1GHz Pentium IIIs are under $80 at pricewatch.com. Looking at the other CPUs, the price inflation for the faster bus is really quite small and the PIIIs actually fit pretty neatly in the price lists.
Same thing happened to 9- and 18-gig SCSI drives...
I bought a used 10000RPM 9GB SCSI drive for $20; it had come out of a Sun RAID array, I think. PC133 RAM will work in PC100 slots, and 128MB is easily under $40, especially with a store rebate. Perhaps you should shop around more.
This is a worse idea than the Tarriff-22/CARP thing they tried in 2002/2003, where they wanted to tax EVERYONE who broadcasts music in any form, per listener, whether or not the person had direct permission of the artist and whether or not the artist had anythign to do with the music associations - and then distribute that tax to the top few dozen artists.
Sure, we may dislike taxation in general, but this tax is not being done to expand government but rather to remove a parasitic business practice
What stikes me about the proposed tax is that it is so inequitable. Taxes should be simply for funding government; using them to regulate markets is sinful, IMO.
Didn't someone predict that ray tracing will overtake current hardware-hack-rendering in real-time graphics (games, simulations)? With a fast CPU and these co-processors, perhaps this isn't too far away.
If AGP cards become rare, while people hold on to their AGP-supporting motherboards (especially those running Athlon64's), their value is going to rise.
Seriously, when in the history of PCs has this ever happened? Supply-and-demand breaks down when the word "obselete" creeps into peoples' minds. We're not talking baseball cards, here.
Sun released some new UltraSPARC IV Sun Fire servers last week. The top-end one has 144 "cores" (72 physcial CPUs). I'm not sure if they offer single-image clustering, but Sun does offer 8-way traditional clustering with 1GB/sec (8000Gb/sec) interconnect (1152 CPUs and 4TB RAM for appropriate $$$, of course). I've never used one, but can at least drool at their web page.
I'm also suprised that no one seems to be talking about the new 2-way 64-bit Opteron servers Sun is selling, now. If anything should make big talk on Slashdot, this would be it.
It generally depends on what you're doing, what bugs you touch on, etc.
Linux is the all-purpose "Windows" of the UNIX world. No offense, but this is really becoming more true every day.
The BSDs vary, but are generally world-renowned for network infrastructure. I never did figure out Linux firewalling, for example, but OpenBSD was a piece of cake by comparison. The BSDs tend to be more intuitive, better documented, and more coherent than most Linux distributions (not all, of course).
Solaris is a world-class workstation and server OS. It is commercial, so you don't get all the source code. It is, however, very well documented, and Sun generally doesn't keep too many aces up their sleeves (the kernel is documented in a book called "Solaris Internals" and it is UNIX plus X11R6, for the most part). Solaris + Sun hardware is a pretty sweet combination (analogous to Mac OS X on Macs, I suppose), where nearly everything does "just work", if you don't mind reading a bit, first.
Hypochondriacs, take note:
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 1
You are actually healthier for not going to the doctor! All he'll do is give you a prescription you don't need just to get you to shut up and quit bothering him. Hypochondria is due to your low self-esteem rather than any physical ailment, and if you are tired all the time and every blood test known to man comes back normal, please consider getting off your fat ass and start enjoying life outside the waiting room!
Lotusscript was terrible. I spent hours and hours on the phone with their tech support trying to figure out why various parts of the language did not do what they were supposed to do.
I guess I never had the pleasure of programming with Lotusscript. Mainly, I just remember how intuitive and efficient Ami Pro was relative to MS Word back then. Good footnotes, for example, were a breeze in Ami Pro, Ami Pro's icons were clear and in a managable number, it didn't have 1000+ menu items with little or no useful on-line help, etc. From an end-user's experience Ami Pro was a darn good word processor.
Ami Pro is the best! What year is it, anyway?!? Oh.
Ten years is a generation in software terms. While Lotus mopped the floor with MS Office at the time, Microsoft was slimier and smarter and won--for now. What I like, though, is just how bad Microsoft's karma has become.
If IBM came out with a "desktop" or even "workstation" PowerPC machine that ran, say, Yellow Dog Linux (or PPC Suse or the like), how would Apple respond?
Their RS/6000 (new name now, I think) workstations with the POWER3 and POWER4 CPUs seem like a good start. They make Macs look pretty damn affordable, though. Also, IBM's history of keeping everything a secret might make it hard to port XFree86 (if it hasn't been ported already).
i would not use java to talk to a hardware component which is my favorite coding activity
This is why Java itself is implemented in C. Java is an applications language rather than a operating systems language.
For systems programming, K&R plus the UNIX man pages is an awesome environment for that task. I still cringe to think that applications, such as GNOME, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org are written in C and C++, though. But, then, they have to compete with the all-in-house proprietary kludge that is Microsoft Windows, IE, and Office and all the meaningless performance benchmarks that people like to cite.
Capitalist does not change the nature of people, so it is not really much better. In any democracy - as soon as mediocrity realizes they don't have to work hard to achieve that standard of living and that there are simpler ways (e.g outlaw outsourcing to prevent competition from other laborers) they go for it.
The good thing about capitalism and a limited democracy (ideally what the USA is supposed to be) is that it can lead to a de-facto socialism but only after several centuries of capitalism creates enough wealth. Unfortunately, the USA is not ready, yet people are beginning to see what's possible on the horizon and want it all now. Therefore, the Democratic Party's platform.
We really need a solid 100 or 200 more years before technology, medicine, and everything else allow the essense of socialism to exist in the misdt of an active captialist state. I believe this really won't happen until food and energy are no longer a challenge (e.g., what we still read in science fiction novels).
Most inexpensive graphics sub-systems will do what people need.
I agree with everything you said, but I still think better graphics cards can be worth the expense. Even though they are old, now, Sun Creator and Elite3D cards have really nice and crisp output, especially with anti-aliasing enabled, where a lot of cheaper cards simply don't look as good. I suppose some research could find a gem of a cheap card, but that could mean moving outside of vendor-standard configurations, which is a risk for any commercial installation that wants vendor-provided support.
Java cannot compare with C and C++, because it is simply so much easier to write applications in Java, it is simpler than C++, more concise than C, it is better documented, and it is all in one place. Writing software under C++ is no more portable if you use a library that works only on three systems. Any non-trivial C++ program will have dependencies that limit it pretty much to a single platform without tons of portability work. A lot of thought and work went into making NetBSD run on all those platforms--be thankful you don't have to write all that platform-specific assembly code yourself!
Think of using Java like hiring all of Sun's Java programmers to do a lot of the really hard work for you without charging you a dime. How 'bout that? It's really hard to pass up this deal.
It's too bad that Karl Marx was an idiot. Socialism and Communism are the gateway to a world of mediocrity. Most people are just damn lazy and motivated to do only what it takes to achieve some standard of living. If you just give that standard of living to them, they do nothing. The fallacy of socialism is that humans are animals, and, like animals, lead the minimum-energy path in life (dolphins are streamlined due to water resistence, cats sleep 20 hours a day to conserve food, humans organize into hierarchies due to how societies scale and how hard it is to work together).
3/4 of the jobs in my local market are all.net now.
That's because they still don't know what.NET even is. They probably put.NET on the description, even if all they want is someone to maintain 7-year-old Visual Basic code.
Clarification: you are not allowed to use Sun's documentation / specifications either.
1000% incorrect. Every API and specification published by Sun regarding Java is open to anyone for re-implementation. Take JBoss, for example. The money comes into the picture when you want to make a Java-licensed product (name, logo, the whole banana) and sell it (e.g., BEA WebLogic).
Please, what are some of these sites? I use Safari and Camino regularly on my Mac, and I can't remember the last time a site shot me down for not being IE.
I agree entirely. The only websites I ever really had problems with were crappy corporate intranet sites which were designed by bureaucratic morons. I've generally had a very good experiences with public sites, except, of course, ones that use WMA.
Sometimes, for fun, I'll click reload several times in Mozilla, just to get a few more entries into a website's logs.
Win32 is getting a pretty nice grip on this market. Almost all of the MCAD (mechanical CAD) companies offer win32 versions of their software.
I do feel sorry for all the engineers out there with cheap PCs and fuzzy monitors.
If you price out a real engineering workstation (fast CPU, lots of ram, 10000+RPM disks, 3DLabs-type graphics), then the price differences among x86, Apple, and Sun really are not that large.
It makes me cringe to think how many engineers and scientists are willing to lock their work and data into proprietary formats and platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
1GHz Pentium IIIs are under $80 at pricewatch.com. Looking at the other CPUs, the price inflation for the faster bus is really quite small and the PIIIs actually fit pretty neatly in the price lists.
Same thing happened to 9- and 18-gig SCSI drives...
I bought a used 10000RPM 9GB SCSI drive for $20; it had come out of a Sun RAID array, I think. PC133 RAM will work in PC100 slots, and 128MB is easily under $40, especially with a store rebate. Perhaps you should shop around more.
This is a worse idea than the Tarriff-22/CARP thing they tried in 2002/2003, where they wanted to tax EVERYONE who broadcasts music in any form, per listener, whether or not the person had direct permission of the artist and whether or not the artist had anythign to do with the music associations - and then distribute that tax to the top few dozen artists.
Taxes are the market-killer.
Sure, we may dislike taxation in general, but this tax is not being done to expand government but rather to remove a parasitic business practice
What stikes me about the proposed tax is that it is so inequitable. Taxes should be simply for funding government; using them to regulate markets is sinful, IMO.
"Direct Marketing Association and libertarians oppose"
DMA: we're scared.
Libertarians: the DMA will be dead, soon, anyway, so why get the government involved.
Mmmm....six PCI-E slots = six-node desktop vector supercomputer.
Didn't someone predict that ray tracing will overtake current hardware-hack-rendering in real-time graphics (games, simulations)? With a fast CPU and these co-processors, perhaps this isn't too far away.
If AGP cards become rare, while people hold on to their AGP-supporting motherboards (especially those running Athlon64's), their value is going to rise.
Seriously, when in the history of PCs has this ever happened? Supply-and-demand breaks down when the word "obselete" creeps into peoples' minds. We're not talking baseball cards, here.
Sun released some new UltraSPARC IV Sun Fire servers last week. The top-end one has 144 "cores" (72 physcial CPUs). I'm not sure if they offer single-image clustering, but Sun does offer 8-way traditional clustering with 1GB/sec (8000Gb/sec) interconnect (1152 CPUs and 4TB RAM for appropriate $$$, of course). I've never used one, but can at least drool at their web page.
I'm also suprised that no one seems to be talking about the new 2-way 64-bit Opteron servers Sun is selling, now. If anything should make big talk on Slashdot, this would be it.
Have you tried compiling the latest release of GNUCash? If you are a hard-core compiling masochist, as you claim to be, I highly recommend it.
But free software should set an example by encouraging portable code.
My theory is that RMS is really Bill Gates in disguise.
Is any one of them more robust than another?
It generally depends on what you're doing, what bugs you touch on, etc.
Linux is the all-purpose "Windows" of the UNIX world. No offense, but this is really becoming more true every day.
The BSDs vary, but are generally world-renowned for network infrastructure. I never did figure out Linux firewalling, for example, but OpenBSD was a piece of cake by comparison. The BSDs tend to be more intuitive, better documented, and more coherent than most Linux distributions (not all, of course).
Solaris is a world-class workstation and server OS. It is commercial, so you don't get all the source code. It is, however, very well documented, and Sun generally doesn't keep too many aces up their sleeves (the kernel is documented in a book called "Solaris Internals" and it is UNIX plus X11R6, for the most part). Solaris + Sun hardware is a pretty sweet combination (analogous to Mac OS X on Macs, I suppose), where nearly everything does "just work", if you don't mind reading a bit, first.
You are actually healthier for not going to the doctor! All he'll do is give you a prescription you don't need just to get you to shut up and quit bothering him. Hypochondria is due to your low self-esteem rather than any physical ailment, and if you are tired all the time and every blood test known to man comes back normal, please consider getting off your fat ass and start enjoying life outside the waiting room!
Lotusscript was terrible. I spent hours and hours on the phone with their tech support trying to figure out why various parts of the language did not do what they were supposed to do.
I guess I never had the pleasure of programming with Lotusscript. Mainly, I just remember how intuitive and efficient Ami Pro was relative to MS Word back then. Good footnotes, for example, were a breeze in Ami Pro, Ami Pro's icons were clear and in a managable number, it didn't have 1000+ menu items with little or no useful on-line help, etc. From an end-user's experience Ami Pro was a darn good word processor.
Ami Pro is the best! What year is it, anyway?!? Oh.
Ten years is a generation in software terms. While Lotus mopped the floor with MS Office at the time, Microsoft was slimier and smarter and won--for now. What I like, though, is just how bad Microsoft's karma has become.
If IBM came out with a "desktop" or even "workstation" PowerPC machine that ran, say, Yellow Dog Linux (or PPC Suse or the like), how would Apple respond?
Their RS/6000 (new name now, I think) workstations with the POWER3 and POWER4 CPUs seem like a good start. They make Macs look pretty damn affordable, though. Also, IBM's history of keeping everything a secret might make it hard to port XFree86 (if it hasn't been ported already).
i would not use java to talk to a hardware component which is my favorite coding activity
This is why Java itself is implemented in C. Java is an applications language rather than a operating systems language.
For systems programming, K&R plus the UNIX man pages is an awesome environment for that task. I still cringe to think that applications, such as GNOME, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org are written in C and C++, though. But, then, they have to compete with the all-in-house proprietary kludge that is Microsoft Windows, IE, and Office and all the meaningless performance benchmarks that people like to cite.
Capitalist does not change the nature of people, so it is not really much better. In any democracy - as soon as mediocrity realizes they don't have to work hard to achieve that standard of living and that there are simpler ways (e.g outlaw outsourcing to prevent competition from other laborers) they go for it.
The good thing about capitalism and a limited democracy (ideally what the USA is supposed to be) is that it can lead to a de-facto socialism but only after several centuries of capitalism creates enough wealth. Unfortunately, the USA is not ready, yet people are beginning to see what's possible on the horizon and want it all now. Therefore, the Democratic Party's platform.
We really need a solid 100 or 200 more years before technology, medicine, and everything else allow the essense of socialism to exist in the misdt of an active captialist state. I believe this really won't happen until food and energy are no longer a challenge (e.g., what we still read in science fiction novels).
Most inexpensive graphics sub-systems will do what people need.
I agree with everything you said, but I still think better graphics cards can be worth the expense. Even though they are old, now, Sun Creator and Elite3D cards have really nice and crisp output, especially with anti-aliasing enabled, where a lot of cheaper cards simply don't look as good. I suppose some research could find a gem of a cheap card, but that could mean moving outside of vendor-standard configurations, which is a risk for any commercial installation that wants vendor-provided support.
This is a pretty good troll.
Java cannot compare with C and C++, because it is simply so much easier to write applications in Java, it is simpler than C++, more concise than C, it is better documented, and it is all in one place. Writing software under C++ is no more portable if you use a library that works only on three systems. Any non-trivial C++ program will have dependencies that limit it pretty much to a single platform without tons of portability work. A lot of thought and work went into making NetBSD run on all those platforms--be thankful you don't have to write all that platform-specific assembly code yourself!
Think of using Java like hiring all of Sun's Java programmers to do a lot of the really hard work for you without charging you a dime. How 'bout that? It's really hard to pass up this deal.
It's too bad that Karl Marx was an idiot. Socialism and Communism are the gateway to a world of mediocrity. Most people are just damn lazy and motivated to do only what it takes to achieve some standard of living. If you just give that standard of living to them, they do nothing. The fallacy of socialism is that humans are animals, and, like animals, lead the minimum-energy path in life (dolphins are streamlined due to water resistence, cats sleep 20 hours a day to conserve food, humans organize into hierarchies due to how societies scale and how hard it is to work together).
3/4 of the jobs in my local market are all .net now.
.NET even is. They probably put .NET on the description, even if all they want is someone to maintain 7-year-old Visual Basic code.
That's because they still don't know what
Clarification: you are not allowed to use Sun's documentation / specifications either.
1000% incorrect. Every API and specification published by Sun regarding Java is open to anyone for re-implementation. Take JBoss, for example. The money comes into the picture when you want to make a Java-licensed product (name, logo, the whole banana) and sell it (e.g., BEA WebLogic).
Please, what are some of these sites? I use Safari and Camino regularly on my Mac, and I can't remember the last time a site shot me down for not being IE.
.
I agree entirely. The only websites I ever really had problems with were crappy corporate intranet sites which were designed by bureaucratic morons. I've generally had a very good experiences with public sites, except, of course, ones that use WMA
Sometimes, for fun, I'll click reload several times in Mozilla, just to get a few more entries into a website's logs.
Win32 is getting a pretty nice grip on this market. Almost all of the MCAD (mechanical CAD) companies offer win32 versions of their software.
I do feel sorry for all the engineers out there with cheap PCs and fuzzy monitors.
If you price out a real engineering workstation (fast CPU, lots of ram, 10000+RPM disks, 3DLabs-type graphics), then the price differences among x86, Apple, and Sun really are not that large.
It makes me cringe to think how many engineers and scientists are willing to lock their work and data into proprietary formats and platforms.
If I'm not using the cursor, I'd like it to disappear.
Yeah, and I'm real pissed my car didn't come with rocket launchers!
BTW, if focus-follows-mouse is enabled in a GUI, having the pointer disappear is pretty annoying.