These are the same kind of people who complain about Microsoft spreading lies (FUD) about Linux, but these hypocrites have no problems doing the same regarding Solaris, because it doesn't fit into their open source ideology.
Oh no! Now RMS will be spamming the Linux kernel dev mailing list about how "...Solaris is the spirit of the whip hand!"
PS: Am I the only one who, upon hearing that from him about the BitKeeper license, pictured in my head a bunch of little kids sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories about The Spirit of the Whip Hand?
He is probably also missing the point that you CAN use a 5 year old computer if you don't put WinXP on it.
I also find it ironic that he complains about not being able to use a 5 year old computer, yet all he puts in the case is a PIII/1ghz (and yes, it's probably for power and heat reasons, but ironic nonetheless).
I don't see why he had to ruin this computer. Is he too lazy to burn his favorite MP3s onto a CD-R (or two or five) and use a CD player? Or just use a computer he already has? No way in hell you'd see me rip the guts out of my SGI Indy or Sun SparcStation IPX just so that I could have a PC in a "retro" case.
When I was a teenager, the only computer that I could afford was a 386 @ 8MHz with something like 2 megabytes of RAM. I put up with the damn thing into the 90s ('96 or '97 IIRC), until I finally was able to afford a modern machine. I'd like to see if he could get by with something like that (probably not).
I specifically said, "I dunno 'bout Macs..." because I wasn't trying to make a "See? Intel is better than Mac" post. I was just giving the date at which Intel introduced their first 32-bit processor.
And now that you mention it, I do remember reading that the M68k was 32-bit, but it only had a 24-bit address bus, which meant the max. amount of RAM it could physically have was 16 megabytes. Again, I'm not trying to bash anybody, I'm trying to point out that your "64-bit CPUs aren't really 64-bit because they only have a 48-bit address bus" argument is flawed.
Why you went off on the whole Apple vs. Wintel thing is beyond me, but if you want to play ball, OK. For the record, the PC wasn't meant to compete with the Lisa or the Mac, and both of those computers were introduced after the PC. The original IBM PC was a competitor to the Apple II, but more oriented towards business use rather than home use. If you remember, the Apple II also used a cassette tape drive (just like the original PC), but, like the PC's successors, the PC-XT and the PC-AT (all modern PCs are descended from the PC-AT), later had the ability to use floppy drives and hard drives.
The 1982 lisa had windows, scolling, dialogs, fonts, buttons, WYSIWYG text editing with graphics, etc.
Which were all "borrowed" from Xerox PARC. The fact that Apple later whined and bitched about Microsoft "borrowing" those ideas from the Lisa and/or Mac (when Apple themselves had stolen those concepts from somebody else in the first place) is too amusing for words. I can't stomach Bill Gates, but I have just as hard of a time putting up with Steve Jobs ("You stole Windows! It's not fair! We stole it first!").
And as for Mac OS always being 8 years ahead of Windows, well, I'm no lover of Windows, but Windows had preemptive multitasking years before Mac OS (Windows got it in Win95, Mac OS didn't have it until OS X).
the Apple II had 75% of us market
Although I don't have any hard facts, I have a hard time with this. It wasn't like IBM and Apple were the only players in the personal computer market. There was Commodore with their highly successful Commodore 64 computer (not to mention the Commodore PET, VIC-20, and Commodore 128), Sinclair, the TRS-80 (from Tandy and RadioShack IIRC), and a whole host of others.
*Sigh* The size of a CPU's address/data bus does not reflect a processor's "bitness". 64-bit means that it has a 64-bit word size (as opposed to the 32-bit word size on x86 processors), 64-bit registers, etc. Most 64-bit CPUs don't actually have a 64-bit address bus. Like you said, the Alpha's is 48-bit. This is usually done to keep the pin count down to a sane level (if you need all the physical RAM that a 64-bit address bus would provide, you need something bigger than a desktop CPU). You can expect that as 64-bit chips become more common on the desktop to see somebody introduce a 64-bit CPU that has a 64-bit address bus just so that they can say, "Hey, look, we have a 64-bit address bus, the other guys only have a 48-bit one!" and (like you are trying to do) will insinuate that this means the competition's CPUs aren't "true" 64-bit (even though they are).
I dunno 'bout Macs (I don't know the M68k's "bitness"), but Intel introduced the 386 (their first 32-bit CPU) in 1986. And I certainly don't think the M68k was a RISC processor.
at current prices and projected prices, 512 gigabytes or RAM will barely cost more than a couple of the fastest processors of this type.
Really? I would LOVE to be able to buy 512 gigabytes of RAM for the cost of a couple of fast desktop processors. Don't forget that the PowerPC 970 is meant to be a desktop processor.
Yeah, you Brits are a real bunch of geniuses *cough* Lucas Electric *cough*.
I live in the southwestern US, and used to know a guy who gave tours of the Phoenix area and surrounding desert. He once had an English guy call up to make a reservation for him and his family, but wanted to know if the Indians would "present a problem."
And we've all heard the (possibly untrue, but still amusing) story about the American who went to visit some relatives in the UK that he'd never met before. Once he arrived and got settled in, they asked him to go out with them to dinner, to which he agreed. Right as they're about to depart, one of them asks him if "just this once" he would leave his gun behind rather than taking it with him to the resturaunt. Possibly just an urban legend, but since I have some friends who had a similar experience when visiting London, I doubt it.
The moral of the story is this: not everything you read or see in the movies is true, especially when it's rumors about countries that you've never even visited.
You do realize that DVDs use MPEG-2, right? You also realize that once you burn a DVD, as long as you keep it dust and scratch free, the image and sound quality will never decrease, right? As for it being lossy, as long as you use a high enough bitrate the image quality is far superior to VHS, even when played on the same TV. As other posters have noted, VHS has a significantly lower horizontal resolution than DVD (dunno about vertical rezolution).
With VHS, the quality of the image, sound, and tape itself gets worse over time, no matter how clean you keep it. The mere act of playing it degrades its quality.
My view on nuclear power: the lesser of two necessary evils. We need power, and a massive amount of it. Nuclear power is no worse than burning fossil fuels, as long as we can safely store the resulting nuclear waste. The main thing preventing widespread adoption of nuclear power is 1)tree-hugging hippies, and 2)the fact that nobody's done long-term studies on the effect "safely" storing nuclear waste has on the surrounding cities and towns (does the cancer/birth defect/[insert other health problem] rate increase in such a way that implies exposure to increased levels of radiation?). And, of course, these studies would actually have to be carried out by a party whose only interest in the outcome is that it be accurate and true, which is unlikely to happen, especially in the near future.
And if we'd get off our lazy asses and get to the point of being able to send stuff into space cheaply, safely, and reliably, we could always just shoot nuclear waste into the sun, at least until we figure out how to get efficient solar power (at which point we would be harnessing the ultimate source of nuclear power in the solar system, how ironic).
It would seem to me that so many people do not even care about dividends (or know that they exist). Ask John Q. Daytrader what the key to the stock market is and you'll very likely hear, "Buy low, sell high." He is, of course, referring to a stock's price.
To many people, a stock's only real value is "Will I be able to sell it at a later date for a higher price?". In an ideal world, this would be, "What are the dividend potentials right now? In a year? In five years? In ten years?" and then buy the stock based on that.
I mean, wasn't that the whole point to begin with? You give a company some money, and in return you get to be a partial owner who is therefore entitled to a percentage of the company's profits. Nowadays all it seems to be is, "Buy a chunk of Company A. Wait X number of days/weeks/months, then sell that chunk to some idiot for twice what you paid for it." The only real reason a company's stock price should go up is 1)the profits have increased, or 2)it looks like the profits are going to increase withing a reasonable timeframe (the company has had a history of making successful products while turning a healthy profit, etc.)
Like the article says, replacing management that is actually doing a good job is always a bad idea (i.e. the company is profitable, has money in the bank, but the VCs want to get their initial investment plus a sizeable chunk of cash NOW, so they do something like in the article to bump up the IPO, then cash out).
Because having a web-based way to post means you can do updates from anywhere you have internet access.
Plus there are a lot of people who don't know HTML.
Re:Status Blog now has info
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 1
If you want to host your own site, but don't want to bother with Slash, check out BANG!. It is pretty easy to set up, and is fairly lightweight (no MySQL required or needed, very low CPU load). It probably won't run on Windows servers (AFAIK no one has ever tried to), but if you're the kind of person who would run Windows on a web server then you'd probably be better off sticking with a service like LiveJournal anyway;)
Re:Unless you have 28 years of once daily entries.
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 1
I agree. For many purposes, MySQL is just not worth the server load.
People who don't have MySQL for one reason or another (don't want to bother setting it up, web host doesn't provide it, etc.) can check out BANG!, a lightweight news/weblog script.
Blog is shorthand for web log. Some would consider Slashdot a blog, since the authors are only posting whatever interests them, but most blogs are just Joe User posting inane crap like, "Ok, I'm going 2 the movies 2nite. I hope Ring doesnt' sux0r as bad as XXXX! Hahaha!"
BTW, if you want a news/blog script, but don't want to host it on somebody else's web host (read: you have your own space), and you can run Perl CGI scripts, check out BANG!, a nifty little open-source news script.
No, it wasn't. When you install Minix, you also install ALL of the source code. The source for the kernel, the filesystem, all the userland utilities, everything. Aside from a few pieces of assembly that is only used at the very beginning of the boot process, the whole thing is written in C.
The book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation includes most of the Minix kernel source code in the back of the book. Minix gets its compactness from simplicity and surprisingly small amount of source code, not from being written in assembly.
Minix is not very valuable for learning Unix. It's value comes from it and its source code being so simple, which makes it easy to learn OS [i]design and implementation[/i] from Minix.
Don't assume that just because your programs won't compile under Minix to mean that your programs aren't portable. The Minix C compiler is really awful.
Re:The REAL Question is
on
The End Of Minix?
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· Score: 3, Informative
No. As far as I could tell, all the Minix tools were written specifically for Minix, lame C compiler and all.
I wasn't calling open-source developers cheap bastards. The people I was calling cheap bastards are the ones who bitch about not being able to use the free version of BitKeeper to work on competing software.
I tend not to use open source software much because compiling it-- in some cases, porting it-- is work
Yes, because we all know how much work it is to type:
./configure
make
make install
And, just for the record, unless you treat your car like shit (or are a rich kid who can afford to pay some mechanic to *gasp* check the oil), you HAVE to get under the hood, so that you can check the oil, power steering, brakes, etc.
1)You CAN use BitKeeper to develop competing software. But instead of being a cheap bastard (or a Linux kernel developer), you have to buy a commercial license.
2)The Linux kernel is not competition to BitKeeper, and BitKeeper has features that free/open-source RCS systems do not have. Therefor, BitKeeper is the best tool for the job. Any Linux kernel developers who also do not work on projects such as CVS, Subversion, etc., don't have to worry. The ones that do will either just have to live without BitKeeper or (*GASP*) pay for a commercial license.
Slashdot Mirror
My Indy runs just fine. My IPX just came today, so I haven't gotten a chance to test it out.
And I paid $10 for it.
But that doesn't change the fact that I would never take the guts out just so I could have a PC in an IPX case.
These are the same kind of people who complain about Microsoft spreading lies (FUD) about Linux, but these hypocrites have no problems doing the same regarding Solaris, because it doesn't fit into their open source ideology.
Oh no! Now RMS will be spamming the Linux kernel dev mailing list about how "...Solaris is the spirit of the whip hand!"
PS: Am I the only one who, upon hearing that from him about the BitKeeper license, pictured in my head a bunch of little kids sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories about The Spirit of the Whip Hand?
He is probably also missing the point that you CAN use a 5 year old computer if you don't put WinXP on it.
I also find it ironic that he complains about not being able to use a 5 year old computer, yet all he puts in the case is a PIII/1ghz (and yes, it's probably for power and heat reasons, but ironic nonetheless).
I don't see why he had to ruin this computer. Is he too lazy to burn his favorite MP3s onto a CD-R (or two or five) and use a CD player? Or just use a computer he already has? No way in hell you'd see me rip the guts out of my SGI Indy or Sun SparcStation IPX just so that I could have a PC in a "retro" case.
When I was a teenager, the only computer that I could afford was a 386 @ 8MHz with something like 2 megabytes of RAM. I put up with the damn thing into the 90s ('96 or '97 IIRC), until I finally was able to afford a modern machine. I'd like to see if he could get by with something like that (probably not).
I'm not saying they copied the look & feel of the GUI developed at Xerox PARC, just that they copied the concepts and ideas from them.
I specifically said, "I dunno 'bout Macs..." because I wasn't trying to make a "See? Intel is better than Mac" post. I was just giving the date at which Intel introduced their first 32-bit processor.
And now that you mention it, I do remember reading that the M68k was 32-bit, but it only had a 24-bit address bus, which meant the max. amount of RAM it could physically have was 16 megabytes. Again, I'm not trying to bash anybody, I'm trying to point out that your "64-bit CPUs aren't really 64-bit because they only have a 48-bit address bus" argument is flawed.
Why you went off on the whole Apple vs. Wintel thing is beyond me, but if you want to play ball, OK. For the record, the PC wasn't meant to compete with the Lisa or the Mac, and both of those computers were introduced after the PC. The original IBM PC was a competitor to the Apple II, but more oriented towards business use rather than home use. If you remember, the Apple II also used a cassette tape drive (just like the original PC), but, like the PC's successors, the PC-XT and the PC-AT (all modern PCs are descended from the PC-AT), later had the ability to use floppy drives and hard drives.
The 1982 lisa had windows, scolling, dialogs, fonts, buttons, WYSIWYG text editing with graphics, etc.
Which were all "borrowed" from Xerox PARC. The fact that Apple later whined and bitched about Microsoft "borrowing" those ideas from the Lisa and/or Mac (when Apple themselves had stolen those concepts from somebody else in the first place) is too amusing for words. I can't stomach Bill Gates, but I have just as hard of a time putting up with Steve Jobs ("You stole Windows! It's not fair! We stole it first!").
And as for Mac OS always being 8 years ahead of Windows, well, I'm no lover of Windows, but Windows had preemptive multitasking years before Mac OS (Windows got it in Win95, Mac OS didn't have it until OS X).
the Apple II had 75% of us market
Although I don't have any hard facts, I have a hard time with this. It wasn't like IBM and Apple were the only players in the personal computer market. There was Commodore with their highly successful Commodore 64 computer (not to mention the Commodore PET, VIC-20, and Commodore 128), Sinclair, the TRS-80 (from Tandy and RadioShack IIRC), and a whole host of others.
*Sigh* The size of a CPU's address/data bus does not reflect a processor's "bitness". 64-bit means that it has a 64-bit word size (as opposed to the 32-bit word size on x86 processors), 64-bit registers, etc. Most 64-bit CPUs don't actually have a 64-bit address bus. Like you said, the Alpha's is 48-bit. This is usually done to keep the pin count down to a sane level (if you need all the physical RAM that a 64-bit address bus would provide, you need something bigger than a desktop CPU). You can expect that as 64-bit chips become more common on the desktop to see somebody introduce a 64-bit CPU that has a 64-bit address bus just so that they can say, "Hey, look, we have a 64-bit address bus, the other guys only have a 48-bit one!" and (like you are trying to do) will insinuate that this means the competition's CPUs aren't "true" 64-bit (even though they are).
I dunno 'bout Macs (I don't know the M68k's "bitness"), but Intel introduced the 386 (their first 32-bit CPU) in 1986. And I certainly don't think the M68k was a RISC processor.
at current prices and projected prices, 512 gigabytes or RAM will barely cost more than a couple of the fastest processors of this type.
Really? I would LOVE to be able to buy 512 gigabytes of RAM for the cost of a couple of fast desktop processors. Don't forget that the PowerPC 970 is meant to be a desktop processor.
Yeah, you Brits are a real bunch of geniuses *cough* Lucas Electric *cough*.
I live in the southwestern US, and used to know a guy who gave tours of the Phoenix area and surrounding desert. He once had an English guy call up to make a reservation for him and his family, but wanted to know if the Indians would "present a problem."
And we've all heard the (possibly untrue, but still amusing) story about the American who went to visit some relatives in the UK that he'd never met before. Once he arrived and got settled in, they asked him to go out with them to dinner, to which he agreed. Right as they're about to depart, one of them asks him if "just this once" he would leave his gun behind rather than taking it with him to the resturaunt. Possibly just an urban legend, but since I have some friends who had a similar experience when visiting London, I doubt it.
The moral of the story is this: not everything you read or see in the movies is true, especially when it's rumors about countries that you've never even visited.
You do realize that DVDs use MPEG-2, right? You also realize that once you burn a DVD, as long as you keep it dust and scratch free, the image and sound quality will never decrease, right? As for it being lossy, as long as you use a high enough bitrate the image quality is far superior to VHS, even when played on the same TV. As other posters have noted, VHS has a significantly lower horizontal resolution than DVD (dunno about vertical rezolution).
With VHS, the quality of the image, sound, and tape itself gets worse over time, no matter how clean you keep it. The mere act of playing it degrades its quality.
My view on nuclear power: the lesser of two necessary evils. We need power, and a massive amount of it. Nuclear power is no worse than burning fossil fuels, as long as we can safely store the resulting nuclear waste. The main thing preventing widespread adoption of nuclear power is 1)tree-hugging hippies, and 2)the fact that nobody's done long-term studies on the effect "safely" storing nuclear waste has on the surrounding cities and towns (does the cancer/birth defect/[insert other health problem] rate increase in such a way that implies exposure to increased levels of radiation?). And, of course, these studies would actually have to be carried out by a party whose only interest in the outcome is that it be accurate and true, which is unlikely to happen, especially in the near future.
And if we'd get off our lazy asses and get to the point of being able to send stuff into space cheaply, safely, and reliably, we could always just shoot nuclear waste into the sun, at least until we figure out how to get efficient solar power (at which point we would be harnessing the ultimate source of nuclear power in the solar system, how ironic).
It would seem to me that so many people do not even care about dividends (or know that they exist). Ask John Q. Daytrader what the key to the stock market is and you'll very likely hear, "Buy low, sell high." He is, of course, referring to a stock's price.
To many people, a stock's only real value is "Will I be able to sell it at a later date for a higher price?". In an ideal world, this would be, "What are the dividend potentials right now? In a year? In five years? In ten years?" and then buy the stock based on that.
I mean, wasn't that the whole point to begin with? You give a company some money, and in return you get to be a partial owner who is therefore entitled to a percentage of the company's profits. Nowadays all it seems to be is, "Buy a chunk of Company A. Wait X number of days/weeks/months, then sell that chunk to some idiot for twice what you paid for it." The only real reason a company's stock price should go up is 1)the profits have increased, or 2)it looks like the profits are going to increase withing a reasonable timeframe (the company has had a history of making successful products while turning a healthy profit, etc.)
Like the article says, replacing management that is actually doing a good job is always a bad idea (i.e. the company is profitable, has money in the bank, but the VCs want to get their initial investment plus a sizeable chunk of cash NOW, so they do something like in the article to bump up the IPO, then cash out).
Because having a web-based way to post means you can do updates from anywhere you have internet access.
Plus there are a lot of people who don't know HTML.
If you want to host your own site, but don't want to bother with Slash, check out BANG!. It is pretty easy to set up, and is fairly lightweight (no MySQL required or needed, very low CPU load). It probably won't run on Windows servers (AFAIK no one has ever tried to), but if you're the kind of person who would run Windows on a web server then you'd probably be better off sticking with a service like LiveJournal anyway ;)
I agree. For many purposes, MySQL is just not worth the server load.
People who don't have MySQL for one reason or another (don't want to bother setting it up, web host doesn't provide it, etc.) can check out BANG!, a lightweight news/weblog script.
I use BANG!. It's remarkably easy to set up, and very lightweight (no MySQL database and minimal CPU load).
The advantage of using a web-based news/blog system is that you can post from anywhere you have internet access.
Blog is shorthand for web log. Some would consider Slashdot a blog, since the authors are only posting whatever interests them, but most blogs are just Joe User posting inane crap like, "Ok, I'm going 2 the movies 2nite. I hope Ring doesnt' sux0r as bad as XXXX! Hahaha!"
BTW, if you want a news/blog script, but don't want to host it on somebody else's web host (read: you have your own space), and you can run Perl CGI scripts, check out BANG!, a nifty little open-source news script.
No, it wasn't. When you install Minix, you also install ALL of the source code. The source for the kernel, the filesystem, all the userland utilities, everything. Aside from a few pieces of assembly that is only used at the very beginning of the boot process, the whole thing is written in C.
The book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation includes most of the Minix kernel source code in the back of the book. Minix gets its compactness from simplicity and surprisingly small amount of source code, not from being written in assembly.
Minix is not very valuable for learning Unix. It's value comes from it and its source code being so simple, which makes it easy to learn OS [i]design and implementation[/i] from Minix.
Don't assume that just because your programs won't compile under Minix to mean that your programs aren't portable. The Minix C compiler is really awful.
No. As far as I could tell, all the Minix tools were written specifically for Minix, lame C compiler and all.
Is it really that hard to check your car's oil and other fluids by yourself? It isn't exactly rocket science...
Of course, I've bought the service manual for each and every car that I've owned so that I can do minor repairs and tuning myself.
I wasn't calling open-source developers cheap bastards. The people I was calling cheap bastards are the ones who bitch about not being able to use the free version of BitKeeper to work on competing software.
Yes, because we all know how much work it is to type:
./configure
And, just for the record, unless you treat your car like shit (or are a rich kid who can afford to pay some mechanic to *gasp* check the oil), you HAVE to get under the hood, so that you can check the oil, power steering, brakes, etc.make
make install
Yeah, we've got those here in the US.
1)You CAN use BitKeeper to develop competing software. But instead of being a cheap bastard (or a Linux kernel developer), you have to buy a commercial license.
2)The Linux kernel is not competition to BitKeeper, and BitKeeper has features that free/open-source RCS systems do not have. Therefor, BitKeeper is the best tool for the job. Any Linux kernel developers who also do not work on projects such as CVS, Subversion, etc., don't have to worry. The ones that do will either just have to live without BitKeeper or (*GASP*) pay for a commercial license.