Do I care? A Sun machine with the uptime promise like that costs over a million dollars.
Guess what? Not all companies require the same level of reliability out of their machines! For you reliability isn't the be all and end all. Cool, don't spend big bucks on a Sun. For many banks reliability comes ahead of everything - down time can be hugely expensive.
Oh, and a million dollars is not a lot of money to spend on a good computer. Even my small department spent more than that on Sun gear in 2004.
Written a different way most applications can be parallelized.
Most, but not all - and the ones that can't are often very important to companies.
Sun (and other big iron providers like IBM) fill a niche in the market that commodity hardware cannot fill. It is however a niche that many, very wealthy, companies need filling and one that isn't going to go away soon.
Can you fit more than eight Opterons in a single machine? Can the CPUs be hot swapped? Do they have the proven uptime record of UltraSparcs?
If the answer to any of these questions is 'No' then I forsee a continued market for Sparc hardware. Banks spend millions on new Sparc kit every year - for both new and legacy applications. Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, not every task is suitable for clustering. The bandwidth between nodes is still far too small, and the network induced lag far too great.
When you can get five-nines uptime out of a thirty processor Opteron box - then it'll be time to retire the Sparc range. Until that day comes they'll always have a market.
As far as I am aware, no wiccans have ever gone to war and slaughtered entire civilizations over their religion.
That's probably because Wicca didn't exist before the 1950s. Actual pagans, i.e. the people who lived in Europe prior to spread of Christianity, were just as brutal and violent as anyone else. The pagans of the British Isles and Scandinavia were very much a warrior society, hardly the vegetarian tree huggers that make up modern 'pagan' groups.
Or they could just use those Trident II ICBMs the US Government sold them. Luckly for Michigan the US designed targetting systems will probably get confused and hit a Canadian target instead.
Apologies for the PDF, but this was the only source I could find quickly that had a figure for the California state budget. It puts it at 110 billion USD, or 60 billion pounds. According to this PDF the UK government spend 488 billion pounds last year, or 900 billion USD.
The EU budget is 99 billion Euros, or about 127 billion US dollars. Whilst this is far smaller than the US federal budget you have to appreciate that the EU budget is on top of the individual (and in many cases enormous) national government spending. The British Government government spend over half a trillion a year, and the UK isn't the most spendthrift nation in Europe.
There's also the small matter of the EU budget failing its financial audit for the tenth year running. They don't even use double-entry book keeping! So we can safely assume that much of that 99 billion is not going where it's supposed to go.
... redirect them to one of the GNAA/goats.cx style shock images. Nothing will discourage (most) webloggers from deep linking to your images more than turning their precious 'blogs' in to gay scat porn sites.
I tried FlightGear last week (under Windows) and it was awful! My machine is no super computer (3.2Ghz P4 and a Ge4600Ti) but I expected more than 2-8fps. By comparison MS Flight Sim 2004 runs smoothly and looks great - as well as having well regarded flight dynamics, a excellent weather modelling and a pretty comprehensive ATC system.
The problem is that producing a game requires much more focus and many more resources than 99.9% of OS projects have access to. What's really needed is a high quality, high level OS game engine. Something that hides all the OpenGL/SDL details, that's easy for programmers to pick and use, that's easy extensible, that's cross platform, that builds with multiple compilers and that doesn't require hundreds of lines of code just to initalise. Ideally it should also have bindings for a number of common languages: C, C++, Perl, Python and Ruby would probably cover most bases.
Such an engine would allow a small team to produce a game in a reasonable time frame (i.e. before they lose interest).
The same thing that's holding back gaming on the Mac: Marketability / Userbase.
Exactly. Companies don't avoid OSX (or Linux) because they are such huge fans of win32 that the though of releasing software for anything else is abhorrent (Microsoft's first and second party studios aside). It's simply not worth the time and effort to do so for relatively few sales.
The huge popularity of consoles relative to the PC games market is already cutting in to the number of Windows compatible titles. If companies aren't willing to develop for Windows, why on Earth would they port their games to a platform with 1/50th the potential market?
There will always be games for the Mac and Linux. But they are going to be few in number and (mostly) behind the curve due to the time it takes to port them. Crappy video drivers for Linux and Apple selling machine with sub-laptop video performance isn't helping the matter either.
A BBC? The Beeb was for kids who wore glasses and had piano lessons. All the cool kids had Speccys and suffered with Sinclair Basic. Well, suffered for as long as it took to learn Z80 assembler.
I'm waiting for someone to find a way of combining Mac and Nintendo zealotry with insulting Sony, Real, Microsoft, SCO, Sun, the whole concept of big iron computing over generic boxes,.NET, C++, Qt's windows license, and any form of DRM.
I honestly don't think Slashcode will be able to cope with 1e16 'Insightful' mods.
Sony already owned an array of media companies - including a games publishing arms. Apple don't. Sony were a ubiquitous producer of all types of consumer electronics and had near total vertical integration. Apple make a niche computer and a MP3 player. Sony had more money than God and could afford to spend billions to establish a market position. Apple can't. Sony entered a stagnating market populated by two comparatively small companies. Apple would be entering a competitive market dominated by two huge multinationals.
Apple won't enter the console market because they are not run by complete idiots. They have been very successful in the MP3 player market because they were the first company to launch a unit that had mass market acceptability. They got the jump on Sony by nearly two years. They do not have that luxury in the console market. Sony and Microsoft can easily afford to poach the best publishers and can sell their machines at massive losses. Even Nintendo, with it's pedigree and ability to produce fantastic first-party titles, is struggling to compete. To compare Apple's position now to Sony's in 1994 is laughable.
Setting up a stage platform that is identical to the production platform and then compiling the sources as packages for later deployment
This isn't just an option, it's a necessity. You should never install new software, or a new version of currently installed software, without first testing it on a machine that mirrors the production setup. Only after testing has shown it's stable and doesn't adversly affect other software should it be rolled out on the production machine.
In the case of a source based distribution you should be rolling out the binaries you know work - i.e. the ones you built and tested for your test system.
No it's not, the replacement of static folders with more flexible labels does not change the basic model of email. There's no doubting it's a cool feature, but it's very much evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
The only paradigm that's been shifted by GMail is that marketeers now have direct access to their potential customers' emails and so have an unprecedented window in to the mind of their market.
The later form is perfectly acceptable when using British English. Anyway people usually just refer to them as "Goldmans" or "that place where they all work one hundred hour weeks".
The Sci-Fi channel initially refused to fund the Battlestar series, even after the excellent ratings the miniseries got. It was only after Sky One stumped up 400,000 GBP (about 720K USD) per episode that it was commisioned. So I wouldn't say Sci-Fi are 100% behind the show, but at least outside involvement might stop them cancelling it at the first opportunity.
Don't feel too bad - even our gallic neighbours can bugger up from time to time. The most recent example that springs to mind is their on going battle to build
an aircraft carrier that can move without irradiating the crew.
That said, there probably isn't a word in French that could describe the billion dollar tent that is the Millenium Dome!
As if! Blair went to The Chorister School in Durham and then Fettes College in Edinburgh. Having been to university in Durham and knowing people who went to Fettes I can assure you that they are both as elite as they come.
An interesting point is that both Thatcher and Major, filthy elitist pigs that they were, both went to state run grammar schools.
Rising sea levels are a problem for poor countries. Just half the funding to the NHS (which is the most wasteful organisation in the history of humanity) and we've got over fifty billion pounds per annum to spend on sea defences. Fifty billion a year will pay for a lot of sea walls, especially if we concentrate them around areas with a high population density.
Which would mean you aren't self respecting of yourself, since you not only say you have a DS but have pulled it out in public, right?
What can I say - I'm a geek, and a geek who collects games consoles at that.
... that's a pretty hefty amount of money for a system just to have it 4 months before UK launch. How many games do you have for it, too?
I work in the City and so have a high disposable income. I choose to spend part of this income on games consoles, others spend it on coke - each to their own. Plus new console releases are few and far between - the last major one was the GBA/SP - so over time it isn't too expensive.
That's the SpikeTV crowd, that's the MTV crowd, thats the crowd where if there was some genetic disease that would kill off stupid people, they'd all die.
Damn right - but in case you hadn't noticed the world (or at least the Anglo-Saxon portion of it) is run by and for the lowest common denominator. A credit bubble has given them huge disposable incomes and they've chosen to spend it on a Playstation and EA FIFA/Madden/Hockey. These days image is everything, if its wasn't Nike would not be able to sell 2 dollars worth of shoe for 150 dollars.
Oh, and the PSP does look nice. It looks like someone took the time to design it - the DS looks like they only remembered about the casing at the last moment.
You made a good troll attempt, really... but we have yet to see how well the PSP will do in all the markets.
Shame, you were doing so well but couldn't resist a little ad hominem at the end. Anyway - obviously we'll have to wait and see. But of the two machine only the PSP has any chance of mainstream acceptance. There's always the chance it could flop 3DO style; but the DS will be, at best, a fun piece of curio.
No self respecting 18-35 year old is going to start playing a DS on the train. It looks like a childs toy because, in essence, that's what it is. The PSP looks cool - I've yet to use mine without generating a crowd of admiring observers. In comparison I've had my DS for over a month more and it's never generated anything like the same interest.
For the market Sony is aiming at the price difference is trival. They are after the kind of consumers who upgrade their phones every three months and happily spend hundreds of pounds/dollars/euros on the latest and greatest gadgets. When Sony released the original Playstation they made gaming acceptable to the mainstream. Nintendo and Sega were/are seen as toy companies - Sony were the acceptable face of videogaming. Handheld games machines are still seen as toys. In the UK I have never seen an adult playing on a Gameboy in public - ever. Sony will market the PSP as a portable entertainment device - a machine that plays music, videos and (whisper it) games. Expect an enormous marketing blitz that emphasises the 'cool' aspect of the machine, rather than it's (admittedly very good) abilities as gaming device.
I've got both a PSP and a DS and the build quality on the PSP is far higher. The DS is a cool little machine and I can't wait for the new versions of Advance Wars and Mario Kart. But it looks and feels like a toy - it's clunky and made with cheap looking plastic. The PSP, as befits a machine costing 100USD more, looks and feels like a quality piece of consumer electronics. My machine has no dead pixels, twisting it doesn't cause the UMD lid to open and using it in public generates a crowd of interested observers.
My only real gripes are that it uses Memory Stick DUO media, which are very expensive in comparison to non-Sony memory cards, and that the shiney facia seems to get fingerprints on it no matter how careful you are.
Why would anyone buy it off eBay when you can get it from Lik Sang for 400USD? Not to disparage the majority of eBay sellers but there is no way I'm sending some random punter two hundred quid on the off chance he'll send me the console. I ordered my PSP from Lik Sang on 2005/01/02 and it arrived at my office in London two days later - unlike the few things I've ordered off eBay which have never arrived in less than a week (from such remote locations as Stoke and Gillingham).
On a vaguely off topic note - anyone who has a PSP and hasn't visted wooba.com should do so. I has a very handy guide to playing video on the machine and has a link to a drag'n'drop video encoder.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and a million dollars is not a lot of money to spend on a good computer. Even my small department spent more than that on Sun gear in 2004.
Most, but not all - and the ones that can't are often very important to companies.
Sun (and other big iron providers like IBM) fill a niche in the market that commodity hardware cannot fill. It is however a niche that many, very wealthy, companies need filling and one that isn't going to go away soon.
If the answer to any of these questions is 'No' then I forsee a continued market for Sparc hardware. Banks spend millions on new Sparc kit every year - for both new and legacy applications. Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, not every task is suitable for clustering. The bandwidth between nodes is still far too small, and the network induced lag far too great.
When you can get five-nines uptime out of a thirty processor Opteron box - then it'll be time to retire the Sparc range. Until that day comes they'll always have a market.
Pah - Elite for the Acorn Archimedes is the best version of the greatest game ever made! Though the original Super Mario Kart runs it a close second.
That's probably because Wicca didn't exist before the 1950s. Actual pagans, i.e. the people who lived in Europe prior to spread of Christianity, were just as brutal and violent as anyone else. The pagans of the British Isles and Scandinavia were very much a warrior society, hardly the vegetarian tree huggers that make up modern 'pagan' groups.
Or they could just use those Trident II ICBMs the US Government sold them. Luckly for Michigan the US designed targetting systems will probably get confused and hit a Canadian target instead.
Apologies for the PDF, but this was the only source I could find quickly that had a figure for the California state budget. It puts it at 110 billion USD, or 60 billion pounds. According to this PDF the UK government spend 488 billion pounds last year, or 900 billion USD.
There's also the small matter of the EU budget failing its financial audit for the tenth year running. They don't even use double-entry book keeping! So we can safely assume that much of that 99 billion is not going where it's supposed to go.
... redirect them to one of the GNAA/goats.cx style shock images. Nothing will discourage (most) webloggers from deep linking to your images more than turning their precious 'blogs' in to gay scat porn sites.
The problem is that producing a game requires much more focus and many more resources than 99.9% of OS projects have access to. What's really needed is a high quality, high level OS game engine. Something that hides all the OpenGL/SDL details, that's easy for programmers to pick and use, that's easy extensible, that's cross platform, that builds with multiple compilers and that doesn't require hundreds of lines of code just to initalise. Ideally it should also have bindings for a number of common languages: C, C++, Perl, Python and Ruby would probably cover most bases.
Such an engine would allow a small team to produce a game in a reasonable time frame (i.e. before they lose interest).
Wishful thinking I know.
Exactly. Companies don't avoid OSX (or Linux) because they are such huge fans of win32 that the though of releasing software for anything else is abhorrent (Microsoft's first and second party studios aside). It's simply not worth the time and effort to do so for relatively few sales.
The huge popularity of consoles relative to the PC games market is already cutting in to the number of Windows compatible titles. If companies aren't willing to develop for Windows, why on Earth would they port their games to a platform with 1/50th the potential market?
There will always be games for the Mac and Linux. But they are going to be few in number and (mostly) behind the curve due to the time it takes to port them. Crappy video drivers for Linux and Apple selling machine with sub-laptop video performance isn't helping the matter either.
A BBC? The Beeb was for kids who wore glasses and had piano lessons. All the cool kids had Speccys and suffered with Sinclair Basic. Well, suffered for as long as it took to learn Z80 assembler.
I honestly don't think Slashcode will be able to cope with 1e16 'Insightful' mods.
Apple won't enter the console market because they are not run by complete idiots. They have been very successful in the MP3 player market because they were the first company to launch a unit that had mass market acceptability. They got the jump on Sony by nearly two years. They do not have that luxury in the console market. Sony and Microsoft can easily afford to poach the best publishers and can sell their machines at massive losses. Even Nintendo, with it's pedigree and ability to produce fantastic first-party titles, is struggling to compete. To compare Apple's position now to Sony's in 1994 is laughable.
This isn't just an option, it's a necessity. You should never install new software, or a new version of currently installed software, without first testing it on a machine that mirrors the production setup. Only after testing has shown it's stable and doesn't adversly affect other software should it be rolled out on the production machine.
In the case of a source based distribution you should be rolling out the binaries you know work - i.e. the ones you built and tested for your test system.
No it's not, the replacement of static folders with more flexible labels does not change the basic model of email. There's no doubting it's a cool feature, but it's very much evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
The only paradigm that's been shifted by GMail is that marketeers now have direct access to their potential customers' emails and so have an unprecedented window in to the mind of their market.
The later form is perfectly acceptable when using British English. Anyway people usually just refer to them as "Goldmans" or "that place where they all work one hundred hour weeks".
The Sci-Fi channel initially refused to fund the Battlestar series, even after the excellent ratings the miniseries got. It was only after Sky One stumped up 400,000 GBP (about 720K USD) per episode that it was commisioned. So I wouldn't say Sci-Fi are 100% behind the show, but at least outside involvement might stop them cancelling it at the first opportunity.
That said, there probably isn't a word in French that could describe the billion dollar tent that is the Millenium Dome!
Isn't Blair actually a council school grad?
As if! Blair went to The Chorister School in Durham and then Fettes College in Edinburgh. Having been to university in Durham and knowing people who went to Fettes I can assure you that they are both as elite as they come.An interesting point is that both Thatcher and Major, filthy elitist pigs that they were, both went to state run grammar schools.
Rising sea levels are a problem for poor countries. Just half the funding to the NHS (which is the most wasteful organisation in the history of humanity) and we've got over fifty billion pounds per annum to spend on sea defences. Fifty billion a year will pay for a lot of sea walls, especially if we concentrate them around areas with a high population density.
What can I say - I'm a geek, and a geek who collects games consoles at that.
I work in the City and so have a high disposable income. I choose to spend part of this income on games consoles, others spend it on coke - each to their own. Plus new console releases are few and far between - the last major one was the GBA/SP - so over time it isn't too expensive.
That's the SpikeTV crowd, that's the MTV crowd, thats the crowd where if there was some genetic disease that would kill off stupid people, they'd all die.Damn right - but in case you hadn't noticed the world (or at least the Anglo-Saxon portion of it) is run by and for the lowest common denominator. A credit bubble has given them huge disposable incomes and they've chosen to spend it on a Playstation and EA FIFA/Madden/Hockey. These days image is everything, if its wasn't Nike would not be able to sell 2 dollars worth of shoe for 150 dollars.
Oh, and the PSP does look nice. It looks like someone took the time to design it - the DS looks like they only remembered about the casing at the last moment.
You made a good troll attempt, really... but we have yet to see how well the PSP will do in all the markets.Shame, you were doing so well but couldn't resist a little ad hominem at the end. Anyway - obviously we'll have to wait and see. But of the two machine only the PSP has any chance of mainstream acceptance. There's always the chance it could flop 3DO style; but the DS will be, at best, a fun piece of curio.
For the market Sony is aiming at the price difference is trival. They are after the kind of consumers who upgrade their phones every three months and happily spend hundreds of pounds/dollars/euros on the latest and greatest gadgets. When Sony released the original Playstation they made gaming acceptable to the mainstream. Nintendo and Sega were/are seen as toy companies - Sony were the acceptable face of videogaming. Handheld games machines are still seen as toys. In the UK I have never seen an adult playing on a Gameboy in public - ever. Sony will market the PSP as a portable entertainment device - a machine that plays music, videos and (whisper it) games. Expect an enormous marketing blitz that emphasises the 'cool' aspect of the machine, rather than it's (admittedly very good) abilities as gaming device.
My only real gripes are that it uses Memory Stick DUO media, which are very expensive in comparison to non-Sony memory cards, and that the shiney facia seems to get fingerprints on it no matter how careful you are.
On a vaguely off topic note - anyone who has a PSP and hasn't visted wooba.com should do so. I has a very handy guide to playing video on the machine and has a link to a drag'n'drop video encoder.