I think to a great extent, it is already like this. There is RedHat and SUSE for more serious (read business) deployments, and a plethora of others, from which you can choose one that fits your needs.
I've been trying to set up my GF old PC for her folks. I tested RH 9 and Mandrake 10.0 before I settled on Ubuntu, primarily because I like it's polish, simplicity, and application availability for a fairly new linux user, but also because it is Debian based, and I've had a few years worth of experience working with and on with my own Debian box at work. But in the end, I was glad to have a few distros to try out to find one that suited the eventual use of the PC (mostly web surfing, light "Office"-type work, photo download + editing, and most importantly, not having to working about every *!@#&*!! virus and worm prowling the net in the hunt for vulnerable windows systems). I could not imaging finding this good a fit if there were fewer choices available.
I would love to see Pixar side-step all the normal distribution channels, and use a video version of iTunes (or whatever it'll be called by that time) to sell and distribute their movies. The one Mr S. Jobs is one of the few people with enough brass to actually do something like that, and he's the CEO of both companies. Alas, I dream...
Recode the GUI in something like wxWidgets, Qt, FLTK, etc (stated in order of personal preference). It'd probably also help clean up any bugs within their code... Dare I dream ?.... Been hoping Mathworks would do the same thing with Matlab. Me thinks, from the look of things, that their OS X port is a recompilation of their linux port...
This should be a really neat way to get rid of power hungry displays. This device will draw some power, but hopefully, by virtue of its size, nowhere near the amount of a conventional laptop or PDA display. It should definitely open up some interesting possibilities. Imagine being able to shut off your laptop display, with this plugged into the VGA port, and drawing it's necessary power from a powered USB or Firewire port. Mmmmm... Tasty...
This is excellent - with the Slim MP3 player and Apple's Airport express base station starting this trend off, hopefully, we will get more devices with more cool features, and all (hopefully) playing nice with each other.
I wonder if the ad for the job posting at Apple that appeared here a few weeks ago will be impacted by this at all. In any case, I am looking forward to integrating my A/V system into my computer, and get rid of a ton of wires, all in one swell foop !!;-)
The post I was replying to was not referring to the amount of RAM per CPU (which I agree - has not changed), but the speed ratio between the RAM and CPU. In the G5 tower line, the CPU/RAM speed ratio is 2:1, while with the new iMacs, it is 3:1 - hence the performance/heat issues. HTH
There has to be some performanace differentiation between the consumer line and the pro line to justify the price difference. If the CPU/memory ratio was the same as the G5 tower, how many people (other than those that need the expandability) would pay that much more for roughly equivalent performance.
Heat concerns - since this case does not have as much room, or as much cooling fans as the towers, they have to find a way to cut back on heat production. Clocking down the CPU/RAM bus is another way to achieve that.
If this link/posting was indeed true, I would think this would be more for someone working on the video version of the airport express base station, as the audio/WiFi version is already out there.
IBM has realized this, and is building up their services business around this model, and it would be great if companies like Sun join the fray, to keep the competition there.
I also liked the portion of the essay where he talks about being able to pull together all of the components yourself, and support it yourself, or to pay someone else to support it for you. The first part of that is why I used OSS, and the 2nd part is what is currently lacking to make OSS more generally accepted. While there are people that will need support, there are some of us that just want the choice, freedom and flexibility, and OSS seems to be the best way to provide both right now.
I think the most flexible/cost effective way is a case with a USB 2.0 and a firewire port. Pricewatch lists an 80 GB notebook drive for $130, and a case to hold it costs under $100, even with an Oxford bridge, well-supported under Mac OS X, Linux, and AFAIK, Windows XP. This should be fairly compact as well, as laptop drives can generally draw enough power from USB and (6-pin) firewire ports to function, without needing an external power supply. I currently use such a case with a 20 G laptop drive to move stuff between my PowerMac running linux at work, and my PB running OS X at home.
This reminds of a similar article a couple of years ago in the NY Times about the difference between male and female brains - which afterwards turned out to be NOT entirely sound as the experiments were not very well done.
My work is with the physics and engineering side of this technology, but I do a bit of reading on and listening to the neuroscience end of things, and it is EXTREMELY difficult to get the right controls for neuroscience experiments like this. And to top it all off, researchers still don't know the basic underlying mechanism of the signal we see in MRI. We know that firing neurons cause neighbouring increases in vascular activity, but how these things are coupled, or even why they happen, are still not known.
Bottom line - these people want attention - and the NY Times is undeservedly giving it to them - as with anything else that is even slightly inflammatory - at least socially and politcally at this stage. Whatever happened to real journalism ?
Great promo if they would tie it in somehow
on
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Just a little while ago, Office Depot announced a PC recycling program. See this link. It would have been a great promo if they could have worked in some kind of discount with the new PCs, or even flexibility with the service provider, when you brought in your old PC.
In the same breath, one can't help but wonder if any of the components in these "new" PCs are from the recycling program, esp. considering the specs of some of the components, namely the optical drives;-)
I have agree with some of the previous postings here, in that Free and Open software no longer exists in the "hobbyist space" - we have real technological and economic implications to deal with. The one thing that we should NEVER comprimise on is quality of the code produced, either to serve a certain company, standard or set of interests. Within a company, with closed projects, this ideal is most likely impossible. But it is this very same ideal that has made a lot of the high-profile projects into the high-quality pieces of software we recognize them as. So no matter how much we get pushed towards more business-like models/applications/environments, we need to keep the quality of code in these projects as high as possible. And in the end - we ALL come out ahead.
My issues were not with the choice of XP itself if it were the appropriate tool for the job. My issue is the use of XP because of its prominence, and not on whatever merits other OSes might have had. My colleauge said the choice of OS was NOT the choice of the system engineers, but from the "higher-ups" in Siemens.
MR Imaging has extremely high demands on hardware, especially where timing is concerned. Several pieces of hardware (RF transmitters/receivers, coils with hundred of amps passing through them, and A/D converters) need to coordinated with microsecond, and preferably nanosecond accuracy.
The "ideal" OS for a scanner is really not a generic OS, it is something specialized for the hardware and job it has to do. In essence, all of the scanner hardware creates a state machine - albeit a relatively complex one, and just need an OS that will coordinate the activities of such a state machine with the desired timing accuracy.
I know Linux has not been really "real-time" for very long, and may also be overkill, but at least we have the ability to strip out from linux what we don't need, and keep what we need. There is no such flexibility with XP. What is also telling, at least to me, that if the engineers are familiar enough to get the scanner working stably under an older OS, with older hardware, why would it be so hard to get a stable driver on a more modern OS on better hardware ?
Maybe XP embedded, RT-Linux, or QNX would be better. But with XP getting all the press, this is all the PHBs want to hear about. It is just not appropriate such a complex OS, with the overhead of XP, be used to run a critical piece of equipment on which peoples' lives depend. I just thank my lucky stars that the new scanners our group will be getting over the next few months will both have Linux consoles.
I work with MRI scanners, so I know about these issues very well, and here's an example from my own experience:
An old colleague of mine got funding to start his own reasearch group, meaning he got his own MRI scanner. He asked me to consult on some software that would extract the data from the console of a Siemens scanner (at the time, the console was based on an OLD version SunOS, whose native compilers did not even conform to standard ANSI C) and send it directly to another computer running software that we use for data analysis. The dialect of C was a little strange, but within a week, I was able to get the software together, and my colleague was able to do the type of experiments he wanted to. And his scanner hummed along. This was back in 2001.
Fast-forward to the present. His console has since been "upgraded" to Windows XP system, and in the times I've spoken to him, he's had nothing but bad things to say about the stability of the "upgraded" system. And it's not that he had a choice, as support for his previous system was phased out. So now patients, doctors and reasearchers in his group are at the mercy of the moods of an XP system. And mind you - this system is not even on a publicly accessible network. It is on its own dedicated, private network, and its stability still can't be maintained, even by the support staff of the scanner manufacturer.
When it comes down to it, Windows still does not have the stability (never mind the security issues to cut it in really "mission-critical" situations). Maybe in cases where you need your e-commerce site up, running, and handling 1000s of transaction per second. But NOT when peoples' lives are involved.
I would be in favour of Apple being "forced" to open up their DRM, if it meant that EVERY DRM scheme had to be opened up and cross-liscensed (it's all about setting a precedent). I know that no-DRM is better than the lightest available DRM, but since "no-DRM" is very unlikely, then the next best thing is "wildly" cross-liscensing EVERYTHING. For example, I would not mind having MS forced to also open up their DRM scheme, if Apple is now forced to do so.
Because a lot of times, it is NOT just a simple matter of recompilation. Some of my code for my dissertation never ended up working on OS X (and thankfully, it was not required to run on that platform - it was just more of a convenience for me to be able take it anywhere and debug it).
The same code work on IRIX/MIPS, Linux/x86 and Linux/PowerPC, but I could never get it running on OS X - even though the code itself was compiled with the -Wall and -pedantic flags when using gcc. And this code was not doing anything out of the ordinary - one failure point was in a shared memory application, while the other was a simple malloc, the only out of the ordinary issue being that it would need to allocate a huge amount of RAM (usually a couple of GIGs)...
So Linux on Apple hardware is a good thing, despite OS X being such a powerful and flexible OS, and I (along with my trusting 8500 running Woody) will defend that position to anyone who cares to ask;-)
I'll admit up-front, that I am a fan of Apple hardware and software, but I can't really agreed with their decision to confront Real on this for the following reason:
They've said that the Apple Music Store exists to drive iPod sales. If consumers can play a wider range of music on their iPod, would they not be MORE willing to buy one?
I would say they should probably do some "back room strong-arming" to work out a deal with Real that they will allow this in some shape or form, make Real pay some sort of licensing fee, and NOT "officially support it"... That way, they make money off it directly (through fees from Real), indirectly (through higher iPod sales) and finally they won't have to worry about support, once they state quite clearly, they won't support other music sources.
I know there is an image to upkeep, but give your consumers the choice, for goodness sakes.
Does anyone have any idea if it would be possible to route the audio from the WiFi-interface to the USB port? I have a Yamaha cavit that my mac sees and can play to or record from over USB 1.1.
Any chance that instead of going to the optical / analog audio port, that we can get the audio through the USB port ?
I'm a heavy mac user, and I read this site pretty much on a daily basis, as the guy responsible for the site puts up a LOT of decent Mac hardware and software info on there. But this has got to be one of the most UNinformative, useless things he's posted. I know there's a desire for info about this card - but shouldn't we wait till some more detailed specs are released, or till someone has some actual silicon so benchmarks can be run ?
Yet another example of "no news" being news... As many other people have said, "Nothing to see here. Move along !!"
One thing I am hoping it can do is integrate better with OS X's application/library packing system. I do a little development with X and Motif, and for a while, I was using Apple's X11 + Darwinports' Motif. However, due to library problems somewhere along the way, I had to switch to fink's openmotif. I was hoping for a way I could keep track of all installed apps and libs. Fink is nice, but it is like having a second independent OS/system within OS X.
Now, for the icing on the cake, it would be nice if folks would think about coding the GUIs in their apps in cross-platform toolkits (wxWidgets, FLTK, etc), so we could have truly native apps and hooks into whatever OS we are using, but alas, I dream...:)
I know 2 wrongs don't make a right, but it is a sad day when enforcement of copyright and trademark law trumps enforcement of a law guaranteeing equal access of information to all...
Folks - this is not just a Mozilla/Windows problem. Just a few short weeks ago, a lot of noise was made about a very similar URI exploit on Mac OS X, both through any browser that runs on OS X (noise was made about Safari, and I verified that the exploit was also present in Camino) and OS X's help system.
Because of the seemingly general nature of this type of exploit - why are we letting browsers run code ?? The web SHOULD primarily be to exchange information (text, images, audio, video). Why are we allowing remote program execution?
Slashdot Mirror
I think to a great extent, it is already like this. There is RedHat and SUSE for more serious (read business) deployments, and a plethora of others, from which you can choose one that fits your needs.
I've been trying to set up my GF old PC for her folks. I tested RH 9 and Mandrake 10.0 before I settled on Ubuntu, primarily because I like it's polish, simplicity, and application availability for a fairly new linux user, but also because it is Debian based, and I've had a few years worth of experience working with and on with my own Debian box at work. But in the end, I was glad to have a few distros to try out to find one that suited the eventual use of the PC (mostly web surfing, light "Office"-type work, photo download + editing, and most importantly, not having to working about every *!@#&*!! virus and worm prowling the net in the hunt for vulnerable windows systems). I could not imaging finding this good a fit if there were fewer choices available.
I am an Apple/Pixar fan.
...
I would love to see Pixar side-step all the normal distribution channels, and use a video version of iTunes (or whatever it'll be called by that time) to sell and distribute their movies. The one Mr S. Jobs is one of the few people with enough brass to actually do something like that, and he's the CEO of both companies. Alas, I dream
Recode the GUI in something like wxWidgets, Qt, FLTK, etc (stated in order of personal preference). It'd probably also help clean up any bugs within their code ... Dare I dream ? .... Been hoping Mathworks would do the same thing with Matlab. Me thinks, from the look of things, that their OS X port is a recompilation of their linux port ...
This should be a really neat way to get rid of power hungry displays. This device will draw some power, but hopefully, by virtue of its size, nowhere near the amount of a conventional laptop or PDA display. It should definitely open up some interesting possibilities. Imagine being able to shut off your laptop display, with this plugged into the VGA port, and drawing it's necessary power from a powered USB or Firewire port. Mmmmm ... Tasty ...
This is excellent - with the Slim MP3 player and Apple's Airport express base station starting this trend off, hopefully, we will get more devices with more cool features, and all (hopefully) playing nice with each other.
;-)
I wonder if the ad for the job posting at Apple that appeared here a few weeks ago will be impacted by this at all. In any case, I am looking forward to integrating my A/V system into my computer, and get rid of a ton of wires, all in one swell foop !!
Well, I'm not sure if the RAM itself is running at that speed, but according to this page, the CPU/memory bus does indeed run at 1.25 GHz.
The post I was replying to was not referring to the amount of RAM per CPU (which I agree - has not changed), but the speed ratio between the RAM and CPU. In the G5 tower line, the CPU/RAM speed ratio is 2:1, while with the new iMacs, it is 3:1 - hence the performance/heat issues. HTH
Probably for 2 reasons:
If this link/posting was indeed true, I would think this would be more for someone working on the video version of the airport express base station, as the audio/WiFi version is already out there.
Little steps at a time folks, little steps ...
IBM has realized this, and is building up their services business around this model, and it would be great if companies like Sun join the fray, to keep the competition there.
I also liked the portion of the essay where he talks about being able to pull together all of the components yourself, and support it yourself, or to pay someone else to support it for you. The first part of that is why I used OSS, and the 2nd part is what is currently lacking to make OSS more generally accepted. While there are people that will need support, there are some of us that just want the choice, freedom and flexibility, and OSS seems to be the best way to provide both right now.
I think the most flexible/cost effective way is a case with a USB 2.0 and a firewire port. Pricewatch lists an 80 GB notebook drive for $130, and a case to hold it costs under $100, even with an Oxford bridge, well-supported under Mac OS X, Linux, and AFAIK, Windows XP. This should be fairly compact as well, as laptop drives can generally draw enough power from USB and (6-pin) firewire ports to function, without needing an external power supply. I currently use such a case with a 20 G laptop drive to move stuff between my PowerMac running linux at work, and my PB running OS X at home.
This reminds of a similar article a couple of years ago in the NY Times about the difference between male and female brains - which afterwards turned out to be NOT entirely sound as the experiments were not very well done.
My work is with the physics and engineering side of this technology, but I do a bit of reading on and listening to the neuroscience end of things, and it is EXTREMELY difficult to get the right controls for neuroscience experiments like this. And to top it all off, researchers still don't know the basic underlying mechanism of the signal we see in MRI. We know that firing neurons cause neighbouring increases in vascular activity, but how these things are coupled, or even why they happen, are still not known.
Bottom line - these people want attention - and the NY Times is undeservedly giving it to them - as with anything else that is even slightly inflammatory - at least socially and politcally at this stage. Whatever happened to real journalism ?
Just a little while ago, Office Depot announced a PC recycling program. See this link. It would have been a great promo if they could have worked in some kind of discount with the new PCs, or even flexibility with the service provider, when you brought in your old PC.
In the same breath, one can't help but wonder if any of the components in these "new" PCs are from the recycling program, esp. considering the specs of some of the components, namely the optical drives ;-)
I have agree with some of the previous postings here, in that Free and Open software no longer exists in the "hobbyist space" - we have real technological and economic implications to deal with. The one thing that we should NEVER comprimise on is quality of the code produced, either to serve a certain company, standard or set of interests. Within a company, with closed projects, this ideal is most likely impossible. But it is this very same ideal that has made a lot of the high-profile projects into the high-quality pieces of software we recognize them as. So no matter how much we get pushed towards more business-like models/applications/environments, we need to keep the quality of code in these projects as high as possible. And in the end - we ALL come out ahead.
My issues were not with the choice of XP itself if it were the appropriate tool for the job. My issue is the use of XP because of its prominence, and not on whatever merits other OSes might have had. My colleauge said the choice of OS was NOT the choice of the system engineers, but from the "higher-ups" in Siemens.
MR Imaging has extremely high demands on hardware, especially where timing is concerned. Several pieces of hardware (RF transmitters/receivers, coils with hundred of amps passing through them, and A/D converters) need to coordinated with microsecond, and preferably nanosecond accuracy.
The "ideal" OS for a scanner is really not a generic OS, it is something specialized for the hardware and job it has to do. In essence, all of the scanner hardware creates a state machine - albeit a relatively complex one, and just need an OS that will coordinate the activities of such a state machine with the desired timing accuracy.
I know Linux has not been really "real-time" for very long, and may also be overkill, but at least we have the ability to strip out from linux what we don't need, and keep what we need. There is no such flexibility with XP. What is also telling, at least to me, that if the engineers are familiar enough to get the scanner working stably under an older OS, with older hardware, why would it be so hard to get a stable driver on a more modern OS on better hardware ?
Maybe XP embedded, RT-Linux, or QNX would be better. But with XP getting all the press, this is all the PHBs want to hear about. It is just not appropriate such a complex OS, with the overhead of XP, be used to run a critical piece of equipment on which peoples' lives depend. I just thank my lucky stars that the new scanners our group will be getting over the next few months will both have Linux consoles.
I work with MRI scanners, so I know about these issues very well, and here's an example from my own experience:
An old colleague of mine got funding to start his own reasearch group, meaning he got his own MRI scanner. He asked me to consult on some software that would extract the data from the console of a Siemens scanner (at the time, the console was based on an OLD version SunOS, whose native compilers did not even conform to standard ANSI C) and send it directly to another computer running software that we use for data analysis. The dialect of C was a little strange, but within a week, I was able to get the software together, and my colleague was able to do the type of experiments he wanted to. And his scanner hummed along. This was back in 2001.
Fast-forward to the present. His console has since been "upgraded" to Windows XP system, and in the times I've spoken to him, he's had nothing but bad things to say about the stability of the "upgraded" system. And it's not that he had a choice, as support for his previous system was phased out. So now patients, doctors and reasearchers in his group are at the mercy of the moods of an XP system. And mind you - this system is not even on a publicly accessible network. It is on its own dedicated, private network, and its stability still can't be maintained, even by the support staff of the scanner manufacturer.
When it comes down to it, Windows still does not have the stability (never mind the security issues to cut it in really "mission-critical" situations). Maybe in cases where you need your e-commerce site up, running, and handling 1000s of transaction per second. But NOT when peoples' lives are involved.
I would be in favour of Apple being "forced" to open up their DRM, if it meant that EVERY DRM scheme had to be opened up and cross-liscensed (it's all about setting a precedent). I know that no-DRM is better than the lightest available DRM, but since "no-DRM" is very unlikely, then the next best thing is "wildly" cross-liscensing EVERYTHING. For example, I would not mind having MS forced to also open up their DRM scheme, if Apple is now forced to do so.
I'm taking bets - which is the next to be released: XP Service Pack 2, or the next Debian stable (Sarge) ?
Because a lot of times, it is NOT just a simple matter of recompilation. Some of my code for my dissertation never ended up working on OS X (and thankfully, it was not required to run on that platform - it was just more of a convenience for me to be able take it anywhere and debug it).
;-)
The same code work on IRIX/MIPS, Linux/x86 and Linux/PowerPC, but I could never get it running on OS X - even though the code itself was compiled with the -Wall and -pedantic flags when using gcc. And this code was not doing anything out of the ordinary - one failure point was in a shared memory application, while the other was a simple malloc, the only out of the ordinary issue being that it would need to allocate a huge amount of RAM (usually a couple of GIGs)...
So Linux on Apple hardware is a good thing, despite OS X being such a powerful and flexible OS, and I (along with my trusting 8500 running Woody) will defend that position to anyone who cares to ask
cheers
I'll admit up-front, that I am a fan of Apple hardware and software, but I can't really agreed with their decision to confront Real on this for the following reason:
... That way, they make money off it directly (through fees from Real), indirectly (through higher iPod sales) and finally they won't have to worry about support, once they state quite clearly, they won't support other music sources.
They've said that the Apple Music Store exists to drive iPod sales. If consumers can play a wider range of music on their iPod, would they not be MORE willing to buy one?
I would say they should probably do some "back room strong-arming" to work out a deal with Real that they will allow this in some shape or form, make Real pay some sort of licensing fee, and NOT "officially support it"
I know there is an image to upkeep, but give your consumers the choice, for goodness sakes.
Does anyone have any idea if it would be possible to route the audio from the WiFi-interface to the USB port? I have a Yamaha cavit that my mac sees and can play to or record from over USB 1.1.
Any chance that instead of going to the optical / analog audio port, that we can get the audio through the USB port ?
I'm a heavy mac user, and I read this site pretty much on a daily basis, as the guy responsible for the site puts up a LOT of decent Mac hardware and software info on there. But this has got to be one of the most UNinformative, useless things he's posted. I know there's a desire for info about this card - but shouldn't we wait till some more detailed specs are released, or till someone has some actual silicon so benchmarks can be run ?
... As many other people have said, "Nothing to see here. Move along !!"
Yet another example of "no news" being news
One thing I am hoping it can do is integrate better with OS X's application/library packing system. I do a little development with X and Motif, and for a while, I was using Apple's X11 + Darwinports' Motif. However, due to library problems somewhere along the way, I had to switch to fink's openmotif. I was hoping for a way I could keep track of all installed apps and libs. Fink is nice, but it is like having a second independent OS/system within OS X.
... :)
Now, for the icing on the cake, it would be nice if folks would think about coding the GUIs in their apps in cross-platform toolkits (wxWidgets, FLTK, etc), so we could have truly native apps and hooks into whatever OS we are using, but alas, I dream
I know 2 wrongs don't make a right, but it is a sad day when enforcement of copyright and trademark law trumps enforcement of a law guaranteeing equal access of information to all ...
Folks - this is not just a Mozilla/Windows problem. Just a few short weeks ago, a lot of noise was made about a very similar URI exploit on Mac OS X, both through any browser that runs on OS X (noise was made about Safari, and I verified that the exploit was also present in Camino) and OS X's help system.
Because of the seemingly general nature of this type of exploit - why are we letting browsers run code ?? The web SHOULD primarily be to exchange information (text, images, audio, video). Why are we allowing remote program execution?