All things being equal, you're right. But this is the real world. The underlying architecture plays a VERY important role, it's much deeper than "just the processor." I believe the OP was not referring to X86 processors themselves, but the entire platform.
Itanium, Sparc, Power-series, etc. are designed from the start for high-performance, IT services. Would they make a great desktop? Who knows, probably not. Do they kick x86's arse in the server / workstation world? You betcha.
I agree with the OP that the x86 architecture is probably limited by it's high degree of backward compatibility. I don't have technical facts to back this up, but I think common-sense would agree with me here.
Now to contradict myself... It's important to note that Sparc has always been (and continues to be) backward compatible. I can run code from my SparcStation on an E10k and it will run exactly the same. In this way, the x86 platform is flawed. It was not designed for a lot of the tasks we need it to do TODAY. Sparc was, or they just got lucky, or both...
As long as the thing supports things like larger memories and larger integers, and as long as it continues to get faster, then the processor is completely irrelevant.
That's great, but x86 doesn't support "larger memories."
features in PHP5; highlights include the new object model, namespaces, interfaces, access control and exceptions.
Of course, Perl has had all this for some time.
Just curious, how can you have an object model without namespaces? Or interfaces for that matter? Isn't that like "New Car - with tires!"??
Either way, PHP makes for a good interface language for web apps - I guess. You can throw it on top of an application layer to do the real work. Last I checked, you could only use SOAP to do this - has anyone tested how well that performs? SOAP doesn't scale all that well.
It would be nice to let the HTML monkeys handle some of this stuff while the serious development can take place in a real language./me dawns the flamesuit.
Re:how many hack books do i need to buy?
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Linux Server Hacks
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· Score: 1
I'd rather be able to kick back and drink a beer and read. Can't do that with a 19" CRT.
What type of nerd are you?!
A weak one!
Re:how many hack books do i need to buy?
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Linux Server Hacks
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· Score: 4, Informative
MySQL is already faster than postgres at the limited amount of things MySQL can do.
MySQL, even with 4, still lacks numerous features found in Postgres. Looking at MySQL's site, it won't have most of these features until 5.1 comes out.
Someone brought this up in the last MySQL thread, but there really haven't been any *recent* MySQL vs. Postgres comparisons.
I'm excited for 4.0, we'll probably make our slave a 4.0 box today.
Simply put, if you expect your web application to get any amount of decent traffic (say 100,000 pageviews+ per day), then MySQL is simply not an option.
FYI. 1.5M per day - we run MySQL. It has and continues to run like a champ every single day for the last 2+ years.
Of course, we've thrown some pretty high-end hardware at it to keep it running this long.
MySQL cannot scale reliably, period. Having two database systems act as a pool, under MySQL, is a crapshoot at best. Unless you like designing single points of failure into your web applications, stay away from MySQL.
Nail on the head here. InnoDB (the real seller for MySQL, since it gives them ACID compliance) *really* sucks under load. It starts chewing itself apart. Funny to watch, not funny to clean up - since you really can't.
We've been using replication in MySQL for backup purposes. (The replication has always been reliable for us) We can take the slave down for snapshots. But that is *all* we use it for.
MySQL will last us just long enough to finish our PostgreSQL migration.
MySQL does most certainly NOT support these tricks.
In fact, without kernel hacks MySQL won't use any more than 2gb of ram regardless of your settings. Even with those hacks, you're only looking at 3gb instead of 2. Woo Hoo. This is the biggest drawback, IMO, to the threaded module. A fork()ing system still has the problem but it's MUCH more managable.
I played a pen-and-paper RPG which had rules like yours. And frankly, I loved it. IMO, The "level" concept is completely flawed.
The system had an age modifier, well, it was much more complex than that but anyway... You could start out incredably old if you wanted, and have an insane amount of points to distribute. Or you could be very young. The key to this though, is to limit your ranges based on ages as well.
You may be a brilliant 82yo, but no way your str or con is above average. Likewise, at 8yo, you will not have a "size" (easiest to think of as your height in feet) of 5 or more.
The trick is adjusting these values throughout the characters life. Of course, in a MMORPG how you manage "character time" would be quite difficult. Those who only play a couple times a week should not age as quickly as one who plays every day for many hours. Then again, maybe they should.
Not a bad guess either. Java is the premier language for business application development right now. It probably will be for quite some time to come. From IBM's standpoint Java is, or at least should be, a valuable asset to IBM. Afterall, they are now the largest consulting firm in the world. Wasn't something like over half their annual income from consulting services?
Another side, probably less important, is the hardware end. IBM and Sun have been going at it in the enterprise computing arena for a while. IBM is big on IP and Sun probably has a lot of it.
Re:The cost of Solaris
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The real problem is in the cost of Sun's hardware as well as relative performance of UltraSPARC processors compared to the 32-bit x86 processors and certain 64-bit processors. Sun executives are still living in an imaginary world thinking that Sun's future is in selling large mega-bucks systems to the data centers completely ignoring the low-profit high-volume low-end side of the market.
Sun Execs. live in this dilusion because their customers allow them to.
I know that a year from now, when I need a 64-bit platform for my rapidly growing DB server, AMD and Intel will be there. And Linux will be there. And so will all the jagged edges you get with very young hardware and software.
Then I will turn to Sun, who have been building the same 64-bit platform for over a decade. No jagged edges here. It's solid. It's reliable. Sun engineers have been there and seen it all.
Do you actually own a Sun? You should probably open it up and compare it to your uber-clocked Althon-space-heater sometime. Their hardware is very high quality. Their support is as well.
So, to my boss, the question becomes: Do I go with the guys who've been doing it since before I was born or do I go with this new stuff? I think the answer is clear.
IMO, Sun needn't worry too much about AMD and Intel. If you look at who Sun is *really* in competition with, it's IBM. The Power4 and AIX or Linux combination is increadably powerful and worthy of attention.
He is insane...
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok, his first points are very valid and I will agree. Sun is in serious trouble. They're betting the company on N1. Apple won't buy them. Java wasn't the smoking gun.
But to say that a merger with Sony would be better than Apple is just plain dumb. What have the two in common? Absolutely nothing. Sony has no interest in the server market - if they had they'd be there already. Furthermore, the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market.
He article further states that N1 puts Sun in direct competition with Microsoft and IBM. Uhh, hello, where you have been dude - they've been in competition for a long time now. If he is trying to draw comparison between N1 and a MS or IBM product then he should do so. From what I've read N1 has a LOT of potential. And while IBM is certainly a contender in the distributed-computing area, MS is definitely not.
Although Cringley was clearly drunk when he wrote this, he makes good points. And I would agree that N1 is certain to fail. Not because it won't perform, or not because Sun is actually using sales people to sell it, but because the market is rather slim. N1 doesn't benefit a small or medium sized company very much. Not nearly as much as it does the enterprise.
I don't know what Sun should be doing right now. But I, and I bet a lot of you/. folk, agree - they're not doing the right thing.
It takes months of preperation to get one of these shuttles up there. Thousands of people inspect the shuttle before launch looking for any possible reason not to go. This takes a LONG time and without these precautions you would probably end up with two dead shuttles in space.
I do not believe the shuttle can remain in orbit long enough to wait that long.
Well, we know that an orbiter inspection was impossible in this case. If I remember correctly, the cargo bay was full leaving the manuvering arm disabled. Space walks cannot happen without that arm, or are highly discouraged, or something like that. I forget the exact wording they used.
Also, there are no handles or other surfaces to which the astronauts could use to manuver efficient on the underside of the shuttle. For inspects to take place these would need to be added.
Adding these handles, requiring astronauts to handle and inspect these tiles may actually introduce more variables and increase the chances of failure upon re-entry. What if a tile is damaged DUE to the inspection?
Space Walks also take a long time, the shuttle may not be that large but to inspect it thuroughly before re-entry would add considerable resource requirements to every launch. They would either have to prepare for more time in space or cut back on the tasks to be performed for each mission. That would get costly no matter which way they go.
I read somewhere that they use ground telescopes to inspect the shuttle as well. But that these inspections are not very good due to poor resolution, shuttle orientation and timing issues.
This has certainly been a tragic loss. We lost 7 great people. We lost a remarkable piece of engineering. And the space agency has suffered a setback none shall forget for some time. But we must remember we call them 'heros' for a reason. These things do happen and are part of the job.
I tried these things at Best Buy / CC a while ago. Not the 5.1 but the 4.1 variant. I was certainly not impressed.
I ended up walking away with the Klipsch THX 5.1 package, this thing ROCKS. Best speakers I've ever heard - for computing at least. Granted, I'm no audiophile.
My only complaint would be some flatness near the very low end - but my wife doesn't appreciate me shaking the house anyway.:)
Naturally, the volume controller has a headphone mic that cuts out the normal speakers. I really wish it had a mic. jack on it too, that would be perfect for voice-command games (like CS).
More often than not a geek knows how to treat a lady better than a lot of guys. Or so it seems at least. Must be because the typical geek is not a "manly-man." Whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. You'll also find that a lot of geeks like poetry and junk - expect that from the Apple folks. They're typically creative people.;) Maybe one of them will write a love poem for you to give her.
For me, my wife is not a geek but does play an awful lot of DAOC lately... She says she wants a keyboard without a "stupid windows key", I guess it must be a DAOC thing.
Here's what you do - get her an appointment at one of those beauty spas on the 14th, in the evening. Make sure she'll be there for a while, maybe an hour or two. Ya know, the oil treatment, the massage, the whole nine yards. Then, when she gets home - you've got dinner waiting for her. Not any Taco Bell dude, make some spaghetti or something simple - yet not too simple. Make sure to get the red wine, if you can't cook you'd better get her drunk...
Women love this stuff and it's very much worth it - the rest of the year she will always remember this day and you'll NEVER get the "You're not affectionate" speech again.
If you didn't blow your wad on the oil treatment when splurge for diamonds. Doesn't have to be huge or expensive - just a little nugget of love that will always remind her of you (and the great Valentines day you gave her!)
The thing that pushes ppl to Linux and Open Source is the price. Depending if MS lower its prices too much, it may cause a lot of ppl not to consider OSS software at all.
They won't, they can't. Doing so would destroy their current loftly margins and hinder their ability to do R&D. Remember, the only reason Microsoft does not have subsidiaries is because ALL of their projects rely on Windows and Office sales. It is this huge moneypit that allows them to embrace and eliminate new technologies.
Who would want use and a disgruntled OS if they may get nice box, nice gradient buttons, stylish consistent GUI for a reasonable price?
Sounds like you're describing KDE to me, and I agree. It sure is reasonably priced. Considering you need the same hardware to run a pretty-KDE that would a pretty-WinXP I think it's a fair comparison.
Maybe it forces OSS software to evolve from merely copying proprietary functionalities to actually improve users' life in order to make a differentiation. A reason for ppl to use it. For now, it's price.
Copying proprietary functionalities? OSS? Have you heard of TCP/IP? It came from an OS project - called uhhh... oh yeah BSD.
You're apparently of the mindset that innovation requires some new ground-breaking revolution. You would be wrong. Often, the best new ideas are merely a new twist to an old idea. Look at just abuot every successful product you can find - it was based on something at some point.
The people who buy these things know this and can deal with it. Remember, these are not crammed in like Mini-ATX towers (like the one under your desk). They're deployed by professionals in a professional environment with standards for this stuff.
Secondly is doesn't have any applications. I don't mean Gnome and KDE, I mean the sort of applications that big corporations run.
Big Corporations can and will port their existing (probably already 64-bit) applications to Itanium to take advantage of the newer / faster platform. ISVs are already porting applications to it and have been for a while.
Thirdly it isn't backwards-compatible with any existing architectures. You can't just take your binaries over and run them, at least not at full speed. Applications will need to be ported and retested. This is not insignificant in time, effort and cost.
See above. Porting will and has happened. If the logic can be presented that the company will either save or gain money by upgrading to this hardware then it will happen. It just makes business sense.
Fourthly, most people who want 64-bit in the corporate world already have it in the form of SPARC, Power, PA RISC and Alpha. Why should they change to an unproven, immature "jam tomorrow" architecture given their working and reliable systems already in use?
When the systems already in use are cost prohibitive to maintain they will be abandoned. A smart company will see the trend and start migration early. The Sparc platform is dated and loosing it's performance edge very quickly. The IBM Power series is still a reasonable choice. PA RISC who? Alpha who? You need to understand that IT departments invest for the long-haul, you won't see too many more shiney new Alphas being purchased not because they're bad but because C[T|I]Os know they're a doomed platform.
I'm afraid intel missed the boat by about 10 years. If they'd brought out a 64-bit RISC at the same time as SPARC, MIPS, Alpha and Power they might have stood a chance.
Or they could be going under like so many of the platforms you just mentioned. The 64bit world is certainly not new but it definitly requires some re-thinking in todays world. Intel is in a great position to do that.
I don't even need to mention how Athlon 64/Opteron will eat its lunch in the commodity sector of the market.
You don't need to say it because you can't say it. At least not yet. I too doubt that Itanium will be a hugh smash in the commodity arena. Not because it's inferior (I'm not arguing that either way) but because the money isn't there.
The companies that need and use 64-bit applications will not want those applications running on commodity hardware. They'll want a well supported platform and one that works time and again. Itanium can provide this. IBM can provide this. AMD cannot - they don't even make their own motherboards for christ sake.
Frankly, once a company has enough business to justify a 64bit platform they'll probably be profitable enough to deplay a good one - not the one from CompUSA.
Currently, it seems like the options for a runtime are the JVM, which is still dominated by Sun with respect to its design future
Pretty much sums it up I think. From an OS perspective having Sun invovled (as much as they are) is a bad thing. Remember, in the end it's all about money to Sun - in a pinch you bet they'll piss of the community.
OTOH, one must ask if this is such a bad thing? Something like this was need an absolute authority. Absolute Authority goes against the grain of open source, the GPL at least.
What good would a common-runtime be if you needed 19 [slightly] different versions of it to run everything?
Parrot seems to achieve this goal to a degree. I don't know if the Parrot folk see it as an OS universal runtime and that may hinder it (in this capacity).
As you say, they're planning for multi-language support. I think they're trying to make it Python ready, that right there is two of the major OS languages.
I don't think Parrot will be adopted too quickly though. Look at Apache, 2.0 adoption has been slow due to lack of 3rd party modules. Now think about CPAN - same thing.
I can never understand this stuff. You want to give "poor developing countries" internet access? Don't you think we should spend more time actually developing these places before we start laying in the luxuries? (Remember, the Internet is not some god given right, it's a Luxury.)
Yeah, let's build a community center in BFE for a group of people who don't have running water or electricity in their homes and the nearest hospitol is a 300M charter plane trip away.
Yeah yeah, mod me down. Before you do, realize that they're places in northern Alaska that fit this description nicely - and they have a nicer net connection than a lot of people I know.
Our bedroom has only one electronic device - a clock radio. There is no telephone, the cell stays in the kitchen, absolutely no computers, TVs, at all. I made the cable hookup a dead line. (It helps the signal to the cable modem too)
I work from home, I get calls at all hours about work. However, the nearest phone to my bedroom is a good distance. So far in fact, that I cannot get to it before voice mail does. If I do hear it, I don't even bother.
It was not always this way. When living space was at a premium I had my box in the bedroom for a short while. Fortunately, the wife put an end to it VERY quickly.
Your house is your kingdom and your bedroom your sanctuary. It's very comforting to lay my head down and hear absolutely nothing. No phone. No CPU fans. No churning disks. I really can get away there....of course, when the servers are on fire it can be sort of a problem... but that's what watchdogs and managed hosting companies are for.:)
--- Live in Wichita? Code perl? Want a job? Let me know.
...anyone who takes the corporate sector seriously?
Perhaps you cannot grasp the sheer mass of the project. Groupware is HUGE. I can't think of any small+ sized corporations that do not have some kind of internal group-scheduling / tasking / messaging system.
Could I piecemeal my own? Sure. But it would be costly still and I wouldn't have the interopability nor the years of refinment that has gone into existing products, namely Outlook.
Clearly, this is not something you can just sit down and code in a few weeks. $5M is a drop in the bucket.
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All things being equal, you're right. But this is the real world. The underlying architecture plays a VERY important role, it's much deeper than "just the processor." I believe the OP was not referring to X86 processors themselves, but the entire platform.
Itanium, Sparc, Power-series, etc. are designed from the start for high-performance, IT services. Would they make a great desktop? Who knows, probably not. Do they kick x86's arse in the server / workstation world? You betcha.
I agree with the OP that the x86 architecture is probably limited by it's high degree of backward compatibility. I don't have technical facts to back this up, but I think common-sense would agree with me here.
Now to contradict myself... It's important to note that Sparc has always been (and continues to be) backward compatible. I can run code from my SparcStation on an E10k and it will run exactly the same. In this way, the x86 platform is flawed. It was not designed for a lot of the tasks we need it to do TODAY. Sparc was, or they just got lucky, or both...
As long as the thing supports things like larger memories and larger integers, and as long as it continues to get faster, then the processor is completely irrelevant.
That's great, but x86 doesn't support "larger memories."
Java by any other name...
/me dawns the flamesuit.
Leave it to a Perl guy to compare PHP to Java.
features in PHP5; highlights include the new object model, namespaces, interfaces, access control and exceptions.
Of course, Perl has had all this for some time.
Just curious, how can you have an object model without namespaces? Or interfaces for that matter? Isn't that like "New Car - with tires!"??
Either way, PHP makes for a good interface language for web apps - I guess. You can throw it on top of an application layer to do the real work. Last I checked, you could only use SOAP to do this - has anyone tested how well that performs? SOAP doesn't scale all that well.
It would be nice to let the HTML monkeys handle some of this stuff while the serious development can take place in a real language.
I'd rather be able to kick back and drink a beer and read. Can't do that with a 19" CRT.
What type of nerd are you?!
A weak one!
It already is.
:)
Our company tried the safari thing for a while. It's very sweet, many many books online covering a wide variety of topics.
You pay for the books you use, and you can add / remove books at your leisure. Some books are worth more than others. It really makes a lot of sense.
Not sure what the costs are for individual use. Considering their "group" rates, I'd say their individual rates are probably very fair.
Personally, I don't like online books too much. I'd rather be able to kick back and drink a beer and read. Can't do that with a 19" CRT.
Perhaps when web-pads are more mainstream (and thinner and lighter)...
MySQL is already faster than postgres at the limited amount of things MySQL can do.
MySQL, even with 4, still lacks numerous features found in Postgres. Looking at MySQL's site, it won't have most of these features until 5.1 comes out.
Someone brought this up in the last MySQL thread, but there really haven't been any *recent* MySQL vs. Postgres comparisons.
I'm excited for 4.0, we'll probably make our slave a 4.0 box today.
Simply put, if you expect your web application to get any amount of decent traffic (say 100,000 pageviews+ per day), then MySQL is simply not an option.
FYI. 1.5M per day - we run MySQL. It has and continues to run like a champ every single day for the last 2+ years.
Of course, we've thrown some pretty high-end hardware at it to keep it running this long.
MySQL cannot scale reliably, period. Having two database systems act as a pool, under MySQL, is a crapshoot at best. Unless you like designing single points of failure into your web applications, stay away from MySQL.
Nail on the head here. InnoDB (the real seller for MySQL, since it gives them ACID compliance) *really* sucks under load. It starts chewing itself apart. Funny to watch, not funny to clean up - since you really can't.
We've been using replication in MySQL for backup purposes. (The replication has always been reliable for us) We can take the slave down for snapshots. But that is *all* we use it for.
MySQL will last us just long enough to finish our PostgreSQL migration.
I think MySQL supports these tricks too
MySQL does most certainly NOT support these tricks.
In fact, without kernel hacks MySQL won't use any more than 2gb of ram regardless of your settings. Even with those hacks, you're only looking at 3gb instead of 2. Woo Hoo. This is the biggest drawback, IMO, to the threaded module. A fork()ing system still has the problem but it's MUCH more managable.
I played a pen-and-paper RPG which had rules like yours. And frankly, I loved it. IMO, The "level" concept is completely flawed.
The system had an age modifier, well, it was much more complex than that but anyway... You could start out incredably old if you wanted, and have an insane amount of points to distribute. Or you could be very young. The key to this though, is to limit your ranges based on ages as well.
You may be a brilliant 82yo, but no way your str or con is above average. Likewise, at 8yo, you will not have a "size" (easiest to think of as your height in feet) of 5 or more.
The trick is adjusting these values throughout the characters life. Of course, in a MMORPG how you manage "character time" would be quite difficult. Those who only play a couple times a week should not age as quickly as one who plays every day for many hours. Then again, maybe they should.
Not a bad guess either. Java is the premier language for business application development right now. It probably will be for quite some time to come. From IBM's standpoint Java is, or at least should be, a valuable asset to IBM. Afterall, they are now the largest consulting firm in the world. Wasn't something like over half their annual income from consulting services?
Another side, probably less important, is the hardware end. IBM and Sun have been going at it in the enterprise computing arena for a while. IBM is big on IP and Sun probably has a lot of it.
The real problem is in the cost of Sun's hardware as well as relative performance of UltraSPARC processors compared to the 32-bit x86 processors and certain 64-bit processors. Sun executives are still living in an imaginary world thinking that Sun's future is in selling large mega-bucks systems to the data centers completely ignoring the low-profit high-volume low-end side of the market.
Sun Execs. live in this dilusion because their customers allow them to.
I know that a year from now, when I need a 64-bit platform for my rapidly growing DB server, AMD and Intel will be there. And Linux will be there. And so will all the jagged edges you get with very young hardware and software.
Then I will turn to Sun, who have been building the same 64-bit platform for over a decade. No jagged edges here. It's solid. It's reliable. Sun engineers have been there and seen it all.
Do you actually own a Sun? You should probably open it up and compare it to your uber-clocked Althon-space-heater sometime. Their hardware is very high quality. Their support is as well.
So, to my boss, the question becomes: Do I go with the guys who've been doing it since before I was born or do I go with this new stuff? I think the answer is clear.
IMO, Sun needn't worry too much about AMD and Intel. If you look at who Sun is *really* in competition with, it's IBM. The Power4 and AIX or Linux combination is increadably powerful and worthy of attention.
Ok, his first points are very valid and I will agree. Sun is in serious trouble. They're betting the company on N1. Apple won't buy them. Java wasn't the smoking gun.
/. folk, agree - they're not doing the right thing.
But to say that a merger with Sony would be better than Apple is just plain dumb. What have the two in common? Absolutely nothing. Sony has no interest in the server market - if they had they'd be there already. Furthermore, the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market.
He article further states that N1 puts Sun in direct competition with Microsoft and IBM. Uhh, hello, where you have been dude - they've been in competition for a long time now. If he is trying to draw comparison between N1 and a MS or IBM product then he should do so. From what I've read N1 has a LOT of potential. And while IBM is certainly a contender in the distributed-computing area, MS is definitely not.
Although Cringley was clearly drunk when he wrote this, he makes good points. And I would agree that N1 is certain to fail. Not because it won't perform, or not because Sun is actually using sales people to sell it, but because the market is rather slim. N1 doesn't benefit a small or medium sized company very much. Not nearly as much as it does the enterprise.
I don't know what Sun should be doing right now. But I, and I bet a lot of you
It takes months of preperation to get one of these shuttles up there. Thousands of people inspect the shuttle before launch looking for any possible reason not to go. This takes a LONG time and without these precautions you would probably end up with two dead shuttles in space.
I do not believe the shuttle can remain in orbit long enough to wait that long.
Well, we know that an orbiter inspection was impossible in this case. If I remember correctly, the cargo bay was full leaving the manuvering arm disabled. Space walks cannot happen without that arm, or are highly discouraged, or something like that. I forget the exact wording they used.
Also, there are no handles or other surfaces to which the astronauts could use to manuver efficient on the underside of the shuttle. For inspects to take place these would need to be added.
Adding these handles, requiring astronauts to handle and inspect these tiles may actually introduce more variables and increase the chances of failure upon re-entry. What if a tile is damaged DUE to the inspection?
Space Walks also take a long time, the shuttle may not be that large but to inspect it thuroughly before re-entry would add considerable resource requirements to every launch. They would either have to prepare for more time in space or cut back on the tasks to be performed for each mission. That would get costly no matter which way they go.
I read somewhere that they use ground telescopes to inspect the shuttle as well. But that these inspections are not very good due to poor resolution, shuttle orientation and timing issues.
This has certainly been a tragic loss. We lost 7 great people. We lost a remarkable piece of engineering. And the space agency has suffered a setback none shall forget for some time. But we must remember we call them 'heros' for a reason. These things do happen and are part of the job.
I tried these things at Best Buy / CC a while ago. Not the 5.1 but the 4.1 variant. I was certainly not impressed.
:)
I ended up walking away with the Klipsch THX 5.1 package, this thing ROCKS. Best speakers I've ever heard - for computing at least. Granted, I'm no audiophile.
My only complaint would be some flatness near the very low end - but my wife doesn't appreciate me shaking the house anyway.
Naturally, the volume controller has a headphone mic that cuts out the normal speakers. I really wish it had a mic. jack on it too, that would be perfect for voice-command games (like CS).
More often than not a geek knows how to treat a lady better than a lot of guys. Or so it seems at least. Must be because the typical geek is not a "manly-man." Whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. You'll also find that a lot of geeks like poetry and junk - expect that from the Apple folks. They're typically creative people. ;) Maybe one of them will write a love poem for you to give her.
For me, my wife is not a geek but does play an awful lot of DAOC lately... She says she wants a keyboard without a "stupid windows key", I guess it must be a DAOC thing.
Here's what you do - get her an appointment at one of those beauty spas on the 14th, in the evening. Make sure she'll be there for a while, maybe an hour or two. Ya know, the oil treatment, the massage, the whole nine yards. Then, when she gets home - you've got dinner waiting for her. Not any Taco Bell dude, make some spaghetti or something simple - yet not too simple. Make sure to get the red wine, if you can't cook you'd better get her drunk...
Women love this stuff and it's very much worth it - the rest of the year she will always remember this day and you'll NEVER get the "You're not affectionate" speech again.
If you didn't blow your wad on the oil treatment when splurge for diamonds. Doesn't have to be huge or expensive - just a little nugget of love that will always remind her of you (and the great Valentines day you gave her!)
The thing that pushes ppl to Linux and Open Source is the price. Depending if MS lower its prices too much, it may cause a lot of ppl not to consider OSS software at all.
They won't, they can't. Doing so would destroy their current loftly margins and hinder their ability to do R&D. Remember, the only reason Microsoft does not have subsidiaries is because ALL of their projects rely on Windows and Office sales. It is this huge moneypit that allows them to embrace and eliminate new technologies.
Who would want use and a disgruntled OS if they may get nice box, nice gradient buttons, stylish consistent GUI for a reasonable price?
Sounds like you're describing KDE to me, and I agree. It sure is reasonably priced. Considering you need the same hardware to run a pretty-KDE that would a pretty-WinXP I think it's a fair comparison.
Maybe it forces OSS software to evolve from merely copying proprietary functionalities to actually improve users' life in order to make a differentiation. A reason for ppl to use it. For now, it's price.
Copying proprietary functionalities? OSS? Have you heard of TCP/IP? It came from an OS project - called uhhh... oh yeah BSD.
You're apparently of the mindset that innovation requires some new ground-breaking revolution. You would be wrong. Often, the best new ideas are merely a new twist to an old idea. Look at just abuot every successful product you can find - it was based on something at some point.
...Sigh here we go:
First, it's too hot and too expensive.
The people who buy these things know this and can deal with it. Remember, these are not crammed in like Mini-ATX towers (like the one under your desk). They're deployed by professionals in a professional environment with standards for this stuff.
Secondly is doesn't have any applications. I don't mean Gnome and KDE, I mean the sort of applications that big corporations run.
Big Corporations can and will port their existing (probably already 64-bit) applications to Itanium to take advantage of the newer / faster platform. ISVs are already porting applications to it and have been for a while.
Thirdly it isn't backwards-compatible with any existing architectures. You can't just take your binaries over and run them, at least not at full speed. Applications will need to be ported and retested. This is not insignificant in time, effort and cost.
See above. Porting will and has happened. If the logic can be presented that the company will either save or gain money by upgrading to this hardware then it will happen. It just makes business sense.
Fourthly, most people who want 64-bit in the corporate world already have it in the form of SPARC, Power, PA RISC and Alpha. Why should they change to an unproven, immature "jam tomorrow" architecture given their working and reliable systems already in use?
When the systems already in use are cost prohibitive to maintain they will be abandoned. A smart company will see the trend and start migration early. The Sparc platform is dated and loosing it's performance edge very quickly. The IBM Power series is still a reasonable choice. PA RISC who? Alpha who? You need to understand that IT departments invest for the long-haul, you won't see too many more shiney new Alphas being purchased not because they're bad but because C[T|I]Os know they're a doomed platform.
I'm afraid intel missed the boat by about 10 years. If they'd brought out a 64-bit RISC at the same time as SPARC, MIPS, Alpha and Power they might have stood a chance.
Or they could be going under like so many of the platforms you just mentioned. The 64bit world is certainly not new but it definitly requires some re-thinking in todays world. Intel is in a great position to do that.
I don't even need to mention how Athlon 64/Opteron will eat its lunch in the commodity sector of the market.
You don't need to say it because you can't say it. At least not yet. I too doubt that Itanium will be a hugh smash in the commodity arena. Not because it's inferior (I'm not arguing that either way) but because the money isn't there.
The companies that need and use 64-bit applications will not want those applications running on commodity hardware. They'll want a well supported platform and one that works time and again. Itanium can provide this. IBM can provide this. AMD cannot - they don't even make their own motherboards for christ sake.
Frankly, once a company has enough business to justify a 64bit platform they'll probably be profitable enough to deplay a good one - not the one from CompUSA.
Currently, it seems like the options for a runtime are the JVM, which is still dominated by Sun with respect to its design future
Pretty much sums it up I think. From an OS perspective having Sun invovled (as much as they are) is a bad thing. Remember, in the end it's all about money to Sun - in a pinch you bet they'll piss of the community.
OTOH, one must ask if this is such a bad thing? Something like this was need an absolute authority. Absolute Authority goes against the grain of open source, the GPL at least.
What good would a common-runtime be if you needed 19 [slightly] different versions of it to run everything?
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Parrot seems to achieve this goal to a degree. I don't know if the Parrot folk see it as an OS universal runtime and that may hinder it (in this capacity).
As you say, they're planning for multi-language support. I think they're trying to make it Python ready, that right there is two of the major OS languages.
I don't think Parrot will be adopted too quickly though. Look at Apache, 2.0 adoption has been slow due to lack of 3rd party modules. Now think about CPAN - same thing.
Posts like this remind me of WHY my skills in database and application design are in such high demand....
So what, it's still slow as hell.
MySQL rulez!
Yes yes, please keep thinking that Troll. I'm paid very well to clean up your messes.
Funny you mention it, I was going to run Apache on Linux so Apache would get some front-page /. treatment.
I can never understand this stuff. You want to give "poor developing countries" internet access? Don't you think we should spend more time actually developing these places before we start laying in the luxuries? (Remember, the Internet is not some god given right, it's a Luxury.)
Yeah, let's build a community center in BFE for a group of people who don't have running water or electricity in their homes and the nearest hospitol is a 300M charter plane trip away.
Yeah yeah, mod me down. Before you do, realize that they're places in northern Alaska that fit this description nicely - and they have a nicer net connection than a lot of people I know.
That's the one!
Our bedroom has only one electronic device - a clock radio. There is no telephone, the cell stays in the kitchen, absolutely no computers, TVs, at all. I made the cable hookup a dead line. (It helps the signal to the cable modem too)
...of course, when the servers are on fire it can be sort of a problem... but that's what watchdogs and managed hosting companies are for. :)
I work from home, I get calls at all hours about work. However, the nearest phone to my bedroom is a good distance. So far in fact, that I cannot get to it before voice mail does. If I do hear it, I don't even bother.
It was not always this way. When living space was at a premium I had my box in the bedroom for a short while. Fortunately, the wife put an end to it VERY quickly.
Your house is your kingdom and your bedroom your sanctuary. It's very comforting to lay my head down and hear absolutely nothing. No phone. No CPU fans. No churning disks. I really can get away there.
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Live in Wichita? Code perl? Want a job? Let me know.
...anyone who takes the corporate sector seriously?
Perhaps you cannot grasp the sheer mass of the project. Groupware is HUGE. I can't think of any small+ sized corporations that do not have some kind of internal group-scheduling / tasking / messaging system.
Could I piecemeal my own? Sure. But it would be costly still and I wouldn't have the interopability nor the years of refinment that has gone into existing products, namely Outlook.
Clearly, this is not something you can just sit down and code in a few weeks. $5M is a drop in the bucket.