 to start the install process, the Installation CD with all it's browsery goodness breaks the upgrade process
Bugs aside, it's cool to have a console and a browser while I'm installing.
Debian does this. Gnome, KDE and Windowmaker menus are all updated automatically when you apt-get new software. It's one of those nice little touches you notice after you've been using it for a while...
just picking a nit, but someone interviewed the article mentions that "nowhere in SF was digital technology's impact predicted"
Spinrad's "riding the torch" comes pretty close in my opinion, and it's from the early 70s. I first read it in the mid '90s, and my immediate thought was, "groovy, he's talking about the internet."
Of course, in the 80s a great deal of people starting thinking about digital communication & media, not least of which was Gibson...
uh.. I love my dreamcast, but the biggest problem with DC was that most of the games were dog shit.
I can count on one hand the games with serious re play ability on DC. More often, they were content light substandard quality clones of the games available for other systems (Blue stinger anyone..)
don't get me wrong...I used it for a few months before we bought, and I wouldn't have gotten the pointy-hairs to buy me a copy if it wasn't useful. The good definitely outweighs the bad.
The regex prototyper and real time debugging are killer features, I just wish the damned thing was a bit peppier...
.. And it works pretty well. I inherited it from my boss (he bought an A30p). We're both running Red Hat 7.2. He constantly used to gripe about the A20 freezing up in X. After having it for a couple of days, I determined that SpeedStep was somehow causing the problem.
Without SpeedStep my battery life is about 30 minutes, but that's not a major issue for me. The A30p seems to be stable even with speedstep turned on.
Slashdot Mirror
Overpopulation is a problem that solves itself. The problem isn't that we'll end up running out of food/water/air and all dying, it's that we'll "die off" in huge numbers to get back to equilibrium.
The four horsemen will take care of overpopulation as it happens...
So who is going to buy these machines now, with the "In-box upgrade to IA-64" the only future for (some) current PA-RISC machines?
As it is, the uncertainty around the merger and the coming death of PA-RISC *must* have had a negative effect on sales of HP Unix machines. Anecdotally, the one customer I support who was on HP-UX and an HP 9000 has migrated over to Solaris on Sun hardware.
Any HP employees out there who can shed some light on this murky "strategy" ?
Depends what you want it for.
As I've stated elsewhere in the thread, I've got one. What you get for your $995 USD is pretty much the same guts as a Netra X1 (smaller HD and a different bus speed I believe) but much more suitable as a hobbyist's server than a Netra.
We use Netras extensively at work (they make very nice, reliable, and cheap, web servers especially if you are a Sun reseller) but for my home machine I wanted something that could drive a monitor, accept PCI cards and had a CD-ROM drive. For that reason I gave up the slightly faster bus speed, LOM features and dual NICs of the Netra, in favour of a Blade.
Yes, if you are looking for a workstation to replace a post-1999 Intel or PPC box you should probably look elsewhere, but if you want a nifty little home server that doubles as a workstation, it's hard to go wrong with a Blade.
I have a Blade 100. Of my three desktops (I also use an IBM Thinkpad A20P and a 950Mhz Athlon), it is definitely the slowest for interactive use - terrible graphics performance is the biggest culprit here, even when I use WindowMaker instead of CDE - and really loses the price/performance war to the other two machines.
If you "need" to have a Sparc machine, it's a nice option for the budget conscious, but I honestly have to say I think you'll be disappointed with it if you want to replace a relatively recent Intel or PPC machine
You'll have to spend a few more dollars than that to get a RISC workstation that will beat a $1000 Intel machine.
that works, except you're forgetting the period '81 - '83 when empire was the worst of the two, which it clearly is not.
favOUrite? Nice. You are a pompous british asshole.
Try Canadian.
Sorry that I may have misjudged you as being gay.
I'll live
And as far as my post being an ad hominem attack, or calling you an asshole being ad hominem. Well, calling those who enjoyed books like the Zahn trilogy mouth-breathers hardly helps your argument. You insult a group, you get insulted. That's the breaks.
Heh, yeah I guess I did. twice, actually. oops!
It had been about 7 years after jedi that Heir to the Empire(Zahn trilogy book one) was realeased. People were begging to be taken back to that fantasy world. The books were actually pretty well written and the story was interesting. Oh no! the books were successful and a mass market created!
I actually always figured it was children who were the target audience
Yes, many of the books written have been shit. Barbara Hambly's two books being prime examples of a godawful author with a star wars license.
Licensed material, as in "we'll sell the license instead of making a quality product" is usually garbage. This is my core point
Most of these books were written before The Jar-Jar movie hit the theaters. A time when we didn't quite realize what a slimeball Lucas is. The star wars universe was a nice escape and not so quickly associated with taco bell, n'sync, and 5 year-olds.
Irrelevant. I love Star Wars - see my post elsewhere in the thread about actually enjoying TPM.
One more thing, if star wars novels are somehow pushing your literary masterpieces off the shelves, try shopping at a bigger bookstore.
If it were really that easy .. the problem is that publishing is a zero-sum game. The more garbage that gets printed, the less of the "good stuff" that does.
Look at it this way. If a movie like "Dungeons and Dragons" had been a commercial success, there would be a lower probability that good stuff like "Fellowship of the Ring" gets made - if you can stuff shit down the audience's throats, why bother trying to find quality?
Yeah I actually read one of the Timothy Zahn books, a friend brought it on vacation and I got curious.
Dude it's crap. My review:Mortgage payment was due, eh Tim?
If you want some high quality action-adventure stuff try reading Zelazny's Amber series. Smart, funny, exciting, and all at an eighth grade reading level. That is much more the literary equivalent of Star Wars than any of those shitty novelizations.
blah, ad hominem attacks because you can't defend the dog shit you like to read beyond saying, "it's mass entertainment".
Listen, I like greasy kid stuff as much as the next guy. If you think the list of SF authors I named are "high brow" then you are indeed sadly misinformed. If I'd come in here and started telling you all that you are wasting your time unless you read a constant diet of obscure 20th century philosophers, you'd have an argument .. that would have been pompous. All I'm trying to say is let's demand some quality from our mass entertainment
I don't like cynical, mass-produced trash like the vast majority of movie and tv show novel tie-ins. If you people would stop buying anything that said fucking "star wars" on it, I might have a chance to read better books.
Fucking semi-literate mouth breathers with no functioning shit-detectors all want books in my favourite genre.. argh
Agreed, I've noticed that the last star wars film always seems to be the "worst one ever" until a few years go by. Hell, I remember when Empire came out, people were whining that it was a bad sequel and tarnished the original film, blah blah. Now many feel it's the strongest of the four. Similarly with Jedi, the Ewok backlash was huge.
Give it time, although I would put phantom menace at the bottom of the pile (slightly trailing Jedi) it's still a good enough flick that I'll fire it up on the occasional Sunday morning and watch it through.
bah. none of that stuff is canonical. Those books are the literary equivalent of deer hunter video games, they are just crap thrown together. I doubt lucas would blink at making them all anachronistic.
Think: Dragonlance "novels", Star Trek "novels", ad infinitum. I hate that stuff, it takes shelf space away from decent SF literature.
Here's an exercise for you.
If you don't see a problem with that, kindly stop breathing now. No wonder people don't take science fiction or fantasy stuff seriously, it's audience is largely composed of mouth breathers who can't tell the difference between Tolkein and Terry Brooks
I'm guessing they are scripts dude.
something like this:
Of course, I am ignorant to how it originally sounded in it's Lost in Space (isn't that where it's from?) days, but in Army Of Darkness, I'd swear he was supposed to say:
The quote is from the over-rated 50's sci fi flick The Day The Earth Stood Still, not from the above mentioned 60's shit sandwich.
And I'm pretty sure it's Klaatu Verada Nikto but it's been decades since I saw the flick...
True, and (at least if you use the 10/01 media, which we are still using at my shop) if you try to upgrade Solaris 2.6 or 7, you must use Software CD 1 to start the install process, the Installation CD with all it's browsery goodness breaks the upgrade process
Bugs aside, it's cool to have a console and a browser while I'm installing.
Solaris 8 gives you a web browser during the install (after network setup), which I think is fucking brilliant...
Debian does this. Gnome, KDE and Windowmaker menus are all updated automatically when you apt-get new software. It's one of those nice little touches you notice after you've been using it for a while...
Agreed, in general. However, there is a UNIX desktop that doesn't clone windows, is clean and easy to use, and is easy to configure.
Find out more here.
I think it's a crying shame that the mainstream linux distributions don't provide WM as a third option.
just picking a nit, but someone interviewed the article mentions that "nowhere in SF was digital technology's impact predicted"
Spinrad's "riding the torch" comes pretty close in my opinion, and it's from the early 70s. I first read it in the mid '90s, and my immediate thought was, "groovy, he's talking about the internet."
Of course, in the 80s a great deal of people starting thinking about digital communication & media, not least of which was Gibson...
uh.. I love my dreamcast, but the biggest problem with DC was that most of the games were dog shit.
I can count on one hand the games with serious re play ability on DC. More often, they were content light substandard quality clones of the games available for other systems (Blue stinger anyone..)
don't get me wrong...I used it for a few months before we bought, and I wouldn't have gotten the pointy-hairs to buy me a copy if it wasn't useful. The good definitely outweighs the bad.
The regex prototyper and real time debugging are killer features, I just wish the damned thing was a bit peppier...
you're talking about Komodo. I use it every day, 10 hours a day.
One thing to point out about Komodo, it's damned slow. Not sure if that's because of the built in Perl interpreter (for instant debugging) or XUL.
If you use mozilla this dude's crap won't widen your pages... it's a feature of IE ;)
You can turn SpeedStep features off in the BIOS,the OS doesn't matter much...
.. And it works pretty well. I inherited it from my boss (he bought an A30p). We're both running Red Hat 7.2. He constantly used to gripe about the A20 freezing up in X. After having it for a couple of days, I determined that SpeedStep was somehow causing the problem.
Without SpeedStep my battery life is about 30 minutes, but that's not a major issue for me. The A30p seems to be stable even with speedstep turned on.
Dude I think he was talking about Windows..
try gnustep