It seems like a waste of money even at $25m. I suspect they won't even be able to make $25m worth of trouble for IBM.
But perhaps it's just a ploy by the executives to bring about just that outcome: after all, they must hold lots of nearly worthless stock and stock options. If IBM tries to buy them, it drives up the price and gives them a buyer, and they make at least some money.
Your best bet is to encrypt individual files on a VFAT file system with an encryption program that exists on all platforms. That way, you can at least get at the files when you need to.
The second part is to get transparent encryption/decryption. That's a matter of convenience. There is no single good solution for all platforms. Some programs (editors like vi and emacs) can automate this for you. You can write scripts or batch files to do this for you as needed.
On Linux, you can get transparent encrypt/decryption for almost all programs using LD_PRELOAD. Look at the "Plastic File System" (some assembly required). Similar DLL hacks are possible on Windows, though harder and less reliable.
Any life on Europe is likely going to be miles deep under water. An ion cloud and radiation hitting the surface is not going to make any difference there. So, the chances for Europan life are as good or as slim as they have ever been. However, the radiation may make exploration more difficult.
How would the "Dragon" be "free" and how could it be competitive running at 500mhz?
It's for grid/cluster computing. As long as it's sufficiently cheaper than other processors relative to its performance, that's fine. And if it has good power consumption, you can put a lot of them into a small space. And 64 bit support is important in and of itself; I'd buy an Athlon64 today even if it cost the same as an AthlonXP and ran more slowly.
Text nicely separates the message from the messenger. That's something that's desirable in most communications. If we didn't have it, we'd have to invent it. Leave the video to dating services, where the messenger is the message.
Otherwise, what's next? Slashdot video postings? Shudder.
Rambus has maintained that its document destruction was part of the company's regular document retention policy.
Rambus went on to explain that they had a standing policy to destroy all incriminating evidence when it comes to their attention. "It is part of our lawsuit-based business model and corporate culture," the spokesperson said.
Your CF reader may be plugged into an IDE port, or into a USB port (or, possibly, a FireWire port, but that's like USB for this purpose). If it's plugged into an IDE port, you should have no trouble booting from it, provided your OS can boot from another IDE drive (Linux can, NT could, and XP probably can as well). If it's plugged into a USB port, you should have no trouble hotplugging the CF card, not even under Windows XP, and certainly not under Linux. In no case should you have trouble just "leaving it in"--it's either an extra IDE drive or an extra USB drive--why would any OS care?
It sounds to me you just have bad hardware, whatever hardware you have.
I wonder whether "health monitoring" of computers is even a rational thing to do. Just like with medical health, too much diagnosis and knowledge can be harmful: it can lead to overtreatment, unnecessary worries, and lots of extra expenses. The kinds of problems that hardware sensors detect (fan, overheating, CPU voltage off, etc.) are usually very easy to check on a case-by-case basis when one suspects a hardware problem (intermittent or fatal).
I have found that having a few spares on hand, being able to swap out machines quickly, and having a good backup and mirroring strategy has always been the best insurance. Beyond that, I don't want to be bothered by little aches and pains from a computer until it breaks.
It's an array of CCDs, so it goes well with an array of machines. In different words, there is no need to push all those pixels through a single machine. The most natural thing to do would be to have a common trigger and timestamp the images, but to capture, compress, and store them on separate machines.
You could get in the ballpark of this by buying 40 off-the-shelf 5 Mpixel consumer cameras and 40 laptops to hook them up to. Voila--instant "200 Mpixel camera", plus the bandwidth to process and store all those images.
Free software license aren't a pissing contest, they are deliberately chosen to achieve certain goals.
Putting the LGPL onto a widget set means that the widget set and desktop can be more easily adopted by companies. The Gnome developers and users consider that a good thing. The adoption of Gnome by Sun seems to suggest that it's achieving its intended goals. You are free to disagree that those goals are desirable.
KDE made its own, different choice in this regard. We'll simply have to wait and see which one works better in the long run. Each group will have to live with their choices.
What Linux and BSD need is something like Cocoa (or Carbon or whatever it's called) in OS X.
I'm sorry, but how is this better? OS X uses a client-server rendering architecture, just like X11, only it's based on PDF and considerably slower. And OS X uses an Objective-C based toolkit, which is considerably harder to interface to from C/C++ than Gtk+ or even Qt. Now, there are some nice things about the OS X graphics subsystem, such as a PostScript-like imaging model, but X11 pretty much has that by now as well.
The only reason OS X is not as easily remotable as X11 is because the toolkit and desktop environment don't know how to deal with that. But fear not, Gnome and KDE seem to be hardcoding assumptions about local program execution into their desktops as well.
Furthermore, if you like that sort of thing, you can get GNUStep (gnustep.org): it has pretty much the same rendering model and the same toolkit as OS X, the PostScript renderer can run inside the display server, and they are building a desktop.
No, it's not needed anymore except in a server, multi-user environment. Desktops ain't that.
You are pretty narrow-minded there. One of the largest uses of UNIX and Linux workstations is still at universities and in research labs, and remote applications are absolutely crucial there.
I don't think you're sufficiently familar with CL to comment
I don't think you have sufficient information to make that determination.
CMUCL, for example, is certainly comparable to bigloo (only better:-) ),
As implementations, the two aren't comparable at all. Bigloo generates small, stand-alone, efficient executables, while CMU CL does not.
I have actually used CMU CL quite a bit over the last decade. IMO, it's one of the best Lisp implementations around; but what makes it good is a lot of the things that it implements that go beyond the CommonLisp standard.
In fact, Bigloo is my textbook example of how Scheme needs to become most of a Common Lisp implementation to actually do anything useful!
You will get no argument from me that the Scheme standard is too minimialist for industrial-strength Lisp development. But Bigloo is a good implementation of Scheme in the same sense that CMU CL is a good implementation of CommonLisp: both go far beyond the standard they are based on, and neither is fully compliant with the base standard.
Bizarrely, you use the past tense for the CL community - you may be confusing your leaving it with it's non-existent demise.
I believe I only used the past tense when referring to past events. If I indicated that CL had already met its demise, that was unintentional. While CL usage seems to be shrinking relative to other language communities, it clearly isn't gone yet.
You use very judgmental language ("disdain", "little world") to describe a community you are obviously not a member of.
Yes, like most of my colleagues (and the creator of AspectJ, for that matter), at some point I stopped being part of the CommonLisp community. As for the terms, they aren't judgemental, they are descriptive: read the "UNIX Hater's Handbook".
Of course Common Lisp was standardized for the benefit of Lisp programmers,
CommonLisp was standardized for the benefit of users and vendors of a number of commercial lisp dialects, not all Lisp users.
I don't know how "little" the world of Lisp programmers can be when it includes things like Orbitz.
The world of Lisp programmers is quite big. The world of CommonLisp programmers is "little" in the sense the fraction of all programmers using CommonLisp is very small (and probably decreasing, for that matter).
Have you actually tried TiPaint.com? According to several of the reader reports [macintouch.com] at MacInTouch, they're a scam.
No, but I have a Titanium Powerbook, and the paint keeps peeling. I pointed at TiPaint.com because they have a picture (mine actually was worse). I don't recommend people buy their stuff, I recommend people send in their Powerbooks for repair to Apple.
Hardly something you can fault them for - build it out of plastic and you're more likely to crack it than make a dent. Not much you can do other than take care: they're computers, they're always going to be delicate.
I don't fault anybody for anything, I'm just saying that in my experience with the Titanium Powerbook, metal does not make a good material for a laptop casing.
It doesn't take much to dent the Titanium Powerbook, and the case also flexes. Polycarbonate cases, like those used on the iBook or the IBM laptops, don't crack, don't flex, and don't peel.
That would be the 12" PowerBook [apple.com].
Let me spell it out for you: "what Apple needs to come out with, in my opinion, is a G4 processor in an iBook-like polycarbonate casing because the metal casings just aren't as durable in my experience". OK?
Yeah, heaven forbid the kids should have a UNIX system with vendor supported hardware drivers,
PC Laptop hardware is pretty standardized, so this is just not a problem. For an order like this, a company like IBM or Dell will almost certainly be happy to configure Linux for it. And there are smaller vendors that will be happy to ship Linux laptops to you with any size order. Note, incidentall, that a number of OS X drivers (like USB cameras) are actually ports of Linux drivers to OS X.
Microsoft Office,
Do we really want to get our students hooked on Microsoft Office early on? I don't think so.
a free IDE, etc.
There are plenty of free IDEs around for Linux and Windows, and many of them are much better suited to student and educational use than the IDE Apple ships.
I have a Titanium Powerbook. The Titanium powerbooks are much better looking, and the slot-loading drive is really neat. Apple service is generally good. And Mac OS X beats Windows in just about every respect.
But they aren't all roses either. The enamel keeps peeling off, and the exterior of the machine, being metal, is prone to denting. The processor is pretty slow by current Intel standards. And DVD playback on my Ti Powerbook is unreliable (yes, Apple tried to fix this by replacing the drive, but the problem persisted--I think it's the software, actually). Wireless range on my Ti Powerbook is also poor compared to other notebooks. Overall, the Ti Powerbook is a reasonably nice and usable machine, but it's not a design that Apple should continue or that others should emulate; I bought it for the G4, not the looks.
Perhaps you haven't noticed any of that because you say you have an iBook, which I think are much more robust and practical. The main problem with the iBooks (and why I didn't get one) is that they are fairly slow--fast enough for word processing and the like, but not if you do significant computation. What Apple really needs to do is come out with a G4 iBook, and, of course, a much faster processor, both on their laptops and on their notebooks.
And if PC vendors copy anything, it should be the iBook. The Titanium Powerbook is a compromise between looks and practicality. You may notice that Apple's new 12" and 17" notebooks are already made out of different materials.
2G of RAM means two 1G DIMMs for the laptop. If you can get those at all, they are outrageously expensive. Even 512M DIMMS cost quite a premium. All the laptop vendors are in the same boat as far as I can tell.
Note that a 512M 1-DIMM configuration costs $200 more than a 512M 2-DIMM configuration.
But... if you can point me at a source of cheap 512M or 1G DIMMS for notebooks, I'd be really happy.
Maybe you should read the posting you are responding to:
The US calls the shots when it comes to the ISS, and
the limited role the Europeans play is because [...]
In different words, I'm not arguing that the Europeans are contributing huge chunks to the ISS, I'm just saying that whatever they contribute is what the US wants them to contribute, and the US apparently doesn't want them to contribute more.
Traditionally, copyrights didn't protect the appearance of industrial designs, only limited classes of printed materials. That's why we got design patents. Nowadays, there may be some overlap.
The US calls the shots when it comes to the ISS, and the limited role the Europeans play is because the US is miffed at European foreign policy and thinks that European engineers are dolts (see here).
If you want to know what parts of the ISS the US has assigned to other nations, you can find it on Google (e.g., this and this). Ariane rocket launches also are used for a lot of components, although US media don't seem to have much interest in reporting this (e.g., here).
The main reason for NASA to favor international involvement in something like the ISS is because it makes it harder for Congress to cancel the project; otherwise, it looks like they'd just as soon go it alone.
"after WWII, Europeans didn't really care about anybody proving superiority to anyone anymore, they just wanted to live in peace and prosperity"
behind the u.s shield.
What does that have to do with anything? Does one need to prove one's societal superiority with flashy megaprojects in order to defend oneself?
sometimes i think a lot of slashdot'ers would have liked to live under Soviet rule.
Any US/Soviet conflict in Europe would have meant the death and destruction of large parts of Europe. If it had come to a conflict, faced with certain death, many Europeans might well have preferred to live under Soviet rule and work for peaceful change from within (which is how the East Block finally did fall apart). But the US pretty much had made a commitment to "live free or die" on behalf of the Europeans.
Ask yourself this: given the choice between death or moving to Hungary or Poland in the 1970's, which would you personally have picked?
Anyway, with US short a shuttle, I'd think there should be more of europe stepping up to support the ISS; you know, the *international* space station? of which they are also a part of?
Do you have any concrete indication that the Europeans are not "stepping up"? Last I looked, ESA seemed very enthusiastic and supportive of the ISS.
Slashdot Mirror
What was that movie again where a tiny little country attacks the US in hopes of being taken over and occupied?
But perhaps it's just a ploy by the executives to bring about just that outcome: after all, they must hold lots of nearly worthless stock and stock options. If IBM tries to buy them, it drives up the price and gives them a buyer, and they make at least some money.
The second part is to get transparent encryption/decryption. That's a matter of convenience. There is no single good solution for all platforms. Some programs (editors like vi and emacs) can automate this for you. You can write scripts or batch files to do this for you as needed.
On Linux, you can get transparent encrypt/decryption for almost all programs using LD_PRELOAD. Look at the "Plastic File System" (some assembly required). Similar DLL hacks are possible on Windows, though harder and less reliable.
Any life on Europe is likely going to be miles deep under water. An ion cloud and radiation hitting the surface is not going to make any difference there. So, the chances for Europan life are as good or as slim as they have ever been. However, the radiation may make exploration more difficult.
It's for grid/cluster computing. As long as it's sufficiently cheaper than other processors relative to its performance, that's fine. And if it has good power consumption, you can put a lot of them into a small space. And 64 bit support is important in and of itself; I'd buy an Athlon64 today even if it cost the same as an AthlonXP and ran more slowly.
Otherwise, what's next? Slashdot video postings? Shudder.
Rambus went on to explain that they had a standing policy to destroy all incriminating evidence when it comes to their attention. "It is part of our lawsuit-based business model and corporate culture," the spokesperson said.
It sounds to me you just have bad hardware, whatever hardware you have.
I have found that having a few spares on hand, being able to swap out machines quickly, and having a good backup and mirroring strategy has always been the best insurance. Beyond that, I don't want to be bothered by little aches and pains from a computer until it breaks.
You could get in the ballpark of this by buying 40 off-the-shelf 5 Mpixel consumer cameras and 40 laptops to hook them up to. Voila--instant "200 Mpixel camera", plus the bandwidth to process and store all those images.
Putting the LGPL onto a widget set means that the widget set and desktop can be more easily adopted by companies. The Gnome developers and users consider that a good thing. The adoption of Gnome by Sun seems to suggest that it's achieving its intended goals. You are free to disagree that those goals are desirable.
KDE made its own, different choice in this regard. We'll simply have to wait and see which one works better in the long run. Each group will have to live with their choices.
I'm sorry, but how is this better? OS X uses a client-server rendering architecture, just like X11, only it's based on PDF and considerably slower. And OS X uses an Objective-C based toolkit, which is considerably harder to interface to from C/C++ than Gtk+ or even Qt. Now, there are some nice things about the OS X graphics subsystem, such as a PostScript-like imaging model, but X11 pretty much has that by now as well.
The only reason OS X is not as easily remotable as X11 is because the toolkit and desktop environment don't know how to deal with that. But fear not, Gnome and KDE seem to be hardcoding assumptions about local program execution into their desktops as well.
Furthermore, if you like that sort of thing, you can get GNUStep (gnustep.org): it has pretty much the same rendering model and the same toolkit as OS X, the PostScript renderer can run inside the display server, and they are building a desktop.
No, it's not needed anymore except in a server, multi-user environment. Desktops ain't that.
You are pretty narrow-minded there. One of the largest uses of UNIX and Linux workstations is still at universities and in research labs, and remote applications are absolutely crucial there.
I don't think you have sufficient information to make that determination.
CMUCL, for example, is certainly comparable to bigloo (only better :-) ),
As implementations, the two aren't comparable at all. Bigloo generates small, stand-alone, efficient executables, while CMU CL does not.
I have actually used CMU CL quite a bit over the last decade. IMO, it's one of the best Lisp implementations around; but what makes it good is a lot of the things that it implements that go beyond the CommonLisp standard.
In fact, Bigloo is my textbook example of how Scheme needs to become most of a Common Lisp implementation to actually do anything useful!
You will get no argument from me that the Scheme standard is too minimialist for industrial-strength Lisp development. But Bigloo is a good implementation of Scheme in the same sense that CMU CL is a good implementation of CommonLisp: both go far beyond the standard they are based on, and neither is fully compliant with the base standard.
Bizarrely, you use the past tense for the CL community - you may be confusing your leaving it with it's non-existent demise.
I believe I only used the past tense when referring to past events. If I indicated that CL had already met its demise, that was unintentional. While CL usage seems to be shrinking relative to other language communities, it clearly isn't gone yet.
Yes, like most of my colleagues (and the creator of AspectJ, for that matter), at some point I stopped being part of the CommonLisp community. As for the terms, they aren't judgemental, they are descriptive: read the "UNIX Hater's Handbook".
Of course Common Lisp was standardized for the benefit of Lisp programmers,
CommonLisp was standardized for the benefit of users and vendors of a number of commercial lisp dialects, not all Lisp users.
I don't know how "little" the world of Lisp programmers can be when it includes things like Orbitz.
The world of Lisp programmers is quite big. The world of CommonLisp programmers is "little" in the sense the fraction of all programmers using CommonLisp is very small (and probably decreasing, for that matter).
No, but I have a Titanium Powerbook, and the paint keeps peeling. I pointed at TiPaint.com because they have a picture (mine actually was worse). I don't recommend people buy their stuff, I recommend people send in their Powerbooks for repair to Apple.
Hardly something you can fault them for - build it out of plastic and you're more likely to crack it than make a dent. Not much you can do other than take care: they're computers, they're always going to be delicate.
I don't fault anybody for anything, I'm just saying that in my experience with the Titanium Powerbook, metal does not make a good material for a laptop casing.
It doesn't take much to dent the Titanium Powerbook, and the case also flexes. Polycarbonate cases, like those used on the iBook or the IBM laptops, don't crack, don't flex, and don't peel.
That would be the 12" PowerBook [apple.com].
Let me spell it out for you: "what Apple needs to come out with, in my opinion, is a G4 processor in an iBook-like polycarbonate casing because the metal casings just aren't as durable in my experience". OK?
Yeah, heaven forbid the kids should have a UNIX system with vendor supported hardware drivers,
PC Laptop hardware is pretty standardized, so this is just not a problem. For an order like this, a company like IBM or Dell will almost certainly be happy to configure Linux for it. And there are smaller vendors that will be happy to ship Linux laptops to you with any size order. Note, incidentall, that a number of OS X drivers (like USB cameras) are actually ports of Linux drivers to OS X.
Microsoft Office,
Do we really want to get our students hooked on Microsoft Office early on? I don't think so.
a free IDE, etc.
There are plenty of free IDEs around for Linux and Windows, and many of them are much better suited to student and educational use than the IDE Apple ships.
But they aren't all roses either. The enamel keeps peeling off, and the exterior of the machine, being metal, is prone to denting. The processor is pretty slow by current Intel standards. And DVD playback on my Ti Powerbook is unreliable (yes, Apple tried to fix this by replacing the drive, but the problem persisted--I think it's the software, actually). Wireless range on my Ti Powerbook is also poor compared to other notebooks. Overall, the Ti Powerbook is a reasonably nice and usable machine, but it's not a design that Apple should continue or that others should emulate; I bought it for the G4, not the looks.
Perhaps you haven't noticed any of that because you say you have an iBook, which I think are much more robust and practical. The main problem with the iBooks (and why I didn't get one) is that they are fairly slow--fast enough for word processing and the like, but not if you do significant computation. What Apple really needs to do is come out with a G4 iBook, and, of course, a much faster processor, both on their laptops and on their notebooks.
And if PC vendors copy anything, it should be the iBook. The Titanium Powerbook is a compromise between looks and practicality. You may notice that Apple's new 12" and 17" notebooks are already made out of different materials.
Note that a 512M 1-DIMM configuration costs $200 more than a 512M 2-DIMM configuration.
But... if you can point me at a source of cheap 512M or 1G DIMMS for notebooks, I'd be really happy.
Fixed wireless communications based on lasers are already available commercially, and have been for a number of years. Do some searching on Google.
By Romans, Christians, and Muslims. Story here.
Traditionally, copyrights didn't protect the appearance of industrial designs, only limited classes of printed materials. That's why we got design patents. Nowadays, there may be some overlap.
If you want to know what parts of the ISS the US has assigned to other nations, you can find it on Google (e.g., this and this). Ariane rocket launches also are used for a lot of components, although US media don't seem to have much interest in reporting this (e.g., here).
The main reason for NASA to favor international involvement in something like the ISS is because it makes it harder for Congress to cancel the project; otherwise, it looks like they'd just as soon go it alone.
behind the u.s shield.
What does that have to do with anything? Does one need to prove one's societal superiority with flashy megaprojects in order to defend oneself?
sometimes i think a lot of slashdot'ers would have liked to live under Soviet rule.
Any US/Soviet conflict in Europe would have meant the death and destruction of large parts of Europe. If it had come to a conflict, faced with certain death, many Europeans might well have preferred to live under Soviet rule and work for peaceful change from within (which is how the East Block finally did fall apart). But the US pretty much had made a commitment to "live free or die" on behalf of the Europeans.
Ask yourself this: given the choice between death or moving to Hungary or Poland in the 1970's, which would you personally have picked?
Do you have any concrete indication that the Europeans are not "stepping up"? Last I looked, ESA seemed very enthusiastic and supportive of the ISS.