Didn't Sun announce earlier this year that they were dropping their Linux program?
Well yes, they aren't making "Sun Linux" any more. However it was just Red Hat under the covers. Now they just call it RedHat. Move along, nothing to see here. Coincidence?
I'm 34 and have been using keyboards since approximately 1983. Since leaving secondary education my hand muscles have been easily tired by writing with a pen. A 2000 word essay during my Engineering degree was torture, not because of the composition, but because of the manual effort of using a pen. Meanwhile many times that many words in FORTRAN were comfortably produced and submitted electronically for my final-year project, in 1989.
I've been telling people my handwriting is bad because it hurts to use a pen, since I'm used to typing, for more than 15 years.
We, my friend, had to input our code using dip switches, 1 byte at a time. And heaven forbid that you make a mistake near the end of the program, 'cause then we had to start all over.
You had dip switches? You were lucky! We had to... no, I just can't bear it any more.
very true, however the area I describe is 3 hours drive from New York City, not somewhere remote. No doubt Voicestream is only a few more transmitters away from serving us. I'm looking forward to not paying the local phone company a fortune just to pick up my email!
Agreed it looks bad on a map, given that it doesn't cover anything but a small % of the area. However you have to understand that there are large areas of the USA where there's no population and areas with not even roads running to them.
The coverage you see although it only covers a small percentage of the country, does cover most of the population and anywhere you're ever likely to go.
i find this just a little over optimistic. I own a house less than 10 miles from an interstate, and there is no GSM service at the house whatsoever. The house is within a town boundary ("incorporated land") and we are eligible for DSL. I can drive for miles around and still get no phone signal. When I head towards the nearest big city I come into range about 10-15 miles east of my house. Friends not on GSM get coverage at our kitchen table.
At that price, you could get a brand-new 650MHz SPARC workstation from a company called Sun Microsystems running an operating system called Solaris which is very Unix like. This CPU has 512kb on-chip 2nd-level
cache and decent floating-point (unlike XSCale).
The machine has serial, USB and Firewire ports, and 10/100 ethernet, not to mention ATA-100 disks, PCI,CD-ROM and a smart card reader, and it can be upgraded to 4GB RAM!!
Solaris still has a large and dedicated user-base, and Sun still supports it (see docs.sun.com).
Whilst the OS is loaded from hard disk, cdrom or network, you can get into a monitor very quick (about 10 seconds from power-on) by pressing "Stop-A" and here you have a full Forth interpreter if you wish to start programming very quick. This monitor is called "OpenBoot" and is stored in Flash ROM.
Once you have your machine, you can download thousands of free applications! The GNU stuff, for instance, almost always works on it.
These machines, and some even larger models are still in use, worldwide!
My only real issue with this topic is that there's virtually no competition (at
least in the NYC metro area)
Not strictly true. I have Speakeasy DSL through Verizon/Covad and it's 1.4Mb down/384Kb up with servers explicitly allowed (no ports blocked) and I live in Brooklyn. It's $90/month, which is higher than many people on this thread want to pay, but I pay it happily to have an ISP that really suits me and kick-ass bandwidth for a home-based webserver. I switched to them from Verizon DSL (was Bell Atlantic then I think) and the speakeasy/covad service is vastly superior.
Most of the warmth in the subways is caused by heat that has been absorbed by the roadbeds above radiating downward into the stations, to a lesser degree by the exhaust of the air
conditioning on subway cars, and to a still smaller degree by steam tunnels that border some of the tunnels and run in parallel conduits. Not by braking trains.
Well, that directly contradicts what I've read about it, so perhaps you'd like to cite your sources. Even just thinking about it a moment shows that the heat of the brakes must be significant. A huge amount of energy is used to accelerate these trains, and what brakes do is convert the momentum into heat. That heat is dissipated from the brakes into the air in the tunnels/stations.
A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a "desperate" labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job
applicants.
I find this totally unconvincing. I can imagine the following situation : company wishes to hire 100 people. Company interviews 100 people but 98 of them are unqualified for the jobs. Company is short by 98 people and thus experiences a labor shortage.
In fact, I think the 2% number backs up the claim. Why would a company interview 50 times as many people as it needed unless it was having a hard time finding the right skills. Seems to me if the required skills were abundant they would find more people with them in any sample size, so their hiring rate would go up...
Most desktops for financial applications already run Windows, therefore it's much easier to just use Exceed for X-based remote applications than convert to Linux.
I made no comment about cost or value, but I agree with you anyway.
I have Linux, Solaris and Windows NT, plus Exceed and VMware and I am aware of the plusses and minuses of each.
The original poster claimed it was easier to run X-based remote applications on Linux than on Windows. Actually, it's almost exactly as easy, it's just the cost structure that's different.
Linux does not win "hands-down" if there are other Windows-based applications the user also needs to run, which I find to be the case most of the time. Unfortunately.
My comments are based on the fact that the average desktop for financial apps is already Windows-based. Therefore using Exceed to display X-based apps is easier than getting in a unix box.
I have no comment on the value aspect so your point number 1) is irrelevant as much as I agree with it.
My "living grant" was from my Dad and was long gone before the end of the summer term, so I was living on 100 pounds/week total for 12 weeks. I'm not saying it was penury, but there wasn't much left over for beer (my downfall!).
The National Exhibition Centre ("NEC") in Birmingham, England had an inventory system running on Xenix in 1988. There were 5-10 terminals across the site, mostly Wyse VT terminals plus the console (VGA graphics).
I think the system was called "Impact" but I'm not sure. It had some problems in the UI with a large data set (all character-based graphics of course).
I got a job there as a student in my second year at University doing data entry. We would read an entry from a Kalamazoo paper based inventory book like "Rubber grommet, 1/16 cubit, 12.50/100, 12.5% discount, Acme Grommets" and convert it to a price each (yes, we had to throw away information) and enter it into the new system by hand.
I worked on the console of the server which was a 10MHz AT-clone which ran "like shit off a shovel" according to the vendor rep.
Every night I would back up the whole system to tape. I think it was a 250MB QIC cartridge, but I'm not sure. I know they had that distinctive metal plate on one side (a Travan NS20 is quite similar, but smaller, and 10GB).
In my lunch-hours I would read about strange things like "Bourne Shell" and "echo".
It was the first multi-user system I ever used so we all had fun looking at each others files.
I seem to remember making a directory called personal, which contained another called private, and in there a file called readme.txt, which contained only the words "aren't you nosy". Someone asked me about that within a week.
The Word processor was quite nice for the day and called "Lyrix". Unix systems in those days had real printed manuals which is good for beginners who don't know their way around. All the messages that Lyrix used could be overriden in a text file, so again we had a lot of fun with that.
I seem to remember I was being paid 100 pounds a week in total for a full-time job, and paying rent and running a car out of that. I lost quite a bit of weight that summer.
Just a couple of the critical apps we need. If I can't even coax an OS X version of Bloomberg out of them, how can I persuade them to do a Linux port (even though it'd be easy, since they do/did a Solaris version).
We definitely still support Solaris (see this). Linux support is technically feasible. There are many other issues involved, however.
[SNIP]
We need apps. Big ones. How do we get there?
In the case of Bloomberg, I would advise asking your sales rep for support for your platform of choice. Seriously.
It's true the website implies they're not available yet, however I have one since I wrote to Sean and asked nicely:)
I believe they have sold the hand-soldered batch and are now getting ready for the first contract manufactured batch. It's possible that will eventually drive the price down.
Anyway, there's no sign of poor quality in the hand-assembled version, in fact I think it was worth every penny. I now convert my music collection to MP3 at 192kb/s using bladeenc and play it back through my Linn Ninka speakers driven by my 10 year old Pioneer A400 and it sounds almost as good as cds, plus I have hundreds of albums available at the touch of a remote, but no PC-style background noise.
Apologies to people who read my previous comments on this topic, but when considering these devices, please also consider the "SliMP3" from Slim Devices.
Advantages include :
open-source cross-platform server (just a perl script).
high quality vacuum-fluorescent display (it's nice)
low-noise, low-power, low-heat-output hardware (no fan, no heatsink even!).
The obvious answer is Multics. Unix was a pun on Multics since it was originally a single-user OS in its earliest days. The original authors needed something less ambitious that could fit into the small computer they had to play with. Although the scale of unix systems eventually greatly exceeded any known Multics system, there is still some inherent architectural "heft" in Multics that Unix never had (never needed?). It's almost pure theology now, but you did ask. More info at Multicians.org I believe.
Re:Carpel tunnel syndrome strikes
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Move cursor right is the right arrow on the inverted T arrow keys.
Richard Stallman may have carpal tunnel syndrome, but it's not because emacs is inefficient, it's because he worked too hard for too long on the GNU project.
...when is the NeXT Cube port of OS X coming out? Ok, so a 25MHz 68040 isn't going to set the world on fire, but my cube has the NeXT Dimension graphics card. In its day this was a powerful beast and has an Intel i960 accelerator.
I bet Steve Jobs would secretly love such a release. Hey, I'd even get enough RAM for it (mine can go to 128MB I believe).
Slashdot Mirror
Well yes, they aren't making "Sun Linux" any more. However it was just Red Hat under the covers. Now they just call it RedHat. Move along, nothing to see here.
Coincidence?
yes
I'm 34 and have been using keyboards since approximately 1983. Since leaving secondary education my hand muscles have been easily tired by writing with a pen. A 2000 word essay during my Engineering degree was torture, not because of the composition, but because of the manual effort of using a pen. Meanwhile many times that many words in FORTRAN were comfortably produced and submitted electronically for my final-year project, in 1989.
I've been telling people my handwriting is bad because it hurts to use a pen, since I'm used to typing, for more than 15 years.
This is OLD news.
Chris
You had bits?
We, my friend, had to input our code using dip switches, 1 byte at a time. And heaven forbid that you make a mistake near the end of the program, 'cause then we had to start all over.
You had dip switches? You were lucky! We had to ... no, I just can't bear it any more.
very true, however the area I describe is 3 hours drive from New York City, not somewhere remote. No doubt Voicestream is only a few more transmitters away from serving us. I'm looking forward to not paying the local phone company a fortune just to pick up my email!
Agreed it looks bad on a map, given that it doesn't cover anything but a small % of the area. However you have to understand that there are large areas of the USA where there's no population and areas with not even roads running to them.
The coverage you see although it only covers a small percentage of the country, does cover most of the population and anywhere you're ever likely to go.
i find this just a little over optimistic. I own a house less than 10 miles from an interstate, and there is no GSM service at the house whatsoever. The house is within a town boundary ("incorporated land") and we are eligible for DSL. I can drive for miles around and still get no phone signal. When I head towards the nearest big city I come into range about 10-15 miles east of my house. Friends not on GSM get coverage at our kitchen table.
At that price, you could get a brand-new 650MHz SPARC workstation from a company called Sun Microsystems running an operating system called Solaris which is very Unix like. This CPU has 512kb on-chip 2nd-level cache and decent floating-point (unlike XSCale).
The machine has serial, USB and Firewire ports, and 10/100 ethernet, not to mention ATA-100 disks, PCI,CD-ROM and a smart card reader, and it can be upgraded to 4GB RAM!!
Solaris still has a large and dedicated user-base, and Sun still supports it (see docs.sun.com).
Whilst the OS is loaded from hard disk, cdrom or network, you can get into a monitor very quick (about 10 seconds from power-on) by pressing "Stop-A" and here you have a full Forth interpreter if you wish to start programming very quick. This monitor is called "OpenBoot" and is stored in Flash ROM.
Once you have your machine, you can download thousands of free applications! The GNU stuff, for instance, almost always works on it.
These machines, and some even larger models are still in use, worldwide!
You Want Zinf
Not strictly true. I have Speakeasy DSL through Verizon/Covad and it's 1.4Mb down/384Kb up with servers explicitly allowed (no ports blocked) and I live in Brooklyn. It's $90/month, which is higher than many people on this thread want to pay, but I pay it happily to have an ISP that really suits me and kick-ass bandwidth for a home-based webserver. I switched to them from Verizon DSL (was Bell Atlantic then I think) and the speakeasy/covad service is vastly superior.
Well, that directly contradicts what I've read about it, so perhaps you'd like to cite your sources. Even just thinking about it a moment shows that the heat of the brakes must be significant. A huge amount of energy is used to accelerate these trains, and what brakes do is convert the momentum into heat. That heat is dissipated from the brakes into the air in the tunnels/stations.
A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a "desperate" labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants.
I find this totally unconvincing. I can imagine the following situation : company wishes to hire 100 people. Company interviews 100 people but 98 of them are unqualified for the jobs. Company is short by 98 people and thus experiences a labor shortage.
In fact, I think the 2% number backs up the claim. Why would a company interview 50 times as many people as it needed unless it was having a hard time finding the right skills. Seems to me if the required skills were abundant they would find more people with them in any sample size, so their hiring rate would go up...
Most desktops for financial applications already run Windows, therefore it's much easier to just use Exceed for X-based remote applications than convert to Linux.
I made no comment about cost or value, but I agree with you anyway.
I have Linux, Solaris and Windows NT, plus Exceed and VMware and I am aware of the plusses and minuses of each.
The original poster claimed it was easier to run X-based remote applications on Linux than on Windows. Actually, it's almost exactly as easy, it's just the cost structure that's different.
Linux does not win "hands-down" if there are other Windows-based applications the user also needs to run, which I find to be the case most of the time. Unfortunately.
My comments are based on the fact that the average desktop for financial apps is already Windows-based. Therefore using Exceed to display X-based apps is easier than getting in a unix box.
I have no comment on the value aspect so your point number 1) is irrelevant as much as I agree with it.
Uh-huh
Its a hell of lot easier to display those remote windows to UNIX platforms than M$ platform
Bzzzt! Exceed
Next!
My "living grant" was from my Dad and was long gone before the end of the summer term, so I was living on 100 pounds/week total for 12 weeks. I'm not saying it was penury, but there wasn't much left over for beer (my downfall!).
The National Exhibition Centre ("NEC") in Birmingham, England had an inventory system running on Xenix in 1988. There were 5-10 terminals across the site, mostly Wyse VT terminals plus the console (VGA graphics).
I think the system was called "Impact" but I'm not sure. It had some problems in the UI with a large data set (all character-based graphics of course).
I got a job there as a student in my second year at University doing data entry. We would read an entry from a Kalamazoo paper based inventory book like "Rubber grommet, 1/16 cubit, 12.50/100, 12.5% discount, Acme Grommets" and convert it to a price each (yes, we had to throw away information) and enter it into the new system by hand.
I worked on the console of the server which was a 10MHz AT-clone which ran "like shit off a shovel" according to the vendor rep.
Every night I would back up the whole system to tape. I think it was a 250MB QIC cartridge, but I'm not sure. I know they had that distinctive metal plate on one side (a Travan NS20 is quite similar, but smaller, and 10GB).
In my lunch-hours I would read about strange things like "Bourne Shell" and "echo".
It was the first multi-user system I ever used so we all had fun looking at each others files.
I seem to remember making a directory called personal, which contained another called private, and in there a file called readme.txt, which contained only the words "aren't you nosy". Someone asked me about that within a week.
The Word processor was quite nice for the day and called "Lyrix". Unix systems in those days had real printed manuals which is good for beginners who don't know their way around. All the messages that Lyrix used could be overriden in a text file, so again we had a lot of fun with that.
I seem to remember I was being paid 100 pounds a week in total for a full-time job, and paying rent and running a car out of that. I lost quite a bit of weight that summer.
I work for Bloomberg, on the client software.
Here's two: Office and the Bloomberg service...
*Blush*
Just a couple of the critical apps we need. If I can't even coax an OS X version of Bloomberg out of them, how can I persuade them to do a Linux port (even though it'd be easy, since they do/did a Solaris version).
We definitely still support Solaris (see this). Linux support is technically feasible. There are many other issues involved, however.
[SNIP]
We need apps. Big ones. How do we get there?
In the case of Bloomberg, I would advise asking your sales rep for support for your platform of choice. Seriously.
Chris
Well, you could have bought a linux copy of the game if it was that important to you!
Chris
-completed quake2 under slackware
It's true the website implies they're not available yet, however I have one since I wrote to Sean and asked nicely :)
I believe they have sold the hand-soldered batch and are now getting ready for the first contract manufactured batch. It's possible that will eventually drive the price down.
Anyway, there's no sign of poor quality in the hand-assembled version, in fact I think it was worth every penny. I now convert my music collection to MP3 at 192kb/s using bladeenc and play it back through my Linn Ninka speakers driven by my 10 year old Pioneer A400 and it sounds almost as good as cds, plus I have hundreds of albums available at the touch of a remote, but no PC-style background noise.
Cheers,
Chris Morgan
Apologies to people who read my previous comments on this topic, but when considering these devices, please also consider the "SliMP3" from Slim Devices.
Advantages include :
The obvious answer is Multics. Unix was a pun on Multics since it was originally a single-user OS in its earliest days. The original authors needed something less ambitious that could fit into the small computer they had to play with. Although the scale of unix systems eventually greatly exceeded any known Multics system, there is still some inherent architectural "heft" in Multics that Unix never had (never needed?). It's almost pure theology now, but you did ask. More info at Multicians.org I believe.
Move cursor right is the right arrow on the inverted T arrow keys.
Richard Stallman may have carpal tunnel syndrome, but it's not because emacs is inefficient, it's because he worked too hard for too long on the GNU project.
Aluminium was the officially accepted spelling here in the US too, until 1925, see the
Los Alamos National Laboratory Periodic Table entry for Element 13
This sounds like the kind of thing Mike Paquette would do, but only distribute internally at Apple.
Please send him my sincere best wishes and encouragement... :)
...when is the NeXT Cube port of OS X coming out? Ok, so a 25MHz 68040 isn't going to set the world on fire, but my cube has the NeXT Dimension graphics card. In its day this was a powerful beast and has an Intel i960 accelerator.
I bet Steve Jobs would secretly love such a release. Hey, I'd even get enough RAM for it (mine can go to 128MB I believe).
Chris Morgan