For me it's a question of compromise. I want a machine with a big display, something approaching a usable keyboard, and small enough that I can slip it into my inside suit pocket without looking like an idiot. Obviously a larger keyboard would be nice, but not at the expense of size.
This device looks like be nicest compromise I've seen so far, as long as the slide out mechanism doesn't make it feel flimsy. If it looks and feels as nice in real life as in those photographs then I'll buy one.
Anyway, I actually agree with you for the most part. But while supporting different architectures doesn't seem to be a problem, supporing different sizes of system well is difficult. The same algorithm that's optimal for scheduling five runable processes on two processors probably won't be optimal for scheduling 5000 processes on twenty processors.
Having said that, Linus has been pretty good in insisting that algorithms should be generic and that people wanting extreme scalability can't sacrifice low-end performance. When somebody with authority forces you to think hard about a problem until you find the answer, often the answer actually appears.
It's worked really well so far, but it's not clear if it will always work.
Yes, it was irrelevent. He contrived an absurd scenerio just so he could make a political statement.
The scenerio is only absurd because nobody is likely to prosecute. That doesn't change the fact that he would have been violating the letter of the DMCA. Documenting a security bug is a violation of current U.S. law if that security is used to protect copyrighted material.
So what should Alan do in this situation. Yes, he can ignore the law and chances are he won't be convicted, but the potential penalty is 5 years in prison and $500,000. Is it worth the risk? If you think it's worthwhile then you can find the bug and document it, but don't ask somebody else to do it for you.
Another factor is probably the tremendous range of hardware and workloads that Linux tries to handle. I don't think any other OS attempts to work well on watches and mainframes (and everything inbetween) while using the same code base.
Ok, it's definately true that you don't buy a cheapo clone and use it for a mission critical server. But on real hardware (high-end Intel, RS/6000) Linux is every bit as reliable as commercial Unix. The only thing that's missing is "hot-swap anything" features that are only available on really high-end hardware.
It's true that Linux can't go up against Sun in every market yet, but I think the original poster is correct in saying that Sun needs to do something before they lose their edge. McNealy said recently that Linux was no threat since anything new developed for Linux could be incorporated into Solaris, but that's stupid. If you're selling a higher-price product you can't compete by matching the lower priced product, you have to be better.
Linux (for now) competes on low end (mostly Intel) hardware. The biggest player on the low-end by far is Microsoft, so that's who's most affected. Users who switch from proprietary Unix to Linux do so because they see a cost benefit from switching to low-end hardware. If Linux weren't there then they would be forced to go to MS.
It is true that Linux has clobbered the main lown-end Unix: SCO. Good riddence:-).
One thing that does surprise me is that Windows is still so popular on basic file & print servers. These machines don't run any special software, so they should be simple to replace with Linux boxen. We just got a Cobalt cube in our office and it's really neat. Setup is fast (like 3 minutes!) and painless, and it does everything you need from a small office server. Why aren't these things more popular?
This just goes to show that you don't need to be intelligent to get an MBA. Most higher education just requires hard work and discipline. There's nothing wrong with that, it's probably how it should be, but don't mistake a degree for intelligence.
Perhaps it's also evidence that the education you get from an MBA, while perhaps useful for running companies, doesn't help you to lead a country.
Have you considered just calibrating the equipment? You'll probably need this anyway since, even if you can get the specs, they'll be expressed as ranges and individual components can fall anywhere within the range (as well as changing physically over the life of the equipment). This is true of your custom hardware as well.
If you want to get an idea of how the equipment performs before you buy, just bring your test images and a laptop into the store and ask to try the demo model.
Talk to some of the researchers in your lab. They probably already have tests as well as software that will compensate for irregularities in a CCD based on the results of the calibration.
There's still a good reason to have a distinction between/bin and/usr/bin./bin is normally on the root partition and the commands there will be available in maintenance mode./usr/bin will normally be on a much larger disk, so you can put lots of stuff there, but it won't normally be mounted in maintenance mode.
Keeping the root partition small means it's less likely to get f**ked up on the event of serious problems, so you just put those commands in/bin that you really need in order to recover the machine.
Re:Educated people don't need spelling checkers.
on
Mozilla Bug Week
·
· Score: 2
French is kind of funny, in that, in general, you can figure out the pronounciation from the spelling, but there's absolutely no hope of going the other way. There are _tons_ of silent letters, but the rules are followed well enough that you can usually figure out which letters aren't pronounced. (Of course there are exceptions like the ones you point out.)
At the other extreme from English and French is Finnish. It's spelled exactly the way it sounds, right down to long and short consonents. It's pretty neat. In English the difference between "balled" and "baled" is in the vowel, in Finnish the vowels wouldn't change, but the length of the consonent would be different.
Does that mean that the X applications run on a plane "above" Aqua? So an X window can't be beneath an Aqua window?
I guess what I'm missing is how these two environment's interact. How, for example, does an event (mouse-click, keypress, etc.) get to the right environment? If I give focus to an Aqua window, does the X window lose focus?
My impression is that Wine has been "almost" ready for ages. The basic structure is there and works, but the MS APIs are so large and innacurately documented that many individual functions don't work or don't work exactly as on Windows. Transgaming claims to have a DirectX implementation.
The Transgaming approach of selecting specific games and making sure that the API calls they use work properly could actually work. The question is whether or not their business model will generate enough revenue to keep up the development.
In fact I dont' have a thesaurus handy, but really it should have both meanings for black. That's the whole point behind reference books.
This is also getting really far off topic, but it's not so much using colour to characterize people as trying to find a word that works. In my peer group, at least, "black" is a perfectly good word used to refer to people that others might classify as "negro", "African-American", etc. I wouldn't call people of East Asian descent "yellow" though, I'd say "oriental". There's no logic to it, it's just a combination of sounds that has an agreed upon meaning and connotation.
Re:Educated people don't need spelling checkers.
on
Mozilla Bug Week
·
· Score: 2
Actually the problem is with English. Many (perhaps most?) languages are actually spelled the way they sound. Even loan works are transformed so they match the local spelling rules.
Spending valuable time memorizing thousands of bizarre English spellings might help you to impress people, but that's time that could have been spent learning something useful.
As far as I'm concerned, trying to improve my spelling in the age of spellcheckers is about as useful as trying to improve my handwriting in the age of word-processers. It's a nice hobby if you enjoy it, but it's not a life skill.
I agree with you for the most part, removing these words isn't nearly the same as censorship, but...
Given the choice, I really would like my thesaurus to come up with the full selection of words. If I type in "Black" it should produce "African", "nigger", "negro", "colored", etc. with a note explaining the connotation of each word. The thesaurus isn't there to tell me what I mean, it's there to help me find the word that matches what I'd like to say.
In some contexts it's actually very important. A foreigner may not know which words are derogatory and which aren't (it's pretty arbitrary, after all). A good thesaurus can be a life saver in such cases.
That doesn't really address my need, since I'm not about to spend money on a Mac just so my Mom can use e-mail, but... this still sounds interesting. Do you have more information? I think it's a pretty good idea, although I think an add-in PS2 card for a PC would have more of a market.
If you made one of these out of a PlayStation it would sell like hotcakes:
Runs PlayStation 2 games
Plays DVDs
Does e-mail, surfs web, etc.
Comes with one year of AOL
Monitor is optional - works fine with a TV but at lower resolution
Expandible w. hard drive so it can run Linux and OpenOffice (or "AOLOffice" maybe?)
It's just what Sony and AOL both need to fight Microsoft. I wouldn't use it myself, but I'd definately buy one for my mother so we could finally communicate by e-mail instead of running up phone bills.
many people are still running windows 95 at home... people do not switch OSs easily, and especially if it is technically involved. I would guess that most people don't upgrade their operating system at all, and the only time they do is when they buy a new computer.
Fair enough, but I don't think that's relavent. People using their old computers with the original hardware and software aren't a source of revenue for anybody. You can count them as installed base, but counting them as real "market share" isn't valid. MS has no way to push a Windows 95 user to.NET.
so the biggest obstacle is a dearth of pre-packaged computers with Linux installed by the vendor. When Dell, Compaq, et al offer Linux systems, MS will start to feel it. Of course, MS has monstrous influence at these companies, and change there is very unlikely any time soon.
MS has monstrous influence only because today's PCs must ship with MS software. The problem is that the desktop applications currently available aren't comparible to Windows. Actually, they're good enough for most people, but not good enough that a new PC user wouldn't notice that something is missing. When the Linux apps become so good that the average end user could happily use his system and not realize the difference, some smallish PC company will starting pushing Linux based systems. The rest of the market will be forced to offer Linux as an option. Think of it in the same way as AMD vs. Intel, except imagine that AMD CPUs are free and available in unlimited supply.
another huge step would be an AOL port to Linux, but that hasn't even happened yet... that is a barrier to tens of millions of people in the US who use them for their ISP.
AOL and Sony could actually accelerate the process, although I don't know whether or not they will. If AOL shipped StarOffice (for Windows) with their coasters a lot of people who normally just use MS-Works would use SO instead. Moving to Linux later would be easy since the applications would be the same. Sony, meanwhile, is getting ready to ship Linux for PlayStation in the US. If they ship a few applictions and toss in a little marketing then the effect would be the same - a few million Linux desktops that are "good enough" for a lot of people.
The $500 billion question is whether or not MS can move their revenue base to services before their monopoly on the desktop runs out. I think they might just be able to pull it off, but the odds are against them.
I figure the Linux desktop (including productivity applications) will be feature comparible to Windows/Office in about two years. That's about one iteration of Windows away. At that point the trickle of users moving their desktops to Linux will become a flood and MS won't have anything to use as leverage to take over new markets.
So what are the chances that MS will be able to build their services business from almost nothing to $30 billion dollars within that time? Considering that the services don't even exist yet, I'd say their chances are pretty slim. When you consider the fact that IBM, AOL, Sun, Sony, Oracle, and others will be fighting MS all the way, I'd say MS is screwed.
The best MS can do is become like every other IT company struggling to compete on merit. Sure they'll always be big, but in five years they won't be any more influentual than the other major players.
Re:MS doesn't actually turn a profit.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure I know what you would even expect Sony to do... once you have a console out, you're stuck with it - at which point it's all about the games (and trying to get certain games on your system).
I would expect them to try to build the same kind of leverage into the PlayStation that MS will build into the XBox. Partner with AOL to offer a combined service. License the guts of the PS2 (or maybe the PS1) to other companies who manufacture set-top boxes, digital VCRs, and PC video cards (remember that Sony makes money off of game titles, not hardware).
Re:MS doesn't actually turn a profit.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
Not at all. MS employees are not "industry standard" employees, they're MS employees, and they expect to get paid what they've been getting paid. If their pay is cut, the ones who can draw more will go elsewhere, gutting the company's productivity.
I think you've just contradicted yourself. Employees will leave if they can get more money elsewhere, so MS has to meet that (industry standard) price. They don't need to make their employees rich with stock options in order to compete.
At this point they're desperate, they're squeezing their big customers for every penny, sacrificing long-term revenue potentials by alienating them. Meanwhile, the people in charge continue their policy of selling off their own holdings.
Agreed that they're doing stupid things to keep revenue up in the short term. But they are making plausible attempts to raise revenue long-term through heavy investments in projects like the X-Box. The big question whether this will work. I don't think that Sony will just roll over for MS, but I haven't noticed Sony doing the kind of radical things they'll need to do in order to combat MS either. I'm afraid that Sony is a little over-confident just as Novell was.
Novell had the dominent position in corporate file and print servers and thought that market-share and a superior product would let them keep it. When your opponent has tons of cash and a related monopoly to leverage, this just isn't true.
Re:MS doesn't actually turn a profit.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
I've heard this arguement before. The notion that MS stock is highly overvalued in relation to the growth potential left in the company is, IMHO, absolutely true. But I'm skeptical of the idea that once the growth slows down (and the stock price adjusts) the company won't be viable.
In order to support your position you need to show that paying MS employees the market rate (without stock options) would be a significant (or devastating) blow to profits. Do you have evidence that this is really true? Are average salaries at MS available somewhere alongside industry standard salaries for similar positions?
I worked on an online conference about this time last year with a couple of researchers. It was pretty cool actually. Two guys who worked at universities in different continents did most of the organization and I did the technical work. We put about thirty papers on the web site and set up a nice forum system for participants to discuss the papers. Think Slashdot, but instead of short blurbs there were long detailed articles complete with diagrams and photos, and the discussion was much more on-topic. Signal to noise was excellent. We ended up with about 300 "participants".
The interesting thing is that it could never have happened as a "physical" conference. The subject discussed (trypanosomes) affected mostly developing countries and the researchers wouldn't have been able to afford to fly from diverse parts of the world to present their work in person. And a physical conference could never be organized on a shoestring by three people living on different continents.
Online conferences aren't nearly as much fun as everybody getting together and partying for a weekend, but it's a great way to get researchers from around the world together in one virtual space for constructive discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
For me it's a question of compromise. I want a machine with a big display, something approaching a usable keyboard, and small enough that I can slip it into my inside suit pocket without looking like an idiot. Obviously a larger keyboard would be nice, but not at the expense of size.
This device looks like be nicest compromise I've seen so far, as long as the slide out mechanism doesn't make it feel flimsy. If it looks and feels as nice in real life as in those photographs then I'll buy one.
Wow, you really feel strongly about this :-).
Anyway, I actually agree with you for the most part. But while supporting different architectures doesn't seem to be a problem, supporing different sizes of system well is difficult. The same algorithm that's optimal for scheduling five runable processes on two processors probably won't be optimal for scheduling 5000 processes on twenty processors.
Having said that, Linus has been pretty good in insisting that algorithms should be generic and that people wanting extreme scalability can't sacrifice low-end performance. When somebody with authority forces you to think hard about a problem until you find the answer, often the answer actually appears.
It's worked really well so far, but it's not clear if it will always work.
The scenerio is only absurd because nobody is likely to prosecute. That doesn't change the fact that he would have been violating the letter of the DMCA. Documenting a security bug is a violation of current U.S. law if that security is used to protect copyrighted material.
So what should Alan do in this situation. Yes, he can ignore the law and chances are he won't be convicted, but the potential penalty is 5 years in prison and $500,000. Is it worth the risk? If you think it's worthwhile then you can find the bug and document it, but don't ask somebody else to do it for you.
Really? Do you have URLs for that? I've never heard of the NetBSD watch or mainframe.
Another factor is probably the tremendous range of hardware and workloads that Linux tries to handle. I don't think any other OS attempts to work well on watches and mainframes (and everything inbetween) while using the same code base.
Ok, it's definately true that you don't buy a cheapo clone and use it for a mission critical server. But on real hardware (high-end Intel, RS/6000) Linux is every bit as reliable as commercial Unix. The only thing that's missing is "hot-swap anything" features that are only available on really high-end hardware.
It's true that Linux can't go up against Sun in every market yet, but I think the original poster is correct in saying that Sun needs to do something before they lose their edge. McNealy said recently that Linux was no threat since anything new developed for Linux could be incorporated into Solaris, but that's stupid. If you're selling a higher-price product you can't compete by matching the lower priced product, you have to be better.
Linux (for now) competes on low end (mostly Intel) hardware. The biggest player on the low-end by far is Microsoft, so that's who's most affected. Users who switch from proprietary Unix to Linux do so because they see a cost benefit from switching to low-end hardware. If Linux weren't there then they would be forced to go to MS.
It is true that Linux has clobbered the main lown-end Unix: SCO. Good riddence :-).
One thing that does surprise me is that Windows is still so popular on basic file & print servers. These machines don't run any special software, so they should be simple to replace with Linux boxen. We just got a Cobalt cube in our office and it's really neat. Setup is fast (like 3 minutes!) and painless, and it does everything you need from a small office server. Why aren't these things more popular?
This just goes to show that you don't need to be intelligent to get an MBA. Most higher education just requires hard work and discipline. There's nothing wrong with that, it's probably how it should be, but don't mistake a degree for intelligence.
Perhaps it's also evidence that the education you get from an MBA, while perhaps useful for running companies, doesn't help you to lead a country.
Have you considered just calibrating the equipment? You'll probably need this anyway since, even if you can get the specs, they'll be expressed as ranges and individual components can fall anywhere within the range (as well as changing physically over the life of the equipment). This is true of your custom hardware as well.
If you want to get an idea of how the equipment performs before you buy, just bring your test images and a laptop into the store and ask to try the demo model.
Talk to some of the researchers in your lab. They probably already have tests as well as software that will compensate for irregularities in a CCD based on the results of the calibration.
There's still a good reason to have a distinction between /bin and /usr/bin. /bin is normally on the root partition and the commands there will be available in maintenance mode. /usr/bin will normally be on a much larger disk, so you can put lots of stuff there, but it won't normally be mounted in maintenance mode.
Keeping the root partition small means it's less likely to get f**ked up on the event of serious problems, so you just put those commands in /bin that you really need in order to recover the machine.
French is kind of funny, in that, in general, you can figure out the pronounciation from the spelling, but there's absolutely no hope of going the other way. There are _tons_ of silent letters, but the rules are followed well enough that you can usually figure out which letters aren't pronounced. (Of course there are exceptions like the ones you point out.)
At the other extreme from English and French is Finnish. It's spelled exactly the way it sounds, right down to long and short consonents. It's pretty neat. In English the difference between "balled" and "baled" is in the vowel, in Finnish the vowels wouldn't change, but the length of the consonent would be different.
Does that mean that the X applications run on a plane "above" Aqua? So an X window can't be beneath an Aqua window?
I guess what I'm missing is how these two environment's interact. How, for example, does an event (mouse-click, keypress, etc.) get to the right environment? If I give focus to an Aqua window, does the X window lose focus?
Ok, that's really freaky. It almost makes me want to have a Mac.
I thought Aqua didn't use X though. How does this actually work? What's the window manager?
My impression is that Wine has been "almost" ready for ages. The basic structure is there and works, but the MS APIs are so large and innacurately documented that many individual functions don't work or don't work exactly as on Windows. Transgaming claims to have a DirectX implementation.
The Transgaming approach of selecting specific games and making sure that the API calls they use work properly could actually work. The question is whether or not their business model will generate enough revenue to keep up the development.
In fact I dont' have a thesaurus handy, but really it should have both meanings for black. That's the whole point behind reference books.
This is also getting really far off topic, but it's not so much using colour to characterize people as trying to find a word that works. In my peer group, at least, "black" is a perfectly good word used to refer to people that others might classify as "negro", "African-American", etc. I wouldn't call people of East Asian descent "yellow" though, I'd say "oriental". There's no logic to it, it's just a combination of sounds that has an agreed upon meaning and connotation.
Actually the problem is with English. Many (perhaps most?) languages are actually spelled the way they sound. Even loan works are transformed so they match the local spelling rules.
Spending valuable time memorizing thousands of bizarre English spellings might help you to impress people, but that's time that could have been spent learning something useful.
As far as I'm concerned, trying to improve my spelling in the age of spellcheckers is about as useful as trying to improve my handwriting in the age of word-processers. It's a nice hobby if you enjoy it, but it's not a life skill.
I agree with you for the most part, removing these words isn't nearly the same as censorship, but...
Given the choice, I really would like my thesaurus to come up with the full selection of words. If I type in "Black" it should produce "African", "nigger", "negro", "colored", etc. with a note explaining the connotation of each word. The thesaurus isn't there to tell me what I mean, it's there to help me find the word that matches what I'd like to say.
In some contexts it's actually very important. A foreigner may not know which words are derogatory and which aren't (it's pretty arbitrary, after all). A good thesaurus can be a life saver in such cases.
That doesn't really address my need, since I'm not about to spend money on a Mac just so my Mom can use e-mail, but... this still sounds interesting. Do you have more information? I think it's a pretty good idea, although I think an add-in PS2 card for a PC would have more of a market.
If you made one of these out of a PlayStation it would sell like hotcakes:
It's just what Sony and AOL both need to fight Microsoft. I wouldn't use it myself, but I'd definately buy one for my mother so we could finally communicate by e-mail instead of running up phone bills.
Fair enough, but I don't think that's relavent. People using their old computers with the original hardware and software aren't a source of revenue for anybody. You can count them as installed base, but counting them as real "market share" isn't valid. MS has no way to push a Windows 95 user to .NET.
MS has monstrous influence only because today's PCs must ship with MS software. The problem is that the desktop applications currently available aren't comparible to Windows. Actually, they're good enough for most people, but not good enough that a new PC user wouldn't notice that something is missing. When the Linux apps become so good that the average end user could happily use his system and not realize the difference, some smallish PC company will starting pushing Linux based systems. The rest of the market will be forced to offer Linux as an option. Think of it in the same way as AMD vs. Intel, except imagine that AMD CPUs are free and available in unlimited supply.
AOL and Sony could actually accelerate the process, although I don't know whether or not they will. If AOL shipped StarOffice (for Windows) with their coasters a lot of people who normally just use MS-Works would use SO instead. Moving to Linux later would be easy since the applications would be the same. Sony, meanwhile, is getting ready to ship Linux for PlayStation in the US. If they ship a few applictions and toss in a little marketing then the effect would be the same - a few million Linux desktops that are "good enough" for a lot of people.
The $500 billion question is whether or not MS can move their revenue base to services before their monopoly on the desktop runs out. I think they might just be able to pull it off, but the odds are against them.
I figure the Linux desktop (including productivity applications) will be feature comparible to Windows/Office in about two years. That's about one iteration of Windows away. At that point the trickle of users moving their desktops to Linux will become a flood and MS won't have anything to use as leverage to take over new markets.
So what are the chances that MS will be able to build their services business from almost nothing to $30 billion dollars within that time? Considering that the services don't even exist yet, I'd say their chances are pretty slim. When you consider the fact that IBM, AOL, Sun, Sony, Oracle, and others will be fighting MS all the way, I'd say MS is screwed.
The best MS can do is become like every other IT company struggling to compete on merit. Sure they'll always be big, but in five years they won't be any more influentual than the other major players.
I would expect them to try to build the same kind of leverage into the PlayStation that MS will build into the XBox. Partner with AOL to offer a combined service. License the guts of the PS2 (or maybe the PS1) to other companies who manufacture set-top boxes, digital VCRs, and PC video cards (remember that Sony makes money off of game titles, not hardware).
I think you've just contradicted yourself. Employees will leave if they can get more money elsewhere, so MS has to meet that (industry standard) price. They don't need to make their employees rich with stock options in order to compete.
Agreed that they're doing stupid things to keep revenue up in the short term. But they are making plausible attempts to raise revenue long-term through heavy investments in projects like the X-Box. The big question whether this will work. I don't think that Sony will just roll over for MS, but I haven't noticed Sony doing the kind of radical things they'll need to do in order to combat MS either. I'm afraid that Sony is a little over-confident just as Novell was.
Novell had the dominent position in corporate file and print servers and thought that market-share and a superior product would let them keep it. When your opponent has tons of cash and a related monopoly to leverage, this just isn't true.
I've heard this arguement before. The notion that MS stock is highly overvalued in relation to the growth potential left in the company is, IMHO, absolutely true. But I'm skeptical of the idea that once the growth slows down (and the stock price adjusts) the company won't be viable.
In order to support your position you need to show that paying MS employees the market rate (without stock options) would be a significant (or devastating) blow to profits. Do you have evidence that this is really true? Are average salaries at MS available somewhere alongside industry standard salaries for similar positions?
I worked on an online conference about this time last year with a couple of researchers. It was pretty cool actually. Two guys who worked at universities in different continents did most of the organization and I did the technical work. We put about thirty papers on the web site and set up a nice forum system for participants to discuss the papers. Think Slashdot, but instead of short blurbs there were long detailed articles complete with diagrams and photos, and the discussion was much more on-topic. Signal to noise was excellent. We ended up with about 300 "participants".
The interesting thing is that it could never have happened as a "physical" conference. The subject discussed (trypanosomes) affected mostly developing countries and the researchers wouldn't have been able to afford to fly from diverse parts of the world to present their work in person. And a physical conference could never be organized on a shoestring by three people living on different continents.
Online conferences aren't nearly as much fun as everybody getting together and partying for a weekend, but it's a great way to get researchers from around the world together in one virtual space for constructive discussion.