I have never, ever installed Solaris on any machine before now. Just a while back, I popped in Solaris 10 on an old UltraSPARC box I have kicking around.
Let me tell you, it was a pretty easy and painless install (and I am definitely _not_ a *NIX guru).
I've been actually _using_ it for a while (alongside my other boxen, a PIII-800 WinXP machine and a dual PIII-800 Linux machine). Configuration of user stuff was relatively straightforward (as far as UNIX goes), no real problems that you mentioned.
The JDE... basically GNOME (right?), tells me that the GNOME guys are farting around. The JDE interface and menusare _very nicely_ cleaned up. Consistent menus, and stuff put in reasonable places (i.e. config and preferences aren't littered all over the menus!)
User experience wise, the UltraSPARC (400MHz CPU) is more responsive than my dual-800MHz Linux! (Also GNOME desktop). Java seems to be used for most of the GUI configuration tools (much like what OS/2 did years back).
Overall, it's a big step forward for Solaris I think, and almost useable desktop workstation (depending on what you use it for).
I'd have to say, if I had to use *NIX and I'd a choice to download Linux for free or pay $100 for Solaris 10 out of my own pocket... tough choice, but I might just edge over to Solaris.
You forget, for the cost of 1 researcher in USA, you can get about 10 of them in India or China... It doesn't matter if USA spends more, it'll never catch up.
It doesn't really help that virtually all the grad students are from overseas too. Since USA doesn't let them stay really, guess where they're all heading?
USA is like China several hundred years ago. It's losing the lead but is too blind to see it.
Who cares how "cool" the rendering is? Who cares how awesome the effects are?
It all means almost zero if the interface SUCKS. The prettiest X-Window window manager is still bloody X-Window. Even KDE and GNOME are not quite up to snuff when compared to the likes of WinXP, OS X or even OS/2 in terms of useability for _non-hackers_.
Always chasing the wrong problem. Right in front of me right now I've got a WinXP box, an OS/2 Thinkpad T40p, a dual-CPU RedHat box, a SPARC with Solaris 10. Already the Sun guys have done quite a bit of tweaking to make their Java Desktop Environment (GNOME really) much better than the default GNOME. On either case, the GNOME desktop sucks ass when compared to WinXP or OS/2's WPS even though, as in the case of WPS, it is on the ugly side. GNOME or X-Windows is like that bimbo with nothing behind that pretty face.
I'll vouch for that. I'm a US Citizen. When I drove across the border from Canada to USA, it turns out my wife did not have proper paperwork.
(This is really screwy. Before marrying me, she's freely allowed to enter USA for almost as long as she wants, whenever she wants. Afterwards, no such luck).
So what do you think should happen? Any reasonable person would get turned around, refused entry and that's was that. We even told them "Look, if we don't have the proper paperwork, we'll come back when we do."
Instead, they detained us for over 2 hours and searched my car and messed everything up. They were _very_ rude and exceedingly hostile. Yes, that is how America treats its own citizens and citizens of a friendly nation. I can imagine if I got lippy with them (even though no laws are broken) they would be even more trouble. They even threatened to throw me in an isolated room. (FYI, I'm not of middle-eastern descent!)
When I went to Washington DC _before_ 9/11, every public building had metal detectors and bag searches. When I queued up for the Whitehouse, I was told that not to even put my hands on the fence outside, else the Secret Service would come. Yes, they assume their own citizens will do something nasty.
When I went to the social security office (not to collect money, to get my SSN), it was 1 person entry at a time, no cameras, metal detectors, bag searches. The one granny ahead of me had a cane (she was Caucasion, not visible minority), they made her give up her cane, take off her shoes and belts and had her hobble through.
Look at all the flack the Dixie Chicks got into for criticizing Bush. I dunno how they're doing now, but I'll bet if they wanted to, they could have totally ruined their careers. You call that freedom of speech?
Unlike the good ol' USA? Who is hostile to just about everyone, including its own citizens?
I went to DC _before_ 9/11, every single bloody federal building had metal detectors and bag searches before we could get in. They automatically _assume_ everyone is against them.
I'm a f**king US citizen (by birth, not by choice), and I do not feel safe with with the Feds. I recently went to the social security building. The procedure? 1 person through the door at a time, metal detector, search and all. There's an old granny with a cane (not visible minority) ahead of me. They took her cane and made her take off her shoes and belts before making her hobble through the metal detector.
I'd be more worried about the US Government than the Chinese government. At least in China, they're nominally a dictatorship, but the average citizen gets left alone (if you guys know anyone there, you'll know the situation is way over-blown). Unless you do mass protests in public, you'll get no trouble.
In America, geeze, the average citizen should worry about getting unfair treatment from the gov., the cops, anybody in the "estabilishment", especially if you're the wrong colour. The worst I've done is speeding tickets (and that's not even in America), and everytime I cross the border, they're not friendly at all.
Is America free? Shit no! Didn't those protestors get prevented from getting X feet away from the Republican/Democratic conventions? "You can only protest under our rules" -- what kind of country does that sound like to you?
The safest, free-est country in the world is not USA. In a free country, you can do what you want, you don't have to lock the doors, you don't have to worry about somebody wanting to beat the shit out of you.
First, the article uses makes stupid use of Flash.
Secondly, as I read the article, there was that silly stuff about the "depth of field".
Utter bullshit. Your eyes are subject to physics just as the camera lens is. Secondly, the depth of field depends on the aperture size of your lense. For the digital SLR, this is interchangeable.
This throws the whole article in doubt. It is utter crap.
All my friends who came from Tawain, HongKong or other parts of Asia so totally kicked ass in Grade 11, Grade 12 and even 1st or 2nd year of university.
Mostly because they had all done it before and they had really good study skills and habits. Come the final years, it was no longer all rosy because something like what you said. When you start from almost ground zero, we're all human and anyone who's gotten that far has pretty much the same capacity for learning.
The problem with US (and North American in general) education system is that it is WAAAY too easy on the kids. Kids are smart, they'll learn if pushed, but nobody here pushes them.
I developed incredibly bad study habits (technically, I started school in HK, but I've been here long enough to know the school system elementary on up) because I was reasonably bright, so I got almost straight A's without doing anything because everything was too damned easy. That sucked. That came back to bite me later in university.
If US wants "the lead" back in tech. it has to start in elementary school and parents can't be scared of pushing their kids or making it a little tough for them.
Rexx is a _very_ nice language. It's easy to use, very readable and certainly powerful enough. Comes in "classic" and object-oriented versions.
There may be some advantages to Perl, but it's readability and maintainability is generally so bad, it's not worth the hassle. (Okay, so you like Perl. Now try maintaining _somebody else's_ Perl script!)
Python is a close enough replacement for Rexx for most of my purposes.
Rexx isn't just a scripting language. Entire GUI applications have been written in Rexx. (Especially OS/2). Also Rexx, I believe, is an ANSI standard language. In the older days, it was the scripting language of choice for many OS/2 applications (e.g. Lotus stuff and others), much like VB is now for MSOffice.
Those of you moaning about why Rexx didn't succeed due to non-open-source, Regina Rexx has been available for a long time! (See, that's what happens when you have a standard language. Others can do another implementation). The only reason is people not opening their minds to possibility of new language. What's the difference between lemmings running towards WinXX and lemmings running towards Perl? Selecting something cause it's the best tool for the job is one thing. Choosing it cause everyone else is is not a usually a great idea.
Rexx is flexible and powerful enough, I even wrote a simulation of nuclear spin diffusion through a 3-d cubic lattice. Not the _fastest_ language for that purpose, but that was just to show you could.
Generally solder down gives better performance than socketed.
Yes, the chips are small. But it is possible to make them support a socket (how do you think they get tested?). I advise you to wait. If enough people want them, it'll happen. The first 1.6GHz Efficeons are only a few weeks old, you don't stock-pile 100,000 chips before you let loose to market!
FYI, the new 90nm (it's no secret) are fabbed at Fujitsu, not TSMC or UMC. It's never been UMC. IBM was one of the earlier ones.
The thing that saves you is just that little less wattage from the Efficeon, enough not to need a fan, which saves you space and power.
In comparison, my Thinkpad runs a Pentium-M 1.6GHz (same clock), and the fan often comes on. The Sharp Mebius with 1.6GHz Efficeon, I believe, doesn't use a fan. I know for sure the predecessor from Sharp (a slower Efficeon at 130nm) has no fan.
Wait for benchmarks. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. A 1.6GHz Efficeon should be performance competitive with a 1.6GHz Pentium-M.
Actually, Apple are not the first to try this trick. Downward firing stereo speakers were also on my old IBM Thinkpad 770X.
Let me tell you, they work amazingly well, especially considering they are tiny 2W laptop speakers. Too bad IBM has taken a step backwards with the new "T" series. That is the crappiest audio I've ever heard on any laptop, and it isn't even stereo.
IBM had a prototype Thinkpad which did this. So far hasn't seen the light of production.
This is why you're not working at Apple. A laptop... is a laptop, NOT a desktop. Put a stalk on it, and that adds extra weight and extra size. You're one of those guys who'd like to tote around a 3.5kg laptop the size of several small textbooks?
If they think that the only thing missing is a grammar checker, then they haven't written any real documents.
I've used AbiWord, it is not even close to competing. Maybe for writing letters to grandma...
There are lots of word processors better and closer to MS Word. WordPro, Wordperfect, OpenOffice, Papyrus, etc.
All of these are better than AbiWord. What was that, getting a programmer dude to review a word processor? The same kind of guys who whip up man pages? Ugh!
While good for its time, the P1000 is way too long in the tooth. The 800MHz Crusoe is much slower than a 1GHz Efficeon. We have a bunch of those P1000 type machines...
I work for a certain company that makes CPU's, can't say which;-)
I can tell you that the Efficeon's produce similar performance to Pentium-M's at the same clock, and they consume, at most, 12W per CPU at max power. (That's no secret, that's the spec).
Enlightenment was/is a really cool window manager. Unfortunately, that is all it. A window manager. A lot of eye candy, a lot of processing power and it doesn't _do_ a heck of a lot when compared with even OS X's Aqua, MS' WinXP, IBM's WPS....
Pretty eye candy is cool, but how about making it do something useful?
First, let me say I don't think MS is cheaper in this case.
However, the "free" solution isn't always "cheaper", because it isn't always about the upfront cost.
For example, I'm an engineer, we make chips (CPU's actually). Vendor A sells a chip tester for $5million Vendor B sells one for $1million.
Obviously Vendor B is "cheaper", right? Wrong, because the tools on Vendor A allow me to debug and test in 1/10 the time as Vendor B. Because they tools are so reliable and so good, I make 5 times less mistakes. Because that results in a time to market advantage and faster debugging (resulting in less silicon revisions, less very expensive mask changes). It works out Vendor A is actually cheaper.
Linux is free, Windows is not. But you don't actually _do_ anything with Windows or Linux, you do something with some program that runs on top of them. The question is, for whatever it is you're doing, what is the _total_ cost, not the initial procurement cost.
Seems like most of the open-source/Linux folks still don't get this.
I'll rant right now. Gcc and the suite of "open-source" dev. tools basically... uh... SUCK. Given the same application, you can write and debug much faster in Visual C/C++. Free vs. say $500? (I don't know if that's the cost right now). If it were part of my living, I'd take the $500 one over the $0 if I can develop/debug in even 80% of the time.
What's going on? This is a Dutch Auction. People put in their bids, and then the price is whatever the high cut-off limit is. It depends on what people bid, you can't lower the IPO price! This isn't a regular IPO
World domination by Linux , Open Source is perhaps just as terrifying as domination by MS Windows or any other large, closed-source platform.
- RTFM - You don't like it, go code it yourself
Open-source is mostly dominating by being FREE (as in beer), not necessarily being better, excepty for a few glowing examples. (Sendmail, Apache, Mozilla...). Linux is winning because mostly, it's FREE. It is most definitely NOT better or easier to use for the average user.
And it's free because lots of people contribute their time, without pay.
Can you imagine a world dominated by free, open-source? The programmer's are likely not paid, so they do not have to answer the users complaints if they don't feel like it, their livelyhood does not depend on it, unlike the Big Redmond Machine. Remember when someone said that about open source that it's about people "scratching their own itch"? Well, what if _I_ have an itch that needs scratching and I can't reach it?
No domination please, just free, open STANDARDS, so I can run any platform I damn well choose.
Why is it that 6% of engineers are trained in the US news to you?
Are you aware that there is more to the world than the USA? You know, good ol' America only contains about 4-6% of the world's population. You think the other countries have no need of engineers?
That figure is totally in-line with what you would expect!
It is stronger, despite what the job numbers might say. At least for Engineers. I was "off" for 24 months. I promptly went back to school for yet another degree, but kept my eye on the job market the whole time. There was nothing.
But the past 6 months, there have been a real up-tick. The headhunters are calling again, flying me in, offering close to what I was paid , before. Companies are advertising. Down in Silicon Valley, they are again taking out radio ads (proclaiming "olympic size swimming pools" believe it or not), banners at their front door, billboards by the highway...
I finally accepted a job (not in my town of choice, but hey can't be picky now) that pays close to what I got before, depending on daily exchange rate.
I don't have the burden of a family, so I immediately went into grad-student survival mode for 2 years (and 3 months severance) and lived off a meagre RA salary and my savings. I got lucky. After 2 years, I came out alive, new, great job, zero debts, and still have my 2 cars and my own place.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never, ever installed Solaris on any machine before now.
... basically GNOME (right?), tells me that the GNOME guys are farting around. The JDE interface and menusare _very nicely_ cleaned up. Consistent menus, and stuff put in reasonable places (i.e. config and preferences aren't littered all over the menus!)
... tough choice, but I might just edge over to Solaris.
Just a while back, I popped in Solaris 10 on an old UltraSPARC box I have kicking around.
Let me tell you, it was a pretty easy and painless install (and I am definitely _not_ a *NIX guru).
I've been actually _using_ it for a while (alongside my other boxen, a PIII-800 WinXP machine and a dual PIII-800 Linux machine).
Configuration of user stuff was relatively straightforward (as far as UNIX goes), no real problems that you mentioned.
The JDE
User experience wise, the UltraSPARC (400MHz CPU) is more responsive than my dual-800MHz Linux! (Also GNOME desktop).
Java seems to be used for most of the GUI configuration tools (much like what OS/2 did years back).
Overall, it's a big step forward for Solaris I think, and almost useable desktop workstation (depending on what you use it for).
I'd have to say, if I had to use *NIX and I'd a choice to download Linux for free or pay $100 for Solaris 10 out of my own pocket
You forget, for the cost of 1 researcher in USA, you can get about 10 of them in India or China...
It doesn't matter if USA spends more, it'll never catch up.
It doesn't really help that virtually all the grad students are from overseas too. Since USA doesn't let them stay really, guess where they're all heading?
USA is like China several hundred years ago. It's losing the lead but is too blind to see it.
Who cares how "cool" the rendering is? Who cares how awesome the effects are?
It all means almost zero if the interface SUCKS.
The prettiest X-Window window manager is still bloody X-Window. Even KDE and GNOME are not quite up to snuff when compared to the likes of WinXP, OS X or even OS/2 in terms of useability for _non-hackers_.
Always chasing the wrong problem. Right in front of me right now I've got a WinXP box, an OS/2 Thinkpad T40p, a dual-CPU RedHat box, a SPARC with Solaris 10.
Already the Sun guys have done quite a bit of tweaking to make their Java Desktop Environment (GNOME really) much better than the default GNOME.
On either case, the GNOME desktop sucks ass when compared to WinXP or OS/2's WPS even though, as in the case of WPS, it is on the ugly side.
GNOME or X-Windows is like that bimbo with nothing behind that pretty face.
You mean you were too lazy to do your own homework and that well-known audio component manufacturer Yamaha has what you need?
I'll vouch for that. I'm a US Citizen.
When I drove across the border from Canada to USA, it turns out my wife did not have proper paperwork.
(This is really screwy. Before marrying me, she's freely allowed to enter USA for almost as long as she wants, whenever she wants. Afterwards, no such luck).
So what do you think should happen? Any reasonable person would get turned around, refused entry and that's was that. We even told them "Look, if we don't have the proper paperwork, we'll come back when we do."
Instead, they detained us for over 2 hours and searched my car and messed everything up. They were _very_ rude and exceedingly hostile.
Yes, that is how America treats its own citizens and citizens of a friendly nation. I can imagine if I got lippy with them (even though no laws are broken) they would be even more trouble. They even threatened to throw me in an isolated room.
(FYI, I'm not of middle-eastern descent!)
When I went to Washington DC _before_ 9/11, every public building had metal detectors and bag searches. When I queued up for the Whitehouse, I was told that not to even put my hands on the fence outside, else the Secret Service would come. Yes, they assume their own citizens will do something nasty.
When I went to the social security office (not to collect money, to get my SSN), it was 1 person entry at a time, no cameras, metal detectors, bag searches. The one granny ahead of me had a cane (she was Caucasion, not visible minority), they made her give up her cane, take off her shoes and belts and had her hobble through.
Look at all the flack the Dixie Chicks got into for criticizing Bush. I dunno how they're doing now, but I'll bet if they wanted to, they could have totally ruined their careers. You call that freedom of speech?
That is America. Not as free as you think.
Unlike the good ol' USA? Who is hostile to just about everyone, including its own citizens?
I went to DC _before_ 9/11, every single bloody federal building had metal detectors and bag searches before we could get in. They automatically _assume_ everyone is against them.
I'm a f**king US citizen (by birth, not by choice), and I do not feel safe with with the Feds. I recently went to the social security building. The procedure? 1 person through the door at a time, metal detector, search and all. There's an old granny with a cane (not visible minority) ahead of me. They took her cane and made her take off her shoes and belts before making her hobble through the metal detector.
I'd be more worried about the US Government than the Chinese government. At least in China, they're nominally a dictatorship, but the average citizen gets left alone (if you guys know anyone there, you'll know the situation is way over-blown). Unless you do mass protests in public, you'll get no trouble.
In America, geeze, the average citizen should worry about getting unfair treatment from the gov., the cops, anybody in the "estabilishment", especially if you're the wrong colour.
The worst I've done is speeding tickets (and that's not even in America), and everytime I cross the border, they're not friendly at all.
Is America free? Shit no! Didn't those protestors get prevented from getting X feet away from the Republican/Democratic conventions?
"You can only protest under our rules" -- what kind of country does that sound like to you?
The safest, free-est country in the world is not USA. In a free country, you can do what you want, you don't have to lock the doors, you don't have to worry about somebody wanting to beat the shit out of you.
First, the article uses makes stupid use of Flash.
Secondly, as I read the article, there was that silly stuff about the "depth of field".
Utter bullshit. Your eyes are subject to physics just as the camera lens is.
Secondly, the depth of field depends on the aperture size of your lense. For the digital SLR, this is interchangeable.
This throws the whole article in doubt. It is utter crap.
If a Chinese spy plane crashed in Los Angeles, would you want to give it back?
Duuuuhhhh!
Yes, something like that.
All my friends who came from Tawain, HongKong or other parts of Asia so totally kicked ass in Grade 11, Grade 12 and even 1st or 2nd year of university.
Mostly because they had all done it before and they had really good study skills and habits.
Come the final years, it was no longer all rosy because something like what you said. When you start from almost ground zero, we're all human and anyone who's gotten that far has pretty much the same capacity for learning.
The problem with US (and North American in general) education system is that it is WAAAY too easy on the kids. Kids are smart, they'll learn if pushed, but nobody here pushes them.
I developed incredibly bad study habits (technically, I started school in HK, but I've been here long enough to know the school system elementary on up) because I was reasonably bright, so I got almost straight A's without doing anything because everything was too damned easy. That sucked. That came back to bite me later in university.
If US wants "the lead" back in tech. it has to start in elementary school and parents can't be scared of pushing their kids or making it a little tough for them.
Hell yeah!
Rexx is a _very_ nice language. It's easy to use, very readable and certainly powerful enough. Comes in "classic" and object-oriented versions.
There may be some advantages to Perl, but it's readability and maintainability is generally so bad, it's not worth the hassle. (Okay, so you like Perl. Now try maintaining _somebody else's_ Perl script!)
Python is a close enough replacement for Rexx for most of my purposes.
Rexx isn't just a scripting language. Entire GUI applications have been written in Rexx. (Especially OS/2). Also Rexx, I believe, is an ANSI standard language. In the older days, it was the scripting language of choice for many OS/2 applications (e.g. Lotus stuff and others), much like VB is now for MSOffice.
Those of you moaning about why Rexx didn't succeed due to non-open-source, Regina Rexx has been available for a long time!
(See, that's what happens when you have a standard language. Others can do another implementation).
The only reason is people not opening their minds to possibility of new language. What's the difference between lemmings running towards WinXX and lemmings running towards Perl? Selecting something cause it's the best tool for the job is one thing. Choosing it cause everyone else is is not a usually a great idea.
Rexx is flexible and powerful enough, I even wrote a simulation of nuclear spin diffusion through a 3-d cubic lattice. Not the _fastest_ language for that purpose, but that was just to show you could.
Generally solder down gives better performance than socketed.
Yes, the chips are small. But it is possible to make them support a socket (how do you think they get tested?). I advise you to wait. If enough people want them, it'll happen. The first 1.6GHz Efficeons are only a few weeks old, you don't stock-pile 100,000 chips before you let loose to market!
FYI, the new 90nm (it's no secret) are fabbed at Fujitsu, not TSMC or UMC. It's never been UMC. IBM was one of the earlier ones.
The thing that saves you is just that little less wattage from the Efficeon, enough not to need a fan, which saves you space and power.
In comparison, my Thinkpad runs a Pentium-M 1.6GHz (same clock), and the fan often comes on. The Sharp Mebius with 1.6GHz Efficeon, I believe, doesn't use a fan. I know for sure the predecessor from Sharp (a slower Efficeon at 130nm) has no fan.
Wait for benchmarks. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. A 1.6GHz Efficeon should be performance competitive with a 1.6GHz Pentium-M.
Get left out too often.
Actually, Apple are not the first to try this trick. Downward firing stereo speakers were also on my old IBM Thinkpad 770X.
Let me tell you, they work amazingly well, especially considering they are tiny 2W laptop speakers.
Too bad IBM has taken a step backwards with the new "T" series. That is the crappiest audio I've ever heard on any laptop, and it isn't even stereo.
IBM had a prototype Thinkpad which did this. So far hasn't seen the light of production.
... is a laptop, NOT a desktop. Put a stalk on it, and that adds extra weight and extra size.
This is why you're not working at Apple.
A laptop
You're one of those guys who'd like to tote around a 3.5kg laptop the size of several small textbooks?
If they think that the only thing missing is a grammar checker, then they haven't written any real documents.
I've used AbiWord, it is not even close to competing. Maybe for writing letters to grandma...
There are lots of word processors better and closer to MS Word.
WordPro, Wordperfect, OpenOffice, Papyrus, etc.
All of these are better than AbiWord. What was that, getting a programmer dude to review a word processor? The same kind of guys who whip up man pages? Ugh!
Because check Fujitsu's web site:/ buildse riesbean.do?series=P1
http://webshop.fujitsupc.com/fpc/Ecommerce
It only runs an 800MHz Crusoe, which is much, much slower than a 1GHz Efficeon.
(Much more so than the 200MHz speed difference in clocks).
I know because our company has a bunch of the P1000 type machines.
While good for its time, the P1000 is way too long in the tooth. The 800MHz Crusoe is much slower than a 1GHz Efficeon.
We have a bunch of those P1000 type machines...
No way dude. The U101 had a 600MHz Mobile Celeron.
The 1GHz Efficeon will easily outpace that old thing. If there were a 1GHz Pentium-M, it would also give it a good run for performance.
I work for a certain company that makes CPU's, can't say which ;-)
I can tell you that the Efficeon's produce similar performance to Pentium-M's at the same clock, and they consume, at most, 12W per CPU at max power. (That's no secret, that's the spec).
You're comparing an HP made laptop with SUSE to Apple with the WAAAY more elegant OS X?
The day that happens is the day I switch to Linux. Get coding...
GNOME and KDE are a bad kludge compared to Aqua, or WPS or even WindowsXP explorer desktop.
Enlightenment was/is a really cool window manager. Unfortunately, that is all it. A window manager. A lot of eye candy, a lot of processing power and it doesn't _do_ a heck of a lot when compared with even OS X's Aqua, MS' WinXP, IBM's WPS....
Pretty eye candy is cool, but how about making it do something useful?
First, let me say I don't think MS is cheaper in this case.
... uh... SUCK.
However, the "free" solution isn't always "cheaper", because it isn't always about the upfront cost.
For example, I'm an engineer, we make chips (CPU's actually).
Vendor A sells a chip tester for $5million
Vendor B sells one for $1million.
Obviously Vendor B is "cheaper", right?
Wrong, because the tools on Vendor A allow me to debug and test in 1/10 the time as Vendor B. Because they tools are so reliable and so good, I make 5 times less mistakes. Because that results in a time to market advantage and faster debugging (resulting in less silicon revisions, less very expensive mask changes). It works out Vendor A is actually cheaper.
Linux is free, Windows is not. But you don't actually _do_ anything with Windows or Linux, you do something with some program that runs on top of them. The question is, for whatever it is you're doing, what is the _total_ cost, not the initial procurement cost.
Seems like most of the open-source/Linux folks still don't get this.
I'll rant right now. Gcc and the suite of "open-source" dev. tools basically
Given the same application, you can write and debug much faster in Visual C/C++.
Free vs. say $500? (I don't know if that's the cost right now). If it were part of my living, I'd take the $500 one over the $0 if I can develop/debug in even 80% of the time.
What's going on?
This is a Dutch Auction. People put in their bids, and then the price is whatever the high cut-off limit is.
It depends on what people bid, you can't lower the IPO price! This isn't a regular IPO
World domination by Linux , Open Source is perhaps just as terrifying as domination by MS Windows or any other large, closed-source platform.
- RTFM
- You don't like it, go code it yourself
Open-source is mostly dominating by being FREE (as in beer), not necessarily being better, excepty for a few glowing examples. (Sendmail, Apache, Mozilla...). Linux is winning because mostly, it's FREE. It is most definitely NOT better or easier to use for the average user.
And it's free because lots of people contribute their time, without pay.
Can you imagine a world dominated by free, open-source? The programmer's are likely not paid, so they do not have to answer the users complaints if they don't feel like it, their livelyhood does not depend on it, unlike the Big Redmond Machine.
Remember when someone said that about open source that it's about people "scratching their own itch"? Well, what if _I_ have an itch that needs scratching and I can't reach it?
No domination please, just free, open STANDARDS, so I can run any platform I damn well choose.
Why is it that 6% of engineers are trained in the US news to you?
Are you aware that there is more to the world than the USA? You know, good ol' America only contains about 4-6% of the world's population. You think the other countries have no need of engineers?
That figure is totally in-line with what you would expect!
It is stronger, despite what the job numbers might say. At least for Engineers. I was "off" for 24 months. I promptly went back to school for yet another degree, but kept my eye on the job market the whole time. There was nothing.
But the past 6 months, there have been a real up-tick. The headhunters are calling again, flying me in, offering close to what I was paid , before. Companies are advertising. Down in Silicon Valley, they are again taking out radio ads (proclaiming "olympic size swimming pools" believe it or not), banners at their front door, billboards by the highway...
I finally accepted a job (not in my town of choice, but hey can't be picky now) that pays close to what I got before, depending on daily exchange rate.
I don't have the burden of a family, so I immediately went into grad-student survival mode for 2 years (and 3 months severance) and lived off a meagre RA salary and my savings. I got lucky. After 2 years, I came out alive, new, great job, zero debts, and still have my 2 cars and my own place.