Why would anyone bother with calculators in non-educational setting today? I am a college student and the only use that I find for a calculator is to use it during exams (when they're allowed). Otherwise, I'd just use Mathematica or Matlab (or their open source equivalents) on a PC. Both of them are a whole lot more powerful than the handhelds will ever be. Using a conventional keyboard is also a lot more convinient.
The year is 2018. The Amiga ethusiasts can't wait for the long awaited AMIGA OS release 24 years after the last release by Commodore. The Amiga Inc. promisses to start shipping the final product at the end of year after some unexpected delays.
Actually, it is a worthy clause. It is not intended to keep the customers by luring them with a refund. It is intended to prevent Oracle from taking over Peoplesoft because everyone knows Oracle's primary intention once they take over Peoplesoft is to get rid of Peoplesoft's technology. Oracle has already been complaining that the price they're paying for Peoplesoft shares is too high. Peoplesoft expects to benefit from the clause by hoping that the customers will continue using peoplesoft products since they believe that the clause will make the takeover unlikely.
You really are fulling yourself if you believe that a 700MHz G3 or even a 800MHz G4 is close or better in performance to a 2GHz mobile Pentium 4 laptop at doing anything except for well crafted Photoshop benchmarks and perhaps one or two other niche applications (notice Apple's reluctance to publish the Spec2000 scores for either G3 or G4 CPUs. They don't because their numbers suck).
The price is a concern of course. For the price of an iBook I can (and could) get a very decently performing x86 laptop without having to spend at least $2000, which is the price of the Powerbook.
I must say that the improvements in the speed of Apple portables have been really pathetic during all recent years. Consider this example.. almost two and a half years ago I bought an iBook with a 600MHz G3 processor. Honestly, I felt the performance was barely adequate and I decided to replace it eventually, maybe in about three years. But today, for about the same price, you can buy an iBook with an 800MHz G4 (and all other components slightly beefed up). The speed improvement is barely noticeable. In the same time frame the PC portables have improved by a whole lot more, not to mention, I wouldn't have had this performance anxiety if I bought something like an R-series IBM Thinkpad with +1GHz mobile pentium 3 for about the same price back then to begin with)..
If Apple doesn't come up within a year with an iBook replacement that has at least 1.5GHz or so CPU, I'll probably just switch to PC laptops.
Uh, why bring an inherintly more expensive, more complex, and more unsafe space craft to life? In my opinion Russians are lucky to have terminated their shuttle program early on. If Russians had to fly shuttles today, they surely would been broke. Look at NASA. Much of their technical and financial problems come from shuttle. It's an overhypped and bloated design that that should have never existed in the first place. The cost of a _single shuttle lunch_ equals the size of the entire anual Russian space budget, yet Russians are somehow able to launch at least half a dozen conventional rockets to the ISS missions every year with what they have not counting their other minor projects. The only thing that Russians should be upset about is that they didn't terminate their Buran project even earlier.
I'd sign up for Speakeasy if it wasn't relatively expensive compared to other ISPs. I can get 1500/128Kbps DSL with a static IP (and sometimes with faster upload speeds) for $50/month. Speakeasy wants $60 or more for a similar package.
Two years ago I bought a 600MHz iBook with 12inch screen for about $1300. Today, for about this much I can get a 12inch iBook with a 800MHz G4 CPU. While I am fine with this screen size, the progress of CPU speeds on low-end portables is disappointing. Compare this to how much the CPU speed of PC portables changed since 2001. They're probably at least twice as fast. I am still thinking of replacing this iBook eventually with another iBook but only when they come up with the model that's at least twice as fast as the 600MHz iBook (actually CPU speed is the only reason I want to upgrade it).
RedHat just announced that RHEL WS is available for $25/per year and AS for $50/per year without requiring you to purchase the base package. You don't get phone support but that's still a pretty good deal if you just want a stable computing platoform, updates, etc.
This sounds like words of someone who hasn't really worked in an IT enterprise setting. Enterprises want real support and that means not only telephone support. They want updated installers that work with newer hardware. They want a saner product release and upgrade cycle. They also require support for longer than one or even two years. Finally, the ISVs also want pretty much the same things. It's pretty hard for them to test and support their enterprise software products on six or seven different versions of RedHat Linux simultaneously with a new (possibly incompatible) version coming out every five months.
What's missing from the model is a solid, value add that sets Red Hat aside in the OS distribution, and that's where they don't have a story.
You're wrong. Their Enterprise Linux products make a perfect business sense because 1) Support contracts are available 2) RedHat guartantees a sane release schedules (about once in two years), 3) RedHat guarantees support for a long time (something like five years or six years).
This is what an enterprise OS should have to be successful. As for home users, you can continue using the free RedHat distro but it will not be called "RedHat" Linux anymore.
Fortunately, there are plenty Linux distributions that are not slackware-like. It's good to see slackware to finally overcome this stone age limitation though.
I care a lot about performance of SSH because we're using all time time to large data transfers (backups, or simply copying files between systems, etc).
Does there exist a good replacement for C? Obviously, things aren't getting any better even though most programmers are aware of and try to avoid various types of typical C problems like buffer overflows, "off by one" errors, "double free" errors, fmt string vulnerabilities, etc. This language should be reserved for low level programming tasks like OS and compiler development only. For other tasks we need an efficient, portable language with automatic memory management, easy string handling, and object oriented facilities. For efficiency reasons, I think that Java or scripting languages like Pythnon are not a good replacement for C. What other alternatives are out there?
The problem is with the laptops. I don't want to carry a mouse around just so that I could use a two button mouse (although, I do prefer a two button mouse to the one button one)
The package system should be "stable". See what RedHat or Debian do. Once the distribution has been released, all packages that come with it are -frozen- too. They even usually merge the security updates and bug fixes by patching the same versions of packages that were originally released with the distribution instead of bumping their versions. This way there is less impact on the users. It is rarely required to update anything else when something like gettext update is released (because if they do release an update, it's going to be the idential version with minor patches applied)
I am sorry, but this slashdot story looks like an blatant and biased ad for Postfix that also undeservably bashes Sendmail. The security problems mentioned in the story are relatively old. This problem has been found and fixed in March. So, why are these advisories making it into slashdot headlines today? Talk about sensassionalist journalism. I'll stick with sendmail. Thank you very much.
The RH ES and WS are more reasonable prices (the list price is something like $400 and $200 per year per machine if all you want is right to use license and the updates)
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone bother with calculators in non-educational setting today? I am a college student and the only use that I find for a calculator is to use it during exams (when they're allowed). Otherwise, I'd just use Mathematica or Matlab (or their open source equivalents) on a PC. Both of them are a whole lot more powerful than the handhelds will ever be. Using a conventional keyboard is also a lot more convinient.
Why would NASA bother taking tourists into space? They're not russians. $20M buys only peanuts for NASA (literally).
That thing on the picture is not a Mig-29. Google for it if you want to see how it looks like.
The year is 2018. The Amiga ethusiasts can't wait for the long awaited AMIGA OS release 24 years after the last release by Commodore. The Amiga Inc. promisses to start shipping the final product at the end of year after some unexpected delays.
Microsoft provides updates, that's gotta be worth something.
Actually, it is a worthy clause. It is not intended to keep the customers by luring them with a refund. It is intended to prevent Oracle from taking over Peoplesoft because everyone knows Oracle's primary intention once they take over Peoplesoft is to get rid of Peoplesoft's technology. Oracle has already been complaining that the price they're paying for Peoplesoft shares is too high. Peoplesoft expects to benefit from the clause by hoping that the customers will continue using peoplesoft products since they believe that the clause will make the takeover unlikely.
You really are fulling yourself if you believe that a 700MHz G3 or even a 800MHz G4 is close or better in performance to a 2GHz mobile Pentium 4 laptop at doing anything except for well crafted Photoshop benchmarks and perhaps one or two other niche applications (notice Apple's reluctance to publish the Spec2000 scores for either G3 or G4 CPUs. They don't because their numbers suck).
The price is a concern of course. For the price of an iBook I can (and could) get a very decently performing x86 laptop without having to spend at least $2000, which is the price of the Powerbook.
I must say that the improvements in the speed of Apple portables have been really pathetic during all recent years. Consider this example.. almost two and a half years ago I bought an iBook with a 600MHz G3 processor. Honestly, I felt the performance was barely adequate and I decided to replace it eventually, maybe in about three years. But today, for about the same price, you can buy an iBook with an 800MHz G4 (and all other components slightly beefed up). The speed improvement is barely noticeable. In the same time frame the PC portables have improved by a whole lot more, not to mention, I wouldn't have had this performance anxiety if I bought something like an R-series IBM Thinkpad with +1GHz mobile pentium 3 for about the same price back then to begin with)..
If Apple doesn't come up within a year with an iBook replacement that has at least 1.5GHz or so CPU, I'll probably just switch to PC laptops.
Uh, why bring an inherintly more expensive, more complex, and more unsafe space craft to life? In my opinion Russians are lucky to have terminated their shuttle program early on. If Russians had to fly shuttles today, they surely would been broke. Look at NASA. Much of their technical and financial problems come from shuttle. It's an overhypped and bloated design that that should have never existed in the first place. The cost of a _single shuttle lunch_ equals the size of the entire anual Russian space budget, yet Russians are somehow able to launch at least half a dozen conventional rockets to the ISS missions every year with what they have not counting their other minor projects. The only thing that Russians should be upset about is that they didn't terminate their Buran project even earlier.
I'd sign up for Speakeasy if it wasn't relatively expensive compared to other ISPs. I can get 1500/128Kbps DSL with a static IP (and sometimes with faster upload speeds) for $50/month. Speakeasy wants $60 or more for a similar package.
Two years ago I bought a 600MHz iBook with 12inch screen for about $1300. Today, for about this much I can get a 12inch iBook with a 800MHz G4 CPU. While I am fine with this screen size, the progress of CPU speeds on low-end portables is disappointing. Compare this to how much the CPU speed of PC portables changed since 2001. They're probably at least twice as fast. I am still thinking of replacing this iBook eventually with another iBook but only when they come up with the model that's at least twice as fast as the 600MHz iBook (actually CPU speed is the only reason I want to upgrade it).
RedHat just announced that RHEL WS is available for $25/per year and AS for $50/per year without requiring you to purchase the base package. You don't get phone support but that's still a pretty good deal if you just want a stable computing platoform, updates, etc.
This sounds like words of someone who hasn't really worked in an IT enterprise setting. Enterprises want real support and that means not only telephone support. They want updated installers that work with newer hardware. They want a saner product release and upgrade cycle. They also require support for longer than one or even two years. Finally, the ISVs also want pretty much the same things. It's pretty hard for them to test and support their enterprise software products on six or seven different versions of RedHat Linux simultaneously with a new (possibly incompatible) version coming out every five months.
What's missing from the model is a solid, value add that sets Red Hat aside in the OS distribution, and that's where they don't have a story.
You're wrong. Their Enterprise Linux products make a perfect business sense because 1) Support contracts are available 2) RedHat guartantees a sane release schedules (about once in two years), 3) RedHat guarantees support for a long time (something like five years or six years).
This is what an enterprise OS should have to be successful. As for home users, you can continue using the free RedHat distro but it will not be called "RedHat" Linux anymore.
2. The fact that RedHat will not produce a RedHat-branded free Linux distro was also known for a while.
3. Finally, the fact that RedHat's free Linux distro will be developed jointly with the Fedora project was also announced here a few weeks ago.
So, I am not sure why is this even being posted on the Slashdot front page. This is non-news.
Fortunately, there are plenty Linux distributions that are not slackware-like. It's good to see slackware to finally overcome this stone age limitation though.
I care a lot about performance of SSH because we're using all time time to large data transfers (backups, or simply copying files between systems, etc).
Does there exist a good replacement for C? Obviously, things aren't getting any better even though most programmers are aware of and try to avoid various types of typical C problems like buffer overflows, "off by one" errors, "double free" errors, fmt string vulnerabilities, etc. This language should be reserved for low level programming tasks like OS and compiler development only. For other tasks we need an efficient, portable language with automatic memory management, easy string handling, and object oriented facilities. For efficiency reasons, I think that Java or scripting languages like Pythnon are not a good replacement for C. What other alternatives are out there?
The problem is with the laptops. I don't want to carry a mouse around just so that I could use a two button mouse (although, I do prefer a two button mouse to the one button one)
The package system should be "stable". See what RedHat or Debian do. Once the distribution has been released, all packages that come with it are -frozen- too. They even usually merge the security updates and bug fixes by patching the same versions of packages that were originally released with the distribution instead of bumping their versions. This way there is less impact on the users. It is rarely required to update anything else when something like gettext update is released (because if they do release an update, it's going to be the idential version with minor patches applied)
I am sorry, but this slashdot story looks like an blatant and biased ad for Postfix that also undeservably bashes Sendmail. The security problems mentioned in the story are relatively old. This problem has been found and fixed in March. So, why are these advisories making it into slashdot headlines today? Talk about sensassionalist journalism. I'll stick with sendmail. Thank you very much.
Does anyone know if it would be possible to upgrade a retail RedHat Linux version (say 7.2 or 9) to RHEL ES 3.0?
The RH ES and WS are more reasonable prices (the list price is something like $400 and $200 per year per machine if all you want is right to use license and the updates)