And there's not even anything wrong with this; this is the way small businesses in this country have always worked. It's not up to every guy who runs a bakery or a stationary store or whatever to come up with entirely new business models whenever they hit hard times, and nobody expects them to - yet for some reason, people do expect that when it comes to the web.
Yet, *somebody* in that pool *WILL* innovate, and the ones who want to continue the fight will learn from the innovation(s) and apply them.
Think of farmer's markets and other direct marketing efforts for small farmers, because either they cannot get into the commodity market or can't make money doing so. So they innovate.
Farmer's markets and other DMA efforts like CSAs (Community-Supported Agrigulture, i.e., customers "subscribe" to the farm to get periodic product from the farmers. Some veggie growers here in PDX are able to supply veggies 10-12 months out of the year. So you're not getting tomatoes and lettuce in December and winter squash and turnips instead, so it requires some flexibility on the customer as well) allow the farmers to work directly with their customers, and sell at a mutually beneficial level - farmer gets more profit, customer gets better product.
$3.00/dz for farm eggs might be too much for you. But at least I can unequivocally state what has, and more importantly, has NOT, gone into those eggs.
For everyone else, there's a WalMart Supercenter near by.
Small business owners, if they're not innovators, they are imitators. There's nothing wrong with that, unless every little small business in an area starts looking a little bit the same.
Do you fault the farmer selling his goods at the Farmer's Market, instead of selling them to some sort of wholesaler who then sells them at a good profit to the store buyers, who sell them to you?
It would be nice if you could buy a desktop machine w/o the OS preinstalled, the so-called "Microsoft Tax". But you can't. So you either use that license of XP to run XP, or...you reformat the HD. MS still got their money.
Even more complicated would be using a single NIC to connect two operating systems to the same network. Unless someone came up with a clever solution, each OS would need its own IP address. However, routers and switches outside the computer would become immensely confused when a single NIC and a single MAC address belong to two IP addresses, since most routers/switches only have a one-to-one correlation between MAC addresses and IP addresses.
coLinux and vmWare take two different approaches to doing the network card thing (vmWare emulates a card...and a bios...and a soundcard...and a video card). coLinux uses a faked network card, and bridges the existing network interface to it.
With the coLinux instance running, you either use one of the console apps, start X, and use a windows-based X terminal server to run X apps on the Linux side... ends up being quie a bit faster than vmWare, and the only hinky part is the network interfaces and bridging them together.
The cover article on the newest Linux Journal talks about the municipal network that has been developed in Wellington, New Zealand, and how it's set up, how it has developed, etc.
It's not that the Internet is free (you still have to set up and pay for an ISP account in order to get DNS to the rest of the world. Oh, yeah, this MAN is ISP-agnostic...), but if you're just doing stuff on their network, it's peer-hosted, fast, and probably good enough for most people, really. Probably what cable modems should have been in the US. But no, not only must companies provide the access, but they feel the need to shove their idea of the "Internet Experience" down everyone's throat, because that's what "people are used to".
Perhaps if they had done something like that, then it might have worked. I think they have probably given up on it too soon, too. And probably pulled the typical municipal boondoggle service routine - put it where no one is going to use it, thus ensuring its downfall, and justifying all the naysayers who said it wouldn't work (and who probably had a hand in implementing it to boot).
Jihadists, whacko environmentalists, right-wing extremists and their ilk are the predators and pathogens of the modern global ecosystem.
No, these are the ticks, the mosquitoes, the starlings. They annoy the shit out of the system, occaisionally cause or induce actual harm, but are for the most part really just benign, in the grand scheme of things.
The real wolves are the RIAA/MPAA, corporate agriculture, "Free Trade" advocates, Brazilian soy bean farmers, squeeky wheel Revelationists, neo-Talibanists in the US, etc., a culture that seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and Congresses (US and EU) that values their corporate ties more or less above all else, and has forgotten that its job is not to get itself reelected, but to serve the people of the US and country, not serve the companies that serve the people.
Why aren't either hypocenter of the atomic bombs detonations a destination for Americans?
Why isn't anywhere in Japan a major destination for vacationing Americans? Probably the same reasons that most places in southeast Asia aren't. They're a 12- to 18-hour plane ride away, and too many Americans don't want to go to Japan to eat Chinese food (there's a famous quote of a US pro athlete not looking forward to going to Japan for an exhibition game that resurfaces occaisionally), because they heard that you can't really get Almond Chicken or Sweet & Sour Pork over there.
More people drag their sorry asses farther to see a silly car race in the US each weekend for 10 months out of the year than go to pay their respects on Memorial Day and Veteran's Day (among other US holidays), which are seen as much for the day off from work as they are sales events (and token appreciation for the "reason for the season" is given), etc.
Do the Japanese visit Nanking or other places in Manchuria? So much for their collective guilt.
Next time you state that the atomic bombs saved lives -- without any room for question or flexibility, I'll meet you at the Peace Park in Nagasaki. We'll walk across the street together to the Atomic Bomb Museum. You just hold your head high knowing the US made the right decision. Watch how the Japanese react to your confidence.
I'll meet you there after we first meet at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor.
that NONE of those applications has been set up to be "critical" to the operation of OSX. Each and every one of them can be removed from the OS (trivially, to boot), and the OS will still boot and function, unless you are also talking about things like the tcp/ip stack, etc., in which case, you're just an idiot.
There are alternatives to most/all of the applications you have listed. Not as popular, maybe not integrating well with the iPod, but available.
If you look into where all sorts of API calls for Internet Explorer are located, you will realize that those calls are in those DLLs just to support Microsoft's idea of "integration". They are not used by other applications, unless they're integrating with IE services.
It's like if you're programming in ADO, and you need a Command, Connection an Recordset object, but you put each declaration into 3 separate DLLs. No sane person would do this, but Microsoft does.
No, the amusement is in realizing that if the earthquake caused a break underwater, that it's not going to be fixed in ~2 hrs, thus indicating the cluelessness of the question pondered.
Well, the explosion of Microsoft was in no doubt aided and abetted by software piracy. How many of us took home those Win31 floppies and all those Office floppies from work?
Re:Do they or do they not have the source legally?
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
I'm no more free than using Opera or IE.
Until Microsoft or someone puts in place technical and legal measures that effectively bar the installation of software that is not "blessed", and will not allow free/OSS developers to have access to these technical means, that is. Then, you really are in the position of just eating cake.
Microsoft is close to doing this. They have the means in place to do it (think signed vs unsigned drivers) at the OS level.
Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE.
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 1
So what you're saying is that RoR is becoming more complex as it tries to handle the complex things J2EE has to handle?
No, it's getting much better at doing most of the boring stuff (i.e., object persistance, database CRUD actions, basic UI underpinnings), while leaving as much of it as clean and easy to use to do business logic, you know, the COOL stuff.
There is a certain irreducable amount of complexity in writing enterprise software (whatever that is).
Really? If by "enterprise software" you mean applications that have nearly every complex interaction model, algorithm, and support for EVERY theoretical edge case thrown in, then yes. Including silly things like "we must plan for enterprise database migration (i.e., Sybase->Oracle, Informix->Oracle, MySQL->Access, etc)."
Frameworks that try to support this completely generally become more and more complex themselves until they reach J2EE levels.
Well, it seems like J2EE started out with making every little edge case visible to the point where they affect everything that has to be done, even for basic, simple stuff that is probably 90% of what one does. My view of J2EE, and most Java things, is it's complexity for complexity's sake. Rather than make the simple stuff easy, and enable/facilitate graceful migration of more complex things, it starts down with "to use a motor, first you must cut these plates out of sheet iron, wrap by hand like so with this really fine copper wire, etc." because, after all, the only way to use an electric motor is to roll your own [sic].
The vast majority of the "complicated" things in J2EE are in there because they are needed to solve real world problems.
No, they are there because they're edge cases, and the edge case people shouted loud enough for them to be "important features", and the J2EE developers had decided that they wanted to generically deal with these things because no one else had. And, it's because J2EE is very very generalized. I see the need for all of J2EE's pieces on their own, but as a whole, it seems way too complicated.
It's like buying the biggest Craftsman tool set from Sears, because it has every possible hand tool you might ever need, but then when all you need to do is tighten a nut and bolt, you are stuck trying to decide "do I use a screwdriver and pliers, a crescent wrench and socket, or the hammer?" (but then, which hammer? the claw hammer? the rubber mallet? the deadblow hammer? the ball peen hammer? the jackhammer?)
Anything that attempts to solve the same set of problems will approach the same complexity.
Yes, but most applications will only hit a few of those complexities, and most of them will hit about the same subset of complexities. So why not make those complexities handled easily, nicely, etc., without duplication of efforts, etc.?
Rails is for doing Web apps. It's set up for a pattern of development and application usage, that maps out to about what 90% of webapps are and what they need for plumbing.
Would you write an airline ticket reservation system with it? Nope. J2EE is the way to go with that (especially with the mainframe links). Would you write an application that attempts to link together data from disparate database systems into a "portal" application? Nope. J2EE is probably better for that, too.
But if you decide you really would be better off developing your own Content Management System, etc., then Rails is probably a better choice if you don't want to use something that's already been developed (i.e., phpnuke, etc).
Probably the coolest thing so far is that Rails is nicely layered, and it does not seem to have a lot of feature creep right now. Need a login form? then "gems login" is it. I don't need it (right now), so out of sight is out of mind, and that's a good thing.
It even acknowledges its weaknesses (i.e., supporting existing "legacy" database schemas, such as your gloried "timestamps" for transaction control), and suggests that J2EE might be better for you in that case.
Why is it that non-technical types argue that they can manage technical jobs as good as, or better, than any person of a technical background?
Would you hire an engineer to be the CFO of an advertising agency? Probably not. So why hire a sales & marketing person to run a technical organization, who has no technical background?
I'll throw out Carly F, the rube who was running Yahoo for awhile, and all the other people who have originated in Sales and Marketing to become CEOs who have failed brilliantly in their jobs.
At some point, even the person who has the "best" technical people under him or her to provide advice has to make a decisions based purely on technical data. "I don't know, what do you think" at that point is not an option.
Well, the people he might be replacing are probably political appointees, or directly tied to political appointees. They're probably way higher than your GS-5 job title.
While it might be a "high profile" mob, it's not part of the Space Shuttle infrastructure, or the space science academia group, Cal-Tech/JPL, JHAPL, etc. It makes a lot of noise, but in the end our group doesn't really matter, unless we somehow can sway those entities.
Then there is the 800-tonne leviathan known as "Congress".
And the current mouse with a mighty roar that seems to be doing a good job at wagging the dog as well.
And you think that if funding comes from "the private sector", it won't similarly be encumbered with agendas, targets to be reached, people to hire/benefit regardless, etc.?
Most of NASA's budget is tied up in running the Space Shuttle (think Boeing and Lockmart). Yes, those are two major "private sector" enterprises.
They influence NASA directly or indirectly through Congressional pressures, especially come election time or for budget blood-letting.
The Space Shuttle goes on, but any new alternative that NASA has started to develop recently to replace the Space Shuttle seems to get dropped like a lead balloon as soon as it starts to show promise or viability.
But it's been there for at least... oh, 10 years (on WinTel). My 2-CPU Gateway 650 server benefits from even the multi-threading in NT 4.0.
The calculation engine in Excel 2000/XP/2003 runs in a separate thread. I think the spell checker in Word 2000+ might even run in a separate thread.
Various subsystems of Windows are indeed multithreaded. Some OLE-DB drivers are multi-threaded (yay, because ODBC isn't).
Even if user apps are not multithreaded, most of the OSs that users use will benefit from multiple cores.
Re:Must be a parallel universe you live in
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps a nice job scheduler would be nice. Perhaps, if one of the cores ran at 4x or in a very low latency mode and the other ones ran at 0.5x, the critical very interrupt-driven tasks could live on the fast core, and other tasks (like Word, Excel, etc.) could be scheduled on the other core(s). That way, even if a user app locked up on one of the non-critical cores, the rest of the system stays up and accessible.
I'd even take a multi-core 1GHz chip (with only a passive heatsink on it...) vs a 3.x GHz with its gas-powered 150K RPM turbine blower on it to keep enough air blowing over it.
Oh, wait. I already have a dual-processor (2x833 MHz P3) server, and it's quite a bit more responsive than my single-CPU workstation. SCSI of course has something to do with that as well.
not only might you have to deal with Union bullshit (big union in Oregon likes to go on strike every legislative session), state civil service rules (why is THAT loozer getting a merit raise and I'm not? What? He's bumping me from my job???), but beware "sensitivity" issues.
We all more or less act civilly towards each other in most situations. But universities is one place where things can get blown way out of proportion quickly and publicly.
Oh, yes. And if you're in a grant-based job, hopefully your grant writers do a good job. Otherwise, you can be at the mercy of state legislators who do not see the benefit of providing future employees (which does cost $$$) while slashing university budgets.
No, but that is the reality. Look at who uses Macs. The so-called "digerati". If you take Joe 6pack, he's buying an "expensive" pc at best buy or circuit city if he wants to think he's impressing others, or walmart if he has no shame.
but if there is at least that much headroom in the shift to Pentium-D (esp. dual-core Pentium D), then it will probably be a wash.
Too bad Apple isn't trying to work with AMD.
At some point, if Apple sales don't improve, Intel will make the same decisions that IBM made. "How much of our sales does Apple contribute to? 0.005%? We need them about as much as Wal-Mart needs Rubbermaid."
Lest people forget, at the time, shifting NeXTStep to Intel was supposed to be the big savior of Steve Job's previous computer company...
I'll still get a Mac Mini later this summer, though.
The problem now is that the Government wants to be able to come in, look at this forum, and make a very visible case of virtually dragging out the rabble, sending them to Gitmo, and locking everything up as being secret-hush-hush.
Maybe Bush & Putin did see eye-to-eye. Bush is more like Putin, rather than the other way around.
not if you have a "C:\Program Sucks\" to go along with "C:\Program Files\"... Then, it goes to the first directory that matches the pattern, which will be not what you want it to be.
Then you get into dealing with when to double-quote long file names and when not to, etc., that Unix/Linux does much better.
Slashdot Mirror
And there's not even anything wrong with this; this is the way small businesses in this country have always worked. It's not up to every guy who runs a bakery or a stationary store or whatever to come up with entirely new business models whenever they hit hard times, and nobody expects them to - yet for some reason, people do expect that when it comes to the web.
Yet, *somebody* in that pool *WILL* innovate, and the ones who want to continue the fight will learn from the innovation(s) and apply them.
Think of farmer's markets and other direct marketing efforts for small farmers, because either they cannot get into the commodity market or can't make money doing so. So they innovate.
Farmer's markets and other DMA efforts like CSAs (Community-Supported Agrigulture, i.e., customers "subscribe" to the farm to get periodic product from the farmers. Some veggie growers here in PDX are able to supply veggies 10-12 months out of the year. So you're not getting tomatoes and lettuce in December and winter squash and turnips instead, so it requires some flexibility on the customer as well) allow the farmers to work directly with their customers, and sell at a mutually beneficial level - farmer gets more profit, customer gets better product.
$3.00/dz for farm eggs might be too much for you. But at least I can unequivocally state what has, and more importantly, has NOT, gone into those eggs.
For everyone else, there's a WalMart Supercenter near by.
Small business owners, if they're not innovators, they are imitators. There's nothing wrong with that, unless every little small business in an area starts looking a little bit the same.
Good for them!
Do you fault the farmer selling his goods at the Farmer's Market, instead of selling them to some sort of wholesaler who then sells them at a good profit to the store buyers, who sell them to you?
It would be nice if you could buy a desktop machine w/o the OS preinstalled, the so-called "Microsoft Tax". But you can't. So you either use that license of XP to run XP, or...you reformat the HD. MS still got their money.
Even more complicated would be using a single NIC to connect two operating systems to the same network. Unless someone came up with a clever solution, each OS would need its own IP address. However, routers and switches outside the computer would become immensely confused when a single NIC and a single MAC address belong to two IP addresses, since most routers/switches only have a one-to-one correlation between MAC addresses and IP addresses.
coLinux and vmWare take two different approaches to doing the network card thing (vmWare emulates a card...and a bios...and a soundcard...and a video card). coLinux uses a faked network card, and bridges the existing network interface to it.
With the coLinux instance running, you either use one of the console apps, start X, and use a windows-based X terminal server to run X apps on the Linux side... ends up being quie a bit faster than vmWare, and the only hinky part is the network interfaces and bridging them together.
run osx under a highly modified coLinux (to run freebsd instead...)
...would be havening ironical.
net start osx
or
net start tiger
The cover article on the newest Linux Journal talks about the municipal network that has been developed in Wellington, New Zealand, and how it's set up, how it has developed, etc.
It's not that the Internet is free (you still have to set up and pay for an ISP account in order to get DNS to the rest of the world. Oh, yeah, this MAN is ISP-agnostic...), but if you're just doing stuff on their network, it's peer-hosted, fast, and probably good enough for most people, really. Probably what cable modems should have been in the US. But no, not only must companies provide the access, but they feel the need to shove their idea of the "Internet Experience" down everyone's throat, because that's what "people are used to".
Perhaps if they had done something like that, then it might have worked. I think they have probably given up on it too soon, too. And probably pulled the typical municipal boondoggle service routine - put it where no one is going to use it, thus ensuring its downfall, and justifying all the naysayers who said it wouldn't work (and who probably had a hand in implementing it to boot).
Jihadists, whacko environmentalists, right-wing extremists and their ilk are the predators and pathogens of the modern global ecosystem.
No, these are the ticks, the mosquitoes, the starlings. They annoy the shit out of the system, occaisionally cause or induce actual harm, but are for the most part really just benign, in the grand scheme of things.
The real wolves are the RIAA/MPAA, corporate agriculture, "Free Trade" advocates, Brazilian soy bean farmers, squeeky wheel Revelationists, neo-Talibanists in the US, etc., a culture that seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and Congresses (US and EU) that values their corporate ties more or less above all else, and has forgotten that its job is not to get itself reelected, but to serve the people of the US and country, not serve the companies that serve the people.
Why aren't either hypocenter of the atomic bombs detonations a destination for Americans?
Why isn't anywhere in Japan a major destination for vacationing Americans? Probably the same reasons that most places in southeast Asia aren't. They're a 12- to 18-hour plane ride away, and too many Americans don't want to go to Japan to eat Chinese food (there's a famous quote of a US pro athlete not looking forward to going to Japan for an exhibition game that resurfaces occaisionally), because they heard that you can't really get Almond Chicken or Sweet & Sour Pork over there.
More people drag their sorry asses farther to see a silly car race in the US each weekend for 10 months out of the year than go to pay their respects on Memorial Day and Veteran's Day (among other US holidays), which are seen as much for the day off from work as they are sales events (and token appreciation for the "reason for the season" is given), etc.
Do the Japanese visit Nanking or other places in Manchuria? So much for their collective guilt.
Next time you state that the atomic bombs saved lives -- without any room for question or flexibility, I'll meet you at the Peace Park in Nagasaki. We'll walk across the street together to the Atomic Bomb Museum. You just hold your head high knowing the US made the right decision. Watch how the Japanese react to your confidence.
I'll meet you there after we first meet at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor.
Except...
that NONE of those applications has been set up to be "critical" to the operation of OSX. Each and every one of them can be removed from the OS (trivially, to boot), and the OS will still boot and function, unless you are also talking about things like the tcp/ip stack, etc., in which case, you're just an idiot.
There are alternatives to most/all of the applications you have listed. Not as popular, maybe not integrating well with the iPod, but available.
If you look into where all sorts of API calls for Internet Explorer are located, you will realize that those calls are in those DLLs just to support Microsoft's idea of "integration". They are not used by other applications, unless they're integrating with IE services.
It's like if you're programming in ADO, and you need a Command, Connection an Recordset object, but you put each declaration into 3 separate DLLs. No sane person would do this, but Microsoft does.
Nice troll. Now go eat a goat.
No, the amusement is in realizing that if the earthquake caused a break underwater, that it's not going to be fixed in ~2 hrs, thus indicating the cluelessness of the question pondered.
Well, the explosion of Microsoft was in no doubt aided and abetted by software piracy. How many of us took home those Win31 floppies and all those Office floppies from work?
I'm no more free than using Opera or IE.
Until Microsoft or someone puts in place technical and legal measures that effectively bar the installation of software that is not "blessed", and will not allow free/OSS developers to have access to these technical means, that is. Then, you really are in the position of just eating cake.
Microsoft is close to doing this. They have the means in place to do it (think signed vs unsigned drivers) at the OS level.
So what you're saying is that RoR is becoming more complex as it tries to handle the complex things J2EE has to handle?
No, it's getting much better at doing most of the boring stuff (i.e., object persistance, database CRUD actions, basic UI underpinnings), while leaving as much of it as clean and easy to use to do business logic, you know, the COOL stuff.
There is a certain irreducable amount of complexity in writing enterprise software (whatever that is).
Really? If by "enterprise software" you mean applications that have nearly every complex interaction model, algorithm, and support for EVERY theoretical edge case thrown in, then yes.
Including silly things like "we must plan for enterprise database migration (i.e., Sybase->Oracle, Informix->Oracle, MySQL->Access, etc)."
Frameworks that try to support this completely generally become more and more complex themselves until they reach J2EE levels.
Well, it seems like J2EE started out with making every little edge case visible to the point where they affect everything that has to be done, even for basic, simple stuff that is probably 90% of what one does. My view of J2EE, and most Java things, is it's complexity for complexity's sake. Rather than make the simple stuff easy, and enable/facilitate graceful migration of more complex things, it starts down with "to use a motor, first you must cut these plates out of sheet iron, wrap by hand like so with this really fine copper wire, etc." because, after all, the only way to use an electric motor is to roll your own [sic].
The vast majority of the "complicated" things in J2EE are in there because they are needed to solve real world problems.
No, they are there because they're edge cases, and the edge case people shouted loud enough for them to be "important features", and the J2EE developers had decided that they wanted to generically deal with these things because no one else had. And, it's because J2EE is very very generalized. I see the need for all of J2EE's pieces on their own, but as a whole, it seems way too complicated.
It's like buying the biggest Craftsman tool set from Sears, because it has every possible hand tool you might ever need, but then when all you need to do is tighten a nut and bolt, you are stuck trying to decide "do I use a screwdriver and pliers, a crescent wrench and socket, or the hammer?" (but then, which hammer? the claw hammer? the rubber mallet? the deadblow hammer? the ball peen hammer? the jackhammer?)
Anything that attempts to solve the same set of problems will approach the same complexity.
Yes, but most applications will only hit a few of those complexities, and most of them will hit about the same subset of complexities. So why not make those complexities handled easily, nicely, etc., without duplication of efforts, etc.?
Rails is for doing Web apps. It's set up for a pattern of development and application usage, that maps out to about what 90% of webapps are and what they need for plumbing.
Would you write an airline ticket reservation system with it? Nope. J2EE is the way to go with that (especially with the mainframe links). Would you write an application that attempts to link together data from disparate database systems into a "portal" application? Nope. J2EE is probably better for that, too.
But if you decide you really would be better off developing your own Content Management System, etc., then Rails is probably a better choice if you don't want to use something that's already been developed (i.e., phpnuke, etc).
Probably the coolest thing so far is that Rails is nicely layered, and it does not seem to have a lot of feature creep right now. Need a login form? then "gems login" is it. I don't need it (right now), so out of sight is out of mind, and that's a good thing.
It even acknowledges its weaknesses (i.e., supporting existing "legacy" database schemas, such as your gloried "timestamps" for transaction control), and suggests that J2EE might be better for you in that case.
Why is it that non-technical types argue that they can manage technical jobs as good as, or better, than any person of a technical background?
Would you hire an engineer to be the CFO of an advertising agency? Probably not. So why hire a sales & marketing person to run a technical organization, who has no technical background?
I'll throw out Carly F, the rube who was running Yahoo for awhile, and all the other people who have originated in Sales and Marketing to become CEOs who have failed brilliantly in their jobs.
At some point, even the person who has the "best" technical people under him or her to provide advice has to make a decisions based purely on technical data. "I don't know, what do you think" at that point is not an option.
Well, unfortunatly civil servants can't be fired
Well, the people he might be replacing are probably political appointees, or directly tied to political appointees. They're probably way higher than your GS-5 job title.
It's just that those who are rich, who PAY MORE TAXES get money back as well.
Maybe in gross amount, but not in net percentage.
While it might be a "high profile" mob, it's not part of the Space Shuttle infrastructure, or the space science academia group, Cal-Tech/JPL, JHAPL, etc. It makes a lot of noise, but in the end our group doesn't really matter, unless we somehow can sway those entities.
Then there is the 800-tonne leviathan known as "Congress".
And the current mouse with a mighty roar that seems to be doing a good job at wagging the dog as well.
And you think that if funding comes from "the private sector", it won't similarly be encumbered with agendas, targets to be reached, people to hire/benefit regardless, etc.?
Most of NASA's budget is tied up in running the Space Shuttle (think Boeing and Lockmart). Yes, those are two major "private sector" enterprises.
They influence NASA directly or indirectly through Congressional pressures, especially come election time or for budget blood-letting.
The Space Shuttle goes on, but any new alternative that NASA has started to develop recently to replace the Space Shuttle seems to get dropped like a lead balloon as soon as it starts to show promise or viability.
But it's been there for at least... oh, 10 years (on WinTel). My 2-CPU Gateway 650 server benefits from even the multi-threading in NT 4.0.
The calculation engine in Excel 2000/XP/2003 runs in a separate thread. I think the spell checker in Word 2000+ might even run in a separate thread.
Various subsystems of Windows are indeed multithreaded. Some OLE-DB drivers are multi-threaded (yay, because ODBC isn't).
Even if user apps are not multithreaded, most of the OSs that users use will benefit from multiple cores.
Perhaps a nice job scheduler would be nice. Perhaps, if one of the cores ran at 4x or in a very low latency mode and the other ones ran at 0.5x, the critical very interrupt-driven tasks could live on the fast core, and other tasks (like Word, Excel, etc.) could be scheduled on the other core(s). That way, even if a user app locked up on one of the non-critical cores, the rest of the system stays up and accessible.
I'd even take a multi-core 1GHz chip (with only a passive heatsink on it...) vs a 3.x GHz with its gas-powered 150K RPM turbine blower on it to keep enough air blowing over it.
Oh, wait. I already have a dual-processor (2x833 MHz P3) server, and it's quite a bit more responsive than my single-CPU workstation. SCSI of course has something to do with that as well.
not only might you have to deal with Union bullshit (big union in Oregon likes to go on strike every legislative session), state civil service rules (why is THAT loozer getting a merit raise and I'm not? What? He's bumping me from my job???), but beware "sensitivity" issues.
We all more or less act civilly towards each other in most situations. But universities is one place where things can get blown way out of proportion quickly and publicly.
Oh, yes. And if you're in a grant-based job, hopefully your grant writers do a good job. Otherwise, you can be at the mercy of state legislators who do not see the benefit of providing future employees (which does cost $$$) while slashing university budgets.
If you have a budget, guard it well.
No, but that is the reality. Look at who uses Macs. The so-called "digerati". If you take Joe 6pack, he's buying an "expensive" pc at best buy or circuit city if he wants to think he's impressing others, or walmart if he has no shame.
but if there is at least that much headroom in the shift to Pentium-D (esp. dual-core Pentium D), then it will probably be a wash.
Too bad Apple isn't trying to work with AMD.
At some point, if Apple sales don't improve, Intel will make the same decisions that IBM made. "How much of our sales does Apple contribute to? 0.005%? We need them about as much as Wal-Mart needs Rubbermaid."
Lest people forget, at the time, shifting NeXTStep to Intel was supposed to be the big savior of Steve Job's previous computer company...
I'll still get a Mac Mini later this summer, though.
The problem now is that the Government wants to be able to come in, look at this forum, and make a very visible case of virtually dragging out the rabble, sending them to Gitmo, and locking everything up as being secret-hush-hush.
Maybe Bush & Putin did see eye-to-eye. Bush is more like Putin, rather than the other way around.
not if you have a "C:\Program Sucks\" to go along with "C:\Program Files\"... Then, it goes to the first directory that matches the pattern, which will be not what you want it to be.
Then you get into dealing with when to double-quote long file names and when not to, etc., that Unix/Linux does much better.