Sure X *can* do those things in principle, but those capabilities are only in esoteric proprietary (and now abandoned) implementaitons. (Truth be told, we'd petition Sun to turn loose of NeWS if we had any sense...)
A bigger shortcoming of X that will prevent its move into the modern world is that it handles only display, keyboard, and mouse. This pretty much lets out multimedia, which requires audio and video at reasonable frame rates. I've tried writing programs to run meteorological "movies" on X, and it just cant work very well. Synchronizing audio and video when delivering the video via X is effectively impossible since X doesn't even know audio exists.
In my mind, these are the reasons X must go. The fact that for all practical purposes its fonts can't be fixed is just one more reason. If X doesn't get replaced *very soon* then the battle for the desktop will be over and W2K will have won not only the battle but the war. (There is a rapidly coalescing opnion in the industry that the only end-user interface that matters going forward is Windows (2000|ME|CE) and IE. This is believed even in companies that are largely considered to be "Linux-friendly", like say, the largest computer company on the planet. If that perception isn't changed soon, it will be too late to matter.)
Good question. At a glance, it looks like it just means you can't bootstrap yourself from a SPARC unless you have the previous kernel: i.e.: that you'd have to build the SPARC kernel elsewhere first unless you have the old one. One wonders why they'd do this though...
Plan 9 is different than the usual Unix ways of doing these, and in some respects, better. One of the cool things about Plan9 (and its follow-on Inferno, which I've been looking at lately) is that pretty much *everything* is network extensible and *completely* location transparent, and this is all built in and does not rely on bolt-ons like AFS directory services, etc. (Imagine being able to relocate any service, part, or function of the OS as easily and effectively as you redirect an X display and you'll start to get the idea... And on top of that, they actually managed to make it quite small and efficient!)
Yes, you *can* make Unix jump through those hoops, but in many ways it's just pretending. Plan 9 was arguably the first really serious attempt to write a true network-centric OS that recognized the power and potential of networked computing. I'm not sure if Plan 9 is the same as Inferno in this regard, but one of the things that's impressing me about Inferno is that to a much greater degree than Unix, *everything* is a file. This makes it possible to write scripts that have incredible power, for instance, to open a TCP connection, you just write a connect command with the proper parameters to the TCP device file, so pretty much everything can now be done from the command line. This is a higher level of functional abstraction that makes scripting much more powerful, allowing those of us that love the power and leverage of Unix' superior text processing and scripting tools to really shine. In this respect, although it's clearly post-Unix, it's actually truer to the "Unix philosophy" than Unix itself! (Not to start a flame war, but I've always believed that unless you're writing bit-banging code like device drivers, resorting to C reflects a substantial lack of imagination and knowledge of Unix on the part of the programmer.)
I think we all recognize that assuming from the get-go that the network is an ever-present and reliable service would lead to an operating environment very different in some important respects from what we have today. Plan 9 and Inferno are the result of one approach to taking that assumption to its logical conclusion.
You really need to read up on it yourself to appreciate it, but don't think that Plan 9 is either "just another Unix clone", "something bolted onto Unix", or "just the same old thing." It really is a different spin on the role of the network from the OS point of view. Although there may be better obscure examples, Plan 9/Inferno is the most network-aware, network-integrated OS I know of. Check it out - I'm going to!
P.S.: One of the interesting side-effects of this philosophy is it's impact on the prevalence and power of interpreted languages in general. Now that Open Source is here to stay, and Moore's law is outrunning the hardware nedds of most of us, do we really even need compiled languages anymore? (The classical reasons are speed and secrecy of source for comercial reasons - those are now both becoming increasingly irrelevant. I personally believe interpreted languages will triumph in the end, as I have believed since 1985. We're not there yet, but we're getting much closer...)
The site referenced by this article is quite suspect and oozes poor scientific method and reasoning. (The skeletal calculations are a joke.) That is not true of all Creationist/anti-evolutionist sites however. (The question of how such big animals were viable is an interesting one, but the analysis offered is quite weak, and inexplicably ignores the possibility that these and other fossils may have become "enlarged" by some unknown process. This hypothesis should be investigated if such size truly presents problems, as it may offer a more likely explanation for 170 lb. eagles than variable planetary gravity . Still, it seems difficult to envision a process that would enlarge so uniformly at such magnitudes...)
It is quite possible to reject evolution solely on the bases of scientific fact and the way the scientific community plays fast and loose with actual facts in order to make them support the dogma of evolutionary development of man. A pretty good reference site is noted hacker Do-While Jones' site, Science Against Evolution. Don't even bother to write a flaming reply until you've browsed his pages to see the extent of the scientific dishonesty plaguing this topic - I think you'll find he does an admirable job of sticking to factual, scientific evidence and arguments.
Let's face facts folks, there's plenty of absolutely deplorable science on both sides, in both cases often driven by a dogmatic attempt to make the facts fit the theory. The only thing that can be argued with certainty from a scientific point of view is that we don't know how we got here, and we can't with any significant degree of certainty even date the things we find. Any statement beyond this is speculation, not science.
A good example of this scientific dishonesty would be the "composite foot" literally dreamed up for "Lucy" (afarensis, a fossil for which the feet are conspicuously absent!) to fit the Laetoli footprints in Tanzania. Although there is absolutely no evidence that afarensis made those footprints, Donald Johansen wanted to prove a connection so badly that he invented a foot for Lucy that would fit the footprints. This "composite foot" was "made from fossil bones belonging to Homo from nearby Olduvai Gorge combined with Hadar toe bones" - in other words, he used 3.5 myo toe bones from one species and foot bones from a (supposedly) entirely different species that lived a million years later, mixed thoroughly with imagination and preconceived notions! And so now evolutionists go around telling people "science" has proven afarensis made those tracks. Oh, yeah, that's good science! All this to explain a footprint that is by thier own admission indistinguishable from a modern human footprint, a foot print that in reality could be much younger than they assume.
Seriously, I find it takes far less faith to believe in Creation than in evolution!
Warning: Personal beliefs rant follows... As an added benefit, accepting that Creation could be true in turn led me to consider that perhaps the Bible was inerrant after all, as was believed by many people much brighter than I over centuries. As soon as you're willing to assume that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God (for which there is quite compelling scientific evidence by the way), you begin to see that that single presupposition leads to a perfectly logically consistent belief system which explains all the hard questions. Personally, I believe John Calvin tied all this together better than anyone since St. Paul, and Jonathan Edwards better than anyone since Calvin. (Edwards, although unfamiliar to many today, is generally acknowledged by historians as the most brilliant mind in the history of the New World: he entered the precursor to Yale at age thirteen with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew already under his belt. You can read a bit more about him at my friend Mark Trigsted's JonathanEdwards.com site.) Don't flame either Calvin or Edwards until you've read them and really tried to understand their arguments. I think you'll be blown away - in this sense Calvinism is perfect for Geeks, since it provides the only structured and sytematic Theology cabable of explaining all the things that really need explaining. This isn't warm, fuzzy, Christianity, but it passes the test of Truth, which is far more important than a feel-good factor. Some of us are proud to be Puritans.
A few years ago, I had the privelege to do one of the coolest consulting gigs of my career. The job was for a global oil company that ships more oil than anyone else, and was very concerned about minimizing environmental damage and having the right command and control structures in place instantly in the event of a spill. Here are a few tips based on that experience:
We wound up using an Inmarsat phone by Magnavox (back then only Magnavox and NEC were *seriously* in that business, but Nera and Thrane & Thrane seem to aim more at the serious marine market now.) Inmarsat is rather expensive, but other than the protocol performance problems inherent in the horrible latency to geosynchronous orbit, it works reliably. Prices have come *way* down from the $17/minute of a few years ago to monthly fees of a few dozen dollars plus airtime of $2-5/minute.
The Magnavox phone we used had a folding parabolic antenna which had great response, but was finicky w.r.t. alignment. Many of the newer (and lower cost) phones use multiple phased array antennae which are much better suited to a smallish boat - you don't want to be trying to keep an antenna pointed straight at the bird while on the seas in a rocking boat! You get what you pay for here. There are some decent entry-level phones that are compact, easy-to-use, and affordable, but they often have data rates of around 2400 bps! 64 kbps phones have been out since late last year.
Also, pay atention to how you get connected to the Net on the ground end. I've heard (second-hand) that the Dutch PTT has good Internet access and competitive rates.
Make sure the computers on both ends have RFC 1323 (the LFN RFC) compliant TCP/IP stacks. This makes a *huge* difference in the way your machine will handle geosync latencies! Most modern machines will have this feature by now, but if it's missing on either end, you'll see big performance problems.
Inmarsat is probably still the best bet for a boat because you get voice and data and they're on pretty much every ship in the world, which can be handy for checking weather, etc. from your neighbors. (Learn the wetiquette for this before spamming folks at high connect charges!)
Iridium would have been a good choice, but sadly, they're gone. Globalstar is still an option, and one that might work for you, but despite their name, they're not global yet, so coverage may be an issue. Globalstar phones though, have the advantage of being seriously multimode: Globalstar satellite, AMPS analog cellular, CDMA Digital, or the crude, brain-frying GSM. These could save a lot of money near shore, if roaming doesn't bite you worse than satellite time!
Good luck. I'm envious of anyone heading out to sea...
We typically run 1-CAT3, 2-CAT5, & 1-Coax drops in each bedroom, living space, study, etc. This has been done to over 1/2 the houses we've built in the last 3 years.
FWIW, I'm remodeling my 10-year-old home now (not worn out, but it suffered from terminal architectural boredom), and I used to be a telecom consultant making recommendations right down to the wiring, so here are my general recommendations:
First, I'm cheap, so I only want to spend money where I'm fairly certain I'll get it back. You can pull fiber everywhere, but then you'll choke at the cost of network electronics (priced optical hubs lately?), and you still won't have the right type or grade 20 years from now and will pay a premium to deal with weird media. You have *no* idea how much really expensive cable I've seen abandoned in place just because someone decided "we might use it someday".
What to pull: The most I could justify is two jackets (w/ 4 pair ea.) of Cat-5 to each location. This is enough to still let you keep analog and digital in separate jackets and you still have plenty of pairs left over for future use. (For instance, in the digital jacket you'd use just half the pairs for 10 or 100 Ethernet, and in the analog jacket you could have two phone lines, the cable, and still another unused analog pair - that's probably plenty.) Try to keep analog and digital in separate jackets, and remember that although the phone loop itself is 48V max, the ring signal is a 90V square wave. If you're still paranoid and have money to burn, pull a third jacket, but I bet you'll never use it.
How to Pull It: This is one of the most important considerations. When doing my remodeling, I took advantage of a leftover triangular space to put a storage niche and wiring center. You want to "home run" everything, that is, everything is a star topology running from the outlet to your wiring closet. You may need more or less space depending on what's going to be located there. Although your first inclination is to put your servers, etc, there, you might later find this is inconvenient. I have one rule that works for me: If it can't hang on the wall (there's a sheet of plywood there to act as a substrate), it doesn't go in the wiring closet. Consider ventilation and power requirements, especially if you want many computers there. This is the one reason I'm a fanatic about low power machines for server use (I use a Laptop and a "cash register computer" for my Linux servers): I hate paying for all the KW-hrs big servers burn, and I also don't want to have to worry about special A/C or power requirements. Remember the trend is for things to become much lower-power, so skipping the dedicated 30A circuit and A/C duct should be fine. Hard conduit, whether steel or PVC is quite expensive and is not required by code in most places, so avoid it if you can. It can make pulling things later much easier, but if there's much "snakiness" in the run you'll usually wind up using whatever was already in there as your pull-cord for the new stuff, anyway. Electrical and building supply places sell a blue corrugated flexible conduit commonly called "smurf tube" that can be great for getting through the tough spots or as a tough sleeve when for instance, crossing through metal studs. Just keep in mind before you start that it's *much* easier to pull wire in new construction before all the walls, cielings and floors are there than aftterwards. You can spend all day failing to get wire into some places if you're not realistic about your experience level.
Cable Wiring: Some purists may disagree, but the frequency response and noise immunity of good Cat5 cable is so impressive that I really don't think there's any need to go to the trouble (and considerable expense) of pulling coax any more. Use balun transformers instead - you can even buy them integrated into F-connectors now, so your coax gear plus right in.
Termination: This is where things can get expensive, especially if you go with the slick looking prepackaged wiring boxes like they're putting in the new homes. In reality, most of them are just way overpriced 110 blocks, RJ jacks and cable splitters. Again, if you've got money to burn, you can go that route. The home automation guys have this stuff (try smarthome.com, worthdist.com, and homecontrols.com), but I really don't recommend it because in addition to expense, the box itself my limit you before long. I prefer to simply terminate all the wires into RJ-45s and then patch them into whatever is needed. On that subject, I recommend the EIA/TIA T568A terminations, as they're the most common. (You can use T568B if you plan on any AT&T phone gear.) Leviton has some great low cost 8 and 16 jack surface mount termination boxes (what I use instead of the expensive fancy deals), and they use the same little plug-in adapters (RJ-45, RJ-11, F-type balun, etc.) that fit in the really slick little Leviton faceplates. (I've seen these with from two to eight positions for a single gang box, which should be plenty. They're available at Lowe's, Home Depot and the like these days for less than the specialty places.)
Hope this helps. Now if there were just an easy way to add speaker wires!
ONLY Microsoft can make the kind of Hardware that they do.
ROFL! Funny, I'll bet Logitech, ALPS, and Mouse Systems would strongly disagree with you on that point...:-)
MouseSystems and Logitech between the two of them had nearly 100% of the OEM mouse market sewn up until Microsoft started leaning on the OEMs. While some of Microsoft's newer hardware products are good, there was certainly nothing compelling about the original Microsoft mouse except that it kept the OEMs license cost lower. Even their "innovative" products, such as the wheel mouse and the natural keyboard were intended primarily to promote Microsoft lock-in, since for a very long time, only Microsoft hardware supported the "new" scrolling features and Windows keys.
The new Explorer mouse may be the first real piece of innovation we've seen from them in the hardware space (and it *is* cool), so I think I'd hold off before getting so enthusiastic...
FYI about Microsoft hardware from personal experience in the industry: MS established themselves in the PC hardware business by again leveraging their OS and apps monopolies, and not on the merits of their product.
Put yourself in the place of a PC manufacturer for a moment: Guess what happens to the cost of your OS and apps licenses if you decide you *don't* want to ship MS keyboards and mice? The simple fact is that if you want "most favored nation" pricing from MS, you *will* ship a significant portion of your orders with MS hardware. You'll also build your hardware to conform to Microsoft's hardware specifications and do whatever else they tell you to to, simply because you can't afford not to. It's precisely this sort of abuse of monopoly power that's illegal, and for good reason.
Back in your role again: You don't have to sell MS hardware of course, but remember that the OEM PC business has become one of thin margins and volume, so if you pay another $30/unit for your OS and apps license simply because you'd like to specify your own keyboard, you are now at a significant disadvantage to your competitors in a world of $150-$300 margins for desktop PCs.
It would be interesting indeed to see how many OEMs would continue to buy Microsoft's hardware if they didn't have to.
Don't ever forget that the computer makers don't even get to decide what the hardware standards are for your next PC: that's Microsoft's turf (PC9x, et al), and again, if you don't play, you pay - big. This control will bite Linux and other alternative OSes big-time in the near future, as it already is to some degree with the new "legacy-free" PCs required by the newest versions of the specs.
To a large degree, what DOJ and the states are doing here is slamming the barn door shut with authority years after the horse disappeared over the horizon. Trying to fix the existing desktop OS/apps monopoly is a low return deal. Preventing MS from extending its monopoly into the server space is possible, but only if the correct remedy is employed, as MS is now using its desktop monopoly to achieve monopoly on the server side as well.
Don't believe me? Have a look at the number of attractive features in Windows 2000 that don't work unless you also have Windows 2000 servers. This matters! As much as the crowd here likes to bash MS, Win2K is a pretty damn good OS, and the things it offers when deployed on both servers and desktops are things like TCO that companies care about right now. (And, sadly, the things I see the Linux community ignoring...) As a practical matter, deploying W2K on the desktop demands its deployment on the servers as well, or there's no point in migrating. (As one industry pundit has noted, the ugly secret of W2K is that its great so long as you don't mind replacing all of your software and hardware.)
Microsoft is using its desktop monopoly to deadly effect to ensure that it controls the servers too - all the way up to the datacenter, through Active Directory, Intellimirror, Terminal Server, and the bundling of dozens of apps that are "just good enough" to prevent "competitors" from making a living selling them. (Go do the math - there is a very long list of products displaced by Win2K, many of which provide functions not commonly part of any OS distribution today.)
Until and unless Microsoft is prevented from using its desktop monopoly to drive a server monopoly, nothing the government does will have the slightest effect.
Note that splitting Microsoft in *either* of the ways proposed does not eliminate this problem. Since this is driven primarily by the OS monopoly, any split that allows the OS company to operate across desktop and server platforms is ineffective, as are the "baby Bill" scanarios like Ellison's in which Microsoft is split vertically (not horizontally as a poster says elsewhere) into three or so companies containing all of MS's assets. Any effective remedy must prevent MS from using is desktop monopoly to force customers into giving it a server monopoly as well.
This may be the only aspect of a structural remedy that matters, but it looks like it's not going to happen, and Microsoft will laugh all the way to the bank again...
(Note: these comments are mine and may or may not represent my employers' views.)
This is not something that's *in* any OS, unless Sun's added it into Solaris in S8. (Could be, I don't get to play with Suns anymore... sniff...)
Although I'm sure the options have changed some since I was fully up on this stuff about three years ago, there were only a handful of failover options at that point, and only one of them worked really well.
That one, interestingly was in reality a bag of (very good) scripts, which implemented a heartbeat function and when it detected something wrong, would down the interfaces, re-plumb them if necessary, reset addrs, and up them again. Although it's worth the money they charge, if you're into a serious DIY mode, there's no reason you couldn't write such scripts yourself, and there are almost certainly some already out there, probably as part of the Linux HA project.
Oh, and as an aside, I would stick with the script-based solutions whether you build or buy: they're more reliable, and they leverage the OS better than the proprietary methods. (Qualix's main competitor back when I worked for Sun consulting for customers on such things was OpenVision HA, which was a huge, slick, impressive monolith of GUI binaries that had a well-earned reputation for leaving a trail of dead bodies behind it. FirstWatch, on the other hand, was simple and unimpressive in a demo, but it just worked, and worked well, in the real world.
Qualix was bought by Veritas a few years ago - check with them if you want a decent supported package. (And let's face it - HA is certainly one area where it may not pay to roll your own, since a failure in the HA system in production would be a serious career-limiting move...)
It's true that Apple's Macintosh was the first *PC* to include networking support - however - it was support for the incredibly proprietary AppleTalk, which was limited to troublesome daisy chain topologies only and a maximum speed of 230 kbps.
Although they finally gave in a couple of years ago, Apple resisted Ethernet like hell: in the early 90s they did everything they could to make Ethernet expensive and hard to use on the Mac. In fact, IMO, it was this insistence on running up the cost of Ethernet for Macs that was chiefly responsible for them getting drummed out of most corporate networks in the mid-90s, as Mac adapters were always a minimum of about 4x the cost of their ISA counterparts.
Remember, Apple went so far as to establish thier own completely incompatible tranciever interface, AAUI, which had no benefit over the tried and true AUI except that it used a (slightly!) smaller connector, and forced customers wanting Ethernet to buy from Apple for a year until the third parties got geared up.
And then there were the heinous atrocities that AppleTalk and AppleShare inflicted on the rest of your network if you through some means ever put those protocols on your Ethernet.
Apple was no friend of networking other than the proprietary kind until they realized they had to interoperate or die. They came to the Internet party even later than Microsoft, so I have lttle respect for them as a network innovator. Keep in mind that AppleShare (file sharing) was a very expensive extra until a few years ago.
Apple doesn't "get" cost, and until recently has always assumed that it didn't matter, and even intentionally drove it up. It was this attitude that led Intel-based hardware to become cheap and commoditized and that in turn drove the creation of Linux. Apple has made its bed, and now must sleep in it.
Although I'm sure they've fixed this by now, I actually bought a Psion Sienna a few years back to replace my original Pilot 1000.
I kept it for an entire week, sure that somehow, somewhere, there must be some way to make the thing create an @-sign for storing e-mail addresses. I called Psion's support line and the best they could do was, "gee, we're not sure..." I finally learned through back channels to Psion that the Sienna was intentionally incapable of storing e-mail addresses because they didn't want it to compete with the more expensive Psions which were supposedly aimed at a more tech-savvy market. Any company with an attitude like that deserves to fail.
I returned the Sienna and bought the then-new PalmPilot Pro I still carry. (Although I'm itching for a new one now.) EPOC32 isn't too bad, but the Psion devices are too expensive to justify the marginal increase in capability, and they don't enjoy the broad software support the Palms have. There's no question I'd hang onto the PPP 'til the end if someone were to begin stripping me of my computers one by one.
Whether y'all like it or not, "y'all" fills a void in the English language, and one that needs filling: a word for the second person plural pronoun. Consistency with Latin among other languages demands this, and "y'all" is an extraordinarily useful construct. I count myself as fortunate to live where I can use it regularly without fear of retribution.
For evidence that English speakers (in general) think it needs filling, look at the variety of ways various English-speakers fill this void - in addition to y'all (which I think is more graceful, elegant, and consistent than the following), there are you'uns/yunz/yins/y'uns (Pennsylvania for sure, and probably other areas as well), and youse/yous (parts of England, Ireland, New York, and New Jersey). Y'all is certainly more elegant than these, and is a proper contraction to boot.
Those who dislike Southerners' use of y'all can convince me to give it up when they propose a better, non-silly alternative. Until then, those of us that recognize a good, necessary, and vibrant addition to the English language will continue to offend y'all that don't...
I thought I made it quite clear that I was not in any way cheerleading CORL stock. I even went the extra step of disclosing that I hold CORL stock (although only a few hundred shares...)
The company has serious problems - I didn't gloss over those. My point was that even a sick company that is already established in the software industry on a non-trivial scale has some valuable attributes missing in the gigabuck IPO companies we've seen lately. I understand that CALD is all IPO cash - that was my *point*!
For all its faults, Corel has sevreral decent products - Word Perfect, in particular, in my experience is still much more stable with large documents than Word - this is why WP is still the most common word processor in the legal, medical transcription, and real estate professions. (Note that I personally dislike the way WP works, but it is clearly superior for that sort of work, and customers like that.)
Corel may or may not make it. My holdings aside, I hope they do make it, if only to ensure commercial alternatives to parts of Microsoft's hegemony.
It's quite clear that at least one man realized that Hitler was that "sick" and certainly that dangerous.
He sounded the alarm loudly, but was ignored for several more years until it became painfully obvious that he had been right after all, but it was by that time too late to do any of the things he had advocated a few years before to head off the crisis.
His name was Winston Spencer Churchill, and the story of the very clearcut signs leading up to the Second World War are told in his book "The Gathering Storm", the first volume of a six-volume set on the history of the Second World War written by an excellent historian with a unique vantage point. (He won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature partly for this work.)
Required reading, but fair warning to the leftists out there: you'll agree with Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher when you're done. Of course, that would in turn indicate that you've raised your IQ signifcantly... [grin] Seriously - this is a great history from a great vantage point of the most influential event of the 20th century. Read it.
Discalaimer: I own some Corel stock (which I could sell today and still make a decent profit...)
There's a lot of Corel bashing going on here. Some of it is deserved (the company is no shining beacon of management success), but Corel stacks up well against many of the current darlings of the industry. This is not a cheerleading attempt for CORL, but an attempt to point out how badly values are out of line with fundamentals across the software industry right now.
(Further, it surprises me that Corel is so villified here on/. - they are the primary commercial proponent of what is arguably the most "pure" Linux flavor - Debian.)
Let's take a look at Corel (CORL) relative to some of the more favored stocks in the Linux space, say Red Hat (RHAT), VA Linux Systems (LNUX), and Caldera (CALD):
First, a very important distinction: although Corel has cash problems, the company *is* making money, unlike any of the others above. This means it actually has a P/E ratio (curently 17.44 as I write this), unlike the others. That's beacuse CORL actually has some earnings per share:
This is called fundamental value, and is the main reason that even if Corel gets strapped for cash ( as is becoming increasingly likely) that someone is likely to step in and buy them out, simply because they are a very good deal.
Now for a look at market cap:
CALD: 382M CORL: 386M LNUX: 2064M RHAT: 3099M
Notice that Caldera has nearly the same market cap as Corel, in spite of the fact that they are losing money like crazy and also unlike Corel, have no established customer base, no established large-scale development organisation, no established large scale technical support organisation, and no distribution channel to speak of. These things matter! They are the things that distinguish a true going concern from one that has merely managed to get a huge IPO pop. The same is true of the others, even though their market caps are much larger. (Exercise for the reader: so which is really worth the most?)
Finally, whether it's to your tastes or not (I prefer Caldera, but that's beside the point) Corel has done a pretty good Linux distro - one which has achieved the significant accomplishment of taking Debian (which is technicaly excellent but had a well-deserved reputation for being a nightmare to install and configure) and making it quite easily usable by mere mortals. For a 1.0 release, I think the product is quite good - better than comparable first efforts from any of the other major distros.
Bash Corel if you want, but recognize that in the real world, where the rubber meets the road - Corel has things that the big market cap guys are still dreaming about. Little things, like paying and loyal customers, that some of us contrarians believe could be important over the long haul...
This one has actually been done just to prove it's possible.
I learned of it in an Interop tutorial back a number of years ago - either David Clark or Marshall Rose mentioned it in passing. Intrigued, I pawed through the RFCs long enough to satisfy myself that although it was weird, and would require an accomplice on the inside, it was possible, and would simply fly through pretty much any firewall that allowed DNS resolution of external IP addresses.
I don't know if anyone has ever publicly used or distributed this method.
The basic problem is that pretty much anything that goes through can be used to tunnel almost anything else if you want to do it badly enough...
Because americans will use monopolistic and preditory practices to suck the life out of all compeeting languages?
No, not at all. English has and will continue to succeed on its merits. Although it is far from perfect, and has a number of acquired inconsistencies which are (obviously) not present in a designed language or some natural languages, it works.
In fact, it works very, very well. English succeeds because of both its breadth and depth. The English language is the original open source project, adopting and adapting ideas, features, vocabulary, grammars, and structures from other languages with little or no prejudice. I'm not picking on the French, but contrast this with French, which insists on inventing "French" words rather than adopting prevailing and perfectly good words from other languages, especially English. (e.g.: "Informatique" instead of "computing" or "data processing", IIRC.)
You may not like the English language for whatever reason, but there are many historians who believe that the power, flexibility, and adapabilty of the English language has been one of the keys to the prominence of English-speaking peoples over the past several centuries. (I highly recommend Winston Churchill's excellent four-volume series "The History of the English Speaking Peoples" for more insight into the culture behind the language.)
The simple fact is that English has survived and thrived because it permits and even encourages a broader range of expression and a finer ganularity of meaning then is possible in nearly any other major language. The fact that it also (although not uniquely among western languages) lends itself to easy mechanical representaiton is just icing on the cake.
Those of you bashing English out of anti-American sentiments (whether American yourselves or not) are missing the point: The English language has earned its place in the world, and will continue to thrive into the future simply because it works so well.
I'd argue that in today's world of increasingly available broadband (cable/DSL/wireless/etc.) there are nearly as many home users with ethernet as with USB.
If you count the number with working USB vs. working Ethernet, the numbers are even more strongly in favor of Ethernet.
Not to bash USB, but USB is just starting to work, even in the Windows world. The USB in the initial Win98, although much better than the previous add-on for Win95 still left a lot to be desired in the stability and functionality departments. The hardware vendors only in the past year or so have gotten the BIOSes working predictably and reliably with USB.
And don't even get me started about Linux. I love Linux, I really do, but I'm likely to switch to W2K at home simply because more things that I need (like USB) work out of the box in W2K than in Linux. (As part of my Linux advocacy, I refuse to ever build kernels, since that is not a reasonable thing to expect end users to do. Go ahead, flame me, but if you live with Linux as a "real world" user has to, you'll quickly see we have a very long way to go.)
I'll resurrect Scott McNealy's old Windows challenge for USB:
Scenario 1) Let's take a nice Taurus 6-shot.38 Special revolver, place one round in the cylinder, and spin it. Place the gun against your head and pull the trigger. If it clicks, you walk, if it fires, bummer.
Scenario 2) Let's take the first USB-equipped machine we find as we walk around. Plug in an off-the-CompUSA-shelf USB component other than a keyboard or mouse and see if it works as designed. If it works, you walk, if not, the revolver gets loaded and bummer, you're shot dead.
Which would you choose?
Nearly all of us recognize that the odds are better at Russian roulette than they are at getting USB devices (or new software applications, as Scott originally framed the challenge) to work as designed out of the box.
Add a third scenario, that of plugging in an Ethernet device and seeing if it works as designed, and it's suddenly quite clear that this is the safest of all three alternatives.
The only downside to Ethernet as a peripheral interconnect is that a lot of people don't have Ethernet hubs because they are either using crossover cables or the modem has the pairs crossed internally.
Why we don't build hubs/switches into our computers' NICs or cable modems is beyond me. (It's also beyond me why anyone would bother to build any PC anymore, especially a laptop, without on-board Ethernet.) It does add a little to the price, as do USB hubs in monitors, but the difference is that Ethernet hubs nearly always interoperate with other Ethernet gear, while USB hubs often create problems...
Would you buy a car for which the company kept secrete the method of doing some key maintainance, so that they could shaft you at dealership in a couple of years ?
And this would be different from BMW's standard practice in what way? There are people lining up to pay big bucks to get treated like that. Go figure.
Note: This is the primary reason I'll never own a BMW - heck, even their tools are proprietary - you can't even work on one of the things without a few kilobucks worth of special tools only available through BMW!
I scanned the replies to this article, and although there was lots of heat and a little light about various display models and what should go into the "next X" from a graphics point of view (personally, I like a Java-based approach), I saw no one bring up the fact that any "Xng" that's going to serve us well needs to be able to be able to connect audio over the network as well as graphics and standard device inputs.
This is really not an option in today's multimedia world. If this isn't built into Xng, then machines that rely on X will fall further and further behind the competition. Note that this would require at a minimum, CD-quality audio from X client to X server, and ISDN-quality from X server to X client.
Real touchscreen support should also be in there - that means not just something that pretends to be a mouse, but something that provides the fundamentals required by gestural interfaces, perhaps with a set of gestural recognition primitives. (Which raises the question of whether or not X should include written character recognition as well - given Linux expected penetration into the embedded space, this can be done once well, or many times probably not so well.
Remember, good programmers write good code, great programmers steal (leverage somebody else's) good code. Xng should have good stuff to steal.
Re:Don't let Microsoft's numbering confuse you
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Linux 2.2.15 Released
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Actually, the decimal system specifies a single decimal point!
It's the morons that started the assanine idea that multiple decimal points belong in any kind of nomenclature thaqt are responsible for the confusion. "Best practices" is a zillion industries for a century or more have recognized the danger of using the decimal point as a saparator.
Dashes are the traditional separator character choice where there needs to be a division for convenience: take phone numbers, for example, or the vast majority of part numbering schemes out there.
[FLAME ON]BTW, this "cool, it's like the net" crud of using dots as separators in phone numbers is garbage. Although most people don't know it, there is a correct and standard way to write phone numbers: the IDDD standard, which specifies a leading + followed by country code ("1" for the US, Canada, and the Carribean) and phone number, separated into groups with dashes by whatever convention prevails in that country.[FLAME OFF]
Yeah, but see, here in Texas, the resulting puddle of reacting metal would melt down, creating a vertical hole in the ground, something we normally have to pay $$$ for, so that's not a bad side effect after all... [grin]
Really, you have to realize that the way you've framed your question (via your behavior) precludes getting what you would consider a useful answer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in essence you're asking, "Is there anyone out there that will take used-up husks of my computer gear after they are so old or stripped that they have negative economic value?"
The answer to that question is that no one is going to take that sort of equipment. This is one reason the Microsoft/Intel upgrade merry-go-round ticks me off - the very structure of the industry guarantees that you will have to simply throw away your current computer and most if not all of its peripherals in a few years. (One of the reasons I buy really cheap computers, but fairly nice printers and monitors.)
Anyway, the only thing you can do is throw it away. As a previous poster pointed out, even that can be problematic in many areas. Fortunately, even with the Loony Left running Austin and imposing Public Waste policies worthy of the KGB on us, you can still throw away *anything* as long as it's in your city-supplied trash can. There's a huge list of things they say they won't take (rocks, and construction debris, for instance), but if you can get it into the trash can, it all just disappears. You can throw away anything that will fit in the trash can with no trouble at all: mercury, radioactive iodine, Plutonium powder, anything, just so long as it's in the official, approved pay-as-you-throw container. With the rates they charge for trash service here, I don't feel even a little bit guilty about throwing away anything I can manage to stuff in the can.
Austin's policy is incredibly stupid, though - if you were trying to build a policy that provided the maximum incentive possible for people to just dump crud into the canyons, you couldn't do any better than the policy the city has. I know a lot of people that find it cheaper and easier to dump (especially things like trimmed branches and grass clippings, which are really hard to get rid of) than put up with the city's restrictions. Sad, really.
I think probably he used ViaVoice because it's freely available for Linux.
Your post had some credibility until you told us you own a Citroen. That blew it - it's hard to go lower than Volvo, but you've done it. [grin] (My eight-year-old daughter wondered aloud the other day "Why are Volvo drivers always so stupid and slow?" I guess we're raising her right.)
Not really to bash French cars (OK, yeah, to bash French cars) I'll tell a true story: In college, I worked for one of the handful of EPA certified emissions test facilities. Peugeot sent us one of the first new 505s with some engine change that mandated re-testing. The interesting thing was that *it wouldn't roll*! It took us several hours of trying everything (and we had several skilled mechanics handy) before we finally gave up and took it off the truck with a forklift. The next day, we discovered that some drunk Frenchman had somehow hammered the front calipers onto the rotors with the wrong pads - pads so tight that it took us half a day to pull the calipers off. How it got all the way from France to Texas that way, and how they even even managed to put it together that way remains a mystery...
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Sure X *can* do those things in principle, but those capabilities are only in esoteric proprietary (and now abandoned) implementaitons. (Truth be told, we'd petition Sun to turn loose of NeWS if we had any sense...)
A bigger shortcoming of X that will prevent its move into the modern world is that it handles only display, keyboard, and mouse. This pretty much lets out multimedia, which requires audio and video at reasonable frame rates. I've tried writing programs to run meteorological "movies" on X, and it just cant work very well. Synchronizing audio and video when delivering the video via X is effectively impossible since X doesn't even know audio exists.
In my mind, these are the reasons X must go. The fact that for all practical purposes its fonts can't be fixed is just one more reason. If X doesn't get replaced *very soon* then the battle for the desktop will be over and W2K will have won not only the battle but the war. (There is a rapidly coalescing opnion in the industry that the only end-user interface that matters going forward is Windows (2000|ME|CE) and IE. This is believed even in companies that are largely considered to be "Linux-friendly", like say, the largest computer company on the planet. If that perception isn't changed soon, it will be too late to matter.)
Good question. At a glance, it looks like it just means you can't bootstrap yourself from a SPARC unless you have the previous kernel: i.e.: that you'd have to build the SPARC kernel elsewhere first unless you have the old one. One wonders why they'd do this though...
Plan 9 is different than the usual Unix ways of doing these, and in some respects, better. One of the cool things about Plan9 (and its follow-on Inferno, which I've been looking at lately) is that pretty much *everything* is network extensible and *completely* location transparent, and this is all built in and does not rely on bolt-ons like AFS directory services, etc. (Imagine being able to relocate any service, part, or function of the OS as easily and effectively as you redirect an X display and you'll start to get the idea... And on top of that, they actually managed to make it quite small and efficient!)
Yes, you *can* make Unix jump through those hoops, but in many ways it's just pretending. Plan 9 was arguably the first really serious attempt to write a true network-centric OS that recognized the power and potential of networked computing. I'm not sure if Plan 9 is the same as Inferno in this regard, but one of the things that's impressing me about Inferno is that to a much greater degree than Unix, *everything* is a file. This makes it possible to write scripts that have incredible power, for instance, to open a TCP connection, you just write a connect command with the proper parameters to the TCP device file, so pretty much everything can now be done from the command line. This is a higher level of functional abstraction that makes scripting much more powerful, allowing those of us that love the power and leverage of Unix' superior text processing and scripting tools to really shine. In this respect, although it's clearly post-Unix, it's actually truer to the "Unix philosophy" than Unix itself! (Not to start a flame war, but I've always believed that unless you're writing bit-banging code like device drivers, resorting to C reflects a substantial lack of imagination and knowledge of Unix on the part of the programmer.)
I think we all recognize that assuming from the get-go that the network is an ever-present and reliable service would lead to an operating environment very different in some important respects from what we have today. Plan 9 and Inferno are the result of one approach to taking that assumption to its logical conclusion.
You really need to read up on it yourself to appreciate it, but don't think that Plan 9 is either "just another Unix clone", "something bolted onto Unix", or "just the same old thing." It really is a different spin on the role of the network from the OS point of view. Although there may be better obscure examples, Plan 9/Inferno is the most network-aware, network-integrated OS I know of. Check it out - I'm going to!
P.S.: One of the interesting side-effects of this philosophy is it's impact on the prevalence and power of interpreted languages in general. Now that Open Source is here to stay, and Moore's law is outrunning the hardware nedds of most of us, do we really even need compiled languages anymore? (The classical reasons are speed and secrecy of source for comercial reasons - those are now both becoming increasingly irrelevant. I personally believe interpreted languages will triumph in the end, as I have believed since 1985. We're not there yet, but we're getting much closer...)
The site referenced by this article is quite suspect and oozes poor scientific method and reasoning. (The skeletal calculations are a joke.) That is not true of all Creationist/anti-evolutionist sites however. (The question of how such big animals were viable is an interesting one, but the analysis offered is quite weak, and inexplicably ignores the possibility that these and other fossils may have become "enlarged" by some unknown process. This hypothesis should be investigated if such size truly presents problems, as it may offer a more likely explanation for 170 lb. eagles than variable planetary gravity . Still, it seems difficult to envision a process that would enlarge so uniformly at such magnitudes...)
It is quite possible to reject evolution solely on the bases of scientific fact and the way the scientific community plays fast and loose with actual facts in order to make them support the dogma of evolutionary development of man. A pretty good reference site is noted hacker Do-While Jones' site, Science Against Evolution. Don't even bother to write a flaming reply until you've browsed his pages to see the extent of the scientific dishonesty plaguing this topic - I think you'll find he does an admirable job of sticking to factual, scientific evidence and arguments.
Let's face facts folks, there's plenty of absolutely deplorable science on both sides, in both cases often driven by a dogmatic attempt to make the facts fit the theory. The only thing that can be argued with certainty from a scientific point of view is that we don't know how we got here, and we can't with any significant degree of certainty even date the things we find. Any statement beyond this is speculation, not science.
A good example of this scientific dishonesty would be the "composite foot" literally dreamed up for "Lucy" (afarensis, a fossil for which the feet are conspicuously absent!) to fit the Laetoli footprints in Tanzania. Although there is absolutely no evidence that afarensis made those footprints, Donald Johansen wanted to prove a connection so badly that he invented a foot for Lucy that would fit the footprints. This "composite foot" was "made from fossil bones belonging to Homo from nearby Olduvai Gorge combined with Hadar toe bones" - in other words, he used 3.5 myo toe bones from one species and foot bones from a (supposedly) entirely different species that lived a million years later, mixed thoroughly with imagination and preconceived notions! And so now evolutionists go around telling people "science" has proven afarensis made those tracks. Oh, yeah, that's good science! All this to explain a footprint that is by thier own admission indistinguishable from a modern human footprint, a foot print that in reality could be much younger than they assume.
Seriously, I find it takes far less faith to believe in Creation than in evolution!
Warning: Personal beliefs rant follows... As an added benefit, accepting that Creation could be true in turn led me to consider that perhaps the Bible was inerrant after all, as was believed by many people much brighter than I over centuries. As soon as you're willing to assume that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God (for which there is quite compelling scientific evidence by the way), you begin to see that that single presupposition leads to a perfectly logically consistent belief system which explains all the hard questions. Personally, I believe John Calvin tied all this together better than anyone since St. Paul, and Jonathan Edwards better than anyone since Calvin. (Edwards, although unfamiliar to many today, is generally acknowledged by historians as the most brilliant mind in the history of the New World: he entered the precursor to Yale at age thirteen with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew already under his belt. You can read a bit more about him at my friend Mark Trigsted's JonathanEdwards.com site.) Don't flame either Calvin or Edwards until you've read them and really tried to understand their arguments. I think you'll be blown away - in this sense Calvinism is perfect for Geeks, since it provides the only structured and sytematic Theology cabable of explaining all the things that really need explaining. This isn't warm, fuzzy, Christianity, but it passes the test of Truth, which is far more important than a feel-good factor. Some of us are proud to be Puritans.
A few years ago, I had the privelege to do one of the coolest consulting gigs of my career. The job was for a global oil company that ships more oil than anyone else, and was very concerned about minimizing environmental damage and having the right command and control structures in place instantly in the event of a spill. Here are a few tips based on that experience:
We wound up using an Inmarsat phone by Magnavox (back then only Magnavox and NEC were *seriously* in that business, but Nera and Thrane & Thrane seem to aim more at the serious marine market now.) Inmarsat is rather expensive, but other than the protocol performance problems inherent in the horrible latency to geosynchronous orbit, it works reliably. Prices have come *way* down from the $17/minute of a few years ago to monthly fees of a few dozen dollars plus airtime of $2-5/minute.
The Magnavox phone we used had a folding parabolic antenna which had great response, but was finicky w.r.t. alignment. Many of the newer (and lower cost) phones use multiple phased array antennae which are much better suited to a smallish boat - you don't want to be trying to keep an antenna pointed straight at the bird while on the seas in a rocking boat! You get what you pay for here. There are some decent entry-level phones that are compact, easy-to-use, and affordable, but they often have data rates of around 2400 bps! 64 kbps phones have been out since late last year.
Also, pay atention to how you get connected to the Net on the ground end. I've heard (second-hand) that the Dutch PTT has good Internet access and competitive rates.
Make sure the computers on both ends have RFC 1323 (the LFN RFC) compliant TCP/IP stacks. This makes a *huge* difference in the way your machine will handle geosync latencies! Most modern machines will have this feature by now, but if it's missing on either end, you'll see big performance problems.
Inmarsat is probably still the best bet for a boat because you get voice and data and they're on pretty much every ship in the world, which can be handy for checking weather, etc. from your neighbors. (Learn the wetiquette for this before spamming folks at high connect charges!)
Iridium would have been a good choice, but sadly, they're gone. Globalstar is still an option, and one that might work for you, but despite their name, they're not global yet, so coverage may be an issue. Globalstar phones though, have the advantage of being seriously multimode: Globalstar satellite, AMPS analog cellular, CDMA Digital, or the crude, brain-frying GSM. These could save a lot of money near shore, if roaming doesn't bite you worse than satellite time!
Good luck. I'm envious of anyone heading out to sea...
We typically run 1-CAT3, 2-CAT5, & 1-Coax drops in each bedroom, living space, study, etc. This has been done to over 1/2 the houses we've built in the last 3 years.
FWIW, I'm remodeling my 10-year-old home now (not worn out, but it suffered from terminal architectural boredom), and I used to be a telecom consultant making recommendations right down to the wiring, so here are my general recommendations:
First, I'm cheap, so I only want to spend money where I'm fairly certain I'll get it back. You can pull fiber everywhere, but then you'll choke at the cost of network electronics (priced optical hubs lately?), and you still won't have the right type or grade 20 years from now and will pay a premium to deal with weird media. You have *no* idea how much really expensive cable I've seen abandoned in place just because someone decided "we might use it someday".
What to pull: The most I could justify is two jackets (w/ 4 pair ea.) of Cat-5 to each location. This is enough to still let you keep analog and digital in separate jackets and you still have plenty of pairs left over for future use. (For instance, in the digital jacket you'd use just half the pairs for 10 or 100 Ethernet, and in the analog jacket you could have two phone lines, the cable, and still another unused analog pair - that's probably plenty.) Try to keep analog and digital in separate jackets, and remember that although the phone loop itself is 48V max, the ring signal is a 90V square wave. If you're still paranoid and have money to burn, pull a third jacket, but I bet you'll never use it.
How to Pull It: This is one of the most important considerations. When doing my remodeling, I took advantage of a leftover triangular space to put a storage niche and wiring center. You want to "home run" everything, that is, everything is a star topology running from the outlet to your wiring closet. You may need more or less space depending on what's going to be located there. Although your first inclination is to put your servers, etc, there, you might later find this is inconvenient. I have one rule that works for me: If it can't hang on the wall (there's a sheet of plywood there to act as a substrate), it doesn't go in the wiring closet. Consider ventilation and power requirements, especially if you want many computers there. This is the one reason I'm a fanatic about low power machines for server use (I use a Laptop and a "cash register computer" for my Linux servers): I hate paying for all the KW-hrs big servers burn, and I also don't want to have to worry about special A/C or power requirements. Remember the trend is for things to become much lower-power, so skipping the dedicated 30A circuit and A/C duct should be fine. Hard conduit, whether steel or PVC is quite expensive and is not required by code in most places, so avoid it if you can. It can make pulling things later much easier, but if there's much "snakiness" in the run you'll usually wind up using whatever was already in there as your pull-cord for the new stuff, anyway. Electrical and building supply places sell a blue corrugated flexible conduit commonly called "smurf tube" that can be great for getting through the tough spots or as a tough sleeve when for instance, crossing through metal studs. Just keep in mind before you start that it's *much* easier to pull wire in new construction before all the walls, cielings and floors are there than aftterwards. You can spend all day failing to get wire into some places if you're not realistic about your experience level.
Cable Wiring: Some purists may disagree, but the frequency response and noise immunity of good Cat5 cable is so impressive that I really don't think there's any need to go to the trouble (and considerable expense) of pulling coax any more. Use balun transformers instead - you can even buy them integrated into F-connectors now, so your coax gear plus right in.
Termination: This is where things can get expensive, especially if you go with the slick looking prepackaged wiring boxes like they're putting in the new homes. In reality, most of them are just way overpriced 110 blocks, RJ jacks and cable splitters. Again, if you've got money to burn, you can go that route. The home automation guys have this stuff (try smarthome.com, worthdist.com, and homecontrols.com), but I really don't recommend it because in addition to expense, the box itself my limit you before long. I prefer to simply terminate all the wires into RJ-45s and then patch them into whatever is needed. On that subject, I recommend the EIA/TIA T568A terminations, as they're the most common. (You can use T568B if you plan on any AT&T phone gear.) Leviton has some great low cost 8 and 16 jack surface mount termination boxes (what I use instead of the expensive fancy deals), and they use the same little plug-in adapters (RJ-45, RJ-11, F-type balun, etc.) that fit in the really slick little Leviton faceplates. (I've seen these with from two to eight positions for a single gang box, which should be plenty. They're available at Lowe's, Home Depot and the like these days for less than the specialty places.)
Hope this helps. Now if there were just an easy way to add speaker wires!
ONLY Microsoft can make the kind of Hardware that they do.
:-)
ROFL! Funny, I'll bet Logitech, ALPS, and Mouse Systems would strongly disagree with you on that point...
MouseSystems and Logitech between the two of them had nearly 100% of the OEM mouse market sewn up until Microsoft started leaning on the OEMs. While some of Microsoft's newer hardware products are good, there was certainly nothing compelling about the original Microsoft mouse except that it kept the OEMs license cost lower. Even their "innovative" products, such as the wheel mouse and the natural keyboard were intended primarily to promote Microsoft lock-in, since for a very long time, only Microsoft hardware supported the "new" scrolling features and Windows keys.
The new Explorer mouse may be the first real piece of innovation we've seen from them in the hardware space (and it *is* cool), so I think I'd hold off before getting so enthusiastic...
FYI about Microsoft hardware from personal experience in the industry: MS established themselves in the PC hardware business by again leveraging their OS and apps monopolies, and not on the merits of their product.
Put yourself in the place of a PC manufacturer for a moment: Guess what happens to the cost of your OS and apps licenses if you decide you *don't* want to ship MS keyboards and mice? The simple fact is that if you want "most favored nation" pricing from MS, you *will* ship a significant portion of your orders with MS hardware. You'll also build your hardware to conform to Microsoft's hardware specifications and do whatever else they tell you to to, simply because you can't afford not to. It's precisely this sort of abuse of monopoly power that's illegal, and for good reason.
Back in your role again: You don't have to sell MS hardware of course, but remember that the OEM PC business has become one of thin margins and volume, so if you pay another $30/unit for your OS and apps license simply because you'd like to specify your own keyboard, you are now at a significant disadvantage to your competitors in a world of $150-$300 margins for desktop PCs.
It would be interesting indeed to see how many OEMs would continue to buy Microsoft's hardware if they didn't have to.
Don't ever forget that the computer makers don't even get to decide what the hardware standards are for your next PC: that's Microsoft's turf (PC9x, et al), and again, if you don't play, you pay - big. This control will bite Linux and other alternative OSes big-time in the near future, as it already is to some degree with the new "legacy-free" PCs required by the newest versions of the specs.
(Opinions here are mine.)
To a large degree, what DOJ and the states are doing here is slamming the barn door shut with authority years after the horse disappeared over the horizon. Trying to fix the existing desktop OS/apps monopoly is a low return deal. Preventing MS from extending its monopoly into the server space is possible, but only if the correct remedy is employed, as MS is now using its desktop monopoly to achieve monopoly on the server side as well.
Don't believe me? Have a look at the number of attractive features in Windows 2000 that don't work unless you also have Windows 2000 servers. This matters! As much as the crowd here likes to bash MS, Win2K is a pretty damn good OS, and the things it offers when deployed on both servers and desktops are things like TCO that companies care about right now. (And, sadly, the things I see the Linux community ignoring...) As a practical matter, deploying W2K on the desktop demands its deployment on the servers as well, or there's no point in migrating. (As one industry pundit has noted, the ugly secret of W2K is that its great so long as you don't mind replacing all of your software and hardware.)
Microsoft is using its desktop monopoly to deadly effect to ensure that it controls the servers too - all the way up to the datacenter, through Active Directory, Intellimirror, Terminal Server, and the bundling of dozens of apps that are "just good enough" to prevent "competitors" from making a living selling them. (Go do the math - there is a very long list of products displaced by Win2K, many of which provide functions not commonly part of any OS distribution today.)
Until and unless Microsoft is prevented from using its desktop monopoly to drive a server monopoly, nothing the government does will have the slightest effect.
Note that splitting Microsoft in *either* of the ways proposed does not eliminate this problem. Since this is driven primarily by the OS monopoly, any split that allows the OS company to operate across desktop and server platforms is ineffective, as are the "baby Bill" scanarios like Ellison's in which Microsoft is split vertically (not horizontally as a poster says elsewhere) into three or so companies containing all of MS's assets. Any effective remedy must prevent MS from using is desktop monopoly to force customers into giving it a server monopoly as well.
This may be the only aspect of a structural remedy that matters, but it looks like it's not going to happen, and Microsoft will laugh all the way to the bank again...
(Note: these comments are mine and may or may not represent my employers' views.)
This is not something that's *in* any OS, unless Sun's added it into Solaris in S8. (Could be, I don't get to play with Suns anymore... sniff...)
Although I'm sure the options have changed some since I was fully up on this stuff about three years ago, there were only a handful of failover options at that point, and only one of them worked really well.
That one, interestingly was in reality a bag of (very good) scripts, which implemented a heartbeat function and when it detected something wrong, would down the interfaces, re-plumb them if necessary, reset addrs, and up them again. Although it's worth the money they charge, if you're into a serious DIY mode, there's no reason you couldn't write such scripts yourself, and there are almost certainly some already out there, probably as part of the Linux HA project.
Oh, and as an aside, I would stick with the script-based solutions whether you build or buy: they're more reliable, and they leverage the OS better than the proprietary methods. (Qualix's main competitor back when I worked for Sun consulting for customers on such things was OpenVision HA, which was a huge, slick, impressive monolith of GUI binaries that had a well-earned reputation for leaving a trail of dead bodies behind it. FirstWatch, on the other hand, was simple and unimpressive in a demo, but it just worked, and worked well, in the real world.
Qualix was bought by Veritas a few years ago - check with them if you want a decent supported package. (And let's face it - HA is certainly one area where it may not pay to roll your own, since a failure in the HA system in production would be a serious career-limiting move...)
It's true that Apple's Macintosh was the first *PC* to include networking support - however - it was support for the incredibly proprietary AppleTalk, which was limited to troublesome daisy chain topologies only and a maximum speed of 230 kbps.
Although they finally gave in a couple of years ago, Apple resisted Ethernet like hell: in the early 90s they did everything they could to make Ethernet expensive and hard to use on the Mac. In fact, IMO, it was this insistence on running up the cost of Ethernet for Macs that was chiefly responsible for them getting drummed out of most corporate networks in the mid-90s, as Mac adapters were always a minimum of about 4x the cost of their ISA counterparts.
Remember, Apple went so far as to establish thier own completely incompatible tranciever interface, AAUI, which had no benefit over the tried and true AUI except that it used a (slightly!) smaller connector, and forced customers wanting Ethernet to buy from Apple for a year until the third parties got geared up.
And then there were the heinous atrocities that AppleTalk and AppleShare inflicted on the rest of your network if you through some means ever put those protocols on your Ethernet.
Apple was no friend of networking other than the proprietary kind until they realized they had to interoperate or die. They came to the Internet party even later than Microsoft, so I have lttle respect for them as a network innovator. Keep in mind that AppleShare (file sharing) was a very expensive extra until a few years ago.
Apple doesn't "get" cost, and until recently has always assumed that it didn't matter, and even intentionally drove it up. It was this attitude that led Intel-based hardware to become cheap and commoditized and that in turn drove the creation of Linux. Apple has made its bed, and now must sleep in it.
Although I'm sure they've fixed this by now, I actually bought a Psion Sienna a few years back to replace my original Pilot 1000.
I kept it for an entire week, sure that somehow, somewhere, there must be some way to make the thing create an @-sign for storing e-mail addresses. I called Psion's support line and the best they could do was, "gee, we're not sure..." I finally learned through back channels to Psion that the Sienna was intentionally incapable of storing e-mail addresses because they didn't want it to compete with the more expensive Psions which were supposedly aimed at a more tech-savvy market. Any company with an attitude like that deserves to fail.
I returned the Sienna and bought the then-new PalmPilot Pro I still carry. (Although I'm itching for a new one now.) EPOC32 isn't too bad, but the Psion devices are too expensive to justify the marginal increase in capability, and they don't enjoy the broad software support the Palms have. There's no question I'd hang onto the PPP 'til the end if someone were to begin stripping me of my computers one by one.
Whether y'all like it or not, "y'all" fills a void in the English language, and one that needs filling: a word for the second person plural pronoun. Consistency with Latin among other languages demands this, and "y'all" is an extraordinarily useful construct. I count myself as fortunate to live where I can use it regularly without fear of retribution.
For evidence that English speakers (in general) think it needs filling, look at the variety of ways various English-speakers fill this void - in addition to y'all (which I think is more graceful, elegant, and consistent than the following), there are you'uns/yunz/yins/y'uns (Pennsylvania for sure, and probably other areas as well), and youse/yous (parts of England, Ireland, New York, and New Jersey). Y'all is certainly more elegant than these, and is a proper contraction to boot.
Those who dislike Southerners' use of y'all can convince me to give it up when they propose a better, non-silly alternative. Until then, those of us that recognize a good, necessary, and vibrant addition to the English language will continue to offend y'all that don't...
I thought I made it quite clear that I was not in any way cheerleading CORL stock. I even went the extra step of disclosing that I hold CORL stock (although only a few hundred shares...)
The company has serious problems - I didn't gloss over those. My point was that even a sick company that is already established in the software industry on a non-trivial scale has some valuable attributes missing in the gigabuck IPO companies we've seen lately. I understand that CALD is all IPO cash - that was my *point*!
For all its faults, Corel has sevreral decent products - Word Perfect, in particular, in my experience is still much more stable with large documents than Word - this is why WP is still the most common word processor in the legal, medical transcription, and real estate professions. (Note that I personally dislike the way WP works, but it is clearly superior for that sort of work, and customers like that.)
Corel may or may not make it. My holdings aside, I hope they do make it, if only to ensure commercial alternatives to parts of Microsoft's hegemony.
It's quite clear that at least one man realized that Hitler was that "sick" and certainly that dangerous.
He sounded the alarm loudly, but was ignored for several more years until it became painfully obvious that he had been right after all, but it was by that time too late to do any of the things he had advocated a few years before to head off the crisis.
His name was Winston Spencer Churchill, and the story of the very clearcut signs leading up to the Second World War are told in his book "The Gathering Storm", the first volume of a six-volume set on the history of the Second World War written by an excellent historian with a unique vantage point. (He won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature partly for this work.)
Required reading, but fair warning to the leftists out there: you'll agree with Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher when you're done. Of course, that would in turn indicate that you've raised your IQ signifcantly... [grin] Seriously - this is a great history from a great vantage point of the most influential event of the 20th century. Read it.
Discalaimer: I own some Corel stock (which I could sell today and still make a decent profit...)
/. - they are the primary commercial proponent of what is arguably the most "pure" Linux flavor - Debian.)
There's a lot of Corel bashing going on here. Some of it is deserved (the company is no shining beacon of management success), but Corel stacks up well against many of the current darlings of the industry. This is not a cheerleading attempt for CORL, but an attempt to point out how badly values are out of line with fundamentals across the software industry right now.
(Further, it surprises me that Corel is so villified here on
Let's take a look at Corel (CORL) relative to some of the more favored stocks in the Linux space, say Red Hat (RHAT), VA Linux Systems (LNUX), and Caldera (CALD):
First, a very important distinction: although Corel has cash problems, the company *is* making money, unlike any of the others above. This means it actually has a P/E ratio (curently 17.44 as I write this), unlike the others. That's beacuse CORL actually has some earnings per share:
CORL: +0.31
RHAT: -0.10
CALD: -0.79
LNUX: -1.68(!)
This is called fundamental value, and is the main reason that even if Corel gets strapped for cash ( as is becoming increasingly likely) that someone is likely to step in and buy them out, simply because they are a very good deal.
Now for a look at market cap:
CALD: 382M
CORL: 386M
LNUX: 2064M
RHAT: 3099M
Notice that Caldera has nearly the same market cap as Corel, in spite of the fact that they are losing money like crazy and also unlike Corel, have no established customer base, no established large-scale development organisation, no established large scale technical support organisation, and no distribution channel to speak of. These things matter! They are the things that distinguish a true going concern from one that has merely managed to get a huge IPO pop. The same is true of the others, even though their market caps are much larger. (Exercise for the reader: so which is really worth the most?)
Finally, whether it's to your tastes or not (I prefer Caldera, but that's beside the point) Corel has done a pretty good Linux distro - one which has achieved the significant accomplishment of taking Debian (which is technicaly excellent but had a well-deserved reputation for being a nightmare to install and configure) and making it quite easily usable by mere mortals. For a 1.0 release, I think the product is quite good - better than comparable first efforts from any of the other major distros.
Bash Corel if you want, but recognize that in the real world, where the rubber meets the road - Corel has things that the big market cap guys are still dreaming about. Little things, like paying and loyal customers, that some of us contrarians believe could be important over the long haul...
This one has actually been done just to prove it's possible.
I learned of it in an Interop tutorial back a number of years ago - either David Clark or Marshall Rose mentioned it in passing. Intrigued, I pawed through the RFCs long enough to satisfy myself that although it was weird, and would require an accomplice on the inside, it was possible, and would simply fly through pretty much any firewall that allowed DNS resolution of external IP addresses.
I don't know if anyone has ever publicly used or distributed this method.
The basic problem is that pretty much anything that goes through can be used to tunnel almost anything else if you want to do it badly enough...
Because americans will use monopolistic and preditory practices to suck the life out of all compeeting languages?
No, not at all. English has and will continue to succeed on its merits. Although it is far from perfect, and has a number of acquired inconsistencies which are (obviously) not present in a designed language or some natural languages, it works.
In fact, it works very, very well. English succeeds because of both its breadth and depth. The English language is the original open source project, adopting and adapting ideas, features, vocabulary, grammars, and structures from other languages with little or no prejudice. I'm not picking on the French, but contrast this with French, which insists on inventing "French" words rather than adopting prevailing and perfectly good words from other languages, especially English. (e.g.: "Informatique" instead of "computing" or "data processing", IIRC.)
You may not like the English language for whatever reason, but there are many historians who believe that the power, flexibility, and adapabilty of the English language has been one of the keys to the prominence of English-speaking peoples over the past several centuries. (I highly recommend Winston Churchill's excellent four-volume series "The History of the English Speaking Peoples" for more insight into the culture behind the language.)
The simple fact is that English has survived and thrived because it permits and even encourages a broader range of expression and a finer ganularity of meaning then is possible in nearly any other major language. The fact that it also (although not uniquely among western languages) lends itself to easy mechanical representaiton is just icing on the cake.
Those of you bashing English out of anti-American sentiments (whether American yourselves or not) are missing the point: The English language has earned its place in the world, and will continue to thrive into the future simply because it works so well.
English. It just Works!
I'd argue that in today's world of increasingly available broadband (cable/DSL/wireless/etc.) there are nearly as many home users with ethernet as with USB.
.38 Special revolver, place one round in the cylinder, and spin it. Place the gun against your head and pull the trigger. If it clicks, you walk, if it fires, bummer.
If you count the number with working USB vs. working Ethernet, the numbers are even more strongly in favor of Ethernet.
Not to bash USB, but USB is just starting to work, even in the Windows world. The USB in the initial Win98, although much better than the previous add-on for Win95 still left a lot to be desired in the stability and functionality departments. The hardware vendors only in the past year or so have gotten the BIOSes working predictably and reliably with USB.
And don't even get me started about Linux. I love Linux, I really do, but I'm likely to switch to W2K at home simply because more things that I need (like USB) work out of the box in W2K than in Linux. (As part of my Linux advocacy, I refuse to ever build kernels, since that is not a reasonable thing to expect end users to do. Go ahead, flame me, but if you live with Linux as a "real world" user has to, you'll quickly see we have a very long way to go.)
I'll resurrect Scott McNealy's old Windows challenge for USB:
Scenario 1) Let's take a nice Taurus 6-shot
Scenario 2) Let's take the first USB-equipped machine we find as we walk around. Plug in an off-the-CompUSA-shelf USB component other than a keyboard or mouse and see if it works as designed. If it works, you walk, if not, the revolver gets loaded and bummer, you're shot dead.
Which would you choose?
Nearly all of us recognize that the odds are better at Russian roulette than they are at getting USB devices (or new software applications, as Scott originally framed the challenge) to work as designed out of the box.
Add a third scenario, that of plugging in an Ethernet device and seeing if it works as designed, and it's suddenly quite clear that this is the safest of all three alternatives.
The only downside to Ethernet as a peripheral interconnect is that a lot of people don't have Ethernet hubs because they are either using crossover cables or the modem has the pairs crossed internally.
Why we don't build hubs/switches into our computers' NICs or cable modems is beyond me. (It's also beyond me why anyone would bother to build any PC anymore, especially a laptop, without on-board Ethernet.) It does add a little to the price, as do USB hubs in monitors, but the difference is that Ethernet hubs nearly always interoperate with other Ethernet gear, while USB hubs often create problems...
Would you buy a car for which the company kept secrete the method of doing some key maintainance, so that they could shaft you at dealership in a couple of years ?
And this would be different from BMW's standard practice in what way? There are people lining up to pay big bucks to get treated like that. Go figure.
Note: This is the primary reason I'll never own a BMW - heck, even their tools are proprietary - you can't even work on one of the things without a few kilobucks worth of special tools only available through BMW!
I scanned the replies to this article, and although there was lots of heat and a little light about various display models and what should go into the "next X" from a graphics point of view (personally, I like a Java-based approach), I saw no one bring up the fact that any "Xng" that's going to serve us well needs to be able to be able to connect audio over the network as well as graphics and standard device inputs.
This is really not an option in today's multimedia world. If this isn't built into Xng, then machines that rely on X will fall further and further behind the competition. Note that this would require at a minimum, CD-quality audio from X client to X server, and ISDN-quality from X server to X client.
Real touchscreen support should also be in there - that means not just something that pretends to be a mouse, but something that provides the fundamentals required by gestural interfaces, perhaps with a set of gestural recognition primitives. (Which raises the question of whether or not X should include written character recognition as well - given Linux expected penetration into the embedded space, this can be done once well, or many times probably not so well.
Remember, good programmers write good code, great programmers steal (leverage somebody else's) good code. Xng should have good stuff to steal.
Actually, the decimal system specifies a single decimal point!
It's the morons that started the assanine idea that multiple decimal points belong in any kind of nomenclature thaqt are responsible for the confusion. "Best practices" is a zillion industries for a century or more have recognized the danger of using the decimal point as a saparator.
Dashes are the traditional separator character choice where there needs to be a division for convenience: take phone numbers, for example, or the vast majority of part numbering schemes out there.
[FLAME ON]BTW, this "cool, it's like the net" crud of using dots as separators in phone numbers is garbage. Although most people don't know it, there is a correct and standard way to write phone numbers: the IDDD standard, which specifies a leading + followed by country code ("1" for the US, Canada, and the Carribean) and phone number, separated into groups with dashes by whatever convention prevails in that country.[FLAME OFF]
Yeah, but see, here in Texas, the resulting puddle of reacting metal would melt down, creating a vertical hole in the ground, something we normally have to pay $$$ for, so that's not a bad side effect after all... [grin]
Really, you have to realize that the way you've framed your question (via your behavior) precludes getting what you would consider a useful answer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in essence you're asking, "Is there anyone out there that will take used-up husks of my computer gear after they are so old or stripped that they have negative economic value?"
The answer to that question is that no one is going to take that sort of equipment. This is one reason the Microsoft/Intel upgrade merry-go-round ticks me off - the very structure of the industry guarantees that you will have to simply throw away your current computer and most if not all of its peripherals in a few years. (One of the reasons I buy really cheap computers, but fairly nice printers and monitors.)
Anyway, the only thing you can do is throw it away. As a previous poster pointed out, even that can be problematic in many areas. Fortunately, even with the Loony Left running Austin and imposing Public Waste policies worthy of the KGB on us, you can still throw away *anything* as long as it's in your city-supplied trash can. There's a huge list of things they say they won't take (rocks, and construction debris, for instance), but if you can get it into the trash can, it all just disappears. You can throw away anything that will fit in the trash can with no trouble at all: mercury, radioactive iodine, Plutonium powder, anything, just so long as it's in the official, approved pay-as-you-throw container. With the rates they charge for trash service here, I don't feel even a little bit guilty about throwing away anything I can manage to stuff in the can.
Austin's policy is incredibly stupid, though - if you were trying to build a policy that provided the maximum incentive possible for people to just dump crud into the canyons, you couldn't do any better than the policy the city has. I know a lot of people that find it cheaper and easier to dump (especially things like trimmed branches and grass clippings, which are really hard to get rid of) than put up with the city's restrictions. Sad, really.
I think probably he used ViaVoice because it's freely available for Linux.
Your post had some credibility until you told us you own a Citroen. That blew it - it's hard to go lower than Volvo, but you've done it. [grin] (My eight-year-old daughter wondered aloud the other day "Why are Volvo drivers always so stupid and slow?" I guess we're raising her right.)
Not really to bash French cars (OK, yeah, to bash French cars) I'll tell a true story: In college, I worked for one of the handful of EPA certified emissions test facilities. Peugeot sent us one of the first new 505s with some engine change that mandated re-testing. The interesting thing was that *it wouldn't roll*! It took us several hours of trying everything (and we had several skilled mechanics handy) before we finally gave up and took it off the truck with a forklift. The next day, we discovered that some drunk Frenchman had somehow hammered the front calipers onto the rotors with the wrong pads - pads so tight that it took us half a day to pull the calipers off. How it got all the way from France to Texas that way, and how they even even managed to put it together that way remains a mystery...
Dino 308gt4 forever!