The parent post is utter crud. Is it me, or has the average level of computer science knowledge on/. dropped drastically of late?
Does anyone (else) remember the DEC Firefly - ISTR it was one of the first implementations of Berkeley cache coherency schemes, and came with *five* CPU's. I guess it was PDP-11 or VAX based, probably running RSX-11 or VMS, but conceivably it could have run Ultrix.
Principal performance limitations on SMP are (a) memory bandwidth and (b) kernel threading granularity. Cray had the latter well licked in Unicos before they started going to the wall; 32 processor YMP's and x90's work perfectly well, though the main OS intensive bits in supercomputer apps tend to be I/O.
In the same vein, NEC's SX-5 supercomputers (32 cpus, 128Gb/sec* memory bandwidth) can be clustered, and I think the cluster has some SSI (Single System Image) behaviour.
The SGI/Cray Origin 2K (ccNUMA) is supposed to be single system image, and they ship that in a 128 CPU config, using a 2x2 crossbar to join four 32-cpu racks. Anyone played with one?
I know also that a one-off 128 or 256 proc version of the old Convex S-Class (now HP V-Class / Qdome) was made, I think for CalTech. This would be running SPP-UX I presume, don't know if it's SSI though.
If you think 4Gb RAM and 4 CPUs is a big box, you've spent too long listening to the marketing boys in Redmond.
Youa re incorrect to say that a national level sales tax is unworkable - this is what most countries who levy a sales tax have (c.f. VAT in the UK).
As it is, the US has this quaint system whereby sales tax is split over something like 7,000 geographical areas, each with different scope and rates for it. There is a whole little software industry in the US devoted to generating sales tax calculation software beacuse it is so complex a problem.
You seem to have a few facts out of line - car registration tax here is $70-odd for a year - hardly excessive. The standard of road maintenance is just as poor as in most of the USA.
What Texas does have is high sales and property taxes. They always get you one way or another........
I guess this crackdown is going to be really effective, like the current police / FBI efforts against drugs.
In this case, IIRC the kid wasn't making money off it, but in general profit from piracy outweighs the rewards. In most small computer stores in European countries you can buy a beautiful shrinkwrapped copy of Office 97 for 1/3 to 1/2 of Microsoft's price, complete with a unique license number which MS will provide phone support against - and it's a pirate copy, of course.
This sort of business is worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and like the drug industry the only way to prevent it will be to make it unprofitable.
The solution to both problems is obvious - legalise soft drugs, and ship PC's with Linux preloaded:-)
If like most of us you have a machine with finite resources (memory, swap space, kernel PID's, whatever) then it is possible to come up with a situation where you run out of them. Handling all possible situations of this kind is not a core responsibility of the kernel, working well in more common situations is.
It is impossible to guarantee to defend against all possible DoS attacks while maintaining service to legitimate users (for the CS grads - Decidability, Halting Problem)
In a real situation, web servers sit behind firewalls.
If you're hoping to avoid lining Microsoft's pocket, think again...if you check you'll find that the price difference between Linux and NT models is the same as the price difference between NT and Win98 OEM's, and you'll still be paying Bill his $25 or so. This is written into Dell's deal with MS and they're not going to eat it for your benefit.
Does anyone know for sure if Dell's Linux desktops actually ship with RH only, or with a LILO dual boot setup and Win98?
Have you ever read one of those articles in the PC magazines (they appear every few months) where they go through the "let's give Linux a try" bit.
They all spend half the article bitching that to run Linux you have to partition the hard disc, ignoring that fact that the work is predicated on the fact that (a) Windows is already there and (b) you actually want to keep it. The reverse applies if you have a pre-existing Linux install and add Windows.
For the average non-techie, installing RH or SuSe (predicating Linux supported hardware) is a lot easier these days than installing Windows, it's just that they never have to install Windows.
These preloaded machines will go long way to dispelling this urban legend in the minds of the masses.
I thought the standard Microsoft monopoly contract stated that vendors have to *pay* Microsoft for a Win9x license for every machine shipped even if it goes out the door with something else on it.
Get the book The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks - the one in the brown cover with La Brea tar pits on the front. This timeless classic offers pragmatic advice about how to organise a software development project, and is excellent refutation for the now all too common PHB school of thought that project management consists of using MS-Project to produce a ton of Gantt charts.
The book is based on the author's experience of running the (world's) first operating system development project at IBM. It has a few things to say about documentation which may surprise you.
The computer industry is somewhat unique in the fact that even now, the majority of people providing professional services in it are amateurs without formal tertiary education in the field (by this I mean a degree in Computer Science).
When was the last time you saw a building site where the site engineer didn't have a Civil Engineering degree, or drove a car whose chassis wasn't designed by qualified mechanical engineer, or had surgery from an amateur physician?
I have heard nasty rumours for a while now that Microsoft has plans to rope in some of the second tier educational establishments (technical colleges etc.) to offer extended versions of MCSE as two year courses in "Microsoftology" for what would (in the USA) be an Associates degree.
I can see the PHB community eating this up.
As someone who has previously been involved in teaching proper academic courses in computer science and related fields, I am apalled that any educator would take such a thing seriously, but I expect to see it become reality nonetheless.
Perhaps in the USA this is not such a strange concept - you can apparently get a degree in "Hamburger Technology" (i.e. being a McDonald's franchisee) from one of the universities in southern Florida. Then again you can also get a degree by mail order for three easy payments of $29.95 plus S&H from a number of places.
As far as the present MCSE goes (or for that matter a Unix sysadmin course), I have worked as a full time sysadmin, I have never been on one of these, and didn't ever feel the need. I have friends who work as NT sysadmins, and even MCSE tutors, and they universally regard MCSE as a vacuous qualification. To extend the construction industry analogy, sitting a high school leaver down for a couple of weeks and teaching them how to use one particular CAD package does not make them an architect.
At best, all that MCSE tells you is that someone has seen NT before and knows which buttons Microsft recommend that you push in normal situations. It does not make them the sort of person you can rely on to get your network up and running at 8pm on a Sunday night when you have 1000 telesales staff coming on shift at 7am the next day. If you hire a sysadmin whose sole frame of reference for the technology they are supposed to work with is one of these little MCSE-like courses, well, you will get what you pay for.
Just my UKL0.02p worth
Dave BA (Hons), MA, Ph.D
alas no MCSE or RHCLE(sp?):-)
GUI network from Windoze - Re:clarification
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CrackThisBox Updates
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Actually, I heard a rumor that W2K server comes with WinFrame / MetaFrame bundled (can anyone confirm / deny?)
There is a native Linux client, or you can get add-ons that run the "client" on the server side and have it pump out X11.
Anyone out there who has to deploy NT in a mostly *nix environment just so people can run Turd and Excel should give this technology a look. Far less hassle than having hundreds of instances of NT Workstation to babysit.
There are a handful of people in the US who receive every month in the mail a big biscuit tin with 300 machine rolled reefers, supplied by Uncle Sam. They are all sufferers of terminal ailments like cancer and Parkinson's disease, and it's a research program about the medical benefits of cannabis. The goodies are grown on a research station in one of those midwest states beginning with M.
I don't know the details, but this is not an urban legend, this is real - it is frequently cited in pro-legalisation discussions, and the process is shown by UK documentaries on the issue.
I'm sure a quick sweep of the pro-legalisation web sites will turn up info about it.
Presumably this restriction only applies to those in the jurisdiction of the land of the not so free? Now that.com is no longer under the sole control of Network Solutions, are there any registries outside the USA? If not, does the law apply to registries or just to the squatters? Just a thought "We the People(TM), in order to form a more profitable union, promote commerce, corporates and lobbying groups, provide for the conglomerate defence...."
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre had a group several years ago working on this problem using big iron hardware - they have now downsized their software from MPP's to workstations and PC's, and it's being flogged by a commercial company called Quadstone Last time I saw a demo of Paramics (c. 1996) it was doing the whole of central and suburban Edinburgh (inside the A720) in close to realtime on a then state of the art SGI workstation, and they had just put in modelling for different nationalities' driver tempraments.
I agree with the sentiment - restricting IPO's to "established" people should be made unconstitutional. This is becoming more of a hairy issue with these days of internet hype, where perceived "internet" stocks trade at multiples of thousands (and even negative thousands) and where suitably hyped IPOs often realise a 400% or more rise in the first hours of trading.
The implications in the comments are, however, totally misleading.
The practice of buying IPO shares and selling them the same day for quick profit is known as "flipping" and that is the one thing the underwriter is seeking desparately to avoid. If this was widespread, the IPO would nosedive, wiping untold millions off the market cap of the newly floated company, possibly causing its demise. Not really a success for the underwriter.
If you monitor the IPO live, you'll probably see that it takes a few hours before the first shares are sold and bought on NASDAQ, and the volumes will be tiny - these shares will only be traded in order to establish the price, which will fluctuate wildly throughout the day.
In theory, the purpose of the IPO eligibility selection is to filter out people likely to flip the stock. Anyone who has a reputation ofr it is highly unlikely to be approved.
Large institutional investors want to hold the stock for a decent period (6 months +) and see it flourish for capital growth.
You miss the point... to the unknowing world at large, every website (and that is all a domain name is to them) starts with http://www. and ends with.com - I had the hardest time explaining to a relatively techno savvy lawyer friend why they didn't make better use of namespace by having prefixes other than http for website URI's
The already proposed new TLD's (.shop etc.) may as well not be created either.
As far as corporate bullies having over the little guy, isn't this supposed to be the land of the free, where anyone can aspire to be president (so long as they are over 30, a natural born citizen, oh and white, rich, male, straight, married, christian, right wing,.....)
Democracy? ROFL. Relax guys. In Scotland we invented democracy for the little guy (well, country) and declarations of independence 370 years before you did, and we still have some rights of the upper classes enshrined in law;-)
The author has got to the crux of the matter - the sole reason to buy Windows is to run Office. Office is what makes Microsoft its billions, not NT or Wing Commander. And the only reason to run Office is because everyone else does, and ignorant people send you email in Office formats instead of "standard" ones.
The point of the browser war is the issue of "portalising" surfers, and Microsoft has a valid claim that the AOL/Netscape alliance has a big captive market there too. The DoJ could lose that one on those grounds.
What had Microsoft running scared to cause them to pour so much effort into IE was the vision of the future where "the browser is the computer" - if you have web-based word processing, what place for Office? They've certainly covered their rear well for this risk, with WinCE and WebTV looking after the other potential competitors.
And yes, I too hate that fscking paperclip, and all of Word's other wonderful design flaws - try deleting ACTORS.DLL, it doesn't seem to impact the small, useful subset of Word's features.
I have a bit of experience running Linux as a supported desktop OS in a work environment, but for now it's just for personal use.
I recently bought a new PeeCee for home, deliberately choosing a Linux vendor to avoid paying for a DVD (don't want), a modem (don't need) and MS-Tax (maybe a bit of religion there). The machine came preloaded with RH6 and bundled with the $80 boxed set.
I also installed it for dual boot on my work computer, an IBM Thinkpad 770, on which it ran out of the box, supporting X, PCMCIA, modem, ethernet etc. with no extra drivers and no messing. The only change was to lilo.conf, as 2.2 still doesn't autodetect its memory size. A steady improvement on RH5.2 which required minor tweaks - nice. The laptop has never crashed under Linux.
By contrast, I have invested around 24 hours in the last 8 weeks trying to get a stable setup of NT4 SP4 (an OS officially supported by IBM) on the same laptop. On two occasions, the accursed registry has been blown away by the official procedure for installing MS products and then reinstalling patches (oops, I meant the service pack). Purported ase of installation is the biggest advantage cited for Windows by the sheep, it's nice to see that tide turning.
Now to the RH6 system itself. Nice OS improvements, not all Red Hat's to be sure. It's becoming more like a mature Unix. The OK things appear to be mimicking the same feature in HP-UX. Performance of the whole rig is blistering on my modest desktop machine (Pentium 2, 128Mb, ATA disk).
Gnome+Enlightenment is lovely - this is my first real chance to play with it. Something like Gnome is necessary for market penetration to non-techie users. I only have one minor gripe with it - I would like to be able to do a single click (preferably button1) on the buttons in the pager which would transfer focus to a window AND raise it, while not having autoraise on, and can't find a config setting to do this.
The separation of Enlightenment from Gnome has a few wrinkles - two backdrop setups, and it's easy to end up in a situation where it won't save menu changes.
KDE is equally promising on ease of use - my *mother* uses it (with SuSe 5.3)
The demo of Applixware on the RH6 apps CD doesn't work due to a corrupt rpm - that could have been caught in pre production, but was promptly sorted (pointer to a download) by RH and Applix tech support.
The only significant problems I have had have been caused by the 20Mb+ monster that is the only supported mainstream browser on Linux. Out of the box, it crashed every tiem the Java VM started (because it was missing fonts!!) - a known errata on RedHat's page and trivial to fix. Try do do a text search on a 100K+ page and it locks the whole X server for several seconds - not clever. I keep hoping Netscape will see the light - the point of a free browser is to portalise users, and at the moment Microsoft is leaving them a free run at 10 million+ desktops (Linux, FreeBSD, most commercial Unixes) - surely worth a little more effort? Even the little things still missing from X11 Netscape bug me, e.g. why can't we have a scrolling chooser, like in Windows? In this day in age when web site designers assume everyone has one and put 100+ items on a single menu, the "More.." doesn't cut it.
The big problem with RH6 for ease of use from a beginner's point of view is still the lack of easy install apps - everyone out there is still supplying tarballs, or at best a cheesy script. The lack of initiative is no doubt partly due to having to support many distributions. It's the same in the commrecial Unix world (e.g. few if any non-Sun commercial Solaris apps use pkgadd), but where there is sysadmin support, this is not such an issue.
What I would like to see is enough standardisation so that apps would come with point and click install which would set up window manager menus, etc. I wonder how tractable it would be to write a tool akin to InstallShield which would support most of the common distro's and WM's?
My new employer lives on Notes, and it is truly very overrated. The replication trick is very nice, but as a whole the thing is slow, and the UI is very poor and counterintuitive - in mail, "Reply with History" and "Reply to All" only moved to the same *screen* with the latest R5 release.
The R5 client is a memory hog, it space leaks and more than occasionally takes down my 96Mb Nt machine with death by swap.
The Domino web UI is also nothing to write home about - the latest mail incarnation is pitiful compared to something like Yahoo. For all practical purposes, it is unusable. Submitting expense reports in Notes is hard enough, I wouldn't dream of trying to do it via Domino web. Now they even provide a (buggy) applet so you can compose on the web in all those cutesy fonts. Wake up Lotus - applets are on the way out, and non ASCII mail is a flawed concept in a world with Internet access.
In spite of this, I wish it was Notes and not Domino they were porting, as it is one of the few things that means my Thinkpad has to run NT most of the day.:( Also, it is Notes that would add to Linux credibility on the desktop - it is already established in the back shop.
Another thing to remember is that Lotus is no longer the darling of the PHB's - they are all drinking at the fountain of truth in Redmond nowadays, and buying Exchange. Sure, it doesn't do half of what Notes can do, but it's from Redmond and that's all that matters nowadays.
After much research around here (Austin TX) into cable modems vs ADSL I just got a cable modem from TWC. On the up side, ADSL here is from JumpNet who don't care what you run, offer static IPs for a sane price, etc. They only care about bandwidth. I mentioned Linux and they even knew what it was:)
TWC's RoadRunner requires a "login" using a TCP client (warning bells) but there are valid reasons: they use it to allow you to limit access e.g. to the kiddies, and without it I'm not sure how they would stop somebody from connecting a "rogue" cable modem - I think the modems have MAC addresses but I don't know if TWC's software tracks them.
I dealt with them honestly - I told them I was running Linux, and that I would not be running a server but would be running at least a dozen TCP daemons. They were quite happy.:)
The irony is that Linux is actually better supported on RoadRunner than Windows - I have a couple of friends who had it set up by TWC techies on Windoze (complete with trashing their copy of Netscape and installing IE4 with the "e" replaced with a birdie) who had a good bit of hassle, while I installed mine myself in about 10 minutes flat (including compiling rrlogind). The rrlogind kit is totally slick, only thing it didn't do was make init.d files.
One advantage of TWC (if you want to run the odd httpd or whatever) is that they are using packaged technology that they don't understand - in this case their Unix and TCP/IP ignorance acts in your favour.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent post is utter crud. Is it me, or has the average level of computer science knowledge on /. dropped drastically of late?
Does anyone (else) remember the DEC Firefly - ISTR it was one of the first implementations of Berkeley cache coherency schemes, and came with *five* CPU's. I guess it was PDP-11 or VAX based, probably running RSX-11 or VMS, but conceivably it could have run Ultrix.
Principal performance limitations on SMP are (a) memory bandwidth and (b) kernel threading granularity. Cray had the latter well licked in Unicos before they started going to the wall; 32 processor YMP's and x90's work perfectly well, though the main OS intensive bits in supercomputer apps tend to be I/O.
In the same vein, NEC's SX-5 supercomputers (32 cpus, 128Gb/sec* memory bandwidth) can be clustered, and I think the cluster has some SSI (Single System Image) behaviour.
The SGI/Cray Origin 2K (ccNUMA) is supposed to be single system image, and they ship that in a 128 CPU config, using a 2x2 crossbar to join four 32-cpu racks. Anyone played with one?
I know also that a one-off 128 or 256 proc version of the old Convex S-Class (now HP V-Class / Qdome) was made, I think for CalTech. This would be running SPP-UX I presume, don't know if it's SSI though.
If you think 4Gb RAM and 4 CPUs is a big box, you've spent too long listening to the marketing boys in Redmond.
Dave
* yes, Gigabytes per second, it's not a misprint
Youa re incorrect to say that a national level sales tax is unworkable - this is what most countries who levy a sales tax have (c.f. VAT in the UK).
As it is, the US has this quaint system whereby sales tax is split over something like 7,000 geographical areas, each with different scope and rates for it. There is a whole little software industry in the US devoted to generating sales tax calculation software beacuse it is so complex a problem.
You seem to have a few facts out of line - car registration tax here is $70-odd for a year - hardly excessive. The standard of road maintenance is just as poor as in most of the USA.
What Texas does have is high sales and property taxes. They always get you one way or another........
I guess this crackdown is going to be really effective, like the current police / FBI efforts against drugs.
:-)
In this case, IIRC the kid wasn't making money off it, but in general profit from piracy outweighs the rewards. In most small computer stores in European countries you can buy a beautiful shrinkwrapped copy of Office 97 for 1/3 to 1/2 of Microsoft's price, complete with a unique license number which MS will provide phone support against - and it's a pirate copy, of course.
This sort of business is worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and like the drug industry the only way to prevent it will be to make it unprofitable.
The solution to both problems is obvious - legalise soft drugs, and ship PC's with Linux preloaded
Dave
If like most of us you have a machine with finite resources (memory, swap space, kernel PID's, whatever) then it is possible to come up with a situation where you run out of them. Handling all possible situations of this kind is not a core responsibility of the kernel, working well in more common situations is.
It is impossible to guarantee to defend against all possible DoS attacks while maintaining service to legitimate users (for the CS grads - Decidability, Halting Problem)
In a real situation, web servers sit behind firewalls.
Dave
With stuff of this volume and scale, biological factors like mutation and entropy come into play.
How long before one of these things takes a freaky and turns the entire biosphere into copies of itself?
I thought someone in RH's employ (at risk of naming names, someone based in Edinburgh) was writing a journalling add-on for ext2/ext3 ?
If you're hoping to avoid lining Microsoft's pocket, think again...if you check you'll find that the price difference between Linux and NT models is the same as the price difference between NT and Win98 OEM's, and you'll still be paying Bill his $25 or so. This is written into Dell's deal with MS and they're not going to eat it for your benefit.
Does anyone know for sure if Dell's Linux desktops actually ship with RH only, or with a LILO dual boot setup and Win98?
Have you ever read one of those articles in the PC magazines (they appear every few months) where they go through the "let's give Linux a try" bit.
They all spend half the article bitching that to run Linux you have to partition the hard disc, ignoring that fact that the work is predicated on the fact that (a) Windows is already there and (b) you actually want to keep it. The reverse applies if you have a pre-existing Linux install and add Windows.
For the average non-techie, installing RH or SuSe (predicating Linux supported hardware) is a lot easier these days than installing Windows, it's just that they never have to install Windows.
These preloaded machines will go long way to dispelling this urban legend in the minds of the masses.
I thought the standard Microsoft monopoly contract stated that vendors have to *pay* Microsoft for a Win9x license for every machine shipped even if it goes out the door with something else on it.
Has anyone here done a reclaim against Dell?
Dave
Get the book The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks - the one in the brown cover with La Brea tar pits on the front. This timeless classic offers pragmatic advice about how to organise a software development project, and is excellent refutation for the now all too common PHB school of thought that project management consists of using MS-Project to produce a ton of Gantt charts.
The book is based on the author's experience of running the (world's) first operating system development project at IBM. It has a few things to say about documentation which may surprise you.
Hey, it's up (Mon 0:00 CST)
The computer industry is somewhat unique in the fact that even now, the majority of people providing professional services in it are amateurs without formal tertiary education in the field (by this I mean a degree in Computer Science).
:-)
When was the last time you saw a building site where the site engineer didn't have a Civil Engineering degree, or drove a car whose chassis wasn't designed by qualified mechanical engineer, or had surgery from an amateur physician?
I have heard nasty rumours for a while now that Microsoft has plans to rope in some of the second tier educational establishments (technical colleges etc.) to offer extended versions of MCSE as two year courses in "Microsoftology" for what would (in the USA) be an Associates degree.
I can see the PHB community eating this up.
As someone who has previously been involved in teaching proper academic courses in computer science and related fields, I am apalled that any educator would take such a thing seriously, but I expect to see it become reality nonetheless.
Perhaps in the USA this is not such a strange concept - you can apparently get a degree in "Hamburger Technology" (i.e. being a McDonald's franchisee) from one of the universities in southern Florida. Then again you can also get a degree by mail order for three easy payments of $29.95 plus S&H from a number of places.
As far as the present MCSE goes (or for that matter a Unix sysadmin course), I have worked as a full time sysadmin, I have never been on one of these, and didn't ever feel the need. I have friends who work as NT sysadmins, and even MCSE tutors, and they universally regard MCSE as a vacuous qualification. To extend the construction industry analogy, sitting a high school leaver down for a couple of weeks and teaching them how to use one particular CAD package does not make them an architect.
At best, all that MCSE tells you is that someone has seen NT before and knows which buttons Microsft recommend that you push in normal situations. It does not make them the sort of person you can rely on to get your network up and running at 8pm on a Sunday night when you have 1000 telesales staff coming on shift at 7am the next day. If you hire a sysadmin whose sole frame of reference for the technology they are supposed to work with is one of these little MCSE-like courses, well, you will get what you pay for.
Just my UKL0.02p worth
Dave
BA (Hons), MA, Ph.D
alas no MCSE or RHCLE(sp?)
Actually, I heard a rumor that W2K server comes with WinFrame / MetaFrame bundled (can anyone confirm / deny?)
There is a native Linux client, or you can get add-ons that run the "client" on the server side and have it pump out X11.
Anyone out there who has to deploy NT in a mostly *nix environment just so people can run Turd and Excel should give this technology a look. Far less hassle than having hundreds of instances of NT Workstation to babysit.
There are a handful of people in the US who receive every month in the mail a big biscuit tin with 300 machine rolled reefers, supplied by Uncle Sam. They are all sufferers of terminal ailments like cancer and Parkinson's disease, and it's a research program about the medical benefits of cannabis. The goodies are grown on a research station in one of those midwest states beginning with M.
I don't know the details, but this is not an urban legend, this is real - it is frequently cited in pro-legalisation discussions, and the process is shown by UK documentaries on the issue.
I'm sure a quick sweep of the pro-legalisation web sites will turn up info about it.
Presumably this restriction only applies to those in the jurisdiction of the land of the not so free? Now that .com is no longer under the sole control of Network Solutions, are there any registries outside the USA? If not, does the law apply to registries or just to the squatters? Just a thought "We the People(TM), in order to form a more profitable union, promote commerce, corporates and lobbying groups, provide for the conglomerate defence ...."
Well, what did you expect? ;-)
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre had a group several years ago working on this problem using big iron hardware - they have now downsized their software from MPP's to workstations and PC's, and it's being flogged by a commercial company called Quadstone Last time I saw a demo of Paramics (c. 1996) it was doing the whole of central and suburban Edinburgh (inside the A720) in close to realtime on a then state of the art SGI workstation, and they had just put in modelling for different nationalities' driver tempraments.
I agree with the sentiment - restricting IPO's to "established" people should be made unconstitutional. This is becoming more of a hairy issue with these days of internet hype, where perceived "internet" stocks trade at multiples of thousands (and even negative thousands) and where suitably hyped IPOs often realise a 400% or more rise in the first hours of trading.
;-)
The implications in the comments are, however, totally misleading.
The practice of buying IPO shares and selling them the same day for quick profit is known as "flipping" and that is the one thing the underwriter is seeking desparately to avoid. If this was widespread, the IPO would nosedive, wiping untold millions off the market cap of the newly floated company, possibly causing its demise. Not really a success for the underwriter.
If you monitor the IPO live, you'll probably see that it takes a few hours before the first shares are sold and bought on NASDAQ, and the volumes will be tiny - these shares will only be traded in order to establish the price, which will fluctuate wildly throughout the day.
In theory, the purpose of the IPO eligibility selection is to filter out people likely to flip the stock. Anyone who has a reputation ofr it is highly unlikely to be approved.
Large institutional investors want to hold the stock for a decent period (6 months +) and see it flourish for capital growth.
Eek! Capatalism on Slashdot..........
You miss the point... to the unknowing world at large, every website (and that is all a domain name is to them) starts with http://www. and ends with .com - I had the hardest time explaining to a relatively techno savvy lawyer friend why they didn't make better use of namespace by having prefixes other than http for website URI's
.....)
;-)
The already proposed new TLD's (.shop etc.) may as well not be created either.
As far as corporate bullies having over the little guy, isn't this supposed to be the land of the free, where anyone can aspire to be president (so long as they are over 30, a natural born citizen, oh and white, rich, male, straight, married, christian, right wing,
Democracy? ROFL. Relax guys. In Scotland we invented democracy for the little guy (well, country) and declarations of independence 370 years before you did, and we still have some rights of the upper classes enshrined in law
The author has got to the crux of the matter - the sole reason to buy Windows is to run Office. Office is what makes Microsoft its billions, not NT or Wing Commander. And the only reason to run Office is because everyone else does, and ignorant people send you email in Office formats instead of "standard" ones.
The point of the browser war is the issue of "portalising" surfers, and Microsoft has a valid claim that the AOL/Netscape alliance has a big captive market there too. The DoJ could lose that one on those grounds.
What had Microsoft running scared to cause them to pour so much effort into IE was the vision of the future where "the browser is the computer" - if you have web-based word processing, what place for Office? They've certainly covered their rear well for this risk, with WinCE and WebTV looking after the other potential competitors.
And yes, I too hate that fscking paperclip, and all of Word's other wonderful design flaws - try deleting ACTORS.DLL, it doesn't seem to impact the small, useful subset of Word's features.
Yet Another Anecdotal Data Point
.." doesn't cut it.
I have a bit of experience running Linux as a supported desktop OS in a work environment, but for now it's just for personal use.
I recently bought a new PeeCee for home, deliberately choosing a Linux vendor to avoid paying for a DVD (don't want), a modem (don't need) and MS-Tax (maybe a bit of religion there). The machine came preloaded with RH6 and bundled with the $80 boxed set.
I also installed it for dual boot on my work computer, an IBM Thinkpad 770, on which it ran out of the box, supporting X, PCMCIA, modem, ethernet etc. with no extra drivers and no messing. The only change was to lilo.conf, as 2.2 still doesn't autodetect its memory size. A steady improvement on RH5.2 which required minor tweaks - nice. The laptop has never crashed under Linux.
By contrast, I have invested around 24 hours in the last 8 weeks trying to get a stable setup of NT4 SP4 (an OS officially supported by IBM) on the same laptop. On two occasions, the accursed registry has been blown away by the official procedure for installing MS products and then reinstalling patches (oops, I meant the service pack). Purported ase of installation is the biggest advantage cited for Windows by the sheep, it's nice to see that tide turning.
Now to the RH6 system itself. Nice OS improvements, not all Red Hat's to be sure. It's becoming more like a mature Unix. The OK things appear to be mimicking the same feature in HP-UX. Performance of the whole rig is blistering on my modest desktop machine (Pentium 2, 128Mb, ATA disk).
Gnome+Enlightenment is lovely - this is my first real chance to play with it. Something like Gnome is necessary for market penetration to non-techie users. I only have one minor gripe with it - I would like to be able to do a single click (preferably button1) on the buttons in the pager which would transfer focus to a window AND raise it, while not having autoraise on, and can't find a config setting to do this.
The separation of Enlightenment from Gnome has a few wrinkles - two backdrop setups, and it's easy
to end up in a situation where it won't save menu changes.
KDE is equally promising on ease of use - my *mother* uses it (with SuSe 5.3)
The demo of Applixware on the RH6 apps CD doesn't work due to a corrupt rpm - that could have been caught in pre production, but was promptly sorted (pointer to a download) by RH and Applix tech support.
The only significant problems I have had have been caused by the 20Mb+ monster that is the only supported mainstream browser on Linux. Out of the box, it crashed every tiem the Java VM started (because it was missing fonts!!) - a known errata on RedHat's page and trivial to fix. Try do do a text search on a 100K+ page and it locks the whole X server for several seconds - not clever. I keep hoping Netscape will see the light - the point of a free browser is to portalise users, and at the moment Microsoft is leaving them a free run at 10 million+ desktops (Linux, FreeBSD, most commercial Unixes) - surely worth a little more effort?
Even the little things still missing from X11 Netscape bug me, e.g. why can't we have a scrolling chooser, like in Windows? In this day in age when web site designers assume everyone has one and put 100+ items on a single menu, the "More
The big problem with RH6 for ease of use from a beginner's point of view is still the lack of easy install apps - everyone out there is still supplying tarballs, or at best a cheesy script. The lack of initiative is no doubt partly due to having to support many distributions. It's the same in the commrecial Unix world (e.g. few if any non-Sun commercial Solaris apps use pkgadd), but where there is sysadmin support, this is not such an issue.
What I would like to see is enough standardisation so that apps would come with point and click install which would set up window manager menus, etc. I wonder how tractable it would be to write a tool akin to InstallShield which would support most of the common distro's and WM's?
All the recent wibble on E-Bay's site is about CGI servers and problems thereof - are these not running on En-Tee ?
My new employer lives on Notes, and it is truly very overrated. The replication trick is very nice, but as a whole the thing is slow, and the UI is very poor and counterintuitive - in mail, "Reply with History" and "Reply to All" only moved to the same *screen* with the latest R5 release.
:( Also, it is Notes that would add to Linux credibility on the desktop - it is already established in the back shop.
The R5 client is a memory hog, it space leaks and more than occasionally takes down my 96Mb Nt machine with death by swap.
The Domino web UI is also nothing to write home about - the latest mail incarnation is pitiful compared to something like Yahoo. For all practical purposes, it is unusable. Submitting expense reports in Notes is hard enough, I wouldn't dream of trying to do it via Domino web.
Now they even provide a (buggy) applet so you can compose on the web in all those cutesy fonts. Wake up Lotus - applets are on the way out, and non ASCII mail is a flawed concept in a world with Internet access.
In spite of this, I wish it was Notes and not Domino they were porting, as it is one of the few things that means my Thinkpad has to run NT most of the day.
Another thing to remember is that Lotus is no longer the darling of the PHB's - they are all drinking at the fountain of truth in Redmond nowadays, and buying Exchange. Sure, it doesn't do half of what Notes can do, but it's from Redmond and that's all that matters nowadays.
After much research around here (Austin TX) into cable modems vs ADSL I just got a cable modem from TWC. On the up side, ADSL here is from JumpNet who don't care what you run, offer static IPs for a sane price, etc. They only care about bandwidth. I mentioned Linux and they even knew what it was :)
:)
TWC's RoadRunner requires a "login" using a TCP client (warning bells) but there are valid reasons: they use it to allow you to limit access e.g. to the kiddies, and without it I'm not sure how they would stop somebody from connecting a "rogue" cable modem - I think the modems have MAC addresses but I don't know if TWC's software tracks them.
I dealt with them honestly - I told them I was running Linux, and that I would not be running a server but would be running at least a dozen TCP daemons. They were quite happy.
The irony is that Linux is actually better supported on RoadRunner than Windows - I have a couple of friends who had it set up by TWC techies on Windoze (complete with trashing their copy of Netscape and installing IE4 with the "e" replaced with a birdie) who had a good bit of hassle, while I installed mine myself in about 10 minutes flat (including compiling rrlogind). The rrlogind kit is totally slick, only thing it didn't do was make init.d files.
One advantage of TWC (if you want to run the odd httpd or whatever) is that they are using packaged technology that they don't understand - in this case their Unix and TCP/IP ignorance acts in your favour.