Games like Doom3, and HL2 were practically DESIGNED around the Opteron, so Intel's lagging behind because of optimization at this point.
But, gamers, if you really want to save some money, please buy the AMD. At this point, I'd wait for the next release of the 6XX line before buying one.
Hey, it's a joke, but at least Intel took a really good step: Including SpeedStep by default on their DESKTOP processors. This was a move I predicted would happen in 1999-2001, back when the Pentium 3's were running into thermo problems as well, and then the Pentium 4's were just getting out of the gate. Even though it can be argued AMD doesn't need to take this extra step, such a step would be great if not for power savings alone, but also a possible boost in durability of the processor.
My negative statement: Intel should have used SpeedStep2, and had an adjustable multiplier down to 8x or 10x. If they could drop the temp down to around 35dC, and around 1.5GHz, and people won't really notice a huge performance hit. I really love the way the Pentium M and Pentium 4 are working together for Intel.
Maybe because it won't work, or is incredibly dangerous, and they can't get any of their lawyers/insurance agencies to insure it.
It seems like a good idea when you read about it, but it's really got no structural rigidity, and almost everything we've built in space so far has been first and foremost a floating ROCK. Recently we've added more composite materials due to their strenght and relative weight reduction, but even these materials aren't seen very often.
There are also a lot of other considerations. For one, what about radiation? This is basically a shopping bag filled with air, floating in space; what's to stop the millions of rads coming from the sun from ripping what ever organism inhabits them to shreads? Next, what about micrometeor impact? One constant in our space voyages is that we've left more and more garbage in orbit, lots of which are nothing but small flecks of paint or a nut or a bolt that's came off of a bulkhead (or a shearing body, like in Apollo's shear-away stage bolts). What about the heat expansion/contraction from when the module's in front of the sun vs behind the Earth?
But it's not all negative. I love the idea of in-space inflation/construction, and I did read that they plan on using water for radiation shielding, and licensed some NASA patents to help out, and they have put some thought into micrometeorites and presurization, but the fact still remains that a system like this just hasn't been tested yet, and that generally with these kinds of hazards, one should over-design rather than under. I'm just a skeptic, and think that, while this is a novel idea, it won't lead to "Space Yachts" in our life time.
One of the reasons PHP doesn't integrate their own logic for building templates is very simple; it's a programming language, not a content designer.
PHP has done everything within their power to make it easy for anyone to build their own templating engine; They've made it so prints can be inlined, they've made it so it has great database access including support for a core database (SQLite), they've made it so error reporting can be customized and everything can be sugar coated as deeply as you want.
The fact is, when you add more to the language, you add to the bloat of the beast. This is one of the problems I have with Perl (though, I have many more significant problems with it); there is literally a module to do everything. And since the language has built in modules to do it, nobody bothers to write code anymore.
I think PHP is still sans-template-engine out of the nature of it. Many companys thrive off of selling their PHP-page templates (Movable Type being the best example I can think of, also look at Invision Forums, etc), and this is how it should be. People should write the code so that it does what they want it, not have the language dictate how it should be done.
As for PHP's move into Object Orientation, I embrace it. I think that in order for PHP to even be considerable as a language, it needs to have an Object subsystem so that it's easier to maintain and to allow programmers to quickly write programs that will last in the language. PHP once was "Scriptable C", which is great and fast and enough for 80% (arbitrary number, not quotable) of the users, and that's why those 80% still use PHP4, but for those who want/need OO, they've upgraded.
So why are you bitching about not having some common facility in the language, and the fact the language is now OO? The two arguments counteract each other. The fact it's now OO makes it EASIER to design those facilities in the language, thus, keeping them out of the implementation of it.
I think one of the reasons IBM won't touch Wine is legality concerns. Sure, it's an open source re-engineered version of Win32, but there's no way to completely trust the source, to say that some of it didn't come directly from Windows. And Microsoft could very easily pull that trap on anyone, if they felt the need to.
Besides, why use WinAPI when you can natively port the code? It saves a boatload in interpretation time, and is better interoperable with other programs on the system (some/most of which won't speak WinAPI). Generally I would totally agree with you, but when it comes to Wine, even I'm skiddish about touching it.
It'd take a lot of engineering to get the details of Step 4 right. The major problem with this is that the capsules would most likely disintegrate long before they're at a low enough atmostpheric level for gravity to hold onto it.
I think we'd have a lot better luck genetically engineering some kind of moss that loves cold temperatures, eating carbon-oxide rich rocks and outputting oxygen. Get enough of the moss on the surface to pump a certain quota of oxygen, then burn some of the moss, releasing CO2. Of course, we're still years off from considering anything like this, as we've got to overcome the technological hurdle of getting off our planet, and even the Space Elevator is a long way off.
Then again, it sounds very reasonable. Think about how the human body's immune system works. When our bodies detect some foreign bodies, we simply crank up the temperature and eventually smoke out what ever illness we've contracted.
Going along with the ideal that the human race is actually a virus, it could be said that mother nature's "turning up the temperature" is partly her attempt to get rid of us.
Hopefully we'll be smarter viruses and help keep the temperature down, or else we'll be needing to "evolve" a new way off of this body. Very good analogy I'd say.
From my point of view, this year's been shaping up to be the coldest one yet. Here in Kentucky it's barely made it above 50 degrees all year (even though it's less than 60 days into it so far). We haven't seen any record-setting snowfall yet, but that's not surprising either.
Wake me up when March rolls to a close. I could use some warmpth.
Some sound advice has already been given..
on
x86 Assembly on Mac OS X
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You've got the option of either Emulation or new hardware, as quoted by everyone on here. But there is probably a better way than both. Ask your teacher at your school if there's a box available in the IT department that's the correct archetecture. Like, for example, I am also a vehement mac user, and I had a project that required me to use assembly (mainly SSE-related things). Since I didn't know assembly for the PPC yet, I asked my professor and he said to get an account with the school's super computer. So I did, I wrote the software, and got an A on the project. Simple as that. VNC is your friend.
20 Seconds is used to keep the database from keeling over. After all, they do get a significant amount of reads and writes per second.
It's sad that Slashdot hasn't invested very much time in improving technologically. It could be so much better, but I guess it's just another blog to those who run it.
It's not got to be that complicated. It's simply a transaction layer. You tell me in what ever language you want how to do something, and I'll translate it to another language so that another GUI can do what you asked. If done right, it wouldn't require ANY recompilation of the programs existing today, and would simply reduce the amount of libraries needed in memory. Of course, the trade off is translation time, which can be a lot or a little depending on how alike the two windowing systems are.
Xlibs really don't have much to do with your argument. X simply provides a surface on which to draw, what I'm asking is getting together all of the artists with a translator, sitting down and letting each library teach the others how to draw their way. This reduces the amount of which seperates the two, providing a stable medium in which a single, unified desktop linux widget/windowing system can be based upon, which is programmable with a HUGE variety of windowing program design. Which ever one that becomes more dominant will obviously be superior, simply because it's faster to translate from it, to the drawing core. Other, less dominant systems will eventually pass to the way side, because programmers won't want to use an interface that's inheirently slower, but will still want their programs to be runnable by everyone without having to go through Dependency Hell.
..based on something from Star Trek. This is the very kind of thing I think of when they pull up their tricorder to some alien race, and poof, a strand of their DNA is up on one of those pretty LCD monitors behind them.
That being said, I think this is a brilliant use of computer technology. Catalogs and databases of this kind are what we need, especially while going through the jungles of various continents in search of miraculous wonder cures. Besides, if we had done this before with the Dodo and other animals that went extinct, we could rebuild the strands of DNA, and make the animal again for study. I tend to think more and more as we corrupt the planet with roads and sidewalks that research and food will be the only reason to have living stuff around, and knowing that we have a computer database of all that is alive and the ability through cloning to reproduce any of it is at least a comforting thought.
Which is why I ask "Why hasn't there been a framework written yet to make ANY windowing system look native?" I know there are attempts: wxWindows for example. But the problem is, you still have to use their API's, which means that you're limited to your coding skills. There's also been qt-gtk which is a library that accepts some gtk calls and passes them to the QT library. This is more of what we want/need.
Imagine a QT-GTK-Windows-wxWindows-SWING-Cocoa-etc. Program using absolutely any GUI style coding you know, and let the catch-all library intercept the call, and pass it to whatever windowing system you want. I know this will be rough work, but where virtually all windowing systems do the same thing, I'm sure it can be done. The hardest part will be tearing apart the Macros that each implementation uses, and then optimizing it once you've stripped it to its most verbose state.
Then the problem won't be "What libraries are in RAM?", but instead "Which can perform the interpretation from X to X fastest?". More kudos to QT-GTK, but I hope it keeps going.
If you ask me, they just hired some MIPS engineers to stick a bunch of "Stream", or "Continuous Vector" units onto a modern processor, to try to undercut the video card market. Think about it this way: the Xbox hyped about having nVidia graphics core, the Gamecube is sporting a nice Radeon inside, but since Sony is a japanese megacorp, they want to do everything themselves.
I'd suspect performance to be on par with a slower pentium 4 (around 2.8GHz), due to waiting on those stream processors to use the bus, and due to SMT, which automatically performance hits whatever can't use it effeciently enough. As for Playstation games, it'll probably be the fastest damned platform ever.
I believe in the GPL as well, but I also believe that for Linux to ever have a future, it needs solidity, which is something that it still fails at having, and therefore, fails to get a foothold on Microsoft.
A thousand monkeys can code a great operating system in no time at all, Microsoft, Apple, or Linux developers included. What Apple did with OS X is take something that OS developers were working on, and gave it direction. They planned how it would work with their hardware, and how their graphics engine would work on top of it, and that's why it was great.
Windows was originally great because of this same ideal; take something that exists, give it direction, and make it work for anyone. DOS had been around quite a while, so they took it, slapped on a graphical shell, and it started working for users. Sure, it had tons of problems, still does, but that's only because Windows leadership and direction has totally failed; they're so rich they don't feel the need to guide their product anymore. They can just pay someone else to do it for them (advertisers).
Linux is everything underneath. It's a great codebase, but it's highly disorganized, and lacking any sort of solid direction. Sure, there are tons of little organizations based on Open Source technologies, and lots of them are doing well. For example, Mozilla's probably one of the most successful Open Source projects in existance to date, because they have a highly organized body driving them, pushing them to be not only innovative, but standard complete and safe. Their success stems from their organization.
Certain Linux distrobutions got their act together organizational wise, and that's why they're doing so much better now as well. Take Suse or Redhat for example. They both have corporate backings which gives them a definite direction, and something to tailor themselves to. Both of those corporations tend to realize that Linux is best in the server room. Maybe this should say something to the Linux developers about where they need to innovate.
Look, you're barking up the complete wrong tree. Apple uses free and open source technologies to bolster their own technology because its readily available, and in great techonlogical shape. It doesn't help the community in the sense of switching to Free and Open Source software. It was never intended to. It intention is, and always will be, to make money and satisfy customers. Linux will never satisfy customers because it's not listening to its customers; It's listening to its developers. You can argue that they are fundamentally the same thing, and this may be true for most Linux users. But to those who don't know jack shit about programming, but know that when an operating system looks good, is fast and responsive, bug free and robust, they will want to use it, those people will choose Apple every day compared to anything.
I praise Apple and their work towards Open Source because they realized how much it helped them become who they are. They realized this by making their software easy, standards compatible, and user friendly. They want people to use their products, and in the end run, this is ultimately what keeps Apple great. The consequences of using Open Source to bolster Closed Source is community resentment more than anything else (look at the Linksys/Busybox situation, for example), and Apple's striving hard to keep their relationship with their community healthy and strong. If they continue on this path, I see nothing to worry about.
Stop being so paranoid, pedantic and proud. Open Source will continue to live, and be strong. It, above anything else, is the future, and companies that understand that, will only grow by embracing it. Just think about that the next time you buy a piece of hardware.
I'm guessing you've never owned a Mac. My iBook with its dinky 32MB card and 256 MB of ddr (before I added a gig) ran every graphical piece of eye candy completely fine until the harddrive got very full (98%). Then it seemed like the operating system swapped out a lot, causing it to be a bit slower. Even then, it was much better than anything I've seen in Windows, and its performance was still good enough to play World of Warcraft without batting an eye.
Apple can show you that minimalistic hardware can go a long way. No need for 256MB graphics cards on a daily user or an economy machine.
I don't want a browser to throw an error when it can't parse a page, I would have liked it if way back when, it wouldn't have rendered a page that was broken. That way, the web developers could instantly tell something was wrong, and fix their code.
MS embraces broken standards by making an XML parser that parses XML files that are non-standard compliant, and in this case (MS Money), I think it should throw an error, instead of parsing. That would have instantly made people call up their financial institutions and say "Hey, I got this error message, what do I do?", provoking them to fix their code. It's very simple.
As for people always creating invalid input, that's bullshit. People create it because "it works" and not just to spite the engineer. Software, and computers in general, operate with a very simple contract: "I, the computer, will do anything you tell me to do, just as long as I can understand what you're telling me to do." If the user wants to let down his side of the contract, so should the computer.
Fix the XML, then parse. Microsoft's parser is probably broken in a way that it doesn't look for closing tags (think, regular expression matching for the open tag, then extracting data until it hits the next tag). It's not beyond Microsoft to break their own software just to make it difficult for others to use the format, but it does make it harder on us developers to keep going.
So, I'd try finding a way to rebuild the XML file before parsing it, but only after detecting if it needs it.
And you answered the reason for such a thing at the end of your post. Sure it's cheaper to rent a server for 150$ a month, but you're only going to get a recent pentium 4, maybe a xeon or a opteron. You could spend a little more and get a much bigger system, but this is around what you'll get, tops.
What if you wanted to do a research project on the fluid mechanics of the jetstream? (completely hypothetical, and just as an example of an operation that could be parallelized for speed). Your little 1-2 processor machine that you'll get for 150$ bucks is now going to take forever to do this, even for a relatively short sample. So, you now have an option of getting a 512 processor machine that can probably do the same amount of work in five to ten minutes, but since you're buying time in CPU hours, you can afford to do 6-12 times the sample space, for just 512 dollars, and can have it done in an hour, verses waiting a couple of months to do the same sample space, which would end up costing you relatively the same in monitary units, but a vast amount of difference in time. And as we know, Time == Money, so by blowing more time, you've actually spent more (especially if you're working for a company, which wants it done yesterday).
I dunno, this thing sounds perfect for our University (UofL). We have two "super computers", a newer Operton based one, and a much older IBM big iron server (supposedly the same kind as the one that ran Deep Blue). Both super computers are open to all computer science students as a means for centralized storage and backup, and for compiling bigger projects, but other than that, they go unused (as far as I know). I believe if they ever hit a big enough research project that required more CPU power than what we have (which is to say, not too shabby for a university, but it's no BigMac either), we'd be shit out of luck. That was before this offering, though.
This should've been a poll topic, and probably has been a bajillion times before, but at least as a poll, it would get close.
Then there are all of the "MISSING OPTION" threads, where people are like "well, Debian is on the list, but I feel the need to mention Ubunto/UserLinux because I'm a douche". And then on top of that you get the "HAHAHA, I USE BSD" posts that we're already getting, which are specifically out of realm of the question.
SIGH. I just wish/. had better filters for this garbage.
Well, Ubuntu is (Desktop)BusinessDebian (like UserLinux, only much further ahead), and I'm still a little shaky on it, I think there's some "Monkey Magic" that it performs that's a little weird and the use of their own apt-get servers isn't the best either. Good at limiting their distro, bad for general debian-to-ubuntu compatibility.
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Games like Doom3, and HL2 were practically DESIGNED around the Opteron, so Intel's lagging behind because of optimization at this point.
But, gamers, if you really want to save some money, please buy the AMD. At this point, I'd wait for the next release of the 6XX line before buying one.
Hey, it's a joke, but at least Intel took a really good step: Including SpeedStep by default on their DESKTOP processors. This was a move I predicted would happen in 1999-2001, back when the Pentium 3's were running into thermo problems as well, and then the Pentium 4's were just getting out of the gate. Even though it can be argued AMD doesn't need to take this extra step, such a step would be great if not for power savings alone, but also a possible boost in durability of the processor.
My negative statement: Intel should have used SpeedStep2, and had an adjustable multiplier down to 8x or 10x. If they could drop the temp down to around 35dC, and around 1.5GHz, and people won't really notice a huge performance hit. I really love the way the Pentium M and Pentium 4 are working together for Intel.
Maybe because it won't work, or is incredibly dangerous, and they can't get any of their lawyers/insurance agencies to insure it.
It seems like a good idea when you read about it, but it's really got no structural rigidity, and almost everything we've built in space so far has been first and foremost a floating ROCK. Recently we've added more composite materials due to their strenght and relative weight reduction, but even these materials aren't seen very often.
There are also a lot of other considerations. For one, what about radiation? This is basically a shopping bag filled with air, floating in space; what's to stop the millions of rads coming from the sun from ripping what ever organism inhabits them to shreads? Next, what about micrometeor impact? One constant in our space voyages is that we've left more and more garbage in orbit, lots of which are nothing but small flecks of paint or a nut or a bolt that's came off of a bulkhead (or a shearing body, like in Apollo's shear-away stage bolts). What about the heat expansion/contraction from when the module's in front of the sun vs behind the Earth?
But it's not all negative. I love the idea of in-space inflation/construction, and I did read that they plan on using water for radiation shielding, and licensed some NASA patents to help out, and they have put some thought into micrometeorites and presurization, but the fact still remains that a system like this just hasn't been tested yet, and that generally with these kinds of hazards, one should over-design rather than under. I'm just a skeptic, and think that, while this is a novel idea, it won't lead to "Space Yachts" in our life time.
One of the reasons PHP doesn't integrate their own logic for building templates is very simple; it's a programming language, not a content designer.
PHP has done everything within their power to make it easy for anyone to build their own templating engine; They've made it so prints can be inlined, they've made it so it has great database access including support for a core database (SQLite), they've made it so error reporting can be customized and everything can be sugar coated as deeply as you want.
The fact is, when you add more to the language, you add to the bloat of the beast. This is one of the problems I have with Perl (though, I have many more significant problems with it); there is literally a module to do everything. And since the language has built in modules to do it, nobody bothers to write code anymore.
I think PHP is still sans-template-engine out of the nature of it. Many companys thrive off of selling their PHP-page templates (Movable Type being the best example I can think of, also look at Invision Forums, etc), and this is how it should be. People should write the code so that it does what they want it, not have the language dictate how it should be done.
As for PHP's move into Object Orientation, I embrace it. I think that in order for PHP to even be considerable as a language, it needs to have an Object subsystem so that it's easier to maintain and to allow programmers to quickly write programs that will last in the language. PHP once was "Scriptable C", which is great and fast and enough for 80% (arbitrary number, not quotable) of the users, and that's why those 80% still use PHP4, but for those who want/need OO, they've upgraded.
So why are you bitching about not having some common facility in the language, and the fact the language is now OO? The two arguments counteract each other. The fact it's now OO makes it EASIER to design those facilities in the language, thus, keeping them out of the implementation of it.
I think one of the reasons IBM won't touch Wine is legality concerns. Sure, it's an open source re-engineered version of Win32, but there's no way to completely trust the source, to say that some of it didn't come directly from Windows. And Microsoft could very easily pull that trap on anyone, if they felt the need to.
Besides, why use WinAPI when you can natively port the code? It saves a boatload in interpretation time, and is better interoperable with other programs on the system (some/most of which won't speak WinAPI). Generally I would totally agree with you, but when it comes to Wine, even I'm skiddish about touching it.
It'd take a lot of engineering to get the details of Step 4 right. The major problem with this is that the capsules would most likely disintegrate long before they're at a low enough atmostpheric level for gravity to hold onto it.
I think we'd have a lot better luck genetically engineering some kind of moss that loves cold temperatures, eating carbon-oxide rich rocks and outputting oxygen. Get enough of the moss on the surface to pump a certain quota of oxygen, then burn some of the moss, releasing CO2. Of course, we're still years off from considering anything like this, as we've got to overcome the technological hurdle of getting off our planet, and even the Space Elevator is a long way off.
Then again, it sounds very reasonable. Think about how the human body's immune system works. When our bodies detect some foreign bodies, we simply crank up the temperature and eventually smoke out what ever illness we've contracted.
Going along with the ideal that the human race is actually a virus, it could be said that mother nature's "turning up the temperature" is partly her attempt to get rid of us.
Hopefully we'll be smarter viruses and help keep the temperature down, or else we'll be needing to "evolve" a new way off of this body. Very good analogy I'd say.
I'm gonna have to go with you on this one.
From my point of view, this year's been shaping up to be the coldest one yet. Here in Kentucky it's barely made it above 50 degrees all year (even though it's less than 60 days into it so far). We haven't seen any record-setting snowfall yet, but that's not surprising either.
Wake me up when March rolls to a close. I could use some warmpth.
You've got the option of either Emulation or new hardware, as quoted by everyone on here. But there is probably a better way than both. Ask your teacher at your school if there's a box available in the IT department that's the correct archetecture. Like, for example, I am also a vehement mac user, and I had a project that required me to use assembly (mainly SSE-related things). Since I didn't know assembly for the PPC yet, I asked my professor and he said to get an account with the school's super computer. So I did, I wrote the software, and got an A on the project. Simple as that. VNC is your friend.
20 Seconds is used to keep the database from keeling over. After all, they do get a significant amount of reads and writes per second.
It's sad that Slashdot hasn't invested very much time in improving technologically. It could be so much better, but I guess it's just another blog to those who run it.
It's not got to be that complicated. It's simply a transaction layer. You tell me in what ever language you want how to do something, and I'll translate it to another language so that another GUI can do what you asked. If done right, it wouldn't require ANY recompilation of the programs existing today, and would simply reduce the amount of libraries needed in memory. Of course, the trade off is translation time, which can be a lot or a little depending on how alike the two windowing systems are.
Xlibs really don't have much to do with your argument. X simply provides a surface on which to draw, what I'm asking is getting together all of the artists with a translator, sitting down and letting each library teach the others how to draw their way. This reduces the amount of which seperates the two, providing a stable medium in which a single, unified desktop linux widget/windowing system can be based upon, which is programmable with a HUGE variety of windowing program design. Which ever one that becomes more dominant will obviously be superior, simply because it's faster to translate from it, to the drawing core. Other, less dominant systems will eventually pass to the way side, because programmers won't want to use an interface that's inheirently slower, but will still want their programs to be runnable by everyone without having to go through Dependency Hell.
..based on something from Star Trek. This is the very kind of thing I think of when they pull up their tricorder to some alien race, and poof, a strand of their DNA is up on one of those pretty LCD monitors behind them.
That being said, I think this is a brilliant use of computer technology. Catalogs and databases of this kind are what we need, especially while going through the jungles of various continents in search of miraculous wonder cures. Besides, if we had done this before with the Dodo and other animals that went extinct, we could rebuild the strands of DNA, and make the animal again for study. I tend to think more and more as we corrupt the planet with roads and sidewalks that research and food will be the only reason to have living stuff around, and knowing that we have a computer database of all that is alive and the ability through cloning to reproduce any of it is at least a comforting thought.
end rant.
Which is why I ask "Why hasn't there been a framework written yet to make ANY windowing system look native?" I know there are attempts: wxWindows for example. But the problem is, you still have to use their API's, which means that you're limited to your coding skills. There's also been qt-gtk which is a library that accepts some gtk calls and passes them to the QT library. This is more of what we want/need.
Imagine a QT-GTK-Windows-wxWindows-SWING-Cocoa-etc. Program using absolutely any GUI style coding you know, and let the catch-all library intercept the call, and pass it to whatever windowing system you want. I know this will be rough work, but where virtually all windowing systems do the same thing, I'm sure it can be done. The hardest part will be tearing apart the Macros that each implementation uses, and then optimizing it once you've stripped it to its most verbose state.
Then the problem won't be "What libraries are in RAM?", but instead "Which can perform the interpretation from X to X fastest?". More kudos to QT-GTK, but I hope it keeps going.
If you ask me, they just hired some MIPS engineers to stick a bunch of "Stream", or "Continuous Vector" units onto a modern processor, to try to undercut the video card market. Think about it this way: the Xbox hyped about having nVidia graphics core, the Gamecube is sporting a nice Radeon inside, but since Sony is a japanese megacorp, they want to do everything themselves.
I'd suspect performance to be on par with a slower pentium 4 (around 2.8GHz), due to waiting on those stream processors to use the bus, and due to SMT, which automatically performance hits whatever can't use it effeciently enough. As for Playstation games, it'll probably be the fastest damned platform ever.
Like, total duh dude. Haven't you heard of Longhorn?????
I believe in the GPL as well, but I also believe that for Linux to ever have a future, it needs solidity, which is something that it still fails at having, and therefore, fails to get a foothold on Microsoft.
A thousand monkeys can code a great operating system in no time at all, Microsoft, Apple, or Linux developers included. What Apple did with OS X is take something that OS developers were working on, and gave it direction. They planned how it would work with their hardware, and how their graphics engine would work on top of it, and that's why it was great.
Windows was originally great because of this same ideal; take something that exists, give it direction, and make it work for anyone. DOS had been around quite a while, so they took it, slapped on a graphical shell, and it started working for users. Sure, it had tons of problems, still does, but that's only because Windows leadership and direction has totally failed; they're so rich they don't feel the need to guide their product anymore. They can just pay someone else to do it for them (advertisers).
Linux is everything underneath. It's a great codebase, but it's highly disorganized, and lacking any sort of solid direction. Sure, there are tons of little organizations based on Open Source technologies, and lots of them are doing well. For example, Mozilla's probably one of the most successful Open Source projects in existance to date, because they have a highly organized body driving them, pushing them to be not only innovative, but standard complete and safe. Their success stems from their organization.
Certain Linux distrobutions got their act together organizational wise, and that's why they're doing so much better now as well. Take Suse or Redhat for example. They both have corporate backings which gives them a definite direction, and something to tailor themselves to. Both of those corporations tend to realize that Linux is best in the server room. Maybe this should say something to the Linux developers about where they need to innovate.
Look, you're barking up the complete wrong tree. Apple uses free and open source technologies to bolster their own technology because its readily available, and in great techonlogical shape. It doesn't help the community in the sense of switching to Free and Open Source software. It was never intended to. It intention is, and always will be, to make money and satisfy customers. Linux will never satisfy customers because it's not listening to its customers; It's listening to its developers. You can argue that they are fundamentally the same thing, and this may be true for most Linux users. But to those who don't know jack shit about programming, but know that when an operating system looks good, is fast and responsive, bug free and robust, they will want to use it, those people will choose Apple every day compared to anything.
I praise Apple and their work towards Open Source because they realized how much it helped them become who they are. They realized this by making their software easy, standards compatible, and user friendly. They want people to use their products, and in the end run, this is ultimately what keeps Apple great. The consequences of using Open Source to bolster Closed Source is community resentment more than anything else (look at the Linksys/Busybox situation, for example), and Apple's striving hard to keep their relationship with their community healthy and strong. If they continue on this path, I see nothing to worry about.
Stop being so paranoid, pedantic and proud. Open Source will continue to live, and be strong. It, above anything else, is the future, and companies that understand that, will only grow by embracing it. Just think about that the next time you buy a piece of hardware.
I'm guessing you've never owned a Mac. My iBook with its dinky 32MB card and 256 MB of ddr (before I added a gig) ran every graphical piece of eye candy completely fine until the harddrive got very full (98%). Then it seemed like the operating system swapped out a lot, causing it to be a bit slower. Even then, it was much better than anything I've seen in Windows, and its performance was still good enough to play World of Warcraft without batting an eye.
Apple can show you that minimalistic hardware can go a long way. No need for 256MB graphics cards on a daily user or an economy machine.
At least they aren't "making the data fit the theory". Just imagine what gravity would work like if Newton wanted it to point away from the earth ;)
I don't want a browser to throw an error when it can't parse a page, I would have liked it if way back when, it wouldn't have rendered a page that was broken. That way, the web developers could instantly tell something was wrong, and fix their code.
MS embraces broken standards by making an XML parser that parses XML files that are non-standard compliant, and in this case (MS Money), I think it should throw an error, instead of parsing. That would have instantly made people call up their financial institutions and say "Hey, I got this error message, what do I do?", provoking them to fix their code. It's very simple.
As for people always creating invalid input, that's bullshit. People create it because "it works" and not just to spite the engineer. Software, and computers in general, operate with a very simple contract: "I, the computer, will do anything you tell me to do, just as long as I can understand what you're telling me to do." If the user wants to let down his side of the contract, so should the computer.
Fix the XML, then parse. Microsoft's parser is probably broken in a way that it doesn't look for closing tags (think, regular expression matching for the open tag, then extracting data until it hits the next tag). It's not beyond Microsoft to break their own software just to make it difficult for others to use the format, but it does make it harder on us developers to keep going.
So, I'd try finding a way to rebuild the XML file before parsing it, but only after detecting if it needs it.
And you answered the reason for such a thing at the end of your post. Sure it's cheaper to rent a server for 150$ a month, but you're only going to get a recent pentium 4, maybe a xeon or a opteron. You could spend a little more and get a much bigger system, but this is around what you'll get, tops.
What if you wanted to do a research project on the fluid mechanics of the jetstream? (completely hypothetical, and just as an example of an operation that could be parallelized for speed). Your little 1-2 processor machine that you'll get for 150$ bucks is now going to take forever to do this, even for a relatively short sample. So, you now have an option of getting a 512 processor machine that can probably do the same amount of work in five to ten minutes, but since you're buying time in CPU hours, you can afford to do 6-12 times the sample space, for just 512 dollars, and can have it done in an hour, verses waiting a couple of months to do the same sample space, which would end up costing you relatively the same in monitary units, but a vast amount of difference in time. And as we know, Time == Money, so by blowing more time, you've actually spent more (especially if you're working for a company, which wants it done yesterday).
Just a thought/example.
I dunno, this thing sounds perfect for our University (UofL). We have two "super computers", a newer Operton based one, and a much older IBM big iron server (supposedly the same kind as the one that ran Deep Blue). Both super computers are open to all computer science students as a means for centralized storage and backup, and for compiling bigger projects, but other than that, they go unused (as far as I know). I believe if they ever hit a big enough research project that required more CPU power than what we have (which is to say, not too shabby for a university, but it's no BigMac either), we'd be shit out of luck. That was before this offering, though.
This should've been a poll topic, and probably has been a bajillion times before, but at least as a poll, it would get close.
/. had better filters for this garbage.
Then there are all of the "MISSING OPTION" threads, where people are like "well, Debian is on the list, but I feel the need to mention Ubunto/UserLinux because I'm a douche". And then on top of that you get the "HAHAHA, I USE BSD" posts that we're already getting, which are specifically out of realm of the question.
SIGH. I just wish
They want to know about LINUX, not a BSD. BSD's are great (I'm typing this on a super-BSD right now, Mac OS X), but they're not Linux.
Well, Ubuntu is (Desktop)BusinessDebian (like UserLinux, only much further ahead), and I'm still a little shaky on it, I think there's some "Monkey Magic" that it performs that's a little weird and the use of their own apt-get servers isn't the best either. Good at limiting their distro, bad for general debian-to-ubuntu compatibility.