Oh god, the pain from being flamed by an AC. How ever shall I go on?
If you were paying attention, troll, you would realize my point was that this is something any mediocre web admin with limited CGI ability can write. It's prety much an introductory CGI/database app. As such, I don't see it being front page news.
Heck, I wrote one of those a few years back and forgot about it.
I had a period of blissful unemployment back in 2000 (stupid company bought by stupider but richer company with generous severance package) where I delved into web-apps to make my life better. In particular, coordinating fun with my friends. (Hey, I was burned out and didn't need to look for a new job for at least 6 months)
One was a bookmark system. It was a rather simple framed page with a side frame having the bookmarks and the main screen being your primary search. Just set that page to your homepage and login (yes, I enabled cookies) to have it constantly active. (this was before mozilla and live bookmarks)
When you found a site you wanted you clicked a button and filled out a little form. You could mark the link as private or publish it to the group list, set an expiration date to it, there were various categories/keywords, etc.
It ran on MySQL and PERL and other than setting up a hierarchical folder renderer it wasn't that hard to code. I am a rather pedestrian coder so I'm surprised this is impressive in the slightest.
I think the "break through" in this process is that it works over a series of frames automatically rather than requiring each frame to be manipulated. It was my uneducated understanding that colorization tended to be a frame-by-frame process.
If this can cut the work down to 1/10th normal it becomes plausible for the general public. While I'm no budding spielburg, I know a lot of people who might want to touch up the color quality of their wedding video.
Call it what you want but until they develop a reliable, reproducible, and generally accepted set of practices they still aren't engineers.
Skillfull and amazing, yes. Artisans maybe.
Engineers no.
It's the same reason ABET doesn't certify software engineering; it's still more art than science. Good engineering is science, great engineering is scientific artistry.
They ran tests under a variety of thermal shutdown conditions. They even ran Van's test program. They never got the weird on/off/on/off routine he saw. Instead the system hit a maximum perormance and stabilized at 70C/158F. The only possible way I can think of they could have tested the board harder would be to hit it with a blow dryer or heat gun to bounce the ambient temperatures higher than the 24C/75F the testers had.
Since that has the possibility of "testing to destruction" it's not a nice thing to do with a loaner. As the board is one of the pre-production releases, it would also be meaningless if it did die.
Did Van see a throttling loop? More than likely but given the fact that *this* review is with pre-production hardware and Van's comments have been out for some time, exactly what generation of equipment did *he* touch? He's not known to lie but he does go off on crusades. I stopped reading his site several years ago because it felt more and more biased. Predictably and unabashedly when it happened but there it was and I was simply too lazy to filter it out.
I left out the word "new" in that sentence, didn't I? Obviously there are several european space corporations out there, just to service the communication industry if nothing else.
Since the "new" is implicit in "form" my point remains.
I read an article recently (http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~24 79286,00.html) that NASA can't get rid of Lockheed despite the cockups with Genesis, Mars Climate observer and Mars Polar Observer because Lockheed has too many of the people with experience. The only way to avoid this is to get more people in the loop.
NASA has a program where high schoolers can put together an experiment to be run in the pressurized portion of the shuttle, which is great, but doesn't compare to the fact that there are now three colleges that have experience building orbital devices and an untold number of individuals who were involved in the collaboration. If the ESA keeps this up we might see several european aerospace companies form in the next decade.
..or at least the brakes. It's not a new plan, though it might be a new flavor. Nivens was talking about laser-based launching stations back in the 70s and he was just taking the most probable solution.
Of course Newton's laws interest me. If you fire an energy beam able to move a 1000kg probe at 11.7km/s, your 10,000kg station is going to be moving 0.117km/s. (261mph)
Then there's the power issue. Exactly what are these orbital launcher going to use for power? I don't see the green club letting enough fissionable materials get up there and otherwise we're looking at a biiiiig solar array tied to some form of energy storage (water/hydrogen/fuelcell?)
IANAL so the terms may be off, but some functions are a vital service that impacts general community health (i.e. water and sanitary services). In some areas power and telephones are considered vital services that are too important to trust to a private industry. For those areas, a public utility is the way to go.
Otherwise it turns into a government vs. industry situation and the gov't will always be able to legislate the industry out of the picture. For this reason, government operated services have to be declared a vital service where there are already market providers. I believe the rules are different where there is no existing market and no private entities have indicated a desire to enter the market.
The solution is to use a hybrid solution; the public co-op. The legal definition meanders about from place to place, but a co-op is generally a not-for-profit/non-profit organization that provides a service to its owners (i.e. the community). Not being a profit-focused organization, the local gov't can usually provide some form of special concessions to "stimulate" the local reinvestment of capital.
There are two problems from my experience is when a co-op (or any competitor) enters a market with an existing monopolist provider.
1) In things like telco, the first person on site spent a fortune to build the infrastructure; ordering them to share with their competitors tends to make them feel like a J.C. Penny's being ordered to allow Sears Roebuck to take over floor space for free. This really does have a sense of unfairness to it, though I agree that an entrenched carrier is in many cases taking advantage of public right-of-ways and thus is required to share.
2) The original service provider is a a real $**thead and is screaming "unfair competition" with no real basis. Where I live the local cable provider threatened lawsuits, failed to provide upgrades, and basically threw temper tantrums as long as the city did not give them an exclusive contract, excluding other carriers from using the right-of-ways even though those other carriers would be forced to build their own network.
Case number 1 is a real fairness issue. The groundbreaker could be taken advantage of by acruing massive debt his competitors don't have to deal with, alternately the system could be well amortized and the carrier just doesn't want competition. #2, IMO, deserves to be beaten with a big publicly-driven cluebat until rationality or cessation of bodily functions happens.
Someone migrating from Solaris->Linux isn't a big deal for stuff web, ftp or email services.
The real reason this is significant is because it means that US Government-approved application developers are making Linux software. An OS is something you run apps on; no apps, no need for the OS.
BakBone's backup system, ehh, it's a quasi-embedded product. I'm more impressed by Momentum, the financial management package in use by 94 districts. THAT is where Linux will start to make real inroads.
I like linux, but it has its problems. Where Windows is a fluffy, nerf environment with no locks, Linux is a hard and lockable place with lots of sharp edges.
Here's my windows survival tips
1. Uptime. Other than obsolete applications my company uses that the vendor won't even consider providing support on, I don't have crashes. My Win2k box stays on all week, only being shut down on the weekends. Run windows update and just pull out the silly crap that will try to DRM your machine. No Media player 9!
2. Window managers with multiple desktops. I agree. Do a web search for IMPVWM.exe. I've been using it since Win95 and it's worked on every Windows variant I've tried. It occassionally fights with an application that will *not* let go of the processor, but otherwise nice. If need be email me and I'll send you a copy.
3. Modern Browsers, Konqueror, Mozilla, even Galleon.
Agreed, which is why I run Mozilla/Firefox on Win2k.
4. Modern mail clients. Can't speak on this one; I've got a webmail server set up. Corporate uses Outlook2k3, which does have a spellchecker. But gawds, the Exchange server is slooooooow!
5. GIMP and friends. Agreed. I run Gimp on Win2k
6. K3B and Eroaster for burning CDs. Never used 'em. I have a few freeware burners I use.
7. No DRM to mess with my music. It is very nice to know that ogg won't go away and neither will any of my legitimately gotten music.
Agreed. I don't use Windows Media player and convert my own audio to MP3 or Ogg. (Yay Winamp!)
Nope, don't think so. I got the ~14Mbps number from a couple of documents on www.broadcastpapers.com. Most HDTV will use an MPEG style compression scheme so you aren't sending full frames. I have no personal experience with MPeG compression efficiency so I can't say how accurate this is. For all I know this is the etch-a-sketch version of 1080i.
But you are right to wonder. A continuous, full-screen 60fps 1080i would take nearly 1Gbps (1.24 MBps) http://streamingmedialand.com/data.html
Re:Need it on my stereo receiver
on
USB Going Wireless
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From my reading, you need ~14Mbps for 1080i which includes multichannel audio, but lets assume 15Mbps for 5.1 audio. WUSB has 480Mbps; shave off 20% for management and we've got 384Mbps of usable bandwidth which is some 23 HDTV channels. I *think* that's enough bandwidth.
As far as the switches, I don't like adding any more interfaces than needed as each one adds more degradation. I may or may not be able to notice it but it still exists. My receiver has a good array of ports (I bought it with that in mind) but it's about maxed out.
Yes, I know WUSB will have some degradation to it with interference. But since I don't plan on using all the bandwidth it can step down to a more redundant mode, broadcasting my data on multiple channels to ensure it arrives.
So I reiterate my desire to see AV devices with WUSB built in.
Need it on my stereo receiver
on
USB Going Wireless
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
More than my PC. Really, there aren't many external devices I have for my PC that don't require power and a rather easily managed cable thanks to convenient hubs.
What I *do* need is an easier time with my A/V setup. Swapping out components is bad but adding anything new is nightmarish. Deciding which devices should be analog, S-Video, optical, or digital coax is mind numbing. I'd hoped I could firewire everything together but that hasn't happened either, darn it.
Give me a receiver, DVD player, Tivo, consoles, TVs and speakers with WUSB and I'll be happy. Plug the buggers into a power strip and watch as magic happens and everything chats. Sure, It'll probably need a PAN ID of somesort to limit bleed between setups but dang, it'd make it so much easier to drop a DVD changer and another console or 3 into the setup.
This is really sad. I first heard of the DOI's incredible mishandling of the Indian trust here on slashdot a few years ago when they were shut down the first time.
I can understand having problems recompiling literally centuries of data for tens of thousands of people. But c'mon, you can't figure out how to set up firewalls with VPN connections between disparate groups?
Could you imagine any private organization like a mutual fund or retirement investor leaving SSNs and customer information online on websites? Imagine the smack down from the government! But if it's the gov't itself nada. Thank god (or Great Spirit, whatever) that there's at least one judge willing to do the right thing.
SGI released XFS into "the wild" and has ensured its longevity with little to no support on their part and increased the number of "out of box" coders they can hire to work on FS projects.
Microsoft....hasn't. Heck, MS is preparing to charge media makers (CF, SM, MMC, etc) to use FAT.
I say media makers switch to using XFS or another GPL'd journaling file systems. Won't take long for other platforms to support it in bulk (make/ config.....) and for stuff like flash where corruptions can occur often, I'd like a bit of journaling to minimize the impact.
The office I'm at now had Novell when I started here 3 years ago. It was my first time touching Netware but after realizing what era the interface was developed in I felt right at home. (FYI it tends to look a bit Lynx like in "graphical" mode and apps are launched with LOAD so the CLI feels a bit like Commodore)
We had an HP netserver P2-400 providing mail & calaboration (groupwise), AutoCAD license server and file/NDS server. With the exception of a freaky problem when someone used the webmail interface connector from another office crashing our groupwise, uptimes were typically 3-6 months with the majority of downtime being building power or installing service packs.
Network searches were lightning fast, even searching for text within a document. The office was ~30 engineers & designers with pretty much all files stored and used over the network; 10-20MB files were the norm. The server handled that plus mail functions without a single hiccup, not like the dedicated Exchange servers I'd seen running on similar hardware with similar usage.
Oh and did I mention we had gigs and gigs of mail on the server? Groupwise's databases were an incredibly efficient storage system and while I always feared a database corruption it never happened.
This was all Netware 4 and Groupwise 5.5 so we were out of date and it still ran better than NT 4/Exchange or even some 2k/Exchange servers I'd seen.
We never rolled out Zenworks because of a head-office snafu where our new corporate masters got whined & dined by M$ resulting in a complete switchover to Windows/Exchange. Sigh.
I can't get to anything that will show this "restrictive" license, just that they require re-registration verified by the license code that came with the software. So far that seems pretty much like any other paid-support site.
I'm not saying that SCO isn't addle-pated enough to re-license all GPL software but until I actually *see* this bit of lunacy I'm not unlimbering my pitchfork or lighting the torches.
Okay this is neat for the mass roll-outs but for anyone doing R&D or otherwise living on the bleeding edge they're going to need a compiler that handles "make -xen" to generate those new kernels.
I could see this being he11a kewl with the kernel-based web servers for maximum security sandboxing.
I didn't say it was. But fact o' the matter is that hardware-wise, this isn't that much different from Via or even SiS, both of whom have developed their own memory controllers, followed the chip manufacturer's FSB specs (for Apple's case that would be IBM) and probably got *more* engineering support from IBM than Via or SiS did for P4.
These days I think Apple would do better to tout their OS skills over their hardware skills. Once upon a time, they and Intel were really the only home/office suppliers. But now it isn't such a big deal with AMD, Transmeta Intel and Via all producing mobos & processors.
The reality today is that most non-evangelical geeks will admit that OSX is a competent OS. With a BSD-core and MacOS GUI & environment emulation it's everything that a *Nix user would want out of a desktop: stability, flexibility, grandma-friendliness, and a ready supply of off the shelf retail and tarballed software not to mention hardware with drivers.
The only reason we (I'm in this group) ever hesitated in getting an OSX machine was cost:performance. Now an OSX machine should have roughly the same cost:performance as a similar high-end Dell or HPaq workstation. All will be somewhat ouchy to the wallet but I won't run into the fact that CPU intensive apps will run an order of magnitude slower on OSX than Linux/Windows because Steve Jobs wouldn't either let go of PPC or beat Motorola until >1.5Ghz processors fell out.
Could Apple close the tech gap? No. Could IBM? Oh yeah. Am I the only one who's noticed that only the mobo, BIOS and firewire are Apple technology and everything else is purchased/licensed? I'm not berating Apple for this, but it's an IBM processor with JEDEC memory, USB/PCI/AGP (from Intel!) and, IIRC, an AMD hypertransport bus. This is by no means the culmination of "Apple Technology." (The Newton may have had that distinction) Good marketing, good engineering, overall a good job but nothing that stunning that originated in Steve's back yard.
You won't find XP for $50 on Tiger's site. According to the article and the associated web page, Tiger sends MS a list of customers who bought Lindows machines and MS will give them a rebate towards the purchase of XP for "taking a survey"
This bothers me on two levels. First is the dumping factor. MS will get out of that because in this case they are "buying market research data" from the customer with that rebate. Second is how yet again personal information is sold between companies. I'm very close to forming an LLC just to act as an "agent" for all my purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh god, the pain from being flamed by an AC. How ever shall I go on?
If you were paying attention, troll, you would realize my point was that this is something any mediocre web admin with limited CGI ability can write. It's prety much an introductory CGI/database app. As such, I don't see it being front page news.
Heck, I wrote one of those a few years back and forgot about it.
I had a period of blissful unemployment back in 2000 (stupid company bought by stupider but richer company with generous severance package) where I delved into web-apps to make my life better. In particular, coordinating fun with my friends. (Hey, I was burned out and didn't need to look for a new job for at least 6 months)
One was a bookmark system. It was a rather simple framed page with a side frame having the bookmarks and the main screen being your primary search. Just set that page to your homepage and login (yes, I enabled cookies) to have it constantly active. (this was before mozilla and live bookmarks)
When you found a site you wanted you clicked a button and filled out a little form. You could mark the link as private or publish it to the group list, set an expiration date to it, there were various categories/keywords, etc.
It ran on MySQL and PERL and other than setting up a hierarchical folder renderer it wasn't that hard to code. I am a rather pedestrian coder so I'm surprised this is impressive in the slightest.
I think the "break through" in this process is that it works over a series of frames automatically rather than requiring each frame to be manipulated. It was my uneducated understanding that colorization tended to be a frame-by-frame process.
If this can cut the work down to 1/10th normal it becomes plausible for the general public. While I'm no budding spielburg, I know a lot of people who might want to touch up the color quality of their wedding video.
Call it what you want but until they develop a reliable, reproducible, and generally accepted set of practices they still aren't engineers.
Skillfull and amazing, yes. Artisans maybe.
Engineers no.
It's the same reason ABET doesn't certify software engineering; it's still more art than science. Good engineering is science, great engineering is scientific artistry.
They ran tests under a variety of thermal shutdown conditions. They even ran Van's test program. They never got the weird on/off/on/off routine he saw. Instead the system hit a maximum perormance and stabilized at 70C/158F. The only possible way I can think of they could have tested the board harder would be to hit it with a blow dryer or heat gun to bounce the ambient temperatures higher than the 24C/75F the testers had.
Since that has the possibility of "testing to destruction" it's not a nice thing to do with a loaner. As the board is one of the pre-production releases, it would also be meaningless if it did die.
Did Van see a throttling loop? More than likely but given the fact that *this* review is with pre-production hardware and Van's comments have been out for some time, exactly what generation of equipment did *he* touch? He's not known to lie but he does go off on crusades. I stopped reading his site several years ago because it felt more and more biased. Predictably and unabashedly when it happened but there it was and I was simply too lazy to filter it out.
I left out the word "new" in that sentence, didn't I? Obviously there are several european space corporations out there, just to service the communication industry if nothing else.
Since the "new" is implicit in "form" my point remains.
I read an article recently (http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~24 79286,00.html) that NASA can't get rid of Lockheed despite the cockups with Genesis, Mars Climate observer and Mars Polar Observer because Lockheed has too many of the people with experience. The only way to avoid this is to get more people in the loop.
NASA has a program where high schoolers can put together an experiment to be run in the pressurized portion of the shuttle, which is great, but doesn't compare to the fact that there are now three colleges that have experience building orbital devices and an untold number of individuals who were involved in the collaboration. If the ESA keeps this up we might see several european aerospace companies form in the next decade.
Look out Lockheed.
..or at least the brakes. It's not a new plan, though it might be a new flavor. Nivens was talking about laser-based launching stations back in the 70s and he was just taking the most probable solution.
Of course Newton's laws interest me. If you fire an energy beam able to move a 1000kg probe at 11.7km/s, your 10,000kg station is going to be moving 0.117km/s. (261mph)
Then there's the power issue. Exactly what are these orbital launcher going to use for power? I don't see the green club letting enough fissionable materials get up there and otherwise we're looking at a biiiiig solar array tied to some form of energy storage (water/hydrogen/fuelcell?)
IANAL so the terms may be off, but some functions are a vital service that impacts general community health (i.e. water and sanitary services). In some areas power and telephones are considered vital services that are too important to trust to a private industry. For those areas, a public utility is the way to go.
Otherwise it turns into a government vs. industry situation and the gov't will always be able to legislate the industry out of the picture. For this reason, government operated services have to be declared a vital service where there are already market providers. I believe the rules are different where there is no existing market and no private entities have indicated a desire to enter the market.
The solution is to use a hybrid solution; the public co-op. The legal definition meanders about from place to place, but a co-op is generally a not-for-profit/non-profit organization that provides a service to its owners (i.e. the community). Not being a profit-focused organization, the local gov't can usually provide some form of special concessions to "stimulate" the local reinvestment of capital.
There are two problems from my experience is when a co-op (or any competitor) enters a market with an existing monopolist provider.
1) In things like telco, the first person on site spent a fortune to build the infrastructure; ordering them to share with their competitors tends to make them feel like a J.C. Penny's being ordered to allow Sears Roebuck to take over floor space for free. This really does have a sense of unfairness to it, though I agree that an entrenched carrier is in many cases taking advantage of public right-of-ways and thus is required to share.
2) The original service provider is a a real $**thead and is screaming "unfair competition" with no real basis. Where I live the local cable provider threatened lawsuits, failed to provide upgrades, and basically threw temper tantrums as long as the city did not give them an exclusive contract, excluding other carriers from using the right-of-ways even though those other carriers would be forced to build their own network.
Case number 1 is a real fairness issue. The groundbreaker could be taken advantage of by acruing massive debt his competitors don't have to deal with, alternately the system could be well amortized and the carrier just doesn't want competition. #2, IMO, deserves to be beaten with a big publicly-driven cluebat until rationality or cessation of bodily functions happens.
Someone migrating from Solaris->Linux isn't a big deal for stuff web, ftp or email services.
The real reason this is significant is because it means that US Government-approved application developers are making Linux software. An OS is something you run apps on; no apps, no need for the OS.
BakBone's backup system, ehh, it's a quasi-embedded product. I'm more impressed by Momentum, the financial management package in use by 94 districts. THAT is where Linux will start to make real inroads.
I like linux, but it has its problems. Where Windows is a fluffy, nerf environment with no locks, Linux is a hard and lockable place with lots of sharp edges.
Here's my windows survival tips
1. Uptime.
Other than obsolete applications my company uses that the vendor won't even consider providing support on, I don't have crashes. My Win2k box stays on all week, only being shut down on the weekends.
Run windows update and just pull out the silly crap that will try to DRM your machine. No Media player 9!
2. Window managers with multiple desktops.
I agree. Do a web search for IMPVWM.exe. I've been using it since Win95 and it's worked on every Windows variant I've tried. It occassionally fights with an application that will *not* let go of the processor, but otherwise nice. If need be email me and I'll send you a copy.
3. Modern Browsers, Konqueror, Mozilla, even Galleon.
Agreed, which is why I run Mozilla/Firefox on Win2k.
4. Modern mail clients.
Can't speak on this one; I've got a webmail server set up. Corporate uses Outlook2k3, which does have a spellchecker. But gawds, the Exchange server is slooooooow!
5. GIMP and friends.
Agreed. I run Gimp on Win2k
6. K3B and Eroaster for burning CDs.
Never used 'em. I have a few freeware burners I use.
7. No DRM to mess with my music. It is very nice to know that ogg won't go away and neither will any of my legitimately gotten music.
Agreed. I don't use Windows Media player and convert my own audio to MP3 or Ogg. (Yay Winamp!)
very good until it just kinda....ended. The downside of creativity is that it isn't always consistent.
To welcome our new lesbian overlords!
Nope, don't think so. I got the ~14Mbps number from a couple of documents on www.broadcastpapers.com. Most HDTV will use an MPEG style compression scheme so you aren't sending full frames. I have no personal experience with MPeG compression efficiency so I can't say how accurate this is. For all I know this is the etch-a-sketch version of 1080i.
But you are right to wonder. A continuous, full-screen 60fps 1080i would take nearly 1Gbps (1.24 MBps) http://streamingmedialand.com/data.html
From my reading, you need ~14Mbps for 1080i which includes multichannel audio, but lets assume 15Mbps for 5.1 audio. WUSB has 480Mbps; shave off 20% for management and we've got 384Mbps of usable bandwidth which is some 23 HDTV channels. I *think* that's enough bandwidth.
As far as the switches, I don't like adding any more interfaces than needed as each one adds more degradation. I may or may not be able to notice it but it still exists. My receiver has a good array of ports (I bought it with that in mind) but it's about maxed out.
Yes, I know WUSB will have some degradation to it with interference. But since I don't plan on using all the bandwidth it can step down to a more redundant mode, broadcasting my data on multiple channels to ensure it arrives.
So I reiterate my desire to see AV devices with WUSB built in.
More than my PC. Really, there aren't many external devices I have for my PC that don't require power and a rather easily managed cable thanks to convenient hubs.
What I *do* need is an easier time with my A/V setup. Swapping out components is bad but adding anything new is nightmarish. Deciding which devices should be analog, S-Video, optical, or digital coax is mind numbing. I'd hoped I could firewire everything together but that hasn't happened either, darn it.
Give me a receiver, DVD player, Tivo, consoles, TVs and speakers with WUSB and I'll be happy. Plug the buggers into a power strip and watch as magic happens and everything chats. Sure, It'll probably need a PAN ID of somesort to limit bleed between setups but dang, it'd make it so much easier to drop a DVD changer and another console or 3 into the setup.
This is really sad. I first heard of the DOI's incredible mishandling of the Indian trust here on slashdot a few years ago when they were shut down the first time.
I can understand having problems recompiling literally centuries of data for tens of thousands of people. But c'mon, you can't figure out how to set up firewalls with VPN connections between disparate groups?
Could you imagine any private organization like a mutual fund or retirement investor leaving SSNs and customer information online on websites? Imagine the smack down from the government! But if it's the gov't itself nada. Thank god (or Great Spirit, whatever) that there's at least one judge willing to do the right thing.
SGI released XFS into "the wild" and has ensured its longevity with little to no support on their part and increased the number of "out of box" coders they can hire to work on FS projects.
Microsoft....hasn't. Heck, MS is preparing to charge media makers (CF, SM, MMC, etc) to use FAT.
I say media makers switch to using XFS or another GPL'd journaling file systems. Won't take long for other platforms to support it in bulk (make/ config.....) and for stuff like flash where corruptions can occur often, I'd like a bit of journaling to minimize the impact.
The office I'm at now had Novell when I started here 3 years ago. It was my first time touching Netware but after realizing what era the interface was developed in I felt right at home. (FYI it tends to look a bit Lynx like in "graphical" mode and apps are launched with LOAD so the CLI feels a bit like Commodore)
We had an HP netserver P2-400 providing mail & calaboration (groupwise), AutoCAD license server and file/NDS server. With the exception of a freaky problem when someone used the webmail interface connector from another office crashing our groupwise, uptimes were typically 3-6 months with the majority of downtime being building power or installing service packs.
Network searches were lightning fast, even searching for text within a document. The office was ~30 engineers & designers with pretty much all files stored and used over the network; 10-20MB files were the norm. The server handled that plus mail functions without a single hiccup, not like the dedicated Exchange servers I'd seen running on similar hardware with similar usage.
Oh and did I mention we had gigs and gigs of mail on the server? Groupwise's databases were an incredibly efficient storage system and while I always feared a database corruption it never happened.
This was all Netware 4 and Groupwise 5.5 so we were out of date and it still ran better than NT 4/Exchange or even some 2k/Exchange servers I'd seen.
We never rolled out Zenworks because of a head-office snafu where our new corporate masters got whined & dined by M$ resulting in a complete switchover to Windows/Exchange. Sigh.
I can't get to anything that will show this "restrictive" license, just that they require re-registration verified by the license code that came with the software. So far that seems pretty much like any other paid-support site.
I'm not saying that SCO isn't addle-pated enough to re-license all GPL software but until I actually *see* this bit of lunacy I'm not unlimbering my pitchfork or lighting the torches.
Okay this is neat for the mass roll-outs but for anyone doing R&D or otherwise living on the bleeding edge they're going to need a compiler that handles "make -xen" to generate those new kernels.
I could see this being he11a kewl with the kernel-based web servers for maximum security sandboxing.
parts list:
plastic & titanium shell: check
HD-capable web cam: check
1GB+ flash memory: check
broadband/3G wireless voice/data: check
power efficient processor: check
high energy-density rechargeable batteries: check
flexible, low-power, FMV capable disply: SOON!
Now if I can only get the skrills to breed true...
The mobo isn't exactly chopped liver.
I didn't say it was. But fact o' the matter is that hardware-wise, this isn't that much different from Via or even SiS, both of whom have developed their own memory controllers, followed the chip manufacturer's FSB specs (for Apple's case that would be IBM) and probably got *more* engineering support from IBM than Via or SiS did for P4.
These days I think Apple would do better to tout their OS skills over their hardware skills. Once upon a time, they and Intel were really the only home/office suppliers. But now it isn't such a big deal with AMD, Transmeta Intel and Via all producing mobos & processors.
The reality today is that most non-evangelical geeks will admit that OSX is a competent OS. With a BSD-core and MacOS GUI & environment emulation it's everything that a *Nix user would want out of a desktop: stability, flexibility, grandma-friendliness, and a ready supply of off the shelf retail and tarballed software not to mention hardware with drivers.
The only reason we (I'm in this group) ever hesitated in getting an OSX machine was cost:performance. Now an OSX machine should have roughly the same cost:performance as a similar high-end Dell or HPaq workstation. All will be somewhat ouchy to the wallet but I won't run into the fact that CPU intensive apps will run an order of magnitude slower on OSX than Linux/Windows because Steve Jobs wouldn't either let go of PPC or beat Motorola until >1.5Ghz processors fell out.
Could Apple close the tech gap?
No.
Could IBM?
Oh yeah.
Am I the only one who's noticed that only the mobo, BIOS and firewire are Apple technology and everything else is purchased/licensed? I'm not berating Apple for this, but it's an IBM processor with JEDEC memory, USB/PCI/AGP (from Intel!) and, IIRC, an AMD hypertransport bus. This is by no means the culmination of "Apple Technology." (The Newton may have had that distinction) Good marketing, good engineering, overall a good job but nothing that stunning that originated in Steve's back yard.
You won't find XP for $50 on Tiger's site. According to the article and the associated web page, Tiger sends MS a list of customers who bought Lindows machines and MS will give them a rebate towards the purchase of XP for "taking a survey"
This bothers me on two levels. First is the dumping factor. MS will get out of that because in this case they are "buying market research data" from the customer with that rebate. Second is how yet again personal information is sold between companies. I'm very close to forming an LLC just to act as an "agent" for all my purchases.