On the contrary - I think it's time the old monopoly was closed down, and we were introduced to something we haven't had in a LONG time in the consumer PC processor market - choice.
Cyrix/Via (with Joshua), AMD (with the K6-3/K6-2+) and Intel (with the Celeron) it would appear now ALL have Celeron-class (for want of a better term)processors in the marketplace - for the first time - all aimed at consumers.
While AMD and Intel are battling it out in the medium-high end market (P3 & Athlon) and AMD are soon to release top end processors to compete with Intel's Xeons, we now have a 3 way (and possibly 4 way if you include Transmeta) battle for the low end market.
We should be getting better products for less money as a result of this, as each manufacturer attempts to gain market share - and this can only be a good thing.
The low power consumption of the Crusoe processor means that the fuel cell that lasts only 20 hours with an intel processor based laptop will last a lot longer - sure, more people don't use a laptop for longer than this between recharges, but what about for people in the field, where they don't have access to power for days at a time?
Also, the low power consumption of the Crusoe means it gives off less heat - which is an advantage all of it's own.
Gates has said before that he believes that the Internet is Microsoft's future.
Now, with the possibility that M$ will be broken up into 3 parts - OS, Software and Internet, Gates has positioned himself at the head of the section he believes is the way forward anyway.
The other two sections - OS (which is facing increasing competition from Linux, MacOS, BeOS, etc) and software (now facing renewed competition from Sun with StarOffice, amongst others) are both, it would seem, on downward spirals, meanwhile IE usage (which I know isn't the entirety of M$'s Internet business, but is a good indication) is skyrocketting - the website I run has approximately 60% of users using IE5, another 20% using IE4. IIS has crushed Netscape's web server platform, and, if you believe what M$ say, is a serious contender for the www server crown. ASP is widespread, backending into SQL6.5 and SQL7 databases.
Gates has simply positioned himself at the top of the fastest growing section of M$ for the breakup - he's kept M$ alive for 25 years by making "smart" decisions - M$ never rose to the heady heights they've reached because they had the best software - but because Gates made the right decisions for the company's longetivity, and it appears he's doing it again.
You have to remember - if M$ survives, Gates survives. People say he's the richest man in the world, but a LOT of his wealth is tied up in M$ - and if M$ fails, he'll lose a LOT of money.
Before you moderate this as redundant, please at least do me the courtesy of reading all that I have to say.
Lately, there's been a BIG kerfuffle in Australia with Telstra and their monopoly on broadband Internet access. On a more global scale, Governments everywhere have been declaring that violent computer games promote real life violence - something that most of us disagree with.
I submitted two stories to Slashdot about it - at different stages in the battle against Telstra's ridiculously high prices, and have just submitted a story about the Australian Goverment actually getting something right and declaring the computer games DON'T create homocidal maniacs (since Australia's 'net censorship, and the way goverments all over the world have been blaming computer games for violent crimes), and I'm going to be very surprised if it makes it to the front page as a news item.
And yet a story about someone wasting money on discovering why bubbles in Guinness seem to sink has been deemed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Slashdot's standards are definately falling - I know it's been mentioned before, and people who have said so have been moderated down through the floor - but it's a sad day when news about bubbles in beer moving in unexpected directions is deemed to matter more than news about monopolies and their effect on freedom of access to the Internet, and the fact that at least somewhere in this crazy world a government has realised that playing Quake doesn't immediately turn you into a weapon of mass destruction.
Like the other posts on this matter, this one will probably get moderated down to ridiculous depths as well - but I feel that this needs to be said, and I'm willing to risk my karma to give it a +2 head start before it vanishes into the ether.
OK, I don't know about in the US, but it's customary both here in Australia and in the UK (I have lived in both places) to use boiling water to make coffee, and tea for that matter.
Now call me stupid if you will, but I'm pretty sure that no matter HOW much energy you apply to water, it doesn't get any hotter (in liquid form) than 100 degrees celcius.
So to expect a beverage made from boiling water to be 100 degrees celsius or lower.
To spill such a beverage in your lap, whether sitting in the driver or passenger seat of a car, or anywhere else for that matter, is NOT McDonald's fault.
In fact, to make the coffee (at least here in Austrlalia, a perculator is used - which *requires* the water to be boiling to actually work.
1. Your point about free local calls. In the US, the local call zones are a LOT smaller than here in Australia - outr local call zones, by comparison, are HUGE - and $0.25 a call really isn't that much.
ADSL is being trialled in Australia now by Telstra. It will come. Yes, cable is only available in capital cities, and even not all of those.
But let's consider the following..
Telstra are a single company, covering a country as large geographically as the US (check an atlas if you don't believe me), with only 17 million potential customers (and when you consider there's 4.3 people on average per household, and most households have only one phone line, that reduces their effective market to around 4 million homes. Compare this to the US, with several regional carriers, all with a substantially larger market to deal with.
While I agree that Telstra are making an absolute fortune, and aren't providing all the services, and the quality of service, that they really should be, there are valid reasons for our late uptake of high speed Internet access.
I've played a 3D VR boxing game - you stood on a platform, with a barrier around you to stop you falling, you had 2 hand pieces, that detected movement, and a headset with audio and visual output (so you could see and hear what was happening within the game).
You moved around the ring by transferring your weight around the platform - you could actually simulate walking fairly easily.
Firstly, a comment on the political side of things....
It's not that China is a Communist country any more that makes it a "bad" place - after all, in an ideal world, where people aren't selfish and greedy, Socialism/Communism is an ideologically sound social structure (note I said social, NOT political. It is our weaknesses as humans that require the political side of Communism and Socialism to become the driving force in a country which embraces these idealologies. And no, I'm not a Marxist - I just happen to have my eyes open politically, and I also studied revolutionary and political theory).
As another poster mentioned, China is one of the few remaining "superpowers" - but at what cost? China has a well known reputation for supression of individual thought, by force when necessary (do we all remember the footage of a lone student standing in front of a line of tanks in Tienamin (sp) Square?).
China is now the "bad guy" as such, not because they are one of the few remaining Communist countries, but because of their shocking supression of what the western world considers to be basic human rights and priviledges.
But this is all off topic. Is China's adoption of Linux as "The State's Official Operating System" a bad thing?
For the Affirmative: Do you really believe that China will honour the GPL? Do you think that Chinese programmers, payed by the Chinese government, will release all that they develop, along with source code, and will give credit to developers of code they used to build their programs? Can you see the Chinese Intelligence Agency (what ever they might be called) releasing the code to the programs they have written to crack encoded messages, because the GPL says they should, after they used other people's code to assist them in their efforts?
For the Negative: Just because it's now the "official" OS, this doesn't mean that Linux hasn't been used up until this point. Acknowledging their use of Linux (while I suppose those still stuck in the Cold War mindset could use this against Linux) can only help to raise the profile of Linux, and give it more credibility (the decision to use Linux for ALL relevant systems in a government as large as the Chinese government is can't have been a small, or ill-informed decision). This will also bring a whole new group of programmers into contact with Linux, and hopefully will lead to new advancements in application and kernel programming (after all, for kernel inclusion, Linus and team still have to approve the code, so the chance of something "naughty" slipping through is very low).
Over all? I don't know. I really don't. I don't think it really does any harm, since whether or not it's official, there's a very good chance that it's being used anyway.
Imagine you're driving along a road in a country town, through a wheat field, and there's NOBODY around for MILES - and you see this little square aluminium box on wheels, with a big arm moving slowly along the edge of the wheat field - wouldn't you be even SLIGHTLY inclined to stop, and since there's no-one around, pinch the thing?
I know most people wouldn't actually do so, but I don't think it wouldn't got through anyone's mind - but some people would take them, and I'm not sure that I know of a farmer who could afford to lose a $1,500 tool that easily, especially not several of them.....
I suppose you're going to provide some evidence to back up these ridiculous claims of over-the-top censorship in the Australian media?
I live in Australia, have done so for the past 23 years (I'm 23, so yes, I was born here) - but I've travelled, and am reasonably aware of what's going on in the world around me, especially when it comes to the Internet (I've worked with the Internet in one way or another, directly for over 4 years now), and I know that up until recently with this ridiculous Internet censorship law (which incidently has only gone through parliment because some old, backward, conservative to the point of being absurdly old fashioned Tasmanian politician holds the balance of power in our parlimentary system, and without his support, the current government would never have been able to sell off Telstra the way that they have - don't even begin to ask me about the ramifications this alone is having on our telecommunications industry, especially in relation to Internet access prices, technology and performance, I just won't stop, and I don't think I'm yet qualified to write feature articles for Slashdot).
If you consider Australia to be on the edge of the censorship issue, where do you put countries like China, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philipenes and other such countries?
So yes, it is a surprise - at least to people who actually know what's going on in this country.
Just so you know, Hercules were very much alive and kicking until about 6 months ago - they were on schedule to release into the market THE fastest TNT2-Ultra based video card - but apparently they ran out of money JUST prior to release - I assume Guillemot have bought the stock and everything too - which means they should have a large number of VERY nice TNT2 based cards ready for market, as Hercules had manufactured quite a number of cards ready for sale when they closed their doors....
The K6-3 never kept up with the P2/3 when it came to FP calculations, not even close, and I'd question that it beat the P2/3 in regular integer calculations Mhz for Mhz. It certainly wasn't as stable/overclockable as the P2/3 either.....
While there may be alternatives, Intel still command the largest (by far) segment of the processor market.
This means that most software is developed for Intel processors - sure, you can run NT on a DEC Alpha, and run FX32! to run Intel compiled programs, but that's not always a suitable alternative.
You could get a G4, but they're stuck at 450MHz at the moment - and there's a lack of software (though not as bad as in my next example).
As for getting a Sparc, as much as that'd be nice, again, you run into the problem that there's simply not the market for these processors to warrent the development of a lot of software, especially games (and you'll find that a large number of overclockers are actually gamers).
It's all good and well to crow about the alternatives, but unfortunately, that's all they are at the moment in many cases - alternative ideas, not necessarily good ones.
As much as GPLing it might result in a finished product, it would still be called "Half-Life" - and Valve would, to some degree, still be seen as being responsible for it.
There are things that no matter how good a programmer you are, you can't beat - such as the relatively poor 3D performance of the Macs at the moment, due to the lacklustre card they're running still. Perhaps if the G3/G4 came with a better card (not only is the current one a bit old, but it was slower than the PC equivilent right from the start).
I think we may see quite a few 3D FPS titles not make it to the Mac, or make it, but not as a full quality product, until Apple decide to do something about the 3D video problem the Mac's are suffering from......
Hmmm, Q3A for the Mac is looking better by the second - it's a shame that Valve couldn't get a decent port of Half-Life done for the Mac, as it would pretty much have been the only real competition for Q3A in the current generation FPS genre......
Have Intel been giving us their best - hardly likely - until now, no-one's pushed them, so they've been able to deliver lower cost, lower performing processors as "state-of-the-art", simply because no-one could show us, the consumers, otherwise. Now that AMD have finally "made it", they're being forced to bring out the more advanced processors - IA-32 (Williamette) launch pushed forward 9 months as an example.
AMD - without a doubt - they've been struggling to keep in the market, as a smaller, less well financed and therefor less well financed company, they've had no choice but to put forward their best just to keep up with the market - AMD chips have until recently been renowned for not being very overclockable - because they ran close to their maximum performance levels already. With the release of the Athlon, they've finally caught, and surpassed Intel - and now Intel are being forced to change tactics in order to compete with the people who could quite possibly steal the "PC clone performance kings" title from them. Much kudos to AMD for what they've managed to achieve.
As an aside, I opened up an OLD PC the other day (I can't remember what it was, but I do know it was OLD) and a large number of the chips were labelled with Intel AND AMD logos - together, on the same chips - kind of hard to comprehend considering the way Intel and AMD are now so fiercely competitive....
I suppose you support 3dfx's lack of a full OpenGL ICD still as well, despite the original Voodoo chip coming out HOW long ago was it now?
At least nVidia/Matrox have written full OpenGL ICDs, complying with that is considered "THE" standard for 3D graphics - 3dfx continue with their half-baked OpenGL ICD/proprietary Glide system - I know who I'll be supporting......
I used to have a Canopus Pure3D, utilising the Voodoo chip, but when the time came to upgrade, the TNT was the best option in my opinion - and nVidia's products, again IMHO, continue to set the standard by which the others are all measured, and for good reason.
If anything, 3dfx are showing M$-like tendencies in releasing a proprietary standard, persisting with it, and expecting people to adhere to it, when a perfectly good and usable standard had already been established, and proven to work acceptably.
... but I wasn't aware that system administrators were hired to take the easy way out - especially when it comes to data security.
If there are 21 known security issues, and patches are available to fix them, I can't see that *any* system administrator worth his salt, either in a small business, or a huge enterprise business, would knowingly ignore this and just not install the relevent patches, simply because he thought it would be easier to wait for the next major upgrade. For ZDNet to suggest this is ludicrous - they obviously have NO idea about how things in the real world operate.
This would be the same as saying a few years ago "Well, M$ just released Service Pack 3, but I'd rather just let NT run without any service packs or hot fixes, because Service Pack 5 can't be far away, and it'll fix more problems than Service Pack 3 and the hot fixes do together - I'll just leave my system insecure and prone to DoS attacks until then - in fact, I might just wait for NT5" (which we know isn't coming now, but when SP3 was released, that was where NT was going).
ZDNet have just, in my opinion, killed their own credibility.
It's just a shame that someone TOTALLY independant can't do these tests, and give us a totally unbiased report on how these two OSs stack up against each other.
Why is it that SO many slashdot readers are so negative about this guy?
He may not be the world's greatest writer (it's not my place to judge him either way, but I've never had a problem understanding what he's been trying to get at), he may not be a technological genius (again, it's not my place to judge him on this, but to me, when he does mention technology, he doesn't try to bluff his way along like so many people do - when he speaks (writes) of technology, he does it with at least some understanding of what he's talking about). He openly admits to being non technical - he doesn't try to say he's right, or that anyone else is wrong - he just states HIS opinion - and I'm sorry, but his opinion is HIS - whether it happens to correspond with what anyone else thinks is irrelevant - it's HIS opinion, and he has a right to express it.
Jon, congratulations. You set out to meet a challenge (to get Linux up and running so that it was in some way useful to you - and as much as you've had problems, and have had to seek advice, you've at least managed to do that much). It doesn't matter how you did it - you had a challenge in front of you, and you've beaten it - OK, so things aren't perfect yet (the PPP daemon problems spring to mind) but you've posted your first article from your Linux box - and to you, that makes Linux usable. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, either about the level of success you have achieved in your adventures with Linux, or the methods by which you have succeeded.
The thing I think most slashdot readers (or at least those who see fit to post - this is my first post on slashdot, lets see what the reaction is) fail to see is that there's no defined level of competency with Linux (or any other OS for that matter) that you must reach to be "accepted", yet people are determined to say "You're only using Linux because someone helped you get it working - you're not good enough." I openly admit, I've done most of my computing on NT and Win9x boxes - all I do at work is use NT boxes, but I'm trying to learn Linux - in fact, I "borrowed" one of the desktops that are supposed to go out to one of our branches to run RedHat 5.2 up on - it's sitting on my desk beside me at work, quietly serving a select few webpages to a select few people.
I started out with a very basic knowledge of Linux - I'd done some basic sysadmin work on BSDi 2.1 before, and had a rudimentry understanding of the CLI, and the commands used, but I was by no means ready to do a complete install from scratch - in the last 2 weeks, I've done the following...
1. Installed RedHat 5.2 from CD (I bought the box set a while ago, but didn't have the time to deal with it sooner). 2. Installed KDE 1.1.1 3. Upgraded my kernel from 2.0.36-0.7 (the version that RedHat 5.2 shipped with) to 2.0.36-3 (using RPMs from the RedHat FTP site). 4. Blown the whole lot away, and started again - installed KDE 1.1.2, upgraded my X server (downloaded the gzipped tarball, installed from that - my first experience with source code and the "make" command). 5. Upgraded my kernel from 2.0.36-0.7 to 2.2.12 (there's no RPMs for this - so I did my first kernel recompile). 6. Read an awefully large amount of documentation....
I know I've got a long way to go - everything I did to this box I did with a web browser open on my NT workstation, reading the documentation on various websites as I worked - I don't believe I could yet do a kernel upgrade without at least referring to the documentation briefly.
Why did I do all this? I think for the same reason that Jon Katz did - it's a personal challenge - and like Jon, I'd like to think I've succeeded in reaching my personal goals - at least the initial ones. One day I'd like to be able to say to a prospective employer that I'm a competent *nix system administrator, but for now I'm just happy that I've gotten as far as I have - I have a usable Linux box sitting on my desk - I hope to install a printer, and download and install Star Office later today - then I might even start to use it as my primary box - though I'll always need my NT box on my desk, at least when I'm working where I am at the moment.
Some of us are gurus when it comes to Linux - the kind of people who help maintain distributions of Linux - some of us are complete newbies, desperately trying to learn everything we can just to get a foothold on what is (at least to me) an exciting, progressive, community - and these two groups seem to be accepted and catered for.
But the group in the middle - those who can do a RedHat install without problems, but don't know where to look for a config file for, say the httpd daemon, aren't well catered for, or accepted - I've noticed lately, that when I join the #Linux channel on my regular IRC network, I very often get told "You suck - you've only got M$ experience, and that's worth nothing - you might as well know nothing about computers because all you actually do know is just M$ hype and b^%&**&t" - yet a complete newbie can come in, and ask "What's Linux, and why does everyone keep saying it's good?" and they'll be welcomed with open arms - despite the questions such as "But will mIRC work under Linux, coz I don't want to lose my settings?", "Isn't Linux just a different version of DOS?", the newbies are gently coached, yet when I ask a question like "OK, my Linux box has 64MB RAM, and when I first boot it up, it's only using 32MB of that, but a few days later, it's practically using all 64MB - I'm running X,Y and Z services, any idea where my RAM's going" and people tell me to RTFM, to give up, because I'm obviously intellectually incapable of administering a Linux box if I have to ask questions like that, or that they don't have time to give long and complicated answers to newbies like me - I finally got the answer I needed "run top, hit shift-m and it will list the processes by memory usage, keep track of what uses the most RAM, and what changes, and you'll find your answer" - quite a simple, short, helpful answer - and yet the same people who don't have the time to help me will spend an hour explaining to some 12 year old why mIRC won't run under Linux (at least without a Windows emulator of some description).
Jon and I fall into this middle group - we're at different stages of progress through this group - but we're definately not completely clueless newbies, and we're certainly not accomplished system administrators - we're somewhere in between.
The Linux community needs to learn the same lesson that the local Rugby Union club where I live had to learn (and is still learning) - it's all well and good to promote the cause to people who don't have a clue, and to keep those people who are involved at the top interested, but if you ignore those in the middle, they'll leave - in the case of the Rugby club I'm talking of - thwe juniors are well looked after, the top senior grades are well looked after, but those in the middle (the lower senior grades, where the up and coming players *should* be learning the ropes are barely given the time of day - and all of a sudden, there's no-one to replace the good players as they retire, because as all the good young players reach the lower senior grades, they get jacked off by the club's attitude towards them, and leave for other clubs who treat them better.
The same thing will happen to the Linux community if we're not careful - there's a lot of work going into getting people interested in Linux, and the people who are established in the community are catered for, but those in the middle, trying to make the transition between the two levels are being left in the cold, and if we're not careful, they'll leave - and when the current stock of geeks, nerds and sys-admins starts to get a bit older, and needs to be replaced, there simply won't be anyone to replace them - as the newbies will be too green, and there won't be anyone else.
Sorry for the length of this rant, but it's been in my mind for a long time now, and I figured it was about time I let it all out.....
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary - I think it's time the old monopoly was closed down, and we were introduced to something we haven't had in a LONG time in the consumer PC processor market - choice.
Cyrix/Via (with Joshua), AMD (with the K6-3/K6-2+) and Intel (with the Celeron) it would appear now ALL have Celeron-class (for want of a better term)processors in the marketplace - for the first time - all aimed at consumers.
While AMD and Intel are battling it out in the medium-high end market (P3 & Athlon) and AMD are soon to release top end processors to compete with Intel's Xeons, we now have a 3 way (and possibly 4 way if you include Transmeta) battle for the low end market.
We should be getting better products for less money as a result of this, as each manufacturer attempts to gain market share - and this can only be a good thing.
Well done Cyrix/Via.
As long as it just sat in the corner and didn't do anything sure.
:P
But movement takes power too remember
How do you figure that?
The low power consumption of the Crusoe processor means that the fuel cell that lasts only 20 hours with an intel processor based laptop will last a lot longer - sure, more people don't use a laptop for longer than this between recharges, but what about for people in the field, where they don't have access to power for days at a time?
Also, the low power consumption of the Crusoe means it gives off less heat - which is an advantage all of it's own.
Hence me saying "if you believe what M$ say"
:)
Gates has said before that he believes that the Internet is Microsoft's future.
Now, with the possibility that M$ will be broken up into 3 parts - OS, Software and Internet, Gates has positioned himself at the head of the section he believes is the way forward anyway.
The other two sections - OS (which is facing increasing competition from Linux, MacOS, BeOS, etc) and software (now facing renewed competition from Sun with StarOffice, amongst others) are both, it would seem, on downward spirals, meanwhile IE usage (which I know isn't the entirety of M$'s Internet business, but is a good indication) is skyrocketting - the website I run has approximately 60% of users using IE5, another 20% using IE4. IIS has crushed Netscape's web server platform, and, if you believe what M$ say, is a serious contender for the www server crown. ASP is widespread, backending into SQL6.5 and SQL7 databases.
Gates has simply positioned himself at the top of the fastest growing section of M$ for the breakup - he's kept M$ alive for 25 years by making "smart" decisions - M$ never rose to the heady heights they've reached because they had the best software - but because Gates made the right decisions for the company's longetivity, and it appears he's doing it again.
You have to remember - if M$ survives, Gates survives. People say he's the richest man in the world, but a LOT of his wealth is tied up in M$ - and if M$ fails, he'll lose a LOT of money.
I agree with your sentiments.
Before you moderate this as redundant, please at least do me the courtesy of reading all that I have to say.
Lately, there's been a BIG kerfuffle in Australia with Telstra and their monopoly on broadband Internet access. On a more global scale, Governments everywhere have been declaring that violent computer games promote real life violence - something that most of us disagree with.
I submitted two stories to Slashdot about it - at different stages in the battle against Telstra's ridiculously high prices, and have just submitted a story about the Australian Goverment actually getting something right and declaring the computer games DON'T create homocidal maniacs (since Australia's 'net censorship, and the way goverments all over the world have been blaming computer games for violent crimes), and I'm going to be very surprised if it makes it to the front page as a news item.
And yet a story about someone wasting money on discovering why bubbles in Guinness seem to sink has been deemed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Slashdot's standards are definately falling - I know it's been mentioned before, and people who have said so have been moderated down through the floor - but it's a sad day when news about bubbles in beer moving in unexpected directions is deemed to matter more than news about monopolies and their effect on freedom of access to the Internet, and the fact that at least somewhere in this crazy world a government has realised that playing Quake doesn't immediately turn you into a weapon of mass destruction.
Like the other posts on this matter, this one will probably get moderated down to ridiculous depths as well - but I feel that this needs to be said, and I'm willing to risk my karma to give it a +2 head start before it vanishes into the ether.
OK, I don't know about in the US, but it's customary both here in Australia and in the UK (I have lived in both places) to use boiling water to make coffee, and tea for that matter.
Now call me stupid if you will, but I'm pretty sure that no matter HOW much energy you apply to water, it doesn't get any hotter (in liquid form) than 100 degrees celcius.
So to expect a beverage made from boiling water to be 100 degrees celsius or lower.
To spill such a beverage in your lap, whether sitting in the driver or passenger seat of a car, or anywhere else for that matter, is NOT McDonald's fault.
In fact, to make the coffee (at least here in Austrlalia, a perculator is used - which *requires* the water to be boiling to actually work.
Do they make the coffee differently in the USA?
Nah, he called his company "Microsoft" for a reason you know :P~
Let's be fair here...
1. Your point about free local calls. In the US, the local call zones are a LOT smaller than here in Australia - outr local call zones, by comparison, are HUGE - and $0.25 a call really isn't that much.
ADSL is being trialled in Australia now by Telstra. It will come. Yes, cable is only available in capital cities, and even not all of those.
But let's consider the following..
Telstra are a single company, covering a country as large geographically as the US (check an atlas if you don't believe me), with only 17 million potential customers (and when you consider there's 4.3 people on average per household, and most households have only one phone line, that reduces their effective market to around 4 million homes. Compare this to the US, with several regional carriers, all with a substantially larger market to deal with.
While I agree that Telstra are making an absolute fortune, and aren't providing all the services, and the quality of service, that they really should be, there are valid reasons for our late uptake of high speed Internet access.
I've played a 3D VR boxing game - you stood on a platform, with a barrier around you to stop you falling, you had 2 hand pieces, that detected movement, and a headset with audio and visual output (so you could see and hear what was happening within the game).
You moved around the ring by transferring your weight around the platform - you could actually simulate walking fairly easily.
Firstly, a comment on the political side of things....
It's not that China is a Communist country any more that makes it a "bad" place - after all, in an ideal world, where people aren't selfish and greedy, Socialism/Communism is an ideologically sound social structure (note I said social, NOT political. It is our weaknesses as humans that require the political side of Communism and Socialism to become the driving force in a country which embraces these idealologies. And no, I'm not a Marxist - I just happen to have my eyes open politically, and I also studied revolutionary and political theory).
As another poster mentioned, China is one of the few remaining "superpowers" - but at what cost? China has a well known reputation for supression of individual thought, by force when necessary (do we all remember the footage of a lone student standing in front of a line of tanks in Tienamin (sp) Square?).
China is now the "bad guy" as such, not because they are one of the few remaining Communist countries, but because of their shocking supression of what the western world considers to be basic human rights and priviledges.
But this is all off topic. Is China's adoption of Linux as "The State's Official Operating System" a bad thing?
For the Affirmative: Do you really believe that China will honour the GPL? Do you think that Chinese programmers, payed by the Chinese government, will release all that they develop, along with source code, and will give credit to developers of code they used to build their programs? Can you see the Chinese Intelligence Agency (what ever they might be called) releasing the code to the programs they have written to crack encoded messages, because the GPL says they should, after they used other people's code to assist them in their efforts?
For the Negative: Just because it's now the "official" OS, this doesn't mean that Linux hasn't been used up until this point. Acknowledging their use of Linux (while I suppose those still stuck in the Cold War mindset could use this against Linux) can only help to raise the profile of Linux, and give it more credibility (the decision to use Linux for ALL relevant systems in a government as large as the Chinese government is can't have been a small, or ill-informed decision). This will also bring a whole new group of programmers into contact with Linux, and hopefully will lead to new advancements in application and kernel programming (after all, for kernel inclusion, Linus and team still have to approve the code, so the chance of something "naughty" slipping through is very low).
Over all? I don't know. I really don't. I don't think it really does any harm, since whether or not it's official, there's a very good chance that it's being used anyway.
How about "And how many of you that voted for Win9x being unstable are actually running an alternative such as Linux as your primary OS?"
I think that question might give a rather less biased result.
Um, people?
Imagine you're driving along a road in a country town, through a wheat field, and there's NOBODY around for MILES - and you see this little square aluminium box on wheels, with a big arm moving slowly along the edge of the wheat field - wouldn't you be even SLIGHTLY inclined to stop, and since there's no-one around, pinch the thing?
I know most people wouldn't actually do so, but I don't think it wouldn't got through anyone's mind - but some people would take them, and I'm not sure that I know of a farmer who could afford to lose a $1,500 tool that easily, especially not several of them.....
I suppose you're going to provide some evidence to back up these ridiculous claims of over-the-top censorship in the Australian media?
I live in Australia, have done so for the past 23 years (I'm 23, so yes, I was born here) - but I've travelled, and am reasonably aware of what's going on in the world around me, especially when it comes to the Internet (I've worked with the Internet in one way or another, directly for over 4 years now), and I know that up until recently with this ridiculous Internet censorship law (which incidently has only gone through parliment because some old, backward, conservative to the point of being absurdly old fashioned Tasmanian politician holds the balance of power in our parlimentary system, and without his support, the current government would never have been able to sell off Telstra the way that they have - don't even begin to ask me about the ramifications this alone is having on our telecommunications industry, especially in relation to Internet access prices, technology and performance, I just won't stop, and I don't think I'm yet qualified to write feature articles for Slashdot).
If you consider Australia to be on the edge of the censorship issue, where do you put countries like China, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philipenes and other such countries?
So yes, it is a surprise - at least to people who actually know what's going on in this country.
Just so you know, Hercules were very much alive and kicking until about 6 months ago - they were on schedule to release into the market THE fastest TNT2-Ultra based video card - but apparently they ran out of money JUST prior to release - I assume Guillemot have bought the stock and everything too - which means they should have a large number of VERY nice TNT2 based cards ready for market, as Hercules had manufactured quite a number of cards ready for sale when they closed their doors....
The K6-3 never kept up with the P2/3 when it came to FP calculations, not even close, and I'd question that it beat the P2/3 in regular integer calculations Mhz for Mhz. It certainly wasn't as stable/overclockable as the P2/3 either.....
While there may be alternatives, Intel still command the largest (by far) segment of the processor market.
This means that most software is developed for Intel processors - sure, you can run NT on a DEC Alpha, and run FX32! to run Intel compiled programs, but that's not always a suitable alternative.
You could get a G4, but they're stuck at 450MHz at the moment - and there's a lack of software (though not as bad as in my next example).
As for getting a Sparc, as much as that'd be nice, again, you run into the problem that there's simply not the market for these processors to warrent the development of a lot of software, especially games (and you'll find that a large number of overclockers are actually gamers).
It's all good and well to crow about the alternatives, but unfortunately, that's all they are at the moment in many cases - alternative ideas, not necessarily good ones.
As much as GPLing it might result in a finished product, it would still be called "Half-Life" - and Valve would, to some degree, still be seen as being responsible for it.
There are things that no matter how good a programmer you are, you can't beat - such as the relatively poor 3D performance of the Macs at the moment, due to the lacklustre card they're running still. Perhaps if the G3/G4 came with a better card (not only is the current one a bit old, but it was slower than the PC equivilent right from the start).
I think we may see quite a few 3D FPS titles not make it to the Mac, or make it, but not as a full quality product, until Apple decide to do something about the 3D video problem the Mac's are suffering from......
Hmmm, Q3A for the Mac is looking better by the second - it's a shame that Valve couldn't get a decent port of Half-Life done for the Mac, as it would pretty much have been the only real competition for Q3A in the current generation FPS genre......
Have Intel been giving us their best - hardly likely - until now, no-one's pushed them, so they've been able to deliver lower cost, lower performing processors as "state-of-the-art", simply because no-one could show us, the consumers, otherwise. Now that AMD have finally "made it", they're being forced to bring out the more advanced processors - IA-32 (Williamette) launch pushed forward 9 months as an example.
AMD - without a doubt - they've been struggling to keep in the market, as a smaller, less well financed and therefor less well financed company, they've had no choice but to put forward their best just to keep up with the market - AMD chips have until recently been renowned for not being very overclockable - because they ran close to their maximum performance levels already. With the release of the Athlon, they've finally caught, and surpassed Intel - and now Intel are being forced to change tactics in order to compete with the people who could quite possibly steal the "PC clone performance kings" title from them. Much kudos to AMD for what they've managed to achieve.
As an aside, I opened up an OLD PC the other day (I can't remember what it was, but I do know it was OLD) and a large number of the chips were labelled with Intel AND AMD logos - together, on the same chips - kind of hard to comprehend considering the way Intel and AMD are now so fiercely competitive....
I suppose you support 3dfx's lack of a full OpenGL ICD still as well, despite the original Voodoo chip coming out HOW long ago was it now?
At least nVidia/Matrox have written full OpenGL ICDs, complying with that is considered "THE" standard for 3D graphics - 3dfx continue with their half-baked OpenGL ICD/proprietary Glide system - I know who I'll be supporting......
I used to have a Canopus Pure3D, utilising the Voodoo chip, but when the time came to upgrade, the TNT was the best option in my opinion - and nVidia's products, again IMHO, continue to set the standard by which the others are all measured, and for good reason.
If anything, 3dfx are showing M$-like tendencies in releasing a proprietary standard, persisting with it, and expecting people to adhere to it, when a perfectly good and usable standard had already been established, and proven to work acceptably.
... but I wasn't aware that system administrators were hired to take the easy way out - especially when it comes to data security.
If there are 21 known security issues, and patches are available to fix them, I can't see that *any* system administrator worth his salt, either in a small business, or a huge enterprise business, would knowingly ignore this and just not install the relevent patches, simply because he thought it would be easier to wait for the next major upgrade. For ZDNet to suggest this is ludicrous - they obviously have NO idea about how things in the real world operate.
This would be the same as saying a few years ago "Well, M$ just released Service Pack 3, but I'd rather just let NT run without any service packs or hot fixes, because Service Pack 5 can't be far away, and it'll fix more problems than Service Pack 3 and the hot fixes do together - I'll just leave my system insecure and prone to DoS attacks until then - in fact, I might just wait for NT5" (which we know isn't coming now, but when SP3 was released, that was where NT was going).
ZDNet have just, in my opinion, killed their own credibility.
It's just a shame that someone TOTALLY independant can't do these tests, and give us a totally unbiased report on how these two OSs stack up against each other.
Why is it that SO many slashdot readers are so negative about this guy?
He may not be the world's greatest writer (it's not my place to judge him either way, but I've never had a problem understanding what he's been trying to get at), he may not be a technological genius (again, it's not my place to judge him on this, but to me, when he does mention technology, he doesn't try to bluff his way along like so many people do - when he speaks (writes) of technology, he does it with at least some understanding of what he's talking about). He openly admits to being non technical - he doesn't try to say he's right, or that anyone else is wrong - he just states HIS opinion - and I'm sorry, but his opinion is HIS - whether it happens to correspond with what anyone else thinks is irrelevant - it's HIS opinion, and he has a right to express it.
Jon, congratulations. You set out to meet a challenge (to get Linux up and running so that it was in some way useful to you - and as much as you've had problems, and have had to seek advice, you've at least managed to do that much). It doesn't matter how you did it - you had a challenge in front of you, and you've beaten it - OK, so things aren't perfect yet (the PPP daemon problems spring to mind) but you've posted your first article from your Linux box - and to you, that makes Linux usable. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, either about the level of success you have achieved in your adventures with Linux, or the methods by which you have succeeded.
The thing I think most slashdot readers (or at least those who see fit to post - this is my first post on slashdot, lets see what the reaction is) fail to see is that there's no defined level of competency with Linux (or any other OS for that matter) that you must reach to be "accepted", yet people are determined to say "You're only using Linux because someone helped you get it working - you're not good enough." I openly admit, I've done most of my computing on NT and Win9x boxes - all I do at work is use NT boxes, but I'm trying to learn Linux - in fact, I "borrowed" one of the desktops that are supposed to go out to one of our branches to run RedHat 5.2 up on - it's sitting on my desk beside me at work, quietly serving a select few webpages to a select few people.
I started out with a very basic knowledge of Linux - I'd done some basic sysadmin work on BSDi 2.1 before, and had a rudimentry understanding of the CLI, and the commands used, but I was by no means ready to do a complete install from scratch - in the last 2 weeks, I've done the following...
1. Installed RedHat 5.2 from CD (I bought the box set a while ago, but didn't have the time to deal with it sooner).
2. Installed KDE 1.1.1
3. Upgraded my kernel from 2.0.36-0.7 (the version that RedHat 5.2 shipped with) to 2.0.36-3 (using RPMs from the RedHat FTP site).
4. Blown the whole lot away, and started again - installed KDE 1.1.2, upgraded my X server (downloaded the gzipped tarball, installed from that - my first experience with source code and the "make" command).
5. Upgraded my kernel from 2.0.36-0.7 to 2.2.12 (there's no RPMs for this - so I did my first kernel recompile).
6. Read an awefully large amount of documentation....
I know I've got a long way to go - everything I did to this box I did with a web browser open on my NT workstation, reading the documentation on various websites as I worked - I don't believe I could yet do a kernel upgrade without at least referring to the documentation briefly.
Why did I do all this? I think for the same reason that Jon Katz did - it's a personal challenge - and like Jon, I'd like to think I've succeeded in reaching my personal goals - at least the initial ones. One day I'd like to be able to say to a prospective employer that I'm a competent *nix system administrator, but for now I'm just happy that I've gotten as far as I have - I have a usable Linux box sitting on my desk - I hope to install a printer, and download and install Star Office later today - then I might even start to use it as my primary box - though I'll always need my NT box on my desk, at least when I'm working where I am at the moment.
Some of us are gurus when it comes to Linux - the kind of people who help maintain distributions of Linux - some of us are complete newbies, desperately trying to learn everything we can just to get a foothold on what is (at least to me) an exciting, progressive, community - and these two groups seem to be accepted and catered for.
But the group in the middle - those who can do a RedHat install without problems, but don't know where to look for a config file for, say the httpd daemon, aren't well catered for, or accepted - I've noticed lately, that when I join the #Linux channel on my regular IRC network, I very often get told "You suck - you've only got M$ experience, and that's worth nothing - you might as well know nothing about computers because all you actually do know is just M$ hype and b^%&**&t" - yet a complete newbie can come in, and ask "What's Linux, and why does everyone keep saying it's good?" and they'll be welcomed with open arms - despite the questions such as "But will mIRC work under Linux, coz I don't want to lose my settings?", "Isn't Linux just a different version of DOS?", the newbies are gently coached, yet when I ask a question like "OK, my Linux box has 64MB RAM, and when I first boot it up, it's only using 32MB of that, but a few days later, it's practically using all 64MB - I'm running X,Y and Z services, any idea where my RAM's going" and people tell me to RTFM, to give up, because I'm obviously intellectually incapable of administering a Linux box if I have to ask questions like that, or that they don't have time to give long and complicated answers to newbies like me - I finally got the answer I needed "run top, hit shift-m and it will list the processes by memory usage, keep track of what uses the most RAM, and what changes, and you'll find your answer" - quite a simple, short, helpful answer - and yet the same people who don't have the time to help me will spend an hour explaining to some 12 year old why mIRC won't run under Linux (at least without a Windows emulator of some description).
Jon and I fall into this middle group - we're at different stages of progress through this group - but we're definately not completely clueless newbies, and we're certainly not accomplished system administrators - we're somewhere in between.
The Linux community needs to learn the same lesson that the local Rugby Union club where I live had to learn (and is still learning) - it's all well and good to promote the cause to people who don't have a clue, and to keep those people who are involved at the top interested, but if you ignore those in the middle, they'll leave - in the case of the Rugby club I'm talking of - thwe juniors are well looked after, the top senior grades are well looked after, but those in the middle (the lower senior grades, where the up and coming players *should* be learning the ropes are barely given the time of day - and all of a sudden, there's no-one to replace the good players as they retire, because as all the good young players reach the lower senior grades, they get jacked off by the club's attitude towards them, and leave for other clubs who treat them better.
The same thing will happen to the Linux community if we're not careful - there's a lot of work going into getting people interested in Linux, and the people who are established in the community are catered for, but those in the middle, trying to make the transition between the two levels are being left in the cold, and if we're not careful, they'll leave - and when the current stock of geeks, nerds and sys-admins starts to get a bit older, and needs to be replaced, there simply won't be anyone to replace them - as the newbies will be too green, and there won't be anyone else.
Sorry for the length of this rant, but it's been in my mind for a long time now, and I figured it was about time I let it all out.....
Moderate away guys.....