This is obviously very impressive. Maglev trains are very expensive (especially the track), but they reach enormous speeds. It gets even better if you let them run in a depressurised tunnel, allowing them to reach speeds of several thousand kilometers per hour. Of course, that costs lots of extra moolah, but its an upgrade possibility once maglevs have become more commonplace.
Concerning the question of why other countries don't have trains as cool as Japan - well, several reasons. The US just aren't interested. Appearantly, the American Way means having two cars per family and getting stuck in a traffic jam at least once a week. Besides, there are geographical concerns. America, as well as my home country (Germany) are definitely two-dimensional, rather than a linear strip of settlement like Japan, meaning that one requires a grid of synchronised train lines. Trust me, that's hard.
Also, for the US there's the problem of population density. Sure, in the cities, public transport has customers. But in the rural regions, there isn't enough demand to make narrow-interval trains profitable. And the broader the intervals (say, twice a day?) the lower the interest. After all, why wait two hours for the next train, when you can jump in your car now?
SuSE's Gnome has gotten better? Really? Sweet. Okay, so I don't use it. When I lack performance, I use barebones stuff like XFCE and Fluxbox, and when I have the performance I treat myself to KDE's luxury, but still, it makes me feel better about recommending it to friends.
The last time I really tested Gnome on SuSE was sometime around 7.3, with a little stint during 8.1. Here is my scientific conclusion from back then: ARGGGGGHHH! MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP GUUUGUUuuugurgjkglollllnnn.... After falling to the floor in agony, I managed to kick the plug out of the socket and then reboot into KDE. Saved!
Take SuSE, respected for its KDE, mocked for its Gnome.
Make a Gnome-based distro with it
Take away any support for KDE at all (some companies might actually want it, so why should we provide it?)
Brutally rape all performance by using Java (don't flame - Java is cool on the net, but its not very performant, to be nice about it)
make it look like Windows 3.11
?????????????????
Profit?
No profit!
Yeah, seems to work. Besides, what some people said about the corporate desktop having to be standardised: I only know university and research surroundings, but those desktops have to individualised at least for every workgroup. Yes, it does take a lot of admin work, but the needs are just too diverse. Medics want their CT analysis programs, voice recording (and recognition), biologists have their own brand of software, physicists want Maple/Mathematica and mathematicians will kill to get their Scilab. You could try to include everything, but judging from both reviews, JDS is anything but overfeatured.
All this said, for the needs of an insurance company or some such it might be okay; but I don't see how it's better than SuSE, Redhat or Mandrake.
PS: What's wrong with the YaST installation? I like the way it's a 3-click install for newbies, but can configure everything for experts!
My brother's godfather works in packaging design, and for a while, one of their most interesting long term projects has been developing a transponder that cost only a couple cents. The theory is that you simply dump all the stuff in your cart, drive through the detector thing at the checkout, and voila, all articles are billed, and don't need to held over some kind of scanner.
Of course, since his company sells groceries, they don't care to track your purchases to your home. What they want is something so cheap, you can stick it onto a milk box without upping its price by more than 0.02?. Their current favourite is a low-range transponder, meaning that if something within a couple meters sends an electromagnetic wave at it, it causes some kind of identifiable echo, say its barcode. Their is no read-write (too expensive), and to access it over long range takes one heck of a lot of power. Also, these tags are meant to be placed in plain sight and thus easily removable once out of the store. I was always rather interested by the whole idea, and I can't help but think that with a bit of regulation in the right places, the dangers of RFIDs could rather easily be avoided. After all, while our computers don't send our ssh private key to people, we do usually answer a ping.
Admittedly, this guy is leaning out of the window here. However, the industry -- in this case meaning not computer vendors but IT companies wanting to use computers for administrating/performing their work, is so far used to Windows, and may not always be forgiving when it comes to quirks that geek distros like Debian, Gentoo and Slackware tend to have. While in the hands of a dedicated power user, these may be far superior to SuSE and RedHat, in the hands of even a computer-experienced, intelligent linux-newbie, they bomb.
Having appeased the geeks (I like Debian a great deal, trust me), what does SuSE(my current OS) have to offer? Easy, smooth installation, flawless autodetection -- as far as I know -- and an acceptable configuration tool in the form of YaST. On first boot, you get a good KDE install, with the important stuff, like OpenOffice and such integrated, good menu structure and MIME type settings. SuSE's weakest points are lack of SuSE rpms for a lot of programs, and the fact that changes to configuration files may be overwritten by SuSEconfig, which runs after every major system change. However, for someone who either wants a smoothly running system, or is proficient enough to disable SuSEconfig and compile some programs themselves, SuSE is quite a nice distro. For those reasons, it may be much more attractive for companies than tweak distros.
I have yet to meet anyone who actually liked the candy interface from Windows XP, and this Aero thingie seems to take another step in the same direction. If I ever had to work on this thing, I'd need some insulin injection with all the happy happy vibrant candy wrapper colours assaulting my eyes.
Add to the aesthetics (or was it anesthetics?) the usability point. Judging from the screen shots, this is going to be just like Luna:
Oooh! Bright colours!
Handy sidebars, flashing animations. Life is good!
Errr, where's the button for this feature?
I want to get to this dialog now. I do not want to parse several screens of the wizard interface.
Those sidebars waste an awful lot of screen space. And I don't even use the application it offers! (Winamp instead of MediaPlayer, Photoshop instead of Paint)
Ergo: Gimme classic!
A possible way of redemption (for the GUI, not for Longhorn) would be configurability. Leave secretaries, grandparents and little siblings to Aero, and put a little checkbox somewhere "Enable advanced gui configuration". On having checked that you should be able to set styles, window decoration, move toolbars around, change the icons in the toolbars (Office had this for years), and so forth. Considering the wealth of resources for KDE, and the much bigger Windows user base (and probably even geek user base), Windows could become extremely configurable. Why Microsoft hastn't done this yet? Dunno, corporate identity maybe.
First off, the thing that I find attractive about this is the reduced noise level. What counts for me is the ability to run my computer 24/7 and not get hearing defects from it (or get my computer fried). So if water cooling really is quieter while cooling better, then I'd be willing to pay... say 40 Euros more for it.
That said, why stop at water cooling? Once you have a seperate coolant circuit, it wouldn't be much of a difference to work with pressure change cooling, like a fridge. That would work like this: In the radiator, the coolant is compressed, causing it to emit heat. After it is pumped to the cpu, there is a throttle, which allows the coolant to expand after passing it, thereby drawing in heat like a sponge, which is in turn dumped in the radiator. Of course, this approach requires a compressor and a pipe system that doesn't burst when overpressurized by a few Kilopascal.
The battle for the legality of Linux is becoming increasingly melodramatic: Two weeks ago, RedHat CEO Mathew Szulik declared himself Saviour of the Free World, and called for all Linux-Supporters to join the battle for freedom from the software industry. His opponent darl McBride from SCO strikes an even more martialic pose: a James Bond fighting against the forces of Darkness -- incarnated in the Open Source Movement.
McBride spent no less than two hours at the beginnign of the SCO symposium to clarify his company's legal position. Backed by pictures and music from various Bond flicks, he attempted to rally the supporters of the formerly cult company from Santa Cruz to his fight for the Good Cause. The SCO Group has started a legal battle against IBM for alleged copyright violations and misuse of SCO-owned UNIX code in Linux. Star attorney David Boies, famous for fielding the US anti-trust effort against Microsoft, represents SCO against IBM. More than 1500 major Linux-using companies have received admonitions to pay licensing fees from SCO.
With Vice CEO Chris Sontag as sidekick, McBride offered several examples from Kernel 2.5 and 2.6 that are meant to prove that several program parts were transplanted unmodified from UNIX -- such an example is here. Duplicated typos in the commentary as well as unusual coding style have left traces, says Sontag. To porve this, McBride employed teams for pattern recognition to parse tens of thousands of lines of code. The few sequences of actual code shown besides the commentaries were largely scrambled, supposedly to protect SCO copyright. They were, however, representative for a thousand other just like them, emphasizes Sontag. Multiple developers had illegally transplanted code into Linux and then distributed the source to users and developers. The software in question is nothing trivial, but contains integral operating system functions used for demanding applications and extremely secure environments in companies. Among them are the multiprocessor technologies NUMA and SMP, which under UNIX licensing cost 10,000$ or more.
Rouhgly 700 lines of code for the SMP technology are supposed to have gone into Kernel versions 2.4 and 2.5. All in all, SCO claims to have found no less than 800.000 lines of duplicated code -- one example is shown here. Attorney Mark Heise from Boies' law firm joined the SCO chiefs on the podium in Las Vegas. He emphasized that the GPL did not offer protection against copyright claims from SCO. The Unix license that SCO bought from AT&T in 1994 guarantees SCO ownership of System V copyright and all AT&T software and sublicense rights. The license agreement, originally drawn up by AT&T lawyers, which has since gone over to SCO, is unequivocal concerning scope, Heise affirmed. Accordingly, the license gives the licensee (e.g. IBM) the right to use the software internally for commercial purposes. Modifications and derivatives are subject to the license just like the original. They cannot be used for or by third parties.
"Now we finally know how Linux has matured from hobby OS to IT-company platform," Sontag jibes. "If something sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't," topped McBride. Evolved technology simply cannot be had for free. "Free Software -- not our thing." UNXIX comprises 20 years of development work: Based on it, SCO wants to make money for another 20 years. McBride appealed for support from partners and developers from the UNIX community, otherwise, "the times for good business might soon be over." GPL and Open Source destroy legal business models -- compensations and a legal business model for the future are therefore necessary. Heise seconded: That SCO once distributed its code as Linux distributor, did not mean that Linux users where protected from all demands because of the GPL. Copyright for code can only be obtained by a written contract wit
Well, considering that the SCO bosses are busy selling of their stock now before the gig blows up, I'd say that that affair is soon to be history.
As for DRM:
It's a problem that needs to be adressed, and probably compromised on (something RMS doesn't seem to agree with). Sure, I do not want a Palladium giving its blessing to every file I open, but on the other hand, some things like mp3 or ebooks have considerable value. I admire authors who let their books be spread over the net, but I can certainly understand those who actually want to see some money for their work, and for that, some degree of DRM might be necessary.
On top of that, the freedom (which includes ability to duplicate and distribute) of computer data scares a lot of artists/authors away from considering the computer as a market, because, let's face it, something where things can be copied virtually free of costs and effort is not a market. So, either people come up with some visionary new business practices, DRM is provided in some form, or digital literature and music will simply stay a non-market.
Slashdot Mirror
This is obviously very impressive. Maglev trains are very expensive (especially the track), but they reach enormous speeds. It gets even better if you let them run in a depressurised tunnel, allowing them to reach speeds of several thousand kilometers per hour. Of course, that costs lots of extra moolah, but its an upgrade possibility once maglevs have become more commonplace.
Concerning the question of why other countries don't have trains as cool as Japan - well, several reasons. The US just aren't interested. Appearantly, the American Way means having two cars per family and getting stuck in a traffic jam at least once a week. Besides, there are geographical concerns. America, as well as my home country (Germany) are definitely two-dimensional, rather than a linear strip of settlement like Japan, meaning that one requires a grid of synchronised train lines. Trust me, that's hard.
Also, for the US there's the problem of population density. Sure, in the cities, public transport has customers. But in the rural regions, there isn't enough demand to make narrow-interval trains profitable. And the broader the intervals (say, twice a day?) the lower the interest. After all, why wait two hours for the next train, when you can jump in your car now?
SuSE's Gnome has gotten better? Really? Sweet. Okay, so I don't use it. When I lack performance, I use barebones stuff like XFCE and Fluxbox, and when I have the performance I treat myself to KDE's luxury, but still, it makes me feel better about recommending it to friends.
The last time I really tested Gnome on SuSE was sometime around 7.3, with a little stint during 8.1. Here is my scientific conclusion from back then:
ARGGGGGHHH! MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP GUUUGUUuuugurgjkglollllnnn....
After falling to the floor in agony, I managed to kick the plug out of the socket and then reboot into KDE. Saved!
Let's see if I got this right...
Yeah, seems to work. Besides, what some people said about the corporate desktop having to be standardised: I only know university and research surroundings, but those desktops have to individualised at least for every workgroup. Yes, it does take a lot of admin work, but the needs are just too diverse. Medics want their CT analysis programs, voice recording (and recognition), biologists have their own brand of software, physicists want Maple/Mathematica and mathematicians will kill to get their Scilab. You could try to include everything, but judging from both reviews, JDS is anything but overfeatured.
All this said, for the needs of an insurance company or some such it might be okay; but I don't see how it's better than SuSE, Redhat or Mandrake.
PS: What's wrong with the YaST installation? I like the way it's a 3-click install for newbies, but can configure everything for experts!
My brother's godfather works in packaging design, and for a while, one of their most interesting long term projects has been developing a transponder that cost only a couple cents. The theory is that you simply dump all the stuff in your cart, drive through the detector thing at the checkout, and voila, all articles are billed, and don't need to held over some kind of scanner.
Of course, since his company sells groceries, they don't care to track your purchases to your home. What they want is something so cheap, you can stick it onto a milk box without upping its price by more than 0.02?. Their current favourite is a low-range transponder, meaning that if something within a couple meters sends an electromagnetic wave at it, it causes some kind of identifiable echo, say its barcode. Their is no read-write (too expensive), and to access it over long range takes one heck of a lot of power. Also, these tags are meant to be placed in plain sight and thus easily removable once out of the store. I was always rather interested by the whole idea, and I can't help but think that with a bit of regulation in the right places, the dangers of RFIDs could rather easily be avoided. After all, while our computers don't send our ssh private key to people, we do usually answer a ping.
Admittedly, this guy is leaning out of the window here. However, the industry -- in this case meaning not computer vendors but IT companies wanting to use computers for administrating/performing their work, is so far used to Windows, and may not always be forgiving when it comes to quirks that geek distros like Debian, Gentoo and Slackware tend to have. While in the hands of a dedicated power user, these may be far superior to SuSE and RedHat, in the hands of even a computer-experienced, intelligent linux-newbie, they bomb.
Having appeased the geeks (I like Debian a great deal, trust me), what does SuSE(my current OS) have to offer? Easy, smooth installation, flawless autodetection -- as far as I know -- and an acceptable configuration tool in the form of YaST. On first boot, you get a good KDE install, with the important stuff, like OpenOffice and such integrated, good menu structure and MIME type settings. SuSE's weakest points are lack of SuSE rpms for a lot of programs, and the fact that changes to configuration files may be overwritten by SuSEconfig, which runs after every major system change. However, for someone who either wants a smoothly running system, or is proficient enough to disable SuSEconfig and compile some programs themselves, SuSE is quite a nice distro. For those reasons, it may be much more attractive for companies than tweak distros.
I have yet to meet anyone who actually liked the candy interface from Windows XP, and this Aero thingie seems to take another step in the same direction. If I ever had to work on this thing, I'd need some insulin injection with all the happy happy vibrant candy wrapper colours assaulting my eyes.
Add to the aesthetics (or was it anesthetics?) the usability point. Judging from the screen shots, this is going to be just like Luna:
- Oooh! Bright colours!
- Handy sidebars, flashing animations. Life is good!
- Errr, where's the button for this feature?
- I want to get to this dialog now. I do not want to parse several screens of the wizard interface.
- Those sidebars waste an awful lot of screen space. And I don't even use the application it offers! (Winamp instead of MediaPlayer, Photoshop instead of Paint)
- Ergo: Gimme classic!
A possible way of redemption (for the GUI, not for Longhorn) would be configurability. Leave secretaries, grandparents and little siblings to Aero, and put a little checkbox somewhere "Enable advanced gui configuration". On having checked that you should be able to set styles, window decoration, move toolbars around, change the icons in the toolbars (Office had this for years), and so forth. Considering the wealth of resources for KDE, and the much bigger Windows user base (and probably even geek user base), Windows could become extremely configurable. Why Microsoft hastn't done this yet? Dunno, corporate identity maybe.First off, the thing that I find attractive about this is the reduced noise level. What counts for me is the ability to run my computer 24/7 and not get hearing defects from it (or get my computer fried). So if water cooling really is quieter while cooling better, then I'd be willing to pay... say 40 Euros more for it.
That said, why stop at water cooling? Once you have a seperate coolant circuit, it wouldn't be much of a difference to work with pressure change cooling, like a fridge. That would work like this: In the radiator, the coolant is compressed, causing it to emit heat. After it is pumped to the cpu, there is a throttle, which allows the coolant to expand after passing it, thereby drawing in heat like a sponge, which is in turn dumped in the radiator. Of course, this approach requires a compressor and a pipe system that doesn't burst when overpressurized by a few Kilopascal.
The battle for the legality of Linux is becoming increasingly melodramatic: Two weeks ago, RedHat CEO Mathew Szulik declared himself Saviour of the Free World, and called for all Linux-Supporters to join the battle for freedom from the software industry. His opponent darl McBride from SCO strikes an even more martialic pose: a James Bond fighting against the forces of Darkness -- incarnated in the Open Source Movement.
McBride spent no less than two hours at the beginnign of the SCO symposium to clarify his company's legal position. Backed by pictures and music from various Bond flicks, he attempted to rally the supporters of the formerly cult company from Santa Cruz to his fight for the Good Cause. The SCO Group has started a legal battle against IBM for alleged copyright violations and misuse of SCO-owned UNIX code in Linux. Star attorney David Boies, famous for fielding the US anti-trust effort against Microsoft, represents SCO against IBM. More than 1500 major Linux-using companies have received admonitions to pay licensing fees from SCO.
With Vice CEO Chris Sontag as sidekick, McBride offered several examples from Kernel 2.5 and 2.6 that are meant to prove that several program parts were transplanted unmodified from UNIX -- such an example is here. Duplicated typos in the commentary as well as unusual coding style have left traces, says Sontag. To porve this, McBride employed teams for pattern recognition to parse tens of thousands of lines of code. The few sequences of actual code shown besides the commentaries were largely scrambled, supposedly to protect SCO copyright. They were, however, representative for a thousand other just like them, emphasizes Sontag. Multiple developers had illegally transplanted code into Linux and then distributed the source to users and developers. The software in question is nothing trivial, but contains integral operating system functions used for demanding applications and extremely secure environments in companies. Among them are the multiprocessor technologies NUMA and SMP, which under UNIX licensing cost 10,000$ or more.
Rouhgly 700 lines of code for the SMP technology are supposed to have gone into Kernel versions 2.4 and 2.5. All in all, SCO claims to have found no less than 800.000 lines of duplicated code -- one example is shown here. Attorney Mark Heise from Boies' law firm joined the SCO chiefs on the podium in Las Vegas. He emphasized that the GPL did not offer protection against copyright claims from SCO. The Unix license that SCO bought from AT&T in 1994 guarantees SCO ownership of System V copyright and all AT&T software and sublicense rights. The license agreement, originally drawn up by AT&T lawyers, which has since gone over to SCO, is unequivocal concerning scope, Heise affirmed. Accordingly, the license gives the licensee (e.g. IBM) the right to use the software internally for commercial purposes. Modifications and derivatives are subject to the license just like the original. They cannot be used for or by third parties.
"Now we finally know how Linux has matured from hobby OS to IT-company platform," Sontag jibes. "If something sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't," topped McBride. Evolved technology simply cannot be had for free. "Free Software -- not our thing." UNXIX comprises 20 years of development work: Based on it, SCO wants to make money for another 20 years. McBride appealed for support from partners and developers from the UNIX community, otherwise, "the times for good business might soon be over." GPL and Open Source destroy legal business models -- compensations and a legal business model for the future are therefore necessary. Heise seconded: That SCO once distributed its code as Linux distributor, did not mean that Linux users where protected from all demands because of the GPL. Copyright for code can only be obtained by a written contract wit
Well, considering that the SCO bosses are busy selling of their stock now before the gig blows up, I'd say that that affair is soon to be history. As for DRM: It's a problem that needs to be adressed, and probably compromised on (something RMS doesn't seem to agree with). Sure, I do not want a Palladium giving its blessing to every file I open, but on the other hand, some things like mp3 or ebooks have considerable value. I admire authors who let their books be spread over the net, but I can certainly understand those who actually want to see some money for their work, and for that, some degree of DRM might be necessary. On top of that, the freedom (which includes ability to duplicate and distribute) of computer data scares a lot of artists/authors away from considering the computer as a market, because, let's face it, something where things can be copied virtually free of costs and effort is not a market. So, either people come up with some visionary new business practices, DRM is provided in some form, or digital literature and music will simply stay a non-market.