The startups are offering worse working conditions and so they have to pay more to tempt people away.
Depends on what you call worse working conditions. If you care about your toys and food, then maybe you are correct. If you are interested to work your ass off to have a real chance to 'make it big'.
I see a lot of startups in the valley now that are far more serious then we saw a few years ago and I really hope it's going to pay off for them.
If a company has insurance wouln't that just make it more likely for them to get sued?
I think this is quite a complex subject. It seems to me that the legal system has become just an other tool that companies use to 'get ahead' (in lue of a better description).
What we see a lot today are lawsuits that have seemingly little merit, which are just used to either damage a competitor or leach of the sucess of a large corp.
A large ('flush') company can sue a small/new competitor pretty much crushing it with the sheer cost of defence.
On the other side you see small companies suing large companies, perhaps because they have some silly patent and want to leach of the sucess that a large company had with the technology supposedly covered by the patent.
To get back to the question, all this makes the business lawsuits very different from say the more common lawsuits, for example car accident related ones.
If you are in a car accident and the other person was clearly at fault _AND_ you had significant losses _AND_ the other person has significant assets, then lawyers will tell you it's a great idea to sue. If the other person doesn't have assest, then it's not very interesting to sue, because there's nothing to get. Unless they have insurance, in which case you can start the battle with the insurance company. This of course is a much harder fight because the insurrance company has good lawyers...
So with the more traditional situations having insurrance could perhaps make you more of a target IF you didn't have assets. As I described above, it seems that the enviroment of lawsuits at corporate level are very different, so it's hard to say. If I had a small startup, I'd probably try to get some insurance against lawsuits, but on a general basis, not specific to OSS. I don't think this would make me more of a target, if anything less, because it wouldn't (supposedly) be effective to crush me.
A lot of the annoyance of 'web apps' comes from the fact that browsers can't just refresh a simple tag on the page from the server. They have to re-render the entire page, causing a jarring visual experience for the user.
Yeah, like:
Chapters 8- 10: seamlessly working with the Server
Where Unobtrusive DOMscripting really gets developers juices flowing is the ability to communicate with the server without obviously refreshing the page. Chapter 8 takes you through a variety of methods. Some, like the hacky iframe method or hideous 204 piggyback method are so gruesome that I breathed a sigh of relief loud enough to wake the cat when I finally turned the page to read "XMLHTTP". This method (which is non-standard and introduced by Microsoft) has ushered in the Next Great Web Thing: asynchronous communication with the server. Langridge walks through using the Sarissa library to make a user registration form that checks whether the user name you choose is taken, and if so, suggest some alternatives without refreshing the page.
Such a switch by Symbian would make Linux, in one fell swoop, the leading mobile device platform
Sure, whatever, so long as you understand that Embedded OS != mobile device platform.
Perhaps it's hard to believe, but to become the #1 embedded OS, it's going to take a little more than dominating cell-phones. Although it would be a good first step;-)
FTFA: As long as your power supply is still plugged in and turned on, regardless of whether or not your system is running, shut down or in standby mode, the i-RAM will still be powered by the 3.3V line feeding it from the PCI slot.
By "turned on" they mean the switch that some psu's have, not the power button on the front.
Yeah, that's why I said when "the power to the PC is turned off", not when the PC is turned off.
For example, I'm one of those crazy people that removes all devices from the outlets when I go on a trip. On top of that, our rental place has an old breaker panel and it happens frequently that a circuit-breaker pops. So I personally can see how my PC is going to be without power for an extended amount of time.
FreeBSD allows you to allocate a dynamically resizable filesystem out of swap (see: md, mfs). I'm thinking of mounting the whole thing as a super-fast swap partition - basically, as a giant L4 cache - and mounting/tmp and a few other speed-critical filesystems out of there.
Mmmm, hyper-fast builds that don't depend on the latency of moving parts...
This doesn't make sense. I suspect that you were misled by the incorrect summary. You don't get 4GB of solid state storage for $100.-. That would actually be a really good deal. All you get is a card which has SATA on one side and RAM slots on the other side.
So instead of buying this card you could take the $100 towards a motherboard that supports > 4GB of RAM. Then the RAM will be sitting on a bus that can actually sustain datarates WAY higher than SATA.
Since you don't need persistent storage for cache it makes little sense to stick it on a bus that can theoretically do, what, 150 MB/s? When you can stick it on a bus which can do several GB/s.
I don't really see the point of this card, since it will only keep the data for 16 hours if not powered. In other words, if you leave for a weekend and for some reason the power to your PC is turned off, your tough out of luck.
Other cards that I have seen in the past that make more sense, actually have a normal drive for persistent storage. If power fails, there's enough backup power to write everything to disk. That's basically like having cache on the disk equal to the size of the disk.
Bottom line; this is a rehash of what's been done many times before, didn't really take off then, and considering a relatively stupid implementation, probably won't take off now.
First of all; great post, but I wanted to reply to this comment:
Yet here goes the House of Representatives, doing exactly what bin Laden wants: Taking away our freedom
Here's a thing that bugs me about this: why is it so rarely discussed/researched in the media what the _real_ reasons are behind these terrorist attacks? I mean, "know your enemy" and all. From the very beginning everyone has been saying it's because 'they hate our freedom'.
I don't buy it; at least not without some pretty damn good substantiation. Without that it sounds pretty likely that there's a little bit more to it than just that.
Maybe I'm crazy, but it seem to me that before anybody talks about signing 10-year extensions to such a controversial (to say the least) thing as the Patriot Act, it may be an idea to actually understand what we are really up against?
In other words, the Patriot Act is a very reactive measure, and I hear very little about what can be done to design proactive measures. I hate to say it, but I think terrorist are always going to find ways around the reactive measures...
I was looking for some more concrete evidence on power specifically for the CPU and from the datasheet, at 266MHz they quote 1.9W max power. The STPC Elite SoC datasheet (CPU from the example you used) states 4.8W for the x86 at 133MHz.
Yes, it is fucking bullshit.
First of all, your link for STPC Elite doesn't point to a STPC Elite page. Second of all, the STPC Elite does NOT use 4.8W but 2.3Watt max @ 133 MHz
Yes, perhaps that's at half the clock speed, but it also adds PCI, IDE and floating point.
In any case, that is still NOT several orders of magnitude less power.
I noticed that the x86 board you refer to has half the DRAM,no 10/100 Ethernet interface, maybe this help for the power consumption? (it probably doesn't explain the whole difference)
100Mb/s Ethernet can be implemented @ about 250 mW. In any case, this board adds Ethernet, video and more RAM and runs at about 6.5 Watt.
At the end of the day my main point was that an ARM based board is not several orders of magnitude lower power than a somewhat comparable x86 based design.
According to this press release, the ARM processor consumes around 8mW, though I can't dig out any real-life figures atm
Well, shows your amount of clue by linking to a press release to point out 'facts'. I mean, are you serious?
To get back to our original discussion about the Linksys board that was quoted to consume 8.6 Watt while idle. As other pointed out, they state that that's measured at the mains side. They of course also say Current: Calculated current supplied at the 5V line, while running, but who am I to quible.
A little later they show a table which is measured at the 5V side. So let's take that, and let's assume that the nsieve test is 100% load of the entire board, and let's take the 266Mhz number because that gives the best performance/Watt. So that's 0.59A * 5V = 2.95 Watt. Pretty impressive for a board with Ethernet and 2x USB 2.0.
That is still NOT _several_ orders of magnitude better power consumption than a Celeron M @ 1GHz for example, which will run at something like 15 Watt at 100% load (probably less).
Sure, it's 5x the power consumption, but it also has video, IDE and audio. Plus floating point.
since ARM is still orders of magnitude more power-efficient than anything x86
This is utter bullshit.
On this page it says that at 133MHz, idle, the board consumes 8.6W. There are plenty of embedded x86 boards that run lower power and/or higher clock frequency.
For example, here's a board that runs at 133MHz, 5 Watt at 100% CPU load.
Telephones need to work in an emergency including when there is a power failure. Traditional telephones do
The majority of phones today are cordless and practically none work without power.
I used to buy cordless phones that had a speaker on the base unit for this very reason, but alas, those also don't work anymore without power, on most modern phones.
The GP or someone else has pointed out that some code is remarked with "OS/2" here and there but that is because Windows 2000 (XP and NT?) implement a OS/2 sublayer.
Nope, it wasn't code that implemented the OS/2 support. It was code that originated from the OS/2 source tree.
In fact it wasn't in the NT (or derivatives) source tree at all. It was WFW 3.11 I believe.
Forgive me that I don't remember the details, it was a long time ago.
It was originally a colaboration between MS and IBM. So chances are MS owns some of the code.
Exactly. When I worked at MS, I have seen files in the Windows source tree that had comments saying they were part of OS/2. They were also marked as 'Copyright Microsoft' only, which implies that MS licensed their source to IBM, but kept the copyright.
If you don't care, don't read and don't post. Very easy, very simple.
I disagree. Posting comments like that is the easiest and arguably the best way for readers to indicate that they don't like the direction in which a site like/. is heading. (provided of course the editors ever actually read comments...)
I got a similar reply as yours to a comment I placed about the 'Bruce Campbell' story.
Of course I don't have to read that article nor this one. But it seems fair to bitch about it when a place you frequent for a certain type of information seems to take a weird turn and start reporting on stuff that you really don't care about.
The comment system is specifically designed to moderate comments that aren't appreciated, and the OP got mod'd +5, so obviously (s)he is not the only one feeling that way.
In other words; I appreciate a lot of stuff that gets posted on/. and I really would like to continue reading it. But without trying to sound too dramatic, between these type of stories, the dupes and the stories that are rediculously biased and/or plain flamebait, I'm starting to wonder what's happening to good ole/.
I mean, you gotta honestly wonder if Taco (& the others) are really actively working on this site anymore.
Yeah, or is it a slightly re-engineered version of their 3D technology
I have one of those sitting here, and I can totally see how this 'new breakthrough' would be possible using the same technique, just different mechanical layout.
FYI: the 3D monitor is not that great, you have to position your head in the _exact_ right position.
Welcome to slashdot, where you have to insert a microsoft bash to get submitted article posted;)
It's really quite unfortunate. I still think/. is an interesting source for tech news, but j.c., why the hell this highly biased/opinionated crap gets posted all the time is beyond me.
I mean, journalism 101; you don't need to provide your audience with an opinion; they can make up their own. If/. wants to maintain just a frail of integrity they really should refrain from posting articles like this. I don't care how great the link is, the summary doesn't need to tell me what to think.
Stuff like (when Google doesn't even show up articles about democracy, that's no good thing) is completely unnecessary. Just as easily the poster could have said 'Google doesn't show up articles about democracy', which would give us (the readers) the benefit of the doubt that we actually have a brain and can make up our own mind about whether that's a 'Good Thing' or not.
It's getting to the point where I'm no longer telling people that I read it on/. Maybe someday I'll be fortunate enough to quit reading this shit and actually get back to coding:-O
Slashdot Mirror
The startups are offering worse working conditions and so they have to pay more to tempt people away.
Depends on what you call worse working conditions. If you care about your toys and food, then maybe you are correct. If you are interested to work your ass off to have a real chance to 'make it big'.
I see a lot of startups in the valley now that are far more serious then we saw a few years ago and I really hope it's going to pay off for them.
The article says that one of the things they need the cash for is possible acquisitions. It seems they are acquiring a lot.
;))
One of the recent ones that I have not read about on slashdot is android
What's interesting about that one is that it's being speculated that they have been creating an Operating System for cell-phones.
(That should be enough to have another 50 stories on slashdot about people pondering what technology is going get involved with next.
If a company has insurance wouln't that just make it more likely for them to get sued?
I think this is quite a complex subject. It seems to me that the legal system has become just an other tool that companies use to 'get ahead' (in lue of a better description).
What we see a lot today are lawsuits that have seemingly little merit, which are just used to either damage a competitor or leach of the sucess of a large corp.
A large ('flush') company can sue a small/new competitor pretty much crushing it with the sheer cost of defence.
On the other side you see small companies suing large companies, perhaps because they have some silly patent and want to leach of the sucess that a large company had with the technology supposedly covered by the patent.
To get back to the question, all this makes the business lawsuits very different from say the more common lawsuits, for example car accident related ones.
If you are in a car accident and the other person was clearly at fault _AND_ you had significant losses _AND_ the other person has significant assets, then lawyers will tell you it's a great idea to sue. If the other person doesn't have assest, then it's not very interesting to sue, because there's nothing to get. Unless they have insurance, in which case you can start the battle with the insurance company. This of course is a much harder fight because the insurrance company has good lawyers...
So with the more traditional situations having insurrance could perhaps make you more of a target IF you didn't have assets. As I described above, it seems that the enviroment of lawsuits at corporate level are very different, so it's hard to say. If I had a small startup, I'd probably try to get some insurance against lawsuits, but on a general basis, not specific to OSS. I don't think this would make me more of a target, if anything less, because it wouldn't (supposedly) be effective to crush me.
Just my 2 cents; not a lawyer and all...
A lot of the annoyance of 'web apps' comes from the fact that browsers can't just refresh a simple tag on the page from the server. They have to re-render the entire page, causing a jarring visual experience for the user.
Yeah, like:
Chapters 8- 10: seamlessly working with the Server
Where Unobtrusive DOMscripting really gets developers juices flowing is the ability to communicate with the server without obviously refreshing the page. Chapter 8 takes you through a variety of methods. Some, like the hacky iframe method or hideous 204 piggyback method are so gruesome that I breathed a sigh of relief loud enough to wake the cat when I finally turned the page to read "XMLHTTP". This method (which is non-standard and introduced by Microsoft) has ushered in the Next Great Web Thing: asynchronous communication with the server. Langridge walks through using the Sarissa library to make a user registration form that checks whether the user name you choose is taken, and if so, suggest some alternatives without refreshing the page.
When face with a similar problem, the Soviets used a "window".
So you are saying we have the Soviets to thank for "Windows"?
Just had to say that was one of the funniest & original posts I've ever read here... :-D Thanks!
Such a switch by Symbian would make Linux, in one fell swoop, the leading mobile device platform
;-)
Sure, whatever, so long as you understand that Embedded OS != mobile device platform.
Perhaps it's hard to believe, but to become the #1 embedded OS, it's going to take a little more than dominating cell-phones. Although it would be a good first step
FTFA: As long as your power supply is still plugged in and turned on, regardless of whether or not your system is running, shut down or in standby mode, the i-RAM will still be powered by the 3.3V line feeding it from the PCI slot.
By "turned on" they mean the switch that some psu's have, not the power button on the front.
Yeah, that's why I said when "the power to the PC is turned off", not when the PC is turned off.
For example, I'm one of those crazy people that removes all devices from the outlets when I go on a trip. On top of that, our rental place has an old breaker panel and it happens frequently that a circuit-breaker pops. So I personally can see how my PC is going to be without power for an extended amount of time.
FreeBSD allows you to allocate a dynamically resizable filesystem out of swap (see: md, mfs). I'm thinking of mounting the whole thing as a super-fast swap partition - basically, as a giant L4 cache - and mounting /tmp and a few other speed-critical filesystems out of there.
Mmmm, hyper-fast builds that don't depend on the latency of moving parts...
This doesn't make sense. I suspect that you were misled by the incorrect summary. You don't get 4GB of solid state storage for $100.-. That would actually be a really good deal. All you get is a card which has SATA on one side and RAM slots on the other side.
So instead of buying this card you could take the $100 towards a motherboard that supports > 4GB of RAM. Then the RAM will be sitting on a bus that can actually sustain datarates WAY higher than SATA.
Since you don't need persistent storage for cache it makes little sense to stick it on a bus that can theoretically do, what, 150 MB/s? When you can stick it on a bus which can do several GB/s.
I don't really see the point of this card, since it will only keep the data for 16 hours if not powered. In other words, if you leave for a weekend and for some reason the power to your PC is turned off, your tough out of luck.
Other cards that I have seen in the past that make more sense, actually have a normal drive for persistent storage. If power fails, there's enough backup power to write everything to disk. That's basically like having cache on the disk equal to the size of the disk.
Bottom line; this is a rehash of what's been done many times before, didn't really take off then, and considering a relatively stupid implementation, probably won't take off now.
HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?
I for one, will be happy if I can install their printer drivers without having to wonder what they 'invented' next.
First of all; great post, but I wanted to reply to this comment:
Yet here goes the House of Representatives, doing exactly what bin Laden wants: Taking away our freedom
Here's a thing that bugs me about this: why is it so rarely discussed/researched in the media what the _real_ reasons are behind these terrorist attacks? I mean, "know your enemy" and all. From the very beginning everyone has been saying it's because 'they hate our freedom'.
I don't buy it; at least not without some pretty damn good substantiation. Without that it sounds pretty likely that there's a little bit more to it than just that.
Maybe I'm crazy, but it seem to me that before anybody talks about signing 10-year extensions to such a controversial (to say the least) thing as the Patriot Act, it may be an idea to actually understand what we are really up against?
In other words, the Patriot Act is a very reactive measure, and I hear very little about what can be done to design proactive measures. I hate to say it, but I think terrorist are always going to find ways around the reactive measures...
You must be new here.
This is utter bullshit.
Eh, no, it isn't.
I was looking for some more concrete evidence on power specifically for the CPU and from the datasheet, at 266MHz they quote 1.9W max power. The STPC Elite SoC datasheet (CPU from the example you used) states 4.8W for the x86 at 133MHz.
Yes, it is fucking bullshit.
First of all, your link for STPC Elite doesn't point to a STPC Elite page. Second of all, the STPC Elite does NOT use 4.8W but 2.3Watt max @ 133 MHz
Yes, perhaps that's at half the clock speed, but it also adds PCI, IDE and floating point.
In any case, that is still NOT several orders of magnitude less power.
I noticed that the x86 board you refer to has half the DRAM,no 10/100 Ethernet interface, maybe this help for the power consumption? (it probably doesn't explain the whole difference)
100Mb/s Ethernet can be implemented @ about 250 mW. In any case, this board adds Ethernet, video and more RAM and runs at about 6.5 Watt.
At the end of the day my main point was that an ARM based board is not several orders of magnitude lower power than a somewhat comparable x86 based design.
Really, you should have a clue before posting.
Uhm, sure, this is all entirely new to me.
According to this press release, the ARM processor consumes around 8mW, though I can't dig out any real-life figures atm
Well, shows your amount of clue by linking to a press release to point out 'facts'. I mean, are you serious?
To get back to our original discussion about the Linksys board that was quoted to consume 8.6 Watt while idle. As other pointed out, they state that that's measured at the mains side. They of course also say Current: Calculated current supplied at the 5V line, while running, but who am I to quible.
A little later they show a table which is measured at the 5V side. So let's take that, and let's assume that the nsieve test is 100% load of the entire board, and let's take the 266Mhz number because that gives the best performance/Watt. So that's 0.59A * 5V = 2.95 Watt. Pretty impressive for a board with Ethernet and 2x USB 2.0.
That is still NOT _several_ orders of magnitude better power consumption than a Celeron M @ 1GHz for example, which will run at something like 15 Watt at 100% load (probably less).
Sure, it's 5x the power consumption, but it also has video, IDE and audio. Plus floating point.
In case you are wondering, the datasheet for the Celeron M at 1 GHz (TDP: 5 Watt)
So, I hope you don't mind, but I'm still going to call a bullshit on that 'several orders of magnitude' comment.
since ARM is still orders of magnitude more power-efficient than anything x86
This is utter bullshit.
On this page it says that at 133MHz, idle, the board consumes 8.6W. There are plenty of embedded x86 boards that run lower power and/or higher clock frequency.
For example, here's a board that runs at 133MHz, 5 Watt at 100% CPU load.
You obviously haven't been in an office before.
Thanks for pointing that out. It's an astute observation and it makes the rest of your comment absolutely worth reading.
Telephones need to work in an emergency including when there is a power failure. Traditional telephones do
The majority of phones today are cordless and practically none work without power.
I used to buy cordless phones that had a speaker on the base unit for this very reason, but alas, those also don't work anymore without power, on most modern phones.
The GP or someone else has pointed out that some code is remarked with "OS/2" here and there but that is because Windows 2000 (XP and NT?) implement a OS/2 sublayer.
Nope, it wasn't code that implemented the OS/2 support. It was code that originated from the OS/2 source tree.
In fact it wasn't in the NT (or derivatives) source tree at all. It was WFW 3.11 I believe.
Forgive me that I don't remember the details, it was a long time ago.
It was originally a colaboration between MS and IBM. So chances are MS owns some of the code.
Exactly. When I worked at MS, I have seen files in the Windows source tree that had comments saying they were part of OS/2. They were also marked as 'Copyright Microsoft' only, which implies that MS licensed their source to IBM, but kept the copyright.
If you don't care, don't read and don't post. Very easy, very simple.
/. is heading. (provided of course the editors ever actually read comments...)
/. and I really would like to continue reading it. But without trying to sound too dramatic, between these type of stories, the dupes and the stories that are rediculously biased and/or plain flamebait, I'm starting to wonder what's happening to good ole /.
I disagree. Posting comments like that is the easiest and arguably the best way for readers to indicate that they don't like the direction in which a site like
I got a similar reply as yours to a comment I placed about the 'Bruce Campbell' story.
Of course I don't have to read that article nor this one. But it seems fair to bitch about it when a place you frequent for a certain type of information seems to take a weird turn and start reporting on stuff that you really don't care about.
The comment system is specifically designed to moderate comments that aren't appreciated, and the OP got mod'd +5, so obviously (s)he is not the only one feeling that way.
In other words; I appreciate a lot of stuff that gets posted on
I mean, you gotta honestly wonder if Taco (& the others) are really actively working on this site anymore.
Ooookay...
/.
That still doesn't explain to me why the hell this is posted on
Seems to me that if I were interested in these type of things I would be reading, like, Salon, or something?
If people want to use OS/2, why not sell it to them? If people need support for it, why not sell it to them?
Because it's not cost effective.
This is a new breakthrough in LCD technology
Yeah, or is it a slightly re-engineered version of their 3D technology
I have one of those sitting here, and I can totally see how this 'new breakthrough' would be possible using the same technique, just different mechanical layout.
FYI: the 3D monitor is not that great, you have to position your head in the _exact_ right position.
Welcome to slashdot, where you have to insert a microsoft bash to get submitted article posted ;)
/. is an interesting source for tech news, but j.c., why the hell this highly biased/opinionated crap gets posted all the time is beyond me.
/. wants to maintain just a frail of integrity they really should refrain from posting articles like this. I don't care how great the link is, the summary doesn't need to tell me what to think.
/. Maybe someday I'll be fortunate enough to quit reading this shit and actually get back to coding :-O
It's really quite unfortunate. I still think
I mean, journalism 101; you don't need to provide your audience with an opinion; they can make up their own. If
Stuff like (when Google doesn't even show up articles about democracy, that's no good thing) is completely unnecessary. Just as easily the poster could have said 'Google doesn't show up articles about democracy', which would give us (the readers) the benefit of the doubt that we actually have a brain and can make up our own mind about whether that's a 'Good Thing' or not.
It's getting to the point where I'm no longer telling people that I read it on
(And again, no-I'm not new here.)