It also runs on Linux MacOS and Windows. It works great with large data sets and supports a lot of data sources (ranging from XLS files to SAS databases)
I am a Samba + RedHat Directory Server (previously OpenLDAP) since the early 3.0 series for our Domain.
I've also watched Samba development closely in the past years and I am pretty sure that Samba 4 won't happen. The real Samba 4 will probably be based of a very recent 3.x series with a few Samba 4 patches backported.
Most Samba developers are currently working on the samba-3.2-testing or samba-3.3-testing git branches and occasionally adding a patch or two to the samba-4.0-testing tree.
Samba 3.2 is currently very limited in functionality:
* no AD logins, actually no AD features at all. The Solaris CIFS server (which is a simple and beautiful piece of engineering that does only 1 thing, as simple and beautiful things should do) requires Active Directory.
* No NFSv4 ACL support. Don't be fooled by it. Samba's NFSv4 ACL support is useful for read-only stuff at best, once you start creating files remotely on that volume (say a ZFS), you start having a mess with permissions, Samba+ZFS cannot mimic Windows behavior, while Solaris CIFS Server + ZFS can. You cannot have directory and file masks for NFSv4 ACLs.
* Samba doesn't do the sane thing of reordering the ACLs with the deny entries first (not required by NFSv4/ZFS but required by Windows) when setting them and Windows cannot read them.
* What's with the IDMAP config, are they high? It changed 3 times in the 3.0 series and it's still different in 3.2. Can't they get it right just once? Every time I do a version upgrade joining the domain and creating users gets broken because of version changes and I get woken up from my sleep at 3-4AM.
I don't usually criticize OSS projects, but Samba is a vital one and right now they are either understaffed or they don't have their priorities straight. I know that this will blow away half of my karma points but Samba is more or less in the same place from a functional point of view as it was in September 2003 (5 and 1/2 years ago) when Samba 3.0 was launched. While it was reasonable in 2003 not to have AD support and the rest of the deal, in 2008 it means our company will most probably have to abandon FLOSS DC support this year in favor of "the real thingâ" (Windows 2008).
I think he is referring to the userspace/kernelspace split in Windows NT. On 32bit Windows XP, by default, the userspace (ring3) will have at most 2 GB of the physical RAM, and the kernel space would get the rest (some of it paged and some of it not). On systems with more than 3G of RAM (a lot by 2002 standards), it was kinda pointless to reserve that much for the kernel space, so they added a boot.ini flag that changed the split to _AT_MOST_ 3GBytes for the userspace and the rest for kernel space. In Vista the split for 3G/1G of RAM is default. Actually on a system with 4G of RAM running in 32bit mode, you can't use all of them even if you try (in Windows XP), because right under the 4G limit you would have the PCI memory address mappings, that can be as large as 512M for a common video card with half a gig of RAM. Add to that the RAID controllers and the other hardware, and you have about 800megs of RAM unused because they can't be addressed, as their address-space is used by the installed devices. I think that http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823440/ and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/171793/ should describe what I'm talking about pretty clearly.
While the values of capitalism should not be dismissed, there are a few strategic fields/industries in which government help should be allowed: 1) Education. An educated country means a profitable country and one that exports. It's clear by now that the US cannot be competitive in most blue-collar jobs, at least compared to some Asian countries, and probably in the future with African ones. 2) Health. Having healthy workers means having a productive country, thus more money. Making health unaffordable, like in the US means having more sick people. More sick people, means less productive people. I do find the US health system to be rather expensive. I broke my hand over there and they asked for $12000 for a lousy cast at the Saint Francis Memorial in San Francisco, and only after a lot of negotiations (and them realizing the prospect of me not paying) they lowered that to $3000, which my travel insurance covered. What were the $3000 for? Just an x-ray, a pill and a cast. Furthermore, it's better to prevent illnesses, than to treat them, and that's not what the US is doing. 3) Safety (police, firemen, coast-guard, national guard, rangers, etc.). Isn't it weird that in a capitalist country like the USA you don't have to have a protection contract with a private protection company? If it's weird, you probably grew in a mafia controlled hood.
When will you realize that social liberalism does not mean communism? If you define the American Dream (TM) as having a house, 2.4 kids, a job and a healthy, educated family, without a bit of socialism, you would need to be a millionaire in order to make it real. Since most Americans aren't millionaires, the American Dream (with a nuclear family & all) is going bust at this rate.
I am running ZFS successfully on 6 32bit systems for 2 years now. Actually, for file servers in our company we always use slower servers. In our case, we have dual CPU Xeon 2.8 GHz (Prestonia) systems with 2 or 3 GBytes of RAM running Solaris 10 with ZFS and Samba and NFS sharing.
Get your facts right. I don't know about FreeBSD 32bit vs 64bit, but on Solaris, it works regardless and it works brilliantly.
The only problem I am having is the reordering of the NFSv4 ACLs in ZFS and inheritance with Samba's ZFS vfs module. Samba still sucks at anything else than POSIX ACLs.
Because Yahoo! wants independence.
Because Grandma considers Yahoo! Mail to be the only Email option. Or to put it more correctly, she thinks that the Email service and Yahoo! Mail are one and the same thing. She doesn't know that there are alternatives, and she doesn't care. She likes emailing other grandma's and she will follow the guidelines that I wrote on the side of her screen and only apply to Yahoo!
I think that it's just another nice way of refusing.
I think that the Yahoo! folks realize that Yahoo! and Microsoft don't really mix together.
Microsoft only wants the userbase and the brand, not the products. If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, all their technology (Apache, Oracle, MySQL, PHP, Java, etc running on top of Linux and BSD) would be replaced by Windows servers running IIS. That would make most of the Yahoo! engineers redundant.
I am pretty sure that they would just add the missing features to their Live products, and rebrand them as Yahoo! The Yahoo! products will start a short (i.e.: 1-2 years) death as soon as Microsoft buys them, to make room for Yahoo! branded MSN/Live ones.
Imagine a.NET/Mono based Zimbra.
Furthermore, I assume that at that level all negociations are 'friendly'. Unless they fail, when they become friendly only for the winning side.
Finally, I do believe that Yahoo! is worth more than that ammount, because there are countries where no competition exists (see Romania). In a blog from one of the Fedora Art Group members, the blogger said that over 90% of the email addresses in Romania were Yahoo! ones. I can confirm this with the Messenger part. I've never seen anyone giveout a GTalk or MSN id in Romania, only Yahoo!.
KUDOS to the BBC for being a leader in all fronts of the Mass-Media. This video proves that they can do serious journalism, something that most media companies have forgotten how to do. Short, correct and difficult to answer questions. Ask the right questions, that's all it takes.
Try looking a little harder. Sun contributed a lot more to open source than IBM or Novel or Red Hat. Most of it's contributions come from formerly proprietary software that was open sourced (OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, etc.), but they also contribute a lot to projects such as Xorg, GNOME, Linux, Postgres, Samba, Xen, etc. Furthermore, there are projects started by Sun that from version 1 are open source (see OpenSPARC). Only the projects that I mentioned above contain more source code than Novel and IBM and RedHat ever contributed, and keep in mind that Sun contributes to a lot more projects. I really think that they are on the right track, even though they have occasional troubles (see the OOo contribution problem with the Novel folks, or the OpenDS issue).
Nope. I know that both IBM and Novell have contributed to the open source community, but their contributions are small (in number of lines of code) compared to OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Java and many others. Sun also contributed to a lot of projects (see the GNOME project), but in lines of code it's the products that they open-sourced that make the big difference.
Considering that a pretty good fraction of our cars are manufactured in Korea, Japan, or Europe, I'm not sure what you mean by the "crappy suspension" that "we" put in "our cars". Wake up. Volvo, Jaguar, and Land Rover are owned by Ford. Until recently, Daimler owned Chrysler. And the irony is that the 2008 Ford Focus sold in the states is 2 generations behind the one in Europe, the Ford Mondeo (the car in Casino Royale), doesn't exist in the States, and most of the Fords sold in Europe have Diesel engines, and pretty good ones too. I don't think that American cars are crappy (except for the sports cars, which are simply lame), but I do think that the cars sold in the United States (regardless of origin) are crappy. Compare the Toyota Avensis with the Toyota Camry, they share the same platform, but the difference is huge.
I've always wondered why on earth do American cars have 3,4,5 or even 6 liter engines, but after a trip to the gas-station I found out: the octane numbers for gas in California are 87, 89 and 91 (and in some places 93 seldomly 95). If you stop at _ANY_ gas station in Bucharest you will see 95, 98 and 99 or 100. In the manuals of most cars I've seen it says that you should use gas at least 95, preferably 98.
You've got to be kidding me. I must honestly say that I've never seen (even on the news) an accident caused by a tire blowout. Mainly because WE DON'T USE INNER TUBES ANYMORE for at least two decades (I am not talking about bikes and trucks). I did see once a Honda Accord that was driving a little faster than the car that I was in (we were at 105 mph) and it's tire deflated and was torn to shreds, but the driver didn't even realize until he looked in the side-mirror because the car kept going in the right direction at the same speed. That being said, there is a _HUGE_ difference between the quality of the tarmac in the EU zone and the US. In the EU there are no bumps and cracks and the whole road foundation is leveled a lot better, the turns are wider (except the milan-genova highway in italy, near genova) and the lanes are wider as well.
Not necessarily. Some american drivers suck, and because of that american motorway speeds are incredibly low. Almost everywhere in Europe the maximum speed is around 80 mph, and everywhere you can safely drive at OVER 90mph, while in the US it's at 65 or 75mph. The problem with the american drivers is that they hardly ever use the mirrors. I've seen drivers going directly from the carpool lane to the exit quite a few times without ever bothering to check the damned mirrors. From my point of view, automatic gear-boxes combined with driving only on motorways, leads to bad drivers. I've also seen drivers with their feet on the dashboard. I can't possibly imagine how on earth is the driver supposed to brake and avoid a possible accident with his feet up. They give an 18 year old a gun, they allow him to drive (which is potentially dangerous) at 16, but he can't have a beer until he's 21. Figure that out. It seems pretty normal to me to learn about the effects of alcohol _BEFORE_ you can get a weapon or drive a car. Getting back to the subject at hand. I think that the US should make the drivers license exam (the practical part) a lot harder. Driving on a mountain-side road with a lot of hairpin-turns in a manual gearbox car (possibly on snow or other bad conditions), teaches one about driving more than 1000 hours on a motorway. I also think that the guy has a very serious point by doing that.
The author also seems to forget that 3G is not only Data calls. 3G is video Calls, high bandwidth for both upload and download, data sessions NOT interrupted by voice calls, IPv6, Mobile Radio and TV (as mentioned above). From my point of view, the fact that the Apple iPhone uses the inefficient EDGE network, while the world (except the US obviously) uses 3G, and more recently WiMAX. In Romania, while Orange and Vodafone said they will introduce the WiMAX networks later this year, using a WiMAX enabled device you can already see their networks in the 3.5/3.75 GHz spectrum. I actually had high hopes from the iPhone, and after it came out it simply disappointed me. My next device will be the Nokia Nx00 with WiMAX, that I hope is coming out Q108.
Actually only the cell-phones in the US are half-ass web featured ones. Two years ago, the coolest cell in the US was the brain-dead, RAZR, granted it was sexy, but it was also brain-dead. On the other side of the planet, there were touch-screen phones that ran Linux and had Opera 7.5 as a pretty decent browser. They still rule because they can run Doom and Quake, and can render most pages without a problem. Come to think about-it, most of what the iPhone brings, you can get from a Nokia N800 with a basic GSM phone that also has Bluetooth in parallel. Actually the N800 is a lot better than the iPhone. I have an excelent IMAP client on it (Claws), I have Pidgin for IM, I have a very decent Opera 9 with flash and a lot of other goodies. The great thing about-it is that it only takes an incredibly small amount of time to port ANY gtk application to the Maemo platform that the N800 uses. The multitude of applications that have been ported to the N800 only proves that it's a better platform than most of the others.
I will give the iPhone the following:
1) Multi-touch. It sounds like it's more than a simple touch-screen. The Nokia N800 has a nice feature that detects if you touch with the stick or a finger and adjusts the input method and the menus accordingly, but I doubt that it's as cool as the one on the iPhone. I am sure that the Nokia N800+1 could easily implement something like this.
2) Screen rotation sensor.
3) Phone
Flame follows: (3) is actually one that can be put in both good and bad. The iPhone is an Edge phone on a 3G world. Granted that the network coverage for 3G in the US is a joke compared to Europe or Asia. Actually, the network coverage in the US is more like a joke. In Romania, the country that only a few years ago was under communist ruling, we have basically 100% coverage for the cell phone networks, and a lot of 3G, and nation-wide GPRS on Vodaphone (they are introducing 7.something Mbps HSUPA later this year) and EDGE on Orange (same as Vodafone). Vodafone currently has 2.8 Mbps HSDPA, and Orange has 3.6 Mbps HSDPA. In Germany it's even more impressing, you have almost full 3G coverage for the whole country.
Zapp, our only CDMA operator, has EVDO 2.4 Mbps since 2004, and they are going for an upgrade later this year. Now, allow me to be disappointed by the lame EDGE options available to the US market. I am also disappointed by the fact that Apple didn't allow the buying of unlocked phones and gave AT&T exclusivity.
BTW: The rates for Cell phone is the US are also huge. In 2005, a prepaid card from Cingular gave me "free calls" in the US, but having to pay an airtime rate of $.25/min for both outgoing and incoming calls. In Romania in 2005 the prepaid rates were somewhere around $.20 for outgoing calls, and free for incoming. I also found the fact that you get charged from the second that you make the call, even if the other party doesn't answer, to be a little disturbing, especially since a call to Romania costed around $.90 + airtime tax, and would usually take around 45s to connect to the Bucharest based operators. I've called Cingular and asked for my money back for the situations in which it didn't connect at all. Based on their pricing details I expected to be charged $0.25 in that minute until the person answers and until the call connects, and after that $0.25 + $0.90 for the call, but I was charged almost an extra dollar for each call. I find this wierd because in Europe, if the person doesn't answer, you don't pay anything, and if you receive a call (except for roaming), you don't pay anything. In the US, if someone hates you they simply have to send you a lot of Text messages, because they also cost if you receive them.
Anyway, to make a long story short, in the US the mobile phones are a lot more expensive and dumb (literally), the rates are a lot worst and the network coverage is a joke. This is coming from a guy that lives in Romania, not in the UK or France or Germany. I talk my ass off on my cell phone (and we all have a cell phone), and I never exceed than $45, except when I'm out of the country.
Jet Engines (Henri Coanda) and the Coanda Effect in aerodynamics. The first gymnast ever to score a perfect "ten". Constantin Brancusi in Scultpture. Alexandru Ciurcu invented with M.M. Just Buisson the first Reactive Engine Anastase Dragomir invented the parachute cell, predecessor of the ejection seat Dragomir Hurmuzescu inventor of the first high tension dynamo Rodrig Goliescu invented the first tubular airplane Dracula for the SCI-FI fans and last but not least important: the Cheeky Girls(at least the brits seem to love them) and Ozone (I can't seem to forget the drunk austrians in Vienna new-years 2005 when all they sang was a "Hey, baby" remix chorus and Ozone's own "Dragostea din tei").
All the Renaults I knew in the past few years used a stalk. That includes Laguna, Clio, Symbol, Logan and Megane. I don't know about the other ones (Velsatis and the vans).
In the US, only Mercedes is trying to get educate the crowds in the advantages of Diesel fuel. In Europe, Diesel is actually popular, but in the US there is a stereotype that Diesel means slow and sluggish. I've recently visited the autos.yahoo.com website and I was completely baffled by the comments over there. Everyone seems to be surprised by the great fuel economy that the Mercedes-Benz 320 CDI offers and also the incredible acceleration on a highway. In Europe this would be taken for granted.
Let's take another car right now: the Honda Accord. In Europe it also has a Diesel option with the following fuel economy values: Hwy-53 mpg, City-33 mpg. It delivers 140 bhp with an immense torque of 340nm and a maximum speed (in the manual) of 136 mph. Should be taken into consideration that the values for Hwy in Europe are generally taken at a speed of 80mph, which is the recommended or imposed maximum speed on highways in most of Europe. Considering that in the US it ranges between 65 and 75, the values could be better for highway. The same applies for city values. European cities tend to be a lot more crowded and the traffic to be a lot worst than that of a US city (San Francisco does resemble an European city somewhat due to it's smaller streets and it's hills).
Our car is a Renault Megane (Renault is the "other half" of the Renault-Nissan corp.). It has a *1.5*L diesel Engine (3 year old engine) that delivers 110 bhp with an imense torque. It's mpg at 100mph on a hwy is 42 as reported by the on-board computer. That gives-it a 600+ miles range on one diesel fuel fill (15 gallons) at a higher than legal speed. If you only drive legally on hwy (less than 80mph), you could actually cross Europe on one or two fills.
Even more surprising is that the engines that are found in the US have worst performance in any given aspect than the European ones for the same volume. In Europe, for a 2L Gas Engine you can get 200 bhp at some manufacturers.
Romania also has most of the wiring done underground, except for the 110kV and higher powergrid lines. It was funny that last summer I was in the US in Sillicon Valley, there was something that can be best described as light rain with a few thunderstrikes and the power went down. Here, in Romania, I didn't have a powerfailture that lasted longer than 10 minutes since 1998, and I didn't have a power failture in the last year (at least since I returned from the US). We have heavy snow in the winter, we have heavy rains, we have all kinds of weather and that didn't stop anyone.
The real reason for not sending the grid underground in the US escapes me. Long-term it's not more expensive, as the maintenance operations on a properly designed powergrid needed less often than on an aerial one. You don't have cars running into the powergrid poles, you don't have lightning, etc. You guys bury fiber optic wires but not the power-grid and that's wierd from where I'm standing. Basically it's only a matter of forcing the power companies to actually give a f**k about the customers. I'd hate having poles ruin the look of my house/garden. Especially those wooden poles that you see in California, that were found in Romania 30 or 40 years ago.
We will see Windows on PowerPC long before we ever see the full OS X on x86. There's absolutely no advantage to changing platforms at this point.
Windows NT 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0 were ported to PowerPC. I would assume that Windows NT 5.x is also ported to the PowerPC architecture because of the XBox 360, which, to my knowledge (I could be wrong though) is running on a PowerPC-like architecture, with IBM developed chips.
If I remember correctly, XBox ran a stripped down Windows 2000 kernel. It is safe to assume, right now, that XBox 360 runs a Windows XP/2003 kernel for PowerPC. Trimmed down and optimized, of course, but a PowerPC port of Windows XP/2003 nevertheless
That is a serious issue right now. SCO ownz the SystemV code, and the whole SCO deal was about a few lines (if any) which were open-sourced by IBM and SGI. As Solaris has a hudge quantity of UNIX code, how the hell can they open-source that? It's true, Solaris was build initially upon BSD, but right now it's SystemV. One more thing, what do they mean by Solaris? The kernel? CDE (opengroup as in HP/IBM/SUN/etc.)? ZFS (Sun/HP)? It's a lot of code that's not only their's. I doubt that IBM/HP/etc. would agree with that move.
Think how AIX would be affected by this move, imagine Solaris ported to PPC and S390x. Then think of a PA-RISC/IA-64 port of Solaris.
It seems highly unprobable to me because this would really screw the UNIX bussiness for IBM/HP.
The necessity of those features that you mention, is not for me to judge. I think that the fact that Microsoft implemented it lately into it's os, proves that there are hudge numbers of people that can use it.
Is network bandidth that expensive? I have gigabit at home. For XFS 10MBits/sec work perfectly. But having a fost archive of 4-5GBytes, it's not only a waste of space in having it on any computer in a DTP lab, it's a problem with installing the new fonts on all the computers, it's also a problem with the loading and sorting of the fonts at startup. Network transparency is a good thing guys. If you don't need that then don't use it.
X11, contrarely to a very popular opinion doesn't look, it shows. If you want-it to look as good as AQUA, then design a theme like that for GTK or QT, as they CAN look that good. If you want expose, it's in the window manager where you have to work (I belive that metacity has a patch for that, google for expocity), you need shadows? Keithp is working on that. It's the COMPOSITE and DAMAGE extensions for X11 that you're looking for. It's still unstable but try XServ from freedesktop.org.
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First they hire a Microsoft dude, then they start smelling people.
It also runs on Linux MacOS and Windows. It works great with large data sets and supports a lot of data sources (ranging from XLS files to SAS databases)
I am a Samba + RedHat Directory Server (previously OpenLDAP) since the early 3.0 series for our Domain.
I've also watched Samba development closely in the past years and I am pretty sure that Samba 4 won't happen. The real Samba 4 will probably be based of a very recent 3.x series with a few Samba 4 patches backported.
Most Samba developers are currently working on the samba-3.2-testing or samba-3.3-testing git branches and occasionally adding a patch or two to the samba-4.0-testing tree.
Samba 3.2 is currently very limited in functionality:
* no AD logins, actually no AD features at all. The Solaris CIFS server (which is a simple and beautiful piece of engineering that does only 1 thing, as simple and beautiful things should do) requires Active Directory.
* No NFSv4 ACL support. Don't be fooled by it. Samba's NFSv4 ACL support is useful for read-only stuff at best, once you start creating files remotely on that volume (say a ZFS), you start having a mess with permissions, Samba+ZFS cannot mimic Windows behavior, while Solaris CIFS Server + ZFS can. You cannot have directory and file masks for NFSv4 ACLs.
* Samba doesn't do the sane thing of reordering the ACLs with the deny entries first (not required by NFSv4/ZFS but required by Windows) when setting them and Windows cannot read them.
* What's with the IDMAP config, are they high? It changed 3 times in the 3.0 series and it's still different in 3.2. Can't they get it right just once? Every time I do a version upgrade joining the domain and creating users gets broken because of version changes and I get woken up from my sleep at 3-4AM.
I don't usually criticize OSS projects, but Samba is a vital one and right now they are either understaffed or they don't have their priorities straight. I know that this will blow away half of my karma points but Samba is more or less in the same place from a functional point of view as it was in September 2003 (5 and 1/2 years ago) when Samba 3.0 was launched. While it was reasonable in 2003 not to have AD support and the rest of the deal, in 2008 it means our company will most probably have to abandon FLOSS DC support this year in favor of "the real thingâ" (Windows 2008).
I think he is referring to the userspace/kernelspace split in Windows NT. On 32bit Windows XP, by default, the userspace (ring3) will have at most 2 GB of the physical RAM, and the kernel space would get the rest (some of it paged and some of it not). On systems with more than 3G of RAM (a lot by 2002 standards), it was kinda pointless to reserve that much for the kernel space, so they added a boot.ini flag that changed the split to _AT_MOST_ 3GBytes for the userspace and the rest for kernel space.
In Vista the split for 3G/1G of RAM is default. Actually on a system with 4G of RAM running in 32bit mode, you can't use all of them even if you try (in Windows XP), because right under the 4G limit you would have the PCI memory address mappings, that can be as large as 512M for a common video card with half a gig of RAM. Add to that the RAID controllers and the other hardware, and you have about 800megs of RAM unused because they can't be addressed, as their address-space is used by the installed devices.
I think that http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823440/ and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/171793/ should describe what I'm talking about pretty clearly.
While the values of capitalism should not be dismissed, there are a few strategic fields/industries in which government help should be allowed:
1) Education. An educated country means a profitable country and one that exports. It's clear by now that the US cannot be competitive in most blue-collar jobs, at least compared to some Asian countries, and probably in the future with African ones.
2) Health. Having healthy workers means having a productive country, thus more money. Making health unaffordable, like in the US means having more sick people. More sick people, means less productive people. I do find the US health system to be rather expensive. I broke my hand over there and they asked for $12000 for a lousy cast at the Saint Francis Memorial in San Francisco, and only after a lot of negotiations (and them realizing the prospect of me not paying) they lowered that to $3000, which my travel insurance covered. What were the $3000 for? Just an x-ray, a pill and a cast. Furthermore, it's better to prevent illnesses, than to treat them, and that's not what the US is doing.
3) Safety (police, firemen, coast-guard, national guard, rangers, etc.). Isn't it weird that in a capitalist country like the USA you don't have to have a protection contract with a private protection company? If it's weird, you probably grew in a mafia controlled hood.
When will you realize that social liberalism does not mean communism? If you define the American Dream (TM) as having a house, 2.4 kids, a job and a healthy, educated family, without a bit of socialism, you would need to be a millionaire in order to make it real. Since most Americans aren't millionaires, the American Dream (with a nuclear family & all) is going bust at this rate.
I am running ZFS successfully on 6 32bit systems for 2 years now. Actually, for file servers in our company we always use slower servers. In our case, we have dual CPU Xeon 2.8 GHz (Prestonia) systems with 2 or 3 GBytes of RAM running Solaris 10 with ZFS and Samba and NFS sharing.
Get your facts right. I don't know about FreeBSD 32bit vs 64bit, but on Solaris, it works regardless and it works brilliantly.
The only problem I am having is the reordering of the NFSv4 ACLs in ZFS and inheritance with Samba's ZFS vfs module. Samba still sucks at anything else than POSIX ACLs.
Sort of a checkin in Sun terms.
Briliant.
Because Yahoo! wants independence. Because Grandma considers Yahoo! Mail to be the only Email option. Or to put it more correctly, she thinks that the Email service and Yahoo! Mail are one and the same thing. She doesn't know that there are alternatives, and she doesn't care. She likes emailing other grandma's and she will follow the guidelines that I wrote on the side of her screen and only apply to Yahoo!
I think that it's just another nice way of refusing.
I think that the Yahoo! folks realize that Yahoo! and Microsoft don't really mix together.
Microsoft only wants the userbase and the brand, not the products. If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, all their technology (Apache, Oracle, MySQL, PHP, Java, etc running on top of Linux and BSD) would be replaced by Windows servers running IIS. That would make most of the Yahoo! engineers redundant.
I am pretty sure that they would just add the missing features to their Live products, and rebrand them as Yahoo! The Yahoo! products will start a short (i.e.: 1-2 years) death as soon as Microsoft buys them, to make room for Yahoo! branded MSN/Live ones.
Imagine a .NET/Mono based Zimbra.
Furthermore, I assume that at that level all negociations are 'friendly'. Unless they fail, when they become friendly only for the winning side.
Finally, I do believe that Yahoo! is worth more than that ammount, because there are countries where no competition exists (see Romania). In a blog from one of the Fedora Art Group members, the blogger said that over 90% of the email addresses in Romania were Yahoo! ones. I can confirm this with the Messenger part. I've never seen anyone giveout a GTalk or MSN id in Romania, only Yahoo!.
KUDOS to the BBC for being a leader in all fronts of the Mass-Media. This video proves that they can do serious journalism, something that most media companies have forgotten how to do.
Short, correct and difficult to answer questions. Ask the right questions, that's all it takes.
Bravo BBC
Try looking a little harder. Sun contributed a lot more to open source than IBM or Novel or Red Hat. Most of it's contributions come from formerly proprietary software that was open sourced (OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, etc.), but they also contribute a lot to projects such as Xorg, GNOME, Linux, Postgres, Samba, Xen, etc. Furthermore, there are projects started by Sun that from version 1 are open source (see OpenSPARC).
Only the projects that I mentioned above contain more source code than Novel and IBM and RedHat ever contributed, and keep in mind that Sun contributes to a lot more projects.
I really think that they are on the right track, even though they have occasional troubles (see the OOo contribution problem with the Novel folks, or the OpenDS issue).
Nope.
I know that both IBM and Novell have contributed to the open source community, but their contributions are small (in number of lines of code) compared to OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Java and many others. Sun also contributed to a lot of projects (see the GNOME project), but in lines of code it's the products that they open-sourced that make the big difference.
I've always wondered why on earth do American cars have 3,4,5 or even 6 liter engines, but after a trip to the gas-station I found out: the octane numbers for gas in California are 87, 89 and 91 (and in some places 93 seldomly 95). If you stop at _ANY_ gas station in Bucharest you will see 95, 98 and 99 or 100. In the manuals of most cars I've seen it says that you should use gas at least 95, preferably 98.
You've got to be kidding me. I must honestly say that I've never seen (even on the news) an accident caused by a tire blowout. Mainly because WE DON'T USE INNER TUBES ANYMORE for at least two decades (I am not talking about bikes and trucks).
I did see once a Honda Accord that was driving a little faster than the car that I was in (we were at 105 mph) and it's tire deflated and was torn to shreds, but the driver didn't even realize until he looked in the side-mirror because the car kept going in the right direction at the same speed. That being said, there is a _HUGE_ difference between the quality of the tarmac in the EU zone and the US. In the EU there are no bumps and cracks and the whole road foundation is leveled a lot better, the turns are wider (except the milan-genova highway in italy, near genova) and the lanes are wider as well.
Not necessarily. Some american drivers suck, and because of that american motorway speeds are incredibly low. Almost everywhere in Europe the maximum speed is around 80 mph, and everywhere you can safely drive at OVER 90mph, while in the US it's at 65 or 75mph. The problem with the american drivers is that they hardly ever use the mirrors. I've seen drivers going directly from the carpool lane to the exit quite a few times without ever bothering to check the damned mirrors. From my point of view, automatic gear-boxes combined with driving only on motorways, leads to bad drivers. I've also seen drivers with their feet on the dashboard. I can't possibly imagine how on earth is the driver supposed to brake and avoid a possible accident with his feet up.
They give an 18 year old a gun, they allow him to drive (which is potentially dangerous) at 16, but he can't have a beer until he's 21. Figure that out.
It seems pretty normal to me to learn about the effects of alcohol _BEFORE_ you can get a weapon or drive a car.
Getting back to the subject at hand. I think that the US should make the drivers license exam (the practical part) a lot harder. Driving on a mountain-side road with a lot of hairpin-turns in a manual gearbox car (possibly on snow or other bad conditions), teaches one about driving more than 1000 hours on a motorway. I also think that the guy has a very serious point by doing that.
The author also seems to forget that 3G is not only Data calls. 3G is video Calls, high bandwidth for both upload and download, data sessions NOT interrupted by voice calls, IPv6, Mobile Radio and TV (as mentioned above).
From my point of view, the fact that the Apple iPhone uses the inefficient EDGE network, while the world (except the US obviously) uses 3G, and more recently WiMAX. In Romania, while Orange and Vodafone said they will introduce the WiMAX networks later this year, using a WiMAX enabled device you can already see their networks in the 3.5/3.75 GHz spectrum.
I actually had high hopes from the iPhone, and after it came out it simply disappointed me. My next device will be the Nokia Nx00 with WiMAX, that I hope is coming out Q108.
Actually only the cell-phones in the US are half-ass web featured ones. Two years ago, the coolest cell in the US was the brain-dead, RAZR, granted it was sexy, but it was also brain-dead. On the other side of the planet, there were touch-screen phones that ran Linux and had Opera 7.5 as a pretty decent browser. They still rule because they can run Doom and Quake, and can render most pages without a problem. Come to think about-it, most of what the iPhone brings, you can get from a Nokia N800 with a basic GSM phone that also has Bluetooth in parallel. Actually the N800 is a lot better than the iPhone. I have an excelent IMAP client on it (Claws), I have Pidgin for IM, I have a very decent Opera 9 with flash and a lot of other goodies. The great thing about-it is that it only takes an incredibly small amount of time to port ANY gtk application to the Maemo platform that the N800 uses. The multitude of applications that have been ported to the N800 only proves that it's a better platform than most of the others.
I will give the iPhone the following:
1) Multi-touch. It sounds like it's more than a simple touch-screen. The Nokia N800 has a nice feature that detects if you touch with the stick or a finger and adjusts the input method and the menus accordingly, but I doubt that it's as cool as the one on the iPhone. I am sure that the Nokia N800+1 could easily implement something like this.
2) Screen rotation sensor.
3) Phone
Flame follows: (3) is actually one that can be put in both good and bad. The iPhone is an Edge phone on a 3G world. Granted that the network coverage for 3G in the US is a joke compared to Europe or Asia. Actually, the network coverage in the US is more like a joke. In Romania, the country that only a few years ago was under communist ruling, we have basically 100% coverage for the cell phone networks, and a lot of 3G, and nation-wide GPRS on Vodaphone (they are introducing 7.something Mbps HSUPA later this year) and EDGE on Orange (same as Vodafone). Vodafone currently has 2.8 Mbps HSDPA, and Orange has 3.6 Mbps HSDPA. In Germany it's even more impressing, you have almost full 3G coverage for the whole country.
Zapp, our only CDMA operator, has EVDO 2.4 Mbps since 2004, and they are going for an upgrade later this year. Now, allow me to be disappointed by the lame EDGE options available to the US market. I am also disappointed by the fact that Apple didn't allow the buying of unlocked phones and gave AT&T exclusivity.
BTW: The rates for Cell phone is the US are also huge. In 2005, a prepaid card from Cingular gave me "free calls" in the US, but having to pay an airtime rate of $.25/min for both outgoing and incoming calls. In Romania in 2005 the prepaid rates were somewhere around $.20 for outgoing calls, and free for incoming. I also found the fact that you get charged from the second that you make the call, even if the other party doesn't answer, to be a little disturbing, especially since a call to Romania costed around $.90 + airtime tax, and would usually take around 45s to connect to the Bucharest based operators. I've called Cingular and asked for my money back for the situations in which it didn't connect at all. Based on their pricing details I expected to be charged $0.25 in that minute until the person answers and until the call connects, and after that $0.25 + $0.90 for the call, but I was charged almost an extra dollar for each call. I find this wierd because in Europe, if the person doesn't answer, you don't pay anything, and if you receive a call (except for roaming), you don't pay anything. In the US, if someone hates you they simply have to send you a lot of Text messages, because they also cost if you receive them.
Anyway, to make a long story short, in the US the mobile phones are a lot more expensive and dumb (literally), the rates are a lot worst and the network coverage is a joke. This is coming from a guy that lives in Romania, not in the UK or France or Germany. I talk my ass off on my cell phone (and we all have a cell phone), and I never exceed than $45, except when I'm out of the country.
Coverage information is available at Coverage Maps.
Jet Engines (Henri Coanda) and the Coanda Effect in aerodynamics.
The first gymnast ever to score a perfect "ten".
Constantin Brancusi in Scultpture.
Alexandru Ciurcu invented with M.M. Just Buisson the first Reactive Engine
Anastase Dragomir invented the parachute cell, predecessor of the ejection seat
Dragomir Hurmuzescu inventor of the first high tension dynamo
Rodrig Goliescu invented the first tubular airplane
Dracula for the SCI-FI fans and last but not least important: the Cheeky Girls(at least the brits seem to love them) and Ozone (I can't seem to forget the drunk austrians in Vienna new-years 2005 when all they sang was a "Hey, baby" remix chorus and Ozone's own "Dragostea din tei").
All the Renaults I knew in the past few years used a stalk. That includes Laguna, Clio, Symbol, Logan and Megane. I don't know about the other ones (Velsatis and the vans).
In the US, only Mercedes is trying to get educate the crowds in the advantages of Diesel fuel. In Europe, Diesel is actually popular, but in the US there is a stereotype that Diesel means slow and sluggish. I've recently visited the autos.yahoo.com website and I was completely baffled by the comments over there. Everyone seems to be surprised by the great fuel economy that the Mercedes-Benz 320 CDI offers and also the incredible acceleration on a highway. In Europe this would be taken for granted.
Let's take another car right now: the Honda Accord. In Europe it also has a Diesel option with the following fuel economy values: Hwy-53 mpg, City-33 mpg. It delivers 140 bhp with an immense torque of 340nm and a maximum speed (in the manual) of 136 mph. Should be taken into consideration that the values for Hwy in Europe are generally taken at a speed of 80mph, which is the recommended or imposed maximum speed on highways in most of Europe. Considering that in the US it ranges between 65 and 75, the values could be better for highway. The same applies for city values. European cities tend to be a lot more crowded and the traffic to be a lot worst than that of a US city (San Francisco does resemble an European city somewhat due to it's smaller streets and it's hills).
Our car is a Renault Megane (Renault is the "other half" of the Renault-Nissan corp.). It has a *1.5*L diesel Engine (3 year old engine) that delivers 110 bhp with an imense torque. It's mpg at 100mph on a hwy is 42 as reported by the on-board computer. That gives-it a 600+ miles range on one diesel fuel fill (15 gallons) at a higher than legal speed. If you only drive legally on hwy (less than 80mph), you could actually cross Europe on one or two fills.
Even more surprising is that the engines that are found in the US have worst performance in any given aspect than the European ones for the same volume. In Europe, for a 2L Gas Engine you can get 200 bhp at some manufacturers.
Romania also has most of the wiring done underground, except for the 110kV and higher powergrid lines. It was funny that last summer I was in the US in Sillicon Valley, there was something that can be best described as light rain with a few thunderstrikes and the power went down. Here, in Romania, I didn't have a powerfailture that lasted longer than 10 minutes since 1998, and I didn't have a power failture in the last year (at least since I returned from the US). We have heavy snow in the winter, we have heavy rains, we have all kinds of weather and that didn't stop anyone. The real reason for not sending the grid underground in the US escapes me. Long-term it's not more expensive, as the maintenance operations on a properly designed powergrid needed less often than on an aerial one. You don't have cars running into the powergrid poles, you don't have lightning, etc. You guys bury fiber optic wires but not the power-grid and that's wierd from where I'm standing. Basically it's only a matter of forcing the power companies to actually give a f**k about the customers. I'd hate having poles ruin the look of my house/garden. Especially those wooden poles that you see in California, that were found in Romania 30 or 40 years ago.
If I remember correctly, XBox ran a stripped down Windows 2000 kernel. It is safe to assume, right now, that XBox 360 runs a Windows XP/2003 kernel for PowerPC. Trimmed down and optimized, of course, but a PowerPC port of Windows XP/2003 nevertheless
That is a serious issue right now. SCO ownz the SystemV code, and the whole SCO deal was about a few lines (if any) which were open-sourced by IBM and SGI. As Solaris has a hudge quantity of UNIX code, how the hell can they open-source that? It's true, Solaris was build initially upon BSD, but right now it's SystemV. One more thing, what do they mean by Solaris? The kernel? CDE (opengroup as in HP/IBM/SUN/etc.)? ZFS (Sun/HP)? It's a lot of code that's not only their's. I doubt that IBM/HP/etc. would agree with that move.
Think how AIX would be affected by this move, imagine Solaris ported to PPC and S390x. Then think of a PA-RISC/IA-64 port of Solaris.
It seems highly unprobable to me because this would really screw the UNIX bussiness for IBM/HP.
The necessity of those features that you mention, is not for me to judge. I think that the fact that Microsoft implemented it lately into it's os, proves that there are hudge numbers of people that can use it.
Is network bandidth that expensive? I have gigabit at home. For XFS 10MBits/sec work perfectly. But having a fost archive of 4-5GBytes, it's not only a waste of space in having it on any computer in a DTP lab, it's a problem with installing the new fonts on all the computers, it's also a problem with the loading and sorting of the fonts at startup. Network transparency is a good thing guys. If you don't need that then don't use it.
X11, contrarely to a very popular opinion doesn't look, it shows. If you want-it to look as good as AQUA, then design a theme like that for GTK or QT, as they CAN look that good. If you want expose, it's in the window manager where you have to work (I belive that metacity has a patch for that, google for expocity), you need shadows? Keithp is working on that. It's the COMPOSITE and DAMAGE extensions for X11 that you're looking for. It's still unstable but try XServ from freedesktop.org.