I assume you know *everything* about what it's like to live in a 3rd world country?
I have more experience with it than most people. Mexico, China, Russia and Nigeria count I think, and if not it's because the real third world (how is it defined?) is even worse off, so my conclusions should just be stronger there. (I haven't actually been to any but Mexico, unfortunately, but I have developed close relationships with natives of the others, who were quite happy to enlighten me about conditions there, and I've had the opportunity to observe natives of both places for extended periods of time.)
Anyway, there is no need to start patronizing (spellcheck?) me, since you seem to automatically assume that I'm one of those "spoiled little whiners who insist eve... etc etc". Or am I this time over-interpreting *your* words?
You are over-interpreting me I believe. I was just pointing out that you seem to be assuming that people just won't use anything that isn't supremely "easy" to use. So you think they are either lazy or stupid or both? Third worlders are no dumber than the rest of us, and much less lazy.
In a very rich country it may well be that most people will not want to use old-school programs like I mentioned, because it is easy for them to get something that doesn't require as much work to learn to use (at a very basic level.) But in a poor country, that dynamic is not so likely to be there. It's one thing to turn down a 486 because you can go get a PIII and some gooey-gum-drops. (It's still mildly stupid, in my mind, since the gooey-gum-drop crap makes real work harder - not easier, but there is still some sense to it too - not everyone actually needs any real power anyway, and taking the path of least resistance is a fairly strong human behaviour pattern.) It would be quite another thing for someone who couldn't afford the PIII if they had 50 years salary liquid to turn down a perfectly functional 486!
So, in sum, I thought your comment was analogous to someone saying that sending old cars to third world countries was pointless, since no one would drive anything without ABS and the NorthStar system anyway. Silly.
You know, honestly, you obviously haven't the slightest clue what life in a third world country is like. These people are used to working for what they have, they aren't spoiled little whiners who insist everything be handed to them on a silver platter with gooey-gum-drop widgets. And that's why they are going to be eating our lunch soon, if we can just avoid bombing them for a few years.
try running kde/gnome/mozilla/staroffice on an old machine with limited memory
Why on earth would I do that? That would be silly.
What I would and have done, however, is run far less bloated programs on Linux on old hardware, and it runs just great. It's a simple matter of avoiding the bloat. Who needs KDE or Gnome? If you need X at all, use Blackbox, or IceWM, or WindowMaker. Mozilla? Get real. Netscape Navigator, Konquerer, Opera, or better yet, Lynx or Links. StarOffice? Please.
An old 486 with 16 Megs of ram will run Emacs (NoX), Links, Mutt, BitchX, and even Licq with the the text-mode plugin just fine.
Wow, I was going to reply to this, but the AC really nailed it.
I'm going to repost what he said, in case he's below your filter.
------------Begin Quote---------------
From the Mozilla.org homepage: Mozilla is an open-source web browser, designed for standards compliance, performance and portability
The real goal of Mozilla is to create XUL and XPCOM and offer a truly cross platfrom network component environment.
Great! Who the fuck asked for that?! Not to mention that their home page is lying! We've already got SOAP and Java and COM and CORBA and 100 other solution that actually get used in the field. Get used to the idea that nobody of note is going to make use of this "cross platform network component environment", and that that goal has effectively shafted millions of potential browser users as dupes who accidentally download someone's toolkit sample app.
The crap that really turns me off about Mozilla is the arm chair quarterbacks who mouth off without a clue. You obviously didn't even read the freaking bug report [mozilla.org].
No, as I made clear in another comment up the page, I haven't been involved with this project in around 6 months. Before that I wasted untold hours testing and reporting bugs though, so I think I have some idea of how the project goes. I was always a Netscape user, and I had high hopes for Mozilla, but for years I've seen it go downhill, because instead of simply writing a browser people seem to think it's necessary to write everything else instead. A mail client, a calender, a word processor, a spell checker, a freaking completely new widget library that doesn't look right *anywhere*, and the list goes on for page after page after page. As of when I finally threw up my hands in disgust and gave up on this project, Mozilla had about 4 times the footprint of Netscape Navigator, was several times slower, ugly as sin, and crashed all the time. This after *years* of work, which unfortunately seems to have been almost exclusively spent on adding features instead of making the core features work. And don't tell me "try it now, the nightly build is so much better now" - if I had a penny for every time I've heard that I'd be a very rich man.
...ispell isn't available on all platforms, and it would seriously slow Mozilla down, since spawning a process is usually pretty slow.
But as I pointed out, the source is open, and there are in fact even binaries for most platforms available anyway. Ispell binaries are available for MS/DOS, Win32, OS/2, and even the Amiga, as well as *nix. http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/fmg-members/geoff/ispel l.html
Aspell (http://aspell.sourceforge.net/) would probably be a better choice, and it's also open source and already available on several platforms.
It strikes me as very ironic that you would suggest that spawning a process to run the spell check would be rejected for being too slow. I'm going to be laughing about that for quite awhile. At any rate, the source is available, so there are plenty of options besides reinventing the wheel.
The cross-platform nature of Mozilla is very, very important, and very critical to its development. All features must be incorporated into the codebase and written in such a manner that the platform doesn't matter.
Gahhh this is the crap that really turns me off from Mozilla. It seems like the project is dead set on reinventing everything. What is the point of writing a spellchecker when there are several very good ones already available, and open source even so if you need to you can tweak as needed to get them to work with your program properly? Just pipe the text to ispell (or any similar already existing program) in the background and all you have to write is a simple parser to handle the results.
While I'm on the subject, why write an email client? There are plenty of great email clients out there, all the browser needs to know is what program to invoke to handle mailto links. Why write an entire widget library just to make pretty buttons? So you can turn around and add "native-style widgets on winXP and OS X" - wow, you can get mozilla to look like it belongs on the box it's running, at a significant performance hit, and it took how many man hours of coding to do that? I'm sorry, I just don't understand why anyone would spend all this time on duplicating so much work unecessarily. It would seem to me that your time would be better spent actually writing a browser instead of, it appears, spending most of the coding time on anything and everything but the browser.
* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.
I haven't tried Mozilla for some months, so this information could be out of date - but I doubt it, it's been this way from when I first used Netscape up until the last Mozilla build I used, maybe 6 months ago.
Disabling cookies causes the browser to refuse them. This will break many websites, unfortunately. However, there is a little trick that avoids that problem, and still prevents cookie data from ever being saved. Your browser will still accept and return them, satisfying those pushy websites, but will never actually save them, so they all get erased whenever you close the browser, in effect. Well, actually they never even get written.
Netscape/Mozilla stores cookies in a file named cookies.txt, in plain text format. (I wish opera did that, why they have to store them in some wierdo formatted file I don't know, but I digress.) If you simply make that file a link to/dev/null (in *nix) or delete it and make a directory with the name cookies.txt in the same place (on dos systems, this is a minor hack to overcome the deficiency of not having a/dev/null) then everything works fine, except that the cookies never get saved. Since a copy is kept in memory as long as the session lasts, websites get what they want, but as soon as you close the browser, it's all gone, so you get what you want too.
I also know not everyone agrees with me. But, for whatever it's worth, I gave up on Mozilla along time ago. Why? Featuritis. God, no offense, but on this issue you guys are worse than MS. Every release has more and more features that I don't want or need, and takes the inevitable hit from that on speed and reliability and footprint.
I'll be happy to give it another try when I find out that you have a usable configure script that will let me simply compile all that stuff out (I've heard rumblings about that possibility on and off,) but I'm not holding my breath. You could throw at least half the code right out the door and I, and many others I know, wouldn't miss it at all. At the same time, the few features I do want never seem to be a priority.
For now I'm using Opera, and except for being closed source, I really like it. Fairly small footprint, very fast, the few features I want (like intelligent cookie handling) are pretty much there. Unlike Mozilla, it doesn't make my PII/128MBram system perform like a 486.
I can't believe I'm actually getting into an argument about the feasibility of "Klingons".. *sigh*
Why not? Certainly there is a degree of silliness to the subject, but that hardly makes it unworthy of discussion.
Ok, you say that Klingon women who are weaker and therefore not able to do 'honorable' things much are responsible for Klingon advancement? Who builds the ships?... Males fight and rule.. Females design.. Slaves implement the designs under guard of males. That's the only way it could work.. But, with the exception of prison camps (ST-VI) we've not seen Klingons as keeping slaves.
The lowest class of males, the civilians (those that have been rejected for military service) do the manual labour and other low level tasks, all the while struggling for a chance to show themselves worthy of being allowed into the military of course. The military females, however, dominate the more technical positions. And yes, that does mean they have more honour than those poor civilian males. And yes, those males don't like that one bit. But the males who did make it into the military would happily slaughter them if they tried to revolt. So they aren't the slaves of your scenario, exactly, but there is certainly a level of coercion involved in getting them to work. The klingon leaders have long known the value of good weapons - and will do what they have to in order to acquire them.
This system is made fairly explicit in several DS9 episodes, the Klingon General (Martok?) was rejected by the military and served for a time as a civilian contractor, the lowest of the low in Klingon society, before a ship he was on was boarded and he managed to impress the commander in the battle that ensued, earning a battlefield commission.
The Klingons actually do have a source of technicians and scientists. This is the female of the species. Smaller and weaker than her male counterpart, she is however often more intelligent, and almost always better educated (by our standards.) Roles without sufficient honour for the men, scientific and technical positions in particular, are reserved for them. The advances of Klingon women, supplemented by the technological gains achieved by conquering more advanced, but less canny and battleworthy races, is responsible for their ability to compete.
As already pointed out, the licensing is still Free. And, because of GNOME, KDE is now Free as well, and has been for quite awhile. So even if GNOME does go down in flames like this, it will still have served its purpose.
Miguel is certainly not inspiring confidence lately. He's either an utter moron or an utter genius, and only time will tell which, but experience leads me to view his recent statements as probably being in the first category.
It affects it not at all, since this so-called standards organisation has no authority over anyone, and everyone who matters has already decided to ignore them.
Ahh, sorry, the link was slashdotted so I had to go from the blurb *sigh* always a bad idea, I know.
Regardless, I stand by the gist of my statement though. I don't know how old their HP boxes were either. But I've worked with old HPs. In '96 I was working on a network of PA-RISC boxes that were considered very old at the time, and in terms of reliability they were light years above *current* Intel hardware.
Yeah, they were a pain in some ways. A coworker at the time was busy trying to port Linux to them, and he had plenty of choice words about the architecture and its peculiarities. But they had a fault tolerant cluster that did it's job 365 days of the year, and did it well. Those old Apollos definately had their good points. If I were in charge of Oracles infrastructure I would be extremely careful about replacing boxes like those with Intel boxes. Cheaper and faster they may be, but more reliable they have never been.
I have to agree with a couple of other posters - I'd have been looking really hard at some IBM big iron with virtualised linux servers myself. I don't know all the details, so I can't say what the final decision would be, just that I sure wouldn't have jumped the way they did without some serious good, and unforseen at this point, reasons to do so.
Sure, Linux is great, I love it. That's not the problem.
The hardware aspect of this just doesn't sound that great to me. Replacing three high end SPARC boxes with a cluster of Intel hardware might not be the greatest idea in the world. Secondary costs could easily skyrocket. I guess only time will tell...
It's interesting, all the comments I've read so far, including yours, seem to deal with this as a dichotomy between Linux/Intel and OS10/PPC. Don't forget you can run Linux on PPC. For a high performance dedicated cluster that would definately be an option I would look at.
Of course, there are situations where the Mac software has advantages that will really shine. Like if your "Cluster" is really just the lab machines at the college, acting as a cluster when not being used for DTP and Video editing or whatever. In that case the ease of setting this up with Mac OS10 would be a real plus.
The problem with spam is that is mostly useless. If spammers refined their targeting strategies users would not complain.
Written like a true marketing major, congratulations!
You're absolutely dead wrong.
The problem with spam isn't that it's useless, although it usually is. The problem with Spam is that it's trespass and theft.
A golfer would never consider a cool catalogue with the latest golf toys spam. A hacker would welcome the latest diff of O'Reilly titles.
Nonsense. The day O'Reilly spams me is the day I quit buying their books. I am perfectly capable of going to their website and browsing their catalogue whenever I want to. Attacking my mailbox is an assault, not a service.
The demand for ebooks is so low that the blind would be a significant portion of it, if they didn't lock them out.
If you had explored the link I gave you, you would find that very few blind people can even read braile, and many rely on books on tape and computer equipped with text-to-voice capabilities to "read" at all.
This is not at all absurd. Yes, the blind are a small market. That hardly means they don't exist. A large problem they face is precisely your attitude, which is mirrored all through our society. Because of that attitude, their tasks are made much harder - because people neglect very easy, simple things they could do in designing tools so that both the sighted and the blind can use them.
But they persevere anyway. http://www.nfb.org/ Try the aids and appliances link. You might learn a bit more than you want to.
The chief difference is that I don't send HTML mail out of malice, I do it because I think it adds value to the mail
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If you have something that really needs to be a webpage (which I highly doubt) then you can send a webpage as an attachment, and explain why you are sending that in the email body. There is absolutely never an excuse to send inline html in an email, and if you think using funky fonts and colours is "adding value" I probably don't want to waste my team reading what you write anyhow.
But I do believe it's not out of malice that you do this, but rather out of stupidity.
You are assuming that AMDs current explanation is 100% true, correct, and complete. There are good reasons to doubt this.
The "explanation" so far has just raised more questions. Why does the same code that causes the athlon to crash work fine on pentiums? Apparently the GART is cacheable on pentium systems? And the Athlon is billed as pentium-compatible...
Why does disabling large pages fix the problem? If their explanation is correct, that fix should not work, because it doesn't address the issue they claim to be the problem.
I'm sure this will get worked around in software (and the linux fix will actually workaround the underlying problem, rather than just making it less likely as the windows world seems to be satisfied with) once the real details of this are known. But to claim it's not a hardware bug is ludicrous. It's a bug with the Athlon CPU, or with certain GARTS found in Athlon chipsets, or both. If AMD were less worried about spin-controlling it and claiming it's the software at fault maybe they would be more forthcoming about what is really going on here.
It would have been fixed months ago if AMD had labeled it a hardware bug. It was billed as a "Win2k Bug" and quite naturally Linux hackers don't tend to pay much attention to that class of problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I have more experience with it than most people. Mexico, China, Russia and Nigeria count I think, and if not it's because the real third world (how is it defined?) is even worse off, so my conclusions should just be stronger there. (I haven't actually been to any but Mexico, unfortunately, but I have developed close relationships with natives of the others, who were quite happy to enlighten me about conditions there, and I've had the opportunity to observe natives of both places for extended periods of time.)
You are over-interpreting me I believe. I was just pointing out that you seem to be assuming that people just won't use anything that isn't supremely "easy" to use. So you think they are either lazy or stupid or both? Third worlders are no dumber than the rest of us, and much less lazy.
In a very rich country it may well be that most people will not want to use old-school programs like I mentioned, because it is easy for them to get something that doesn't require as much work to learn to use (at a very basic level.) But in a poor country, that dynamic is not so likely to be there. It's one thing to turn down a 486 because you can go get a PIII and some gooey-gum-drops. (It's still mildly stupid, in my mind, since the gooey-gum-drop crap makes real work harder - not easier, but there is still some sense to it too - not everyone actually needs any real power anyway, and taking the path of least resistance is a fairly strong human behaviour pattern.) It would be quite another thing for someone who couldn't afford the PIII if they had 50 years salary liquid to turn down a perfectly functional 486!
So, in sum, I thought your comment was analogous to someone saying that sending old cars to third world countries was pointless, since no one would drive anything without ABS and the NorthStar system anyway. Silly.
You know, honestly, you obviously haven't the slightest clue what life in a third world country is like. These people are used to working for what they have, they aren't spoiled little whiners who insist everything be handed to them on a silver platter with gooey-gum-drop widgets. And that's why they are going to be eating our lunch soon, if we can just avoid bombing them for a few years.
Why on earth would I do that? That would be silly.
What I would and have done, however, is run far less bloated programs on Linux on old hardware, and it runs just great. It's a simple matter of avoiding the bloat. Who needs KDE or Gnome? If you need X at all, use Blackbox, or IceWM, or WindowMaker. Mozilla? Get real. Netscape Navigator, Konquerer, Opera, or better yet, Lynx or Links. StarOffice? Please.
An old 486 with 16 Megs of ram will run Emacs (NoX), Links, Mutt, BitchX, and even Licq with the the text-mode plugin just fine.
Wow, I was going to reply to this, but the AC really nailed it.
I'm going to repost what he said, in case he's below your filter.
------------Begin Quote---------------
From the Mozilla.org homepage: Mozilla is an open-source web browser, designed for standards compliance, performance and portability
Great! Who the fuck asked for that?! Not to mention that their home page is lying! We've already got SOAP and Java and COM and CORBA and 100 other solution that actually get used in the field. Get used to the idea that nobody of note is going to make use of this "cross platform network component environment", and that that goal has effectively shafted millions of potential browser users as dupes who accidentally download someone's toolkit sample app.
------------End Quote---------------
Miguel has now responded. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/20 02-February/msg00042.html
No, as I made clear in another comment up the page, I haven't been involved with this project in around 6 months. Before that I wasted untold hours testing and reporting bugs though, so I think I have some idea of how the project goes. I was always a Netscape user, and I had high hopes for Mozilla, but for years I've seen it go downhill, because instead of simply writing a browser people seem to think it's necessary to write everything else instead. A mail client, a calender, a word processor, a spell checker, a freaking completely new widget library that doesn't look right *anywhere*, and the list goes on for page after page after page. As of when I finally threw up my hands in disgust and gave up on this project, Mozilla had about 4 times the footprint of Netscape Navigator, was several times slower, ugly as sin, and crashed all the time. This after *years* of work, which unfortunately seems to have been almost exclusively spent on adding features instead of making the core features work. And don't tell me "try it now, the nightly build is so much better now" - if I had a penny for every time I've heard that I'd be a very rich man.
On Linux I use Mutt. On Win32 Pmail. Both are excellent IMAP clients.
But as I pointed out, the source is open, and there are in fact even binaries for most platforms available anyway. Ispell binaries are available for MS/DOS, Win32, OS/2, and even the Amiga, as well as *nix. http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/fmg-members/geoff/ispel l.html
Aspell (http://aspell.sourceforge.net/) would probably be a better choice, and it's also open source and already available on several platforms.
It strikes me as very ironic that you would suggest that spawning a process to run the spell check would be rejected for being too slow. I'm going to be laughing about that for quite awhile. At any rate, the source is available, so there are plenty of options besides reinventing the wheel.
And just how do you think this applies here?
ispell -l | fmt
Gahhh this is the crap that really turns me off from Mozilla. It seems like the project is dead set on reinventing everything. What is the point of writing a spellchecker when there are several very good ones already available, and open source even so if you need to you can tweak as needed to get them to work with your program properly? Just pipe the text to ispell (or any similar already existing program) in the background and all you have to write is a simple parser to handle the results.
While I'm on the subject, why write an email client? There are plenty of great email clients out there, all the browser needs to know is what program to invoke to handle mailto links. Why write an entire widget library just to make pretty buttons? So you can turn around and add "native-style widgets on winXP and OS X" - wow, you can get mozilla to look like it belongs on the box it's running, at a significant performance hit, and it took how many man hours of coding to do that? I'm sorry, I just don't understand why anyone would spend all this time on duplicating so much work unecessarily. It would seem to me that your time would be better spent actually writing a browser instead of, it appears, spending most of the coding time on anything and everything but the browser.
I haven't tried Mozilla for some months, so this information could be out of date - but I doubt it, it's been this way from when I first used Netscape up until the last Mozilla build I used, maybe 6 months ago.
Disabling cookies causes the browser to refuse them. This will break many websites, unfortunately. However, there is a little trick that avoids that problem, and still prevents cookie data from ever being saved. Your browser will still accept and return them, satisfying those pushy websites, but will never actually save them, so they all get erased whenever you close the browser, in effect. Well, actually they never even get written.
Netscape/Mozilla stores cookies in a file named cookies.txt, in plain text format. (I wish opera did that, why they have to store them in some wierdo formatted file I don't know, but I digress.) If you simply make that file a link to /dev/null (in *nix) or delete it and make a directory with the name cookies.txt in the same place (on dos systems, this is a minor hack to overcome the deficiency of not having a /dev/null) then everything works fine, except that the cookies never get saved. Since a copy is kept in memory as long as the session lasts, websites get what they want, but as soon as you close the browser, it's all gone, so you get what you want too.
I also know not everyone agrees with me. But, for whatever it's worth, I gave up on Mozilla along time ago. Why? Featuritis. God, no offense, but on this issue you guys are worse than MS. Every release has more and more features that I don't want or need, and takes the inevitable hit from that on speed and reliability and footprint.
I'll be happy to give it another try when I find out that you have a usable configure script that will let me simply compile all that stuff out (I've heard rumblings about that possibility on and off,) but I'm not holding my breath. You could throw at least half the code right out the door and I, and many others I know, wouldn't miss it at all. At the same time, the few features I do want never seem to be a priority.
For now I'm using Opera, and except for being closed source, I really like it. Fairly small footprint, very fast, the few features I want (like intelligent cookie handling) are pretty much there. Unlike Mozilla, it doesn't make my PII/128MBram system perform like a 486.
Why not? Certainly there is a degree of silliness to the subject, but that hardly makes it unworthy of discussion.
The lowest class of males, the civilians (those that have been rejected for military service) do the manual labour and other low level tasks, all the while struggling for a chance to show themselves worthy of being allowed into the military of course. The military females, however, dominate the more technical positions. And yes, that does mean they have more honour than those poor civilian males. And yes, those males don't like that one bit. But the males who did make it into the military would happily slaughter them if they tried to revolt. So they aren't the slaves of your scenario, exactly, but there is certainly a level of coercion involved in getting them to work. The klingon leaders have long known the value of good weapons - and will do what they have to in order to acquire them.
This system is made fairly explicit in several DS9 episodes, the Klingon General (Martok?) was rejected by the military and served for a time as a civilian contractor, the lowest of the low in Klingon society, before a ship he was on was boarded and he managed to impress the commander in the battle that ensued, earning a battlefield commission.
The Klingons actually do have a source of technicians and scientists. This is the female of the species. Smaller and weaker than her male counterpart, she is however often more intelligent, and almost always better educated (by our standards.) Roles without sufficient honour for the men, scientific and technical positions in particular, are reserved for them. The advances of Klingon women, supplemented by the technological gains achieved by conquering more advanced, but less canny and battleworthy races, is responsible for their ability to compete.
As already pointed out, the licensing is still Free. And, because of GNOME, KDE is now Free as well, and has been for quite awhile. So even if GNOME does go down in flames like this, it will still have served its purpose.
Miguel is certainly not inspiring confidence lately. He's either an utter moron or an utter genius, and only time will tell which, but experience leads me to view his recent statements as probably being in the first category.
It affects it not at all, since this so-called standards organisation has no authority over anyone, and everyone who matters has already decided to ignore them.
Ahh, sorry, the link was slashdotted so I had to go from the blurb *sigh* always a bad idea, I know.
Regardless, I stand by the gist of my statement though. I don't know how old their HP boxes were either. But I've worked with old HPs. In '96 I was working on a network of PA-RISC boxes that were considered very old at the time, and in terms of reliability they were light years above *current* Intel hardware.
Yeah, they were a pain in some ways. A coworker at the time was busy trying to port Linux to them, and he had plenty of choice words about the architecture and its peculiarities. But they had a fault tolerant cluster that did it's job 365 days of the year, and did it well. Those old Apollos definately had their good points. If I were in charge of Oracles infrastructure I would be extremely careful about replacing boxes like those with Intel boxes. Cheaper and faster they may be, but more reliable they have never been.
I have to agree with a couple of other posters - I'd have been looking really hard at some IBM big iron with virtualised linux servers myself. I don't know all the details, so I can't say what the final decision would be, just that I sure wouldn't have jumped the way they did without some serious good, and unforseen at this point, reasons to do so.
Hahahah indeed!
:)
Well that's egg on Timothys face, for neither the first nor the last time I fear.
Anyway, I very much doubt I will ever use your gimmick, it is, as you admit, a waste of time. But a clever one at least.
Not sure what to think of this, honestly.
Sure, Linux is great, I love it. That's not the problem.
The hardware aspect of this just doesn't sound that great to me. Replacing three high end SPARC boxes with a cluster of Intel hardware might not be the greatest idea in the world. Secondary costs could easily skyrocket. I guess only time will tell...
It's interesting, all the comments I've read so far, including yours, seem to deal with this as a dichotomy between Linux/Intel and OS10/PPC. Don't forget you can run Linux on PPC. For a high performance dedicated cluster that would definately be an option I would look at.
Of course, there are situations where the Mac software has advantages that will really shine. Like if your "Cluster" is really just the lab machines at the college, acting as a cluster when not being used for DTP and Video editing or whatever. In that case the ease of setting this up with Mac OS10 would be a real plus.
Written like a true marketing major, congratulations!
You're absolutely dead wrong.
The problem with spam isn't that it's useless, although it usually is. The problem with Spam is that it's trespass and theft.
Nonsense. The day O'Reilly spams me is the day I quit buying their books. I am perfectly capable of going to their website and browsing their catalogue whenever I want to. Attacking my mailbox is an assault, not a service.
The demand for ebooks is so low that the blind would be a significant portion of it, if they didn't lock them out.
If you had explored the link I gave you, you would find that very few blind people can even read braile, and many rely on books on tape and computer equipped with text-to-voice capabilities to "read" at all.
This is not at all absurd. Yes, the blind are a small market. That hardly means they don't exist. A large problem they face is precisely your attitude, which is mirrored all through our society. Because of that attitude, their tasks are made much harder - because people neglect very easy, simple things they could do in designing tools so that both the sighted and the blind can use them.
But they persevere anyway. http://www.nfb.org/ Try the aids and appliances link. You might learn a bit more than you want to.
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If you have something that really needs to be a webpage (which I highly doubt) then you can send a webpage as an attachment, and explain why you are sending that in the email body. There is absolutely never an excuse to send inline html in an email, and if you think using funky fonts and colours is "adding value" I probably don't want to waste my team reading what you write anyhow.
But I do believe it's not out of malice that you do this, but rather out of stupidity.
You are assuming that AMDs current explanation is 100% true, correct, and complete. There are good reasons to doubt this.
The "explanation" so far has just raised more questions. Why does the same code that causes the athlon to crash work fine on pentiums? Apparently the GART is cacheable on pentium systems? And the Athlon is billed as pentium-compatible...
Why does disabling large pages fix the problem? If their explanation is correct, that fix should not work, because it doesn't address the issue they claim to be the problem.
I'm sure this will get worked around in software (and the linux fix will actually workaround the underlying problem, rather than just making it less likely as the windows world seems to be satisfied with) once the real details of this are known. But to claim it's not a hardware bug is ludicrous. It's a bug with the Athlon CPU, or with certain GARTS found in Athlon chipsets, or both. If AMD were less worried about spin-controlling it and claiming it's the software at fault maybe they would be more forthcoming about what is really going on here.
It would have been fixed months ago if AMD had labeled it a hardware bug. It was billed as a "Win2k Bug" and quite naturally Linux hackers don't tend to pay much attention to that class of problems.