Professors generally do not share their speeches on a P2P network. Kids with book reports do not generally have substantial amounts shared out over a P2P network.
I think RIAA will be targeting those users who leave their computer on all the time sharing out a few gigs (or so) of music. Chances are, there are not that many "live" performances that are OKed by bands that are cool with sharing of their music.
Irregardless, RIAA has already had to apologize to various users for alleging people had copyrighted works - it would appear that they simply used a search engine style query. If someone has more than 3 gigs of MP3s on their share - you can be pretty sure they probably have at least one wrongfully distributed music file.
What bothers me is the seemingly potential unfettered access that the RIAA has in finding out personal and private contact information from service providers. The RIAA simply has to present previous court decisions to service providers threatening to take them to court unless they hand your information over. Most companies would like to stay out court and more than likely hand things over with little discretion (as these types of requests become more common place).
If an individual has to go about tracking someone who accessed their computer and stole information off of it, they must go to the authorities where the investigators (actual law enforcement) in charge pursue finding out the personal information of the alleged perpetrator.
RIAA is not a government entity. According to the RIAA, they are a "trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry." A company that can simply request your personal information to contact you for the purpose of serving you a notice of the intent to be sued is absolutely and fundamentally wrong.
I think supporting such service providers that would hand over information to another for-profit organization without the content of the consumer should be held liable to the extent that the law allows.
If you visit the Apple store, click on the big advertisement on the center to select your PowerMac G5. In the upper-right part of the screen it states:
Apple tweaks the specs to make their system look faster.
Dell tweaks the specs to make their system look faster.
Apple does not use Dell's tweaked specs but instead chooses to cripple Dell's machine for benchmarking purposes. Dell did not cripple an Apple machine for comparison.
You are correct in that modern operating system kernels attempt to take advantage of that fact that there is more than one processor in an SMP box. However, applications written for SMP machines take more advantage of more than one processor than the kernel simply selecting the processor affinity of particular thread (or process).
Apple chose processor intensive benchmarks in its suite of testing (which makes perfect since). Applications that are processor intensive and SMP-aware usually are designed to calculate things in parallel (spawning N threads on N processors to calculate an end result). Applications that are not processor aware will usually spawn 1 thread on N processors - this makes perfect sense.
It is very true that more than one processor helps take the load off the system. I/O, music, background threads, etc. all consume processor time. Modern kernels know how to distribute the threads to the processors for maximum responsiveness. But 8 processors does not make a calculator produce a result faster if it is not SMP-aware.
Apple's disabling of hyperthreading takes the edge away from Intel that it worked hard in implementing for the Pentium 4. Hyperthreading for the modern Pentium 4s (3.06GHz+) and the P4-Xeons are considered "standard equipment". Although minor issues have cropped up with hyperthreading in the Windows world, Intel's logical processor implementation is excellent and considered stable for production use.
For the scenario you provided, a single HT-enabled P4 would not receive much benefit for background threads (such as I/O, for example) since it still only has one physical processor layer - just two perfectly copied states of the physical layer. As such, no performance advantage would be necessary gained.
However, SMP-aware applications that parallelize their calculation to the number of processors in a machine would do so in a manner that the P4 could implement the instructions in a more parallel fashion on the physical processor layer, thus increasing performance (albeit marginal). But even still, this marginal performance increase makes the modern P4s what they are. Intel would not have included the technology had they not wanted it to be a part of their processor.
1 HT-enabled P4 would still be slower than 2 HT-disabled P4s.
The yester-year equivalent (roughly) would be Apple comparing a floating point benchmark with their 68040 processor with a FPU-disabled 486DX processor.
Apple's hardware focus is misdirected. Instead of catering to the vast majority of Mac users (like yourself), Apple has the mission of migrating (the "Switch") PC users to the Mac world. Although Apple does say "our new box is faster than our old box", it attempts to use smoke and mirrors to get their machine up to par with the newest offerings from the PC world. Then, Apple goes so far as to claim that their machine is the fastest a consumer can buy?
One thing car salesman figure out quick is to never claim the trophy - only claim rights that his car is "one of the best".
Apple would be smart to recognize that a person that has used a PC since "DOS became graphical" will more likely stick with a PC (and its ultra cheap components) than make the switch to the proprietary Mac world. Instead, APple risks its credibility to make PC consumers think they are buying into inferior hardware.
Knowing that companies taint their benchmarks is definitely common knowledge; however, that does not make it a good practice. nVidia caught major flak from the 3DMark benchmarks. AMD is currently catching hell from their XP rating system. Apple should focus on their user base and continue to offer the public high quality components, software, and services - which all leads to increased market share.
What's left? Just as you said - the G5 is indeed faster than the G4 that it is replacing. It's technologically superior and still does a hell of a job for the Mac consumers out there. There was a point in time where I figured Apple would simply advertise "We're Apple - we're not a PC" and get the point across.
Apple should drop its comparison with the PC world considering the application and core hardware base are vastly different.
So while I'd love to get this up and running for The Powers that Be, until something that's even more advanced and is guaranteed to support Windows 2000 or XP only apps comes along, no endorsement here can be made.
VMWare has been providing the ability to run nearly all modern OSes that are available for x86 - the caveat is in its virtualization of computer resources which leads to a performance hit; one that Win4Lin focuses on dealing with by utilizing the existing facilities in a Linux box for its actual Windows process.
I think as of 3.0 (3.2.1/4.0 are current), VMWare has the ability to access raw internal devices (IDE/SCSI) as well as provide support for external USB devices with excellent OS-to-OS transparency. You can find out more about their Workstation software by clicking here.
Most Windows applications have no problem running under Windows 9x (especially 98+). It is true that Microsoft is phasing out applications from running on their legacy Win9x operating systems, the rest of the world is still supporting Windows 9x+ and will do so when it because unfeasible to do so within their operating budgets.
Win4Lin allows people to run Windows applications at almost native speeds (if not a wee bit faster) than a true Windows 9x system, while still allowing their systems to be stable and Linux based. Where VMWare has the ability to run modern Windows operating systems (NT based), it does so with a penalty on performance and system requirements.
I can only assume that Win4Lin is going to pursue the same type of support for NT based Windows when Windows 9x is retired from the list of eligible operating systems that can run Windows software. But for now, it will serve to bridge the gap quite nicely.
Not outdated - simply practical...
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Win4Lin 5.0 Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Production environments moved to Windows 2000+ years ago because of operating stability issues encountered when running Windows 9x based systems. Nevermind the inherent security issues that plagued the operating system when the user is assumed to be the administrator of the machine.
Production environments that have selected Linux as their "host" operating system have already made a good choice in selecting a stable, secure operating system. Allowing their users to still be able to use "modern" Windows software (for various reasons) is priceless.
I used to work for a company which deployed Linux throughout. However, various assignments for software development required the use of Visual Studio, which runs just fine under Windows 98 - but, as you can imagine, has a difficulty running under Linux. I purchased Win4Lin 3.0 - and the flexibility (and speed), yet convenience of not having to install Windows was absolutely fantastic.
Please note this comment in the article: "The PSX is not a product of SCEI, but rather the BroadBand Network Company, part of the main Sony company and headed by Kutaragi."
Panasonic had a relationship with Sega to repackage their Dreamcast. Another Japanese manufacturer also repackages Nintendo's latest offering.
... purchasing the PSX instead. That means people who own Tivo's and don't give a rat's ass about burning DVD-XXs will be able to buy the PS2 at bargain basement prices ($129...??)
Personally, I think this is excellent - it bolsters Sony's lead over Microsoft in the overall arena of technology in a box, plus it will extend the PS2's lead over Microsoft in units and games once the PS2's price falls another $70...
First things first - I love open source software. I prefer Linux. But let's be realistic:
Microsoft is a software vendor - a software vendor has employees that know, love, and baby their source code to produce a software product. Windows XP is one of their software products. These software developers know their particular piece of the puzzle well - while they may know jack and doodle about another piece of the puzzle within the same product. Nevermind they have no clue on how another piece of software is written from a completely different vendor!
If Microsoft were to release a patch to Windows XP - do you honestly want them to test the patch against the fifty three million software products that are available to run under their operating system? Let's not forget all the legacy versions that are still floating out there.
C'mon - that's ridiculous. It's an unfair argument to state that Microsoft should test against software not written by them. I would expect Microsoft's testing strategy is to make sure that the software does not adversely affect the performance of their own operating system and the software that came with it.
Since we do not have sufficient information about all the software that was affected by the patch, we do not know the whole scope of the problem. All we know is that Symantec's software product conflicts with the latest update.
If five software products out of fifty three million are broken while the remainder has absolutely no problem - would it not be safe to say that the problem does not lie within the patch, but perhaps the coding practices of the five software products that have the conflicts?
Unlike what I would have expected from Microsoft, pulling the patch was the right idea. I imagine their quality department immediately dispatched a request to Symantec to evaluate the possible conflict and to work a resolution as a fast as possible.
a nice utility that does a rollback of patches that were recently applied to the machine. Intermediate+ users of Windows know that most updates have be uninstalled and reverted back to its previous state by going to Add/Remove Programs. These hotfixes are considered a necessary fix if your machine utilizes the particular component that is indeed broken.
Microsoft should create a "Repair Utility" that is available to the user in the event that a large anomaly (like loss of networking should occur). The user could then browse the patches that were installed, give a description of those patches, and then provide a link to the Knowledge Base article associated with the patch.
If a user encountered a problem with loss of networking, the utility would show that the most recent update to Windows installed was the IPSec patch (the description would say - "this package updates the networking componet of Windows"). Even the beginner or novice could then put two and two together - I can't connect to the Internet so now the "networking component of Windows" is horked.
A nice button that says "Revert" or "Uninstall" would allow the user to remove the patch, reboot, and get on with the program.
With the number of updates that software vendors pass down to the end users which wreak more havoc than good, I'm not too sure if I want a single entity responsible for determining when the laptop should and should not operate normally. If there is a software glitch on the server side, not only would I potentially be affected, but thousands upon thousands of laptops equipped with this "feature" would find themselves being wiped in a heartbeat - all because someone forgot a simple check in their code.
Think about it.
Otherwise, the method by which this system works is if the "thief" connects via the Internet. The coordinates are transmitted to the server during this handshake - then what?
Phoenix: Is this the Some City police department? SCPD: Yes? Can we help you? Phoenix: We have a stolen laptop in your vicinity. We find it to be within a six block radius of 24th and 7th. We know the originating IP address. SCPD: What the hell is an IP address? Give us a real address! Do you realize how many people live in that area? Thanks - but no thanks.
Unless the laptop was hardwired to always be networked (embedded Bluetooth or 802.11), a thief would simply remove the PC Card to steal all of the data off the drive (if it were so important). I don't see how industrial espionage would be deterred if a smart thief looked on the laptop and saw "TheftGuard Equipped" and didn't allow the laptop to connect to the Internet.
I would also imagine that the BIOS would need some interaction with the host OS to communicate over the networking device - if it did so transparently, then it would be a more useful feature since a format could eliminate any potential drivers.
Be mindful that Red Hat attempts to provide an array of software and services to their customer base - this includes the mainstream (read: free) distribution that contains GPL (or near-equivalent license) software.
Otherwise, Red Hat produces other distributions (like Advanced Server and Enterprise Server) that might contain proprietary (read: not so free) code and software that may require additional licenses.
The spirit is in open-source - but customer wishes also pay the bills.
Companies have long adopted the "open-source" fundamental philosophy even before Linux and what I call the modern open source movement caught on. Often, a company would have a nice product - license the code to a sub-company (who would modify/repackage/etc the original product). The license agreement stipulated that all modifications would 1) have to be reviewed by the company without restriction from the sub-company 2) the modifications would have to be approved by the company.
Take for instance the relationship between Microsoft and IBM during the OS/2 era. The two companies working on the same code base produced OS/2 and, eventually, the NT kernel.
Or, more recently - the brilliant strategy of Netscape Communications Corporation - the birth of the Mozilla project. To the open source community - take our browser, modify it like hell, make it a better project. You have, of course, Mozilla as the browser - but Netscape (Navigator) still exists (as a repackaged, "enhanced" Mozilla).
nVidia's source code release would have two major impacts as far as their performance goes.
1) ATI (et al.) would find the actual software-based enhancements they could also incorporate into their own driver to improve their product.
2) nVidia could capture the many brilliant software developers that happen to be a part of the whole nVidia "cult" - this could lead to significant advancements to their driver quality (and overall product quality).
My guess is that the lid is kept so tightly shut on nVidia's drivers because they can keep their chips relatively simple through their complex software driver. ATI, perhaps, has the technical edge in the hardware arena, but does not have the finesse for software enhancing drivers like nVidia does.
Video performance from my Radeon 7500 under Linux (using the ATI optimized drivers for XFree86 4.3) is not nearly as good as the ATI-provided drivers under Windows 2000. I think ATI gives the type of ingredients to the Linux driver developers, but the quantity of those ingredients it keeps to themselves.
nVidia could really follow along this same philosophy, instead of hearing the massive complaints from their oft-buggy video driver.
Or, perhaps SCO (being a company which has very little growth potential) is simply looking at IBM to buy it out (to shut SCO up).
*shrug*
It seems rather futile. You know it's a bad sign when the company's main website has links to their court filings and condemning letters sent to all kind of other companies.
The problem with the Sacagawea (sp?) dollar is that people hoarded them instead of actually using them in regular circulation. It was a problem of the supply could not match up well with the demand for consumers and collectors.
Now, if they would print something on the dollar like....... well, something simple that would not have vast historical value, then perhaps it would not be such a collectors item.
I imagine they don't fold up very well for a good fit in my wallet. I mean, sheesh - I already have enough problem with all my credit card receipts and the one-dollar bills biting into my ass when I sit for long periods of time!
Most banks and stores that detect counterfeit bills do so using a special marker that leaves a particular mark/color on a true bill and nothing/or another special mark on fake. It's the reaction with the cloth-based real bill.
Since most stores use this method (banks will already know better), it will remain true for the new $20 (just as it has for the 1997 $20 and the legacy $20s.)
Even still detection mechanisms simply are in place to keep honest people honest. They are a deterrent. Successful counterfeiters can always find a mom and pop shop to accept their close-to-the-real thing design.
This is an old philosophy that I'm sure is running out of steam.
Myth: Doubling your RAM leads to significant benefits.
Fact: RAM has been cheap for quite a long time. In fact, it is not uncommon to find machines with 512M or more of system memory - not only that, but extremely fast memory as well. It would not be surprising to find that most individuals have at least 256M of RAM. And for 90% of the regular consumer - 256M is more than sufficient (as of current).
In yester-years - most people struggled with large bloated applications with very little memory. We all remember the days of 8M to 32M (wow!) and 64M to 128M (big wow!). Windows 95 did one thing for the industry that was absolutely positive: it forced people to stop struggling along with 16M or 32M of RAM and move up to the big top - 64 to 128M. (Unfortunately, Microsoft never stopped - 256M seems to be a nice sweet spot for Windows 2000 - will we be seeing a 1G sweet spot anytime soon?)
But this is a new era of computing: software still runs well on hardware that is a few years old. Prices for computer components have drastically fallen in the last decade. Components are now extremely modular and flexible - and can accomodate new and improved hardware. You can still find the ubiquitous i440BX chipset (introduced in the early P2 era) hosting P3-500+ processors.
Since people have been able to stock their computers with more memory (more than enough for mundane tasks; good enough for large behemoth games), RAM doubling may not help that much. Sure, an OS's page cache can always benefit from "wasted" memory by loading everything under the sun into memory. I have three computers that I regularly use: one with 768M, one with 384M, and one with... 32M (a paltry laptop).
Granted, the laptop would see a huge performance benefit with another 64M module. But the 384M machine always has free memory, and the 768M workstation (although loaded down pretty well) will manages to avoid swap without a problem.
My 768M stocked workstation is what I call ideal for me: a 10000RPM 80G hard drive, P4-2.4GHz, and with an ATI Radeon 7500. It's for browsing, compiling, and editing - no gaming.
My 384M stocked workstation is what I call the bare minimum: 5 hard drives (for a total of 145G), a dual P2-400MHz, and with an nVidia GeForce 2. It's for moderate gaming, browsing, and compiling.
My 32M stocked laptop is what I call "Jurassic": 1 hard drive (for a total of 1.6G), a P-166MHz/MMX, and a I-don't-know-what-the-hell-it-is video chipset. It's for board games, card games, and light browsing.
I'll focus on my 384M stocked box. I could get rid of the 5 drives and invest in 2 80G or 120G 7200/10000RPM drives. Hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in a system. The higher the density and the faster the spindle speed is a theoretical higher output from the drive. Other factors weigh in considerably - but this is a mere example!
I could also upgrade my processors to the maximum limit of the motherboard. If I flash the BIOS, I'm supposedly able to move to dual P3-800M. According to Pricewatch, I can get two of these bad boys at a small price of $156 (total).
Since gaming is not really a big focus for me, I can deal with this aged video board. But ideally, I would probably go with a relatively cheap dual-Athlon board, get a couple Duron 1.3GHz processors, move my 384M RAM over and be done with it.
Is the biggest gripe with RPM the inability to automatically download packages? Is it because people have a big problem with the dependencies inherent to ? Many advocates of Debian's "package management" like it simply because it is easy to install packages from remote servers.
This is not the philosophy of package management. It is, however, an easy way to retrieve and install packages. "apt-get" is the utility by which packages are retrieved from other servers, cross-checked with a local database for dependency issues and then installed. If such functionality is desired by the end-user, there are utilities that also allow the automatic download and installation of a package and all of its dependencies.
RPM is a feature-robust, well-developed package management tool that allows developers to intricately control the methods by which applications are installed, configured, updated, and removed. When a spec file (the file that "rpmbuild" uses to make binary and source RPMs) is properly formatted and configured, package management (and dependencies) are a snap. It is an invaluable tool for a developer that wishes to target their package for the majority of Linux installations out in the community.
RPM has been chosen by quite a few mainstream distributions as well as being supported by third-party software distributors. Without custom modifications, RPM (and its source packages) can be easily configured and installed on a target distribution with little to no hassle. I have been using RPM for many years now and find it to be quite nice and user friendly. As with any software application, it takes a bit of time and training to feel comfortable using it.
Gentoo's decision to adopt RPM, in my opinion, is a good one - conforming to the LSB brings another distribution into compliance to make the end-user's experience a more consistent one with other mainstream distributions. This approach allows for users to "make the switch" from another popular distribution to Gentoo with relative ease. Gentoo also can continue to enhance portage without having to rely on their own custom package management tool - diverting time and effort into the portage system rather than the build/packaging process. Thus, Gentoo opens up to a established base of already-present packages (including their enhancement patches) to further better their own distribution.
In terms of performance, I tend to look at the "bang per buck" factor. The processor is just one component of the core of a system. When you factor in motherboard and memory costs, I think AMD still gives the better edge (especially since the XP 3000 is not that much more expensive than the Pentium 4 counterpart.)
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Professors generally do not share their speeches on a P2P network. Kids with book reports do not generally have substantial amounts shared out over a P2P network.
I think RIAA will be targeting those users who leave their computer on all the time sharing out a few gigs (or so) of music. Chances are, there are not that many "live" performances that are OKed by bands that are cool with sharing of their music.
Irregardless, RIAA has already had to apologize to various users for alleging people had copyrighted works - it would appear that they simply used a search engine style query. If someone has more than 3 gigs of MP3s on their share - you can be pretty sure they probably have at least one wrongfully distributed music file.
What bothers me is the seemingly potential unfettered access that the RIAA has in finding out personal and private contact information from service providers. The RIAA simply has to present previous court decisions to service providers threatening to take them to court unless they hand your information over. Most companies would like to stay out court and more than likely hand things over with little discretion (as these types of requests become more common place).
If an individual has to go about tracking someone who accessed their computer and stole information off of it, they must go to the authorities where the investigators (actual law enforcement) in charge pursue finding out the personal information of the alleged perpetrator.
RIAA is not a government entity. According to the RIAA, they are a "trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry." A company that can simply request your personal information to contact you for the purpose of serving you a notice of the intent to be sued is absolutely and fundamentally wrong.
I think supporting such service providers that would hand over information to another for-profit organization without the content of the consumer should be held liable to the extent that the law allows.
By any chance have you read the fifteen volume license agreement you signed up when you created your MSN/Hotmail account?
For the same reason the P4-2.8GHz clocked down to 1GHz would be faster than the P3-1GHz processor. The architecture has changed - but by how much?
If you visit the Apple store, click on the big advertisement on the center to select your PowerMac G5. In the upper-right part of the screen it states:
"Just how fast? Get the proof here.". Following this link will take you to Apple's own site where you can read details about the benchmark.
What's missing?
The comparison between G4-optimized benchmarks and the current G5-optimized benchmarks.
Apple tweaks the specs to make their system look faster.
Dell tweaks the specs to make their system look faster.
Apple does not use Dell's tweaked specs but instead chooses to cripple Dell's machine for benchmarking purposes. Dell did not cripple an Apple machine for comparison.
Any questions?
You are correct in that modern operating system kernels attempt to take advantage of that fact that there is more than one processor in an SMP box. However, applications written for SMP machines take more advantage of more than one processor than the kernel simply selecting the processor affinity of particular thread (or process).
Apple chose processor intensive benchmarks in its suite of testing (which makes perfect since). Applications that are processor intensive and SMP-aware usually are designed to calculate things in parallel (spawning N threads on N processors to calculate an end result). Applications that are not processor aware will usually spawn 1 thread on N processors - this makes perfect sense.
It is very true that more than one processor helps take the load off the system. I/O, music, background threads, etc. all consume processor time. Modern kernels know how to distribute the threads to the processors for maximum responsiveness. But 8 processors does not make a calculator produce a result faster if it is not SMP-aware.
Apple's disabling of hyperthreading takes the edge away from Intel that it worked hard in implementing for the Pentium 4. Hyperthreading for the modern Pentium 4s (3.06GHz+) and the P4-Xeons are considered "standard equipment". Although minor issues have cropped up with hyperthreading in the Windows world, Intel's logical processor implementation is excellent and considered stable for production use.
For the scenario you provided, a single HT-enabled P4 would not receive much benefit for background threads (such as I/O, for example) since it still only has one physical processor layer - just two perfectly copied states of the physical layer. As such, no performance advantage would be necessary gained.
However, SMP-aware applications that parallelize their calculation to the number of processors in a machine would do so in a manner that the P4 could implement the instructions in a more parallel fashion on the physical processor layer, thus increasing performance (albeit marginal). But even still, this marginal performance increase makes the modern P4s what they are. Intel would not have included the technology had they not wanted it to be a part of their processor.
1 HT-enabled P4 would still be slower than 2 HT-disabled P4s.
The yester-year equivalent (roughly) would be Apple comparing a floating point benchmark with their 68040 processor with a FPU-disabled 486DX processor.
Apple's hardware focus is misdirected. Instead of catering to the vast majority of Mac users (like yourself), Apple has the mission of migrating (the "Switch") PC users to the Mac world. Although Apple does say "our new box is faster than our old box", it attempts to use smoke and mirrors to get their machine up to par with the newest offerings from the PC world. Then, Apple goes so far as to claim that their machine is the fastest a consumer can buy?
One thing car salesman figure out quick is to never claim the trophy - only claim rights that his car is "one of the best".
Apple would be smart to recognize that a person that has used a PC since "DOS became graphical" will more likely stick with a PC (and its ultra cheap components) than make the switch to the proprietary Mac world. Instead, APple risks its credibility to make PC consumers think they are buying into inferior hardware.
Knowing that companies taint their benchmarks is definitely common knowledge; however, that does not make it a good practice. nVidia caught major flak from the 3DMark benchmarks. AMD is currently catching hell from their XP rating system. Apple should focus on their user base and continue to offer the public high quality components, software, and services - which all leads to increased market share.
What's left? Just as you said - the G5 is indeed faster than the G4 that it is replacing. It's technologically superior and still does a hell of a job for the Mac consumers out there. There was a point in time where I figured Apple would simply advertise "We're Apple - we're not a PC" and get the point across.
Apple should drop its comparison with the PC world considering the application and core hardware base are vastly different.
What about a kitty detector and a small slingshot device to keep them from running underneath the wheels of my truck?
VMWare has been providing the ability to run nearly all modern OSes that are available for x86 - the caveat is in its virtualization of computer resources which leads to a performance hit; one that Win4Lin focuses on dealing with by utilizing the existing facilities in a Linux box for its actual Windows process.
I think as of 3.0 (3.2.1/4.0 are current), VMWare has the ability to access raw internal devices (IDE/SCSI) as well as provide support for external USB devices with excellent OS-to-OS transparency. You can find out more about their Workstation software by clicking here.
Most Windows applications have no problem running under Windows 9x (especially 98+). It is true that Microsoft is phasing out applications from running on their legacy Win9x operating systems, the rest of the world is still supporting Windows 9x+ and will do so when it because unfeasible to do so within their operating budgets.
Win4Lin allows people to run Windows applications at almost native speeds (if not a wee bit faster) than a true Windows 9x system, while still allowing their systems to be stable and Linux based. Where VMWare has the ability to run modern Windows operating systems (NT based), it does so with a penalty on performance and system requirements.
I can only assume that Win4Lin is going to pursue the same type of support for NT based Windows when Windows 9x is retired from the list of eligible operating systems that can run Windows software. But for now, it will serve to bridge the gap quite nicely.
Production environments moved to Windows 2000+ years ago because of operating stability issues encountered when running Windows 9x based systems. Nevermind the inherent security issues that plagued the operating system when the user is assumed to be the administrator of the machine.
Production environments that have selected Linux as their "host" operating system have already made a good choice in selecting a stable, secure operating system. Allowing their users to still be able to use "modern" Windows software (for various reasons) is priceless.
I used to work for a company which deployed Linux throughout. However, various assignments for software development required the use of Visual Studio, which runs just fine under Windows 98 - but, as you can imagine, has a difficulty running under Linux. I purchased Win4Lin 3.0 - and the flexibility (and speed), yet convenience of not having to install Windows was absolutely fantastic.
Please note this comment in the article: "The PSX is not a product of SCEI, but rather the BroadBand Network Company, part of the main Sony company and headed by Kutaragi."
Panasonic had a relationship with Sega to repackage their Dreamcast. Another Japanese manufacturer also repackages Nintendo's latest offering.
... purchasing the PSX instead. That means people who own Tivo's and don't give a rat's ass about burning DVD-XXs will be able to buy the PS2 at bargain basement prices ($129...??)
Personally, I think this is excellent - it bolsters Sony's lead over Microsoft in the overall arena of technology in a box, plus it will extend the PS2's lead over Microsoft in units and games once the PS2's price falls another $70...
Time to retire ye olde PS1...
First things first - I love open source software. I prefer Linux. But let's be realistic:
Microsoft is a software vendor - a software vendor has employees that know, love, and baby their source code to produce a software product. Windows XP is one of their software products. These software developers know their particular piece of the puzzle well - while they may know jack and doodle about another piece of the puzzle within the same product. Nevermind they have no clue on how another piece of software is written from a completely different vendor!
If Microsoft were to release a patch to Windows XP - do you honestly want them to test the patch against the fifty three million software products that are available to run under their operating system? Let's not forget all the legacy versions that are still floating out there.
C'mon - that's ridiculous. It's an unfair argument to state that Microsoft should test against software not written by them. I would expect Microsoft's testing strategy is to make sure that the software does not adversely affect the performance of their own operating system and the software that came with it.
Since we do not have sufficient information about all the software that was affected by the patch, we do not know the whole scope of the problem. All we know is that Symantec's software product conflicts with the latest update.
If five software products out of fifty three million are broken while the remainder has absolutely no problem - would it not be safe to say that the problem does not lie within the patch, but perhaps the coding practices of the five software products that have the conflicts?
Unlike what I would have expected from Microsoft, pulling the patch was the right idea. I imagine their quality department immediately dispatched a request to Symantec to evaluate the possible conflict and to work a resolution as a fast as possible.
a nice utility that does a rollback of patches that were recently applied to the machine. Intermediate+ users of Windows know that most updates have be uninstalled and reverted back to its previous state by going to Add/Remove Programs. These hotfixes are considered a necessary fix if your machine utilizes the particular component that is indeed broken.
Microsoft should create a "Repair Utility" that is available to the user in the event that a large anomaly (like loss of networking should occur). The user could then browse the patches that were installed, give a description of those patches, and then provide a link to the Knowledge Base article associated with the patch.
If a user encountered a problem with loss of networking, the utility would show that the most recent update to Windows installed was the IPSec patch (the description would say - "this package updates the networking componet of Windows"). Even the beginner or novice could then put two and two together - I can't connect to the Internet so now the "networking component of Windows" is horked.
A nice button that says "Revert" or "Uninstall" would allow the user to remove the patch, reboot, and get on with the program.
With the number of updates that software vendors pass down to the end users which wreak more havoc than good, I'm not too sure if I want a single entity responsible for determining when the laptop should and should not operate normally. If there is a software glitch on the server side, not only would I potentially be affected, but thousands upon thousands of laptops equipped with this "feature" would find themselves being wiped in a heartbeat - all because someone forgot a simple check in their code.
Think about it.
Otherwise, the method by which this system works is if the "thief" connects via the Internet. The coordinates are transmitted to the server during this handshake - then what?
Phoenix: Is this the Some City police department?
SCPD: Yes? Can we help you?
Phoenix: We have a stolen laptop in your vicinity. We find it to be within a six block radius of 24th and 7th. We know the originating IP address.
SCPD: What the hell is an IP address? Give us a real address! Do you realize how many people live in that area? Thanks - but no thanks.
Unless the laptop was hardwired to always be networked (embedded Bluetooth or 802.11), a thief would simply remove the PC Card to steal all of the data off the drive (if it were so important). I don't see how industrial espionage would be deterred if a smart thief looked on the laptop and saw "TheftGuard Equipped" and didn't allow the laptop to connect to the Internet.
I would also imagine that the BIOS would need some interaction with the host OS to communicate over the networking device - if it did so transparently, then it would be a more useful feature since a format could eliminate any potential drivers.
Be mindful that Red Hat attempts to provide an array of software and services to their customer base - this includes the mainstream (read: free) distribution that contains GPL (or near-equivalent license) software.
Otherwise, Red Hat produces other distributions (like Advanced Server and Enterprise Server) that might contain proprietary (read: not so free) code and software that may require additional licenses.
The spirit is in open-source - but customer wishes also pay the bills.
Companies have long adopted the "open-source" fundamental philosophy even before Linux and what I call the modern open source movement caught on. Often, a company would have a nice product - license the code to a sub-company (who would modify/repackage/etc the original product). The license agreement stipulated that all modifications would 1) have to be reviewed by the company without restriction from the sub-company 2) the modifications would have to be approved by the company.
Take for instance the relationship between Microsoft and IBM during the OS/2 era. The two companies working on the same code base produced OS/2 and, eventually, the NT kernel.
Or, more recently - the brilliant strategy of Netscape Communications Corporation - the birth of the Mozilla project. To the open source community - take our browser, modify it like hell, make it a better project. You have, of course, Mozilla as the browser - but Netscape (Navigator) still exists (as a repackaged, "enhanced" Mozilla).
nVidia's source code release would have two major impacts as far as their performance goes.
1) ATI (et al.) would find the actual software-based enhancements they could also incorporate into their own driver to improve their product.
2) nVidia could capture the many brilliant software developers that happen to be a part of the whole nVidia "cult" - this could lead to significant advancements to their driver quality (and overall product quality).
My guess is that the lid is kept so tightly shut on nVidia's drivers because they can keep their chips relatively simple through their complex software driver. ATI, perhaps, has the technical edge in the hardware arena, but does not have the finesse for software enhancing drivers like nVidia does.
Video performance from my Radeon 7500 under Linux (using the ATI optimized drivers for XFree86 4.3) is not nearly as good as the ATI-provided drivers under Windows 2000. I think ATI gives the type of ingredients to the Linux driver developers, but the quantity of those ingredients it keeps to themselves.
nVidia could really follow along this same philosophy, instead of hearing the massive complaints from their oft-buggy video driver.
Or, perhaps SCO (being a company which has very little growth potential) is simply looking at IBM to buy it out (to shut SCO up).
*shrug*
It seems rather futile. You know it's a bad sign when the company's main website has links to their court filings and condemning letters sent to all kind of other companies.
The problem with the Sacagawea (sp?) dollar is that people hoarded them instead of actually using them in regular circulation. It was a problem of the supply could not match up well with the demand for consumers and collectors.
Now, if they would print something on the dollar like....... well, something simple that would not have vast historical value, then perhaps it would not be such a collectors item.
I imagine they don't fold up very well for a good fit in my wallet. I mean, sheesh - I already have enough problem with all my credit card receipts and the one-dollar bills biting into my ass when I sit for long periods of time!
Most banks and stores that detect counterfeit bills do so using a special marker that leaves a particular mark/color on a true bill and nothing/or another special mark on fake. It's the reaction with the cloth-based real bill.
Since most stores use this method (banks will already know better), it will remain true for the new $20 (just as it has for the 1997 $20 and the legacy $20s.)
Even still detection mechanisms simply are in place to keep honest people honest. They are a deterrent. Successful counterfeiters can always find a mom and pop shop to accept their close-to-the-real thing design.
This is an old philosophy that I'm sure is running out of steam.
Myth: Doubling your RAM leads to significant benefits.
Fact: RAM has been cheap for quite a long time. In fact, it is not uncommon to find machines with 512M or more of system memory - not only that, but extremely fast memory as well. It would not be surprising to find that most individuals have at least 256M of RAM. And for 90% of the regular consumer - 256M is more than sufficient (as of current).
In yester-years - most people struggled with large bloated applications with very little memory. We all remember the days of 8M to 32M (wow!) and 64M to 128M (big wow!). Windows 95 did one thing for the industry that was absolutely positive: it forced people to stop struggling along with 16M or 32M of RAM and move up to the big top - 64 to 128M. (Unfortunately, Microsoft never stopped - 256M seems to be a nice sweet spot for Windows 2000 - will we be seeing a 1G sweet spot anytime soon?)
But this is a new era of computing: software still runs well on hardware that is a few years old. Prices for computer components have drastically fallen in the last decade. Components are now extremely modular and flexible - and can accomodate new and improved hardware. You can still find the ubiquitous i440BX chipset (introduced in the early P2 era) hosting P3-500+ processors.
Since people have been able to stock their computers with more memory (more than enough for mundane tasks; good enough for large behemoth games), RAM doubling may not help that much. Sure, an OS's page cache can always benefit from "wasted" memory by loading everything under the sun into memory. I have three computers that I regularly use: one with 768M, one with 384M, and one with... 32M (a paltry laptop).
Granted, the laptop would see a huge performance benefit with another 64M module. But the 384M machine always has free memory, and the 768M workstation (although loaded down pretty well) will manages to avoid swap without a problem.
My 768M stocked workstation is what I call ideal for me: a 10000RPM 80G hard drive, P4-2.4GHz, and with an ATI Radeon 7500. It's for browsing, compiling, and editing - no gaming.
My 384M stocked workstation is what I call the bare minimum: 5 hard drives (for a total of 145G), a dual P2-400MHz, and with an nVidia GeForce 2. It's for moderate gaming, browsing, and compiling.
My 32M stocked laptop is what I call "Jurassic": 1 hard drive (for a total of 1.6G), a P-166MHz/MMX, and a I-don't-know-what-the-hell-it-is video chipset. It's for board games, card games, and light browsing.
I'll focus on my 384M stocked box. I could get rid of the 5 drives and invest in 2 80G or 120G 7200/10000RPM drives. Hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in a system. The higher the density and the faster the spindle speed is a theoretical higher output from the drive. Other factors weigh in considerably - but this is a mere example!
I could also upgrade my processors to the maximum limit of the motherboard. If I flash the BIOS, I'm supposedly able to move to dual P3-800M. According to Pricewatch, I can get two of these bad boys at a small price of $156 (total).
Since gaming is not really a big focus for me, I can deal with this aged video board. But ideally, I would probably go with a relatively cheap dual-Athlon board, get a couple Duron 1.3GHz processors, move my 384M RAM over and be done with it.
Is the biggest gripe with RPM the inability to automatically download packages? Is it because people have a big problem with the dependencies inherent to ? Many advocates of Debian's "package management" like it simply because it is easy to install packages from remote servers.
This is not the philosophy of package management. It is, however, an easy way to retrieve and install packages. "apt-get" is the utility by which packages are retrieved from other servers, cross-checked with a local database for dependency issues and then installed. If such functionality is desired by the end-user, there are utilities that also allow the automatic download and installation of a package and all of its dependencies.
RPM is a feature-robust, well-developed package management tool that allows developers to intricately control the methods by which applications are installed, configured, updated, and removed. When a spec file (the file that "rpmbuild" uses to make binary and source RPMs) is properly formatted and configured, package management (and dependencies) are a snap. It is an invaluable tool for a developer that wishes to target their package for the majority of Linux installations out in the community.
RPM has been chosen by quite a few mainstream distributions as well as being supported by third-party software distributors. Without custom modifications, RPM (and its source packages) can be easily configured and installed on a target distribution with little to no hassle. I have been using RPM for many years now and find it to be quite nice and user friendly. As with any software application, it takes a bit of time and training to feel comfortable using it.
Gentoo's decision to adopt RPM, in my opinion, is a good one - conforming to the LSB brings another distribution into compliance to make the end-user's experience a more consistent one with other mainstream distributions. This approach allows for users to "make the switch" from another popular distribution to Gentoo with relative ease. Gentoo also can continue to enhance portage without having to rely on their own custom package management tool - diverting time and effort into the portage system rather than the build/packaging process. Thus, Gentoo opens up to a established base of already-present packages (including their enhancement patches) to further better their own distribution.
In terms of performance, I tend to look at the "bang per buck" factor. The processor is just one component of the core of a system. When you factor in motherboard and memory costs, I think AMD still gives the better edge (especially since the XP 3000 is not that much more expensive than the Pentium 4 counterpart.)