The problem isn't the OS it's the hardware. Try running those same problems with Linux on your x86 hardware and watch it choke to all hell. x86 architecture is crap, and the x86 chips have trouble when being given intense workloads 100% of the time.
That beeping sound you're hearing is my BS-o-meter going off its measurement scale. While I agree that x86 architecture is pretty much crap next to SPARC and PowerPC, it is nowhere near that unstable. If it was, I sincerely doubt that many Linux and *BSD boxen could chalk up such impressive uptimes. I myself have a few machines salvaged from my workplace scrappile that have been resurrected as general-purpose servers, with old Pentiums and minimal RAM, that have *never* had a hardware or OS failure. Never. And this system does quite a bit of real work; it's a development server for about five people, a web server, mail server, USENET cache, DNS server, FTP server, and used to hold a small SQL database.
I won't get into the details here but thats why things like the Unisys ES7000 are so difficult to make - you have to have 3rd level caches, you have to have on-board chips monitoring state so you can 'reboot' an x86 at times and keep it working.
If it's so lousy, why do they keep using it, then? More importantly, why should a company invest in x86 architecture if it's so crappy? Truth is, it really isn't. It's not the best architecture, but if it was as crash-prone as you claim, it would have been replaced years ago.
Windows is a pretty good system - run this stuff on you're ia64 and watch it not have troubles.
Sorry, but the platform is too new to have a proven track record of any sort, or would you care to provide data to back up your claims?
Besides, didn't Linux run on the IA64 before Win2K did?
There really isn't much Unix can't do that Microsoft can't, and there is a whole lot Microsoft can do, and a whole lot faster, than Unix.
This is such an obvious troll that I can't even think of a way to retort to it; and I needn't -- somebody else already did here.
Why do you think a lot of image processing / computer vision / etc is done on windows - because you can just plug in a firewire camera and it WORKS, drivers from winupdate can automatically be installed, you can use the same API to grab and do your calculations, and MFC is a helluva lot easier to use than coding decent, high performance X apps. (High performance and X is a strange combination, considering X is a bigger memory hog than Explorer)
You don't know how wonderful it is when working on a project, having a camera fail on you, and just being able to go across the hall, borrow someone elses USB cam instead of firewire, plug it in, and have your program keep working. In linux you'd have to change your code and have a nightmare with drivers and the like.
Image processing -- you mean PhotoShop? Ok, I'll grant that. But on the side of UNIX, we can throw gene sequencing, designing aircraft, creating movies (Shrek or Monsters, Inc., anyone?), testing chemical models, modeling supernovae, handling massive bank transactions, and massive mathematical calculations that take months to finish.
The rest of your comment reeks of more of the same whining about USB camera compatibility, which is all desktop-centric (and handled just as well by a Mac, which is a much better desktop system). This article is about *datacenters* and *servers*, where things like X programming and USB cameras mean spit.
You are the one guilty of the logical fallacy here; it's called the "Straw Man" -- attacking the argument from a different angle that is unrelated to the main theme of the argument.
Don't feel old; I'm only twenty-one, and I miss the same things (I got started pretty young, though).
Gopher was awesome. I remember the first time I did a Veronica search, and was watching the results pool shrink *in real time* before my eyes as I typed in the search query...and who can forget TradeWars...
Wow, you pulled all that from a small post reminiscing how Nice It Was(tm) living in the pre-AOL era? Is it nice living in that small, smelly hole known as Youworld?
I never made any statments about requiring intelligence tests to access the Internet, yet you seem to have read somewhere that I had; and that, furthermore, you make the assertion that I scoff at people possessing limited HTML skills, which is also false.
I *do* scoff at high-school graduates that are incapable of even the most basic tasks, who write like third-graders, and who interpret every bit of positive criticism that they get as a grave insult. But I digress.
Erm, "the ideas the Internet was founded upon"? I don't suppose you've ever heard of ARPANET at all? If we were all online for the original purpose that the Internet was founded for, than we'd have names beginning with 'Colonel' and 'Lieutenant'.
If you look at the underpinnings of the 'modern' Internet, you'd see that it was created and used largely for- and by- academic institutions (after the split with the military). Freedom of information was one of the ideals of this emerging Internet, but it came with the understanding that the information one distributed should be, for the most part, relevant, interesting to others, or important.
This quasi-utopian state continuted up until AOL released its moron horde onto the Internet, which promptly swamped the long-term net users (who were, for the most part, both polite and literate) in a massive river of digital sewage. Instead of the Internet acting to help enrich the minds of its users, it began serving as a type of mental bog -- much like television is today. The "intent" of the internet wasn't to provide a voice for every immature, uneducated, ignorant individual on the planet; it was a means of communication for the people who cared about using their minds.
It's obvious that we can't turn back the clock; Pandora has opened the proverbial box, and the once-pristine world of the Internet was in an instant infested with a type of informational disease. But we can think back to the "old days", and try to build Internet communites with higher standards in the future; ones like ASR, K5, and (formerly) Slashdot. Places where people can go, not just to be entertained, but to expand their minds.
Web-browsing used to being up a plethora of intelligent, well-written, interesting pages back in the days of the Internet being a largely academic arena. Now that everybody and their pet dingo are online, the quality of content has gone down dramatically; especially on unmoderated forums. Proper spelling and grammar have all but disappeared from the 'net, and only us "old timers" bother with things like netiquette.
Sure, it's cute that Grandma can email her grandkids whenever she feels the need, but with that comes a thousand hastily-designed pages on Geocities, all alike, proclaiming between BLINK tags how different and special each one of them is.
I've retreated almost totally into USENET, mailing lists, and a few IRC channels that still offer a modicum of intelligent conversation and interesting information. I don't accept HTML email, and although I still browse slashdot and K5, I don't post as regularly as I used to.
Okay, so by following the same logic, one shouldn't need to learn what that round thing is in the car (the one in front of all the dials and switches) if one would like to drive. So, why do we have mandatory driver's education and licensing?
The fact of the matter is that computers are an integral part of the lifestyle of first-world nations. It is almost impossible to get along in our society without knowing the basics of using a computer, and a little knowledge beyond the basics can be incredibly helpful to an individual, even if they don't work in the computer field. Ignorance of and apathy for the use of computers only results in a severe detriment; resumes are supposed to be supplied by email nowadays, and universities no longer accept handwritten papers, except in some rare circumstances. Accountants, secretaries, and pretty much anybody who isn't a blue-collar worker (and many who are) depend on some type of computer know-how. Technical knowledge is a requirement to live in a Western society, not an option.
With that, I can agree that somebody who refuses to learn even the basics of operating a computer is incredibly lazy.
It doesn't require a godlike knowledge of 'C' to use Linux, or in-depth knowledge of the kernel. It does require critical thinking skills and a grasp of basic logic, which many people seem to lack nowadays. If someone can listen, remember, and understand some pretty simple concepts, they can learn to use a Linux (or Unix) system very effectively; at home, or in the office.
The problem lies in that many people (and most Americans) have the attention span of a kitten spun on crack cocaine, and understand simple logic as well as Ashcroft understands the Bill of Rights.
Urm, I hate to tell you this, but "ball games and other sports" are hardly the opiate of Joe Sixpack; that award goes to professional American football[1]. Many intelligent people, astrophysicists and neuroscientists even, enjoy spending time cycling, playing tennis, volleyball, or a pick-up game of basketball. The most intelligent people I know spent years studying martial arts.
The ability to use the body does not impinge upon the ability to use the mind, and learning to use both provides a much greater benefit than having skill solely with one or the other. The pudgy no-exercise anti-sports nerd lies at the same level of extreme as Mr. Pro Football Joe Sixpack.
As to your last comment, hey: I'm a cyclist. I play basketball during the summer (despite my abject lack of talent), practice martial arts, and I lift weights. I also code heavily in four languages, run Linux on all my hardware (even my older SPARCs), and dabble with electronics and amateur radio when I have time.
Only difference between you and I is that I can still see certain important organs when I look downward...
[1] Not to be confused with Football, known to us Americans as "Soccer".
What's the last group of people to get the axe at a failing company, other than the executives? S&M[1], that's who, because they help supply the lifeblood of the company (in theory).
A competent S&M group actually can work wonders; look at Jack in the Box, Volkswagen, and Ikea -- companies that have, at one point or another, virtually risen from the dead because they had both marketing and technical (engineering) geeks. One of the key things behind S&M, though, is that it depends on/image/ -- the way a company is perceived by its customers, partners, and competition. Having an office based in "San Fransisco, CA" or "New York, NY" looks a lot better on your company's letterhead than does "Bubbaville, TN", in much the same way that driving a Ferrari looks better than driving an Oldsmobile[2].
For the record, I'm a technical geek -- I make my living playing with various flavors of Unix. But I've had a more in-depth experience with marketing types than most, and while about 90% of them are worthless crap, the top 10% are incredibly nifty and effective people.
This has nothing to do with holes in APIs; this has to do with third-party software installing extra crap without notifying the user. A Debian package or an RPM could easily install spyware or make unwanted changes without notifying the user -- the reason that I've never seen a package that does is because free software developers tend to have more respect for their users; it's more of a peer relationship than an adversarial one.
Funny; I grabbed all of my application software, from StarOffice to Opera, for free, off of the Internet, and it seems to work just fine. So do the numerous other, smaller applications, like 'mutt' and 'ssh' -- they haven't trashed my computer, either, and they were free.
I think what the author is trying to get across is that the user needs to be informed; and while this is taken for granted in the free software world, it seems to be largely absent nowadays in the world of commercial software.
When a Debian package is going to make changes to a configuration file, it asks me first (unless I tell it not to); when most Windows-based installers decide that it's time to replace the IP stack with a Jell-O recipe, it just goes ahead without informing the end user of squat. While Microsoft has made this easier, it's not totally their fault (for once); and it's something that applications developers need to keep in mind.
You really need to work on your understanding of "high end"; Sun's high-end is boxes like the E10K and E15K -- and it's an area where Intel has no leverage. An E15K can support multiple hardware domains, up to 106 US3 900MHz CPUs, and over a half *terabyte* of RAM.
You find me an Intel machine with those specs. Oh, and it must be fully managable from a remote site down to the hardware level; you have to be able to turn CPUs on and off, power the machine up and down, re-assign drive IDs, and such -- remotely.
The eight-way xSeries competes more with Sun's low-end server hardware, which is comprable in price; I can't really give an exact figure without knowing what this server is for.
Homogenity may be healthy in some obscure, theory-based sense; but, let me assure you: homogenity is not a good thing to the people who run businesses.
Homogenity is having to pay millions of dollars in licensing fees to a seperate corporation so you can develop a simple in-house application that doesn't have a shrink-wrapped equivalent.
Homogenity is having your entire business' electronic infrastructure annhiliated by a Norweigan teenager because you use one operating system to span server, workstation, and PDA.
Homogenity is having to answer calls from two hundred end users, each having an identical workstation posessing a broken foot pedal and drink coaster.
A bike computer is a small (or, in this case, not-so-small) device attached to the handlebars of your trusty steed. The cheaper computers only track speed, distance, and trip time; and the more expensive computers (when mated with the appropriate components[1]) can track altitute, position, and even cadence -- the last of these being vital to any moderately serious road cyclist.
So; almost all bikes nowadays are equipped with computers; the Palm just provides a larger display. Since it can't track cadence, however, it would be useless to pretty much any road cyclist. The fact that Palms don't absorb repedative shock all too well rules mountain biking out. However, the large display size makes a Palm almost ideal for recumbent cyclists.
[1] For example, the Flight Deck computers must be mated with Shimano 105 (or better) components.
Re:They even give out free t-shirts!
on
Palm on a Bicycle
·
· Score: 2
Urm; why don't they give out cycling jerseys instead?
This is why infrared is used instead of visible light. Infrared optics have been used for over a decade in night-vision systems, and the FLAIR system, which uses IR cameras to penetrate bad weather conditions as well as darkness, can be found on Apache attack helicopters.
So the only issue is having objects get placed in the way of the beam; not a big deal for companies that have line-of-site access from the roofs of their buildings -- the only things that'll get in the way thirty feet up are going to be new, taller buildings being built.
My company uses a similar setup (focused microwave rather than IR), and we're quite happy with it. We've had a few small one-second hicups, but that's because they are erecting a new building beween the ones we have radio links on (and yes, the new one is short enough to allow the radio to continue functioning).
Possibilities.
on
Modular Robots
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This opens up quite a number of doors in the robotics industry; as each new module can [potentially] add processing power to the chain -- making the robot even more capable. Furthermore, as long as the interfaces between modules are kept consistant, it would be possible to engineer special modules for specialized tasks, which only adds to the versatility of the robot.
There is a gross difference between Javascript and Java; Javascript is an in-brower scripting language with a rather vague specification. Java is a different beast entirely.
Java applets are actually different from Java applications; they don't have the ability to interact directly with the contents of the hard drive, in addition to all of the other limitations running in the JVM. The most malicious things that a Java applet can do are make lots of windows (not a problem on a Unix box), or present false information to the user -- essentially, Java applets are no more harmful than HTML.
The risk associated with Java applets is significantly different
from some of the other technologies. Java has a robust security
mechanism designed to deal with situations like these that prevents
sensitive information from being disclosed or client information from
being damaged.
However, Java applets written by an attacker can still be loaded
while your are viewing a legitimate web page. The problems that can
arise are similar to those involving the and other HTML
tags. For example, an attacker could develop a "Trojan Horse" program
that presented misleading information and prompted you for a password.
If you failed to recognize the malicious applet for what it was, you
could accidentally disclose sensitive information.
You must make your own determination about disabling Java applets,
based on your tolerance for these risks. If you choose to disable
Java, please see the detailed instructions below.
There's also (in theory) a special security privilege to run "potentially harmful" ActiveX scripts or Outlook macros; yet they seem to slip through on a regular basis. I have little faith in Microsoft's ability to successfully implement a decent security model, based on their track history alone. The JVM doesn't provide any memory manipulation capabilities whatsoever, so even massive bugs in the JVM don't necessarily open up your entire system.
I'd place a bet that there are ways around C# security.
I will admit that I'm not fantastically well-versed in.NET (who is?), but I do understand the fundamentals.
Furthermore, using code that handles memory directly is a lousy way to implement platform independent software; why do you think there are so many little-to-big-to-little endian conversion functions in C?
I think the difference is that.NET and C# are designed as a network-based platform; e.g., you grab code off of the 'net as you need it, rather than storing everything locally. Having "unsafe" code in such an environment is utterly suicide, as it allows pretty much anybody who can put code on the network for you to use can do what they want to your system.
Java actually does the opposite of "letting programmers be careless"; it forces them to be pedantic. In Java, you *have* to check that data is formatted properly, or your program will throw an exception and die. You have to properly typecast objects, define variables, and return from non-void functions, or the compiler will return an error. Java forces the programmer to handle all the boring, tedious work of making sure their code handles error conditions in a proper manner; because if it doesn't, the program will crash. But it will never allow access to the system outside of the JVM -- making Java a very safe network application platform.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't the OS it's the hardware. Try running those same problems with Linux on your x86 hardware and watch it choke to all hell. x86 architecture is crap, and the x86 chips have trouble when being given intense workloads 100% of the time.
That beeping sound you're hearing is my BS-o-meter going off its measurement scale. While I agree that x86 architecture is pretty much crap next to SPARC and PowerPC, it is nowhere near that unstable. If it was, I sincerely doubt that many Linux and *BSD boxen could chalk up such impressive uptimes. I myself have a few machines salvaged from my workplace scrappile that have been resurrected as general-purpose servers, with old Pentiums and minimal RAM, that have *never* had a hardware or OS failure. Never. And this system does quite a bit of real work; it's a development server for about five people, a web server, mail server, USENET cache, DNS server, FTP server, and used to hold a small SQL database.
I won't get into the details here but thats why things like the Unisys ES7000 are so difficult to make - you have to have 3rd level caches, you have to have on-board chips monitoring state so you can 'reboot' an x86 at times and keep it working.
If it's so lousy, why do they keep using it, then? More importantly, why should a company invest in x86 architecture if it's so crappy? Truth is, it really isn't. It's not the best architecture, but if it was as crash-prone as you claim, it would have been replaced years ago.
Windows is a pretty good system - run this stuff on you're ia64 and watch it not have troubles.
Sorry, but the platform is too new to have a proven track record of any sort, or would you care to provide data to back up your claims?
Besides, didn't Linux run on the IA64 before Win2K did?
There really isn't much Unix can't do that Microsoft can't, and there is a whole lot Microsoft can do, and a whole lot faster, than Unix.
This is such an obvious troll that I can't even think of a way to retort to it; and I needn't -- somebody else already did here.Why do you think a lot of image processing / computer vision / etc is done on windows - because you can just plug in a firewire camera and it WORKS, drivers from winupdate can automatically be installed, you can use the same API to grab and do your calculations, and MFC is a helluva lot easier to use than coding decent, high performance X apps. (High performance and X is a strange combination, considering X is a bigger memory hog than Explorer)
You don't know how wonderful it is when working on a project, having a camera fail on you, and just being able to go across the hall, borrow someone elses USB cam instead of firewire, plug it in, and have your program keep working. In linux you'd have to change your code and have a nightmare with drivers and the like.
Image processing -- you mean PhotoShop? Ok, I'll grant that. But on the side of UNIX, we can throw gene sequencing, designing aircraft, creating movies (Shrek or Monsters, Inc., anyone?), testing chemical models, modeling supernovae, handling massive bank transactions, and massive mathematical calculations that take months to finish.
The rest of your comment reeks of more of the same whining about USB camera compatibility, which is all desktop-centric (and handled just as well by a Mac, which is a much better desktop system). This article is about *datacenters* and *servers*, where things like X programming and USB cameras mean spit.
You are the one guilty of the logical fallacy here; it's called the "Straw Man" -- attacking the argument from a different angle that is unrelated to the main theme of the argument.
Don't feel old; I'm only twenty-one, and I miss the same things (I got started pretty young, though).
Gopher was awesome. I remember the first time I did a Veronica search, and was watching the results pool shrink *in real time* before my eyes as I typed in the search query...and who can forget TradeWars...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the result of that equation is the number of times you've been turned down for a date?
Wow, you pulled all that from a small post reminiscing how Nice It Was(tm) living in the pre-AOL era? Is it nice living in that small, smelly hole known as Youworld?
I never made any statments about requiring intelligence tests to access the Internet, yet you seem to have read somewhere that I had; and that, furthermore, you make the assertion that I scoff at people possessing limited HTML skills, which is also false.
I *do* scoff at high-school graduates that are incapable of even the most basic tasks, who write like third-graders, and who interpret every bit of positive criticism that they get as a grave insult. But I digress.
Erm, "the ideas the Internet was founded upon"? I don't suppose you've ever heard of ARPANET at all? If we were all online for the original purpose that the Internet was founded for, than we'd have names beginning with 'Colonel' and 'Lieutenant'.
If you look at the underpinnings of the 'modern' Internet, you'd see that it was created and used largely for- and by- academic institutions (after the split with the military). Freedom of information was one of the ideals of this emerging Internet, but it came with the understanding that the information one distributed should be, for the most part, relevant, interesting to others, or important.
This quasi-utopian state continuted up until AOL released its moron horde onto the Internet, which promptly swamped the long-term net users (who were, for the most part, both polite and literate) in a massive river of digital sewage. Instead of the Internet acting to help enrich the minds of its users, it began serving as a type of mental bog -- much like television is today. The "intent" of the internet wasn't to provide a voice for every immature, uneducated, ignorant individual on the planet; it was a means of communication for the people who cared about using their minds.
It's obvious that we can't turn back the clock; Pandora has opened the proverbial box, and the once-pristine world of the Internet was in an instant infested with a type of informational disease. But we can think back to the "old days", and try to build Internet communites with higher standards in the future; ones like ASR, K5, and (formerly) Slashdot. Places where people can go, not just to be entertained, but to expand their minds.
Web-browsing used to being up a plethora of intelligent, well-written, interesting pages back in the days of the Internet being a largely academic arena. Now that everybody and their pet dingo are online, the quality of content has gone down dramatically; especially on unmoderated forums. Proper spelling and grammar have all but disappeared from the 'net, and only us "old timers" bother with things like netiquette.
Sure, it's cute that Grandma can email her grandkids whenever she feels the need, but with that comes a thousand hastily-designed pages on Geocities, all alike, proclaiming between BLINK tags how different and special each one of them is.
I've retreated almost totally into USENET, mailing lists, and a few IRC channels that still offer a modicum of intelligent conversation and interesting information. I don't accept HTML email, and although I still browse slashdot and K5, I don't post as regularly as I used to.
Okay, so by following the same logic, one shouldn't need to learn what that round thing is in the car (the one in front of all the dials and switches) if one would like to drive. So, why do we have mandatory driver's education and licensing?
The fact of the matter is that computers are an integral part of the lifestyle of first-world nations. It is almost impossible to get along in our society without knowing the basics of using a computer, and a little knowledge beyond the basics can be incredibly helpful to an individual, even if they don't work in the computer field. Ignorance of and apathy for the use of computers only results in a severe detriment; resumes are supposed to be supplied by email nowadays, and universities no longer accept handwritten papers, except in some rare circumstances. Accountants, secretaries, and pretty much anybody who isn't a blue-collar worker (and many who are) depend on some type of computer know-how. Technical knowledge is a requirement to live in a Western society, not an option.
With that, I can agree that somebody who refuses to learn even the basics of operating a computer is incredibly lazy.
It doesn't require a godlike knowledge of 'C' to use Linux, or in-depth knowledge of the kernel. It does require critical thinking skills and a grasp of basic logic, which many people seem to lack nowadays. If someone can listen, remember, and understand some pretty simple concepts, they can learn to use a Linux (or Unix) system very effectively; at home, or in the office.
The problem lies in that many people (and most Americans) have the attention span of a kitten spun on crack cocaine, and understand simple logic as well as Ashcroft understands the Bill of Rights.
Urm, I hate to tell you this, but "ball games and other sports" are hardly the opiate of Joe Sixpack; that award goes to professional American football[1]. Many intelligent people, astrophysicists and neuroscientists even, enjoy spending time cycling, playing tennis, volleyball, or a pick-up game of basketball. The most intelligent people I know spent years studying martial arts.
The ability to use the body does not impinge upon the ability to use the mind, and learning to use both provides a much greater benefit than having skill solely with one or the other. The pudgy no-exercise anti-sports nerd lies at the same level of extreme as Mr. Pro Football Joe Sixpack.
As to your last comment, hey: I'm a cyclist. I play basketball during the summer (despite my abject lack of talent), practice martial arts, and I lift weights. I also code heavily in four languages, run Linux on all my hardware (even my older SPARCs), and dabble with electronics and amateur radio when I have time.
Only difference between you and I is that I can still see certain important organs when I look downward...
[1] Not to be confused with Football, known to us Americans as "Soccer".
I'm not terribly sure about that last bit.
/image/ -- the way a company is perceived by its customers, partners, and competition. Having an office based in "San Fransisco, CA" or "New York, NY" looks a lot better on your company's letterhead than does "Bubbaville, TN", in much the same way that driving a Ferrari looks better than driving an Oldsmobile[2].
What's the last group of people to get the axe at a failing company, other than the executives? S&M[1], that's who, because they help supply the lifeblood of the company (in theory).
A competent S&M group actually can work wonders; look at Jack in the Box, Volkswagen, and Ikea -- companies that have, at one point or another, virtually risen from the dead because they had both marketing and technical (engineering) geeks. One of the key things behind S&M, though, is that it depends on
For the record, I'm a technical geek -- I make my living playing with various flavors of Unix. But I've had a more in-depth experience with marketing types than most, and while about 90% of them are worthless crap, the top 10% are incredibly nifty and effective people.
[1] Sales and Marketing for the acronym-impared.
This has nothing to do with holes in APIs; this has to do with third-party software installing extra crap without notifying the user. A Debian package or an RPM could easily install spyware or make unwanted changes without notifying the user -- the reason that I've never seen a package that does is because free software developers tend to have more respect for their users; it's more of a peer relationship than an adversarial one.
Funny; I grabbed all of my application software, from StarOffice to Opera, for free, off of the Internet, and it seems to work just fine. So do the numerous other, smaller applications, like 'mutt' and 'ssh' -- they haven't trashed my computer, either, and they were free.
I think what the author is trying to get across is that the user needs to be informed; and while this is taken for granted in the free software world, it seems to be largely absent nowadays in the world of commercial software.
When a Debian package is going to make changes to a configuration file, it asks me first (unless I tell it not to); when most Windows-based installers decide that it's time to replace the IP stack with a Jell-O recipe, it just goes ahead without informing the end user of squat. While Microsoft has made this easier, it's not totally their fault (for once); and it's something that applications developers need to keep in mind.
You really need to work on your understanding of "high end"; Sun's high-end is boxes like the E10K and E15K -- and it's an area where Intel has no leverage. An E15K can support multiple hardware domains, up to 106 US3 900MHz CPUs, and over a half *terabyte* of RAM.
You find me an Intel machine with those specs. Oh, and it must be fully managable from a remote site down to the hardware level; you have to be able to turn CPUs on and off, power the machine up and down, re-assign drive IDs, and such -- remotely.
The eight-way xSeries competes more with Sun's low-end server hardware, which is comprable in price; I can't really give an exact figure without knowing what this server is for.
Actually, there is one Microsoft product that beat an Open Source product, hands down. What is it?
Microsoft Product: WindowsNT
Open Source Product: crashme
Erm, I hate to ruin your little world and all, but FreeBSD uses zlib, too.
Homogenity may be healthy in some obscure, theory-based sense; but, let me assure you: homogenity is not a good thing to the people who run businesses.
Homogenity is having to pay millions of dollars in licensing fees to a seperate corporation so you can develop a simple in-house application that doesn't have a shrink-wrapped equivalent.
Homogenity is having your entire business' electronic infrastructure annhiliated by a Norweigan teenager because you use one operating system to span server, workstation, and PDA.
Homogenity is having to answer calls from two hundred end users, each having an identical workstation posessing a broken foot pedal and drink coaster.
You forgot:
11 Cutesy posts making predictions about other posts.
As a cyclist, allow me to cluebat you in.
A bike computer is a small (or, in this case, not-so-small) device attached to the handlebars of your trusty steed. The cheaper computers only track speed, distance, and trip time; and the more expensive computers (when mated with the appropriate components[1]) can track altitute, position, and even cadence -- the last of these being vital to any moderately serious road cyclist.
So; almost all bikes nowadays are equipped with computers; the Palm just provides a larger display. Since it can't track cadence, however, it would be useless to pretty much any road cyclist. The fact that Palms don't absorb repedative shock all too well rules mountain biking out. However, the large display size makes a Palm almost ideal for recumbent cyclists.
[1] For example, the Flight Deck computers must be mated with Shimano 105 (or better) components.
Urm; why don't they give out cycling jerseys instead?
Methinks the military would take you out before you got a shot off; they want to test the new Star Wars system on an undamaged target, after all.
This is why infrared is used instead of visible light. Infrared optics have been used for over a decade in night-vision systems, and the FLAIR system, which uses IR cameras to penetrate bad weather conditions as well as darkness, can be found on Apache attack helicopters.
So the only issue is having objects get placed in the way of the beam; not a big deal for companies that have line-of-site access from the roofs of their buildings -- the only things that'll get in the way thirty feet up are going to be new, taller buildings being built.
My company uses a similar setup (focused microwave rather than IR), and we're quite happy with it. We've had a few small one-second hicups, but that's because they are erecting a new building beween the ones we have radio links on (and yes, the new one is short enough to allow the radio to continue functioning).
This opens up quite a number of doors in the robotics industry; as each new module can [potentially] add processing power to the chain -- making the robot even more capable. Furthermore, as long as the interfaces between modules are kept consistant, it would be possible to engineer special modules for specialized tasks, which only adds to the versatility of the robot.
It's kind of like having industrial-grade legos.
No, they'd get sued for trademark infringement by Microsoft.
There is a gross difference between Javascript and Java; Javascript is an in-brower scripting language with a rather vague specification. Java is a different beast entirely.
Java applets are actually different from Java applications; they don't have the ability to interact directly with the contents of the hard drive, in addition to all of the other limitations running in the JVM. The most malicious things that a Java applet can do are make lots of windows (not a problem on a Unix box), or present false information to the user -- essentially, Java applets are no more harmful than HTML.
I direct you to a pertinent section of the CERT/CC Malicious Web Scripts FAQ:
There's also (in theory) a special security privilege to run "potentially harmful" ActiveX scripts or Outlook macros; yet they seem to slip through on a regular basis. I have little faith in Microsoft's ability to successfully implement a decent security model, based on their track history alone. The JVM doesn't provide any memory manipulation capabilities whatsoever, so even massive bugs in the JVM don't necessarily open up your entire system. I'd place a bet that there are ways around C# security.
.NET (who is?), but I do understand the fundamentals.
I will admit that I'm not fantastically well-versed in
Furthermore, using code that handles memory directly is a lousy way to implement platform independent software; why do you think there are so many little-to-big-to-little endian conversion functions in C?
I think the difference is that .NET and C# are designed as a network-based platform; e.g., you grab code off of the 'net as you need it, rather than storing everything locally. Having "unsafe" code in such an environment is utterly suicide, as it allows pretty much anybody who can put code on the network for you to use can do what they want to your system.
Java actually does the opposite of "letting programmers be careless"; it forces them to be pedantic. In Java, you *have* to check that data is formatted properly, or your program will throw an exception and die. You have to properly typecast objects, define variables, and return from non-void functions, or the compiler will return an error. Java forces the programmer to handle all the boring, tedious work of making sure their code handles error conditions in a proper manner; because if it doesn't, the program will crash. But it will never allow access to the system outside of the JVM -- making Java a very safe network application platform.
Doritos . . . chips to large they can be inhaled.