You're missing my point. Apple did it. Twice. They managed to move their entire user base from 680x0 to PowerPC with a combination of emulation and fat binaries. Then they added AltaVec with the G4 computers, while still maintaining compatability with earlier G3 computers. Finally, they have moved to the 64 bit G5. Wait that's three times. (Four if you include the introduction of CoreImage that depends on advances in Video cards).
My exact point is that Apple has done what Intel wants done, without breaking compatability. Say what you want about Apple, but they will be tremendously useful for Intel.
I think you underestimate the value of Apple for Intel. Intel spent billions of dollars developing the Itanium family of processors, which have been a complete failure in the market. They have also spent more millions developing MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3 and so on, and these have been barely used. Intel keeps developing new chip technologies in order to distance themselves from AMD and VIA, but Microsoft refuses to put them into use in their operating systems. Why not? Microsoft may be a software company, but they hate doing the work of developing software. They remind me of a piano student who says he loves playing piano, but hates practicing. Microsoft never bothered to do a decent job of porting Windows or Office to the Itanium, of to fully integrate MMX/SSE into their operating system because it would have been too much work. Compare that to Apple which went from 680x0 to PowerPC, and from PowerPC32 to PowerPC64 as soon as they had working silicon.
I believe that Intel has made big concessions to Apple because it knows that Apple will use every technology that they can to make MacOSX work well on Intel chips, and that that will shame Microsoft into finally getting off of its %@#^ and get developing. Well, and it makes good revenge for Microsoft's ignoring Itanium but releasing for AMD64.
Raising taxes on gas to $6-$8/gal in the U.S. would crush the economy. We're just not built for it. We're slowly emphasizing mass transit and there's been a small movement towards local community envolvement (i.e. not driving 50 miles to work, but working where you live), and we'll get there... but let's not get drastic.
An interesting point, and I don't think that is how things have happened. I remember hearing a couple of years ago that the economy would collaps if oil was $60 a barrel, and gas was $2.50 a gallon. Well, they went there, and the economy didn't fail. Now I hear economists saying that $3.00 a gallon was the psycological barrier, but no new prediction of when the economy will suffer.
The sad thing is that if we had taxed fuel to current levels 6 years ago, the current money that is going to Exxon/Mobile would be going to scientific research on energy sources and efficiencies, reducing demand, and pushing raw prices down, rather than going to oil companies who have an interest in keeping comsumption up.
The $64 billion question is how much higher fuel prices will have to go before Americans change their habits. Given that the economy hasn't suffered noticibly, I will make two predictions:
1. OPEC and Exxon/Mobile will find out in the next couple of years how much they can raise prices.
2. We will be at $2.50 gas and $60 oil for the forseeable future. OPEC has kept oil below $28 for a lot of years for fear that raising it will hurt demand and the american economy. Now that that has been proven false, what idiot would ever sell oil at $28 again.
As an educator who has actually use the clickers, I can say that a) The current hardware/software solutions are too expensive, cheaply built, or both. b) They require a change in teaching style, but are very worth it for classes larger than 35 or so.
We used units from H-ITT, and they looked like they were soldered in somebody's garage. They were probably soldered in somebody's garage. The have made two new hardware revisions since the first ones that I used, and they are much more reliable now. They cost $35 or so which is a lot of money for students, but they are a lot cheaper than many of the other options. I specifically asked the students at the end of the semester whether they would suggest that I have students buy them the next year (actually it was a quiz during the class, done with the transmitters) and they overwhelmingly said that they would. I personally tried using my palm pilot and several universal remotes to replace one of the H-ITT transmitters, but they didn't have the range. I am also not convinced that your average student could make something as well built for much less money.
As far as teaching style, it does require a change. I had tried using on-line and paper quizzes to make students read their textbook assignments before class, and neither was successful. The on-line quizzes just led to a flurry of students saying that their computers didn't work (which may or may not have been true), and the paper quizzes took too much time to complete and grade. My solution for the interactive quizzes was to sit down in the minutes before lecture and write the questions in marker on overhead transparency file. This meant that I could change questions on the fly, depending on the answers the students gave me. It also meant that during the lecture I could as a question, and ge tthe students to respond. If I wasn't sure if they understood a concept, I could quiz them to see if they could. Asking for a show of hands is almost universally unsuccessful because most students will not answer. They know that their peers are watching, and don't want to be wrong. With the transmitters they have to answer, and that is a good thing.
In the semesters when I used the transmitter, I saw that many more students were prepared for lecture. Having said that, they are useless for classes with less than 35 students, where a good professor should know each student personally.
As a final point, my biggest disappointment was in the software, not the hardware. At the time I taught, there was only a cheap VisualBasic Windows program, and it was very flakey. The companies who produce these systems would do well to provide a public API for their systems. They make all of their money on the transmitters, and the software only hold the system back.
Sadly, there is a strong drive for faculty to buy into this system. While I love the idea of MIT courseware, the publishers have two important card to play. First, they have resources that they can offer. All of the major publishers have libraries of image that you can use for books that you publish with them. All of them also offer electronic homework and quiz/test systems that come with the book. There aren't any good equivelents in the free software world. So if I want electronic content I can spend my own money and write my own, and the cost will be passed on to the student in the cost of the textbook, or I can use the publishers stuff, and pass it along that way. Second, they publishers are the gatekeepers in the academic market. It I want my textbook to have national distribution, I need a big academic publisher, and they are much more interested in my book if I have the electronic resources that they want.
In the end, the publishers have a strong financial incentive, and they are willing to do what it takes to make it work. If there were good free courseware tools, the situation might be different. I really do hope that the MIT opencourseware model works, but there is the problem that writing a textbook takes 2-3 years of hard work, so faculty are going to need compensation. The biggest problem right now is that textbook publishers take a much larger cut then the writers, the printers, the distributors, or anybody else. If there were a model that would pay writers the $5-10 they are currently getting, and cutting out all of the other middle-men, I think that everybody (except the publishers) would be happy.
Re:So much for selling used books
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
As a professor, I am seeing a new, and very insidious development. We just went through a pitch from a major publisher for a book that we produce for a local class. We had been self-publishing, and our cost was $25 per book. They were willing to do the editing and publishing for us, and we were ready to talk about developing written materials for thei book, but all that they wanted to talk about was on-line content. When we pushed, it turns out that their new thing is to twist arms to get required web-delivered content in all of their books. So now when you buy a book, you get a code that is valid for one semester.
If this works, they won't care if you sell it used, because the web code is no longer valid, so the book is useless, unless you buy a new code for $15. They get their cut no matter what. If you fail the course, and have to re-take the class, you owe them another $15. If you give it to your younger brother, $15. They always get their cut.
Their web content often includes web-supported and web-submitted homework and quizzes so if faculty buy in, students will have no choice but to pay. Kind of sad.
Unfortunately, this is impossible. Thermodynamics say that CO2 is lower in energy than graphite and molecular oxygen. Catalisis can only speed up reactions that product products that are lower in energy. So we can make a catalyst that speeds the reaction of C+O2 -> CO2, but not the other way around. In order to get the reverse reaction to go, we need to add the same amount of energy that we got out initially. If we cant to undo the CO2 emitted form a coal power plant, we need to put back into the reaction at least the same energy that we got out initially.
This isn't impossible. What you are really describing is photosyntheses. Of yourse if we could do artificial photosyntheses, we could just keep burning, and then reforming coal or oil again and again. That's what plants do, and it seems to work for them.
I think that the best idea is not to do DDOS, but something even more useful. If everyone chooses a fake set of personal credentials (name, phone number and whatever else) and then responds with the fake information, that will shut down the spammers in a hurry. Instead of sending out 10,000,000 e-mails and getting 10 promising leads, they will get 10 promising leads and 999,990 fake names and addresses.
This would be like saying that when more people start buying BMWs instead of Chevys, then more problems will show up.
Firefox has been designed from the ground up to be better in the way of security. I doesn't have the hooks into the operating system. It doesn't have the ActiveX stuff. It doesn't allow arbitrary installation of code from web pages. No matter how big Firefox's market share gets, it will still be immune from most IE exploits because it is better designed.
I think that Intel's real problem is that it did not count on competing with AMD. When they started the Itanium project, it was slated to come out at faster clock speeds than the Pentium II chips. By the time they released it, AMD had produced 1 GHz chips, and Intel had to follow. In the end the choice between a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 and an 800 MHz Itanium made it look bad.
The bigger problem, though, was the software support. If you want to run Windows, don't bother. If you want to run Unix, you have a lot of choices, of which Intel is only one. If Microsoft had quickly released a highly optimized version of Windows NT/2000, that showcased the Itanium's strengths, the story might have been different. The is especially interesting in light of the big new story of the last few months. I believe that Intel has made major concessions to get Apple to port OSX to Intel to guarantee that there is no repeat of the Itanium episode. Apple engineers are known for using every little feature of a CPU to get maximum performance. Microsoft is known for trying to write as little new code as possible. Imagine that Intel produces the Itanium 3 tomorrow. Microsoft will do as they always have, and do a minimal make to get a working version. Apple will produce a highly optimized version of OSX that will look and run great. Microsoft is now in the position of either having to build a good version to keep up, or admit that they are incompetent programmers.
I believe that this is the biggest reason that Intel has been a big supporter of Linux, and why they have supported Apple in the transition.
I think that this is even too simple a notion. Even programs are not the end of computing (well maybe for geeks, the programs are what it is all about, that would explain the religious fervor about Emacs versus vi) the important thing is data. I don't care what web browser I run, only whether it will let me see my websites correctly. I don't care what word processor I use, only that it lets me write my papers.
In then end the biggest success of the open source movement would be to commoditize the operating system AND application markets. If the OASIS document format becomes a standard, then I can use MSWord, Word Perfect, Openoffice Writer, AbiWord, KWord (or vi or emacs) or whatever program I want.
If java and LAMP succeed, applicatiion platform don't matter, as long as you have a java/browser stack.
Similarly, if open source succeeds, then why not run SkyOS. You have easily port Mozilla, Openoffice, and gcj to them, and then you have all of the same applications as any other OS. The best analogy I can think of is that John Deloreon can make a very small run of funny cars because it is perfectly compatabile with the existing roads, gas stations and garages. So what if I am the only person I know who drives a Deloreon, that does not change its value of utility.
Hooray for specialty OSs and applications, as long as they read and write open standard formats so that my data is preserved.
Yeah, but Dell designs their own motherboards and cases too. I don't see how an apple build by an asian manufacturer to Apple's specs is that different from a Dell machine built to Dell's specs. (Excpept that Dell's specs make for butt ugly machines, and Apple's specs make for cool "Space-age" machines)
You say this like Apple actually still makes all of their own hardware. Unlike the old days, Apple uses mostly standard parts form asian manufacturers. They are already mostly outsourcing their manufacturing. What's to be gained by having Dell outsource their outsourcing.
This point is a biggy in the scientific computing world. It is easier to get capitol equipment money than it is to get salary money. (This is because equipment money is overhead free, while salary money incurrs a 50% overhead rate). We just had a donor give us many millions to guy a cluster, but he would commit to long term money for sys-admin support. We ended up including a lot of vendor support into the bid for the contract in order to turn support money into capitol equipment money. Considering that a sys-admin can easily cost $100K per year, this isn't such a bad deal.
My real concern is that it is now illegal for me to shovel the snow off of my neighbour's sidewalk. Price fixing against professional show removal services. No more helping out at community events. More price fixing. We are going to have to ban mothers nursing their babies. Price fixing against formula companies. Heck, I suppose I now have to hire a full-time baby-sitter to avoid legal liabilities.
Actually, I guess I am one of those two guys. I have a scientific instrument from a German company that has driver software written in OS/2. There is an NT version, but it is pathetic in comparison. So I keep my OS/2 version running, though I do occasionally miss file service and print service, and a bunch of other stuff.
In order to get updates with no services started, you have to do an update with no services on, then do updates, and then go back and start up the services. It is an extra, and completely unnecessary step.
But really, I only used this as an example. Right or wrong (and I do believe that the people who did the study were substantially wrong), I believe that there are lessons we can learn from their results if we quite just writing them off as toadies.
Yes, but you have to install with no services active, and then go back and turn them on. The responsibility is with the user doing the install. The traditional Linux user is fine with that (it's what I have always done, but then again I also hand edit my configuration files, and write my own ACPI scripts) but we are trying to increase our market. Put simply, I am fine edit fstab entries and hand mounting disks, but I also enjoy the new HAL automount stuff, and my students don't want to bother doing hand mounting. To them learning the mount command is an unnecessary burden. And in the end, even I am finding hand mounting/unmounting is an unneccesary burdent.
My point was, and still is, why not make security automatic and unavoidable. I know the weaknesses of the study, but why not learn from it anyway.
I agree with your point, but I think that there is another important point.
Years ago, there was another case where Microsoft commissioned a stude of MS vs Linux on SMB file service. They shows that MSWindows was faster than Linux. When the details came out, they had picked a particular configuration that favored MS over linux. Now the Linux community could have just ignored it, and complained about the biased nature of the study (an many did), but the more useful people saw this as a chance to beat MS on its own terms. They found the problem in Linux, and set about fixing it. A couple of months later they shows better Linux performance on MS's own test.
This is what our community needs to do. There are still problems Linux security. I shouldn't need to boot into a full Linux system, with open ports in order to get OS updates. Linux should automatically install updates as part of the install, before ANY services are started.
There are probably more things that we can do. We should use this report as an opportunity to fix problems that we aren't thinking of. Then we can say that even biased studies are not enough to make MS look good.
I think we need to look at this as an opportunity. If every slashdotter called every week to re-activate a windows install, we could bring them to theit knees. Now that is a slashdotting I would love to see.
It all depends on your goals.
1. All programs should be GPL - This may be be the one case in which porting to Windows is a bad thing. Of course it may be the perfect gateway drug, and so this works well.
2. People should be using open source software - In this case, porting gets more people using open source software, so we have a definite win.
3. We want to use software that doesn't suck - Again increasing competition in the marketplace is good, so porting is good.
4. We want to crush Microsoft - This is the most interesting case. We maybe don't set with crushing MS as a primary goal, but it is pretty desirable. If you look back at how MS and Intel crushed the rest of the marketplace in the computer industry, you can learn a lot. Intel started their Intel InsideTM campaign as a way of saying that your computer builder is unimportant because only the microprocessor matters: Boxes are just commodities. Microsoft built up its OS/tools in order to make application software just commodity: As long as your run windows, nothing else matters. Porting software will have the sample effecdt on Microsoft. If every platform runs OpenOffice, Evolution and Firefox then platform doesn't matter. Windows is just another platform for running your software. In the end they go from being a monopoly player to being on among many, and I think that we would all agree that in a competitive marketplace Microsoft will not be a player.
I think that the goal is 3 with a large hint of 4. Let's marginalize MS into non-existence.
I consider myself a crufty old Linux user ( my credentials are that I installed the first Slackware distribution on a 486/25 with 8MB memory 40 MB hard disk, from a whole lot of floppy disks, and I have run it continuously since) and have built many machines from scratch. For three years I ran a dell laptop with various distros on it, hacked a lot of scripts, compiled a lot of drivers, and it mostly worked. 14 months ago, I got a powerbook, and I would never go back. Power management is way better than any non-Apple machine, wireless just works, and I can even run X11 and bash. I have set up Linux on 5 different laptops, and I have never had one work fully.
Get the PowerBook.
Right. Now if only I could learn to read numbers. Well, I'll still syand by my original post, 400 W is pretty common for a desktop system, so as long as this is faster than 4 P4 systems it still wins. I say this having just specced systems for hundreds of Xeons or Opterons with power usage requirements 100 times this system. The performance is wasted on WinXP, but will be wonderful for computational chemistry or biology.
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You're missing my point. Apple did it. Twice. They managed to move their entire user base from 680x0 to PowerPC with a combination of emulation and fat binaries. Then they added AltaVec with the G4 computers, while still maintaining compatability with earlier G3 computers. Finally, they have moved to the 64 bit G5. Wait that's three times. (Four if you include the introduction of CoreImage that depends on advances in Video cards).
My exact point is that Apple has done what Intel wants done, without breaking compatability. Say what you want about Apple, but they will be tremendously useful for Intel.
I think you underestimate the value of Apple for Intel. Intel spent billions of dollars developing the Itanium family of processors, which have been a complete failure in the market. They have also spent more millions developing MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3 and so on, and these have been barely used. Intel keeps developing new chip technologies in order to distance themselves from AMD and VIA, but Microsoft refuses to put them into use in their operating systems. Why not? Microsoft may be a software company, but they hate doing the work of developing software. They remind me of a piano student who says he loves playing piano, but hates practicing. Microsoft never bothered to do a decent job of porting Windows or Office to the Itanium, of to fully integrate MMX/SSE into their operating system because it would have been too much work. Compare that to Apple which went from 680x0 to PowerPC, and from PowerPC32 to PowerPC64 as soon as they had working silicon.
I believe that Intel has made big concessions to Apple because it knows that Apple will use every technology that they can to make MacOSX work well on Intel chips, and that that will shame Microsoft into finally getting off of its %@#^ and get developing. Well, and it makes good revenge for Microsoft's ignoring Itanium but releasing for AMD64.
An interesting point, and I don't think that is how things have happened. I remember hearing a couple of years ago that the economy would collaps if oil was $60 a barrel, and gas was $2.50 a gallon. Well, they went there, and the economy didn't fail. Now I hear economists saying that $3.00 a gallon was the psycological barrier, but no new prediction of when the economy will suffer.
The sad thing is that if we had taxed fuel to current levels 6 years ago, the current money that is going to Exxon/Mobile would be going to scientific research on energy sources and efficiencies, reducing demand, and pushing raw prices down, rather than going to oil companies who have an interest in keeping comsumption up.
The $64 billion question is how much higher fuel prices will have to go before Americans change their habits. Given that the economy hasn't suffered noticibly, I will make two predictions: 1. OPEC and Exxon/Mobile will find out in the next couple of years how much they can raise prices. 2. We will be at $2.50 gas and $60 oil for the forseeable future. OPEC has kept oil below $28 for a lot of years for fear that raising it will hurt demand and the american economy. Now that that has been proven false, what idiot would ever sell oil at $28 again.
As an educator who has actually use the clickers, I can say that
a) The current hardware/software solutions are too expensive, cheaply built, or both.
b) They require a change in teaching style, but are very worth it for classes larger than 35 or so.
We used units from H-ITT, and they looked like they were soldered in somebody's garage. They were probably soldered in somebody's garage. The have made two new hardware revisions since the first ones that I used, and they are much more reliable now. They cost $35 or so which is a lot of money for students, but they are a lot cheaper than many of the other options. I specifically asked the students at the end of the semester whether they would suggest that I have students buy them the next year (actually it was a quiz during the class, done with the transmitters) and they overwhelmingly said that they would. I personally tried using my palm pilot and several universal remotes to replace one of the H-ITT transmitters, but they didn't have the range. I am also not convinced that your average student could make something as well built for much less money.
As far as teaching style, it does require a change. I had tried using on-line and paper quizzes to make students read their textbook assignments before class, and neither was successful. The on-line quizzes just led to a flurry of students saying that their computers didn't work (which may or may not have been true), and the paper quizzes took too much time to complete and grade. My solution for the interactive quizzes was to sit down in the minutes before lecture and write the questions in marker on overhead transparency file. This meant that I could change questions on the fly, depending on the answers the students gave me. It also meant that during the lecture I could as a question, and ge tthe students to respond. If I wasn't sure if they understood a concept, I could quiz them to see if they could. Asking for a show of hands is almost universally unsuccessful because most students will not answer. They know that their peers are watching, and don't want to be wrong. With the transmitters they have to answer, and that is a good thing.
In the semesters when I used the transmitter, I saw that many more students were prepared for lecture. Having said that, they are useless for classes with less than 35 students, where a good professor should know each student personally.
As a final point, my biggest disappointment was in the software, not the hardware. At the time I taught, there was only a cheap VisualBasic Windows program, and it was very flakey. The companies who produce these systems would do well to provide a public API for their systems. They make all of their money on the transmitters, and the software only hold the system back.
Sadly, there is a strong drive for faculty to buy into this system. While I love the idea of MIT courseware, the publishers have two important card to play. First, they have resources that they can offer. All of the major publishers have libraries of image that you can use for books that you publish with them. All of them also offer electronic homework and quiz/test systems that come with the book. There aren't any good equivelents in the free software world. So if I want electronic content I can spend my own money and write my own, and the cost will be passed on to the student in the cost of the textbook, or I can use the publishers stuff, and pass it along that way. Second, they publishers are the gatekeepers in the academic market. It I want my textbook to have national distribution, I need a big academic publisher, and they are much more interested in my book if I have the electronic resources that they want.
In the end, the publishers have a strong financial incentive, and they are willing to do what it takes to make it work. If there were good free courseware tools, the situation might be different. I really do hope that the MIT opencourseware model works, but there is the problem that writing a textbook takes 2-3 years of hard work, so faculty are going to need compensation. The biggest problem right now is that textbook publishers take a much larger cut then the writers, the printers, the distributors, or anybody else. If there were a model that would pay writers the $5-10 they are currently getting, and cutting out all of the other middle-men, I think that everybody (except the publishers) would be happy.
As a professor, I am seeing a new, and very insidious development. We just went through a pitch from a major publisher for a book that we produce for a local class. We had been self-publishing, and our cost was $25 per book. They were willing to do the editing and publishing for us, and we were ready to talk about developing written materials for thei book, but all that they wanted to talk about was on-line content. When we pushed, it turns out that their new thing is to twist arms to get required web-delivered content in all of their books. So now when you buy a book, you get a code that is valid for one semester.
If this works, they won't care if you sell it used, because the web code is no longer valid, so the book is useless, unless you buy a new code for $15. They get their cut no matter what. If you fail the course, and have to re-take the class, you owe them another $15. If you give it to your younger brother, $15. They always get their cut.
Their web content often includes web-supported and web-submitted homework and quizzes so if faculty buy in, students will have no choice but to pay. Kind of sad.
Unfortunately, this is impossible. Thermodynamics say that CO2 is lower in energy than graphite and molecular oxygen. Catalisis can only speed up reactions that product products that are lower in energy. So we can make a catalyst that speeds the reaction of C+O2 -> CO2, but not the other way around. In order to get the reverse reaction to go, we need to add the same amount of energy that we got out initially. If we cant to undo the CO2 emitted form a coal power plant, we need to put back into the reaction at least the same energy that we got out initially.
This isn't impossible. What you are really describing is photosyntheses. Of yourse if we could do artificial photosyntheses, we could just keep burning, and then reforming coal or oil again and again. That's what plants do, and it seems to work for them.
I think that the best idea is not to do DDOS, but something even more useful. If everyone chooses a fake set of personal credentials (name, phone number and whatever else) and then responds with the fake information, that will shut down the spammers in a hurry. Instead of sending out 10,000,000 e-mails and getting 10 promising leads, they will get 10 promising leads and 999,990 fake names and addresses.
This would be like saying that when more people start buying BMWs instead of Chevys, then more problems will show up.
Firefox has been designed from the ground up to be better in the way of security. I doesn't have the hooks into the operating system. It doesn't have the ActiveX stuff. It doesn't allow arbitrary installation of code from web pages. No matter how big Firefox's market share gets, it will still be immune from most IE exploits because it is better designed.
Hey!! I still run it, and personally know two more people. I don't believe that I know that much of the world.
I think that Intel's real problem is that it did not count on competing with AMD. When they started the Itanium project, it was slated to come out at faster clock speeds than the Pentium II chips. By the time they released it, AMD had produced 1 GHz chips, and Intel had to follow. In the end the choice between a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 and an 800 MHz Itanium made it look bad.
The bigger problem, though, was the software support. If you want to run Windows, don't bother. If you want to run Unix, you have a lot of choices, of which Intel is only one. If Microsoft had quickly released a highly optimized version of Windows NT/2000, that showcased the Itanium's strengths, the story might have been different. The is especially interesting in light of the big new story of the last few months. I believe that Intel has made major concessions to get Apple to port OSX to Intel to guarantee that there is no repeat of the Itanium episode. Apple engineers are known for using every little feature of a CPU to get maximum performance. Microsoft is known for trying to write as little new code as possible. Imagine that Intel produces the Itanium 3 tomorrow. Microsoft will do as they always have, and do a minimal make to get a working version. Apple will produce a highly optimized version of OSX that will look and run great. Microsoft is now in the position of either having to build a good version to keep up, or admit that they are incompetent programmers.
I believe that this is the biggest reason that Intel has been a big supporter of Linux, and why they have supported Apple in the transition.
I think that this is even too simple a notion. Even programs are not the end of computing (well maybe for geeks, the programs are what it is all about, that would explain the religious fervor about Emacs versus vi) the important thing is data. I don't care what web browser I run, only whether it will let me see my websites correctly. I don't care what word processor I use, only that it lets me write my papers. In then end the biggest success of the open source movement would be to commoditize the operating system AND application markets. If the OASIS document format becomes a standard, then I can use MSWord, Word Perfect, Openoffice Writer, AbiWord, KWord (or vi or emacs) or whatever program I want. If java and LAMP succeed, applicatiion platform don't matter, as long as you have a java/browser stack. Similarly, if open source succeeds, then why not run SkyOS. You have easily port Mozilla, Openoffice, and gcj to them, and then you have all of the same applications as any other OS. The best analogy I can think of is that John Deloreon can make a very small run of funny cars because it is perfectly compatabile with the existing roads, gas stations and garages. So what if I am the only person I know who drives a Deloreon, that does not change its value of utility. Hooray for specialty OSs and applications, as long as they read and write open standard formats so that my data is preserved.
Yeah, but Dell designs their own motherboards and cases too. I don't see how an apple build by an asian manufacturer to Apple's specs is that different from a Dell machine built to Dell's specs. (Excpept that Dell's specs make for butt ugly machines, and Apple's specs make for cool "Space-age" machines)
You say this like Apple actually still makes all of their own hardware. Unlike the old days, Apple uses mostly standard parts form asian manufacturers. They are already mostly outsourcing their manufacturing. What's to be gained by having Dell outsource their outsourcing.
This point is a biggy in the scientific computing world. It is easier to get capitol equipment money than it is to get salary money. (This is because equipment money is overhead free, while salary money incurrs a 50% overhead rate). We just had a donor give us many millions to guy a cluster, but he would commit to long term money for sys-admin support. We ended up including a lot of vendor support into the bid for the contract in order to turn support money into capitol equipment money. Considering that a sys-admin can easily cost $100K per year, this isn't such a bad deal.
My real concern is that it is now illegal for me to shovel the snow off of my neighbour's sidewalk. Price fixing against professional show removal services. No more helping out at community events. More price fixing. We are going to have to ban mothers nursing their babies. Price fixing against formula companies. Heck, I suppose I now have to hire a full-time baby-sitter to avoid legal liabilities.
Actually, I guess I am one of those two guys. I have a scientific instrument from a German company that has driver software written in OS/2. There is an NT version, but it is pathetic in comparison. So I keep my OS/2 version running, though I do occasionally miss file service and print service, and a bunch of other stuff.
In order to get updates with no services started, you have to do an update with no services on, then do updates, and then go back and start up the services. It is an extra, and completely unnecessary step. But really, I only used this as an example. Right or wrong (and I do believe that the people who did the study were substantially wrong), I believe that there are lessons we can learn from their results if we quite just writing them off as toadies.
Yes, but you have to install with no services active, and then go back and turn them on. The responsibility is with the user doing the install. The traditional Linux user is fine with that (it's what I have always done, but then again I also hand edit my configuration files, and write my own ACPI scripts) but we are trying to increase our market. Put simply, I am fine edit fstab entries and hand mounting disks, but I also enjoy the new HAL automount stuff, and my students don't want to bother doing hand mounting. To them learning the mount command is an unnecessary burden. And in the end, even I am finding hand mounting/unmounting is an unneccesary burdent. My point was, and still is, why not make security automatic and unavoidable. I know the weaknesses of the study, but why not learn from it anyway.
I agree with your point, but I think that there is another important point. Years ago, there was another case where Microsoft commissioned a stude of MS vs Linux on SMB file service. They shows that MSWindows was faster than Linux. When the details came out, they had picked a particular configuration that favored MS over linux. Now the Linux community could have just ignored it, and complained about the biased nature of the study (an many did), but the more useful people saw this as a chance to beat MS on its own terms. They found the problem in Linux, and set about fixing it. A couple of months later they shows better Linux performance on MS's own test. This is what our community needs to do. There are still problems Linux security. I shouldn't need to boot into a full Linux system, with open ports in order to get OS updates. Linux should automatically install updates as part of the install, before ANY services are started. There are probably more things that we can do. We should use this report as an opportunity to fix problems that we aren't thinking of. Then we can say that even biased studies are not enough to make MS look good.
I mean, that's do question. Do people want fire that can be fit nasally?
I think we need to look at this as an opportunity. If every slashdotter called every week to re-activate a windows install, we could bring them to theit knees. Now that is a slashdotting I would love to see.
It all depends on your goals. 1. All programs should be GPL - This may be be the one case in which porting to Windows is a bad thing. Of course it may be the perfect gateway drug, and so this works well. 2. People should be using open source software - In this case, porting gets more people using open source software, so we have a definite win. 3. We want to use software that doesn't suck - Again increasing competition in the marketplace is good, so porting is good. 4. We want to crush Microsoft - This is the most interesting case. We maybe don't set with crushing MS as a primary goal, but it is pretty desirable. If you look back at how MS and Intel crushed the rest of the marketplace in the computer industry, you can learn a lot. Intel started their Intel InsideTM campaign as a way of saying that your computer builder is unimportant because only the microprocessor matters: Boxes are just commodities. Microsoft built up its OS/tools in order to make application software just commodity: As long as your run windows, nothing else matters. Porting software will have the sample effecdt on Microsoft. If every platform runs OpenOffice, Evolution and Firefox then platform doesn't matter. Windows is just another platform for running your software. In the end they go from being a monopoly player to being on among many, and I think that we would all agree that in a competitive marketplace Microsoft will not be a player. I think that the goal is 3 with a large hint of 4. Let's marginalize MS into non-existence.
I consider myself a crufty old Linux user ( my credentials are that I installed the first Slackware distribution on a 486/25 with 8MB memory 40 MB hard disk, from a whole lot of floppy disks, and I have run it continuously since) and have built many machines from scratch. For three years I ran a dell laptop with various distros on it, hacked a lot of scripts, compiled a lot of drivers, and it mostly worked. 14 months ago, I got a powerbook, and I would never go back. Power management is way better than any non-Apple machine, wireless just works, and I can even run X11 and bash. I have set up Linux on 5 different laptops, and I have never had one work fully. Get the PowerBook.
Right. Now if only I could learn to read numbers. Well, I'll still syand by my original post, 400 W is pretty common for a desktop system, so as long as this is faster than 4 P4 systems it still wins. I say this having just specced systems for hundreds of Xeons or Opterons with power usage requirements 100 times this system. The performance is wasted on WinXP, but will be wonderful for computational chemistry or biology.