> I agree with his statement that DSL can be pretty ugly, but it's very lightweight. I studied abroad for a semester and didn't bring a computer with me, but found an ancient Pentium-1 era machine that was being thrown out.
Yes, I used DSL for similar situations, too. However, I have a spare Athlon XP plus board, a spare Nvidia 5200, and I am sure there should be a memory bar with 256 MB somewhere. You can put these in any ATX case, and make a damn fine Linux installation with the distribution of your choice. So for me, the days of messing about with DSL are over.
I could not live without LyX and LaTeX anyway. Sure, back in the days I did LaTeX on a 386SX with 2 MB of RAM and a dos extender. And you can still edit using LyX (or XEmacs) on a pretty small machine. But running LaTeX and acroread without a good amount of memory is just painful.
Xubuntu is quite ok as a small distribution, but I think you would reasonably want 256 MB for it. Firefox 3 certainly uses a lot less memory than firefox 2, and that is quite important for me. And of course you need Adblock, because there is just way too much resource consuming Javascript out there.
In general the start-up and shut-down process could be faster, though. I guess this is down to an the old laptop disk.
> So where does OpenSolaris fit in? It seems to be an OS lacking a niche.
The niche for OpenSolaris is the 64way mission-critical server. Unfortunately, even ultimate kernel hacking enthusiasts rarely have one of those at home.
I agree. The structure may be close to the "original" UNIX, but where is all the comfort you are used to from any Linux distro off the shelf? The command line is positively hostile, unless you hunt down and install all the typical Linux tools. And on the GUI front things are not much better. It makes a certain kind of sense to write everything in Java, but unfortunately it is horribly slow, ugly and often difficult to use.
Solaris can be a nice system, but by the time you have added all the missing bits, it is hardly different from a normal Linux system.
> I have a few ultrasparc machines running linux. There is no working implementation of Java available for them, so I have to without it.
And even with Solaris, you would not get a browser plug-in for a 64bit browser. Ok, maybe you do not need more than 2GB of address space in a browser, but it is still a bizarre limitation.
> Seems anything Sun works on is a greedy resource sob. OpenOffice is great, but for shit sakes, it's slower than my grandmother with two broken hips and chews memory like it's fritos.
Actually I think that is again because of Java. At some point Sun decided to do all the fancy GUI and dialogues in Java, and ever since OO is slow as molasses.
Of course my main grievance is that there is still no 64bit browser plug-in. Hey, my first 64bit PC is rapidly approaching obsolescence, and Sun still does not support it? (Of course SPARC64 CPUs are already mostly history, and I used those, too.)
> As a record store owner, My business faces ruin.
Tough. The pervasive use of automotive vehicles has put a lot of blacksmiths out of business. But would the world really be a better place if we had stuck to using horse drawn carts?
While generally I agree, I think in this case the answer is clear. Windows Vista runs reasonably, if it offers a tangible advantage (as advertised) over Windows XP. If users decide on mass that it runs better with those resource consuming 3D effects turned off (which are after all the main selling point), then obviously it does not run reasonable.
The judge will take this very same position, as it is legally perfectly sound. The leaked memos just add insult to injury. And Microsoft will receive the beating that they deserve. (Well, not quite. The damages will hardly make a dent into the revenue from Visa.)
> as Web services were promoted then too, now web services are actively discouraged for security and scalability reasons. Lessons learned, I guess.
That is not the way I remember it. When ActiveX came out, I remember a public outcry from the security guys. Basically they said that even Microsoft can't be so stupid to just run any odd executable found on the web. But Microsoft completely ignored any criticism, went ahead with ActiveX, and thus created the biggest security problem even seen. Just look through the Windows updates, half of them are still cleaning up broken ActiveX applets. And as long as Windows Update is realised as an ActiveX applet, I would conclude that Microsoft has not learned any lesson.
ActiveX has to go. The world is not going to be safe as long as it is still necessary to run Windows.
> The books do tend to suck a lot more than non-engineering subjects.
Having read hundreds of engineering and non-engineering text books, I fail to see any difference. There are excellent engineering text books out there, but a lot more mediocre ones. Exactly the same applies to non-engineering text books, or even scifi-books. The crucial difference is that engineering is a "deep" topic: one thing builds on the other. So before you read an engineering book, you need to know the necessary requirements. A good book will tell you about this.
Another aspect that may be relevant is that in engineering (and in science) you have right and wrong. So if you do not understand something, you cannot disguise it as a "minority opinion" or an interpretation. This can certainly lead to bad grades for a significant amount of students, but I do not think that grade inflation is the correct solution. Find out what the students can understand, and teach them that. That is hard work, but it is the only way.
> The advantage of AMD is design. AMD has never bested Intel in fabrication.
That may be true (although with the Athlon they were close), but you just do not get fabrication like Intel's on the open market. If you want cutting etch CPUs, you need cutting etch fabs, and that is not available as a commodity.
> I know that exactly the same style of ID cards exists in at least Belgium and Germany. Why is it a problem?
The problem is the life long ID, which allows anybody (and especially the government) to track you. Most European ID cards do not feature a life long ID, but only a serial number, which changes with each issue. This may seem like a minor issue, but it was the main difference in registration between western and eastern Germany. In the GDR, each ID card had a life long personal ID.
Of course now that communism is gone, there is no longer any need to differentiate. So totalitarian methods are slowly being implemented across what used to be the first world.
This all reminds me of the Stasi. We're all spying on each other now, and all of that data business and government hold and will use against use. Be it credit refusal, travel restrictions, political control. We're already there. Indeed, and I think it has more to do with communism than most people realise. During the cold war, the western world had a "spiritual" need to demonstrate how open and free they were, compared to the countries in "the other block". Now that communism has collapsed (or is perceived so), there is no longer any pressure to differentiate. Slowly but surely the same methods that we previously despised are being introduced in all western societies.
And the scary part is the word "all". There seems to be no exception, all civilised countries are following the same trend. So you cannot even vote with your feet.
It seems like a complicated array of technology just to save a few watts of power. It should not be complicated. A Stirling engine is a very simple machine, and it typically lasts a long time. Also you have an automatic temperature control, because it only runs when the chip is hot. So I think they may be on to something.
There's certainly room for it on the iPhone as well. The fact that the iPhone is the "most open" platform say it all. Phones are a convenient way for the networks to control customers. This also means that they are not enabling technology. I am confident that Firefox will change this, but it may take some time.
Am I the only one who thinks that having 3 cores, 6 cores, 3MB and 12MB is weird? Where did all the multiples of three come from in the sea of powers or 2. Concerning the six cores: yes, that is weird. And after making fun of AMD for selling 3 core CPUs, it is now our obligation to make fun of Intel for announcing six core CPUs. Especially since they seem to tick pretty much the same boxes as AMD anyway. (Unfortunately 6 is more than 3, so I would still want an Intel...)
For the cache, the matter is simple. If you can fit 12 MB, but not 16, then 12 is still better than 8. You build them in 3 units of 4 MB each, so no big deal.
That is an interesting point, because the shape of the Earth is indeed a fact. You can have a look at Earth and compare it with your statement.
Evolution on the other hand is an explanation. You cannot pick up a fossil and say "hey, this is evolution". The fossil is your fact, but evolution is only the explanation for these facts, not the fact itself.
I think it would be much better to describe Evolution as a law of nature. It is very much like ideal gas theory, in that it explains a lot of facts, but not all of them.
> Um, this isn't a new concept, nor is it particularly sneaky:
Hey, this is slashdot. You may have heard of it 10 years ago, and so did I, but you have to take into account all the youngsters that are not around that long. After all, downloading songs from iTunes is much more fun than studying traffic shaping. As long as your song fits in the bucket.
> Ah, good old fashioned Harvard arrogance. Let's see how long this lasts.
My university has the same policy, although it is only recommended, not mandatory. So far I had no serious issues, as most publishers will accept copyright forms that retain the right to make the paper available on-line. Change is certainly happening, and it is about time to hop on the band wagon.:-)
> MS is trying to get OOXML accepted by a standards body. That is hardly an act requiring retaliation by the EU.
MS is trying to get OOXML accepted using MS tactics, and that is the problem. Buying votes is not legal, and buying votes to get an unfair advantage does not make it any more acceptable.
> On most hardware, the older Windows 2000 had a huge performance advantage over its newer cousin
I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated. But that is where my praise ends: it might be small, but it was still difficult to use in a lot of places. Windows XP did actually improve the usability quite a bit, although style wise it was a mixed blessing. And since SP2 there is no comparison: XP is just a lot more secure.
I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.
> Software / Hardware security is not too difficult to achieve.
I think what the article is trying to say is that no single measure is perfect. So you have to look at a range of measures and they work together. The outside router/firewall is a perfect example for this. With only perfect systems behind the router, you need no filtering. And still filtering out unnecessary ports can reduce your exposure significantly.
> As usual, the company is only as strong as it's weakest link.
That has been the case so far, but it is time to think about approaches that combine several levels of security. As in more mature systems (transport, buildings, deposit boxes etc) there should be no single point of failure.
> I had a Sony Ericsson T610 mobile (on contract, though mobile contracts let you keep the phone after, so kind of owned kind of not) which was damn near invulnerable.
I agree. I have mine for just over 3 years now. The battery is no longer fresh, but it works for a few days (still better then my first mobile, that would only last for 24 hours when lucky). One key is a bit hard to press, but everything still works.
And the worst bit is that I have been looking for a worthy successor for ages. It does everything I need, but I could do with a better organizer, 3G and a full web browser (Opera Mini may be nice, but it is not quite the same). Try to find that in a reasonably sturdy case and without making you poor!
Slashdot Mirror
> I agree with his statement that DSL can be pretty ugly, but it's very lightweight. I studied abroad for a semester and didn't bring a computer with me, but found an ancient Pentium-1 era machine that was being thrown out.
Yes, I used DSL for similar situations, too. However, I have a spare Athlon XP plus board, a spare Nvidia 5200, and I am sure there should be a memory bar with 256 MB somewhere. You can put these in any ATX case, and make a damn fine Linux installation with the distribution of your choice. So for me, the days of messing about with DSL are over.
I could not live without LyX and LaTeX anyway. Sure, back in the days I did LaTeX on a 386SX with 2 MB of RAM and a dos extender. And you can still edit using LyX (or XEmacs) on a pretty small machine. But running LaTeX and acroread without a good amount of memory is just painful.
Xubuntu is quite ok as a small distribution, but I think you would reasonably want 256 MB for it. Firefox 3 certainly uses a lot less memory than firefox 2, and that is quite important for me. And of course you need Adblock, because there is just way too much resource consuming Javascript out there.
In general the start-up and shut-down process could be faster, though. I guess this is down to an the old laptop disk.
> My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it on.
"They also called is Slowlaris."
> So where does OpenSolaris fit in? It seems to be an OS lacking a niche.
The niche for OpenSolaris is the 64way mission-critical server. Unfortunately, even ultimate kernel hacking enthusiasts rarely have one of those at home.
> Using it is a tremendous pain in the ass.
I agree. The structure may be close to the "original" UNIX, but where is all the comfort you are used to from any Linux distro off the shelf? The command line is positively hostile, unless you hunt down and install all the typical Linux tools. And on the GUI front things are not much better. It makes a certain kind of sense to write everything in Java, but unfortunately it is horribly slow, ugly and often difficult to use.
Solaris can be a nice system, but by the time you have added all the missing bits, it is hardly different from a normal Linux system.
> I have a few ultrasparc machines running linux. There is no working implementation of Java available for them, so I have to without it.
And even with Solaris, you would not get a browser plug-in for a 64bit browser. Ok, maybe you do not need more than 2GB of address space in a browser, but it is still a bizarre limitation.
> Seems anything Sun works on is a greedy resource sob. OpenOffice is great, but for shit sakes, it's slower than my grandmother with two broken hips and chews memory like it's fritos.
Actually I think that is again because of Java. At some point Sun decided to do all the fancy GUI and dialogues in Java, and ever since OO is slow as molasses.
Of course my main grievance is that there is still no 64bit browser plug-in. Hey, my first 64bit PC is rapidly approaching obsolescence, and Sun still does not support it? (Of course SPARC64 CPUs are already mostly history, and I used those, too.)
> As a record store owner, My business faces ruin.
Tough. The pervasive use of automotive vehicles has put a lot of blacksmiths out of business. But would the world really be a better place if we had stuck to using horse drawn carts?
> Define reasonable?
While generally I agree, I think in this case the answer is clear. Windows Vista runs reasonably, if it offers a tangible advantage (as advertised) over Windows XP. If users decide on mass that it runs better with those resource consuming 3D effects turned off (which are after all the main selling point), then obviously it does not run reasonable.
The judge will take this very same position, as it is legally perfectly sound. The leaked memos just add insult to injury. And Microsoft will receive the beating that they deserve. (Well, not quite. The damages will hardly make a dent into the revenue from Visa.)
> as Web services were promoted then too, now web services are actively discouraged for security and scalability reasons. Lessons learned, I guess.
That is not the way I remember it. When ActiveX came out, I remember a public outcry from the security guys. Basically they said that even Microsoft can't be so stupid to just run any odd executable found on the web. But Microsoft completely ignored any criticism, went ahead with ActiveX, and thus created the biggest security problem even seen. Just look through the Windows updates, half of them are still cleaning up broken ActiveX applets. And as long as Windows Update is realised as an ActiveX applet, I would conclude that Microsoft has not learned any lesson.
ActiveX has to go. The world is not going to be safe as long as it is still necessary to run Windows.
> The books do tend to suck a lot more than non-engineering subjects.
Having read hundreds of engineering and non-engineering text books, I fail to see any difference. There are excellent engineering text books out there, but a lot more mediocre ones. Exactly the same applies to non-engineering text books, or even scifi-books. The crucial difference is that engineering is a "deep" topic: one thing builds on the other. So before you read an engineering book, you need to know the necessary requirements. A good book will tell you about this.
Another aspect that may be relevant is that in engineering (and in science) you have right and wrong. So if you do not understand something, you cannot disguise it as a "minority opinion" or an interpretation. This can certainly lead to bad grades for a significant amount of students, but I do not think that grade inflation is the correct solution. Find out what the students can understand, and teach them that. That is hard work, but it is the only way.
> The advantage of AMD is design. AMD has never bested Intel in fabrication.
That may be true (although with the Athlon they were close), but you just do not get fabrication like Intel's on the open market. If you want cutting etch CPUs, you need cutting etch fabs, and that is not available as a commodity.
> I know that exactly the same style of ID cards exists in at least Belgium and Germany. Why is it a problem?
The problem is the life long ID, which allows anybody (and especially the government) to track you. Most European ID cards do not feature a life long ID, but only a serial number, which changes with each issue. This may seem like a minor issue, but it was the main difference in registration between western and eastern Germany. In the GDR, each ID card had a life long personal ID.
Of course now that communism is gone, there is no longer any need to differentiate. So totalitarian methods are slowly being implemented across what used to be the first world.
And the scary part is the word "all". There seems to be no exception, all civilised countries are following the same trend. So you cannot even vote with your feet.
For the cache, the matter is simple. If you can fit 12 MB, but not 16, then 12 is still better than 8. You build them in 3 units of 4 MB each, so no big deal.
That is an interesting point, because the shape of the Earth is indeed a fact. You can have a look at Earth and compare it with your statement.
Evolution on the other hand is an explanation. You cannot pick up a fossil and say "hey, this is evolution". The fossil is your fact, but evolution is only the explanation for these facts, not the fact itself.
I think it would be much better to describe Evolution as a law of nature. It is very much like ideal gas theory, in that it explains a lot of facts, but not all of them.
> Um, this isn't a new concept, nor is it particularly sneaky:
Hey, this is slashdot. You may have heard of it 10 years ago, and so did I, but you have to take into account all the youngsters that are not around that long. After all, downloading songs from iTunes is much more fun than studying traffic shaping. As long as your song fits in the bucket.
> Ah, good old fashioned Harvard arrogance. Let's see how long this lasts.
:-)
My university has the same policy, although it is only recommended, not mandatory. So far I had no serious issues, as most publishers will accept copyright forms that retain the right to make the paper available on-line. Change is certainly happening, and it is about time to hop on the band wagon.
> MS is trying to get OOXML accepted by a standards body. That is hardly an act requiring retaliation by the EU.
MS is trying to get OOXML accepted using MS tactics, and that is the problem. Buying votes is not legal, and buying votes to get an unfair advantage does not make it any more acceptable.
> On most hardware, the older Windows 2000 had a huge performance advantage over its newer cousin
I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated. But that is where my praise ends: it might be small, but it was still difficult to use in a lot of places. Windows XP did actually improve the usability quite a bit, although style wise it was a mixed blessing. And since SP2 there is no comparison: XP is just a lot more secure.
I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.
> Software / Hardware security is not too difficult to achieve.
I think what the article is trying to say is that no single measure is perfect. So you have to look at a range of measures and they work together. The outside router/firewall is a perfect example for this. With only perfect systems behind the router, you need no filtering. And still filtering out unnecessary ports can reduce your exposure significantly.
> As usual, the company is only as strong as it's weakest link.
That has been the case so far, but it is time to think about approaches that combine several levels of security. As in more mature systems (transport, buildings, deposit boxes etc) there should be no single point of failure.
> I had a Sony Ericsson T610 mobile (on contract, though mobile contracts let you keep the phone after, so kind of owned kind of not) which was damn near invulnerable.
I agree. I have mine for just over 3 years now. The battery is no longer fresh, but it works for a few days (still better then my first mobile, that would only last for 24 hours when lucky). One key is a bit hard to press, but everything still works.
And the worst bit is that I have been looking for a worthy successor for ages. It does everything I need, but I could do with a better organizer, 3G and a full web browser (Opera Mini may be nice, but it is not quite the same). Try to find that in a reasonably sturdy case and without making you poor!