a GUI is useful on a server for a number of reasons. To name three:
It's better to monitor performance by watching graphs than by waiting for error messages. Graphs show trends, which error messages never do.
In a GUI, you can have multiple control panels open at once. A command line forces you to work one at a time.
GUIs are more impressive and "boss friendly." Don't underestimate the importance of this one; anyone who doesn't think it's important has never had to fight for a budget.
I can do all of these with my servers, none of which have a GUI (or a monitor, for that matter). What they do have is X libraries, that let me display to any X server on my network. As for being boss friendly... do you really take your boss down to the machine room to show them a GUI? I'd say it's far friendlier to show them the same information on my personal workstation. Or even at my boss' own workstation without them having to leave their desk.
But then I'm a contractor, and that's what it says in my contract. Overtime has to be agreed in writing in advance. When I submit my timesheets, they have to be for 40 hours.
That said, when I was working in a permanent position, I was working closer to 60 hours a week. I guess that as a contractor, I just have no loyalty to anyone but myself. Or maybe I've just seen the light, and don't feel the need to work for nothing any more. Perhaps it comes with age. I doubt that I'd return to working 60 hours a week even if I did go back to a permanent job.
this could be a StrongArm machine. Chances are, though, that it's another Hitachi brain
Yep. PIII/Athlon are too big, too expensive, and do too much. A games console doesn't need one. What it needs is a good media processing chip. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest they may be using a Nuon. It has all the attributes needed for a good games console, and in particular, should be priced very cheaply.
Microsoft has the money to deploy these at a fair loss, and still make it back from licensing fees
That's the one thing they'll never do. For all his faults, Bill Gates knows that having unhindered development is the road to success. He's argued the point on many occasions, and from what I've heard, they plan to do the same for the X-Box. They'll just release the box, and a development kit and let anyone develop for it. No official submission, no licensing fees. Just find yourself a publisher and/or distribution deal and away you go. That is what's going to kill Sega, Sony and Nintendo, not the technical superiority of the box (in fact, they don't even need to be technically superior).
What happens when something goes wrong? I'm not about to tell my grandmother over the phone how to use vi to edit her/etc/passwd to fix something.
But what happens when something goes wrong with Windows? You're prepared to talk her through fixing a corrupt registry with regedit? Didn't think so...
Other than that, I agree with pretty much everything else you said!
A very good word processing program (I maintain anything with "reveal codes" has to be superior to Word).
Actually, despite sucking for many, many years, Microsoft seems to have got their act together, and the latest version of Word is actually pretty good. That's not to say it's perfect, but overall I prefer it to WordPerfect. Much of that, though, is simply due to the interface. Easy access to styles makes for a less stressful word processing experience.
Where WordPerfect really comes into its own (apart from the fact that I can run it under Linux:-) is foreign language support. I *can't* do my family tree in Word because it won't let me insert Polish accented characters. WordPerfect under Linux does let me do so. Whether that's an issue with Windows or Word, I don't know, but to a certain extent I don't care. WP lets me do it, so that's what I use.
I went out and bought a DVD-RAM drive, mostly on the basis of Panasonic's previous history with writable optical media (I've been using their rewritable optical drives for 6 or 7 years without problems). It was also partly out of ignorance -- I wasn't aware of DVD+RW or any other writable DVD standard at the time. The question is, did I make the right choice? Which do people think is more likely to prevail. I would have said DVD-RAM, but recently DVD+RW seems to be getting a lot more press. Does anyone know any technical reasons to go for one format over another?
1) Win2k is buggy 2) Win2k is unstable 4) Win2k is bloated
I admire this prescient ability to review Win2k without even possessing a trial copy.
What amazing assumptions you make. The above three are all true, based on the Win2k version we have running in the office here. Yes, it's a beta, so you can excuse some bugs, but only so many. It's also slooooooow. My P166 running 95 is noticably faster than the PIII/550 we have running Win2k. It has some nice eye-candy (e.g., the fading menus), but I'd rather they'd spent more time making it run at a sensible speed.
What ISPs should I look at? What size area do ISPs cover in the country?
The UK is full of free national ISPs. They typically offer free web space, web or IMAP/POP3 based email and a national dialup number charged at local rates. I'd recommend one to which you can subscribe before you leave, such as Freedom 2 Surf, who I've been using for many years now. They run a lot on Linux and are generally Unix friendly.
Do hotels have phone jacks?
Some do. You may find a lot of digital exchanges, though, where you'll probably be out of luck. Also, bear in mnd that local calls in the UK are not free, and the hotel will add their own extortionate overhead on top of that. Be sure to check the prices in advance.
Can I get one that will work in France as well?
Compuserve. My sister spends half the year in France and half in the UK, and Compuserve is the only one we could find that gives local call access in both countries. Many ISPs are part of the iPass global roaming scheme which allows local call access from most places around the world. However, the cost of access from outside of the ISPs native country makes it prohibitively expensive for any serious work.
Sony takes a loss on every console it sells. A rather substantial one at that.
Myth. Sony made a loss on the PSX when it was first released. As volumes picked up, manufacturing costs dropped, and they started making a profit. PSX hardware hasn't been sold at a loss for some time now, AFAIK.
What we're concerned with is the fact that you want us to run precompiled code.
Not only that, but some of us can't run it even if we wanted to (and without source, I wouldn't want to anyway). Where's my Linux/Sparc executable? What about one for my DGUX/m88k machine? The internet is not just Linux/x86 and Solaris.
From what I read of the specs on IPv6, all the data needed to track a packet from destination right down to the MAC address is included in the packet.
I'm no IPv6 expert, but as I understand it, space is reserved for this information in an IPv6 packet, but it's not mandatory to fill it, it's only recommended. Maybe someone who knows more about IPv6 can confirm this?
If Victor doesn't sue them for patent infringement, does that open the doors for a Microsoft or a Sun to come in and use it 'illegally' without paying a license?
No. You don't have to defend a patent in the same way that you have to defend a trademark.
let go of everything bitmap, and implement the GUI in vector and True Type Fonts.
True Type tends to have better hinting for low resolution devices like a CRT screen, while Type1 gives better output on high resolution devices such as printers. With these high resolution LCD screens, Type1 may be a better choice.
Also, remember that while scrollbars, entry boxes and the like can already be any size you want them, on a high-res display, the 3D effects will get lost as they'll be too small to see, for example. Converting these to vectors will help. But bear in mind that not everything is suitable for conversion to vectors. Many enlightenment and gtk themes, for example, would be all but impossible to make into vectors.
I suspect what we'll end up with is a halfway house where theme designers will have to make multiple versions for various resolutions, much like we have 75 and 100dpi bitmaps fonts now.
Old sci-fi is a cinch for book finder services as well. And if you've got the time and money I'd suggest cruising estate sales and auctions.
Fortunately, I already have a near complete collection of most of my favourite authors. It just depresses me that readers new to SF won't be able to go to a bookshop and buy what I consider essential reading for any SF fan...
Motif is bug-ridden, poorly architected, and breaks the object abstraction model left and right.
Perhaps so, but by far the biggest problem with Motif is that it's not abstracted enough. It's not possible to write a pure Motif program -- you need to resort to using Xt and Xlib as well. A quick check of my O'Reilly X11 books reveals that's over 2500 pages of documentation to get through.
Both Gtk+ and Qt are suitably abstracted, and you don't need to learn anything else in order to use them. That's why they're going to take over from Motif. Even if neither is yet as complete as Motif, both provide the functionality needed by 99.9% of developers, which at the end of the day is more than enough!
Disclaimer: thankfully, I haven't had to write anything in Motif for many, many years now, and my memory's flaky as hell, so what I've said could be completely wrong:-)
Why is everybody going on about Slan so much? I'm a big Van Vogt fan, but for me, by far his best work was "The Weapon Shops of Isher" and "The Weapon Makers", with the mutant mage series being pretty good too.
What is it that people see in Slan over and above his other work? Or is it just that it's among the easier of his books to find, so more people have read it?
As a side note, I find it incredibly depressing how hard it's becoming to buy classic science fiction. Here in the UK, at least, it's rare to find more than 6 or 7 books by the major names (Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein), and others like Van Vogt and John Windham are almost non-existent. Even worse, I'm talking about specialist SF bookshops like New Worlds and Forbidden Planet here. In "normal" bookshops the situation is even more dire. Surely these books have the same appeal now that they always did? Or am I just showing my age?
Yes, I know it has. I already have the Windows version. I'm just waiting for the full version to be released on Linux. BTW, here in the UK, EB don't tend to sell stuff at a discount (apart from second hand console games).
The Heroes of Might and Magic series has been great, and I'm eagerly awaiting HMM3 for Linux. However, at 93MB for the demo, I'll have to give it a miss, and just wait for the full game. Even with my ISDN, it's just too big to be practical. Until BT get off their fscking backsides and sort out ASDL, those of us in the UK are stuck with comparatively slow net access:-(
The article talks about the chip dynamically adjusting its clock speed to minimize power usage. While this is done in existing laptops, it only tends to be triggered by specific events (being connected/disconnected from mains power, battery level reaching certain thresholds etc). The article seems to imply Crusoe will adjust its speed dynamically at any time.
I'm curious to know how OSes will handle this. For example, we've already had a thread on the linux-kernel list about timing loops being thrown off by this for existing laptops (because the bogomips on which they're based are calculated at boot time). What was the outcome of that thread? Was a solution reached? Will it apply for Crusoe too?
I wonder how much that was influenced by Acronsfot? For non-UK readers, Acronsfot was a nickname for Acornsoft, the software division of Acorn Computers. It turns up in all sorts of unexpected places (try disassembling their Arcadians game, for example), and was quite popular throughout the BBC micro scene in the early '80s.
Interesting. I've never played it, but a friend with a Mac has been raving about it for years. It can only be a good thing, particularly releasing it under GPL rather than "XYZ Corp's open source license of the week". I wonder why they only released the second one, though?
OK, so it's only just been relaunched, and we can hope that it'll get better over time. However, there's only one job in London, and while I could do it standing on my head, I'm not interested in a permanent job at the moment. It would be great to have a range of jobs to choose from.
FWIW, if anyone has any contract Unix work (whether coding, admin or anything else) in/around London, let me know! The time off has been nice, but it's time to look for another contract...
BSDI had a fix on day one or two of the F00F bug announcements. Sources reported that the BSDI fix was reverse-engineered to make a Linux fix. Days later, BSDI came up with improvements to their fix (first enabling it only on Pentium chips, later improving performance even on those systems affected).
BSDI made their fix first because they had information about the bug direct from Intel (under NDA, before the bug was announced to the general public). They were forced by Intel to remove the fix they posted almost immediately because it violated the NDA. The Linux fix, IIRC, was not reverse engineered from the BSDI fix, but was a separate effort that worked in a slightly different way, without the help of Intel's additional info. As I understand it, BSDI's fix was later reengineered to behave in the same way as the Linux fix.
PS. I'm not knocking BSDI here, who I think make a great product. I'm merely correcting misinformation (at least, I think I am -- my memory's not great, and I'm too lazy to search the Linux kernel archives to find out for sure:-)
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- It's better to monitor performance by watching graphs than by waiting for error messages. Graphs show trends, which error messages never do.
- In a GUI, you can have multiple control panels open at once. A command line forces you to work one at a time.
- GUIs are more impressive and "boss friendly." Don't underestimate the importance of this one; anyone who doesn't think it's important has never had to fight for a budget.
I can do all of these with my servers, none of which have a GUI (or a monitor, for that matter). What they do have is X libraries, that let me display to any X server on my network. As for being boss friendly... do you really take your boss down to the machine room to show them a GUI? I'd say it's far friendlier to show them the same information on my personal workstation. Or even at my boss' own workstation without them having to leave their desk.That said, when I was working in a permanent position, I was working closer to 60 hours a week. I guess that as a contractor, I just have no loyalty to anyone but myself. Or maybe I've just seen the light, and don't feel the need to work for nothing any more. Perhaps it comes with age. I doubt that I'd return to working 60 hours a week even if I did go back to a permanent job.
Yep. PIII/Athlon are too big, too expensive, and do too much. A games console doesn't need one. What it needs is a good media processing chip. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest they may be using a Nuon. It has all the attributes needed for a good games console, and in particular, should be priced very cheaply.
That's the one thing they'll never do. For all his faults, Bill Gates knows that having unhindered development is the road to success. He's argued the point on many occasions, and from what I've heard, they plan to do the same for the X-Box. They'll just release the box, and a development kit and let anyone develop for it. No official submission, no licensing fees. Just find yourself a publisher and/or distribution deal and away you go. That is what's going to kill Sega, Sony and Nintendo, not the technical superiority of the box (in fact, they don't even need to be technically superior).
But what happens when something goes wrong with Windows? You're prepared to talk her through fixing a corrupt registry with regedit? Didn't think so...
Other than that, I agree with pretty much everything else you said!
Yes, but isn't Holland an English name anyway? Does anyone in Holland actually call it Holland, or do they call it Nederland?
Actually, despite sucking for many, many years, Microsoft seems to have got their act together, and the latest version of Word is actually pretty good. That's not to say it's perfect, but overall I prefer it to WordPerfect. Much of that, though, is simply due to the interface. Easy access to styles makes for a less stressful word processing experience.
Where WordPerfect really comes into its own (apart from the fact that I can run it under Linux :-) is foreign language support. I *can't* do my family tree in Word because it won't let me insert Polish accented characters. WordPerfect under Linux does let me do so. Whether that's an issue with Windows or Word, I don't know, but to a certain extent I don't care. WP lets me do it, so that's what I use.
I went out and bought a DVD-RAM drive, mostly on the basis of Panasonic's previous history with writable optical media (I've been using their rewritable optical drives for 6 or 7 years without problems). It was also partly out of ignorance -- I wasn't aware of DVD+RW or any other writable DVD standard at the time. The question is, did I make the right choice? Which do people think is more likely to prevail. I would have said DVD-RAM, but recently DVD+RW seems to be getting a lot more press. Does anyone know any technical reasons to go for one format over another?
2) Win2k is unstable
4) Win2k is bloated
I admire this prescient ability to review Win2k without even possessing a trial copy.
What amazing assumptions you make. The above three are all true, based on the Win2k version we have running in the office here. Yes, it's a beta, so you can excuse some bugs, but only so many. It's also slooooooow. My P166 running 95 is noticably faster than the PIII/550 we have running Win2k. It has some nice eye-candy (e.g., the fading menus), but I'd rather they'd spent more time making it run at a sensible speed.
The UK is full of free national ISPs. They typically offer free web space, web or IMAP/POP3 based email and a national dialup number charged at local rates. I'd recommend one to which you can subscribe before you leave, such as Freedom 2 Surf, who I've been using for many years now. They run a lot on Linux and are generally Unix friendly.
Do hotels have phone jacks?
Some do. You may find a lot of digital exchanges, though, where you'll probably be out of luck. Also, bear in mnd that local calls in the UK are not free, and the hotel will add their own extortionate overhead on top of that. Be sure to check the prices in advance.
Can I get one that will work in France as well?
Compuserve. My sister spends half the year in France and half in the UK, and Compuserve is the only one we could find that gives local call access in both countries. Many ISPs are part of the iPass global roaming scheme which allows local call access from most places around the world. However, the cost of access from outside of the ISPs native country makes it prohibitively expensive for any serious work.
Myth. Sony made a loss on the PSX when it was first released. As volumes picked up, manufacturing costs dropped, and they started making a profit. PSX hardware hasn't been sold at a loss for some time now, AFAIK.
Not only that, but some of us can't run it even if we wanted to (and without source, I wouldn't want to anyway). Where's my Linux/Sparc executable? What about one for my DGUX/m88k machine? The internet is not just Linux/x86 and Solaris.
I'm no IPv6 expert, but as I understand it, space is reserved for this information in an IPv6 packet, but it's not mandatory to fill it, it's only recommended. Maybe someone who knows more about IPv6 can confirm this?
No. You don't have to defend a patent in the same way that you have to defend a trademark.
True Type tends to have better hinting for low resolution devices like a CRT screen, while Type1 gives better output on high resolution devices such as printers. With these high resolution LCD screens, Type1 may be a better choice.
Also, remember that while scrollbars, entry boxes and the like can already be any size you want them, on a high-res display, the 3D effects will get lost as they'll be too small to see, for example. Converting these to vectors will help. But bear in mind that not everything is suitable for conversion to vectors. Many enlightenment and gtk themes, for example, would be all but impossible to make into vectors.
I suspect what we'll end up with is a halfway house where theme designers will have to make multiple versions for various resolutions, much like we have 75 and 100dpi bitmaps fonts now.
Fortunately, I already have a near complete collection of most of my favourite authors. It just depresses me that readers new to SF won't be able to go to a bookshop and buy what I consider essential reading for any SF fan...
Perhaps so, but by far the biggest problem with Motif is that it's not abstracted enough. It's not possible to write a pure Motif program -- you need to resort to using Xt and Xlib as well. A quick check of my O'Reilly X11 books reveals that's over 2500 pages of documentation to get through.
Both Gtk+ and Qt are suitably abstracted, and you don't need to learn anything else in order to use them. That's why they're going to take over from Motif. Even if neither is yet as complete as Motif, both provide the functionality needed by 99.9% of developers, which at the end of the day is more than enough!
Disclaimer: thankfully, I haven't had to write anything in Motif for many, many years now, and my memory's flaky as hell, so what I've said could be completely wrong :-)
What is it that people see in Slan over and above his other work? Or is it just that it's among the easier of his books to find, so more people have read it?
As a side note, I find it incredibly depressing how hard it's becoming to buy classic science fiction. Here in the UK, at least, it's rare to find more than 6 or 7 books by the major names (Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein), and others like Van Vogt and John Windham are almost non-existent. Even worse, I'm talking about specialist SF bookshops like New Worlds and Forbidden Planet here. In "normal" bookshops the situation is even more dire. Surely these books have the same appeal now that they always did? Or am I just showing my age?
Yes, I know it has. I already have the Windows version. I'm just waiting for the full version to be released on Linux. BTW, here in the UK, EB don't tend to sell stuff at a discount (apart from second hand console games).
The Heroes of Might and Magic series has been great, and I'm eagerly awaiting HMM3 for Linux. However, at 93MB for the demo, I'll have to give it a miss, and just wait for the full game. Even with my ISDN, it's just too big to be practical. Until BT get off their fscking backsides and sort out ASDL, those of us in the UK are stuck with comparatively slow net access :-(
I'm curious to know how OSes will handle this. For example, we've already had a thread on the linux-kernel list about timing loops being thrown off by this for existing laptops (because the bogomips on which they're based are calculated at boot time). What was the outcome of that thread? Was a solution reached? Will it apply for Crusoe too?
I wonder how much that was influenced by Acronsfot? For non-UK readers, Acronsfot was a nickname for Acornsoft, the software division of Acorn Computers. It turns up in all sorts of unexpected places (try disassembling their Arcadians game, for example), and was quite popular throughout the BBC micro scene in the early '80s.
Interesting. I've never played it, but a friend with a Mac has been raving about it for years. It can only be a good thing, particularly releasing it under GPL rather than "XYZ Corp's open source license of the week". I wonder why they only released the second one, though?
FWIW, if anyone has any contract Unix work (whether coding, admin or anything else) in/around London, let me know! The time off has been nice, but it's time to look for another contract...
BSDI made their fix first because they had information about the bug direct from Intel (under NDA, before the bug was announced to the general public). They were forced by Intel to remove the fix they posted almost immediately because it violated the NDA. The Linux fix, IIRC, was not reverse engineered from the BSDI fix, but was a separate effort that worked in a slightly different way, without the help of Intel's additional info. As I understand it, BSDI's fix was later reengineered to behave in the same way as the Linux fix.
PS. I'm not knocking BSDI here, who I think make a great product. I'm merely correcting misinformation (at least, I think I am -- my memory's not great, and I'm too lazy to search the Linux kernel archives to find out for sure :-)