Also, didn't the early productivity studies regarding lighting show that productivity went because of the study itself? Wikipedia is down, so I can't link it, but if I recall, they changed the lighting, and productivity went up 15%. They changed the lighting back, and productivity still went up 15%. They determined that people worked harder because of the study.
I don't think rail will be able to compete with air travel and Interstate roads for city-to-city routes in the US. To survive, they would need heavy gov't subsidies, as Amtrak does today. I do believe that light rail commuter systems can run close to the break-even point even in smaller (1-2 million) metro areas. The common wisdom is that urban sprawl prohibits mass transit in the US, but in all the sprawled cities I'm familiar with, the "sprawl" is pretty congested along several spoke roads radiating from the center of the city. So one could run the rail system along the main spoke, and have regular shuttle service at main interchanges to get people to/from offices and neighborhoods.
Rail travel is nice, as you say, and it is a shame that Amtrak does not market itself well. We use it periodically, but the station is dark, dingy, and in a questionable part of town. Many of our friends didn't even know you could take the train for travel: "where do you get on?". If Amtrak were to move its routes slightly or offer shuttle pickup in the newer areas of town, they would probably have a lot more traffic.
I imagine you will appreciate the fact that yes, I *did* use Google to search CFL benchmarks, ratings, tests, compact fluorescent, and any number of terms. I subscribe to the dead tree edition of PM, and the bulbs I mentioned were in that article (N:Vision) that I read months ago. They were a total waste of money.
Using Google for this is sort of like finding good computer hardware using Google: lots of talk and marketing, but it is often hard to find someone who says "yes, I used product X and it works like this". There are too many punkz that will give hand-waving responses with no real help. So for now, I'll stick with Edison-style bulbs, unfortunately.
I've had horrible luck with CFLs for primary lighting. I have used them for years in lamps that stay on for long periods of time, but for areas like the kitchen or for primary lighting, every brand has been a dud. The main problems are the 1-5 minute warm up times and the eerie lighting quality. Saving money and power is a good thing, but I gave up on CFLs earlier this year when I wasted $12 on two can light CFLs that were useless the first 5 minutes, and after full warmup were NOT as bright as the incandescent 65W bulbs next to them. I placed them in the basement office which has no windows, and for the first 30 seconds it was about as bright as taping a couple of gameboy units on the ceiling (I'm not joking). Nobody wanted them, so they are sitting in a landfill somewhere now, and I lost out on about 120 KwH of elecricity (we were running about $0.10/KwH here). I wonder if they could change the CFL to consume 50-60W to "heat up" in a second or two, and then ramp down.
In the past I've had brands that failed after a year or two, or buzzed. I wish there was a site that had hands-on reviews in real-world conditions, and even more importantly, where to buy the units. For now I'll stay with incandescents for primary lights, with CFLs in lamps and "mixed in" with incandescents, and just not leave lights on when they are not needed.
I purchased a Sentry safe a year or so ago for home use, and it had paperwork listing the conditions it is designed to withstand. I believe it can withstand 1700 degrees F for 2 hours, and the contents will stay within so many degrees (250?). The unit is rated to take a 30 ft drop onto rubble, then it is heat tested at 1200 degrees for a period of time (not 2 hrs, but 30 minutes, I believe). I may have the exact numbers wrong, but for a $350 safe, I was impressed, particularly for home use.
For business use, you can probably get much better performance (for more money), and the vendor should have a listing of the tests they run (fire, collapse, water damage, etc).
These companies don't support Linux because they don't earn any money with Linux. People who have Windows, and OSX pay money for their software and applications. People who use Linux are cheap skates, which goes back to the original point that they use Linux because it saves them money.
Aren't we talking about hardware here? Canon, Tom-Tom, etc, do not make money from software, they make money from hardware, which Linux users buy a lot of.
Maglev technology is really an answer in search of a question. I recall that several years ago Texas in the US was looking to build a maglev between Houston and Dallas, I believe, which would be a long-haul track (I don't know the exact distance, but hundreds of miles). The cost was estimated in the multi billions. It all fell apart when somebody did a quick study that showed how a small fleet of Boeing 737's could provide about the same carrying capacity for a minuscule fraction of the track costs, the energy requirements were less, and the only "track" to maintain would be the two runways. That, and the service could begin as soon as Boeing could deliver the units.
Not mentioned was the flexibility of being able to change routes over time as cities wax and wane in respect to each other. If San Antonio grew in importance with Dallas, one or more units could be diverted to that city without having to build a new track. But that is more of a limitation with rail service in general, not maglevs in particular.
If the hardware happens to support text mode. The Amiga could do a perfectly usable GUI with a 7MHz M68k...
I'll disagree with you on this point, and it was one that annoyed me about my Amiga 2000 back in the day. Text scrolling was at the CLI was S-L-O-W compared to my Tandy 1000 (8088), even with FastFonts loaded. Other than that though, how I miss my old Ami...
It seems kind of funny to me to hear someone from Microsoft admit that they were a laughingstock, and that they're looking for kudos for not being a laughingstock.
This is classic Microsoft MO: as soon as a Windows version has been released for a few months, start badmouthing the previous versions. They did the same with XP to 2K/ME, ME to 98, NT4 to NT 3.5, etc.
Just Vista marketing. Nothing to see here, move along.
Nice, I dimly recall mention of NeWS, but never touched it; it lived a few years before I could touch such hardware. Wikipedia brought me a bit up to speed, though. I'm surprised an OSS implementation of this never got started (or did it?)
I've never really tried to code with PS, but I know it is the only printing system I'll use. Awesome output, no drivers required, works with any OS. Worth the extra few dollars.
Aren't I'm just a fountain of useless trivia today? That's the best kind. Useful stuff is often overrated.
that "everything is a file" is completely counterintuitive to most people I like having files to work with, because I can use lots of generic tools (like the bash code below) to get/set information without having to have a programming API or specialized tool to work with. For people who like to have API calls or specialized tools, the file metaphor does not preclude having these, either.
For something so acclaimed it's amazing how sucky the performance is over a slow link without something like FreeNX. X is designed to work on a low-latency LAN, and it is really good at this. Unfortunately it is too chatty for slower links, which is why RDP/NX/VNC is required to buffer the display. Natively buffered remote protocols like RDP are good over slow links, but they tend to hit a performance ceiling on LANs, because they were engineered for buffered, high-latency networks. On a LAN, remote X is generally indistinguishable from local X, unlike buffered protocols where you can tell you're not local because menus/scrolling/animation/etc are not snappy. X + NX is the best of both worlds, really. I consider NX sort of a modular buffering tool that I can snap in for remote work, but not use when I want LAN performance.
That said, I agree that Linux/Unix is not perfect. It's the best thing I've found so far, but I'm hoping in the next several years a new 'big thing' will come along to recharge my interest in all things computer like Linux did about 8-10 years ago. Luckily the fun factor is not completely gone like it was for me years ago in the Windows/non-OSS world.
That many things will inexplainably stop functioning if they're in a path with a space in them? Completely offtopic, but I'm guessing these are shell scripts that are failing. Mine used to do this, too, because I used bash 'for' loops like this: for f in `find . -name "*.foo"`; do echo "$f"; done A space in the filename causes this to go wrong. Remove 'for' from your memory. Use 'while read' instead, which can be used anywhere for can be used, but it works with spaces: find . -name "*.foo" | while read f; do echo "$f"; done Works every time, unless of course the filename has a linefeed, in which case you're in trouble anyway.
Better yet, I'll setup one $50k 4x Quad-Core Xeon system with 8GB RAM, 4 NIC's, etc and load up $20k of VMWare ESX and I can easily run 8 Web server instances and get ALMOST the same performance and availability as 8 separate $5k servers. Maybe this makes sense somewhere out 3-4 years based on mangement, power and space costs-savings, but I can't see it.
In this example, while the single big box might have a lower total peak performance if all 8 VMs were maxed at the same time, this may rarely happen all at once. If you split them up into little boxes, each particular server is limited to be as fast as its individual box. On the big machine, if 7 VMs are relatively idle and one VM has a huge spike, it has 16 cores at its disposal for that time, whereas it would have been limited to the single proc before. Same principle as the mainframe concept, and its usefulness depends on processes idling most of the time, with large sporadic spikes.
2: Any Race unable to enter the atmosphere of a planet safely in a crewed ship would also be unlikely to be inclined to do so, or they would have gathered experience. After all, we've barely got started and already we know the problems involved in landing on different planets.
We might be their first try. Or if they aren't some kind of hive mind, they have a Capt. Zaph Branigan at the helm...
...Anyone know if there's a "Loop Homology and Hochschild Cohomology for Dummies" out yet?
Holy cow, these kids are off the charts! And I was impressed with the GW-BASIC database I wrote in high school. It looks like something Homer Simpson built compared to that...
Let's forget the funny numbers and break it down to basics: If I buy ANY COMPUTER FROM ANOTHER COMPANY and none of your products are present or involved in those computers, you HAVE NO RIGHT TO EVEN KNOW I HAVE THOSE COMPUTERS, and therefore my purchases from another vendor should in no way influence my purchasing terms from you. I don't care if you have an 'alternative' licensing scheme to handle this case. Why in the world should you even know about the products that I received from another entity?
You are right, though, most schools will just pay the upgrade and remove the 100 Linux machines, because there is no cost benefit if Microsoft gets paid for those systems anyway. Or OS-X. Or Novell. That is why this licensing scheme should be (and likely is) illegal, because it removes any benefit of implementing alternative products once the agreement has been entered. And not entering it in the first place means paying a relative fortune for the Windows machines they do have.
I'm tired of arguing about this. This is clearly unethical and justice will one day be served, and I suspect that you will one day not look fondly on your involvement during these times.
I think the poster was referring to the FINAL resolution of a widescreen anamorphic DVD as it is displayed on a non-CRT screen. The 720 pixels on the DVD are not square pixels, but slightly wider than they are tall. Most (all?) LCD/DLP projectors or monitors have square pixels, so they do a quick scale to map those rectangular 720 pixels to the equivalent width of square pixels, which is 854.
You are correct in your statement, but that is where the 854x480 comes from.
How careful did we need to be in a market where there was no serious competitor? UNIX in its official form was up to a hundred times the cost. FreeBSD engineers were in short supply and quite rightly demanded massive salaries. Linux was still effectively a toy. DOS was dead. OS/2 was dying. BeOS was barely trying.
I don't buy those arguments, because by the same metric, at the time DOS was a toy, and Windows 3.x doubly so. But let's take a more concrete example that doesn't involve the OS. What about WordPerfect? Lotus? Do you not think that having the application stack as well as the API (Win16/32) is not a conflict of interest? Imagine if GE controlled a large portion of the power companies. All they would need to do is switch to 50Hz, 147V power every several years, and soon enough people would get tired of buying adapters for their Sylvania or Frigidaire products and just choose the path of least resistance. It's all just 'market forces' until only one plausible provider exists. It's amazing to me that simple principles are missed: competition is good for all parties concerned in the long run. Even for Microsoft, having a monopoly will be bad for those employees who will have to fight it out during the decline.
I *want* people to be able to freely use whatever product they choose, including Windows. However, the way Microsoft designs its products, implements its licenses, and handles its lobbyists means that when someone chooses Microsoft, my ability to choose an alternative is diminished. This does not happen when someone chooses Linux, Mac, S/390, etc, other than the natural network effects.
1. Your school owes NOTHING for those 100 PCs unless and until they renew the School Agreement, which may have a term of one or three years.
So you are admitting that Microsoft receives payment for services or products rendered by another entity. I don't care if it's after one or three years. Microsoft DID NOTHING to provide services or software for those 100 PCs. Why on earth should they receive tribute for them? That is not extortion how? Do you not realize the implications of this?
But I'm honestly curious. What was the Right Thing in *your* opinion? How should Microsoft have responded to the court decisions? What should we have done?
All the points you made were technical improvements. Yes, Microsoft software tends to be marginal, but it's the fact that it is *forced* on many of us is the real problem. Even if the software is perfect, many companies have now given their whole computing future to a single company. The OS? Microsoft. The office suite? Microsoft. The development tools? Microsoft. The database server? Microsoft. Various methods were used to get to this position, and improved engineering had little to do with it in the mid-1990s when this monopoly was carefully being built.
What should you have done? Lots of things, but for starters, someone should have been jailed for the so-called School Agreement that says (quoted from your website):
Count the number of eligible PCs you have. (See below for a definition of an eligible PC.) Then choose the application, system, and Client Access License (CAL) products you want to be licensed to use. [...] Eligible computers include: 100 percent of academic institution owned or leased Pentium II, iMac G3, or equivalent or better computers.
To paraphrase, if I donated 100 Linux / OpenOffice PCs to my local school, Microsoft would still get an annual fee for each of those PCs, even though Microsoft did nothing to earn that money. That, my friend, is taxation. And Microsoft's lobby would prevent any public officials from having this lock-in overturned.
Oh, well, I'm not worried... the farther Microsoft goes, the farther it will fall. It happened to IBM. If the timing is right, Gates' historical reputation will be as tarnished as Rockefeller's still is, regardless of how much money his heirs gave away.
They are to blame for ABUSING their monopoly, but who gave them the income and market penetration to vault them to monopoly status in the first place? The consumers who bought their products.
No, they entered exclusivity agreements with the hardware manufacturers, and used that power to later enforce exclusivity agreements with business, and also with colleges and schools. This was done to build the monopoly that is now being fully exercised. Odds are your local school system is locked into a 'Campus Agreement' that forces the school to pay Microsoft around $35-50 per year for every computer in their system, even if the computer doesn't run Microsoft software. It takes a combination of power and evil to have agreements like that stand year after year without reprisal, and this one has been around for more than five years.
On the other hand, I've begun to take much that same cynical stance as you: let them squeeze money out of individuals, companies, and governments. I am a Linux expert, so as cheap foreign influences begin to erode the US software/hardware industry much as it did the auto industry, I will be able to speak the language of the new overlords, so to speak, and can flourish while the drag'n'drop MCSE's have to find new occupations.
I didn't even know it was possible to run 3D desktops over a network like that, [...]
Yup, OpenGL is network-transparent. It connects to the glx server, which is an extension to your X11 display and passes 3D operations at a higher level than just "draw pixel (1,1), draw pixel (2,1), etc.", so it is surprisingly light on the network if you don't constantly reload lots of textures.
OpenGL was created by SGI in the late 80's or early 90's and it was designed to have small SGI Indy-class boxes connecting to large Onyx-class systems that did the heavy data lifting, so it needed to be network transparent at a time when big iron was needed for the applications.
[...]and it works beautifully for anything other than intensive 3-d rendering.
The SunRay units use a buffered display like Remote Desktop (RDP), VNC, or NX, and while these methods give good low-bandwidth results, they don't improve past a certain point when given LAN-class speeds. However, "stock" uncompressed remote X11 can do 3D graphics beautifully on a LAN, because OpenGL was created in the beginning (by SGI) to run over remote terminals. The GL operation is sent to the terminal, and the graphics card actually performs the operation, rather than the actual pixels getting passed over the wire. You can get 50+fps on an OpenGL application and only use about 100K/s of LAN bandwidth. Advanced 3D games tend to load/unload textures often and do other tricks, so they can use a lot more bandwidth, but for 3D applications, X11 terminals work great if they have a 3D card.
The thin clients cost the same as the PC but do a lot less If you stick with Windows RDP terminals, they can, particularly the Wyse Winterms. Now there are Linux terminals (that can be configured via LTSP to be RDP clients) as low as $90 in volume and $149. (The NTA 6020P is $149, although they have removed the line-item pricing for some reason).
So things are looking good for these units. The City of Largo has an administrator that keeps a blog that is interesting reading on how they are stepping up from basic terminals to using advanced terminals to add 3D eye candy, presumably driven by the cost savings over the past 5-10 years. I particularly like this posting that shows some daytime loads on the different servers.
So all modern operating system kernels use RAM to cache disk blocks even at the expense of having to swap memory used by processes to disk.
No, this does not happen on Linux boxes. If it does swap due to disk access, it must stop after about 10-20MB. On Windows XP, this happens all the time and it infuriates me. Especially if I copy a large file over the network, since it swaps out my *running applications* so it can cache a file that lives on another machine. Then over the next half hour I have to watch screens and menus redraw as I try to run the other apps. Win9x had a MaxFileCache setting that I wish XP had. I would set the cache to 128MB and leave it. Or better yet, I'm hopefully going to a Linux workstation soon at work and can finally cut the cord.
Perhaps a little ambitious, considering these children are probably seeing a computer for the first time. Shows how times have changed and expectations have altered. I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Model III and Model 4. After playing with the crude productivity apps for about three minutes, I immediately began learning to write simple programs in BASIC. I had much fewer resources than are available via Google or Barnes & Noble today; essentially the owner's manuals that had some primitive tutorials. I recall a few years later when I got my Tandy 1000 PC with DOS how cool it was to finally have a real programming book at my disposal (Big Blue BASIC).
Nobody in my family knew anything about computers, and I was in a small town in a rural Southern state, so no bicycle trips to Stanford for me.... It's funny remembering the lengths I went to get information. I joined a local computer club mainly to get access to the freeware collection of about 1500 floppies. I used Tandy's PC-Link to download information in short bursts because it was long-distance $0.14/min at 1200 baud... non-trivial cost in 1987.
My point is, if a child wants to learn something, it is surprising how far they will stretch the little resources they have. These kids will have loads of docs and tutorials, and a decent language (Python?). I used to question the OLPC project because lots of these kids may need more basic needs, but I've come to understand that some portion of these kids will be able to crawl out of poverty with the skills they will teach themselves. It may be a small percentage, but I think it will be greater than zero.
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Also, didn't the early productivity studies regarding lighting show that productivity went because of the study itself? Wikipedia is down, so I can't link it, but if I recall, they changed the lighting, and productivity went up 15%. They changed the lighting back, and productivity still went up 15%. They determined that people worked harder because of the study.
I don't think rail will be able to compete with air travel and Interstate roads for city-to-city routes in the US. To survive, they would need heavy gov't subsidies, as Amtrak does today. I do believe that light rail commuter systems can run close to the break-even point even in smaller (1-2 million) metro areas. The common wisdom is that urban sprawl prohibits mass transit in the US, but in all the sprawled cities I'm familiar with, the "sprawl" is pretty congested along several spoke roads radiating from the center of the city. So one could run the rail system along the main spoke, and have regular shuttle service at main interchanges to get people to/from offices and neighborhoods.
Rail travel is nice, as you say, and it is a shame that Amtrak does not market itself well. We use it periodically, but the station is dark, dingy, and in a questionable part of town. Many of our friends didn't even know you could take the train for travel: "where do you get on?". If Amtrak were to move its routes slightly or offer shuttle pickup in the newer areas of town, they would probably have a lot more traffic.
I imagine you will appreciate the fact that yes, I *did* use Google to search CFL benchmarks, ratings, tests, compact fluorescent, and any number of terms. I subscribe to the dead tree edition of PM, and the bulbs I mentioned were in that article (N:Vision) that I read months ago. They were a total waste of money. Using Google for this is sort of like finding good computer hardware using Google: lots of talk and marketing, but it is often hard to find someone who says "yes, I used product X and it works like this". There are too many punkz that will give hand-waving responses with no real help. So for now, I'll stick with Edison-style bulbs, unfortunately.
I've had horrible luck with CFLs for primary lighting. I have used them for years in lamps that stay on for long periods of time, but for areas like the kitchen or for primary lighting, every brand has been a dud. The main problems are the 1-5 minute warm up times and the eerie lighting quality. Saving money and power is a good thing, but I gave up on CFLs earlier this year when I wasted $12 on two can light CFLs that were useless the first 5 minutes, and after full warmup were NOT as bright as the incandescent 65W bulbs next to them. I placed them in the basement office which has no windows, and for the first 30 seconds it was about as bright as taping a couple of gameboy units on the ceiling (I'm not joking). Nobody wanted them, so they are sitting in a landfill somewhere now, and I lost out on about 120 KwH of elecricity (we were running about $0.10/KwH here). I wonder if they could change the CFL to consume 50-60W to "heat up" in a second or two, and then ramp down.
In the past I've had brands that failed after a year or two, or buzzed. I wish there was a site that had hands-on reviews in real-world conditions, and even more importantly, where to buy the units. For now I'll stay with incandescents for primary lights, with CFLs in lamps and "mixed in" with incandescents, and just not leave lights on when they are not needed.
I wouldn't exactly call this 'bashing'. More of a jab. With six version of Vista, MSFT pretty much walked into that punchline.
I purchased a Sentry safe a year or so ago for home use, and it had paperwork listing the conditions it is designed to withstand. I believe it can withstand 1700 degrees F for 2 hours, and the contents will stay within so many degrees (250?). The unit is rated to take a 30 ft drop onto rubble, then it is heat tested at 1200 degrees for a period of time (not 2 hrs, but 30 minutes, I believe). I may have the exact numbers wrong, but for a $350 safe, I was impressed, particularly for home use.
For business use, you can probably get much better performance (for more money), and the vendor should have a listing of the tests they run (fire, collapse, water damage, etc).
These companies don't support Linux because they don't earn any money with Linux. People who have Windows, and OSX pay money for their software and applications. People who use Linux are cheap skates, which goes back to the original point that they use Linux because it saves them money.
Aren't we talking about hardware here? Canon, Tom-Tom, etc, do not make money from software, they make money from hardware, which Linux users buy a lot of.
Maglev technology is really an answer in search of a question.
I recall that several years ago Texas in the US was looking to build a maglev between Houston and Dallas, I believe, which would be a long-haul track (I don't know the exact distance, but hundreds of miles). The cost was estimated in the multi billions. It all fell apart when somebody did a quick study that showed how a small fleet of Boeing 737's could provide about the same carrying capacity for a minuscule fraction of the track costs, the energy requirements were less, and the only "track" to maintain would be the two runways. That, and the service could begin as soon as Boeing could deliver the units.
Not mentioned was the flexibility of being able to change routes over time as cities wax and wane in respect to each other. If San Antonio grew in importance with Dallas, one or more units could be diverted to that city without having to build a new track. But that is more of a limitation with rail service in general, not maglevs in particular.
If the hardware happens to support text mode. The Amiga could do a perfectly usable GUI with a 7MHz M68k...
I'll disagree with you on this point, and it was one that annoyed me about my Amiga 2000 back in the day. Text scrolling was at the CLI was S-L-O-W compared to my Tandy 1000 (8088), even with FastFonts loaded. Other than that though, how I miss my old Ami...
It seems kind of funny to me to hear someone from Microsoft admit that they were a laughingstock, and that they're looking for kudos for not being a laughingstock.
This is classic Microsoft MO: as soon as a Windows version has been released for a few months, start badmouthing the previous versions. They did the same with XP to 2K/ME, ME to 98, NT4 to NT 3.5, etc.
Just Vista marketing. Nothing to see here, move along.
I've never really tried to code with PS, but I know it is the only printing system I'll use. Awesome output, no drivers required, works with any OS. Worth the extra few dollars. Aren't I'm just a fountain of useless trivia today? That's the best kind. Useful stuff is often overrated.
That said, I agree that Linux/Unix is not perfect. It's the best thing I've found so far, but I'm hoping in the next several years a new 'big thing' will come along to recharge my interest in all things computer like Linux did about 8-10 years ago. Luckily the fun factor is not completely gone like it was for me years ago in the Windows/non-OSS world. That many things will inexplainably stop functioning if they're in a path with a space in them? Completely offtopic, but I'm guessing these are shell scripts that are failing. Mine used to do this, too, because I used bash 'for' loops like this:
for f in `find . -name "*.foo"`; do echo "$f"; done
A space in the filename causes this to go wrong. Remove 'for' from your memory. Use 'while read' instead, which can be used anywhere for can be used, but it works with spaces:
find . -name "*.foo" | while read f; do echo "$f"; done
Works every time, unless of course the filename has a linefeed, in which case you're in trouble anyway.
In this example, while the single big box might have a lower total peak performance if all 8 VMs were maxed at the same time, this may rarely happen all at once. If you split them up into little boxes, each particular server is limited to be as fast as its individual box. On the big machine, if 7 VMs are relatively idle and one VM has a huge spike, it has 16 cores at its disposal for that time, whereas it would have been limited to the single proc before. Same principle as the mainframe concept, and its usefulness depends on processes idling most of the time, with large sporadic spikes.
2: Any Race unable to enter the atmosphere of a planet safely in a crewed ship would also be unlikely to be inclined to do so, or they would have gathered experience. After all, we've barely got started and already we know the problems involved in landing on different planets.
We might be their first try. Or if they aren't some kind of hive mind, they have a Capt. Zaph Branigan at the helm...
...Anyone know if there's a "Loop Homology and Hochschild Cohomology for Dummies" out yet?
Holy cow, these kids are off the charts! And I was impressed with the GW-BASIC database I wrote in high school. It looks like something Homer Simpson built compared to that...
OK, set the Kool-aid down for a minute.
Let's forget the funny numbers and break it down to basics: If I buy ANY COMPUTER FROM ANOTHER COMPANY and none of your products are present or involved in those computers, you HAVE NO RIGHT TO EVEN KNOW I HAVE THOSE COMPUTERS, and therefore my purchases from another vendor should in no way influence my purchasing terms from you. I don't care if you have an 'alternative' licensing scheme to handle this case. Why in the world should you even know about the products that I received from another entity?
You are right, though, most schools will just pay the upgrade and remove the 100 Linux machines, because there is no cost benefit if Microsoft gets paid for those systems anyway. Or OS-X. Or Novell. That is why this licensing scheme should be (and likely is) illegal, because it removes any benefit of implementing alternative products once the agreement has been entered. And not entering it in the first place means paying a relative fortune for the Windows machines they do have.
I'm tired of arguing about this. This is clearly unethical and justice will one day be served, and I suspect that you will one day not look fondly on your involvement during these times.
Good-bye and best of luck.
I think the poster was referring to the FINAL resolution of a widescreen anamorphic DVD as it is displayed on a non-CRT screen. The 720 pixels on the DVD are not square pixels, but slightly wider than they are tall. Most (all?) LCD/DLP projectors or monitors have square pixels, so they do a quick scale to map those rectangular 720 pixels to the equivalent width of square pixels, which is 854.
You are correct in your statement, but that is where the 854x480 comes from.
How careful did we need to be in a market where there was no serious competitor? UNIX in its official form was up to a hundred times the cost. FreeBSD engineers were in short supply and quite rightly demanded massive salaries. Linux was still effectively a toy. DOS was dead. OS/2 was dying. BeOS was barely trying.
I don't buy those arguments, because by the same metric, at the time DOS was a toy, and Windows 3.x doubly so. But let's take a more concrete example that doesn't involve the OS. What about WordPerfect? Lotus? Do you not think that having the application stack as well as the API (Win16/32) is not a conflict of interest? Imagine if GE controlled a large portion of the power companies. All they would need to do is switch to 50Hz, 147V power every several years, and soon enough people would get tired of buying adapters for their Sylvania or Frigidaire products and just choose the path of least resistance. It's all just 'market forces' until only one plausible provider exists. It's amazing to me that simple principles are missed: competition is good for all parties concerned in the long run. Even for Microsoft, having a monopoly will be bad for those employees who will have to fight it out during the decline.
I *want* people to be able to freely use whatever product they choose, including Windows. However, the way Microsoft designs its products, implements its licenses, and handles its lobbyists means that when someone chooses Microsoft, my ability to choose an alternative is diminished. This does not happen when someone chooses Linux, Mac, S/390, etc, other than the natural network effects.
1. Your school owes NOTHING for those 100 PCs unless and until they renew the School Agreement, which may have a term of one or three years.
So you are admitting that Microsoft receives payment for services or products rendered by another entity. I don't care if it's after one or three years. Microsoft DID NOTHING to provide services or software for those 100 PCs. Why on earth should they receive tribute for them? That is not extortion how? Do you not realize the implications of this?
But I'm honestly curious. What was the Right Thing in *your* opinion? How should Microsoft have responded to the court decisions? What should we have done?
All the points you made were technical improvements. Yes, Microsoft software tends to be marginal, but it's the fact that it is *forced* on many of us is the real problem. Even if the software is perfect, many companies have now given their whole computing future to a single company. The OS? Microsoft. The office suite? Microsoft. The development tools? Microsoft. The database server? Microsoft. Various methods were used to get to this position, and improved engineering had little to do with it in the mid-1990s when this monopoly was carefully being built.
What should you have done? Lots of things, but for starters, someone should have been jailed for the so-called School Agreement that says (quoted from your website):
Count the number of eligible PCs you have. (See below for a definition of an eligible PC.) Then choose the application, system, and Client Access License (CAL) products you want to be licensed to use.
[...]
Eligible computers include: 100 percent of academic institution owned or leased Pentium II, iMac G3, or equivalent or better computers.
To paraphrase, if I donated 100 Linux / OpenOffice PCs to my local school, Microsoft would still get an annual fee for each of those PCs, even though Microsoft did nothing to earn that money. That, my friend, is taxation. And Microsoft's lobby would prevent any public officials from having this lock-in overturned.
Oh, well, I'm not worried... the farther Microsoft goes, the farther it will fall. It happened to IBM. If the timing is right, Gates' historical reputation will be as tarnished as Rockefeller's still is, regardless of how much money his heirs gave away.
They are to blame for ABUSING their monopoly, but who gave them the income and market penetration to vault them to monopoly status in the first place? The consumers who bought their products.
No, they entered exclusivity agreements with the hardware manufacturers, and used that power to later enforce exclusivity agreements with business, and also with colleges and schools. This was done to build the monopoly that is now being fully exercised. Odds are your local school system is locked into a 'Campus Agreement' that forces the school to pay Microsoft around $35-50 per year for every computer in their system, even if the computer doesn't run Microsoft software. It takes a combination of power and evil to have agreements like that stand year after year without reprisal, and this one has been around for more than five years.
On the other hand, I've begun to take much that same cynical stance as you: let them squeeze money out of individuals, companies, and governments. I am a Linux expert, so as cheap foreign influences begin to erode the US software/hardware industry much as it did the auto industry, I will be able to speak the language of the new overlords, so to speak, and can flourish while the drag'n'drop MCSE's have to find new occupations.
I didn't even know it was possible to run 3D desktops over a network like that, [...]
Yup, OpenGL is network-transparent. It connects to the glx server, which is an extension to your X11 display and passes 3D operations at a higher level than just "draw pixel (1,1), draw pixel (2,1), etc.", so it is surprisingly light on the network if you don't constantly reload lots of textures.
OpenGL was created by SGI in the late 80's or early 90's and it was designed to have small SGI Indy-class boxes connecting to large Onyx-class systems that did the heavy data lifting, so it needed to be network transparent at a time when big iron was needed for the applications.
[...]and it works beautifully for anything other than intensive 3-d rendering.
The SunRay units use a buffered display like Remote Desktop (RDP), VNC, or NX, and while these methods give good low-bandwidth results, they don't improve past a certain point when given LAN-class speeds. However, "stock" uncompressed remote X11 can do 3D graphics beautifully on a LAN, because OpenGL was created in the beginning (by SGI) to run over remote terminals. The GL operation is sent to the terminal, and the graphics card actually performs the operation, rather than the actual pixels getting passed over the wire. You can get 50+fps on an OpenGL application and only use about 100K/s of LAN bandwidth. Advanced 3D games tend to load/unload textures often and do other tricks, so they can use a lot more bandwidth, but for 3D applications, X11 terminals work great if they have a 3D card.
The thin clients cost the same as the PC but do a lot less
If you stick with Windows RDP terminals, they can, particularly the Wyse Winterms. Now there are Linux terminals (that can be configured via LTSP to be RDP clients) as low as $90 in volume and $149. (The NTA 6020P is $149, although they have removed the line-item pricing for some reason).
So things are looking good for these units. The City of Largo has an administrator that keeps a blog that is interesting reading on how they are stepping up from basic terminals to using advanced terminals to add 3D eye candy, presumably driven by the cost savings over the past 5-10 years. I particularly like this posting that shows some daytime loads on the different servers.
So all modern operating system kernels use RAM to cache disk blocks even at the expense of having to swap memory used by processes to disk.
No, this does not happen on Linux boxes. If it does swap due to disk access, it must stop after about 10-20MB. On Windows XP, this happens all the time and it infuriates me. Especially if I copy a large file over the network, since it swaps out my *running applications* so it can cache a file that lives on another machine. Then over the next half hour I have to watch screens and menus redraw as I try to run the other apps. Win9x had a MaxFileCache setting that I wish XP had. I would set the cache to 128MB and leave it. Or better yet, I'm hopefully going to a Linux workstation soon at work and can finally cut the cord.
Nobody in my family knew anything about computers, and I was in a small town in a rural Southern state, so no bicycle trips to Stanford for me.... It's funny remembering the lengths I went to get information. I joined a local computer club mainly to get access to the freeware collection of about 1500 floppies. I used Tandy's PC-Link to download information in short bursts because it was long-distance $0.14/min at 1200 baud... non-trivial cost in 1987.
My point is, if a child wants to learn something, it is surprising how far they will stretch the little resources they have. These kids will have loads of docs and tutorials, and a decent language (Python?). I used to question the OLPC project because lots of these kids may need more basic needs, but I've come to understand that some portion of these kids will be able to crawl out of poverty with the skills they will teach themselves. It may be a small percentage, but I think it will be greater than zero.