It's ability to easily follow multiple journals, including posting comments to various entries, and it's "communities" make it seem somewhat like your talking about.
Additionally, all the source code that runs it is available.
Having people keep "work journals" of what they're working on makes it easy to keep track of who's doing what, and the communities could be very advantageous in a work environement.
Okay, the first thing you need to do is understand the difference between a Window Manager, and a Desktop Environment.
Gnome and KDE are desktop environments. They run on top of X Windows, providing a number of extra services and features, but they still rely on a Window Manager to handle basic window appearance, changes, etc. XFCE is kind of a hybrid choice. It is a Desktop Environment, like Gnome/KDE, and thus provides many similar features, but it was designed to be lightweight and small. Thus, it falls somewhere in the middle between running just a Window Manager, and running one of the "heavyweight" Desktop Environements. It generally doesn't provide as many features as Gnome or KDE, but it runs faster than either. It requires more resources than a simple Window Manager, but it also provides more features.
If you want something really lightweight, what you need to do is to stop running Gnome or KDE. Now, note, if you have the Gnome/KDE libraries installed, you can still run Gnome and KDE applicatoins, even when that Desktop Environement isn't running.
As far as lightweight Window Managers, when Gnome/KDE are not running, almost any basic Window Manager will feel lightweight by comparison. Personaly, I like Sawfish, for it's customization abilities, and scriptability. However, WindowMaker, AfterStep, fvwm2, BlackBox, etc, will all perform fine on that machine.
Others have mentioned it, but I'll offer my opinion as well. Unless you're doing something fairly bizarre, Sendmail might be overkill for you as an MTA. QMail is a breeze to set up and config, it's as secure as can be, and it handles heavy loads of mail with ease.
Additionally, QMail and ezmlm were written together, with similar design principles, and they complement each other perfectly. They provide and extremely powerful, stable, secure, and featureful mailing solution.
Two notes I do want to point out, however. First of all, while Dan Bernstein is a brilliant coder, he's also a difficult man. His license for QMail is almost non-existent, but it it doesn't allow for modified redistribution. This means that QMail may need to be patched for certain special features.
Additionally, though following in the same vein, the stock version of ezmlm is missing some key features. I would strongly encourage the use of the ezmlm-idx patch, available at ezmlm.org. With this applied, ezmlm becomes one of the most powerful, featureful, and impressive mailing list management programs available.
Personally, I've been much impressed with Kawa, both in it's current capabilities, and it's pace of improvement (especially considering that you are doing nearly all the work on your own).
"Plaintiffs have not been prosecuted under the DMCA, nor have they been threatened with such prosecution..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this whole thing come about because Felten was threatened under the DMCA, and told that if he published his research, he would be sued?
The guys at the DoJ did read the case before throwing out their opinion, didn't they?
Very true, HP is another player in the high end Unix market, HP just gets overlooked by a lot of people, since Sun is #1 and IBM is #2 (in the Unix market).
Additionally, it's been my experience that HP is usually a step or two behind the "best available", although I admit I've not investigated their offerings as closely as those of the other two.
Re:Differences between PPC G4 and Power 4 ?
on
IBM Launches p690
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are two variants on the CPU architecture, which was co-developed by IBM and Motorola.
The PowerPC (with recent releases being known as G3/G4) variant is a 32 bit CPU, primarily found in Macintosh computers.
The Power4 (and Power3 before it) is a 64 bit CPU (such as an Alpha or UltraSPARC), intended for use in high end workstations/servers, and found in IBM's RS/6000 line, AS/400 line, etc.
So, they both stem from the same root, but they reflect different intended purposes.
The article makes some rather misleading comments, such as the stock price. . .
You can't directly compare stock prices without taking into account things like the number of shares outstanding.
For example, Sun has almost twice as many shares of stock out there, so even though it's stock price is lower, it's not quite as far off as it appears. (Market capitalization for IBM is $168B, and for Sun is $29B).
As things stand right now, I'd be very surprised if IBM made a bit for Sun, (although, as you say, stranger things have happened). IBM's been gaining in the Unix market for the past year or so, I think they'd be better off to wait a good bit longer before doing anything so drastic.
You do the PPC injustice. The benchmarks here show that while you'll save a couple bucks with an x86, a properly tuned G4 system is superior.
That's very amusing. You provided a link to a page which back up my argument, and failed to counter it. If you read what I said, I stated that you "you will *not* get the same performance for the buck" with Mac vs. x86.
I am *not* saying that the PowerPC is a bad processor, in fact if you read an earlier comment, you'll see that I specifically state that if I could buy PowerPC CPU's and motherboards directly, without buying a Mac, I'd be the first in line for one. Now, here's a direct quote from the URL you gave:
On a strictly cost basis, the Macintosh is the clear loser. Though Mac enthusiasts like myself may cite intangible advantages like "more elegant look and feel," that does little to convince Wintel lovers that they should spend $700 to $900 more just for the right to be abused verbally by their friends for buying a Macintosh.
On a cost/performance basis, the Athlon system is clearly the overall winner.
This is exactly what I said above. You get more bang for the buck with an x86 system than you do with a Mac.
The fact of the matter is that TCO is a valid argument, which is probably why you are trying to derail it. Go on eBay, and you can find three-year old Macs being sold for 50% of what they were purchased originally. How does your x86 stand up to that?
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is one of the most subjective and misleading statistics ever created. It's sole purpose is for computer/software/OS manufacturers to use to convince you that it's better to pay more money for their stuff than someone elses, because you'll save money in the long run.
The fact is, TCO depends as much, or often times more, on the people you have and the experience and knowledge they have, than anything else. You can't give a single TCO for a system, and have it be realistic for every buyer of that system.
As for your statements about buying Macs on eBay, that is unrelated to this argument. All that does is prove that Apple has a restrictive stranglehold on the Macintosh market, and that they artificially inflate prices in order to create revenue.
Also, remember that Apple/Mac and PowerPC are not necessarily synonymous, and should be treated as separate entities. I love the PowerPC processor, however I dislike many of Apple's business practices, and don't like how they inflate hardware prices to cover research and development costs, as well as software costs. They should either make up their mind and choose to be a software or a hardware company, or they should separate their products more and open up to allow for outside R&D.
First of all, the RS/6000 is a very different beast from a PC or a Macintosh. It's an enterprise level Unix workstation/server comparable with a Sun UltraSPARC, Compaq/DEC AlphaStation, or an SGI workstation.
Additionally, if you want to be strict, the Power CPU used in RS/6000's is not exactly the same as the PowerPC processor. It's a more advanced 64 bit version.
So, there is a *huge* difference in what you get betweeen an RS/6000 and a Macintosh. They have different purposes, different uses, and shouldn't really be directly compared.
Now, as to my second point, I never said I would buy an RS/6000. In fact, I was trying to make the point that for general use, they are much too expensive. Your average person cannot afford to spend that much on a machine.
Lastly, I don't 'hate' Apple. I dislike many of their business practices, as well as their Operating System (pre-MacOS x), but I don't hate them. Honestly, I don't care enough about them as a company to hate them.
Laptops are a completely different world from desktops. When dealing with laptops, Apple machines aren't as bad of a buy.
However, as impressive as the PowerPC processor is, you will *not* get the same performance for the buck out of a Mac that you will out of an x86 machine. It won't happen.
Period. This isn't FUD, this is reality. When you are dealing with a single vendor who has to subsidise their research and development costs through hardware sales, that's what happens.
And don't pull that "Total Cost of Ownership" crap. TCO is based very heavily on the previous experience and knowledge of the users. If they have Mac experience, they'll have less trouble with Macs. If they have Windows experience, they'll have less trouble with Windows. Same thing with administrator experience. What you know will cost you less.
Restricted and limited in that I have to buy a system preconfigured by Apple, according to what they want to sell me.
There isn't a lot of choice. . . I'm forced to buy what they're willing to sell me, and that's it.
Now, in a PC, if it starts becoming obsolete, I can go out and buy a new motherboard and CPU, slap it in, and bang, my computer's ready to live another few years.
What do I do with my becoming obsolete Mac? Doorstop, anyone?;-)
Or, what happens if I want a desktop machine with SCSI disks? As I recall (and I may be slightly wrong on this), Apple no longer offers non-IDE drives in their desktops. I don't want to buy a machine just to rip out half of it to replace it.
The fact that they finally moved to the industry standard PCI bus is a great thing (Although, I don't know that I've yet seen a Mac with more than 2 slots), don't get me wrong, and the USB is nice (firewire is nifty, but still poorly supported by devices, though it's getting better). However, there's a lot more to flexibility than that, and I don't like being limited to only what one company is willing to sell me.
Short answer is nobody bought them. Do you expect it to be any different this time?
Yes, actually, I do.;-)
Many things have changed since the mid '90s. Computers have become ubiquitous. Back then, they were still a very expensive and somewhat uncommon item, even if they were gaining in popularity. You didn't find them in millions of homes across the US, as well as throughout the world.
The PowerPC processor never had a real opportunity to break into the general PC market, because of lack of support. When it was first introduced, Apple was the only major non-embedded user, and shortly after, IBM. Availability of PowerPC CPU's and motherboards was never at the same level as Intel compatible parts. Additionally, that was a different world of PCs. Five years ago, it was almost unheard of for someone without a technical degree to build their own computer, while it's become very common today.
Also, on the Operating System front, if you built a PowerPC system, what OS would you run? Until Windows NT was released, with PowerPC support, there was no Microsoft compatible operating system. There was MacOS, if your BIOS would support it, but then why not just buy a Macintosh? Also, shortly after NT 4 was released, Microsoft stopped suporting NT on PowerPC.
Today, there is a very viable Operating System in Linux that can be run on it, and two lesser known alternatives, BeOS and NetBSD (and OpenBSD) which can be used on PowerPC systems. None of these existed in a viable form five years ago.
Five years ago, if I were building a PowerPC system myself, I would be worried about what OS I would put on it, what applications I would run, and where I would find them. With Linux and the plethora of available, that question has an easy answer.
Five years ago, if there were PowerPC CPU's and motherboards available to build a PC with, I wouldn't have cared much. I didn't have any use for it. Today, if they were available, I'd be among the first in line to purchase one. So yeah, again, I do think things would be different today.;-)
What I think we really need, before we'll see the PowerPC really take off, is the ability to build PowerPC Systems.
For example, if I want to build an Intel (or compatible) system, I buy a CPU, a motherboard, memory, any devices I need, I put it together, and boom. A system is born.
I can even do that with Alpha systems, though it's a little more work.
However, has anyone ever seen PowerPC CPU's and motherboards available anywhere?
I love PowerPC systems, I think they're absolutely amazing. However, I don't have the $10k to drop on an RS/6000, and I have no interest in purchasing an over-price Macintosh computer. They're too restrictive and limited.
As soon as I can buy a PowerPC CPU and motherboard somewhere, though, and build a system myself, I'll be the first in line to do it. Linux runs amazingly well on PowerPC processors.
Well, Lisp isn't really based of anything, at least, not off of any other programming langauges. It is based on the concept of the Lambda Calculus, which is something of a way to describe programs in a mathematical way. Or, something like that. <g> Honestly, I've never gotten a great definition of lambda calculus, but I'm content that Lisp is cool.;-)
Now, as to why you haven't heard of it before, my guess is because you are either not a University Computer Science graduate, or you haven't branched into functional programming. Most universities will cover it at least very briefly in some sort of programming languages class, though rarely do they do it justice.
As for functional programming, it's a programming paradigm, like imperative or object oriented programming. It tends to be very powerful, often makes use of constructs which are terse (fewer lines of code to do the the same thing than required in other langauges) and generally makes extensive use of recursion.
Lisp is very interesting, however. Even though it is usually thought of as a functional language, it actually provides excellent support for functional, imperative, and object oriented programming. In fact, many people think the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is one of the best Object Oriented Programming implementations available. It was also the first object oriented langauge that was standardized (by ANSI or ISO, I don't remember for sure which one).
It's also been around for a while. In fact, Lisp is one of the oldest programming langauges still in somewhat common use today. (The only older language being Fortran, which predates it by about 5 years, as I recall.)
If you've never had any experience with functional programming, I strongly encourage you to investigate and study[1] it a little, even if you never really use it, because you will learn a great deal about programming in general for your time invested.
Now, as for what applications have been written in it, the canonical example is GNUEmacs. At it's core, Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is then written in Lisp.
While applications that are written entirely in Lisp are perhaps not as well known, one of the most common places to find Lisp is as an extension language for other programs. Here are a handfull that make impressive use of Lisp:
The GIMP uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp for it's Script-Fu, which can be used to programatically execute anything that can be done by hand.
Autodesk, the makers of the industry leading CAD software AutoCAD use their own dialect of Lisp, called AutoLISP, for programming and customising the AutoCAD software.
Siag Office is a free small, Open Source, and very impressive, Office Suite making extensive use of Scheme. (SIAG == Scheme In A Grid). It includes a very cool Spreadsheet program, as well as others, and is highly customisable.
GnuCash makes use of the Guile library to provide Scheme as an extension and scripting language for the application.
Speaking of Guile, Guile is the official extension language library of the GNU project. Using Guile to provide Scheme scripting, you can add support for scripting and extensibility to any application. Guile is used in many applications including GnuCash (mentioned above), the SCWM Window Manager, the TeXmacs editor (integrating Tex support into an Emacs like editor), and many others.
One last example is the Sawfish Window Manager, which seems to be among the most popular Window Managers around these days. It makes use of an Emacs-ish philosophy, having a very small core program, including a lisp interpreter, and implementing most of its feature set on top of that with lisp.
This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of applications written in, or making use of, Lisp, however I think everyone here will prolly recognise a few names there.;-)
[1] If you're interested in learning more about Lisp, I strong suggest you take a look the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The full text is available online at the link here, and it is one of the best books ever written about Computer Science. It's also used as an early CS text book at MIT.
Re:Interpreted languages must die.
on
Programming Ruby
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· Score: 2
Ugh, that's scary.
The C Shell has to be one of the worst things ever created for scripting. It was designed specifically for interactive use, and does not work well as a scripting langauge.
If you're going to write shell scripts, you should generally use the Bourne Shell. It's standardized, found on every unix machine in the world, and was designed to be a reasonable scripting language, as well as an interactive language.
Also, read csh Programming Considered Harmful for a well written and comprehensive analysis of the numerous problmes with C Shell scripting.
Now, as to scripting in general, the above statement is complete and totally untrue. You should use the best tool to get the job done, regardless of whether that's a sh script, a perl script, a python, ruby, scheme, lisp, etc, script. Or, if a script isn't appropriate, you should use a compiled language, such as C, C++, Java, assembly, etc.
The choices available are as many as the problems they're used to solve. Find the right tool for the matter at hand, and stop trying to force square pegs into round holes.
I think the problem here, is the asker of the question is looking for something that, at the instance of conception, jumps out and totally changes society.
Unfortunately, that generally doesn't happen.
You see, there are thousands of innovative things that are conceived yearly. However, there's more to revolutionizing society than simply having a good idea. There are dozens of factors such as time, need, viability, cost, etc, that come into play to determine what kind of an impact this innovation will have.
Additionally, it's almost impossible to look at something and say, "This here idea will change the face of the world." When you do that, you are almost always going to be wrong.
Innovation is something that is recognized *after* it impacts society. For example, when the web browser was first released, do you think everyone and their mother jumped on board and said, "This will change the the world, the economy, our society, and more!"? No, they didn't. It was originally conceived as an academic tool for easier sharing of (mostly) textual information.
It was only later, with the introduction of Mosaic and GUI web browsers that it showed it's true potential.
Ask this question again in 5, or even 10 years, and *then* you'll be able to see what innovations appeared in the late 90's.
As a last note, nearly every innovation is an evolutionary change. Sometimes, however, that incremental bit becomes enough to have repercussions to society. For example, the web browser is just an incremental improvement to gopher, but it was at that point that it had a truly major impact. Additionally, if you were to take a closer look at the sociences, I think you'd be pretty impressed with the creativity and innovation that is occuring there.
Actually, I believe this is one of the things that ReiserFS excels at.
I have very limited experience with Reiser myself, so perhaps someone else can provide more details, but as I understand it ReiserFS is capable of dealing with thousands of small files extremely efficiently (Through the use of tree structures to hold the filesystem). From what I've read, it would be a fairly ideal file system for things like maildir storage.
In fact, now that the 2.4.1 kernel is out, with included stable ReiserFS support, I might just give this a shot.;-)
The greatest Anime ever is actually another one by the guy who did Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki. It's called Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
Many of us consider Nausicaa to be Miyazaki's masterpiece. It's simply amazing. Check out nausicaa.net for more information on Nausicaa, and the rest of Miyazaki's films.
Re:Cautionary Statement [Nothing to worry 'bout]
on
Dual Athlons Released
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· Score: 2
That statemen really doesn't mean anything. It's basically your standard disclaimer that *all* companies use when issuing a press release about products in developement.
It's not meant to say, "Oh, by the way, we're talking ou of our ass, and none of this might actualy happen, and if it does, it could take 3 years." What it means, is that they are simply covering their butts, legally, so if unplanned and unexpected problems occur, they can't be held legally liable for it.
If you search through press releases from any big company in which future or developemental products are mentioned, you'll see this exact same disclaimer.
3. Point out the benefits of a legally licensed, preinstalled operating system. Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software.
Okay, now hold up a minute here. I recall a whole bunch of articles just a few months ago about how Microsoft was No Longer allowing major OEM's to ship Windows CD-ROMs[*] anymore. This was, as I recall, to help stop piracy.
First OEM's are no longer allowed to ship Windows CD's, and now this is one of the benefits customers get when they buy a computer with a pre-installed Microsoft Operating System?
Someone help me out here, I'm feeling confused. It doesn't quite make sense, there, does it? Is that not something of a contradiction? Perhaps I'm just not able to completely understand Microsoft's double talk, but this misinformation annoys me.
Slashdot Mirror
You might wanna check out LiveJournal.
It's ability to easily follow multiple journals, including posting comments to various entries, and it's "communities" make it seem somewhat like your talking about.
Additionally, all the source code that runs it is available.
Having people keep "work journals" of what they're working on makes it easy to keep track of who's doing what, and the communities could be very advantageous in a work environement.
Okay, the first thing you need to do is understand the difference between a Window Manager, and a Desktop Environment.
Gnome and KDE are desktop environments. They run on top of X Windows, providing a number of extra services and features, but they still rely on a Window Manager to handle basic window appearance, changes, etc. XFCE is kind of a hybrid choice. It is a Desktop Environment, like Gnome/KDE, and thus provides many similar features, but it was designed to be lightweight and small. Thus, it falls somewhere in the middle between running just a Window Manager, and running one of the "heavyweight" Desktop Environements. It generally doesn't provide as many features as Gnome or KDE, but it runs faster than either. It requires more resources than a simple Window Manager, but it also provides more features.
If you want something really lightweight, what you need to do is to stop running Gnome or KDE. Now, note, if you have the Gnome/KDE libraries installed, you can still run Gnome and KDE applicatoins, even when that Desktop Environement isn't running.
As far as lightweight Window Managers, when Gnome/KDE are not running, almost any basic Window Manager will feel lightweight by comparison. Personaly, I like Sawfish, for it's customization abilities, and scriptability. However, WindowMaker, AfterStep, fvwm2, BlackBox, etc, will all perform fine on that machine.
Others have mentioned it, but I'll offer my opinion as well. Unless you're doing something fairly bizarre, Sendmail might be overkill for you as an MTA. QMail is a breeze to set up and config, it's as secure as can be, and it handles heavy loads of mail with ease.
Additionally, QMail and ezmlm were written together, with similar design principles, and they complement each other perfectly. They provide and extremely powerful, stable, secure, and featureful mailing solution.
Two notes I do want to point out, however. First of all, while Dan Bernstein is a brilliant coder, he's also a difficult man. His license for QMail is almost non-existent, but it it doesn't allow for modified redistribution. This means that QMail may need to be patched for certain special features.
Additionally, though following in the same vein, the stock version of ezmlm is missing some key features. I would strongly encourage the use of the ezmlm-idx patch, available at ezmlm.org. With this applied, ezmlm becomes one of the most powerful, featureful, and impressive mailing list management programs available.
Personally, I've been much impressed with Kawa, both in it's current capabilities, and it's pace of improvement (especially considering that you are doing nearly all the work on your own).
;-)
Thanks for the great software.
"Plaintiffs have not been prosecuted under the DMCA, nor have they been threatened with such prosecution..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this whole thing come about because Felten was threatened under the DMCA, and told that if he published his research, he would be sued?
The guys at the DoJ did read the case before throwing out their opinion, didn't they?
Very true, HP is another player in the high end Unix market, HP just gets overlooked by a lot of people, since Sun is #1 and IBM is #2 (in the Unix market).
Additionally, it's been my experience that HP is usually a step or two behind the "best available", although I admit I've not investigated their offerings as closely as those of the other two.
There are two variants on the CPU architecture, which was co-developed by IBM and Motorola.
The PowerPC (with recent releases being known as G3/G4) variant is a 32 bit CPU, primarily found in Macintosh computers.
The Power4 (and Power3 before it) is a 64 bit CPU (such as an Alpha or UltraSPARC), intended for use in high end workstations/servers, and found in IBM's RS/6000 line, AS/400 line, etc.
So, they both stem from the same root, but they reflect different intended purposes.
The article makes some rather misleading comments, such as the stock price. . .
You can't directly compare stock prices without taking into account things like the number of shares outstanding.
For example, Sun has almost twice as many shares of stock out there, so even though it's stock price is lower, it's not quite as far off as it appears. (Market capitalization for IBM is $168B, and for Sun is $29B).
As things stand right now, I'd be very surprised if IBM made a bit for Sun, (although, as you say, stranger things have happened). IBM's been gaining in the Unix market for the past year or so, I think they'd be better off to wait a good bit longer before doing anything so drastic.
It's nice to see someone giving Sun a little competition in the "very high end" of the Unix spectrum.
You do the PPC injustice. The benchmarks here show that while you'll save a couple bucks with an x86, a properly tuned G4 system is superior.
That's very amusing. You provided a link to a page which back up my argument, and failed to counter it. If you read what I said, I stated that you "you will *not* get the same performance for the buck" with Mac vs. x86.
I am *not* saying that the PowerPC is a bad processor, in fact if you read an earlier comment, you'll see that I specifically state that if I could buy PowerPC CPU's and motherboards directly, without buying a Mac, I'd be the first in line for one. Now, here's a direct quote from the URL you gave:
This is exactly what I said above. You get more bang for the buck with an x86 system than you do with a Mac.The fact of the matter is that TCO is a valid argument, which is probably why you are trying to derail it. Go on eBay, and you can find three-year old Macs being sold for 50% of what they were purchased originally. How does your x86 stand up to that?
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is one of the most subjective and misleading statistics ever created. It's sole purpose is for computer/software/OS manufacturers to use to convince you that it's better to pay more money for their stuff than someone elses, because you'll save money in the long run.
The fact is, TCO depends as much, or often times more, on the people you have and the experience and knowledge they have, than anything else. You can't give a single TCO for a system, and have it be realistic for every buyer of that system.
As for your statements about buying Macs on eBay, that is unrelated to this argument. All that does is prove that Apple has a restrictive stranglehold on the Macintosh market, and that they artificially inflate prices in order to create revenue.
Also, remember that Apple/Mac and PowerPC are not necessarily synonymous, and should be treated as separate entities. I love the PowerPC processor, however I dislike many of Apple's business practices, and don't like how they inflate hardware prices to cover research and development costs, as well as software costs. They should either make up their mind and choose to be a software or a hardware company, or they should separate their products more and open up to allow for outside R&D.
First of all, the RS/6000 is a very different beast from a PC or a Macintosh. It's an enterprise level Unix workstation/server comparable with a Sun UltraSPARC, Compaq/DEC AlphaStation, or an SGI workstation.
Additionally, if you want to be strict, the Power CPU used in RS/6000's is not exactly the same as the PowerPC processor. It's a more advanced 64 bit version.
So, there is a *huge* difference in what you get betweeen an RS/6000 and a Macintosh. They have different purposes, different uses, and shouldn't really be directly compared.
Now, as to my second point, I never said I would buy an RS/6000. In fact, I was trying to make the point that for general use, they are much too expensive. Your average person cannot afford to spend that much on a machine.
Lastly, I don't 'hate' Apple. I dislike many of their business practices, as well as their Operating System (pre-MacOS x), but I don't hate them. Honestly, I don't care enough about them as a company to hate them.
Laptops are a completely different world from desktops. When dealing with laptops, Apple machines aren't as bad of a buy.
However, as impressive as the PowerPC processor is, you will *not* get the same performance for the buck out of a Mac that you will out of an x86 machine. It won't happen.
Period. This isn't FUD, this is reality. When you are dealing with a single vendor who has to subsidise their research and development costs through hardware sales, that's what happens.
And don't pull that "Total Cost of Ownership" crap. TCO is based very heavily on the previous experience and knowledge of the users. If they have Mac experience, they'll have less trouble with Macs. If they have Windows experience, they'll have less trouble with Windows. Same thing with administrator experience. What you know will cost you less.
Restricted and limited in that I have to buy a system preconfigured by Apple, according to what they want to sell me.
;-)
There isn't a lot of choice. . . I'm forced to buy what they're willing to sell me, and that's it.
Now, in a PC, if it starts becoming obsolete, I can go out and buy a new motherboard and CPU, slap it in, and bang, my computer's ready to live another few years.
What do I do with my becoming obsolete Mac? Doorstop, anyone?
Or, what happens if I want a desktop machine with SCSI disks? As I recall (and I may be slightly wrong on this), Apple no longer offers non-IDE drives in their desktops. I don't want to buy a machine just to rip out half of it to replace it.
The fact that they finally moved to the industry standard PCI bus is a great thing (Although, I don't know that I've yet seen a Mac with more than 2 slots), don't get me wrong, and the USB is nice (firewire is nifty, but still poorly supported by devices, though it's getting better). However, there's a lot more to flexibility than that, and I don't like being limited to only what one company is willing to sell me.
Yes, actually, I do. ;-)
Many things have changed since the mid '90s. Computers have become ubiquitous. Back then, they were still a very expensive and somewhat uncommon item, even if they were gaining in popularity. You didn't find them in millions of homes across the US, as well as throughout the world.
The PowerPC processor never had a real opportunity to break into the general PC market, because of lack of support. When it was first introduced, Apple was the only major non-embedded user, and shortly after, IBM. Availability of PowerPC CPU's and motherboards was never at the same level as Intel compatible parts. Additionally, that was a different world of PCs. Five years ago, it was almost unheard of for someone without a technical degree to build their own computer, while it's become very common today.
Also, on the Operating System front, if you built a PowerPC system, what OS would you run? Until Windows NT was released, with PowerPC support, there was no Microsoft compatible operating system. There was MacOS, if your BIOS would support it, but then why not just buy a Macintosh? Also, shortly after NT 4 was released, Microsoft stopped suporting NT on PowerPC.
Today, there is a very viable Operating System in Linux that can be run on it, and two lesser known alternatives, BeOS and NetBSD (and OpenBSD) which can be used on PowerPC systems. None of these existed in a viable form five years ago.
Five years ago, if I were building a PowerPC system myself, I would be worried about what OS I would put on it, what applications I would run, and where I would find them. With Linux and the plethora of available, that question has an easy answer.
Five years ago, if there were PowerPC CPU's and motherboards available to build a PC with, I wouldn't have cared much. I didn't have any use for it. Today, if they were available, I'd be among the first in line to purchase one. So yeah, again, I do think things would be different today. ;-)
The article mentions it, yes.
I'm just pointing out that, in my opinion, this is the key reason that PowerPC hasn't caught on as an architecture like it could.
What I think we really need, before we'll see the PowerPC really take off, is the ability to build PowerPC Systems.
For example, if I want to build an Intel (or compatible) system, I buy a CPU, a motherboard, memory, any devices I need, I put it together, and boom. A system is born.
I can even do that with Alpha systems, though it's a little more work.
However, has anyone ever seen PowerPC CPU's and motherboards available anywhere?
I love PowerPC systems, I think they're absolutely amazing. However, I don't have the $10k to drop on an RS/6000, and I have no interest in purchasing an over-price Macintosh computer. They're too restrictive and limited.
As soon as I can buy a PowerPC CPU and motherboard somewhere, though, and build a system myself, I'll be the first in line to do it. Linux runs amazingly well on PowerPC processors.
Thanks for the additional info.
;-)
I realized after I hit "Submit" that I prolly should have written a more thorough description of functional programming and it's benefits.
Well, Lisp isn't really based of anything, at least, not off of any other programming langauges. It is based on the concept of the Lambda Calculus, which is something of a way to describe programs in a mathematical way. Or, something like that. <g> Honestly, I've never gotten a great definition of lambda calculus, but I'm content that Lisp is cool. ;-)
Now, as to why you haven't heard of it before, my guess is because you are either not a University Computer Science graduate, or you haven't branched into functional programming. Most universities will cover it at least very briefly in some sort of programming languages class, though rarely do they do it justice.
As for functional programming, it's a programming paradigm, like imperative or object oriented programming. It tends to be very powerful, often makes use of constructs which are terse (fewer lines of code to do the the same thing than required in other langauges) and generally makes extensive use of recursion.
Lisp is very interesting, however. Even though it is usually thought of as a functional language, it actually provides excellent support for functional, imperative, and object oriented programming. In fact, many people think the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is one of the best Object Oriented Programming implementations available. It was also the first object oriented langauge that was standardized (by ANSI or ISO, I don't remember for sure which one).
It's also been around for a while. In fact, Lisp is one of the oldest programming langauges still in somewhat common use today. (The only older language being Fortran, which predates it by about 5 years, as I recall.)
If you've never had any experience with functional programming, I strongly encourage you to investigate and study[1] it a little, even if you never really use it, because you will learn a great deal about programming in general for your time invested.
Now, as for what applications have been written in it, the canonical example is GNU Emacs. At it's core, Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is then written in Lisp.
While applications that are written entirely in Lisp are perhaps not as well known, one of the most common places to find Lisp is as an extension language for other programs. Here are a handfull that make impressive use of Lisp:
The GIMP uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp for it's Script-Fu, which can be used to programatically execute anything that can be done by hand.
Autodesk, the makers of the industry leading CAD software AutoCAD use their own dialect of Lisp, called AutoLISP, for programming and customising the AutoCAD software.
Siag Office is a free small, Open Source, and very impressive, Office Suite making extensive use of Scheme. (SIAG == Scheme In A Grid). It includes a very cool Spreadsheet program, as well as others, and is highly customisable.
GnuCash makes use of the Guile library to provide Scheme as an extension and scripting language for the application.
Speaking of Guile, Guile is the official extension language library of the GNU project. Using Guile to provide Scheme scripting, you can add support for scripting and extensibility to any application. Guile is used in many applications including GnuCash (mentioned above), the SCWM Window Manager, the TeXmacs editor (integrating Tex support into an Emacs like editor), and many others.
One last example is the Sawfish Window Manager, which seems to be among the most popular Window Managers around these days. It makes use of an Emacs-ish philosophy, having a very small core program, including a lisp interpreter, and implementing most of its feature set on top of that with lisp.
This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of applications written in, or making use of, Lisp, however I think everyone here will prolly recognise a few names there. ;-)
[1] If you're interested in learning more about Lisp, I strong suggest you take a look the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The full text is available online at the link here, and it is one of the best books ever written about Computer Science. It's also used as an early CS text book at MIT.
Ugh, that's scary.
The C Shell has to be one of the worst things ever created for scripting. It was designed specifically for interactive use, and does not work well as a scripting langauge.
If you're going to write shell scripts, you should generally use the Bourne Shell. It's standardized, found on every unix machine in the world, and was designed to be a reasonable scripting language, as well as an interactive language.
Also, read csh Programming Considered Harmful for a well written and comprehensive analysis of the numerous problmes with C Shell scripting.
Now, as to scripting in general, the above statement is complete and totally untrue. You should use the best tool to get the job done, regardless of whether that's a sh script, a perl script, a python, ruby, scheme, lisp, etc, script. Or, if a script isn't appropriate, you should use a compiled language, such as C, C++, Java, assembly, etc.
The choices available are as many as the problems they're used to solve. Find the right tool for the matter at hand, and stop trying to force square pegs into round holes.
I think the problem here, is the asker of the question is looking for something that, at the instance of conception, jumps out and totally changes society.
Unfortunately, that generally doesn't happen.
You see, there are thousands of innovative things that are conceived yearly. However, there's more to revolutionizing society than simply having a good idea. There are dozens of factors such as time, need, viability, cost, etc, that come into play to determine what kind of an impact this innovation will have.
Additionally, it's almost impossible to look at something and say, "This here idea will change the face of the world." When you do that, you are almost always going to be wrong.
Innovation is something that is recognized *after* it impacts society. For example, when the web browser was first released, do you think everyone and their mother jumped on board and said, "This will change the the world, the economy, our society, and more!"? No, they didn't. It was originally conceived as an academic tool for easier sharing of (mostly) textual information.
It was only later, with the introduction of Mosaic and GUI web browsers that it showed it's true potential.
Ask this question again in 5, or even 10 years, and *then* you'll be able to see what innovations appeared in the late 90's.
As a last note, nearly every innovation is an evolutionary change. Sometimes, however, that incremental bit becomes enough to have repercussions to society. For example, the web browser is just an incremental improvement to gopher, but it was at that point that it had a truly major impact. Additionally, if you were to take a closer look at the sociences, I think you'd be pretty impressed with the creativity and innovation that is occuring there.
Actually, both mod_perl (available from ActiveState) and mod_php (as of PGP version 4+) are available for Win32 now.
Check out ActiveState's web site for the perl module, and php.net for the Win32 binary download.
Of course, it's been my experience that both run much better in a Unix environement.
Actually, I believe this is one of the things that ReiserFS excels at.
I have very limited experience with Reiser myself, so perhaps someone else can provide more details, but as I understand it ReiserFS is capable of dealing with thousands of small files extremely efficiently (Through the use of tree structures to hold the filesystem). From what I've read, it would be a fairly ideal file system for things like maildir storage.
In fact, now that the 2.4.1 kernel is out, with included stable ReiserFS support, I might just give this a shot. ;-)
-- Toph
I'd have to say that I can deny it. ;-)
The greatest Anime ever is actually another one by the guy who did Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki. It's called Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
Many of us consider Nausicaa to be Miyazaki's masterpiece. It's simply amazing. Check out nausicaa.net for more information on Nausicaa, and the rest of Miyazaki's films.
That statemen really doesn't mean anything. It's basically your standard disclaimer that *all* companies use when issuing a press release about products in developement. It's not meant to say, "Oh, by the way, we're talking ou of our ass, and none of this might actualy happen, and if it does, it could take 3 years." What it means, is that they are simply covering their butts, legally, so if unplanned and unexpected problems occur, they can't be held legally liable for it. If you search through press releases from any big company in which future or developemental products are mentioned, you'll see this exact same disclaimer.
From Microsoft's page:
Okay, now hold up a minute here. I recall a whole bunch of articles just a few months ago about how Microsoft was No Longer allowing major OEM's to ship Windows CD-ROMs[*] anymore. This was, as I recall, to help stop piracy.
First OEM's are no longer allowed to ship Windows CD's, and now this is one of the benefits customers get when they buy a computer with a pre-installed Microsoft Operating System?
Someone help me out here, I'm feeling confused. It doesn't quite make sense, there, does it? Is that not something of a contradiction? Perhaps I'm just not able to completely understand Microsoft's double talk, but this misinformation annoys me.
[*] InfoWorld Article 1, Article 2, Slashdot Editorial
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Toph