I'd love something to would finally get rid of the awkward (no pun intended) make, and having a system based on Python would make it double good.
So now my C, C++, or Java programs can be dependent on yet another language runtime environment? Awesome!
Yes, there are limitations to Make, but why hasn't a genuinely better replacement materialized in the last twenty years and become truly widely adopted (in a manner like Perl, for example)?
Truth is, if you avoid fancy GNU extensions and stick to POSIX, make really isn't all the stuff people cry about.
Have you figured out exactly why that quadrotriticale stuff affects them so much? (Yes, my sense of humor is that pathetic)
As an aside the review process for this journal is one of the longest I have ever seen approximately 5 months. Compared to the Journal of Physics D which encourages the use of Latex which was reviewed and published in 3 months.
It takes them an extra two months to figure out how to get the Word format into a presentable form, whereas the LaTeX guys just do a dvips...
Re:"The circle widens"
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Linux"
It is important for us to make a more general distinction between those things from Microsoft and those things not from Microsoft. In a healthy market, we should be able to focus on going end-to-end with any OS, given that it supports the necessary standards.
Linux is simply an option. A very good option, but by far not the only one. We need choice more than anything else, lest we stagnate once more.
Perhaps "Titanium" refers to the big heat sink necessary for the admin's forehead the first two weeks after purchase. Admin meltdown--it ain't pretty.
Re:The problem is not techical its social
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
Our users unnfortuantely were afraid that by using Groupware others could do some "data mining" on their work and that they have no secrets anymore.
Yes, unfortunately, some office cultures are so perverse that sharing information just doesn't seem to occur. In these cultures, it doesn't matter if anything works together, as long as your name is on something.
Quite a while ago, I even had some of my own work trashed and reimplemented over a weekend while I was gone, because one person wanted to change the architecture. Now that I'm gone from that project, nearly everything I did is being reimplemented under someone else's name. Not because of technical merit (any cited problems with my work would have been trivial to fix), but because of ownership rights among the "team". I wouldn't go back to work with those people, even for $150,000/year.
I come from the physical sciences (specifically, physics and astronomy) and academia, and I know of no one in the field who uses Word. Or Windows, for that matter.
I know I already replied to you, but I just remembered that, back in college, an engineering conference required MS Word-format submissions. This was back in the late 90's.
The ultimate engineering workstation for the thinking-disadvantaged: Windows NT/2K/XP (proprietary lock-in), Pro/E for Windows (more proprietary lock-in, though harder to avoid), and Microsoft Office (yet more proprietary lock-in). I'm suprised how many people are totally satisifed whistling while they work, yet the simply don't look down to see their testicles (if a man) gripped by an iron fist protruding from their computer. I'm not sure what the iron fist would choose for women, but I think my point is clear.
I come from the physical sciences (specifically, physics and astronomy) and academia, and I know of no one in the field who uses Word. Or Windows, for that matter.
In some supposedly intellectual/academic circles the people are really short sighted and/or downright stupid. The worst thing I've heard proposed recently is changing the format of a very complex ISO document, for the sole purpose of shoehorning the damn thing into the less capable yet popular like a cheap hooker Microsoft Word.
This is taking an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD document and encoding it into one of the MOST PROPIETARY and LEAST FLEXIBLE formats known to man! Just because the people working with the document cry when their little mouse doesn't click right! Truly sad.
BTW, those PSones with the attached LCD and speakers look pretty cool. Perfect for the backseat on a family road trip.
I was also suprised to see a snap-on battery and LCD for the gamecube at Toys'R'Us, too. Although the advertised play time for the battery wasn't too impressive (it would need a 12V plug for cars).
Anyone who knows Japanese culture to any extent knows why the XBOX isn't selling well in Japan.
It took me a second to understand "yank tank". I wouldn't be suprised if the best selling games for the XBox are themed after NASCAR, monster trucks, and WWE. Perhaps I should buy stock in that Hulk game...
Slackware and OpenBSD, for example, are simple and intuitive to work with, but Red Hat is less so (in my experience). Red Hat seems to add complexity under a guise of user-friendliness and is approaching Windows in that respect. It always seems that I end up fighting a bit more with Red Hat to get it working just like I want to versus Slackware or OpenBSD.
OpenBSD, by the way, has very good documentation for those not too lazy to read it.
The only chip design methodology that still has its original meaning is VLIW. That original meaning is "bankruptcy."
Sun's MAJC CPU is actually a dual-core VLIW chip and is used in their high-end video cards. I'm pretty sure I've seen VLIW elsewhere...perhaps DSP chips?
Hopefully one of these is a winner, even if Itanic eventually loses.
At $36.69 per year (running 24/7), the G5 will pay for itself in 13.62 years.
I forgot to address this one. I think the payoff is faster than that, considering that there is added HVAC load from hotter computers, though I don't know how to estimate that.
Also, I don't mean to troll, but there is also the added savings of not dealing with Microsoft Windows every day (financial as well as psychological).
The break-even point is probably more like five or six years, which is a fair replacement interval for non-PC workstations. And after six years, the performance of a new workstation would be justified.
This means, at worst, a PowerMac G5 costs absolutely no more than a PC over time, and most likely (counting administraction costs) will be a net savings all around.
Generally, they do not perform like the POWER4, UltraSPARC III, etc., for comparable power consumption. The Opteron is the closest bet for x86.
Remember, electricity is pennies a KWh.
Although $37 looks small, the savings scales with the company and can amount to thousands of dollars saved. Imagine an 8-way server ($300/year saved) or 32-way server ($1,200/year saved) or an office with 50 workstations ($2,000/year saved). That savings just might replace a broken photocopier or other budget-constrained items.
Power costs aren't something to laugh at, and conservation should be practiced in all aspects of a company (lighting, insulation, etc.). For self-employed people, it can mean an extra week's gasoline, for a large corporation, it can mean not laying someone off. These are real tangible benefits to buying low-consumption devices.
Given that electricity is not free, the fact that a PPC-based computer (or almost any non-x86 computer, for that matter) draws significantly less electricity is, well, significant.
If a company spends extra money on a set of gorgeous G5s or whatever, a non-trivial amount of that money is made back on the utility bills for very similar performance.
Other RISC vendors can be a win, also. For example, my old UltraSPARC workstations are not the space-heaters they might be stereotyped as (USII draws less than 20W). UltraSPARC III tops out at 65 watts, which although not as good as the PPC 970 is still much better than P4 or Itanic.
This is a win for Linux, but not that big of a win, considering the details of the situation. This hardly indicates an expanding mindshare for the platform, just ability to cannibalize another *nix with its freeness.
We should check back in two or three years. A payroll system is potentially a very high throughput system of many thousands of financial transactions each pay day. If they are successful, in the long-term, with this "upgrade" from UNIX to Linux, then many myths about Linux would be dispelled. Using this as a case study, selling Linux should get much easier.
I know I would still hesitate using Linux on a high-throughput system today, but in three years, I don't know. However, which Linux to use will remain a critical question, as Red Hat, for example, seems much less pure than Slackware, for example. For a server, I would still prefer a BSD for its utter simplicity and clean layout; for Linux, the same attributes would be attractive.
Why is linux getting all that good press is the real puzzlement.
It's the penguin. Have you seen its eyes? They follow you as you walk by...sending messages into our brains!
In Japan, one day, there will be a great battle of the evil Penguin against our savior, Hello Kitty. I have read Nostradamus predicted a great peace following this battle, where cute marketing icons will lead us all into enlightenment. Only, then, will the BSD Daemon rise to join the ranks of Hello Kitty and the defeated Penguin to form an eternal Traid of Cuteness. I look forward to this day.
...it's not that people emulate the characters they see directly, but that movies STYLIZE killing and violence
I'm not afraid of movies that stylize murder, I'm afraid of "gangstas" who think it's cool to have murder on their resume. It's a credential, you know.
BTW, anyone who listens to music that advocates violence and "bitches and hoes" yet claims to be a civil rights advocate is a pathetic loser.
Why not implement a "paper trail" through punching holes in a metal plate using a laser. Each machine would encode their votes in metal, which would be hard to falsify (the holes will have clear characteristics). The metal plates can then be removed from the machines after voting and kept available for recounts, if needed. Optical scanners could even automate recounts.
My ignorance won't prevent me from making a pretty good choice in my purchase of an automobile.
The salesman hopes that it will. The last car I bought was from a traditional dealership, and holy shit did that guy pull out a bag of tricks. I studied my targeted car's specs and financing for two days before going in for the negotiation. Without that preparation, I am sure I would not have gotten a better-than-blue-book trade-in nor the respectabily near-invoice price for the new car.
Good salespeople are so good that you only realize what happened two weeks after the sale, once your subconscience catches up. Even months after the sale, I will suddenly realize something and think "damn that was clever, these sales people know their marks".
Bonus points to whomever can figure out what car I (arbitrarily) chose...
Apple did something reasonably similiar with the MacOS/OSX switch.
I haven't used Mac OS X and their "classic" emulator, but, in principle, it can be argued that they did the right thing. They saw an opportunity to go from their DOS-era desktop operating system and make a 1970-2000+ modern workstation/server operating system while still keeping compatibility in a separate compartmentalized emulator. In the long-term, this is a big win for both Apple and their customers.
What? This is and will be only one Windows from one company. Portability isn't even possible. Programs will still have to be written for Microsoft's runtime using Microsoft's APIs and Microsoft's operating system. Customers will still be locked in. Nothing will change.
As far as platform support is concerned, please consider these kernels: Linux and NetBSD. Between those, has any platform been missed?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love something to would finally get rid of the awkward (no pun intended) make, and having a system based on Python would make it double good.
So now my C, C++, or Java programs can be dependent on yet another language runtime environment? Awesome!
Yes, there are limitations to Make, but why hasn't a genuinely better replacement materialized in the last twenty years and become truly widely adopted (in a manner like Perl, for example)?
Truth is, if you avoid fancy GNU extensions and stick to POSIX, make really isn't all the stuff people cry about.
There are women in engineering?
I must be working at the wrong place.
Yup. Where I work, there are 3 women for every man, and all the women look like Sandra Bullock.
What lame company did you get stuck with?
tribology
Have you figured out exactly why that quadrotriticale stuff affects them so much? (Yes, my sense of humor is that pathetic)
As an aside the review process for this journal is one of the longest I have ever seen approximately 5 months. Compared to the Journal of Physics D which encourages the use of Latex which was reviewed and published in 3 months.
It takes them an extra two months to figure out how to get the Word format into a presentable form, whereas the LaTeX guys just do a dvips...
"Linux"
It is important for us to make a more general distinction between those things from Microsoft and those things not from Microsoft. In a healthy market, we should be able to focus on going end-to-end with any OS, given that it supports the necessary standards.
Linux is simply an option. A very good option, but by far not the only one. We need choice more than anything else, lest we stagnate once more.
"Titanium"
Oooooo...ahhhhhh....hey look guys, it shiny!
Perhaps "Titanium" refers to the big heat sink necessary for the admin's forehead the first two weeks after purchase. Admin meltdown--it ain't pretty.
Our users unnfortuantely were afraid that by using Groupware others could do some "data mining" on their work and that they have no secrets anymore.
Yes, unfortunately, some office cultures are so perverse that sharing information just doesn't seem to occur. In these cultures, it doesn't matter if anything works together, as long as your name is on something.
Quite a while ago, I even had some of my own work trashed and reimplemented over a weekend while I was gone, because one person wanted to change the architecture. Now that I'm gone from that project, nearly everything I did is being reimplemented under someone else's name. Not because of technical merit (any cited problems with my work would have been trivial to fix), but because of ownership rights among the "team". I wouldn't go back to work with those people, even for $150,000/year.
I believe Lotus was a full blown groupware suite before Outlook.
And better, I've heard. Sad, isn't it?
I come from the physical sciences (specifically, physics and astronomy) and academia, and I know of no one in the field who uses Word. Or Windows, for that matter.
I know I already replied to you, but I just remembered that, back in college, an engineering conference required MS Word-format submissions. This was back in the late 90's.
The ultimate engineering workstation for the thinking-disadvantaged: Windows NT/2K/XP (proprietary lock-in), Pro/E for Windows (more proprietary lock-in, though harder to avoid), and Microsoft Office (yet more proprietary lock-in). I'm suprised how many people are totally satisifed whistling while they work, yet the simply don't look down to see their testicles (if a man) gripped by an iron fist protruding from their computer. I'm not sure what the iron fist would choose for women, but I think my point is clear.
I come from the physical sciences (specifically, physics and astronomy) and academia, and I know of no one in the field who uses Word. Or Windows, for that matter.
In some supposedly intellectual/academic circles the people are really short sighted and/or downright stupid. The worst thing I've heard proposed recently is changing the format of a very complex ISO document, for the sole purpose of shoehorning the damn thing into the less capable yet popular like a cheap hooker Microsoft Word.
This is taking an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD document and encoding it into one of the MOST PROPIETARY and LEAST FLEXIBLE formats known to man! Just because the people working with the document cry when their little mouse doesn't click right! Truly sad.
"...PSone - 3.7 percent
Xbox - 1.6 percent..."
BTW, those PSones with the attached LCD and speakers look pretty cool. Perfect for the backseat on a family road trip.
I was also suprised to see a snap-on battery and LCD for the gamecube at Toys'R'Us, too. Although the advertised play time for the battery wasn't too impressive (it would need a 12V plug for cars).
Anyone who knows Japanese culture to any extent knows why the XBOX isn't selling well in Japan.
It took me a second to understand "yank tank". I wouldn't be suprised if the best selling games for the XBox are themed after NASCAR, monster trucks, and WWE. Perhaps I should buy stock in that Hulk game...
Eh? "Pure" in what sense?..
Slackware and OpenBSD, for example, are simple and intuitive to work with, but Red Hat is less so (in my experience). Red Hat seems to add complexity under a guise of user-friendliness and is approaching Windows in that respect. It always seems that I end up fighting a bit more with Red Hat to get it working just like I want to versus Slackware or OpenBSD.
OpenBSD, by the way, has very good documentation for those not too lazy to read it.
The only chip design methodology that still has its original meaning is VLIW. That original meaning is "bankruptcy."
Sun's MAJC CPU is actually a dual-core VLIW chip and is used in their high-end video cards. I'm pretty sure I've seen VLIW elsewhere...perhaps DSP chips?
Hopefully one of these is a winner, even if Itanic eventually loses.
At $36.69 per year (running 24/7), the G5 will pay for itself in 13.62 years.
I forgot to address this one. I think the payoff is faster than that, considering that there is added HVAC load from hotter computers, though I don't know how to estimate that.
Also, I don't mean to troll, but there is also the added savings of not dealing with Microsoft Windows every day (financial as well as psychological).
The break-even point is probably more like five or six years, which is a fair replacement interval for non-PC workstations. And after six years, the performance of a new workstation would be justified.
This means, at worst, a PowerMac G5 costs absolutely no more than a PC over time, and most likely (counting administraction costs) will be a net savings all around.
There are low power x86 processors.
Generally, they do not perform like the POWER4, UltraSPARC III, etc., for comparable power consumption. The Opteron is the closest bet for x86.
Remember, electricity is pennies a KWh.
Although $37 looks small, the savings scales with the company and can amount to thousands of dollars saved. Imagine an 8-way server ($300/year saved) or 32-way server ($1,200/year saved) or an office with 50 workstations ($2,000/year saved). That savings just might replace a broken photocopier or other budget-constrained items.
Power costs aren't something to laugh at, and conservation should be practiced in all aspects of a company (lighting, insulation, etc.). For self-employed people, it can mean an extra week's gasoline, for a large corporation, it can mean not laying someone off. These are real tangible benefits to buying low-consumption devices.
Given that electricity is not free, the fact that a PPC-based computer (or almost any non-x86 computer, for that matter) draws significantly less electricity is, well, significant.
If a company spends extra money on a set of gorgeous G5s or whatever, a non-trivial amount of that money is made back on the utility bills for very similar performance.
Other RISC vendors can be a win, also. For example, my old UltraSPARC workstations are not the space-heaters they might be stereotyped as (USII draws less than 20W). UltraSPARC III tops out at 65 watts, which although not as good as the PPC 970 is still much better than P4 or Itanic.
This is a win for Linux, but not that big of a win, considering the details of the situation. This hardly indicates an expanding mindshare for the platform, just ability to cannibalize another *nix with its freeness.
We should check back in two or three years. A payroll system is potentially a very high throughput system of many thousands of financial transactions each pay day. If they are successful, in the long-term, with this "upgrade" from UNIX to Linux, then many myths about Linux would be dispelled. Using this as a case study, selling Linux should get much easier.
I know I would still hesitate using Linux on a high-throughput system today, but in three years, I don't know. However, which Linux to use will remain a critical question, as Red Hat, for example, seems much less pure than Slackware, for example. For a server, I would still prefer a BSD for its utter simplicity and clean layout; for Linux, the same attributes would be attractive.
Why is linux getting all that good press is the real puzzlement.
It's the penguin. Have you seen its eyes? They follow you as you walk by...sending messages into our brains!
In Japan, one day, there will be a great battle of the evil Penguin against our savior, Hello Kitty. I have read Nostradamus predicted a great peace following this battle, where cute marketing icons will lead us all into enlightenment. Only, then, will the BSD Daemon rise to join the ranks of Hello Kitty and the defeated Penguin to form an eternal Traid of Cuteness. I look forward to this day.
...it's not that people emulate the characters they see directly, but that movies STYLIZE killing and violence
I'm not afraid of movies that stylize murder, I'm afraid of "gangstas" who think it's cool to have murder on their resume. It's a credential, you know.
BTW, anyone who listens to music that advocates violence and "bitches and hoes" yet claims to be a civil rights advocate is a pathetic loser.
Why not implement a "paper trail" through punching holes in a metal plate using a laser. Each machine would encode their votes in metal, which would be hard to falsify (the holes will have clear characteristics). The metal plates can then be removed from the machines after voting and kept available for recounts, if needed. Optical scanners could even automate recounts.
Access databases
Voting is one domain where Microsoft needs to step aside and let someone else do it right.
My ignorance won't prevent me from making a pretty good choice in my purchase of an automobile.
The salesman hopes that it will. The last car I bought was from a traditional dealership, and holy shit did that guy pull out a bag of tricks. I studied my targeted car's specs and financing for two days before going in for the negotiation. Without that preparation, I am sure I would not have gotten a better-than-blue-book trade-in nor the respectabily near-invoice price for the new car.
Good salespeople are so good that you only realize what happened two weeks after the sale, once your subconscience catches up. Even months after the sale, I will suddenly realize something and think "damn that was clever, these sales people know their marks".
Bonus points to whomever can figure out what car I (arbitrarily) chose...
(waves hand)...you will give me your car...
Cross Drilled Brake Lines
Um, check whether this "supplier" has a grudge against you before driving your car!
Apple did something reasonably similiar with the MacOS/OSX switch.
I haven't used Mac OS X and their "classic" emulator, but, in principle, it can be argued that they did the right thing. They saw an opportunity to go from their DOS-era desktop operating system and make a 1970-2000+ modern workstation/server operating system while still keeping compatibility in a separate compartmentalized emulator. In the long-term, this is a big win for both Apple and their customers.
This will make Windows more portable than *nix.
What? This is and will be only one Windows from one company. Portability isn't even possible. Programs will still have to be written for Microsoft's runtime using Microsoft's APIs and Microsoft's operating system. Customers will still be locked in. Nothing will change.
As far as platform support is concerned, please consider these kernels: Linux and NetBSD. Between those, has any platform been missed?