My thoughts exactly, especially when one potential buyer, historically, has absolutely hemorraged money for things like this: the US government. Iridium phones are crucial to military peacekeeping operations where there is no established phone network, a la Kosovo. The Armed forces own 3000 Iridium handsets which would be a pretty hefty investment to lose. They even built a $14 million base station in Hawaii for Iridium service. They are very dependent on this and I wouldn't be surprised to see them buy it. Also, the State Department owns an additional thousand Iridium phones. Between them I think that we will likely see an offer. I mean, come on... compared to the R&D and production costs for the F22, even a fscking satellite constellation must look like small change.
What do you mean by Unix? I can't really think of an all encompassing definiton. I'm not sure about everything here, but in my limited knowledge of Unix heritage and composition, it occured that a lot of things qualify in one way or another as Unix. Posix compliant? Nope - NT is Posix. Based on original Bell Labs code? Not even Linux qualifies. Containing Unix code? Fine, but don't forget to throw in MacOS X and BeOS as well. Command line based? No way - DOS et al aren't Unix. Unix grew from being an operating system at Bell Labs as in "Unix, the descendant of Multics" to standing for a whole slew of operating systems. Much like our DNA is different from primates by only about 3%, there are only a handful of things that separate a Windows machine from a Unix box. For the most part, they're a lot alike. Both have the same fundamental architecture - kernel, processes, etc. To me Unix means a really stable, secure multiuser OS that is remotely manageable and based on Open Standards. But I'm just pulling that out of my ass. It means different things to different people. Novell meets that description too. NT, in some ways, does too. So I guess my answer would be that everything qualifies, in one form or another, as being part Unix. Can anyone more clearly define what, exactly, Unix is?
Internet voting is great, but it will be a long, long time before every state institutes this, and even longer before you see it in a general election. Arizona is pretty much a conservative stronghold - this is the state of Goldwater, and now McCain, not to mention a Republican governor (Hull), and Republican majorities in both the State House and the State senate. Internet users tend to be white, affluent, and male. Republican voters tend to be white, affluent, and male. It doesn't take a genious to see what is going on here - Republicans in power in the Arizona state government saw this as a way to get more votes, and they went for it. People laud this as cutting edge and democratic, but I see it as the exact opposite: a byzantine regression back to the days of boss politics and smoke-filled rooms. Arizona is already the most gerrymandered state in the union, and I'm not suprised that they effectively went ahead and used the same tactics in cyberspace. Dare I say, 'egerrymandering'?:)
Republican stronghold states - most of the bible belt - will probably follow suit within a matter of years, but in states without a pronounced Republican majority this innovation is going to take a lot longer, at least until there is parity between minority and white Internet usage, not to mention between genders. This, also, will takes decades, perhaps.
I really don't have a problem with this, although I'm sure the other 499,999 Slashdot citizens probably will. Patents exist, in theory, to guarantee someone that their years of hard work and research won't go for naught by having their great idea stolen from them. If whoever this person can generate wormholes (pretend with me for a second), then by all means, he should be able to patent his idea. By doing so, he will be encouraged to work further on it. The benefits to all of humanity from being able to create wormholes far, far outweigh any highbrow philosophical qualms I might have about patents.
I agree. I first subscribed to Mindspring when I lived in Atlanta ca. 1991. This was back in the static IP days, when signup took about 3 days. You guys were great! I remember reading a ton of rave reviews from the Atlanta Journal-Constituition about the cool corporate culture that MSpring fostered and I remember thinking "Wow.. when I grow up I want to work at a place like that." The art designer's official title, as in on her placard and on the payroll, was "Creative Goddess." Those things were cool. I hear horror stories about them - not their service, which is still great (99.9999% uptime for web servers in the last two years, that translates to something like 45 minutes of downtime a year), but about a cool corporation gone sour. `Tis a shame. I don't think I want to work there anymore.
Sadly, they barely touch on a quarter of the inaccuracies in this movie. Here's one for you: the group tentatively decides to plan a rescue mission to Mars, and by the next scene they are im a shiny new spacecraft within hours of orbiting the planet. Nevermind the 1+ year transmit time, and, oh yeah, the time it takes to construct a fscking space ship. The film is replete with such anachronisms. If this movie were (God forbid) real, it would take place over the course of years. Yet no one changes. Not even their hairstyles change.
By far the most egregious and laughable error is the "greenhouse" that Cheadle supposedly lives in. Nevermind the fact that a blisteringly hot Martian day might break -60 degrees Fahrenheit, and ten seconds spent in this contraption on the dark side of Mars would kill any human, period. Give them a half a point here for at least trying to explain this one away by saying that the base camp was at the South Pole of Mars, which I assume would give it six months of frigid, deadly daylight before the six months or frigid, deadly darkness set in.
Tim Robbins manages to remove his helmet in outer space, which, as far as I know, is not possible to do using the standard NASA latching mechanism for a spacesuit.
Micrometeors appear to hit the ship from at least twelve different directions simultaneously; one has to wonder as to the astronomical probability of particles traveling several thousand miles per hour converging on relatively the same point in time within a split second of each other.
The meteors manage to nick an exposed fuel line, an idea which completely contravenes all conventional engineering wisdom as well as any design that Nasa has set forth to date.
I could go on, but the nausea overpowers me. The whole thing wreaked of a 2001 ripoff when it managed to raise itself to even that level.
The page says that you have to install a 2.5" hard drive unless you can find a way to use the 16mb flash. The thing is, it seems like you could use the flash. Anyone have any pointers here?
Crash them into Earth and search for intelligent life. (Good luck finding any). Or, better yet, watch the president of Iridium start taking potshots at his mother-in-law's house starting around 11:55PM;)
RPMs aren't really the hardest thing in the world to do. Okay, building pre and post-install scripts that account for a lot of different contingency factors on a lot of different platforms can be a bit of a pain, but for just rolling something on your own that will remember that files it stuck where, I'd give it a whirl: http://www.rpm.org.
Intel's motives, I suspect, are not entirely altruistic. Ford's weren't either, but they were a lot closer. They wanted their workers to be more computer literate to be more efficient, and in the process allow them to acquire skills that many of them don't have the ability to practice otherwise. In that sense they are really doing their employees a favor, considering that probably 3/4 of them are working class, blue collar, high school graduates who probably wouldn't have a chance to learn basic computer skills otherwise. Intel, on the other hand, is using this as a ploy, an overpublicized signing bonus intended to steal away scarce tech workers from other firms. It's not a bad thing, but come on - how many people working at Intel don't already have a Pentium 3 or something else, and how many of those don't know how to use it? You're getting into fractions of a percent here. I'm not knocking the program, but you should try to avoid piling on the felicitations - I think Intel's motives are a lot more transparent that Ford's were.
Isn't it kind of obvious? Just how much lag are you willing to induce, here? Piping sound and 3D graphics over the network is bound to introduce probably +50ms or more of latency - who knows, maybe more - and while that may not be much for mpg123 or a 3D rendering program, it's totally killer for an FPS. Nobody wants to buy a game where the single player mode plays like multiplayer, and the multiplayer plays even slower. I'm not familiar with Loki games personally, but I'm guessing that the "non-standard 3D stuff" is probably GLX with most of the feature-cruft cut out. Having hooks for running the 3D rendering on another box inside your 3D driver is bound to slow things down, and I have a feeling they're very speed conscious.
Yeah that one piqued my curiosity, too. Typically any computer science degree is abstracted to the point where it will actually be useful for years and years after you graduate - the whole "We don't teach you C, we teach you how to program" philosophy. Yet by delving into disciplines like human kinetics they are moving away from this. Certainly knowledge in this field is useful for some sort of first-person sim, but who's to say that FPSs aren't a passing fad? Ten years ago they would have been teaching things like writing a software texture renderer or sprite animation. Those are practically dinosaurs now, and if you'd been trained in them you'd be back in school by now. I'm curious if they will be able to tailor this degree so that it's dynamic enough to still be useful a couple years of of college, considering that games are pretty much the only field of software that actually innovates and pushes the technological limits anymore.
You are very ignorant of the difference between backend and frontend, obviously. Coding a Linux client would involve starting from the ground up - it literally has no similarity to the server. By your logic the same argument could be made for any service. Does the existance of Apache (the "backend") on Linux in any way help along the development of the "client" (browser)? Of course not.
Well, from a practical standpoint, it sounds like he's been really damn busy. This thing literally blew up in his face, yet as he says there are still a ton of problems with his flagship product. Right now he is worried about appeasing the 80-90% of the people who would be on Windows anyways, and to that end he has a lot of work to do. The infrastructure is a mess (I still can't logon during peak hours, 5-9PM), the client sucks (can't even abort a search), and there is a lot to be desired. He feels a very palpable sense of urgency to get these things right before someone else does, which is why he left school, etc. I'm sure that a Linux client is in the works, but there are more important priorities right now. The evolution of ICQ went the exact same way - they spent a good year or two ramping up their servers and creating a better client before they ever bothered with Linux. A Linux napster, by the way, is kind of a moot point, considering that there are 7 or 8 unofficial ones out there already. Some of these work a lot better than the Windows client itself. But for the sake of appearances, I doubt he will forget his Unix roots.
Nielsen seems to allude to that fact that a great many companies have tried to build a Unix GUI and failed - most notably his former employer, Sun, with CDE. He even goes so far as to suggest that it might be impossible to accomplish this task. My question is: why? Windows has an installed base of probably billions, and I have yet to see a single feature in it that couldn't be duplicated on Linux. True, a bunch of Open Source hackers cannot necessarily spend money on HI research and focus grouping to find out how usable their GUI is, but the simple fact remains that it certainly isn't imposible to build a competent GUI on Linux or any other Unix incantation. I think what's keeping us from achieving this goal are two things:
1. Almost every programmer writing OSS Linux software is "scratching their itch." I don't know this for a fact, but I'd wager that KDE, Gnome, et al all started out as pet projects of hackers who couldn't find an acceptable substitute of a GUI. So they wrote their own. This is fine, nay, this is great - for the most part, it's what's perpetuating this whole movement. But at the same time it leads to the creeping feature creature syndrome - more and more functions are added, that, while they are useful to the developers and anyone else fluent in the GUI, tend to convolute the whole process for a newbie. Early versions of Enlightenment seem to illustrate this - they were damn cool, but hogged memory and had cryptic icons and a UI that Raster and probably two other people in the world fully understood. Every release contained more of the same. I think there has been a very conscientous move away from this ideology recently, which is good, but on the whole any Linux UI out there is far more complicated than Windows. Sorry, guys, for using Windows as a benchmark, but it's what we need to be aiming for. If Linux was as usable as Windows, then there wouldn't be the need for this discussion.
2. Lack of standards. If I installed a program in Windows right now, all the files except.DLLs would go in C:\Program Files. Entries would be made in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software. Folders for my Start Menu are placed in \Windows\Start Menu. Everything has a set place. Now install a piece of software under Unix. First, good luck finding it./usr/bin,/usr/local/bin,/usr/share/bin,/usr/local/program/bin, even/opt, are all acceptable places for the program. As for getting the GUI to recognize it, well, good luck. It's pretty much a crapshoot, especially considering that the major GUIs have different standards for accomplishing this.
I'm sure there are lots of other things hindering this development. The Unix security model has probably been the biggest stumbling block. People nursed on Windows all their life find it quite a surprise when they can't save a file wherever they want. I don't have a solution for this short throwing the whole thing out the windows (stupid) or fancily chrooting everything.
Lack of office software has been a problem, although I have a feeling that once a critical mass of users switch to GUI Linux this won't be that big of an issue. The first version of Office, rather, Word, wasn't exactly an opus of programming, but as more people instinctively bought the Microsoft bundle to go with their Microsoft OS, more efforts went into developing it, and now it's pretty good. Office programs really are quite the same; there's only so many ways to make a word bigger, bolder, or blacker - in other words, switching office software isn't as big a deal as, say, moving from Win NT to Linux. I think StarOffice would appease many people, but not without a really easy-to-use OS driving it.
I'll stop rambling now, but just remember that it certainly isn't impossible to build a good GUI for Unix. The failure of many big corporations to do it with a closed team of developers merely lends creedence to the concepts of peer review and group effort that have driven Linux all along.
How do you explain RAID 1 then? Both redundancy and striping, and a lot more cost effective: combining two 4.5gb 10000 RPM drives (assuming such a beast existed) into a logical drive with half the seek time and twice the throughput would be a lot, lot cheaper than buying a 20000 RPM drive with no failover. I realize they don't even exist, and I think (?) that's the whole point of RAID: obtaining a logical drive that works a lot, lot faster than anything on the market today, and doing it at a cost that would be much cheaper than obtaining some sort of prototype or whatever. If a RAID guru would like to jump in here, feel free.
It's all a matter of perspective. I can go out and buy a one terabyte RAID array right now. I cannot go out and buy a one terabyte hard drive. In fact, a one terabyte hard drive would could so much to produce in terms of physical medium (platters and heads) that it would be cost prohibitive versus stringing a bunch of "cheap" Cheetah 18LP hard drives together. That's the whole idea behind RAID - string a bunch of cheaper disks together to make one really, really big disk, which, in some cases, even if it could actually be made (like the 1TB), would cost exponentially more.
Hotswap really isn't the commodity people make it out to be. I find that those who decry software RAID because you can't hotswap often are the same people who bought EDO DRAM over FPM, etc. - they don't really see a difference or know why they are paying extra money, except that it's the "right thing to do." The reality is that very, very few people can actually justify spending several hundred dollars on a hardware hotswap RAID controller because they can't tolerate more than a few minutes downtime. Furthermore, a lot people equate hotswap with the ability to rebuild a crashed drive. This is fallacy - one is inherent to RAID 5, the other isn't. You can rebuild a crashed drive using software RAID 5, but you have to open the case and replace a drive. BFD.. most people don't need hotswappability. Software RAID is fine.
Umm.. ahem. It's pretty funny to see all these people arguing about why you should use this or software RAID from Linux when they are the same thing. Think about it - if you can flash the controller's BIOS into suddenly being a RAID controller, then something must be happening in software. I've never heard of a BIOS flash that actually creates a whole new processor right onboard. Hardware RAID always, always costs more than a hundred bucks. If you don't believe me, may I suggest Pricewatch. The extra money you pay is for a dedicated on-board processor. The FastTrack don't got one; it relies on the host processor just as much as Linux kernel RAID does. I'm not sure which is faster, but I guess they'd be comparable. So just choose one and pick it - if you're like me you'll pick the free solution, but whatever.
There are, but a much faster way is to just go to www.esnipe.com and queue up as many snipes as you want. I prefer this because my Linux box isn't always on; these guys are. Also, who knows when my cable modem will go out? On an important auction, that's a risk I can't afford to take.
If you're hellbent on doing this yourself, check Freshmeat for "bidwatcher". This will snipe, although it won't run as a daemon so you have to leave it running.
Is anyone else really impressed by the breadth of the GPL? There's literally 100 threads here ruminating on ways to beat it and everything seems to be covered in one section or another. Guess I should spend time reading it:)
Oh stop trying to pull rank. Why not just throw out the whole pedigree: people who "only" played beginning with Wolfenstein need to pay props to Duke, and people who started with Duke owe it all the Commander Keen. Blah blah blah it goes all the way back to pong. Personally, I'm ecstatic when I see FPS players giving no "respect" to the early FPS games - it means they're new gamers, and new gamers mean more opponents for me, and more servers too. So stop bellyaching.
This, in and of itself, is not that bad of a thing. Splinter distros can be made to be very useful, and this a great example. It was a horrendous chore to install Linux on a UDMA-66 motherboard before now simply because no distro (AFAIK) has UDMA-66 support for the install kernel. Go to www.bp6.com and read up if you don't believe me. Abit fixed this problem, and everyone is better off because of it.
What I think everyone is worried about here, rather they realize it or not, is the lack of standards. Linux really has none. I quit fooling with KDE a year or two ago, so this might have changed, but it used to everything in/opt. Why? Completely nonsensical. Discussing the relative merits of/usr versus/usr/local would start a jihad amongst some bored Slashdotters. There just aren't standards for where to put things like there are in Windows, and because of that Linux is always playing catch up in terms of developer support. Even something as mundane as popping up a web browser from within a program turns into the chore a.) finding which browser came bundled with this distro, then b.) finding where it's located in this distro. Windows does this all in the registry. Now the coherent thing to do here would be to create a single, unified standard for something link this - "Okay, henceforth/usr/bin/browser will be a symlink to Netscape/Opera/Lynx/whatever you want."
These kind of inter-distro compatility issues pop up all over the place. RedHats prior to 5 came with nonshadowed passwords for some reason. I could write a book on the compiling problems I solved for people who were getting things to compile on the (shadowed) Slackware machines but couldn't make it work on their RH box for this reason.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Good luck, as a developer, if you want to bring up a PPP modem link from inside your program. If the user is on Redhat, you could try "/usr/sbin/usernetctl ppp0 up" and it might work. On SuSE, it's 'wvdial' and/or YaST. It's probably different for Debian and Slackware too. If they're on KDE on any distro, they might have kPPP installed - who knows?
It's things like this, I think, that often annoy developers into giving up on porting/writing apps for Linux. There's so much more work involved in just figuring out what you're dealing with that I think they all figure it's more worth their time to write another app for Windows than port an existing one to Linux.
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My thoughts exactly, especially when one potential buyer, historically, has absolutely hemorraged money for things like this: the US government. Iridium phones are crucial to military peacekeeping operations where there is no established phone network, a la Kosovo. The Armed forces own 3000 Iridium handsets which would be a pretty hefty investment to lose. They even built a $14 million base station in Hawaii for Iridium service. They are very dependent on this and I wouldn't be surprised to see them buy it. Also, the State Department owns an additional thousand Iridium phones. Between them I think that we will likely see an offer. I mean, come on... compared to the R&D and production costs for the F22, even a fscking satellite constellation must look like small change.
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What do you mean by Unix? I can't really think of an all encompassing definiton. I'm not sure about everything here, but in my limited knowledge of Unix heritage and composition, it occured that a lot of things qualify in one way or another as Unix. Posix compliant? Nope - NT is Posix. Based on original Bell Labs code? Not even Linux qualifies. Containing Unix code? Fine, but don't forget to throw in MacOS X and BeOS as well. Command line based? No way - DOS et al aren't Unix. Unix grew from being an operating system at Bell Labs as in "Unix, the descendant of Multics" to standing for a whole slew of operating systems. Much like our DNA is different from primates by only about 3%, there are only a handful of things that separate a Windows machine from a Unix box. For the most part, they're a lot alike. Both have the same fundamental architecture - kernel, processes, etc. To me Unix means a really stable, secure multiuser OS that is remotely manageable and based on Open Standards. But I'm just pulling that out of my ass. It means different things to different people. Novell meets that description too. NT, in some ways, does too. So I guess my answer would be that everything qualifies, in one form or another, as being part Unix. Can anyone more clearly define what, exactly, Unix is?
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Internet voting is great, but it will be a long, long time before every state institutes this, and even longer before you see it in a general election. Arizona is pretty much a conservative stronghold - this is the state of Goldwater, and now McCain, not to mention a Republican governor (Hull), and Republican majorities in both the State House and the State senate. Internet users tend to be white, affluent, and male. Republican voters tend to be white, affluent, and male. It doesn't take a genious to see what is going on here - Republicans in power in the Arizona state government saw this as a way to get more votes, and they went for it. People laud this as cutting edge and democratic, but I see it as the exact opposite: a byzantine regression back to the days of boss politics and smoke-filled rooms. Arizona is already the most gerrymandered state in the union, and I'm not suprised that they effectively went ahead and used the same tactics in cyberspace. Dare I say, 'egerrymandering'? :)
Republican stronghold states - most of the bible belt - will probably follow suit within a matter of years, but in states without a pronounced Republican majority this innovation is going to take a lot longer, at least until there is parity between minority and white Internet usage, not to mention between genders. This, also, will takes decades, perhaps.
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I really don't have a problem with this, although I'm sure the other 499,999 Slashdot citizens probably will. Patents exist, in theory, to guarantee someone that their years of hard work and research won't go for naught by having their great idea stolen from them. If whoever this person can generate wormholes (pretend with me for a second), then by all means, he should be able to patent his idea. By doing so, he will be encouraged to work further on it. The benefits to all of humanity from being able to create wormholes far, far outweigh any highbrow philosophical qualms I might have about patents.
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Sorry, you're absolutely right.. it was Prodigy 1991, Mindspring around 95...
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I agree. I first subscribed to Mindspring when I lived in Atlanta ca. 1991. This was back in the static IP days, when signup took about 3 days. You guys were great! I remember reading a ton of rave reviews from the Atlanta Journal-Constituition about the cool corporate culture that MSpring fostered and I remember thinking "Wow.. when I grow up I want to work at a place like that." The art designer's official title, as in on her placard and on the payroll, was "Creative Goddess." Those things were cool. I hear horror stories about them - not their service, which is still great (99.9999% uptime for web servers in the last two years, that translates to something like 45 minutes of downtime a year), but about a cool corporation gone sour. `Tis a shame. I don't think I want to work there anymore.
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Sadly, they barely touch on a quarter of the inaccuracies in this movie. Here's one for you: the group tentatively decides to plan a rescue mission to Mars, and by the next scene they are im a shiny new spacecraft within hours of orbiting the planet. Nevermind the 1+ year transmit time, and, oh yeah, the time it takes to construct a fscking space ship. The film is replete with such anachronisms. If this movie were (God forbid) real, it would take place over the course of years. Yet no one changes. Not even their hairstyles change.
By far the most egregious and laughable error is the "greenhouse" that Cheadle supposedly lives in. Nevermind the fact that a blisteringly hot Martian day might break -60 degrees Fahrenheit, and ten seconds spent in this contraption on the dark side of Mars would kill any human, period. Give them a half a point here for at least trying to explain this one away by saying that the base camp was at the South Pole of Mars, which I assume would give it six months of frigid, deadly daylight before the six months or frigid, deadly darkness set in.
Tim Robbins manages to remove his helmet in outer space, which, as far as I know, is not possible to do using the standard NASA latching mechanism for a spacesuit.
Micrometeors appear to hit the ship from at least twelve different directions simultaneously; one has to wonder as to the astronomical probability of particles traveling several thousand miles per hour converging on relatively the same point in time within a split second of each other.
The meteors manage to nick an exposed fuel line, an idea which completely contravenes all conventional engineering wisdom as well as any design that Nasa has set forth to date.
I could go on, but the nausea overpowers me. The whole thing wreaked of a 2001 ripoff when it managed to raise itself to even that level.
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The page says that you have to install a 2.5" hard drive unless you can find a way to use the 16mb flash. The thing is, it seems like you could use the flash. Anyone have any pointers here?
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Crash them into Earth and search for intelligent life. (Good luck finding any). Or, better yet, watch the president of Iridium start taking potshots at his mother-in-law's house starting around 11:55PM ;)
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RPMs aren't really the hardest thing in the world to do. Okay, building pre and post-install scripts that account for a lot of different contingency factors on a lot of different platforms can be a bit of a pain, but for just rolling something on your own that will remember that files it stuck where, I'd give it a whirl: http://www.rpm.org.
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Intel's motives, I suspect, are not entirely altruistic. Ford's weren't either, but they were a lot closer. They wanted their workers to be more computer literate to be more efficient, and in the process allow them to acquire skills that many of them don't have the ability to practice otherwise. In that sense they are really doing their employees a favor, considering that probably 3/4 of them are working class, blue collar, high school graduates who probably wouldn't have a chance to learn basic computer skills otherwise. Intel, on the other hand, is using this as a ploy, an overpublicized signing bonus intended to steal away scarce tech workers from other firms. It's not a bad thing, but come on - how many people working at Intel don't already have a Pentium 3 or something else, and how many of those don't know how to use it? You're getting into fractions of a percent here. I'm not knocking the program, but you should try to avoid piling on the felicitations - I think Intel's motives are a lot more transparent that Ford's were.
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Isn't it kind of obvious? Just how much lag are you willing to induce, here? Piping sound and 3D graphics over the network is bound to introduce probably +50ms or more of latency - who knows, maybe more - and while that may not be much for mpg123 or a 3D rendering program, it's totally killer for an FPS. Nobody wants to buy a game where the single player mode plays like multiplayer, and the multiplayer plays even slower. I'm not familiar with Loki games personally, but I'm guessing that the "non-standard 3D stuff" is probably GLX with most of the feature-cruft cut out. Having hooks for running the 3D rendering on another box inside your 3D driver is bound to slow things down, and I have a feeling they're very speed conscious.
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Yeah that one piqued my curiosity, too. Typically any computer science degree is abstracted to the point where it will actually be useful for years and years after you graduate - the whole "We don't teach you C, we teach you how to program" philosophy. Yet by delving into disciplines like human kinetics they are moving away from this. Certainly knowledge in this field is useful for some sort of first-person sim, but who's to say that FPSs aren't a passing fad? Ten years ago they would have been teaching things like writing a software texture renderer or sprite animation. Those are practically dinosaurs now, and if you'd been trained in them you'd be back in school by now. I'm curious if they will be able to tailor this degree so that it's dynamic enough to still be useful a couple years of of college, considering that games are pretty much the only field of software that actually innovates and pushes the technological limits anymore.
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You are very ignorant of the difference between backend and frontend, obviously. Coding a Linux client would involve starting from the ground up - it literally has no similarity to the server. By your logic the same argument could be made for any service. Does the existance of Apache (the "backend") on Linux in any way help along the development of the "client" (browser)? Of course not.
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Well, from a practical standpoint, it sounds like he's been really damn busy. This thing literally blew up in his face, yet as he says there are still a ton of problems with his flagship product. Right now he is worried about appeasing the 80-90% of the people who would be on Windows anyways, and to that end he has a lot of work to do. The infrastructure is a mess (I still can't logon during peak hours, 5-9PM), the client sucks (can't even abort a search), and there is a lot to be desired. He feels a very palpable sense of urgency to get these things right before someone else does, which is why he left school, etc. I'm sure that a Linux client is in the works, but there are more important priorities right now. The evolution of ICQ went the exact same way - they spent a good year or two ramping up their servers and creating a better client before they ever bothered with Linux. A Linux napster, by the way, is kind of a moot point, considering that there are 7 or 8 unofficial ones out there already. Some of these work a lot better than the Windows client itself. But for the sake of appearances, I doubt he will forget his Unix roots.
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Nielsen seems to allude to that fact that a great many companies have tried to build a Unix GUI and failed - most notably his former employer, Sun, with CDE. He even goes so far as to suggest that it might be impossible to accomplish this task. My question is: why? Windows has an installed base of probably billions, and I have yet to see a single feature in it that couldn't be duplicated on Linux. True, a bunch of Open Source hackers cannot necessarily spend money on HI research and focus grouping to find out how usable their GUI is, but the simple fact remains that it certainly isn't imposible to build a competent GUI on Linux or any other Unix incantation. I think what's keeping us from achieving this goal are two things:
.DLLs would go in C:\Program Files. Entries would be made in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software. Folders for my Start Menu are placed in \Windows\Start Menu. Everything has a set place. Now install a piece of software under Unix. First, good luck finding it. /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/share/bin, /usr/local/program/bin, even /opt, are all acceptable places for the program. As for getting the GUI to recognize it, well, good luck. It's pretty much a crapshoot, especially considering that the major GUIs have different standards for accomplishing this.
1. Almost every programmer writing OSS Linux software is "scratching their itch." I don't know this for a fact, but I'd wager that KDE, Gnome, et al all started out as pet projects of hackers who couldn't find an acceptable substitute of a GUI. So they wrote their own. This is fine, nay, this is great - for the most part, it's what's perpetuating this whole movement. But at the same time it leads to the creeping feature creature syndrome - more and more functions are added, that, while they are useful to the developers and anyone else fluent in the GUI, tend to convolute the whole process for a newbie. Early versions of Enlightenment seem to illustrate this - they were damn cool, but hogged memory and had cryptic icons and a UI that Raster and probably two other people in the world fully understood. Every release contained more of the same. I think there has been a very conscientous move away from this ideology recently, which is good, but on the whole any Linux UI out there is far more complicated than Windows. Sorry, guys, for using Windows as a benchmark, but it's what we need to be aiming for. If Linux was as usable as Windows, then there wouldn't be the need for this discussion.
2. Lack of standards. If I installed a program in Windows right now, all the files except
I'm sure there are lots of other things hindering this development. The Unix security model has probably been the biggest stumbling block. People nursed on Windows all their life find it quite a surprise when they can't save a file wherever they want. I don't have a solution for this short throwing the whole thing out the windows (stupid) or fancily chrooting everything.
Lack of office software has been a problem, although I have a feeling that once a critical mass of users switch to GUI Linux this won't be that big of an issue. The first version of Office, rather, Word, wasn't exactly an opus of programming, but as more people instinctively bought the Microsoft bundle to go with their Microsoft OS, more efforts went into developing it, and now it's pretty good. Office programs really are quite the same; there's only so many ways to make a word bigger, bolder, or blacker - in other words, switching office software isn't as big a deal as, say, moving from Win NT to Linux. I think StarOffice would appease many people, but not without a really easy-to-use OS driving it.
I'll stop rambling now, but just remember that it certainly isn't impossible to build a good GUI for Unix. The failure of many big corporations to do it with a closed team of developers merely lends creedence to the concepts of peer review and group effort that have driven Linux all along.
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How do you explain RAID 1 then? Both redundancy and striping, and a lot more cost effective: combining two 4.5gb 10000 RPM drives (assuming such a beast existed) into a logical drive with half the seek time and twice the throughput would be a lot, lot cheaper than buying a 20000 RPM drive with no failover. I realize they don't even exist, and I think (?) that's the whole point of RAID: obtaining a logical drive that works a lot, lot faster than anything on the market today, and doing it at a cost that would be much cheaper than obtaining some sort of prototype or whatever. If a RAID guru would like to jump in here, feel free.
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It's all a matter of perspective. I can go out and buy a one terabyte RAID array right now. I cannot go out and buy a one terabyte hard drive. In fact, a one terabyte hard drive would could so much to produce in terms of physical medium (platters and heads) that it would be cost prohibitive versus stringing a bunch of "cheap" Cheetah 18LP hard drives together. That's the whole idea behind RAID - string a bunch of cheaper disks together to make one really, really big disk, which, in some cases, even if it could actually be made (like the 1TB), would cost exponentially more.
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Hotswap really isn't the commodity people make it out to be. I find that those who decry software RAID because you can't hotswap often are the same people who bought EDO DRAM over FPM, etc. - they don't really see a difference or know why they are paying extra money, except that it's the "right thing to do." The reality is that very, very few people can actually justify spending several hundred dollars on a hardware hotswap RAID controller because they can't tolerate more than a few minutes downtime. Furthermore, a lot people equate hotswap with the ability to rebuild a crashed drive. This is fallacy - one is inherent to RAID 5, the other isn't. You can rebuild a crashed drive using software RAID 5, but you have to open the case and replace a drive. BFD.. most people don't need hotswappability. Software RAID is fine.
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Umm.. ahem. It's pretty funny to see all these people arguing about why you should use this or software RAID from Linux when they are the same thing. Think about it - if you can flash the controller's BIOS into suddenly being a RAID controller, then something must be happening in software. I've never heard of a BIOS flash that actually creates a whole new processor right onboard. Hardware RAID always, always costs more than a hundred bucks. If you don't believe me, may I suggest Pricewatch. The extra money you pay is for a dedicated on-board processor. The FastTrack don't got one; it relies on the host processor just as much as Linux kernel RAID does. I'm not sure which is faster, but I guess they'd be comparable. So just choose one and pick it - if you're like me you'll pick the free solution, but whatever.
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Well, not sure if this helps too much, but go to any computer swap meet and you could probably score a PCMCIA adapter for about 5 bucks...
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There are, but a much faster way is to just go to www.esnipe.com and queue up as many snipes as you want. I prefer this because my Linux box isn't always on; these guys are. Also, who knows when my cable modem will go out? On an important auction, that's a risk I can't afford to take.
If you're hellbent on doing this yourself, check Freshmeat for "bidwatcher". This will snipe, although it won't run as a daemon so you have to leave it running.
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Is anyone else really impressed by the breadth of the GPL? There's literally 100 threads here ruminating on ways to beat it and everything seems to be covered in one section or another. Guess I should spend time reading it :)
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Oh stop trying to pull rank. Why not just throw out the whole pedigree: people who "only" played beginning with Wolfenstein need to pay props to Duke, and people who started with Duke owe it all the Commander Keen. Blah blah blah it goes all the way back to pong. Personally, I'm ecstatic when I see FPS players giving no "respect" to the early FPS games - it means they're new gamers, and new gamers mean more opponents for me, and more servers too. So stop bellyaching.
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This, in and of itself, is not that bad of a thing. Splinter distros can be made to be very useful, and this a great example. It was a horrendous chore to install Linux on a UDMA-66 motherboard before now simply because no distro (AFAIK) has UDMA-66 support for the install kernel. Go to www.bp6.com and read up if you don't believe me. Abit fixed this problem, and everyone is better off because of it.
/opt. Why? Completely nonsensical. Discussing the relative merits of /usr versus /usr/local would start a jihad amongst some bored Slashdotters. There just aren't standards for where to put things like there are in Windows, and because of that Linux is always playing catch up in terms of developer support. Even something as mundane as popping up a web browser from within a program turns into the chore a.) finding which browser came bundled with this distro, then b.) finding where it's located in this distro. Windows does this all in the registry. Now the coherent thing to do here would be to create a single, unified standard for something link this - "Okay, henceforth /usr/bin/browser will be a symlink to Netscape/Opera/Lynx/whatever you want."
What I think everyone is worried about here, rather they realize it or not, is the lack of standards. Linux really has none. I quit fooling with KDE a year or two ago, so this might have changed, but it used to everything in
These kind of inter-distro compatility issues pop up all over the place. RedHats prior to 5 came with nonshadowed passwords for some reason. I could write a book on the compiling problems I solved for people who were getting things to compile on the (shadowed) Slackware machines but couldn't make it work on their RH box for this reason.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Good luck, as a developer, if you want to bring up a PPP modem link from inside your program. If the user is on Redhat, you could try "/usr/sbin/usernetctl ppp0 up" and it might work. On SuSE, it's 'wvdial' and/or YaST. It's probably different for Debian and Slackware too. If they're on KDE on any distro, they might have kPPP installed - who knows?
It's things like this, I think, that often annoy developers into giving up on porting/writing apps for Linux. There's so much more work involved in just figuring out what you're dealing with that I think they all figure it's more worth their time to write another app for Windows than port an existing one to Linux.
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