My high school physics teacher used Apple ][s with homemade photogates for our experiments in class. Three years later in college I saw Pentium 200s with expensive photogates doing the same thing with only one more digit of precision. I could only chuckle at how a Pentium had became an expensive stopwatch, especially when something as simple as an Apple ][ could have done just as good of a job.
IMHO K-8 should be without computers. They aren't necessary for learning that needs to be done, like grammmer and basic math. I didn't need a calculator until Trig/Pre-Calc, and even then rarely, and it wasn't until a year and a half ago (1 1/2 years of college) that I needed a powerful computer so I could run Mathematica. In High School typing classes should become mandatory, and all you need to learn how to type is a typewriter, not a pentium. I agree that beginning programing classes should be with BASIC and with tools like QBasic.
We should be concentrating more on making sure that those who go through school come out literate, creative, independent people. Take the money to update "outdated" computeres and pay the teachers more. We would get better teachers if we payed them a decent wage, none of this $29,000-$3?,000 for starting wages.
The big question is: Teachers or Computers, which are more important to teach our children? Should be an easy question to answer, right...... right?
I have been trying to figure out what MS has truly inovated sence it started. I can only think of a handful, like the "if carpel tunnel syndrom hasn't hit you yet it will soon" wheel mouse, minesweeper, Exchange, and the magic talking paperclip.
I don't think that I am the only person who wants to know what MS has truly inovated so I was hoping that some of you could list MS's inovations.
Although unrealistic for the average business with an online site, there were a couple of configurations with only 1 gigabit ethernet card. With that configuration Linux served 1270 pages while Win 2000 served 732 pages.
Again, a 1 gigabit ethernet card is a bit overboard for most businesses but it isn't completely unreasonable. That is what you get when you ask for the vendors to put up what ever machine they want to have tested.
Anyway, if you look at the RS6000 hardware they had 8 gigabit etherenet cards.
benefits came out of it, but nothing that wouldn't have come out of industry anyway (only cheaper)
I'm sure that microprocessors, the push for micronization, and several super light super strong plastics would have eventually showed up in industry without the inovations by the Apollo program but would they have been any cheeper than they are today, and would it have take another 10-20 years to get to the level that the Apollo program had. Would our $49 k6-2's really be any cheeper if microprocessors had been inovated by industry. Would our level of technology today be anywhere near what it is if we hadn't had the space program? Here is some of the inventions. http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/Daily News/NASA_spinoffs981001.html
Most new, truly inovative, technologys arrise from the needs of pure research. If we cut off pure research, as you are suggesting, then we can expect truly mold shattering inventions to become less frequent.
It is time for private industry to privatize space
I would like to hear you say that when Coca Cola starts putting up orbiting advertisements that block you and your dates view of the stars. If private industry privatizes space you can expect the Taco Bell Dog annoying us in even the most remote of places. Without the govenment preventing space from becoming the next greatest billboard by having the only game in town we can enjoy the views of the stars unobstructed. Eventually those advertisements will appear but not any time soon.
The moon was interesting because that was new, and we had the russians to beat
Well, the Russians may be out of the picture but with China develping a space program we may have another space race coming up.
It is also best for society to keep up pure research. If one looks at the chronicles of history, all of the great empires (except the British) started to collaps when scientific research for the sake of science was cut in funding to help fund, mostly military, but also other programs. Our ability to support pure scientific research, like exploring space and mars, is a necessity and something we should be proud of and support because without it our great society will fall victom to repeating history.
I didn't mention anything about being first. They aren't the first to put these types of products on Linux, Applix and StarOffice beat Corel to the Office suites, and the GIMP beat them to the market that Photo-Paint is in.
The point that I was trying to make was that they are attempting to create more of a market in Linux by releasing their products. By creating a market they might have a chance of surviving. If they push Linux, and more people switch over then there is a better chance for them to survive because their isn't a MS in that market. This isn't a, if I get there first maybe I can dominate, and more of a, maybe if I port my products and create a market there then maybe we won't die. Corel doesn't stand a chance in the MS Windows world, and it isn't MS produces a better office product (because they don't), it's because MS doesn't play fair.
As for making rock solid products, have you ever used Corel WordPerfect Office Suite, because it doesn't sound like you have. WordPerfect Office 8 is a powerful, robust, and polished Office Suite. Quattro Pro 8 may not be up to Excel's standards, but at least it doesn't contain a doom game that you can't remove. I've used MS Office 95, 97, and StarOffice 5.2 on machines at my school, and at work and from my experiences neither of them have both the robustness and being polished as WordPerfect Office. MS Office may look nice but the last time I used Word it crashed on me three times in five minutes, the last time taking down PowerPoint and NT, not exactly robust. StarOffice may be robust, but it is slow and definately not polished. Now if Corel WordPerfect Suite 2000 follows in the same path of being a great product that the suite has had sence I started using it when Borland incorperated WordPerfect 5 into their office suite, then I can't wait until the Linux version shows up in the mail.
Before you go and attack a company you should actually TRY their products, you might be surprised. If you want to talk about companies that should be concentrating on makeing rock-solid products it should be MS. They had rock-solid products, once, NT 3.51 and Office 95 come to mind, and then they broke them.
Actually they are not giving away all of their apps. They are charging $100 for their office suite, and when Corel Draw comes out they plan on charging roughly the same as they are charging for the Windows version.
The three things that they have given away, Corel Linux, Photo-Paint, and WordPerfect 8 have been for good reasons. The first two are because the market value of Linux and a product like Photo-Paint is zero, Linux for obvious reasons, and Photo-Paint has to compete with the GIMP.
As for WordPerfect 8, my guess is they wanted to gain their marketshare back. By catering to the Linux community they hoped that people would use it, and then pay for the full WordPerfect Suite 2000, with WP 9. Also, if they want to be able to sell their products they need Linux to grow, and with one of the biggest complaints about Linux being that it has no real commercial and home use products (although FUD, it is what a lot of people believe) they needed to show that there is in fact everything that you can get on Windows for Linux.
As for your question about MS.net. I have a feeling that we won't have to worry too much about it, and I'm not implying anything about the trial. MS is pissing too many people off, and this will continue to agrivate them. I have meet too many people who are tired of MS jerking them around, and telling them what to do, and are getting ready to either stop using some of their products or not upgrade. Major companies are starting to look to other solutions, even different Office Suites, because it is becoming too expensive to upgrade, especially now that MS is pulling roving licensing and requiring that every machine that might use Office must have a seperate license. Also with MS not having the same leverage on the OEMs as they used to, they won't be able to force it down everyones throat. It won't fly.
The brittleness would depend on how quickly you heated it up, and if you threw it on the floor right after you removed it.
Today, people have found out that if you submerge an object in liquid nitrogen or liquid O2 then let it heat up to room temperature over the span of ~week that it actually increases the strength of the material, at least it works for metals. (Over_simplification)This occures due to the material aligning itself into a stronger crystal lattice, which will remain if the heating process is not so sudden as cause enough immediate energy to break the bonds. When the material finishes reaching room temp, if it was heated slowly enough, the stronger crystal lattice will remain, ergo making the object stronger.(/Over_simplification)
From what I have heard, disposable razors that have had this done to them will keep their edge for months.
I doubt that they waited a long enough time for that to happen. And of course, if they heated it up too quickly then the material would expand too quickly and it would shatter.
Sure it seems like a waste of money for a Celeron 366, but imagine what you could do to a Athlon 1GHz with this system. They nearly doubled the clock on the Celeron, although I doubt one could do that to a 1GHz machine, but even an added 300 Mhz is quite a bit of improvement.
Test with the cheeper stuff then move up to the expensive computers. Imagine you just spent $4000+ on a brand spank'n new computer then do this to it and it breaks it. Whoops.
Once you peek at it, you're infected with Sun Intellectual Property and should be careful about "appropriating" their ideas in your own code. If you do change the Solaris source, you have to give it to Sun to lock in...
Perhaps I read the article wrong, but what I got out of it was, you could modify the source but don't call it Solaris, not, you can modify the source but you have to give us those modifications."I am happy to give someone Solaris source code and let them do whatever they want with it, if they don't use the name 'Solaris' when they are done." Sun's vice president and general manager for Solaris Software.
Also, it seems more like they are trying to open it up more so that people can write better programs for it, and allow for hardware manufactures to support Solaris better. This is a really good thing because one of the many reasons x86 Solaris isn't very good is its lack of hardware support.
UltraSparc processors perform a little more poorly than current x86, PPC and Alpha processors
True, the UltraSPARC II has poorer Integer and Floating point performance then the three processors that you mentioned. Of course I wouldn't buy a Dodge Ram if I really wanted a Viper. If I wanted a good 16 processor server, oh wait x86, PPC, and Alpha can't do that, whoops. FPU and INT performance isn't the end all to be all. Look at what SPARC stands for, Symetric Processor Architecture, it may not be MIPS but the E10K seems to be quite a hit. The UltraSPARC processor is not out there to be the sports car of processors, it is out there to build the infrastructure that is needed. Also, the UltraSPARC I/II processor architecture is 5 years old, and going to be replaced by the UltraSPARC III architecture, which on top of improving INT and FPU, will be able to scale up to 1024 processors, I want to see the standard P6 or even Wilmetta arch scale like that.
Although Solaris may not be the best UNIX out there, one has to admire its ability to survive. Other, what some would call more fit to survive, UNICes like IRIX have folded. Right now Solaris is the most widely sold Commercial UNIX out there. With Solaris 8 being free, for 8 or less processor machines, and soon to be open, one should not expect Solaris or Sun to disappear any time soon. Probably the best feature of Solaris is its ablility to adapt.
Was this event scheduled for the same time as PC Expo? If so, it was no wonder that only 300 hundred people showed up. It seems that the people who might have shown up went to the expo that was more prominent, ie PC Expo.
Even if the original quote is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from Magic" the quote could be altered to replace magic with God without losing meaning. If a race's technology is advanced enough then many could equate it with being a Godlike.
Anyway, just because someone accendentally misquoted something doesn't mean you should label them "troll". I'm sure that you have misquoted people before.
First that depends on whether when he mentioned Linux if he was actually discussing all free *nices. I know that, well at least last year, Hot Mail ran on Solaris and OpenBSD.
Also, if you read the Win2000 license it mentions that there are a couple services and products that are under the GPL license and mentions where to get the source code.
MS may not be using Linux for external services but they are probably using it for testing and comparison.
I would look more to insurance companies and old not tech blue chip companies. Those are generally more stingy about using something this new and without the backing and support of a very big company.
There are quite a few supercomputers out there doing things other than nuclear bomb research, but one must understand that that research requires intensive computing. Anything that deals with simulating the motion of large numbers of particles requires intensive computing, not just bomb research.
Q: Why are such huge computers are needed for bomb symulation, or fusion power research etc...?
A: For each particle that you want to simulate you need nine dimentions to specify where it is and where is it going, three for position, three for linear momentum, and three for angular momentum. Each dimention specified takes up roughly one FLOP (floating point operation per second), over simplified but it gets the point across. Therefore each particle requires nine FLOPS. So a 12 teraflop machine can keep track of ~1.33E12 particles. This may seem like a lot of particles to keep track of but considering things like Avregadros(sp?) number...
An example roughly of how intense this is. This new machine could do a decent job simulating a mid-sized tokamac fusion facility, if you use the quick and somewhat inaccurate way of simulating.
If you were to take a look at the top 500 most powerful machines you would find that most of the ones at the very top are either doing nuclear weapons testing or fusion power research.
Oh, in case you are wondering, the government changed one of their supercomputers that was doing weapons simulation over to traffic simulation last year. Traffic simulations also require several dimensions per car, again, three for position.... On top of those they need to worry about where roads go and where unmovable objects go and, of course, people.
Obviously not enough if the Palm tent is full and the PocketPC area is nearly empty as the commentary implies.
Also that Linux seems to making a strong showing there, even if it is off in a corner. The idea that RedHat gave out 400 CD in one day, mostly to suites is very encouraging, IMHO.
Having a big marketing budget can always help a product, but if they don't deliver eventually no matter how big you marketing budget is it won't help.
It seems that every day someone with an extremely creative mind and a lot of ambition uses it to create something extremely useless. Kind of reminds me of that article on Dot Matrix Printer music, really creative and unique, but WHY?
Perhaps some good will come out of this though. If enough people in the US start trying to do this then maybe the cell phone companies will start to get us up to where Japan in terms of bandwidth. Or maybe they will just milk everyone for money.
They do not all behave the same. Oracle and Sun have good products. Some people may not like those products but you have a choice if you don't like that product. If you don't like Oracle then you can always by Sybase. If you don't like Sun, then get another Unix.
You don't see Sun or Oracle falsefing evidence to support their claims. You don't see them attacking their competition with lies, FUD or unfair business practices.
As for Sun being total control freaks, I assume that you are talking about Java, right? They needed to keep a tight control on Java while the trial with MS over lisencing issues played out. The minute that they released it to the ISO is the minute that MS could start to try to "inovate, and extend" Java, mutating it into a piece of junk. Don't be surprised if it gets released to the ISO in the relatively near future.
The only thing I can see that is the same among the companies that you mentioned is that all of the CEO's have an ego problem.
The current Transmeta chip is not supposed to be the most powerful thing out there, and definately not to be a primary server. It is there to be used in devices that don't need a full powered Intel, AMD... the point is that it has lower power consumption, and produces low heat. It is perfect for a laptop, palm device, and embedded devices, and that is the market that they are after. In my opinion it would be a waste of time, and effert, for Transmeta to implement SMP support into the Crusoe. SMP support takes up space on the chip, space they could use for something more practicle for the market they are aiming at.
Also, just because you have more than one processor doesn't mean that it is the greatest thing out there. There are a lot of things one needs to consider before dealing with SMP machines, like is it necessary, or will the software that you are using effectively use the SMP capabilities of the machine? I don't need SMP to do what I do at home, in fact on fast expensive chip is better for what I do at home. Frankly, in the lab that I work, the code isn't optimized to take advantage of SMP, and is actually faster to run my multiple symulations on seperate machines than load them up onto one SMP machine.
The one use I could see for having SMP capabilities for the Transmeta chip is for a backup chip for a server attached to a UPS. The power goes out, you don't want the server to die, no one can connect to the server because their machines are dead, switch to the Crusoe that is emulating the same chip as your server and let it keep the server alive until the power comes back up.
Although LCD technology is not exactly new, the introduction of LCD screens into the desktop market in mass quantities is. This introduction, along with the relatively cheap material, will drop the price of LCD monitors rather quickly as companies start to ramp up their production of them.
The price of materials for an LCD screen will soon become cheaper than that of your regular CRT tube. A good analogy is the difference between vaccume tubes and transistors. At first it was still cheaper to use tubes until transistors had developed a little more, and then the transistors took off (Side note, we can thank the Apollo program for pushing for miniturization of computers, their need for as little weight as possible made SI possible much sooner than through regular inovation). Liquid crystal technology is still developing, not only by the companies that make the displays but also by research teams at universities. I know that the physics department at the university that I am attending is doing reseach on LCD's and making them even cheaper.
In my opinion LCD prices will continue to drop until they are below the price of CRT tube monitors. Any major breakthroughs will only serve to increase the speed at which it drops.
Just because Sun hasn't released a drastically new chipset sence 1995, or was it 96, when the Ultra-1's came out doesn't mean that they should be attacked. They have been working on the Ultra 3 architecture for quite some time now and should be release this summer. Theoretically it should be fairly different, at least from what I have been told.
Now, here is a curious question. At what point does this actually save you money? For all we know this thing could cost more than what the average user would need to spend in order to double their ram. Heck, if this thing cost even $175 it wouldn't be worth it for me to buy it, yet.
This is great for server news but from what I have read, most of the people here seem to think this will be great for their PC. Maybe in a couple of years when we need more ram to do whatever we are doing or after the price goes down
New MS.net, allowing crackers easier access to millions of computers through one site.
By using our MS Inova$ion (copyright pending) we have designed a way for on cracker who has entered our site to gain access to millions of machines world wide to do their bidding.
Are you a person who creates virsus but is tired of having to wait for a virus to propogate through normal channels? Through proper insertion into MS.net a virus can do multi-billion dollar damage in a matter of seconds.
Do you want to DDoS a site, or multiple sites, but waiting for trojan horses to work is starting to frustrate you? With MS.net you can access millions of machines though just one, so you don't have to wait.
Order MS.net now.
Ugg. If this product was release by a company that I could trust it would be a different story. Unfortunately MS has betrayed any trust that I might of had for them time and time again.
This is probably flamebait but if I don't say it I will explode.
Considering how long it took for hybrid cars to finally be produced (special thanks to Texaco for buying most of the patents to preventing a hybrid car from being mass produced) I have a bad feeling that one of the oil companies will try their hardest to prevent genetic algorithms from improving the average cars engine. I don't know how they will prevent, whether it be that they buy up some patents (if there are any) or what.
Considering that I have know about hybrid cars sence the mid-nineties and considering that they are finally being produced this year... I just don't have the faith enought to believe that this will be applicable for quite some time.
That, on top of the fact that the US seems to have a SUV fetish right now. It is almost like people are proud of the fact that they get ten gallons to the mile... er... ten miles to the gallon.
While I'm on this subject I would just like to thank Toyota for producing the first mass produced hybrid car. Now all of us who admire things like the Geo Metro can move to something even better.
The Appellate court may have sided with MS in the previous ruling by Judge Jackson against MS, but that does not necessarily mean that they are firmly in MS's pocket. There are some key points as to why I believe that they are not.
1) They have decided to see this one En Blanc, unlike the previous two trials. But three of the Judges have been disqualified from sitting on the case due to conflict of interest. They are obviously trying to show that they are taking this case with the utmost seriousness.
2) That seriousness was also shown in their haste to accept the trial. As soon as MS had submitted their request for appeal the case was accepted, no waiting at all. They were expecting this, and have obviously started getting ready for the apeal.
3) Most of the Justices were appointed during the Reagan era. Now most would say that this would help MS, but it actually hurts them. Although they are conservative judges who most likely want to help big business, they also know that monopolies hurt business and hurt the economy and therefore are more likely to side against a monopoly.
Perhaps in the previous two appeals they didn't feel that the case was strong enough, or the punishment severe enough. Perhaps they have been waiting for MS to even more blatently abuse its power so that when it gets caught they can rule for a harsher penelty then what had been submitted before. Perhaps not, perhaps they will continue to side with MS. I'm just speculating here.
If one goes by the rulings from the previous cases then it seems obvious that they will rule in favor of MS, but that does not necessarily mean that they will. This isn't just about integrating IE into Windows anymore, this is much bigger and will have a much larger impact on the economy then the previous cases. The Justices have obviously been following the case, they know how MS acted throughout the trial. Not just one or two Justices but all of them, and they are informed enough to stop 3 of them from sitting due to conflict on interest. If they follow their conservative background then they will rule in favor of the economy, which is against MS.
We also may never know how they would rule if the Supreme Court takes it.
Slashdot Mirror
My high school physics teacher used Apple ][s with homemade photogates for our experiments in class. Three years later in college I saw Pentium 200s with expensive photogates doing the same thing with only one more digit of precision. I could only chuckle at how a Pentium had became an expensive stopwatch, especially when something as simple as an Apple ][ could have done just as good of a job.
... right?
IMHO K-8 should be without computers. They aren't necessary for learning that needs to be done, like grammmer and basic math.
I didn't need a calculator until Trig/Pre-Calc, and even then rarely, and it wasn't until a year and a half ago (1 1/2 years of college) that I needed a powerful computer so I could run Mathematica. In High School typing classes should become mandatory, and all you need to learn how to type is a typewriter, not a pentium. I agree that beginning programing classes should be with BASIC and with tools like QBasic.
We should be concentrating more on making sure that those who go through school come out literate, creative, independent people. Take the money to update "outdated" computeres and pay the teachers more. We would get better teachers if we payed them a decent wage, none of this $29,000-$3?,000 for starting wages.
The big question is: Teachers or Computers, which are more important to teach our children? Should be an easy question to answer, right...
I have been trying to figure out what MS has truly inovated sence it started. I can only think of a handful, like the "if carpel tunnel syndrom hasn't hit you yet it will soon" wheel mouse, minesweeper, Exchange, and the magic talking paperclip.
I don't think that I am the only person who wants to know what MS has truly inovated so I was hoping that some of you could list MS's inovations.
Thank you.
Although unrealistic for the average business with an online site, there were a couple of configurations with only 1 gigabit ethernet card. With that configuration Linux served 1270 pages while Win 2000 served 732 pages.
Again, a 1 gigabit ethernet card is a bit overboard for most businesses but it isn't completely unreasonable. That is what you get when you ask for the vendors to put up what ever machine they want to have tested.
Anyway, if you look at the RS6000 hardware they had 8 gigabit etherenet cards.
benefits came out of it, but nothing that wouldn't have come out of industry anyway (only cheaper)
y News/NASA_spinoffs981001.html
I'm sure that microprocessors, the push for micronization, and several super light super strong plastics would have eventually showed up in industry without the inovations by the Apollo program but would they have been any cheeper than they are today, and would it have take another 10-20 years to get to the level that the Apollo program had. Would our $49 k6-2's really be any cheeper if microprocessors had been inovated by industry. Would our level of technology today be anywhere near what it is if we hadn't had the space program?
Here is some of the inventions.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/Dail
Most new, truly inovative, technologys arrise from the needs of pure research. If we cut off pure research, as you are suggesting, then we can expect truly mold shattering inventions to become less frequent.
It is time for private industry to privatize space
I would like to hear you say that when Coca Cola starts putting up orbiting advertisements that block you and your dates view of the stars. If private industry privatizes space you can expect the Taco Bell Dog annoying us in even the most remote of places. Without the govenment preventing space from becoming the next greatest billboard by having the only game in town we can enjoy the views of the stars unobstructed. Eventually those advertisements will appear but
not any time soon.
The moon was interesting because that was new, and we had the russians to beat
Well, the Russians may be out of the picture but with China develping a space program we may have another space race coming up.
It is also best for society to keep up pure research. If one looks at the chronicles of history, all of the great empires (except the British) started to collaps when scientific research for the sake of science was cut in funding to help fund, mostly military, but also other programs. Our ability to support pure scientific research, like exploring space and mars, is a necessity and something we should be proud of and support because without it our great society will fall victom to repeating history.
I didn't mention anything about being first. They aren't the first to put these types of products on Linux, Applix and StarOffice beat Corel to the Office suites, and the GIMP beat them to the market that Photo-Paint is in.
The point that I was trying to make was that they are attempting to create more of a market in Linux by releasing their products. By creating a market they might have a chance of surviving. If they push Linux, and more people switch over then there is a better chance for them to survive because their isn't a MS in that market. This isn't a, if I get there first maybe I can dominate, and more of a, maybe if I port my products and create a market there then maybe we won't die. Corel doesn't stand a chance in the MS Windows world, and it isn't MS produces a better office product (because they don't), it's because MS doesn't play fair.
As for making rock solid products, have you ever used Corel WordPerfect Office Suite, because it doesn't sound like you have. WordPerfect Office 8 is a powerful, robust, and polished Office Suite. Quattro Pro 8 may not be up to Excel's standards, but at least it doesn't contain a doom game that you can't remove. I've used MS Office 95, 97, and StarOffice 5.2 on machines at my school, and at work and from my experiences neither of them have both the robustness and being polished as WordPerfect Office. MS Office may look nice but the last time I used Word it crashed on me three times in five minutes, the last time taking down PowerPoint and NT, not exactly robust. StarOffice may be robust, but it is slow and definately not polished. Now if Corel WordPerfect Suite 2000 follows in the same path of being a great product that the suite has had sence I started using it when Borland incorperated WordPerfect 5 into their office suite, then I can't wait until the Linux version shows up in the mail.
Before you go and attack a company you should actually TRY their products, you might be surprised. If you want to talk about companies that should be concentrating on makeing rock-solid products it should be MS. They had rock-solid products, once, NT 3.51 and Office 95 come to mind, and then they broke them.
Actually they are not giving away all of their apps. They are charging $100 for their office suite, and when Corel Draw comes out they plan on charging roughly the same as they are charging for the Windows version.
.net. I have a feeling that we won't have to worry too much about it, and I'm not implying anything about the trial. MS is pissing too many people off, and this will continue to agrivate them. I have meet too many people who are tired of MS jerking them around, and telling them what to do, and are getting ready to either stop using some of their products or not upgrade. Major companies are starting to look to other solutions, even different Office Suites, because it is becoming too expensive to upgrade, especially now that MS is pulling roving licensing and requiring that every machine that might use Office must have a seperate license. Also with MS not having the same leverage on the OEMs as they used to, they won't be able to force it down everyones throat. It won't fly.
The three things that they have given away, Corel Linux, Photo-Paint, and WordPerfect 8 have been for good reasons. The first two are because the market value of Linux and a product like Photo-Paint is zero, Linux for obvious reasons, and Photo-Paint has to compete with the GIMP.
As for WordPerfect 8, my guess is they wanted to gain their marketshare back. By catering to the Linux community they hoped that people would use it, and then pay for the full WordPerfect Suite 2000, with WP 9. Also, if they want to be able to sell their products they need Linux to grow, and with one of the biggest complaints about Linux being that it has no real commercial and home use products (although FUD, it is what a lot of people believe) they needed to show that there is in fact everything that you can get on Windows for Linux.
As for your question about MS
The brittleness would depend on how quickly you heated it up, and if you threw it on the floor right after you removed it.
/Over_simplification)
Today, people have found out that if you submerge an object in liquid nitrogen or liquid O2 then let it heat up to room temperature over the span of ~week that it actually increases the strength of the material, at least it works for metals. (Over_simplification)This occures due to the material aligning itself into a stronger crystal lattice, which will remain if the heating process is not so sudden as cause enough immediate energy to break the bonds. When the material finishes reaching room temp, if it was heated slowly enough, the stronger crystal lattice will remain, ergo making the object stronger.(
From what I have heard, disposable razors that have had this done to them will keep their edge for months.
I doubt that they waited a long enough time for that to happen. And of course, if they heated it up too quickly then the material would expand too quickly and it would shatter.
Hope that was helpful.
Sure it seems like a waste of money for a Celeron 366, but imagine what you could do to a Athlon 1GHz with this system. They nearly doubled the clock on the Celeron, although I doubt one could do that to a 1GHz machine, but even an added 300 Mhz is quite a bit of improvement.
Test with the cheeper stuff then move up to the expensive computers. Imagine you just spent $4000+ on a brand spank'n new computer then do this to it and it breaks it. Whoops.
Umm, let's start from the begining here.
Once you peek at it, you're infected with Sun Intellectual Property and should be careful about "appropriating" their ideas in your own code. If you do change the Solaris source, you have to give it to Sun to lock in...
Perhaps I read the article wrong, but what I got out of it was, you could modify the source but don't call it Solaris, not, you can modify the source but you have to give us those modifications."I am happy to give someone Solaris source code and let them do whatever they want with it, if they don't use the name 'Solaris' when they are done." Sun's vice president and general manager for Solaris Software.
Also, it seems more like they are trying to open it up more so that people can write better programs for it, and allow for hardware manufactures to support Solaris better. This is a really good thing because one of the many reasons x86 Solaris isn't very good is its lack of hardware support.
UltraSparc processors perform a little more poorly than current x86, PPC and Alpha processors
True, the UltraSPARC II has poorer Integer and Floating point performance then the three processors that you mentioned. Of course I wouldn't buy a Dodge Ram if I really wanted a Viper. If I wanted a good 16 processor server, oh wait x86, PPC, and Alpha can't do that, whoops. FPU and INT performance isn't the end all to be all. Look at what SPARC stands for, Symetric Processor Architecture, it may not be MIPS but the E10K seems to be quite a hit. The UltraSPARC processor is not out there to be the sports car of processors, it is out there to build the infrastructure that is needed. Also, the UltraSPARC I/II processor architecture is 5 years old, and going to be replaced by the UltraSPARC III architecture, which on top of improving INT and FPU, will be able to scale up to 1024 processors, I want to see the standard P6 or even Wilmetta arch scale like that.
Although Solaris may not be the best UNIX out there, one has to admire its ability to survive. Other, what some would call more fit to survive, UNICes like IRIX have folded. Right now Solaris is the most widely sold Commercial UNIX out there. With Solaris 8 being free, for 8 or less processor machines, and soon to be open, one should not expect Solaris or Sun to disappear any time soon. Probably the best feature of Solaris is its ablility to adapt.
Was this event scheduled for the same time as PC Expo? If so, it was no wonder that only 300 hundred people showed up. It seems that the people who might have shown up went to the expo that was more prominent, ie PC Expo.
Of course I could be completely wrong.
Even if the original quote is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from Magic" the quote could be altered to replace magic with God without losing meaning. If a race's technology is advanced enough then many could equate it with being a Godlike.
Anyway, just because someone accendentally misquoted something doesn't mean you should label them "troll". I'm sure that you have misquoted people before.
First that depends on whether when he mentioned Linux if he was actually discussing all free *nices. I know that, well at least last year, Hot Mail ran on Solaris and OpenBSD.
Also, if you read the Win2000 license it mentions that there are a couple services and products that are under the GPL license and mentions where to get the source code.
MS may not be using Linux for external services but they are probably using it for testing and comparison.
I would look more to insurance companies and old not tech blue chip companies. Those are generally more stingy about using something this new and without the backing and support of a very big company.
There are quite a few supercomputers out there doing things other than nuclear bomb research, but one must understand that that research requires intensive computing. Anything that deals with simulating the motion of large numbers of particles requires intensive computing, not just bomb research.
.... On top of those they need to worry about where roads go and where unmovable objects go and, of course, people.
Q: Why are such huge computers are needed for bomb symulation, or fusion power research etc...?
A: For each particle that you want to simulate you need nine dimentions to specify where it is and where is it going, three for position, three for linear momentum, and three for angular momentum. Each dimention specified takes up roughly one FLOP (floating point operation per second), over simplified but it gets the point across. Therefore each particle requires nine FLOPS. So a 12 teraflop machine can keep track of ~1.33E12 particles. This may seem like a lot of particles to keep track of but considering things like Avregadros(sp?) number...
An example roughly of how intense this is. This new machine could do a decent job simulating a mid-sized tokamac fusion facility, if you use the quick and somewhat inaccurate way of simulating.
If you were to take a look at the top 500 most powerful machines you would find that most of the ones at the very top are either doing nuclear weapons testing or fusion power research.
Oh, in case you are wondering, the government changed one of their supercomputers that was doing weapons simulation over to traffic simulation last year. Traffic simulations also require several dimensions per car, again, three for position
Obviously not enough if the Palm tent is full and the PocketPC area is nearly empty as the commentary implies.
Also that Linux seems to making a strong showing there, even if it is off in a corner. The idea that RedHat gave out 400 CD in one day, mostly to suites is very encouraging, IMHO.
Having a big marketing budget can always help a product, but if they don't deliver eventually no matter how big you marketing budget is it won't help.
Amen.
It seems that every day someone with an extremely creative mind and a lot of ambition uses it to create something extremely useless. Kind of reminds me of that article on Dot Matrix Printer music, really creative and unique, but WHY?
Perhaps some good will come out of this though. If enough people in the US start trying to do this then maybe the cell phone companies will start to get us up to where Japan in terms of bandwidth. Or maybe they will just milk everyone for money.
Oracle==Sun==...!=Microsoft
They do not all behave the same. Oracle and Sun have good products. Some people may not like those products but you have a choice if you don't like that product.
If you don't like Oracle then you can always by Sybase. If you don't like Sun, then get another Unix.
You don't see Sun or Oracle falsefing evidence to support their claims. You don't see them attacking their competition with lies, FUD or unfair business practices.
As for Sun being total control freaks, I assume that you are talking about Java, right? They needed to keep a tight control on Java while the trial with MS over lisencing issues played out. The minute that they released it to the ISO is the minute that MS could start to try to "inovate, and extend" Java, mutating it into a piece of junk. Don't be surprised if it gets released to the ISO in the relatively near future.
The only thing I can see that is the same among the companies that you mentioned is that all of the CEO's have an ego problem.
The current Transmeta chip is not supposed to be the most powerful thing out there, and definately not to be a primary server. It is there to be used in devices that don't need a full powered Intel, AMD ... the point is that it has lower power consumption, and produces low heat. It is perfect for a laptop, palm device, and embedded devices, and that is the market that they are after. In my opinion it would be a waste of time, and effert, for Transmeta to implement SMP support into the Crusoe. SMP support takes up space on the chip, space they could use for something more practicle for the market they are aiming at.
Also, just because you have more than one processor doesn't mean that it is the greatest thing out there. There are a lot of things one needs to consider before dealing with SMP machines, like is it necessary, or will the software that you are using effectively use the SMP capabilities of the machine? I don't need SMP to do what I do at home, in fact on fast expensive chip is better for what I do at home. Frankly, in the lab that I work, the code isn't optimized to take advantage of SMP, and is actually faster to run my multiple symulations on seperate machines than load them up onto one SMP machine.
The one use I could see for having SMP capabilities for the Transmeta chip is for a backup chip for a server attached to a UPS. The power goes out, you don't want the server to die, no one can connect to the server because their machines are dead, switch to the Crusoe that is emulating the same chip as your server and let it keep the server alive until the power comes back up.
Although LCD technology is not exactly new, the introduction of LCD screens into the desktop market in mass quantities is. This introduction, along with the relatively cheap material, will drop the price of LCD monitors rather quickly as companies start to ramp up their production of them.
The price of materials for an LCD screen will soon become cheaper than that of your regular CRT tube. A good analogy is the difference between vaccume tubes and transistors. At first it was still cheaper to use tubes until transistors had developed a little more, and then the transistors took off (Side note, we can thank the Apollo program for pushing for miniturization of computers, their need for as little weight as possible made SI possible much sooner than through regular inovation).
Liquid crystal technology is still developing, not only by the companies that make the displays but also by research teams at universities. I know that the physics department at the university that I am attending is doing reseach on LCD's and making them even cheaper.
Demand increasing
+Production increasing
+Competition existing
+Inovation
=Lower costs.
In my opinion LCD prices will continue to drop until they are below the price of CRT tube monitors. Any major breakthroughs will only serve to increase the speed at which it drops.
Just because Sun hasn't released a drastically new chipset sence 1995, or was it 96, when the Ultra-1's came out doesn't mean that they should be attacked. They have been working on the Ultra 3 architecture for quite some time now and should be release this summer. Theoretically it should be fairly different, at least from what I have been told.
Now, here is a curious question. At what point does this actually save you money? For all we know this thing could cost more than what the average user would need to spend in order to double their ram. Heck, if this thing cost even $175 it wouldn't be worth it for me to buy it, yet.
This is great for server news but from what I have read, most of the people here seem to think this will be great for their PC. Maybe in a couple of years when we need more ram to do whatever we are doing or after the price goes down
In principle, yes we could. One minor drawback though, a simple little thing known as ethics.
Am I the only one who finds this mildly disturbing? Sure the idea is creative and unique, but dot matrix music? Well, whatever floats their boat.
New MS .net, allowing crackers easier access to millions of computers through one site.
.net a virus can do multi-billion dollar damage in a matter of seconds.
.net you can access millions of machines though just one, so you don't have to wait.
.net now.
By using our MS Inova$ion (copyright pending) we have designed a way for on cracker who has entered our site to gain access to millions of machines world wide to do their bidding.
Are you a person who creates virsus but is tired of having to wait for a virus to propogate through normal channels? Through proper insertion into MS
Do you want to DDoS a site, or multiple sites, but waiting for trojan horses to work is starting to frustrate you? With MS
Order MS
Ugg. If this product was release by a company that I could trust it would be a different story. Unfortunately MS has betrayed any trust that I might of had for them time and time again.
This is probably flamebait but if I don't say it I will explode.
Considering how long it took for hybrid cars to finally be produced (special thanks to Texaco for buying most of the patents to preventing a hybrid car from being mass produced) I have a bad feeling that one of the oil companies will try their hardest to prevent genetic algorithms from improving the average cars engine. I don't know how they will prevent, whether it be that they buy up some patents (if there are any) or what.
Considering that I have know about hybrid cars sence the mid-nineties and considering that they are finally being produced this year... I just don't have the faith enought to believe that this will be applicable for quite some time.
That, on top of the fact that the US seems to have a SUV fetish right now. It is almost like people are proud of the fact that they get ten gallons to the mile... er... ten miles to the gallon.
While I'm on this subject I would just like to thank Toyota for producing the first mass produced hybrid car. Now all of us who admire things like the Geo Metro can move to something even better.
I am going to play devils advocate for this one.
The Appellate court may have sided with MS in the previous ruling by Judge Jackson against MS, but that does not necessarily mean that they are firmly in MS's pocket. There are some key points as to why I believe that they are not.
1) They have decided to see this one En Blanc, unlike the previous two trials. But three of the Judges have been disqualified from sitting on the case due to conflict of interest. They are obviously trying to show that they are taking this case with the utmost seriousness.
2) That seriousness was also shown in their haste to accept the trial. As soon as MS had submitted their request for appeal the case was accepted, no waiting at all. They were expecting this, and have obviously started getting ready for the apeal.
3) Most of the Justices were appointed during the Reagan era. Now most would say that this would help MS, but it actually hurts them. Although they are conservative judges who most likely want to help big business, they also know that monopolies hurt business and hurt the economy and therefore are more likely to side against a monopoly.
Perhaps in the previous two appeals they didn't feel that the case was strong enough, or the punishment severe enough. Perhaps they have been waiting for MS to even more blatently abuse its power so that when it gets caught they can rule for a harsher penelty then what had been submitted before. Perhaps not, perhaps they will continue to side with MS. I'm just speculating here.
If one goes by the rulings from the previous cases then it seems obvious that they will rule in favor of MS, but that does not necessarily mean that they will. This isn't just about integrating IE into Windows anymore, this is much bigger and will have a much larger impact on the economy then the previous cases. The Justices have obviously been following the case, they know how MS acted throughout the trial. Not just one or two Justices but all of them, and they are informed enough to stop 3 of them from sitting due to conflict on interest. If they follow their conservative background then they will rule in favor of the economy, which is against MS.
We also may never know how they would rule if the Supreme Court takes it.
Only time will tell at this point.