OK you get 128MB with a P4 almost for free, but who sticks with 128MB these days. I'd say you need at least 512MB to use such a CPU.
Add 512MB of PC800 RDRAM at 2*$280, versus PC2100 DDR-RAM at 2*$206, and the price difference gets $150 bigger (according to the weekly pricelist on sharkyextreme).
I agree with most, but not with your XML-RPC assessment. There already is an RPC mechanism which is fully suitable for cross-platform development: Corba. There is absolutely no reason to do RPC's in a human-readable format (which doesn't guarantee better interoperability btw), it is just a big waste of resources.
I get sick at the though that future Internet apps might be based on XML-RPC.
This is a myth! FreeBSD driver support exceeds Linux in some respects, and lags in some others. For sure FreeBSD's driver support is not less. E.g. for USB it was much faster, also for UDMA.
As for your example: it's wrong. FreeBSD supports ATA100 since version 4.2 (about 6 months now, and about 12 months in the developtment tree).
In contrast: Linux added ATA100 support to standard (non-dev) kernel much later than 6 months ago.
Somehow people keep repeating each other in these false statments, that might have been true many years ago.
The only area where FreeBSD is painfully lagging is Nvidia 3D-driver support. It is irritating, because of Linux's more prominent image this vendor supports Linux but not FreeBSD in their (binary only, mind you) driver.
This in contrast with vmware, for example, which runs perfectly under FreeBSD. The kernel parts of vmware are available as source and were ported to FreeBSD long ago. The non-kernel part runs 110% under Linux "emulation" (which, technically, isn't a real emulator and runs most linux software faster than directly under linux).
I have 512kbit/s over ISDN. It can go up to almost the same speeds as for DSL over analog, but it needs an extra $50 splitter, as opposed to only an analog filter. This is because ISDN uses higher frequencies as analogue telephone.
The european Telco's pushed for an addition to the DSL standard to enable using normal DSL speeds over ISDN (since ISDN is so widespread in Europe). Maybe american DSL providers don't use it, but it surely is possible.
The problem is, there are equally nice (at least) disributions that you can get for free. And that are more widespread (maybe because of that).
So why go with a rather obscure distribution that you have to pay for, when you can something equally good or better for free?
Bad luck for them, but they have no chance. Yes it is their right to get paid for their work, but they should go into another business if they want to. Linux distributions is something you just can't make money with.
In Europe the prices are much higher. Before you all start shouting that the telecom companies here are so inefficient or still ruled by old (fading) monopolies, there might be other factors (too):
For example in Switzerland you can have an ADSL service @ 256/64 for about $60/month, and 512/128 at $90-$100 per month.
That may seem very high by US standards, and maybe it is overpriced, but on the other hand:
They will provide the service to the whole country within one year, i.e. not only to the bigger cities but also to all rural areas. Companies do not only pick the most profitable areas and leave the rest in the cold.
They make profit very fast, thus the chances for good services and stability (no bankrupcies) is very good.
It seems in the US many make immense investments, just to get market share first, in fact giving the service too cheap. Later people will find out that the service is bad, might even be discontinued and/or prices have to be raised.
OK you may not agree, then please reply stating why not. But rating my article a troll is simply not true. Btw two other responses did agree.
You know what a troll is? And what moderation is for: not to state your opinion but only to judge the quality of responses, regardless of whether you agree with them or not.
Maybe I should get into meta-moderating somewhat more to "punish" inserious moderators that are frustrating the moderation system.
Yes, you could moderate this as off-topic. With that I would not have a problem.
What a nonsense. The point here is that what is expensive in the Philipines, is cheap in the USA. What is expensive is relative.
Current prices mean that almost any hobby site in the USA can afford a trusted SSL certificate, but even most business sites in the Philipines hardly can afford one.
I think that the security of the WEB and thus e-commerce in most cases, in any country, is a matter of international importance that would better not be in the hands of a small group of companies. Instead an international (UN?) organization should supply certificates for a very low fee as a service for the common good.
zsh: command- and filename completion are fully programmable. It is 100% equivalent to tcsh for interactive convenience (i.e. better than bash), plus 99.9%/bin/ksh compatible. tcsh is not/bin/ksh compatible at all and thus no good for scripting, and bash is quite compatible but by far not enough to write really portable shell scripts (portable to standard Unix that rely on/bin/sh or/bin/ksh).
The biggest reason is that its simpler for the majority of people, specifically those raised on Windows and Mac like interfaces.
They should be deprogrammed and reeducated instead. But indeed, a Filemanager might help them to take the first step towards UNIX. Second step would be re-education and take away the Filemanager:). So UNIX should have a fake filemanager which looks very nice but in fact is crap.
People only think they are too stupid to use powerful command line tools, but in fact with a little help almost everyone can use it and can be more productive with it. Most are too lazy though, and thus because they don't want to spend the initial 30 minutes, they loose 30 minutes each day.
From my work I can reach my home at 64kbit/s. First I tried X, but it ran too slow. Then VNC: too slow either, it seems to send the whole screen as a huge (compressed) bitmap.
LBX though is somewhat usable at 64, and really usable at 128kbit/s. I don't see how VNC could be a match for LBX. Also VNC somehow looks very ugly (probably a fonts problem).
X in itself is well designed for low bandwidth use, since it doesn't send the screen (or parts thereof) as bitmaps, but only sends graphics primitives (draw line, draw rect etc). LBX adds compression of events, omision of non-essential events and also (if you want) stream compression (I don't use it since I run LBX over a compressed SSH stream).
Yes, but it shows very nicely how absurd the DMCA is. It shows that code, in a way, really is like speech, and making such things illegal really is constraining the right on free speech.
So you really got to coredump even Informix, Oracle and DB2?
What OS do you use?
I've used Informix on SGI for 1 year, a 5TB transaction database. And currently Oracle 8i on Solaris, a 100GB datawarehouse full of stored procedures, triggers etc running extremely large (generated) SQL queries, some of the queries alone are 100kb text!!!
In the 3 years intensive working with these databases, I've never seen a single crash, and could not imagine one.
Could the coredumps you see have something to do with the operating system you are using? Such as the ever changing glibc on Linux, which will surely make some applications instable?
By the way, it does have a normal PCI slot, and you could put the SunPCI-II card in it, but also some other PCI card (provided there is a Solaris 8 driver for it).
There are more efficient ways to link the consumer to the producer. Resources spent on ads is in principle lost resources (both of the advertiser and the consumer): it produces nothing, transmits dishonest and un-objective information (lies), generally it is a waste of time and money.
Remember that the advertising budget, obviously, is paid for by the buyer of the product: the margin of the product pays for the advertisement budget. Instead of paying for dishonest information I'd rather pay for objective and true information.
Maybe it is a necessary evil (up to a certain point), but it is better to do without. Instead, there should be objective consumer organisations that test products and publish such test results.
Producers can send press releases to objective organisations that summarize and organize information on new and existing products, and present that in an honest and efficient way to potential consumers.
There are numerous countries where (state) television does not or hardly have advertisements. The programs are paid for by tax. Americans may not like tax, but what is the difference between paying a "tax" on products (you know, the advertisements are paid for by the profits on products) or a tax to the state that can finance honest and objective programs from that.
Then there are organisations (such as the dutch consumer-union) that you can become member of for about $20 a year, you get monthly testreports on all kind of goods (televisions, washpowder, insurances, you name it) that enable you to pick the right product for you.
For more specific products (like, what UNIX server do I need) there are professional magazines that do (hopefully) objective tests and write about the products. You can be sure that that information is more trustworthy than the information coming directly from the producers.
No, I really don't see how advertisements can be a good thing, and people believing ads and buying based on that "information" are fools.
Real world problems that suffer from mentioned combinatorial explosion, are too complex: The business model in such cases should be simplified. The sulution to complex access schemes is not to add a complex technical implementation, but to simplify the scheme.
The (many) times I've seen ACL's in action to implement overly complex access control schemes, it bacame chaos, and nobody knew anymore who was allowed to see what, and why the ACL's were the way they were. Maybe massive beaurocratic measurements could prevent chaos in such cases, but one had better rethink the way permissions are granted.
As for modify/append: There are a couple of very specific (system) tasks where append-only might be useful, especially for logfiles that intruders may not tamper with. But for general purpose use, I don't see the need. Append-only can just as well be implemented as a write-only directory (a la/tmp on Unix systems) where a user can "append" a record by creating a new file. Then cat them all in order of mtime, and you have about the same.
Time-dependant access etc is insane to administer, and again IMO the business model should rather be simplified.
Maybe ACL's are nice for control-freak type of system administrators that don't have much work to do, but for normal situations they're no good.
This is utter nonsense. Do you know what the embedded world is? Vxworks is used in jetfighters, in space robots, in nuclear reactor control systems and the like. (I used it for a space robot myself). Don't imagine to see Linux there anytime soon (or ever).
The price is not exorbitant, given the range of applications you can/may use it for. For that money they do extreme quality control. Do you know what the requirements are for software to be used in a nuclear reactor?!?
B.t.w. any price the customer is willing to pay in a fair and open market (i.e. not the monopolized desktop computer market) is a fair price, by definition. Since they're still in business after 15 years, there must be some that apparently find the product worth the price.
WindRiver has done quite a lot for GNU (GCC, GDB). OK, their OS is very expensive, but as long as there are customers willing to pay: good for them.
Since 10 years they already deliver the GNU toolchain as (cross)development environment for their OS. In fact, they were one of the first to use GNU tools in a commercial setting, and in that time, they have contributed quite a bit to gcc,gdb etc (and because of the GPL, shared those improvements with the rest of the world). As their target platform covers many different CPU's they contributed to many gcc backends as well.
They deserve some credit for that. Curt Schacker is not saying that the GPL is wrong (otherwise, they would not have used GPL-stuff for so long) but is only warning about upcoming developments in the GPL. Those might force them to stop using GCC.
GNU tools have been successful because of a balance: you can use it commercially, but improvements you have to give back (good for both). If the GPL goes out of balance, the result will be no more commercial use of GPL-ed stuff, and thus less improvements coming back from commercial users. That would be a loss for both sides.
Wrong compromise. He gave away ssh including the name (as long as you keep it compatible with the ssh-protocol) before the trademark. Thus is trademark is invalid.
The only thing he can do is modify the name of his product, trademark the new name, and launch an advertisement campaign to make it known.
First find a job here, and then your grandchildren may be elegible to become a citizen. In many towns, for each particular individual that wants to become a citizen a referendum is held.
AC: You didn't read quite well.
Indeed, copying for private use remains legal. But alas, national governments do not have to take actions against copy protection mechanisms. The first article says that the parliament declined to force states to take such actions.
OTOH, at least circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms has not become illegal (as is the case in the DMCA), and states even may take actions against it, which is especially logical for states that already impose a tax on copying devices and blank media.
Also, states do not have to impose tax on copying devices and blank media.
Summary: It could have been worse (like the DMCA) and the practical consequences depends for a great deal on what the individual states will do. Probably there will be big differences, causing people to circumvent taxes etc by ordering media or equipment in another state. I think that in a few years time this will cause new discussions. Lets hope that in the meantime, politicians will become more experienced with this subject matter so that they will see how dangerous these developments are for consumer rights.
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Add 512MB of PC800 RDRAM at 2*$280, versus PC2100 DDR-RAM at 2*$206, and the price difference gets $150 bigger (according to the weekly pricelist on sharkyextreme).
I get sick at the though that future Internet apps might be based on XML-RPC.
When I tried it at home my first though was: Oh no, not yet another RTS game, and after 5 minutes I quit.
Reading the comments here I guess I should give it a closer look, it seems it is more a mixture of genres, or a new kind of game.
As for your example: it's wrong. FreeBSD supports ATA100 since version 4.2 (about 6 months now, and about 12 months in the developtment tree). In contrast: Linux added ATA100 support to standard (non-dev) kernel much later than 6 months ago.
Somehow people keep repeating each other in these false statments, that might have been true many years ago.
The only area where FreeBSD is painfully lagging is Nvidia 3D-driver support. It is irritating, because of Linux's more prominent image this vendor supports Linux but not FreeBSD in their (binary only, mind you) driver.
This in contrast with vmware, for example, which runs perfectly under FreeBSD. The kernel parts of vmware are available as source and were ported to FreeBSD long ago. The non-kernel part runs 110% under Linux "emulation" (which, technically, isn't a real emulator and runs most linux software faster than directly under linux).
The european Telco's pushed for an addition to the DSL standard to enable using normal DSL speeds over ISDN (since ISDN is so widespread in Europe). Maybe american DSL providers don't use it, but it surely is possible.
So why go with a rather obscure distribution that you have to pay for, when you can something equally good or better for free?
Bad luck for them, but they have no chance. Yes it is their right to get paid for their work, but they should go into another business if they want to. Linux distributions is something you just can't make money with.
For example in Switzerland you can have an ADSL service @ 256/64 for about $60/month, and 512/128 at $90-$100 per month.
That may seem very high by US standards, and maybe it is overpriced, but on the other hand:
- They will provide the service to the whole country within one year, i.e. not only to the bigger cities but also to all rural areas. Companies do not only pick the most profitable areas and leave the rest in the cold.
- They make profit very fast, thus the chances for good services and stability (no bankrupcies) is very good.
It seems in the US many make immense investments, just to get market share first, in fact giving the service too cheap. Later people will find out that the service is bad, might even be discontinued and/or prices have to be raised.You know what a troll is? And what moderation is for: not to state your opinion but only to judge the quality of responses, regardless of whether you agree with them or not.
Maybe I should get into meta-moderating somewhat more to "punish" inserious moderators that are frustrating the moderation system.
Yes, you could moderate this as off-topic. With that I would not have a problem.
Current prices mean that almost any hobby site in the USA can afford a trusted SSL certificate, but even most business sites in the Philipines hardly can afford one.
I think that the security of the WEB and thus e-commerce in most cases, in any country, is a matter of international importance that would better not be in the hands of a small group of companies. Instead an international (UN?) organization should supply certificates for a very low fee as a service for the common good.
zsh: command- and filename completion are fully programmable. It is 100% equivalent to tcsh for interactive convenience (i.e. better than bash), plus 99.9% /bin/ksh compatible. tcsh is not /bin/ksh compatible at all and thus no good for scripting, and bash is quite compatible but by far not enough to write really portable shell scripts (portable to standard Unix that rely on /bin/sh or /bin/ksh).
They should be deprogrammed and reeducated instead. But indeed, a Filemanager might help them to take the first step towards UNIX. Second step would be re-education and take away the Filemanager :). So UNIX should have a fake filemanager which looks very nice but in fact is crap.
People only think they are too stupid to use powerful command line tools, but in fact with a little help almost everyone can use it and can be more productive with it. Most are too lazy though, and thus because they don't want to spend the initial 30 minutes, they loose 30 minutes each day.
LBX though is somewhat usable at 64, and really usable at 128kbit/s. I don't see how VNC could be a match for LBX. Also VNC somehow looks very ugly (probably a fonts problem).
X in itself is well designed for low bandwidth use, since it doesn't send the screen (or parts thereof) as bitmaps, but only sends graphics primitives (draw line, draw rect etc). LBX adds compression of events, omision of non-essential events and also (if you want) stream compression (I don't use it since I run LBX over a compressed SSH stream).
Yes, but it shows very nicely how absurd the DMCA is. It shows that code, in a way, really is like speech, and making such things illegal really is constraining the right on free speech.
What OS do you use?
I've used Informix on SGI for 1 year, a 5TB transaction database. And currently Oracle 8i on Solaris, a 100GB datawarehouse full of stored procedures, triggers etc running extremely large (generated) SQL queries, some of the queries alone are 100kb text!!!
In the 3 years intensive working with these databases, I've never seen a single crash, and could not imagine one.
Could the coredumps you see have something to do with the operating system you are using? Such as the ever changing glibc on Linux, which will surely make some applications instable?
By the way, it does have a normal PCI slot, and you could put the SunPCI-II card in it, but also some other PCI card (provided there is a Solaris 8 driver for it).
Remember that the advertising budget, obviously, is paid for by the buyer of the product: the margin of the product pays for the advertisement budget. Instead of paying for dishonest information I'd rather pay for objective and true information.
Maybe it is a necessary evil (up to a certain point), but it is better to do without. Instead, there should be objective consumer organisations that test products and publish such test results.
Producers can send press releases to objective organisations that summarize and organize information on new and existing products, and present that in an honest and efficient way to potential consumers.
There are numerous countries where (state) television does not or hardly have advertisements. The programs are paid for by tax. Americans may not like tax, but what is the difference between paying a "tax" on products (you know, the advertisements are paid for by the profits on products) or a tax to the state that can finance honest and objective programs from that.
Then there are organisations (such as the dutch consumer-union) that you can become member of for about $20 a year, you get monthly testreports on all kind of goods (televisions, washpowder, insurances, you name it) that enable you to pick the right product for you.
For more specific products (like, what UNIX server do I need) there are professional magazines that do (hopefully) objective tests and write about the products. You can be sure that that information is more trustworthy than the information coming directly from the producers.
No, I really don't see how advertisements can be a good thing, and people believing ads and buying based on that "information" are fools.
The (many) times I've seen ACL's in action to implement overly complex access control schemes, it bacame chaos, and nobody knew anymore who was allowed to see what, and why the ACL's were the way they were. Maybe massive beaurocratic measurements could prevent chaos in such cases, but one had better rethink the way permissions are granted.
As for modify/append: There are a couple of very specific (system) tasks where append-only might be useful, especially for logfiles that intruders may not tamper with. But for general purpose use, I don't see the need. Append-only can just as well be implemented as a write-only directory (a la /tmp on Unix systems) where a user can "append" a record by creating a new file. Then cat them all in order of mtime, and you have about the same.
Time-dependant access etc is insane to administer, and again IMO the business model should rather be simplified.
Maybe ACL's are nice for control-freak type of system administrators that don't have much work to do, but for normal situations they're no good.
The price is not exorbitant, given the range of applications you can/may use it for. For that money they do extreme quality control. Do you know what the requirements are for software to be used in a nuclear reactor?!?
B.t.w. any price the customer is willing to pay in a fair and open market (i.e. not the monopolized desktop computer market) is a fair price, by definition. Since they're still in business after 15 years, there must be some that apparently find the product worth the price.
Since 10 years they already deliver the GNU toolchain as (cross)development environment for their OS. In fact, they were one of the first to use GNU tools in a commercial setting, and in that time, they have contributed quite a bit to gcc,gdb etc (and because of the GPL, shared those improvements with the rest of the world). As their target platform covers many different CPU's they contributed to many gcc backends as well.
They deserve some credit for that. Curt Schacker is not saying that the GPL is wrong (otherwise, they would not have used GPL-stuff for so long) but is only warning about upcoming developments in the GPL. Those might force them to stop using GCC.
GNU tools have been successful because of a balance: you can use it commercially, but improvements you have to give back (good for both). If the GPL goes out of balance, the result will be no more commercial use of GPL-ed stuff, and thus less improvements coming back from commercial users. That would be a loss for both sides.
Yes, it is legal. You can find them everywhere (in normal retail shops).
The only thing he can do is modify the name of his product, trademark the new name, and launch an advertisement campaign to make it known.
First find a job here, and then your grandchildren may be elegible to become a citizen. In many towns, for each particular individual that wants to become a citizen a referendum is held.
AC: You didn't read quite well.
Indeed, copying for private use remains legal. But alas, national governments do not have to take actions against copy protection mechanisms. The first article says that the parliament declined to force states to take such actions.
OTOH, at least circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms has not become illegal (as is the case in the DMCA), and states even may take actions against it, which is especially logical for states that already impose a tax on copying devices and blank media.
Also, states do not have to impose tax on copying devices and blank media.
Summary: It could have been worse (like the DMCA) and the practical consequences depends for a great deal on what the individual states will do. Probably there will be big differences, causing people to circumvent taxes etc by ordering media or equipment in another state. I think that in a few years time this will cause new discussions. Lets hope that in the meantime, politicians will become more experienced with this subject matter so that they will see how dangerous these developments are for consumer rights.
Everything you need to know, apart from generic UNIX basics, comes with the system.