I don't have the info handy, and I'm having some trouble finding it. The person who testified was a major entity in the government's control of nuclear energy, but I'm afraid I don't remember who.
"The reason is that some very rich uranium deposits have now been found in Canada, like 3% ore vs 0.2 % which is the richest U.S. ore. Australia is also producing low cost uranium. If you mean at costs less than $50 per pound, which is the historic high (adjusted for inflation), it is probably safe to say there is enough for at least 100 years. "
Then those overqualified people are worth more to the market then you are. Did you consider that they are also taking positions worth less than positions that they are qualified for, but are getting beat out by those who are even more overqualified?
The market says I'm worth between $15k and $30k more than I earn now, and my situation is certainly not for lack of effort.
How can the market say otherwise when you are getting paid what you're getting paid? Your market worth is what the market is willing to pay you. If it's not willing to pay you a higher salary, then you'll have a hard time finding a job that pays you what you think you're worth.
This is because Apple is moving from Darwin to Solaris 10 x86
The scary part is that switching from Mach to the Solaris kernel sounds like an awefully good idea to me. Must... get... OpenStep for Solaris... out... of... head...
Thanks for planting screwy ideas in my head, ya bum!:-P
Easily. At close range, even a.22 would go through plate armor.
Indeed. But I was also considering the chain-link armor worn by many knights. Such armor was far stronger than plate armor, and might have been capable of deflecting a handgun bullet. It certainly couldn't stop an armor piercing bullet (the armor would have actually made it worse), but maybe, just maybe, a handgun...
Sure, if you throw enough spear men at a tank, you can beat it like in Civilization II,
Only if you're REALLY, REALLY, REALLY lucky. A tank could literally roll over entire armies of spear men, crushing them where they stand. And God forbid they should stand close enough together for the tank to fire a slug. You could lose hundreds of men in a single salvo.
Consider other scenarios for a moment:
* The firing lines of Civil War soldiers could be completely cut down by a single man with a modern machine gun. * A Roman Legion could be completely destroyed by a single bomb from a fighter or helicopter. * An RPG or Bazooka could eliminate a castle's defenses by simply blowing a hole through the side. * The armor of a knight would fail completely in the face of armor piercing munitions. (It's quite possible that an average handgun would be sufficient to penetrate many armors of the time.) * The most fearsome warships of the Spanish Armada could be destroyed over the horizon through shelling by battleships that are now a century old. * The best biplane pilots would have been eliminated by guided missles before they ever got their guns close enough to take a shot at a jet fighter. (Assuming they could catch a jet aircraft, which they couldn't.) * The best battleships of World War I could be easily destroyed by planes from a modern carrier without any losses on the carrier's side.
You point still stands, but it's actually stronger than you think. Having old weaponry won't necessarily prevent you from winning, but lacking technology will guarantee your loss.:-)
You answered your own question. The DotCom boom created a sudden and unexpected demand for tech workers that artificially inflated the value of those workers. Now that the bubble has burst, the market is correcting for incorrect salaries and paying employees their real market value. It's still possible to get DotCom wages, but you have to be both utterly invaluable to a company and in the right place at the right time. Otherwise your skills will be valued at a rate similar to those of most non-executive business professionals.
It's a good thing you posted as Anonymous Coward. You sound like an idiot.
1. I never claimed that a nuclear plant could explode. You did. 2. I never claimed that you could take the stuff from a plant and put a fuse in it. You did. 3. I never mentioned a dirty bomb. You did. 4. I never claimed that plutonium was ultra-dangerous. You did.
All I said was that bombs were easy to make. Allow me to demonstrate:
Step 1: Take a critical piece of U-235. Step 2: Shape it into two hemispheres. Step 3: Place the two hemispheres in a neutron reflective casing, with one side secured and the other side sitting on an explosive. Step 4: Light the explosive. The second hemisphere will rocket toward the first one. When the two collide (assuming you designed the weapon correctly), they will experience a significant amount of pressure through being forced together. The now critical sphere of U-235 will experience super-criticality and will "explode".
In case your engineering is sub-standard, add a nuetron source such as alternating polonium-210 and beryllium spheres between the two hemispheres of U-235. When they are crushed, they will release a massive burst of neutron radiation that will help kickstart the super-critical event.
This is what's known as a "gun type" atomic warhead. They're so easy to make that the Little Boy warhead dropped on Hiroshima was not tested prior to use. All the development activities were instead focused on the more complex (but safer and more scalable) implosion device used in the Fat Man warhead.
Now if you would be so kind as to stop your foaming at the mouth nonsense? Oh, and next time use the Preview button.
The other day I overheard a fellow at a local game store chatting with a cop about getting better speeds on BitTorrent(!). (Disclaimer: Always remember that there *are* legal uses for BitTorrent.) At this point, BitTorrent and other P2P downloads have become so widespread that they are using a significant fraction of the Internet's resources. I don't see how adding more legal video downloads is going to create a traffic jam above and beyond what we already have. In fact, it's quite likely that many of the legal downloads will replace either illegal or amature-produced downloads. Thus the net effect, IMHO, would be undoubtedly far less than expected.
If service providers feel they actually have a reason to be concerned about the matter, then they should see it as an opportunity to sell more server class bandwidth to customers. Assuming they're not undercutting themselves (???), they should be able to use the sales to increase their bandwidth infrastructure to meet the needs.
Honestly, I think the question is, who is raising the concerns in the article and why? The answer seems to be, "the service providers" and "so they can sell the idea of tiered service". Will they just get over it? No one is buying the tiered service idea.
The EU's problem with the bundling of WMP is that Microsoft effectively killed competition in the market before the video player market had a chance to develop. Their accusation is that Microsoft was so effective at this because they are a monopoly. If they weren't a monopoly, they would have merely tied the success of the Windows product to the success of WMP and visa versa.
The result of Microsoft's abuse of power was that the leaders in the market (RealPlayer and Quicktime) effectively lost their places overnight, and the upstarts who were just starting to compete disappeared at the same time. (Remember when Quicktime was the defacto video player for multimedia programs, and RealPlayer was the defacto choice for streaming content?) From that perspective, the EU is correct. Microsoft wiped out an industry for one more Windows feature, and forced their player down everyone's throats. Note that improvements to the market stopped right there. There have been no significant changes to video players since Microsoft arrived on the market. The only company doing innovation in that area is Apple with their Quicktime product and their support of the Sorenson codecs.
They came from a testamony before congress on how much time switching to all nuclear would buy us. The testamony had several problems, though:
* It was based on existing Uranium reserves. * It didn't take breeder reactors into account. * It didn't account for other nuclear technologies that have been developed.
At this point, the 100 year figure is pretty well debunked (though we know that we don't have an infinite supply), but it does make a "absolute worst case, if we keep ourselves in the stone age of nuclear power" baseline figure.
The GnomeVFS API may well be difficult to work with (*), but this statement of yours applies to absolutely every API out there.
Ummm... no. In this case there is a lowest level virtual file system that can be modified to make ALL programs compatible. With GnomeVFS, RealPlayer fails, Acrobat fails, KOffice fails, OpenOffice fails, etc. because the GnomeVFS API is a structure that duplicates officially provided functionality. Ergo, it's not that good of a design.
Until then, I think it's better to stick the genie back in the bottle as much as possible and spend those HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS on developing alternative cleaner and more renewable tech.
Mr. Anonymous? There's a Ms. Pandora here to see you. Something about learning the secret to stuffing things back in their bottles and boxes?
I hate to break it to you, but nuclear power isn't going anywhere. It's too damn easy to build a bomb. All we can do is try to restrict access to materials (good luck; as soon as a country has enough industrial infrastructure, that's it) and keep our seismometers turned on "extra-sensitive". Beyond that, there's nothing we can do. Uranium is plentiful, and the technology for a basic nuclear weapon (read: gun device) is not terribly sophisticated. And we simply can't deny countries the right to build up their industrial infrastructure without severely impairing their development and creating new enemies. (Though we can embargo the necessary equipment to make sure they don't get it before they develop it for themselves.) So what would you have us do? Mind wipe everyone who's ever heard of nuclear technology?
We will soon enough run into the same problems with nuclear power that we're running into with coal power.
Except that the worst estimates say that if we switched over to 100% nuclear today, we'd have about 100 years of fuel for the most basic power plants. With all the nuclear technology we've developed, we could easily breed many times that amount of material. So we're pretty much set for the next few hundred years.
If we run out, it *is* possible to mine nuclear materials from elsewhere in the solar system. This is a much more difficult thing to do with coal and oil. Thus given the options at our disposal, nuclear is the best option with the longest possible life.:-)
Excellent! The way the summary/article was worded, it somewhat sounded like it was being added to the GnomeVFS. I'm glad I was wrong. The GnomeVFS was not a bad idea, but getting programs to properly work with it (even many GNOME programs) is impossible. If they don't use the proper APIs, it simply doesn't work.
I'd forgotten about HAL. It looks like its progress is coming along nicely. This is a step that Linux should have taken a LONG time ago. Oh well, better late than never.:-)
Am I the only one who thinks that this stuff is in the wrong level of the software stack? I mean, if you want a cool virtual file system, extend the virtual file system. Don't add a VFS on top of a VFS. Doing so only creates compatibility problems for programs that use the "standard" Linux APIs. Considering that users *do* use KDE, OpenOffice, a few commercial apps, and the command line (for sufficiently advanced users) how does it help to leave the user locked out of his data in all of these situations?
I'm not trying to disparage the work done here, I'm sure it's very good. My problem is a matter of improper architectures that don't take many common usage scenarios into account.
Well, it was an "actual" cut-scene from the game.:/
Well, that explains a lot. I was suitably impressed by the graphics on screen, but couldn't figure out for the life of me how they ever got all that action going on with such pretty graphics. Actual Game Footage, indeed.:-/
This is pretty common among standardized technologies. Must I remind you of the CDROM drive?
Yellow Book (Format) Red Book (Audio) Green Book (Multimedia) Orange Book (RO/RW) White Book (VCD) Blue Book (Graphics) Beige Book (Photo) Purple Book (Double Density) Scarlet Book (Super Audio?)
That's why it's so important to add which technology you're talking about. e.g. "Orange Book Security", "Orange Book CD Rewritables", and "OpenGL Orange Book".
I would ask these investors to send me $100,000 cash, in return for which I will do absolutely nothing.
It won't work. Everyone knows that Venture Capitalists would never invest in an individual. Too much "risk." You need to first register a new Corporation in the state of California known as "American AC in Paris, Inc." with the mission statement of "making money by doing nothing." The VCs will then give you massive sums of money that you can use to pay your own exhorbant salary. Once the money runs out, you simply declare bankruptcy and free yourself from any penalties. The VCs will get to sell everything your company owns, but since it doesn't own anything, they'll get nothing.
What I really want to know is, what genius thought it would be a good idea to hype the hell out of this thing before development even began in earnest? I mean, 3 mil for development, ~60 mil for other stuff? There's something seriously wrong here. Not to mention that for 3 mil most of us would have had something ready to go out the door.
I still don't understand why the compiler was moved into the GL server.
Because the different graphics cards implement very different processors. Taking maximum advantage of those processors is easier if you can glean the intent of the source code. Once it's compiled down to a bytecode level, you have to start looking for structure among all those instructions before you can decide which ones can be optimized.
The compiler can also consider tradeoffs that bytecode cannot. For example, the compiler can decide if variables X and Y will be used shortly and thus should be loaded into registers, or if they'll be hanging around for quite a long time and should be pushed onto the stack. It can also more easily detect out-of-order instructions, and do an analysis of the code to produce SMID instructions if the code is streaming. Again, all much more difficult to do from a bytecode level.
HTML Application. It allows the Webapp to run even when you're not connected. Currently this is Microsoft specific (though the same thing can be achieved with most other browsers through downloadable HTML files), but there is a rough standard that's being worked on to make it available across all browsers and platforms.
An HTA application can continue to allow someone to work (caching the necessary files on disk, and saving updates to disk) until the next time a network connection is made. Then it can shunt the data to the server as if nothing happened.
However, we _also_ have two Linux servers. One of them, is the main mail server and the other is the cvs repository.
However, if you were running these on Big Iron Unix machines you'd have them both on the same server. There's no point in wasting the resources of a large machine on a single task.
I should think that the number of "small" Linux boxes is now pretty close to the number of "small" Windows boxes.... but I doubt whether they come into these stats.
Similarly, what about all the routers running Linux variants. Do they count? They're "servers" of a kind.
Unfortunately, none of the Linux boxes count for much. If you purchased an Enterprise license, then they might. But every system that has a downloaded copy of the software, free software w/ paid support, or bundled Linux customized for the box, most likely does not count toward the revenue totals. And even if it does, such copies would often be valued lower than their Windows counterparts due to a lack of standard pricing on "free" software.
It sucks, but that's the way these studies work. The only way to find somewhat accurate numbers is to poll a significant number of businesses (100 or more) for an exact count of machines by OS.
In nature mono-cultures like that would die-out very quicky.
It happened to the American Indians. Their ability to resist disease was limited to only a few types. (You'll forgive me, but I forget the exact terminology used here.) When the early explorers arrived they brought new diseases with them (especially in their pigs) that most of the Indian population was unable to resist. Thus the great cities that existed in the time of the Conquistadors had completely disappeared by the time the Mayflower settlers landed.
Slashdot Mirror
*grumble* *grumble* make me work *grumble* :-P
I don't have the info handy, and I'm having some trouble finding it. The person who testified was a major entity in the government's control of nuclear energy, but I'm afraid I don't remember who.
Until I find the info, here are similar thoughts echoed by Bernard Cohen:
"The reason is that some very rich uranium deposits have now been found in Canada, like 3% ore vs 0.2 % which is the richest U.S. ore. Australia is also producing low cost uranium. If you mean at costs less than $50 per pound, which is the historic high (adjusted for inflation), it is probably safe to say there is enough for at least 100 years. "
Then those overqualified people are worth more to the market then you are. Did you consider that they are also taking positions worth less than positions that they are qualified for, but are getting beat out by those who are even more overqualified?
The market says I'm worth between $15k and $30k more than I earn now, and my situation is certainly not for lack of effort.
How can the market say otherwise when you are getting paid what you're getting paid? Your market worth is what the market is willing to pay you. If it's not willing to pay you a higher salary, then you'll have a hard time finding a job that pays you what you think you're worth.
Where are you getting your figures from?
I love 1632. 1633 was pretty good too. 1634 put me to sleep. :(
This is because Apple is moving from Darwin to Solaris 10 x86
:-P
The scary part is that switching from Mach to the Solaris kernel sounds like an awefully good idea to me. Must... get... OpenStep for Solaris... out... of... head...
Thanks for planting screwy ideas in my head, ya bum!
Easily. At close range, even a .22 would go through plate armor.
Indeed. But I was also considering the chain-link armor worn by many knights. Such armor was far stronger than plate armor, and might have been capable of deflecting a handgun bullet. It certainly couldn't stop an armor piercing bullet (the armor would have actually made it worse), but maybe, just maybe, a handgun...
Sure, if you throw enough spear men at a tank, you can beat it like in Civilization II,
:-)
Only if you're REALLY, REALLY, REALLY lucky. A tank could literally roll over entire armies of spear men, crushing them where they stand. And God forbid they should stand close enough together for the tank to fire a slug. You could lose hundreds of men in a single salvo.
Consider other scenarios for a moment:
* The firing lines of Civil War soldiers could be completely cut down by a single man with a modern machine gun.
* A Roman Legion could be completely destroyed by a single bomb from a fighter or helicopter.
* An RPG or Bazooka could eliminate a castle's defenses by simply blowing a hole through the side.
* The armor of a knight would fail completely in the face of armor piercing munitions. (It's quite possible that an average handgun would be sufficient to penetrate many armors of the time.)
* The most fearsome warships of the Spanish Armada could be destroyed over the horizon through shelling by battleships that are now a century old.
* The best biplane pilots would have been eliminated by guided missles before they ever got their guns close enough to take a shot at a jet fighter. (Assuming they could catch a jet aircraft, which they couldn't.)
* The best battleships of World War I could be easily destroyed by planes from a modern carrier without any losses on the carrier's side.
You point still stands, but it's actually stronger than you think. Having old weaponry won't necessarily prevent you from winning, but lacking technology will guarantee your loss.
You answered your own question. The DotCom boom created a sudden and unexpected demand for tech workers that artificially inflated the value of those workers. Now that the bubble has burst, the market is correcting for incorrect salaries and paying employees their real market value. It's still possible to get DotCom wages, but you have to be both utterly invaluable to a company and in the right place at the right time. Otherwise your skills will be valued at a rate similar to those of most non-executive business professionals.
It's a good thing you posted as Anonymous Coward. You sound like an idiot.
1. I never claimed that a nuclear plant could explode. You did.
2. I never claimed that you could take the stuff from a plant and put a fuse in it. You did.
3. I never mentioned a dirty bomb. You did.
4. I never claimed that plutonium was ultra-dangerous. You did.
All I said was that bombs were easy to make. Allow me to demonstrate:
Step 1: Take a critical piece of U-235.
Step 2: Shape it into two hemispheres.
Step 3: Place the two hemispheres in a neutron reflective casing, with one side secured and the other side sitting on an explosive.
Step 4: Light the explosive. The second hemisphere will rocket toward the first one. When the two collide (assuming you designed the weapon correctly), they will experience a significant amount of pressure through being forced together. The now critical sphere of U-235 will experience super-criticality and will "explode".
In case your engineering is sub-standard, add a nuetron source such as alternating polonium-210 and beryllium spheres between the two hemispheres of U-235. When they are crushed, they will release a massive burst of neutron radiation that will help kickstart the super-critical event.
This is what's known as a "gun type" atomic warhead. They're so easy to make that the Little Boy warhead dropped on Hiroshima was not tested prior to use. All the development activities were instead focused on the more complex (but safer and more scalable) implosion device used in the Fat Man warhead.
Now if you would be so kind as to stop your foaming at the mouth nonsense? Oh, and next time use the Preview button.
The other day I overheard a fellow at a local game store chatting with a cop about getting better speeds on BitTorrent(!). (Disclaimer: Always remember that there *are* legal uses for BitTorrent.) At this point, BitTorrent and other P2P downloads have become so widespread that they are using a significant fraction of the Internet's resources. I don't see how adding more legal video downloads is going to create a traffic jam above and beyond what we already have. In fact, it's quite likely that many of the legal downloads will replace either illegal or amature-produced downloads. Thus the net effect, IMHO, would be undoubtedly far less than expected.
If service providers feel they actually have a reason to be concerned about the matter, then they should see it as an opportunity to sell more server class bandwidth to customers. Assuming they're not undercutting themselves (???), they should be able to use the sales to increase their bandwidth infrastructure to meet the needs.
Honestly, I think the question is, who is raising the concerns in the article and why? The answer seems to be, "the service providers" and "so they can sell the idea of tiered service". Will they just get over it? No one is buying the tiered service idea.
The EU's problem with the bundling of WMP is that Microsoft effectively killed competition in the market before the video player market had a chance to develop. Their accusation is that Microsoft was so effective at this because they are a monopoly. If they weren't a monopoly, they would have merely tied the success of the Windows product to the success of WMP and visa versa.
The result of Microsoft's abuse of power was that the leaders in the market (RealPlayer and Quicktime) effectively lost their places overnight, and the upstarts who were just starting to compete disappeared at the same time. (Remember when Quicktime was the defacto video player for multimedia programs, and RealPlayer was the defacto choice for streaming content?) From that perspective, the EU is correct. Microsoft wiped out an industry for one more Windows feature, and forced their player down everyone's throats. Note that improvements to the market stopped right there. There have been no significant changes to video players since Microsoft arrived on the market. The only company doing innovation in that area is Apple with their Quicktime product and their support of the Sorenson codecs.
What is the "officially provided" and commonly agreed upon way to access a sftp:// URL?
Duh. Just call a "mountsftp" mounter to access the FS. There's an SSHFS implementation here that does pretty much the same thing.
Now where did those numbers come from?
They came from a testamony before congress on how much time switching to all nuclear would buy us. The testamony had several problems, though:
* It was based on existing Uranium reserves.
* It didn't take breeder reactors into account.
* It didn't account for other nuclear technologies that have been developed.
At this point, the 100 year figure is pretty well debunked (though we know that we don't have an infinite supply), but it does make a "absolute worst case, if we keep ourselves in the stone age of nuclear power" baseline figure.
The GnomeVFS API may well be difficult to work with (*), but this statement of yours applies to absolutely every API out there.
Ummm... no. In this case there is a lowest level virtual file system that can be modified to make ALL programs compatible. With GnomeVFS, RealPlayer fails, Acrobat fails, KOffice fails, OpenOffice fails, etc. because the GnomeVFS API is a structure that duplicates officially provided functionality. Ergo, it's not that good of a design.
Until then, I think it's better to stick the genie back in the bottle as much as possible and spend those HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS on developing alternative cleaner and more renewable tech.
Mr. Anonymous? There's a Ms. Pandora here to see you. Something about learning the secret to stuffing things back in their bottles and boxes?
I hate to break it to you, but nuclear power isn't going anywhere. It's too damn easy to build a bomb. All we can do is try to restrict access to materials (good luck; as soon as a country has enough industrial infrastructure, that's it) and keep our seismometers turned on "extra-sensitive". Beyond that, there's nothing we can do. Uranium is plentiful, and the technology for a basic nuclear weapon (read: gun device) is not terribly sophisticated. And we simply can't deny countries the right to build up their industrial infrastructure without severely impairing their development and creating new enemies. (Though we can embargo the necessary equipment to make sure they don't get it before they develop it for themselves.) So what would you have us do? Mind wipe everyone who's ever heard of nuclear technology?
We will soon enough run into the same problems with nuclear power that we're running into with coal power.
:-)
Except that the worst estimates say that if we switched over to 100% nuclear today, we'd have about 100 years of fuel for the most basic power plants. With all the nuclear technology we've developed, we could easily breed many times that amount of material. So we're pretty much set for the next few hundred years.
If we run out, it *is* possible to mine nuclear materials from elsewhere in the solar system. This is a much more difficult thing to do with coal and oil. Thus given the options at our disposal, nuclear is the best option with the longest possible life.
Excellent! The way the summary/article was worded, it somewhat sounded like it was being added to the GnomeVFS. I'm glad I was wrong. The GnomeVFS was not a bad idea, but getting programs to properly work with it (even many GNOME programs) is impossible. If they don't use the proper APIs, it simply doesn't work.
:-)
I'd forgotten about HAL. It looks like its progress is coming along nicely. This is a step that Linux should have taken a LONG time ago. Oh well, better late than never.
Am I the only one who thinks that this stuff is in the wrong level of the software stack? I mean, if you want a cool virtual file system, extend the virtual file system. Don't add a VFS on top of a VFS. Doing so only creates compatibility problems for programs that use the "standard" Linux APIs. Considering that users *do* use KDE, OpenOffice, a few commercial apps, and the command line (for sufficiently advanced users) how does it help to leave the user locked out of his data in all of these situations?
I'm not trying to disparage the work done here, I'm sure it's very good. My problem is a matter of improper architectures that don't take many common usage scenarios into account.
Well, it was an "actual" cut-scene from the game. :/
:-/
Well, that explains a lot. I was suitably impressed by the graphics on screen, but couldn't figure out for the life of me how they ever got all that action going on with such pretty graphics. Actual Game Footage, indeed.
This is pretty common among standardized technologies. Must I remind you of the CDROM drive?
Yellow Book (Format)
Red Book (Audio)
Green Book (Multimedia)
Orange Book (RO/RW)
White Book (VCD)
Blue Book (Graphics)
Beige Book (Photo)
Purple Book (Double Density)
Scarlet Book (Super Audio?)
That's why it's so important to add which technology you're talking about. e.g. "Orange Book Security", "Orange Book CD Rewritables", and "OpenGL Orange Book".
I would ask these investors to send me $100,000 cash, in return for which I will do absolutely nothing.
:-P
It won't work. Everyone knows that Venture Capitalists would never invest in an individual. Too much "risk." You need to first register a new Corporation in the state of California known as "American AC in Paris, Inc." with the mission statement of "making money by doing nothing." The VCs will then give you massive sums of money that you can use to pay your own exhorbant salary. Once the money runs out, you simply declare bankruptcy and free yourself from any penalties. The VCs will get to sell everything your company owns, but since it doesn't own anything, they'll get nothing.
See how VCs mitigate risk this way?
But... but... but...
HOW WILL I PLAY DUKE NUKEM FOREVER?!?
*sob*
---
What I really want to know is, what genius thought it would be a good idea to hype the hell out of this thing before development even began in earnest? I mean, 3 mil for development, ~60 mil for other stuff? There's something seriously wrong here. Not to mention that for 3 mil most of us would have had something ready to go out the door.
I still don't understand why the compiler was moved into the GL server.
Because the different graphics cards implement very different processors. Taking maximum advantage of those processors is easier if you can glean the intent of the source code. Once it's compiled down to a bytecode level, you have to start looking for structure among all those instructions before you can decide which ones can be optimized.
The compiler can also consider tradeoffs that bytecode cannot. For example, the compiler can decide if variables X and Y will be used shortly and thus should be loaded into registers, or if they'll be hanging around for quite a long time and should be pushed onto the stack. It can also more easily detect out-of-order instructions, and do an analysis of the code to produce SMID instructions if the code is streaming. Again, all much more difficult to do from a bytecode level.
HTML Application. It allows the Webapp to run even when you're not connected. Currently this is Microsoft specific (though the same thing can be achieved with most other browsers through downloadable HTML files), but there is a rough standard that's being worked on to make it available across all browsers and platforms.
An HTA application can continue to allow someone to work (caching the necessary files on disk, and saving updates to disk) until the next time a network connection is made. Then it can shunt the data to the server as if nothing happened.
However, we _also_ have two Linux servers. One of them, is the main mail server and the other is the cvs repository.
However, if you were running these on Big Iron Unix machines you'd have them both on the same server. There's no point in wasting the resources of a large machine on a single task.
I should think that the number of "small" Linux boxes is now pretty close to the number of "small" Windows boxes.... but I doubt whether they come into these stats.
Similarly, what about all the routers running Linux variants. Do they count? They're "servers" of a kind.
Unfortunately, none of the Linux boxes count for much. If you purchased an Enterprise license, then they might. But every system that has a downloaded copy of the software, free software w/ paid support, or bundled Linux customized for the box, most likely does not count toward the revenue totals. And even if it does, such copies would often be valued lower than their Windows counterparts due to a lack of standard pricing on "free" software.
It sucks, but that's the way these studies work. The only way to find somewhat accurate numbers is to poll a significant number of businesses (100 or more) for an exact count of machines by OS.
In nature mono-cultures like that would die-out very quicky.
It happened to the American Indians. Their ability to resist disease was limited to only a few types. (You'll forgive me, but I forget the exact terminology used here.) When the early explorers arrived they brought new diseases with them (especially in their pigs) that most of the Indian population was unable to resist. Thus the great cities that existed in the time of the Conquistadors had completely disappeared by the time the Mayflower settlers landed.