Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage. A backup power system will be required, but system speeds will go through the roof due to faster data access times.
Not a chance in hell. The only acceptable solid-state data storage medium is non-volatile memory i.e. "flash" memory. No one anywhere will risk all their data to any storage medium that a dead battery would wipe out. Flash storage is waaaay too slow for primary storage. Even a modern IDE hard disk is much faster. modern SCSI even faster than that, and the latest 2 Gb/s fibre-channel disk drives even faster. DEC tried selling solid state hard disks in the mid 90's. I believe they had a 512MB, 1GB and 2GB models. They were very expensive and very slow. The same is true today.
Hard drives fail and are slow as hell. They are the bottlenecks in 99% of today's systems. That will change soon, thanks in part to Intel and AMD.
Not always true. First of all, some applications are CPU bound and some are I/O bound. Folding@home is CPU bound. it doesn't give a crap what your hard disk is. 'tar' and 'dd' are i/o bound, they work better on faster disks. Some applications are equally cpu and i/o bound like video editing.
This will NOT change any time soon, nor will the disk I/O speeds of personal computers drastically change in the next five years. Yes, I am willing to bet on it.
But NewsForge's Joe Barr discovered that the US is driving policy for the organization, and its official position is that 'using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit'; in other words, they want to make the world safe for capitalism."
Obviously, Capitalism is the economic system which works the best i.e. it provides the best chance for a given nation to operate on it's production possibilities curve (yeah...econ101) and therefore provide the highest standard of living for the people.
I, like most/.ers, disagree with the statement that OSS gets in the way of profits. OSS certainly requires a different business model to generate revenue, (duh) but from an economic perspective, it isn't any better or worse than proprietary software.
I do not however like the negative spin that you are putting on Capitalism. Achieving a decent standard of living with plentiful food, medical care, and economic and political stability cannot be achieved as well with any other system; Capitalism has emerged as the clear winner. Degrading this most efficient system because it's not always associated with your views on software licensing is just foolish.
Barrett is quoted saying, 'There will be one operating system that will support all (64-bit) extended systems.' Maybe 64-bit computing is right around the corner after all, and we may even see compatible instruction sets from Intel and AMD!
My 100 shares of AMD say "they damn well better!";-)
On Intel Xeons, noless. That said, they built it signficantly before the G5 Desktop and the G5 XServe were available. No offense, but much as I want a G5 and like the look-and-feel of Mac OS X, you have to admit that a bunch of overheating 1GHz G4's were significantly less cost effective than a similar bunch of P4 Xeons at the time the render farm was built.
Now wait just a gosh-darn second here! Who you callin "overheating"??
PowerPC chips use
MUCH less power than Xeon. Tons less. In fact, that's what the PPC architecture was designed for was embedded applications.
Jobs, who is worth $1.7 billion (U.S.), according to Forbes magazine last year, routinely declines interview requests and could not be reached for comment for this story.
What does Steve Jobs not wanting to do an interview for the San Francisco Chronicle have to do with how much money he is worth?
Hell, me and my $1.7 hundred (U.S.), according to my most recent bank statement, would decline an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
If the Pixar modeling/rendering software ran on MacOS X, then there'd be an army of Joe Sixpacks out there competing with Pixar, with a few thousand dollars worth of computers.
Steve JObs wants to keep this business obscure enough to keep the bar raised to where Pixar offers a unique and valuable service.
Hold your horses there cowboy bebop. It would take a lot more than Pixar's software to turn Joe Sixpack into the next "Finding Nemo" creator.
All the software in the world cant get around the CPU cycle requirements for this type of rendering. Perhaps if Joe Sixpack had a raised floor room in his basement with about 2000 Xserve G5's (Ok, so it's a big basement) then maybe the release of this software on OSX would be a threat.
If it holds such important why was it sold for scrap?
It has historic value today. It didn't back then - it was only a tool.
A broken civil war rifle or a cracked native american clay pot might have been thrown away as garbage in their time, but today they are valuable artifacts worth $$$ and part of private collections or museums.
Obligatory Indiana Jones quote. "Look at this [holds up a pocket watch]. It's worthless, $10 from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it into the sand for a thousand years and it becomes priceless, like the ark. Men will kill for it, men like you and me."
Well, the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that you shouldn't trust information you find on-line if you can't verify the source as someone you trust. Simple as that, really...
Online or offline. This isn't anything new here kids. If you put your trust in information whose source or quality can't be confirmed - you are an idiot.
Let me put this into terms that even a slashdot geek could understand:
Would you buy a dual Opteron workstation from some
mysterious Romanian in a dark alley? Of course not, because its probably full of potatos. Would you buy a dual Opteron workstation from here or from here? Of course, because these are trusted sources.
Get it now??
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If I spend $7,000 on performance parts the car will be able to drag against dodge vipers that cost around $60,000 (I think a dodge viper has a 12 second 1/4 mile time
Much better bang for your buck can be found in the VW/Audi 1.8 turbo engine. with just a chip, bigger turbo and exhaust (together under $3500) you can have well over 300 horsepower and torque out the wazoo. A VW/Audi 1.8 turbo car, slightly modified, can do 12-13 second quarter miles easy.
But who gives a crap about drag racing anyways? My grandma can push her right foot down and go fast in a straight line. Real racing involves tight twisty turns (many of them - not boring nascar lets-drive-in-a-circle-500-times). Have a look here to see where the action is.
Another plus for the VW/Audi cars - there is a serial cable you connect to the car that you can interact with all electronic parts of the car - from the engine to the stereo to the anti-lock-brakes. And even better, the protocol spec is open and published for anyone. I can put a laptop on the front seat of my car while I drive and watch the turbo boost pressure, oil pressure, and tons of other cool real-time metrics. Very open-source'esque. You don't get that with the bland "big-three" or the "rice-boy" asian car crowd.
So they can make money when people forget to send the form on time, or fill it in incorrectly.
Not only that, but anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 of all the rebate applications get "automatically" rejected, and you get a "rebate declined" letter in the mail. Most folks will ignore the letter and toss it out because now it's 8 weeks after they bought the damn product and theyre irritated enough. Only a very small percentage will actually call back and complain about the declined rebate at which point the company will promptly mail you your check.
fired over 1/2 of the maintenance staff, and people on campus no longer have trash cans in their dorm hallways - they have to take their trash outside to a dumpster. The snow trucks in Blacksburg have far less salt than they had last year to clear the roads (I only think of this as I sit here at Netmar and watch today's 3 inches of snow fall).
Bah. When I was in school son, we didn't have dumpsters. If something was no longer wanted, we had to eat it or reuse it - nothing got thrown away. You have snow plows? And snow that falls?? Back in my day, we had to make the snow ourselves in the winter. After that, we had to clear the roads with hand-shovels! Plows.... bah. Don't even get me started on maintenance staff.
Re: PIT planning on reclaiming the costs?
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Same way Starbucks does...get you in a seat, and sell you stuf...
Agreed. I've got three large airports within 45 minutes of me. If one of them offered free wifi and the others didnt, it would be a very easy decision which airport to fly out of. I think most business travelers would agree.
Didn't Ebay just win a case that said they are not liable for the statements posted by users?
Wouldn't this logically apply to teacher reviews and make them nonliable for things posted by their users?
It's a good precedent but as the poster stated - he doesn't have the time/resources to put on a legal defense. No matter how good the previous rulings are, you still need legal counsel.
I'm not interested in fancy/artistic things like video editing on my computer, I just want high quality video, preferably keeping it under $1000.
Not to be a troll, but wouldn't this question be better suited for a consumer electronics discussion board? I find it odd that you would ask the slashdot crowd about a product whose computer interface capabilities you care nothing about.
That being said, I have a $499 Sony digital-8 handycam. It works great, uses the ubiquitous digital-8 tapes (same form factor as hi-8), and has USB and firewire connections to boot!
What are the Indian trolls like? Do they also proclaim the death of BSD and the nuances of Soviet Russia?
What is minimum wage in India (if there is such a thing there)? What would you estimate the average programmer or sysadmin makes in India? (both figures in Rupees)
The only thing I'd like to add also is to *NEVER* trust an employer (or anyone else) that says "sure it's in the contract, but we never really apply it".
Excellent advice. That's like the used car salesman assuring you that "Sure, that sound is normal, It'll go away on it's own".
If it's not in writing, it didn't happen. If it IS in writing, rest assured, it WILL happen.
"Hire a Lawyer" has become a kneejerk reaction on Slashdot. I'd suggest, instead, to understand what you're being asked to sign, and then if a minor modification would fix it, mark up the contract, initial it, and ask them to do the same.
It isn't a knee jerk reaction - it's the only logical course of action if you yourself are not a lawyer.
Laws change on a regular basis and the "language" of these contracts is very precise. If you are not familar with writing legal contracts yourself, and you do not keep up with all the changes each year to all the applicable contract laws - don't do it.
If you are not a lawyer, it just isn't worth the risk of "DIY".
Why is Microsoft doing this? Besides the obvious "Why don't they just use Linux?" suggestion, I'm puzzled why M$ would "develop" a stripped down Windows for just that market. If "crippled" means that it doesn't include a web browser or media player - I'm all for it. They should sell the product in other markets IMO.
Plus, in many developing nations like Thailand you can buy any software you want for about $1 or $1.50 per CD. Why would they pay more to get less?
I'll be interested to see if the product actually takes off there.
Slashdot Mirror
Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage. A backup power system will be required, but system speeds will go through the roof due to faster data access times.
Not a chance in hell. The only acceptable solid-state data storage medium is non-volatile memory i.e. "flash" memory. No one anywhere will risk all their data to any storage medium that a dead battery would wipe out. Flash storage is waaaay too slow for primary storage. Even a modern IDE hard disk is much faster. modern SCSI even faster than that, and the latest 2 Gb/s fibre-channel disk drives even faster. DEC tried selling solid state hard disks in the mid 90's. I believe they had a 512MB, 1GB and 2GB models. They were very expensive and very slow. The same is true today.
Hard drives fail and are slow as hell. They are the bottlenecks in 99% of today's systems. That will change soon, thanks in part to Intel and AMD.
Not always true. First of all, some applications are CPU bound and some are I/O bound. Folding@home is CPU bound. it doesn't give a crap what your hard disk is. 'tar' and 'dd' are i/o bound, they work better on faster disks. Some applications are equally cpu and i/o bound like video editing.
This will NOT change any time soon, nor will the disk I/O speeds of personal computers drastically change in the next five years. Yes, I am willing to bet on it.
There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
Instead, only try to realize the truth..... there is no SCO.
Yeah ok so it doesn't make sense. piss off.
But NewsForge's Joe Barr discovered that the US is driving policy for the organization, and its official position is that 'using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit'; in other words, they want to make the world safe for capitalism."
/.ers, disagree with the statement that OSS gets in the way of profits. OSS certainly requires a different business model to generate revenue, (duh) but from an economic perspective, it isn't any better or worse than proprietary software.
Obviously, Capitalism is the economic system which works the best i.e. it provides the best chance for a given nation to operate on it's production possibilities curve (yeah...econ101) and therefore provide the highest standard of living for the people.
I, like most
I do not however like the negative spin that you are putting on Capitalism. Achieving a decent standard of living with plentiful food, medical care, and economic and political stability cannot be achieved as well with any other system; Capitalism has emerged as the clear winner. Degrading this most efficient system because it's not always associated with your views on software licensing is just foolish.
Barrett is quoted saying, 'There will be one operating system that will support all (64-bit) extended systems.' Maybe 64-bit computing is right around the corner after all, and we may even see compatible instruction sets from Intel and AMD!
;-)
My 100 shares of AMD say "they damn well better!"
On Intel Xeons, noless. That said, they built it signficantly before the G5 Desktop and the G5 XServe were available. No offense, but much as I want a G5 and like the look-and-feel of Mac OS X, you have to admit that a bunch of overheating 1GHz G4's were significantly less cost effective than a similar bunch of P4 Xeons at the time the render farm was built.
Now wait just a gosh-darn second here! Who you callin "overheating"??
PowerPC chips use MUCH less power than Xeon. Tons less. In fact, that's what the PPC architecture was designed for was embedded applications.
Overheating G4's????
Jobs, who is worth $1.7 billion (U.S.), according to Forbes magazine last year, routinely declines interview requests and could not be reached for comment for this story. What does Steve Jobs not wanting to do an interview for the San Francisco Chronicle have to do with how much money he is worth?
Hell, me and my $1.7 hundred (U.S.), according to my most recent bank statement, would decline an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
If the Pixar modeling/rendering software ran on MacOS X, then there'd be an army of Joe Sixpacks out there competing with Pixar, with a few thousand dollars worth of computers. Steve JObs wants to keep this business obscure enough to keep the bar raised to where Pixar offers a unique and valuable service.
Hold your horses there cowboy bebop. It would take a lot more than Pixar's software to turn Joe Sixpack into the next "Finding Nemo" creator.
All the software in the world cant get around the CPU cycle requirements for this type of rendering. Perhaps if Joe Sixpack had a raised floor room in his basement with about 2000 Xserve G5's (Ok, so it's a big basement) then maybe the release of this software on OSX would be a threat.
If it holds such important why was it sold for scrap?
It has historic value today. It didn't back then - it was only a tool.
A broken civil war rifle or a cracked native american clay pot might have been thrown away as garbage in their time, but today they are valuable artifacts worth $$$ and part of private collections or museums.
Obligatory Indiana Jones quote. "Look at this [holds up a pocket watch]. It's worthless, $10 from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it into the sand for a thousand years and it becomes priceless, like the ark. Men will kill for it, men like you and me."
Not sure why this was modded funny... I AGREE with it.
It (the HMS Beagle) used to have a huge bank of guns, but they were gutted and replaced with diagnostic equipment. Make science, not war!
Bah, just look where THAT got it. Under 12 feet of mud at the bottom of a marsh.
Most Linux live CD's have all the functionality of a full OS install. Why would we use a stripped-down hardly-useful Windows CD instead?
Why is this news?? Microsoft products playing catchup to Linux is oooooold news.
Well, the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that you shouldn't trust information you find on-line if you can't verify the source as someone you trust. Simple as that, really...
Online or offline. This isn't anything new here kids. If you put your trust in information whose source or quality can't be confirmed - you are an idiot.
Let me put this into terms that even a slashdot geek could understand:
Would you buy a dual Opteron workstation from some mysterious Romanian in a dark alley? Of course not, because its probably full of potatos. Would you buy a dual Opteron workstation from here or from here? Of course, because these are trusted sources.
Get it now??
If I spend $7,000 on performance parts the car will be able to drag against dodge vipers that cost around $60,000 (I think a dodge viper has a 12 second 1/4 mile time
Much better bang for your buck can be found in the VW/Audi 1.8 turbo engine. with just a chip, bigger turbo and exhaust (together under $3500) you can have well over 300 horsepower and torque out the wazoo. A VW/Audi 1.8 turbo car, slightly modified, can do 12-13 second quarter miles easy.
But who gives a crap about drag racing anyways? My grandma can push her right foot down and go fast in a straight line. Real racing involves tight twisty turns (many of them - not boring nascar lets-drive-in-a-circle-500-times). Have a look here to see where the action is.
Another plus for the VW/Audi cars - there is a serial cable you connect to the car that you can interact with all electronic parts of the car - from the engine to the stereo to the anti-lock-brakes. And even better, the protocol spec is open and published for anyone. I can put a laptop on the front seat of my car while I drive and watch the turbo boost pressure, oil pressure, and tons of other cool real-time metrics. Very open-source'esque. You don't get that with the bland "big-three" or the "rice-boy" asian car crowd.
So they can make money when people forget to send the form on time, or fill it in incorrectly.
Not only that, but anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 of all the rebate applications get "automatically" rejected, and you get a "rebate declined" letter in the mail. Most folks will ignore the letter and toss it out because now it's 8 weeks after they bought the damn product and theyre irritated enough. Only a very small percentage will actually call back and complain about the declined rebate at which point the company will promptly mail you your check.
Yeah, it's basically a big scam.
fired over 1/2 of the maintenance staff, and people on campus no longer have trash cans in their dorm hallways - they have to take their trash outside to a dumpster. The snow trucks in Blacksburg have far less salt than they had last year to clear the roads (I only think of this as I sit here at Netmar and watch today's 3 inches of snow fall).
Bah. When I was in school son, we didn't have dumpsters. If something was no longer wanted, we had to eat it or reuse it - nothing got thrown away. You have snow plows? And snow that falls?? Back in my day, we had to make the snow ourselves in the winter. After that, we had to clear the roads with hand-shovels! Plows.... bah. Don't even get me started on maintenance staff.
Same way Starbucks does...get you in a seat, and sell you stuf...
Agreed. I've got three large airports within 45 minutes of me. If one of them offered free wifi and the others didnt, it would be a very easy decision which airport to fly out of. I think most business travelers would agree.
I agree this wifi free-for-all is getting out of hand. Heck, I've got three different neighbors providing free wifi! ;-)
Didn't Ebay just win a case that said they are not liable for the statements posted by users? Wouldn't this logically apply to teacher reviews and make them nonliable for things posted by their users?
It's a good precedent but as the poster stated - he doesn't have the time/resources to put on a legal defense. No matter how good the previous rulings are, you still need legal counsel.
So not only is he punished with unfair accusations, but now we follow it up with a thorough slashdotting? Have mercy on the poor guy!
and all you'll see is huge pink squares on your screen where the nipples should be.
;-)
Kind of like pr0n on a TRS80 or C64
I'm not interested in fancy/artistic things like video editing on my computer, I just want high quality video, preferably keeping it under $1000.
Not to be a troll, but wouldn't this question be better suited for a consumer electronics discussion board? I find it odd that you would ask the slashdot crowd about a product whose computer interface capabilities you care nothing about.
That being said, I have a $499 Sony digital-8 handycam. It works great, uses the ubiquitous digital-8 tapes (same form factor as hi-8), and has USB and firewire connections to boot!
How's the pr0n in India?
What are the Indian trolls like? Do they also proclaim the death of BSD and the nuances of Soviet Russia?
What is minimum wage in India (if there is such a thing there)? What would you estimate the average programmer or sysadmin makes in India? (both figures in Rupees)
The only thing I'd like to add also is to *NEVER* trust an employer (or anyone else) that says "sure it's in the contract, but we never really apply it".
Excellent advice. That's like the used car salesman assuring you that "Sure, that sound is normal, It'll go away on it's own".
If it's not in writing, it didn't happen. If it IS in writing, rest assured, it WILL happen.
"Hire a Lawyer" has become a kneejerk reaction on Slashdot. I'd suggest, instead, to understand what you're being asked to sign, and then if a minor modification would fix it, mark up the contract, initial it, and ask them to do the same.
It isn't a knee jerk reaction - it's the only logical course of action if you yourself are not a lawyer.
Laws change on a regular basis and the "language" of these contracts is very precise. If you are not familar with writing legal contracts yourself, and you do not keep up with all the changes each year to all the applicable contract laws - don't do it.
If you are not a lawyer, it just isn't worth the risk of "DIY".
Why is Microsoft doing this? Besides the obvious "Why don't they just use Linux?" suggestion, I'm puzzled why M$ would "develop" a stripped down Windows for just that market. If "crippled" means that it doesn't include a web browser or media player - I'm all for it. They should sell the product in other markets IMO.
Plus, in many developing nations like Thailand you can buy any software you want for about $1 or $1.50 per CD. Why would they pay more to get less?
I'll be interested to see if the product actually takes off there.