In my opinion you will not see tarifs on imported software because the corporations which import that software are very large and very powerful and it would be against their interests. Additionally, imposing tarifs on software would be a protectionist move and would harm the US economy in the long term (as well as harm those in other countries whose lives are being improved by their relatively high local wages) since it would discourage inovation.
On top of all that, MS and other big software companies would oppose it since it would encourage open source and free software (which wouldn't have the tarifs imposed since it is free/relatively low cost).
This is going to sound calus, but US computer programmers need to realize that just knowing how to program a computer does not gaurantee a high paying job. People who have an additional skill and can use their programming skills to enhance that skill will be in a much better position. That is why MIS's are able to get jobs as Database Administrators and CS majors generally cannot.
Write your congress people and govenors explaining them why this would be bad. A good point would be that this will provide a disinsentive to technically savy workers.
Maybe they should just fire all their IT people and hire some l33t linux people?
Luddite alert! Just because you do something one way now doesn't mean that is the best way to do it.
They wouldn't have to retrain all their data entry and secretarial workers since they would be replacing the operating system on the servers. Since everything is GUI now anyway, I doubt that there would be much re-training required for anyone but the programmers and system administrators even if they did replace all the MS products with OSS alternatives. Besides the Windows NT desktop has about as much in common with the Gnome and KDE desktops as the XP desktop.
For people who are scared of both getting locked into MS's licensing schemes and jumping headlong into another operating system, consider replacing your applications but not your operating system. OpenOffice and most of the OSS databases run on both GNU/Linux and Windows so you can keep your data out of propriatary formats without the dreaded "retraining" costs.
What about Redhat Enterprise Edition? Sure, it cannot play windows games, but for running servers it is certainly a viable alternative to Windows OSs. It sure costs less than 4000$ a license. Perhaps the companies that were too strapped for cash to upgrade their NT servers are still to poor to buy new lisenses for MS server software.
I'm not sure about how the Xbox handles games (how much does it load on the hard disk?), but wouldn't consoles which run the software off of a non-rewritable medium (PS2/Gamecube) be ideal for online gaming since then the distributor can control what software is on everyone's machine?
Mainframe operators do a lot more than just load tapes. They are in charge of maintaining the system and correcting all of the problems before they bring the system to its knees. This is a task similar to Ob/Gen in medicine. Easy, until something goes wrong, then everything goes to hell. On top of good technical skils, they would have to be very knowledgeable about the systems they are administering.
The mainframe skills shortage is emerging as subtly as gray hair. It's bumping up training costs and raising concerns among data center managers who wonder how they will replace retiring green-screen wizards with workers weaned on Microsoft and open systems.
Kinda funny that the article seems to start off by blaming "user friendly" software for the shortage. Is it true that no one tinkers anymore?
Or perhaps the problem is that recent CS degrees are getting as devorced from the actual running of computers as mechanical engeneers are from the running of automobiles? Perhaps the field should split so there is a relatively large group of people with highly technical skills to do most of the labor, and another, smaller, group of the cream of the crop to do the actual computer science. This is instead of calling everyone who takes programming classes in college computer scientists.
It is a software service. They compress the data before transmitting it to your computer, where it is uncompressed. Provide the computers doing the compression are fast enough (and there is no reason to think they are not) it will speed up the data transfer by whatever compression factor they can get. Generally, webpages sans graphics will download much faster. Graphics will download at about the same speed, and compressed files (.zip,.gz,.bz2, mp3,.mpeg2,.jpg etc.) will download at almost exactly the same speed.
I think that there is a cap on the hardware speed from the way that voice data is handled by the phone company(ies).
You can still digitize a copy protected CD, most sound cards have "mic" inputs and "line-in" inputs so you can still digitize from the analog output of your stereo. I know that the quality is somewhat degraded, but if the analog->digital process only happens once it is hard to notice. The point of the two different types of CDs would be in the licensing of the music. The cheaper one would have a license of "you can listen to this music on this medium," but the more expensive one would have the license of "you can listen to this music." The music industry could try to extort more money for the consumers. Besides, if someone is going to break the law via piracy, you won't be able to stop them (provided they have a brain).
Sounds like they want to encourage Open Source software to encourage the local economy. Makes sense, they won't have to send X-dollars per computer to MS or IBM or SUN or Apple and that money can stay in the local economy. Before someone says, "but what about the cost of training?" The money spent on the computer training for people to use OSS will also stay in the local economy and is actually a direct expendature on educating the local work force.
I agree that this is a good idea. It will let the consumer dollars vote on the existsance and/or type of copy protection for digital media. However, I'm going to bet that there will be 2 versions of each music release, one with encription, costing 10$, and one without encription costing 30$.
The index of refraction and the speed of light discussed in Special Relativity both apply to the speed of the photon/gaussian wave packet.
X-ray telescopes and gamma-ray telescopes don't work via optical systems. They work by detecting the individual X and Gamma rays and then aquiring enough statistics to show the sources.
Could you provide a link to a reputable source selling a material with an index of refraction between 1 and zero for any wavelength?
The index of refraction is the ratio of the speed of light in a substance relative to the speed of light in vacuum. Special relativity is violated if the index of refraction has an absolute value less than one. While it is new for a material to have a negative index of refraction, this doesn't violate any fundamental laws of physics. It just means that light bends the wrong way when it passes from one medium to another.
The latest versions of the Haupage encoder cards have on-board mpeg2 compression. (I think these are the WinTV-PVR boards). Unfortunately, not the one I have.
This argument assumes no latency in any devices and no time spent accessing any of the devices. While it is possible that such a system may eventually exist, I have not yet seen one. The major problems with sync-ing the components of a computer come from one device having to wait for another. Before buffering hard disks cheap to do, a major problem could occur if the hard disk was just faster than the rest of the computer because the computer would have to wait for the disk to make a complete revolution before it could get the next read. While computers have come a _long_ way since then accessing most devices which are not embeded on the chip takes time. This includes RAM, but all main-stream chips now buffer RAM communcations with small cache's on the chip. This means that for small operations you are correct that you would see a boost in performance by increasing the core frequency. However, if an operation exceeds that cache, RAM must be accessed and the CPU has to wait for the RAM's access time, which is not changed by increasing the core frequency. There are situations that occur where increasing the core frequency just makes the CPU wait more, as with the first batch of G3 Macs and the Atari 9600.
Check out mini-itx.com. It seems to be a pretty good resource. I ended up buying parts from two of the companies listed in their USA resources page. I do however, have a couple of pointers for you. First, the 600 MHz Eden comes on the Eden-M motherboard which isn't all that well supported on Redhat 8.0 (no clue about 9, obviously) which is why I went with the Mandrake 9.1 beta. You will most likely have to download the ALSA drivers for the sound card (expect to spend some time building those). Second, if you go with a "fanless" case it will most likely require a "slim" cdrom drive. These take a 50 pin connector instead of a 40 pin connector for the IDE bus, 4 pins for electricity, and 4 pins for audio out. Make sure that the case either comes with the adaptor or you order one, they arn't easily avalible in the states (and don't buy one from www.ussa.com, current low price for a slim samsung 24x12x24x8 cdrw/dvd drive on pricewatch their service sucks, go with mwave.com instead. If you don't believe me look at bizrate.). Finally, the 401b WinTV card from Haupage has a funny way to encode sound, an external jumper to the input of the soundcard. This is actually a problem for the EPIA-M since you have a choice between 5.1 sound or stereo + line in + mic and any problems with the sound card affect your ability to coordinate sound and video. If you have a descent stereo you might want to get a different TV Encoder card.
I am using it in a media center, but with SMB instead of NFS, running Mandrake 9.1beta (looks like I'll have to get the "stable" version now) and a Haupage 401b WinTV card. So far I haven't had any problems with performance from it (in fact I have been suprised at how well it is performing). Most of the suprising performances coming out if it seem to be related to the "off-chip" processes like sound, video, and TV, although boot-up times are amazingly short. However, it does not re-build a kernel very quickly. The biggest pain so far has been compiling the ALSA sound drivers. However, I would not recommend using an EDEN processor in a video game machine. Remember that the early TiVo's used a 33MHz processor.
On the other hand for 1000$ you could build a 6 Eden beowolf cluster since they have built in ethernet and the bios for the EPIA-M's support boot from network. (1 harddrive + 6 EPIA-M (Eden 600MHz) + 1 Case + 1 Hard-drive + 6 128MB DIMMs) and still draw less power than one high end AMD or Intel chip.
The reason is that noone, except maybe Transmeta, has made any significant headway in making chips run cooler.
Umm...VIA's EDEN processors run pretty cool (3,5, and 6 watts for the different clock speeds, for comparison the coeruso runs draws 6 watts). I recently got one, and while it is rated for only 600 Mhz it compairs quite well performance-wise to my other computers using AMD and Intel chips at higher clockspeeds (including a AMD 2200+). I think the reason why the performance doesn't scale so well with the MHz rating of the chip has to do with how well integrated the chip is with the rest of the system.
On a different topic, increasing the clockspeed (or multiplier) on a chip does have additional effects beyond making the CPU run hotter and faster. It also affects the relative timing of the other components of the system. This is why the first G3 based Apples didn't see a performance increase when their clock speeds were increased beyond 500 MHz, and the Atari 9600 couldn't be increased beyond 8 MHz. If the relative timing of the rest of the computer is cruddy anyway, I can see overclocking making a big difference, but if the rest of the computer is very well timed, I don't see the advantage of overclocking.
Deveolpers should now concentrate on bringing GIMP up to parity with PS.
For a second I thought you were talking about PostScript (another Adobe product) which is well supported on open source platforms.
Personally, GIMP is already good enough for home use, and really big shops all seem to run custom software anyway (Industrual Light and Magic runs a GNU/Linux farm for their image processing). The big thing missing from the OSS graphics options is vectored drawing programs, ala Ilustrator.
I'm not sure that it is supported by the article (or even hinted at), but if Adobe really did push its users to a Windows/Intel platform, I think that it would hurt Apple much more than Adobe. Graphics pros arn't so stuck in their ways that the wouldn't switch OS's if the premere tools were suddenly only avalible for one platform. If they all are so stuck in their ways, why don't they use 8x10" negatives anymore?
Wouldn't it be more useful to have something more akin to lojack for kids? This would be a device which would _only_ have applicability if the child was in trouble, rather than an intrusive device which they will inevitably reject somewhere around age 10. It would also be more useful for tracking a kidnapping victim since the kidnapper wouldn't nessasarially know it existed (unlike the cell phone that distracted the kid while the villian snuck up on them). It could also be potentially much smaller since it wouldn't need external controls, maybe in the form of a keychain fob?
Walmart is the least likely to fold under to MS. Walmart is the largest corporation _ever_ employing something like 1.2 million people. It also has more money than MS. Also, remember that Walmart's is selling Lindows PCs on their website (aparently at a clip faster than they can be produced) and other computers without any operating systems.
If Walmart and MS seriously butt heads I'ld expect Walmart to win. If for no other reason that it can threaten to put a complete Linux PC on its shelves for less than the cost of Windows XP.
Good point. I would agree that the loss of "non-certified" hardware is a much bigger deal than the loss of "non-certified" software. Especially since the vast majority of commercial software is already designed for MS Windows.
However, I'ld bet this is the beginning of the end for Office Despot (err depot). For a while now they have been competeing agains such big-box retailers such as CompUSA, BestBuy, and Walmart. CompUSA is probably hurting their computer sales all over, but especially at the "mom and pop" business and geek level. BestBuy and Walmart have been underpricing everyone for a long time now and are probably killing off the "just need x peice of hardware" market. Office Depot has neither the knowledgeable staff of CompUSA, nor the low prices of BestBuy and Walmart.
All in all though, this isn't likely to affect anyone in the/. community very much. Office Depot, Staples, and OfficeMax have traditionally had very high prices and very limited selections for computer hardware anyway.
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On top of all that, MS and other big software companies would oppose it since it would encourage open source and free software (which wouldn't have the tarifs imposed since it is free/relatively low cost).
This is going to sound calus, but US computer programmers need to realize that just knowing how to program a computer does not gaurantee a high paying job. People who have an additional skill and can use their programming skills to enhance that skill will be in a much better position. That is why MIS's are able to get jobs as Database Administrators and CS majors generally cannot.
I was wondering, is it even legal for a state to pass these laws? Doesn't data trafic fall under then realm of interstate commerce?
Write your congress people and govenors explaining them why this would be bad. A good point would be that this will provide a disinsentive to technically savy workers.
Luddite alert! Just because you do something one way now doesn't mean that is the best way to do it.
They wouldn't have to retrain all their data entry and secretarial workers since they would be replacing the operating system on the servers. Since everything is GUI now anyway, I doubt that there would be much re-training required for anyone but the programmers and system administrators even if they did replace all the MS products with OSS alternatives. Besides the Windows NT desktop has about as much in common with the Gnome and KDE desktops as the XP desktop.
For people who are scared of both getting locked into MS's licensing schemes and jumping headlong into another operating system, consider replacing your applications but not your operating system. OpenOffice and most of the OSS databases run on both GNU/Linux and Windows so you can keep your data out of propriatary formats without the dreaded "retraining" costs.
What about Redhat Enterprise Edition? Sure, it cannot play windows games, but for running servers it is certainly a viable alternative to Windows OSs. It sure costs less than 4000$ a license. Perhaps the companies that were too strapped for cash to upgrade their NT servers are still to poor to buy new lisenses for MS server software.
I'm not sure about how the Xbox handles games (how much does it load on the hard disk?), but wouldn't consoles which run the software off of a non-rewritable medium (PS2/Gamecube) be ideal for online gaming since then the distributor can control what software is on everyone's machine?
Mainframe operators do a lot more than just load tapes. They are in charge of maintaining the system and correcting all of the problems before they bring the system to its knees. This is a task similar to Ob/Gen in medicine. Easy, until something goes wrong, then everything goes to hell. On top of good technical skils, they would have to be very knowledgeable about the systems they are administering.
Kinda funny that the article seems to start off by blaming "user friendly" software for the shortage. Is it true that no one tinkers anymore?
Or perhaps the problem is that recent CS degrees are getting as devorced from the actual running of computers as mechanical engeneers are from the running of automobiles? Perhaps the field should split so there is a relatively large group of people with highly technical skills to do most of the labor, and another, smaller, group of the cream of the crop to do the actual computer science. This is instead of calling everyone who takes programming classes in college computer scientists.
I think that there is a cap on the hardware speed from the way that voice data is handled by the phone company(ies).
but it would speed up /.
You can still digitize a copy protected CD, most sound cards have "mic" inputs and "line-in" inputs so you can still digitize from the analog output of your stereo. I know that the quality is somewhat degraded, but if the analog->digital process only happens once it is hard to notice. The point of the two different types of CDs would be in the licensing of the music. The cheaper one would have a license of "you can listen to this music on this medium," but the more expensive one would have the license of "you can listen to this music." The music industry could try to extort more money for the consumers. Besides, if someone is going to break the law via piracy, you won't be able to stop them (provided they have a brain).
Sounds like they want to encourage Open Source software to encourage the local economy. Makes sense, they won't have to send X-dollars per computer to MS or IBM or SUN or Apple and that money can stay in the local economy. Before someone says, "but what about the cost of training?" The money spent on the computer training for people to use OSS will also stay in the local economy and is actually a direct expendature on educating the local work force.
I agree that this is a good idea. It will let the consumer dollars vote on the existsance and/or type of copy protection for digital media. However, I'm going to bet that there will be 2 versions of each music release, one with encription, costing 10$, and one without encription costing 30$.
X-ray telescopes and gamma-ray telescopes don't work via optical systems. They work by detecting the individual X and Gamma rays and then aquiring enough statistics to show the sources.
Could you provide a link to a reputable source selling a material with an index of refraction between 1 and zero for any wavelength?
How about a toaster and a computer?
The index of refraction is the ratio of the speed of light in a substance relative to the speed of light in vacuum. Special relativity is violated if the index of refraction has an absolute value less than one. While it is new for a material to have a negative index of refraction, this doesn't violate any fundamental laws of physics. It just means that light bends the wrong way when it passes from one medium to another.
The latest versions of the Haupage encoder cards have on-board mpeg2 compression. (I think these are the WinTV-PVR boards). Unfortunately, not the one I have.
This argument assumes no latency in any devices and no time spent accessing any of the devices. While it is possible that such a system may eventually exist, I have not yet seen one. The major problems with sync-ing the components of a computer come from one device having to wait for another. Before buffering hard disks cheap to do, a major problem could occur if the hard disk was just faster than the rest of the computer because the computer would have to wait for the disk to make a complete revolution before it could get the next read. While computers have come a _long_ way since then accessing most devices which are not embeded on the chip takes time. This includes RAM, but all main-stream chips now buffer RAM communcations with small cache's on the chip. This means that for small operations you are correct that you would see a boost in performance by increasing the core frequency. However, if an operation exceeds that cache, RAM must be accessed and the CPU has to wait for the RAM's access time, which is not changed by increasing the core frequency. There are situations that occur where increasing the core frequency just makes the CPU wait more, as with the first batch of G3 Macs and the Atari 9600.
Check out mini-itx.com. It seems to be a pretty good resource. I ended up buying parts from two of the companies listed in their USA resources page. I do however, have a couple of pointers for you. First, the 600 MHz Eden comes on the Eden-M motherboard which isn't all that well supported on Redhat 8.0 (no clue about 9, obviously) which is why I went with the Mandrake 9.1 beta. You will most likely have to download the ALSA drivers for the sound card (expect to spend some time building those). Second, if you go with a "fanless" case it will most likely require a "slim" cdrom drive. These take a 50 pin connector instead of a 40 pin connector for the IDE bus, 4 pins for electricity, and 4 pins for audio out. Make sure that the case either comes with the adaptor or you order one, they arn't easily avalible in the states (and don't buy one from www.ussa.com, current low price for a slim samsung 24x12x24x8 cdrw/dvd drive on pricewatch their service sucks, go with mwave.com instead. If you don't believe me look at bizrate.). Finally, the 401b WinTV card from Haupage has a funny way to encode sound, an external jumper to the input of the soundcard. This is actually a problem for the EPIA-M since you have a choice between 5.1 sound or stereo + line in + mic and any problems with the sound card affect your ability to coordinate sound and video. If you have a descent stereo you might want to get a different TV Encoder card.
On the other hand for 1000$ you could build a 6 Eden beowolf cluster since they have built in ethernet and the bios for the EPIA-M's support boot from network. (1 harddrive + 6 EPIA-M (Eden 600MHz) + 1 Case + 1 Hard-drive + 6 128MB DIMMs) and still draw less power than one high end AMD or Intel chip.
Umm...VIA's EDEN processors run pretty cool (3,5, and 6 watts for the different clock speeds, for comparison the coeruso runs draws 6 watts). I recently got one, and while it is rated for only 600 Mhz it compairs quite well performance-wise to my other computers using AMD and Intel chips at higher clockspeeds (including a AMD 2200+). I think the reason why the performance doesn't scale so well with the MHz rating of the chip has to do with how well integrated the chip is with the rest of the system.
On a different topic, increasing the clockspeed (or multiplier) on a chip does have additional effects beyond making the CPU run hotter and faster. It also affects the relative timing of the other components of the system. This is why the first G3 based Apples didn't see a performance increase when their clock speeds were increased beyond 500 MHz, and the Atari 9600 couldn't be increased beyond 8 MHz. If the relative timing of the rest of the computer is cruddy anyway, I can see overclocking making a big difference, but if the rest of the computer is very well timed, I don't see the advantage of overclocking.
For a second I thought you were talking about PostScript (another Adobe product) which is well supported on open source platforms.
Personally, GIMP is already good enough for home use, and really big shops all seem to run custom software anyway (Industrual Light and Magic runs a GNU/Linux farm for their image processing). The big thing missing from the OSS graphics options is vectored drawing programs, ala Ilustrator.
I'm not sure that it is supported by the article (or even hinted at), but if Adobe really did push its users to a Windows/Intel platform, I think that it would hurt Apple much more than Adobe. Graphics pros arn't so stuck in their ways that the wouldn't switch OS's if the premere tools were suddenly only avalible for one platform. If they all are so stuck in their ways, why don't they use 8x10" negatives anymore?
Wouldn't it be more useful to have something more akin to lojack for kids? This would be a device which would _only_ have applicability if the child was in trouble, rather than an intrusive device which they will inevitably reject somewhere around age 10. It would also be more useful for tracking a kidnapping victim since the kidnapper wouldn't nessasarially know it existed (unlike the cell phone that distracted the kid while the villian snuck up on them). It could also be potentially much smaller since it wouldn't need external controls, maybe in the form of a keychain fob?
If Walmart and MS seriously butt heads I'ld expect Walmart to win. If for no other reason that it can threaten to put a complete Linux PC on its shelves for less than the cost of Windows XP.
However, I'ld bet this is the beginning of the end for Office Despot (err depot). For a while now they have been competeing agains such big-box retailers such as CompUSA, BestBuy, and Walmart. CompUSA is probably hurting their computer sales all over, but especially at the "mom and pop" business and geek level. BestBuy and Walmart have been underpricing everyone for a long time now and are probably killing off the "just need x peice of hardware" market. Office Depot has neither the knowledgeable staff of CompUSA, nor the low prices of BestBuy and Walmart.
All in all though, this isn't likely to affect anyone in the /. community very much. Office Depot, Staples, and OfficeMax have traditionally had very high prices and very limited selections for computer hardware anyway.