Hypocracy is saying one thing and practicing another, which is opposed to or exclusive of the first.
In this case, I feel about the same way about this case as I did about the very first such cases (mcdonalds.com and mtv.com). That is, the person who registered the domain did so in an attempt to utilize the popularity of the name of a product. Realistically, trademark or no, that's a slimy move.
In the case of, for example, etoy vs. etoys the etoy domain was there first, so they could not possibly have chosen that name to capitalize on the popularity of etoys.com.
As for "freedom" and "legality"... if something is legal, but morally repugnant to me, I don't accept it. The freedom issues don't enter into it. This guy is free to do whatever he wants, but we don't have to like it. Microsoft is free to write crappy software, but that doesn't stop us from complaining about it and using other products....
This is all, of course, pending hearing his side of the story. It could turn out that the OpenSSH project is not telling the whole story....
You need to go to your management, wherever you work and say:
"There's an effort to get all 50 states to pass legislation called UCITA that removes the last vestige of liability from software vendors. It also makes it legal for them to insert back-doors into the software that, hypothetically, only they would be able to use to shut down your software if they feel that you've violated your license.
What I need you to do is a) ask yourself if you are comfortable with the current no-warantee nature of software let-alone new laws to further limit liability b) think about the damage that will be caused when the "hackers" figure out how to remotely shut down your software and c) start thinking about what our company should be doing to either support or oppose this law."
That's it. No frills. No "evil empire" scenario. Just present it in terms that they will understand and cannot afford to ignore. Anyone who can keep a business running will recognize the danger, here.
Yes, effects layers are very cool. The Gimp can do just about everything that PS5 can, but effects layers are definitely the odd-feature-out.
history (undos/redos limited only by memory!)
This has been a standard Gimp feature since, as far as I know, the beginning. Certainly since pre-1.0.
some ahckers will say "it would be cool to have better prepress and spot color features"
Would that it were so. But, no. These features are not in The Gimp because they're patented. The only way to include them would be for someone to write them under license and then sell them as plug-ins. I could see a vendor like Red Hat doing this, or maybe a new third-party could start doing things like this.
As for refuting software RAID because hardware is faster... try using a NetApp, and then tell me software is slow. Yep NetApp (the high-high-end of network-attached disk arrays) is software raid.
Actually, the other shocking thing is that NetApps aren't RAID5, they're RAID4, which usually has a performance penalty, but they've gotten around that by using a sort of log-based-RAID, which is a cool idea all on it's own.
Does anyone have any experience with netapps in real production environments? Do they generate a ton of network traffic? Mount options that make them perform better? Comments?
I know that one of the largest sites on the net (in terms of hits) runs off of NetApp. I'm sure others do, but this one is run by a friend. NetApp is often faster than locally attached storage. Things to keep in mind:
No one ever runs a NetApp off of a wire shared with other services
You can go to gigabit speeds over fiber, though switched 100baseT is usually fine for file access
Databases tend to run faster on a NetApp than local disks
EMC is good, but if you've got, say, a farm of a half-dozen or more file or Web servers that all need to see the same filesystem, NetApp is the cleanest way to go
I don't have any stake in NetApp (though I kick myself for not buying stock), I just love their product.
What he's basically saying is "after the anti-privacy industry finishes lobbying congress the get laws passed, shit like this won't make our stock price plummet."
You didn't think these were nice people, did you? They're an ad-banner company, for gods' sake.
This is a really good point, and bears reinforcement.
People forget what RAID stands for: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. IDE RAID is sneered at by the general hardware geek because it's crappy compared to SCSI. Well, of course it is, but you don't care, because it's RAID.
Yes, yes, you can't hot-swap most IDE, and you're limited to the number of hosts per controler, but you don't much care 'bout that either because it's just so damn cheap. If you use multiple controlers you get around most of the limitations of IDE anyhow, so adding an extra controler for the additional disks is a no-brainer. As for hot-swap, you can just keep a hot-spare in the case. That way you can bring it on line in case of a failure and you don't go down unless two disks fail before you can schedule down-time to replace one. Linux RAID doesn't do this sort of hot-spare thing automatically that I know of, but it certainly is easy enough to hack together.
As for refuting software RAID because hardware is faster... try using a NetApp, and then tell me software is slow. Yep NetApp (the high-high-end of network-attached disk arrays) is software raid.
Speaking of which, when is someone going to write a one-step online backup system for ext2fs (or ext3fs) like the one on the NetApp. Basically it's a copy-on-write setup where the root inode is coppied, and every write to a block causes it to be coppied and every inode above it to be coppied. Thus an online backup can be done in seconds, allowing applications like databases to be brought down for practically no time (0 time, if you're using Oracle).
There are almost certainly patent problems here, but someone should at least research how close to this one could get before stepping on patented toes....
I could write a one-liner with find and perl which would do something *like* this with hard-links (they're really not talking about symlinks here, as deleting the original would result in a lost file).
But, I'm not sure that that's what they mean. If they mean that they have a copy-on-write system that manages duplicate files, that would be awesome, and I would praise MS for actual innovation (NetApp has something like this, but it's more manual... still the single biggest reason to by a NetApp, though).
All in all, I'd like to see some more technical info.
Is the ruling that they cannot show US content, or that they cannot rebroadcast US channels? For example, a number of Canadian channels show some ammount of US shows, but also a lot of Canadian shows. Will iCrave have to censor these channels when they are showing US-originated shows?
This brings up an interesting point, as some shows are "US shows", but are produced in Canada. How would Highlander repeats fare in this?
There is a big difference between a cluster of workstations and real supercomputers.
Nope. Really. The only reasons that the two scale differently are bus speed and software support.
On the bus speed count, we've got bonded Gb Ethernet. Try 4 bonded, switched 1Gb/s ethernets on for size, and tell me that it's slow. I don't think so, but if you feel it is, there's always fiberchannel.
Software support is comming. Things like Cluster City and the new SGI boxes will help.
As a matter of fact, there are many ways in which a single "supercomputer" just isn't super enough. For example, you can take advantage of the fact that you have video on all of those nodes, using the video hardware to do complex calculations that can be simulated in the 3D hardware while the processor does something else. This is tricky, and requires a lot of special-case coding, but there are very large gains to be had.
There is a reason that such arrays are not as useful as supercomputers for certain purposes, though. This is the fact that most of the people who know how to code for those special purposes are used to mainframes and supercomputers. They are not used to small-node arrays. That will change.
I have a PDA (a Handspring Visor) and use AvantGo to view Web pages on my way to work after syncing up first thing in the morning. My commute is 1+1/2 hours on public transportation, so I have plenty of time to read.
Ideally I would like to read Slashdot, but all of the AvantGo-channel-ready Slashdot hacks out there only show the articles, not the talkback. I tried setting up my own page through some CGI that parsed the rdf, and created links to the Slashdot-FAQ-suggested version of the pages, but even with threshold=4, plain=1 and boxes=0, the HTML is way to long in many cases, and it's certainly too ugly on the PDA screen.
Well, I'm a coder, I got around it, but I don't like the fact that I had to parse the feedback page in order to do it. Slashdot should have support for such browsing. I would even happily download the banner-ad, if it meant getting a VERY simple HTML version of the page.
If you want my solution, grab sd and sdforum. Put them in your cgi-bin directory and rename them so that they have a.cgi extension (sd finds sdforum only if it's in the same directory and called sdforum.cgi). You will need Perl, and you will need the CPAN modules libwww-perl and XML::RSS. Now open your Web-browser and visit sd.cgi. You should see a bullet-list of articles. You can then click on any one to see a VERY cut-down version of the feedback page. If that works, you're on to the next step.
If you use AvantGo, they give you a nifty little javascript-button that will set the current page in your list. Use that on sd and you're done. If you use Pendragon Browser, use their user interface to add the URL to sd. For other off-line browsing applications your milage may vary.
Please, even if you manage to find where I keep sd on my system, don't use it from there. I don't have great bandwidth, and I don't want to be in the business of being a Slashdot-for-PDA mirror (I'm not even sure of the legalities). If I have to move it to stop people from using it, I will.
GNOME has several pieces, and each can be approached seperately. First, the window manager. GNOME is window manager independant, so if you don't have a kick-ass system with at least 128 MB of RAM, I suggest ditching enlightenment. Go with sawmill or icewm or one of the other WMs.
Next comes widget themes for Gtk+. Keep in mind that themes that have pixmaps for every widget take up a LOT of memory. The flat-colored themes are the least expensive, but least visually apealing. Try looking at the various theme entries on themes.org and note the sizes. Pick a list of your favorite themes and use the one with the smallest size (the size of the theme is not a perfect guage, but it's a good start).
If GNOME still seems slow try these tips:
Don't use transparent windows, and if you must, don't use shaded transparency
Exit netscape if you're not using it. It's a pig.
Don't run GNOME and KDE apps at the same time. They both have huge libraries.
Grab the source for glib, gtk+ and gnome-libs and re-compile with "-O2 -finline-functions -mxyz" where xyz is your platform (e.g. "pentiumpro"). The GNOME coding standards require lots of little functions, so the "-finline-functions" parameter will really help.
You made some good points, but some really bad ones. Here's a few corrections:
6) What does Sun do that Lintel cannot?
A lot of things.
Nothing.
First, all of the workstations and servers have TRUE plug and play.
If you're buying pre-installed you don't care. You can actually say that everything in a pre-installed Linux box is plug-and-play, you just don't have to plug. We're talking about Suns vs. PC clones, so Plug 'N Play(tm) as a strict definition does not enter into it. Suns do not adhere to that standard, so the only measure of plug-and-playness is the convinience of your devices being recognized and supported.
There[sic] processors scale from Laptops (anyone remember Tadpoles) all the way up to Mainframe-sized computers (E10k). Laptops. Like Dell, Toshiba, etc. Mainframe-sized computers like the Cluster City from VA/Linux and other large lintel cluster arrangements.
Intel does not scale gracefully, but we were discussing capabilities not grace, and once you buy it in a package, you really don't care how hard it was to get there.
Also - hot-swappable I/O and CPU/Memory in the Enterprise systems.
If you're using a cluster like the Cluster City, then entire systems are hot-swappable
The E10K can scale up to 64 450 Meg processors with 8 megs of L2 Cache, 64 Gigs of Ram, and can run 4 Virtual Machines that can be dynmically allocated on the fly.
Let's see, a Cluster City with 20 2x2's (ignoring the admin server) means 40 600MHz (700 available?) processors with 20MB of L2 cache, 40GB of RAM and IS 20 machines that can be dynamically re-allocated on the fly.
So, the question is still: What can Suns do that Lintel cannot? The answer of course is nothing. The only stumbling block to total Linux acceptance is the application porting. I still can't get most of the high-end application servers for Linux, even though most of them are based on Java. This sort of thing will change, and has been for years.
The article claims that one of the problems with Linux is the lack of an easy to use office suite. Well, there's Corel Office on the way, of which Word Perfect exists on shelves today. But, beta-released vapor is not the end of it. There's Star Office, Applix (does anyone remember when it was Asterix?) and whatever the AbiFolks are doing (haven't checked in quite some time). This, not to mention the GNOME effort (of which gnumeric is the only currently functional product that I know), KOffice (never used any of it) and a few misc. contenders.
So, perhaps the real problem is just that there are too many to choose from and choice confuses people who are used to windows....
Wouldn't it make a good hybrid engine? I would think that a hydrogen/electric engine would work quite nicely. What's more the electric utility could ALSO use hydrogen....
I'm an Open Source advocate, and yet I want this to happen. I want to see Real Player ship with Red Hat. Why? Because I want streaming video. The free efforts I've seen just don't cut the mustard.
However, perhaps Real can be persuaded to release source. After all, they rely on patents to defend their market, so giving out the source won't hurt them. It won't be Open Source, but at least it'll be source. The ability to fix bugs and partake in the development of new features cannot be underestimated.
It is an inherently object-oriented technology so it should surprise no one that that it doesn't work well with a non object-oriented language.
Check out GNOME's component system (called Bonobo) for an example of a very reasonable object-oriented component system written in C.
And of course, because it's written in C, there are language bindings for C++, Perl, Python, Eiffel, ADA, Guile (scheme), Objective C and a few others that are not as well supported.
Compare this to the leading C++ based component system for UNIX systems (KDE) which has language bindings for C++. There were Perl and Python bindings once, but the last time I checked they were not being maintained (e.g. the links from the KDE site were broken). But even if we accept the two "phantom" bindings for KDE, that's it.
The problem is that C++ requires the programmer to bend his or her programming to the language design so completely that writing bindings for other languages can be a very daunting task. The C++ bindings for Gtk+ (gtk--) took a couple of weeks to create, and over the months that they have been around have become a very rich library that C++ programmers can feel comfortable with.
Of course, this results from solid design which is something that a lot of C and C++ libraries lack.
is C++ more efficient for those lower-level things
Actually, the problem with C++ for systems programming is not efficiency (though there may or may not be problems there). The real doozy is that in C++ it is not only possible, but fairly well accepted practice to make it hard to tell what is being done by the most innocent seeming operations.
Take for example:
void foo() { bar tmp; }
Does that do anything? Well, it could. It could do a whole hell of a lot, in fact.
What about foo a = 0; foo b = a; ? How many memory coppies and/or allocations go on there? You have no way of knowing without looking at the implimentation of foo. Some of it you can tell just by looking at the method prototypes in the class being referenced, but those, in my experience, have not been the norm.
I use C when I need predictability. I use Perl when I want high-level. I use C++ when I need unpredictable low-level.:-(
C has long been the UNIX-world's systems programming language, and still remains that way. I know you don't like to compare C++ to other languages, so I'll just ask if you feel that there are any core reasons why C++ either does not make a good systems prgramming language or failed to capture the interest of the systems C programmers.
I registered a domain with them, and all worked well back when Slashdot first reported that they were up and running. They were free at first, but made it clear that a charge was comming. It looks like they intend for the Open Source project domains to be free forever, but I'd get that in writing if I were you....
Re:You know slashdot is going downhill...
on
38-Inch LCD Panels
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· Score: 2
to be fair, the slashdot guys didn't put those in, the guy who posted the story did. but mayb slashdot should have some way to fix that
It's called the demoroniser. It's been around for quite a while, so I'm a little suprised to see that the Slashdot folks don't use it to clean up messy input....
No no no! You want these companies to demand unreasonable things. The the support companies like Linux Care and Red Hat will have to hire more programmers to do the things that the projects don't want to take on. In the end, this will serve everyone. Of course, some things simply don't make sense, and those will end up not being accepted back into the core projects. Open Source development really does work, why are people still doubting that after so much evidence?
There are limited places where you could put Linux on the desktop and make it work. Why is this? Because the 'elite Linux gurus' want Linux to remain as-is. A club that only people with the computer and programming know-how can join.
Would those be the people working on KDE, GNOME, XFree86, the various office suites and graphical installers? Please go grab a copy of Red Hat 4.2 and try using it (I'll dup my CD for you, if you like). I suspect you will detect an OS that has not remained "as-is".
Then again, perhaps you're refering to the kernel, where video, USB and IR support are being added for easier integration with consumer electronics; or what about those "elite Linux gurus" and their hard-to-use games like Myth2 and Heroes of Might and Magic III; there' always things like Mozilla and Knoqueror, which clearly are aiming at making the desktop harder to use....
This movie is an interesting test of Marvel Entertainment. For those of you who don't know, Marvel used to be a real mess. They finally went bankrupt because they just could not manage their assets. For example, the whole reason that when Cameron wanted to do a Spiderman movie, he couldn't (he ended up doing True Lies and then Titanic while waiting) was that Marvel had sold seemingly conflicting rights to multiple parties. Think about this: Jim "Top of the World" Cameron wanted to make a Spiderman movie, but Marvel had made it nearly impossible, no matter how much money Cameron was willing to spend.
They had done a lot of this, and they basically didn't retain much control over these products nor over the royalties. This lead to crap like Fantastic Four and The Punnisher, which you can find on video at conventions, but trust me, they're not really worth the money.
So why is X-Men different? After going through bankruptcy, Marvel has a very different attitude. They are excercising a good deal of control over the X-Men movie from what I've heard, and they are also coordinating marketing efforts with the release of the film. Expect to see numerous X-Men products coming from Marvel and their partners when the movie comes out.
What's even more interesting is that Marvel stock (MVL) is currently suffering from the effects of their bankruptcy. No one wants to take the chance, so it's cheap. If this movie does well, and the upcoming Spiderman movie also hits the mark, Marvel could be back on track and the stock has a lot of room to rise... of course, this *is* Marvel, and they *do* have a track record....
Any particular reason you feel it's a "piece-of-shit" movie? Everything I've heard says this is being done with the utmost respect for the original story. The only thing they've done is change the costumes, which of course, is necessary. Sorry, but human beings just don't look like that in skin-tight outfits. The outfits they went for are darker partly because that's popular now, and partly because it hides the padding a little better. But as far as I can tell they have not fallen for the idiocy of the Batman movie (e.g. they're not all wearing body armor that requires them to swivel their entire bodies in order to look behind them).
Slashdot Mirror
Hypocracy is saying one thing and practicing another, which is opposed to or exclusive of the first.
In this case, I feel about the same way about this case as I did about the very first such cases (mcdonalds.com and mtv.com). That is, the person who registered the domain did so in an attempt to utilize the popularity of the name of a product. Realistically, trademark or no, that's a slimy move.
In the case of, for example, etoy vs. etoys the etoy domain was there first, so they could not possibly have chosen that name to capitalize on the popularity of etoys.com.
As for "freedom" and "legality"... if something is legal, but morally repugnant to me, I don't accept it. The freedom issues don't enter into it. This guy is free to do whatever he wants, but we don't have to like it. Microsoft is free to write crappy software, but that doesn't stop us from complaining about it and using other products....
This is all, of course, pending hearing his side of the story. It could turn out that the OpenSSH project is not telling the whole story....
You need to go to your management, wherever you work and say:
"There's an effort to get all 50 states to pass legislation called UCITA that removes the last vestige of liability from software vendors. It also makes it legal for them to insert back-doors into the software that, hypothetically, only they would be able to use to shut down your software if they feel that you've violated your license.
What I need you to do is a) ask yourself if you are comfortable with the current no-warantee nature of software let-alone new laws to further limit liability b) think about the damage that will be caused when the "hackers" figure out how to remotely shut down your software and c) start thinking about what our company should be doing to either support or oppose this law."
That's it. No frills. No "evil empire" scenario. Just present it in terms that they will understand and cannot afford to ignore. Anyone who can keep a business running will recognize the danger, here.
This has been a standard Gimp feature since, as far as I know, the beginning. Certainly since pre-1.0.
Would that it were so. But, no. These features are not in The Gimp because they're patented. The only way to include them would be for someone to write them under license and then sell them as plug-ins. I could see a vendor like Red Hat doing this, or maybe a new third-party could start doing things like this.
- No one ever runs a NetApp off of a wire shared with other services
- You can go to gigabit speeds over fiber, though switched 100baseT is usually fine for file access
- Databases tend to run faster on a NetApp than local disks
- EMC is good, but if you've got, say, a farm of a half-dozen or more file or Web servers that all need to see the same filesystem, NetApp is the cleanest way to go
I don't have any stake in NetApp (though I kick myself for not buying stock), I just love their product.What he's basically saying is "after the anti-privacy industry finishes lobbying congress the get laws passed, shit like this won't make our stock price plummet."
You didn't think these were nice people, did you? They're an ad-banner company, for gods' sake.
This is a really good point, and bears reinforcement.
People forget what RAID stands for: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. IDE RAID is sneered at by the general hardware geek because it's crappy compared to SCSI. Well, of course it is, but you don't care, because it's RAID.
Yes, yes, you can't hot-swap most IDE, and you're limited to the number of hosts per controler, but you don't much care 'bout that either because it's just so damn cheap. If you use multiple controlers you get around most of the limitations of IDE anyhow, so adding an extra controler for the additional disks is a no-brainer. As for hot-swap, you can just keep a hot-spare in the case. That way you can bring it on line in case of a failure and you don't go down unless two disks fail before you can schedule down-time to replace one. Linux RAID doesn't do this sort of hot-spare thing automatically that I know of, but it certainly is easy enough to hack together.
As for refuting software RAID because hardware is faster... try using a NetApp, and then tell me software is slow. Yep NetApp (the high-high-end of network-attached disk arrays) is software raid.
Speaking of which, when is someone going to write a one-step online backup system for ext2fs (or ext3fs) like the one on the NetApp. Basically it's a copy-on-write setup where the root inode is coppied, and every write to a block causes it to be coppied and every inode above it to be coppied. Thus an online backup can be done in seconds, allowing applications like databases to be brought down for practically no time (0 time, if you're using Oracle).
There are almost certainly patent problems here, but someone should at least research how close to this one could get before stepping on patented toes....
I could write a one-liner with find and perl which would do something *like* this with hard-links (they're really not talking about symlinks here, as deleting the original would result in a lost file).
But, I'm not sure that that's what they mean. If they mean that they have a copy-on-write system that manages duplicate files, that would be awesome, and I would praise MS for actual innovation (NetApp has something like this, but it's more manual... still the single biggest reason to by a NetApp, though).
All in all, I'd like to see some more technical info.
Is the ruling that they cannot show US content, or that they cannot rebroadcast US channels? For example, a number of Canadian channels show some ammount of US shows, but also a lot of Canadian shows. Will iCrave have to censor these channels when they are showing US-originated shows?
This brings up an interesting point, as some shows are "US shows", but are produced in Canada. How would Highlander repeats fare in this?
On the bus speed count, we've got bonded Gb Ethernet. Try 4 bonded, switched 1Gb/s ethernets on for size, and tell me that it's slow. I don't think so, but if you feel it is, there's always fiberchannel.
Software support is comming. Things like Cluster City and the new SGI boxes will help.
As a matter of fact, there are many ways in which a single "supercomputer" just isn't super enough. For example, you can take advantage of the fact that you have video on all of those nodes, using the video hardware to do complex calculations that can be simulated in the 3D hardware while the processor does something else. This is tricky, and requires a lot of special-case coding, but there are very large gains to be had.
There is a reason that such arrays are not as useful as supercomputers for certain purposes, though. This is the fact that most of the people who know how to code for those special purposes are used to mainframes and supercomputers. They are not used to small-node arrays. That will change.
An only slightly off-topic rant:
.cgi extension (sd finds sdforum only if it's in the same directory and called sdforum.cgi). You will need Perl, and you will need the CPAN modules libwww-perl and XML::RSS. Now open your Web-browser and visit sd.cgi. You should see a bullet-list of articles. You can then click on any one to see a VERY cut-down version of the feedback page. If that works, you're on to the next step.
I have a PDA (a Handspring Visor) and use AvantGo to view Web pages on my way to work after syncing up first thing in the morning. My commute is 1+1/2 hours on public transportation, so I have plenty of time to read.
Ideally I would like to read Slashdot, but all of the AvantGo-channel-ready Slashdot hacks out there only show the articles, not the talkback. I tried setting up my own page through some CGI that parsed the rdf, and created links to the Slashdot-FAQ-suggested version of the pages, but even with threshold=4, plain=1 and boxes=0, the HTML is way to long in many cases, and it's certainly too ugly on the PDA screen.
Well, I'm a coder, I got around it, but I don't like the fact that I had to parse the feedback page in order to do it. Slashdot should have support for such browsing. I would even happily download the banner-ad, if it meant getting a VERY simple HTML version of the page.
If you want my solution, grab sd and sdforum. Put them in your cgi-bin directory and rename them so that they have a
If you use AvantGo, they give you a nifty little javascript-button that will set the current page in your list. Use that on sd and you're done. If you use Pendragon Browser, use their user interface to add the URL to sd. For other off-line browsing applications your milage may vary.
Please, even if you manage to find where I keep sd on my system, don't use it from there. I don't have great bandwidth, and I don't want to be in the business of being a Slashdot-for-PDA mirror (I'm not even sure of the legalities). If I have to move it to stop people from using it, I will.
Next comes widget themes for Gtk+. Keep in mind that themes that have pixmaps for every widget take up a LOT of memory. The flat-colored themes are the least expensive, but least visually apealing. Try looking at the various theme entries on themes.org and note the sizes. Pick a list of your favorite themes and use the one with the smallest size (the size of the theme is not a perfect guage, but it's a good start).
If GNOME still seems slow try these tips:
- Don't use transparent windows, and if you must, don't use shaded transparency
- Exit netscape if you're not using it. It's a pig.
- Don't run GNOME and KDE apps at the same time. They both have huge libraries.
- Grab the source for glib, gtk+ and gnome-libs and re-compile with "-O2 -finline-functions -mxyz" where xyz is your platform (e.g. "pentiumpro"). The GNOME coding standards require lots of little functions, so the "-finline-functions" parameter will really help.
Hope this helps!Nothing.
If you're buying pre-installed you don't care. You can actually say that everything in a pre-installed Linux box is plug-and-play, you just don't have to plug. We're talking about Suns vs. PC clones, so Plug 'N Play(tm) as a strict definition does not enter into it. Suns do not adhere to that standard, so the only measure of plug-and-playness is the convinience of your devices being recognized and supported.
Intel does not scale gracefully, but we were discussing capabilities not grace, and once you buy it in a package, you really don't care how hard it was to get there.
If you're using a cluster like the Cluster City, then entire systems are hot-swappable
Let's see, a Cluster City with 20 2x2's (ignoring the admin server) means 40 600MHz (700 available?) processors with 20MB of L2 cache, 40GB of RAM and IS 20 machines that can be dynamically re-allocated on the fly.
So, the question is still: What can Suns do that Lintel cannot? The answer of course is nothing. The only stumbling block to total Linux acceptance is the application porting. I still can't get most of the high-end application servers for Linux, even though most of them are based on Java. This sort of thing will change, and has been for years.
The article claims that one of the problems with Linux is the lack of an easy to use office suite. Well, there's Corel Office on the way, of which Word Perfect exists on shelves today. But, beta-released vapor is not the end of it. There's Star Office, Applix (does anyone remember when it was Asterix?) and whatever the AbiFolks are doing (haven't checked in quite some time). This, not to mention the GNOME effort (of which gnumeric is the only currently functional product that I know), KOffice (never used any of it) and a few misc. contenders.
So, perhaps the real problem is just that there are too many to choose from and choice confuses people who are used to windows....
Wouldn't it make a good hybrid engine? I would think that a hydrogen/electric engine would work quite nicely. What's more the electric utility could ALSO use hydrogen....
I'm an Open Source advocate, and yet I want this to happen. I want to see Real Player ship with Red Hat. Why? Because I want streaming video. The free efforts I've seen just don't cut the mustard.
However, perhaps Real can be persuaded to release source. After all, they rely on patents to defend their market, so giving out the source won't hurt them. It won't be Open Source, but at least it'll be source. The ability to fix bugs and partake in the development of new features cannot be underestimated.
And of course, because it's written in C, there are language bindings for C++, Perl, Python, Eiffel, ADA, Guile (scheme), Objective C and a few others that are not as well supported.
Compare this to the leading C++ based component system for UNIX systems (KDE) which has language bindings for C++. There were Perl and Python bindings once, but the last time I checked they were not being maintained (e.g. the links from the KDE site were broken). But even if we accept the two "phantom" bindings for KDE, that's it.
The problem is that C++ requires the programmer to bend his or her programming to the language design so completely that writing bindings for other languages can be a very daunting task. The C++ bindings for Gtk+ (gtk--) took a couple of weeks to create, and over the months that they have been around have become a very rich library that C++ programmers can feel comfortable with.
Of course, this results from solid design which is something that a lot of C and C++ libraries lack.
Take for example:
void foo() {
bar tmp;
}
Does that do anything? Well, it could. It could do a whole hell of a lot, in fact.
What about foo a = 0; foo b = a; ? How many memory coppies and/or allocations go on there? You have no way of knowing without looking at the implimentation of foo. Some of it you can tell just by looking at the method prototypes in the class being referenced, but those, in my experience, have not been the norm.
I use C when I need predictability. I use Perl when I want high-level. I use C++ when I need unpredictable low-level.
C has long been the UNIX-world's systems programming language, and still remains that way. I know you don't like to compare C++ to other languages, so I'll just ask if you feel that there are any core reasons why C++ either does not make a good systems prgramming language or failed to capture the interest of the systems C programmers.
Actually, the link should be to this question.
I registered a domain with them, and all worked well back when Slashdot first reported that they were up and running. They were free at first, but made it clear that a charge was comming. It looks like they intend for the Open Source project domains to be free forever, but I'd get that in writing if I were you....
No no no! You want these companies to demand unreasonable things. The the support companies like Linux Care and Red Hat will have to hire more programmers to do the things that the projects don't want to take on. In the end, this will serve everyone. Of course, some things simply don't make sense, and those will end up not being accepted back into the core projects. Open Source development really does work, why are people still doubting that after so much evidence?
Would those be the people working on KDE, GNOME, XFree86, the various office suites and graphical installers? Please go grab a copy of Red Hat 4.2 and try using it (I'll dup my CD for you, if you like). I suspect you will detect an OS that has not remained "as-is".
Then again, perhaps you're refering to the kernel, where video, USB and IR support are being added for easier integration with consumer electronics; or what about those "elite Linux gurus" and their hard-to-use games like Myth2 and Heroes of Might and Magic III; there' always things like Mozilla and Knoqueror, which clearly are aiming at making the desktop harder to use....
This movie is an interesting test of Marvel Entertainment. For those of you who don't know, Marvel used to be a real mess. They finally went bankrupt because they just could not manage their assets. For example, the whole reason that when Cameron wanted to do a Spiderman movie, he couldn't (he ended up doing True Lies and then Titanic while waiting) was that Marvel had sold seemingly conflicting rights to multiple parties. Think about this: Jim "Top of the World" Cameron wanted to make a Spiderman movie, but Marvel had made it nearly impossible, no matter how much money Cameron was willing to spend.
They had done a lot of this, and they basically didn't retain much control over these products nor over the royalties. This lead to crap like Fantastic Four and The Punnisher, which you can find on video at conventions, but trust me, they're not really worth the money.
So why is X-Men different? After going through bankruptcy, Marvel has a very different attitude. They are excercising a good deal of control over the X-Men movie from what I've heard, and they are also coordinating marketing efforts with the release of the film. Expect to see numerous X-Men products coming from Marvel and their partners when the movie comes out.
What's even more interesting is that Marvel stock (MVL) is currently suffering from the effects of their bankruptcy. No one wants to take the chance, so it's cheap. If this movie does well, and the upcoming Spiderman movie also hits the mark, Marvel could be back on track and the stock has a lot of room to rise... of course, this *is* Marvel, and they *do* have a track record....
Any particular reason you feel it's a "piece-of-shit" movie? Everything I've heard says this is being done with the utmost respect for the original story. The only thing they've done is change the costumes, which of course, is necessary. Sorry, but human beings just don't look like that in skin-tight outfits. The outfits they went for are darker partly because that's popular now, and partly because it hides the padding a little better. But as far as I can tell they have not fallen for the idiocy of the Batman movie (e.g. they're not all wearing body armor that requires them to swivel their entire bodies in order to look behind them).
I for one am looking forward to this!