At my previous company, we used a Mozilla based installer front end. We used a cut down mozilla browser, without address bars or anything like that, which allowed easy UI creation for a wizard, embedded HTML online release notes, built in JS engine for customization at the product/package level, easily extended to interface with back end installers using XPCom. All in all, it was a great piece of work and very stable, this was 2004/2005.
Then we were acquired by an unnamed big blue bohemouth, who didn't like the MPL, and moved us to one of their in-house installers (which was awful beyond words.) And just like that, it was gone.
You could paint it black to hide from amateur optical observers, but what kind of stealth could hide a large satellite in low orbit from other states with radar and infra-red observation? It'd have to either hide on the moon, or in place of a known existing satellite that it swallows, with stealth making it look smaller.
But the chances of a $3bil project staying that secret from other states? Zero.
You wouldn't want to paint it black, it'd absorb huge amounts of radiation when in sunlight that would result in heating that would be difficult to manage.
PS. Not a satellite nor even a rocket scientist, so the above is conjecture only.
I don't understand why existing engine bays have not been reused to fit motor/battery into existing car platforms.
Surely there is sufficient volume under the bonnet/hood to include a pretty much self contained motor/battery/control unit that could be a straight replacement for the existing lump of metal that is the engine/gearbox combination.
It shouldn't even affect the car dynamics much, as you'll be just replacing one dense concentration of metal with another. I'd even wager a motor and reasonably large battery would weigh less than the engine being replaced.
30 years ago, RISC CPUs were just coming to the market.
SPARC, ARM, MIPS and PA-RISC were all being released in the mid-late 80's, and it wouldn't be long until they were joined by the likes of Alpha.
If you could afford them or had access to them, these RISC based machines were a step change in computing power compared to contemporary CISC CPUs of the time, which would have been 286 or 386 (if you were lucky) or 68K. They destroyed even the mini-computers of the time, such as VAXen. It must have been an exciting time to have such a jump in performance on your desk.
Add in the likes of Atari ST and Amiga, and 30 years ago was quite a time for personal computing advances.
It's just a shame the UNIX wars fucked it up for everyone and we ended up stuck with DOS/Windows.
Also F1 engines are far from production, they're rebuilt after almost every race (in the case of Renault last season, sometimes during the race) because they run at such tight tolerances. They have complex anti stall systems because if you stall one you will destroy it and if you don't use enough accelerator, it will stall.
It's been a long time since F1 engines have been rebuilt after every race. Engines have to stay intact after each race, and last as long as possible before being discarded for one of the next of the 4 engines allowed a season. Stupid rule, IMO, but it has put focus on reliability as well as all out power.
If you stall an engine, you'll destroy your race. Of course it can be restarted, it just requires an external starter, which is generally not available outside of the pits, hence the anti-stall.
The cafés I tend to visit don't even have large enough tables to put the X220T on...
It's a LAPtop. I regularly just sit in the lounger chairs, and operate off my lap. (Toshiba Satellite T110-107 11.6" laptop - ~£20 off ebay with no HDD - used spare SSD)
It was also a short and long term benefit of their customers. Are you willing to pay Intel back for the extra performance they provided by their same decision that you are deriding today?
Eh? We've already paid the Intel for the performance. Intel CPUs are that bit more expensive than equivalent AMD CPUs, performance is why they commanded the price premium.
Customers trusted Intel that the performance was gained with no cost to security, a reasonable assumption. I'm computer literate, and I'm shocked that this can even be an issue. How the hell do speculative memory accesses leak through kernel memory protection?
So I'm not sure what you think is to be paid back.
One point that you are unfortunately wholly incorrect on is the culpability of the false 911 caller. If you are in commission of a crime and someone dies as a result of the commission of that crime, you can be found criminally liable for your actions.
Absolutely agree! And as I write, I understand someone has already been arrested for the false call.
I just don't want the police white washing "their" part in this travesty.
1. When the cops tell you to do something, you do it. The place to argue is in court, not when confronted with (a) police officer(s). The dead guy would probably have been fine if he did this (excluding a ND by the cops).
Erm, he did. He answered the door, from the body cam video, he raised his hands when told to.
The caller ID thing is neither here nor there, the phone company will record the actual caller for billing purposes. Finding the real source number will be no problem.
But if the police try and pin this entirely on the prankster, that would be a travesty of justice. The police are completely culpable here, the officer who shot was not fit to carry a weapon.
With nuclear, they don't use electrolysis to split water, they use heat. Not sure what efficiency but much better than electrolysis. Process is called thermochemical water splitting. It's efficient because it doesn't require generating electricity as a step in the process, rather it uses the reactors own heat directly to fuel the operation.
I heard they tried that in Japan at Fukushima, it didn't end well.
Of course, there are more options about what to do with excess power. One option touted is compressing air into underground caves, or liquefying the compressed air into cryogenic tanks, then using the expansion of that air at times of peak load to drive turbines.
But I'm of the opinion that district level storage using chemical batteries (flow batteries seem promising) will provide the best value for money. That will allow the existing grids to continue with minimal changes, allow the storage of domestic micro-generation (Solar PV, combined heat and power) and keep the storage close to the consumers.
Do these manufactures not realize just how much damage the crapware does to their brand?
They don't care because a big part of their business case for PC products which have razor thin margins and anything that brings in additional revenue is going to be implemented.
I've been using a MacBook Air for three years now as my primary business laptop and have been putting Mint on the few old Windows laptops I have hanging around and building my own systems to avoid the pre-installed malware of "Name" brands like HP. I can't say enough good things about my MacBook Air - I don't use it for code development but for email, presentations and/. posts, it's the best laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the Mac Pages, Numbers and Keynote (as well as Google Apps) worked as well as were completely compatible with the Office equivalents.
Unfortunately, at my daughter's college the faculty push Windows (10!) products with very significant discounts for the students. I've been trying to get her to do her programming work/assignments on a system that I have built and use a MacBook for classes.
With Windows 10 ISO download and electronic activation, there really is no excuse not to just wipe the pre-installed mess and put a clean Windows 10 image on. It should run much better, have no activation issues, and give you a nice known base installation from which you can make a reasonable restore image.
... so five users can be logged in simultaneous on the Xenix system, which is a port of Series 3 UNIX that Microsoft produced. Yes, Microsoft was a UNIX software vendor back in the day.
Five concurrent users on an 8086 processor with 512K of RAM. From Microsoft. With dazzling hardware designed by Altos, of course.
IIRC, MicroSoft was in fact the largest UNIX vendor of the day. This was a time when AT&T had only just come out of their consent decree preventing them selling UNIX, the likes of SUN and SGI were minnow start ups, and HP/IBM had a myriad of other proprietary cash-cow OSes already.
I remember being pretty impressed on a university open day at one of the labs being run on a single Xenix PC, with maybe 20 terminals attached. Probably not a 8086 PC, mind, this was 1993, but probably nothing more powerful than a i386. (that said, the adjacent lab of brand new SUNstation IPXs was more impressive:)
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer.
Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Until something unified and stable can actually compete with the ease of setup of Microsoft's office suite, Linux has no hope here.
So it looks like we'll be stuck with Windows Server and it's regular RDS server dropouts, printer spooler issues, DFS shares disappearing, and random Windows hangs for a long time into the forseeable future until someone can do something about it.
Very much depends on mindset. If you want things to work in the "Windows Way", then of course the Linux alternatives will not appear comparable.
But the simple fact is most people don't spend their time SETTING UP their office suite. People should be USING their office suite. I'm not even sure what setting up Linux office suites require. Just install them and go.
As for Sharepoint, I can't comment. We had a MS zealot come in at our place, and try and roll out Sharepoint company wide, and it was so dysfunctional most people ignored it until we were subsumed by another company (and all the MS stuff was thrown out in favour of Notes/Domino). But this was >10 years ago, it may be more functional now.
With the march towards web based applications (especially CRM and ERM), the specific client is becoming less and less critical. A functioning web browser can provide most applications people need for their jobs these days. Which is good.
Why accept such shitty consumer protection? You should demand European style protections - minimum 2 year warranty and where a device is tied to a contract it must last at least as long as the contract or the contract ends.
Why do you put up with this crap? Do you think it saves you money?
Marked as a troll? Really?
My opinion is the phone should indeed last as long as the contract. The phone is part of the contract, and once the phone breaks, the provider is no longer holding up their end of the contract, so should either replace the phone or release the contract.
But, and I'm not defending Apple here, the customer beef should be with the contract provider in that case(as it would be under European consumer laws), not Apple.
Of course, if the phone is bought out of contact, and is warranted for 1 year, then 1 year it is. Buy a better phone, and spend you money elsewhere.
EPIC was too far ahead of its time. Compiler technology was still in the research phase. The hardware implementation was harder than expected.
EPIC was a dog.
The VLIW bundles had limited encoding of instruction groups, which in practice meant the compiler was unable to use all the slots of a bundle for useful work. So, not only did code density go down, but the explicit parallelism was limited by the VLIW itself.
It's the same mistake MIPS made. They exposed the underlying hardware design (in MIPS case, the pipeline design) so that they could forgo pipeline stage interlocks for increased speed. But as clock rates grew, the number of pipeline stages needed to increase, and interlocks were required anyway, and the delay slots were similarly useless.
RISC-V has taken all this on board, and produced an orthogonal ISA, which abstracts away as much implementation detail as possible (no assumptions on pipeline design, no delay slots). I just hope RISC-V becomes a big thing in the coming years.
they didn't do it in the 80's and 90's when flying half full planes was the norm. they started in the late 90's when airline tickets first went online and people started to shop by price.
I was bumped off a trans-Atlantic flight for just this very reason in 1991, so I don't buy that.
Turned out OK. Put up in a hotel, flight refunded and flew the next day, and I was in no hurry as I was going to the US for the whole summer. But had I been going for just a week, or have had commitments at the other end, I'd have been pissed.
Actually, Linux needs competition or it will start to run out of reasons to make it better. In future, it looks like the BSD family will be pretty much it.
Thanks, Sun/Oracle for erecting barriers around DTrace, thus motivating even better tracing in Linux. Thanks also for doing the same to ZFS, thus saving the rest of us from that sprawling abomination.
Actually, Solaris was de facto a single platform OS - namely for SPARCs. Sun did have that experiment w/ OpenSolaris, but once Oracle sabotaged it, and even surviving forks like OpenIndiana were x86 only, it was a lost cause.
I would like to see SPARC survive, though, w/ either Linux or *BSD on it. It would however be nice if it weren't something available only from Oracle
But frankly, the only thing SPARC ever had going for it was everything around it. SPARC succeeded despite SPARC, not because of it. Consider:
- SUN produced some awesome workstations and servers. - Everything used to be open standards (covering SPARC, SBUS, OpenFirmware etc.) - Solaris stabilized into a nice enough UNIX. - Lots of Open Source implementations available (Linux, *BSD).
But consider the downsides: - SUN was swallowed by Oracle. - SPARC is a nasty RISC architecture. Register windows were really a mistake, and most architectures eschew them as a result. Ditto for delay slots. - SPARC lagged behind all the other major RISC architectures save for perhaps ARM (which was aimed at low pwoer anyway) in performance.
While SPARC lacked in RISC firepower, it still beasted contemporary x86 CPUs until the Pentium II era (christ, that was 20 years ago!). Since then though, it's just sucked SUN resources as they struggled to keep up with other CPU vendors. They only stayed on top while they could scale up to 64 CPUs when other vendors could not. Once Windows and Linux had caught up with that scaling, and x86 could be reasonable scaled to 16 or more CPUs economically, the writing was on the wall.
But that 2-3 hours might be to only drive 40 miles in gridlocked traffic system at rush hour. When not moving, EV use no power. When slowing down, EVs use regeneration to recover the kinetic energy of the vehicle. EVs are a commuter car.
Being LA, EVs are also ideal for drive by shootings, as they're quiet and accelerate quickly.
I think it goes further in that Microsoft is most likely intentionally sabotaging Windows 7. It seems that almost every Windows 7 computer I encounter has svchost.exe fully consuming a CPU core and consuming massive amounts of memory for no reason other than a failed update..
Modern software is just too complex, and it is very easy to break things unintentionally. Not saying they're not doing it on purpose, but just saying there is reasonable doubt.
His argument is solid. What other PC operating system supports as many hardware devices, has as much software developed for it? Regardless of the OS being open, Windows as a platform has been a very open to anyone who wants to develop for it.
Most open though? More open than Linux? Seriously? Not a chance.
Vendors (hardware, software) supporting Windows is not the same as Windows supporting the vendors. Linux supports more hardware than Windows out of the box. Linux supports all those non-out of the box pieces of hardware just fine, the vendor just has to write the drivers for them.
Windows is proprietary to Microsoft and doesn't implement an open standards backed API. Linux supports proper open standards, such as POSIX, and provides all the source so it can be extended.
By any definition of open, Windows does not meet it.
Tesla is the automotive equivalent of Apple. Cheaper alternatives will come along (such as the Chevy Bolt).
Except Tesla probably have a significantly higher BOM than most car makers, due to low volume and new tech. Apple have no such excuse, using no more advanced tech than anyone else, and having massive volume to boot, yet still charging a massive premium.
A better analogy would be Ford charging Tesla prices for their everyday cars, and people still buying them.
Slashdot Mirror
all that I have will now be directed at convincing people away from you
Away from Huawei, and towards...? Who are the smart phone manufacturers that let you boot your own OS?
Google, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG (and they're just the brands I've personally owned and installed Cyanogenmod/LineageOS on.)
At my previous company, we used a Mozilla based installer front end. We used a cut down mozilla browser, without address bars or anything like that, which allowed easy UI creation for a wizard, embedded HTML online release notes, built in JS engine for customization at the product/package level, easily extended to interface with back end installers using XPCom. All in all, it was a great piece of work and very stable, this was 2004/2005.
Then we were acquired by an unnamed big blue bohemouth, who didn't like the MPL, and moved us to one of their in-house installers (which was awful beyond words.) And just like that, it was gone.
You could paint it black to hide from amateur optical observers, but what kind of stealth could hide a large satellite in low orbit from other states with radar and infra-red observation?
It'd have to either hide on the moon, or in place of a known existing satellite that it swallows, with stealth making it look smaller.
But the chances of a $3bil project staying that secret from other states? Zero.
You wouldn't want to paint it black, it'd absorb huge amounts of radiation when in sunlight that would result in heating that would be difficult to manage.
PS. Not a satellite nor even a rocket scientist, so the above is conjecture only.
US automakers have subsidiaries in quite a few non-US countries
. . . but what are US countries . . . ? Besides the US itself, of course.
Would Puerto Rico be a US country?
I don't understand why existing engine bays have not been reused to fit motor/battery into existing car platforms.
Surely there is sufficient volume under the bonnet/hood to include a pretty much self contained motor/battery/control unit that could be a straight replacement for the existing lump of metal that is the engine/gearbox combination.
It shouldn't even affect the car dynamics much, as you'll be just replacing one dense concentration of metal with another. I'd even wager a motor and reasonably large battery would weigh less than the engine being replaced.
Or am I missing something?
30 years ago, RISC CPUs were just coming to the market.
SPARC, ARM, MIPS and PA-RISC were all being released in the mid-late 80's, and it wouldn't be long until they were joined by the likes of Alpha.
If you could afford them or had access to them, these RISC based machines were a step change in computing power compared to contemporary CISC CPUs of the time, which would have been 286 or 386 (if you were lucky) or 68K. They destroyed even the mini-computers of the time, such as VAXen. It must have been an exciting time to have such a jump in performance on your desk.
Add in the likes of Atari ST and Amiga, and 30 years ago was quite a time for personal computing advances.
It's just a shame the UNIX wars fucked it up for everyone and we ended up stuck with DOS/Windows.
Also F1 engines are far from production, they're rebuilt after almost every race (in the case of Renault last season, sometimes during the race) because they run at such tight tolerances. They have complex anti stall systems because if you stall one you will destroy it and if you don't use enough accelerator, it will stall.
It's been a long time since F1 engines have been rebuilt after every race. Engines have to stay intact after each race, and last as long as possible before being discarded for one of the next of the 4 engines allowed a season. Stupid rule, IMO, but it has put focus on reliability as well as all out power.
If you stall an engine, you'll destroy your race. Of course it can be restarted, it just requires an external starter, which is generally not available outside of the pits, hence the anti-stall.
Oh my god, did you *really* just say "computer literate" in 2018!
Anyone else triggered by this anymore? Can't stand hearing people say that.
Sorry, perhaps I should have said computer science literate? As in, I know how computers work, not just how to use them.
The cafés I tend to visit don't even have large enough tables to put the X220T on...
It's a LAPtop. I regularly just sit in the lounger chairs, and operate off my lap. (Toshiba Satellite T110-107 11.6" laptop - ~£20 off ebay with no HDD - used spare SSD)
It was also a short and long term benefit of their customers. Are you willing to pay Intel back for the extra performance they provided by their same decision that you are deriding today?
Eh? We've already paid the Intel for the performance. Intel CPUs are that bit more expensive than equivalent AMD CPUs, performance is why they commanded the price premium.
Customers trusted Intel that the performance was gained with no cost to security, a reasonable assumption. I'm computer literate, and I'm shocked that this can even be an issue. How the hell do speculative memory accesses leak through kernel memory protection?
So I'm not sure what you think is to be paid back.
One point that you are unfortunately wholly incorrect on is the culpability of the false 911 caller. If you are in commission of a crime and someone dies as a result of the commission of that crime, you can be found criminally liable for your actions.
Absolutely agree! And as I write, I understand someone has already been arrested for the false call.
I just don't want the police white washing "their" part in this travesty.
Two points:
1. When the cops tell you to do something, you do it. The place to argue is in court, not when confronted with (a) police officer(s). The dead guy would probably have been fine if he did this (excluding a ND by the cops).
Erm, he did. He answered the door, from the body cam video, he raised his hands when told to.
The caller ID thing is neither here nor there, the phone company will record the actual caller for billing purposes. Finding the real source number will be no problem.
But if the police try and pin this entirely on the prankster, that would be a travesty of justice. The police are completely culpable here, the officer who shot was not fit to carry a weapon.
With nuclear, they don't use electrolysis to split water, they use heat. Not sure what efficiency but much better than electrolysis. Process is called thermochemical water splitting. It's efficient because it doesn't require generating electricity as a step in the process, rather it uses the reactors own heat directly to fuel the operation.
I heard they tried that in Japan at Fukushima, it didn't end well.
Of course, there are more options about what to do with excess power. One option touted is compressing air into underground caves, or liquefying the compressed air into cryogenic tanks, then using the expansion of that air at times of peak load to drive turbines.
But I'm of the opinion that district level storage using chemical batteries (flow batteries seem promising) will provide the best value for money. That will allow the existing grids to continue with minimal changes, allow the storage of domestic micro-generation (Solar PV, combined heat and power) and keep the storage close to the consumers.
Do these manufactures not realize just how much damage the crapware does to their brand?
They don't care because a big part of their business case for PC products which have razor thin margins and anything that brings in additional revenue is going to be implemented.
I've been using a MacBook Air for three years now as my primary business laptop and have been putting Mint on the few old Windows laptops I have hanging around and building my own systems to avoid the pre-installed malware of "Name" brands like HP. I can't say enough good things about my MacBook Air - I don't use it for code development but for email, presentations and /. posts, it's the best laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the Mac Pages, Numbers and Keynote (as well as Google Apps) worked as well as were completely compatible with the Office equivalents.
Unfortunately, at my daughter's college the faculty push Windows (10!) products with very significant discounts for the students. I've been trying to get her to do her programming work/assignments on a system that I have built and use a MacBook for classes.
With Windows 10 ISO download and electronic activation, there really is no excuse not to just wipe the pre-installed mess and put a clean Windows 10 image on. It should run much better, have no activation issues, and give you a nice known base installation from which you can make a reasonable restore image.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-g...
... so five users can be logged in simultaneous on the Xenix system, which is a port of Series 3 UNIX that Microsoft produced. Yes, Microsoft was a UNIX software vendor back in the day.
Five concurrent users on an 8086 processor with 512K of RAM. From Microsoft. With dazzling hardware designed by Altos, of course.
IIRC, MicroSoft was in fact the largest UNIX vendor of the day. This was a time when AT&T had only just come out of their consent decree preventing them selling UNIX, the likes of SUN and SGI were minnow start ups, and HP/IBM had a myriad of other proprietary cash-cow OSes already.
I remember being pretty impressed on a university open day at one of the labs being run on a single Xenix PC, with maybe 20 terminals attached. Probably not a 8086 PC, mind, this was 1993, but probably nothing more powerful than a i386. (that said, the adjacent lab of brand new SUNstation IPXs was more impressive :)
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer.
Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Until something unified and stable can actually compete with the ease of setup of Microsoft's office suite, Linux has no hope here.
So it looks like we'll be stuck with Windows Server and it's regular RDS server dropouts, printer spooler issues, DFS shares disappearing, and random Windows hangs for a long time into the forseeable future until someone can do something about it.
Very much depends on mindset. If you want things to work in the "Windows Way", then of course the Linux alternatives will not appear comparable.
But the simple fact is most people don't spend their time SETTING UP their office suite. People should be USING their office suite. I'm not even sure what setting up Linux office suites require. Just install them and go.
As for Sharepoint, I can't comment. We had a MS zealot come in at our place, and try and roll out Sharepoint company wide, and it was so dysfunctional most people ignored it until we were subsumed by another company (and all the MS stuff was thrown out in favour of Notes/Domino). But this was >10 years ago, it may be more functional now.
With the march towards web based applications (especially CRM and ERM), the specific client is becoming less and less critical. A functioning web browser can provide most applications people need for their jobs these days. Which is good.
Why accept such shitty consumer protection? You should demand European style protections - minimum 2 year warranty and where a device is tied to a contract it must last at least as long as the contract or the contract ends.
Why do you put up with this crap? Do you think it saves you money?
Marked as a troll? Really?
My opinion is the phone should indeed last as long as the contract. The phone is part of the contract, and once the phone breaks, the provider is no longer holding up their end of the contract, so should either replace the phone or release the contract.
But, and I'm not defending Apple here, the customer beef should be with the contract provider in that case(as it would be under European consumer laws), not Apple.
Of course, if the phone is bought out of contact, and is warranted for 1 year, then 1 year it is. Buy a better phone, and spend you money elsewhere.
It never was a very good architecture
EPIC was too far ahead of its time. Compiler technology was still in the research phase. The hardware implementation was harder than expected.
EPIC was a dog.
The VLIW bundles had limited encoding of instruction groups, which in practice meant the compiler was unable to use all the slots of a bundle for useful work. So, not only did code density go down, but the explicit parallelism was limited by the VLIW itself.
It's the same mistake MIPS made. They exposed the underlying hardware design (in MIPS case, the pipeline design) so that they could forgo pipeline stage interlocks for increased speed. But as clock rates grew, the number of pipeline stages needed to increase, and interlocks were required anyway, and the delay slots were similarly useless.
RISC-V has taken all this on board, and produced an orthogonal ISA, which abstracts away as much implementation detail as possible (no assumptions on pipeline design, no delay slots). I just hope RISC-V becomes a big thing in the coming years.
int ceo() /* Fall through */
{
while(1) {
int action = rand() % 100;
switch(action%6) {
case 0:
blame(previous_ceo);
case 1:
acquire(competitor);
break;
case 2:
strip(assets);
break;
case 3:
change(company_direction);
break;
case 4:
buy(yacht);
default:
sail(yacht);
break;
}
cache(stock_options);
if (random == 99) {
previous_ceo = current_ceo;
return FAILURE;
}
}
}
they didn't do it in the 80's and 90's when flying half full planes was the norm. they started in the late 90's when airline tickets first went online and people started to shop by price.
I was bumped off a trans-Atlantic flight for just this very reason in 1991, so I don't buy that.
Turned out OK. Put up in a hotel, flight refunded and flew the next day, and I was in no hurry as I was going to the US for the whole summer. But had I been going for just a week, or have had commitments at the other end, I'd have been pissed.
This was with British Airways BTW.
Actually, Linux needs competition or it will start to run out of reasons to make it better. In future, it looks like the BSD family will be pretty much it.
Thanks, Sun/Oracle for erecting barriers around DTrace, thus motivating even better tracing in Linux. Thanks also for doing the same to ZFS, thus saving the rest of us from that sprawling abomination.
Actually, Solaris was de facto a single platform OS - namely for SPARCs. Sun did have that experiment w/ OpenSolaris, but once Oracle sabotaged it, and even surviving forks like OpenIndiana were x86 only, it was a lost cause.
I would like to see SPARC survive, though, w/ either Linux or *BSD on it. It would however be nice if it weren't something available only from Oracle
You can still get SPARC systems from Fujitsu.
But frankly, the only thing SPARC ever had going for it was everything around it. SPARC succeeded despite SPARC, not because of it. Consider:
- SUN produced some awesome workstations and servers.
- Everything used to be open standards (covering SPARC, SBUS, OpenFirmware etc.)
- Solaris stabilized into a nice enough UNIX.
- Lots of Open Source implementations available (Linux, *BSD).
But consider the downsides:
- SUN was swallowed by Oracle.
- SPARC is a nasty RISC architecture. Register windows were really a mistake, and most architectures eschew them as a result. Ditto for delay slots.
- SPARC lagged behind all the other major RISC architectures save for perhaps ARM (which was aimed at low pwoer anyway) in performance.
While SPARC lacked in RISC firepower, it still beasted contemporary x86 CPUs until the Pentium II era (christ, that was 20 years ago!). Since then though, it's just sucked SUN resources as they struggled to keep up with other CPU vendors. They only stayed on top while they could scale up to 64 CPUs when other vendors could not. Once Windows and Linux had caught up with that scaling, and x86 could be reasonable scaled to 16 or more CPUs economically, the writing was on the wall.
Ever been to Los Angeles?
But that 2-3 hours might be to only drive 40 miles in gridlocked traffic system at rush hour. When not moving, EV use no power. When slowing down, EVs use regeneration to recover the kinetic energy of the vehicle. EVs are a commuter car.
Being LA, EVs are also ideal for drive by shootings, as they're quiet and accelerate quickly.
I think it goes further in that Microsoft is most likely intentionally sabotaging Windows 7. It seems that almost every Windows 7 computer I encounter has svchost.exe fully consuming a CPU core and consuming massive amounts of memory for no reason other than a failed update..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Modern software is just too complex, and it is very easy to break things unintentionally. Not saying they're not doing it on purpose, but just saying there is reasonable doubt.
His argument is solid. What other PC operating system supports as many hardware devices, has as much software developed for it? Regardless of the OS being open, Windows as a platform has been a very open to anyone who wants to develop for it.
Most open though? More open than Linux? Seriously? Not a chance.
Vendors (hardware, software) supporting Windows is not the same as Windows supporting the vendors. Linux supports more hardware than Windows out of the box. Linux supports all those non-out of the box pieces of hardware just fine, the vendor just has to write the drivers for them.
Windows is proprietary to Microsoft and doesn't implement an open standards backed API. Linux supports proper open standards, such as POSIX, and provides all the source so it can be extended.
By any definition of open, Windows does not meet it.
Tesla is the automotive equivalent of Apple. Cheaper alternatives will come along (such as the Chevy Bolt).
Except Tesla probably have a significantly higher BOM than most car makers, due to low volume and new tech. Apple have no such excuse, using no more advanced tech than anyone else, and having massive volume to boot, yet still charging a massive premium.
A better analogy would be Ford charging Tesla prices for their everyday cars, and people still buying them.