Gee, Microsoft is putting new features into Windows that could extend their dominance into servers and e-commerce?
Who'd a thunk it!
OF COURSE, they're adding features and trying to dominate the server market (as if they don't already!). That's what companies do when they want to keep growing, Microsoft and all the rest! Despite my personal feelings about Microsoft (which aren't generally too positive) this smacks of the often clueless EU trying to stop a company from doing what it's supposed to do. Gawd! And I thought the US government was clueless and pathetic - the EU makes us look brilliant in comparison!
Does Mario Monti really think that they really have the ability to stop Windows 2000 from shipping as is, or that they can somehow hamstring it enough to suddenly jump-start a European competotor (don't kid yourself, this is what he's really after)? Wrong. Anti-trust in general is one thing, but this is stupid. Windows 2000 may well suck on it's own merits (though the Professional version is pretty nice, actually), but if NT 4 is legal (and it most likely is), then so is Windows 2000. Microsoft has plenty of problems ahead of it without this kind of stupidity.
If I were in Ballmer's shoes, I'd give serious thought to just saying "screw the Euros, I'll shut down my local offices over there and pull out of the market and see how fast they cave. Since the rest of the world is still going to be using all our software I'll show those buggers who's in charge here".
Of course, that's why I'm writing a/. comment instead of actually being in Ballmer's shoes...
Have you found an Athlon motherboard that runs the RAM at 133 MHz? I can't find one anywhere.
Not yet - but I plan to slap a serious cooler on it and do some overclocking. I have the Asus K7M board, which has support for higher bus speeds. So PC133 doesn't cost much more (about $10 for a 128 MB stick), and has a higher margin of tolerance.
I'm looking forward to the VIA chipset for Athlon (the Asus uses the AMD Northbridge, with a VIA Southbridge - the other current vendors use the full AMD chipset), as it should drive prices down and support PC133 RAM explicitly. But hey - I didn't want to wait. I can always build another Athlon system later on to run Linux on (my current one is my Win98 gaming PC and my Linux desktop is a PII-350).
Of course, I only paid $240 for my Athlon 600 processor, so I don't feel too deprived.
To the people wondering just how a system with only a 200 MHz bus (and PC100 RAM, at that) can be useful at 1.1 GHz:
First of all, if you're dropping the kind of change on one of these that is appropriate, you'll have more than a puny 64MB of RAM. It's liklier that you'll have at least 128 MB or probably 256 MB+. So you won't have a huge problem with disk thrashing. Just make sure if you were to use one of these beasts that the rest of the system is up to the task. That means a fast ATA or Ultra SCSI disk, a fast 3D card (don't be using no Rage Pro!), and the best memory that the system spec works with. I use all PC-133 nowadays.
On the other side of this is the processor itself. On-die cache (Celerons, CuMine PIII processors) is much faster than the variety that is mounted on the PCB (older PII and III and current Athlons). It can run at full processor clock instead of, say, 1/2 clock or 2/5 clock. Because of this speed advantage, less of it goes a long way. Older PII and PIII designs used 512k of on-board cache, which is replaced by 256k of on-die in the CuMines (128k in the Celery). With a big, fast L2 cache a lot of your instructions are fetched from cache and executed much faster - and of course a big L1 cache helps, too. Also, SDRAM does a better job of feeding data in bursts than older EDO and FP RAM did. But RAM technology is becoming the bottleneck lately. Rambus and DDR SDRAM is supposed to help, but DDR isn't really there yet, and Rambus has been a fiasco to date and the yields are allegedly horrible.
Ultimately, on-die cache allows the cache to run at either full CPU speed or a high divisor of it. PCB cache is more constrained. But faster processors will always make a difference no matter what - it's just that after you outrun the rest of the system it's a matter of diminishing returns. An Athlon 1000 is not necessarily exactly twice as fast as an Athlon 500 - but it's still wicked fast!
The whole idea behind editorial independence is that advertising and editorial are unrelated. So I'm not worried about Rob and Jeff suddenly becoming VA 'stooges' - I trust them to keep the site's content on target and fair. I expect they will show bias towards some stories, that's inevitable with humans deciding what gets posted. But I think that the bias will be the same personal bias they have already (Rob'll post anything about Pete Townshend, for instance - and Jeff is a nano nut. And expect more AIBO stuff).
Advertising is a different case, but if VA wants revenue they'll take ads from all comers, including Copyleft and Penguin Computing. Because if they only take ads from VA and ThinkGeek, they're not affecting what we read per se, or the editorial side of Slashdot at all. They're only affecting the ad sales folks, and VA's overall revenue. Remember, they serve ads at semi-random, with Adfu (last time I checked). Unlike the dead tree publications, there asn't really any association of ads with stories. If I load the same page twice, I'll get two different ads. If I open up PC Week to the same page twice, I get the same Microsoft ad each time.
Think about it, folks - it really just means more money for VA if they take ads from all comers, and less if they don't. But that's not Slashdot's problem until and unless Rob and Jeff leave (and even then it may not be an issue) - and then some Slashdot clone'll pop up and take their place immediately if Slashdot itself goes down the chute.
SDMI devices are coming to market, and MP3-based devices are already out there. The one thing we all need to keep in mind here is that MP3 already is the de facto standard for digital audio. If the consumers stick to MP3-enabled devices, SDMI will die on the vine, like Betamax. Ultimately, all the consumer electronics manufacturers will act in their self-interest, and stick to "fishing where the fish are".
Ultimately, SDMI's fate is in our hands, because we control our own pursestrings. If we don't buy it, they'll stop selling it. The recording industry may think SDMI is the be-all-end-all of digital playback, but it doesn't matter how much they market it or how pretty the box is if we dogs won't eat their dogfood.
What can slashdotters do?
Buy only MP3 devices for themselves. Do not buy devices that support SDMI instead of, or in addition to MP3.
Evangelize your friends and the less technically astute. Don't hammer them with the technical details of why SDMI is inferior. Say things like "you'll want to back up your songs, right? SDMI can't do that" or "Only MP3 players work as-is with your existing CD's, just like making tapes for your Walkman". Keep it simple. MP3 still wins.
Write to the big consumer electronics resellers. If Best Buy and Circuit City alone emphasized MP3 players they could almost single-handedly ensure the death of SDMI. They may support it now, but if they do that's because they genuinely think the marketplace will accept SDMI. Circuit City, in particular, should have learned their lesson about proprietary systems from the DIVX fiasco.
Taiwan has never been as bad as the rest of the "Tigers" when it comes to cronyism. Granted, they've been under single-party control since the Nationalists escaped there, but a key differentiating factor in the "crony capitalism" economies is that ownership is concentrated in the hands of the families and friends of the ruling family. Though Taiwan is controlled by a single party, it's not the one-family (like for instance, Indonesia's Suhartos) type of party that is so corruptible. For better or for worse, free-market capitalism is the standard in Taiwan, and the government invests in industries instead of controlling them.
The big difference in Taiwan is that government approaches ownership from a strategic viewpoint, and they aren't investing so much to get family members rich as they are to try and jump-start industries. In Indonesia, Suharto would have pumped $100 million into a chip company and put his nephew in charge. In Taiwan, Morris Chang was able to get the government to invest $100 million in exchange for an ownership stake with the purpose of jump-starting a semicinductor industry. By just about any measure, the effort was a spectacular free-market success. The difference is that in a cronyist system, Chang would have not been concerned with profits - he'd be skimming off the top and not worrying about the details. The Taiwanese semiconductor giants are making profits in a difficult sector of the market - and that's the biggest difference between what happens when government invests in free-market companies versus what happens when government actually owns the company. When the government owns the company, you get Indonesia, Thailand, and the British Leylands of the business world. I'd take the Taiwan approach any day in comparison.
The idea here is that unlike cattle, cats are highly individualistic critters who do whatever they feel like at any given time rather than what you want them to do. A popular expression over the years has been "managing programmers is like herding cats".
A related thought - you see people taking dogs for walks - have you ever seen a cat be taken for a walk?
And talk about how these are two teams that shouldn't even be in this game, and the horrors of NFL parity, and how it's a shame that teams hold their cities hostage for stadiums and that the commercials have become the highlight of the game, but...
I'll just list my take on the best ads:
3: The Budweiser ad featuring the upset dog. Very funny, though they already used the running into a truck idea with the "I have to run" ad they've been using for a month or so.
2: E-Trade and the monkey. It's right up there with the ad that ran a while back saying "If your broker's so good, why does he still work?" Sponsoring the lame-ass halftime show was dumb, though. The WWF halftime show on USA was better.
1: EDS, "Herding Cats". Need I say more? I suspect all tech people (and especially their bosses) "got" that one instantly. A lot more people, though, were probably scratching their heads. I loved it.
That was also the concensus at the engineer-heavy party I just was at.
For most people, there shouldn't be a requirement to learn much. For you, I, and most of the readers here, computers are a tool we can shape as we need to, to perform whatever tasks we can conceive. For us, a computer should be a flexible and powerful as possible, so we can mold it to each task we want to perform.
But most people don't need or want that kind of power - they want an appliance. Something they can turn on, perform predetermined tasks with, and turn off. They want it to be inexpensive, reliable, and simple. Customization isn't important - simplicity is. We can't provide that with OSS at this point in time.
As far as "winning" goes though, Linux is useful today. Therefore we've won in a big sense. But the commercial development of Linux and the market acceptance of OSS have come in large part because the promise is there to build something suitable for Everyuser. Red Hat is worth billions in market cap, and can afford to pay lots of people to sit around and write Linux code that gets GPL'ed. That's not because geeks are a huge market - it's because of the potential to grow beyond the geek community. But without that potential, the explosive growth we've seen will go away, the funding will dry up, and Linux will go back to being an excellent OS that people hack on because they want to. But the increased pace of development and market acceptance we're seeing should say something. It tells me "I don't want to go back".
I'll share a dirty little secret with you: I use Linux on a desktop and a server at home, and a couple of servers at work. Users at my company use Windows NT, because it's "good enough" for their use (easy to use, and much more restrictive security than Win95). And when I go home, and want to just turn on the computer, check my email, read Usenet, write checks, and work on my book...
Open Source has developed a plethora of worthy software - as the examples mentioned elsewhere prove so well. But user interfaces have never been an area of concern - partly because those of us who use and build the software aren't the type of people who need much in the way of a UI, partly because we're building on a system that wasn't designed with usability as a primary concern (remeber the age of Unix, folks!), and partly due to Geek Testosterone.
Sure, the Gnomes and KDE's of the world put a prettier face on some of it, but most programs that have a thought-out UI in the Open Source world are just retreads of existing non-free programs' interfaces. So the GIMP is an example of a nice interface? It's pretty much a Photoshop clone that has some differences, but there are more similarities than not. Skins and chrome are cool, and a nice way for power users to spice up their user experience, but if we want to see World Domination anytime soon, we need to understand the needs of the ordinary user. They don't need or want a cool skin - they need a straightforward interface that works the way they need it to and that they can use out of the box.
Saying "once they learn how to use bash properly" doesn't cut it - If an average non-power user has to get that far they'll give up. Period. They don't want to learn, nor should they have to. For Linux to succeed as a desktop OS, it needs to be possible to perform all the necessary user tasks without ever requiring a command line or editing a.conf file. That includes configuring the system and installing software. For better or worse, the marketplace has Windows and MacOS out there, and both have comparatively well thought-out, consistent user interfaces that enforce similar rules throughout all applications that run on the platform. In this case, the power and flexibility of Linux is the fatal flaw.
Open Source is not necessarily the same as Free Software, though the two overlap much of the time. Gartner is speaking in favor of Open Source and, frankly, I see absolutely no reason to keep source code closed off from people. Free Software, though, is not necessarily the same.
Only the GPL and its descendants guarantee Free Software, while there are many Open Source licenses (the Sun license, the BSD licenses, and the MPL, for instance) that are similar but don't necessarily accomplish quite the same thing. Rather than getting into a detailed discussion of licenses per se, I'd just remind everyone that Open Source comes in many flavors, and hopefully the market will reward the freer varieties over the less and non free ones. Gartner is on the right track, though.
It's not so much that the transistor did things individually that tubes, valves, and relays couldn't - it wansn't that big a deal by the standards of what transistors alone could do. But the transistor made possible:
-sufficiently miniaturized componentry and a low enough cost to enable much smaller and cheaper electronic equipment (remember transistor radios?)
-the microprocessor - not to mention Moore's law!
Ultimately, electronics existed before the transistor did, but it took the invention of the transistor to enable all the revolutions that followed. Imagine if my slick new Palm Vx used vacuum tubes!
Only two of these were invented in the 1900's - the other two are holdovers form the 19th century that weren't widely adopted until the 20th.
1: The Telephone. I know the telephone was actually invented earlier (in fact, Bell gave his first public demo here in my town, in what is today a chi-chi restaurant), but it was in this century that telephones became ubiquitous. Automated switching was the other breakthrough that made telephones something everyone had and used. Telephones changed the nature of business by allowing practical real-time communications.
2: The automobile. Again, the first cars were introduced in the late 1800's, but they didn't become widely adopted until the Model T. The automobile made much of today's mobile society possible, by no longer requiring people to live close to their work. This helped make white-collar work more viable (by enabling companies to attract workers from a wider area) and this change directly helped create our modern economy. In the 19th century, most workers were engaged in the direct, hands-on work of making things, rather than services. White collar workers were relatively small in number. The automobile also made the suburb possible, and now most people in this country live in them.
3: The airplane: Aircraft made simple, high-speed travel between continents and within larger nations (like this one) practical for the first time. It also revolutionized the freight industry.
SCO UnixWare came in last, not Red Hat. And file server performance isn't the top reason I'd run Red Hat, anyhow. Basically, the way I see the choices are:
If you run a pretty much homogenous network of Windows (95, NT, and/or 2000) clients, then Windows 2000 isn't a bad server, really. Where Windows 2000 starts to suck hard is if you have to support other platforms in either the desktop or the server space. But it's actually a pretty solid OS, and a "safe" pick for a Windows shop.
If speed is what matters, you run mostly Windows at the desktops, and you're not looking for an application server (because nobody in their right minds develops NLMs), NetWare is fast, efficient, and has the most robust and complete directory services out there. Not to mention that there's a tremendous amount of trained, experienced NetWare CNE's to draw upon. It's fast, it's stable, and it's not Microsoft.
But if you want to run the most stable platform of all, and you want the power of Unix's tools and services, then Red Hat is ideal. It's easy on the wallet, too. Combine Red Hat and solid hardware that has multiple power supplies and ECC RAM and you'll probably never have to reboot it. And Linux is a lot easier for a network administrator to handle than it used to be.
And if you're on crack, you'll pick UnixWare - which sucked when Novell had it and still sucked the last time I got a look at it (a year or so ago). Some of the features of Red Hat, a much higher price, and closed source. Yum.
Yes, but the obvious next step is to have a sublayer of the dye sandwiched between two thin plastic layers, rather than putting it directly on the surface. It wouldn't be impossible to defeat (only physical destruction of the layer the data is encoded on would suffice for a truly unbreakable time-bomb), but exceedingly difficult. I think that's the logical direction for the technology.
Although I do like the idea of defeating the scheme with a bottle of Turtle Wax and a good polishing cloth...
Though self-destructing DVDs are pretty stupid for mainstream purposes, I can see a few uses - mainly for sending large amounts of sensitive data (with a short time delay), so that if the disk was intercepted enroute it would quickly be rendered useless. Maybe in a few cases movies or other media could be delivered that way, but I really don't see any advantage.
The difference is that this is just a misguided but mostly harmless copy-protection scheme, while DIVX was an evil, privacy-invading monster which only had the purpose of artificially separating users from the content they wished to purchase.
The problem with traditional partisan economic approaches is this:
Democrats typically want to spend a lot more than the government brings in. And when times are tough, they are happy to spend more in an attempt to prime the pump.
Republicans want to spend too much as well - and their first reaction to everything is to cut taxes (without cutting spending), expecting the wealth to flow down to the masses.
The reality is - neither of these approaches work as such. Yes, there are plenty of examples of screwed-up taxes, and there are plenty of places where government spending helps, too. But a proper, centrist approach to economics will balance the two urges - keep spending down and keep taxes from climbing, with the priority on spending the same or less than we bring in in revenue.
Clinton was forced into this by the combination of government paralysis and a last-minute education in economics. But when he bought the idea of centrist economics, he bought it 100% - and that's been good for the economy in the long term as well as now. We've retired a lot of the US's debt in the last few years, and made the looming problems with Social Security and Medicare into less of a crisis as a result. If W continues on the course of paying off debt (which, if you think about it, is the really "conservative" thing to do) before worrying about tax cuts, then there will be some money available in case we do slip into recession and need to do a little old-fashioned pump priming. When you spend within your means, it's surprising how much flexibility you can get to deal with the unexpected. This applies to governments as well as individuals.
The stock market bubble formed because people started to overvalue tech companies, not taking into account the actual rate of change. Now that reality has set in, the market (as is it wont to do) is overreacting in the opposite direction. I expect growth to slow substantially for a while as things sort themselves out - but I'm not convinced a recession looms on the horizon. Remember, like the original poster said, a recession means sustained _negative_ growth - not a slowdown, and not a single bad quarter. As for me, I've bought more stock since the market started tanking than I did during the entire run-up - but I'm looking for companies that are well-run and either are making money now or have a clear plan for it in the near future. That excludes about 2/3 of the NASDAQ, though. And I won't worry about how much that stock is worth for a few years, at least.
I do not mean to disparage anything or anyone here - I'm a faithful/.er, and I actually enjoy most of Katz's stuff. Here's where the "synergy" lies:
Katz writes for Slashdot. He also writes books. Slashdot features Katz's book as coming out RSN. This is good. And there may be a movie, with bit parts for the fellows who run Slashdot. Also neat.
Tacked on at the end of the article is an opportunity to pre-order the book from ThinkGeek, a cool online store that just happens to be owned by Slashdot's parent - Andover.net. So Andover, Slashdot, and ThinkGeek have turned an interesting story into a revenue opportunity. This is the future, folks - get used to it.
There's nothing wrong with cross-selling within your properties, but you'll see a lot more of it from companies a lot less trustworthy than Andover. Be prepared.
That said, congratulations, Jon. I'll be one of the first to buy a copy when it comes out!
People spent money on this? It's always been obvious to me that each pint of Guinness represents a full-fledged microclimate, with convection and all. I'm surprised thunderstorms don't break out in it.
Actually, thunderstorms have been know to break out in my head after drinking a large amount of it, but I don't think that counts.
Heck, even I could have done this research. It would have been fun, too. I wonder how the effect changes as the level of stout in the glass drops...
Here's how OS X handles multitasking, as compared to the "classic" MacOS:
OS X is, as we all know, Mach/BSD based. Applications that are written to the OS X API will premptively multitask. Life is good.
Then there's the "bridge" API, Carbon. Carbon is essentially the bulk of the old Mac Toolbox calls, cleaned up and rebuilt to allow reentrant code and to be clean in a preemptive environment. Carbonized apps have had the old, icky Mac code cleaned out and can run on the old Mac OS (OS 9 now, I think OS 8.5 and 8.6 later) through a CarbonLib shared library that allows the app to run. Carbonized applications are kind of a "best of both worlds" solution, and Carbonizing an application is supposedly very easy in most cases.
Finally, there's "classic" Mac applications, which run in a compatibility environment. Basically, OS X spawns a full Mac OS 9 VM as a subtask, and applications run in it without the ability to access hardware directly (it's walled off by OS X). The classic environment can crash just like a Mac today, but if it does it doesn't take down the whole machine.
Classic Mac OS (OS 9.x and below) only supports a very limited form of preemptive multitasking, using the Thread Manager. And the mouse will interrupt the whole system while it is depressed - only a handful of background tasks can continue to function, and then only if they use Thread Manager. The classic Mac multitasking model has always been a cooperative one, like Win16 apps. This is not a problem on OS X, though the OS 9 subsystem will have the same limitations that MacOS has today, only within that subsystem. A depressed mousebutton in the classic environment will still halt processing in classic without affecting the rest of OS X.
In Windows 9X, only 32-bit applications can be preemptive. Win16 apps still can run amok and take over the system - there's no compatibility "sandbox". The good point of this is that almost all 16-bit applications work with Windows 9X - the bad news is that Win16 apps and drivers probably cause more Windows crashes than any other single cause (crappy software aside). Since Windows NT and Win2K keep Win16 apps isolated, a lot of Win16 software doesn't run under NT systems but the system is far more stable as a result. The model NT uses (kind of a Win16 VM emulation deal) is somewhat similar to Apple's, though Apple has the advantage of running on a Mach/BSD kernel instead of the Windows cruft.
I am a crappy coder, and haven't even tried to seriously write an app in years, so I may be a little off (and I tried on purpose to over-simplify, too), so don't kick me too hard, but that's my general picture of things.
In the whole community, there are a large number of talented programmers, and a smaller number of truly elite hackers who can do most anything.
And then there is a tiny group of people, who could probably be counted with your fingers and toes, who just have that certain "it" that lets them understand their work, the needs it fills, and the larger context into which it all fits.
Larry Wall is close to the top of that list. Unlike most, he understands that what he produces means something in relation to the rest of the world and the community. Perl is the kind of tool that could only come from a mind like Larry's - and there aren't enough of those minds to go around.
Thanks for Perl, Larry - my sysadmins thank you too. Please - look both ways before you cross the street, and every other precaution we can think of. We can't afford to lose you...
They can drive it to bankruptcy, sell it to a PC clone maker, market into oblivion, miss out on a chip technology transition, and sell it again to some guys in a garage - and it JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
It won't die, but it's walking around with knives, chainsaws, and barbed wire sticking to it's zombie hide, and there are gaping holes from the BFG blasts it's taken. I mean, geez!, this is getting to be worse than a bad horror movie - or to use the '80s metaphor, a bad episode of Dallas or Dynasty.
Alright, Amino - we'll give you until the end of CES. Then put up or shut up, I'm begging you!
I actually pretty much agree with you, but I have a couple of caveats besides:
1: Most companies that pull that kind of stuff will lose employees anyways due to being generally cheeseheaded. Chances are that would just be the tip of the iceberg.
2: Kind of related - a company that is in financial trouble isn't that likely to be sending employees off as telecommuters - it's likelier to be tossing them overboard entirely.
But you're right - the "take one for the team" pressure can be intense at times. Employees need to stand up for their right to be equipped properly. I would anticipate that existing laws should be sufficient to protect the worker, though.
There was a similar piece about OSHA sticking their noses where they don't belong a few weeks back, if anyone recalls. If I am going to work at home in my own "facility", it's my damn business whether or not I want to work in ergonomically correct surroundings. If I'm more comfortable on the sofa with a keyboard balanced on my lap it's my business and not OSHA's. An employer's liability should be confined to making sure that ergonomically correct materials are available to the employee, should they choose to use them. Employers that fail to meet this need will lose employees to the companies that do.
As for the question of liability, injuries that occur in the course of doing your job, wherever they occur, should be covered by existing workman's comp laws. If you choose to not use an ergonomically correct work area, that should absolve the employer of the liability for your injury (if that's the reason you were injured).
Falling down your stairs when you go downstairs for a slice of leftover pizza should not be grounds for workman's comp claims, either.
All that's needed (if anything) is to add that to existing law.
This is yet another example of government expanding to fill all the available space in our society. Welcome to the world of ever-growing mandates. This sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, Microsoft is putting new features into Windows that could extend their dominance into servers and e-commerce?
/. comment instead of actually being in Ballmer's shoes...
Who'd a thunk it!
OF COURSE, they're adding features and trying to dominate the server market (as if they don't already!). That's what companies do when they want to keep growing, Microsoft and all the rest! Despite my personal feelings about Microsoft (which aren't generally too positive) this smacks of the often clueless EU trying to stop a company from doing what it's supposed to do. Gawd! And I thought the US government was clueless and pathetic - the EU makes us look brilliant in comparison!
Does Mario Monti really think that they really have the ability to stop Windows 2000 from shipping as is, or that they can somehow hamstring it enough to suddenly jump-start a European competotor (don't kid yourself, this is what he's really after)? Wrong. Anti-trust in general is one thing, but this is stupid. Windows 2000 may well suck on it's own merits (though the Professional version is pretty nice, actually), but if NT 4 is legal (and it most likely is), then so is Windows 2000. Microsoft has plenty of problems ahead of it without this kind of stupidity.
If I were in Ballmer's shoes, I'd give serious thought to just saying "screw the Euros, I'll shut down my local offices over there and pull out of the market and see how fast they cave. Since the rest of the world is still going to be using all our software I'll show those buggers who's in charge here".
Of course, that's why I'm writing a
- -Josh Turiel
Have you found an Athlon motherboard that runs the RAM at 133 MHz? I can't find one anywhere.
Not yet - but I plan to slap a serious cooler on it and do some overclocking. I have the Asus K7M board, which has support for higher bus speeds. So PC133 doesn't cost much more (about $10 for a 128 MB stick), and has a higher margin of tolerance.
I'm looking forward to the VIA chipset for Athlon (the Asus uses the AMD Northbridge, with a VIA Southbridge - the other current vendors use the full AMD chipset), as it should drive prices down and support PC133 RAM explicitly. But hey - I didn't want to wait. I can always build another Athlon system later on to run Linux on (my current one is my Win98 gaming PC and my Linux desktop is a PII-350).
- -Josh Turiel
Of course, I only paid $240 for my Athlon 600 processor, so I don't feel too deprived.
To the people wondering just how a system with only a 200 MHz bus (and PC100 RAM, at that) can be useful at 1.1 GHz:
First of all, if you're dropping the kind of change on one of these that is appropriate, you'll have more than a puny 64MB of RAM. It's liklier that you'll have at least 128 MB or probably 256 MB+. So you won't have a huge problem with disk thrashing. Just make sure if you were to use one of these beasts that the rest of the system is up to the task. That means a fast ATA or Ultra SCSI disk, a fast 3D card (don't be using no Rage Pro!), and the best memory that the system spec works with. I use all PC-133 nowadays.
On the other side of this is the processor itself. On-die cache (Celerons, CuMine PIII processors) is much faster than the variety that is mounted on the PCB (older PII and III and current Athlons). It can run at full processor clock instead of, say, 1/2 clock or 2/5 clock. Because of this speed advantage, less of it goes a long way. Older PII and PIII designs used 512k of on-board cache, which is replaced by 256k of on-die in the CuMines (128k in the Celery). With a big, fast L2 cache a lot of your instructions are fetched from cache and executed much faster - and of course a big L1 cache helps, too. Also, SDRAM does a better job of feeding data in bursts than older EDO and FP RAM did. But RAM technology is becoming the bottleneck lately. Rambus and DDR SDRAM is supposed to help, but DDR isn't really there yet, and Rambus has been a fiasco to date and the yields are allegedly horrible.
Ultimately, on-die cache allows the cache to run at either full CPU speed or a high divisor of it. PCB cache is more constrained. But faster processors will always make a difference no matter what - it's just that after you outrun the rest of the system it's a matter of diminishing returns. An Athlon 1000 is not necessarily exactly twice as fast as an Athlon 500 - but it's still wicked fast!
- -Josh Turiel
The whole idea behind editorial independence is that advertising and editorial are unrelated. So I'm not worried about Rob and Jeff suddenly becoming VA 'stooges' - I trust them to keep the site's content on target and fair. I expect they will show bias towards some stories, that's inevitable with humans deciding what gets posted. But I think that the bias will be the same personal bias they have already (Rob'll post anything about Pete Townshend, for instance - and Jeff is a nano nut. And expect more AIBO stuff).
Advertising is a different case, but if VA wants revenue they'll take ads from all comers, including Copyleft and Penguin Computing. Because if they only take ads from VA and ThinkGeek, they're not affecting what we read per se, or the editorial side of Slashdot at all. They're only affecting the ad sales folks, and VA's overall revenue. Remember, they serve ads at semi-random, with Adfu (last time I checked). Unlike the dead tree publications, there asn't really any association of ads with stories. If I load the same page twice, I'll get two different ads. If I open up PC Week to the same page twice, I get the same Microsoft ad each time.
Think about it, folks - it really just means more money for VA if they take ads from all comers, and less if they don't. But that's not Slashdot's problem until and unless Rob and Jeff leave (and even then it may not be an issue) - and then some Slashdot clone'll pop up and take their place immediately if Slashdot itself goes down the chute.
- -Josh Turiel
SDMI devices are coming to market, and MP3-based devices are already out there. The one thing we all need to keep in mind here is that MP3 already is the de facto standard for digital audio. If the consumers stick to MP3-enabled devices, SDMI will die on the vine, like Betamax. Ultimately, all the consumer electronics manufacturers will act in their self-interest, and stick to "fishing where the fish are".
Ultimately, SDMI's fate is in our hands, because we control our own pursestrings. If we don't buy it, they'll stop selling it. The recording industry may think SDMI is the be-all-end-all of digital playback, but it doesn't matter how much they market it or how pretty the box is if we dogs won't eat their dogfood.
What can slashdotters do?
Buy only MP3 devices for themselves. Do not buy devices that support SDMI instead of, or in addition to MP3.
Evangelize your friends and the less technically astute. Don't hammer them with the technical details of why SDMI is inferior. Say things like "you'll want to back up your songs, right? SDMI can't do that" or "Only MP3 players work as-is with your existing CD's, just like making tapes for your Walkman". Keep it simple. MP3 still wins.
Write to the big consumer electronics resellers. If Best Buy and Circuit City alone emphasized MP3 players they could almost single-handedly ensure the death of SDMI. They may support it now, but if they do that's because they genuinely think the marketplace will accept SDMI. Circuit City, in particular, should have learned their lesson about proprietary systems from the DIVX fiasco.
- -Josh Turiel
Taiwan has never been as bad as the rest of the "Tigers" when it comes to cronyism. Granted, they've been under single-party control since the Nationalists escaped there, but a key differentiating factor in the "crony capitalism" economies is that ownership is concentrated in the hands of the families and friends of the ruling family. Though Taiwan is controlled by a single party, it's not the one-family (like for instance, Indonesia's Suhartos) type of party that is so corruptible. For better or for worse, free-market capitalism is the standard in Taiwan, and the government invests in industries instead of controlling them.
The big difference in Taiwan is that government approaches ownership from a strategic viewpoint, and they aren't investing so much to get family members rich as they are to try and jump-start industries. In Indonesia, Suharto would have pumped $100 million into a chip company and put his nephew in charge. In Taiwan, Morris Chang was able to get the government to invest $100 million in exchange for an ownership stake with the purpose of jump-starting a semicinductor industry. By just about any measure, the effort was a spectacular free-market success. The difference is that in a cronyist system, Chang would have not been concerned with profits - he'd be skimming off the top and not worrying about the details. The Taiwanese semiconductor giants are making profits in a difficult sector of the market - and that's the biggest difference between what happens when government invests in free-market companies versus what happens when government actually owns the company. When the government owns the company, you get Indonesia, Thailand, and the British Leylands of the business world. I'd take the Taiwan approach any day in comparison.
- -Josh Turiel
I've always referred to it as "taking the cat out for a drag".
- -Josh Turiel
The idea here is that unlike cattle, cats are highly individualistic critters who do whatever they feel like at any given time rather than what you want them to do. A popular expression over the years has been "managing programmers is like herding cats".
A related thought - you see people taking dogs for walks - have you ever seen a cat be taken for a walk?
- -Josh Turiel
And talk about how these are two teams that shouldn't even be in this game, and the horrors of NFL parity, and how it's a shame that teams hold their cities hostage for stadiums and that the commercials have become the highlight of the game, but...
I'll just list my take on the best ads:
3: The Budweiser ad featuring the upset dog. Very funny, though they already used the running into a truck idea with the "I have to run" ad they've been using for a month or so.
2: E-Trade and the monkey. It's right up there with the ad that ran a while back saying "If your broker's so good, why does he still work?" Sponsoring the lame-ass halftime show was dumb, though. The WWF halftime show on USA was better.
1: EDS, "Herding Cats". Need I say more? I suspect all tech people (and especially their bosses) "got" that one instantly. A lot more people, though, were probably scratching their heads. I loved it.
That was also the concensus at the engineer-heavy party I just was at.
- -Josh Turiel
For most people, there shouldn't be a requirement to learn much. For you, I, and most of the readers here, computers are a tool we can shape as we need to, to perform whatever tasks we can conceive. For us, a computer should be a flexible and powerful as possible, so we can mold it to each task we want to perform.
But most people don't need or want that kind of power - they want an appliance. Something they can turn on, perform predetermined tasks with, and turn off. They want it to be inexpensive, reliable, and simple. Customization isn't important - simplicity is. We can't provide that with OSS at this point in time.
As far as "winning" goes though, Linux is useful today. Therefore we've won in a big sense. But the commercial development of Linux and the market acceptance of OSS have come in large part because the promise is there to build something suitable for Everyuser. Red Hat is worth billions in market cap, and can afford to pay lots of people to sit around and write Linux code that gets GPL'ed. That's not because geeks are a huge market - it's because of the potential to grow beyond the geek community. But without that potential, the explosive growth we've seen will go away, the funding will dry up, and Linux will go back to being an excellent OS that people hack on because they want to. But the increased pace of development and market acceptance we're seeing should say something. It tells me "I don't want to go back".
I'll share a dirty little secret with you: I use Linux on a desktop and a server at home, and a couple of servers at work. Users at my company use Windows NT, because it's "good enough" for their use (easy to use, and much more restrictive security than Win95). And when I go home, and want to just turn on the computer, check my email, read Usenet, write checks, and work on my book...
I use an iBook.
- -Josh Turiel
Open Source has developed a plethora of worthy software - as the examples mentioned elsewhere prove so well. But user interfaces have never been an area of concern - partly because those of us who use and build the software aren't the type of people who need much in the way of a UI, partly because we're building on a system that wasn't designed with usability as a primary concern (remeber the age of Unix, folks!), and partly due to Geek Testosterone.
.conf file. That includes configuring the system and installing software. For better or worse, the marketplace has Windows and MacOS out there, and both have comparatively well thought-out, consistent user interfaces that enforce similar rules throughout all applications that run on the platform. In this case, the power and flexibility of Linux is the fatal flaw.
Sure, the Gnomes and KDE's of the world put a prettier face on some of it, but most programs that have a thought-out UI in the Open Source world are just retreads of existing non-free programs' interfaces. So the GIMP is an example of a nice interface? It's pretty much a Photoshop clone that has some differences, but there are more similarities than not. Skins and chrome are cool, and a nice way for power users to spice up their user experience, but if we want to see World Domination anytime soon, we need to understand the needs of the ordinary user. They don't need or want a cool skin - they need a straightforward interface that works the way they need it to and that they can use out of the box.
Saying "once they learn how to use bash properly" doesn't cut it - If an average non-power user has to get that far they'll give up. Period. They don't want to learn, nor should they have to. For Linux to succeed as a desktop OS, it needs to be possible to perform all the necessary user tasks without ever requiring a command line or editing a
- -Josh Turiel
Open Source is not necessarily the same as Free Software, though the two overlap much of the time. Gartner is speaking in favor of Open Source and, frankly, I see absolutely no reason to keep source code closed off from people. Free Software, though, is not necessarily the same.
Only the GPL and its descendants guarantee Free Software, while there are many Open Source licenses (the Sun license, the BSD licenses, and the MPL, for instance) that are similar but don't necessarily accomplish quite the same thing. Rather than getting into a detailed discussion of licenses per se, I'd just remind everyone that Open Source comes in many flavors, and hopefully the market will reward the freer varieties over the less and non free ones. Gartner is on the right track, though.
- -Josh Turiel
It's not so much that the transistor did things individually that tubes, valves, and relays couldn't - it wansn't that big a deal by the standards of what transistors alone could do. But the transistor made possible:
-sufficiently miniaturized componentry and a low enough cost to enable much smaller and cheaper electronic equipment (remember transistor radios?)
-the microprocessor - not to mention Moore's law!
Ultimately, electronics existed before the transistor did, but it took the invention of the transistor to enable all the revolutions that followed. Imagine if my slick new Palm Vx used vacuum tubes!
- -Josh Turiel
Only two of these were invented in the 1900's - the other two are holdovers form the 19th century that weren't widely adopted until the 20th.
1: The Telephone. I know the telephone was actually invented earlier (in fact, Bell gave his first public demo here in my town, in what is today a chi-chi restaurant), but it was in this century that telephones became ubiquitous. Automated switching was the other breakthrough that made telephones something everyone had and used. Telephones changed the nature of business by allowing practical real-time communications.
2: The automobile. Again, the first cars were introduced in the late 1800's, but they didn't become widely adopted until the Model T. The automobile made much of today's mobile society possible, by no longer requiring people to live close to their work. This helped make white-collar work more viable (by enabling companies to attract workers from a wider area) and this change directly helped create our modern economy. In the 19th century, most workers were engaged in the direct, hands-on work of making things, rather than services. White collar workers were relatively small in number. The automobile also made the suburb possible, and now most people in this country live in them.
3: The airplane: Aircraft made simple, high-speed travel between continents and within larger nations (like this one) practical for the first time. It also revolutionized the freight industry.
4: The transistor. Duh.
- -Josh Turiel
SCO UnixWare came in last, not Red Hat. And file server performance isn't the top reason I'd run Red Hat, anyhow. Basically, the way I see the choices are:
If you run a pretty much homogenous network of Windows (95, NT, and/or 2000) clients, then Windows 2000 isn't a bad server, really. Where Windows 2000 starts to suck hard is if you have to support other platforms in either the desktop or the server space. But it's actually a pretty solid OS, and a "safe" pick for a Windows shop.
If speed is what matters, you run mostly Windows at the desktops, and you're not looking for an application server (because nobody in their right minds develops NLMs), NetWare is fast, efficient, and has the most robust and complete directory services out there. Not to mention that there's a tremendous amount of trained, experienced NetWare CNE's to draw upon. It's fast, it's stable, and it's not Microsoft.
But if you want to run the most stable platform of all, and you want the power of Unix's tools and services, then Red Hat is ideal. It's easy on the wallet, too. Combine Red Hat and solid hardware that has multiple power supplies and ECC RAM and you'll probably never have to reboot it. And Linux is a lot easier for a network administrator to handle than it used to be.
And if you're on crack, you'll pick UnixWare - which sucked when Novell had it and still sucked the last time I got a look at it (a year or so ago). Some of the features of Red Hat, a much higher price, and closed source. Yum.
- -Josh Turiel
Yes, but the obvious next step is to have a sublayer of the dye sandwiched between two thin plastic layers, rather than putting it directly on the surface. It wouldn't be impossible to defeat (only physical destruction of the layer the data is encoded on would suffice for a truly unbreakable time-bomb), but exceedingly difficult. I think that's the logical direction for the technology.
Although I do like the idea of defeating the scheme with a bottle of Turtle Wax and a good polishing cloth...
- -Josh Turiel
Though self-destructing DVDs are pretty stupid for mainstream purposes, I can see a few uses - mainly for sending large amounts of sensitive data (with a short time delay), so that if the disk was intercepted enroute it would quickly be rendered useless. Maybe in a few cases movies or other media could be delivered that way, but I really don't see any advantage.
The difference is that this is just a misguided but mostly harmless copy-protection scheme, while DIVX was an evil, privacy-invading monster which only had the purpose of artificially separating users from the content they wished to purchase.
DIVX was far worse, bar none.
- -Josh Turiel
The problem with traditional partisan economic approaches is this:
Democrats typically want to spend a lot more than the government brings in. And when times are tough, they are happy to spend more in an attempt to prime the pump.
Republicans want to spend too much as well - and their first reaction to everything is to cut taxes (without cutting spending), expecting the wealth to flow down to the masses.
The reality is - neither of these approaches work as such. Yes, there are plenty of examples of screwed-up taxes, and there are plenty of places where government spending helps, too. But a proper, centrist approach to economics will balance the two urges - keep spending down and keep taxes from climbing, with the priority on spending the same or less than we bring in in revenue.
Clinton was forced into this by the combination of government paralysis and a last-minute education in economics. But when he bought the idea of centrist economics, he bought it 100% - and that's been good for the economy in the long term as well as now. We've retired a lot of the US's debt in the last few years, and made the looming problems with Social Security and Medicare into less of a crisis as a result. If W continues on the course of paying off debt (which, if you think about it, is the really "conservative" thing to do) before worrying about tax cuts, then there will be some money available in case we do slip into recession and need to do a little old-fashioned pump priming. When you spend within your means, it's surprising how much flexibility you can get to deal with the unexpected. This applies to governments as well as individuals.
The stock market bubble formed because people started to overvalue tech companies, not taking into account the actual rate of change. Now that reality has set in, the market (as is it wont to do) is overreacting in the opposite direction. I expect growth to slow substantially for a while as things sort themselves out - but I'm not convinced a recession looms on the horizon. Remember, like the original poster said, a recession means sustained _negative_ growth - not a slowdown, and not a single bad quarter. As for me, I've bought more stock since the market started tanking than I did during the entire run-up - but I'm looking for companies that are well-run and either are making money now or have a clear plan for it in the near future. That excludes about 2/3 of the NASDAQ, though. And I won't worry about how much that stock is worth for a few years, at least.
- -Josh Turiel
I do not mean to disparage anything or anyone here - I'm a faithful /.er, and I actually enjoy most of Katz's stuff. Here's where the "synergy" lies:
Katz writes for Slashdot. He also writes books. Slashdot features Katz's book as coming out RSN. This is good. And there may be a movie, with bit parts for the fellows who run Slashdot. Also neat.
Tacked on at the end of the article is an opportunity to pre-order the book from ThinkGeek, a cool online store that just happens to be owned by Slashdot's parent - Andover.net. So Andover, Slashdot, and ThinkGeek have turned an interesting story into a revenue opportunity. This is the future, folks - get used to it.
There's nothing wrong with cross-selling within your properties, but you'll see a lot more of it from companies a lot less trustworthy than Andover. Be prepared.
That said, congratulations, Jon. I'll be one of the first to buy a copy when it comes out!
- -Josh Turiel
People spent money on this? It's always been obvious to me that each pint of Guinness represents a full-fledged microclimate, with convection and all. I'm surprised thunderstorms don't break out in it.
Actually, thunderstorms have been know to break out in my head after drinking a large amount of it, but I don't think that counts.
Heck, even I could have done this research. It would have been fun, too. I wonder how the effect changes as the level of stout in the glass drops...
- -Josh Turiel
Here's how OS X handles multitasking, as compared to the "classic" MacOS:
OS X is, as we all know, Mach/BSD based. Applications that are written to the OS X API will premptively multitask. Life is good.
Then there's the "bridge" API, Carbon. Carbon is essentially the bulk of the old Mac Toolbox calls, cleaned up and rebuilt to allow reentrant code and to be clean in a preemptive environment. Carbonized apps have had the old, icky Mac code cleaned out and can run on the old Mac OS (OS 9 now, I think OS 8.5 and 8.6 later) through a CarbonLib shared library that allows the app to run. Carbonized applications are kind of a "best of both worlds" solution, and Carbonizing an application is supposedly very easy in most cases.
Finally, there's "classic" Mac applications, which run in a compatibility environment. Basically, OS X spawns a full Mac OS 9 VM as a subtask, and applications run in it without the ability to access hardware directly (it's walled off by OS X). The classic environment can crash just like a Mac today, but if it does it doesn't take down the whole machine.
Classic Mac OS (OS 9.x and below) only supports a very limited form of preemptive multitasking, using the Thread Manager. And the mouse will interrupt the whole system while it is depressed - only a handful of background tasks can continue to function, and then only if they use Thread Manager. The classic Mac multitasking model has always been a cooperative one, like Win16 apps. This is not a problem on OS X, though the OS 9 subsystem will have the same limitations that MacOS has today, only within that subsystem. A depressed mousebutton in the classic environment will still halt processing in classic without affecting the rest of OS X.
In Windows 9X, only 32-bit applications can be preemptive. Win16 apps still can run amok and take over the system - there's no compatibility "sandbox". The good point of this is that almost all 16-bit applications work with Windows 9X - the bad news is that Win16 apps and drivers probably cause more Windows crashes than any other single cause (crappy software aside). Since Windows NT and Win2K keep Win16 apps isolated, a lot of Win16 software doesn't run under NT systems but the system is far more stable as a result. The model NT uses (kind of a Win16 VM emulation deal) is somewhat similar to Apple's, though Apple has the advantage of running on a Mach/BSD kernel instead of the Windows cruft.
I am a crappy coder, and haven't even tried to seriously write an app in years, so I may be a little off (and I tried on purpose to over-simplify, too), so don't kick me too hard, but that's my general picture of things.
- -Josh Turiel
In the whole community, there are a large number of talented programmers, and a smaller number of truly elite hackers who can do most anything.
And then there is a tiny group of people, who could probably be counted with your fingers and toes, who just have that certain "it" that lets them understand their work, the needs it fills, and the larger context into which it all fits.
Larry Wall is close to the top of that list. Unlike most, he understands that what he produces means something in relation to the rest of the world and the community. Perl is the kind of tool that could only come from a mind like Larry's - and there aren't enough of those minds to go around.
Thanks for Perl, Larry - my sysadmins thank you too. Please - look both ways before you cross the street, and every other precaution we can think of. We can't afford to lose you...
- -Josh Turiel
They can drive it to bankruptcy, sell it to a PC clone maker, market into oblivion, miss out on a chip technology transition, and sell it again to some guys in a garage - and it JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
It won't die, but it's walking around with knives, chainsaws, and barbed wire sticking to it's zombie hide, and there are gaping holes from the BFG blasts it's taken. I mean, geez!, this is getting to be worse than a bad horror movie - or to use the '80s metaphor, a bad episode of Dallas or Dynasty.
Alright, Amino - we'll give you until the end of CES. Then put up or shut up, I'm begging you!
- -Josh Turiel
I actually pretty much agree with you, but I have a couple of caveats besides:
1: Most companies that pull that kind of stuff will lose employees anyways due to being generally cheeseheaded. Chances are that would just be the tip of the iceberg.
2: Kind of related - a company that is in financial trouble isn't that likely to be sending employees off as telecommuters - it's likelier to be tossing them overboard entirely.
But you're right - the "take one for the team" pressure can be intense at times. Employees need to stand up for their right to be equipped properly. I would anticipate that existing laws should be sufficient to protect the worker, though.
- -Josh Turiel
There was a similar piece about OSHA sticking their noses where they don't belong a few weeks back, if anyone recalls. If I am going to work at home in my own "facility", it's my damn business whether or not I want to work in ergonomically correct surroundings. If I'm more comfortable on the sofa with a keyboard balanced on my lap it's my business and not OSHA's. An employer's liability should be confined to making sure that ergonomically correct materials are available to the employee, should they choose to use them. Employers that fail to meet this need will lose employees to the companies that do.
As for the question of liability, injuries that occur in the course of doing your job, wherever they occur, should be covered by existing workman's comp laws. If you choose to not use an ergonomically correct work area, that should absolve the employer of the liability for your injury (if that's the reason you were injured).
Falling down your stairs when you go downstairs for a slice of leftover pizza should not be grounds for workman's comp claims, either.
All that's needed (if anything) is to add that to existing law.
This is yet another example of government expanding to fill all the available space in our society. Welcome to the world of ever-growing mandates. This sucks.
- -Josh Turiel