I think that Snapdragon is a really interesting concept that could really fly if someone took it to Android. The ability to play video in 720i smooth and very good battery time is something that could really move smartbooks/netbooks. While im pretty convinced ASUS has gone into an agreemennt with Microsoft that forbids any linuxy stuff someone else will take the platform and run with it. The point of a netbook is not and has never been running a full desktop with all the bloat that brings. Thats Microsofts bastardisation of a netbook thats really more a small underpowered laptop.
If you have admins that cant manage anything but Windows you should really ponder replacing them. Admins that cant wrap their head around anything but windows arent really that good at windows either. I can manage just about anything and i have seen collegues spend insane amount of money on stuff even a simple script or even a.bat file could fix. The right tool for the right job requires people to know a bit more than an MCSE gives.
Those people are also often the ones who stalls upgrades for all its worth because they dont want to learn new stuff.
One thing that rarely comes up when discussing bloat and slow underperforming applications is energy consumption. While you can shave off some percents off of a server by maximizing hardware energy savings you can save much more by optimizing its software in many cases.
I think it all comes down to economics. As long as the hardware and software industry lives in symbiosis with their endless upgrade loop we will have to endure this. To have your customers buy the same stuff over and over again is a precious cash cow they wont let go off volontarily.
The he only way countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan etc can be sure they wont be invaded is to get nuclear weapons.
It would have been much easier arguing against these countries getting nuclear arms of the west had not invaded countries right and left for no reasons. Stupid decisions brings terrible effects.
I very highly doubt these weapons will ever be used. The only country that has ever used an atombomb so far is the US so i would watch them more closely than North Korea.
The problem is that something in contact with the water dissolves into the water and then build up at another place. Probably crappy aluminum or a completely wrong alloy for using in water.
Problems with crystals comes with some types of water where there are a high degree of lime in it. While its simpler to just use heat exchangers you could also use waterfilters that separates the minerals from the water before use. Most places have water with low amounts of lime and minerals so deposits arent really a problem.
I had a company that made solar panels (heating houses) and inverters for house warming. In some cases we took ground water and extracted heat directly from it and when taken apart those heat exchangers very rarely showed any deposits at all even after ten years of use.
The easiest way to see what type of water you have is to look in your toilet and your sink. If there are much deposits there (not brown ones) you have water thats high with lime or other minerals.
Theres nothing that would make the margins better for Dell, HP or anybody else pushing Windows boxes than selling Linux openly and with some ads. If Microsoft even hints at giving that OEM worse pricing a quick visit at EU and US justice would slap Microsoft silly. Just look at Asus and the extensive rebates they got, plus pure money down their pockets.
Even if selling Linux in itself would be a zero sum game the bargaining power would lower the total paid for Windows OEM licenses much more. If its highly successfull, screw Windows! Current attempts has been hidden, half baked and virtually impossible to find. A serious attempt at selling Linux would be very interesting.
If the various OEMs could stop acting like a bunch of girls stabbing each other in the back for that hunk Microsoft and band together they could really run the show again for the first time in ages.
I would not think Google have anything to worry about legally since they dont use their monopoly in the search market to push out competitors in other markets. The complaints agains Google has been laughable so far and initiated by Microsoft or proxy.
Microsoft, Intel and HP on the other hand should be very afraid. If any serious scrutinize is put on them they are going down and fast.
I have been wanting an Android phone since i first lay my hands on one and could try it out. After i put android on my openmoko even more so. I have used most smartphones in my line of work since im the one setting them up for our users. Symbian and Windows Mobile etc. with all the different iterations plainly just sucks compared to an Android phone. Using Android is a pleasant moment of "so this is how a smartphone should behaive!". I know taste is personal, Android and me have perfect chemistry.
The problem for me is that no matter how much money im willing to spend i cant get one in Sweden. For some reason Sweden has become a real backwater for anything but Microsofts crap. Were first with all the boring stuff and dead last with new exciting stuff.
If this is a know big corp you could look into their past history before deciding. If its for eg. Microsoft then just sell it, quit the company and start over. If its on the other hand is a benign company like Google you have nothing to fear from telling them no thanks.
Its really hard these days being independant with all the software patents flying around in the US. Any big company in software has broad invalid patents that they can use as an excuse to bury any small company they like just for the fun of it and with pocketchange.
I can only concur. Slashdot looks more and more like a place for Microsoft to badmouth Google and overhype any old crap with a new name. I want tech NEWS damnit, not a torrent of flaimbait articles of some ancient crap like Windows.
I think the only time i hasnt used Norton Commander or something else than debug in dos/windows was back in the day when i got my first harddrive for my NCR PC4i. The ST-506 disk was a bit fast for the 8088 CPU so except having to manually replace the bios chip i had to interleave the thing manually too.
Good thing they start cleaning the Dos stuff out of windows finally. I guess 1987 called Microsoft and wanted its software back.
One of the problems with multiprocessor applications is that many tasks doesnt become that much faster no matter how many cores you throw at them. I/O from disk and memory can often has much higher impact on performance than more CPU cycles. Often with even one core you spend countless of cycles wating for things to finish on the disk or in memory etc. With multiple cores even more cycles are wasted waiting.
More cores arent a solution to the brick wall that the chip makers have hit, its an interim solution until we get faster cores or better designed ones.
Some applications like browsers can benefit from more cores but its no use redesigning and reimplementing every app just for the fun of it.
As for servers one of the problems is that the current solution of running many services on one hardware is a bandaid. My hopes are native services that can be moved, load balanced between hardware and coexist without virtualisation and all the overhead it brings both in CPU, Mem and service.
Whats really tiresome theese days is that i cant really read a review and make any use whatsoever of it. This benchmark is an excellent example. With all the astroturfing going on the only way of knowing if something is usable is to test it yourself or talk to a friend you trust.
Vista actually looked rather promising and got good reviews all over but the moment i had the chance to try it out i realized all was just empty talk from the spin machines. I strongly suspect the same for Windows 7. The good reviews and comments about Windows 7 are probably all fluff and paid for astroturfing. Once we have it in our hands we will see its just Vista with a new name.
Google goes out of their way of doing something nice and "people" kick them in the groin repetedly. The people feels a lot like astroturfers trying to portrait Google in a bad manner. I suspect its very irritating for some unnamed companies with goodwill down in the slimepit that a successful company like Google can be liked by their users.
It would be nice of the editors would stop posting crap articles like this whos only purpouse is badmouthing, straight from the competition. Its a different kind of FUD but still the same of the old and tried.
The more i read things like this the more i feel for Google. They really need to start buying politicians and astroturfers if this keeps up just as their competition already does.
I think that most of the people who wines about Linux not being good is the people who just wants Windows for free and without all the problems, viruses and insanity like DRM. Following Microsofts whims around are a bottomless pit of wasted time. For every API linux manages to mimic Microsoft creates ten more and "forgets" to document half of them.
If you want Linux to succed you need to make Linux better, not more like Windows. Right now its very easy to use Linux at home for almost every task possible except using Windows applications. I dont think making Linux handling more Windows applications will be better for Linux. It will rather take away any incentive for comercial developers to make native versions.
I can name a few things Linux could use better than more Windows support:
More work on Sabayon, its really excellent user profile handling and eons better than the Windows 95 policy-crud NTConfig.POL Microsoft spews out.
Better and more integrated filesharing than samba. Samba fits into linux as a melon in that dark place the dancing baboon talks out of. Skip Windows altogheter and concentrate on Linux and sharing files between Linux machines easily.
One standard way that you can deploy applications from a developer into multiple distributions. Multiple choices exist, one of them has to come out on top. Doesnt at all have to replace.rpm.deb or tgz etc.
Other than that i cant think of one single thing i lack in Linux. Thats despite that i use it in work, at home and manages a great bunch of Linux machines.
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can for all we know just be making it up as he go just to get a leaner sentence. That and the torture hes been put through sure can make wonders for a captives imagination.
Torture is a very crappy way of getting information and just about as reliable now as it was during the spanish inquisition where many people confessed of being wiches, sorcerers and all sorts of funny things. The inquisition was dismantled because it was ineffective, not because it was evil or inhuman.
Barack Obama is a spineless wimp for not prosecuting the hell out of the former administration and instead letting things like this that excuses torture upfront.
"Hey customer! Forget about that DRM thingie we snuck in last version and look at how much better Windows 7 is than Vista! Never mind all those pesky little compatible issues, we give you two OS to fix, hunt for malware and upgrade by shipping XP inside Windows 7! Now that you have crappy Vista to benchmak against instead of XP Windows 7 will look almost bearable!"
Brilliant! The really sad part is that many ppl will swallow this hook line and sinker. Good for them as long as i can keep it off any computer i touch.
No doubt we will hear about the Microsoft connection in a couple of days. Just as with the Yahoo deal this complaint is most probably a lobby initiated by Microsoft. Its very clear Ballmer is out to crush Google with every possible means. Not for the sake of the Microsoft stockholders but as a personal vendetta.
I think all this will do is push technologies like live raytracing harder. A raytraced 3d view is much much more realistic than anything a modern GPU can muster. Back in the day when i fooled around with povray on my 33 mhz computer it was very easy to do 3d views that beat anything i has ever seen in a modern game. It took a couple of days to do a high resolution image. Live it has to render a pic about 40-50 times a second wich demands a great deal of computational power or a new way of doing raytracing.
I would much prefer if the openoffice developers, abiword, koffice and the rest put much more work into making odf displaying flawlessly between them than people putting much work into forking openoffice.
I personally doesnt like openoffice much but primary because its an MS Office clone. The copy can only be so much better than the original.
"Your post makes it painfully obvious that you haven't actually used AD or Group Policies, and your entire post is a pack of lies."
I can tell you its not a pack of lies but my honest opinion. You can think its the best thing since sliced bread for all you want. I still think Active Directory sucks in a way only Microsoft and a vacuum cleaner can.
I want the crap to work as expected first of all. Self healing comes at the very bottom of any list i have. Id much rather have good error handling and logging than self healing.
Self healing is something i hate since it makes software behave inherently unpredictable, even more so than an average Windows box of/etc/random
Slashdot Mirror
I think that Snapdragon is a really interesting concept that could really fly if someone took it to Android. The ability to play video in 720i smooth and very good battery time is something that could really move smartbooks/netbooks. While im pretty convinced ASUS has gone into an agreemennt with Microsoft that forbids any linuxy stuff someone else will take the platform and run with it. The point of a netbook is not and has never been running a full desktop with all the bloat that brings. Thats Microsofts bastardisation of a netbook thats really more a small underpowered laptop.
If you have admins that cant manage anything but Windows you should really ponder replacing them. Admins that cant wrap their head around anything but windows arent really that good at windows either. I can manage just about anything and i have seen collegues spend insane amount of money on stuff even a simple script or even a .bat file could fix. The right tool for the right job requires people to know a bit more than an MCSE gives.
Those people are also often the ones who stalls upgrades for all its worth because they dont want to learn new stuff.
One thing that rarely comes up when discussing bloat and slow underperforming applications is energy consumption. While you can shave off some percents off of a server by maximizing hardware energy savings you can save much more by optimizing its software in many cases.
I think it all comes down to economics. As long as the hardware and software industry lives in symbiosis with their endless upgrade loop we will have to endure this. To have your customers buy the same stuff over and over again is a precious cash cow they wont let go off volontarily.
Whos your daddy?
The he only way countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan etc can be sure they wont be invaded is to get nuclear weapons.
It would have been much easier arguing against these countries getting nuclear arms of the west had not invaded countries right and left for no reasons. Stupid decisions brings terrible effects.
I very highly doubt these weapons will ever be used. The only country that has ever used an atombomb so far is the US so i would watch them more closely than North Korea.
The problem is that something in contact with the water dissolves into the water and then build up at another place. Probably crappy aluminum or a completely wrong alloy for using in water.
Problems with crystals comes with some types of water where there are a high degree of lime in it. While its simpler to just use heat exchangers you could also use waterfilters that separates the minerals from the water before use. Most places have water with low amounts of lime and minerals so deposits arent really a problem.
I had a company that made solar panels (heating houses) and inverters for house warming. In some cases we took ground water and extracted heat directly from it and when taken apart those heat exchangers very rarely showed any deposits at all even after ten years of use.
The easiest way to see what type of water you have is to look in your toilet and your sink. If there are much deposits there (not brown ones) you have water thats high with lime or other minerals.
Endorse Linux!
Theres nothing that would make the margins better for Dell, HP or anybody else pushing Windows boxes than selling Linux openly and with some ads. If Microsoft even hints at giving that OEM worse pricing a quick visit at EU and US justice would slap Microsoft silly. Just look at Asus and the extensive rebates they got, plus pure money down their pockets.
Even if selling Linux in itself would be a zero sum game the bargaining power would lower the total paid for Windows OEM licenses much more. If its highly successfull, screw Windows! Current attempts has been hidden, half baked and virtually impossible to find. A serious attempt at selling Linux would be very interesting.
If the various OEMs could stop acting like a bunch of girls stabbing each other in the back for that hunk Microsoft and band together they could really run the show again for the first time in ages.
I would not think Google have anything to worry about legally since they dont use their monopoly in the search market to push out competitors in other markets. The complaints agains Google has been laughable so far and initiated by Microsoft or proxy.
Microsoft, Intel and HP on the other hand should be very afraid. If any serious scrutinize is put on them they are going down and fast.
I have been wanting an Android phone since i first lay my hands on one and could try it out. After i put android on my openmoko even more so. I have used most smartphones in my line of work since im the one setting them up for our users. Symbian and Windows Mobile etc. with all the different iterations plainly just sucks compared to an Android phone. Using Android is a pleasant moment of "so this is how a smartphone should behaive!". I know taste is personal, Android and me have perfect chemistry.
The problem for me is that no matter how much money im willing to spend i cant get one in Sweden. For some reason Sweden has become a real backwater for anything but Microsofts crap. Were first with all the boring stuff and dead last with new exciting stuff.
If this is a know big corp you could look into their past history before deciding. If its for eg. Microsoft then just sell it, quit the company and start over. If its on the other hand is a benign company like Google you have nothing to fear from telling them no thanks.
Its really hard these days being independant with all the software patents flying around in the US. Any big company in software has broad invalid patents that they can use as an excuse to bury any small company they like just for the fun of it and with pocketchange.
I can only concur. Slashdot looks more and more like a place for Microsoft to badmouth Google and overhype any old crap with a new name. I want tech NEWS damnit, not a torrent of flaimbait articles of some ancient crap like Windows.
I think the only time i hasnt used Norton Commander or something else than debug in dos/windows was back in the day when i got my first harddrive for my NCR PC4i. The ST-506 disk was a bit fast for the 8088 CPU so except having to manually replace the bios chip i had to interleave the thing manually too.
Good thing they start cleaning the Dos stuff out of windows finally. I guess 1987 called Microsoft and wanted its software back.
One of the problems with multiprocessor applications is that many tasks doesnt become that much faster no matter how many cores you throw at them. I/O from disk and memory can often has much higher impact on performance than more CPU cycles. Often with even one core you spend countless of cycles wating for things to finish on the disk or in memory etc. With multiple cores even more cycles are wasted waiting.
More cores arent a solution to the brick wall that the chip makers have hit, its an interim solution until we get faster cores or better designed ones.
Some applications like browsers can benefit from more cores but its no use redesigning and reimplementing every app just for the fun of it.
As for servers one of the problems is that the current solution of running many services on one hardware is a bandaid. My hopes are native services that can be moved, load balanced between hardware and coexist without virtualisation and all the overhead it brings both in CPU, Mem and service.
Whats really tiresome theese days is that i cant really read a review and make any use whatsoever of it. This benchmark is an excellent example. With all the astroturfing going on the only way of knowing if something is usable is to test it yourself or talk to a friend you trust.
Vista actually looked rather promising and got good reviews all over but the moment i had the chance to try it out i realized all was just empty talk from the spin machines. I strongly suspect the same for Windows 7. The good reviews and comments about Windows 7 are probably all fluff and paid for astroturfing. Once we have it in our hands we will see its just Vista with a new name.
Google goes out of their way of doing something nice and "people" kick them in the groin repetedly. The people feels a lot like astroturfers trying to portrait Google in a bad manner. I suspect its very irritating for some unnamed companies with goodwill down in the slimepit that a successful company like Google can be liked by their users.
It would be nice of the editors would stop posting crap articles like this whos only purpouse is badmouthing, straight from the competition. Its a different kind of FUD but still the same of the old and tried.
The more i read things like this the more i feel for Google. They really need to start buying politicians and astroturfers if this keeps up just as their competition already does.
I think that most of the people who wines about Linux not being good is the people who just wants Windows for free and without all the problems, viruses and insanity like DRM. Following Microsofts whims around are a bottomless pit of wasted time. For every API linux manages to mimic Microsoft creates ten more and "forgets" to document half of them.
If you want Linux to succed you need to make Linux better, not more like Windows. Right now its very easy to use Linux at home for almost every task possible except using Windows applications. I dont think making Linux handling more Windows applications will be better for Linux. It will rather take away any incentive for comercial developers to make native versions.
I can name a few things Linux could use better than more Windows support:
More work on Sabayon, its really excellent user profile handling and eons better than the Windows 95 policy-crud NTConfig.POL Microsoft spews out.
Better and more integrated filesharing than samba. Samba fits into linux as a melon in that dark place the dancing baboon talks out of. Skip Windows altogheter and concentrate on Linux and sharing files between Linux machines easily.
One standard way that you can deploy applications from a developer into multiple distributions. Multiple choices exist, one of them has to come out on top. Doesnt at all have to replace .rpm .deb or tgz etc.
Other than that i cant think of one single thing i lack in Linux. Thats despite that i use it in work, at home and manages a great bunch of Linux machines.
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can for all we know just be making it up as he go just to get a leaner sentence. That and the torture hes been put through sure can make wonders for a captives imagination.
Torture is a very crappy way of getting information and just about as reliable now as it was during the spanish inquisition where many people confessed of being wiches, sorcerers and all sorts of funny things. The inquisition was dismantled because it was ineffective, not because it was evil or inhuman.
Barack Obama is a spineless wimp for not prosecuting the hell out of the former administration and instead letting things like this that excuses torture upfront.
"Hey customer! Forget about that DRM thingie we snuck in last version and look at how much better Windows 7 is than Vista! Never mind all those pesky little compatible issues, we give you two OS to fix, hunt for malware and upgrade by shipping XP inside Windows 7! Now that you have crappy Vista to benchmak against instead of XP Windows 7 will look almost bearable!"
Brilliant! The really sad part is that many ppl will swallow this hook line and sinker. Good for them as long as i can keep it off any computer i touch.
Global warming, fundamentalist christian, jews, muslims, poisonous food additives,and a global echonomic collaps can be a good start. :D
No doubt we will hear about the Microsoft connection in a couple of days. Just as with the Yahoo deal this complaint is most probably a lobby initiated by Microsoft.
Its very clear Ballmer is out to crush Google with every possible means. Not for the sake of the Microsoft stockholders but as a personal vendetta.
I think all this will do is push technologies like live raytracing harder. A raytraced 3d view is much much more realistic than anything a modern GPU can muster. Back in the day when i fooled around with povray on my 33 mhz computer it was very easy to do 3d views that beat anything i has ever seen in a modern game. It took a couple of days to do a high resolution image. Live it has to render a pic about 40-50 times a second wich demands a great deal of computational power or a new way of doing raytracing.
I would much prefer if the openoffice developers, abiword, koffice and the rest put much more work into making odf displaying flawlessly between them than people putting much work into forking openoffice.
I personally doesnt like openoffice much but primary because its an MS Office clone. The copy can only be so much better than the original.
"Your post makes it painfully obvious that you haven't actually used AD or Group Policies, and your entire post is a pack of lies."
I can tell you its not a pack of lies but my honest opinion. You can think its the best thing since sliced bread for all you want. I still think Active Directory sucks in a way only Microsoft and a vacuum cleaner can.
I want the crap to work as expected first of all. Self healing comes at the very bottom of any list i have. Id much rather have good error handling and logging than self healing.
Self healing is something i hate since it makes software behave inherently unpredictable, even more so than an average Windows box of /etc/random