Increasing the spec to be able to run XP would be stupid on many levels.
It was designed to be very low power, so even with a small internal battery, it can run a long time. It is light and rugged so if you drop it it won't break. It doesn't need lot of cooling airflow, so it won't collect dust and dirt inside. Change any of those parameters and you have not only a more expensive product, but a much worse one.
For what? So you can run legacy programs that were not designed for that hardware or tuned for the cultural context?
When SONY announced the development of the Cell chip, and the plans they had for their next gen console, the ability to do big, immersive environments that span across the network is what they had in mind. The Cell chip was designed for that, and even though it cost them with delays and price overruns it may well pay off big time. They will be able to provide an experience that Wii and Xbox 360 can't match. Including Blu-ray also hurt them with delays and cost, but it is paying off already, as Blu-ray has now passed HD-DVD in disk sales, despite a later launch (and terrible PR).
HD-DVD has been out for a month, and is reportedly "selling well" but that is, relatively well for an early adopter product. They are not moving huge volumes. The only players on the market are from Toshiba, with a "budget" $500 model and a "premium" $800 model.
The real market for both Blu-ray and HD-DVD is for 1080p HDTV owners. Upscaling DVD looks good on a 720p TV, and the maximum broadcast quality will be 1080i. The only place to get 1080p quality content will be Blu-ray or HD-DVD, and the cheaper Toshiba players will not even put out 1080p. All the Blu-ray players announced will feature 1080p, and are meant to have high build quality and high quality components, so that the early adopters who have 1080p sets will want them, because they have money, and want the best.
So, if the SONY unit is delayed until August, it just means that there will only be 1 Blu-ray player on the market for the first few months, and Samsung will have higher sales initially. Samsung also is making some very competitive 1080p HDTV sets, so look for some bundling and cross-promotion.
When the first Blu-ray movies are released with the Samsung player at the end of this month, the home theater sites and publications will compare the image quality, sound quality, and content of Blu-ray movies with the existing HD-DVD releases. There is a good chance that Blu-ray will look better, and win the favor of the early adopter technophile market. Over the next couple of years the percentage of HDTV sets that support 1080p will increase, driving demand for the highest quality content. The 50GB Blu-ray disc will support more movie content, and higher bitrate (less agressive compression, fewer compression artifacts), resulting in better image quality than HD-DVD.
Where does PS3 come in? As we know, the cheaper $500 PS3 will not have HDMI, so it is intended not to compete with the high-end Blu-ray players, but it will provide a huge market for Blu-ray discs. This will eventually bring prices down, so that 3 years from now, when the majority HDTVs are 1080p, and there are even 1080p sets for under $1000, then stand-alone blu-ray players will sell for $200-$300, and start to become mass market item.
It seems like he is making some valid points, but Langa's premise is off in a couple of respects.
First, he is assuming that business users will set up their own hardware, and therefore, everything needs to work "out of the box." They don't. That's what they have system administrators for, who can dedicate some time to keep up with the status of Linux support of various hardware, and guide the purchase of hardware that is compatible, if the company makes the decision to use Linux.
Secondly, he expressed some frustration that so many people responded to his article asking what was the sound card that he can't get configured. He thought that was irrelevant. The reasons why Linux users want to know what sound card it is are (1) so they can avoid purchasing that sound card in the future, and/or (2) so they can help him get it working. He was focussing on an "Achilles heel", and totally missed Linux's greatest strength, it user community.
We use LaCie external drives all the time to ship data (FedEX is faster that 100Mbs coast to coast).
I recently tried to buy a couple of the 500GB "big disks" but they were out of stock everywhere, so had to settle for the 320GB version (2 160GB drives in a box). They must be connected with striping, because the I/O is a lot faster that single disks.
4 drives may be even better, but don't count on them being available in quantity in February. That's when you can start to back order them.
A lot is in the works for ReiserFS 4.0, including a plugin infrastructure for advanced features such as security, and database functionality. Open source software has the potential to match and exceed every bit of functionality that Microsoft includes in Windows/Office, and lead in performance. If these features are what corporate users want, they could have a choice, but only if Linux/Unix/Mac developers move to take advantage of such new and existing technolgies
Mono is a clone of C# (c-hash) and the Common Language Interpreter (CLI). The clone of.NET (and Hailstorm) is DotGNU, which Miguel has nothing to do with.
There is a clear advantage of using the.NET CLI framework. Insead of write once in Java and run anywhere, it is write once an any language, and run anywhere. This is very well suited to free software development, since it is much easier to reuse code, and allow more people to collaborate.
Re:Hardware reviews from Salon!??
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 1
The Salon article is not a hardware review. It is a content review, with an eye to creativity, and the realization of new ideas through the hardware. They really didn't comment at all on the hardware.
They started publishing a few years back, instigated by a well-known ecologist (C. S. Holling) and sponsored at first by an NSF grant, if I'm not mistaken.
I should also say that there were, and are still good reasons for having traditional paper journals, such as permanent archiving, and also having a publishing house take care of all the details of printing and distribution, it frees the scientists to do more research.
With self-publication, whether in print or web pages, they have to divide their time, or pay someone else to do it. Of course this is becoming much less of a problem because of easier to use software and the Internet.
One huge difference with e-journals is that they can become much more widely available. With many print journals, only a few hundred or thousand copies are ever printed, they go to libraries and scientific association members. It takes time to get a hold of an article, and searching through abstracts on-line can reveal less about the article than searching through the full text, so you might miss information that is relavent to your work.
The system of having a journal retain copyright, I presume, has functioned as a cost-control mechanism, since if only a few hundred copies of a journal are printed, they are necessarily expensive, so the best way to ensure the per-issue price is kept down, and to make it worthwhile for the publishing house to keep a stock of reprints for those interested, was to give them a monopoly over the work. At least, that is a theory.
Anyway, another issue that maybe noone addressed here, is that you have to ensure that scietific papers are not altered for mischevious purposes and redistributed. That could cause chaos.
I'm trying out Moz on a PII-350, and the preformance is awesome. But, at home I have a K62-500, and the speed and stability are not there. Could it be because of i686 optimizations?
I have built the tree before on my box, (with slow performace at the time) and it may be time to do it again, to see if an i586 of K6 build would improve things.
If you think I should get a PIII, talk to my wife!
The intro posted is not correct. The article says that Grid software infrastructure is being developed on the "open source model," it does not say that it incoporates Linux (although I'm sure Linux will be a major OS used with it). MS has also contributed $1 million to the effort, and hopes to tie in.NET, and Sun already has a type of Grid deployed under Solaris for corporate computer networks.
These folks deserve kudos on many levels. They have the clearest, most easily understood documentation of any Linux distribution. Red Hat should hire some of these folks to edit their documentation for them!
As always, Palm is playing on their strong points.The need to have a 200MHz cpu or 32 MB ram is less urgent.
I read that Palm is working with Motorola to get them to incorporate an <a href="http://www.electronicnews.com/news/5708-346N ewsDetail.asp"> ARM core </a> into their handheld cpus, so they can move past the 33MHz Dragonball, but that is evidently for the future. There is no mention of the CPU used in the M505.
They mention a "long life" battery, but not how long the life is. That's an important convenience point. They do have it charge in the cradle, which helps a lot.
64K colors, good. MGI photosuite? Interesting. does this mean you can retouch photos on the go?
All in all, a great product, and the price is not too bad, although I'll have to stick with my IIIe for a while longer.
Nobody seemd to mention that LinuxBios could be a big plus on embedded systems and internet appliances.
We can't just think about geeks who keep their computers on all the time, but other folks who might be switching them on and off several times a day, and for different system designs where fast bootup is a big plus. Things that people may not think of as a "computer," like Tivo, etc.
Also, being able to boot to a more flexible maintennance state, including network, and a bash prompt, even if the hard disk fails.
First of all let's state the obvious. Software makers would not be interested in going to subscriptionware unless they thought they could increase profits by doing so.
Increased profit for software companies does not necessarily mean decreased value per $ for consumers. At best, it allows far greater flexibility in creating targeted products (lite, home, student, professional, legal, medical, etc.), without having to create separate shrink-wrapped packages, saving production costs.
This could mean more value for paying customers, however, no value for pirates. No pay, no use!
There has often been an uneasy truce between software companies and those who make illegal copies, for instance the way MS tolerates piracy in China, and by most students. On the plus side, it gives them market share, and prevents their competitors from making inroads, and they have the hope that some day all these people will start paying, and they will rake in loads of money from it. The availability of pirated MS software is the biggest reason Linux is not taking off faster in China. I have lots of Chinese friends and when I show them my Linux laptop with tons of free software, they say "so, I got MS Office for free too, why should I switch"
What about Free software? it will only stand to benefit from subscriptionware. If people don't like the terms that ASPs give them, there are alternatives, becoming more viable all the time.
Also, what prevents Free (Speech) software from being delivered through the same ASP channels? A company could take Ximian Gnome, dress it up, and deliver it though ASP channels for a much lower fee than MS Office. Come to think of it, Ximian could do that!
My favorite quote for the article, that I think says most of all:
''We can build a better product than Linux,'' he said. ''There is always something enamoring about
thinking you can get something for free.''
He is admitting that Linux is better than Windows, well, go ahead, turn Windows into a decent OS! At least I won't have to help people recover from crashes so much!
I'm currently using Win4Lin (http://www.netraverse.com) to run Windows programs, and am very impressed with its performance. Netraverse does not reveal many of the technical details as to how they get such high performance and fast startup times, however, here is a quote from a press release:
"Win4Lin is derived from a proven technology developed over the last 15 years for UNIX® based operating systems, most notably those of SCO®, under the MergeTM brand. With Win4Lin, users boot Windows 95/98 as an application running under the X Window SystemTM on Linux."
My general understanding is that Win4Lin is not a wholesale virtualization of x86 to run Windows on, but rather a patchwork of Linux device drivers and kernel hooks that allow a DOS/Win32 session to run as a Linux userspace program. The result is you get Windows running securely in its own sandbox (just where Windows ought to be!)
Any insights into this, and how Plex86 is similar or different?
Perhaps one of the reasons why Framemaker is available on commercial UNIX is that it was commonly used as an embedded component in other UNIX software. For example, it was used as the help system engine in the Geographical Information System (GIS) software Arc/Info on Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, etc.
In recent versions, though, Arc/Info has shifted to a clone of the Windows help viewer on UNIX, to make the look and feel more like Windows NT, and probably to merge more of their source code with the NT version, which is selling a lot better that the UNIX versions these days.
For these and similar application that were once UNIX dominated (CAD/CAM, image processing, machine vision, etc.) the shift to Windows NT was considered inevitable because NT systems were cheaper and required less retraining, but as we all know, the Linux revolution is challenging that assumption.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there will be a renewed demand for embedded Framemaker. Who knows what Adobe had in mind when they made the Linux beta and then decided not to release it. I would say that they are keeping their options open, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Increasing the spec to be able to run XP would be stupid on many levels.
It was designed to be very low power, so even with a small internal battery, it can run a long time. It is light and rugged so if you drop it it won't break. It doesn't need lot of cooling airflow, so it won't collect dust and dirt inside. Change any of those parameters and you have not only a more expensive product, but a much worse one.
For what? So you can run legacy programs that were not designed for that hardware or tuned for the cultural context?
No, VOD makes DVD irrelevant!
DVD quality movies are only a few GB, while HD quality is over 10GB.
How long are you willing to wait to download a 10GB movie?
Loonies!
When SONY announced the development of the Cell chip, and the plans they had for their next gen console, the ability to do big, immersive environments that span across the network is what they had in mind. The Cell chip was designed for that, and even though it cost them with delays and price overruns it may well pay off big time. They will be able to provide an experience that Wii and Xbox 360 can't match. Including Blu-ray also hurt them with delays and cost, but it is paying off already, as Blu-ray has now passed HD-DVD in disk sales, despite a later launch (and terrible PR).
HD-DVD has been out for a month, and is reportedly "selling well" but that is, relatively well for an early adopter product. They are not moving huge volumes. The only players on the market are from Toshiba, with a "budget" $500 model and a "premium" $800 model.
The real market for both Blu-ray and HD-DVD is for 1080p HDTV owners. Upscaling DVD looks good on a 720p TV, and the maximum broadcast quality will be 1080i. The only place to get 1080p quality content will be Blu-ray or HD-DVD, and the cheaper Toshiba players will not even put out 1080p. All the Blu-ray players announced will feature 1080p, and are meant to have high build quality and high quality components, so that the early adopters who have 1080p sets will want them, because they have money, and want the best.
So, if the SONY unit is delayed until August, it just means that there will only be 1 Blu-ray player on the market for the first few months, and Samsung will have higher sales initially. Samsung also is making some very competitive 1080p HDTV sets, so look for some bundling and cross-promotion.
When the first Blu-ray movies are released with the Samsung player at the end of this month, the home theater sites and publications will compare the image quality, sound quality, and content of Blu-ray movies with the existing HD-DVD releases. There is a good chance that Blu-ray will look better, and win the favor of the early adopter technophile market. Over the next couple of years the percentage of HDTV sets that support 1080p will increase, driving demand for the highest quality content. The 50GB Blu-ray disc will support more movie content, and higher bitrate (less agressive compression, fewer compression artifacts), resulting in better image quality than HD-DVD.
Where does PS3 come in? As we know, the cheaper $500 PS3 will not have HDMI, so it is intended not to compete with the high-end Blu-ray players, but it will provide a huge market for Blu-ray discs. This will eventually bring prices down, so that 3 years from now, when the majority HDTVs are 1080p, and there are even 1080p sets for under $1000, then stand-alone blu-ray players will sell for $200-$300, and start to become mass market item.
That is my prediction.
It seems like he is making some valid points, but Langa's premise is off in a couple of respects.
First, he is assuming that business users will set up their own hardware, and therefore, everything needs to work "out of the box." They don't. That's what they have system administrators for, who can dedicate some time to keep up with the status of Linux support of various hardware, and guide the purchase of hardware that is compatible, if the company makes the decision to use Linux.
Secondly, he expressed some frustration that so many people responded to his article asking what was the sound card that he can't get configured. He thought that was irrelevant. The reasons why Linux users want to know what sound card it is are (1) so they can avoid purchasing that sound card in the future, and/or (2) so they can help him get it working. He was focussing on an "Achilles heel", and totally missed Linux's greatest strength, it user community.
We use LaCie external drives all the time to ship data (FedEX is faster that 100Mbs coast to coast).
I recently tried to buy a couple of the 500GB "big disks" but they were out of stock everywhere, so had to settle for the 320GB version (2 160GB drives in a box). They must be connected with striping, because the I/O is a lot faster that single disks.
4 drives may be even better, but don't count on them being available in quantity in February. That's when you can start to back order them.
OK, hams, then!
The message was dated
Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Mon, 01 Apr 2002 00:00:00 -0700 (PDT)
the story posted here:
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday April 01, @04:19PM
That's like 13-16 hours late, depending on your time zone. C'mon, Taco, you're slipping!
(Score:5, Funny)
Steam? Sounds like vaporware to me!
A lot is in the works for ReiserFS 4.0, including a plugin infrastructure for advanced features such as security, and database functionality. Open source software has the potential to match and exceed every bit of functionality that Microsoft includes in Windows/Office, and lead in performance. If these features are what corporate users want, they could have a choice, but only if Linux/Unix/Mac developers move to take advantage of such new and existing technolgies
Mono is a clone of C# (c-hash) and the Common Language Interpreter (CLI). The clone of .NET (and Hailstorm) is DotGNU, which Miguel has nothing to do with.
.NET CLI framework. Insead of write once in Java and run anywhere, it is write once an any language, and run anywhere. This is very well suited to free software development, since it is much easier to reuse code, and allow more people to collaborate.
There is a clear advantage of using the
The Salon article is not a hardware review. It is a content review, with an eye to creativity, and the realization of new ideas through the hardware. They really didn't comment at all on the hardware.
Check this out: http://www.consecol.org/Journal/
They started publishing a few years back, instigated by a well-known ecologist (C. S. Holling) and sponsored at first by an NSF grant, if I'm not mistaken.
I should also say that there were, and are still good reasons for having traditional paper journals, such as permanent archiving, and also having a publishing house take care of all the details of printing and distribution, it frees the scientists to do more research.
With self-publication, whether in print or web pages, they have to divide their time, or pay someone else to do it. Of course this is becoming much less of a problem because of easier to use software and the Internet.
One huge difference with e-journals is that they can become much more widely available. With many print journals, only a few hundred or thousand copies are ever printed, they go to libraries and scientific association members. It takes time to get a hold of an article, and searching through abstracts on-line can reveal less about the article than searching through the full text, so you might miss information that is relavent to your work.
The system of having a journal retain copyright, I presume, has functioned as a cost-control mechanism, since if only a few hundred copies of a journal are printed, they are necessarily expensive, so the best way to ensure the per-issue price is kept down, and to make it worthwhile for the publishing house to keep a stock of reprints for those interested, was to give them a monopoly over the work. At least, that is a theory.
Anyway, another issue that maybe noone addressed here, is that you have to ensure that scietific papers are not altered for mischevious purposes and redistributed. That could cause chaos.
I'm trying out Moz on a PII-350, and the preformance is awesome. But, at home I have a K62-500, and the speed and stability are not there. Could it be because of i686 optimizations?
I have built the tree before on my box, (with slow performace at the time) and it may be time to do it again, to see if an i586 of K6 build would improve things.
If you think I should get a PIII, talk to my wife!
The intro posted is not correct. The article says that Grid software infrastructure is being developed on the "open source model," it does not say that it incoporates Linux (although I'm sure Linux will be a major OS used with it). MS has also contributed $1 million to the effort, and hopes to tie in .NET, and Sun already has a type of Grid deployed under Solaris for corporate computer networks.
These folks deserve kudos on many levels. They have the clearest, most easily understood documentation of any Linux distribution. Red Hat should hire some of these folks to edit their documentation for them!
As always, Palm is playing on their strong points.The need to have a 200MHz cpu or 32 MB ram is less urgent.
N ewsDetail.asp"> ARM core </a> into their handheld cpus, so they can move past the 33MHz Dragonball, but that is evidently for the future. There is no mention of the CPU used in the M505.
I read that Palm is working with Motorola to get them to incorporate an <a href="http://www.electronicnews.com/news/5708-346
They mention a "long life" battery, but not how long the life is. That's an important convenience point. They do have it charge in the cradle, which helps a lot.
64K colors, good. MGI photosuite? Interesting. does this mean you can retouch photos on the go?
All in all, a great product, and the price is not too bad, although I'll have to stick with my IIIe for a while longer.
Nobody seemd to mention that LinuxBios could be a big plus on embedded systems and internet appliances.
We can't just think about geeks who keep their computers on all the time, but other folks who might be switching them on and off several times a day, and for different system designs where fast bootup is a big plus. Things that people may not think of as a "computer," like Tivo, etc.
Also, being able to boot to a more flexible maintennance state, including network, and a bash prompt, even if the hard disk fails.
Use your imagination!
First of all let's state the obvious. Software makers would not be interested in going to subscriptionware unless they thought they could increase profits by doing so.
Increased profit for software companies does not necessarily mean decreased value per $ for consumers. At best, it allows far greater flexibility in creating targeted products (lite, home, student, professional, legal, medical, etc.), without having to create separate shrink-wrapped packages, saving production costs.
This could mean more value for paying customers, however, no value for pirates. No pay, no use!
There has often been an uneasy truce between software companies and those who make illegal copies, for instance the way MS tolerates piracy in China, and by most students. On the plus side, it gives them market share, and prevents their competitors from making inroads, and they have the hope that some day all these people will start paying, and they will rake in loads of money from it. The availability of pirated MS software is the biggest reason Linux is not taking off faster in China. I have lots of Chinese friends and when I show them my Linux laptop with tons of free software, they say "so, I got MS Office for free too, why should I switch"
What about Free software? it will only stand to benefit from subscriptionware. If people don't like the terms that ASPs give them, there are alternatives, becoming more viable all the time.
Also, what prevents Free (Speech) software from being delivered through the same ASP channels? A company could take Ximian Gnome, dress it up, and deliver it though ASP channels for a much lower fee than MS Office. Come to think of it, Ximian could do that!
Intriguing possibilities!
My favorite quote for the article, that I think says most of all:
''We can build a better product than Linux,'' he said. ''There is always something enamoring about
thinking you can get something for free.''
He is admitting that Linux is better than Windows, well, go ahead, turn Windows into a decent OS! At least I won't have to help people recover from crashes so much!
Looks like they want to keep playing with the damn thing until they break it!!!
<CODE>Duh!</CODE>
I'm currently using Win4Lin (http://www.netraverse.com) to run Windows programs, and am very impressed with its performance. Netraverse does not reveal many of the technical details as to how they get such high performance and fast startup times, however, here is a quote from a press release:
"Win4Lin is derived from a proven technology developed over the last 15 years for UNIX® based operating systems, most notably those of SCO®, under the MergeTM brand. With Win4Lin, users boot Windows 95/98 as an application running under the X Window SystemTM on Linux."
My general understanding is that Win4Lin is not a wholesale virtualization of x86 to run Windows on, but rather a patchwork of Linux device drivers and kernel hooks that allow a DOS/Win32 session to run as a Linux userspace program. The result is you get Windows running securely in its own sandbox (just where Windows ought to be!)
Any insights into this, and how Plex86 is similar or different?
Perhaps one of the reasons why Framemaker is available on commercial UNIX is that it was commonly used as an embedded component in other UNIX software. For example, it was used as the help system engine in the Geographical Information System (GIS) software Arc/Info on Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, etc.
In recent versions, though, Arc/Info has shifted to a clone of the Windows help viewer on UNIX, to make the look and feel more like Windows NT, and probably to merge more of their source code with the NT version, which is selling a lot better that the UNIX versions these days.
For these and similar application that were once UNIX dominated (CAD/CAM, image processing, machine vision, etc.) the shift to Windows NT was considered inevitable because NT systems were cheaper and required less retraining, but as we all know, the Linux revolution is challenging that assumption.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there will be a renewed demand for embedded Framemaker. Who knows what Adobe had in mind when they made the Linux beta and then decided not to release it. I would say that they are keeping their options open, though.