which people took seriously even though both of the authors were completely, totally ignorant of even the most basic evolutionary theory (and fairly shoddy researchers and statisticians to boot). LOOKS LIKE A joke and/or flamebait by somebody that fancies himself a modern Jonathan Swift. Or perhaps Dr. Curry is really Tim Curry AKA Dr. Frankenfurter.
As would I, but I suspect that the volume isn't there, and due to the single floating point unit, the Niagara I problem doesn't make a very good desktop box. On the other hand, a dual Niagara II box with a 16 lane PCI-e slot would rock as a personal workstation, but I suspect if Sun builds it, it will be priced out of reach for the masses.
The UltraSPARC IIIi (not III) uses a different socket and different interconnection bus. It is JBus on the IIIi, and something else (don't remember, or never knew) on the III and IV. The IIIi an III are not socket compatible. That said, Sun should be able to make a motherboard with IV chips fit in the IIIi enclosures if ther eis a market for it. I doubt there is. The Niagara and AMD boxes pretty much have the volume servr market covered between them, and Dual Niagara II boxes will quite likely outperform the fastest current IIIi boxes in every way. Concentrating on Niagara II and Opteron makes a lot more sense than trying to squeeze and extra 400MHz out of the IIIi.
Unfortunately, the trade rage business cares mightly about Windows Vista and the 2 or 3 billion dollars that Microsoft will spend to convince people to spend money to upgrade their overpriced, feature poor, security challenged XP system for an even more overpriced, feature poor Windows Vista system. The only dogs salivating for Vista are the ad salespeople. For myself personally, it will be a cold day in hell before Microsoft gets another dollar of my money. There is nothing in Vista that I want or need that I can't get in Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris for a lot less money.
[This guy is an executive?!]
You would think that if his shareholders, you know, the people he is working for, red this article he won't be one for much longer. But, of course, they will probably just throw their proxy ballots in waste can instead of voting their shares and getting rid of a guy that doesn't see any problem with defrauding them.
My first questions were these:
1) Where any of the alleged terrorists actually booked on a flight? The earliest indication seems to be they were not, yet the plot was supposed to happen 'within days'.
2) Did they find the liquid explosives at the time of the arrests?
3) Did they find detonators?
I guess we will know soon enough, but at the moment, this is looking like a bigger version of the Miami Liberty 7; a bunch of clueless terrorist wannbes that couldn't tie their own shoes without having the undercover agents supplying the shoes, laces, and detailed instructions.
[One area where on-board graphics is important are notebooks]
Ain't that the truth? I have a Gateway Solo 1450 which is a pretty nice cheap laptop with an Intel 830MG chip set. It worked fine under Fedora Core 3 when Intel was apparently supporting binary drivers, but out of FC 4, FC5, Centos 4, and Novell/SuSE 10, only SuSE works - and then only if you don't do something rash like try to use virtual consoles which kill X. I don't need killer 3D performance on this laptop, but it sure would be nice if 2D 1024x768 worked, and it doesn't. Hopefully now it will be able to get that working.
first of all, I'm guessing it doesn't run on anything but Windows, and second of all, its just a freaking media player for crying out loud, one of many, almost all of them coming with dozens of butt ugly, disfunctional 'skins'. Of course, it presumable comes with 'Microsoft DRM Inside (tm)', and we are all dying to have that, aren't we?
Blame ComputerWorld, Carol Silva, and Slashdot for poor headline writing. Wincke says, in the very last paragraph of the article, that he has *NO* problem with FOSS or ODF. His complaint is that the third party accessibility tools don't support {Open|Star}Office. So, in otherwords, Wincke would have no problem at all with ODF *as long as it was supported by Microsoft* whose Office applications are supported by third party products.
A suspicious person would suspect that the Microsoft PR department fed ComputerWorld and Ms. Silva a deliberately misleading article about ODF in order to inacurrately frame the issue, but I'm sure nothing like that would ever occur to a fine, public spirited company like Microsoft.
If the WSJ really wanted to get radical, they ought to advocate ending us sugar price supports and dropping the embargo on goods from Cuba where they produce sugar cane at a fraction of the cost that it is produced in the US.
The core problem with the author's article is that one of his axioms is simply wrong; he asserts that Linux does not have the 'click, click, click' install simplicity that Windows XP or OSX offer. I can't speak for OSX, but having installed both many times, any modern Linux is FAR, FAR easier to install than WinXP. The only reason that WinXP is easier to install than Linux is because it comes that way. If Linux came pre-installed on desktop computers, the 'ease of install' would be identical. As for installing FOSS applications, they are at least as easy to install on Linux as they are on Windows. Are Yum, Yast, and apt-get really all that much more 'complex' than an InstallShield installer?
Microsoft is; tried, convicted, and unapologetic for past behaviour. In addition, Firefox doesn't come pre-installed on the OS that is shipped with 95% of the desktop machines sold. I commented previously that Microsoft would find a way to 'cut off Google's air supply', and one way to do it would be to make sure that Windows/IE went to MSN search by default, or perhaps even exclusively. It was marked as a 'troll', but a tiger doesn't change its stripes, and abusive monopolists don't change their business practices unless they are forced to do so by the government. And the current government has signaled very clearly they they don't have a lot of interest in prosecuting anti-trust law violations. As long as that is the case, Microsoft will continue to treat the law as an annoying inconvience.
Let's face it, if a 'bug' in Vista prevents browsers from visiting 'www.google.com', or asks you 'would you like to try MSN search instead?' or just puts a popup like 'Warning: accessing this site may expose your computer to malicious code', then google is dead. Since Microsoft knows the USDOJ will let them do anything they want, I wouldn't put it past them. If google sues for billions of dollars after they go bankrupt, it is a small price to pay to preserve the monopoly.
Actually, they work pretty well. The one near here (Altamonte Pass) can produec up to 114MW at a cost of production of around 4.5 cents/kilowatt hour which is very competitive with natural gas generation. The biggest probem is that the wind turbines are up to 35 years old now and are both obsolete and breaking down, and the current design and placement kills a lot of birds.
I'm not sure why this got modded as funny, at least, not if you would like to see Sun survive as a company. I've met very few people in the industry, and almost none at Sun, that impressed me less than Jonathan Schwartz. Scott screwed up by drinking the koolaid the SPARC guys were selling, but he is a very sharp guy. There isn't much wrong with Sun that making a total sommitment to Solaris and Linux on x86_64 (an dasjusting the cost structure to match) wouldn't solve. The first step would be to actually ship the 8-way Galaxy machines. Getting rid of all the people whose job it is to come up with stupid pricing tricks would be a good start too. Does Sun *really* need 3 different configurations of T2000/T1000 differing only by support contract? I don't think so.
Just off the top of my head, it seems unlikely that consumers are going to come beating on Phillips door to get this marvelous new invention, but I guess they can always sell it to cable companies for incorporation in set top boxes so the consumer doesn't get a choice. And I suppose that eventually, they can 'persuade' somebody to introduce legislation to require TV's to include this 'feature'. It wouldn't be the first time.
[that computers running Linux or other F/OSS OS'es are included in their piracy statistics.]
As well they should be. Why, I myself specifically bought a naked PC so I could run a pirated copy of Fedora Core 5 that I got from the notorious warez site fedora.redhat.com. I just hope it doesn't get slashdot'ed now that I've posted it here.
The real key to any 'open standard' is that it be implementable without payment of royalties or encumberments of any kind. That is what makes ODF or Ogg Vorbis 'open standards' and MS Office formats and MP3 non-open standards. Open standards are great for consumers and voters because it means they can buy which ever standard conforming product best suits their needs, and that encourages true competition. Vendors like Microsoft will off course complain loudly, but it isn't supposed to be about what is best for the vendors, it is supposed to be about what is best for the citizens, and Minnesota seems to understand that better than most. I expect that Microsoft will go in with all guns blazing to derail this proposal.
The problem isn't that there is too much porn on the internet, the problem is that modern society doesn't provide adequate opportunities for 'real' sex. Too much work, two wage earner couples, kids, pets, traffic, in laws, etc. - who has the time? Instead of wringing their hands about internet porn, researchers should be working to force companies to offer mid-afternoon sex break w/pay giving people a chance to slip of home for a quick one. Problem solved.
Jonathan Zuck works indirectly for Microsoft. What Microsoft thinks about the GPL is pretty much irrelevant since they don't license any of their software under any variant of the GPL. This article is 100% USDA FUD.
[ even if you into account that Athlon64 FX will soon support DDR2 ]
How about when you take into account that the Intel chip is 65nm and the AMD is 90nm? The next AMD die shrink will likely take care of most of the performance difference. In the meantime, in the battle between products that you can't actually buy, Intel appears to have a lead on their prefered benchmarks.
Big ticket, no science programs like Bush II's 'man on mars' fantasy provide huge contracts to aerospace corporations that are big contributors. Programs that distribute a lot of small grants to thousands of scientists and graduate students don't produce contributions. Bush II has always been clear that job number one is taking care of the 'political base', and aerospace contractors have always been part of that.
This article doesn't cut through the marketing fluff, it is 100% marketing fluff. Anybody that thinks that a brand, spanking, new Windows kernel is going to have fewer security issues than the old crufty one doesn't know much about software engineering. The more new lines of code there are, the more opportunities there are for new security bugs. In the Microsoft team is like most engineering teams, dollars to donuts they rewrote the relatively clean code that they could understand, and left all the old, gnarly, indescipherable code because nobody could quite figure out what it did. Windows Vista will be exactly like WinXP except there will be a lot more of it, especially eye candy.
Exactly, code that doesn't run in any other office suite, like, say OpenOffice. So if you choose Microsoft for backend or Web based server applications. you continue to fork out for Microsoft client applicationas as well, and vice versa. Microsoft hasn't been fighting the EU tooth and nail for no reason the last 5 years. They have been doing it precisely so that they could introduce things like their 'snap-ins' and prevent competing implementations. A tiger doesn't change its stripes, and neither do abusive monopolists.
Slashdot Mirror
which people took seriously even though both of the authors were completely, totally ignorant of even the most basic evolutionary theory (and fairly shoddy researchers and statisticians to boot). LOOKS LIKE A joke and/or flamebait by somebody that fancies himself a modern Jonathan Swift. Or perhaps Dr. Curry is really Tim Curry AKA Dr. Frankenfurter.
As would I, but I suspect that the volume isn't there, and due to the single floating point unit, the Niagara I problem doesn't make a very good desktop box. On the other hand, a dual Niagara II box with a 16 lane PCI-e slot would rock as a personal workstation, but I suspect if Sun builds it, it will be priced out of reach for the masses.
The UltraSPARC IIIi (not III) uses a different socket and different interconnection bus. It is JBus on the IIIi, and something else (don't remember, or never knew) on the III and IV. The IIIi an III are not socket compatible. That said, Sun should be able to make a motherboard with IV chips fit in the IIIi enclosures if ther eis a market for it. I doubt there is. The Niagara and AMD boxes pretty much have the volume servr market covered between them, and Dual Niagara II boxes will quite likely outperform the fastest current IIIi boxes in every way. Concentrating on Niagara II and Opteron makes a lot more sense than trying to squeeze and extra 400MHz out of the IIIi.
Unfortunately, the trade rage business cares mightly about Windows Vista and the 2 or 3 billion dollars that Microsoft will spend to convince people to spend money to upgrade their overpriced, feature poor, security challenged XP system for an even more overpriced, feature poor Windows Vista system. The only dogs salivating for Vista are the ad salespeople. For myself personally, it will be a cold day in hell before Microsoft gets another dollar of my money. There is nothing in Vista that I want or need that I can't get in Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris for a lot less money.
Just buy a Happy Hacking Lite keyboard which uses the Sun Type 3 keyobard layout.
[This guy is an executive?!] You would think that if his shareholders, you know, the people he is working for, red this article he won't be one for much longer. But, of course, they will probably just throw their proxy ballots in waste can instead of voting their shares and getting rid of a guy that doesn't see any problem with defrauding them.
My first questions were these: 1) Where any of the alleged terrorists actually booked on a flight? The earliest indication seems to be they were not, yet the plot was supposed to happen 'within days'. 2) Did they find the liquid explosives at the time of the arrests? 3) Did they find detonators? I guess we will know soon enough, but at the moment, this is looking like a bigger version of the Miami Liberty 7; a bunch of clueless terrorist wannbes that couldn't tie their own shoes without having the undercover agents supplying the shoes, laces, and detailed instructions.
[One area where on-board graphics is important are notebooks] Ain't that the truth? I have a Gateway Solo 1450 which is a pretty nice cheap laptop with an Intel 830MG chip set. It worked fine under Fedora Core 3 when Intel was apparently supporting binary drivers, but out of FC 4, FC5, Centos 4, and Novell/SuSE 10, only SuSE works - and then only if you don't do something rash like try to use virtual consoles which kill X. I don't need killer 3D performance on this laptop, but it sure would be nice if 2D 1024x768 worked, and it doesn't. Hopefully now it will be able to get that working.
first of all, I'm guessing it doesn't run on anything but Windows, and second of all, its just a freaking media player for crying out loud, one of many, almost all of them coming with dozens of butt ugly, disfunctional 'skins'. Of course, it presumable comes with 'Microsoft DRM Inside (tm)', and we are all dying to have that, aren't we?
Blame ComputerWorld, Carol Silva, and Slashdot for poor headline writing. Wincke says, in the very last paragraph of the article, that he has *NO* problem with FOSS or ODF. His complaint is that the third party accessibility tools don't support {Open|Star}Office. So, in otherwords, Wincke would have no problem at all with ODF *as long as it was supported by Microsoft* whose Office applications are supported by third party products.
A suspicious person would suspect that the Microsoft PR department fed ComputerWorld and Ms. Silva a deliberately misleading article about ODF in order to inacurrately frame the issue, but I'm sure nothing like that would ever occur to a fine, public spirited company like Microsoft.
If the WSJ really wanted to get radical, they ought to advocate ending us sugar price supports and dropping the embargo on goods from Cuba where they produce sugar cane at a fraction of the cost that it is produced in the US.
The core problem with the author's article is that one of his axioms is simply wrong; he asserts that Linux does not have the 'click, click, click' install simplicity that Windows XP or OSX offer. I can't speak for OSX, but having installed both many times, any modern Linux is FAR, FAR easier to install than WinXP. The only reason that WinXP is easier to install than Linux is because it comes that way. If Linux came pre-installed on desktop computers, the 'ease of install' would be identical. As for installing FOSS applications, they are at least as easy to install on Linux as they are on Windows. Are Yum, Yast, and apt-get really all that much more 'complex' than an InstallShield installer?
Microsoft is; tried, convicted, and unapologetic for past behaviour. In addition, Firefox doesn't come pre-installed on the OS that is shipped with 95% of the desktop machines sold. I commented previously that Microsoft would find a way to 'cut off Google's air supply', and one way to do it would be to make sure that Windows/IE went to MSN search by default, or perhaps even exclusively. It was marked as a 'troll', but a tiger doesn't change its stripes, and abusive monopolists don't change their business practices unless they are forced to do so by the government. And the current government has signaled very clearly they they don't have a lot of interest in prosecuting anti-trust law violations. As long as that is the case, Microsoft will continue to treat the law as an annoying inconvience.
Let's face it, if a 'bug' in Vista prevents browsers from visiting 'www.google.com', or asks you 'would you like to try MSN search instead?' or just puts a popup like 'Warning: accessing this site may expose your computer to malicious code', then google is dead. Since Microsoft knows the USDOJ will let them do anything they want, I wouldn't put it past them. If google sues for billions of dollars after they go bankrupt, it is a small price to pay to preserve the monopoly.
Actually, they work pretty well. The one near here (Altamonte Pass) can produec up to 114MW at a cost of production of around 4.5 cents/kilowatt hour which is very competitive with natural gas generation. The biggest probem is that the wind turbines are up to 35 years old now and are both obsolete and breaking down, and the current design and placement kills a lot of birds.
I'm not sure why this got modded as funny, at least, not if you would like to see Sun survive as a company. I've met very few people in the industry, and almost none at Sun, that impressed me less than Jonathan Schwartz. Scott screwed up by drinking the koolaid the SPARC guys were selling, but he is a very sharp guy. There isn't much wrong with Sun that making a total sommitment to Solaris and Linux on x86_64 (an dasjusting the cost structure to match) wouldn't solve. The first step would be to actually ship the 8-way Galaxy machines. Getting rid of all the people whose job it is to come up with stupid pricing tricks would be a good start too. Does Sun *really* need 3 different configurations of T2000/T1000 differing only by support contract? I don't think so.
Just off the top of my head, it seems unlikely that consumers are going to come beating on Phillips door to get this marvelous new invention, but I guess they can always sell it to cable companies for incorporation in set top boxes so the consumer doesn't get a choice. And I suppose that eventually, they can 'persuade' somebody to introduce legislation to require TV's to include this 'feature'. It wouldn't be the first time.
[that computers running Linux or other F/OSS OS'es are included in their piracy statistics.]
As well they should be. Why, I myself specifically bought a naked PC so I could run a pirated copy of Fedora Core 5 that I got from the notorious warez site fedora.redhat.com. I just hope it doesn't get slashdot'ed now that I've posted it here.
The real key to any 'open standard' is that it be implementable without payment of royalties or encumberments of any kind. That is what makes ODF or Ogg Vorbis 'open standards' and MS Office formats and MP3 non-open standards. Open standards are great for consumers and voters because it means they can buy which ever standard conforming product best suits their needs, and that encourages true competition. Vendors like Microsoft will off course complain loudly, but it isn't supposed to be about what is best for the vendors, it is supposed to be about what is best for the citizens, and Minnesota seems to understand that better than most. I expect that Microsoft will go in with all guns blazing to derail this proposal.
The problem isn't that there is too much porn on the internet, the problem is that modern society doesn't provide adequate opportunities for 'real' sex. Too much work, two wage earner couples, kids, pets, traffic, in laws, etc. - who has the time? Instead of wringing their hands about internet porn, researchers should be working to force companies to offer mid-afternoon sex break w/pay giving people a chance to slip of home for a quick one. Problem solved.
Jonathan Zuck works indirectly for Microsoft. What Microsoft thinks about the GPL is pretty much irrelevant since they don't license any of their software under any variant of the GPL. This article is 100% USDA FUD.
[ even if you into account that Athlon64 FX will soon support DDR2 ] How about when you take into account that the Intel chip is 65nm and the AMD is 90nm? The next AMD die shrink will likely take care of most of the performance difference. In the meantime, in the battle between products that you can't actually buy, Intel appears to have a lead on their prefered benchmarks.
Big ticket, no science programs like Bush II's 'man on mars' fantasy provide huge contracts to aerospace corporations that are big contributors. Programs that distribute a lot of small grants to thousands of scientists and graduate students don't produce contributions. Bush II has always been clear that job number one is taking care of the 'political base', and aerospace contractors have always been part of that.
This article doesn't cut through the marketing fluff, it is 100% marketing fluff. Anybody that thinks that a brand, spanking, new Windows kernel is going to have fewer security issues than the old crufty one doesn't know much about software engineering. The more new lines of code there are, the more opportunities there are for new security bugs. In the Microsoft team is like most engineering teams, dollars to donuts they rewrote the relatively clean code that they could understand, and left all the old, gnarly, indescipherable code because nobody could quite figure out what it did. Windows Vista will be exactly like WinXP except there will be a lot more of it, especially eye candy.
Exactly, code that doesn't run in any other office suite, like, say OpenOffice. So if you choose Microsoft for backend or Web based server applications. you continue to fork out for Microsoft client applicationas as well, and vice versa. Microsoft hasn't been fighting the EU tooth and nail for no reason the last 5 years. They have been doing it precisely so that they could introduce things like their 'snap-ins' and prevent competing implementations. A tiger doesn't change its stripes, and neither do abusive monopolists.