If I was Larry I would axe OpenSolaris pure and simple, keeping Solaris. Then I would license the interesting bits as GPLv2 to be added to the Linux kernel so it could be used on OEL. I would keep OpenOffice.org as OSS just to piss off Microsoft and save on licenses. I would also keep VirtualBox as OSS. I would nerf MySQL. I would axe the C/C++ Sun compiler development and use GCC instead.
Oh and axe SPARC CPU development. Buy some software emulator company so my former ex-SPARC on Solaris clients would have a migration path to X86/Solaris.
Yeah. Like market cap means a lot. Market cap is what people think your company is worth. People used to think Enron was worth a lot as well. Not to mention AIG.
I only found a press release written in marketingdroidese claiming a lot of things, mostly vapid. However I found no publicly available source code. Nor even what the released source code will actually be, since the press release is so vacuous you cannot understand which parts of the application will be open source, or if it is the whole application. Nor even in which license the source code is supposed to be released in.
Well yeah nuclear fission is great. It is the only viable alternative to coal we have. Hydropower comes close but the amount of places you can build it is quite limited, mostly already exploited, and they use a lot of land area.
As for crystalline solar photovoltaic cells you would be surprised. I know people like to say silicon wafers are made from sand, but the fact is it is not that simple... First you need to separate the silica in the sand (it's the glassy quartz like bits). This is probably near the order of magnitude in expense of mining alone. Then you need to melt the silica at 1650(±75) C and grow a crystal by putting a seed crystal in the melt. You pull the seed out and the crystal has formed around it. This is a highly energy intensive process.
Then you etch the patterns by photolithography on the silicon wafer. Then you wash the whole thing with acid. Rinse and repeat. There was a time this acid, or parts of it, was dumped on whatever river was near the plant. This is why chip making plants usually are near a river or employ judicious water recycling. Plus manufacturing is a batch process.
For coal you need to do none of that crap. You directly burn the thing you extracted. For nuclear, you need to do separation which usually involves vaporizing the uranium, but since the energy density in the material is much higher to begin with, you need to put way less energy in than the one you get out.
As for transportation costs it is way cheaper to transport uranium than coal to the power plant because it is so compact. Coal is usually transported by rail or barge, while you can use a truck to transport the nuclear material. As for solar supposedly you do not need to transport any fuel at all since the Sun shines nearly everywhere. Except it doesn't do it anytime.
This is why people are working so much on being able to print some kind of crystal powder on a piece of foil using an inkjet instead of doing crystalline cells using a continuous roll to roll process. Or using amorphous materials instead of crystalline.
There is like one sentence about SpaceX near the end of the article. AFAIK things are rolling. Their website is pretty up to date. The article is mostly sour grapes.
Actually they (and a lot of new corporations at the time) thought they were doing to launch dozens, nay hundreds, of commercial LEO constellation satellites at the time. Like, you know, Iridium. Well Iridium went bankrupt when their satellite phones couldn't compete with terrestrial cellphone networks. As for the GEO satellite market, intercontinental satellite phone calls mostly go through fiber optic submarine cables now. The remainder markets are niches in the middle of nowhere. Where there isn't a lot of money to invest in these shiny toys. Well except if you are the military anyway. Or in an oil platform.
In the other hand satellites for terrain imaging continue to be pretty successful. Space is the ultimate high ground after all.
Well the first Soyuz capsule was launched later than 1965 (although not far from it) and it failed (i.e. the guy in it died). In comparison the Chinese were a lot more successful. Hey the Chinese are soon going to do the Salyut program, so all is well...
There are several F-16 models. Some countries buy the cheaper ones, others the more expensive versions. Also F-16 was by General Dynamics, I think it was the F-18 (well YF-17 actually) that was Northrop.
Very little. Basically its a software change, to modify the rocket trajectory, and launch pad modifications so astronauts can actually enter the capsule on top of the rocket. Of course this may change if NASA insists on putting a lot of red tape around it.
The only figures I saw there regarding expenses were $400 million and $1 billion. If you know the space R&D business you would know those costs are tiny. Just developing a new rocket engine, under incumbent methods, can easily cost more than that. The contract for the J-2X engine for Ares-I X alone was $1.2 billion.
Does not matter. I think eventually all the cellphone market is going to consist of what we today call smartphones. The BRIC countries need thousands of millions of phones. iPhone does not seem to be the one who is going to do it. For another thing Apple seems unwilling to replicate its highly successful iPod strategy, where they segmented their product line into several products to compete across the whole spectrum.
Hah. You are comparing the iTunes store with a more closed platform which did not even support MP3 properly and had obnoxious DRM. If anything it was MP3 which won. Like Amazon MP3. Even despite being a technically inferior codec people prefer being able to use non-DRM MP3 than AAC or WMA. Music player hardware is getting increasingly irrelevant ever since cellphones got audio jacks and MP3 support. They will eventually be pushed out of the mainstream market, just like general purpose computers displaced typewriters.
As for Android it only got decent with version 2.0. This is comparable to Windows, version 1.0 sucked and it took version 2.0 for MS to get it right. Once they did it sales went through the roof around the time of version 3.0. Apple is clearly more aware of this than you are since they are suing HTC, just like they sued Microsoft in the 80s.
The Russian Empire was backwards compared to the most advanced industrial nations but it still had a respectable industry. I certainly hope you do not think their weapons manufactured themselves. Nor that they merely bought weapons from abroad while fighting France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire put together in the Crimean War. The Tula Arsenal, for example, was founded in 1712. It still exists today. I should also add the Russian Empire had less military manpower yet smaller losses in the Crimean War, even though they lost, the war took like 3 years so it was no cakewalk. This could not have happened if the Russian Empire did not have reasonably advanced weaponry. In the late XIXth century they designed and manufactured the Mosin-Nagant rifle which is still considered a respectable weapon today.
What did you expect from the guy (Steve Jobs) who insisted the first Apple Macintosh had a black and white display, bolted onto the main unit? I mean even the Commodore 64 was color. Heck a Magnavox Odyssey was color. Then like a decade passed and the first NeXTStep computer still had a black and white display. Jobs loves removing features. It is like his passion. It is said the Amiga developer team showed him a prototype and his expression was that "it had too much hardware". In retrospect he was correct. But the guy is still a minimalist.
No, several Android phones have larger and/or higher resolution screens (in DPI).
I'm guessing when iPhone uses OLED in a couple of generations you will think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Apple does not increase the resolution partly because their GUI API is braindamaged, so iPhone applications are not resolution independent because of this. Notice they took the trouble of using a display with exactly 2x the horizontal and vertical resolution for the iPad and people still think compatibility mode sucks. This is unlike any recent resolution independent GUIs, and is particularly damning considering MacOS X does not suffer from this problem. Heck I think NeXTStep did not suffer from this problem.
Cellphones don't use CCDs for the camera dummy. They use CMOS sensors because they are lower power, cheaper, smaller, and have a higher pixel density. Nice if you want to claim your camera has a zillion megapixels.
I think you are severely mistaken and the Android platform will overtake the iPhone, just like the IBM PC clones overtook the Commodore 64, Apple II, and whatever. The push for this is nearly irresistible.
Re:your first sentence is technically flawed
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
·
· Score: 1
Precisely. For one the 8088 (or most processors used in PCs at the time) did not have hardware memory protection (no MMU). Also, programs written in C (like Unix) were considered bloated at the time. I remember the Amiga OS used a mix of assembly and BCPL however it was written years later for a 256KB machine. Compare this to the cheapest IBM PC model which had 16KB of RAM. Compilation of the simplest programs took forever as well.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was Larry I would axe OpenSolaris pure and simple, keeping Solaris. Then I would license the interesting bits as GPLv2 to be added to the Linux kernel so it could be used on OEL. I would keep OpenOffice.org as OSS just to piss off Microsoft and save on licenses. I would also keep VirtualBox as OSS. I would nerf MySQL. I would axe the C/C++ Sun compiler development and use GCC instead.
Oh and axe SPARC CPU development. Buy some software emulator company so my former ex-SPARC on Solaris clients would have a migration path to X86/Solaris.
Try telling that to Red Hat. Or IBM.
Yeah. Like market cap means a lot. Market cap is what people think your company is worth. People used to think Enron was worth a lot as well. Not to mention AIG.
I only found a press release written in marketingdroidese claiming a lot of things, mostly vapid. However I found no publicly available source code. Nor even what the released source code will actually be, since the press release is so vacuous you cannot understand which parts of the application will be open source, or if it is the whole application. Nor even in which license the source code is supposed to be released in.
Well yeah nuclear fission is great. It is the only viable alternative to coal we have. Hydropower comes close but the amount of places you can build it is quite limited, mostly already exploited, and they use a lot of land area.
As for crystalline solar photovoltaic cells you would be surprised. I know people like to say silicon wafers are made from sand, but the fact is it is not that simple... First you need to separate the silica in the sand (it's the glassy quartz like bits). This is probably near the order of magnitude in expense of mining alone. Then you need to melt the silica at 1650(±75) C and grow a crystal by putting a seed crystal in the melt. You pull the seed out and the crystal has formed around it. This is a highly energy intensive process.
Then you etch the patterns by photolithography on the silicon wafer. Then you wash the whole thing with acid. Rinse and repeat. There was a time this acid, or parts of it, was dumped on whatever river was near the plant. This is why chip making plants usually are near a river or employ judicious water recycling. Plus manufacturing is a batch process.
For coal you need to do none of that crap. You directly burn the thing you extracted. For nuclear, you need to do separation which usually involves vaporizing the uranium, but since the energy density in the material is much higher to begin with, you need to put way less energy in than the one you get out.
As for transportation costs it is way cheaper to transport uranium than coal to the power plant because it is so compact. Coal is usually transported by rail or barge, while you can use a truck to transport the nuclear material. As for solar supposedly you do not need to transport any fuel at all since the Sun shines nearly everywhere. Except it doesn't do it anytime.
This is why people are working so much on being able to print some kind of crystal powder on a piece of foil using an inkjet instead of doing crystalline cells using a continuous roll to roll process. Or using amorphous materials instead of crystalline.
There is like one sentence about SpaceX near the end of the article. AFAIK things are rolling. Their website is pretty up to date. The article is mostly sour grapes.
In the other hand satellites for terrain imaging continue to be pretty successful. Space is the ultimate high ground after all.
It's reliable now after a painstaking debugging process of many decades. Practice makes perfect you know.
Well the first Soyuz capsule was launched later than 1965 (although not far from it) and it failed (i.e. the guy in it died). In comparison the Chinese were a lot more successful. Hey the Chinese are soon going to do the Salyut program, so all is well...
There are several F-16 models. Some countries buy the cheaper ones, others the more expensive versions. Also F-16 was by General Dynamics, I think it was the F-18 (well YF-17 actually) that was Northrop.
NASA has bought flights from Russia for years already.
Very little. Basically its a software change, to modify the rocket trajectory, and launch pad modifications so astronauts can actually enter the capsule on top of the rocket. Of course this may change if NASA insists on putting a lot of red tape around it.
The only figures I saw there regarding expenses were $400 million and $1 billion. If you know the space R&D business you would know those costs are tiny. Just developing a new rocket engine, under incumbent methods, can easily cost more than that. The contract for the J-2X engine for Ares-I X alone was $1.2 billion.
Does not matter. I think eventually all the cellphone market is going to consist of what we today call smartphones. The BRIC countries need thousands of millions of phones. iPhone does not seem to be the one who is going to do it. For another thing Apple seems unwilling to replicate its highly successful iPod strategy, where they segmented their product line into several products to compete across the whole spectrum.
Hah. You are comparing the iTunes store with a more closed platform which did not even support MP3 properly and had obnoxious DRM. If anything it was MP3 which won. Like Amazon MP3. Even despite being a technically inferior codec people prefer being able to use non-DRM MP3 than AAC or WMA. Music player hardware is getting increasingly irrelevant ever since cellphones got audio jacks and MP3 support. They will eventually be pushed out of the mainstream market, just like general purpose computers displaced typewriters.
As for Android it only got decent with version 2.0. This is comparable to Windows, version 1.0 sucked and it took version 2.0 for MS to get it right. Once they did it sales went through the roof around the time of version 3.0. Apple is clearly more aware of this than you are since they are suing HTC, just like they sued Microsoft in the 80s.
Which model would this be? The SE Cybershot C905 certainly isn't. It uses a CMOS sensor like everyone else. Even DSLRs use CMOS now.
Looks like a Chinese KIRF knockoff of the iPad. Hence the low hardware specs.
The Russian Empire was backwards compared to the most advanced industrial nations but it still had a respectable industry. I certainly hope you do not think their weapons manufactured themselves. Nor that they merely bought weapons from abroad while fighting France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire put together in the Crimean War. The Tula Arsenal, for example, was founded in 1712. It still exists today. I should also add the Russian Empire had less military manpower yet smaller losses in the Crimean War, even though they lost, the war took like 3 years so it was no cakewalk. This could not have happened if the Russian Empire did not have reasonably advanced weaponry. In the late XIXth century they designed and manufactured the Mosin-Nagant rifle which is still considered a respectable weapon today.
Yes. Just like petroleum eating bacteria right? No wait those are known since like the 70s and we still have oil.
It's called first mover advantage. However it means squat in the long term if you shoot yourself in the foot, like Apple is doing.
What did you expect from the guy (Steve Jobs) who insisted the first Apple Macintosh had a black and white display, bolted onto the main unit? I mean even the Commodore 64 was color. Heck a Magnavox Odyssey was color. Then like a decade passed and the first NeXTStep computer still had a black and white display. Jobs loves removing features. It is like his passion. It is said the Amiga developer team showed him a prototype and his expression was that "it had too much hardware". In retrospect he was correct. But the guy is still a minimalist.
No, several Android phones have larger and/or higher resolution screens (in DPI).
I'm guessing when iPhone uses OLED in a couple of generations you will think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Apple does not increase the resolution partly because their GUI API is braindamaged, so iPhone applications are not resolution independent because of this. Notice they took the trouble of using a display with exactly 2x the horizontal and vertical resolution for the iPad and people still think compatibility mode sucks. This is unlike any recent resolution independent GUIs, and is particularly damning considering MacOS X does not suffer from this problem. Heck I think NeXTStep did not suffer from this problem.
Cellphones don't use CCDs for the camera dummy. They use CMOS sensors because they are lower power, cheaper, smaller, and have a higher pixel density. Nice if you want to claim your camera has a zillion megapixels.
I think you are severely mistaken and the Android platform will overtake the iPhone, just like the IBM PC clones overtook the Commodore 64, Apple II, and whatever. The push for this is nearly irresistible.
Precisely. For one the 8088 (or most processors used in PCs at the time) did not have hardware memory protection (no MMU). Also, programs written in C (like Unix) were considered bloated at the time. I remember the Amiga OS used a mix of assembly and BCPL however it was written years later for a 256KB machine. Compare this to the cheapest IBM PC model which had 16KB of RAM. Compilation of the simplest programs took forever as well.
seems my brain is slipping...
Why not? I know there have been people who quit DEC to join Apple.