Client-server models make sense for "average" business users and "average" home users... There will obviously be exceptions, like businesses who do heavy video manipulation or home users who play lots of games, but for the vast majority of people who browse the web and write text documents a thin client model is far more efficient.
As for privacy... I know many home users who browse the web and write email, do they care that their emails are travelling via someone else's servers? Not really, because they do that already. Employees at a company are there to work, not to write angry rants about their boss. Most companies have employment contracts stating that anything passing through the company computer systems is company property etc, and that you should have no expectation of privacy. You should only be using the company systems to do company business, and it is thus the company's responsibility to ensure that the servers on which it's stored are secure. And funny you should bring up paris hilton, correct me if i'm wrong but i thought her address book was stolen because she still used the default pin or something... But even if it was hacked, the server was owned/controlled by the telco she used... If you hack the telco it doesnt matter if your address book is stored on the server, you can retrieve the call logs to see who someone's been calling, and you can even snoop on the conversations. If your concerned about privacy, don't use internet/telephony service provided by someone else, or at the very least encrypt all your communications. The trouble with this is, you'l have a very limited subset of people you can talk with!
While I agree that there's no reason for a base install of Leopard on an Apple machine to exhibit problems... The average user will also install a lot of non-apple software on their machine and possibly try to connect some non-apple peripherals. None of the machines running leopard in the apple store seemed to be crashing, and there were 50+ machines on display.
Of the 3 leopard machines i have, only one has crashed, and it's happened once. This was due to plugging in a blackberry. When i upgraded the system from Tiger, i had installed "pocket mac for blackberry" which includes a kernel driver for the device, and this caused leopard to crash. Reinstalling pocketmac cleared up the problems and it's worked since.
So create something better, with it's own client and it's own features.. Then make an outlook plugin that supports the same features exchange does. If your happy with that feature set you can use outlook, if you want access to the new features then you need to use the new better client.
I have a motherboard that boots with a message saying: "CoreCell extreme chip you've ever needed" Tho i think it was MSI rather than Asus, it's still a rather weird phrase.
If you intended to switch to another service, how would these mail providers provide you with all the current mail and user accounts? Or would you be expected to recreate new empty accounts with all existing mail lost? Or expect users to migrate their own mail (yeah right).
This is something missing from these outsourcing options, what is the exit strategy? How is the outsourcing company going to provide an archive of your users and their mail in a standard format if/when you decide to leave?
Download all mail from the server using imap? This is a college he's talking about and thus could have several thousand accounts... You would need to acquire each user's password, or reset it somehow, and retrieve the mail from each mailbox. It is absolutely essential that you have a copy of all user account details and every mailbox in a standard format, so that you can migrate to another service if necessary. Not having this is completely irresponsible. If you don't have the raw data in a usable format or a contractual requirement that it be provided on request, the service provider can hold you to ransom... When your current contract expires, they can make ridiculous demands for it's renewal or else delete all your mail.
When i was at college, hotmail and other free mail services (usa.net etc) were banned.
Other things to consider:
How much of your mail goes outside, and how much stays inside? We had a lot of internal traffic, often sometimes quite heavy (large attachments etc) and it would have been pointless sending this out over the wan only to have it come straight back in again...
What is your privacy policy? And what kind of data is sent over email? If your sending students' personal details etc around you might not have their permission to send/store them off-campus on equipment not owned by the college.
How much storage will users want/need? Disk space is cheap these days...
Can you keep a local backup? You should demand this really, have some ability to pull incremental backups of the mail spools in a standard format so that you have a workable exit strategy if you want to switch services or move it back inhouse. You need to be able to do this centrally, not rely on each user to download all the mails to their clients - most wont.
Is access to mail provided via the methods you need (imap, pop3 etc)?
Bear in mind there were betas of JDK6 for OSX.. So Apple have clearly been working on it at some point. Apple have recently released a new version of their OS (leopard), and some new devices (Iphone, ipod) that needed their own port of the OS... And they're still ironing out bugs in those flagship products. Seeing as they only have limited developer resources, it's not surprising to see java on the back burner for a bit.
Well, your C program could get faster by being compiled with a more optimising compiler... And it's not that ruby written in C cant be faster, it's just the current implementation that's not. Remember, the JVM and it's JIT compiler are themselves written in C. It would still be more efficient to do it without the extra overhead of java, assuming your program doesn't add any extra overheads/inefficiencies of it's own.
And your sig mentions the xbox, is that not a case of microsoft building their own machines? They are diversifying into many different areas, who's to say they won't start making workstations again? Especially with the rising marketshare of apple, and the fact many people like the close integration between hardware and software.
Not necessarily, if the original authors are still the copyright holders then they are free to re-release it under a new set of terms without having to rewrite it.
Out of interest, why is a special asus_acpi module needed? Do asus implement additional features not part of the standard acpi, or do they implement standard features in a non standard way?
The comment was referring to the OS... The same linux kernel runs on a whole range of hardware, and is capable of running the same userland apps assuming you have sufficient hardware resources. The fact is you can run the same apps, although something like openoffice would probably be far too slow and swap-heavy on a cellphone it could certainly execute and be used. The flip side of this is that people can and will code apps for these small devices, that can then be used on full blown desktops. And because these programs are small and efficient, you can run them on old desktops too with little more than a recompile.
Every other OS has the same situation, but linux stretches further either side. You could boot vista on a p200 with 128mb ram and run office 2007 but it wouldn't be useful. You cant boot vista on a 600mhz arm-based cellphone, you have to use windows mobile instead. You can't run office 2007 on windows mobile, you cant recompile it because you don't have source code, and even if you did the two os's are very different and would need considerable porting effort. Similarly apps coming the other way need a lot more effort than a simple recompile.
Don't think anyone has ported VLC, but there is a port of mplayer which pretty much uses the same codecs. I always used mplayer on linux anyway.
I ported a few of my own programs (mostly console based) very easily, so i can't imagine other apps would be especially hard. The only real problem is the hardware resources available.
The newer OS2008 from nokia apparently uses a firefox based browser too.
What other desktop linux apps are you after? Some apps are too heavy for the hardware, that's not linux's fault but rather the individual apps and the hardware. A program designed for a supercomputer with a terabyte of ram won't work very well on even a high end gaming pc.
I dont, but that's not to say i couldn't... Is there any reason why those apps wouldn't compile and run on the N800? They might run slowly, but that's another matter.
There is a robust foundation for gaming... Nvidia's drivers are very good (although proprietary), we have libraries like SDL, OpenAL etc... Games which have native Linux versions tend to beat the windows versions by a small margin, and vista has made this gap somewhat bigger. Some games running under wine also outperform native windows in some areas, tho the results are very much variable with some games being slower or behaving erratically.
The foundation is there, what we need are the actual games.
Some games do, some don't... It's not a cut and dry "linux is always 5% faster", but it's getting there...
Nvidia drivers are typically about 5% faster on linux when running native games, but wine can often reduce or cancel out that advantage. ATI's drivers tend to be noticeably slower on linux.
I think someone recently compared wine, xp and vista running a selection of games on the same hardware. XP was faster in most tests, wine was fastest in a few and vista came in last on all of them i think.
But i do think linux is more likely to take over in business first. The biggest thing missing from linux is as you noted, games... Businesses don't need games, they need secure stable workstations for their staff to do a limited set of things, and increasingly these business uses are tending towards web based apps placing even less requirements on the desktop system. They are also keen to reduce costs, and using linux means not only lower licensing costs (or no licensing costs if they choose), but also no need for certain third party apps like anti spyware and anti virus, not to mention less or no costs for keeping track of licenses, less risk from bsa audits, more competition / cheaper prices for support, less risk of lock in, less risk of a product your depending on being dropped etc. Dos (and by extension windows) succeeded because it captured the business market first, while home users were still happily running the C64s and Amigas... Then people started buying home computers which were compatible with what they knew from work.
Linux wireless support is often better than windows (packet injection, rfmon sniffing etc)... You just need to shop around and buy decent cards if you want the best performance. All the cards I use are Atheros based, and work perfectly with Linux... I used to use Prism2 (802.11b only) based cards which also worked well. I've also found Intel's cards work very well.
If you run some rare type of wireless card you may find that the windows drivers aren't too great for it either, and might stop receiving any updates rather quickly. You're also more likely to have other issues, like drivers breaking when you update windows (how many older types of card don't work at all with vista? and how many of these are no longer supported by their manufacturers and so will never work?). And don't get me started on manufacturers who sell the same model of card with different chipsets, that's wholly irresponsible. They should change the model number if they change the core chipset, as it effectively becomes a whole different card.
Not strictly true... The same Linux kernel, admittedly often configured in different ways and with different userland apps, runs on all these devices... The mobile versions of windows are completely different, and have very little in common with the desktop and server versions. I have a Nokia N800, which runs an embedded linux, i can compile all the same programs i use on my desktop linux machines. Even if you have the source, it's not easy to just recompile a windows program to run on windows mobile, and most programs dont come with source anyway.
As for supercomputers, windows is pretty laughable in this area, it's only used in fairly low end clusters and is horribly inefficient (all your cluster nodes need a videocard and local hd?), most of the serious supercomputers are running linux these days. As for performance, last time i saw a windows cluster in the top500 it consisted of 660 2.8ghz dual cpu dell poweredge servers, a machine using 600 dual cpu 2.8ghz poweredge servers of the same model and running linux was 50 places higher.
Yes, wordpress is rather inefficient... How do php accelerators such as eaccelerator affect it, and what level of hardware would you need to handle a significant load of wordpress hits?
Do consider tho, that this module is specific to Asus laptops, and there is a possibility that the authors of it might actually work for Asus and have granted permission for their code to be distributed under other terms in addition to the GPL.
It could also simply be an oversight or a mistake, have Asus responded yet?
The US is also much bigger, and therefore harder for cellphone operators to provide adequate coverage... One way of doing this is to boost the power. The UK is much smaller, but quite hilly... Cellphone coverage in the netherlands is very good because the country is small, densely populated and flat.
This has happened to the hardware side of things despite intel, not because of them... Intel's products have improved considerably and become better value for money thanks to competition primarily from AMD, but also cyrix, via and all the other x86 compatible makers. The same thing happened in other areas of hardware, competition between seagate/maxtor/ibm/hitachi/etc, nvidia/ati/s3/inte... At the same time, proprietary software has become more expensive and slower, because there is often much less competition and more lock-in.
Depends who does the buying... If the people buying these machines aren't spending their own money, and intel or microsoft offer them some money into their own back pocket in exchange for spending more of someone else's money, what do you think they'll do?
You use a third party service for internal communications? That's utterly ridiculous! Set up an internal jabber server, and force it to use SSL for client communications, that way nothing travels over your internal network without SSL and nothing leaves your internal network at all.
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Client-server models make sense for "average" business users and "average" home users...
There will obviously be exceptions, like businesses who do heavy video manipulation or home users who play lots of games, but for the vast majority of people who browse the web and write text documents a thin client model is far more efficient.
As for privacy...
I know many home users who browse the web and write email, do they care that their emails are travelling via someone else's servers? Not really, because they do that already.
Employees at a company are there to work, not to write angry rants about their boss. Most companies have employment contracts stating that anything passing through the company computer systems is company property etc, and that you should have no expectation of privacy. You should only be using the company systems to do company business, and it is thus the company's responsibility to ensure that the servers on which it's stored are secure.
And funny you should bring up paris hilton, correct me if i'm wrong but i thought her address book was stolen because she still used the default pin or something... But even if it was hacked, the server was owned/controlled by the telco she used... If you hack the telco it doesnt matter if your address book is stored on the server, you can retrieve the call logs to see who someone's been calling, and you can even snoop on the conversations.
If your concerned about privacy, don't use internet/telephony service provided by someone else, or at the very least encrypt all your communications. The trouble with this is, you'l have a very limited subset of people you can talk with!
While I agree that there's no reason for a base install of Leopard on an Apple machine to exhibit problems... The average user will also install a lot of non-apple software on their machine and possibly try to connect some non-apple peripherals.
None of the machines running leopard in the apple store seemed to be crashing, and there were 50+ machines on display.
Of the 3 leopard machines i have, only one has crashed, and it's happened once. This was due to plugging in a blackberry. When i upgraded the system from Tiger, i had installed "pocket mac for blackberry" which includes a kernel driver for the device, and this caused leopard to crash. Reinstalling pocketmac cleared up the problems and it's worked since.
So create something better, with it's own client and it's own features..
Then make an outlook plugin that supports the same features exchange does. If your happy with that feature set you can use outlook, if you want access to the new features then you need to use the new better client.
I have a motherboard that boots with a message saying:
"CoreCell extreme chip you've ever needed"
Tho i think it was MSI rather than Asus, it's still a rather weird phrase.
If you intended to switch to another service, how would these mail providers provide you with all the current mail and user accounts?
Or would you be expected to recreate new empty accounts with all existing mail lost? Or expect users to migrate their own mail (yeah right).
This is something missing from these outsourcing options, what is the exit strategy? How is the outsourcing company going to provide an archive of your users and their mail in a standard format if/when you decide to leave?
Download all mail from the server using imap? This is a college he's talking about and thus could have several thousand accounts... You would need to acquire each user's password, or reset it somehow, and retrieve the mail from each mailbox.
It is absolutely essential that you have a copy of all user account details and every mailbox in a standard format, so that you can migrate to another service if necessary. Not having this is completely irresponsible.
If you don't have the raw data in a usable format or a contractual requirement that it be provided on request, the service provider can hold you to ransom... When your current contract expires, they can make ridiculous demands for it's renewal or else delete all your mail.
When i was at college, hotmail and other free mail services (usa.net etc) were banned.
Other things to consider:
How much of your mail goes outside, and how much stays inside? We had a lot of internal traffic, often sometimes quite heavy (large attachments etc) and it would have been pointless sending this out over the wan only to have it come straight back in again...
What is your privacy policy? And what kind of data is sent over email? If your sending students' personal details etc around you might not have their permission to send/store them off-campus on equipment not owned by the college.
How much storage will users want/need? Disk space is cheap these days...
Can you keep a local backup? You should demand this really, have some ability to pull incremental backups of the mail spools in a standard format so that you have a workable exit strategy if you want to switch services or move it back inhouse. You need to be able to do this centrally, not rely on each user to download all the mails to their clients - most wont.
Is access to mail provided via the methods you need (imap, pop3 etc)?
Bear in mind there were betas of JDK6 for OSX.. So Apple have clearly been working on it at some point.
Apple have recently released a new version of their OS (leopard), and some new devices (Iphone, ipod) that needed their own port of the OS... And they're still ironing out bugs in those flagship products. Seeing as they only have limited developer resources, it's not surprising to see java on the back burner for a bit.
Well, your C program could get faster by being compiled with a more optimising compiler...
And it's not that ruby written in C cant be faster, it's just the current implementation that's not. Remember, the JVM and it's JIT compiler are themselves written in C. It would still be more efficient to do it without the extra overhead of java, assuming your program doesn't add any extra overheads/inefficiencies of it's own.
Actually, Microsoft used to make their own line of workstations, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(computer)
And your sig mentions the xbox, is that not a case of microsoft building their own machines? They are diversifying into many different areas, who's to say they won't start making workstations again? Especially with the rising marketshare of apple, and the fact many people like the close integration between hardware and software.
Not necessarily, if the original authors are still the copyright holders then they are free to re-release it under a new set of terms without having to rewrite it.
Out of interest, why is a special asus_acpi module needed? Do asus implement additional features not part of the standard acpi, or do they implement standard features in a non standard way?
The comment was referring to the OS... The same linux kernel runs on a whole range of hardware, and is capable of running the same userland apps assuming you have sufficient hardware resources.
The fact is you can run the same apps, although something like openoffice would probably be far too slow and swap-heavy on a cellphone it could certainly execute and be used. The flip side of this is that people can and will code apps for these small devices, that can then be used on full blown desktops. And because these programs are small and efficient, you can run them on old desktops too with little more than a recompile.
Every other OS has the same situation, but linux stretches further either side. You could boot vista on a p200 with 128mb ram and run office 2007 but it wouldn't be useful. You cant boot vista on a 600mhz arm-based cellphone, you have to use windows mobile instead. You can't run office 2007 on windows mobile, you cant recompile it because you don't have source code, and even if you did the two os's are very different and would need considerable porting effort. Similarly apps coming the other way need a lot more effort than a simple recompile.
That said, OSX at least supports the hardware it's shipped with...
I've seen systems shipped with vista that had unsupported or broken components.
Having done some quick googling...
Gimp runs on the N800, tho it's quite short of ram:
http://net9.blogspot.com/2007/04/gimp-running-on-n800.html
I couldnt find openoffice for it, tho there is aparrently a non maemo specific version for linux/arm available in debian repositories.. There is a version of abiword for the n800 tho, as well as gnumeric.
gnumeric -> http://www.mail-archive.com/maemo-users@maemo.org/msg04128.html
abiword -> http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5423
Don't think anyone has ported VLC, but there is a port of mplayer which pretty much uses the same codecs. I always used mplayer on linux anyway.
I ported a few of my own programs (mostly console based) very easily, so i can't imagine other apps would be especially hard. The only real problem is the hardware resources available.
The newer OS2008 from nokia apparently uses a firefox based browser too.
What other desktop linux apps are you after?
Some apps are too heavy for the hardware, that's not linux's fault but rather the individual apps and the hardware. A program designed for a supercomputer with a terabyte of ram won't work very well on even a high end gaming pc.
I dont, but that's not to say i couldn't...
Is there any reason why those apps wouldn't compile and run on the N800? They might run slowly, but that's another matter.
There is a robust foundation for gaming...
Nvidia's drivers are very good (although proprietary), we have libraries like SDL, OpenAL etc...
Games which have native Linux versions tend to beat the windows versions by a small margin, and vista has made this gap somewhat bigger. Some games running under wine also outperform native windows in some areas, tho the results are very much variable with some games being slower or behaving erratically.
The foundation is there, what we need are the actual games.
Some games do, some don't...
It's not a cut and dry "linux is always 5% faster", but it's getting there...
Nvidia drivers are typically about 5% faster on linux when running native games, but wine can often reduce or cancel out that advantage. ATI's drivers tend to be noticeably slower on linux.
I think someone recently compared wine, xp and vista running a selection of games on the same hardware. XP was faster in most tests, wine was fastest in a few and vista came in last on all of them i think.
But i do think linux is more likely to take over in business first. The biggest thing missing from linux is as you noted, games... Businesses don't need games, they need secure stable workstations for their staff to do a limited set of things, and increasingly these business uses are tending towards web based apps placing even less requirements on the desktop system. They are also keen to reduce costs, and using linux means not only lower licensing costs (or no licensing costs if they choose), but also no need for certain third party apps like anti spyware and anti virus, not to mention less or no costs for keeping track of licenses, less risk from bsa audits, more competition / cheaper prices for support, less risk of lock in, less risk of a product your depending on being dropped etc.
Dos (and by extension windows) succeeded because it captured the business market first, while home users were still happily running the C64s and Amigas... Then people started buying home computers which were compatible with what they knew from work.
Linux wireless support is often better than windows (packet injection, rfmon sniffing etc)... You just need to shop around and buy decent cards if you want the best performance.
All the cards I use are Atheros based, and work perfectly with Linux... I used to use Prism2 (802.11b only) based cards which also worked well.
I've also found Intel's cards work very well.
If you run some rare type of wireless card you may find that the windows drivers aren't too great for it either, and might stop receiving any updates rather quickly. You're also more likely to have other issues, like drivers breaking when you update windows (how many older types of card don't work at all with vista? and how many of these are no longer supported by their manufacturers and so will never work?).
And don't get me started on manufacturers who sell the same model of card with different chipsets, that's wholly irresponsible. They should change the model number if they change the core chipset, as it effectively becomes a whole different card.
Not strictly true...
The same Linux kernel, admittedly often configured in different ways and with different userland apps, runs on all these devices...
The mobile versions of windows are completely different, and have very little in common with the desktop and server versions.
I have a Nokia N800, which runs an embedded linux, i can compile all the same programs i use on my desktop linux machines. Even if you have the source, it's not easy to just recompile a windows program to run on windows mobile, and most programs dont come with source anyway.
As for supercomputers, windows is pretty laughable in this area, it's only used in fairly low end clusters and is horribly inefficient (all your cluster nodes need a videocard and local hd?), most of the serious supercomputers are running linux these days. As for performance, last time i saw a windows cluster in the top500 it consisted of 660 2.8ghz dual cpu dell poweredge servers, a machine using 600 dual cpu 2.8ghz poweredge servers of the same model and running linux was 50 places higher.
Yes, wordpress is rather inefficient...
How do php accelerators such as eaccelerator affect it, and what level of hardware would you need to handle a significant load of wordpress hits?
Do consider tho, that this module is specific to Asus laptops, and there is a possibility that the authors of it might actually work for Asus and have granted permission for their code to be distributed under other terms in addition to the GPL.
It could also simply be an oversight or a mistake, have Asus responded yet?
The US is also much bigger, and therefore harder for cellphone operators to provide adequate coverage... One way of doing this is to boost the power.
The UK is much smaller, but quite hilly...
Cellphone coverage in the netherlands is very good because the country is small, densely populated and flat.
This has happened to the hardware side of things despite intel, not because of them...
Intel's products have improved considerably and become better value for money thanks to competition primarily from AMD, but also cyrix, via and all the other x86 compatible makers. The same thing happened in other areas of hardware, competition between seagate/maxtor/ibm/hitachi/etc, nvidia/ati/s3/inte...
At the same time, proprietary software has become more expensive and slower, because there is often much less competition and more lock-in.
Depends who does the buying...
If the people buying these machines aren't spending their own money, and intel or microsoft offer them some money into their own back pocket in exchange for spending more of someone else's money, what do you think they'll do?
You use a third party service for internal communications? That's utterly ridiculous!
Set up an internal jabber server, and force it to use SSL for client communications, that way nothing travels over your internal network without SSL and nothing leaves your internal network at all.