Professional reviews are useful for a very general overview of a game, but usually it is easier to find important details at places like GameFaqs. People posting on their own without a profit motive are more likely to mention that a game is really short or overly linear, for example. Of course the noise to signal ratio is very high, but the information is there for people with a little patience.
Isn't one of the side-effects of climate change that various places get more extreme weather? Where I live, we've gotten less snow than normal, Boston got buried in snow recently, Florida got four hurricanes (two of which went into the Appalachian Mtns.), and there's the rain recently in the south-west US. Is any of this more extreme than usual?
Since when did Oracle run on Linux on SPARC? Also, a maxed out E450 has 480MHz CPUs, which are hot stuff--for 1999. Instead of the overhead of UML, Solaris 10 Containers would be better.
Crap, for what most people end up using Oracle for, they could use PostgreSQL and use that money for more man-years or better hardware or a coffee service or, well, just lots of stuff to make life nicer.
Niagara is 8 cores with four threads per core. Still, paying for 8 CPUs on a single little rack-mount computer is pretty silly. I think Oracle will have to cave in eventually.
They've become so protective of their OS in it's current form that they fail to realise that other technologies may start to supersede them.
May? It's already happened at the kernel level with Solaris 10 and at the desktop level with Mac OS X. Windows is second-rate, now, and the only thing Microsoft really has is Office. The only reason they can keep a hold on Office is their file formats.
So, Microsoft is stuck in a middle place of sorts between Solaris on the servers and Mac on the desktops. Now that Linux and OpenOffice.org are aiming squarely for that middle place of sorts--but more cheaply--sort of leaves Microsoft in a perilous position, IMO.
I think the bricks will start falling in force in Asia, where localized Linux desktops with OpenOffice.org are getting popular. For a time, Sun even claimed to be the world's largest distributer of Linux due to a single contract with the Chinese government. People try to downplay OpenOffice.org's significance all the time, but it is truly a brilliant strategic move against MS Office.
The bricks will fall last in the USA, where the "PC revolution" started earliest and has the biggest entrenchment. Thus, it will probably be hard to tell from U.S. media outlets what is really happening--the real news will be from overseas.
...Americans are more likely to side with the entrepreneur who drives the market forward by playing a ruthless game of hardball than the competitor who whines from the sidelines...
The hardball in IT wears really thin after people realize that it is not resulting in clear improvements in productivity but, instead, results in balooning infrastructure budgets and extremely worker-distracting practices for system maintenance.
Why is it that in once place I worked, the UNIX workstations were rebooted only a couple times a year for maintenance but something got done to the PCs nearly every day (scans, reboots, patches, etc.)? Just how long can Windows be something to laugh at in the break room before it just gets plain old? Just how long can businesses feel good about the supposedly cheap up-front prices while their business is being eaten at from the inside-out? How long until some smiling guy in a butterfly suit just doesn't distract the customers enough from the real issues?
As much as I, personally, do not like them or their products, I doubt that Microsoft is going away anytime soon or anytime at all. Too many people have invested too much money and time in the MSFT platform.
I would be okay with Microsoft being as big in fifteen years as Novell is now. The people who invested heavily in MS Office The Platform can still get what they need from the Microsoft Legacy Support Corporation. For everyone else there's UNIX (OpenSolaris), sorta-UNIX-but-very-pretty (Mac OS X), and workalike-UNIX (Linux and the BSDs). Is there even a non-UNIX-like OS that has any growth potential, right now?
...they're _all_ getting behind one of the Un*x's or the other...
I think this is because they all more-or-less work together. A company can choose Mac OS X for secretaries and managers, a customized Linux desktop for the call center, Red Hat/Solaris in the server room, and NetBSD/OpenBSD running the network, but basically have the same skill set across them. The whole IT staff can generally work on all systems with a few people specializing in the finer points of each. Contrast this with Windows, where a company often has to have a dedicated staff just for that platform.
The time savings alone would be worth it. For example, just how often do people need to patch their firewall if it is running OpenBSD? I'm still using an old OpenBSD version and recently looked at their website for security patches...and there were none that mattered to me! Time invested in patching: 5 minutes to look at their website.
Because they have ten years of baggage concerning security, interoperability, etc. They got to where they are by really good marketing covering up their business ethics, and, eventually, most people become desensitized to the marketing.
We cannot forget that artists and labels can remove restrictions for music just as companies use Open Source licenses to remove restrictions for software. If "fair use" is vague in copyright law, what's stopping artists and labels from adding it back into the licensing contract? A good customer is a satisfied customer, right?
I think Sun would be wise to concentrate on hardware and selling services, like IBM.
I guess that's why their new pricing model for Solaris 10 is based on support and service _only_. Sun have clearly shown they can adjust their business model to stay afloat. There is no price advantage, now, of Linux over Solaris 10--customers will choose based on their wants and needs, not price. The only reason, probably, that this bank could not stay with Sun is that they started planning a long time ago before Sun's new pricing.
Tell your Sun engineers that Sun sells Linux, too, on really good hardware. These articles touting migrations to/from Sun are annoying as they could just as well be migrations from Sun to Sun.
Moving away from a CPU to more of a "instruction execution unit" like the Itanium (and moving optimizing to the compiler) is the only realistic choice.
Funny that everyone else is persuing massively-multi-core chips instead of VLIW. Other companies had tried VLIW, too, such as MAJC and Transmeta, with only limited success.
Just go peruse Sun's blogs (http://blogs.sun.com). Sun doesn't hate Linux, several of their engineers say so, and they even sell Linux on their servers and as part of the Java Desktop System.
Sun is a _systems_and_services_ company. Sure, their main product is Solaris on SPARC (and, now, Opteron), but they'll keep on selling Linux, I bet. The reason is that Solaris and Linux both use open standards and protocols, so interoperability isn't the big mess it is with Windows.
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Professional reviews are useful for a very general overview of a game, but usually it is easier to find important details at places like GameFaqs. People posting on their own without a profit motive are more likely to mention that a game is really short or overly linear, for example. Of course the noise to signal ratio is very high, but the information is there for people with a little patience.
I bet he read all about that on the internets!
Isn't one of the side-effects of climate change that various places get more extreme weather? Where I live, we've gotten less snow than normal, Boston got buried in snow recently, Florida got four hurricanes (two of which went into the Appalachian Mtns.), and there's the rain recently in the south-west US. Is any of this more extreme than usual?
Since when did Oracle run on Linux on SPARC? Also, a maxed out E450 has 480MHz CPUs, which are hot stuff--for 1999. Instead of the overhead of UML, Solaris 10 Containers would be better.
I believe it's down to $17K/cpu these days.
Crap, for what most people end up using Oracle for, they could use PostgreSQL and use that money for more man-years or better hardware or a coffee service or, well, just lots of stuff to make life nicer.
Niagara is 8 cores with four threads per core. Still, paying for 8 CPUs on a single little rack-mount computer is pretty silly. I think Oracle will have to cave in eventually.
They've become so protective of their OS in it's current form that they fail to realise that other technologies may start to supersede them.
May? It's already happened at the kernel level with Solaris 10 and at the desktop level with Mac OS X. Windows is second-rate, now, and the only thing Microsoft really has is Office. The only reason they can keep a hold on Office is their file formats.
So, Microsoft is stuck in a middle place of sorts between Solaris on the servers and Mac on the desktops. Now that Linux and OpenOffice.org are aiming squarely for that middle place of sorts--but more cheaply--sort of leaves Microsoft in a perilous position, IMO.
I think the bricks will start falling in force in Asia, where localized Linux desktops with OpenOffice.org are getting popular. For a time, Sun even claimed to be the world's largest distributer of Linux due to a single contract with the Chinese government. People try to downplay OpenOffice.org's significance all the time, but it is truly a brilliant strategic move against MS Office.
The bricks will fall last in the USA, where the "PC revolution" started earliest and has the biggest entrenchment. Thus, it will probably be hard to tell from U.S. media outlets what is really happening--the real news will be from overseas.
The hardball in IT wears really thin after people realize that it is not resulting in clear improvements in productivity but, instead, results in balooning infrastructure budgets and extremely worker-distracting practices for system maintenance.
Why is it that in once place I worked, the UNIX workstations were rebooted only a couple times a year for maintenance but something got done to the PCs nearly every day (scans, reboots, patches, etc.)? Just how long can Windows be something to laugh at in the break room before it just gets plain old? Just how long can businesses feel good about the supposedly cheap up-front prices while their business is being eaten at from the inside-out? How long until some smiling guy in a butterfly suit just doesn't distract the customers enough from the real issues?
As much as I, personally, do not like them or their products, I doubt that Microsoft is going away anytime soon or anytime at all. Too many people have invested too much money and time in the MSFT platform.
I would be okay with Microsoft being as big in fifteen years as Novell is now. The people who invested heavily in MS Office The Platform can still get what they need from the Microsoft Legacy Support Corporation. For everyone else there's UNIX (OpenSolaris), sorta-UNIX-but-very-pretty (Mac OS X), and workalike-UNIX (Linux and the BSDs). Is there even a non-UNIX-like OS that has any growth potential, right now?
...they're _all_ getting behind one of the Un*x's or the other...
I think this is because they all more-or-less work together. A company can choose Mac OS X for secretaries and managers, a customized Linux desktop for the call center, Red Hat/Solaris in the server room, and NetBSD/OpenBSD running the network, but basically have the same skill set across them. The whole IT staff can generally work on all systems with a few people specializing in the finer points of each. Contrast this with Windows, where a company often has to have a dedicated staff just for that platform.
The time savings alone would be worth it. For example, just how often do people need to patch their firewall if it is running OpenBSD? I'm still using an old OpenBSD version and recently looked at their website for security patches...and there were none that mattered to me! Time invested in patching: 5 minutes to look at their website.
With 34.50B, how can they fail?
Because they have ten years of baggage concerning security, interoperability, etc. They got to where they are by really good marketing covering up their business ethics, and, eventually, most people become desensitized to the marketing.
It seems on-topic, I think.
We cannot forget that artists and labels can remove restrictions for music just as companies use Open Source licenses to remove restrictions for software. If "fair use" is vague in copyright law, what's stopping artists and labels from adding it back into the licensing contract? A good customer is a satisfied customer, right?
"I'm planning to buy a big Unix Server. Think I can go with Microsoft?"
I just had a nano-epiphany: "micro soft" is the exact opposite of "big iron".
Whatever consensus Slashdot reaches on a given day reflects fashion not reason.
I think Sun would be wise to concentrate on hardware and selling services, like IBM.
I guess that's why their new pricing model for Solaris 10 is based on support and service _only_. Sun have clearly shown they can adjust their business model to stay afloat. There is no price advantage, now, of Linux over Solaris 10--customers will choose based on their wants and needs, not price. The only reason, probably, that this bank could not stay with Sun is that they started planning a long time ago before Sun's new pricing.
Tell your Sun engineers that Sun sells Linux, too, on really good hardware. These articles touting migrations to/from Sun are annoying as they could just as well be migrations from Sun to Sun.
Moving away from a CPU to more of a "instruction execution unit" like the Itanium (and moving optimizing to the compiler) is the only realistic choice.
Funny that everyone else is persuing massively-multi-core chips instead of VLIW. Other companies had tried VLIW, too, such as MAJC and Transmeta, with only limited success.
It appears we have found Homer Simpson's long lost fraternal twin.
At least Microsoft isn't getting into the condom business. "Introducing Microsoft Condom 3.0, now it actually prevents pregnancy!"
Steve sells PowerMac Cells by the seashore.
Just go peruse Sun's blogs (http://blogs.sun.com). Sun doesn't hate Linux, several of their engineers say so, and they even sell Linux on their servers and as part of the Java Desktop System.
Sun is a _systems_and_services_ company. Sure, their main product is Solaris on SPARC (and, now, Opteron), but they'll keep on selling Linux, I bet. The reason is that Solaris and Linux both use open standards and protocols, so interoperability isn't the big mess it is with Windows.
Philosophy and Law students could probably use Slashdot as a crash course in logical fallacies.
Microsoft Security Vulnerabilities is prime for its own dedicated section at slashdot. The number of stories certainly warrants it.