Support for closed source apps is the main reason one should choose Red Hat Enterprise or United Linux. If you neeed Oracle, you are in bad luck if you choose RH 9. The reduced life cicle of consumer versions could also be a problem.
One option would go to a mix: RH Enterprise on Oracle Servers and RH 9 (or Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, BSD, whatever) on small servers or workstations.
Spend a bit more (300+)and you have a Pocket PC or Linux based device. These are larger and heavier than Palm-based PDAs, but have more compatible software (It is easier to port an existing Windows application to a Pocket PC handheld than to a Palm PDA. Same for Linux).
I agree that there are a lot of software avaliable for windows, and that it is easier to port them to Pocket PC than to Palm. But check out Handango or Palmgear and you will notice that there are a lot of programs avaliable for Palm OS, and my guess is that the selection is wider than for the Pocket PC.
A preview owner of a Palm PDA, I got as a gift the iPaq 1910, and I am having a hard time to find the programs I need. Freeware games, like Galax, seem to be in shortage for the Pocket PC.
For most students, the combination of a desktop and a PDA is the best. A desktop is too big for someone to steal, and a PDA is small enough to be always with you. Don't use the PDA to take notes, tough - it will mostly likely be used to remember you of deadlines and tests. With the right software, it can also replace a cientific or business calculator, and edit Office documents.
That is an important distinction that was not mentioned in the review. The driver developed by the Xfree group complies with the goal of freedom, but the driver provided by Nvidia has better performance. You can download and install for free (as in beer) the driver from the Nvidia website, but it is not something so trivial. Most slashdot readers can get around it, but when the matter is to recommend a Linux distribution for a newbie, the Mandrake's boxed set has the technical advantage of the non-free software included.
But does it use Nvidia's drivers or the ones provided by the Xfree86 group? Look at the XF86 config file (under Red Hat it is in/etc/X11/XF86Config) and check if your driver is "nv" (generic driver) or "nvidia" (nvidia's driver).
As a non-american, I think your tax dollars were well-spent, and I wished my country had the inteligence to fund such a project. As strange as it may seems, a cluster of PS 2 is not something trivial, as it uses a processor with two vektor processing units. The japanese made their bet on vektor processors, and it seemed they had lost the race for building supercomputers for the americans, which were building big clusters with scalar processors.
In 2001, however, the japanese government rolled out the Earth Simulator, a cluster of 5120 vektor processors. It is 5 times faster than IBM ASCI White, the former fastest computer on earth. Know how to cluster vektor processors might be important in the future for really high performance compputing.
Acording to my sources, this should be the last Athlon XP to be released by AMD. Their next desktop processor will probably be Athlon 64, wich will need a different motherboard.
So my advice is for not buying a computer with Atlhon XP 3200, as your upgrade roadmap will be locked. It is better to buy a computer with a slower (and cheaper) Athlon, and wait untill the price drop to buy an Atlon XP 3200. Or wait for the release of Athlon 64 - it will be an excelent computer for video edition, 3D rendering and games like Unreal Tournament 2003 or Doom III.
You can check out in Rackserver, but apparently they will be delivering the server only in 90 days.
By the way, if anyone is interested in TPC-C benchmarks of the Opteron, it can be seen here. It is interesting to see such a small player like Rackserver among big boys like IBM, HP and Fujitsu.
Only HP's cartridges are covered by patents. All the others (Canon, Epson, Lexmark) are not, and that's why you have 3rd party cartridges for them, and not for HP. The patents for cartridges of series 600 printers, though, are too old and no longer valid.
Exactly. It is not only BBC - press all over the world tend to follow this rule. IBM, AMD and BBC are writen ALL CAPS because their names are not pronounced as words.
Reporters must follow editorials rules. Generally, these rules make them use Via and Nvidia instead of VIA and NVIDIA. The use of ALL CAPS in a news story makes it look like a marketing piece.
Actually, you had a great incentive: Red Hat will pull the plug of security updates of RH 8 by the end of the year. Upgrading to RH 9 will give you 3 more months - in their new policy, Red Hat has stated that it will support "consumer" OS for 12 months. If you think it is not enough, you have to pay for the Enterprise Linux server. If you don't want to upgrade your computers so often, I suggest you moving away from plain RH - either to RH Enterprise or other distribution.
I would add a new twist to this matter: this story has appeared on The Register and on Slashdot. I predict that, in a couple of days, when you google for "the seccond superpower", this story will have a high ranking. Even higher than when it first appeared on Dave's Winner scripting.com.
IBM "allowed" IBM-PC clones because of a historical accident. They wanted to develop a PC really fast, to compete with Apple, and used a lot of off-the shelf components - Intel processors and MS-DOS. One of the very few things that was made in IBM was the Bios, but it was soon reverse-engineered by companies like Phoenix.
My point is: the clones were good, increased competition and lowered the prices for personal computers. But it was not a conscious business choice of IBM.
If you think of ther internet as a big network of computers, it is a "Permanet" (in Shirky's terms). But, if you think of it simply as a protocol (TCP/IP) that runs on top of existing networks and can be used with existing computers and software, it is more a "Nearlynet". With TCP/IP you get no assurance of "quality of service" (in the way the telcos do), and that is why in the begining of the internet its success was doubtful. Most of the investment needed to make the internet succeed was not made on the network itself, but rather in the edges - in the personal computers that could understand all the "mess" that flowed from the net.
Yes, someone has. The Creative Commons project has it writen here. They have published a many other licenses in late 2002, with the intention to create degrees between full copyrights (the "all rights reserved) and public domain. Acording to their website
We take inspiration from other folks interested in promoting the sharing of creative works. Foremost among these is Richard Stallman, founder of The Free Software Foundation and author of the General Public License, or the GNU GPL. We want to complement, rather than compete with, these existing efforts to ease online sharing and collaboration. Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works.
France position has nothing to do with their corporations interests in Iraq. There is a HUGE muslim population living in France, mostly Argelian emigrates. Chirac does not want to piss them off.
And, of course, George W Bush is probably the worst american president ever. If he was only slightly more inteligent he could have had more success in building an international coalition. Or even desarming Sadam without a shoot, just for the pressure of those troops in the Gulf area.
When NetBSD started, back in 1992/1993, there was a huge lawsuit against a company called BSDI (that used the BSD code to develop a proprietary operating system and called it Unix). They were sued by USL, a spun-off company formed by AT&T that had rights over Unix. To make a setlement, professors from University of California developed what they called 4BSD - an operating system without the files that were proprerty of USL. FreeBSD an NetBSD had to resynchronize their trees with 4BSD to avoid lawsuits.
The project lost precious time in its early infancy, while Linux progressed at warp speed (people say that Linus was REALY active those days). Linux was also seen as a haven for possible lawsuits as it was writen from scratch, even tough it was technically inferior in the early days. But, as the community around it grew faster, soon it gained momentum and critical mass. Its use of GNU software was also important.
The whole story is in the book Open Sources.
The new Red Hat support policies implies that they will suply update for only one year. After this period, you will have to build your own RPMs from source or rely on third party RPMs.If you want support from Red Hat for a longer period, you have to buy Enteprise AS, ES or WS.
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One option would go to a mix: RH Enterprise on Oracle Servers and RH 9 (or Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, BSD, whatever) on small servers or workstations.
I agree that there are a lot of software avaliable for windows, and that it is easier to port them to Pocket PC than to Palm. But check out Handango or Palmgear and you will notice that there are a lot of programs avaliable for Palm OS, and my guess is that the selection is wider than for the Pocket PC.
A preview owner of a Palm PDA, I got as a gift the iPaq 1910, and I am having a hard time to find the programs I need. Freeware games, like Galax, seem to be in shortage for the Pocket PC.
For most students, the combination of a desktop and a PDA is the best. A desktop is too big for someone to steal, and a PDA is small enough to be always with you. Don't use the PDA to take notes, tough - it will mostly likely be used to remember you of deadlines and tests. With the right software, it can also replace a cientific or business calculator, and edit Office documents.
That is an important distinction that was not mentioned in the review. The driver developed by the Xfree group complies with the goal of freedom, but the driver provided by Nvidia has better performance. You can download and install for free (as in beer) the driver from the Nvidia website, but it is not something so trivial. Most slashdot readers can get around it, but when the matter is to recommend a Linux distribution for a newbie, the Mandrake's boxed set has the technical advantage of the non-free software included.
But does it use Nvidia's drivers or the ones provided by the Xfree86 group? Look at the XF86 config file (under Red Hat it is in /etc/X11/XF86Config) and check if your driver is "nv" (generic driver) or "nvidia" (nvidia's driver).
In 2001, however, the japanese government rolled out the Earth Simulator, a cluster of 5120 vektor processors. It is 5 times faster than IBM ASCI White, the former fastest computer on earth. Know how to cluster vektor processors might be important in the future for really high performance compputing.
You can also buy a current version of Windows and request a downgrade to Microsoft.
Maybe is because there is no dual Pentium 4 in the market. If you want dual processing, you need to go with Xeon.
It will probably be the last Athlon XP to be released. After that, ADM will release Atlhon 64. You won't have to wait too long.
So my advice is for not buying a computer with Atlhon XP 3200, as your upgrade roadmap will be locked. It is better to buy a computer with a slower (and cheaper) Athlon, and wait untill the price drop to buy an Atlon XP 3200. Or wait for the release of Athlon 64 - it will be an excelent computer for video edition, 3D rendering and games like Unreal Tournament 2003 or Doom III.
By the way, if anyone is interested in TPC-C benchmarks of the Opteron, it can be seen here. It is interesting to see such a small player like Rackserver among big boys like IBM, HP and Fujitsu.
Only HP's cartridges are covered by patents. All the others (Canon, Epson, Lexmark) are not, and that's why you have 3rd party cartridges for them, and not for HP. The patents for cartridges of series 600 printers, though, are too old and no longer valid.
Exactly. It is not only BBC - press all over the world tend to follow this rule. IBM, AMD and BBC are writen ALL CAPS because their names are not pronounced as words.
Reporters must follow editorials rules. Generally, these rules make them use Via and Nvidia instead of VIA and NVIDIA. The use of ALL CAPS in a news story makes it look like a marketing piece.
Actually, you had a great incentive: Red Hat will pull the plug of security updates of RH 8 by the end of the year. Upgrading to RH 9 will give you 3 more months - in their new policy, Red Hat has stated that it will support "consumer" OS for 12 months. If you think it is not enough, you have to pay for the Enterprise Linux server. If you don't want to upgrade your computers so often, I suggest you moving away from plain RH - either to RH Enterprise or other distribution.
Oh! The irony!
My point is: the clones were good, increased competition and lowered the prices for personal computers. But it was not a conscious business choice of IBM.
And a desktop computer, of course!
If you think of ther internet as a big network of computers, it is a "Permanet" (in Shirky's terms). But, if you think of it simply as a protocol (TCP/IP) that runs on top of existing networks and can be used with existing computers and software, it is more a "Nearlynet". With TCP/IP you get no assurance of "quality of service" (in the way the telcos do), and that is why in the begining of the internet its success was doubtful. Most of the investment needed to make the internet succeed was not made on the network itself, but rather in the edges - in the personal computers that could understand all the "mess" that flowed from the net.
We take inspiration from other folks interested in promoting the sharing of creative works. Foremost among these is Richard Stallman, founder of The Free Software Foundation and author of the General Public License, or the GNU GPL. We want to complement, rather than compete with, these existing efforts to ease online sharing and collaboration. Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works.
And, of course, George W Bush is probably the worst american president ever. If he was only slightly more inteligent he could have had more success in building an international coalition. Or even desarming Sadam without a shoot, just for the pressure of those troops in the Gulf area.
It can be seen here - http://keithp.com.
You are absolutely right. I was refering to 4.4BSD (more precisely, 4.4BSD-Lite), not the old 4BSD.
The project lost precious time in its early infancy, while Linux progressed at warp speed (people say that Linus was REALY active those days). Linux was also seen as a haven for possible lawsuits as it was writen from scratch, even tough it was technically inferior in the early days. But, as the community around it grew faster, soon it gained momentum and critical mass. Its use of GNU software was also important. The whole story is in the book Open Sources.
The new Red Hat support policies implies that they will suply update for only one year. After this period, you will have to build your own RPMs from source or rely on third party RPMs.If you want support from Red Hat for a longer period, you have to buy Enteprise AS, ES or WS.