You seem to be quite comfortable with the idea of not having control over a computer and to take it as something absolutely natural.
People choose an unsafe operating system and disregard safety precautions because they inconvenience them. Choosing a more secure OS may imply in giving up your familiar programs and your games and perhaps having to relearn some other tools. That same people are responsible for pollution that is starting to make e-mail a useless form of communication. They are also vital parts on the play of criminal groups behind several DDoS initiatives.
There is a better way: hold people accountable for the actions of their computers. A virus downloaded child porn to your computer? It's your computer and thus your responsibility to keep it secure. Your computer is sending e-mail scams? Too bad you have to go to jail for this, but you should know better before installing that fake anti-virus you saw on a web site.
If people drove cars or flew airplanes with the same care they maintain their computers, we would be all dead.
An interesting effect of not having water readily available on the moon could be the development of missions to icy moons to get the water required for a moon (or Mars) colony. The Moon is going to be important if we plan to be a space-faring civilization as it's the closest place to Earth that has the raw materials to build spacecraft coupled to a very rocket-friendly gravity well. I am not sure about fuels (nuclear fuels), but the rest looks promising.
There are many nice places to collect water ice in the outer solar system and once you have a full tank of water collected you can use it as propellant in a nuclear-thermal rocket to get back to the Moon with still plenty left. It would be a bitch to do it with a fully automated and autonomous spacecraft, but, at least, it's conceivable. And even building the spacecraft itself should not be that hard if we can remission Ares-V (more likely an Ares XXVIII, considering the timeframes involved) main tanks for ferrying water back from out there. The spacecrafts would end-up being small when compared to their tanks.
I will have to disagree. A current SPARC T2 may not run Gnome as fast as the fastest Xeon, but it does let Apache serve a huge lot of pages per second, way more than I ever have with x86 boxes.
Itanium too has its strengths: its cache is huge (was unrivaled until the most recent Xeons, IIRC) and could run some workloads entirely off it. I have benefited enormously from moving some workloads from x86 to Itaniums in the mid 2000s.
Both these situations involved real world programs. Maybe just not your world, but I assure you they were real;-)
There is a lot of potential for parallelizing desktop applications - mail readers, browsers, spreadsheets etc - and if those apps are adequately tuned to multi-threaded execution they would stand to benefit hugely from future CPUs. You know... The core numbers are not going down anytime soon.
Yes... There is the XDR problem... And using DDR2/3 memory would require a different version of Cell, nixing the advantage of the PS3 supplies... Unless Sony made a Cell using DDR as a cost-cutting measure.
As for programs adding support for SPEs, one could port OpenCL to the Cell (if that's not already ported) and make more programs OpenCL-friendly.
In the end, everybody would win, as the OpenCL'ed programs could run better on other kinds of machines.
"any non-x86 architecture gets you more theoretical - but less practical - bang for the buck"
not necessarily. You can't run Windows, but a readily available Cell-based desktop workstation in the hands of, say, Gnome developers, would do wonders in making Gnome run better on Cell.
Making it more generic (and applicable to Cell, Niagara and Larrabee), a readily available X-based workstations in the hands of, say, the developers of Y, would do wonders in making Y run better on X.
I am not happy this version is no longer capable of running Linux or any other OS besides Sony's own.
OTOH, its RAM would make for a nasty user experience when running just about anything.
I can't believe it's hard to build a Cell-based desktop system the size of the PS3, but with plenty RAM and a nice GPU that would not play PS3 games. Software compatibility should, today, be a non-issue - there are many full-feature desktop OSs (or different versions of a couple) that can run on Cell. And since it's not a console, they could sell it for a profit. I would buy a Linux-running Windows-proof box for the price of a Dell
In the early 90s, IIRC, Sony made a very nice line of MIPS-based Unix workstations. They could do it again.
If no IE-only user ever came to my site again (http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/blog_en) I would experience a 15% drop in unique visitors and an about 88% reduction of bounces.
I assume users who engaged in anti-social or rule-breaking rules had enough warning (by the publication of the rules forbidding ISK trading) and plenty of opportunity to defend themselves.
As we move more and more of our social interaction into virtual spaces (and not only immersive environments, but places like Slashdot or Hacker News) the need to pay attention to the institution of justice increases.
I have no sympathy for transgressors who live off transgression, but I have no sympathy either with this notion of justice (from this to the censorship on Apple's bulletin boards to erasure of comments on TechCrunch) I see repeatedly being practiced.
Oh no. You got me wrong. I meant sterilizing the boys described in the GP. Then, when mankind's genetic profile improves, we will be able to get to Mars and beyond.
Netbook may be for "internet only" for the Windows crowd. My Linux sees a low-power long-battery-life dual-core computer that's fast enough to develop on.
When on my desk, hooked up on a dual-headed rig and with decent keyboard and mouse, it's a worthy computer.
So, if you need a quad-i7 to run your IDE, it's probably because you are running Visual Studio under Windows Vista. Nobody would want that crap on a netbook.
There is no such thing as a Windows community as a counterpart to the Linux community. Windows is made by one and only one company. The other companies that write software that runs on top of Windows do so only because Windows is common and, from time to time, Microsoft decides to kill a couple as examples. Microsoft has been trying to kill Oracle for decades.
The Linux community is much more cooperative. Even closed-source software providers like, say, Oracle, do cooperate with the rest of a community that's formed by the groups around products.
I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.
Yesterday they criticized Microsoft's FUD about Linux netbook returns, today they get noisy about Windows-proof computers... They can't say they didn't see it coming.
But, hey, Michael, I will buy three Windows-proof ARM-based netbooks provided they:
- run a more or less standard Linux (I am fine with Ubuntu) - have a hard-disk - are expandable to at least 2 gigabytes of RAM - have an optional 768x1366 pixel screen (plus an analog VGA port for a second screen)
I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.
With a nuclear rocket you don't have to send fuel and oxidizer up - you only have to send propellant.
And, as soon as you establish a viable transport network, you can get your propellant on much lower-gravity bodies. One could land on a comet, get a lot of water out of it and use part of the collected water to get back to the fuel station.
Unix has been flabbergastingly amazing since pretty much day 1.
The trick is to continue to do so for 40 years. Being simple, elegant and straight-to-the-point is, probably, what makes it so obsolescence-resistant.
My early 90's RISC workstations still play fine with my network. My Mac SE from the same period doesn't even have an ethernet port, not to mention a TCP/IP stack.
"If NASA hadn't killed promising R&D programs like the X-33 (VentureStar) "
On the other hand, if NASA hadn't killed the Apollo program, we would be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first lunar base this year...
The shuttle also was, just like Venturestar, a promising, low-cost workhorse. In the end, it turned out to be much harder to build and operate a real vehicle. Venturestar would, probably, follow more or less the same path. Remember: every technology holds a couple surprises.
Let's see what comes out of Ares or that Shuttle-C-like thing. We have time. It's not like space is going anywhere.
It's still too large to fit comfortably in a not too big shoulder bag.
Mine is about the right size for an earlier Acer Aspire One, a notebook (a paper one) and assorted stuff (keys, pendrives, phone, charger+mickey-cable, etc)
It all depends on which one runs Linux better. That will be the clear winner for me.
Every day I see people who bought very expensive notebooks that can only run Windows Vista (or 7). I certainly see no reason to buy a piece of equipment that dictates what I can run on it.
I had many bad experiences with ATI chipsets and nothing but joy (despite merely bearable performance) from Intel ones. As I don't play games, the choice, for me, is obvious.
Actually, you can. You only need the Mac to run it on the emulator an the $99 fee to deploy it to a real phone. You can take the code and modify it to run on whatever you want.
It's not unconceivable to build a free working emulator upon GNUStep.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be quite comfortable with the idea of not having control over a computer and to take it as something absolutely natural.
People choose an unsafe operating system and disregard safety precautions because they inconvenience them. Choosing a more secure OS may imply in giving up your familiar programs and your games and perhaps having to relearn some other tools. That same people are responsible for pollution that is starting to make e-mail a useless form of communication. They are also vital parts on the play of criminal groups behind several DDoS initiatives.
And you are welcome to try to root my box.
I will wait, but I won't hold my breath.
There is a better way: hold people accountable for the actions of their computers. A virus downloaded child porn to your computer? It's your computer and thus your responsibility to keep it secure. Your computer is sending e-mail scams? Too bad you have to go to jail for this, but you should know better before installing that fake anti-virus you saw on a web site.
If people drove cars or flew airplanes with the same care they maintain their computers, we would be all dead.
"What's next, a license for sex?"
I hope Russel Smith never gets one. That would save the world from his offspring, probably making it a better place for the rest of us.
An interesting effect of not having water readily available on the moon could be the development of missions to icy moons to get the water required for a moon (or Mars) colony. The Moon is going to be important if we plan to be a space-faring civilization as it's the closest place to Earth that has the raw materials to build spacecraft coupled to a very rocket-friendly gravity well. I am not sure about fuels (nuclear fuels), but the rest looks promising.
There are many nice places to collect water ice in the outer solar system and once you have a full tank of water collected you can use it as propellant in a nuclear-thermal rocket to get back to the Moon with still plenty left. It would be a bitch to do it with a fully automated and autonomous spacecraft, but, at least, it's conceivable. And even building the spacecraft itself should not be that hard if we can remission Ares-V (more likely an Ares XXVIII, considering the timeframes involved) main tanks for ferrying water back from out there. The spacecrafts would end-up being small when compared to their tanks.
I will have to disagree. A current SPARC T2 may not run Gnome as fast as the fastest Xeon, but it does let Apache serve a huge lot of pages per second, way more than I ever have with x86 boxes.
Itanium too has its strengths: its cache is huge (was unrivaled until the most recent Xeons, IIRC) and could run some workloads entirely off it. I have benefited enormously from moving some workloads from x86 to Itaniums in the mid 2000s.
Both these situations involved real world programs. Maybe just not your world, but I assure you they were real ;-)
There is a lot of potential for parallelizing desktop applications - mail readers, browsers, spreadsheets etc - and if those apps are adequately tuned to multi-threaded execution they would stand to benefit hugely from future CPUs. You know... The core numbers are not going down anytime soon.
Yes... There is the XDR problem... And using DDR2/3 memory would require a different version of Cell, nixing the advantage of the PS3 supplies... Unless Sony made a Cell using DDR as a cost-cutting measure.
As for programs adding support for SPEs, one could port OpenCL to the Cell (if that's not already ported) and make more programs OpenCL-friendly.
In the end, everybody would win, as the OpenCL'ed programs could run better on other kinds of machines.
"any non-x86 architecture gets you more theoretical - but less practical - bang for the buck"
not necessarily. You can't run Windows, but a readily available Cell-based desktop workstation in the hands of, say, Gnome developers, would do wonders in making Gnome run better on Cell.
Making it more generic (and applicable to Cell, Niagara and Larrabee), a readily available X-based workstations in the hands of, say, the developers of Y, would do wonders in making Y run better on X.
I am not happy this version is no longer capable of running Linux or any other OS besides Sony's own.
OTOH, its RAM would make for a nasty user experience when running just about anything.
I can't believe it's hard to build a Cell-based desktop system the size of the PS3, but with plenty RAM and a nice GPU that would not play PS3 games. Software compatibility should, today, be a non-issue - there are many full-feature desktop OSs (or different versions of a couple) that can run on Cell. And since it's not a console, they could sell it for a profit. I would buy a Linux-running Windows-proof box for the price of a Dell
In the early 90s, IIRC, Sony made a very nice line of MIPS-based Unix workstations. They could do it again.
If no IE-only user ever came to my site again (http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/blog_en) I would experience a 15% drop in unique visitors and an about 88% reduction of bounces.
I assume users who engaged in anti-social or rule-breaking rules had enough warning (by the publication of the rules forbidding ISK trading) and plenty of opportunity to defend themselves.
As we move more and more of our social interaction into virtual spaces (and not only immersive environments, but places like Slashdot or Hacker News) the need to pay attention to the institution of justice increases.
I have no sympathy for transgressors who live off transgression, but I have no sympathy either with this notion of justice (from this to the censorship on Apple's bulletin boards to erasure of comments on TechCrunch) I see repeatedly being practiced.
Oh no. You got me wrong. I meant sterilizing the boys described in the GP. Then, when mankind's genetic profile improves, we will be able to get to Mars and beyond.
"it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs"
This is Slashdot. Being Windows-proof is a feature, not a bug.
A couple, I guess.
Mathematica runs on Linux. Should be trivial to port, but performance could suffer.
From the top of my head, and I know they are not MathCAD-clones, Sage and R come to mind, depending on what you are doing.
Netbook may be for "internet only" for the Windows crowd. My Linux sees a low-power long-battery-life dual-core computer that's fast enough to develop on.
When on my desk, hooked up on a dual-headed rig and with decent keyboard and mouse, it's a worthy computer.
So, if you need a quad-i7 to run your IDE, it's probably because you are running Visual Studio under Windows Vista. Nobody would want that crap on a netbook.
There is no such thing as a Windows community as a counterpart to the Linux community. Windows is made by one and only one company. The other companies that write software that runs on top of Windows do so only because Windows is common and, from time to time, Microsoft decides to kill a couple as examples. Microsoft has been trying to kill Oracle for decades.
The Linux community is much more cooperative. Even closed-source software providers like, say, Oracle, do cooperate with the rest of a community that's formed by the groups around products.
I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.
Yesterday they criticized Microsoft's FUD about Linux netbook returns, today they get noisy about Windows-proof computers... They can't say they didn't see it coming.
But, hey, Michael, I will buy three Windows-proof ARM-based netbooks provided they:
- run a more or less standard Linux (I am fine with Ubuntu)
- have a hard-disk
- are expandable to at least 2 gigabytes of RAM
- have an optional 768x1366 pixel screen (plus an analog VGA port for a second screen)
I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.
"But when it does hit (don't say if if you mean when), the loss of tax revenue will cause more damage to the budget than the space budget would have."
You know... This argument may just do the trick.
Better:
With a nuclear rocket you don't have to send fuel and oxidizer up - you only have to send propellant.
And, as soon as you establish a viable transport network, you can get your propellant on much lower-gravity bodies. One could land on a comet, get a lot of water out of it and use part of the collected water to get back to the fuel station.
That's surprisingly insightful.
Add sterilization to the package and we will also have smart people flipping burgers on the martian McDonald's.
Unix has been flabbergastingly amazing since pretty much day 1.
The trick is to continue to do so for 40 years. Being simple, elegant and straight-to-the-point is, probably, what makes it so obsolescence-resistant.
My early 90's RISC workstations still play fine with my network. My Mac SE from the same period doesn't even have an ethernet port, not to mention a TCP/IP stack.
"If NASA hadn't killed promising R&D programs like the X-33 (VentureStar) "
On the other hand, if NASA hadn't killed the Apollo program, we would be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first lunar base this year...
The shuttle also was, just like Venturestar, a promising, low-cost workhorse. In the end, it turned out to be much harder to build and operate a real vehicle. Venturestar would, probably, follow more or less the same path. Remember: every technology holds a couple surprises.
Let's see what comes out of Ares or that Shuttle-C-like thing. We have time. It's not like space is going anywhere.
It's still too large to fit comfortably in a not too big shoulder bag.
Mine is about the right size for an earlier Acer Aspire One, a notebook (a paper one) and assorted stuff (keys, pendrives, phone, charger+mickey-cable, etc)
It all depends on which one runs Linux better. That will be the clear winner for me.
Every day I see people who bought very expensive notebooks that can only run Windows Vista (or 7). I certainly see no reason to buy a piece of equipment that dictates what I can run on it.
I had many bad experiences with ATI chipsets and nothing but joy (despite merely bearable performance) from Intel ones. As I don't play games, the choice, for me, is obvious.
"Not with out a mac and a $99 devel fee."
Actually, you can. You only need the Mac to run it on the emulator an the $99 fee to deploy it to a real phone. You can take the code and modify it to run on whatever you want.
It's not unconceivable to build a free working emulator upon GNUStep.
If you already can buy the politicians who work there, what could be the problem of being able to buy the building itself?