The cost involved in transporting text messages is not just the capacity in the network. These messages all end up on a SMSC, a carrier-grade system able to handle multiple-hundreds or -thousands of simultanious SMS messages and route them to other subscribers and operators. These systems are provided by a handful of suppliers that know what to charge for a decent cluster of these baby's... and somehow they need support as well!
NB. Not in any way affiliated with telco's.
A buddy of mine made a media server with bunch of drives (8 I believe) on a single controller. The trick he used is that he switches on and off individual drives through a small PCB he made that uses a relay for switching power. Data connections for a bunch of drives are merged together. The board is controlled through the parallel which theoretically enables him to do 64 drives I hink (2 control signals and 6 for which drive to apply the command to). Small PCB and seems to work nice.
So there is a strict setup routine which drives can be on/off managed on BSD through a perl script.
One drive is allways on and used as a buffer disk. A script finds the file you're looking for using an Index, starts the drive, copies the file to the buffer disk and powers-off the drive again.
Power-friendly solution as well;-)
could be the TPM chip is just there to make sure the OSX DVD images supplied to developers don't run on Generic boxes? The *real* intel Mac's being released next year can use a totally different way to limit spreading of the OS, Firmware hacks, etc.
After all, how much work can it be for a good Apple developer to create a kernel extension that does some checking? Probably no more than a few days...
personally i use the Gentoo LiveCD on my TiBook quite regularly. the only problems occur when the CD gets too much damage from being in my backpack all the time!
gentoo boots into a nice Xwindows environment which i assume you don't care to customise... otherwise you'd make your system dual boot anyway...
and actually one of the nicests includes i found was that Airsnort is on the liveCD as well, making it easier for me to locate wireless networks when i'm on the move. i know there are some Mac alternatives but they usually involve messing with the Airport Driver which i don't like... i like the fact that my Mac just works.
so grab the Gentoo LiveCD from their site... works great.
1. if it doesn't contain a very highly needed security fix or a fix that you've been waiting for... WAIT!
2. if you have a separate machine available make a replica of that production machine and try the update on that machine... preferably of same hardware type of course.
3. always make a good backup of all your data and make sure you have the rescue images or NetBoot drive available.
4. schedule, let people and users know in advance and decide how long you're going to try to get everything working before you do the upgrade.
5. do the upgrade when planned. if all goed well, report that. if something breaks - try to fix it for the time you specified for yourself on forehand. after that time expires, reinstall your config and backup. report.
i think you're slightly off on the Solaris software versions...
SunOS 5.8 is calles Solaris 8, SunOS 5.9 is called Solaris 9. Versions before that were called SunOS . If you do a 'uname -a' on a Solaris 8 or 9 box it will still tell you it's SunOS 5.something.
Basically Apple is doing the same with it's version numbering. The 10.1,.2 etc. all get their special name (that started out as the internal development branch name). After 10.4 they'll probably stick to the O-Esss-Ax name even if they upgrade the major version number to 11.
actually i heard that Juniper themselves are also working on this 'model' to scale the performance by bundling M320's (ehhh, i think that was the typedef) together to... etc etc etc
i wonder if there's a short-term market for this. over here in Europe all but some of the T1 carriers have died, and the ones living are not investing that heavily.
would like to config one of these beasts though! just one! ahhhhhhh.... pleeeeeeeeeeeeaaase?
first thing i wondered about was which other countries had implemented this EUCD, and given the European Diversity, how that laq had been adapted.
This site:
http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/EUCD-Status
gives an excellent overview of the status of the EUCD in the EU countries.
if i had mod-points you would get all of them. if have not yet run across a/. post that puts my feelings about the completely fsck'd computer world in just two paragraphs...
if you're willing to spend $1300 for a Mac, keep your money in your pocket for another month - collect a paycheck and get the lowend G5 for another $300 extra. The G5 will definately fill your needs better than the G4 and have a higher resell value if you decide to "unswitch"... (aha, yeah!)
Just as you say Apple should increase their presence in the market now dominated by the "small" Unix workstations. *Real* apps, and not just ported OSS projects, should get big companies over!
I worked on COMPASS for several years, did some Cadence work as well. I was lucky because of my HP9000 workstation but i feel sorry for the people running them on win32...
Maybe we could compile a list of big, real world, apps for each line of industry and make petitions for a port?
the failure of the music business to get a grip on new models of doing business is, again, shocking. i'm having a hard time coping with it!
(a)
for one, the record companies themselves have made these completely different contracts by country. in order to maximize profits they have agreed on different pricing per country. i understand that there are legal differences, and that from a legal point of view the contracts are difficult and different also but anyways. i feel that the record companies should make a move towards apple (and maybe others as well) to set this up.
(b)
the prices of CD's is very high here in Europe. partly that is because of higher taxes, but the biggest cut still goes to the record companies. this encourages p2p filetrading as all internet-literate people *know* how much a CD is in the US.
(c)
the failure to give the rest of the world the same access to (legal) onlne music *will* hurt the music industry. because of all the different legal systems it is nearly impossible to go after the big traders, unlike the RIAA in the US. the situation in Est-European countries is even more difficult!
my guess is that apple would do wise to crack the European market one-by-one and force the record companies to come up with a solution on their end (by forcing 1 pricing schema!!!). start with the UK and Germany (big markets and easier law). Move on to the other ones, eg. the countries where apple stores are in place so you are a legal entity already.....
on the x86 side there is always vmware... it is a generic and reasonably well working x86 emulator. isn't a port to ppc planned for them?
btw. i know it would be difficult for them as they perform most instructions directly on the cpu -> there is no need to adapt two instruction sets (eg. x86 on x86 vs. x86 on ppc).
nevertheless, it could be a reasonable market considering MS is interested enough to buy companies that operate in that market...
i absolutely love this CD! it comes with good WLAN modules already in the kernel and airsnort on the CD. i went crazy for good WLAN tools without destroying my OSX install, this bootable CD actually has the right things already...
i love it, thumbs up.
funny video thing / random thoughts
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
the thing that always cracks me up about pc's is that i never found one that runs without a video card. it's an easy trick adding to the BIOS some routing to pick a serial port and dumping info there if there is no video, just like 15 year old Sun hardware does.
anyway, my feeling is that the reactions here focus to much on certain "functionality" being legacy, while i would say that the way that functionality has been implemented is legacy. there is absolutely no problem in having regular serial ports. it's just how you do interrupt handling and physicial design that makes the current PC implementation crap.
argh... i absolutely loathe these mine's bigger and faster things... it's like a boy's pissing contest time-and-time again.
this empty article blown up doesn't help!
although i must add that it proves that decent programming skills _on_any_cpu_ helps build a fast program...
Slashdot Mirror
The cost involved in transporting text messages is not just the capacity in the network. These messages all end up on a SMSC, a carrier-grade system able to handle multiple-hundreds or -thousands of simultanious SMS messages and route them to other subscribers and operators. These systems are provided by a handful of suppliers that know what to charge for a decent cluster of these baby's... and somehow they need support as well! NB. Not in any way affiliated with telco's.
A buddy of mine made a media server with bunch of drives (8 I believe) on a single controller. The trick he used is that he switches on and off individual drives through a small PCB he made that uses a relay for switching power. Data connections for a bunch of drives are merged together. The board is controlled through the parallel which theoretically enables him to do 64 drives I hink (2 control signals and 6 for which drive to apply the command to). Small PCB and seems to work nice. So there is a strict setup routine which drives can be on/off managed on BSD through a perl script. One drive is allways on and used as a buffer disk. A script finds the file you're looking for using an Index, starts the drive, copies the file to the buffer disk and powers-off the drive again. Power-friendly solution as well ;-)
could be the TPM chip is just there to make sure the OSX DVD images supplied to developers don't run on Generic boxes? The *real* intel Mac's being released next year can use a totally different way to limit spreading of the OS, Firmware hacks, etc.
After all, how much work can it be for a good Apple developer to create a kernel extension that does some checking? Probably no more than a few days...
the $45 listed in the US Apple Store is without Sales Tax, the EU price includes this.
this makes the US mightymouse (assuming 10% tax) around $50 without shipping.
the EU price is $64,70 (a dollar currently does 0,85 euro) without shipping.
someone is making 30% more profit on these in the EU...
Cisco released their updated VPN client May 12th. It still doesn't support multi-cpu systems but at least it works on 10.4...
gentoo boots into a nice Xwindows environment which i assume you don't care to customise... otherwise you'd make your system dual boot anyway...
and actually one of the nicests includes i found was that Airsnort is on the liveCD as well, making it easier for me to locate wireless networks when i'm on the move. i know there are some Mac alternatives but they usually involve messing with the Airport Driver which i don't like... i like the fact that my Mac just works.
so grab the Gentoo LiveCD from their site... works great.
1. if it doesn't contain a very highly needed security fix or a fix that you've been waiting for... WAIT!
2. if you have a separate machine available make a replica of that production machine and try the update on that machine... preferably of same hardware type of course.
3. always make a good backup of all your data and make sure you have the rescue images or NetBoot drive available.
4. schedule, let people and users know in advance and decide how long you're going to try to get everything working before you do the upgrade.
5. do the upgrade when planned. if all goed well, report that. if something breaks - try to fix it for the time you specified for yourself on forehand. after that time expires, reinstall your config and backup. report.
have fun.
SunOS 5.8 is calles Solaris 8, SunOS 5.9 is called Solaris 9. Versions before that were called SunOS . If you do a 'uname -a' on a Solaris 8 or 9 box it will still tell you it's SunOS 5.something.
Basically Apple is doing the same with it's version numbering. The 10.1, .2 etc. all get their special name (that started out as the internal development branch name). After 10.4 they'll probably stick to the O-Esss-Ax name even if they upgrade the major version number to 11.
But that's marketing :-)
actually i heard that Juniper themselves are also working on this 'model' to scale the performance by bundling M320's (ehhh, i think that was the typedef) together to ... etc etc etc
i wonder if there's a short-term market for this. over here in Europe all but some of the T1 carriers have died, and the ones living are not investing that heavily.
would like to config one of these beasts though! just one! ahhhhhhh.... pleeeeeeeeeeeeaaase?
first thing i wondered about was which other countries had implemented this EUCD, and given the European Diversity, how that laq had been adapted. This site: http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/EUCD-Status gives an excellent overview of the status of the EUCD in the EU countries.
if i had mod-points you would get all of them. if have not yet run across a /. post that puts my feelings about the completely fsck'd computer world in just two paragraphs...
if you're willing to spend $1300 for a Mac, keep your money in your pocket for another month - collect a paycheck and get the lowend G5 for another $300 extra. The G5 will definately fill your needs better than the G4 and have a higher resell value if you decide to "unswitch"... (aha, yeah!)
I worked on COMPASS for several years, did some Cadence work as well. I was lucky because of my HP9000 workstation but i feel sorry for the people running them on win32...
Maybe we could compile a list of big, real world, apps for each line of industry and make petitions for a port?
the failure of the music business to get a grip on new models of doing business is, again, shocking. i'm having a hard time coping with it! (a) for one, the record companies themselves have made these completely different contracts by country. in order to maximize profits they have agreed on different pricing per country. i understand that there are legal differences, and that from a legal point of view the contracts are difficult and different also but anyways. i feel that the record companies should make a move towards apple (and maybe others as well) to set this up. (b) the prices of CD's is very high here in Europe. partly that is because of higher taxes, but the biggest cut still goes to the record companies. this encourages p2p filetrading as all internet-literate people *know* how much a CD is in the US. (c) the failure to give the rest of the world the same access to (legal) onlne music *will* hurt the music industry. because of all the different legal systems it is nearly impossible to go after the big traders, unlike the RIAA in the US. the situation in Est-European countries is even more difficult! my guess is that apple would do wise to crack the European market one-by-one and force the record companies to come up with a solution on their end (by forcing 1 pricing schema!!!). start with the UK and Germany (big markets and easier law). Move on to the other ones, eg. the countries where apple stores are in place so you are a legal entity already. ....
on the x86 side there is always vmware... it is a generic and reasonably well working x86 emulator. isn't a port to ppc planned for them? btw. i know it would be difficult for them as they perform most instructions directly on the cpu -> there is no need to adapt two instruction sets (eg. x86 on x86 vs. x86 on ppc). nevertheless, it could be a reasonable market considering MS is interested enough to buy companies that operate in that market...
i absolutely love this CD! it comes with good WLAN modules already in the kernel and airsnort on the CD. i went crazy for good WLAN tools without destroying my OSX install, this bootable CD actually has the right things already... i love it, thumbs up.
the thing that always cracks me up about pc's is that i never found one that runs without a video card. it's an easy trick adding to the BIOS some routing to pick a serial port and dumping info there if there is no video, just like 15 year old Sun hardware does.
anyway, my feeling is that the reactions here focus to much on certain "functionality" being legacy, while i would say that the way that functionality has been implemented is legacy. there is absolutely no problem in having regular serial ports. it's just how you do interrupt handling and physicial design that makes the current PC implementation crap.
argh... i absolutely loathe these mine's bigger and faster things... it's like a boy's pissing contest time-and-time again. this empty article blown up doesn't help! although i must add that it proves that decent programming skills _on_any_cpu_ helps build a fast program...