The problem isn't that they're being brought into the discussion - it's that you're comparing genocidal maniacs with people who work for a software company. This normally indicates that you're either unable to formulate a rational argument and so are kneeling on the crutch of emotional ad hominem attacks, or that you're so mentally unstable and unbalanced that you actually think that the comparison is one that is equal.No s/he is not. He is comparing the group mentality of the population to that which allowed the Nazis to come to dominance. The poster does not suggest anywhere that Microsoft==Nazi Party, however, he does make the point that the same apathy, apologism, short-sightedness and "it won't hurt me" attitude that let the Nazis almost dominate the world has let Microsoft almost dominate computing.
It is worth reiterating that "we" have largely brought on Microsoft's dominance ourselves. "We" have not been critical and discerning enough. "We" have been sheep. "We" have accepted third-rate software as a matter of course because "we" don't want to have to consider or learn about the alternatives. "We" can't stomach being seen to be different from "everyone else."
Those of us who chose to be different and to use and support the better alternatives suffer to a degree because of the herd's attitude. However, our patience and diligence are already are being rewarded in many ways. Our computers are powerful tools. Yours are pathetic, shiny, patronising, broken toys.
BASIC (at least from my day) is not a great learning language. It is very much like old-fashioned FORTRAN. Evereything is very restrictive. There are only subroutines, no procedures or functions. There are no proper control structures, only IF THEN GOTO. Various implementations did fix certain shortcomings, but in general, BASIC is dreadful. Modern commercial BASICs aren't much better. Oh TrueBASIC, what became of you?
I just upgraded from Slackware 9.1 to 10.0 today. I don't use a "desktop environment" for the simple reason that I like a nice lightweight window manager, WindowMaker, and xterm.
Maybe I'm stuck in tha past? I've always found KDE to be slow, until I got a dual 2.8GHz Xeon PC at work. Modern versions of GNOME seem to be quite lethargic and large too. I can't afford to keep buying new PCs all the time, and I'm afraid my athlon XP2000+ will have to do me at least another year.
I have an old PC in the house running Slackware 9.1 and GNOME 2.4 which is quite slow. The GNOME terminal runs like treacle on a cold winter's morning. If I fire up a traditional xterm, it's nice and fast.
I really wish I had time to delve through the source to see just where all this bloat and slowness is coming from. It used to be that KDE was the fatty boom boom of desktop environments, but the GNOME people seem to have out-done the C++ folks in plain old C.
What the heck is going on?
Anyway, life's too short to look at boring desktop environment code. Life's also too short to run a bloaty, slow desktop environment.
I'll just stick to a plain window manager and some xterms.
Like many geeks, I was single for a long, long time. The only thing was I did try to get out and meet people. For years I was desperate and trying too hard. I was also drinking too hard.
Over a period of a year, life started to improve drastically. I got several pay rises and a promotion at work. It was as if a bolt of lightning had hit me and put some self-belief in my thick skull.
One day I had been for a interview for a new job. It was a long way away, and I didn't get home until late in the evening. It was pub quiz night at my local and my friends were there. Even though it was 10pm I decided to pop along anyway for a couple of pints with them and a bit of a laugh.
When I joined in the quiz, they's just got their answers back from another team having been marked. A lady had written "I love Jason Newstead" on the paper. They were teasing her about it. I joined in and said that he was the only clued-up and talented member of Metallica.
One thing led to another and we've been happily married for nearly two years.
Prayer s attempted communication with supernatural beings (SBs). The word derives from a 14th century French word (preiere) meaning "to obtain by entreaty." The most common use of the word "prayer" is asking an SB for some favor.
No wonder. This is the country where we built a tent by the river Thames to celebrate the Millenium and we still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. We don't do exciting over here.
Will we see GNU / OpenSolaris? Basically all the GNOME / KDE desktop stuff of Linux runing on solaris kernel.
About 4-5 years ago. Sun has been shipping GNOME and KDE for many years now, along with many GNU and Open Source tools. In recent years, Sun has done a lot of development work (and spent a lot of money on) GNOME. GNOME has been the official desktop of Solaris since Solaris 9. The dreaded CDE is still there for legacy reasons (and compliance with certain standards).
But this is slashdot, and we shouldn't let facts get in the way of a good argument.
HP-UX provides an ILP32 environment (meaning 32bit using ia64 ISA instructions) on itanium so that porting from PA-RISC is easy if your app is still not 64bit clean. And 32bit itanium binaries are first class citizens, running completely optimally and being used for CPU benchmarks.
Oops. Sorry. My mistake. I must have succumbed to all that intel marketing hype and believed that its "32-bit capability" was confined to running the x86 instruction set.
Itanium is not a bad chip by any means.
If you're interested in getting high scores on the SPEC FP benchmark and power consumption and heat output are no object. Sadly, for most real-world applications (where speculative execution, branch prediction etc. are useful), people are finding that itanic is a turkey. This is a great shame for intel, because itanic was hyped as the processor to end all processors. It was going to kill all RISC and legacy processors by virtue of its vast superiority. It has failed..
Killing the itanic workstations is probably the thin end of the wedge. When you have big iron servers, you often give your engineers workstations based on the same architecture for developing software. In recent months, many companies have been announcing the cancellation of their software on itanic, or even that they have no intention to port to itanic.
Without a large developer base for itanic, there will be no sustainable ecosystem. itanic has now been condemned to a slow, painful, withering death.
Do you mean the itanium sucks because it can't do another instruction set as fast as its own? How fast does Alpha, Mips, PPC, and Sun run x86 code?
They don't, however, they run the 32-bit instructions of their precursor instruction sets at native speed with no performace pentalty. Their 64-bit "modes" are extensions of the "32-bit" modes of their predecessors. AMD realised this was the way to go and did exactly that with AMD64.
Note that the exception to the above is Alpha. It was designed to replace the VAX (and to a lesser extent 32-bit MIPS). It does not run MIPS or VAX code, but it does have a 32-bit "mode" to make porting legacy software easier.
itanic doesn't have this. There aren't "32-bit" itanic instructions. It used to have a pentium emulator in hardware, but it was apallingly slow. IIRC benchmarking was forbidden, but some results leaked out onto a German website a while back. It was running Petium code at about 10-20% of the speed of a similarly clocked Pentium III.
Once again, the big iron people lead the way and the PeeCee world catches up 10 years later.
The itanic has always been snake oil, and some people (and companies) were clever enough to see that last decade when intel was touting it to be the next great thing that would kill RISC processors.
Luckily for intel, some companies were run by PHBs that didn't have a clue about processor design. In this way, intel managed to kill off development of Alpha (the fastest 64-bit processor in the world), MIPS and PA-RISC. What a way to nail your competition.
Some people were more forward-thinking and that's why POWER (and PowerPC), UltraSPARC (and SPARC64) and AMD64 survived or came about.
intel managed to completely and utterly fail to produce something that people wanted. It's expensive, hot, difficult to program, doesn't have an established software base (or operating system), and has lackluster performance on everything except the SPEC floating-point benchmarks. Thus it has found a niche amongst scientists and engineers with more money that sense and very good air-conditioning.
Over the years, intel and HP have tried very hard to silence the academic and professional itanic dissenters. Alas the PR and FUD machinery couldn't cope (as with all dictatorships) and the empire has crumbled.
It was really funny (and somewhat sad) when a couple of years back the IT press was talking about "the transition to 64-bit computing" when most people, except intel (actually, including intel, just not with itanic) had done it back in the '90s (DEC, SUN, SGI, Cray (maybe the 80's or 70's), HP).
Rather than being a radical new architecture, itanic was actually based on theoretical supercomputer designs of the 1970s that were overtaken by developments in RISC processors in the 1980s by IBM, Sun, SGI, DEC, Fujitsu and NEC.
However, those with the $$$$$$ get to write history, and as I mentioned above, the FUD machine managed to silence many credible critics. Perhaps this will be forgotten. In this case, the market has spoken.
What really bothers me, is that back in 1988 intel produced an absolutely brilliant processor called the 80860 and it died a death. It was genuinely ahead of its time, Unfortunately, poor marketting and MS-DOS sent it to an early grave.
Do you also remember how, in the last few years, prominent academic and professional critics of itanic have been silenced? Remember that university guy who had quite a comprehensive crititque on his website who was forced to replace it overnight with a retraction and an "explanation" of why itanic was "quite good after all"?
And what about the guy from NEC, or was it Fujistu who was sacked for publically declaring that itanic was a turkey (but less bluntly)?
It just goes to show, you can try your hardest to stifle dissent and sent the disidents to the gulags, but the truth gets out eventually, and the regieme is overthrown.
Apart from IBM, Sun was the only large company that didn't drink the intanic Kool Aid. Look what it did to SGI and everyone else. They all cancelled development of their own RISC processors (MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC) in order to get the "jam tomorrow" itanic.
Now that itanic has all but sunk, SGI and HP are in a very tricky situation, and are going to have to turn to Opteron (on in HP's case, intel's inferior clone "Nocona").
If itanic has been a technical and commercial failure, it has succeeded in one way. Namely, intel managed to kill of large swathes of its competition by persuading them to abandon their existing, working and accepted processor for the promise of itanic. intel may not rule the world from the bridge of the itanic, but it may dominate with its Opteron clone, by virtue of tha fact that HP will be putting it in all its Compaq Proliant servers.
Only a week ago,HP announced that it was buying $1.3 billion of its own shares because they were "undervalued."
Maybe this was the clue that itanic is getting scuttled, put out of it misery, at long last.
What next for HP? Will they resurrect Alpha and PA-RISC? I'm sure their good friends at intel will be more than happy to develop and fab them for them.
I can't remember whether it was plutonium oxide and how much he ingested. We used to work in a nulcear power station, and he was in Health Physics. I can't remember the exact figures, but I had a really low occupational dose from radiation being mainly an office worker (Reactor Physics). We worked at one of the UK's oldest Magnox stations (and hence most "dosey"). To give you an order of magnitude estimate, they figured out that his dose from ingested plutonium over 50 years would be about a tenth (IIRC) of my exposure from being present on site over 5 years. To put that in perspective too, it was approximately equivalent to natural background radiation from a very low-dose area c.f. some places where you can get several 10s (or well over 100) mili Sieverts a year from radon exposure alone.
You ralrely get any perspective from news stories on matters nulcear.
This is one reason why, despite being an environmentalist, I have little use for today's environmental "movement". The groups who go to great efforts to paint themselves green turn out to be watermelons.
I think the danger from a dirty bomb is more likely to be contamination and ingestion by people, plants and animals of the radioactive substances. This would lead to a long-term exposure to smallish amounts of radiation which, over many years, would result in an increase in cancer cases (and therefore deaths).
Because the legal thresholds for what counts as "contamination" are very low, such a weapon would render large areas uninhabitable. I for one certainly wouldn't want to live somewhere a dirty bomb had been detonated.
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It is worth reiterating that "we" have largely brought on Microsoft's dominance ourselves. "We" have not been critical and discerning enough. "We" have been sheep. "We" have accepted third-rate software as a matter of course because "we" don't want to have to consider or learn about the alternatives. "We" can't stomach being seen to be different from "everyone else."
Those of us who chose to be different and to use and support the better alternatives suffer to a degree because of the herd's attitude. However, our patience and diligence are already are being rewarded in many ways. Our computers are powerful tools. Yours are pathetic, shiny, patronising, broken toys.
BASIC (at least from my day) is not a great learning language. It is very much like old-fashioned FORTRAN. Evereything is very restrictive. There are only subroutines, no procedures or functions. There are no proper control structures, only IF THEN GOTO. Various implementations did fix certain shortcomings, but in general, BASIC is dreadful. Modern commercial BASICs aren't much better. Oh TrueBASIC, what became of you?
Maybe I'm stuck in tha past? I've always found KDE to be slow, until I got a dual 2.8GHz Xeon PC at work. Modern versions of GNOME seem to be quite lethargic and large too. I can't afford to keep buying new PCs all the time, and I'm afraid my athlon XP2000+ will have to do me at least another year.
I have an old PC in the house running Slackware 9.1 and GNOME 2.4 which is quite slow. The GNOME terminal runs like treacle on a cold winter's morning. If I fire up a traditional xterm, it's nice and fast.
I really wish I had time to delve through the source to see just where all this bloat and slowness is coming from. It used to be that KDE was the fatty boom boom of desktop environments, but the GNOME people seem to have out-done the C++ folks in plain old C.
What the heck is going on?
Anyway, life's too short to look at boring desktop environment code. Life's also too short to run a bloaty, slow desktop environment.
I'll just stick to a plain window manager and some xterms.
Would this happen to be the same company that messed up the Child Support Agency computer system?
Over a period of a year, life started to improve drastically. I got several pay rises and a promotion at work. It was as if a bolt of lightning had hit me and put some self-belief in my thick skull.
One day I had been for a interview for a new job. It was a long way away, and I didn't get home until late in the evening. It was pub quiz night at my local and my friends were there. Even though it was 10pm I decided to pop along anyway for a couple of pints with them and a bit of a laugh.
When I joined in the quiz, they's just got their answers back from another team having been marked. A lady had written "I love Jason Newstead" on the paper. They were teasing her about it. I joined in and said that he was the only clued-up and talented member of Metallica.
One thing led to another and we've been happily married for nearly two years.
And I got the job too :-)
Prayer s attempted communication with supernatural beings (SBs). The word derives from a 14th century French word (preiere) meaning "to obtain by entreaty." The most common use of the word "prayer" is asking an SB for some favor.
No wonder. This is the country where we built a tent by the river Thames to celebrate the Millenium and we still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. We don't do exciting over here.
I often think exactly the same thing when it's time to get up in the morning. Usually, once the day is done, the point is obvious. Hindsight is good.
About 4-5 years ago. Sun has been shipping GNOME and KDE for many years now, along with many GNU and Open Source tools. In recent years, Sun has done a lot of development work (and spent a lot of money on) GNOME. GNOME has been the official desktop of Solaris since Solaris 9. The dreaded CDE is still there for legacy reasons (and compliance with certain standards).
But this is slashdot, and we shouldn't let facts get in the way of a good argument.
Oops. Sorry. My mistake. I must have succumbed to all that intel marketing hype and believed that its "32-bit capability" was confined to running the x86 instruction set.
Itanium is not a bad chip by any means.
If you're interested in getting high scores on the SPEC FP benchmark and power consumption and heat output are no object. Sadly, for most real-world applications (where speculative execution, branch prediction etc. are useful), people are finding that itanic is a turkey. This is a great shame for intel, because itanic was hyped as the processor to end all processors. It was going to kill all RISC and legacy processors by virtue of its vast superiority. It has failed..
Without a large developer base for itanic, there will be no sustainable ecosystem. itanic has now been condemned to a slow, painful, withering death.
Come on HP, bring back Alpha and PA-RISC.
They don't, however, they run the 32-bit instructions of their precursor instruction sets at native speed with no performace pentalty. Their 64-bit "modes" are extensions of the "32-bit" modes of their predecessors. AMD realised this was the way to go and did exactly that with AMD64.
Note that the exception to the above is Alpha. It was designed to replace the VAX (and to a lesser extent 32-bit MIPS). It does not run MIPS or VAX code, but it does have a 32-bit "mode" to make porting legacy software easier.
itanic doesn't have this. There aren't "32-bit" itanic instructions. It used to have a pentium emulator in hardware, but it was apallingly slow. IIRC benchmarking was forbidden, but some results leaked out onto a German website a while back. It was running Petium code at about 10-20% of the speed of a similarly clocked Pentium III.
Once again, the big iron people lead the way and the PeeCee world catches up 10 years later.
Luckily for intel, some companies were run by PHBs that didn't have a clue about processor design. In this way, intel managed to kill off development of Alpha (the fastest 64-bit processor in the world), MIPS and PA-RISC. What a way to nail your competition.
Some people were more forward-thinking and that's why POWER (and PowerPC), UltraSPARC (and SPARC64) and AMD64 survived or came about.
intel managed to completely and utterly fail to produce something that people wanted. It's expensive, hot, difficult to program, doesn't have an established software base (or operating system), and has lackluster performance on everything except the SPEC floating-point benchmarks. Thus it has found a niche amongst scientists and engineers with more money that sense and very good air-conditioning.
Over the years, intel and HP have tried very hard to silence the academic and professional itanic dissenters. Alas the PR and FUD machinery couldn't cope (as with all dictatorships) and the empire has crumbled.
It was really funny (and somewhat sad) when a couple of years back the IT press was talking about "the transition to 64-bit computing" when most people, except intel (actually, including intel, just not with itanic) had done it back in the '90s (DEC, SUN, SGI, Cray (maybe the 80's or 70's), HP).
Rather than being a radical new architecture, itanic was actually based on theoretical supercomputer designs of the 1970s that were overtaken by developments in RISC processors in the 1980s by IBM, Sun, SGI, DEC, Fujitsu and NEC.
However, those with the $$$$$$ get to write history, and as I mentioned above, the FUD machine managed to silence many credible critics. Perhaps this will be forgotten. In this case, the market has spoken.
What really bothers me, is that back in 1988 intel produced an absolutely brilliant processor called the 80860 and it died a death. It was genuinely ahead of its time, Unfortunately, poor marketting and MS-DOS sent it to an early grave.
"It belongs in a museum." - Indiana Jones.
This is slashdot. Moderators smoke mysterious substances.
And what about the guy from NEC, or was it Fujistu who was sacked for publically declaring that itanic was a turkey (but less bluntly)?
It just goes to show, you can try your hardest to stifle dissent and sent the disidents to the gulags, but the truth gets out eventually, and the regieme is overthrown.
Aztec ritual? Wasn't that from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?
Apart from IBM, Sun was the only large company that didn't drink the intanic Kool Aid. Look what it did to SGI and everyone else. They all cancelled development of their own RISC processors (MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC) in order to get the "jam tomorrow" itanic.
Now that itanic has all but sunk, SGI and HP are in a very tricky situation, and are going to have to turn to Opteron (on in HP's case, intel's inferior clone "Nocona").
If itanic has been a technical and commercial failure, it has succeeded in one way. Namely, intel managed to kill of large swathes of its competition by persuading them to abandon their existing, working and accepted processor for the promise of itanic. intel may not rule the world from the bridge of the itanic, but it may dominate with its Opteron clone, by virtue of tha fact that HP will be putting it in all its Compaq Proliant servers.
Only a week ago,HP announced that it was buying $1.3 billion of its own shares because they were "undervalued."
Maybe this was the clue that itanic is getting scuttled, put out of it misery, at long last.
What next for HP? Will they resurrect Alpha and PA-RISC? I'm sure their good friends at intel will be more than happy to develop and fab them for them.
You ralrely get any perspective from news stories on matters nulcear.
Yes :-)
They'd be found out straight away. When it's their turn to make the tea, they'll get it wrong. You just can't fake proper tea.
Indeed :-)
:-)
None. The BBC just likes a good nuclear scare story, and John Large likes a bit of self-publicity.
:-)
I think the danger from a dirty bomb is more likely to be contamination and ingestion by people, plants and animals of the radioactive substances. This would lead to a long-term exposure to smallish amounts of radiation which, over many years, would result in an increase in cancer cases (and therefore deaths).
Because the legal thresholds for what counts as "contamination" are very low, such a weapon would render large areas uninhabitable. I for one certainly wouldn't want to live somewhere a dirty bomb had been detonated.