In all seriousness, this is a good deal for the enterprise.
The big benefit doesn't come from the hardware. The benefit comes from the fact that it's as easy as or easier to administer than a Windows server, and it comes with an unlimited user license. The bulk of the cost of most Windows-based servers is the licensing.
I'm sure many do. The problem is it gets installed with other MS applications if a user specifies that they want all components installed.
My boss just handed me his laptop the other day, wanting to know why it had slowed down. (He'd filled the hard drive to under 200K free.) Among the many other unnecessary items I removed was MS SQL Server. I can only guess that it got installed with MS Office, because all he uses the laptop for are PowerPoint presentations, word processing, surfing and game playing.
There are probably a million people out there who don't even know that they're running it.
Some may remember the hubub last week about EA expressing an unwillingness to participate in the XBox network, citing (among other things) Microsoft wanting a piece of the pie, as opposed to Sony's free-for-all approach.
Any direct traffic is going to be optimized out of the picture. You should be able to put the 2nd NIC on the same subnet, do a broadcast ping, and still see responses from the other interface however.
FWIW -- all UNIXes I've worked with have reported results from all responding systems on a broadcast ping, unlike Windows which only shows the first to respond. So you'll want to filter through grep if there are other systems on the network, as you'll get responses from many systems you don't likely care about.
i wonder how they will deal with crazy 3rd party objects? will that be eliminated. so far The Sims has encouraged people to make their own skins for people and objects for the house. they even give info and link some of the bigger sites. i guess if/when PS2 gets online it will also allow for a keyboard and a hard drive? wasnt that the plan?
Yes, the broadband adapter will ship with a hard drive as well. It would be entirely possible for Sony to either let people visit arbitrary sites, to use some site to deposit characters and objects that you want available, or to let EA maintain a single site with add-on objects.
As a matter of fact, it would be difficult to believe that they wouldn't let people do this!
There is a Diablo port on Playstation. Granted, it's not multiplayer, but it does exist. I always see it at the local Blockbuster and chuckle.
In my opinion, they need to port the other way. Halo for the PC would lead to some wicked lan parties.
Not much motivation to do it though. Judging by the LAN parties I've been exposed to, if there was a really large turnout, you'd still be lucky if anyone there knew anyone who'd actually bought the game.:)
This is the perfect game for it. Keyboard use isn't so wildly important, save for the occasional chatty note, and the interface is pretty simple.
I'd also love to see Diablo ported to the Playstation. This is another one that would work remarkably well on the TV screen, and that has a straightforward interface for most of the game.
What are some of the other online games with simple interfaces? With enough choices like this, online console gaming could finally take off!
Allegedly, the reason for Kentucky Fried Chicken changing their name to KFC was that in Canada, the meat they were serving could no longer be legally called Chicken.
Canada is stricter about health and food laws than the USA, for example - most of the USA cereals and candy snacks are illegal there, or are made with different ingredients. You can't sell ready-to-eat foods with too high a sugar content. There are other such examples, with about twice as many regulations on the quality and source of meat and dairy products as the USA (and most states therein) have as well. Companies are also required to list EVERY ingredient. Brand names and trace quantity ingredients can't be omitted as they are in the USA.
If the KFC renaming bit isn't just a myth - though I know it sounds too juicy to be true - it would be in keeping with Canada's strict standards. And it would also be quite amusing to see what they force these naked chickens be listed as. "Anyone up for chickenoid?" "Chick Khan anyone?"
Well, you had me nodding and agreeing with you right up until you said you gave money to PETA. I assume you mean the so-called "People for Ethical Treatment of Animals", not some other org with the same acronym?
Since I think PETA is a bunch of raving loons who are totally against most of my values, and who use extremist, terrorist tactics to try and get their way, you just shot your credibility, and that of your argument in the foot. With a shotgun. Loaded with 00 buckshot.
Keep in mind that the way we see RMS is the way most animal rights activists see PeTA. "On the right side, but a bit too far out there."
Similarly - the way you're seeing PeTA is about the same way most see RMS. Except to those who are in line with a significant percentage of his points, he seems like a raving lunatic. To you, he probably looks like a plain old lunatic.
I don't think PeTA is too useful, save to spurn animal rights folks into action. Similarly, RMS isn't too useful, except to spurn free software folks into action.
i am pretty sure the only reason this guy posted is because he likes to say "free (as in beer)"
You got me. I am all about free beer.:)
Actually, I wish there were a better term to differentiate between the two. "Free open source" versus "public domain open source" versus "public domain" versus... gah. "Free software" may have been an unfortunate choice of wording, but we'd need something like a permissions mask to cover all the possibilities:
"Oh, frobjazzer is 754." "So the author can do anything, friends can edit and redistribute, but strangers can only redistribute?" "No, that'd be a 732 license. Bit 2 is reselling." "Oh! So MS would be 711?" "No - MS is 700, and requires a hard drive that won't let you chown..." "Oh ho..."
Firstly, you should be able to buy a pair of cheap RF headphones and rewire them yourself. You can even keep the original RF headphones about your neck, with a jack installed to plug your preferred headphones into. Yes, it will look a bit weird.
Alternatively, there are all kinds of devices for remote audio that are meant to be hooked to a stereo. Is it really such a big deal to get an RCA to 1/8" phono plug adapter for these and replace the AC adapter with a battery pack?
Admittedly, either is a little bulky, but certainly not too much to bring about with you in your home or workspace.
Perú's youth continue to approach Villanueva, offering to march in support of the Bill: "It is the youth that needs to drive its creativity, its intelligence, its intellect... there are many young people that can create their own employment through [the use] of free software."
Beautiful. "there are many young people that can create their own employment" thanks to free software.
When you hear people complaining that free (as in beer) software is going to cost programmers jobs or cut their salary, or that free software will send us into an economic tailspin, remember this: Both free (as in speech) and free (as in beer) software are making technological revolutions possible in places where it just couldn't happen otherwise. And you can bet that we're going to see good stuff (more software!) starting to flow back the other way.
I like Linux a lot, but I NEVER recommend Linux when a more closed source solution is at least as good.
Why?
Because the more open source catches on, the less programmers will be paid.
Why can't we be like mechanical engineers, or doctors, who don't go arround destroying their own trade?
I'd counter that countless jobs are being created, as the cost of entering technology businesses goes down. The small guy stands a chance at making it big in technology, where the startup costs were previously prohibitive.
I'll also say that for those who learn to adopt and leverage existing free software, writing the last 10% on top that turns a suite of disconnected applications into something useful, the pay is far far higher than it used to be. The effective one-man datacenter can pretty much set his own salary.
If my service provider went to NAT's, I would screem at them to upgrade there networks to IPV6 so that they had no excuses to NAT me when IPV6 is commonplace.
The purpose of the NAT would be to prevent inbound traffic, not to conserve address space.
Still, to your point -- do any versions of Windows ship with IPv6 enabled by default? I think that's the true test of how ready business is for it.
Even if you don't fully agree with RMS - though I'll admit I do a lot - it's good to have the people with the extreme views about. Having someone with that rigid a mindset means it's tougher to "sneak one by." Public relations departments and lawyers will play all manner of game to try and get something extra for a company without giving anything back, just by reframing something's appearance.
Without RMS' type around, GPL wouldn't exist in the first place. And even if someone else had invented GLP, we'd likely see GPL having been circumvented by a hundred and one different iffy technologies; compiled to intermediate pseudo machine codes, source distributed in human-unreadable shrouded form, sold at high cost, and so on. Having someone with such conviction and with an eagle eye point out every danger, no matter how small, means that nothing gets missed. And if businesses and individuals are afraid to deal with someone who gives off the air of a raving, screaming fanatic, others will carry on the real work once the points are raised.
I support the extreme view of free software for the same reason that a large portion of my charity giving goes to PeTA. Same deal. They overstate most every case, but at least they provide visibility so people can make more informed decisions and spring to action when the events call for it.
Why shouldn't this be the case? I have DSL and I have the AudioGalaxy Satellite setup to run at logon. Whenever I take a look at the satellite, I see that I have only received usally less than 1/10th of the data that I have sent. Why shouldn't people (individuals included) be required to pay for the bandwidth they use?
At current, I'd say say we are paying. We've signed a usage agreement that says we get this speed down and that speed up.
From a business standpoint, the upstream hasn't been the interesting part of the pricing equation to date, however. But when they usage increasing, and their costs going up for something they can turn off or collect an extra fee for, you can bet we won't see so many symmetrical connections or directly-addressable and unfiltered IPs.
Many newer laptops have non-integrated video controllers on a "mini PCI" bus, which is electrically identical to real PCI, only with a different connector. In these cases, the display will be connected directly to the card with some sort of ribbon cable or simple harness.
You should be able to use this with a standard PC by creating a PC to mini-PCI bridge. Prepare to do lots and lots of soldering.
For any working laptops, I'd rather grab the whole thing and just run an extra X server on 'em though. Let it display a few extra apps for you, and go ahead and use samba to use the drive as a safe place for quick data backups. Pretty cool, and a hell of a lot less work!:)
There is a modern day version called K [kx.com] that will crush C based systems when full SIMD support is implemented (is already does a good job of thrashing most languages)
Have you more info on K - an authoritative page? Understandably, it's a tough term to Google on.
While this is a great concept, it scares me a bit.
I'm fully expecting that if we ever reach a point where a substantial percentage of users' traffic becomes outbound traffic, the cablemodem and DSL providers are going to start to rethink the current pricing and service packages.
How long before we find ourselves NATted away, able to originate connections only? A few cablemodem providers have already done this to reduce the traffic from file sharing and to knock out code red and other such silliness. And each time a major ISP does this, it leaves a slightly smaller number of other ISPs providing the outbound service, causing the traffic on the holdout systems to rise.
At some point it's going to snowball, and most of us are going to find ourselves NATted away, with only those paying premium prices for real IP addresses getting the priviledge of having their uplink monopolized by strangers.
This could be the end of the road for processor architecture as we know it.
We're getting to the point where we switch faster and faster, but it still takes time for signals to propagate! Something's going to have to change in the fundamental design of the processor. We're talking exceptionally deep pipelines here, with changes in our data source meaning a huuuuuuuge penalty while dozens of stages are dumped in favor of a new code/data stream. If we're to take fullest advantage of these new architectures, we're talking about structuring computing around SIMD-style programmed tunnels which execute identical operations on fat streams of data, not depending on the results for execution control. This would be akin to writing programs the way you write shaders on modern graphics hardware.
Whether these changes can happen without fundamentally restructuring the way we program remains to be seen. But we're fast getting to the point where something's got to give if we're to take fullest advantage of these new technologies.
Or maybe this just means cycle tuning and assembly are coming back in style.:)
This story also seems like the perfect place to clarify Moore's Law. Please forgive the long post, but I'd love to see this properly understood...
From Jargon File (4.3.0, 30 APR 2001) [jargon]:
Moore's Law/morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of
silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per
square inch) = 2^(t - 1962) where t is time in years; that is, the
amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly
doubled every year since the technology was invented. This relation,
first uttered in 1964 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who
co-founded Intel four years later) held until the late 1970s, at which
point the doubling period slowed to 18 months. The doubling period
remained at that value through time of writing (late 1999). Moore's Law
is apparently self-fulfilling. The implication is that somebody,
somewhere is going to be able to build a better chip than you if you
rest on your laurels, so you'd better start pushing hard on the problem.
See also {Parkinson's Law of Data} and {Gates's Law}.
Note that Moore's law deals with density, not performance. Note, however, that Moore did later comment that if his prediction (Moore's Law) continued to be true, computing power would rise exponentially over time, but this was a seperate observation, not a part of the original prediction.
This is just yet another reason to be excited about technology.
On top of this, look at the on-chip SMP work that the major processor manufacturers are working on. They're working on being able to run multiple virtual CPUs, sharing the same execution pipelines and caches, so when one thread is doing a lot of multiplication work, another may be able to use the addition and general flow pipelines. Allegedly, in simulations, the multiple virtual CPUs end up executing at about 70% of the efficiency of real, individual CPUs, all with very little extra silicon.
On top of that, manufacturing is improving to the point where yields are very, very high. This means it's becoming more fesible to make larger and larger dies with more and more on them without significant failure rates. I think we'll soon see larger caches and wider buses. 64-bit CPUs may be a brief stepping stone to 128- and higher-bit.
Add to this the current focus of Linux, which is Linux on mainframe architectures. The thing is, the very same principles that make mainframes such wonderful beasts are what we're starting to see in the hardware we'll be seeing in the near future. The multi-threaded hardware above, and split-bus architectures both have mainframe parallels. Linux should be ready to take advantage of the new hardware years before Windows is making significant use of it.
Lastly, the increasing popularity of the Mac and the commoditization of game system components means that we're seeing more and more markets for faster general purpose CPUs. This means more competition and, because of that, better funding for research.
We may yet push ahead of the oft-misquoted version of Moore's law!:)
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The big benefit doesn't come from the hardware. The benefit comes from the fact that it's as easy as or easier to administer than a Windows server, and it comes with an unlimited user license. The bulk of the cost of most Windows-based servers is the licensing.
...do you really want a 1U rack that advertises color depth and framerate benchmarks instead of requests per second?
...do you want to run a server that can be DOS'd by crashing OpenGL?
And most importantly...
...do you trust your lonely sysadmin alone with a "lickable" server?
*nod?*
My boss just handed me his laptop the other day, wanting to know why it had slowed down. (He'd filled the hard drive to under 200K free.) Among the many other unnecessary items I removed was MS SQL Server. I can only guess that it got installed with MS Office, because all he uses the laptop for are PowerPoint presentations, word processing, surfing and game playing.
There are probably a million people out there who don't even know that they're running it.
Some may remember the hubub last week about EA expressing an unwillingness to participate in the XBox network, citing (among other things) Microsoft wanting a piece of the pie, as opposed to Sony's free-for-all approach.
I refuse to provide fully accurate information until there are criminal penalties for spamming and junk-mailing registered individuals.
FWIW -- all UNIXes I've worked with have reported results from all responding systems on a broadcast ping, unlike Windows which only shows the first to respond. So you'll want to filter through grep if there are other systems on the network, as you'll get responses from many systems you don't likely care about.
As a matter of fact, it would be difficult to believe that they wouldn't let people do this!
I'd also love to see Diablo ported to the Playstation. This is another one that would work remarkably well on the TV screen, and that has a straightforward interface for most of the game.
What are some of the other online games with simple interfaces? With enough choices like this, online console gaming could finally take off!
Canada is stricter about health and food laws than the USA, for example - most of the USA cereals and candy snacks are illegal there, or are made with different ingredients. You can't sell ready-to-eat foods with too high a sugar content. There are other such examples, with about twice as many regulations on the quality and source of meat and dairy products as the USA (and most states therein) have as well. Companies are also required to list EVERY ingredient. Brand names and trace quantity ingredients can't be omitted as they are in the USA.
If the KFC renaming bit isn't just a myth - though I know it sounds too juicy to be true - it would be in keeping with Canada's strict standards. And it would also be quite amusing to see what they force these naked chickens be listed as. "Anyone up for chickenoid?" "Chick Khan anyone?"
Similarly - the way you're seeing PeTA is about the same way most see RMS. Except to those who are in line with a significant percentage of his points, he seems like a raving lunatic. To you, he probably looks like a plain old lunatic.
I don't think PeTA is too useful, save to spurn animal rights folks into action. Similarly, RMS isn't too useful, except to spurn free software folks into action.
Actually, I wish there were a better term to differentiate between the two. "Free open source" versus "public domain open source" versus "public domain" versus... gah. "Free software" may have been an unfortunate choice of wording, but we'd need something like a permissions mask to cover all the possibilities:
"Oh, frobjazzer is 754." "So the author can do anything, friends can edit and redistribute, but strangers can only redistribute?" "No, that'd be a 732 license. Bit 2 is reselling." "Oh! So MS would be 711?" "No - MS is 700, and requires a hard drive that won't let you chown..." "Oh ho..."
Alternatively, there are all kinds of devices for remote audio that are meant to be hooked to a stereo. Is it really such a big deal to get an RCA to 1/8" phono plug adapter for these and replace the AC adapter with a battery pack?
Admittedly, either is a little bulky, but certainly not too much to bring about with you in your home or workspace.
When you hear people complaining that free (as in beer) software is going to cost programmers jobs or cut their salary, or that free software will send us into an economic tailspin, remember this: Both free (as in speech) and free (as in beer) software are making technological revolutions possible in places where it just couldn't happen otherwise. And you can bet that we're going to see good stuff (more software!) starting to flow back the other way.
I'll also say that for those who learn to adopt and leverage existing free software, writing the last 10% on top that turns a suite of disconnected applications into something useful, the pay is far far higher than it used to be. The effective one-man datacenter can pretty much set his own salary.
Still, to your point -- do any versions of Windows ship with IPv6 enabled by default? I think that's the true test of how ready business is for it.
Without RMS' type around, GPL wouldn't exist in the first place. And even if someone else had invented GLP, we'd likely see GPL having been circumvented by a hundred and one different iffy technologies; compiled to intermediate pseudo machine codes, source distributed in human-unreadable shrouded form, sold at high cost, and so on. Having someone with such conviction and with an eagle eye point out every danger, no matter how small, means that nothing gets missed. And if businesses and individuals are afraid to deal with someone who gives off the air of a raving, screaming fanatic, others will carry on the real work once the points are raised.
I support the extreme view of free software for the same reason that a large portion of my charity giving goes to PeTA. Same deal. They overstate most every case, but at least they provide visibility so people can make more informed decisions and spring to action when the events call for it.
At current, I'd say say we are paying. We've signed a usage agreement that says we get this speed down and that speed up.
From a business standpoint, the upstream hasn't been the interesting part of the pricing equation to date, however. But when they usage increasing, and their costs going up for something they can turn off or collect an extra fee for, you can bet we won't see so many symmetrical connections or directly-addressable and unfiltered IPs.
You should be able to use this with a standard PC by creating a PC to mini-PCI bridge. Prepare to do lots and lots of soldering.
For any working laptops, I'd rather grab the whole thing and just run an extra X server on 'em though. Let it display a few extra apps for you, and go ahead and use samba to use the drive as a safe place for quick data backups. Pretty cool, and a hell of a lot less work! :)
I'm fully expecting that if we ever reach a point where a substantial percentage of users' traffic becomes outbound traffic, the cablemodem and DSL providers are going to start to rethink the current pricing and service packages.
How long before we find ourselves NATted away, able to originate connections only? A few cablemodem providers have already done this to reduce the traffic from file sharing and to knock out code red and other such silliness. And each time a major ISP does this, it leaves a slightly smaller number of other ISPs providing the outbound service, causing the traffic on the holdout systems to rise.
At some point it's going to snowball, and most of us are going to find ourselves NATted away, with only those paying premium prices for real IP addresses getting the priviledge of having their uplink monopolized by strangers.
We're getting to the point where we switch faster and faster, but it still takes time for signals to propagate! Something's going to have to change in the fundamental design of the processor. We're talking exceptionally deep pipelines here, with changes in our data source meaning a huuuuuuuge penalty while dozens of stages are dumped in favor of a new code/data stream. If we're to take fullest advantage of these new architectures, we're talking about structuring computing around SIMD-style programmed tunnels which execute identical operations on fat streams of data, not depending on the results for execution control. This would be akin to writing programs the way you write shaders on modern graphics hardware.
Whether these changes can happen without fundamentally restructuring the way we program remains to be seen. But we're fast getting to the point where something's got to give if we're to take fullest advantage of these new technologies.
Or maybe this just means cycle tuning and assembly are coming back in style. :)
Note that Moore's law deals with density, not performance. Note, however, that Moore did later comment that if his prediction (Moore's Law) continued to be true, computing power would rise exponentially over time, but this was a seperate observation, not a part of the original prediction.
On top of this, look at the on-chip SMP work that the major processor manufacturers are working on. They're working on being able to run multiple virtual CPUs, sharing the same execution pipelines and caches, so when one thread is doing a lot of multiplication work, another may be able to use the addition and general flow pipelines. Allegedly, in simulations, the multiple virtual CPUs end up executing at about 70% of the efficiency of real, individual CPUs, all with very little extra silicon.
On top of that, manufacturing is improving to the point where yields are very, very high. This means it's becoming more fesible to make larger and larger dies with more and more on them without significant failure rates. I think we'll soon see larger caches and wider buses. 64-bit CPUs may be a brief stepping stone to 128- and higher-bit.
Add to this the current focus of Linux, which is Linux on mainframe architectures. The thing is, the very same principles that make mainframes such wonderful beasts are what we're starting to see in the hardware we'll be seeing in the near future. The multi-threaded hardware above, and split-bus architectures both have mainframe parallels. Linux should be ready to take advantage of the new hardware years before Windows is making significant use of it.
Lastly, the increasing popularity of the Mac and the commoditization of game system components means that we're seeing more and more markets for faster general purpose CPUs. This means more competition and, because of that, better funding for research.
We may yet push ahead of the oft-misquoted version of Moore's law! :)