That would be useful, yeah. Though hard drives are easy to add via USB and firewire too. But replacing the old one completely to have less stuff outside the case would be nice. RAM and hard disk are really the most common updates to keep older hardware alive (and video for gamers).
I wonder how hard it is to get at the hard drive in the current iMac?
It'd really just need to have one slot for upgradeable video. Maybe a way to get at the CPU as well, though this is less likely. The rest of the upgrades can be done via USB or Firewire devices for the most part.
Mandriva is probably the next largest distro to offer an enterprise distribution with a long support cycle. I had heard that the next version will be based on Debian, though their current ones are not (Mandrake Corporate Server).
Ubuntu's dapper also has an enterprise worthy product lifetime. Isn't it something like 5 years of updates being offered? Quite impressive for a free download.
Seems a Debian based distro will indeed be #3 one way or another. However, it may continue to be a distant 3rd.
Solaris is probably where it is at as far as having another choice of open source UNIX with enterprise support.
It seems to me that this decision must be driven by sales or market research indicated there is no market for support contracts on Debian based systems.
Not necessarily true. It could mean that their research told them that it would be cheaper for them, and/or more profitable, to support just those 2 distributions. And that other systems are not profitable enough for them to bother with, given how much more profitable providing Suse and RHEL support is.
That doesn't mean that providing support for MySQL on Debian couldn't be a viable business. In fact, given the nature of OSS, it is quite possible for someone else to do so. Profit margins may not be as good as MySQL's own support business, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done.
I see you too have been to a webpage where it waits to load a big JVM, and all that comes up in the grey java box in the end is an animated image with a water efffect. And you have to wonder why they chose Java instead of an animated.gif or something.
It is all about the right tool for the job. Loading an entire virtual machine to display an animation was not a good use of Java. But Java applets would be very useful if Java were built in to most browsers instead of a large plugin.
Heck, if Java were built directly into browsers, you could conceivably have plugins written in Java. Meaning one class file would could potentially work on all platforms. No more x86 or Windows only Firefox plugins for PDF and Flash (assuming Adobe would get on board with that).
Wouldn't that only be true if their webmaster also designed their products? I think that'd be a silly assumption with a company the size of Sun.
I don't think the Java websites have really changed that much over the years, which is great for those who have previously been there and know where to find what they want. Maybe not so good for someone that doesn't know what they want/need.
It actually seems to serve MS well to be late on the bandwagon, since their initial offerings in new spaces tend to be crap anyhow. That, and when these bubbles burst, MS is not hurt by them. Look how much of a hit Sun took when the dotcom bubble burst. Whereas MS came out just fine, especially compared to their competition.
The company is a whole is a lot better at entering established markets. Look at XBox and Zune. MS Office for Windows back in the day. Even NT and the server market. None of these were new markets when they entered. This allowed them to see what others were doing (and copy/borrow a lot from them), and then do something of their own that also happens to integrate very nicely with the OS and the rest of their software stack. Sometimes they dominate new markets (office apps, web browsers), and other times they just take a good slice (XBox, NT).
The only thing holding them back with this approach nowadays is antitrust issues. A lot of these new products and services aren't something that you can sell standalone that easily, yet they risk more antitrust trouble if they bundle them with their products. This makes it harder for them to have web based and advertising based services tightly integrated with the rest of their products.
I think that is why they'll be more successful on the hardware side with XBox and Zune. Of course they can only go so far on the hardware side without alienating the OEMs that load Windows onto their own hardware. So this approach will have its limits too.
Ah, my confusion was from the fact that CPR was the first company to own such a railway. The USA had one, but it was in fragments owned by different companies.
> No other country built our Atlantic to Pacific railway.
Actually, I believe Canada built that before the USA did. Though our methods of getting through the Rocky Mountains isn't exactly the proudest moment for this country (lots of Chinese immigrants setting of dynamite - a number of whom died doing this rather dangerous job).
>It also involves laws, education, and taxes geared towards letting people make money. Our education system in the U.S. is not as good as it should be, and unfortunately doesn't show signs of improvement in the short term.
I wonder how long it takes for the combination of bad laws and a poor education system to bring down an economic giant like the USA. Right now a lot of the important R & D still takes place in the US. But if that starts moving offshore, along with everything else that requires cheap labour, what does that leave? Will it just be MBAs and lawyers left?
And to reward his level headedness, he was removed from his post and basically shoved out of the military. For making the right decision and not killing millions of people on a false alarm. Hell of a performance bonus there.
In my personal experience, I know more and more people buying Apple who never have in the past. Especially in the notebook computer market.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is what most everyone else here is seeing as well.
Sometimes these studies aren't an exercise in what the truth is in the real world, especially if they are funded by those who don't like what is happening in the real world.
I had three of varying ages and sizes. Two of them were built into IBM workstations, so proper cooling should not have been a problem. I actually have no idea where the 3rd came from.
Key word is 'had', as they've all failed.
That doesn't mean all DeskStar's will fail, but there were certainly problems with some of them.
> It's disingenuous to bitch about the things he does as if they were important - flash file system? So what? Journaled file system?
Flash file system is very important for embedded work. NetBSD could've been a much bigger player in the embedded space had they not fallen behind Linux, especially the uclibc/arm toolchain. Journaling file systems are highly desired by many people, including those in the project itself.
The fact is that NetBSD does run on some of the embedded systems that I'm working on, and might even run faster for that matter, with a cleaner codebase. But given that it doesn't support as many devices, and has no real feature advantages, Linux becomes the default choice. Just as in the desktop space, Linux is better supported, and you gain the advantages of the many other people working with the same toolchain as you (more stuff found on Google, etc).
On the desktop, it is much the same. A few years back, we ran an open source undergrad lab on NetBSD instead of Linux (mostly because we had a NetBSD developer on staff, and we figured why not). While it offered a very similar environment and similar selection of software (though Linux folks ended up installing gnu tools for color ls, etc), it really didn't offer any advantages over the Linux deskops. We found that certain features we were needing (pam, cups, etc) were always going to be ready "in a future release", whereas Linux worked right now. Support for proprietary software was also easier under Linux (though most was possible on NetBSD with Linux emulation).
In the end, even the NetBSD developer decided that we should be running Linux in our labs.
That said, the last few NetBSD releases have really packed in some good features and have shown to have great performance. Integration with Xen is also great move for the future.
From reading through the comments here, I think the biggest challenge NetBSD has going for it is perception. Everyone still thinks of it as the BSD with the main goal of being portable (while FreeBSD is "general" or for performance, OpenBSD for security). While it is true that their clean codebase is very portable, including the pkg-src tree, that is not all they are about. Their performance rivals and sometimes surpasses FreeBSD's. Their security record is quite good, likely due to a clean codebase. It is already a good general purpose OS, but most people don't think of using it as such.
Hard to say where the project should go. If they can get their feature set closer to on par with Linux, they'd be very competitive. But would anyone use it if Linux is "good enough"? Can they get past their stigma of just being "portable"? More competition in the form of an open source Solaris can't help their cause either.
Regardless, I imagine they'll just keep on coding anyhow, regardless of what happens. I don't see it as a dying project at all.
I think a number of people may be waiting for it to hit the cheaper theatres before seeing it. Given that the joke is basically that this is a B movie pretending to be a blockbuster, a lot of people may wait for the B theatres or DVD release.
The plot was conceived in a brainstorming session for coming up with the worst movie idea. The fact that they took such a horrible concept this far is a success in itself.
That is partially true. They seem to intend that we buy 23" or 30" displays instead of multiple monitors if we want more space.
Howerver, I do the 2 monitor approach (one Apple 23" LCD, one 19" Sony CRT). I tend to run my X11 stuff on the smaller monitor, so I get my non-native menubars inside the window. My main desktop runs mostly native software and contains the dock and menubar. Works pretty well for my usage. I'm not even sure I'll bother with Spaces, as with that much real estate and Expose to boot, it is hardly worthwhile.
You really have to wonder why someone would choose to do their daily work on a beta OS that doesn't run their software (heck, he needs a virtual machine just to run some of it). Talk about not choosing the right tool for the job.
Apple sort of did it with OS X, basing it on Mach and BSD instead of Linux (well actually it was NextStep, but whatever).
This is a model that MS could use as well. Open up or borrow the base layers, and build on top of it. With MS being in the virtualization market, backwards compatibility becomes less of a problem, as it can be built into the new OS.
Heck, rumour is that Apple has already implemented this Windows compatiblity this with OS X 10.5. Apple may have a better successor to Windows XP than Microsoft does.
Remember that Real now sponsors the open source Helix project. And they appear to be getting less evil all the time (possibly void of any real evil now actually).
It is not like you'll be encouraged to download RealPlayer with FireFox downloads anytime soon. This is really just Real striking back at MS, and helping out FireFox. Who cares if some of us don't like them, it doesn't hurt us any.
As someone above mentioned, it is especially incredible that their population has tripled for those who know anything about elephants. The fact they give birth to one baby at a time, and have a 22 month pregnancy makes it difficult for them to breed like rabbits. This is actually what makes it difficult for their population to recover in areas where they are endangered.
But maybe we just missed the article about the Great Elephant Cloning Project. In that case, I guess we owe wikipedia an apology.
Rumour is that TSN is gunning hard for NHL rights next time around too. Losing "Hockey Night in Canada" would be a huge blow to CBC, as it is by far their most watched show, and biggest money maker as far as advertising goes.
Losing the Olympics hurt big time too, though it hard to win bids when the biggest two commercial competitors, Bell (CTV/TSN) and Rogers (SportsNet), team up to bid against you. Funny how the CRTC made Bell sell SportsNet when they bought TSN so that they wouldn't have a monopoly on sports channels, yet they basically operate as one channel during the World Cup and Olympics.
I think amateur sports will be hurt more than anyone if CBC goes down the tubes. Actually, they're already hurting for coverage, since CBC basically covers these throughout the year in anticipation of the Olympics. Without the big payoff of the Olypmics, why cover the little events?
I think a lot of people lose out when CBC loses and big business wins. Big business is what brings us reality TV, unoriginal MPAA movies and RIAA music, and Windows. Public broadcasting has the freedom to be different. OSS is a perfect fit for them, both in price and philosphy.
Um, you have to make less than $10,000 per year to not pay income tax. If you're really making that little money, I doubt you have enough disposable income that the GST cut will help you at all.
In fact, for those in the lowest tax bracket, they have to spend over half of their gross income on taxable consumables (ie. not rent or food) before the GST cut woud result in lower taxes for them. People with that little income cannot afford to spend so foolishly (though no doubt some do it anyhow).
Heck, I'm not even in the lowest tax bracket, and this latest tax shift actually hurts me as well. Though that is mainly because I refuse to just consume like crazy. I know, I'm a horrible person for not having a savings level of -0.5% like the rest of our consumption mad society. I'm one of those darn hippies not contributing to the economy! But we'll see who's laughing when I can retire early while everyone else keeps working into their 80s to pay off their McMansion mortages and other debts.
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That would be useful, yeah. Though hard drives are easy to add via USB and firewire too. But replacing the old one completely to have less stuff outside the case would be nice. RAM and hard disk are really the most common updates to keep older hardware alive (and video for gamers).
I wonder how hard it is to get at the hard drive in the current iMac?
It'd really just need to have one slot for upgradeable video. Maybe a way to get at the CPU as well, though this is less likely. The rest of the upgrades can be done via USB or Firewire devices for the most part.
Mandriva is probably the next largest distro to offer an enterprise distribution with a long support cycle. I had heard that the next version will be based on Debian, though their current ones are not (Mandrake Corporate Server).
Ubuntu's dapper also has an enterprise worthy product lifetime. Isn't it something like 5 years of updates being offered? Quite impressive for a free download.
Seems a Debian based distro will indeed be #3 one way or another. However, it may continue to be a distant 3rd.
Solaris is probably where it is at as far as having another choice of open source UNIX with enterprise support.
It seems to me that this decision must be driven by sales or market research indicated there is no market for support contracts on Debian based systems.
Not necessarily true. It could mean that their research told them that it would be cheaper for them, and/or more profitable, to support just those 2 distributions. And that other systems are not profitable enough for them to bother with, given how much more profitable providing Suse and RHEL support is.
That doesn't mean that providing support for MySQL on Debian couldn't be a viable business. In fact, given the nature of OSS, it is quite possible for someone else to do so. Profit margins may not be as good as MySQL's own support business, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done.
I see you too have been to a webpage where it waits to load a big JVM, and all that comes up in the grey java box in the end is an animated image with a water efffect. And you have to wonder why they chose Java instead of an animated .gif or something.
It is all about the right tool for the job. Loading an entire virtual machine to display an animation was not a good use of Java. But Java applets would be very useful if Java were built in to most browsers instead of a large plugin.
Heck, if Java were built directly into browsers, you could conceivably have plugins written in Java. Meaning one class file would could potentially work on all platforms. No more x86 or Windows only Firefox plugins for PDF and Flash (assuming Adobe would get on board with that).
Wouldn't that only be true if their webmaster also designed their products? I think that'd be a silly assumption with a company the size of Sun.
I don't think the Java websites have really changed that much over the years, which is great for those who have previously been there and know where to find what they want. Maybe not so good for someone that doesn't know what they want/need.
> What, then, would 33 extra years be worth?
Well it'd probably cost you a death about 33 years earlier, so I'd say it is not worth anything at all.
It actually seems to serve MS well to be late on the bandwagon, since their initial offerings in new spaces tend to be crap anyhow. That, and when these bubbles burst, MS is not hurt by them. Look how much of a hit Sun took when the dotcom bubble burst. Whereas MS came out just fine, especially compared to their competition.
The company is a whole is a lot better at entering established markets. Look at XBox and Zune. MS Office for Windows back in the day. Even NT and the server market. None of these were new markets when they entered. This allowed them to see what others were doing (and copy/borrow a lot from them), and then do something of their own that also happens to integrate very nicely with the OS and the rest of their software stack. Sometimes they dominate new markets (office apps, web browsers), and other times they just take a good slice (XBox, NT).
The only thing holding them back with this approach nowadays is antitrust issues. A lot of these new products and services aren't something that you can sell standalone that easily, yet they risk more antitrust trouble if they bundle them with their products. This makes it harder for them to have web based and advertising based services tightly integrated with the rest of their products.
I think that is why they'll be more successful on the hardware side with XBox and Zune. Of course they can only go so far on the hardware side without alienating the OEMs that load Windows onto their own hardware. So this approach will have its limits too.
Ah, my confusion was from the fact that CPR was the first company to own such a railway. The USA had one, but it was in fragments owned by different companies.
l road
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_rai
I knew I should have looked it up before posting.
> No other country built our Atlantic to Pacific railway.
Actually, I believe Canada built that before the USA did. Though our methods of getting through the Rocky Mountains isn't exactly the proudest moment for this country (lots of Chinese immigrants setting of dynamite - a number of whom died doing this rather dangerous job).
>It also involves laws, education, and taxes geared towards letting people make money. Our education system in the U.S. is not as good as it should be, and unfortunately doesn't show signs of improvement in the short term.
I wonder how long it takes for the combination of bad laws and a poor education system to bring down an economic giant like the USA. Right now a lot of the important R & D still takes place in the US. But if that starts moving offshore, along with everything else that requires cheap labour, what does that leave? Will it just be MBAs and lawyers left?
And to reward his level headedness, he was removed from his post and basically shoved out of the military. For making the right decision and not killing millions of people on a false alarm. Hell of a performance bonus there.
In my personal experience, I know more and more people buying Apple who never have in the past. Especially in the notebook computer market.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is what most everyone else here is seeing as well.
Sometimes these studies aren't an exercise in what the truth is in the real world, especially if they are funded by those who don't like what is happening in the real world.
I had three of varying ages and sizes. Two of them were built into IBM workstations, so proper cooling should not have been a problem. I actually have no idea where the 3rd came from.
Key word is 'had', as they've all failed.
That doesn't mean all DeskStar's will fail, but there were certainly problems with some of them.
The only brand I've had worse luck with is IBM DeskStar. Though thanks to an 100% failure rate, I no longer have any of them.
> It's disingenuous to bitch about the things he does as if they were important - flash file system? So what? Journaled file system?
Flash file system is very important for embedded work. NetBSD could've been a much bigger player in the embedded space had they not fallen behind Linux, especially the uclibc/arm toolchain. Journaling file systems are highly desired by many people, including those in the project itself.
The fact is that NetBSD does run on some of the embedded systems that I'm working on, and might even run faster for that matter, with a cleaner codebase. But given that it doesn't support as many devices, and has no real feature advantages, Linux becomes the default choice. Just as in the desktop space, Linux is better supported, and you gain the advantages of the many other people working with the same toolchain as you (more stuff found on Google, etc).
On the desktop, it is much the same. A few years back, we ran an open source undergrad lab on NetBSD instead of Linux (mostly because we had a NetBSD developer on staff, and we figured why not). While it offered a very similar environment and similar selection of software (though Linux folks ended up installing gnu tools for color ls, etc), it really didn't offer any advantages over the Linux deskops. We found that certain features we were needing (pam, cups, etc) were always going to be ready "in a future release", whereas Linux worked right now. Support for proprietary software was also easier under Linux (though most was possible on NetBSD with Linux emulation).
In the end, even the NetBSD developer decided that we should be running Linux in our labs.
That said, the last few NetBSD releases have really packed in some good features and have shown to have great performance. Integration with Xen is also great move for the future.
From reading through the comments here, I think the biggest challenge NetBSD has going for it is perception. Everyone still thinks of it as the BSD with the main goal of being portable (while FreeBSD is "general" or for performance, OpenBSD for security). While it is true that their clean codebase is very portable, including the pkg-src tree, that is not all they are about. Their performance rivals and sometimes surpasses FreeBSD's. Their security record is quite good, likely due to a clean codebase. It is already a good general purpose OS, but most people don't think of using it as such.
Hard to say where the project should go. If they can get their feature set closer to on par with Linux, they'd be very competitive. But would anyone use it if Linux is "good enough"? Can they get past their stigma of just being "portable"? More competition in the form of an open source Solaris can't help their cause either.
Regardless, I imagine they'll just keep on coding anyhow, regardless of what happens. I don't see it as a dying project at all.
Yeah, but there would be no $1 content if Apple hadn't protected their audio files. They "had to do ti" in order to have an iTunes music store at all.
Or alternatively, they could have told the RIAA to fuck off, and let someone else set up the store. I'm sure MS would've been happy to so.
I think a number of people may be waiting for it to hit the cheaper theatres before seeing it. Given that the joke is basically that this is a B movie pretending to be a blockbuster, a lot of people may wait for the B theatres or DVD release.
The plot was conceived in a brainstorming session for coming up with the worst movie idea. The fact that they took such a horrible concept this far is a success in itself.
That is partially true. They seem to intend that we buy 23" or 30" displays instead of multiple monitors if we want more space.
Howerver, I do the 2 monitor approach (one Apple 23" LCD, one 19" Sony CRT). I tend to run my X11 stuff on the smaller monitor, so I get my non-native menubars inside the window. My main desktop runs mostly native software and contains the dock and menubar. Works pretty well for my usage. I'm not even sure I'll bother with Spaces, as with that much real estate and Expose to boot, it is hardly worthwhile.
You really have to wonder why someone would choose to do their daily work on a beta OS that doesn't run their software (heck, he needs a virtual machine just to run some of it). Talk about not choosing the right tool for the job.
Apple sort of did it with OS X, basing it on Mach and BSD instead of Linux (well actually it was NextStep, but whatever).
This is a model that MS could use as well. Open up or borrow the base layers, and build on top of it. With MS being in the virtualization market, backwards compatibility becomes less of a problem, as it can be built into the new OS.
Heck, rumour is that Apple has already implemented this Windows compatiblity this with OS X 10.5. Apple may have a better successor to Windows XP than Microsoft does.
Remember that Real now sponsors the open source Helix project. And they appear to be getting less evil all the time (possibly void of any real evil now actually).
It is not like you'll be encouraged to download RealPlayer with FireFox downloads anytime soon. This is really just Real striking back at MS, and helping out FireFox. Who cares if some of us don't like them, it doesn't hurt us any.
As someone above mentioned, it is especially incredible that their population has tripled for those who know anything about elephants. The fact they give birth to one baby at a time, and have a 22 month pregnancy makes it difficult for them to breed like rabbits. This is actually what makes it difficult for their population to recover in areas where they are endangered.
But maybe we just missed the article about the Great Elephant Cloning Project. In that case, I guess we owe wikipedia an apology.
Rumour is that TSN is gunning hard for NHL rights next time around too. Losing "Hockey Night in Canada" would be a huge blow to CBC, as it is by far their most watched show, and biggest money maker as far as advertising goes.
Losing the Olympics hurt big time too, though it hard to win bids when the biggest two commercial competitors, Bell (CTV/TSN) and Rogers (SportsNet), team up to bid against you. Funny how the CRTC made Bell sell SportsNet when they bought TSN so that they wouldn't have a monopoly on sports channels, yet they basically operate as one channel during the World Cup and Olympics.
I think amateur sports will be hurt more than anyone if CBC goes down the tubes. Actually, they're already hurting for coverage, since CBC basically covers these throughout the year in anticipation of the Olympics. Without the big payoff of the Olypmics, why cover the little events?
I think a lot of people lose out when CBC loses and big business wins. Big business is what brings us reality TV, unoriginal MPAA movies and RIAA music, and Windows. Public broadcasting has the freedom to be different. OSS is a perfect fit for them, both in price and philosphy.
All business is a legal minefield now. There is nothing special about FOSS that makes it any more or less suseptible to this truth.
Um, you have to make less than $10,000 per year to not pay income tax. If you're really making that little money, I doubt you have enough disposable income that the GST cut will help you at all.
In fact, for those in the lowest tax bracket, they have to spend over half of their gross income on taxable consumables (ie. not rent or food) before the GST cut woud result in lower taxes for them. People with that little income cannot afford to spend so foolishly (though no doubt some do it anyhow).
Heck, I'm not even in the lowest tax bracket, and this latest tax shift actually hurts me as well. Though that is mainly because I refuse to just consume like crazy. I know, I'm a horrible person for not having a savings level of -0.5% like the rest of our consumption mad society. I'm one of those darn hippies not contributing to the economy! But we'll see who's laughing when I can retire early while everyone else keeps working into their 80s to pay off their McMansion mortages and other debts.