Republicans now stand only for moral conservatism at the expense of everything else. They don't care about individual rights, because free thinking people could act immorally. They don't care about states rights, because states could support immoral legislation. All they care about is their 'one true way', which is a farce. Removing everyone's ability to be immoral is in itself immoral, but they probably are completely blind to that. Cue the Spanish Inquisition jokes...just to lighten the mood a bit.
Odds are those iMacs will cost your school several times less in support costs than a Windows PC would. You should actually be thankful that they are _not_ using Windows PCs.
I'm far from the president of the MS fan club, but anybody who gets any low- to mid-level job anywhere is going to be sitting in front of a Winbox and needs to know how to use it.
Then, there should be a separate vocational elective, like "shop" or "home economics", for computer skills. Microsoft-specific training has no place in any regular classroom.
In the future, if only 0.00001% of people are using MS Office for their specific niche environment, I'd be perfectly fine with that. That means the people who genuinely derive value from Office get it, while everyone else saves their money for more important things.
The thing about Open Source is it can potentially reveal trade secrets, things like secret hardware specs. designed to keep other companies and people in the dark regarding the particular nuances of an implementation, thus putting them at a brief competitive disadvantage, at least until the newer, better, more attractive product comes along.
Therein lies the genius behind the CDDL. People try to trivialize Sun's efforts, but it's like trivializing a work of art. The more people study it the more they see the artists insights and realize prior criticism was unfounded. When both programmers and PHBs get to understand the CDDL, they will realize it suits _both_ of them, which is a rare accomplishment. So many people have misgivings about the GPL, simply because it requires so much dilligence to stay legal. The CDDL makes staying clean so simple--it's merely a matter of keeping separate files. That's something programmers will love, as it frees them from always having to think like a lawyer. Just keep the files separate, mission complete.
As an outsider, I see Sun's marketing and blogs, etc., and I'm not convinced that Schwartz is merely a pointy-hair. He's said some really good things to Wall Street customers, and it seems he is a strong advocate for the 'utility grid'. My only fear is that Sun is leading the edge of the 'utility grid' by a bit too much, because it is a cultural shift away from capital expenditure into one of pay-as-you-go get-the-tax-writeoff-now expenditure. For computer hardware that's a really big change. It's a change that could single handedly make Sun the most cost-effective supplier on the planet, but it's still got an uphill battle against established thinking.
Sun's execs also all said the right things in D.C. this week. Trusted Solaris and SunRay got huge exposure, there. I was suprised there are government suppliers whose _entire_ business model is based on Trusted Solaris. No matter what people say about "the war on terror", Sun is poised to cash in big on the sentiments in government and the huge defense expenditure, right now.
One thing Schwartz does, though, is give fuel to the Slashdot flames a bit much. I wonder if it is intentional, because his blog almost says that any publicity is good publicity. Considering that Sun isn't suing the pants off anyone or anything like that, perhaps Sun can't get genuinely bad publicity in his mind. At least Sun's discussions on Slashdot don't read as bad as Microsofts! Slashdot has been skewering Microsoft this week.
When Netburst was first introduced, Intel tried to reassure everyone with promises of a heady 5-6GHz within a few years and eventually numbers as high as 8GHz.
I wonder how many Intel engineers got spanked over this? 8GHz?!?
I recieved a college degree and met my wife when Clinton was in office. All I got when Bush 1 was in office was an RC car, and I had to put it together myself!
On average, corporations redistribute that wealth much more efficiently than governments do. Just look at the social security debate, for example. The government can debate and debate and debate, but they won't be motivated to act until doing so matters in getting votes. Voters won't be prodded into caring until their checks start disappearing in 30 or 40 or 50 years. On the other hand, a corporation has to act within a few years, otherwise they are screwed.
Take Sun, for example. Could anyone have predicted what they are doing now five years ago? If they were the Congress with no competition, they's still be trying to sell the Sun 1.
The irony in the living wage/minimum wage arguments is that the economy adapts within a few years such that the new living wage is worth no more than the old one. There is simply no way that the government waving a magic wand in the law books can change the fundamental strength or weakness of the economy, unless it is the biggies like the federal interest rate or tax law (i.e., money to/from the government itself).
"Datacenter's don't strike me as the kind of customer that would invest in a bleeding edge technology that hasn't been through the paces."
They'll probably buy a few at first, test them, give a 'thumbs up', and then buy more. Also, people running parallelizable simulations will jump all over dual core, ASAP. Small businesses too--imagine getting a 3RU or 4RU server with 4 or 8 cores and 4 or 6 disk slots, which is enough to run everything the business does for a long time.
Intel isn't losing money, but talented engineers are a limited resource. They would have bought the farm on Itanium if they weren't making money on Pentium.
What is interesting is that in spite of being so wealthy, their main Pentium line is suffering. It uses more power, it's stopped advancing in MHz, it doesn't scale in SMP well at all, and it loses benchmarks to chips in the same price range with 1/2 to 2/3 the clock rate.
I think what has happened is that HP/Intel got into a rut with Itanium that will take a long time to recover from. Intel won't go anywhere, but they will have to accept getting trumped by their competitors for a few years, now.
To add insult to injury, Opterons are benchmarking faster than even the Itaniums, and in floating point, no less!
The Quadro FX 4400 has 512MB of RAM. Sun has one that has a gig of RAM but is really really specialized to the V800 server. However, 3dlabs has probably been there the longest, although I'm sure there are some more specialized ones out there.
Yeah, at one of my previous jobs, I would have killed for a spec that was *only* 680 pages. I agree that 680 pages for everything OO.org does is not bad at all.
Oh, and your other reply that developers wanted to edit the documentation in Word...all I can say is that they are idiots. Word is not a documentation system, it's a Microsoft revenue machine.
Paper has been around in some useful form for millenia. Wikis have been around for less than a decade. And if you have to, how do you print out a Wiki effectively? Attach it in an e-mail? Submit it for a publication?
Also, a well-done version control system can apply just as well to OASIS as a Wiki or other formats.
Regardless of paper-centered or not, OASIS at least means in 100 years reading archives won't be a problem, given the media is intact. That's already made Microsoft's entire office suite obselete, IMO. I wonder if Microsoft internally even documents their formats outside of the source code.
Even though other open formats have come before OASIS, adoption by OO.org and others will make it the de facto standard open standard document format, which is a step in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Republicans now stand only for moral conservatism at the expense of everything else. They don't care about individual rights, because free thinking people could act immorally. They don't care about states rights, because states could support immoral legislation. All they care about is their 'one true way', which is a farce. Removing everyone's ability to be immoral is in itself immoral, but they probably are completely blind to that. Cue the Spanish Inquisition jokes...just to lighten the mood a bit.
Odds are those iMacs will cost your school several times less in support costs than a Windows PC would. You should actually be thankful that they are _not_ using Windows PCs.
I'm far from the president of the MS fan club, but anybody who gets any low- to mid-level job anywhere is going to be sitting in front of a Winbox and needs to know how to use it.
Then, there should be a separate vocational elective, like "shop" or "home economics", for computer skills. Microsoft-specific training has no place in any regular classroom.
What about Evolution?
In the future, if only 0.00001% of people are using MS Office for their specific niche environment, I'd be perfectly fine with that. That means the people who genuinely derive value from Office get it, while everyone else saves their money for more important things.
iWork needs an OASIS import/export function, if it doesn't already have it.
The thing about Open Source is it can potentially reveal trade secrets, things like secret hardware specs. designed to keep other companies and people in the dark regarding the particular nuances of an implementation, thus putting them at a brief competitive disadvantage, at least until the newer, better, more attractive product comes along.
Therein lies the genius behind the CDDL. People try to trivialize Sun's efforts, but it's like trivializing a work of art. The more people study it the more they see the artists insights and realize prior criticism was unfounded. When both programmers and PHBs get to understand the CDDL, they will realize it suits _both_ of them, which is a rare accomplishment. So many people have misgivings about the GPL, simply because it requires so much dilligence to stay legal. The CDDL makes staying clean so simple--it's merely a matter of keeping separate files. That's something programmers will love, as it frees them from always having to think like a lawyer. Just keep the files separate, mission complete.
As an outsider, I see Sun's marketing and blogs, etc., and I'm not convinced that Schwartz is merely a pointy-hair. He's said some really good things to Wall Street customers, and it seems he is a strong advocate for the 'utility grid'. My only fear is that Sun is leading the edge of the 'utility grid' by a bit too much, because it is a cultural shift away from capital expenditure into one of pay-as-you-go get-the-tax-writeoff-now expenditure. For computer hardware that's a really big change. It's a change that could single handedly make Sun the most cost-effective supplier on the planet, but it's still got an uphill battle against established thinking.
Sun's execs also all said the right things in D.C. this week. Trusted Solaris and SunRay got huge exposure, there. I was suprised there are government suppliers whose _entire_ business model is based on Trusted Solaris. No matter what people say about "the war on terror", Sun is poised to cash in big on the sentiments in government and the huge defense expenditure, right now.
One thing Schwartz does, though, is give fuel to the Slashdot flames a bit much. I wonder if it is intentional, because his blog almost says that any publicity is good publicity. Considering that Sun isn't suing the pants off anyone or anything like that, perhaps Sun can't get genuinely bad publicity in his mind. At least Sun's discussions on Slashdot don't read as bad as Microsofts! Slashdot has been skewering Microsoft this week.
Just say you found a mouse in a beer bottle, and you can get a job at the local brewery!
Heres int rates:
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V40z 4 cores, 4 chips, 1 core/chip 68.0 76.7
ION Computer Systems I2X4 (1.6GHz Itanium 2 processor) 4 cores, 4 chips, 1 core/chip 64.5 64.9
Opteron wins again in both base and peak.
Look at SPEC FP _rate_, where it matters.
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V40z 4 cores, 4 chips, 1 core/chip 79.6 87.1
ION Computer Systems I2X4 (1.6GHz Itanium 2 processor) 4 cores, 4 chips, 1 core/chip 78.7 78.7
The Opteron system beats the Itanium in both base and peak scores.
When Netburst was first introduced, Intel tried to reassure everyone with promises of a heady 5-6GHz within a few years and eventually numbers as high as 8GHz.
I wonder how many Intel engineers got spanked over this? 8GHz?!?
Correction: "MS deserve to be replaced until they become fair."
I recieved a college degree and met my wife when Clinton was in office. All I got when Bush 1 was in office was an RC car, and I had to put it together myself!
On average, corporations redistribute that wealth much more efficiently than governments do. Just look at the social security debate, for example. The government can debate and debate and debate, but they won't be motivated to act until doing so matters in getting votes. Voters won't be prodded into caring until their checks start disappearing in 30 or 40 or 50 years. On the other hand, a corporation has to act within a few years, otherwise they are screwed.
Take Sun, for example. Could anyone have predicted what they are doing now five years ago? If they were the Congress with no competition, they's still be trying to sell the Sun 1.
The irony in the living wage/minimum wage arguments is that the economy adapts within a few years such that the new living wage is worth no more than the old one. There is simply no way that the government waving a magic wand in the law books can change the fundamental strength or weakness of the economy, unless it is the biggies like the federal interest rate or tax law (i.e., money to/from the government itself).
"Datacenter's don't strike me as the kind of customer that would invest in a bleeding edge technology that hasn't been through the paces."
They'll probably buy a few at first, test them, give a 'thumbs up', and then buy more. Also, people running parallelizable simulations will jump all over dual core, ASAP. Small businesses too--imagine getting a 3RU or 4RU server with 4 or 8 cores and 4 or 6 disk slots, which is enough to run everything the business does for a long time.
Intel isn't losing money, but talented engineers are a limited resource. They would have bought the farm on Itanium if they weren't making money on Pentium.
What is interesting is that in spite of being so wealthy, their main Pentium line is suffering. It uses more power, it's stopped advancing in MHz, it doesn't scale in SMP well at all, and it loses benchmarks to chips in the same price range with 1/2 to 2/3 the clock rate.
I think what has happened is that HP/Intel got into a rut with Itanium that will take a long time to recover from. Intel won't go anywhere, but they will have to accept getting trumped by their competitors for a few years, now.
To add insult to injury, Opterons are benchmarking faster than even the Itaniums, and in floating point, no less!
The Quadro FX 4400 has 512MB of RAM. Sun has one that has a gig of RAM but is really really specialized to the V800 server. However, 3dlabs has probably been there the longest, although I'm sure there are some more specialized ones out there.
Yeah, at one of my previous jobs, I would have killed for a spec that was *only* 680 pages. I agree that 680 pages for everything OO.org does is not bad at all.
Oh, and your other reply that developers wanted to edit the documentation in Word...all I can say is that they are idiots. Word is not a documentation system, it's a Microsoft revenue machine.
Send them a PDF.
Fine, but don't let the ISO committee process ruin it.
Is the any indication if their proposed format is entirely free of patent issues?
Is there any indication that Sun, Novell, Red Hat, etc. don't have enough lawyers?
Paper focused documents are next to useless.
Paper has been around in some useful form for millenia. Wikis have been around for less than a decade. And if you have to, how do you print out a Wiki effectively? Attach it in an e-mail? Submit it for a publication?
Also, a well-done version control system can apply just as well to OASIS as a Wiki or other formats.
Regardless of paper-centered or not, OASIS at least means in 100 years reading archives won't be a problem, given the media is intact. That's already made Microsoft's entire office suite obselete, IMO. I wonder if Microsoft internally even documents their formats outside of the source code.
Even though other open formats have come before OASIS, adoption by OO.org and others will make it the de facto standard open standard document format, which is a step in the right direction.