That has been a threat all along. Meanwhile, the wine team has managed to make very credible inroads to Windows compatibility. MS could have made moves to break that compatibility on several occasions. The Samba team has managed to keep up with MS changes so well that they probably know the MS protocols better than Microsoft engineers do.
I have seen comments here before to the effect that MS actually spends a lot of time compatibility testing a large number of competing software to make sure it does not break. I believe that. It would be very difficult for them to identify and implement a change that would break a single application (mono) while maintaining compatibility with all those others, and even harder to do it in such a way that mono could not be easily fixed and reissued in a matter of days.
I'd bet that MS wishes they had put more such "Windowsisms" into the design before releasing the first draft of.NET just to keep mono at bay. But they didn't see it coming, and it's too late now.
The reason telocs don't sell all that bandwidth is that they don't have all that bandwidth. All they have is fiber in the ground. That does not equal bandwidth.
It wouldn't be that hard to tap, especially since most consumers would be willing to pay for reasonable install costs.
This is not fiber to the home. Consumers need capacity to the home, and that is different technology.
This fiber is along the highway, long distance capacity. It costs thousands of dollars to put fiber in the ground. It costs millions of dollars to put those nice OC-192 Terminals and Repeaters on it to make it carry data. The telcos simply don't have the transmission equipment to light it up. You give them the equipment and I'm sure they would be more than happy to light it up and sell the bandwidth.
Why is there is so much unused fiber? It costs the same to put one fiber in the ground as it does to put one hundred fibers in the ground. The cost is in time and digging equipment. So they plan ahead and put lots of fiber in the first time so they don't have to go back and do it again later. It was not planned as capacity at the time it went in, and not budgeted for transmission equipment. It was easy to do it "Just in case."
If they chose to sell the fiber itself, it would have to be to someone who had the budget to light it up (back to those million dollar equipment cabinets). They probably don't get too many buyers for that reason.
Dark fiber does noone any good. It is an asset that is not producing revenue. If there was any way to get money out of it, someone would be doing it. That is good business. (And since when does good business == good economics)
Yes, ASP Sucks.
Yes, People Should be doing new development in something else.
That said, there are a couple of reasons to support.NET on other platforms via mono::
1. There is already some old code out there for.NET (hard to imagine with it being so new).
2. There are plenty of developers who will go ahead and develop in.NET anyway for business reasons or lack of knowledge about other options. That same codebase may not be ported to other platforms by the authors or others, so the only way to get it outside of windows is to move the entire environment out.
Mono makes it possible (or will eventually make it ppssible) to take complete.NET applications and run them on something other than Windows. This will end the Windows Lock-in factor for a lot of one-platform applications.
A Lot of business decisions are based on the application software, not the OS platform. The software is chosen first, then the platform is brought in to support it. By making the platform choice wider, businesses can opt for something other than Windows to support their.NET applications.
The ultimate goal is to simply have all developers develop for something other than windows. But it's a long slow process to change that mindset and technical merit often has an alarmingly low priority in that process.
I'll bet they (HP) specifically want it to apply to Bob's garage.
If all the small PC stores were required to put these requirements and costs in place, they would have a harder time competing with the big boys. This type of law would drive out a lot of the smaller competition. Keep the cost of business up and the barrier to entry high. Keep the smaller competition down and out.
Hmmm. Those are rare. I might have to give that one a try for a change of taste, to see how well done it really is. It sounds sweet. I just hope I won't be bitterly dissapointed.
This is exactly what all those "Just make a cluster of PC, they're cheaper" dweebs don't get.
You can't buy this kind of protection in a PC at any price.
If AMD wants to really take over from Intel, they should add some level of error checking, state save/restore and failure notice to their processors. That would get the attention of lots of hardware manufactureres.
And since Intel is targetting their Itanium at the server world, maybe they should do the same.
Of course all these processors have fairly large and complex states sets. The IBM machines probably have simpler state sets.
Take google for example. Their software flags failed units, brings them offline, and once a week they go pull them out of the racks and replace them.
Pardon my pessimism, but that is not reliability.
So Google can remove broken units and replace them later. But what happens to the work that was happening on that unit when it broke? Someones query gets lost, and they have to submit it again. No loss in googles case.
On the other hand, a Bank could not allow even one transaction to be lost to such a failure.
In the mainframe discussion they talked about how even a running program, even an individual instruction, on a failed unit could be saved, moved and restarted on another unit. You can't do that on a PC.
A web server can be parallelized easily, but database servers are not so lucky. Sure, Oracle, DB2 and others can be run on multiple machines in parallel, but if one of the units goes down, so does its disks. Disk failover is not as seemless as the Mainframe Channel failover.
True seemless failover, down to the instruction, is something that takes a lot of effort. And there are some places where it is vitally important. Web servers are just not that vital.
2^64 is certainly enough for at least a hundred years
In the late 70's, we hit the limit of what 8-bit computing could do. 16-Bit processors were produced.
8 Years later 16 bit processors were hitting their limit. In '86 Intel produced a 32 bit processor.
Now, 16 years later, we will jump from 32 to 64 bit processors.
That should last us for another 32 years, then we'll hit the limit and really have to go with 128 bit. A Quick calc of the needed bits would be the year - 1970. Sure, we may not need 64 whole bits right now. But we do need more than 32. so the next obvious step is to just bump it up to the next power of two and wait it out.
(This is desktop microprocessors of course. High end and mainframe processors have advanced at earlier dates, but about the same intervals.)
In the late 80' (~86) I saw a reference to Tintin in another comic. I don't remember what the comic was.
It wasn't actually Tintin. It was Tintin and co done up American Superhero style. The lead character looked like Duke Nukem, with the little curl of hair on his forehead. He had a big white fighting animal thing with horns. The other characters were similarly buffed. They appeared and made some heroic rescue of the comics title characters (I think they may have died in the rescue, don't remember that well).
It's good to see that the RIAA and MPAA are following sound military procedures. The best way to protect ourselves from those pirates is to physically limit their ability to copy goods rather than wait and see if they actually make illegal copies. It doesn't matter that you aren't actually a pirate or were not intending to copy anything illegally. Just stop before you COULD do anything we don't want.
As a side note, how many innocents lose their rights, or their lives, whenever someone like the USA goes into "We're just here to protect ourselves" mode?
We don't want someone to POSSIBLY hurt Americans, so we will ACTUALLY pre-emptively hurt other people to prevent it. It's only acceptable if WE aren't the people being hurt.
Not that security is not important, but Dubya's war is really a $#!++/ way to do it.
Then it comes down to how the web site gets paid for adds.
If the site gets paid for image impressions, then this is not a problem for anyone except the bandwidth. (and the advertiser.;) )
If the site gets paid for clickthroughs, then you could just as easily modify the browser to automatically click through ads, load all images, and throw away the results.
I have not read any of the Honor Harrington books. I have read and enjoyed the Miles Vorkossigan books (See the Great Buys pair in there? Its paired with War of Honor). Can someone compare these for style and such to give an idea how the series is?
Author Jack Williamson wrote a treatment of this called Terraforming Earth.
In his story, a base was set up on the moon to awaite the destruction of earth (by asteriod or other disaster). Once the disaster happened (in their case, asteroid), the moon base would "wake up", create clones of people, raise them and educate them, then they would return to earth to rebuild.
It's not the greatest read, but it is an interesting concept.
In a year or two, it will be ready for full production.
I should hope so!
My father worked at Bell/Textron where they were developing/building the prototype XV-15, then later XV-22s in the 80s! I occasionally saw them making test flights over Arlington, TX; an Osprey and a few other chase helecopter.
The original design (XV-15) called for fixed props. The Navy wanted rotors (helicopter style) and wanted the rotors to be foldably for carrier storage. All that made it much more complex and expensive. So Bell killed themselves designing all the complexity, along with the expected problems, and they end up with a tainted reputation on an otherwise good design. The old fix prop design would have been much cheaper and easier (and presumably safer) for land based and civilian aviation uses.
I do most of the shopping on the way home, so I don't always have a good list with me.
I'd like to see something that I could use my grocery store ID tag (those annoying keyring tags that they ID and profile you with) to have it remind me of stuff I've purchased before as I walk by it. "Bing. Do you want to get more Parmasan Cheese?", along with a "Do not remind me about this one again" button and a "Thanks for reminding me" button to improve the profile. It could also have a way to feed it a list and have it direct me down the isles to my items.
A search for new items would be nice, but I can't think of a convenient way to enter the search criteria without a keyboard or touch screen. Maybe a kiosk with some kind of link to the carts (again, through the ID tag).
... the special on cable TV (What channel was that anyway?) called "Bond Girls". It was reviews and interviews with most of the women who have played Bond girls over the years.
It was hosted by Maryam d'Abo of The Living Daylights. She went around searching for and interviewing women from Ursula Andress (of Dr. No) through Hally Berry.
It's probably not the show you were looking for (no pr0n here), but it was a good show.
Of all the gadgets I've seen in all the Bond movies, the only one that really grabbed me and made me say "I want THAT!" was the soviet tank he drove through the streets of Moscow. All the rest was tripe or too unbelieveable to even illicit interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen comments here before to the effect that MS actually spends a lot of time compatibility testing a large number of competing software to make sure it does not break. I believe that. It would be very difficult for them to identify and implement a change that would break a single application (mono) while maintaining compatibility with all those others, and even harder to do it in such a way that mono could not be easily fixed and reissued in a matter of days.
I'd bet that MS wishes they had put more such "Windowsisms" into the design before releasing the first draft of .NET just to keep mono at bay. But they didn't see it coming, and it's too late now.
It wouldn't be that hard to tap, especially since most consumers would be willing to pay for reasonable install costs.
This is not fiber to the home. Consumers need capacity to the home, and that is different technology.
This fiber is along the highway, long distance capacity. It costs thousands of dollars to put fiber in the ground. It costs millions of dollars to put those nice OC-192 Terminals and Repeaters on it to make it carry data. The telcos simply don't have the transmission equipment to light it up. You give them the equipment and I'm sure they would be more than happy to light it up and sell the bandwidth.
Why is there is so much unused fiber? It costs the same to put one fiber in the ground as it does to put one hundred fibers in the ground. The cost is in time and digging equipment. So they plan ahead and put lots of fiber in the first time so they don't have to go back and do it again later. It was not planned as capacity at the time it went in, and not budgeted for transmission equipment. It was easy to do it "Just in case."
If they chose to sell the fiber itself, it would have to be to someone who had the budget to light it up (back to those million dollar equipment cabinets). They probably don't get too many buyers for that reason.
Dark fiber does noone any good. It is an asset that is not producing revenue. If there was any way to get money out of it, someone would be doing it. That is good business. (And since when does good business == good economics)
Yes, People Should be doing new development in something else.
That said, there are a couple of reasons to support .NET on other platforms via mono::
.NET (hard to imagine with it being so new).
.NET anyway for business reasons or lack of knowledge about other options. That same codebase may not be ported to other platforms by the authors or others, so the only way to get it outside of windows is to move the entire environment out.
1. There is already some old code out there for
2. There are plenty of developers who will go ahead and develop in
Mono makes it possible (or will eventually make it ppssible) to take complete .NET applications and run them on something other than Windows. This will end the Windows Lock-in factor for a lot of one-platform applications.
A Lot of business decisions are based on the application software, not the OS platform. The software is chosen first, then the platform is brought in to support it. By making the platform choice wider, businesses can opt for something other than Windows to support their .NET applications.
The ultimate goal is to simply have all developers develop for something other than windows. But it's a long slow process to change that mindset and technical merit often has an alarmingly low priority in that process.
And as we are all aware, "Volume discounts" and exclusionary contracts would never enter the picture. It would be completely fair to the small makers.
If all the small PC stores were required to put these requirements and costs in place, they would have a harder time competing with the big boys. This type of law would drive out a lot of the smaller competition. Keep the cost of business up and the barrier to entry high. Keep the smaller competition down and out.
Hmmm. Those are rare. I might have to give that one a try for a change of taste, to see how well done it really is. It sounds sweet. I just hope I won't be bitterly dissapointed.
Well, 'If it aint broke, don't fix it' sure works better than 'If it aint broke, then replace it with something that will'.
You can't buy this kind of protection in a PC at any price.
If AMD wants to really take over from Intel, they should add some level of error checking, state save/restore and failure notice to their processors. That would get the attention of lots of hardware manufactureres.
And since Intel is targetting their Itanium at the server world, maybe they should do the same.
Of course all these processors have fairly large and complex states sets. The IBM machines probably have simpler state sets.
Pardon my pessimism, but that is not reliability.
So Google can remove broken units and replace them later. But what happens to the work that was happening on that unit when it broke? Someones query gets lost, and they have to submit it again. No loss in googles case.
On the other hand, a Bank could not allow even one transaction to be lost to such a failure. In the mainframe discussion they talked about how even a running program, even an individual instruction, on a failed unit could be saved, moved and restarted on another unit. You can't do that on a PC.
A web server can be parallelized easily, but database servers are not so lucky. Sure, Oracle, DB2 and others can be run on multiple machines in parallel, but if one of the units goes down, so does its disks. Disk failover is not as seemless as the Mainframe Channel failover.
True seemless failover, down to the instruction, is something that takes a lot of effort. And there are some places where it is vitally important. Web servers are just not that vital.
.. but he just isn't what I picture when I read about Dr. Susan Calvin.
In the late 70's, we hit the limit of what 8-bit computing could do. 16-Bit processors were produced.
8 Years later 16 bit processors were hitting their limit. In '86 Intel produced a 32 bit processor.
Now, 16 years later, we will jump from 32 to 64 bit processors.
That should last us for another 32 years, then we'll hit the limit and really have to go with 128 bit. A Quick calc of the needed bits would be the year - 1970. Sure, we may not need 64 whole bits right now. But we do need more than 32. so the next obvious step is to just bump it up to the next power of two and wait it out.
(This is desktop microprocessors of course. High end and mainframe processors have advanced at earlier dates, but about the same intervals.)
Junior: "Not A Word."
It wasn't actually Tintin. It was Tintin and co done up American Superhero style. The lead character looked like Duke Nukem, with the little curl of hair on his forehead. He had a big white fighting animal thing with horns. The other characters were similarly buffed. They appeared and made some heroic rescue of the comics title characters (I think they may have died in the rescue, don't remember that well).
Anyone know what that comic was?
"You don't need to know my name and address."
"I don't need to know your name and address."
"You will sell me this battery."
"Seven twenty five Please."
"SEVEN TWENTY FIVE! Are you nuts?"
"I am nuts."
As a side note, how many innocents lose their rights, or their lives, whenever someone like the USA goes into "We're just here to protect ourselves" mode?
We don't want someone to POSSIBLY hurt Americans, so we will ACTUALLY pre-emptively hurt other people to prevent it. It's only acceptable if WE aren't the people being hurt.
Not that security is not important, but Dubya's war is really a $#!++/ way to do it.
If the site gets paid for image impressions, then this is not a problem for anyone except the bandwidth. (and the advertiser. ;) )
If the site gets paid for clickthroughs, then you could just as easily modify the browser to automatically click through ads, load all images, and throw away the results.
Where does it end?
I have not read any of the Honor Harrington books. I have read and enjoyed the Miles Vorkossigan books (See the Great Buys pair in there? Its paired with War of Honor). Can someone compare these for style and such to give an idea how the series is?
In his story, a base was set up on the moon to awaite the destruction of earth (by asteriod or other disaster). Once the disaster happened (in their case, asteroid), the moon base would "wake up", create clones of people, raise them and educate them, then they would return to earth to rebuild. It's not the greatest read, but it is an interesting concept.
OK, Now I've seen everything.
It's Wagontrain to the stars. All they need is big solar sail off one side and it's ready to roll..., I mean sail.
You seem to be a little slow on the uptake....
Or maybe you already knew that and this was just a rhetorical question. How many times is a rhetorical question relevant before it becomes redundant?
I should hope so!
My father worked at Bell/Textron where they were developing/building the prototype XV-15, then later XV-22s in the 80s! I occasionally saw them making test flights over Arlington, TX; an Osprey and a few other chase helecopter.
The original design (XV-15) called for fixed props. The Navy wanted rotors (helicopter style) and wanted the rotors to be foldably for carrier storage. All that made it much more complex and expensive. So Bell killed themselves designing all the complexity, along with the expected problems, and they end up with a tainted reputation on an otherwise good design. The old fix prop design would have been much cheaper and easier (and presumably safer) for land based and civilian aviation uses.
I'd like to see something that I could use my grocery store ID tag (those annoying keyring tags that they ID and profile you with) to have it remind me of stuff I've purchased before as I walk by it. "Bing. Do you want to get more Parmasan Cheese?", along with a "Do not remind me about this one again" button and a "Thanks for reminding me" button to improve the profile. It could also have a way to feed it a list and have it direct me down the isles to my items.
A search for new items would be nice, but I can't think of a convenient way to enter the search criteria without a keyboard or touch screen. Maybe a kiosk with some kind of link to the carts (again, through the ID tag).
Beautiful Joke. Perfect. Wonderful.
HA HA HA HA Ha Ha Ha Ha ha ha ha ha.....
It was hosted by Maryam d'Abo of The Living Daylights. She went around searching for and interviewing women from Ursula Andress (of Dr. No) through Hally Berry.
It's probably not the show you were looking for (no pr0n here), but it was a good show.
Of all the gadgets I've seen in all the Bond movies, the only one that really grabbed me and made me say "I want THAT!" was the soviet tank he drove through the streets of Moscow. All the rest was tripe or too unbelieveable to even illicit interest.