IBM. Sure. And TI Microsoft. Cisco. Intel. AMD. and Apple. What's the largest chip manufacterer in Europe?
You are really clueless eh?
None of above companies invented the computer, they all did their bit to improve on the idea.
According to themselves, the largest chip manufacurer in Europe is Syfer. You may want to know that AMD uses a substantial amount of European technology for their chip production also.
Then, let me quote wikipedia for a bit about the jet engine:
The first jet engine and jet-propelled aircraft were developped in 1910 by Henri Coanda in the Coanda-1910 aircraft. Actually, gas turbine was not an idea developed in the 1930s: the patent for a stationary turbine was granted to John Barber in England in 1791. The earliest attempts at jet engines were hybrid designs in which an external power source supplied the compression. In this system (called a thermojet by Secondo Campini) the air is first compressed by a fan driven by a conventional piston engine, then it is mixed with fuel and burned for jet thrust. Three known examples of this type of design were the Henri Coanda's Coanda-1910 aircraft, the much later Campini Caproni CC.2, and the Japanese Tsu-11 engine intended to power Ohka kamikaze planes towards the end of World War II. None were entirely successful and the CC.2 ended up being slower than the same design with a traditional engine and propeller combination. Jet engine airflow simulation Enlarge Jet engine airflow simulation
The key to the useful jet engine was the gas turbine, used to extract energy to drive the compressor from the engine itself. The first gas turbine to successfully run self-sustaining was built in 1903 by Norwegian engineer Aegidius Elling. The first patents for jet propulsion were issued in 1917. Limitations in design and practical engineering and metallurgy prevented such engines reaching manufacture. The main problems were safety, reliability, weight and, especially, sustained operation.
On January 16, 1930, in England Frank Whittle submitted patents for his own design for a full-scale aircraft engine (granted in 1932). In 1935 Hans von Ohain started work on a similar design in Germany, seemingly unaware of Whittle's work.
Now tell me again how that is an American invention, the basic idea was patented when the USA had been around for a mere 15 years, and the first practically usable versions did not come from the USA either.
I am not even going to bother disputing the rest of your ramblings. Please go get a clue before you post again.
Unlike Europe, which rejects the 300 million person, 10 year experiment with GM foods.
10 years of experiment with GM food is not going to tell you shit about the long term effects.
For decades people thought burning coal, and later oil was not harmfull in any way, and indeed it took a bit longer then a few decades for the bad effects to show.
I think Europe learned a lesson with regards to meddling with the planet that we live one.
When Europe starts to produce inventions of consequence (the last one was, I believe, the radio, while the US came out with nuclear power, computers, the internet, magnetic storage, long-distance air travel) I'll start to worry.
Your memory seems to be somewhat lacking.. lets expand a little bit on this:
Jet engine was invented in the UK, made usable in the UK and Germany. Only 2 decades after its invention it was starting to be used in the USA.
Modern rockets as we know them were made practical in Germany about a decade before the USA built their own ones, and that only due to importing German scientists.
With regards to computers, tell me again where mr. Turing lived and worked..
Color film? was invented in germany. Magnetic tape? idem.
For those who speak German and happen to be in that country regularely it actually does make a lot of sense. What most younger people there speak is a mix of German and (often wrongly used) American English words.
I thought it was saying the USA helped France to get out of there... In a way you can argue it did, but really, that was not the purpose, and in fact the US aid only prolongued the French involvement.
I also know that Thai is a phoenetic language and not symbolic in the same respect as Chinese or Japanese.
To me it seems the difference is actually not so much in writing as in how the language is constructed and used.
Thai is indeed written phonetically (I love their writing btw), but as a language it is entirely unlike western languages still. From what I understand, they speak by combining very short 'wordlets' (more like sylabses) to create something that has the desired meaning instead of having seperate words for most things. In that a litteral translation of some bit of spoken or written Thai looks more like a formula then a sentence. Usually they have a lot of trouble learning western languages as a result (and Thai is not an easy language to learn for westeners)
But well, I have to go here by what my friends from Thailand tell me, I do speak a few words Thai, but not enough to have any level of conversation, more like just enough to be able to order something in a shop or restaurant.
We do manufacture things, we do have some agriculture, and we do some research, but those are really small in comparison.
Well.. the Netherlands is the 3rd or 4th biggest exporter of agricultural products in the world, despite their rather small landmass.. I would not call that 'some agriculture'. Also, that nice institute in Wageningen is not entirely unknown for its research either.
When people anywhere in the world get to deal with water management, the Dutch often get involved for some reason.
In Eastern Germany, near the city of Dresden AMD built this nice factory, guess where the machinery used for making chips there comes from.
Now, there is this nice array of antennae near a place called Westerbork, its a radio telescope, used to be the biggest one in the world. Somehow when people want to build something like that, they turn to the people operating and mantaining that one for experience etc.
You are right that our main activities concern trade and service, but you are wrong with regards to the role manufacure and science play in the Netherlands.
As I read the constitution the government is 1. only supposed to do things that the constitution explicitly states it is supposed to do and 2. is supposed to encourage useful invention with the patent system.
I think you are mistaken on 2 accounts here.
First of all, the government is supposed to serve the common good. Its power is limited by the constitution, but not the exact things it does. I doubt that the people who wrote the constitution believed they could predict the future to such an extent that they could describe everything the government has to do ever. Also, the constitution allows congress to grant patents in order to promote usefull inventions, but does not say that it is the only thing they can do, nor that it has to do it. Rather, it gives a guideline to how such a promotion of usefull inventions should work if implemented.
Second, science is about doing discoveries, not inventions. The patent system has nothing to do with science, it has to do with inventing. Science is often needed for inventing, but it is not the same thing.
but I'm pretty sure nothing in the Bible/Quran/Ramayana says you'll go to hell just for visiting the United States.
Nah, you just go into infinite detention for being a potential terrorist if you disclose unwelcome information:P
As long as the USA has a government that refuses to understand that the USA constitution applies to EVERY human within the borders of the USA, regardless of their nationality, and tries to get certain forms of torture accepted (not to mention the fact that torture is used by others with their explicit support), you can count on many people simply refusing to visit the USA.
On top of that, the USA thinks it can selectively apply its laws to foreign nationals doing something in their own country (ie, reverse engineering of some copy protection mechanism) and put them in jail as soon as such a person enters the USA.
One of my friends in the USA is going to get married in september this year. I would like to go there, but am not going to take the risk of visiting a country that so blatantly refuses the normal kind of protection that a visitor would expect, not to mention the thing of respecting that other countries are different and may just have different laws.
I think that those who had to deal with the IRA and protestant para-military groups before things calmed down in Northern Ireland would disagree with you. (just one example from recent history, there are many more to be found)
The Renaissance happened because of Greek refugees arriving in Italy after the Muslims destroyed Byzantium - that's why the renaissance began in Italy.
First of all, the people from Byzantium used the Greek language but were not Greek.
Second, way before Byzantium was finally conquered by the Muslims which founded the Ottoman empire, it was overrun by crusadors and they effectively destroyed the city and its institutions. The Ottomans just finished the job there.
Third, the contacts between Byzantines and Italians that resulted in the Renaissance were the result of the attempts in the later 1400s to rejoin the eastern and western branches of the church. Refugees fleeing to Italy contributed as well, but definitely did not kick it off.
Last but not least, after Byzantium was conquered by the Ottomans, they did take the big Sofia church and changed it into a mosk (one of the most amazing buildings of all time btw, study its architecture if you are interested), but they also did allow the eastern catholic church to remain in Byzantium and were a lot less destructive to the city, its culture and population then the crusadors before them.
What's really galling about this was that the US helped France to get out of Viet Nam in the previous twenty years.
Not exactly.
I am assuming you are from the USA where discussing the real causes and effects of the Vietnam war is still very controversial (for understandable reasons)
If the USA would not have offered support to the French they would have been kicked out of Vietnam a bit earlier. If it had not been for the USA sabotaging it (supposedly to fight communism) then the result of the elections in North and South Vietnam would have been accepted and the entire Vietcong would not have existed. If it wasn't for the utter neglecting of human rights and of the principes of self determination, the entire Vietnam war would not have happened.
In the years 1949 till 1953, the Dutch had trouble in their then colony of Indonesia. After the Dutch had sent in their army, and were losing the battle against the Indonesian freedom fighters, the USA together with some other countries put a lot of pressure on the Netherlands to grant independence to Indonesia. Had they done the same with regards to France and Vietnam then the entire thing would simply not have happened and France would have been out of there a lot earlier.
So if anything, the USA helped prolong a decolonisation war with 2 decades and added hunderds of thousands if not milions of casulties.
Hmm, right... raping and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents -- not evil.
I suggest you go take a look at what happened in many southern American countries, or in pre-republic Iran for example. Please take a peek also at where the governments which were in power at the time got their money and knowledge from. By your own standards the USA has been and still is very evil.
You've sold out your morals (or your common sense) for a retarded idea (anti-Americanism? socialism?...?). Let me know when you grow up.
I can't speak for the poster of GP, but I can say that for all I can see, he replaced the utter ignorance about anything outside the USA with a dislike of hypocracy. I congratulate him on that. Now for as far as you are concerned, come back when you can actually think for yourself and have informed yourself instead of mindlessly repeating what government propaganda is trying to tell you.
Just one more thing, if you do not want to look utterly stupid then it is really a good idea to consider that differing opinions and critisism are very American, stamping out anything that is not like you is very un-American. Next time you accuse people of being anti-American that might be something to consider. Maybe you heard about this concept called Freedom? Herr Bush loves to throw the word around, and so do his henchmen, now maybe go look up what it actually means, it may not be what you think it is.
Unless of course, what you want and what the developers want are the same.
Definitely, but who is to say that what they want tomorrow and what you need tomorrow is going to be the same? If the developers care about their own needs only then you may just be out of luck there.
I want a free, secure general purpose unix OS. So do the openbsd developers.
Free? (both in cost and in freedom), they do very well in that.
Secure? They definitely do well in that as well.
General purpose? hrm, if you can live with limited functionality as a desktop then that is fine.
Many people need a bit more from their desktop system then the ability to run mutt and links, and for some of the things I happen to do with my PC, accelerated 3D graphics is an absolute must (and no, I am not talking about gaming, consider things like 3D modelling), and a well supported and uptodate windowing system is really the bare minimum most people require for a desktop (not saying that OpenBSD does not support X, but actually getting a well performing X with something like hardware accelerated 3D is something I have yet to see work on OpenBSD)
So I guess it makes it a pretty good choice for me, in fact its the only OS that fits my needs.
I am afraid you gave away yourself with that last sentence, you are following a religion instead of making a choice.
Last time I checked, NetBSD provides almost everything OpenBSD does and then some. It has a slightly different balance between security and functionality, and one may be better suited then the other, but for a general purpose setup the differences are rather small (not talking about a specialized extremely security sensitive server or such here, we were talking GENERAL PURPOSE)
It is quite possible OpenBSD fits your needs better, that is fine. If you out of hand dismiss any alternatives however then you simply failed to use reason for making your choice.
Just in case, I do use OpenBSD for specific purposes, it is at times the best choice. I also use FreeBSD and NetBSD when those are better suited, and oh horror, I even use Windows when it happens to be the best suited platform.
A laptop doesn't fit in my pocket, is too heavy to always have with me, and while it can do similar stuff with help of some personal information manager software, is in my experience by far not as good at it.
I am quite often in places where usage of a mobile phone is prohibited completely (for a whole lot of reasons, including security) and have yet to find a phone with good enough PDA functionality but without a camera (again, I have to be at places where carrying any form of camera whatsoever is prohibited).
I also rather like the fact that my PDA does not depend on the battery life of my phone (and the other way around).
No idea if you have any requirements with regards to geographical location of your hosting provider, but if not or if hosting in the Netherlands is an option for you...
They support Linux, and as long as you know what you are doing, will also support other OSS based installations (using FreeBSD myself). Currently running on a dedicated server with a celeron 1800 with 1GB memory, 80GB SATA raid 1, 100mbit network connection and 50GB/month for the equivalent of approx $60/month and the nice side effect that part of what you pay is used for promotion and support of Open Source Software.
Yeah, win2k3 server is such a superb product, specifically the enhancements to the TCP/IP stack are really great.
Never mind that they broke about every non MS based tcp application or at the very least degraded the performance to about 1/100th of what it could be. Luckily you can still fix it at least partially by making a bunch of changes to the registry.
Want examples? try using an scp implementation to connect from a win2k3 machine to any non MS platform out there and see what throughput you get. Try running something like Versant on it and see how nicely win2k3 manages to messup its connectivity (works perfectly fine on win2k and XP and a whole variety of Linux variations)
Next step will be to make the same changes on the client and we'll have the cool situation of MS servers performing like 100 times faster then their competition unless people go dig into the registry and change some rather obscure things.
Let's face it, neiter software licensing concept is perfect, but one provides Gates with a LOT of cash, and the AIDS community with $700 million and India with $300 million in development aid. When was the last time the Linux community got together and made a charitable donation? I can't bash Gates, he's vowed to spend his ENTIRE fortune on charity before he and his wife die; can't get more good natured than that.
If Windows and protectionist practises is what it takes to raise $40 billion for good and useful causes then I say: "SO BE IT. Let's all buy Windows."
Ah, all clear now, you are an utterly clueless person who got convinced by some nice bit of marketing. $40 billion is a mere fraction of what the US government spends every year on suppressing people, if you think more money for fighting AIDS would be a good idea, maybe go talk to them and ask them to make some 0.01% of their war budget available for the next decade, and you get a lot more then Bill is ever going to give. It is nice that Bill does at least something good for the world also, but his contribution is irrelevant in the whole scale of things.
Why shouldn't that be legal? If thats the case then both school and MS won't benefit from each other.
It depends.
When this does not concern computers used directly for educational purposes then I am fine with such exclusive contracts.
If it does include those computers used directly for eductaional purposes then the answer is simple, we do not want a single company to dictate what the next generation will learn about the technology that company is active in. First of all because kids should be learnng how the technology works, not how one specific implementation works, and second because it creates a market where competition is simply not viable at all, resulting in much higher cost and lower quality for everyone.
Windows is a monopoly? Funny then, this Linux thing I'm using now must just be an illusion.
Having an economic monopoly does not mean having 100% of the market, it does mean having such a large majority share of the market that you can basicly dictate your conditions to the market.
Regardless of it being 75,80 or 90% marketshare, MS has an economic monopoly in several software related markets, regardless of the existance of Linux or other systems.
I suggest you go learn a bit about what an economic monopoly is, and while at it, take a peek at what the various laws have to say and maybe remind yourself of the fact that MS has been convicted of using its monopoly in illegal ways. MS being a monopoly with illegal business practises is not just the opinion of quite a few slashdot readers, it is something which is defined by law and confirmed by courts.
Oh and I suggest rereading a few of the slashdot stories about this thing of Apple tryng to stop people from running OS X on generic x86 hardware, this time actually try to read things, you may notice a lot of people complaining about it.
For bonus points, PLEASE backport to 5.x and 4.x since many of us (particularly DJB and myself) refuse to move off 4.x unless it is absolutely needed.
If you want modern hardware support, staying on 4.x is simply no option whatsoever. Backporting the ra driver to 5.x is a fair request ofcourse, and imho should really happen once 6.0 gets out of beta.
One of the problems might be that the whole wlan support has changed in 6.0 when compared with 5.x, and this means that a bit more then just the ra driver needs to be ported. Not to mention that on 5.x you will only get WEP, no WPA support, so I don't really see 5.x as a good platform for any wireless networking whatsoever.
Not true about SMP, it was done because a German company wanted it in OpenBSD. They hired a developer to add it to i386 and because it wasn't just some random guy saying, "why isn't there SMP?" But instead someone actually there with code, it was accepted into the system.
Ok, thanks for the correction there.
It does not change at all my point however that when I am looking for a system to use for a specific situation (as opposed to a system to tinker with and maybe develop for) I will use one that actually shows it cares about how it is used instead of only caring about what its own developers need, simply because it has a much much better chance of actually doing what I need from it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are really clueless eh?
None of above companies invented the computer, they all did their bit to improve on the idea.
According to themselves, the largest chip manufacurer in Europe is Syfer. You may want to know that AMD uses a substantial amount of European technology for their chip production also.
Then, let me quote wikipedia for a bit about the jet engine:
Now tell me again how that is an American invention, the basic idea was patented when the USA had been around for a mere 15 years, and the first practically usable versions did not come from the USA either.
I am not even going to bother disputing the rest of your ramblings. Please go get a clue before you post again.
Unlike Europe, which rejects the 300 million person, 10 year experiment with GM foods.
10 years of experiment with GM food is not going to tell you shit about the long term effects.
For decades people thought burning coal, and later oil was not harmfull in any way, and indeed it took a bit longer then a few decades for the bad effects to show.
I think Europe learned a lesson with regards to meddling with the planet that we live one.
When Europe starts to produce inventions of consequence (the last one was, I believe, the radio, while the US came out with nuclear power, computers, the internet, magnetic storage, long-distance air travel) I'll start to worry.
Your memory seems to be somewhat lacking.. lets expand a little bit on this:
Jet engine was invented in the UK, made usable in the UK and Germany. Only 2 decades after its invention it was starting to be used in the USA.
Modern rockets as we know them were made practical in Germany about a decade before the USA built their own ones, and that only due to importing German scientists.
With regards to computers, tell me again where mr. Turing lived and worked..
Color film? was invented in germany. Magnetic tape? idem.
The internet? ah, there you got one indeed.
For those who speak German and happen to be in that country regularely it actually does make a lot of sense. What most younger people there speak is a mix of German and (often wrongly used) American English words.
I thought it was saying the USA helped France to get out of there... In a way you can argue it did, but really, that was not the purpose, and in fact the US aid only prolongued the French involvement.
I also know that Thai is a phoenetic language and not symbolic in the same respect as Chinese or Japanese.
To me it seems the difference is actually not so much in writing as in how the language is constructed and used.
Thai is indeed written phonetically (I love their writing btw), but as a language it is entirely unlike western languages still. From what I understand, they speak by combining very short 'wordlets' (more like sylabses) to create something that has the desired meaning instead of having seperate words for most things. In that a litteral translation of some bit of spoken or written Thai looks more like a formula then a sentence. Usually they have a lot of trouble learning western languages as a result (and Thai is not an easy language to learn for westeners)
But well, I have to go here by what my friends from Thailand tell me, I do speak a few words Thai, but not enough to have any level of conversation, more like just enough to be able to order something in a shop or restaurant.
We do manufacture things, we do have some agriculture, and we do some research, but those are really small in comparison.
Well.. the Netherlands is the 3rd or 4th biggest exporter of agricultural products in the world, despite their rather small landmass.. I would not call that 'some agriculture'. Also, that nice institute in Wageningen is not entirely unknown for its research either.
When people anywhere in the world get to deal with water management, the Dutch often get involved for some reason.
In Eastern Germany, near the city of Dresden AMD built this nice factory, guess where the machinery used for making chips there comes from.
Now, there is this nice array of antennae near a place called Westerbork, its a radio telescope, used to be the biggest one in the world. Somehow when people want to build something like that, they turn to the people operating and mantaining that one for experience etc.
You are right that our main activities concern trade and service, but you are wrong with regards to the role manufacure and science play in the Netherlands.
--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong
My pleasure.
As I read the constitution the government is 1. only supposed to do things that the constitution explicitly states it is supposed to do and 2. is supposed to encourage useful invention with the patent system.
I think you are mistaken on 2 accounts here.
First of all, the government is supposed to serve the common good. Its power is limited by the constitution, but not the exact things it does. I doubt that the people who wrote the constitution believed they could predict the future to such an extent that they could describe everything the government has to do ever. Also, the constitution allows congress to grant patents in order to promote usefull inventions, but does not say that it is the only thing they can do, nor that it has to do it. Rather, it gives a guideline to how such a promotion of usefull inventions should work if implemented.
Second, science is about doing discoveries, not inventions. The patent system has nothing to do with science, it has to do with inventing. Science is often needed for inventing, but it is not the same thing.
but I'm pretty sure nothing in the Bible/Quran/Ramayana says you'll go to hell just for visiting the United States.
:P
Nah, you just go into infinite detention for being a potential terrorist if you disclose unwelcome information
As long as the USA has a government that refuses to understand that the USA constitution applies to EVERY human within the borders of the USA, regardless of their nationality, and tries to get certain forms of torture accepted (not to mention the fact that torture is used by others with their explicit support), you can count on many people simply refusing to visit the USA.
On top of that, the USA thinks it can selectively apply its laws to foreign nationals doing something in their own country (ie, reverse engineering of some copy protection mechanism) and put them in jail as soon as such a person enters the USA.
One of my friends in the USA is going to get married in september this year. I would like to go there, but am not going to take the risk of visiting a country that so blatantly refuses the normal kind of protection that a visitor would expect, not to mention the thing of respecting that other countries are different and may just have different laws.
While Americans have always been more self-absorbed. It's part of our culture... We don't need no durn furriners, this is Amurica!
Which is rather hilarious considering that the large majority of Americans are in fact from foreign origin.
You never hear about Christian terrorists
I think that those who had to deal with the IRA and protestant para-military groups before things calmed down in Northern Ireland would disagree with you. (just one example from recent history, there are many more to be found)
The Renaissance happened because of Greek refugees arriving in Italy after the Muslims destroyed Byzantium - that's why the renaissance began in Italy.
First of all, the people from Byzantium used the Greek language but were not Greek.
Second, way before Byzantium was finally conquered by the Muslims which founded the Ottoman empire, it was overrun by crusadors and they effectively destroyed the city and its institutions. The Ottomans just finished the job there.
Third, the contacts between Byzantines and Italians that resulted in the Renaissance were the result of the attempts in the later 1400s to rejoin the eastern and western branches of the church. Refugees fleeing to Italy contributed as well, but definitely did not kick it off.
Last but not least, after Byzantium was conquered by the Ottomans, they did take the big Sofia church and changed it into a mosk (one of the most amazing buildings of all time btw, study its architecture if you are interested), but they also did allow the eastern catholic church to remain in Byzantium and were a lot less destructive to the city, its culture and population then the crusadors before them.
What's really galling about this was that the US helped France to get out of Viet Nam in the previous twenty years.
Not exactly.
I am assuming you are from the USA where discussing the real causes and effects of the Vietnam war is still very controversial (for understandable reasons)
If the USA would not have offered support to the French they would have been kicked out of Vietnam a bit earlier. If it had not been for the USA sabotaging it (supposedly to fight communism) then the result of the elections in North and South Vietnam would have been accepted and the entire Vietcong would not have existed. If it wasn't for the utter neglecting of human rights and of the principes of self determination, the entire Vietnam war would not have happened.
In the years 1949 till 1953, the Dutch had trouble in their then colony of Indonesia. After the Dutch had sent in their army, and were losing the battle against the Indonesian freedom fighters, the USA together with some other countries put a lot of pressure on the Netherlands to grant independence to Indonesia. Had they done the same with regards to France and Vietnam then the entire thing would simply not have happened and France would have been out of there a lot earlier.
So if anything, the USA helped prolong a decolonisation war with 2 decades and added hunderds of thousands if not milions of casulties.
Hmm, right... raping and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents -- not evil.
...?). Let me know when you grow up.
I suggest you go take a look at what happened in many southern American countries, or in pre-republic Iran for example. Please take a peek also at where the governments which were in power at the time got their money and knowledge from. By your own standards the USA has been and still is very evil.
You've sold out your morals (or your common sense) for a retarded idea (anti-Americanism? socialism?
I can't speak for the poster of GP, but I can say that for all I can see, he replaced the utter ignorance about anything outside the USA with a dislike of hypocracy. I congratulate him on that. Now for as far as you are concerned, come back when you can actually think for yourself and have informed yourself instead of mindlessly repeating what government propaganda is trying to tell you.
Just one more thing, if you do not want to look utterly stupid then it is really a good idea to consider that differing opinions and critisism are very American, stamping out anything that is not like you is very un-American. Next time you accuse people of being anti-American that might be something to consider. Maybe you heard about this concept called Freedom? Herr Bush loves to throw the word around, and so do his henchmen, now maybe go look up what it actually means, it may not be what you think it is.
Unless of course, what you want and what the developers want are the same.
Definitely, but who is to say that what they want tomorrow and what you need tomorrow is going to be the same? If the developers care about their own needs only then you may just be out of luck there.
I want a free, secure general purpose unix OS. So do the openbsd developers.
Free? (both in cost and in freedom), they do very well in that.
Secure? They definitely do well in that as well.
General purpose? hrm, if you can live with limited functionality as a desktop then that is fine.
Many people need a bit more from their desktop system then the ability to run mutt and links, and for some of the things I happen to do with my PC, accelerated 3D graphics is an absolute must (and no, I am not talking about gaming, consider things like 3D modelling), and a well supported and uptodate windowing system is really the bare minimum most people require for a desktop (not saying that OpenBSD does not support X, but actually getting a well performing X with something like hardware accelerated 3D is something I have yet to see work on OpenBSD)
So I guess it makes it a pretty good choice for me, in fact its the only OS that fits my needs.
I am afraid you gave away yourself with that last sentence, you are following a religion instead of making a choice.
Last time I checked, NetBSD provides almost everything OpenBSD does and then some. It has a slightly different balance between security and functionality, and one may be better suited then the other, but for a general purpose setup the differences are rather small (not talking about a specialized extremely security sensitive server or such here, we were talking GENERAL PURPOSE)
It is quite possible OpenBSD fits your needs better, that is fine. If you out of hand dismiss any alternatives however then you simply failed to use reason for making your choice.
Just in case, I do use OpenBSD for specific purposes, it is at times the best choice. I also use FreeBSD and NetBSD when those are better suited, and oh horror, I even use Windows when it happens to be the best suited platform.
A laptop doesn't fit in my pocket, is too heavy to always have with me, and while it can do similar stuff with help of some personal information manager software, is in my experience by far not as good at it.
I am quite often in places where usage of a mobile phone is prohibited completely (for a whole lot of reasons, including security) and have yet to find a phone with good enough PDA functionality but without a camera (again, I have to be at places where carrying any form of camera whatsoever is prohibited).
I also rather like the fact that my PDA does not depend on the battery life of my phone (and the other way around).
No idea if you have any requirements with regards to geographical location of your hosting provider, but if not or if hosting in the Netherlands is an option for you...
I use for all my hosting needs. They are extremely well connected (being at the same location and on the same network as www.debian.org for example).
They support Linux, and as long as you know what you are doing, will also support other OSS based installations (using FreeBSD myself). Currently running on a dedicated server with a celeron 1800 with 1GB memory, 80GB SATA raid 1, 100mbit network connection and 50GB/month for the equivalent of approx $60/month and the nice side effect that part of what you pay is used for promotion and support of Open Source Software.
Mine's in /usr/src/sys/modules/if_ndis, and I'm glad it's there otherwise this laptop wouldn't have a network connection.
Not untill you have run ndisgen (or ndiscvt) to add it there yourself.
Yeah, win2k3 server is such a superb product, specifically the enhancements to the TCP/IP stack are really great.
Never mind that they broke about every non MS based tcp application or at the very least degraded the performance to about 1/100th of what it could be. Luckily you can still fix it at least partially by making a bunch of changes to the registry.
Want examples? try using an scp implementation to connect from a win2k3 machine to any non MS platform out there and see what throughput you get. Try running something like Versant on it and see how nicely win2k3 manages to messup its connectivity (works perfectly fine on win2k and XP and a whole variety of Linux variations)
Next step will be to make the same changes on the client and we'll have the cool situation of MS servers performing like 100 times faster then their competition unless people go dig into the registry and change some rather obscure things.
Let's face it, neiter software licensing concept is perfect, but one provides Gates with a LOT of cash, and the AIDS community with $700 million and India with $300 million in development aid. When was the last time the Linux community got together and made a charitable donation? I can't bash Gates, he's vowed to spend his ENTIRE fortune on charity before he and his wife die; can't get more good natured than that.
If Windows and protectionist practises is what it takes to raise $40 billion for good and useful causes then I say: "SO BE IT. Let's all buy Windows."
Ah, all clear now, you are an utterly clueless person who got convinced by some nice bit of marketing. $40 billion is a mere fraction of what the US government spends every year on suppressing people, if you think more money for fighting AIDS would be a good idea, maybe go talk to them and ask them to make some 0.01% of their war budget available for the next decade, and you get a lot more then Bill is ever going to give. It is nice that Bill does at least something good for the world also, but his contribution is irrelevant in the whole scale of things.
Hmmm.. and that was such a good idea that we should repeat it over and over...
Why shouldn't that be legal? If thats the case then both school and MS won't benefit from each other.
It depends.
When this does not concern computers used directly for educational purposes then I am fine with such exclusive contracts.
If it does include those computers used directly for eductaional purposes then the answer is simple, we do not want a single company to dictate what the next generation will learn about the technology that company is active in. First of all because kids should be learnng how the technology works, not how one specific implementation works, and second because it creates a market where competition is simply not viable at all, resulting in much higher cost and lower quality for everyone.
Windows is a monopoly? Funny then, this Linux thing I'm using now must just be an illusion.
Having an economic monopoly does not mean having 100% of the market, it does mean having such a large majority share of the market that you can basicly dictate your conditions to the market.
Regardless of it being 75,80 or 90% marketshare, MS has an economic monopoly in several software related markets, regardless of the existance of Linux or other systems.
I suggest you go learn a bit about what an economic monopoly is, and while at it, take a peek at what the various laws have to say and maybe remind yourself of the fact that MS has been convicted of using its monopoly in illegal ways. MS being a monopoly with illegal business practises is not just the opinion of quite a few slashdot readers, it is something which is defined by law and confirmed by courts.
Oh and I suggest rereading a few of the slashdot stories about this thing of Apple tryng to stop people from running OS X on generic x86 hardware, this time actually try to read things, you may notice a lot of people complaining about it.
Hmm, no more indeed. I thought he was at the time of adding jail support, but I could be mistaken of course :)
For bonus points, PLEASE backport to 5.x and 4.x since many of us (particularly DJB and myself) refuse to move off 4.x unless it is absolutely needed.
If you want modern hardware support, staying on 4.x is simply no option whatsoever. Backporting the ra driver to 5.x is a fair request ofcourse, and imho should really happen once 6.0 gets out of beta.
One of the problems might be that the whole wlan support has changed in 6.0 when compared with 5.x, and this means that a bit more then just the ra driver needs to be ported. Not to mention that on 5.x you will only get WEP, no WPA support, so I don't really see 5.x as a good platform for any wireless networking whatsoever.
Maybe one of those days you should take a peek at something called picobsd, it is included with the FreeBSD source tree.
Not true about SMP, it was done because a German company wanted it in OpenBSD. They hired a developer to add it to i386 and because it wasn't just some random guy saying, "why isn't there SMP?" But instead someone actually there with code, it was accepted into the system.
Ok, thanks for the correction there.
It does not change at all my point however that when I am looking for a system to use for a specific situation (as opposed to a system to tinker with and maybe develop for) I will use one that actually shows it cares about how it is used instead of only caring about what its own developers need, simply because it has a much much better chance of actually doing what I need from it.