About as fast, in all honesty (Well, Ultra/160, as the name says does 160 MB/s). However, IDE drives will almost certainly continue to lag SCSI in seek time, rotational velocity, cache, and efficency. As it stands, I hear a lot of people claim that you can put 6-10 top-of-the-line SCSI disks on a Ultra/160 chain before IO contention becomes a serious problem. Since ATA is limited to 2 (though they don't share the bus as well as SCSI), I don't think 100 MB/s is going to be a bottleneck anytime soon.
I suspect that due to complexity, SCSI controllers are more likely to fail but offer more options for redundancy and hot swap. SCSI drives are (in my experience) more reliable than ATA.
Obviously SCSI components are 50-1000% more expensive.
Fair doesn't really enter into it... but it is one hell of a better business model than the one where everyone has to pay the entire development cost, do something in house, and end up with a lower quality product.
My guess is that most of the cases where someone is going to pay for a "feature" that then gets integrated into the main branch, it will be something that nobody else needs at the time.
Namesys also (IIRC) will sell you a commercial license to eg. use ResierFS in a custom device w/ a proprietary OS. It has a potential market in embeded devices that need more space than NVRAM or flash can handle, but need to be able to handle power cycles gracefully. In this case, someone might contract for features that wouldn't be appropriate for mainline release, as well.
I think (hope!) some of the newer JVMs are better, but no, early JVMs used mark and sweep. This is one of my main complaints about Java -- the hype has always far exceeded the technical capabilities. Even still, I think Java's (or Java implemntation's) memory management is lagging.
There are a lot of eveidence to show that GC whould outperform manual memory management, especially in firm-realtime applications such as multimedia applications (hard realtime systems generally do no allocation at runtime). Basically, GC allows collecting memory to be defered out of a critical loop, or to be scheduled seperately from critical processes, while free() has to be run immediately. Also, malloc()/free() need to do a lot more bookkeeping to know to manage the heap, reduce fragmentation, and so forth. GC can avoid some of this, and amortize the rest over multiple allocations.
Of course, nothing is going to beat performance on a static/automatic array in C w/o bounds-checking. Java really has no way to support such a beast (even *with* bounds checking). This is one (or many) examples of Java "generalizing" to the extreme, which makes a lot of modern static (compile-time) optimizations impossible. They sort of make up for it with dynamic optimization, but as the article about Dynamo on Ars Technica indicates, they tend to compliment each other, so it would be better yet to have a language like C or C++ + run-time optimization ala dynamo.
Actually I always thought that while Java was OK for network client programming, it sucked for server programming due to the mentioned lack of non-blocking IO, as well as the lack of true destructors (finalize doesn't) which makes resource management impossible to do in an OO fashion.
C doesn't have any particularly aesthetically pleasing IO libraries for this, primarily because by the time network programming becase so ubiquitous that better frameworks were needed, much new development had moved to C++. For an example of an extremely well designed C++ networking framework, see the ACE project which supports many different single and multi-threaded programming models in a portable fashion while still allowing you to use high-performance features (such as asynchronous IO) that are not supported on all platforms if you want to.
I read it. A number of points have merit (like excempting from the source code review requirements software MS licenses from 3rd parties and has no legal right to expose). Some of them are merely political posturing, and some are downright silly. But overall, a document worth reviewing.
>Microsoft has definately abused it's power as a > market leader (maybe even a monopoly)
MS was found guilty of illegal business practices. In the real world of corporate life, when a company repeatedly and illegally abuses monopoly power (and I do belive they have monopoly power), they are punished. They way monopolies are punished is by breaking them up.
The reason the DOJ is pursuing this admitedly extreme remedy is that MS has repeatedly ignored or circumvented other less drastic injunctions. If they had not shown that prior disregard for government imposed remedies, I would not support a breakup. However, while it pains me to see the government interfering in the private sector so much, it would be worse if when the next Big Thing(tm) came along, MS could use it's dominence in the OS and productivity applications market to stifle honest competition for market share.
Nothing in this breakup plan is likely to weaken the stranglehold MS holds on certain current technologies -- if Linux (or anything else) is to unseat MS as the OS of the masses it will have to be soley on vastly superior technology and lower cost. However, hopefully we can protect as yet undiscovered markets from unfair and predatory business practices.
No matter how this plays out it is going to be a pain in the ass for a lot of people for some time. However, I think this is the price we have to pay if we want better competition in the long run.
Both for AT&T and NSI, the breakup of a monopoly (though obviously very different) caused concerns of incompatability and consumer harm. Yet when all was said and done, people figured out way of making things work together and the benefit to consumers has been great. I don't know how MS will do it, but I am sure it is possible.
And who is to say that the Apps division will only develop for Windows? They might, but on the other hand assuming the OS division doesn't backstab them early, they might see it as an opportunity to turn the OS into a commodity market. Consider that if every major application ran on Windows, Linux, BeOS, and *BSD, the choice of OS would be kind of like choosing between Dell and Micron... you get slightly different bells and whistles but you can do your work on any of them basically the same. This is probably going to happen sooner or later anyway, so if I were a major application vendor I would want to be in on it early.
Well, maybe you could set up Quake 3 on 100 machines running at 60 fps each and offset by 1/6000 of a second. Then, you would have 6000 fps distributed over 100 monitors...
And that every game released for the X-box will be designed to run at the optimum framerate at on exactly the CPU and memory configuration available. So a PIII 1GHz won't get you any boost.
By no one's estimation do I run either GNOME or KDE, yet applications for both run just as well as my xterms under a rather spartan WindowMaker desktop.
I am not concerned about disk space, so I don't mind having both sets of libs installed, and there is no desktop overhead when I just have xterms up.
So yes, the choices are manditory, but the great thing is I can choose "D) all of the above." -- without having any stupid (IMO) start menu at all.
So what are those "consequences for not using the window manager that everyone else is using"?
However, the DMCA gives both the right AND the responsibility to internet services to act as law enforcment agencies. Given that eBay is legally obligated to go along with M$, M$ ought to be requrired to abide by something resembling due process. Unfortunately, they are not.
Not only as mentioned 5 or 6 times does Linux run on Alpha, but at one point Digital released a port of the FX!32 emulator for Linux, allowing Linux/Alhpa to run Linux/intel binaries. I don't know how good it is, or how well supported, though.
Compaq/Digital has long supported Linux development on Alpha platforms. They have provided hardware for development, ported FX!32 to Linux/Alpha to provide Linux/x86 compatablity, as well as helping out out with Digital Unix (now Tru64) -> Linux compatability.
All of this was done well before Linux was on any sort of corporate radar, and is the reason why Alpha is the best and first supported non-intel archetecture, and why Linux has been mostly 64 bit clean a long time.
That is not to say that they might not screw it up, but both Digital and the Alpha division of Compaq have a pretty good history of being suppportive of free software, and they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
While I thing the VC++ debugger is a very nice tool, I find that gdb + emacs (not gdb inside emacs, which sucks rocks, IMO) is just as effective, if not as pretty. I usually find the the bottleneck in debugging is me, not the tool. I suspect that until some higher bandwidth human interfaces are designed (time to jack in!), that is not going to change.
The problem is, realistically speaking by the time students have enough background to understand the questions, let alone know enough about higher math to solve these problems without many years of redeveloping advanced mathematical concepts, they already know about these problems.
Acording to number theory ( I repeat, number theory. Not necissarily your idea of common sense) 1 is not a prime.
All elements of a ring (type of set, a notable element being the integers) are either units, prime, or composite. For the integers, the "units" are {1, -1}, and all numbers can be written as the product of a unit and a unique set of positive primes.
The important thing is the unique representation, which you can't get unless you use the "unit", otherwise 6 = 2*3 = 1*2*3 = 1*-1*-1*2*3. While it is sort of a hand waving excercise for the integers, it is more important for other rings, such as polynomials.
No, it is not intuative. Intuative means "Obvious without having to be taught" not "what you have come to expect for no particular reason"... Users Don't care about how many hard disks, or partitions they have in their system, and while UNIX isn't perfect (/var is full, but/home has plenty of space!), it is better than C: and D:. Removable disks are different, users do care about which drive is which then, but in that case using/cdrom and/floppy (or even/mnt/cdrom and/mnt/floppy) is better than "Your drive will be assigned a semi-random drive letter at boot". And anything is better than "Oh, you just installed a zip drive, now all of your applications which have hard coded a CD drive letter will fail to start"
Knowledge transfer is good, and should be a major goal, but lets not repeat the shortcomings of Mac the way windows has.
That said, wrt. to the root of this thread, I think Linux installers are the best availabe. Compare someone clicking throgh 5-10 screens of meaningless nonsense in a standard InstallShield install vs. running 1 install command to install an RPM, which displays a single, simple progress bar, then completes. Yes,.rpm,.deb, and.tgz all coexist, but a novice user probably want's to stick with packages for their version anyway (which are generally widely available). A novice user shouldn't (and usually doesn't) have to build from source.
UNIX has enough novice usability issues already, lets not add more on from Windows!
What I really like are GUI's on top of CLI interfaces. I am one of those freaky MH users (woohoo!). I don't mind GUI mail clients, but I won't give up the ability to check my email via telnet, and none of the various MH front ends appeal to me (or they don't get along well with using MH at the command line).
Of course, the other side is I like MH because it caters to my lack of organization by working well (and fast) with 4000 message in my inbox, and a lot of GUI mail clients seem to choke on that.
The killer app for me would be a gmail like client that stores your mail in a MySQL database for speed, presented a nice GUI interface with support for GPG et. al., plus has a command line query tool (basically like the MH commands), plus an interactive character cell mode (Pine/mutt). Each interface is best suited to different tasks.
So remind me again why after doing this you are now sharing those files via Napster? AFAIK, what this program did was find a list of people who had Napster set up to share Metallica MP3s. If you did that, you were offering people to pirate your (otherwise legitimate) MP3s.. If you didn't, they shouldn't have picked your name up.
Uh, no. Sorry to disapoint you, but unless you open up your chest cavity and apply electrodeds near your heart, 5V is not going to hurt you, no matter what.
DocBook (and all other forms of inline documentation) suck ass. However, they are about 10 times better than no documentation, and 1000 times better than inaccurate documentation. Experience shows that using out-of-line documentation leads to one of the two above problems, and therefore auto generated documenation is becoming the standard.
So, in practice I agree with you, but there is a widely held belief that inline docs are inherently superior to out of line docs. This is just plain wrong, as it leads to suboptimal documentation and suboptimal code (I have often cursed wading through gobs of commented out inline documentation when all I really wanted to see was the code). This is one huge advantage (of many) of C/C++ header files over Java-- at least the documentation only obsures the declaration, not the actual code.
Unfortunately, there is no possible suit against car MP3 players especially. To be in violation of the DMCA (or other aplicible laws), the device has to be designed (or "tweaked" to promote piracy. No actual case (of which there have been several) have shown any existing MP3 player to violate those rules. Car MP3 players in particular have a very good case of being designed to eliminate cumbersome and dangerous CD switching while driving.
I am speaking as someone who has ripped his entire CD collection to MP3 because I *prefer* to listen to them in that format--not because I wanted to weasel out of paying for the CDs in the first place.
To answer the original question: As soon as it becomes available I was planning on buying the empeg player w/ voice control despite the high price tag. If I can get a similar device within the same timeframe for $600, I would jump on it.
He seemed to be under the impression that people would care enough at his mentioning that he used windows in a relatively unextrodinary, though somewhat long winded post to use their moderation points on him.
Not a big deal either way, but I do find the people who continiously make comments about "man, I am going to get moderated down for this one..." for no apparent reason somewhat annoying. Not enough to use my moderator points on them, though:)
I am not a big fan of the old K systems, but the N class systems are pretty nice. We have a 6x440 CPU/16 GB system that screams, and they now go to 8x550/32 GB -- not bad for a "mid-range" server. The N machines have full hardware support for hot-swap components as well. Unfortunately, there is (as of yet) no software support for it at all (supposedly comming in 11.11, but as mentioned it will take at least a year to work right)
Everything I have seen and heard says the hardware is more reliable than anything Sun makes. Unfortunately, there are 6 times as many patches you have to apply to make the software run at all (all of them triggering an auto-reboot after install. Damn, Toto, I think we are in Windows again...)
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About as fast, in all honesty (Well, Ultra/160, as the name says does 160 MB/s). However, IDE drives will almost certainly continue to lag SCSI in seek time, rotational velocity, cache, and efficency. As it stands, I hear a lot of people claim that you can put 6-10 top-of-the-line SCSI disks on a Ultra/160 chain before IO contention becomes a serious problem. Since ATA is limited to 2 (though they don't share the bus as well as SCSI), I don't think 100 MB/s is going to be a bottleneck anytime soon.
I suspect that due to complexity, SCSI controllers are more likely to fail but offer more options for redundancy and hot swap. SCSI drives are (in my experience) more reliable than ATA.
Obviously SCSI components are 50-1000% more expensive.
Fair doesn't really enter into it... but it is one hell of a better business model than the one where everyone has to pay the entire development cost, do something in house, and end up with a lower quality product.
My guess is that most of the cases where someone is going to pay for a "feature" that then gets integrated into the main branch, it will be something that nobody else needs at the time.
Namesys also (IIRC) will sell you a commercial license to eg. use ResierFS in a custom device w/ a proprietary OS. It has a potential market in embeded devices that need more space than NVRAM or flash can handle, but need to be able to handle power cycles gracefully. In this case, someone might contract for features that wouldn't be appropriate for mainline release, as well.
I think (hope!) some of the newer JVMs are better, but no, early JVMs used mark and sweep. This is one of my main complaints about Java -- the hype has always far exceeded the technical capabilities. Even still, I think Java's (or Java implemntation's) memory management is lagging.
There are a lot of eveidence to show that GC whould outperform manual memory management, especially in firm-realtime applications such as multimedia applications (hard realtime systems generally do no allocation at runtime). Basically, GC allows collecting memory to be defered out of a critical loop, or to be scheduled seperately from critical processes, while free() has to be run immediately. Also, malloc()/free() need to do a lot more bookkeeping to know to manage the heap, reduce fragmentation, and so forth. GC can avoid some of this, and amortize the rest over multiple allocations.
Of course, nothing is going to beat performance on a static/automatic array in C w/o bounds-checking. Java really has no way to support such a beast (even *with* bounds checking). This is one (or many) examples of Java "generalizing" to the extreme, which makes a lot of modern static (compile-time) optimizations impossible. They sort of make up for it with dynamic optimization, but as the article about Dynamo on Ars Technica indicates, they tend to compliment each other, so it would be better yet to have a language like C or C++ + run-time optimization ala dynamo.
C doesn't have any particularly aesthetically pleasing IO libraries for this, primarily because by the time network programming becase so ubiquitous that better frameworks were needed, much new development had moved to C++. For an example of an extremely well designed C++ networking framework, see the ACE project which supports many different single and multi-threaded programming models in a portable fashion while still allowing you to use high-performance features (such as asynchronous IO) that are not supported on all platforms if you want to.
I read it. A number of points have merit (like excempting from the source code review requirements software MS licenses from 3rd parties and has no legal right to expose). Some of them are merely political posturing, and some are downright silly. But overall, a document worth reviewing.
>Microsoft has definately abused it's power as a
> market leader (maybe even a monopoly)
MS was found guilty of illegal business practices. In the real world of corporate life, when a company repeatedly and illegally abuses monopoly power (and I do belive they have monopoly power), they are punished. They way monopolies are punished is by breaking them up.
The reason the DOJ is pursuing this admitedly extreme remedy is that MS has repeatedly ignored or circumvented other less drastic injunctions. If they had not shown that prior disregard for government imposed remedies, I would not support a breakup. However, while it pains me to see the government interfering in the private sector so much, it would be worse if when the next Big Thing(tm) came along, MS could use it's dominence in the OS and productivity applications market to stifle honest competition for market share.
Nothing in this breakup plan is likely to weaken the stranglehold MS holds on certain current technologies -- if Linux (or anything else) is to unseat MS as the OS of the masses it will have to be soley on vastly superior technology and lower cost. However, hopefully we can protect as yet undiscovered markets from unfair and predatory business practices.
No matter how this plays out it is going to be a pain in the ass for a lot of people for some time. However, I think this is the price we have to pay if we want better competition in the long run.
Both for AT&T and NSI, the breakup of a monopoly (though obviously very different) caused concerns of incompatability and consumer harm. Yet when all was said and done, people figured out way of making things work together and the benefit to consumers has been great. I don't know how MS will do it, but I am sure it is possible.
And who is to say that the Apps division will only develop for Windows? They might, but on the other hand assuming the OS division doesn't backstab them early, they might see it as an opportunity to turn the OS into a commodity market. Consider that if every major application ran on Windows, Linux, BeOS, and *BSD, the choice of OS would be kind of like choosing between Dell and Micron... you get slightly different bells and whistles but you can do your work on any of them basically the same. This is probably going to happen sooner or later anyway, so if I were a major application vendor I would want to be in on it early.
Well, maybe you could set up Quake 3 on 100 machines running at 60 fps each and offset by 1/6000 of a second. Then, you would have 6000 fps distributed over 100 monitors...
And that every game released for the X-box will be designed to run at the optimum framerate at on exactly the CPU and memory configuration available. So a PIII 1GHz won't get you any boost.
By no one's estimation do I run either GNOME or KDE, yet applications for both run just as well as my xterms under a rather spartan WindowMaker desktop.
I am not concerned about disk space, so I don't mind having both sets of libs installed, and there is no desktop overhead when I just have xterms up.
So yes, the choices are manditory, but the great thing is I can choose "D) all of the above." -- without having any stupid (IMO) start menu at all.
So what are those "consequences for not using the window manager that everyone else is using"?
Their database is on a Sun (E10000), but their web servers run NT.
However, the DMCA gives both the right AND the responsibility to internet services to act as law enforcment agencies. Given that eBay is legally obligated to go along with M$, M$ ought to be requrired to abide by something resembling due process. Unfortunately, they are not.
Not only as mentioned 5 or 6 times does Linux run on Alpha, but at one point Digital released a port of the FX!32 emulator for Linux, allowing Linux/Alhpa to run Linux/intel binaries. I don't know how good it is, or how well supported, though.
Compaq/Digital has long supported Linux development on Alpha platforms. They have provided hardware for development, ported FX!32 to Linux/Alpha to provide Linux/x86 compatablity, as well as helping out out with Digital Unix (now Tru64) -> Linux compatability.
All of this was done well before Linux was on any sort of corporate radar, and is the reason why Alpha is the best and first supported non-intel archetecture, and why Linux has been mostly 64 bit clean a long time.
That is not to say that they might not screw it up, but both Digital and the Alpha division of Compaq have a pretty good history of being suppportive of free software, and they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Email is stealing as well. How dare you deprive the USPS of their hard earned postage?
Using free software is theft because if you want software, you should pay for it.
Sheesh. VoIP is only stealing if you are stealing the bandwidth in the first place.
While I thing the VC++ debugger is a very nice tool, I find that gdb + emacs (not gdb inside emacs, which sucks rocks, IMO) is just as effective, if not as pretty. I usually find the the bottleneck in debugging is me, not the tool. I suspect that until some higher bandwidth human interfaces are designed (time to jack in!), that is not going to change.
The problem is, realistically speaking by the time students have enough background to understand the questions, let alone know enough about higher math to solve these problems without many years of redeveloping advanced mathematical concepts, they already know about these problems.
Acording to number theory ( I repeat, number theory. Not necissarily your idea of common sense) 1 is not a prime.
All elements of a ring (type of set, a notable element being the integers) are either units, prime, or composite. For the integers, the "units" are {1, -1}, and all numbers can be written as the product of a unit and a unique set of positive primes.
The important thing is the unique representation, which you can't get unless you use the "unit", otherwise 6 = 2*3 = 1*2*3 = 1*-1*-1*2*3. While it is sort of a hand waving excercise for the integers, it is more important for other rings, such as polynomials.
No, it is not intuative. Intuative means "Obvious without having to be taught" not "what you have come to expect for no particular reason"... Users Don't care about how many hard disks, or partitions they have in their system, and while UNIX isn't perfect (/var is full, but /home has plenty of space!), it is better than C: and D:. Removable disks are different, users do care about which drive is which then, but in that case using /cdrom and /floppy (or even /mnt/cdrom and /mnt/floppy) is better than "Your drive will be assigned a semi-random drive letter at boot". And anything is better than "Oh, you just installed a zip drive, now all of your applications which have hard coded a CD drive letter will fail to start"
.rpm, .deb, and .tgz all coexist, but a novice user probably want's to stick with packages for their version anyway (which are generally widely available). A novice user shouldn't (and usually doesn't) have to build from source.
Knowledge transfer is good, and should be a major goal, but lets not repeat the shortcomings of Mac the way windows has.
That said, wrt. to the root of this thread, I think Linux installers are the best availabe. Compare someone clicking throgh 5-10 screens of meaningless nonsense in a standard InstallShield install vs. running 1 install command to install an RPM, which displays a single, simple progress bar, then completes. Yes,
UNIX has enough novice usability issues already, lets not add more on from Windows!
What I really like are GUI's on top of CLI interfaces. I am one of those freaky MH users (woohoo!). I don't mind GUI mail clients, but I won't give up the ability to check my email via telnet, and none of the various MH front ends appeal to me (or they don't get along well with using MH at the command line).
Of course, the other side is I like MH because it caters to my lack of organization by working well (and fast) with 4000 message in my inbox, and a lot of GUI mail clients seem to choke on that.
The killer app for me would be a gmail like client that stores your mail in a MySQL database for speed, presented a nice GUI interface with support for GPG et. al., plus has a command line query tool (basically like the MH commands), plus an interactive character cell mode (Pine/mutt). Each interface is best suited to different tasks.
So remind me again why after doing this you are now sharing those files via Napster? AFAIK, what this program did was find a list of people who had Napster set up to share Metallica MP3s. If you did that, you were offering people to pirate your (otherwise legitimate) MP3s.. If you didn't, they shouldn't have picked your name up.
Uh, no. Sorry to disapoint you, but unless you open up your chest cavity and apply electrodeds near your heart, 5V is not going to hurt you, no matter what.
DocBook (and all other forms of inline documentation) suck ass. However, they are about 10 times better than no documentation, and 1000 times better than inaccurate documentation. Experience shows that using out-of-line documentation leads to one of the two above problems, and therefore auto generated documenation is becoming the standard.
So, in practice I agree with you, but there is a widely held belief that inline docs are inherently superior to out of line docs. This is just plain wrong, as it leads to suboptimal documentation and suboptimal code (I have often cursed wading through gobs of commented out inline documentation when all I really wanted to see was the code). This is one huge advantage (of many) of C/C++ header files over Java-- at least the documentation only obsures the declaration, not the actual code.
Unfortunately, there is no possible suit against car MP3 players especially. To be in violation of the DMCA (or other aplicible laws), the device has to be designed (or "tweaked" to promote piracy. No actual case (of which there have been several) have shown any existing MP3 player to violate those rules. Car MP3 players in particular have a very good case of being designed to eliminate cumbersome and dangerous CD switching while driving.
I am speaking as someone who has ripped his entire CD collection to MP3 because I *prefer* to listen to them in that format--not because I wanted to weasel out of paying for the CDs in the first place.
To answer the original question: As soon as it becomes available I was planning on buying the empeg player w/ voice control despite the high price tag. If I can get a similar device within the same timeframe for $600, I would jump on it.
He seemed to be under the impression that people would care enough at his mentioning that he used windows in a relatively unextrodinary, though somewhat long winded post to use their moderation points on him.
:)
Not a big deal either way, but I do find the people who continiously make comments about "man, I am going to get moderated down for this one..." for no apparent reason somewhat annoying. Not enough to use my moderator points on them, though
I am not a big fan of the old K systems, but the N class systems are pretty nice. We have a 6x440 CPU/16 GB system that screams, and they now go to 8x550/32 GB -- not bad for a "mid-range" server. The N machines have full hardware support for hot-swap components as well. Unfortunately, there is (as of yet) no software support for it at all (supposedly comming in 11.11, but as mentioned it will take at least a year to work right)
Everything I have seen and heard says the hardware is more reliable than anything Sun makes. Unfortunately, there are 6 times as many patches you have to apply to make the software run at all (all of them triggering an auto-reboot after install. Damn, Toto, I think we are in Windows again...)