You have a shelf full of calcuators, and the shiny TI machines are brand new, and at a good price. The HP one (if they have one) may have been sitting there for a while, and simply cannot compete on such things as screen resolution and memory.
I've been using my HP 48SX since '93 or so. Back then it cost something like $300. Its an amazing calculator, a lot like having Matlab and a symbolic solver in the palm of your hand, but as the years go by I kept thinking that one day its going to break and I won't be able to find another RPN calc that can do what it does.
So on a trip through Frys one day a couple years back, I spotted a HP 48GX on the shelf, and due to the desperate thought of having the SX die one day I went ahead and bought it as a backup. Even though it still cost a fortune, HP hasn't done anything to the design. Its the exact same calculator I could have gotten 10 years ago.
At least now HP finally has an upgrade - selling the 49G+ - with a 75MHz ARM, USB connectivity, and more memory.
The CPU fan is both more important and, generally, quieter than the power supply.
Not in my experience, usually the CPU fans are 60mm and higher RPM, whereas the power supply is generally larger with a slower RPM. To the first order RPM == noise...
These days there isn't much jeopardy to run a couple degrees hotter for several dB quieter operation. I know that Intel CPUs will throttle down if they get dangerously hot. Frankly I'd rather save my hearing and sanity than the CPU anyway.
One additional annoyance is that most motherboard manufacturers go to the added length of putting unnecessary fans on the board chipset as well. These tend to be small (40mm) and run at stupidly high speeds (6000+ RPM) given the amount of power dissipation they need to counter.
One system I have, a shuttle XPC, doubles up the task of case fan and CPU cooler. I pulled the fan off the board chipset, and also the graphics card (replaced the graphics one with a Zalman passive), pulled the 80mm 5000 RPM Sunon dustbuster fan off the CPU heatsink and replaced it with a 2500 RPM much quieter fan. Now it runs with a total of two fans, CPU and PS, much quieter even at full load. How is this possible without having the thing cook itself ?? simple by underclocking - running the FSB at 190MHz instead of 200MHz. Performance difference is incremental and it runs stable at full load (and its much much quieter).
the marketing droids see "unlimited" as a convenient, useful buzzword
Hmm, if Ford or Chevy picked up on this I wonder if we would see the ALL NEW SUV with unlimited range (300mi), unlimited mileage (10mi/gal), unlimited capacity (6ppl if you squeeze them in). Just imagine the unlimited marketing potential!!
I see. You're willing to stand up for principle, as long as it aint your buck on the line.
You probably made this remark as some sort of attempt at sarcasm, but in a sense it is correct even though you don't know why - the real point, which you've obviously missed, depends on the entrepreneurial nature and motivation behind the invention. The real issue is what happens with that invented knowledge after its patented. If my "buck" IS on the line, then you can damn well bet I'm going to work on doing something with it.
However all the companies I've worked for (and all that I know of) don't view it that way. To them patents are like currency - its something you put in the bank until you can cash in on it. If that means it sits there idle, being worthless for 17 to 20 years then thats just too bad. If someone else does something with it - something worthwhile - and unknowingly steps on it, then guess what - its payday - time to litigate and cash in. The fact that the company owning the patent didn't have to do any real work to cash in is icing on the cake...
So I end up at my original point - I don't file the patent. Now it belongs to no one. As soon as it (presumably a circuit in my case) gets diced and spit out of the fab, its prior art - then it officially belongs to no one. I can take it and use it over and over. I can give it to everybody I know. They can't patent it either. I've done what our current patent system will never do, I've acutally spread useful knowledge (especially if I do something immensely more useful with it like publishing it in a journal).
You're honestly of the impression that there is actually a sizable minority of people who would like to invent something with no guarantee to their right of exclusive production?
I work as a EE in a company and I've been in this situation myself before. I've become so disgusted with the patent process that I've decided that I'm not filing any more patents. If I was working independently as an entrepreneur I might have a different opinion - and it is my belief that that is the real justification behind patents - to protect the entrepreneur long enough to get their product to the market.
However the patent system today doesn't serve to protect individuals, its now nothing more than a corporate club for litigation against any would be competitors. Its used by companies that are already well established and are in no danger of not getting a product to market. I remember someone once telling me the way patent settlements are reached is that the lawyers all gather in a room and the companies put their stacks of patent papers side-by-side, the difference in height yields the settlement fee. More recently there has been a trend towards reviving old patents on things that are obvious or have been in use for decades (ie. Forgent's "jpeg" patent). Its nothing more than a money grab by parasites abusing the patent system.
So back to the original point, yes I've invented things before - but no I don't care if the company I work for gets exclusive rights to it. You see it takes time and effort on my part to file a patent, and what do I get for my efforts - a small wad of cash, big freaking deal. Now on the other hand if I don't patent it, I get to take that knowledge and use it again, for myself or for any other company I work for. Further as soon as the circuit I worked on gets fabricated, it becomes prior art and can no longer be patented after that. Its a selfish motive on my part (no more selfish than the patent grabbing company though), but in the end my method serves myself and everyone else better (well at least the people I work with since they get direct benefits of that prior knowledge)...
So developers will keep doing what the author of the article describes: working around the bullshit to actually get things done.
This is exactly on target. Other replies here are bashing your comment, but this is definitely true. Frankly if we didn't circumvent the red-tape bullshit at my company, we would cease being productive.
The bottom line is that to be efficient and productive you need to operate under the radar of the IT overlords who have this obsessive vision of making all of the computers in the company 100% identical. The truth is that the needs of my group are NOT the same as the needs of every other group in the company. If I need a certain tool, and IT doesn't support it, I will do whatever it takes to get it, install it, and use it.
Don't believe me? well our group is in the rather fortunate position of being in a different city than the rest of the company. Since we are only a handful of people, and since we (thankfully) report to essentially the top of the food chain (directly to executive staff), we get to operate in semi-autonomous mode. Officially we are under the IT overlords thumb. However the reality is that we do our own system admin, despite the fact that it goes totally against the corporate rule. If we need another tool, we just go get it. If we need another machine, we acquire it - one way or the other. We don't expect support from the "mothership" because we know there is essentially no one there who has a clue.
Bottom line, productivity skyrocketed. We are beating time-to-market against every other group in the company. We are going to beat the time-to-revenue record of any previous product (ie. making the most money from the product in the shortest amount of time since the project started).
If the IT overlords would understand that their purpose is to give whatever is needed as soon as its needed, to facilitate and accelerate project development, instead of giving red tape and bullshit because they don't want to do any real work, the rest of the company would be better off also.
Why would you ever want to buy a fab? Forget that unless you plan on running a chip business. For working on a prototype you need to check out MOSIS. They might do low volume production also - I never checked into it.
I fab'ed my MS thesis project through MOSIS. Die area was approx 3.7mm square in 0.5um CMOS, and it cost about $3000 for 25 samples. Worked great. If I was ever going to do another private project I would go that route.
This whole "trust" nonsense is a thinly veiled attempt at shifting some of the security-onus from the OS to the hardware with the blessing of Microsoft along with the side "benefit" of Digital Rights Management.
I agree with you. This sounds like a lock-in to MS compliant hardware, and forced DRM. I'll cast my vote by giving my money to a different BIOS vendor...
Interestingly this might give a boost to the open BIOS movement. When MS started locking people in with "authentication" of their OS and office products, there was a discernable jump in the popularity of OpenOffice.
I've had a similar skull saving from a helmet. As a mountain biker I'd have to say I'm as much or more concerned about the helmet protecting me from things above head height than just protecting my head from the ground.
I remember riding some single track once, where someone had sawed off a overhanging tree branch - only they didn't go quite far enough back - so a nice cleanly cut 4 inch branch was hanging right at head height. Unfortunately for me it was just above the level where my visor blocked it from view - so I came down the trail and - POW - almost knocked me clean off the bike. Left a nice gouge in the top of the helmet. I was damn glad I was wearing one.
Actually I also remember trying in vain to destroy my old helmet when I bought a new one. Incredibly strong stuff, virtually indestructable. I tried standing on it, jumping up and down on it. No effect. You could probably drive a car over it and it wouldn't crack.
I don't think this is quite true... the "enterprise" includes desktops.
As a "enterprise" user I can say that RedHat isn't targeting us. A few weeks ago, looking forward, I would have liked to tell our IT guys that we could migrate off our dog slow HP and Sun boxes to new faster commodity hardware running RH. They might have bought into it for the $50/year or so that the personal "non-enterprise" RH editions cost, but not anymore. RH doesn't have personal editions anymore, it has "enterprise" with a bunch of server crap that we don't need or want (no we don't need 500 workstations each running an apache server, we just need a base workstation OS).
Sure RH has a workstation enterprise edition, but on the new 64-bit AMD hardware it rings in at $792/box!! Check it out
Sorry but at $792/box we are not even going to touch it. At $50/box/year mabye, over that - forget it. Not only that I wouldn't want to touch RH given the rate they EOL their OSes. Heck, I thought I was relatively ok with the 7.2 box I was testing stuff on. Like a blur here comes RH8 (which was a radical change), then RH9, then whoops EOL, sorry you missed it...
It seems like cutting 7 minutes from what, a two and a half hour movie is diminishing returns. I'd rather see what happens to Saruman...
Then again mabye its a conspiricy to get everyone to buy the extended version DVD. Based on the first extended version DVD (Fellowship of the Ring) I thought all the cut stuff should have been left in the movie also. I like getting my moneys worth from a movie ticket, bring on the 3 hour movies.
You would use RHEL over a competing Linux distro mainly for the strong support of other software vendors like Oracle, and IBM (Java, WebSphere Studio, ClearCase). Sure these applications will most likely work on other distros, but the systems are already designed to play nicely with RHEL and vice versa.
This is completely wrong, at least for our situation. I work as a EE using tools from places like Cadence and Mentor Graphics (EDA stuff - spice, schematic, layout, etc), and currently ALL the tools support old UNIX OSs. HP/UX and Solaris are the main choices. Tool vendors just recently started porting their apps to Linux (for the most part they picked RH, sometimes SuSE also).
The main selling point for Linux for us is hardware NOT software. I can get a more powerful AMD64 or P4 box a LOT cheaper than a Sun U60 or HP C3700 (and those aren't exactly high-end these days either). A lot of the cost advantage comes from the OS side. I'm trying to get the people here to convert to Linux, but RH just took a lot of the motivation away. People are going to argue, why should we pay to move to an unproven platform, when the cost saving is so little. The tools we use play nicely on Solaris and HP/UX, and RH is the unsupported one. For the AMD64, RedHat Enterprise Linux WS costs $792 per node!! We could buy a single set and copy the hell out of it, but thats probably forbidden somewhere (yes/no?)
I can tell you there is NO way we are going to replace 500 workstations with an unproven OS costing $800/box. I mean get real, where the heck did they pull this $792 number from, their stupid red hat?!? IMO, RH just shot itself in the foot...
But the bookshelf can't take any more! Seriously speaking, my O'Reilly shelf is packed, 15 volumes at work (not just Perl), and I think I have more stashed at home.
Makes me wonder though if anyone out there has a huge O'Reilly collection. Or does everyone migrate to CDs...
Why can't we just put our cell phone on the do not call registry?
You can. My cell is on the national do-not-call list, but that didn't stop the telemarketers from calling my cell phone three times this morning... bastards..
unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".
An interesting idea, would pathfinder/sojourner be big enough to see? Actually has one probe ever photographed another on the surface of another planet before? Makes me wonder if they could find the Viking probes, or mabye they are buried under the sand by now..
By 'we', you mean you and the publishers of various UFO magazines?
Perhaps he refers to the majority of people who realize that they can only observe a relatively small portion of the universe. And anyone with common-sense can easily realise the 90% figure is used metaphorically so get a clue.
And what UFO magazine did you pull "dyson spheres" out of? Its a pretty safe assumption that dyson spheres won't make up any of the so-called "dark matter" out there.
Perhaps some people really need to read a bit more, some suggested material:
Can someone elaborate on exactly what IP they are licensing? I read somewhere before about it being the NUMA code, wouldn't that only be for multi-cpu setups? What are they licensing under single CPU?
Further, I'm assuming that they are not asking this license of the people who bought SCO's linux distro. If its possible to only license parts of code to certain parts of the linux population, couldn't the other linux IP (copyright, patent, etc) holders require license fees ONLY from SCO linux users? (actually does such selective licensing fall under some type of unfair trade law?)
Actually this reminded me of something someone told me once. He was explaining about how during brain surgery, the doctors can find the part of the brain which controls motor function, ie. zap or touch this bit and the leg moves, that bit and the arm moves. In effect they could find the "commands" to make your body function, but they never could find the "commander". The "commands" but not the "commander".
If the "commands" are your physical body, then the "commander" would be your soul. Haven't found the physical location of the soul, which was a spiritually reassuring fact I thought. Perhaps because its not in your body, your body is merely the way in which your soul connects to the physical world.
Of course, that's just the default assumption. Exactly what will happen depends at least on the nature of the dark energy that makes up 70% of the energy density of the Universe, and just what dark energy is is something that we really do not know; we know much less about it than dark matter.
I've always found this to be a remarkable point. If scientists -know- that the observable part of the universe is merely a tiny fraction of what actually exists, why do they persist in making stupid extrapolations about what will happen for all the rest of eternity - "Letsee, I know 10% of the laws of physics, but if I draw a straight line and extrapolate out to infinity.. ah well there ya go, I've proven what happens at the end of the universe!"
Frankly it makes the authors seem pretty stupid IMO, not all that different than "Well I can see a pretty big chunk of the surface of the earth.. looks pretty flat.. (extrapolates).. yup, I've proven the earth is flat"
Given what we know today, it would be extremenly surprising if the dynamics were such that the Universe would be able to halt and revesre it's expansion-- I'd personally bet against it
Why?? Hell, for all we know, space-time might OSCILLATE - expand - contract - expand- contract (ohmygosh!.. shock.. horror) To assume that we can observe all the physics of space-time from inside our little bubble of it here is rather absurd. Frankly I find the whole concept of the "big-bang" rather simplistic and absurd. Its the same extrapolation only in reverse. Its the theory of a simplistic mind trying to wrap up the understanding of a universe.
In the big-bang theory there is a defined boundry after which there is nothing (the universe hasn't expanded to there yet). Take a look at the deep-field photos sometime, and tell me where exactly does anyone see nothing. It doesn't exist. The counter argument is that there isn't a powerful enough telescope to see the boundry. Funny, seems every time we get a more powerful telescope, it still isn't powerful enough. Every time a new deep-field telescope photo appears, the big-band theorists have to go and revise the age of the universe. Always trying to make their simplistic model "fit".
The bottom line is that the only consistent thing the scientists do is to make bold statements and theories, attempt to massage the data into their theory as long as possible, and then discreetly abandon it when something better comes along...
Had the same thing happen to me a couple years ago also. Got a cheap ATI tuner card, but the crap drivers hosed my Win98 install at the time. Even had to reinstall the OS to fix it. (Believe it or not, I called the tech support on this, and that was their proposed solution - reinstall the OS - yeah, great tech support there guys...)
Oddly though, I eventually managed to get the card working under linux using xawtv. I was able to configure it to recognize the tuner chipset since it was the same as used on several other cards (better supported cards with better documentation I'm guessing). But under W98, and later W2K it was always hosed, which is ironic given that those were the only "officially supported" platforms. Now it sits in the bottom of a box in the closet, more aggravation than its worth.
My response was the same as yours, never buy ATI cards again - and to this day my boxes are loaded with Nvidia cards, and they work great!
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The 150 Watt consumption is somewhat interesting.
The real question is how freaking big and loud is the cooler that has to deal with 150W???
You have a shelf full of calcuators, and the shiny TI machines are brand new, and at a good price. The HP one (if they have one) may have been sitting there for a while, and simply cannot compete on such things as screen resolution and memory.
I've been using my HP 48SX since '93 or so. Back then it cost something like $300. Its an amazing calculator, a lot like having Matlab and a symbolic solver in the palm of your hand, but as the years go by I kept thinking that one day its going to break and I won't be able to find another RPN calc that can do what it does.
So on a trip through Frys one day a couple years back, I spotted a HP 48GX on the shelf, and due to the desperate thought of having the SX die one day I went ahead and bought it as a backup. Even though it still cost a fortune, HP hasn't done anything to the design. Its the exact same calculator I could have gotten 10 years ago.
At least now HP finally has an upgrade - selling the 49G+ - with a 75MHz ARM, USB connectivity, and more memory.
The CPU fan is both more important and, generally, quieter than the power supply.
Not in my experience, usually the CPU fans are 60mm and higher RPM, whereas the power supply is generally larger with a slower RPM. To the first order RPM == noise...
These days there isn't much jeopardy to run a couple degrees hotter for several dB quieter operation. I know that Intel CPUs will throttle down if they get dangerously hot. Frankly I'd rather save my hearing and sanity than the CPU anyway.
One additional annoyance is that most motherboard manufacturers go to the added length of putting unnecessary fans on the board chipset as well. These tend to be small (40mm) and run at stupidly high speeds (6000+ RPM) given the amount of power dissipation they need to counter.
One system I have, a shuttle XPC, doubles up the task of case fan and CPU cooler. I pulled the fan off the board chipset, and also the graphics card (replaced the graphics one with a Zalman passive), pulled the 80mm 5000 RPM Sunon dustbuster fan off the CPU heatsink and replaced it with a 2500 RPM much quieter fan. Now it runs with a total of two fans, CPU and PS, much quieter even at full load. How is this possible without having the thing cook itself ?? simple by underclocking - running the FSB at 190MHz instead of 200MHz. Performance difference is incremental and it runs stable at full load (and its much much quieter).
the marketing droids see "unlimited" as a convenient, useful buzzword
Hmm, if Ford or Chevy picked up on this I wonder if we would see the ALL NEW SUV with unlimited range (300mi), unlimited mileage (10mi/gal), unlimited capacity (6ppl if you squeeze them in). Just imagine the unlimited marketing potential!!
I see. You're willing to stand up for principle, as long as it aint your buck on the line.
You probably made this remark as some sort of attempt at sarcasm, but in a sense it is correct even though you don't know why - the real point, which you've obviously missed, depends on the entrepreneurial nature and motivation behind the invention. The real issue is what happens with that invented knowledge after its patented. If my "buck" IS on the line, then you can damn well bet I'm going to work on doing something with it.
However all the companies I've worked for (and all that I know of) don't view it that way. To them patents are like currency - its something you put in the bank until you can cash in on it. If that means it sits there idle, being worthless for 17 to 20 years then thats just too bad. If someone else does something with it - something worthwhile - and unknowingly steps on it, then guess what - its payday - time to litigate and cash in. The fact that the company owning the patent didn't have to do any real work to cash in is icing on the cake...
So I end up at my original point - I don't file the patent. Now it belongs to no one. As soon as it (presumably a circuit in my case) gets diced and spit out of the fab, its prior art - then it officially belongs to no one. I can take it and use it over and over. I can give it to everybody I know. They can't patent it either. I've done what our current patent system will never do, I've acutally spread useful knowledge (especially if I do something immensely more useful with it like publishing it in a journal).
You're honestly of the impression that there is actually a sizable minority of people who would like to invent something with no guarantee to their right of exclusive production?
I work as a EE in a company and I've been in this situation myself before. I've become so disgusted with the patent process that I've decided that I'm not filing any more patents. If I was working independently as an entrepreneur I might have a different opinion - and it is my belief that that is the real justification behind patents - to protect the entrepreneur long enough to get their product to the market.
However the patent system today doesn't serve to protect individuals, its now nothing more than a corporate club for litigation against any would be competitors. Its used by companies that are already well established and are in no danger of not getting a product to market. I remember someone once telling me the way patent settlements are reached is that the lawyers all gather in a room and the companies put their stacks of patent papers side-by-side, the difference in height yields the settlement fee. More recently there has been a trend towards reviving old patents on things that are obvious or have been in use for decades (ie. Forgent's "jpeg" patent). Its nothing more than a money grab by parasites abusing the patent system.
So back to the original point, yes I've invented things before - but no I don't care if the company I work for gets exclusive rights to it. You see it takes time and effort on my part to file a patent, and what do I get for my efforts - a small wad of cash, big freaking deal. Now on the other hand if I don't patent it, I get to take that knowledge and use it again, for myself or for any other company I work for. Further as soon as the circuit I worked on gets fabricated, it becomes prior art and can no longer be patented after that. Its a selfish motive on my part (no more selfish than the patent grabbing company though), but in the end my method serves myself and everyone else better (well at least the people I work with since they get direct benefits of that prior knowledge)...
So developers will keep doing what the author of the article describes: working around the bullshit to actually get things done.
This is exactly on target. Other replies here are bashing your comment, but this is definitely true. Frankly if we didn't circumvent the red-tape bullshit at my company, we would cease being productive.
The bottom line is that to be efficient and productive you need to operate under the radar of the IT overlords who have this obsessive vision of making all of the computers in the company 100% identical. The truth is that the needs of my group are NOT the same as the needs of every other group in the company. If I need a certain tool, and IT doesn't support it, I will do whatever it takes to get it, install it, and use it.
Don't believe me? well our group is in the rather fortunate position of being in a different city than the rest of the company. Since we are only a handful of people, and since we (thankfully) report to essentially the top of the food chain (directly to executive staff), we get to operate in semi-autonomous mode. Officially we are under the IT overlords thumb. However the reality is that we do our own system admin, despite the fact that it goes totally against the corporate rule. If we need another tool, we just go get it. If we need another machine, we acquire it - one way or the other. We don't expect support from the "mothership" because we know there is essentially no one there who has a clue.
Bottom line, productivity skyrocketed. We are beating time-to-market against every other group in the company. We are going to beat the time-to-revenue record of any previous product (ie. making the most money from the product in the shortest amount of time since the project started).
If the IT overlords would understand that their purpose is to give whatever is needed as soon as its needed, to facilitate and accelerate project development, instead of giving red tape and bullshit because they don't want to do any real work, the rest of the company would be better off also.
I'm sure its all accidental .. and the fact that the charges are never in the consumers favor is a mere coincidence.
Of course sales of 'random billing error' plugin modules are skyrocketing! ... again, coincidence
Why would you ever want to buy a fab? Forget that unless you plan on running a chip business. For working on a prototype you need to check out MOSIS. They might do low volume production also - I never checked into it.
I fab'ed my MS thesis project through MOSIS. Die area was approx 3.7mm square in 0.5um CMOS, and it cost about $3000 for 25 samples. Worked great. If I was ever going to do another private project I would go that route.
This whole "trust" nonsense is a thinly veiled attempt at shifting some of the security-onus from the OS to the hardware with the blessing of Microsoft along with the side "benefit" of Digital Rights Management.
I agree with you. This sounds like a lock-in to MS compliant hardware, and forced DRM. I'll cast my vote by giving my money to a different BIOS vendor...
Interestingly this might give a boost to the open BIOS movement. When MS started locking people in with "authentication" of their OS and office products, there was a discernable jump in the popularity of OpenOffice.
I've had a similar skull saving from a helmet. As a mountain biker I'd have to say I'm as much or more concerned about the helmet protecting me from things above head height than just protecting my head from the ground.
I remember riding some single track once, where someone had sawed off a overhanging tree branch - only they didn't go quite far enough back - so a nice cleanly cut 4 inch branch was hanging right at head height. Unfortunately for me it was just above the level where my visor blocked it from view - so I came down the trail and - POW - almost knocked me clean off the bike. Left a nice gouge in the top of the helmet. I was damn glad I was wearing one.
Actually I also remember trying in vain to destroy my old helmet when I bought a new one. Incredibly strong stuff, virtually indestructable. I tried standing on it, jumping up and down on it. No effect. You could probably drive a car over it and it wouldn't crack.
I don't think this is quite true... the "enterprise" includes desktops.
As a "enterprise" user I can say that RedHat isn't targeting us. A few weeks ago, looking forward, I would have liked to tell our IT guys that we could migrate off our dog slow HP and Sun boxes to new faster commodity hardware running RH. They might have bought into it for the $50/year or so that the personal "non-enterprise" RH editions cost, but not anymore. RH doesn't have personal editions anymore, it has "enterprise" with a bunch of server crap that we don't need or want (no we don't need 500 workstations each running an apache server, we just need a base workstation OS).
Sure RH has a workstation enterprise edition, but on the new 64-bit AMD hardware it rings in at $792/box!! Check it out
Sorry but at $792/box we are not even going to touch it. At $50/box/year mabye, over that - forget it. Not only that I wouldn't want to touch RH given the rate they EOL their OSes. Heck, I thought I was relatively ok with the 7.2 box I was testing stuff on. Like a blur here comes RH8 (which was a radical change), then RH9, then whoops EOL, sorry you missed it...
It seems like cutting 7 minutes from what, a two and a half hour movie is diminishing returns. I'd rather see what happens to Saruman...
Then again mabye its a conspiricy to get everyone to buy the extended version DVD. Based on the first extended version DVD (Fellowship of the Ring) I thought all the cut stuff should have been left in the movie also. I like getting my moneys worth from a movie ticket, bring on the 3 hour movies.
You would use RHEL over a competing Linux distro mainly for the strong support of other software vendors like Oracle, and IBM (Java, WebSphere Studio, ClearCase). Sure these applications will most likely work on other distros, but the systems are already designed to play nicely with RHEL and vice versa.
This is completely wrong, at least for our situation. I work as a EE using tools from places like Cadence and Mentor Graphics (EDA stuff - spice, schematic, layout, etc), and currently ALL the tools support old UNIX OSs. HP/UX and Solaris are the main choices. Tool vendors just recently started porting their apps to Linux (for the most part they picked RH, sometimes SuSE also).
The main selling point for Linux for us is hardware NOT software. I can get a more powerful AMD64 or P4 box a LOT cheaper than a Sun U60 or HP C3700 (and those aren't exactly high-end these days either). A lot of the cost advantage comes from the OS side. I'm trying to get the people here to convert to Linux, but RH just took a lot of the motivation away. People are going to argue, why should we pay to move to an unproven platform, when the cost saving is so little. The tools we use play nicely on Solaris and HP/UX, and RH is the unsupported one. For the AMD64, RedHat Enterprise Linux WS costs $792 per node!! We could buy a single set and copy the hell out of it, but thats probably forbidden somewhere (yes/no?)
I can tell you there is NO way we are going to replace 500 workstations with an unproven OS costing $800/box. I mean get real, where the heck did they pull this $792 number from, their stupid red hat?!? IMO, RH just shot itself in the foot...
But the bookshelf can't take any more! Seriously speaking, my O'Reilly shelf is packed, 15 volumes at work (not just Perl), and I think I have more stashed at home.
Makes me wonder though if anyone out there has a huge O'Reilly collection. Or does everyone migrate to CDs...
Why can't we just put our cell phone on the do not call registry?
You can. My cell is on the national do-not-call list, but that didn't stop the telemarketers from calling my cell phone three times this morning... bastards..
... is merely a formality. "We have full backing from our members"
unless a large number of people vote "Pathfinder/Sojourner site".
An interesting idea, would pathfinder/sojourner be big enough to see? Actually has one probe ever photographed another on the surface of another planet before? Makes me wonder if they could find the Viking probes, or mabye they are buried under the sand by now..
By 'we', you mean you and the publishers of various UFO magazines?
Perhaps he refers to the majority of people who realize that they can only observe a relatively small portion of the universe. And anyone with common-sense can easily realise the 90% figure is used metaphorically so get a clue.
And what UFO magazine did you pull "dyson spheres" out of? Its a pretty safe assumption that dyson spheres won't make up any of the so-called "dark matter" out there.
Perhaps some people really need to read a bit more, some suggested material:
BIG BANG THEORY UNDER FIRE
Why the Big Bang is Wrong
ENDLESS, BOUNDLESS, STABLE UNIVERSE
Hubble's Constant in Terms of the Compton Effect
Can someone elaborate on exactly what IP they are licensing? I read somewhere before about it being the NUMA code, wouldn't that only be for multi-cpu setups? What are they licensing under single CPU?
Further, I'm assuming that they are not asking this license of the people who bought SCO's linux distro. If its possible to only license parts of code to certain parts of the linux population, couldn't the other linux IP (copyright, patent, etc) holders require license fees ONLY from SCO linux users? (actually does such selective licensing fall under some type of unfair trade law?)
Actually this reminded me of something someone told me once. He was explaining about how during brain surgery, the doctors can find the part of the brain which controls motor function, ie. zap or touch this bit and the leg moves, that bit and the arm moves. In effect they could find the "commands" to make your body function, but they never could find the "commander". The "commands" but not the "commander".
If the "commands" are your physical body, then the "commander" would be your soul. Haven't found the physical location of the soul, which was a spiritually reassuring fact I thought. Perhaps because its not in your body, your body is merely the way in which your soul connects to the physical world.
Of course, that's just the default assumption. Exactly what will happen depends at least on the nature of the dark energy that makes up 70% of the energy density of the Universe, and just what dark energy is is something that we really do not know; we know much less about it than dark matter.
I've always found this to be a remarkable point. If scientists -know- that the observable part of the universe is merely a tiny fraction of what actually exists, why do they persist in making stupid extrapolations about what will happen for all the rest of eternity - "Letsee, I know 10% of the laws of physics, but if I draw a straight line and extrapolate out to infinity .. ah well there ya go, I've proven what happens at the end of the universe!"
Frankly it makes the authors seem pretty stupid IMO, not all that different than "Well I can see a pretty big chunk of the surface of the earth .. looks pretty flat .. (extrapolates) .. yup, I've proven the earth is flat"
Given what we know today, it would be extremenly surprising if the dynamics were such that the Universe would be able to halt and revesre it's expansion-- I'd personally bet against it
Why?? Hell, for all we know, space-time might OSCILLATE - expand - contract - expand- contract (ohmygosh! .. shock .. horror) To assume that we can observe all the physics of space-time from inside our little bubble of it here is rather absurd. Frankly I find the whole concept of the "big-bang" rather simplistic and absurd. Its the same extrapolation only in reverse. Its the theory of a simplistic mind trying to wrap up the understanding of a universe.
In the big-bang theory there is a defined boundry after which there is nothing (the universe hasn't expanded to there yet). Take a look at the deep-field photos sometime, and tell me where exactly does anyone see nothing. It doesn't exist. The counter argument is that there isn't a powerful enough telescope to see the boundry. Funny, seems every time we get a more powerful telescope, it still isn't powerful enough. Every time a new deep-field telescope photo appears, the big-band theorists have to go and revise the age of the universe. Always trying to make their simplistic model "fit".
The bottom line is that the only consistent thing the scientists do is to make bold statements and theories, attempt to massage the data into their theory as long as possible, and then discreetly abandon it when something better comes along...
Had the same thing happen to me a couple years ago also. Got a cheap ATI tuner card, but the crap drivers hosed my Win98 install at the time. Even had to reinstall the OS to fix it. (Believe it or not, I called the tech support on this, and that was their proposed solution - reinstall the OS - yeah, great tech support there guys...)
Oddly though, I eventually managed to get the card working under linux using xawtv. I was able to configure it to recognize the tuner chipset since it was the same as used on several other cards (better supported cards with better documentation I'm guessing). But under W98, and later W2K it was always hosed, which is ironic given that those were the only "officially supported" platforms. Now it sits in the bottom of a box in the closet, more aggravation than its worth.
My response was the same as yours, never buy ATI cards again - and to this day my boxes are loaded with Nvidia cards, and they work great!
Yeah, what will they do next, air a TV commercial claiming its a supercomputer and surround it with tanks?!?
DOH, sorry that was the G4...........
Its all part of their plan to hold the world ransom for 3 BILLION DOLLARS!!!
muwhahahahaha