The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
How is my hard drive and RAM different from my "papers" and "effects"?
Let's say I have 3,000 VHS videocassettes in an home owned by me. Those cassettes contain blatantly illegal copies of The Country Bears, which I intend to sell for profit but haven't, yet. The FBI cannot break into my home at any moment to see whether the videocassettes are there; they have to wait until I sell them carelessly leaving a trail right back to my home. Only then, with a warrant in hand, do they come and confiscate the cassettes probably arresting me, too.
Let's say I find a way to copy one of those videocassettes onto my Palladium-equipped PC but haven't distributed it, yet, even though I intend to. Will there be something about this act that triggers Microsoft's piracy alarms? Even though I haven't technically broken the law, yet, can Microsoft or their hit-men enter my computer without a warrant and delete that movie?
How is entering my computer through a network interface different than entering my home through the front door?
Part of the answer for question 22 in Ross' FAQ is even more disturbing:
"When I asked [the Microsoft Research speaker] whether this meant getting rid of linux he replied that linux users would have to be made to use content screening."
Currently, there is a "digital divide" between those who have computers and Internet access and those who don't. Palladium raises the bar to divide those who have Palladium and those who don't. This scares the shit out of me (not literally, now, put probably so in a few years).
If power over people is founded in controlling information, then....
It's disturbing me, but after college it's really difficult to get exposed to new music.
Not always. Just in the last month, NPR introduced me to two new composers, and I'm not much older than 25! (don't dismiss me just yet for listening to both NPR and classical music; I think my last couple paragraphs turned out pretty well)
I think a part of the general difficulty for older people to find new music is due to the fact that nearly all new music is targetted to teenagers. Most new music gets very boring to adults after listening to it just once, because it is just so damn transparent and unoriginal.
The music that has proved timeless, whether it was created in 1790 or 1990, is still pretty easy to find. If something has become difficult to find, then it either was bad and was quickly forgotten, or it was very good but appealed to such a small audience that it didn't catch on.
For the very good music that didn't really catch on, the public domain (Napter, et. al.)is a clear answer. This sort of music has a loyal following but doesn't generate the revenues that the RIAA wants, so the individual musicians should have full freedom to distribute their own or put it into the public domain.
This is yet another good example why current ideas about DRM could harm a perfectly good and healthy part of our culture. Until DRM schemes allow convenient and unencumbered use of both DRM-protected content and content from indpendent distributors or the public domain, it will never ever be successful.
DRM could adversely interfere with the free market in ways that will bias new music and other content even further than we face today. People who create new works, music and otherwise, should be allowed to not choose DRM as well as choose DRM. The market, then, will most likely bury DRM where it belongs, and we all can go onto better things.
The worst thing, perhaps, is that C# is simply not used as an engineering programming language. Most engineers use Fortran, C, Matlab, spreadsheets, have software like Pro/ENGINEER, or, God forbid, use calculators, paper, and pencil.
C#, at best, is an application programming language useful only in the context of Microsoft Windows. Where is the logic in choosing this for non-CS engineering disciplines?
Also, UNIX always has had a strong userbase among engineers. How is C# going to help them?
I think the choice of C# has really detracted from Waterloo's attractiveness as a top-notch engineering school. I agree with other comments that the choice of C# is more along the lines of a communitity or technical college, which is expected to "sell out" to industry.
"Erosion is wearing away the continents -- an example of degeneration in nature"
It seems the author of your book has forgotten about the Sun, a star that the Earth seems to be revolving about.
Degeneration in nature--entropy and the laws of thermodynamics--is a fundamental aspect of all systems. However, this degeneration occurs on so many scales, that one system's degeneration can actually lead to another system's regeneration.
The sunlight we see every day (or every year for those at the poles), is due to the Sun gradually burning a finite supply of nuclear fuel. This sunlight energizes the Earth causing all sorts of interesting stuff to happen. Weather, life cycles, and even evolution are triggered ultimately from energy from the Sun (and certainly some from the Earth's core, too).
This process won't last but another few billion years (oh my!), but it has been long enough to allow life to occur, to mature, and eventually die off when the Sun goes nova.
"The Bible is the source of truth for Christians"
Sure, any source of information that has been edited by a self-appointed intellectual elite (the Church), translated by a severely biased culture into English, and using an incomplete collection of the original works is guaranteed to be the one and only story of the Truth.
The author of your book, I bet, also owns a chain of "family friendly" video stores, which rent out ten-minute versions of A Clockwork Orange and Apocolypse Now (mainly just the credits and a few pictures of the actors). Good for him or her or whatever. I'm glad there are people out there who stand up for my right to be an ignorant fool.
It's already been said only dozens of times above, but it must be said again:
If you get something unsolicited in the mail blah-blah, and U.S. Postal Service code number blah-blah, and blah-blah scams have blah-blah, and blah-blah blah-blah!
I'm not familiar with DXF outside of just using it occasionally. Using it for a WWW format would probably be similarly challenging to using IGES or STEP, just because implementing 3D file formats is a fundmentally difficult problem.
I think one "must have" feature would be spline surfaces and, ideally, NURBS surfaces, since they are very common for representing non-trivial geometry. This is one place where VRML fell short. STEP has full-blown support for splines, but STEP, in general, might be too complex to get mature implementations of it into web browsers in a reasonable time (it took long enough already to get things like XML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. working well).
It seems any 3D standard will have to be a compromise that inevitably leaves things to be desired. 3D modeling just has so many things to keep track of that the ideal of every CAD system sharing flawlessly or having highly detailed 3D web environments is still a ways off. Also, there are several ways to represent solids and their construction (the CAD systems out there use them all), which only compounds the issue.
Second, these standards are, in fact, not so standard themselves.
Even though IGES is a standard, your complaint about it is common, where the standard is too ambiguous and is never implemented fully or even correctly.
STEP is also a standard (ISO-10303) which strives to deal with ambiguity, but it is monstrous, as you said. STEP is a collection of many standards (well over 100), with a subset of those being application-specific schemas suitable for CAD data interchange. The most popular of these is AP203, which is actaully what Pro/E's "STEP" export mostly is (I believe Pro/E does AP214, also). No vendor-provided CAD translator supports all of AP203, but the CAD companies have reached a rough consensus on the subset of functionality supported. This means it can be used to transfer model geometery between CAD systems. Unfortunately, AP203 does not support finer-grained details like parameterized solid features, so there most likely will be information lost in transferring a complex model. Other formats, such as AP224, can capture solid features, but AP224 support is not nearly as wide-spread as AP203 and is mainly used in niche processes.
Another thing to note is that even if you can get to the 3D geometry, it doesn't mean it will be modifiable.
STEP is designed for data interchange and really isn't designed to be a "live" format like the native Pro/E.prt and.asm files. To this end, the STEP formats focus on mathematical correctness over raw efficiency, which is partly the cause for the their large file sizes.
I'm not sure if they have indeed been intended for continuing design between applications, rather than just having access to the 3D geometry for further processing (think 5-axis milling).
Passing data down a work flow is very much one of the goals of STEP. The real design work is done in a system like Pro/E, then the STEP file can be sent to others for proofing and, finally, manufacturing. In general, the STEP file is a result of the design work, instead of being a part of an on-going design process.
You've probably guessed by now that I have worked with STEP. One thing I have learned is that a ubiquitous 3-D format for the WWW will be a terribly difficult undertaking. STEP has done a reasonable job of capturing the concepts of 3D modelling, but only after 30 or so documents to define the fundamental constructs, another two or three for the file format, and another few dozen documents to capture the requirements for specific problem domains. This is literally thousands of pages of specification.
I agree wholeheartedly. Too many web designers totally forget that websites are like store fronts. They must be accessible, and in the U.S. they might even be accountable to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
All Flash (and JavaScript) accomplish is to greatly increase the amount of work needed to make a website usable to a broad audience. It's too bad that the glitz of such tools has fooled so many people into thinking they are the best, when they are actually the worst.
Both parties are about equally friendly to RIAA/MPAA interests regarding copyright control...
It's sad that most references to members of the U.S. government are in the context of "both parties". There have been and always will be more than two political parties in the U.S. as well as political "atheists" who think political parties are hogwash.
I think it is accurate to say that the two biggest political parties in the U.S. have lost credibility and have become indistinguishable in practice. They are mainly just teams to align oneself to without any real reason other than the "other guys suck".
The blatant split in the Bill Clinton impeachment vote is good evidence for this. Political parties have become like labor unions (all for one; one for all), where true indepentent thinking doesn't occur and the members are essentially puppets to their party.
I would love to see the current monopoly in politics broken down into either more parties or no parties. No parties would be ideal, since, like religions, no one party can profess the whole truth, and they each become an unsavory compromise as a result.
Which is ideal. This means that there is real merit behind Linux, and it can succeed mainly through word-of-mouth and steady development. Microsoft, on the other hand, is successful mostly due to aggressive paid marketing and advertising and very aggressive business tatics.
But aren't items 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 really features of Sun Fire servers, not the OS.
Only in part. The OS is providing an interface to extra features in the hardware, and real smarts behind these features are built into the Solaris kernel. For example, the kernel needs to know how to manage the device drivers properly when a failure occurs or the sysadmin takes something off-line.
Also, some of these features are available on commodity parts. You can get elements of hot-swapping if you have an ordinary SCSI bus using Disksuite and the cfgadm command. With some of the Sun Fire servers, there are just more hot-swappable components, such as CPUs and RAM.
Only if everyone is up-to-date on Microsoft's "yes Sir, may I have another" style of software.
I think the 60 different groups of ten is not common in real companies. Most people just use a word processor as a word processor, a spreadsheet as a spreadsheet, and so on. Most people who actually find the "advanced" features of MS Office use them out of curiosity, but rarely make them part of a routine. Those very few people who do make them part of a routine can justify their choice in software, but they can also find ways to play well with everyone else (sending drafts as RTF is one way, using text e-mail is another).
Simplicity in software is a good thing, when it serves a real need well without too much intellectual or monetary overhead. MS Office does not meet these criteria, except for a very few users.
if you spend $1500 on a home appliance, like a fridge, washing machine, how long do you expect it to last? 15 years? 20? more?
Who do you buy from? I spend about $500 for each of these items and expect the same lifetimes.
On a serious note, computers are slightly different than appliances. $7,500 to $15,000 for a workstation will virtually guarantee a computer that is useful for a decade or more (in various roles along the way) with relatively little human intervention. $500 to $1,500 for a PC offers much lower probability of this usefulness, as the fans start growling or the motherboards go bad. PCs just tend to spend more time "in the shop" than real workstations.
and you want businesses, who arent in the computer industry, to buy new equipt every 2-3 years? not gonna happen.
I agree that this should be the case, but PCs and Microsoft have convinced people that computers really are obselete after two or three years. This is a joke, and Microsoft and the PC vendors are laughing all the way to the bank.
I'll use Sun as a counter-example to the PC industry. I'm using a five-year-old Sun workstation right now, and every day, with no real desire or need to upgrade. It is just a damn good workstation. Nearly everyone with a PC in my office complains about this or that, but the Suns just keep on trucking. I think Sun recognizes this fact, as their overall attitude seems to work around long upgrade cycles.
I think a lot of the stigma about IT now-a-days is due to many people focusing on up-front aquisition costs without thinking hard about maintaince and upgrade cycles. I have learned this personally over the years using PCs and Sun workstations, and, when I have a spare $1,000 or so, I would love to buy a used Ultra 2 or 60 for my home computer.
I've seen the $5K to $10K annual per-user "support" costs for PC networks, and they really truly are absurd. We joke that a few of us could break away and do everything for a small fraction of that, which isn't unrealistic, and offer better service at the same time.
The obvious conclusion is that it, Microsoft, is the root cause of the problem...
The sad thing, here, is that this is largely true. Many people were so eager to have a modern IT infrastructure, Microsoft was so willing to sell it to them, they hired tons of administrators to make sense of it all, and, only afterwards, did they realize just how expensive Microsoft software is.
It is unfortuneate that many people are prejudiced against UNIX. I don't have experience with other systems, such as VMS or Netware, but I'm sure they are good, too, just because Windows is such a quagmire.
At least with UNIX, shell scripts and/bin/* are the norm rather than the exception (I am aware of MKS and Cygwin, but what fraction of people use them?). I know that it is possible to set up a system and forget about it aside from routine patches and basic administration (add a user here, update DNS there). UNIX actually makes a sysadmins job easier not harder, but Microsoft's marketing department is just too damn efficient.
I have seen both the UNIX and Windows sides of the issue, and a well-administered UNIX environment will always be cheaper than a well-administered Windows environment. The only reason this wouldn't be true if the Microsoft lock-in (read: imprisonment) has already occurred. I'm not counting crappy system administrators in this, and most of the reasons behind UNIX seeming expensive is actually due to bone-headed decision making. A good UNIX environment will simply make "network downtime" seem like a myth rather than a daily or weekly part of the routine.
If they are shipping Linux Sun distro, why bother making Solaris?
In many cases, Linux is simply not a drop-in replacement for Solaris. Linux is suitable for the small servers, but it lags behind Solaris in features for maintaining small to large servers in a corporate environment.
Only Solaris has been so highly tuned for Sun's UltraSPARC platform.
There are many many people out there who grew up with Solaris and strongly prefer it.
There are many many people out there who have a lot invested in Solaris and have no practical reason to give it up.
my question is will Sun be making any workstations that will have an x86 processor
If they did, they would need to find really good ways to differentiate themselves from Dell or HPaq, for example. Firmware would be an excellent way to do this. As would unique things like a UPA bus (XVR-1000 in a PC? Why not?). Solaris is yet another good way.
On the other hand, I always cringed when I saw a PC with the SGI brand on it. Once SGI started selling PCs with Windows, they plunged themselves to where Dell and Gateway reside. Let's hope Sun is smarter than SGI in this regard.
The difficult stigma that Sun has to deal with is that PCs are crap. And, really, nearly every PC out there is crap. Microsoft has done nothing to help this reputation, so Sun is really doing a balancing act with x86 and Linux. Done right, Sun will really benefit, but, done poorly, Sun will end up in the pit with everyone else.
What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes?
Solaris has:
- extreme CPU, disk, and peripheral scalability - mature 64-bit support - multiple scheduling and VM algorithms - fine-grained patch management - Dynamic Reconfiguration (allows partially-broken servers to continue running) - easy hot-swapping - Dynamic System Domains (multiple OS images) - multipathing for networks and disks - bundled management software (SMC, Disksuite, etc.) - fairly easy installation (similar to Red Hat's install but much more robust) - JumpStart automatic installation - sccs (minor detail, but I like it) - really good bundled documentation (enough to get a sysadmin cert. using it)
And I'm sure there are many more. One thing that is frustrating sometimes is that the Solaris vs. Linux vs. Windows arguments lose many of these details. Most people mindlessly regurgitate benchmarks or marketing-speak trying to justify their basically-religious feelings when an objective analysis would pose a much different argument.
Just look at the benchmarks... Slowlaris is blown away by Linux.
Benchmarks? I don't see any benchmarks in your post.
Solaris and Linux are different beasts. It is fair to say that Solaris and Linux are optimized differently, where Linux may win on small computers, and Solaris shines as the number of processors, disks, or peripherals increases. Quite honestly, Solaris probably just gets better and better as the computer gets bigger. As it should if a 212-CPU Sun Fire 15K becomes possible next year.
Also, Solaris incorporates features that only IBM will be able to put into Linux: Dynamic Reconfiguration, for example.
At its core, Solaris is meant to be a very robust high-throughput high-uptime OS. Remember, there is more to life than single-user workstations (not that it does really badly on single-user workstations, anyway.)
If you look back through Microsoft-oriented Slashdot articles, you will occasionally see a pro-Microsoft post that is blatantly worded like a MS marketing drone wrote it, yet it was very highly moderated.
Also, an occasional well-written anti-Microsoft post was modded into oblivion.
Another trend is to see a blatantly-written pro-Microsoft post initially highly moderated but, then, heavily moderated 'overrated' by non-MS moderators who recognize the post for what it is.
These occurrences defy common sense, given the overall culture of Slashdot, which is a strong indication that Microsoft or people working on Microsoft's behalf are actively posting to capture insecure readers. This is a very sound marketing strategy, and Microsoft is smart to employ it. However, it is very frustrating to those of us who can see straight through it.
None of this is direct proof, but it is enough evidence that makes Microsoft a suspect for these postings. Regardless, it is very important for all Slashdot readers to post the truth, whatever it is, knowing that most of Microsoft's marketing efforts do not hold up under scrutiny. My hope is that objectivity will prevail.
Who said Christians aren't a political party? I've lived in the southern U.S., and the amount of legislation there that is overtly Christian is disturbing. In a nation where most of the population, even government officials, are aligned to a religion, separation of church and state is really a myth.
Taxes don't create jobs, they merely change the kind of jobs that will be done.
On top of that, they tend to also fund projects whose labor is wasted. I've seen too many politically-motivated tax-payer-funded projects to feel comfortable with the government's ability to spend wisely overall. Also, government projects often attract the lower crust of employees. There are certainly notable exceptions, but I'd say they are a small percentage of all government-funded projects.
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Amendment IV.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
How is my hard drive and RAM different from my "papers" and "effects"?
Let's say I have 3,000 VHS videocassettes in an home owned by me. Those cassettes contain blatantly illegal copies of The Country Bears, which I intend to sell for profit but haven't, yet. The FBI cannot break into my home at any moment to see whether the videocassettes are there; they have to wait until I sell them carelessly leaving a trail right back to my home. Only then, with a warrant in hand, do they come and confiscate the cassettes probably arresting me, too.
Let's say I find a way to copy one of those videocassettes onto my Palladium-equipped PC but haven't distributed it, yet, even though I intend to. Will there be something about this act that triggers Microsoft's piracy alarms? Even though I haven't technically broken the law, yet, can Microsoft or their hit-men enter my computer without a warrant and delete that movie?
How is entering my computer through a network interface different than entering my home through the front door?
Part of the answer for question 22 in Ross' FAQ is even more disturbing:
"When I asked [the Microsoft Research speaker] whether this meant getting rid of linux he replied that linux users would have to be made to use content screening."
Currently, there is a "digital divide" between those who have computers and Internet access and those who don't. Palladium raises the bar to divide those who have Palladium and those who don't. This scares the shit out of me (not literally, now, put probably so in a few years).
If power over people is founded in controlling information, then....
It's disturbing me, but after college it's really difficult to get exposed to new music.
Not always. Just in the last month, NPR introduced me to two new composers, and I'm not much older than 25! (don't dismiss me just yet for listening to both NPR and classical music; I think my last couple paragraphs turned out pretty well)
I think a part of the general difficulty for older people to find new music is due to the fact that nearly all new music is targetted to teenagers. Most new music gets very boring to adults after listening to it just once, because it is just so damn transparent and unoriginal.
The music that has proved timeless, whether it was created in 1790 or 1990, is still pretty easy to find. If something has become difficult to find, then it either was bad and was quickly forgotten, or it was very good but appealed to such a small audience that it didn't catch on.
For the very good music that didn't really catch on, the public domain (Napter, et. al.)is a clear answer. This sort of music has a loyal following but doesn't generate the revenues that the RIAA wants, so the individual musicians should have full freedom to distribute their own or put it into the public domain.
This is yet another good example why current ideas about DRM could harm a perfectly good and healthy part of our culture. Until DRM schemes allow convenient and unencumbered use of both DRM-protected content and content from indpendent distributors or the public domain, it will never ever be successful.
DRM could adversely interfere with the free market in ways that will bias new music and other content even further than we face today. People who create new works, music and otherwise, should be allowed to not choose DRM as well as choose DRM. The market, then, will most likely bury DRM where it belongs, and we all can go onto better things.
The worst thing, perhaps, is that C# is simply not used as an engineering programming language. Most engineers use Fortran, C, Matlab, spreadsheets, have software like Pro/ENGINEER, or, God forbid, use calculators, paper, and pencil.
C#, at best, is an application programming language useful only in the context of Microsoft Windows. Where is the logic in choosing this for non-CS engineering disciplines?
Also, UNIX always has had a strong userbase among engineers. How is C# going to help them?
I think the choice of C# has really detracted from Waterloo's attractiveness as a top-notch engineering school. I agree with other comments that the choice of C# is more along the lines of a communitity or technical college, which is expected to "sell out" to industry.
"Erosion is wearing away the continents -- an example of degeneration in nature"
It seems the author of your book has forgotten about the Sun, a star that the Earth seems to be revolving about.
Degeneration in nature--entropy and the laws of thermodynamics--is a fundamental aspect of all systems. However, this degeneration occurs on so many scales, that one system's degeneration can actually lead to another system's regeneration.
The sunlight we see every day (or every year for those at the poles), is due to the Sun gradually burning a finite supply of nuclear fuel. This sunlight energizes the Earth causing all sorts of interesting stuff to happen. Weather, life cycles, and even evolution are triggered ultimately from energy from the Sun (and certainly some from the Earth's core, too).
This process won't last but another few billion years (oh my!), but it has been long enough to allow life to occur, to mature, and eventually die off when the Sun goes nova.
"The Bible is the source of truth for Christians"
Sure, any source of information that has been edited by a self-appointed intellectual elite (the Church), translated by a severely biased culture into English, and using an incomplete collection of the original works is guaranteed to be the one and only story of the Truth.
The author of your book, I bet, also owns a chain of "family friendly" video stores, which rent out ten-minute versions of A Clockwork Orange and Apocolypse Now (mainly just the credits and a few pictures of the actors). Good for him or her or whatever. I'm glad there are people out there who stand up for my right to be an ignorant fool.
It's already been said only dozens of times above, but it must be said again:
If you get something unsolicited in the mail blah-blah, and U.S. Postal Service code number blah-blah, and blah-blah scams have blah-blah, and blah-blah blah-blah!
I'm not familiar with DXF outside of just using it occasionally. Using it for a WWW format would probably be similarly challenging to using IGES or STEP, just because implementing 3D file formats is a fundmentally difficult problem.
I think one "must have" feature would be spline surfaces and, ideally, NURBS surfaces, since they are very common for representing non-trivial geometry. This is one place where VRML fell short. STEP has full-blown support for splines, but STEP, in general, might be too complex to get mature implementations of it into web browsers in a reasonable time (it took long enough already to get things like XML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. working well).
It seems any 3D standard will have to be a compromise that inevitably leaves things to be desired. 3D modeling just has so many things to keep track of that the ideal of every CAD system sharing flawlessly or having highly detailed 3D web environments is still a ways off. Also, there are several ways to represent solids and their construction (the CAD systems out there use them all), which only compounds the issue.
Second, these standards are, in fact, not so standard themselves.
.prt and .asm files. To this end, the STEP formats focus on mathematical correctness over raw efficiency, which is partly the cause for the their large file sizes.
Even though IGES is a standard, your complaint about it is common, where the standard is too ambiguous and is never implemented fully or even correctly.
STEP is also a standard (ISO-10303) which strives to deal with ambiguity, but it is monstrous, as you said. STEP is a collection of many standards (well over 100), with a subset of those being application-specific schemas suitable for CAD data interchange. The most popular of these is AP203, which is actaully what Pro/E's "STEP" export mostly is (I believe Pro/E does AP214, also). No vendor-provided CAD translator supports all of AP203, but the CAD companies have reached a rough consensus on the subset of functionality supported. This means it can be used to transfer model geometery between CAD systems. Unfortunately, AP203 does not support finer-grained details like parameterized solid features, so there most likely will be information lost in transferring a complex model. Other formats, such as AP224, can capture solid features, but AP224 support is not nearly as wide-spread as AP203 and is mainly used in niche processes.
Another thing to note is that even if you can get to the 3D geometry, it doesn't mean it will be modifiable.
STEP is designed for data interchange and really isn't designed to be a "live" format like the native Pro/E
I'm not sure if they have indeed been intended for continuing design between applications, rather than just having access to the 3D geometry for further processing (think 5-axis milling).
Passing data down a work flow is very much one of the goals of STEP. The real design work is done in a system like Pro/E, then the STEP file can be sent to others for proofing and, finally, manufacturing. In general, the STEP file is a result of the design work, instead of being a part of an on-going design process.
You've probably guessed by now that I have worked with STEP. One thing I have learned is that a ubiquitous 3-D format for the WWW will be a terribly difficult undertaking. STEP has done a reasonable job of capturing the concepts of 3D modelling, but only after 30 or so documents to define the fundamental constructs, another two or three for the file format, and another few dozen documents to capture the requirements for specific problem domains. This is literally thousands of pages of specification.
I wish the Web3D people the best of luck.
I agree wholeheartedly. Too many web designers totally forget that websites are like store fronts. They must be accessible, and in the U.S. they might even be accountable to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
All Flash (and JavaScript) accomplish is to greatly increase the amount of work needed to make a website usable to a broad audience. It's too bad that the glitz of such tools has fooled so many people into thinking they are the best, when they are actually the worst.
Instead of trying to change all the politicians, we pick out the worst politician, and put all our efforts into getting that one person defeated.
All the Slashdot readers in South Carolina can help us all by voting for Fritz Hollings' opponent this next go around.
What scares me, though, is that his opponent could be just as bad (southern politicians are yecchy). What do we do then?
Both parties are about equally friendly to RIAA/MPAA interests regarding copyright control...
It's sad that most references to members of the U.S. government are in the context of "both parties". There have been and always will be more than two political parties in the U.S. as well as political "atheists" who think political parties are hogwash.
I think it is accurate to say that the two biggest political parties in the U.S. have lost credibility and have become indistinguishable in practice. They are mainly just teams to align oneself to without any real reason other than the "other guys suck".
The blatant split in the Bill Clinton impeachment vote is good evidence for this. Political parties have become like labor unions (all for one; one for all), where true indepentent thinking doesn't occur and the members are essentially puppets to their party.
I would love to see the current monopoly in politics broken down into either more parties or no parties. No parties would be ideal, since, like religions, no one party can profess the whole truth, and they each become an unsavory compromise as a result.
You can't buy advertising like that.
Which is ideal. This means that there is real merit behind Linux, and it can succeed mainly through word-of-mouth and steady development. Microsoft, on the other hand, is successful mostly due to aggressive paid marketing and advertising and very aggressive business tatics.
But aren't items 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 really features of Sun Fire servers, not the OS.
Only in part. The OS is providing an interface to extra features in the hardware, and real smarts behind these features are built into the Solaris kernel. For example, the kernel needs to know how to manage the device drivers properly when a failure occurs or the sysadmin takes something off-line.
Also, some of these features are available on commodity parts. You can get elements of hot-swapping if you have an ordinary SCSI bus using Disksuite and the cfgadm command. With some of the Sun Fire servers, there are just more hot-swappable components, such as CPUs and RAM.
It works out to being a good deal.
Only if everyone is up-to-date on Microsoft's "yes Sir, may I have another" style of software.
I think the 60 different groups of ten is not common in real companies. Most people just use a word processor as a word processor, a spreadsheet as a spreadsheet, and so on. Most people who actually find the "advanced" features of MS Office use them out of curiosity, but rarely make them part of a routine. Those very few people who do make them part of a routine can justify their choice in software, but they can also find ways to play well with everyone else (sending drafts as RTF is one way, using text e-mail is another).
Simplicity in software is a good thing, when it serves a real need well without too much intellectual or monetary overhead. MS Office does not meet these criteria, except for a very few users.
if you spend $1500 on a home appliance, like a fridge, washing machine, how long do you expect it to last? 15 years? 20? more?
Who do you buy from? I spend about $500 for each of these items and expect the same lifetimes.
On a serious note, computers are slightly different than appliances. $7,500 to $15,000 for a workstation will virtually guarantee a computer that is useful for a decade or more (in various roles along the way) with relatively little human intervention. $500 to $1,500 for a PC offers much lower probability of this usefulness, as the fans start growling or the motherboards go bad. PCs just tend to spend more time "in the shop" than real workstations.
and you want businesses, who arent in the computer industry, to buy new equipt every 2-3 years? not gonna happen.
I agree that this should be the case, but PCs and Microsoft have convinced people that computers really are obselete after two or three years. This is a joke, and Microsoft and the PC vendors are laughing all the way to the bank.
I'll use Sun as a counter-example to the PC industry. I'm using a five-year-old Sun workstation right now, and every day, with no real desire or need to upgrade. It is just a damn good workstation. Nearly everyone with a PC in my office complains about this or that, but the Suns just keep on trucking. I think Sun recognizes this fact, as their overall attitude seems to work around long upgrade cycles.
I think a lot of the stigma about IT now-a-days is due to many people focusing on up-front aquisition costs without thinking hard about maintaince and upgrade cycles. I have learned this personally over the years using PCs and Sun workstations, and, when I have a spare $1,000 or so, I would love to buy a used Ultra 2 or 60 for my home computer.
I've seen the $5K to $10K annual per-user "support" costs for PC networks, and they really truly are absurd. We joke that a few of us could break away and do everything for a small fraction of that, which isn't unrealistic, and offer better service at the same time.
The obvious conclusion is that it, Microsoft, is the root cause of the problem...
/bin/* are the norm rather than the exception (I am aware of MKS and Cygwin, but what fraction of people use them?). I know that it is possible to set up a system and forget about it aside from routine patches and basic administration (add a user here, update DNS there). UNIX actually makes a sysadmins job easier not harder, but Microsoft's marketing department is just too damn efficient.
The sad thing, here, is that this is largely true. Many people were so eager to have a modern IT infrastructure, Microsoft was so willing to sell it to them, they hired tons of administrators to make sense of it all, and, only afterwards, did they realize just how expensive Microsoft software is.
It is unfortuneate that many people are prejudiced against UNIX. I don't have experience with other systems, such as VMS or Netware, but I'm sure they are good, too, just because Windows is such a quagmire.
At least with UNIX, shell scripts and
I have seen both the UNIX and Windows sides of the issue, and a well-administered UNIX environment will always be cheaper than a well-administered Windows environment. The only reason this wouldn't be true if the Microsoft lock-in (read: imprisonment) has already occurred. I'm not counting crappy system administrators in this, and most of the reasons behind UNIX seeming expensive is actually due to bone-headed decision making. A good UNIX environment will simply make "network downtime" seem like a myth rather than a daily or weekly part of the routine.
I don't realy see why I would run solaris on an x86 system.
...such as windows 2000.
Administrators of Solaris-based computer rooms have plenty of reasons to keep Solaris no matter what the CPU architecture is.
I'd still take Solaris x86 over Windows 2000 any day. Windows 2000 is still not as good as Solaris for general server use.
If they are shipping Linux Sun distro, why bother making Solaris?
In many cases, Linux is simply not a drop-in replacement for Solaris. Linux is suitable for the small servers, but it lags behind Solaris in features for maintaining small to large servers in a corporate environment.
Only Solaris has been so highly tuned for Sun's UltraSPARC platform.
There are many many people out there who grew up with Solaris and strongly prefer it.
There are many many people out there who have a lot invested in Solaris and have no practical reason to give it up.
my question is will Sun be making any workstations that will have an x86 processor
If they did, they would need to find really good ways to differentiate themselves from Dell or HPaq, for example. Firmware would be an excellent way to do this. As would unique things like a UPA bus (XVR-1000 in a PC? Why not?). Solaris is yet another good way.
On the other hand, I always cringed when I saw a PC with the SGI brand on it. Once SGI started selling PCs with Windows, they plunged themselves to where Dell and Gateway reside. Let's hope Sun is smarter than SGI in this regard.
The difficult stigma that Sun has to deal with is that PCs are crap. And, really, nearly every PC out there is crap. Microsoft has done nothing to help this reputation, so Sun is really doing a balancing act with x86 and Linux. Done right, Sun will really benefit, but, done poorly, Sun will end up in the pit with everyone else.
What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes?
Solaris has:
- extreme CPU, disk, and peripheral scalability
- mature 64-bit support
- multiple scheduling and VM algorithms
- fine-grained patch management
- Dynamic Reconfiguration (allows partially-broken servers to continue running)
- easy hot-swapping
- Dynamic System Domains (multiple OS images)
- multipathing for networks and disks
- bundled management software (SMC, Disksuite, etc.)
- fairly easy installation (similar to Red Hat's install but much more robust)
- JumpStart automatic installation
- sccs (minor detail, but I like it)
- really good bundled documentation (enough to get a sysadmin cert. using it)
And I'm sure there are many more. One thing that is frustrating sometimes is that the Solaris vs. Linux vs. Windows arguments lose many of these details. Most people mindlessly regurgitate benchmarks or marketing-speak trying to justify their basically-religious feelings when an objective analysis would pose a much different argument.
Just look at the benchmarks... Slowlaris is blown away by Linux.
Benchmarks? I don't see any benchmarks in your post.
Solaris and Linux are different beasts. It is fair to say that Solaris and Linux are optimized differently, where Linux may win on small computers, and Solaris shines as the number of processors, disks, or peripherals increases. Quite honestly, Solaris probably just gets better and better as the computer gets bigger. As it should if a 212-CPU Sun Fire 15K becomes possible next year.
Also, Solaris incorporates features that only IBM will be able to put into Linux: Dynamic Reconfiguration, for example.
At its core, Solaris is meant to be a very robust high-throughput high-uptime OS. Remember, there is more to life than single-user workstations (not that it does really badly on single-user workstations, anyway.)
Don't forget (Free|Open|Net)BSD! These have a genuine UNIX heritage.
Do you have any proof?
If you look back through Microsoft-oriented Slashdot articles, you will occasionally see a pro-Microsoft post that is blatantly worded like a MS marketing drone wrote it, yet it was very highly moderated.
Also, an occasional well-written anti-Microsoft post was modded into oblivion.
Another trend is to see a blatantly-written pro-Microsoft post initially highly moderated but, then, heavily moderated 'overrated' by non-MS moderators who recognize the post for what it is.
These occurrences defy common sense, given the overall culture of Slashdot, which is a strong indication that Microsoft or people working on Microsoft's behalf are actively posting to capture insecure readers. This is a very sound marketing strategy, and Microsoft is smart to employ it. However, it is very frustrating to those of us who can see straight through it.
None of this is direct proof, but it is enough evidence that makes Microsoft a suspect for these postings. Regardless, it is very important for all Slashdot readers to post the truth, whatever it is, knowing that most of Microsoft's marketing efforts do not hold up under scrutiny. My hope is that objectivity will prevail.
Who said Christians aren't a political party? I've lived in the southern U.S., and the amount of legislation there that is overtly Christian is disturbing. In a nation where most of the population, even government officials, are aligned to a religion, separation of church and state is really a myth.
Taxes don't create jobs, they merely change the kind of jobs that will be done.
On top of that, they tend to also fund projects whose labor is wasted. I've seen too many politically-motivated tax-payer-funded projects to feel comfortable with the government's ability to spend wisely overall. Also, government projects often attract the lower crust of employees. There are certainly notable exceptions, but I'd say they are a small percentage of all government-funded projects.