If Andover is going to spring for some "real" hardware then why are you suggesting an Intel based box? I would have to say go with Alpha, or UltraSPARC. Although a Quad-Xeon machine ain't bad, a dual-processor Ultra would probably be a whole lot better for this job. Some Ultras are hot swappable, but the problem with hot swap is whether or not the OS can handle it.
What is going on with the comments today. Everyone seems to be saying, roughly, 'What if SGI releases this under GPL and someone other than Linux uses it! That would be bad!' Excuse me!
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of releasing something open source was so that ANYONE could use it, so long as they published the code and allowed people to modify it. The code, although in a sense given to Linux, is not just for Linux.
Sure there could be a problem of someone like MS taking the code using it and not publishing it. They would be breaking the law if they did, and if it ever got out then they would be screwed. But assuming that they DID integrate it into Windows, publishing or not, the world wins in one sense. This is because they would be using a very good filesystem. Not only that but it would make projects that allow for reading and writing of slices containing MS would be much easier. Perhaps it will help create more of a standard for file naming.
Seriously, don't b?tch about another OS using GPLed code. It is seriously uncool.
*/ I guess. I really don't get why these creationists are so sure that the Bible says that evolution can't have taken place. /*
I remember in high school my biology teacher, who happens to be Catholic, showed me an interesting article. If I remember correctly the title was something like, Pope says the Evolution is more than just a Theory. I haven't read the bible, but there are several cases from which I have gathered that the bible says nothing denying evolution directly. Heck, the a Pope, I think it was the one who is alive today, gave Stephen Hawking a medal for his work with the Big Bang Theory, acknowledging it as fact.
*/ Sigh! I wish schools would teach "creationism" as a theory, following scientific principles. Then teach the evolution and let the students make up their mind. /*
That cannot happen. There are several reasons. One of which is the fact that by teaching "creationism" they would be teaching the views of only ONE religion. This is unacceptable, especially in todays world. There are too many other religions out there with too many different view on how man came to be. There would be a need for a specific class discussing just the views of the major religions, like Hinduism, Buddism, Christianity, etc, etc.
My feeling about this is, if someone wants to learn about a religion then that is their decision, and they can have my "blessing" to do so. Until then the most rational course to tread is to teach the widely accepted non-religious scientific view.
Another reason why this is so important is because of several reasons. 1) Intel is hyping the chip quite a bit. Compaq doesn't hype the Alpha. So there is generally more information, or rumors, about said chip.
But in order for them to hype it properly, Intel is going to need an OS that they can show their chip's new (new for Intel) 64 bit processing. Which brings me to point two.
2)They need to help out the Linux project if they want an affordable OS on their chip when it comes out (affordable being something that the average user will be willing to pay). It isn't like Intel is going to go out and hype that Solaris will run on the Merced chip, and there is no way in the pits of Redmond that MS will get NT 64 out in time.
3)The article is about how IBM is supporting this. Sure the Intel symbol is what is being used for the article here on Slashdot but the big news is that IBM is helping port Linux over to Merced. This is big news, really big news.
4)Linux for the Alpha is already out there. There isn't going to be any news discussing porting Linux over to the old Alpha because it already exists. Also, when something does happen to the Alpha chip, Slashdot does report it.
I was on my way down to Florida two weeks ago. I was stuck on Delta in Atlanta. We sat on the runway behind 18 other planes. When we finally got to the front of the line we moved up to the runway, then pulled off. The pilot then starts to say, "Well folks, how can I put this. Our computer just dumped on us and we have to wait ten minutes for it to come back online. We can't move the plane while it is coming back online...." Needless to say, although I know they don't run off Microsoft the thought definately came to mind. Just when you are about to do something important, splat, then wait ten minutes to reboot and if you move it crashes again.:)
As was mentioned by someone else, Microsoft doesn't need to arrest someone when they can have the government do it.
>Or taxed or regulated someone? They never have.
Actually in a sense they have taxed people. I have heard from too many people that without computer experience you chances of getting hired in the workforce, and therefore getting paid, is very slim. When MS controls ~90% of the market one is almost required to understand how to use it. There are too many places that use MS products and not being able to use them puts you at a significant dissadvantage. Where are the major learning areas? 1) Your PC. Buy a MS OS and you pay through the nose. Buy MS Office and you are paying ~2X that of Corel Office. 2) Your local k-12 school district. The schools buy MS products now. Why, because PC's are what are being donated now. Mac OS doesn't run on PC's, and most schools aren't going to impliment a Linux solution. So they buy MS products, or hope for donations. If they buy them, guess where the money comes from, YOUR TAX DOLLERS! 3) Your local library. They too are buying PC's and MS products for internet access. Once again, where do you think the money is coming from to buy the MS products? Your tax dollers. 4) The college you attend, attended, will attend. They need computer labs too. At CU Boulder the computer labs that the average student has access to is ~50% MS and ~50% Mac, which is amazing. The College of Engineering has some Sun machines and Linux boxes spirited away in the back room where upper division students can access them, but for the most part most there are a lot of MS machines lying around. Not only that but there are several classes that REQUIRE Excel in order to do the homework, and before I get several hundred flame about GNUmeric being able to convert Excel documents, they cannot convert they password protected "encrypted" Excel documents with an overuse of complex proprietary macros, I tried. If the school is a public school then along with tuition, they get funded by the government, which means your tax dollers once again.
The MS tax is one that we all pay whether we like it or not. Sort of like SSI or Medicare.
As for regulated someone. Just look at the computer manufacturers. They knew that if they couldn't sell Windows that they would go belly up because the average joe does not want, and is not going to install an OS on a machine. It frightens most people. With this knowledge it becomes easy for MS to force Office and IE because people don't want to spend more money on their computer for another Office suite nor take the time to download Netscape if they already have a working browser.
>A government by definition is an agency with the power to force people to obey its edicts. If you break the law, men with guns come to your house and arrest you. That's what governments do. Private corporations cannot do that.
They can send men with guns to arrest you if you pirate their software and you get caught.
And actually government by definition is: government \Gov"ern*ment\, n. [F. gouvernement. See Govern.] 1. The act of governing; the exercise of authority; the administration of laws; control; direction; regulation; as, civil, church, or family government
Exercise of authority; control; direction; regulation: Computer manufacturers with Windows, MS Office, and IE. Administration of laws: When Windows 98 came out there was problems with the BIOS's in several machines. The major computer manufacturers all posted information conserning which machines were not compatible with Windows 98. In a couple of days all but Dell had removed this warning, and it wasn't because they were complient. Dell had changed their to, in summary form, read: this is not a bug report for Win 98, this is not a bug report for Win 98, this is a problem with our machines that we have to deal with, this is not a bug report this is not a bug report. It later leaked out, through Gateway if I remember correctly, the MS mentioned some agreament that all problems with Win 98 would be reported to them and not published and if these articles stayed on the website that they would lose the ability to sell Windows.
Yes, MS doesn't effect the church. I give in on that one.
As for family governing. The MS tax.
Although not a true government. They do hold a lot of sway and in some cases emulate one, badly.
Last time I checked, and mind you that was nearly 8 months ago, if you searched for something on their sight and it couldn't find it, generally due to server overload, the error message it would bring up, if it brought one up, was a UNIX error message, not an NT message. My guess is, like HotMail, they realize that their products aren't even close to what is needed for power, security, and durability in their home page.
Maybe it has been switched over yet, but I doubt it.
As other people have mentioned, not all apps that were Win 3.1 complient were NT 4.0 complient. One that I can think of off hand was the WordPerfect Suite, at that time owned by Novell. As for running DOS code, generally not. The NT memory manager doesn't allow for a very large portion of DOS programs to run, mainly because of the way the DOS programs try to access the memory.
One thing about Linux is that you can generally test on one distro, like RedHat, say it is RedHat complient and to a very good degree of accuracy say that it is Linux complient, which is what a lot of these Linux complient companies are starting to do. I was testing a product and we had NT 4.0, 95a, 95, 95OSR2, 98, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. All were needed because they all caused significantly different errors during testing and therefore need to use all of them.
As for NT being POSIX complient, it is there and works. It isn't great but it works. Interesting thing, there is one POSIX.exe file, I can't remember the name, that if you, under service pack 4, type help (filename).exe or (filename).exe -? it gives you nothing, but if you type man (filename).exe it tells you the basic syntax. When I get off work I will try to remember to attach to this message which file it is.
As for backwards compatability. MS should just give up, it hurts them more than it helps them IMHO.
If this guy seriously thought Pepsi was offering a Harrier Jet and was willing to spend $700,000 dollars to get it he should probably be removed from the gene-pool before he does anymore damage. I mean, seriously, Pepsi isn't going to be able to get ahold of a Harrier jet fighter, and even if they were the wouldn't just give it away like that. Well, now he gets to get $700,000 worth of Pepsi crap, serves him right for being such a dumb ?uc?!
Yes, SGI makes great hardware and great software, the problem is that they make bad decisions. They had the niche for ultra powerful graphics stations, and for ultra high end systems. They relied on the MIPS processors to be the next level, being that it does everything graphical on a purely vector based environment. They also relied on the IRIX basically being custom built for each high end machine. They think that those markets are dissappearing, and maybe they are going to.
As the power of the PC increases, not just processor wise but graphically, the price for performance may be such that in a couple of years the SGI MIPS Graphical Workstation may not be worth the price.
Also, they are competing directly with IBM and now Intel for the high end server market, don't forget that one of the top ten most powerful machines out there is an Intel machine.
But instead of fighting tooth and nail for markets that they percieve as going dissapearing they are heading into markets that are already, not just occupied but fortified by major companies. As someone mentioned Sun already occupies the Web Server market, and sense SGI has already anounced that they are planning on killing IRIX and the MIPS line it leaves them with two options: 1: Intel with Linux or NT 2: Sparc with Linux or Solaris Either way, they lose. In both cases they are depending on other companies to deliver so that they can survive, and with option 2 they are depending on the competition to deliver in order to survive.
SGI made a "surprise" profit off of a product line that they have basically anounce that they will remove in a couple of years.
It is gloom and doom because SGI is pulling out of where they are dominate to compete head on with entrenched opponents and depending on other allies to support them.
Sure it is worth the effort. If you read the article more carefully they are also simulating the effects of placing mass transit into said scenario. As for encouraging people to use mass-transit, although it is a good idea, most of the techniques used today aren't working. The most effective technique is to almost abandon the idea of getting the baby-boomers off of the road, they have been so used to having their own car and using it for everything that they won't give it up. Instead, market the Gen-X'ers and younger to ride it before they become too used to the regular pattern of driving. This doesn't happen because it requires a lot of resources to get it started and keep it going while there aren't very many riders. I have talked to people who have set up bus systems in towns and have agreed that this is the way to go.
Normal exponential growth in the computer industry has been a fairly normal occurence so far. An intersting graph to plot is the number of flops a super computer can do vs time in years sense 1970. It is basically exponential.
Awww, only 22.5 gigabytes on something the size of a penny. I guess the technology is worthless.
it uses electro-static for reading, and reads by changes in frequency. Wow. It shouldn't be TOO hard to make multi-layerd disks, just by allowing for different resonating frequencies. Each distinct frequency for each layer, have the player be able to diffenciate between the two and boom, very nice. Imagine if we had something that was as thick as a nickle, was dual sided and multi-layered. Imagine walking around with ~1 terabyte worth of data with the bulkyness of ~10-12 nickles, but no where near as heavy.
Wow! If there is a "sea" there that is composed of somesort of hydrocarbon, perhaps there is a chance for life. Maybe this possible organic material could be sort of like the primortial ooze that was on the earth once, if your like me and believe in evolution. Although, it said that the planet was roughly minus 180 degrees Celsius, life probably wouldn't be able to start without the kickstart of enough heat energy. The idea of looking at material that may have been what started life on our planet would be absolutely amazing!
Although your points are something that the mass user wants I don't think that it will draw the masses to Linux. The attention span of the TV viewer isn't very long, and it isn't getting any better anytime soon. I was thinking more along the lines of showing people using Corel WordPerfect, GNUmric, Netscape, Quake *, all on a flashy desktop, flashing back and forth between a user on Windows getting BSODs, waiting for applications to pop up, Dr. Watson, having the autodetect find their serial port for the 800th time but not finding what ever it was that they just installed. With Linux, don't show the command prompt, and make desktop look similar enough to MS Windows to make people think that it wouldn't be hard to switch. I personally use Gnome on top of Enlightenment but I think KDE would be better suited for this task.
marketing is the key, dare I say it. Right now we don't have the ability to truly market Linux to the masses. The product is here, there is great potential for marketing but the companies that should and can market Linux aren't. If Linux is going to overthrow MS we can't rely on word of mouth, there has to be some marketing effert thrown into it. Without it people will never know what Linux is. The average person uses what ever is the standard installation on their machine because either they don't know they have a choice, or don't understand the choices. What good does having choice do if you don't understand the choices. It is sort of like voting, people who don't keep up with the situation and go out and vote end up following party lines or choosing something that looks somewhat familier.
The funniest thing right now is that the letter X seems to have a huge appeal to the average consumer, X-games, eXtreme blah, the X-generation, etc... It would be fairly easy to market X-Windows and LinuX right now just by taking advantage of the market's fixation with the letter X.
RedHat, Caldera, SuSE, Penguin Computing, VA, Corel, Storm, etc... the list of companies who either sell Linux, or sell stuff that supports Linux. None have done much in the way of marketing, outside the net, to try and draw average people to become customers. The number of companies depending on Linux to make money is increasing very rapidly, and although the base of users is also growing at an astounding rate, there is no way that these companies will survive unless they push to draw the masses to Linux, which will require marketing.
Schools are allowed to search more than JUST lockers. At any point they can search you backpack without your permision. Now, I don't know about you but my school didn't loan out backpacks. I remember quite clearly an assembly that was manditory that all students attend that they searched all the backpacks on the way in, whether you wanted the to or not. When you are under 18 you do not have your full rights as a citizen.
As for the other comment on the same level as the one that I replied to about colleges being allowed to censor and search, public schools are not allowed. I don't know about private schools, they may, depending on what you have to sign. I remember that in order for a resident advisor to search your closet they need your permision or a search warrent with police accompeniment. Also, the school cannot restrict what you see, read or hear. There are ways that they may take to reduce the ability to see that information, like restrictions of information viewed on lab machines, but they cannot prevent you from that information. If the school offers internet access they cannot block you from seeing sights, they can fire your teachers for visiting some sights, but they cannot restict your access as a student.
I don't know how long Linux has had bootable CD's but I know that NT 4.0 has always been bootable via CD. 95 and 98 straight out of the box can not boot from the CD but OEM versions generally can. I understood why 95 couldn't, but the idea that they thought that the average Joe couldn't remember to remove the CD from the drive after the install for reboot for 98 is just plain stupid.
There were several problems with booting from CD on the PC. The bios need to support one of two things, either boot from CD-Rom or state to boot from SCSI first, in general if you have both and IDE and SCSI the IDE has to be hda, c: if you are a DOS person, which complicates booting unless you bios specifically offers boot from SCSI as an option. If the bios allowed a boot from SCSI, which almost all do, you still needed a SCSI CD-rom that was boot capable. I believe that the Toshiba XM-3401, 4X SCSI CD-rom (one of the best CD-roms out there but hasn't been produced for a while, it was replaced by the mass production model XM-5401), was on of the first bootable CD-roms, and those were available before IDE CD-roms popped onto the scene. Also, plain IDE CD-roms are NOT bootable, they MUST BE ATAPI! Before the ATAPI standard there were several IDE CD-roms out there includeing the Toshiba XM-5602, which due to their proprietary coding are not bootable CD-rom drives.
I had a roommate who had a sub-$1000 compaq computer. It was the most proprietary piece of ?hi? I had seen in a long time. I had problems intalling NT instead of 95 on it due to problems with the drivers for the modem and other things, never mind trying to get Linux to work. The case was a desktop and about a thick as a SPARC 10 with one expansion slot filled with this wierd modem that could fit in that box.
Unless you know what you are getting into, or are building your own box, don't buy sub-$1000 machines. The number of corners they cut to drop the price that low is not worth the hastle that you will run into.
Just curious, have you ever used and EISA machine? I don't know about the Compaq Presarion 2200, probably pretty new, but EISA motherboards needed specific software for each specific motherboard. It was an interesting dilema because the software for each specific motherboard was generally only for DOS.
The idea of placing something that is absolutely necessary for the machine to run on a hard drive to make it hard to upgrade is not new, stupid, but not new.
I don't think MS has the ability to support Office in Linux. An OS without DLL's, what ever shall we do?! (I know that Macs don't have DLL's either but I'm trying to be funny so laugh).
Anyway, MS wouldn't be able to sell, or frankly give away, their Office product to Linux users. I don't think MS is being all that stupid. They understand that we aren't going to corrupt our systems with MS Office, they know how to do market research.
Frankly it would be smarter of Corel to attack the pre-install market right now. Kind of piggy back on top of the Linux pre-install. Several major suppliers of computers, like Dell, sell their products with Linux pre-installed now. If Corel could get their foot in the door by trying to get WordPerfect as a option to install with Linux maybe, I'm dreaming in this next part, the consumer will ask for it to be an option for Windows installations also just by seeing it as a option for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
If Andover is going to spring for some "real" hardware then why are you suggesting an Intel based box?
I would have to say go with Alpha, or UltraSPARC. Although a Quad-Xeon machine ain't bad, a dual-processor Ultra would probably be a whole lot better for this job. Some Ultras are hot swappable, but the problem with hot swap is whether or not the OS can handle it.
What is going on with the comments today. Everyone seems to be saying, roughly, 'What if SGI releases this under GPL and someone other than Linux uses it! That would be bad!' Excuse me!
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of releasing something open source was so that ANYONE could use it, so long as they published the code and allowed people to modify it. The code, although in a sense given to Linux, is not just for Linux.
Sure there could be a problem of someone like MS taking the code using it and not publishing it. They would be breaking the law if they did, and if it ever got out then they would be screwed. But assuming that they DID integrate it into Windows, publishing or not, the world wins in one sense. This is because they would be using a very good filesystem. Not only that but it would make projects that allow for reading and writing of slices containing MS would be much easier. Perhaps it will help create more of a standard for file naming.
Seriously, don't b?tch about another OS using GPLed code. It is seriously uncool.
*/
I guess. I really don't get why these creationists are so sure that the Bible says that evolution can't have taken place.
/*
I remember in high school my biology teacher, who happens to be Catholic, showed me an interesting article. If I remember correctly the title was something like, Pope says the Evolution is more than just a Theory.
I haven't read the bible, but there are several cases from which I have gathered that the bible says nothing denying evolution directly. Heck, the a Pope, I think it was the one who is alive today, gave Stephen Hawking a medal for his work with the Big Bang Theory, acknowledging it as fact.
*/
Sigh! I wish schools would teach "creationism" as a theory, following scientific principles. Then teach the evolution and let the students make up their mind.
/*
That cannot happen. There are several reasons. One of which is the fact that by teaching "creationism" they would be teaching the views of only ONE religion. This is unacceptable, especially in todays world. There are too many other religions out there with too many different view on how man came to be. There would be a need for a specific class discussing just the views of the major religions, like Hinduism, Buddism, Christianity, etc, etc.
My feeling about this is, if someone wants to learn about a religion then that is their decision, and they can have my "blessing" to do so. Until then the most rational course to tread is to teach the widely accepted non-religious scientific view.
Maybe they could call it iLinux and sell it in several fruity flavors. Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Another reason why this is so important is because of several reasons.
1) Intel is hyping the chip quite a bit. Compaq doesn't hype the Alpha. So there is generally more information, or rumors, about said chip.
But in order for them to hype it properly, Intel is going to need an OS that they can show their chip's new (new for Intel) 64 bit processing. Which brings me to point two.
2)They need to help out the Linux project if they want an affordable OS on their chip when it comes out (affordable being something that the average user will be willing to pay). It isn't like Intel is going to go out and hype that Solaris will run on the Merced chip, and there is no way in the pits of Redmond that MS will get NT 64 out in time.
3)The article is about how IBM is supporting this. Sure the Intel symbol is what is being used for the article here on Slashdot but the big news is that IBM is helping port Linux over to Merced. This is big news, really big news.
4)Linux for the Alpha is already out there. There isn't going to be any news discussing porting Linux over to the old Alpha because it already exists. Also, when something does happen to the Alpha chip, Slashdot does report it.
I was on my way down to Florida two weeks ago. I was stuck on Delta in Atlanta. We sat on the runway behind 18 other planes. When we finally got to the front of the line we moved up to the runway, then pulled off. The pilot then starts to say, "Well folks, how can I put this. Our computer just dumped on us and we have to wait ten minutes for it to come back online. We can't move the plane while it is coming back online. ..." Needless to say, although I know they don't run off Microsoft the thought definately came to mind. Just when you are about to do something important, splat, then wait ten minutes to reboot and if you move it crashes again. :)
>When's the last time Microsoft arresyed someone?
As was mentioned by someone else, Microsoft doesn't need to arrest someone when they can have the government do it.
>Or taxed or regulated someone? They never have.
Actually in a sense they have taxed people. I have heard from too many people that without computer experience you chances of getting hired in the workforce, and therefore getting paid, is very slim. When MS controls ~90% of the market one is almost required to understand how to use it. There are too many places that use MS products and not being able to use them puts you at a significant dissadvantage. Where are the major learning areas?
1) Your PC. Buy a MS OS and you pay through the nose. Buy MS Office and you are paying ~2X that of Corel Office.
2) Your local k-12 school district. The schools buy MS products now. Why, because PC's are what are being donated now. Mac OS doesn't run on PC's, and most schools aren't going to impliment a Linux solution. So they buy MS products, or hope for donations. If they buy them, guess where the money comes from, YOUR TAX DOLLERS!
3) Your local library. They too are buying PC's and MS products for internet access. Once again, where do you think the money is coming from to buy the MS products? Your tax dollers.
4) The college you attend, attended, will attend. They need computer labs too. At CU Boulder the computer labs that the average student has access to is ~50% MS and ~50% Mac, which is amazing. The College of Engineering has some Sun machines and Linux boxes spirited away in the back room where upper division students can access them, but for the most part most there are a lot of MS machines lying around. Not only that but there are several classes that REQUIRE Excel in order to do the homework, and before I get several hundred flame about GNUmeric being able to convert Excel documents, they cannot convert they password protected "encrypted" Excel documents with an overuse of complex proprietary macros, I tried. If the school is a public school then along with tuition, they get funded by the government, which means your tax dollers once again.
The MS tax is one that we all pay whether we like it or not. Sort of like SSI or Medicare.
As for regulated someone. Just look at the computer manufacturers. They knew that if they couldn't sell Windows that they would go belly up because the average joe does not want, and is not going to install an OS on a machine. It frightens most people. With this knowledge it becomes easy for MS to force Office and IE because people don't want to spend more money on their computer for another Office suite nor take the time to download Netscape if they already have a working browser.
>A government by definition is an agency with the power to force people to obey its edicts. If you break the law, men with guns come to your house and arrest you. That's what governments do. Private corporations cannot do that.
They can send men with guns to arrest you if you pirate their software and you get caught.
And actually government by definition is:
government \Gov"ern*ment\, n. [F. gouvernement. See Govern.] 1. The act of governing; the exercise of authority; the administration of laws; control; direction; regulation; as, civil, church, or family government
Exercise of authority; control; direction; regulation: Computer manufacturers with Windows, MS Office, and IE.
Administration of laws: When Windows 98 came out there was problems with the BIOS's in several machines. The major computer manufacturers all posted information conserning which machines were not compatible with Windows 98. In a couple of days all but Dell had removed this warning, and it wasn't because they were complient. Dell had changed their to, in summary form, read: this is not a bug report for Win 98, this is not a bug report for Win 98, this is a problem with our machines that we have to deal with, this is not a bug report this is not a bug report. It later leaked out, through Gateway if I remember correctly, the MS mentioned some agreament that all problems with Win 98 would be reported to them and not published and if these articles stayed on the website that they would lose the ability to sell Windows.
Yes, MS doesn't effect the church. I give in on that one.
As for family governing. The MS tax.
Although not a true government. They do hold a lot of sway and in some cases emulate one, badly.
Last time I checked, and mind you that was nearly 8 months ago, if you searched for something on their sight and it couldn't find it, generally due to server overload, the error message it would bring up, if it brought one up, was a UNIX error message, not an NT message. My guess is, like HotMail, they realize that their products aren't even close to what is needed for power, security, and durability in their home page.
Maybe it has been switched over yet, but I doubt it.
As other people have mentioned, not all apps that were Win 3.1 complient were NT 4.0 complient. One that I can think of off hand was the WordPerfect Suite, at that time owned by Novell. As for running DOS code, generally not. The NT memory manager doesn't allow for a very large portion of DOS programs to run, mainly because of the way the DOS programs try to access the memory.
.exe file, I can't remember the name, that if you, under service pack 4, type help (filename).exe or (filename).exe -? it gives you nothing, but if you type man (filename).exe it tells you the basic syntax. When I get off work I will try to remember to attach to this message which file it is.
One thing about Linux is that you can generally test on one distro, like RedHat, say it is RedHat complient and to a very good degree of accuracy say that it is Linux complient, which is what a lot of these Linux complient companies are starting to do. I was testing a product and we had NT 4.0, 95a, 95, 95OSR2, 98, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. All were needed because they all caused significantly different errors during testing and therefore need to use all of them.
As for NT being POSIX complient, it is there and works. It isn't great but it works. Interesting thing, there is one POSIX
As for backwards compatability. MS should just give up, it hurts them more than it helps them IMHO.
If this guy seriously thought Pepsi was offering a Harrier Jet and was willing to spend $700,000 dollars to get it he should probably be removed from the gene-pool before he does anymore damage. I mean, seriously, Pepsi isn't going to be able to get ahold of a Harrier jet fighter, and even if they were the wouldn't just give it away like that.
Well, now he gets to get $700,000 worth of Pepsi crap, serves him right for being such a dumb ?uc?!
Yes, SGI makes great hardware and great software, the problem is that they make bad decisions. They had the niche for ultra powerful graphics stations, and for ultra high end systems. They relied on the MIPS processors to be the next level, being that it does everything graphical on a purely vector based environment. They also relied on the IRIX basically being custom built for each high end machine. They think that those markets are dissappearing, and maybe they are going to.
As the power of the PC increases, not just processor wise but graphically, the price for performance may be such that in a couple of years the SGI MIPS Graphical Workstation may not be worth the price.
Also, they are competing directly with IBM and now Intel for the high end server market, don't forget that one of the top ten most powerful machines out there is an Intel machine.
But instead of fighting tooth and nail for markets that they percieve as going dissapearing they are heading into markets that are already, not just occupied but fortified by major companies.
As someone mentioned Sun already occupies the Web Server market, and sense SGI has already anounced that they are planning on killing IRIX and the MIPS line it leaves them with two options:
1: Intel with Linux or NT
2: Sparc with Linux or Solaris
Either way, they lose. In both cases they are depending on other companies to deliver so that they can survive, and with option 2 they are depending on the competition to deliver in order to survive.
SGI made a "surprise" profit off of a product line that they have basically anounce that they will remove in a couple of years.
It is gloom and doom because SGI is pulling out of where they are dominate to compete head on with entrenched opponents and depending on other allies to support them.
Probably the best bet is that it will not be Intel compatible, and that whatever runs on the Power3 will run on the Power4. Which means IBM's UNIX.
Sure it is worth the effort. If you read the article more carefully they are also simulating the effects of placing mass transit into said scenario.
As for encouraging people to use mass-transit, although it is a good idea, most of the techniques used today aren't working. The most effective technique is to almost abandon the idea of getting the baby-boomers off of the road, they have been so used to having their own car and using it for everything that they won't give it up. Instead, market the Gen-X'ers and younger to ride it before they become too used to the regular pattern of driving. This doesn't happen because it requires a lot of resources to get it started and keep it going while there aren't very many riders.
I have talked to people who have set up bus systems in towns and have agreed that this is the way to go.
Normal exponential growth in the computer industry has been a fairly normal occurence so far. An intersting graph to plot is the number of flops a super computer can do vs time in years sense 1970.
It is basically exponential.
Awww, only 22.5 gigabytes on something the size of a penny. I guess the technology is worthless.
it uses electro-static for reading, and reads by changes in frequency. Wow. It shouldn't be TOO hard to make multi-layerd disks, just by allowing for different resonating frequencies. Each distinct frequency for each layer, have the player be able to diffenciate between the two and boom, very nice. Imagine if we had something that was as thick as a nickle, was dual sided and multi-layered. Imagine walking around with ~1 terabyte worth of data with the bulkyness of ~10-12 nickles, but no where near as heavy.
I like.
Wow! If there is a "sea" there that is composed of somesort of hydrocarbon, perhaps there is a chance for life. Maybe this possible organic material could be sort of like the primortial ooze that was on the earth once, if your like me and believe in evolution. Although, it said that the planet was roughly minus 180 degrees Celsius, life probably wouldn't be able to start without the kickstart of enough heat energy. The idea of looking at material that may have been what started life on our planet would be absolutely amazing!
Although your points are something that the mass user wants I don't think that it will draw the masses to Linux. The attention span of the TV viewer isn't very long, and it isn't getting any better anytime soon.
I was thinking more along the lines of showing people using Corel WordPerfect, GNUmric, Netscape, Quake *, all on a flashy desktop, flashing back and forth between a user on Windows getting BSODs, waiting for applications to pop up, Dr. Watson, having the autodetect find their serial port for the 800th time but not finding what ever it was that they just installed. With Linux, don't show the command prompt, and make desktop look similar enough to MS Windows to make people think that it wouldn't be hard to switch. I personally use Gnome on top of Enlightenment but I think KDE would be better suited for this task.
Just my 2 cents.
marketing is the key, dare I say it. Right now we don't have the ability to truly market Linux to the masses. The product is here, there is great potential for marketing but the companies that should and can market Linux aren't. If Linux is going to overthrow MS we can't rely on word of mouth, there has to be some marketing effert thrown into it. Without it people will never know what Linux is. The average person uses what ever is the standard installation on their machine because either they don't know they have a choice, or don't understand the choices. What good does having choice do if you don't understand the choices. It is sort of like voting, people who don't keep up with the situation and go out and vote end up following party lines or choosing something that looks somewhat familier.
The funniest thing right now is that the letter X seems to have a huge appeal to the average consumer, X-games, eXtreme blah, the X-generation, etc... It would be fairly easy to market X-Windows and LinuX right now just by taking advantage of the market's fixation with the letter X.
RedHat, Caldera, SuSE, Penguin Computing, VA, Corel, Storm, etc... the list of companies who either sell Linux, or sell stuff that supports Linux. None have done much in the way of marketing, outside the net, to try and draw average people to become customers. The number of companies depending on Linux to make money is increasing very rapidly, and although the base of users is also growing at an astounding rate, there is no way that these companies will survive unless they push to draw the masses to Linux, which will require marketing.
Schools are allowed to search more than JUST lockers. At any point they can search you backpack without your permision. Now, I don't know about you but my school didn't loan out backpacks. I remember quite clearly an assembly that was manditory that all students attend that they searched all the backpacks on the way in, whether you wanted the to or not. When you are under 18 you do not have your full rights as a citizen.
As for the other comment on the same level as the one that I replied to about colleges being allowed to censor and search, public schools are not allowed. I don't know about private schools, they may, depending on what you have to sign. I remember that in order for a resident advisor to search your closet they need your permision or a search warrent with police accompeniment. Also, the school cannot restrict what you see, read or hear. There are ways that they may take to reduce the ability to see that information, like restrictions of information viewed on lab machines, but they cannot prevent you from that information. If the school offers internet access they cannot block you from seeing sights, they can fire your teachers for visiting some sights, but they cannot restict your access as a student.
I don't know how long Linux has had bootable CD's but I know that NT 4.0 has always been bootable via CD. 95 and 98 straight out of the box can not boot from the CD but OEM versions generally can. I understood why 95 couldn't, but the idea that they thought that the average Joe couldn't remember to remove the CD from the drive after the install for reboot for 98 is just plain stupid.
There were several problems with booting from CD on the PC. The bios need to support one of two things, either boot from CD-Rom or state to boot from SCSI first, in general if you have both and IDE and SCSI the IDE has to be hda, c: if you are a DOS person, which complicates booting unless you bios specifically offers boot from SCSI as an option. If the bios allowed a boot from SCSI, which almost all do, you still needed a SCSI CD-rom that was boot capable. I believe that the Toshiba XM-3401, 4X SCSI CD-rom (one of the best CD-roms out there but hasn't been produced for a while, it was replaced by the mass production model XM-5401), was on of the first bootable CD-roms, and those were available before IDE CD-roms popped onto the scene. Also, plain IDE CD-roms are NOT bootable, they MUST BE ATAPI! Before the ATAPI standard there were several IDE CD-roms out there includeing the Toshiba XM-5602, which due to their proprietary coding are not bootable CD-rom drives.
Hey, if MS just copied everything and didn't release any code themselves then maybe they would have a product that was worth something! :)
I had a roommate who had a sub-$1000 compaq computer. It was the most proprietary piece of ?hi? I had seen in a long time. I had problems intalling NT instead of 95 on it due to problems with the drivers for the modem and other things, never mind trying to get Linux to work. The case was a desktop and about a thick as a SPARC 10 with one expansion slot filled with this wierd modem that could fit in that box.
Unless you know what you are getting into, or are building your own box, don't buy sub-$1000 machines. The number of corners they cut to drop the price that low is not worth the hastle that you will run into.
Just curious, have you ever used and EISA machine? I don't know about the Compaq Presarion 2200, probably pretty new, but EISA motherboards needed specific software for each specific motherboard. It was an interesting dilema because the software for each specific motherboard was generally only for DOS.
The idea of placing something that is absolutely necessary for the machine to run on a hard drive to make it hard to upgrade is not new, stupid, but not new.
I don't think MS has the ability to support Office in Linux. An OS without DLL's, what ever shall we do?! (I know that Macs don't have DLL's either but I'm trying to be funny so laugh).
Anyway, MS wouldn't be able to sell, or frankly give away, their Office product to Linux users. I don't think MS is being all that stupid. They understand that we aren't going to corrupt our systems with MS Office, they know how to do market research.
Frankly it would be smarter of Corel to attack the pre-install market right now. Kind of piggy back on top of the Linux pre-install. Several major suppliers of computers, like Dell, sell their products with Linux pre-installed now. If Corel could get their foot in the door by trying to get WordPerfect as a option to install with Linux maybe, I'm dreaming in this next part, the consumer will ask for it to be an option for Windows installations also just by seeing it as a option for Linux.
Anyway, enough dreaming.