Because as we've seen with the IP(v4) to IPv6 transition, it takes an awful lot of time and an awful lot of money to change the way the entire Internet does a certain thing. It's not something that can change overnight.
A related point is that it's VERY difficult to predict how anything will operate on the hugely large scale of the wild Internet. There are plenty of very elegant systems being developed at the moment that replace DNS with some kind of distributed (sometimes even serverless) systems that make a lot of sense. But these things need time to go from academic projects to something that will work.
It's a target for the future, but unfortunately it's not going to stop "Verslime" getting their own way for 5 years at the very least. The only feasible people who can stop them in the short term are ICANN (or possibly someone like GoDaddy if they can prove they've lost earnings).
So what they're saying is that while Sitefinder was up, people trying to get to.com or.net addresses made 48 million typos? Well, whoop-de-do. I mostly work from my bookmarks these days, but still make at least one domain name typo a day, on average.
I've noticed this recently, Slashdot submitted posting links to individual servers over at THG, which are obviously going to get hammered. That site has like, 10 load balanced boxes, so really they should take the number of the wwwX.tomshardware.com before they post the link!
My last Maxtor purchase was DoA, twice. Last time I ever buy from them. I've had bad experiences with IBM drives too, getting too hot and melting their cache controllers or something, FWIW.
It'll be a lot sooner than that, I think. Based on how sizes are growing, unless there's a significiant bottleneck in current technology that's about to be hit (I have no idea, anyone know?) I think we could well have terabyte drives by the time Windows Longhorn comes out in 2005-06... which is fortunate, since that will probably be the minimum space requirement for the install.
You're forgetting the third way Apple could do itself a favour. They could open source Aqua. Imagine the possibilities:
1. I'm pretty sure that a project would have Aqua running on Linux or FreeBSD in a few months. In the meantime, Apple gets free development and bugfixes for Aqua, and when it's finished, we get the modern, excellent X Windows replacement (with a backwards compatible rootless X Server) people have been wanting for years and years.
2. Apple can still sell their own hardware, and they can limit key products like iTunes to PPC binary. This way, they don't loose out to comoditised x86 boxes.
3. Microsoft won't be pissed and stop producing Mac Office (which is important to a lot of people on the Mac), because again they can just produce PPC binaries instead of x86 binaries. Instead we get OpenOffice.org for Aqua (hopefully faster after they dump the horrendous toolkit they're using now).
Actually I think you need to get out more. I've been away from the PC and the TV for the last 8 days...
LMFAO, you accuse me of not getting out enough because I don't know the latest price of a particular games console.
Maybe it's less socially acceptable, but wouldn't you have a much more powerful machine if you did the same to an X-Box? The only reason it isn't socially acceptable is because of stupid-ass laws like the DMCA.
Besdies, $300 (180 in my money) can buy you a perfectly reasonable reconditioned second-hand machine, or, how about:
Duron 1.3GHz 30.00
MS-6378 (KLE133 w/audio, video, LAN) 37.50
128MB PC133 19.50
ATX Midi Tower 28.00
Seagate U Series X 20 20GB UDMA100 40.00
Samsung SD-616 DVD-ROM 24.51...for a grand total of 179.51 ($287). I wonder whose machine will be faster...
Is the Nintendo GameCube or the Sony Playstation 2 going to be $99? Really badly written article. If the PS2 is going to be dropping to $99, why is Nintendo sharing space at the $99 rack? If the GC is dropping to $99, why are you talking about the PS2?
Where in the article does it say this depends on GNOME? You're asserting that the skilled GNOME devs can't help out and work on other projects?
People like Havoc Pennington are interested in making the LINUX desktop a useable, viable environment to replace windows, and if it's lacking somewhere other than the desktop environment, why shouldn't they apply their skills and help out with that, too?
This kind of scare-mongering went on some months back when people were convinced Keith Packard was collaborating with GNOME to integrate GConf and Glibc into X. As usual, it was all FUD, mostly on the part of anti-GNOME zealots who have no idea what the GNOME devs are trying to achieve.
The point with OSS is that you don't have to use it, and there are usually at least three alternatives for everything you happen to want. But it really doesn't help when people go around spreading FUD about other projects that some of us just happen to like and to which a lot of people have contributed time, effort and money.
My standards-compliant Mozilla-based browser with beautifully antialiased subpixel rendered bitstream fonts sitting in a similarly pretty desktop environment with PNG scalable icons, proper human interface guidelines and a fully skinnable user interface kicks the ass of anything I've ever seen on a Windows machine WRT eye candy.
Sure, OSX looks purdy, but at what cost? Very limited hardware support and a tightly controlled platform.
Your cut and paste problems and your apps looking like crap is probably down to the apps being badly written. And guess what, there are plenty of badly written apps for Windows too!
I'd love to know a platform that has a UNIX, Linux or BSD port that doesn't have Python available.
The Python interpreter is written in a lower level language (I don't know whether it's C or C++, but it doesn't matter). If your port doesn't have a C compiler, then it's not going to get very far.
You're obviously high on your KDE Kandy, but if GTK engines are taking 5 seconds to start up, your system is broken, my friend.
Also, glibc is NOT slow.
Gnome and KDE are both perfectly viable desktop environments and both are improving all the time. It's zealots like yourself that give open source software a bad name.
That may be so, but proprietary software companies are much more likely to screw you when they decide your third party replacement implementation doesn't fit with their corperate vision....Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer is the prime example that comes to mind.
Please don't use this argument. There are a LOT of people who switch their computers off at night or when they go out of the house and do not want to be running 24 hours a day.
A faster boot would be <i>welcome</i> on my systems, simply being able to boot up, read my e-mail and shut down again in 3-5 minutes would be incredible.
I think you'll find Konqueror and Nautilus both already have info:// URLs for dealing with GNU info pages. So this'll have to change. Wonderful, progress, isn't it.
It has handwriting recognition, and although the processor probably isn't fast enough, it'll run almost any Linux application (so speech recognition and speech synthesis should work fine, thanks very much) on the command line. And as Linux developers have always leaned towards a separation between function and GUI, it should be relatively easy to port graphical applications, too (QT in particular, but more generally, any well-written app should make it easy to change the GUI without looking at the entire code base. Look at Xine, XMMS, Lyx).
I'd also like to see a PPC or POS machine act as a handheld web server. IBM's new form factor sounds great, but it's already here, considering what can be done with these Linux PDAs.
Sure, YALPDA, but it looks as though it's as capable as any of the others out there. I see it runs Qtopia too... sensible choice considering the large number of people developing for it (and its various forks, in case Trolltech ever trys to call in fees on the technology, but I doubt they'd be stupid enough to do this!).
This appears to be becoming almost a "de facto" standard for PDA development. The useful thing though, when compared to PPC or POS is that it doesn't really matter what hardware it's running on, so unlike Microsoft or PalmSource, companies won't have their exact hardware specifications dictated in advance.
Hopefully this should lead to some real innovation (and looks like it already is) rather than heaps and heaps of PDAs that look and work exactly the same just because they run the same operating system, even right down to the number of hardware buttons they happen to have. I've always considered this a little silly.
An argument I've heard quite often (not sure whether I agree though) is that if all these (very talented) programmers and designers who work on BeOS, AtheOS and so on switched to working on Linux or BSD or HURD, then perhaps these operating systems would be even better than they are today.
BeOS has some POSIX compliance but it's not as if I can use an autoconfigure script to go and compile something that would work on a Linux or a BSD system, which are much more compatible with eachother.
In any case, I'm also not sure whether I agree with the whole idea of task-specific operating systems. It seems like a step backwards to the days when each software program had to be coded for every possible piece of hardware rather than writing device drivers. If I install BeOS alongside Linux (my primary OS) and Windows and regularly use 5 applications from each it's going to mean a whole lot of reboots and a whole lot of hassle when I want to buy new hardware (where to find three separate drivers, whether the hardware is supported at all...). It reminds me of trying to find a printer that would work with my word processor and spreadsheet in the days of MS-DOS.
I respect and am in some awe at small teams who are able to go away and write a system that seems almost as complete as Windows or MacOS, but honestly I wonder where these systems fit in to the bigger picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Because as we've seen with the IP(v4) to IPv6 transition, it takes an awful lot of time and an awful lot of money to change the way the entire Internet does a certain thing. It's not something that can change overnight.
A related point is that it's VERY difficult to predict how anything will operate on the hugely large scale of the wild Internet. There are plenty of very elegant systems being developed at the moment that replace DNS with some kind of distributed (sometimes even serverless) systems that make a lot of sense. But these things need time to go from academic projects to something that will work.
It's a target for the future, but unfortunately it's not going to stop "Verslime" getting their own way for 5 years at the very least. The only feasible people who can stop them in the short term are ICANN (or possibly someone like GoDaddy if they can prove they've lost earnings).
So what they're saying is that while Sitefinder was up, people trying to get to .com or .net addresses made 48 million typos? Well, whoop-de-do. I mostly work from my bookmarks these days, but still make at least one domain name typo a day, on average.
How's this for a reason:
;)
Gamecube: 458MHz
X-Box: 700MHz
See MY point?
I've noticed this recently, Slashdot submitted posting links to individual servers over at THG, which are obviously going to get hammered. That site has like, 10 load balanced boxes, so really they should take the number of the wwwX.tomshardware.com before they post the link!
My last Maxtor purchase was DoA, twice. Last time I ever buy from them. I've had bad experiences with IBM drives too, getting too hot and melting their cache controllers or something, FWIW.
It'll be a lot sooner than that, I think. Based on how sizes are growing, unless there's a significiant bottleneck in current technology that's about to be hit (I have no idea, anyone know?) I think we could well have terabyte drives by the time Windows Longhorn comes out in 2005-06... which is fortunate, since that will probably be the minimum space requirement for the install.
You're forgetting the third way Apple could do itself a favour. They could open source Aqua. Imagine the possibilities: 1. I'm pretty sure that a project would have Aqua running on Linux or FreeBSD in a few months. In the meantime, Apple gets free development and bugfixes for Aqua, and when it's finished, we get the modern, excellent X Windows replacement (with a backwards compatible rootless X Server) people have been wanting for years and years. 2. Apple can still sell their own hardware, and they can limit key products like iTunes to PPC binary. This way, they don't loose out to comoditised x86 boxes. 3. Microsoft won't be pissed and stop producing Mac Office (which is important to a lot of people on the Mac), because again they can just produce PPC binaries instead of x86 binaries. Instead we get OpenOffice.org for Aqua (hopefully faster after they dump the horrendous toolkit they're using now).
But we don't say "x86 Linux", do we. The operating system is called Linux (or more correctly GNU/Linux) whatever processor it runs on.
Actually I think you need to get out more. I've been away from the PC and the TV for the last 8 days... LMFAO, you accuse me of not getting out enough because I don't know the latest price of a particular games console.
Damned text formatting, let's try again:
Duron 1.3GHz 30.00
MS-6378 (KLE133 w/audio, video, LAN) 37.50
128MB PC133 19.50
ATX Midi Tower 28.00
Seagate U Series X 20 20GB UDMA100 40.00
Samsung SD-616 DVD-ROM 24.51
= 179.51
Maybe it's less socially acceptable, but wouldn't you have a much more powerful machine if you did the same to an X-Box? The only reason it isn't socially acceptable is because of stupid-ass laws like the DMCA. Besdies, $300 (180 in my money) can buy you a perfectly reasonable reconditioned second-hand machine, or, how about: Duron 1.3GHz 30.00 MS-6378 (KLE133 w/audio, video, LAN) 37.50 128MB PC133 19.50 ATX Midi Tower 28.00 Seagate U Series X 20 20GB UDMA100 40.00 Samsung SD-616 DVD-ROM 24.51 ...for a grand total of 179.51 ($287). I wonder whose machine will be faster...
True, I've been away from the computer for a week so probably missed it. Feel free to mod my parent down >:Z
Is the Nintendo GameCube or the Sony Playstation 2 going to be $99? Really badly written article. If the PS2 is going to be dropping to $99, why is Nintendo sharing space at the $99 rack? If the GC is dropping to $99, why are you talking about the PS2?
When does slashdot ever post stories that haven't appeared on other sources first? It's a news aggregation portal, not CNN, damnit.
Damn, that site made me spit coffee all over my poor computer screen!
Where in the article does it say this depends on GNOME? You're asserting that the skilled GNOME devs can't help out and work on other projects? People like Havoc Pennington are interested in making the LINUX desktop a useable, viable environment to replace windows, and if it's lacking somewhere other than the desktop environment, why shouldn't they apply their skills and help out with that, too? This kind of scare-mongering went on some months back when people were convinced Keith Packard was collaborating with GNOME to integrate GConf and Glibc into X. As usual, it was all FUD, mostly on the part of anti-GNOME zealots who have no idea what the GNOME devs are trying to achieve. The point with OSS is that you don't have to use it, and there are usually at least three alternatives for everything you happen to want. But it really doesn't help when people go around spreading FUD about other projects that some of us just happen to like and to which a lot of people have contributed time, effort and money.
Cut and paste seems to work okay for me!
My standards-compliant Mozilla-based browser with beautifully antialiased subpixel rendered bitstream fonts sitting in a similarly pretty desktop environment with PNG scalable icons, proper human interface guidelines and a fully skinnable user interface kicks the ass of anything I've ever seen on a Windows machine WRT eye candy.
Sure, OSX looks purdy, but at what cost? Very limited hardware support and a tightly controlled platform.
Your cut and paste problems and your apps looking like crap is probably down to the apps being badly written. And guess what, there are plenty of badly written apps for Windows too!
I'd love to know a platform that has a UNIX, Linux or BSD port that doesn't have Python available.
The Python interpreter is written in a lower level language (I don't know whether it's C or C++, but it doesn't matter). If your port doesn't have a C compiler, then it's not going to get very far.
You're obviously high on your KDE Kandy, but if GTK engines are taking 5 seconds to start up, your system is broken, my friend.
Also, glibc is NOT slow.
Gnome and KDE are both perfectly viable desktop environments and both are improving all the time. It's zealots like yourself that give open source software a bad name.
That may be so, but proprietary software companies are much more likely to screw you when they decide your third party replacement implementation doesn't fit with their corperate vision. ...Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer is the prime example that comes to mind.
Please don't use this argument. There are a LOT of people who switch their computers off at night or when they go out of the house and do not want to be running 24 hours a day.
A faster boot would be <i>welcome</i> on my systems, simply being able to boot up, read my e-mail and shut down again in 3-5 minutes would be incredible.
I think you'll find Konqueror and Nautilus both already have info:// URLs for dealing with GNU info pages. So this'll have to change. Wonderful, progress, isn't it.
It has handwriting recognition, and although the processor probably isn't fast enough, it'll run almost any Linux application (so speech recognition and speech synthesis should work fine, thanks very much) on the command line. And as Linux developers have always leaned towards a separation between function and GUI, it should be relatively easy to port graphical applications, too (QT in particular, but more generally, any well-written app should make it easy to change the GUI without looking at the entire code base. Look at Xine, XMMS, Lyx). I'd also like to see a PPC or POS machine act as a handheld web server. IBM's new form factor sounds great, but it's already here, considering what can be done with these Linux PDAs.
Sure, YALPDA, but it looks as though it's as capable as any of the others out there. I see it runs Qtopia too... sensible choice considering the large number of people developing for it (and its various forks, in case Trolltech ever trys to call in fees on the technology, but I doubt they'd be stupid enough to do this!).
This appears to be becoming almost a "de facto" standard for PDA development. The useful thing though, when compared to PPC or POS is that it doesn't really matter what hardware it's running on, so unlike Microsoft or PalmSource, companies won't have their exact hardware specifications dictated in advance.
Hopefully this should lead to some real innovation (and looks like it already is) rather than heaps and heaps of PDAs that look and work exactly the same just because they run the same operating system, even right down to the number of hardware buttons they happen to have. I've always considered this a little silly.
An argument I've heard quite often (not sure whether I agree though) is that if all these (very talented) programmers and designers who work on BeOS, AtheOS and so on switched to working on Linux or BSD or HURD, then perhaps these operating systems would be even better than they are today.
BeOS has some POSIX compliance but it's not as if I can use an autoconfigure script to go and compile something that would work on a Linux or a BSD system, which are much more compatible with eachother.
In any case, I'm also not sure whether I agree with the whole idea of task-specific operating systems. It seems like a step backwards to the days when each software program had to be coded for every possible piece of hardware rather than writing device drivers. If I install BeOS alongside Linux (my primary OS) and Windows and regularly use 5 applications from each it's going to mean a whole lot of reboots and a whole lot of hassle when I want to buy new hardware (where to find three separate drivers, whether the hardware is supported at all...). It reminds me of trying to find a printer that would work with my word processor and spreadsheet in the days of MS-DOS.
I respect and am in some awe at small teams who are able to go away and write a system that seems almost as complete as Windows or MacOS, but honestly I wonder where these systems fit in to the bigger picture.