According to the Department of Commerce, you can only export four 2 GHz G5 machines to places like China until you need to get special permission.
So the top end G5 is about 1/4 of a supercomputer. Now if they counted the GPU performance as well, it might be 1/3 of a supercomputer or even 1/2 in a double-headed configuration:)
A truely free-market approach to education is the internet. Most of the information is free and the quality is variable. Applying information theory to the free market, the most unique information would become the most expensive. However, this information is a moving target, and human teachers are far too inefficient to disseminate information to the 7 billion people around the world.
A few educators might be snapped up by the extremely wealthy. The remainder of the population pouldn't know where to start, and would continue in their ignorance. Governments might hire instructors to teach young people some basic information technology concepts like reading, writing, typing and SQL. These people would be paid whatever the State deems adequate, because the State is trying to gain a local advantage by increasing the local education.
Only neo-con, big business puppets suggest that teachers are paid too much.
I think you meant old-school science-fearing religious right.
Big business benefits from an educated populous, which is why tech jobs are going to countries with a strong education system like China and India are geeting all of the exported jobs. Notice that HP and Microsoft aren't farming very many jobs out to Afghanastan or Iran.
You typically pay a per-pound fee for garbage disposal. Since the disposal of the PC is prepaid, it makes sense to take it to the proper station rather than stuff it in the garbage and pay twice.
My apartment building throws garbage in with the rent. Teh tennants will place garbage in the garbage cans, and usable stuff next to the recycle bins. Every few weeks a pile of PCs or old monitors show up. Often someone will then take the machine and do something with it. End result is very similar to the Japanese system -- the machines actually DO get recycled!
While I was in college in North Jersey, a surprising number of old apartment buildings burned down and were replaced with shiny new office buildings and apartments. The result was Hoboken and Jersey City as you see them now. Then the WTC fell over and people started moving into those nifty new office towers.
The problem with arson as an economic driver is that you are just taking money out of the insurance companies. You can withdraw a little money from insurance companies without ill effect. The actuaries calculate the odds of payout very carefully (think of an insurance company as a casino, except you have to get mugged to win the jackpot). If you withdraw from the insurance companies too quickly, they too will fall over. If you withdraw slowly, insurance premiums will steadily increase.
Either way, mucking with insurance companies frequently and on a large scale is a recipe for economic disaster.
So what you're saying is that I'm supposed to decide what companies to invest in, whether or not to support various wars, which of several political candidates to vote for, and whether to take an umbrella to work tomorrow based on journalism of this quality?
I just spent a ghetto-riffic weekend in New Hampshire and was amazed to find that I could only get a GSM signal on my ATT Wireless phone within about 2 miles of the Manchester airport.
Fortunately, they do have electricity in New Hampshire, so I was able to do some offline work on my powerbook...
ActiveX controls only work on Windows (and possibly Mac OSX, but I don't have a Mac so I can't test that). Java Applets will work anywhere you have a java plugin, and many browsers even include a VM, so if you only write AWT applets, you don't even need the plugin.
ActiveX controls do not work on Mac OS X. They are notoriously hard to develop for Windows because there is no ActiveX spec.
This isn't an anti-Linux stance. It's a stance against customizing everything for China. Linux just makes it easier to do.
Funny, I use exactly the same argument when I recommend OS X or Linux for technology startups that are trying to create an innovative computational product. Windows will do a lot of really cool things right out of the box. When you try to do things that Microsoft's program managers didn't envision, you start to run into trouble.
Linux, OTOH, is only marginally useful out of the box. With some customization, it can be the basis of a powerful and successful business (go ask Real Networks about this).
OS X is great because it comes ready to go out of the box *and* can be easily customized to suit a new business model.
I just had a great insight into why Intel won't recommend OS X to Asian developers. Maybe it will come back to me after I post...
Those LEDs first displayed pre-boot CPU status. If the machine failed to get to the point where the graphics interface was active, you could look at the LED display and get some idea of what was wrong.
Once the machine came up and running, the light would bounce back and forth just like Knight Rider. There is a mod out there someplace for building an 8-LED display for the PC parallel port. Back in the 1.x days, there was a corresponding Linux Kernel driver to make the LEDs show load average much like on the Sun.
I've seen the bouncing LEDs on the 3/50, 3/60, 3/110. 3/160 and 3/260. I assume all the VME based suns had it.
Plugins have made browsers worse, rather than better. Some sites are unusable WITHOUT having Flash.
The browsers have been going downhill since the <img> tag. You might be able to read slashdot from lynx, but just try terraserver or mapquest from a text mode browser!
Don't even get me started on the graphic requirements for registering a user at yahoo or Network Soltions.
microsoft wouldn't crash and burn for this, they've got plenty cash to buy top lawyers to defend them.
If Microsoft truely were the evil bastards we believe them to be, they would run the trial to completion and then obtain an exclucive license to the patent for, say one billion dollars. This would lock up the browser market for Microsoft and Windows. Netscape was worth over 3 billion dollars at one point, so a signle billobuck seems like a bargain.
More philosophically, your post appears to represent an attitude of many people on Slashdot that I don't understand. The attitude appears to be that a producer does not have a right to produce and offer for sale a good or service on the terms it deems satisfactory, but instead must offer that good or service to you on terms you feel are satisfactory, or not at all.
The problem is that Microsoft is confusing "goods" with "service." In the case of software, it is intellectually questionable whether software is a particular thing, or just a license to use a concept that someone else has developed. Consequently, some software is "sold" and other software is "licensed."
Now consider a cell phone. I could go buy a SonyEricsson P800 for about $700. But without a service plan it would be a fairly useless device. Sure it can do 640x480 pictures and send them over bluetooth, but for $700 I expect a lot more. Instead, I buy a Nokia 3650 from ATT Wireless for $150 plus around $90 in monthly service fee (I talk on the phone a lot). ATT has locked my phone so that I cannot switch providers during the term of my contract. Since I'm getting a phone that is worth close to $700 for $150 and a monthly service fee, this is reasonable -- I still owe ATT some value for the use of their device.
Now consider a Rolex watch. Suppose the price of gold went up so much that it was profitable to buy Rolexes and melt them down for their gold. People would flock to jewelry stores to get the gold watches and sell off the gold. Rolex might be angry, but it is really their fault for not analyzing the gold market carefully enough.
Finally, consider an XBox. Microsoft wants to sell XBoxes for $199 so that you can play their $60 games. I want to open my XBox up and put Linux on it. It happens that Microsoft paid arund $350 to make each XBox, so if I don't buy a few games, MSFT loses out. Should I cry for Microsoft's lost profits? no.
Now if Microsoft had sold me the console for $199 plus a monthly fee I might consider using it according to MSFT's guidelines. They are selling a good but treating it like a service. I will continue to treat it like a good that I own. You can treat it like a service if you want.
Microsoft's biggest blunder here is not that they are treating a good like a service, but that they are alienating a small but influential portion of the gaming public. A few geeks want to open up their Xboxes and mess around with them. The vast majority of gamers are going to buy some Xbox games and make Microsoft even more money (once they get past the startup expenses, of course). If Microsoft took a more postivie attitude, XBox console and game sales would probably increase.
Last year I bought a cell phone account from Cingular. A month later, a "friend" stole the cell phone and registration paperwork from my apartment, and started making calls. I called Cingular to report the phone as stolen. The following week, I called to check on the status of the account, and was told that my account was active again and charging minutes!
It seems that the theif called Cingular up, and using the information on the initial bill, impersonated me and reactivated the phone. Cingular happily reactivated the phone without any further confirmation. They stuck me with a rather large bill, and to this day the stolen phone is still in use.
2010 will be a little early for my midlife crisis. But I'm very happy to hear that Europe's new satellite system will drive their automotive surveylence system. As long as I'm living in the USA, I'll take a Porsche with a Euro-tracking system over a Corvette with US-GPS.
I'll be sure to get the Corvette for my European vacations, though. Wouldn't want EuroLand to catch me at full speed...
Slashdot Mirror
"I know it's your T1 because our network guy teleported into the Baywatch hub and checked it!"
I want some of that training!
The only defense they have is that they can't support it.
That was code for "we'll be happy to support your Linux system as soon as you send us on a two week training trip to Las Vegas"
PDC support comes from Samba.
According to the Department of Commerce, you can only export four 2 GHz G5 machines to places like China until you need to get special permission.
:)
So the top end G5 is about 1/4 of a supercomputer. Now if they counted the GPU performance as well, it might be 1/3 of a supercomputer or even 1/2 in a double-headed configuration
Here's the specs:
P4 3ghz HT
1 gb RAM
Radeon 9600
Two 60gb 7200RPM HD's in RAID 0
Tell me Mr. Anderson, what good is a laptop if it doesn't have any battery life???
A truely free-market approach to education is the internet. Most of the information is free and the quality is variable. Applying information theory to the free market, the most unique information would become the most expensive. However, this information is a moving target, and human teachers are far too inefficient to disseminate information to the 7 billion people around the world.
A few educators might be snapped up by the extremely wealthy. The remainder of the population pouldn't know where to start, and would continue in their ignorance. Governments might hire instructors to teach young people some basic information technology concepts like reading, writing, typing and SQL. These people would be paid whatever the State deems adequate, because the State is trying to gain a local advantage by increasing the local education.
Only neo-con, big business puppets suggest that teachers are paid too much.
I think you meant old-school science-fearing religious right.
Big business benefits from an educated populous, which is why tech jobs are going to countries with a strong education system like China and India are geeting all of the exported jobs. Notice that HP and Microsoft aren't farming very many jobs out to Afghanastan or Iran.
IDM is music too, you know...
Printing dollar bills, or running a SPAM operation?
Funny, most of the PowerBooks and iBooks I see are covered with stickers. But they are usually bands and other "cool" products. hmm...
You typically pay a per-pound fee for garbage disposal. Since the disposal of the PC is prepaid, it makes sense to take it to the proper station rather than stuff it in the garbage and pay twice.
My apartment building throws garbage in with the rent. Teh tennants will place garbage in the garbage cans, and usable stuff next to the recycle bins. Every few weeks a pile of PCs or old monitors show up. Often someone will then take the machine and do something with it. End result is very similar to the Japanese system -- the machines actually DO get recycled!
"Support the economy, support arson."
While I was in college in North Jersey, a surprising number of old apartment buildings burned down and were replaced with shiny new office buildings and apartments. The result was Hoboken and Jersey City as you see them now. Then the WTC fell over and people started moving into those nifty new office towers.
The problem with arson as an economic driver is that you are just taking money out of the insurance companies. You can withdraw a little money from insurance companies without ill effect. The actuaries calculate the odds of payout very carefully (think of an insurance company as a casino, except you have to get mugged to win the jackpot). If you withdraw from the insurance companies too quickly, they too will fall over. If you withdraw slowly, insurance premiums will steadily increase.
Either way, mucking with insurance companies frequently and on a large scale is a recipe for economic disaster.
I actually cut a CEO's network cable in half (in front of him and his just-about-to-faint secretary) for doing something quite similar.
Why not just replace it with a powerbook?
Now if we can encourage similar competitions in China and India, we migth be able to reverse the tide of jobs flowing out of america.
So what you're saying is that I'm supposed to decide what companies to invest in, whether or not to support various wars, which of several political candidates to vote for, and whether to take an umbrella to work tomorrow based on journalism of this quality?
We have always been at war with oceana.
I just spent a ghetto-riffic weekend in New Hampshire and was amazed to find that I could only get a GSM signal on my ATT Wireless phone within about 2 miles of the Manchester airport.
Fortunately, they do have electricity in New Hampshire, so I was able to do some offline work on my powerbook...
ActiveX controls only work on Windows (and possibly Mac OSX, but I don't have a Mac so I can't test that). Java Applets will work anywhere you have a java plugin, and many browsers even include a VM, so if you only write AWT applets, you don't even need the plugin.
ActiveX controls do not work on Mac OS X. They are notoriously hard to develop for Windows because there is no ActiveX spec.
This isn't an anti-Linux stance. It's a stance against customizing everything for China. Linux just makes it easier to do.
Funny, I use exactly the same argument when I recommend OS X or Linux for technology startups that are trying to create an innovative computational product. Windows will do a lot of really cool things right out of the box. When you try to do things that Microsoft's program managers didn't envision, you start to run into trouble.
Linux, OTOH, is only marginally useful out of the box. With some customization, it can be the basis of a powerful and successful business (go ask Real Networks about this).
OS X is great because it comes ready to go out of the box *and* can be easily customized to suit a new business model.
I just had a great insight into why Intel won't recommend OS X to Asian developers. Maybe it will come back to me after I post...
I borrowed an iBook with OS X for a few weeks and was amazed to discover that you could suspend and resume it all week long without trouble.
After booting Linux out of my apartment, I bought my own TiBook. Apple's startup times could use some improvement.
Now I run Linux in the machine room, and OS X on the desktop.
Those LEDs first displayed pre-boot CPU status. If the machine failed to get to the point where the graphics interface was active, you could look at the LED display and get some idea of what was wrong.
Once the machine came up and running, the light would bounce back and forth just like Knight Rider. There is a mod out there someplace for building an 8-LED display for the PC parallel port. Back in the 1.x days, there was a corresponding Linux Kernel driver to make the LEDs show load average much like on the Sun.
I've seen the bouncing LEDs on the 3/50, 3/60, 3/110. 3/160 and 3/260. I assume all the VME based suns had it.
Plugins have made browsers worse, rather than better. Some sites are unusable WITHOUT having Flash.
The browsers have been going downhill since the <img> tag. You might be able to read slashdot from lynx, but just try terraserver or mapquest from a text mode browser!
Don't even get me started on the graphic requirements for registering a user at yahoo or Network Soltions.
microsoft wouldn't crash and burn for this, they've got plenty cash to buy top lawyers to defend them.
If Microsoft truely were the evil bastards we believe them to be, they would run the trial to completion and then obtain an exclucive license to the patent for, say one billion dollars. This would lock up the browser market for Microsoft and Windows. Netscape was worth over 3 billion dollars at one point, so a signle billobuck seems like a bargain.
More philosophically, your post appears to represent an attitude of many people on Slashdot that I don't understand. The attitude appears to be that a producer does not have a right to produce and offer for sale a good or service on the terms it deems satisfactory, but instead must offer that good or service to you on terms you feel are satisfactory, or not at all.
The problem is that Microsoft is confusing "goods" with "service." In the case of software, it is intellectually questionable whether software is a particular thing, or just a license to use a concept that someone else has developed. Consequently, some software is "sold" and other software is "licensed."
Now consider a cell phone. I could go buy a SonyEricsson P800 for about $700. But without a service plan it would be a fairly useless device. Sure it can do 640x480 pictures and send them over bluetooth, but for $700 I expect a lot more. Instead, I buy a Nokia 3650 from ATT Wireless for $150 plus around $90 in monthly service fee (I talk on the phone a lot). ATT has locked my phone so that I cannot switch providers during the term of my contract. Since I'm getting a phone that is worth close to $700 for $150 and a monthly service fee, this is reasonable -- I still owe ATT some value for the use of their device.
Now consider a Rolex watch. Suppose the price of gold went up so much that it was profitable to buy Rolexes and melt them down for their gold. People would flock to jewelry stores to get the gold watches and sell off the gold. Rolex might be angry, but it is really their fault for not analyzing the gold market carefully enough.
Finally, consider an XBox. Microsoft wants to sell XBoxes for $199 so that you can play their $60 games. I want to open my XBox up and put Linux on it. It happens that Microsoft paid arund $350 to make each XBox, so if I don't buy a few games, MSFT loses out. Should I cry for Microsoft's lost profits? no.
Now if Microsoft had sold me the console for $199 plus a monthly fee I might consider using it according to MSFT's guidelines. They are selling a good but treating it like a service. I will continue to treat it like a good that I own. You can treat it like a service if you want.
Microsoft's biggest blunder here is not that they are treating a good like a service, but that they are alienating a small but influential portion of the gaming public. A few geeks want to open up their Xboxes and mess around with them. The vast majority of gamers are going to buy some Xbox games and make Microsoft even more money (once they get past the startup expenses, of course). If Microsoft took a more postivie attitude, XBox console and game sales would probably increase.
Last year I bought a cell phone account from Cingular. A month later, a "friend" stole the cell phone and registration paperwork from my apartment, and started making calls. I called Cingular to report the phone as stolen. The following week, I called to check on the status of the account, and was told that my account was active again and charging minutes!
It seems that the theif called Cingular up, and using the information on the initial bill, impersonated me and reactivated the phone. Cingular happily reactivated the phone without any further confirmation. They stuck me with a rather large bill, and to this day the stolen phone is still in use.
2010 will be a little early for my midlife crisis. But I'm very happy to hear that Europe's new satellite system will drive their automotive surveylence system. As long as I'm living in the USA, I'll take a Porsche with a Euro-tracking system over a Corvette with US-GPS.
I'll be sure to get the Corvette for my European vacations, though. Wouldn't want EuroLand to catch me at full speed...