I remember thinking 16 meg of vram was a rediculous amount when those cards first came out, becuase my current computer at the time, a 486DX/33 had 8 meg of ram total. And that was pleanty enough to run windows 3.11, damnit. Hell, later, I managed to scrounge another 12 meg of ram for it, and a second 125 meg harddrive, so I installed windows 95 on that POS.
Notepad was slow, but almost usable.
Almost.
on your robot?
People don't use windows because it's small, fast, and easily extensible. They use it because it's got an (relatively) intuitive gui, (generally) above par hardware support, and hides most of the nitty-gritty crap that you don't really need to know about if all you want to do is run the latest game/desktop publishing ap/photoshop/web browser.
If you're building a robot, OTOH, you have absolutely no use for an OS with a GUI, DirectX, and a wide array of vendor supported soft/hardware. You probably don't want much more than a filesystem, basic IO, and true multitasking in the smallest package available.
When you buy the box for an MMO, you're not really paying for some CDs and a crappy manual, you're paying an account creation fee. This has been the case with most MMO's for the lifetime of the genre (nearly a decade).
This works poorly with automated email systems (mailing lists, registration). (Ex.: when you sign up for a slashdot account, slashdot sends you a confirmation email with your password)
Appearantly the idea is you'd give these sorts of sites a pre-generated sub address (Joe;lucky@domain.com in the example), which you'd delete at a later date once you started to recieve spam. However, this would mean resubscribing to every mailing list you're on, and the potential loss of registered accounts (ex.: msn/passport use email adresses for account names, and password recovery).
In short: the system requires that you delete subaddresses that recieve spam. There are some address you can NOT afford to delete, because they recieve automated mails that you _NEED_. Theoretically you could whitelist every such sender, but few people posses both the knowledge and the time to do so.
An open hotspot with WIMAX-class range would attract an awful lot of leachers in any tech-savvy neighborhood. Likeley far more than most residential broadband connections could handle.
I doubt we'll ever see many free, open WIMAX hotspots. Open WiFi hotspots only really work because the limited range effectively limits the number of people that can leach any such connection to a handful.
As a rather useless aside, California pizza huts run their order database software on a single linux/intel box per store, with a half dozen or so serial terminals for order-taking, timecard functions, and other managerial tasks (food orders, inventory, staff database management).
The platform itself is pretty stable. The software (known as SUS/FMS, IIRC) frequently isn't. The interface is nightmarish (completely keyboard based, with lots of function keys). This is further aggrivated by a large non-english-speaking contingent in the workforce.
I'd speculate they've been using that set-up since they first introduced internet ordering (circa '94?), and furthermore chose to do so primarily for cost and controll reasons.
Further off topic, internet ordering was actually discontinued at most locations for an extended period of time, due to lack of orders. They recently (around december of '03) reintroduced internet ordering to most, if not all stores. In the sillicon valley area, internet orders now make up about 1-5% of all orders.
Summary: some corporations actually opt for antiquated *nix based solutions over antiquated windows based solutions.
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I remember thinking 16 meg of vram was a rediculous amount when those cards first came out, becuase my current computer at the time, a 486DX/33 had 8 meg of ram total. And that was pleanty enough to run windows 3.11, damnit. Hell, later, I managed to scrounge another 12 meg of ram for it, and a second 125 meg harddrive, so I installed windows 95 on that POS. Notepad was slow, but almost usable. Almost.
on your robot? People don't use windows because it's small, fast, and easily extensible. They use it because it's got an (relatively) intuitive gui, (generally) above par hardware support, and hides most of the nitty-gritty crap that you don't really need to know about if all you want to do is run the latest game/desktop publishing ap/photoshop/web browser. If you're building a robot, OTOH, you have absolutely no use for an OS with a GUI, DirectX, and a wide array of vendor supported soft/hardware. You probably don't want much more than a filesystem, basic IO, and true multitasking in the smallest package available.
When you buy the box for an MMO, you're not really paying for some CDs and a crappy manual, you're paying an account creation fee. This has been the case with most MMO's for the lifetime of the genre (nearly a decade).
Oh, I get it. That was a parody of a classic linux distro flame.
You can pick up a 200 gig 7200 rpm 3.5" drive for at least $30 less than your 60 gig 2.5". We're talking $0.75/gig vs. $2.50/gig.
This works poorly with automated email systems (mailing lists, registration). (Ex.: when you sign up for a slashdot account, slashdot sends you a confirmation email with your password)
Appearantly the idea is you'd give these sorts of sites a pre-generated sub address (Joe;lucky@domain.com in the example), which you'd delete at a later date once you started to recieve spam. However, this would mean resubscribing to every mailing list you're on, and the potential loss of registered accounts (ex.: msn/passport use email adresses for account names, and password recovery).
In short: the system requires that you delete subaddresses that recieve spam. There are some address you can NOT afford to delete, because they recieve automated mails that you _NEED_. Theoretically you could whitelist every such sender, but few people posses both the knowledge and the time to do so.
An open hotspot with WIMAX-class range would attract an awful lot of leachers in any tech-savvy neighborhood. Likeley far more than most residential broadband connections could handle.
I doubt we'll ever see many free, open WIMAX hotspots. Open WiFi hotspots only really work because the limited range effectively limits the number of people that can leach any such connection to a handful.
As a rather useless aside, California pizza huts run their order database software on a single linux/intel box per store, with a half dozen or so serial terminals for order-taking, timecard functions, and other managerial tasks (food orders, inventory, staff database management).
The platform itself is pretty stable. The software (known as SUS/FMS, IIRC) frequently isn't. The interface is nightmarish (completely keyboard based, with lots of function keys). This is further aggrivated by a large non-english-speaking contingent in the workforce.
I'd speculate they've been using that set-up since they first introduced internet ordering (circa '94?), and furthermore chose to do so primarily for cost and controll reasons.
Further off topic, internet ordering was actually discontinued at most locations for an extended period of time, due to lack of orders. They recently (around december of '03) reintroduced internet ordering to most, if not all stores. In the sillicon valley area, internet orders now make up about 1-5% of all orders.
Summary: some corporations actually opt for antiquated *nix based solutions over antiquated windows based solutions.