As some of you might know, new IBM Unix servers are in black cases (along with black racks, black disk drawers etc). This even raised a comment in a meeting yesterday discussing an optical disk library:
"It's a new library; it's even black"
"That means it's new, does it?"
"Oh, yes!"
To be honest, I find the black better; we have a ton of older IBM kit and it just looks... well, old. The black looks more modern.
Of course, the problem many of us will have with our PCs is a Frankenstein system as we have a beige case with black CD/floppy drives (or vice versa) as we upgrade. We're already having issues like that with some Sun Ultra 80s having black DVD drives (to match the Sunblades and servers).
Well, the problem is that the 'way up' is perhaps 50% more than you're using. Since my first PC (a 486 SX/33 about 7 years ago), I've consistently doubled clock speed on each upgrade (486/33 to P100 to P233 to Athlon 600 to Athlon XP 1800+ (@1533MHz)). Those kinds of jumps just don't fit on 90% of motherboards. Apart from the chipset not supporting those clock speeds, quite often the physical connections aren't compatible.
Added to that, other parts have upgraded; my first AGP slot was on the Athlon 600 (it was never used though; I had a V3 2000 PCI), memory has changed from SIMMS to EDO to PC100 SDRAM to DDR SDRAM, none of which is compatible (OK, the 70ns SIMMS will work in an EDO chipset, I think). Finally, hard drives have gone from non-UDMA through UDMA 33, 66, 100 and now 133.
In short, motherboards don't last long unless you are willing to be crippled in some ways (e.g. memory technology) or willing to upgrade around the motherboard limitation (e.g. buying PCI IDE controllers to use faster hard drives).
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*laugh* "..access to all of that old legacy software". I don't think I've heard of Windows stuff being "legacy" before, but if linux takes off like this, it will be...
As it says in the article, there will easily be cases which need vast amounts of storage (like your satellite imagery above). However, those situations alone won't make these technologies profitable; what they're after is 120TB drives coming in new PCs that "Mom & Pop" users would buy. As is said, how much will they really use?
Yup, we had a group like that. Worst part was one student left about a week before the course finished, so we had a panic attack as he hadn't done his part. Luckily, the program was modularised, and all we needed was a quick hack to basically say "this part not implemented" when his part of the code got called. I think that ran to about 10 lines of code to handle that part.
The rest of the group at least did some code, of various qualities and with varying levels of help from myself (yes, I picked up programming quicker than everyone else, it seemed).
Websphere is not equivalent to Apache (in fact, you need a real webserver with Websphere; Apache works for this). Websphere is more like Tomcat/Jakarta/Jserv with bells and whistles. It also supports clustering (both load balancing and failover) as well as various addons.
Your last point is particularly good; on my keyboard, I can move, cut, copy, paste, edit etc while keeping my hands in the centre part of the keyboard (excepting the esc key on.uk keyboards). On other editors, you either have to use the mouse or reach over to get to the arrow keys, losing productivity. Non-vi users might be surprised at how quickly I can edit a document in vi using the centre block of keys.
Note I said "similar":) Hopefully, we get all the good parts (embedded components) without the bad parts (lockups, corruption etc).
OLE (or a similar technology) in itself is a great idea in theory, but if it's badly implemented then you can get problems. Hopefully, the KDE implementation is good enough to avoid these pitfalls.
Never again will I end up getting errors when I hit escape while editting an email message...:)
On a serious note, it shows that we can do things under linux that happen in Windows; the OLE model in Windows has allowed things like this for years, and it's about time we had a similar model in the *nix world.
no people were exterminated on german soil in death camps
Hrm, quite possibly; the most infamous camp of Auschwitz was in Poland. Also, it depends on whether you define a gas chamber (or whatever) as a "death camp".
To be honest, I've never looked into the details enough, but I believe there to be a lot of evidence supporting the view that it happened; certainly the Jews were persecuted by the Nazi regime in the 30s.
In any event, even if it didn't happen, it should still serve as a warning against extremist views.
Regarding port blocking; the best attitude I've seen has been for my ADSL provider, Nildram. They routinely block port 25 to prevent open relays, but will open it on request after they've checked it isn't an open relay.
Aside from that, they don't block any other ports, allowing me to run an https webmail system so I can check my email from everywhere with a browser, and via IMAP on my home network. There is another web site, but it's just a copy of what I have on my "real" web site for development and a couple of other bits that aren't vital (I'll probably move those when I end up moving my hosting).
Some popups are actually quite good, mainly the ones on e-commerce sites where you click on a link to view an item description. Mozilla does this well by blocking "unrequested" (I think that's the word it uses) popups.
onLoad isn't the most evil popup rule; onExit or onLeave (or whatever they're called) are worse as you can end up with something you can't leave without some fast clicking or disabling Javascript.
Since the robot is loaded up by a person and the route programmed in by that person, I don't see that being a problem. Of course, the person probably reads stuff off from a computer system which could be hacked. However, it's locked in a safe which (hopefully) the patients can't access. Finally, it isn't delivering "narcotics" (and some other drug types) which kinda rules out morphine and other dangerous stuff.
Some of the older Sun mice (usually attached to type 5 keyboards) are pretty quiet, but I don't know if you'd have much luck attaching to a PC. However, it shows the technology is there, probably using strips of metal for contacts rather than microswitches as used in most mice.
Depends what you're doing; you can probably punt the bits down the wire fast enough of a pentium, but if you're doing server-side stuff (CGI/mod_perl/PHP/whatever) there will be an added hit on performance where you might need a beefier box. For static data, you can probably saturate 100Mbit link on something like a P200 (mebbe even less)
Fine, you're an exception; it should allow those settings but it should at least default to the "common case"; i.e. in your case it should ask location (Switzerland), set the timezone accordingly and give defaults for keyboard/language settings which the user can override if he wants to. Something like "Windows has selected the following settings based on your location. Please change anything you don't like". That (a) give the level of control you want and (b) saves me having to tell it I'm in the UK 4 times.
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"It's a new library; it's even black"
"That means it's new, does it?"
"Oh, yes!"
To be honest, I find the black better; we have a ton of older IBM kit and it just looks... well, old. The black looks more modern.
Of course, the problem many of us will have with our PCs is a Frankenstein system as we have a beige case with black CD/floppy drives (or vice versa) as we upgrade. We're already having issues like that with some Sun Ultra 80s having black DVD drives (to match the Sunblades and servers).
Added to that, other parts have upgraded; my first AGP slot was on the Athlon 600 (it was never used though; I had a V3 2000 PCI), memory has changed from SIMMS to EDO to PC100 SDRAM to DDR SDRAM, none of which is compatible (OK, the 70ns SIMMS will work in an EDO chipset, I think). Finally, hard drives have gone from non-UDMA through UDMA 33, 66, 100 and now 133.
In short, motherboards don't last long unless you are willing to be crippled in some ways (e.g. memory technology) or willing to upgrade around the motherboard limitation (e.g. buying PCI IDE controllers to use faster hard drives).
*laugh* "..access to all of that old legacy software". I don't think I've heard of Windows stuff being "legacy" before, but if linux takes off like this, it will be...
As it says in the article, there will easily be cases which need vast amounts of storage (like your satellite imagery above). However, those situations alone won't make these technologies profitable; what they're after is 120TB drives coming in new PCs that "Mom & Pop" users would buy. As is said, how much will they really use?
If you look at the current list on the TOP500 web site, a large portion of the systems are SP2 clusters, so I'd say yes.
The rest of the group at least did some code, of various qualities and with varying levels of help from myself (yes, I picked up programming quicker than everyone else, it seemed).
Hell, it's not like Netscape bothered for Netscape 6.x, why should Compuserve?
- Internet music sharing was rampant in the UK (probably partly attributable to increased availability of broadband) and
- CD sales in the UK rose 4% (NB: vinyl sales rose by even more; go figure), contrary to a downward trend everywhere else
Hrm, let me see...Unfortunately, this information didn't make it through to their web site, as far as I could see...
Now, now, language! :)
Websphere is not equivalent to Apache (in fact, you need a real webserver with Websphere; Apache works for this). Websphere is more like Tomcat/Jakarta/Jserv with bells and whistles. It also supports clustering (both load balancing and failover) as well as various addons.
Hrm, never heard it called a nipple mouse, it's usually referred to as a "clit mouse".
Your last point is particularly good; on my keyboard, I can move, cut, copy, paste, edit etc while keeping my hands in the centre part of the keyboard (excepting the esc key on .uk keyboards). On other editors, you either have to use the mouse or reach over to get to the arrow keys, losing productivity. Non-vi users might be surprised at how quickly I can edit a document in vi using the centre block of keys.
OLE (or a similar technology) in itself is a great idea in theory, but if it's badly implemented then you can get problems. Hopefully, the KDE implementation is good enough to avoid these pitfalls.
On a serious note, it shows that we can do things under linux that happen in Windows; the OLE model in Windows has allowed things like this for years, and it's about time we had a similar model in the *nix world.
... some people have far too much free time on their hands.
To be honest, I've never looked into the details enough, but I believe there to be a lot of evidence supporting the view that it happened; certainly the Jews were persecuted by the Nazi regime in the 30s.
In any event, even if it didn't happen, it should still serve as a warning against extremist views.
It's at the bottom of the page; look closer next time.
Aside from that, they don't block any other ports, allowing me to run an https webmail system so I can check my email from everywhere with a browser, and via IMAP on my home network. There is another web site, but it's just a copy of what I have on my "real" web site for development and a couple of other bits that aren't vital (I'll probably move those when I end up moving my hosting).
onLoad isn't the most evil popup rule; onExit or onLeave (or whatever they're called) are worse as you can end up with something you can't leave without some fast clicking or disabling Javascript.
Since the robot is loaded up by a person and the route programmed in by that person, I don't see that being a problem. Of course, the person probably reads stuff off from a computer system which could be hacked. However, it's locked in a safe which (hopefully) the patients can't access. Finally, it isn't delivering "narcotics" (and some other drug types) which kinda rules out morphine and other dangerous stuff.
Some of the older Sun mice (usually attached to type 5 keyboards) are pretty quiet, but I don't know if you'd have much luck attaching to a PC. However, it shows the technology is there, probably using strips of metal for contacts rather than microswitches as used in most mice.
Depends what you're doing; you can probably punt the bits down the wire fast enough of a pentium, but if you're doing server-side stuff (CGI/mod_perl/PHP/whatever) there will be an added hit on performance where you might need a beefier box. For static data, you can probably saturate 100Mbit link on something like a P200 (mebbe even less)
It's not really for home use yet (give it a few years and it might become standard), and the article lists a price of $6,000.
Fine, you're an exception; it should allow those settings but it should at least default to the "common case"; i.e. in your case it should ask location (Switzerland), set the timezone accordingly and give defaults for keyboard/language settings which the user can override if he wants to. Something like "Windows has selected the following settings based on your location. Please change anything you don't like". That (a) give the level of control you want and (b) saves me having to tell it I'm in the UK 4 times.