IBM's not out of the hardware business, just out of the PC business (and I would argue that Lenovo is doing a decent job of keeping up the Thinkpad name).
IBM still creates and sells PowerPC based servers that are top-of-the-line and built with chips designed in house.
You're right about the competing product lines and there are a lot of questions raised by it. However, I don't think it's Solaris/AIX, it's Solaris/Linux... AIX is still alive and kicking, but inside IBM there is a lot of movement and development on Linux. AIX is receiving incremental updates for newer POWER machines, but nothing new. For example, there isn't an AIX port for the Cell architecture, but running Linux on Cell was a given from day one.
That said, I don't think there's a question of which OS would win in an IBM buyout of Sun... Linux trounces Solaris because IBM has put millions of dollars into Linux for truly first class support of POWER, getting the kernel to support all of the nice features like hotplug memory add / remove and other really neat hardware support. Solaris would have to be ported to POWER from scratch and, in turn, have millions spent on it just to get it up to par with Linux which doesn't make any sense. And even with cool features that Linux doesn't do (ahem, DTrace), it would take far less effort to just update and improve existing Linux based tools (SystemTap) or develop a new tool from scratch, rather than dumping money into the OS just to get them.
Hasn't anyone ever heard of Lambda Calculus. It was derived in the 30s to use formal math for function definition, application and recursion. Yeah... Computer Science can be boiled straight into this.
No, it really isn't. DTrace functions on static trace points. The only thing that differentiates DTrace is that Sun put thousands of trace points throughout the kernel and userspace. All of the legwork to get DTrace to be worth a damn in OSX will be done by the core developers at Apple.
All right, smarty pants, you just waltz into Onyxia's place and show some self-reliance. It's not realizstic to have such epic quests be achievable by 1, 5 or even 20 players.
Another thing: time > skill? Well. In the real world time spent learning = skill. Those WoW addicts that play hours at a time daily are much more likely to have skill than others. Just like those that play Counterstrike are much more likely to have the "Mad Skillz."
Also, the honor system is not as flawed as he makes it seem, you only have to worry about your rank if you're WAYYYY up there, which is totally up to you. And you get points for losing so people still play, for chrissake if you lost every time, spent 4 hours in battle and got *nothing* but broken equipment. That's a flawed system.
A raid zone is a place that you can only really go with a massive number of people in a group (a raid) as opposed to 4 others (a party). If you don't play, why do you care where the Eastern Plaguelands are?
The Undercity (UC) is the main city for the Undead, like Ogrimmar for Orcs and Trolls, Thunder Bluff for Tauren, Ironforge for Dwarves, Stormwind for Humans and... something for Night Elves (can't remember).
For this I have one reason: clients download the mail to your filesystem. Why is this such a big deal? Well, with the new unified desktop where *everything* is a click away, personal information searching is vital. Like the Beagle Desktop information indexer for Linux. Incredible piece of technology and really the only reason that I still use a client for my gMail account.
While it's true that I can search gMail, Beagle indexes and collates *everything* so when I search it hits my email, my im logs, my music collections, text files in directories I choose, code... etc. So I'd rather get all of the information there than search gMail, and use ten other apps to look through my stuff.
As a student, all I have to do is search my email for "Exam" and up pops the emails I've gotten from my professors about when their exams are. Or "ACM" to find out when I have the next ACM meeting. Particularly useful for mailing lists, search your email for your problem and you'll find an answer if it's in the mailing list.
So eliminating the OS will do what to the OS vendors? I find it hard to believe that outside the Feel-Good Open Source movement (I say that as an OSS junkie, referencing cooperation) this will ever happen.
Particularly with players like Microsoft that will never allow applications run on anything but Windows, due to secret APIs and other such lock down features, not to mention the fact that the corporations will let themselves be locked in.
Anyway, from an ideal point of view, this would be great, from a capitalist point of view (or a Microsoft/lock in point of view) this is a terrile idea and their view on it will keep it from happening.
I got hit at the University of Missouri, Rolla and let me tell you, I never saw it coming. I'm pretty computer literate (CS major that codes alot of low-level stuff)... I thought that I was being careful by staying within the school's system (Samba shares) but they still got it. They were watching inside the network. I don't know how on earth they managed to do that, we have a pretty strict network policy.
In the meantime, they dragged through it. I got caught May 5th, 2005, didn't find out until July... never got an action date 'til August. It was awful... although I did start getting music via AllofMP3 (still shady?)
The fact that tech people have grammar skills that are lacking is not the result of any new trend in society other than the internet itself. The internet allows people of all educational levels, nationalities and languages to "speak" (write) in millions of places.
In the past, the only places you'd see people write extensively were the places that trained writers would write. Newspapers, published books, newsletters, magazines... that sort of thing. Joe Blow the mechanic or the farmer never got criticized on his grammar because no one ever saw him write. The snail mail letters he sent were of little note because he was generally writing to a single person or group of people that would be sympathetic.
Nowadays, we have average people using computers, asking questions and posting opinions, so their terrible grammar and spelling is seen by everyone. Add this to the fact that there are millions of them, and you'll see the cause of this seeming epidemic.
The bottom line is that the importance that people put on grammar and spelling hasn't changed... most people still don't care, but now these people have their writings read. This is a side-effect of giving these people voice on the internet, not of these people becoming mongoloids.
This is, of course, not counting the insane amount of abbreviation that occurs on the net, due to the fact that we're typing rather than speaking.
I agree, macros make everything easier and faster. Back in the day I used a program named MiniMacro that would let you macro the shit out of anything. It's currently b0rked in XP, though =(.
When you can open a window and hit Ctrl-Whatever instead of clicking thirty times, productivity sky-rockets.
I don't mean to be too harsh or anything, but about a third of the comments from real parents are shit. I won't claim to be some kind of authority on children (despite the fact that I was one not too long ago) but this sort of thing can vary wildly.
At 6 I was a proficient BASIC programmer. Could every kid do this? No. Could some kids do it faster? Sure. Would *every* kid want to. Absolutely not.
The child defines their own pace and interests and you can't do anything to speed them up. All you, as a parent, should be worried about it providing your child with enough material to (almost literally) absorb and enough topics to help them find an interest.
Would a child that is introduced to computers too early or too late going to be crippled for life? No. A child that runs out of things to learn might just be.
As long as there are freeware compilers and notepads, there will always be the Lone Coder. Despite the patenting and the proliferation of giant projects with thousands of coding slaves behind them, there's always room for individual innovation.
Look at all the concepts that people have discovered by themselves... from General Relativity to the modern day convenience of BitTorrent. That will *never* change... at least not until we all become thoughtless automatons.
I was in China earlier this summer and despite their "genius traffic lights" and cellphone coverage, you can still walk behind the internet bars and savvy shopping marts and find dirt roads, people living on other's garbage and sewage in the streets.
The modernization of Chinese technology is less important than the quality of life of its people. In my opinion, they need to focus less on getting every single person in their country internet and more on getting every single person in their country fed and clean.
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IBM's not out of the hardware business, just out of the PC business (and I would argue that Lenovo is doing a decent job of keeping up the Thinkpad name).
IBM still creates and sells PowerPC based servers that are top-of-the-line and built with chips designed in house.
You're right about the competing product lines and there are a lot of questions raised by it. However, I don't think it's Solaris/AIX, it's Solaris/Linux ... AIX is still alive and kicking, but inside IBM there is a lot of movement and development on Linux. AIX is receiving incremental updates for newer POWER machines, but nothing new. For example, there isn't an AIX port for the Cell architecture, but running Linux on Cell was a given from day one.
That said, I don't think there's a question of which OS would win in an IBM buyout of Sun... Linux trounces Solaris because IBM has put millions of dollars into Linux for truly first class support of POWER, getting the kernel to support all of the nice features like hotplug memory add / remove and other really neat hardware support. Solaris would have to be ported to POWER from scratch and, in turn, have millions spent on it just to get it up to par with Linux which doesn't make any sense. And even with cool features that Linux doesn't do (ahem, DTrace), it would take far less effort to just update and improve existing Linux based tools (SystemTap) or develop a new tool from scratch, rather than dumping money into the OS just to get them.
Hasn't anyone ever heard of Lambda Calculus. It was derived in the 30s to use formal math for function definition, application and recursion. Yeah... Computer Science can be boiled straight into this.
How long until one of the kids forks tag and invents "gat" to get around restriction?
Wow, way to hold a grudge. 15 years ago someone said something stupid. Now, anything they say is automatically discounted. Congrats.
No, it really isn't. DTrace functions on static trace points. The only thing that differentiates DTrace is that Sun put thousands of trace points throughout the kernel and userspace. All of the legwork to get DTrace to be worth a damn in OSX will be done by the core developers at Apple.
Another thing: time > skill? Well. In the real world time spent learning = skill. Those WoW addicts that play hours at a time daily are much more likely to have skill than others. Just like those that play Counterstrike are much more likely to have the "Mad Skillz."
Also, the honor system is not as flawed as he makes it seem, you only have to worry about your rank if you're WAYYYY up there, which is totally up to you. And you get points for losing so people still play, for chrissake if you lost every time, spent 4 hours in battle and got *nothing* but broken equipment. That's a flawed system.
The Undercity (UC) is the main city for the Undead, like Ogrimmar for Orcs and Trolls, Thunder Bluff for Tauren, Ironforge for Dwarves, Stormwind for Humans and ... something for Night Elves (can't remember).
While it's true that I can search gMail, Beagle indexes and collates *everything* so when I search it hits my email, my im logs, my music collections, text files in directories I choose, code... etc. So I'd rather get all of the information there than search gMail, and use ten other apps to look through my stuff.
As a student, all I have to do is search my email for "Exam" and up pops the emails I've gotten from my professors about when their exams are. Or "ACM" to find out when I have the next ACM meeting. Particularly useful for mailing lists, search your email for your problem and you'll find an answer if it's in the mailing list.
Particularly with players like Microsoft that will never allow applications run on anything but Windows, due to secret APIs and other such lock down features, not to mention the fact that the corporations will let themselves be locked in.
Anyway, from an ideal point of view, this would be great, from a capitalist point of view (or a Microsoft/lock in point of view) this is a terrile idea and their view on it will keep it from happening.
I'm part of the OS dev community and this has been detailed time and time again, what makes this so special?
I got hit at the University of Missouri, Rolla and let me tell you, I never saw it coming. I'm pretty computer literate (CS major that codes alot of low-level stuff)... I thought that I was being careful by staying within the school's system (Samba shares) but they still got it. They were watching inside the network. I don't know how on earth they managed to do that, we have a pretty strict network policy. In the meantime, they dragged through it. I got caught May 5th, 2005, didn't find out until July... never got an action date 'til August. It was awful... although I did start getting music via AllofMP3 (still shady?)
In the past, the only places you'd see people write extensively were the places that trained writers would write. Newspapers, published books, newsletters, magazines... that sort of thing. Joe Blow the mechanic or the farmer never got criticized on his grammar because no one ever saw him write. The snail mail letters he sent were of little note because he was generally writing to a single person or group of people that would be sympathetic.
Nowadays, we have average people using computers, asking questions and posting opinions, so their terrible grammar and spelling is seen by everyone. Add this to the fact that there are millions of them, and you'll see the cause of this seeming epidemic.
The bottom line is that the importance that people put on grammar and spelling hasn't changed... most people still don't care, but now these people have their writings read. This is a side-effect of giving these people voice on the internet, not of these people becoming mongoloids.
This is, of course, not counting the insane amount of abbreviation that occurs on the net, due to the fact that we're typing rather than speaking.
I agree, macros make everything easier and faster. Back in the day I used a program named MiniMacro that would let you macro the shit out of anything. It's currently b0rked in XP, though =(. When you can open a window and hit Ctrl-Whatever instead of clicking thirty times, productivity sky-rockets.
I don't mean to be too harsh or anything, but about a third of the comments from real parents are shit. I won't claim to be some kind of authority on children (despite the fact that I was one not too long ago) but this sort of thing can vary wildly. At 6 I was a proficient BASIC programmer. Could every kid do this? No. Could some kids do it faster? Sure. Would *every* kid want to. Absolutely not. The child defines their own pace and interests and you can't do anything to speed them up. All you, as a parent, should be worried about it providing your child with enough material to (almost literally) absorb and enough topics to help them find an interest. Would a child that is introduced to computers too early or too late going to be crippled for life? No. A child that runs out of things to learn might just be.
As long as there are freeware compilers and notepads, there will always be the Lone Coder. Despite the patenting and the proliferation of giant projects with thousands of coding slaves behind them, there's always room for individual innovation. Look at all the concepts that people have discovered by themselves... from General Relativity to the modern day convenience of BitTorrent. That will *never* change... at least not until we all become thoughtless automatons.
I was in China earlier this summer and despite their "genius traffic lights" and cellphone coverage, you can still walk behind the internet bars and savvy shopping marts and find dirt roads, people living on other's garbage and sewage in the streets.
The modernization of Chinese technology is less important than the quality of life of its people. In my opinion, they need to focus less on getting every single person in their country internet and more on getting every single person in their country fed and clean.