Actually the article said 16 Megabit (ie. 2 Megabytes), which is even smaller than I assume you're thinking -- that being a 16 Megabyte chip.
However, this is not so useless as you think... modern memory is not installed in single chips (at least not for PC's); modern memory is installed in sticks, which are comprised of many chips. While 2-megabytes is still too small for even a stick to hold much, it's not so far away from practical uses. When we start seeing 64Mbit chips then you'll know it's just around the corner before they appear on desktop systems.
Until then, a non-volatile 2-megabyte chip makes a great solution for cache memory inside instant-on products, like MP3 players:)
So I'm reading the first 3 (out of 4) pages from that link of early-impressions... seems like there are various problems -- including: cleaning out the menu signals (which are currently bleeding into the actual video feed), slow(er) menu response time, difficulties properly identifying and/or configuring which resolution to output to, and low quality when using the tivo unit to scale the video (instead of letting the TV do it).
Now some of these problems can be fixed easily (more or less) with a firmware update... others might be a sign that the hardware isn't up to snuff. Either way, I don't seem to be reading in rave reviews of the new TiVo... certainly nothing wild enough to dare claim anyone "loves it."
Personally, I think I'll hold on to my money for a while yet until a few of these kinks are worked out.
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this...
on
Postfix
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· Score: 1
Ah... the 390. Brings back memories... We got to write assembler for them back in college. real pieces of shit. They had some freakish 24-bit memory model and 16 GPR's (i think it was 16 of them) that weren't really GPR's 'cause they had assigned roles. God... if anyone other than IBM had created that monstrosity it would have sank...
Anyhoo.. back to my reply: I was merely make a pun at the expensive of MacOS 9. IMHO OSX is the only decent MacOS ever. All the others were terrible; cooperative multitasking, a VM that makes MS-DOS shine, crashability like only Windows could compete with, etc etc.
So don't take it all personal -- It was a joke!!
i stopped reading after i ran into this...
on
Postfix
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"...upgrading the corporate servers from Mac OS 9 to..."
yeah.. that was about where I gave up on this review. Anyone that runs MacOS 9 as a server... not someone I think I'd be taking advice from for my network.
"Why would this be any more secure than listening on a single port for the "unique knock sequence?""
Agreed.. it truely wouldn't make any sense to have all those ports open. Thankfully, modern network software is quite capable of detecting connection attempts to any port, even closed ones.
What I'm saying is that you wouldn't have to have those ports you're listening for set to open states. You could have those ports closed, and just watching for connection attempts on those ports. Once the proper sequence is hit, then you open port X (be it 22, 23, 80, etc).
It seems to me that Microsoft is granting licenses for their FAT code and what-not. They make no mention of not being able to make your own FAT-system (which what everyone has been doing up 'till now).
The only reason you'd really care about this is if you run a large company that makes FAT devices and want to insure that your FAT-system is 100% compatible with specs (which are controlled by Microsoft). Otherwise, you wouldn't care... You'd just look up the well published info already available for free on the 'net.
"RH, any distro for that matter updates so many packages. with windows updates and fixes, it is for the OS itself. pertiod."
Well... that's not entirely true. After you take away the patches that are for Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player there aren't nearly so many "core OS" patches.
That being said, there is no doubt that Microsoft products are less secure than many of their competitors' products. A design decision was made by Microsoft years ago, when security issues were much less of a worry, to focus on features and not security. Now they have the nightmare situation on their hands of something like 80 million lines of code to audit. Security holes are bound to plague them as long as they insist on maintaining the win32 code-base. IMHO, the only thing that could possibly rectify this situation is a new code-base, from the ground up.
Gbit Ethernet doesn't function over Cat-5(e), as Cat-5 maxes out at 100Mhz full-duplex and Cat-5e maxes out at 350Mhz full-duplex. For full-speed Gbit Ethernet over copper you need Cat-6.
Another one I see that he left out is ATM - which works at the same speed as an OC-3 (155.52 Mbit/s). Still... a pretty complete listing, over-all.
Sorry man.. but you've obviously never ran accross a seriously defective product line. Near 3 years ago I bought a KDS 19" Avitron (AV-195TF). This thing had a high-end Trinitron tube in it, and KDS's good name behind it (not to mention their 3 year warranty). It should have been fine and dandy, right? Nope. In the next 2.5 years I had to have it replaced EIGHT times!
The problems were incosistent. I used the monitors in three completely different computers while living in several different locations over that course of time (being a college student). In fact, the only things that were consistent in that 2.5 years were me & the model of monitor. And I never ran it out of spec.
My point is: The warranty is important, but finding a manufacturer that doesn't need the warranty is even more important! Better to ask around (whether it be your friends, colleagues, or public phorums) and find out which manufacturers and models are known for being rock-solid. Then double check and make sure it has a great warranty.
Currently, I'm running a NEC MultiSync FP2141-SB. I've only had it for 2 months... so I can't tell you much about long term reliability. I can tell you that this is one helluva monitor! And that so far I can recommend this to anyone looking for a high-end CRT.
"As I recall, Ender's Game entailed government deception and secrecy, mass slaughter of innocents, a war started by trigger-happy humans, and the brainwashing of children."
Government Deception & Secrecy: No more so than in any war. The majority of government secrecy during wartime is a good thing. In Ender's case it was used to prevent useless civilian panic.
Mass Slaughter of Innocents: I'm a bit lost here. The only mass slaughter that took place was the bugger drones dropping like flies before Ender. You consider them innocent, when they actually started the entire war? And had refused every attempt Earth made at peaceful contact? Earth was cleary not the bad side here, no matter how big the "mis-understanding" there had been in the end.
A War Started By Trigger-Happy Humans: Uhm... the buggers fired first... and kept firing after Earth tried repeated peaceful contacts. How exactly do you define fighting for your species very existence "trigger-happy" ??
Brainwashing of Children: True. The "brain-washing" program wasn't much worse than the psychological training programs that adults are put through for our (the US's) military training. The main difference here is the length and depth of that training, and that it was happening to children. Sometimes extreme times call for extreme measures, though. In such drastic cases, the ends do in fact justify the means IMHO. (Better to warp a few poor childrens' minds than have your entire species wiped out by aliens!)
Personally, I've always found Ender's Game to be a moving story, if a bit far-fetched. As far as using anything of it for military training... Beyond the wonderful toys, I'd hope that the US military doesn't adopt to much from that book.... as it is a story about last hope tactics!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the PowerPC/G4 based off of the POWER4 architecture... but with all the 64-bit (as well as several other "high-end" features) stripped out?
Anyhoo, I know 64-bit sounds nice and all... But my question is: will moving from 64-bit integers, floats, and memory addresses actually improve performance? To my understanding of processor architecture, the answer is definitely 'maybe.'
If the 'new' processor just adds 64-bit extensions, and doesn't actually optimize further than the previous generation, then your 'new' 64-bit chip is now handling data that is twice as large... and probably doesn't need to be twice as large. I mean, really... how often does any of our software make use of 64-bit integers or floats? How often do you need to break the 4GB memory barrier? Sure, years down the road these limitations (especially the memory) will be problems... but for right now, why get all hyped over 64-bit when it will do nothing but double the size of everything?
Personally, for the time being, I'd much rather see highly optimized and blazing fast 32-bit processors on the market. Leave the 64-bit for when I actually need over 4 gigs of memory.
Come on guys.... you know I'm right. Unless you're in the scientific fields that use huge numbers and insane gobs of memory, 64-bit data paths will be wasted cpu-real-estate.
Personally speaking, I don't have much of a problem with MP3 & movie trading. Though the RIAA would like us to believe that their sales drops are caused by all these dangerous mp3's, they also fail to mention that their declining profits precisely match the declining number of albums that they've been putting out in the last couple years.
As far as movies go.... How many movies out there are really up to DVD quality? Or even Broadcast TV quality? Not many! And certainly not before the movie has been put out on DVD do you find DVD quality rips... so does the MPAA really loose money, either? I seriously doubt it.
I can't speak for the rest of the free world.. or even the rest of Americans. But personally, if I download something and actually like it, I go out and buy the CD or DVD. Not because I feel that I have to, but because there are good reasons to. DivX & mp3's don't come with spiffy inserts and the extra's that make a store product worthwhile.
"I am a conservative Christian"... ... "I'm a girl. See naked chicks in my slashdot journal"
Finding your comments contradictory (to say the least), I checked out your user info. Sorry, but anyone that puts links to porn in their user info it NOT a Conservative Christian female, and probably is in fact a horny 15 year old boy that seriously needs to go outside more often.
... that there might also be fewer girls interested in CS?. Just because fewer girls apply for CS degrees does not automatically mean that there is some sort of bias against women in CS programs. One possible reason for this could be that despite recent progress, CS/MIS/IT work is still seen as relatively geeky. And in my honest experience, females (especially younger ones) seem more influenced by social pressures 'n wut-not than guys are. It could be that this geeky image that still surrounds our job field is also hampering the influx of women into the field. Just a hypothesis... but it feels true.
At any rate... I know very few girls in the CS program at my skool. But those few girls that enroll are treated as well, if not better, than the guys in the program (we're all happy to have women around... duh!).
Firstly, he said Dual Athlon 2400+. He made no mention of it being an AthlonXP. Odds are, he's running an AthlonMP.
Secondly, to what problems are you referring to? I've been running Dual AthlonMP's for over a year now, and have experienced no problems that can be attributed specifically to Athlons. Sure, you could have issues if you have low-quality memory, a cheap Power Supply, or bad air-flow... but none of these are Athlon specific issues. IMHO, AthlonMP's are the only way to go for a half-way affordable SMP box these days. Xeon's are waaay to expensive, and P3's cannot compete performance-wise these days.
That being said, this guy obviously has a small willy to be bragging about his system like that. We're going to ignore for the moment that I have a small willy, and am jealous as hell of his box.
"I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars."
After double-checking Sun, I managed to find a Sun Blade 100 for $995 USD. The system "boasts a 64-bit high-performance UltraSPARC® IIe processor, provides plenty of internal disk and memory, and features a fast PCI bus for enhanced I/O. It provides both USB and IEEE1394 interfaces for connectivity to a wide variety of third-party peripherals. And with graphics options that include the on-board Sun PGX64[tm] graphics accelerator". The $995 model has a 500Mhz CPU, 20GB 7200rpm hard disk, and 128mb of PC100 memory (max of 2gigs).
After sitting and thinking about... I'd prob'ly save myself $600 and just buy a Walmart branded Desktop/LX system. Seriously, there are only two possible reason to purchase a Blade 100: A) the coolness factor of having a Blade sitting there, or B) you need to run very specific software which absolutely requires using Sun boxen.
Sun earns its bread 'n butter off of the incredible stability and (to an extent) security Solaris boxen have. The redundancy features of their larger servers is legendary. But as a desktop, there is none of the redundancy features found in their server lines. So, that leaves performance: While the UltraSPARC II is no slouch, and UltraSPARCs have certain nifty features that x86's lack... that does not change the fact that Sun's processors have never been speed demons. The fact that this processor is a 64-bit design does little, if anything at all, to make this a more appealing system for any form of desktop work... I'll explain: this system still maxes out with 2 gigs of RAM(not even the 4gigs that a good x86 board can do). That fact alone negates 90% of the reason anyone would ever need a 64-bit machine. So the extra 32-bits the processor has is basically wasted real-estate. What's more, pushing 64-bit data to and from memory will obviously take more time than it would to push 32-bit data.
All in all, I can't see any reason to waste so much money just to have a Sun box. Comparing a Blade 100 against a $350 Walmart box, I see that I can get easily twice the performance for nearly a third of the price. And I would expect this little Linux box to be nearly as stable as Solaris 8 is.
At any rate, that's just my 2 worth. Hope I didn't step on anyone's toes. If you can find an actual, logical reason to spend the money for this Blade 100 that I haven't listed, please feel free to let me know.
after looking at the current mood going on this topic, i'm pretty sure i'll get hammered on moderation for this... but here we go...
Macro-Evolution is a THEORY. And despite what biology teachers like to profess in modern educational institutions, there is absolutely no more proof for it than there is for creationism. Evolutionists like to use the arguement of how easy it is to see the proof of it... but the exact same can be said for Creation. You just have to be willing to look. No matter which way you go, you must be willing to take a leap of faith.
I had the opportunity of seeing a Creation-Science vs. Macro-Evolution debate at my university not long ago. Amongst other things that infuriated the hell out of the evolutionist, was this interesting tidbit: while many species share body parts that are quite similar in design and function (ie. eyes), the genetic coding for those similar parts is not only completely different, but located in a completely different part of the creatures' DNA. Example: Logic would assume that if birds evolved from reptiles, then the genetic coding for the body parts that they share in common would be located in the same place, and be relatively similar. This does not hold true, however. At the genetic level, there is no proof of evolution... as the genetic differences between different families can be immense. Not to mention the broad genetic differences between different classes, orders, phylums and kingdoms! But the physical similarities between different species is often undeniable. So, this begs the question: if there is no genetic similarities (read: evolutionary relationship) between two physically similar creatures of different biologic-families, why do they have so much in common? The answer could very well be a common Creator.
Personally, in the absense of any real, solid and factual proof of evolution, I choose to believe in God and Creationism. At the heart of it, all evolution really is is a religion. Only with evolution the priests are called "biologists."
RealPlayer has evolved (read: added spyware and other unwanted bloat-code), and is now known as the RealOne Player.
It offers the following wonderful functions, regardless of OS: hijacking your system to automatically play every format it can... regardless of whether you want it to or not, bringing you wonderful ads for miscellaneous garbage that nobody actually wants, and helps lead online content publishers into using proprietary formats that can only be accessed through Real Media's wonderful proprietary software. (and yes, I know they publish part of their protocols and formats... but not enough to actually build a competing client or server using their designs)
For my money, I refuse to install Real-anything. I view it as a viral infection of my system... and nobody in their right mind purposefully infects themselves. If it ain't MP3/OGG, I can't watch it. Oh well. Cei la vie.
The question everyone seems to be answering is why they haven't yet converted over... to me it is more of a question of "why would I want/need to?"
Under Windows 2000, I've got a system that is extremely fast, reliable, and supports all of todays most and least popular hardware. And then there is the application base. All in all, with Win2k, I've got a system that rarely ever crashes, is fast as an Linux system and has a plethora of hardware and sofware support.
And then there is Linux. Ok.. Linux is entirely free (as in beer). What else does it bring to me on the workstation or desktop? Nothing. Seriously. What else does it bring me?
This entire arguement assumes two things: A) I do not care about the monopoly arguements surrounding Microsoft. As long as they produce as product that I find usefull, I don't really care who they piss off.
B) I do not care about the price of either the operating system or the applications that I use under it.
If you assume these two criteria... I don't see an honest case for any Linux system as a Windows desktop-killer.
As a server... well.. I admin FreeBSD servers. Preaching Linux to me is... well, rather stupid.;) My modo is: "if it's good enough to run all of Yahoo!, it's good enough for me."
And in the end... for my home boxen (aside from the OpenBSD router box), i need to be able to play Counter-Strike!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
WHAT IS MORE TERRIFYING THAN A FREAGIN' NUKE?!!
Sorry, but smallpox doesn't hold a candle against a thermonuclear weapon. Middle-ages vs Einstein. Hasn't Civ III taught us this much...
However, this is not so useless as you think... modern memory is not installed in single chips (at least not for PC's); modern memory is installed in sticks, which are comprised of many chips. While 2-megabytes is still too small for even a stick to hold much, it's not so far away from practical uses. When we start seeing 64Mbit chips then you'll know it's just around the corner before they appear on desktop systems.
Until then, a non-volatile 2-megabyte chip makes a great solution for cache memory inside instant-on products, like MP3 players :)
"Ain't that a B!" -Rick James
So I'm reading the first 3 (out of 4) pages from that link of early-impressions... seems like there are various problems -- including: cleaning out the menu signals (which are currently bleeding into the actual video feed), slow(er) menu response time, difficulties properly identifying and/or configuring which resolution to output to, and low quality when using the tivo unit to scale the video (instead of letting the TV do it).
Now some of these problems can be fixed easily (more or less) with a firmware update... others might be a sign that the hardware isn't up to snuff. Either way, I don't seem to be reading in rave reviews of the new TiVo... certainly nothing wild enough to dare claim anyone "loves it."
Personally, I think I'll hold on to my money for a while yet until a few of these kinks are worked out.
Anyhoo.. back to my reply: I was merely make a pun at the expensive of MacOS 9. IMHO OSX is the only decent MacOS ever. All the others were terrible; cooperative multitasking, a VM that makes MS-DOS shine, crashability like only Windows could compete with, etc etc.
So don't take it all personal -- It was a joke!!
yeah.. that was about where I gave up on this review. Anyone that runs MacOS 9 as a server ... not someone I think I'd be taking advice from for my network.
Agreed.. it truely wouldn't make any sense to have all those ports open. Thankfully, modern network software is quite capable of detecting connection attempts to any port, even closed ones.
What I'm saying is that you wouldn't have to have those ports you're listening for set to open states. You could have those ports closed, and just watching for connection attempts on those ports. Once the proper sequence is hit, then you open port X (be it 22, 23, 80, etc).
She is actually a he ...
But, yes, a little more depth would be nice ;)
It seems to me that Microsoft is granting licenses for their FAT code and what-not. They make no mention of not being able to make your own FAT-system (which what everyone has been doing up 'till now).
The only reason you'd really care about this is if you run a large company that makes FAT devices and want to insure that your FAT-system is 100% compatible with specs (which are controlled by Microsoft). Otherwise, you wouldn't care... You'd just look up the well published info already available for free on the 'net.
Well... that's not entirely true. After you take away the patches that are for Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player there aren't nearly so many "core OS" patches.
That being said, there is no doubt that Microsoft products are less secure than many of their competitors' products. A design decision was made by Microsoft years ago, when security issues were much less of a worry, to focus on features and not security. Now they have the nightmare situation on their hands of something like 80 million lines of code to audit. Security holes are bound to plague them as long as they insist on maintaining the win32 code-base. IMHO, the only thing that could possibly rectify this situation is a new code-base, from the ground up.
...it will only take Japan about 5 years to ship it over here. By which time, they'll have the Next Great Thing.
Time-Warner, you suck.
Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese... all built in Korea.
Gbit Ethernet doesn't function over Cat-5(e), as Cat-5 maxes out at 100Mhz full-duplex and Cat-5e maxes out at 350Mhz full-duplex. For full-speed Gbit Ethernet over copper you need Cat-6.
Another one I see that he left out is ATM - which works at the same speed as an OC-3 (155.52 Mbit/s). Still... a pretty complete listing, over-all.
wrong.
Sorry man.. but you've obviously never ran accross a seriously defective product line. Near 3 years ago I bought a KDS 19" Avitron (AV-195TF). This thing had a high-end Trinitron tube in it, and KDS's good name behind it (not to mention their 3 year warranty). It should have been fine and dandy, right? Nope. In the next 2.5 years I had to have it replaced EIGHT times!
The problems were incosistent. I used the monitors in three completely different computers while living in several different locations over that course of time (being a college student). In fact, the only things that were consistent in that 2.5 years were me & the model of monitor. And I never ran it out of spec.
My point is: The warranty is important, but finding a manufacturer that doesn't need the warranty is even more important! Better to ask around (whether it be your friends, colleagues, or public phorums) and find out which manufacturers and models are known for being rock-solid. Then double check and make sure it has a great warranty.
Currently, I'm running a NEC MultiSync FP2141-SB. I've only had it for 2 months... so I can't tell you much about long term reliability. I can tell you that this is one helluva monitor! And that so far I can recommend this to anyone looking for a high-end CRT.
Personally, I've always found Ender's Game to be a moving story, if a bit far-fetched. As far as using anything of it for military training... Beyond the wonderful toys, I'd hope that the US military doesn't adopt to much from that book.... as it is a story about last hope tactics!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the PowerPC/G4 based off of the POWER4 architecture... but with all the 64-bit (as well as several other "high-end" features) stripped out?
Anyhoo, I know 64-bit sounds nice and all... But my question is: will moving from 64-bit integers, floats, and memory addresses actually improve performance? To my understanding of processor architecture, the answer is definitely 'maybe.'
If the 'new' processor just adds 64-bit extensions, and doesn't actually optimize further than the previous generation, then your 'new' 64-bit chip is now handling data that is twice as large... and probably doesn't need to be twice as large. I mean, really... how often does any of our software make use of 64-bit integers or floats? How often do you need to break the 4GB memory barrier? Sure, years down the road these limitations (especially the memory) will be problems... but for right now, why get all hyped over 64-bit when it will do nothing but double the size of everything?
Personally, for the time being, I'd much rather see highly optimized and blazing fast 32-bit processors on the market. Leave the 64-bit for when I actually need over 4 gigs of memory.
Come on guys.... you know I'm right. Unless you're in the scientific fields that use huge numbers and insane gobs of memory, 64-bit data paths will be wasted cpu-real-estate.
Personally speaking, I don't have much of a problem with MP3 & movie trading. Though the RIAA would like us to believe that their sales drops are caused by all these dangerous mp3's, they also fail to mention that their declining profits precisely match the declining number of albums that they've been putting out in the last couple years.
As far as movies go.... How many movies out there are really up to DVD quality? Or even Broadcast TV quality? Not many! And certainly not before the movie has been put out on DVD do you find DVD quality rips... so does the MPAA really loose money, either? I seriously doubt it.
I can't speak for the rest of the free world.. or even the rest of Americans. But personally, if I download something and actually like it, I go out and buy the CD or DVD. Not because I feel that I have to, but because there are good reasons to. DivX & mp3's don't come with spiffy inserts and the extra's that make a store product worthwhile.
Finding your comments contradictory (to say the least), I checked out your user info. Sorry, but anyone that puts links to porn in their user info it NOT a Conservative Christian female , and probably is in fact a horny 15 year old boy that seriously needs to go outside more often.
TurboTax's DRM software only modifies sector 33 of your boot-sector. Basically what this means is that for Windows only users, you're safe.
If, however, you use other boot-loaders or "alternative" OS's, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise as things suddenly stop booting. YIKES!.
Anyhoo.. just thought that I'd point out that any of you that just have to run TurboTax should be "safe" unless you run something non-M$.
... that there might also be fewer girls interested in CS?. Just because fewer girls apply for CS degrees does not automatically mean that there is some sort of bias against women in CS programs. One possible reason for this could be that despite recent progress, CS/MIS/IT work is still seen as relatively geeky. And in my honest experience, females (especially younger ones) seem more influenced by social pressures 'n wut-not than guys are. It could be that this geeky image that still surrounds our job field is also hampering the influx of women into the field. Just a hypothesis... but it feels true.
At any rate... I know very few girls in the CS program at my skool. But those few girls that enroll are treated as well, if not better, than the guys in the program (we're all happy to have women around... duh!).
...the jewelry store?
please tell me we're going to start seeing OEM Jewelers popping up now... retail prices are murder!
Firstly, he said Dual Athlon 2400+. He made no mention of it being an AthlonXP. Odds are, he's running an AthlonMP.
Secondly, to what problems are you referring to? I've been running Dual AthlonMP's for over a year now, and have experienced no problems that can be attributed specifically to Athlons. Sure, you could have issues if you have low-quality memory, a cheap Power Supply, or bad air-flow... but none of these are Athlon specific issues. IMHO, AthlonMP's are the only way to go for a half-way affordable SMP box these days. Xeon's are waaay to expensive, and P3's cannot compete performance-wise these days.
That being said, this guy obviously has a small willy to be bragging about his system like that. We're going to ignore for the moment that I have a small willy, and am jealous as hell of his box.
"I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars."
After double-checking Sun, I managed to find a Sun Blade 100 for $995 USD. The system "boasts a 64-bit high-performance UltraSPARC® IIe processor, provides plenty of internal disk and memory, and features a fast PCI bus for enhanced I/O. It provides both USB and IEEE1394 interfaces for connectivity to a wide variety of third-party peripherals. And with graphics options that include the on-board Sun PGX64[tm] graphics accelerator". The $995 model has a 500Mhz CPU, 20GB 7200rpm hard disk, and 128mb of PC100 memory (max of 2gigs).
After sitting and thinking about... I'd prob'ly save myself $600 and just buy a Walmart branded Desktop/LX system. Seriously, there are only two possible reason to purchase a Blade 100: A) the coolness factor of having a Blade sitting there, or B) you need to run very specific software which absolutely requires using Sun boxen.
Sun earns its bread 'n butter off of the incredible stability and (to an extent) security Solaris boxen have. The redundancy features of their larger servers is legendary. But as a desktop, there is none of the redundancy features found in their server lines. So, that leaves performance: While the UltraSPARC II is no slouch, and UltraSPARCs have certain nifty features that x86's lack... that does not change the fact that Sun's processors have never been speed demons. The fact that this processor is a 64-bit design does little, if anything at all, to make this a more appealing system for any form of desktop work... I'll explain: this system still maxes out with 2 gigs of RAM(not even the 4gigs that a good x86 board can do). That fact alone negates 90% of the reason anyone would ever need a 64-bit machine. So the extra 32-bits the processor has is basically wasted real-estate. What's more, pushing 64-bit data to and from memory will obviously take more time than it would to push 32-bit data.
All in all, I can't see any reason to waste so much money just to have a Sun box. Comparing a Blade 100 against a $350 Walmart box, I see that I can get easily twice the performance for nearly a third of the price. And I would expect this little Linux box to be nearly as stable as Solaris 8 is.
At any rate, that's just my 2 worth. Hope I didn't step on anyone's toes. If you can find an actual, logical reason to spend the money for this Blade 100 that I haven't listed, please feel free to let me know.
after looking at the current mood going on this topic, i'm pretty sure i'll get hammered on moderation for this... but here we go...
Macro-Evolution is a THEORY. And despite what biology teachers like to profess in modern educational institutions, there is absolutely no more proof for it than there is for creationism. Evolutionists like to use the arguement of how easy it is to see the proof of it... but the exact same can be said for Creation. You just have to be willing to look. No matter which way you go, you must be willing to take a leap of faith.
I had the opportunity of seeing a Creation-Science vs. Macro-Evolution debate at my university not long ago. Amongst other things that infuriated the hell out of the evolutionist, was this interesting tidbit: while many species share body parts that are quite similar in design and function (ie. eyes), the genetic coding for those similar parts is not only completely different, but located in a completely different part of the creatures' DNA. Example: Logic would assume that if birds evolved from reptiles, then the genetic coding for the body parts that they share in common would be located in the same place, and be relatively similar. This does not hold true, however. At the genetic level, there is no proof of evolution... as the genetic differences between different families can be immense . Not to mention the broad genetic differences between different classes, orders, phylums and kingdoms! But the physical similarities between different species is often undeniable. So, this begs the question: if there is no genetic similarities (read: evolutionary relationship) between two physically similar creatures of different biologic-families, why do they have so much in common? The answer could very well be a common Creator.
Personally, in the absense of any real, solid and factual proof of evolution, I choose to believe in God and Creationism. At the heart of it, all evolution really is is a religion. Only with evolution the priests are called "biologists."
RealPlayer has evolved (read: added spyware and other unwanted bloat-code ), and is now known as the RealOne Player.
It offers the following wonderful functions, regardless of OS: hijacking your system to automatically play every format it can... regardless of whether you want it to or not, bringing you wonderful ads for miscellaneous garbage that nobody actually wants, and helps lead online content publishers into using proprietary formats that can only be accessed through Real Media's wonderful proprietary software. (and yes, I know they publish part of their protocols and formats... but not enough to actually build a competing client or server using their designs)
For my money, I refuse to install Real-anything. I view it as a viral infection of my system... and nobody in their right mind purposefully infects themselves. If it ain't MP3/OGG, I can't watch it. Oh well. Cei la vie.
The question everyone seems to be answering is why they haven't yet converted over... to me it is more of a question of "why would I want/need to?"
;) My modo is: "if it's good enough to run all of Yahoo!, it's good enough for me."
Under Windows 2000, I've got a system that is extremely fast, reliable, and supports all of todays most and least popular hardware. And then there is the application base. All in all, with Win2k, I've got a system that rarely ever crashes, is fast as an Linux system and has a plethora of hardware and sofware support.
And then there is Linux. Ok.. Linux is entirely free (as in beer). What else does it bring to me on the workstation or desktop? Nothing. Seriously. What else does it bring me?
This entire arguement assumes two things:
A) I do not care about the monopoly arguements surrounding Microsoft. As long as they produce as product that I find usefull, I don't really care who they piss off.
B) I do not care about the price of either the operating system or the applications that I use under it.
If you assume these two criteria... I don't see an honest case for any Linux system as a Windows desktop-killer.
As a server... well.. I admin FreeBSD servers. Preaching Linux to me is... well, rather stupid.
And in the end... for my home boxen (aside from the OpenBSD router box), i need to be able to play Counter-Strike!!!!