Right, but isn't the interest in the story the fact that it uses Linux? It's even mentioned specifically in the article that Sony chose Linux/MIPS over WinTel, that what makes it/. worthy, not necessarily that it's YAPVR.
The gall of these people to expect people to pony up $.75 of their hard earned cash to use a piece of software that has revolutionized the way they listen to music. I won't cave into such greedy corporate tactics and instead I'll save my $.75 and use something that I can pay nothing for, because paying nothing is always better than paying something, that being the most important criteria for judging what software to use.
Taking pictures of people stopped for loitering. How low tech. These days, more and more DMV's are going with computerized drivers licenses including pictures. Now all they have to do is to use the dl database to compile information based on address (since location is obviously an important criteria for them) and then just pull the pictures. This could be done without anyone (i.e. the public) knowing. Heck, they could be doing it now.
Now true, this would be easy to defeat by providing false info, or getting phoney licenses, both easy enough, but the man would still be able to get a large db up and going quickly and quietly.
In this way, the "deleted" elements next points to the it's next next (if that makes any sense at all). This would be highly frowned upon and would have side effects out the wazzoo but it could be effective given the right conditions.
I'd love to fly on the space shuttle, but its not going to happen and I'm not going to waste my time building expensive sets so that I can play "make-believe.
Or spend lots of money on a computer and internet connection and waste time posting on a website to play "I have a make-believe life". Having a beer with buddies or even sitting with your girlfriend is better than typing some stuff into a pretend community to a bunch of nerds.
Outsource to contries who still have the balls to stand up to the greedy corporations.
You mean find a greedy corporation in a country that has the balls to stand up to our greedy corporations? Maybe say a country like China. One that doesn't give a rats *ss about our copyright laws?
OK, so I fixated on the part of his statement that said '15' instead of '14 or 15'. The point was that the goal was to get everything standardized as well as increase capacity. To have the US unilaterally decide on, say, a 20digit barcode would have been a major bad move, that was my point.
One would guess the company side from both common sense and from a practical sense in that the Euros generate one of our 12digit barcodes by tacking a 0 in the front, which is the company side.
Maybe its just good design. BeOS, which was developed in part by ex-apple people, manages to install in 10-15 minutes on just about any system, without control of the hardware. The only problem I've ever had with it is lack of drivers.
Two problems with your statement. The length of the install is totally dependant on what's being installed. BeOS came with hardly anything in terms of end user apps, of course it didn't take very long to install. Plus, unless we're talking about > 2hrs, most people won't care about the time. After all, doing a 15 minute install 6 times doesn't really save you any time. Better to have a _clear_ install that helps you from doing something stupid (swap partition too small, doh!) so you only have to do it once. Most eggheads "know" how to install so they can install almost any OS quickly (not 3 cds and 2hrs+ like the bozo who wrote the article) and the "average" user usually doesn't do an install at all anyway (unless their system got munged by a virus).
Second issue is lack of drivers. One of the things that makes WinXX take a while to install is it's initial execution of most of it's primary drivers in the beginning (load driver, driver load fails, guess they don't have that hardware, next).
That's not the point. He's comparing one OEM OS distro to another but then generalizing the results to the OS's themselves. Linux is easier to install than W2K, uh yeah, right. Why doesn't he get a few "most people" users and have them install it and see which OS is truely easier (at least for the "common" user").
Plus by his logic, you should go back to the original Unix on the PDP to count when the first *nix install was done (as if installing DOS vs W2K have even the slightest thing in common). A truely terrible article.
Learning a new language isn't going to help you avoid debugging
Right but his point was that with C/C++ he spends a lot of time dealing with programming issues unrelated to solving his problem. This is a common occurance in C/C++. In C the most obvious example that is near and dear to everyones heart is string handling. It's easy to introduce many bugs into an app that does even simple string manipulation. Vs say a language like VB, where the string handling is fairly straight forward, so you can spend your time dealing with many of the other shortcomings of the language, oops, I meant to say solving your problem.
If the man wants to do math and not have to worry about memory mangement and pointer arithmitic, then moving to a language like Fortran is not necessarily a bad way to go. He shouldn't get caught up in the age (after all, C aint no spring chicken either). If it's still around and being used, then it probably does the job well (don't know a lick of Fortran so I can't say personally).
You missed my point. If the disk that held your current xaction log gets toasted along with the data, then you can only restore up to your last xaction log backup. You'd have nothing to "open up".
This is how it works: 1. Hot backup at 1am Sunday (database is up and running) 2. Nightly backup of archive logs (i.e they contain all the changes to a database.
That will only get you back to the time of your last backup assuming you don't have other realtime copies of your xaction logs and tables. If you're running your db on one big box with box table storage and xaction logs, if some big power surge comes along and crashes the heads of all your drives, all you can do is restore your full and add the xactions up until your last backup. Anything done since that time is gone.
Picture this, you have a 2GB database (not too big, not too small) and it's time to back it up. Now you are a company of the new information age with customers all around the world, so your operations are effectively 24/7. So how do you backup your database (that may take an hour or so even with DLT/AIT) while it's having transactions done on it and still guarantee integrity in your backup. The answer is that if you use a simple OS based backup, you pretty much can't (unless you shut down for an hour of course). This is why db servers designed for "enterprise" use MUST have a way of backing themselves up in an intelligent fashion.
Now, of course it would be nice if the OS provided support for the backup (let it handle the drivers, it just provides applications with an api to allow it to access whatever "backup device" the user has installed.
Everything you say is true, until your final statement. If IBM is making next to nothing on their peecee, then why do they continue to sell them? Why have they branded/rebranded (Ambra anyone?) their pc lineup? They continue to sink major dollars into pushing them. Why do they do this, well they do it so they can have across the board solutions to push into their accounts. They realize that it's easier to get into a place if they can sell them top to bottom and then provide service. And in the end, it's the service that's the _real_ money maker (margins on the big iron isn't that great either, the competition in the market is very strong and _nobody_ pays retail on those things).
The pc isn't the ends to IBM (like it is to Dell/Gateway/etc), but it is a very critical part of the means. And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.
Short-medium turn is probably correct since the PC server market has more action at the moment.
However, IBM is doing a few things with both the iSeries and pSeries lines (they use the same CPUs) that will likely change that.
Right, but my original statement was that even if PPC was made to be awesome, then they'd still ship fewer total units compared to the number of Intel boxes they ship out the door. IBM will never sell as manyu P/I series as they do peecees. Plus, the P/I series for the most part use POWER chips, is there something that you know about a new PPC that they're planning replacing the POWER3/RS64III (I assume that the POWER4 isn't going anywhere since it's fairly new)????
now they're building huge plants to produce state of the art chips that could conceivably include processors
Right, but remember that IBM has always been a third party fab too. So their current moves are nothing new. After all, as a semiconductor manufacturer, they've come out with several innovations (SOI, cooper interconnects, etc) that other makers of chips (including cpu's) can take advantage of by having IBM do the fabbing.
I have no doubt that IBM would love to stick it to Intel, but I think that this news is really no news since it really does fit into their current product line. That and even if they came up with a PPC that clocked at 3GHz with two cores, they'd still will push more Intel processors out the door than PPC's (at least in the short-medium term).
Keep in mind that IBM is in a funny spot in regards to Intel. On the one hand, they'd like nothing better than to have PPC get more market share, plus they're none to happy about Intel continually pushing into the server/workstation space. BUT, they are also a seller of Wintel boxes, so it behooves them to keep in Intel's good graces as IBM needs Wintel more than Wintel needs them.
This is nothing new however as they have been in this position for years (ever since they started the whole PPC thing with MOT and APL).
For your average/.'er, the girls at the bar should be easy to spot. General rule, if a good looking girl at a bar shows even the slightest bit of interest in you, then they MUST be getting paid (one way or another), and you'd be best to avoid them and go back to playing with your Palm in the back corner.
I was just sitting at the bar, surfing when I stumbled across this thread. I'm doing all this on my new Sony/Ericsson T68i, it's really cool and I love it, I'd post a picture that I took with it, yup, I said that I took a picture with my cell phone, but/. won't let me. If you all have a minute, I'd love to tell you about it and let you check it out.....
Yes, but that didn't help out Alpha or PowerPC much
True, but it's not that having Windoze supports guarantees success, it's that not having the support would be fatal (at least in the case of Intel).
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was also praying for x86-64 over IA64, first because it precludes having to risk a significant investment in supporting an additional platform
I don't think that this is as big of a risk as you might think. First, M$ already has experience porting their HAL to disparate ISA's. Second, Intel themselves would do much of the grunt work, M$ would just utilize their code (esp. their compilers). This is what they did with the RISC chips and this is what they used to do with their own development tools back in the early days (DOS). Third, given Linus' comment, what better way to stem the Linux tide than to beat it out of the gate on a "hot, new" platform? Esp. one geared towards the highend/server market, exactly where Linux is making inroads.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but isn't the interest in the story the fact that it uses Linux? It's even mentioned specifically in the article that Sony chose Linux/MIPS over WinTel, that what makes it /. worthy, not necessarily that it's YAPVR.
The gall of these people to expect people to pony up $.75 of their hard earned cash to use a piece of software that has revolutionized the way they listen to music. I won't cave into such greedy corporate tactics and instead I'll save my $.75 and use something that I can pay nothing for, because paying nothing is always better than paying something, that being the most important criteria for judging what software to use.
Taking pictures of people stopped for loitering. How low tech. These days, more and more DMV's are going with computerized drivers licenses including pictures. Now all they have to do is to use the dl database to compile information based on address (since location is obviously an important criteria for them) and then just pull the pictures. This could be done without anyone (i.e. the public) knowing. Heck, they could be doing it now.
Now true, this would be easy to defeat by providing false info, or getting phoney licenses, both easy enough, but the man would still be able to get a large db up and going quickly and quietly.
One way would be to make the deleted element "become" the next element.
void delitem(item *p)
{
item *tmp = p->next;
memcpy(p,p->next,sizeof(item));
free(tmp); }
In this way, the "deleted" elements next points to the it's next next (if that makes any sense at all). This would be highly frowned upon and would have side effects out the wazzoo but it could be effective given the right conditions.
I'd love to fly on the space shuttle, but its not going to happen and I'm not going to waste my time building expensive sets so that I can play "make-believe.
Or spend lots of money on a computer and internet connection and waste time posting on a website to play "I have a make-believe life". Having a beer with buddies or even sitting with your girlfriend is better than typing some stuff into a pretend community to a bunch of nerds.
Outsource to contries who still have the balls to stand up to the greedy corporations.
You mean find a greedy corporation in a country that has the balls to stand up to our greedy corporations? Maybe say a country like China. One that doesn't give a rats *ss about our copyright laws?
OK, so I fixated on the part of his statement that said '15' instead of '14 or 15'. The point was that the goal was to get everything standardized as well as increase capacity. To have the US unilaterally decide on, say, a 20digit barcode would have been a major bad move, that was my point.
One would guess the company side from both common sense and from a practical sense in that the Euros generate one of our 12digit barcodes by tacking a 0 in the front, which is the company side.
Read the article, they're going to 13 to standardize with the rest of the world.
Maybe its just good design. BeOS, which was developed in part by ex-apple people, manages to install in 10-15 minutes on just about any system, without control of the hardware. The only problem I've ever had with it is lack of drivers.
Two problems with your statement. The length of the install is totally dependant on what's being installed. BeOS came with hardly anything in terms of end user apps, of course it didn't take very long to install. Plus, unless we're talking about > 2hrs, most people won't care about the time. After all, doing a 15 minute install 6 times doesn't really save you any time. Better to have a _clear_ install that helps you from doing something stupid (swap partition too small, doh!) so you only have to do it once. Most eggheads "know" how to install so they can install almost any OS quickly (not 3 cds and 2hrs+ like the bozo who wrote the article) and the "average" user usually doesn't do an install at all anyway (unless their system got munged by a virus).
Second issue is lack of drivers. One of the things that makes WinXX take a while to install is it's initial execution of most of it's primary drivers in the beginning (load driver, driver load fails, guess they don't have that hardware, next).
That's not the point. He's comparing one OEM OS distro to another but then generalizing the results to the OS's themselves. Linux is easier to install than W2K, uh yeah, right. Why doesn't he get a few "most people" users and have them install it and see which OS is truely easier (at least for the "common" user").
Plus by his logic, you should go back to the original Unix on the PDP to count when the first *nix install was done (as if installing DOS vs W2K have even the slightest thing in common). A truely terrible article.
the infamous motorola designed altivec?
Infamous? It's shipping in all the G4's, so Apple is already using AltiVec. And what Intel talk are you referring to?
Learning a new language isn't going to help you avoid debugging
Right but his point was that with C/C++ he spends a lot of time dealing with programming issues unrelated to solving his problem. This is a common occurance in C/C++. In C the most obvious example that is near and dear to everyones heart is string handling. It's easy to introduce many bugs into an app that does even simple string manipulation. Vs say a language like VB, where the string handling is fairly straight forward, so you can spend your time dealing with many of the other shortcomings of the language, oops, I meant to say solving your problem.
If the man wants to do math and not have to worry about memory mangement and pointer arithmitic, then moving to a language like Fortran is not necessarily a bad way to go. He shouldn't get caught up in the age (after all, C aint no spring chicken either). If it's still around and being used, then it probably does the job well (don't know a lick of Fortran so I can't say personally).
No, you also have the current transaction log up.
You missed my point. If the disk that held your current xaction log gets toasted along with the data, then you can only restore up to your last xaction log backup. You'd have nothing to "open up".
This is how it works:
1. Hot backup at 1am Sunday (database is up and running)
2. Nightly backup of archive logs (i.e they contain all the changes to a database.
That will only get you back to the time of your last backup assuming you don't have other realtime copies of your xaction logs and tables. If you're running your db on one big box with box table storage and xaction logs, if some big power surge comes along and crashes the heads of all your drives, all you can do is restore your full and add the xactions up until your last backup. Anything done since that time is gone.
Picture this, you have a 2GB database (not too big, not too small) and it's time to back it up. Now you are a company of the new information age with customers all around the world, so your operations are effectively 24/7. So how do you backup your database (that may take an hour or so even with DLT/AIT) while it's having transactions done on it and still guarantee integrity in your backup. The answer is that if you use a simple OS based backup, you pretty much can't (unless you shut down for an hour of course). This is why db servers designed for "enterprise" use MUST have a way of backing themselves up in an intelligent fashion.
Now, of course it would be nice if the OS provided support for the backup (let it handle the drivers, it just provides applications with an api to allow it to access whatever "backup device" the user has installed.
Everything you say is true, until your final statement. If IBM is making next to nothing on their peecee, then why do they continue to sell them? Why have they branded/rebranded (Ambra anyone?) their pc lineup? They continue to sink major dollars into pushing them. Why do they do this, well they do it so they can have across the board solutions to push into their accounts. They realize that it's easier to get into a place if they can sell them top to bottom and then provide service. And in the end, it's the service that's the _real_ money maker (margins on the big iron isn't that great either, the competition in the market is very strong and _nobody_ pays retail on those things).
The pc isn't the ends to IBM (like it is to Dell/Gateway/etc), but it is a very critical part of the means. And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.
Short-medium turn is probably correct since the PC server market has more action at the moment. However, IBM is doing a few things with both the iSeries and pSeries lines (they use the same CPUs) that will likely change that.
Right, but my original statement was that even if PPC was made to be awesome, then they'd still ship fewer total units compared to the number of Intel boxes they ship out the door. IBM will never sell as manyu P/I series as they do peecees. Plus, the P/I series for the most part use POWER chips, is there something that you know about a new PPC that they're planning replacing the POWER3/RS64III (I assume that the POWER4 isn't going anywhere since it's fairly new)????
now they're building huge plants to produce state of the art chips that could conceivably include processors
Right, but remember that IBM has always been a third party fab too. So their current moves are nothing new. After all, as a semiconductor manufacturer, they've come out with several innovations (SOI, cooper interconnects, etc) that other makers of chips (including cpu's) can take advantage of by having IBM do the fabbing.
I have no doubt that IBM would love to stick it to Intel, but I think that this news is really no news since it really does fit into their current product line. That and even if they came up with a PPC that clocked at 3GHz with two cores, they'd still will push more Intel processors out the door than PPC's (at least in the short-medium term).
Keep in mind that IBM is in a funny spot in regards to Intel. On the one hand, they'd like nothing better than to have PPC get more market share, plus they're none to happy about Intel continually pushing into the server/workstation space. BUT, they are also a seller of Wintel boxes, so it behooves them to keep in Intel's good graces as IBM needs Wintel more than Wintel needs them.
This is nothing new however as they have been in this position for years (ever since they started the whole PPC thing with MOT and APL).
For your average /.'er, the girls at the bar should be easy to spot. General rule, if a good looking girl at a bar shows even the slightest bit of interest in you, then they MUST be getting paid (one way or another), and you'd be best to avoid them and go back to playing with your Palm in the back corner.
I was just sitting at the bar, surfing when I stumbled across this thread. I'm doing all this on my new Sony/Ericsson T68i, it's really cool and I love it, I'd post a picture that I took with it, yup, I said that I took a picture with my cell phone, but /. won't let me. If you all have a minute, I'd love to tell you about it and let you check it out .....
get an Ericsson T68i phone (coming soon to the USA)
Already here:
AT&T Wireless
Yes, but that didn't help out Alpha or PowerPC much
True, but it's not that having Windoze supports guarantees success, it's that not having the support would be fatal (at least in the case of Intel).
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was also praying for x86-64 over IA64, first because it precludes having to risk a significant investment in supporting an additional platform
I don't think that this is as big of a risk as you might think. First, M$ already has experience porting their HAL to disparate ISA's. Second, Intel themselves would do much of the grunt work, M$ would just utilize their code (esp. their compilers). This is what they did with the RISC chips and this is what they used to do with their own development tools back in the early days (DOS). Third, given Linus' comment, what better way to stem the Linux tide than to beat it out of the gate on a "hot, new" platform? Esp. one geared towards the highend/server market, exactly where Linux is making inroads.