Calling 911 when someone is having a heart attack - commendable. Calling 911 when someone just stole your car - questionable, but I can understand it I guess since you want to get in touch ASAP since time is of the essence, and you may not know the local police number.
Calling 911 because someone is annoying you by using your WAP???? How in any way is this an emergency? Why couldn't the store take 30 seconds to look up the local number for the police?
I regularly call 911 to make sure it works, especially when I get a new phone/phone service. Don't you take your car for a test drive before buying it? Don't you double check your knots when rappelling off the edge of a mountain?
How are they going to prove he never bought a latte? Are they going to be able to swear that in the last three months, of all the lattes they sold, not one was bought by him? How do they know his friend didn't buy one and bring it to him in the car?
Who cares?
This is yet another example where human logic and rationality are excluded when a computer is involved.
AFAIK, there is no law against using, ahem, free stuff floating in the air.
There are laws against loitering, vagrancy, and tresspass. Any or all of those could apply to this situation, but no, a computer was involved so it must be some special unwritten law that he broke.
Lets not Mince words here, she's a money grubbing little SLUT and so are her parents. Had they taught her anything about life they'd have told her that boys and men will want to get into her pants, period. It's not nice, but it is reality. If they had talked to her about this when she began puberty maybe none of this would have happened. If indeed she was sat down and had the birds and bees conversation; they would have told her she should have known better and it was her bed to lay in now, pun not entirely intended.
Parents these days don't take proper responsibility or teach their children anything when it comes to morals or self worth, or even taking the responsibility for your own actions. I cannot believe that there is any motive other than publicity and Money.
So, what are you advocating?
Parenting being done by parents instead of government/big brother?
Hmm....
Re:Sick of B&N favoritism
on
Ubuntu Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot's linking to B & N, supposedly because they get nice kickbacks, shows a disgusting disregard for us readers, considering that Amazon has it cheaper.
AFAIK, slashdot editors refuse to link to Amazon in protest of their "one click patent".
And this is why the "Pirate Party" will never be taken seriously. There are legitmate organizations like the EFF, etc., that are all for copyright overhaul. Creating "The Pirate Party" removes a degree of legitimacy from anyone calling for copyright reform.
However, it is scientific fact that global warming is due to a lack of pirates, so with the advent of a pirate party global warming will reverse itself!
Anytime anybody calls me using AT&T, my phone number appears in those records. And since I am not an AT&T customer, I have not agreed to their privacy policy. Is there any legal remedy for this?
All "privacy policies" are bullshit. They all say at the end of them something in legalese like: "We reserve the right to change our mind at any time".
Personally, I believe that _WE_ as individuals should create our own privacy policy and make businesses/corps sign it.
The problem is that no business or corporation or whatever would sign our privacy policy. The rights of individuals have been officially lost as far as I can tell.
So, instead of isolating pregnant women from everything, I say we start giving them controlled infections of common sicknesses, so that their immune systems produce the atibodies, and pass them on to the baby.
Pretty soon there will be shots called immunizations for common illnesses.
As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.
Wrong.
Just because a disk is DDD does not mean its good. Just because a disk is AAD does not mean its bad.
Some of my best sounding disks are AAD. Today, most all disks are DDD, but they still can sound like shit. Many DDD disks from around 1995 to 1999 sound horrible, this is mostly due to the "lets compress the hell out of this to make it sound LOUDER!". Thankfully, audio engineers learned from the mistakes of the era. Take a look at this URL:
Also, there were not different "standards". Before the DRM days, CDs were all "Red Book" standard.
Keep in mind that music is analog. Digital encoding of analog material is limited by the ADC (analog to digital converter) and to a lesser extent the DAC (digital to analog converter). There are a number of issues with digital recordings. The biggest issue is the harsh sound that digital encoding frequently brings. Today, most mixing in the digital domain is done at much greater than "CD quality". The best thing going for them are that digital sources can be transfered losslessly. You do not get the loss with each analog generation like you used to. But a lossless copy of junk still sounds exactly like the original junk.
The lossless copying of media has scared the media cartels for years. That is why we have DRM and other fun stuff like SCMS.
Why would anyone pay $10 for a movie that will be available only digitally? I can go to Walmart and get an actual DVD for $5-$15. I think Jobs and the MPAA are nuts.
Where have you been?
I typically get, watch, and delete (because they suck) movies before they get released to the theaters for free. Or at least, well before they are released on DVD.
How will it help find missing children? Since they are missing, you don't know where to look, and you cannot possibly look everywhere in Los Angeles. If they are kidnapped, then how will the drone find them in a car or a house? Searching for lost hikers is a legitimate use, but how often will it be used for that? I don't see an epidemic of lost hikers justifying purchasing this equipment. As for use in a fire zone, why would the POLICE purchase a drone for that? Wouldn't the FIRE DEPARTMENT need it?
Blah, blah.
Regardless of all of the theoretical or potential good for such a thing, lets keep it simple.
I DON"T WANT TO PAY FOR IT!
Even in the advent of the possible and theoretical good of finding one of the millions of runaways in LA (yes, they could just call home at any time if they wanted to, but their parents still suck).
How much does one of these drones cost? How much is maintenance? How much does it cost me if it falls on my head? What does a simple cost/benefit analysis give me?
Sure, the poor starving CEO of the Drones R US store may be able to eat now. But this seems to be the trend where the government makes up a bullshit story so that there is public support for the meaningless expenditure of lots of cash for no return on investment.
In my state, the government lies to me by putting signs on the side of the road saying "Speed enforced by aircraft". The government is smart enough to know that there is no justification for cost of such a thing, but I'm still pissed off that I had to pay for the bullshit signs.
How in the world did Vista ever become the "largest software project in mankind's history"? I mean, this is an operating system. This is just an OS for a microcomputer, for pity's sake! It's not running the Internation Space Station. It's not running a nuclear aircraft carrier. It's just supposed to manage a personal computer.
Good point. But there is a fundamental difference here. Things like the ISS, nuclear aircraft carriers, and whatnot have clear goals with very high standards in terms of functionality and quality.
Vista's "vision" (no pun intended) appears to be, lets add more crap to an OS and release it. Microsoft, if they are to stay a viable OS vendor needs to make a complete revamping of their system. Lets look at their history. First there was DOS. Wooptydoo. That was not much of an OS. They they slapped win 1-3x on top, and people still used DOS apps much of the time or at least a significant percentage of the time. The 1-3x GUI subsystem with the nastiness of DOS underneath was not very good, but it mostly worked. Then came the 9x line and NT separately. NT was a better OS. Multi-user, more "server" like capabilities, more stability (yet, not stable). Then the marriage between NT and 9x came, and they fought night and day:) Windows ME was arguably one of the worst OSes ever released to the public. Then they were able to merge the DOS/Win to an integrated NT style system with win2k (which had limitations), and then the marriage between the two was consummated with XP.
What is wrong with XP? The "Start" menu is a GUI designers worst nightmare. Too difficult to add, remove, or rearrange stuff in there. And now with XP, its like UNIX or Linux GUI stuff now. Every app looks and feels completely different. Some like to be MAXIMIZED, others are happy being windowless looking windows that simply float around on the desktop with every widget being different than every other apps widgets. Security/basic safety are nonexistent in XP. Yeah, they took that February off to get "security right", but that has failed the acid test. Windows GUI is completely obnoxious. Too much useless information being bombarded to the user. Balloon help all over the place. Tray programs yelling at you all the time. "Your desktop may have too many icons on it, but please don't delete the ones we don't want you to delete, OK?" Popup dialog boxes that steal the users focus, and are filled with information from "Nothing important just happened!" "OK" to things like "You may not have a nonworking anti-security subsystem that did not initialize." With the user then asked "OK" "Cancel" or the uber confusing "OK" "Apply" "Cancel". The OK/Apply/Cancel combination is the most confusing and stupid paradigm that STILL exists in Vista beta!
This is getting long, but its clear that Windows has problems. And going back to the ISS or nuclear aircraft carriers, software needs to be designed with a goal at hand, and a common set of means to achieve that desired goal. Gosh, this is almost like I'm trying to help out MS here, but they need to break down what Windows is supposed to do. Today in 2006, there is multi-media, media copying (CDs/DVDs), interaction between programs, presentation of programs, networking to include file/drive sharing, www, ftp, email, all that stuff. And of course there are the things that are fundamental to an OS that when done well, the user knows nothing about them. Things like hardware driver abstraction layer/subsystem, memory management, disk managemt, basic security, user separation. AND then after all of the basics are met with an intuitive an non-obnoxious interface, they, and only then do you add new and better performance and functionality. Things like a decent command line shell (monad does not seem to cut it). Things like a metadata filesystem and searching mechanism (WinFS is a decade into development).
The reason I don't use Microsoft products, is because they seem psychotic. They are unintuitive, bloated, inconvenie
Again supporting my mantra that human rationality goes to zero when a computer is involved.
Apple is a computer company. In fact, the name of the company is "Apple Computer, Inc."
So, what is next? Verizon being a phone company? Oh, they have proprietary software, they sell phones, but their bread and butter is ripping people off via locked in contracts.
Oh, and Ford is a car company. Yeah, they have proprietary software, and sell auto parts, but their bread and butter is selling cars.
GM is a defense and financing company that also sells cars.
So, to recap, Apple is a computer company that sells computers, monitors, music gadgets, and plenty of other goods and services. In recent times, they switched to a very popular commodity chip, and their bread and butter of selling computers is potentially threatened by Slashdot style geeks building some white-boxes of variable quality and selling them on the black/grey market to customers with OS X and Apple's name all over the place. (As what happened with the Apple clones of the mid-late 90s). If the quality and reliability is not up to Apple's standards, then Apple's name would only stand to lose from having copies of their software floating around and running on random white boxes.
I'm very, very happy with how far Apple has come since the Apple// days. My PowerBook is the best personal computer that I've ever owned. And if Apple has to take some unpopular steps with a minority of geeks to maintain their ability to provide people with nice computer systems, then so be it./rant and karma
fun fact: slashdot is written in an interpreted language (perl).
wait a minute, the kid might be onto something...
I'm not sure how funny vs serious you're trying to be, but slashdot uses mod_perl which only needs to compile the scripts once, and then runs them very fast after that. Kinda like fastcgi, but I haven't heard of fastcgi in quite a while.
I'm still running Windows 2000 on the Windows machine. I have the latest version of OpenOffice, the latest Firefox, the latest Blender, etc. and they all run fine, which is what matters. And I don't have to put up with whatever new stupid thing Microsoft does on XP, where your machine is a slave to Redmond.
Let me get this straight. The latest OpenOffice runs on Linux. The latest Firefox runs on Linux. The latest Blender runs on Linux.
I'm almost 100% sure that Linux will run on any machine that win2k will.
No because Google has money has the money to waste.
Give me a break. Google is simply different than most companies in this world. Waste? Yeah, that is why they picked a freely available operating system and still to this day use cheap OTS diskless servers so that they can save money. That is why every employee spends 20% of their time working on side projects. Oh, and those side projects have created things like gmail, and I would assume this spreadsheet program as well.
Waste and haste are not in the Google mantra. They leave stuff in beta status forever. They have tons of little side projects like Google trendsGoogle sets, the list goes on and on.
These guys are NOT the typical wasteful dot bomb guys of the late 90s. Most of those guys are out of business, Google seems to be doing pretty good.
Economies are based on the decisions of its citizens... a million little decisions controls the tide of the economy.
That is only true with unregulated economies. Today, most economies are manipulations by a few, mostly by the government. Fiat currency and interest rates have TONS to do with economy today.
Want to study real economies? Look at those that work for cash or barter/trade. You know, what we call in a controlled economy, black and grey market economies. Also, study the economies of the mega rich. They do money entirely different than the masses in the middle of the bell curve. Wealthy people can and do have things like Monet paintings on their walls which cost millions. They have the pleasure of keeping those things on their walls for a while, and then they can sell them for whatever they paid, or more often than not, at a higher price than they paid for them. The "middle class"/"working poor" pay a couple of hundred bucks for some worthless painting on the wall. Often paying interest to the bank for it as well. And then sell it for pennies on the dollar or less.
Economies today are mostly from deceit and manipulation with some ideology that drives the masses. For the younger "hip-hop" guys, its called "Bling!" While for the "middle class" its called, "keeping up with the Joneses".
17th Century: Sweden/Ottoman Empire/Spain (in their respective spheres) 18th Century: France 19th Century: Britain 20th Century: USA 21st Century: China?
Thanks for the current events lesson, but what about the ancient Romans and Greeks?
Archimedes did integral calculus _500 years_ before Newton, et al. Athenians did perspective painting around 500 BCE, but we in our short sightedness think it came out of the Renaissance from the 15th century. Go get some Cicero (Roman dude from just before CE), remove his name and give it to someone today. They will think its a current writing.
And of course there were the engineering and things like electric batteries from ancient Egypt from 3-4+ thousand years ago.
I guess, my point is that people have always been smart. Being smart is not a new thing. The new stuff is short sightedness, selfishness, self indulgence and all that jazz. Many religions have hindered logic and knowledge in the Western world for years. The Catholic Church vs Galileo is one of many examples of this.
I don't know. The more I'm on this planet, the more I am in awe of how weird people are. I saw some interview with a magician, and he said that most people don't even want to know how a trick is done if you offer the knowledge to them. They would rather believe its "magic" even though they know its just a trick.
Yes, this does appear to be SPAM for Ant or compfused or something. But I will say that the http://darkcreek.com/ site does have cool stuff on it. The little cube guys, and the 100 years ago thing, the stacking pennies, etc. The little notebook thing with no information though is pretty lame.
If you use GNU/Linux for your cluster, you won't pay any licence.
AND, you get the source. HPC guys are known to tweak the TCP/IP stack and/or drivers. Can't do that even after paying the bargain of ~$500/node for their OS.
...emphasise the fact that purchasing is based on emotion, not rationality. Some 80-90% of all sales are emotion-driven and then sometimes post-facto justified by selectively picking facts.
Maybe with things like cars and clothes, but clusters are merely machines to crunch numbers. Kinda like a big calculator, and little emotion goes into designing and using them. Its bang/buck. Thats it.
Microsoft _may_ be able to sell this HPC edition to some PHB out of emotion who is completely clueless and has clueless admins as well, but an OS has little to do with an HPC system. In fact, the less of the OS the better. Most of the time, HPC apps are in user land. The OS does basic memory management and I/O, but that is it.
Most all clusters are Linux. Why? Its good and cheap. You don't need the scalability and robustness of say Solaris, because you (typically, almost 100% of the time) only have one thread per processor. Yes, I know with large SMP machines, the OS can and does matter, but those rarely have the bang/buck ratio of clusters. The two big guys that have done this over the years (large SMP/NUMA/NUMAcc, etc) are SGI and Cray. And both of those companies are hard for cash right now. IBM probably does not make money, or much money off of their large number crunching systems, but they are probably viewed as RND, not a "for profit" good or service (I could be entirely wrong here regarding IBM, but thats my hunch).
I don't know what Microsoft is doing with this product. Like someone else said, its probably just a "me too!" thing. In looking at their "details", they do not mention using desktop machines at night. The is a BIG miss by them, because that would be one of the only things that could even make this a marketable item for an already primarily MS outfit.
The more I think about this, the more silly this sounds. Yeah, I'm an anti-MS guy, but I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this product seems completely worthless. Actually, now that I learned that this is an only 64bit offering, I believe this is a way for MS to sell a product for beta/stress testing of their 64bit server offerings.
To close this post, from the FAQ:
Q. How does a Windows-based compute cluster compare with a cluster running UNIX or Linux? A. There is little substantive difference, but UNIX-based solutions should be fully ported to Windows to realize the full benefits of the Windows operating system. There are several differences between UNIX-based operating systems and Windows. For example, I/O operations and threading are different on UNIX-based systems than they are on Windows. I/O intensive applications will benefit from using Windows native I/O APIs rather than UNIX style I/O APIs.
Emphasis mine. The second bolded part is important. That porting is expensive and time consuming. Especially when its common for codes to be 30+ years old and designed for UNIX systems. Sounds like vendor lockin to me. Wow, typical Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling 911 when someone is having a heart attack - commendable.
Calling 911 when someone just stole your car - questionable, but I can understand it I guess since you want to get in touch ASAP since time is of the essence, and you may not know the local police number.
Calling 911 because someone is annoying you by using your WAP???? How in any way is this an emergency? Why couldn't the store take 30 seconds to look up the local number for the police?
911 is for emergencies...
Oh? http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/usnews/060410a.aspx
I regularly call 911 to make sure it works, especially when I get a new phone/phone service. Don't you take your car for a test drive before buying it? Don't you double check your knots when rappelling off the edge of a mountain?
Blind trust of a government service is ignorant.
The smart thing would be to send somebody out with a free cup of coffee and get him hooked.
The rational thing to do would be to go out to his car and ask him to leave.
How are they going to prove he never bought a latte? Are they going to be able to swear that in the last three months, of all the lattes they sold, not one was bought by him? How do they know his friend didn't buy one and bring it to him in the car?
Who cares?
This is yet another example where human logic and rationality are excluded when a computer is involved.
AFAIK, there is no law against using, ahem, free stuff floating in the air.
There are laws against loitering, vagrancy, and tresspass. Any or all of those could apply to this situation, but no, a computer was involved so it must be some special unwritten law that he broke.
Lets not Mince words here, she's a money grubbing little SLUT and so are her parents. Had they taught her anything about life they'd have told her that boys and men will want to get into her pants, period. It's not nice, but it is reality. If they had talked to her about this when she began puberty maybe none of this would have happened. If indeed she was sat down and had the birds and bees conversation; they would have told her she should have known better and it was her bed to lay in now, pun not entirely intended.
Parents these days don't take proper responsibility or teach their children anything when it comes to morals or self worth, or even taking the responsibility for your own actions. I cannot believe that there is any motive other than publicity and Money.
So, what are you advocating?
Parenting being done by parents instead of government/big brother?
Hmm....
Slashdot's linking to B & N, supposedly because they get nice kickbacks, shows a disgusting disregard for us readers, considering that Amazon has it cheaper.
AFAIK, slashdot editors refuse to link to Amazon in protest of their "one click patent".
And this is why the "Pirate Party" will never be taken seriously. There are legitmate organizations like the EFF, etc., that are all for copyright overhaul. Creating "The Pirate Party" removes a degree of legitimacy from anyone calling for copyright reform.
However, it is scientific fact that global warming is due to a lack of pirates, so with the advent of a pirate party global warming will reverse itself!
Anytime anybody calls me using AT&T, my phone number appears in those records. And since I am not an AT&T customer, I have not agreed to their privacy policy. Is there any legal remedy for this?
All "privacy policies" are bullshit. They all say at the end of them something in legalese like: "We reserve the right to change our mind at any time".
Personally, I believe that _WE_ as individuals should create our own privacy policy and make businesses/corps sign it.
The problem is that no business or corporation or whatever would sign our privacy policy. The rights of individuals have been officially lost as far as I can tell.
It's still an extra step. I just opened a browser what do you think my intensions are?
Probably the same as everybody that opens up a new IE browser window.
Stare at the ads on the MSN and get mentally prepared to buy everything in sight.
So, instead of isolating pregnant women from everything, I say we start giving them controlled infections of common sicknesses, so that their immune systems produce the atibodies, and pass them on to the baby.
Pretty soon there will be shots called immunizations for common illnesses.
Thats only theory at this time though.
Having an HDTV and high def content, I can attest that much of the HD content from remastered film sources can be beautiful.
The catch is that when a film's scene is cropped pretty hard you can see the grain in the film.
As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.
t m
Wrong.
Just because a disk is DDD does not mean its good. Just because a disk is AAD does not mean its bad.
Some of my best sounding disks are AAD. Today, most all disks are DDD, but they still can sound like shit. Many DDD disks from around 1995 to 1999 sound horrible, this is mostly due to the "lets compress the hell out of this to make it sound LOUDER!". Thankfully, audio engineers learned from the mistakes of the era. Take a look at this URL:
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.h
Also, there were not different "standards". Before the DRM days, CDs were all "Red Book" standard.
Keep in mind that music is analog. Digital encoding of analog material is limited by the ADC (analog to digital converter) and to a lesser extent the DAC (digital to analog converter). There are a number of issues with digital recordings. The biggest issue is the harsh sound that digital encoding frequently brings. Today, most mixing in the digital domain is done at much greater than "CD quality". The best thing going for them are that digital sources can be transfered losslessly. You do not get the loss with each analog generation like you used to. But a lossless copy of junk still sounds exactly like the original junk.
The lossless copying of media has scared the media cartels for years. That is why we have DRM and other fun stuff like SCMS.
Yes. I'm an audiophile.
Why would anyone pay $10 for a movie that will be available only digitally? I can go to Walmart and get an actual DVD for $5-$15. I think Jobs and the MPAA are nuts.
Where have you been?
I typically get, watch, and delete (because they suck) movies before they get released to the theaters for free. Or at least, well before they are released on DVD.
How will it help find missing children? Since they are missing, you don't know where to look, and you cannot possibly look everywhere in Los Angeles. If they are kidnapped, then how will the drone find them in a car or a house? Searching for lost hikers is a legitimate use, but how often will it be used for that? I don't see an epidemic of lost hikers justifying purchasing this equipment. As for use in a fire zone, why would the POLICE purchase a drone for that? Wouldn't the FIRE DEPARTMENT need it?
Blah, blah.
Regardless of all of the theoretical or potential good for such a thing, lets keep it simple.
I DON"T WANT TO PAY FOR IT!
Even in the advent of the possible and theoretical good of finding one of the millions of runaways in LA (yes, they could just call home at any time if they wanted to, but their parents still suck).
How much does one of these drones cost? How much is maintenance? How much does it cost me if it falls on my head? What does a simple cost/benefit analysis give me?
Sure, the poor starving CEO of the Drones R US store may be able to eat now. But this seems to be the trend where the government makes up a bullshit story so that there is public support for the meaningless expenditure of lots of cash for no return on investment.
In my state, the government lies to me by putting signs on the side of the road saying "Speed enforced by aircraft". The government is smart enough to know that there is no justification for cost of such a thing, but I'm still pissed off that I had to pay for the bullshit signs.
How in the world did Vista ever become the "largest software project in mankind's history"? I mean, this is an operating system. This is just an OS for a microcomputer, for pity's sake! It's not running the Internation Space Station. It's not running a nuclear aircraft carrier. It's just supposed to manage a personal computer.
:) Windows ME was arguably one of the worst OSes ever released to the public. Then they were able to merge the DOS/Win to an integrated NT style system with win2k (which had limitations), and then the marriage between the two was consummated with XP.
Good point. But there is a fundamental difference here. Things like the ISS, nuclear aircraft carriers, and whatnot have clear goals with very high standards in terms of functionality and quality.
Vista's "vision" (no pun intended) appears to be, lets add more crap to an OS and release it. Microsoft, if they are to stay a viable OS vendor needs to make a complete revamping of their system. Lets look at their history. First there was DOS. Wooptydoo. That was not much of an OS. They they slapped win 1-3x on top, and people still used DOS apps much of the time or at least a significant percentage of the time. The 1-3x GUI subsystem with the nastiness of DOS underneath was not very good, but it mostly worked. Then came the 9x line and NT separately. NT was a better OS. Multi-user, more "server" like capabilities, more stability (yet, not stable). Then the marriage between NT and 9x came, and they fought night and day
What is wrong with XP? The "Start" menu is a GUI designers worst nightmare. Too difficult to add, remove, or rearrange stuff in there. And now with XP, its like UNIX or Linux GUI stuff now. Every app looks and feels completely different. Some like to be MAXIMIZED, others are happy being windowless looking windows that simply float around on the desktop with every widget being different than every other apps widgets. Security/basic safety are nonexistent in XP. Yeah, they took that February off to get "security right", but that has failed the acid test. Windows GUI is completely obnoxious. Too much useless information being bombarded to the user. Balloon help all over the place. Tray programs yelling at you all the time. "Your desktop may have too many icons on it, but please don't delete the ones we don't want you to delete, OK?" Popup dialog boxes that steal the users focus, and are filled with information from "Nothing important just happened!" "OK" to things like "You may not have a nonworking anti-security subsystem that did not initialize." With the user then asked "OK" "Cancel" or the uber confusing "OK" "Apply" "Cancel". The OK/Apply/Cancel combination is the most confusing and stupid paradigm that STILL exists in Vista beta!
This is getting long, but its clear that Windows has problems. And going back to the ISS or nuclear aircraft carriers, software needs to be designed with a goal at hand, and a common set of means to achieve that desired goal. Gosh, this is almost like I'm trying to help out MS here, but they need to break down what Windows is supposed to do. Today in 2006, there is multi-media, media copying (CDs/DVDs), interaction between programs, presentation of programs, networking to include file/drive sharing, www, ftp, email, all that stuff. And of course there are the things that are fundamental to an OS that when done well, the user knows nothing about them. Things like hardware driver abstraction layer/subsystem, memory management, disk managemt, basic security, user separation. AND then after all of the basics are met with an intuitive an non-obnoxious interface, they, and only then do you add new and better performance and functionality. Things like a decent command line shell (monad does not seem to cut it). Things like a metadata filesystem and searching mechanism (WinFS is a decade into development).
The reason I don't use Microsoft products, is because they seem psychotic. They are unintuitive, bloated, inconvenie
And Firefox is funded by AOL. So take your pick.
Disinformation. This is 2006, not 2003.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/
Apple is a hardware company.
// days. My PowerBook is the best personal computer that I've ever owned. And if Apple has to take some unpopular steps with a minority of geeks to maintain their ability to provide people with nice computer systems, then so be it. /rant and karma
Again supporting my mantra that human rationality goes to zero when a computer is involved.
Apple is a computer company. In fact, the name of the company is "Apple Computer, Inc."
So, what is next? Verizon being a phone company? Oh, they have proprietary software, they sell phones, but their bread and butter is ripping people off via locked in contracts.
Oh, and Ford is a car company. Yeah, they have proprietary software, and sell auto parts, but their bread and butter is selling cars.
GM is a defense and financing company that also sells cars.
So, to recap, Apple is a computer company that sells computers, monitors, music gadgets, and plenty of other goods and services. In recent times, they switched to a very popular commodity chip, and their bread and butter of selling computers is potentially threatened by Slashdot style geeks building some white-boxes of variable quality and selling them on the black/grey market to customers with OS X and Apple's name all over the place. (As what happened with the Apple clones of the mid-late 90s). If the quality and reliability is not up to Apple's standards, then Apple's name would only stand to lose from having copies of their software floating around and running on random white boxes.
I'm very, very happy with how far Apple has come since the Apple
Consider this metric!
Lies, damn lies, statistics!
fun fact: slashdot is written in an interpreted language (perl).
...
wait a minute, the kid might be onto something
I'm not sure how funny vs serious you're trying to be, but slashdot uses mod_perl which only needs to compile the scripts once, and then runs them very fast after that. Kinda like fastcgi, but I haven't heard of fastcgi in quite a while.
I'm still running Windows 2000 on the Windows machine. I have the latest version of OpenOffice, the latest Firefox, the latest Blender, etc. and they all run fine, which is what matters. And I don't have to put up with whatever new stupid thing Microsoft does on XP, where your machine is a slave to Redmond.
Let me get this straight. The latest OpenOffice runs on Linux. The latest Firefox runs on Linux. The latest Blender runs on Linux.
I'm almost 100% sure that Linux will run on any machine that win2k will.
I think its about time to upgrade your OS!
No because Google has money has the money to waste.
Give me a break. Google is simply different than most companies in this world. Waste? Yeah, that is why they picked a freely available operating system and still to this day use cheap OTS diskless servers so that they can save money. That is why every employee spends 20% of their time working on side projects. Oh, and those side projects have created things like gmail, and I would assume this spreadsheet program as well.
Waste and haste are not in the Google mantra. They leave stuff in beta status forever. They have tons of little side projects like Google trends Google sets, the list goes on and on.
These guys are NOT the typical wasteful dot bomb guys of the late 90s. Most of those guys are out of business, Google seems to be doing pretty good.
Economies are based on the decisions of its citizens... a million little decisions controls the tide of the economy.
That is only true with unregulated economies. Today, most economies are manipulations by a few, mostly by the government. Fiat currency and interest rates have TONS to do with economy today.
Want to study real economies? Look at those that work for cash or barter/trade. You know, what we call in a controlled economy, black and grey market economies. Also, study the economies of the mega rich. They do money entirely different than the masses in the middle of the bell curve. Wealthy people can and do have things like Monet paintings on their walls which cost millions. They have the pleasure of keeping those things on their walls for a while, and then they can sell them for whatever they paid, or more often than not, at a higher price than they paid for them. The "middle class"/"working poor" pay a couple of hundred bucks for some worthless painting on the wall. Often paying interest to the bank for it as well. And then sell it for pennies on the dollar or less.
Economies today are mostly from deceit and manipulation with some ideology that drives the masses. For the younger "hip-hop" guys, its called "Bling!" While for the "middle class" its called, "keeping up with the Joneses".
17th Century: Sweden/Ottoman Empire/Spain (in their respective spheres)
18th Century: France
19th Century: Britain
20th Century: USA
21st Century: China?
Thanks for the current events lesson, but what about the ancient Romans and Greeks?
Archimedes did integral calculus _500 years_ before Newton, et al. Athenians did perspective painting around 500 BCE, but we in our short sightedness think it came out of the Renaissance from the 15th century. Go get some Cicero (Roman dude from just before CE), remove his name and give it to someone today. They will think its a current writing.
And of course there were the engineering and things like electric batteries from ancient Egypt from 3-4+ thousand years ago.
I guess, my point is that people have always been smart. Being smart is not a new thing. The new stuff is short sightedness, selfishness, self indulgence and all that jazz. Many religions have hindered logic and knowledge in the Western world for years. The Catholic Church vs Galileo is one of many examples of this.
I don't know. The more I'm on this planet, the more I am in awe of how weird people are. I saw some interview with a magician, and he said that most people don't even want to know how a trick is done if you offer the knowledge to them. They would rather believe its "magic" even though they know its just a trick.
Yes, this does appear to be SPAM for Ant or compfused or something. But I will say that the http://darkcreek.com/ site does have cool stuff on it. The little cube guys, and the 100 years ago thing, the stacking pennies, etc. The little notebook thing with no information though is pretty lame.
If you use GNU/Linux for your cluster, you won't pay any licence.
AND, you get the source. HPC guys are known to tweak the TCP/IP stack and/or drivers. Can't do that even after paying the bargain of ~$500/node for their OS.
...emphasise the fact that purchasing is based on emotion, not rationality. Some 80-90% of all sales are emotion-driven and then sometimes post-facto justified by selectively picking facts.
Maybe with things like cars and clothes, but clusters are merely machines to crunch numbers. Kinda like a big calculator, and little emotion goes into designing and using them. Its bang/buck. Thats it.
Microsoft _may_ be able to sell this HPC edition to some PHB out of emotion who is completely clueless and has clueless admins as well, but an OS has little to do with an HPC system. In fact, the less of the OS the better. Most of the time, HPC apps are in user land. The OS does basic memory management and I/O, but that is it.
Most all clusters are Linux. Why? Its good and cheap. You don't need the scalability and robustness of say Solaris, because you (typically, almost 100% of the time) only have one thread per processor. Yes, I know with large SMP machines, the OS can and does matter, but those rarely have the bang/buck ratio of clusters. The two big guys that have done this over the years (large SMP/NUMA/NUMAcc, etc) are SGI and Cray. And both of those companies are hard for cash right now. IBM probably does not make money, or much money off of their large number crunching systems, but they are probably viewed as RND, not a "for profit" good or service (I could be entirely wrong here regarding IBM, but thats my hunch).
I don't know what Microsoft is doing with this product. Like someone else said, its probably just a "me too!" thing. In looking at their "details", they do not mention using desktop machines at night. The is a BIG miss by them, because that would be one of the only things that could even make this a marketable item for an already primarily MS outfit.
The more I think about this, the more silly this sounds. Yeah, I'm an anti-MS guy, but I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this product seems completely worthless. Actually, now that I learned that this is an only 64bit offering, I believe this is a way for MS to sell a product for beta/stress testing of their 64bit server offerings.
To close this post, from the FAQ:
Q. How does a Windows-based compute cluster compare with a cluster running UNIX or Linux?
A. There is little substantive difference, but UNIX-based solutions should be fully ported to Windows to realize the full benefits of the Windows operating system. There are several differences between UNIX-based operating systems and Windows. For example, I/O operations and threading are different on UNIX-based systems than they are on Windows. I/O intensive applications will benefit from using Windows native I/O APIs rather than UNIX style I/O APIs.
Emphasis mine. The second bolded part is important. That porting is expensive and time consuming. Especially when its common for codes to be 30+ years old and designed for UNIX systems. Sounds like vendor lockin to me. Wow, typical Microsoft.