With new booting software and Linux, your computer will now turn on faster than your cell phone.
To a full-fledged desktop linux?
I was under the impression that the true "instant-boot" linuxes were generally tiny distributions that could fit into EPROM (or whatnot).
I get the fact that it's nice to cut out many of the unnecessary functions performed by legacy BIOS, though that seems like a rather tough sell to consumers, especially given that EFI seems to do much of the same.
Although I'm sure there's room for speed improvements with BIOSes, booting the operating system still takes at least an order of magnitude more time.*
*BeOS is one exception to this generalization. Even back in its heyday, it booted up blindingly fast. However, I suppose you could argue about its qualification as a full-fledged OS.
I'd imagine that mil-spec ICs don't include those provisions.
The reason why Mac OS Classic was explicitly prohibited from operating in these sort of environments was that it was incredibly unstable. Any sort of application crash or freeze would cause a kernel panic.
TMI wasn't caused by a computer failure but the accident was made vastly worse by an error of computer design. Specifically, TMI-2 had a terrible user interface.
See, See. UI is important!!!!
(Stares complacently at his Mac)
Ironically, the Mac OS EULA used to specifically prohibit you from running the software in a nuclear power facility, given that the operating system did not have proper protected memory facilities, making it inherently crash-prone.
I remember stumbling across that tiny clause in a users' manual one time, and chuckled to myself.
I believe that the clause was finally lifted with the release of OS X.
I'm well aware of that, thanks. My point is calling an institute whose main job is to decide who gets cancer drugs "NICE" is pretty bad marketing; it makes people suspicious and paranoid. Maybe it should be called the Klinical Kosts Komittee.
Cry me a river.
Presented with two individuals, but only enough resources to treat one patient, the committee gives the treatment to the patient more likely to survive.
This does suck if you're the one more likely to die, but sounds pretty fair to me.
(I'm also a little sick of the "ooooh! scary communism" bullshit. It's irrelevant, and detracts from reasoned debate. The USSR was a mismanaged and corrupt government; however, this does not necessarily mean that every action taken by that government was inherently evil. I have no qualms about driving a Volkswagen or drinking Fanta, despite the fact that both were created by Nazis)
A very profitable and corrupt situation has evolved where the FDA is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry, the editorial boards of medical journals are bought and paid for, and academic research often dependent on industry money.
Bullshit. I worked for a big pharma company for a while.
Those guys constantly lived in terror of the FDA. The FDA errs on the side of caution regarding most of their actions (as is the way that it should be!) An FDA decision can make or destroy a pharma corporation with the stroke of the pen.
In either event, the FDA is far too big of an organization to pay off, and would have quite a lot of trouble keeping such a scandal under wraps, given that they extensively document all of their trials and decisions. They're obsessively thorough (once again, as it should be!)
If you want to pick government agencies to complain about, the FDA should be near the bottom of your list.
What desktop applications significantly deteriorate as a result of high latency?
I suppose it'd be annoying for video conferencing and gaming, though it seems like it'd be adequately tolerable (ie. still way better than dial-up) for most web browsing.
Sun didn't write VirtualBox (they acquired it and released under an open source license)
OpenOffice is a rather poor example, given that it really isn't all that good from a user's perspective.
On the other hand, things like ZFS, Lustre, and DTrace are all incredibly innovative, and available under fairly permissive open-source licenses. (If you haven't used it, ZFS's handling of volumes and filesystems is outright magical)
Absolutely! One of the things I find most fascinating is that the Queen's political leanings are almost completely unknown to the public.
Given the amount of media attention that the royal family receive, this is outright remarkable, considering that it is well-known that the Queen does take an active interest in the operation of her government (via her weekly meetings with the PM, etc)
....and said undergrad becomes extremely disillusioned with the current state of affairs in scientific research, and decides to go into a different field instead.
Tenured faculty do extremely little original research of their own, but are often paid 5 times in excess of what the graduate students are making.
I'd like to mirror virtually all of those comments as an American. The British are extremely fortunate to have her as head of state, even if her role is largely symbolic.
Members of the British royal family have historically (and still do) fulfill important civic and military duties for their country, with the most recent example of Prince Harry's service on the front lines in Afghanistan.
How many Senators' children do you see anonymously signing themselves up for the war?
My refutation lies in the assumption that you can always "lay more pipes" for terrestrial connections, while it's WAY more difficult to add capacity for wireless capacity, which is an inherently shared resource.
There are tricks that can be used to improve capacity, although none of them are particularly straightforward or inexpensive.
But, yeah. From the application layer, cell providers are indeed "dumb pipes." However, given the fact that bandwidth is a finite and scarce resource, it does make sense to bill based upon usage, even if that usage eventually gets measured in 'kilobytes' as opposed to 'minutes'
The "dumb pipes" analogy doesn't work terribly well.
In the case of terrestrial phone and data lines, capacity can be improved either by improving bandwidth along existing lines, or installing additional lines.
In the case of cellular, this isn't so easy. The amount of usable EM spectrum is finite, and most speed improvements using the already-allocated frequencies will either break compatibility with existing devices, or require a reallocation of the spectrum. Improvements are possible, though they're much more difficult to implement.
A WiFi access point with lots of clients connected tends to be quite slow, regardless of the speed of the WAN that it's connected to. Cell towers operate on that same principle.
To be fair, cellular bandwidth is fundamentally limited, and has been extremely costly to deploy. It's not particularly surprising that the carriers want to recoup their investment.
Although I'll gladly admit that there is price-gouging going on, if the carriers offer unlimited cheap bandwidth, their networks will be quickly overwhelmed. As it currently stands, the carriers can utilize a large percentage of their capacity by charging high rates; what incentive is there for them to lower prices?
As technology improves, and competing companies become more ambitious, we'll likely see prices slowly begin to fall. It's all a matter of economics.
If we want companies to become more ambitious, the government should take steps to prevent monopolies from forming, and ban the absurd contract schemes that the cellular companies force on their customers.
Although the wording is a bit ambiguous "Proven itself" does not have the same definition or connotation as "proved" (as the case of a mathematical theorem) would.
The Theory of Evolution has been proven to be a good predictor of fossil remains, and the manner in which we can observe bacteria conform to their surroundings in a controlled experiment. In other words, the theory's been extensively studied, examined, and tested, and we haven't found any firm basis on which to disprove or refute it.
However, it has not been proved, nor can it ever be -- just like the Theory of Gravity, which though extensively tested and proven on Earth, is thought to be incompatible with some astronomical observations.
Conclusive proofs can only exist in the world of mathematics and logic.
You're indeed right that Apple RAM is expensive as @&$*@
However, I'll submit that Apple don't want you to load your computer to the brim with memory.... at least not just yet.
Apple have given their high-end machines the ability to support absurd quantities of RAM for quite some time now. My 450MHz G4 from 1999 could support 2GiB of RAM, despite the fact that the then-current Mac OS 9 could only address up to 1.5 GiB.
Now, I can't think of any desktop application in 1999 that you'd want that much RAM for. However, 10 years later, the machine has proven to be remarkably resilient, and is still in active use as a desktop machine (albeit running a more current operating system). I'm now extremely grateful that Apple put all those extra RAM slots on-board. Even Final Cut Pro runs fairly well for most basic editing tasks on SD video.
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With new booting software and Linux, your computer will now turn on faster than your cell phone.
To a full-fledged desktop linux?
I was under the impression that the true "instant-boot" linuxes were generally tiny distributions that could fit into EPROM (or whatnot).
I get the fact that it's nice to cut out many of the unnecessary functions performed by legacy BIOS, though that seems like a rather tough sell to consumers, especially given that EFI seems to do much of the same.
Although I'm sure there's room for speed improvements with BIOSes, booting the operating system still takes at least an order of magnitude more time.*
*BeOS is one exception to this generalization. Even back in its heyday, it booted up blindingly fast. However, I suppose you could argue about its qualification as a full-fledged OS.
Can you explain why I, as a consumer, should care about having an open-source BIOS?
Pragmatic responses only, please. The average consumer doesn't care about open-source ideologies.
I'd imagine that mil-spec ICs don't include those provisions.
The reason why Mac OS Classic was explicitly prohibited from operating in these sort of environments was that it was incredibly unstable. Any sort of application crash or freeze would cause a kernel panic.
See, See. UI is important!!!!
(Stares complacently at his Mac)
Ironically, the Mac OS EULA used to specifically prohibit you from running the software in a nuclear power facility, given that the operating system did not have proper protected memory facilities, making it inherently crash-prone.
I remember stumbling across that tiny clause in a users' manual one time, and chuckled to myself.
I believe that the clause was finally lifted with the release of OS X.
I'm well aware of that, thanks. My point is calling an institute whose main job is to decide who gets cancer drugs "NICE" is pretty bad marketing; it makes people suspicious and paranoid. Maybe it should be called the Klinical Kosts Komittee.
Cry me a river.
Presented with two individuals, but only enough resources to treat one patient, the committee gives the treatment to the patient more likely to survive.
This does suck if you're the one more likely to die, but sounds pretty fair to me.
(I'm also a little sick of the "ooooh! scary communism" bullshit. It's irrelevant, and detracts from reasoned debate. The USSR was a mismanaged and corrupt government; however, this does not necessarily mean that every action taken by that government was inherently evil. I have no qualms about driving a Volkswagen or drinking Fanta, despite the fact that both were created by Nazis)
A very profitable and corrupt situation has evolved where the FDA is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry, the editorial boards of medical journals are bought and paid for, and academic research often dependent on industry money.
Bullshit. I worked for a big pharma company for a while.
Those guys constantly lived in terror of the FDA. The FDA errs on the side of caution regarding most of their actions (as is the way that it should be!) An FDA decision can make or destroy a pharma corporation with the stroke of the pen.
In either event, the FDA is far too big of an organization to pay off, and would have quite a lot of trouble keeping such a scandal under wraps, given that they extensively document all of their trials and decisions. They're obsessively thorough (once again, as it should be!)
If you want to pick government agencies to complain about, the FDA should be near the bottom of your list.
What desktop applications significantly deteriorate as a result of high latency?
I suppose it'd be annoying for video conferencing and gaming, though it seems like it'd be adequately tolerable (ie. still way better than dial-up) for most web browsing.
Solaris already is open-source.
The problem is that it's released under a license that's more permissive than the GPL, making it incompatible with most GPL-licensed Linux code.
Sun didn't write VirtualBox (they acquired it and released under an open source license)
OpenOffice is a rather poor example, given that it really isn't all that good from a user's perspective.
On the other hand, things like ZFS, Lustre, and DTrace are all incredibly innovative, and available under fairly permissive open-source licenses. (If you haven't used it, ZFS's handling of volumes and filesystems is outright magical)
Absolutely! One of the things I find most fascinating is that the Queen's political leanings are almost completely unknown to the public.
Given the amount of media attention that the royal family receive, this is outright remarkable, considering that it is well-known that the Queen does take an active interest in the operation of her government (via her weekly meetings with the PM, etc)
....and said undergrad becomes extremely disillusioned with the current state of affairs in scientific research, and decides to go into a different field instead.
Tenured faculty do extremely little original research of their own, but are often paid 5 times in excess of what the graduate students are making.
Where's the justice in THAT?
RTFL.
It's very generous. Similar to the BSD license, which has been around for ages.
Better idea:
Organize a huge mob of people to visit the village "because it wasn't on Google, and wanted to know what it was like"
I'd rather have 3 burglaries than 3 murders.
I'd like to mirror virtually all of those comments as an American. The British are extremely fortunate to have her as head of state, even if her role is largely symbolic.
Members of the British royal family have historically (and still do) fulfill important civic and military duties for their country, with the most recent example of Prince Harry's service on the front lines in Afghanistan.
How many Senators' children do you see anonymously signing themselves up for the war?
The telco world is owned by monopolies with the government giving protectionist laws to the existing monopolies.
AT&T disagrees with you.
The price gouging I was referring to was more along the lines of the $0.20 per text message that most US providers charge.
Even with the limited capacity of cellular networks, it's blatant price-gouging.
My refutation lies in the assumption that you can always "lay more pipes" for terrestrial connections, while it's WAY more difficult to add capacity for wireless capacity, which is an inherently shared resource.
There are tricks that can be used to improve capacity, although none of them are particularly straightforward or inexpensive.
But, yeah. From the application layer, cell providers are indeed "dumb pipes." However, given the fact that bandwidth is a finite and scarce resource, it does make sense to bill based upon usage, even if that usage eventually gets measured in 'kilobytes' as opposed to 'minutes'
The "dumb pipes" analogy doesn't work terribly well.
In the case of terrestrial phone and data lines, capacity can be improved either by improving bandwidth along existing lines, or installing additional lines.
In the case of cellular, this isn't so easy. The amount of usable EM spectrum is finite, and most speed improvements using the already-allocated frequencies will either break compatibility with existing devices, or require a reallocation of the spectrum. Improvements are possible, though they're much more difficult to implement.
A WiFi access point with lots of clients connected tends to be quite slow, regardless of the speed of the WAN that it's connected to. Cell towers operate on that same principle.
To be fair, cellular bandwidth is fundamentally limited, and has been extremely costly to deploy. It's not particularly surprising that the carriers want to recoup their investment.
Although I'll gladly admit that there is price-gouging going on, if the carriers offer unlimited cheap bandwidth, their networks will be quickly overwhelmed. As it currently stands, the carriers can utilize a large percentage of their capacity by charging high rates; what incentive is there for them to lower prices?
As technology improves, and competing companies become more ambitious, we'll likely see prices slowly begin to fall. It's all a matter of economics.
If we want companies to become more ambitious, the government should take steps to prevent monopolies from forming, and ban the absurd contract schemes that the cellular companies force on their customers.
Easy solution there: use kernel version 2.6.29. No Tux!
Although the wording is a bit ambiguous "Proven itself" does not have the same definition or connotation as "proved" (as the case of a mathematical theorem) would.
The Theory of Evolution has been proven to be a good predictor of fossil remains, and the manner in which we can observe bacteria conform to their surroundings in a controlled experiment. In other words, the theory's been extensively studied, examined, and tested, and we haven't found any firm basis on which to disprove or refute it.
However, it has not been proved, nor can it ever be -- just like the Theory of Gravity, which though extensively tested and proven on Earth, is thought to be incompatible with some astronomical observations.
Conclusive proofs can only exist in the world of mathematics and logic.
ZFS *is* open-source, just not GPL.
You know He doesn't like to be called that....
You're indeed right that Apple RAM is expensive as @&$*@
However, I'll submit that Apple don't want you to load your computer to the brim with memory.... at least not just yet.
Apple have given their high-end machines the ability to support absurd quantities of RAM for quite some time now. My 450MHz G4 from 1999 could support 2GiB of RAM, despite the fact that the then-current Mac OS 9 could only address up to 1.5 GiB.
Now, I can't think of any desktop application in 1999 that you'd want that much RAM for. However, 10 years later, the machine has proven to be remarkably resilient, and is still in active use as a desktop machine (albeit running a more current operating system). I'm now extremely grateful that Apple put all those extra RAM slots on-board. Even Final Cut Pro runs fairly well for most basic editing tasks on SD video.