Robert wasn't as long on hard science as Clarke, but he was pretty damned good. Occasionally you also see him get credit for inventing the waterbed (this might fall into the urban legends category, but he definitely described one long before there ever was one). Also appearing first (that I can ever find) in his stories is a mass driver for lobbing things toward orbit. Niven and Clarke are also outstanding places to look for concepts (Clarke had ion propulsion long before I ever heard of NASA developing anything like that), but there are other places as well. Gregory Benford has some great stuff, as well as Robert Forward. Just because there's a lot of Sci-Fi (or Spec-Fic, depending on how Politically Correct you want to be) out there doesn't mean you can't prefilter a lot of it. Anything by L. Ron Hubbard, for instance, can automatically be discarded. What a hack that guy was. I can't friggin believe they are actually making a MOVIE of one of his pathetic excuses for fiction.
In the summer of 1981 George Goble and some pals at Purdue University built what he claims is the world's first multiprocessor UNIX machine. This truly is an outstanding hardware hack; the original technical report can be found at
http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/vax/paper.html
This was not only an impressive feat of engineering, but also economically sound, since George basically produced a machine with twice (benchmarked at 1.9) the computational power as an 11/780, with none of the maintainance costs (George did all the computer maintainance for PU). The additional cost in materials for this increase in performance was 22% of the cost of a new computer.
George was famous for ditzing around with hardware. The HKN lounge in the EE building at Purdue was filled with formerly broken arcade games like Red Baron, Tank and Vortex that George had bought (or just plain carted away as a favor), fixed, uploaded the code and done some alterations that he thought made them more fun. George also won an Ig Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996 for lighting a charcoal grill to cooking temperature in 3 seconds.
It's much more likely that the two star shots are to correct for attitude errors at launch. If you get two star fixes (with sufficient angular separation), you can measure your attitude error in all three axes. The DoD officials commentating on this obviously had no idea how the thing worked , so I wouldn't put too much weight on what wording they used. Ok, now what use is it to measure your attitude error? Here's why:
1) When a missile is launched, the errors in the initialization of the inertial navigation system are quantifiable in a statistical sense.
2) The onboard computer can propagate the error covariance of the navigation states to the point in space where the star fixes are taken.
3) At this point, an error between the expected line of sight to a star (each measurement is composed of two angles perpendicular to the centerline of the sensor taking the measurement) has strong statistical correlation to the attitude errors.
4) The attitude errors at that time can be VERY strongly correlated to position error. The azimuth error (error in the estimate of which way north is) is commonly one of the larger contributions to position error.
5) In this way, measurement of the attitude errors of a missile can effectively be converted into correction of the navigation estimate of position.
6) As an aside, there is a reason you care which way north is. The reason is this: missiles normally use measureable characteristics of the earth to initialize their navigation. Measured gravity tells it which way down is. Earth rotation tells it which way north is. In a relative sense, accelerometers (in a given price range) are more accurate in locating the direction of down than gyroscopes are at locating north (the axis of earth rotation). It's irrelevant what frame of reference you choose to navigate in; you are still stuck with your initialization errors about north and down. Given two non parallel directions, you can build a 3-axis coordinate system using vector cross products and orthonormalization techniques.
Hope this helps. I have been working on these sorts of systems for about 16 years now, so I have a good idea how things are done.
Take glucosamine sulphate and Chondroitin complex daily for at least a month. This stuff takes a long time to kick in, but the alternative is surgery with rehabilitation time of about that long. I think the reason for the extended time before you see a result is that this type of tissue heals very slowly. In addition to this, you need to make sure that your working conditions don't aggravate the problem more than they have to. Get wrist rests, adjust your keyboard level to something sane, and get a mouse that you can use without killing your hands. It will take a combination of these things to improve your situation without surgery.
Every few months, you see an article discussing how Linux is not good enough for ____, which purpose is rapidly increasing. A year ago, Linux wasn't good enough for the desktop. Now, it's not good enough to power EBay (is that really true? He implies that it is). What won't it be good enough for tomorrow?
As an aside, I notice that Dvorak likes to accuse Linux advocates of being groudlessly optimistic. I in turn find him to be groundlessly pessimistic. Linux might not be the answer to every possible need, but it's more likely to achieve that end than any piece of bloatware that microsoft is likely to put out.
I think this idea deserves a little study. Several years ago, a fellow that I worked with developed an algorithm for target detection that was the first and only of its kind, as far as I had seen. I helped to refine it a bit, but basically it was his beastie. On application for patent, we were told that ALGORITHMS were not patentable (this was in the late '80s; things are probably different now). I happen to be in agreement with this. The concept of what constitutes an invention these days is becoming more and more vague. Patents should not be used to squeeze money out of industrious people who happened to solve a fairly well-understood problem in their own way. Now, I don't advocate that all software be free. Software licensing should adequately cover companies like Corel, Microsoft, and Adobe and their software products. Patents on "a spell checker" and the like are frivolous when there are dozens of similar algorithms/applications out there. Selling USES of those is perfectly fine, in my view. Patenting the IDEA of them is idiotic. And a waste of money, paper and the time of the US Patent Office.
I have to disagree with Mr. Narkinsky's opinion of the Card's previous books on the life of Ender Wiggin. Specifically, he says something to the effect that after Ender's Game, Ender lost his edge. What I got out of those books is that Ender was horrified by the way he had exterminated the buggers, and suffered from the guild of havinf removed an intelligent life form from the universe. Also, he discovered that he just wanted to lead a life of anonymity, rather than be constantly recognized as the boy who killed off the buggers. Ender simply becomes more human, and more spiritual. In my opinion, these books were not intended to portray Ender as a hero, but rather to portray him as a human being who posesses extraordinary intelligence, and also who develops a powerful moral conscience.
Let's not confuse Card with a writer of "action" fiction. In nearly all of Card's books, there is an underlying exposure of different aspects of humanity that is missing in the writings of most others. Not that Card has any special insight into humanity, he just has a unique approach to reminding us that we're all just human under whatever facade we have built up. Before reading Card, I had this idea that Mormons have oddball ideas about religion (I still think that) and should be ignored and avoided. Card has wrenched me out of that position a bit.
If it's anything like the G3, it'll be great at integer math (which I don't use that much) and kinda mediocre at floating point (which I do). If I were given one, it would instantly be loaded with the most convenient Linux distro at hand.
Wrong. Hobby rocket engines are NOT hybrids. They contain their own oxidizer, just as all solid engines have as long as they have existed. Normally solid engines contain oxygen in the form of a nitrate or they use another form of oxidant. A basic solid engine could be made of zinc and sulfur powders and a binding agent, with the reaction product being zinc sulfide and heat. The engine described is quite different, because it required the oxidizer to be injected.
an anchor than a harpoon. This is a harpoon like screw anchors are harpoons. Usually you harpoon something from far away, unless you are playing Ahab riding the whale.
After watching a whole season of some blonde bimbette staking vampires, it's remarkable there's any sensation there at all. BTW ER doesn't glorify violence. A video of a tour through a bloodbank would surpass most if not all slasher flicks in blood content, but would still contain no violence. Deadly, bloody violence is what I was speaking of; to pretend you think otherwise is just quibbling.
someone had his favorite show canceled. Is that a legitimate reason for slamming WB? C'mon, Jon. That article had about as much finesse as a pre-election "information" spot, and was just plain inaccurate to boot. The flipside of free speech is that each speaker can also decide what NOT to say. In this case, WB has decided not to air a show which, by many accounts, is unusually violent and bloody. No network is obligated to air programs they think harmful. Indeed, the expectation that they SHOULD have aired it is a sort of reverse censorship that is even more tasteless than the imputed censorship. And is your argument that TV violence begets absolutely no RL violence? Maybe you ought to actually do some research into the matter before you dash off a hasty, one-sentence-per-paragraph tirade on a subject about which you obviously know little. Normally, Jon, I enjoy your articles. But this one just seemed to be an attempt to pander to your audience.
This whole business baffles me in a number of ways. First, these shootings have occurred several times in the last 3 years or so. The shooters have almost all been high school kids who felt themselved to be oppressed and reviled. So when will it finally occur to the oppressors that taunting and abusing their fellow students can in fact have dire consequences? I don't in any way agree with the shooters, but Jesus, when will the rest figure this out? Next, is it really true that there is such sharp divisiveness among high school students? Are there no nerd jocks? No video-junkie cheerleaders? No gothic honor students? My high school days are twenty years gone, and the internet was something restricted to universities and R&D houses. Video games were not much better than Pong. And my high school was pretty white bread; there were very few fights. I was a swimmer that had some friends that were Nerds, some friends were Jocks, and some were Popular. I myself was mostly Nerd/Jock. Maybe my high school days were much more idyllic than what most kids face today. At times in my life I have wanted to become a teacher. It seems like being a teacher is becoming a fairly dangerous occupation. So what do you all think is the root cause here? Is it that parents no longer care to monitor the activities of their kids? (No, I don't mean spy, just actually talk to them) Or is it that school officials are becoming more like police and less like teachers? As a recent parent, I can understand the drive for school dress codes to eliminate those visible differences, but I realize those will be the only ones affected. Probably the issue here is that the crusade for good behavior in classrooms, being composed of mainly dress codes or even school uniforms, has instead taught the students intolerance for anyone different from themselves. It's also valuable to note that the response to intolerance has been intolerance in turn. I have to say the student comments have been almost uniformly intelligent and articulate. Most of these people have legitimate problems with others. Teachers and administration would be well served to listen to these people, instead of trying to counsel them. Communication is a two-way process, and cannot take place if the troubled parties keep getting sent to a shrink when their problem is with other students.
Does the lack of a cache partition pose a problem when you have 4GB RAM? Not being familiar with server configuration, and there not being much detail on what they did, it's hard for me to understand just how Linux operation was hobbled.
Why in the world would you ever put gigabytes (I'm talking DVD here, no flames please) on an optical storage medium designed so people HAVE TO TOUCH IT? Get real. CDs and DVDs should have been designed in a cartridge so that you CAN'T touch the surface, unless you really want to. The fact that a new storage medium has emerged without such protection is unconscionable. I do realize that would introduce additional cost, but big deal. Now that a DVD movie cost $25 retail, wouldn't an extra buck or two be worth it to ensure that movie lasts for years? And if you have several gigabytes of files backed up on DVD, wouldn't it make sense to have it protected against damage that could be casually inflicted?
Sometimes it's referred to as StepUp and sometimes SetUp, which makes it look like it's 2 different products. Either there ARE 2 different products or the author was too lazy to even do a cursory proofread of his material.
I guess the "Georgia Crackers" all moved North.
on
Wired on Kipling
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· Score: 1
Florida doesn't have a lock on the handle of "cracker". I read somewhere where cracker refers to the guy holding the whip, and there weren't too many of those in Florida because cotton doesn't grow very well there. Of course, this could be complete bullshit. Lawton Chiles was a cracker? A cracker would rather go off on a tear than take mood-altering drugs.
So that would be what? 16 2-headed Xeons and a 4-headed Xeon? 6 4-headed Xeons, 1 2-headed Xeons and 10 1-headed Xeons? I figured since it was IBM they could come up with practically anything on short notice. Wait...what am I SAYING? Anyhoo, nowhere does it say 36 total Xeons. Also nowhere does it say 36 for each server. I just did the math and balked at 2.11765 processors per server.
First, a few posters forgot their reading glasses and failed to notice that there were 17 machines, each of which had 36 PIIs in them. If you could have done that with 17 machines having only ONE PII, THAT would be news. Second, the article says they used Xeons. I don't know about what prices IBM gets, but the cheapest I could find a Xeon was about $700. At this price, just the Xeons would cost half a million. The $150k price tag on this setup is just unbelievable, unless either (a) I really misunderstood how many processors they have, and/or (b) $150k was just what they had to buy in addition to what they already had lying around.
Mr. Lewis is more full of himself than the average "expert", and neglected to check the facts. I found it odd that he failed to chart the rate of increase of Windows LOC as he did with Linux. Also odd was that he extrapolated Linux LOC THREE WHOLE YEARS into the future from the last "measured" data point. The claim that Linux LOC will continue to grow exponentially (and at the rate he has selected...ever wonder if he chose the most pessimistic curve that could fit the data?) is a bit silly. Just think...in another decade we could be running operating systems that boast over 10 billion LOC. It also looks as if he is claiming that Linux will be bigger than Windows 2000 when it comes out in 2002 (*chuckle*).
I also absolutely disagree with his issue about support. Usenet support is far superior to MS's online (or telephone...who bothers to try THAT these days?) support, and far more responsive. Additionally, online HOWTOs and included man pages are much better than anything Win98 has to offer. Just the other day, I swapped out my modem for a USR internal (non-Win) modem so that I could maybe connect up to my ISP after rebooting in Linux. After tiring of this, I removed it and reinstalled my original modem. Ohmigod...endless headaches. There's nothing in any MS docs or help files that addresses anything that I ran into. (PortDriver busy or missing on COM4? Nothing is even USING COM4!) My lesson out of all this? Don't even think about fscking with your modem. Plug'n'Play...doesn't. His assertion that Linux advocates are inherent microsoft-bashers is partially true...to the extent that people are sick and tired of crap like I just described, and want software that is written for them, not dumped on them.
Why? You can't patent something that is a process that involves no new technologies. After all, software is distributed over the internet for pay, and that is essentially what they are talking about here...exchanging data for money. I read the whole patent application, and if this is valid, well, I can patent this cool parametric equalizer I built in 1983, which would entitle me to royalties on all stereo equipment sold everywhere. The wording is vague and non-technical (actually, the guy doesn't seem to even be familiar with the correct terminology), and the figures are laughable. Everyone, you should send scathing email to SightSound.com. I basically told them any judge trying the case should kick their asses for being so stupid as to try a stunt like this.
It's really easy. Take any old machine. Yeah, even your old 486 that you don't even bother to boot anymore. Now, here's the key: ACTUALLY INSTALL LINUX FROM THE CDROM. Got problems? NOW'S the time to go read all those manuals. Nothing from those will stick unless it's relevant to what you are doing. I like your writing, despite lack of proof-reading (and I'm pretty anal about that kind of thing), but installing Linux is one of those things you just have to hurl yourself into. No amount of preparation (even a couple of prior installs) will guarantee that you won't run into problems on your current install. I have heard of people who don't know squat about hardware or software getting everything to work the first time. Then, there's me, armed with somewhat better than a vague understanding, faced with an apparently endless series of problems. What the hell...if you don't run into any problems, then you don't learn much, do you?
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Robert wasn't as long on hard science as Clarke, but he was pretty damned good. Occasionally you also see him get credit for inventing the waterbed (this might fall into the urban legends category, but he definitely described one long before there ever was one). Also appearing first (that I can ever find) in his stories is a mass driver for lobbing things toward orbit. Niven and Clarke are also outstanding places to look for concepts (Clarke had ion propulsion long before I ever heard of NASA developing anything like that), but there are other places as well. Gregory Benford has some great stuff, as well as Robert Forward. Just because there's a lot of Sci-Fi (or Spec-Fic, depending on how Politically Correct you want to be) out there doesn't mean you can't prefilter a lot of it. Anything by L. Ron Hubbard, for instance, can automatically be discarded. What a hack that guy was. I can't friggin believe they are actually making a MOVIE of one of his pathetic excuses for fiction.
http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/vax/paper.html
This was not only an impressive feat of engineering, but also economically sound, since George basically produced a machine with twice (benchmarked at 1.9) the computational power as an 11/780, with none of the maintainance costs (George did all the computer maintainance for PU). The additional cost in materials for this increase in performance was 22% of the cost of a new computer.
George was famous for ditzing around with hardware. The HKN lounge in the EE building at Purdue was filled with formerly broken arcade games like Red Baron, Tank and Vortex that George had bought (or just plain carted away as a favor), fixed, uploaded the code and done some alterations that he thought made them more fun. George also won an Ig Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996 for lighting a charcoal grill to cooking temperature in 3 seconds.
Poor Ken.
Sounds like a pretty good price for a 17-year-old girl. Who is this Kroll guy? I have a younger sister I could make him a deal on.
I'd collect the seven dollars and I'd buy a big prosthetic forehead and wear it on my real head.
Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.
They might be giants. Then again, they might not.
Well. Hmph. Guess that slot-loading CD on my ancient Micron Millenium must have been virtual. Micron must have discovered time travel.
1) When a missile is launched, the errors in the initialization of the inertial navigation system are quantifiable in a statistical sense.
2) The onboard computer can propagate the error covariance of the navigation states to the point in space where the star fixes are taken.
3) At this point, an error between the expected line of sight to a star (each measurement is composed of two angles perpendicular to the centerline of the sensor taking the measurement) has strong statistical correlation to the attitude errors.
4) The attitude errors at that time can be VERY strongly correlated to position error. The azimuth error (error in the estimate of which way north is) is commonly one of the larger contributions to position error.
5) In this way, measurement of the attitude errors of a missile can effectively be converted into correction of the navigation estimate of position.
6) As an aside, there is a reason you care which way north is. The reason is this: missiles normally use measureable characteristics of the earth to initialize their navigation. Measured gravity tells it which way down is. Earth rotation tells it which way north is. In a relative sense, accelerometers (in a given price range) are more accurate in locating the direction of down than gyroscopes are at locating north (the axis of earth rotation). It's irrelevant what frame of reference you choose to navigate in; you are still stuck with your initialization errors about north and down. Given two non parallel directions, you can build a 3-axis coordinate system using vector cross products and orthonormalization techniques.
Hope this helps. I have been working on these sorts of systems for about 16 years now, so I have a good idea how things are done.
Take glucosamine sulphate and Chondroitin complex daily for at least a month. This stuff takes a long time to kick in, but the alternative is surgery with rehabilitation time of about that long. I think the reason for the extended time before you see a result is that this type of tissue heals very slowly. In addition to this, you need to make sure that your working conditions don't aggravate the problem more than they have to. Get wrist rests, adjust your keyboard level to something sane, and get a mouse that you can use without killing your hands. It will take a combination of these things to improve your situation without surgery.
As an aside, I notice that Dvorak likes to accuse Linux advocates of being groudlessly optimistic. I in turn find him to be groundlessly pessimistic. Linux might not be the answer to every possible need, but it's more likely to achieve that end than any piece of bloatware that microsoft is likely to put out.
I think this idea deserves a little study. Several years ago, a fellow that I worked with developed an algorithm for target detection that was the first and only of its kind, as far as I had seen. I helped to refine it a bit, but basically it was his beastie. On application for patent, we were told that ALGORITHMS were not patentable (this was in the late '80s; things are probably different now). I happen to be in agreement with this. The concept of what constitutes an invention these days is becoming more and more vague. Patents should not be used to squeeze money out of industrious people who happened to solve a fairly well-understood problem in their own way. Now, I don't advocate that all software be free. Software licensing should adequately cover companies like Corel, Microsoft, and Adobe and their software products. Patents on "a spell checker" and the like are frivolous when there are dozens of similar algorithms/applications out there. Selling USES of those is perfectly fine, in my view. Patenting the IDEA of them is idiotic. And a waste of money, paper and the time of the US Patent Office.
I have to disagree with Mr. Narkinsky's opinion of the Card's previous books on the life of Ender Wiggin. Specifically, he says something to the effect that after Ender's Game, Ender lost his edge. What I got out of those books is that Ender was horrified by the way he had exterminated the buggers, and suffered from the guild of havinf removed an intelligent life form from the universe. Also, he discovered that he just wanted to lead a life of anonymity, rather than be constantly recognized as the boy who killed off the buggers. Ender simply becomes more human, and more spiritual. In my opinion, these books were not intended to portray Ender as a hero, but rather to portray him as a human being who posesses extraordinary intelligence, and also who develops a powerful moral conscience.
Let's not confuse Card with a writer of "action" fiction. In nearly all of Card's books, there is an underlying exposure of different aspects of humanity that is missing in the writings of most others. Not that Card has any special insight into humanity, he just has a unique approach to reminding us that we're all just human under whatever facade we have built up. Before reading Card, I had this idea that Mormons have oddball ideas about religion (I still think that) and should be ignored and avoided. Card has wrenched me out of that position a bit.
If it's anything like the G3, it'll be great at integer math (which I don't use that much) and kinda mediocre at floating point (which I do). If I were given one, it would instantly be loaded with the most convenient Linux distro at hand.
Wrong. Hobby rocket engines are NOT hybrids. They contain their own oxidizer, just as all solid engines have as long as they have existed. Normally solid engines contain oxygen in the form of a nitrate or they use another form of oxidant. A basic solid engine could be made of zinc and sulfur powders and a binding agent, with the reaction product being zinc sulfide and heat. The engine described is quite different, because it required the oxidizer to be injected.
an anchor than a harpoon. This is a harpoon like screw anchors are harpoons. Usually you harpoon something from far away, unless you are playing Ahab riding the whale.
After watching a whole season of some blonde bimbette staking vampires, it's remarkable there's any sensation there at all. BTW ER doesn't glorify violence. A video of a tour through a bloodbank would surpass most if not all slasher flicks in blood content, but would still contain no violence. Deadly, bloody violence is what I was speaking of; to pretend you think otherwise is just quibbling.
someone had his favorite show canceled. Is that a legitimate reason for slamming WB? C'mon, Jon. That article had about as much finesse as a pre-election "information" spot, and was just plain inaccurate to boot. The flipside of free speech is that each speaker can also decide what NOT to say. In this case, WB has decided not to air a show which, by many accounts, is unusually violent and bloody. No network is obligated to air programs they think harmful. Indeed, the expectation that they SHOULD have aired it is a sort of reverse censorship that is even more tasteless than the imputed censorship.
And is your argument that TV violence begets absolutely no RL violence? Maybe you ought to actually do some research into the matter before you dash off a hasty, one-sentence-per-paragraph tirade on a subject about which you obviously know little.
Normally, Jon, I enjoy your articles. But this one just seemed to be an attempt to pander to your audience.
This whole business baffles me in a number of ways. First, these shootings have occurred several times in the last 3 years or so. The shooters have almost all been high school kids who felt themselved to be oppressed and reviled. So when will it finally occur to the oppressors that taunting and abusing their fellow students can in fact have dire consequences? I don't in any way agree with the shooters, but Jesus, when will the rest figure this out?
Next, is it really true that there is such sharp divisiveness among high school students? Are there no nerd jocks? No video-junkie cheerleaders? No gothic honor students? My high school days are twenty years gone, and the internet was something restricted to universities and R&D houses. Video games were not much better than Pong. And my high school was pretty white bread; there were very few fights. I was a swimmer that had some friends that were Nerds, some friends were Jocks, and some were Popular. I myself was mostly Nerd/Jock. Maybe my high school days were much more idyllic than what most kids face today.
At times in my life I have wanted to become a teacher. It seems like being a teacher is becoming a fairly dangerous occupation. So what do you all think is the root cause here? Is it that parents no longer care to monitor the activities of their kids? (No, I don't mean spy, just actually talk to them) Or is it that school officials are becoming more like police and less like teachers? As a recent parent, I can understand the drive for school dress codes to eliminate those visible differences, but I realize those will be the only ones affected. Probably the issue here is that the crusade for good behavior in classrooms, being composed of mainly dress codes or even school uniforms, has instead taught the students intolerance for anyone different from themselves. It's also valuable to note that the response to intolerance has been intolerance in turn.
I have to say the student comments have been almost uniformly intelligent and articulate. Most of these people have legitimate problems with others. Teachers and administration would be well served to listen to these people, instead of trying to counsel them. Communication is a two-way process, and cannot take place if the troubled parties keep getting sent to a shrink when their problem is with other students.
Does the lack of a cache partition pose a problem when you have 4GB RAM? Not being familiar with server configuration, and there not being much detail on what they did, it's hard for me to understand just how Linux operation was hobbled.
Why in the world would you ever put gigabytes (I'm talking DVD here, no flames please) on an optical storage medium designed so people HAVE TO TOUCH IT? Get real. CDs and DVDs should have been designed in a cartridge so that you CAN'T touch the surface, unless you really want to. The fact that a new storage medium has emerged without such protection is unconscionable. I do realize that would introduce additional cost, but big deal. Now that a DVD movie cost $25 retail, wouldn't an extra buck or two be worth it to ensure that movie lasts for years? And if you have several gigabytes of files backed up on DVD, wouldn't it make sense to have it protected against damage that could be casually inflicted?
Sometimes it's referred to as StepUp and sometimes SetUp, which makes it look like it's 2 different products. Either there ARE 2 different products or the author was too lazy to even do a cursory proofread of his material.
Florida doesn't have a lock on the handle of "cracker". I read somewhere where cracker refers to the guy holding the whip, and there weren't too many of those in Florida because cotton doesn't grow very well there. Of course, this could be complete bullshit. Lawton Chiles was a cracker? A cracker would rather go off on a tear than take mood-altering drugs.
So that would be what? 16 2-headed Xeons and a 4-headed Xeon? 6 4-headed Xeons, 1 2-headed Xeons and 10 1-headed Xeons? I figured since it was IBM they could come up with practically anything on short notice. Wait...what am I SAYING? Anyhoo, nowhere does it say 36 total Xeons. Also nowhere does it say 36 for each server. I just did the math and balked at 2.11765 processors per server.
First, a few posters forgot their reading glasses and failed to notice that there were 17 machines, each of which had 36 PIIs in them. If you could have done that with 17 machines having only ONE PII, THAT would be news.
Second, the article says they used Xeons. I don't know about what prices IBM gets, but the cheapest I could find a Xeon was about $700. At this price, just the Xeons would cost half a million. The $150k price tag on this setup is just unbelievable, unless either (a) I really misunderstood how many processors they have, and/or (b) $150k was just what they had to buy in addition to what they already had lying around.
Mr. Lewis is more full of himself than the average "expert", and neglected to check the facts. I found it odd that he failed to chart the rate of increase of Windows LOC as he did with Linux. Also odd was that he extrapolated Linux LOC THREE WHOLE YEARS into the future from the last "measured" data point. The claim that Linux LOC will continue to grow exponentially (and at the rate he has selected...ever wonder if he chose the most pessimistic curve that could fit the data?) is a bit silly. Just think...in another decade we could be running operating systems that boast over 10 billion LOC. It also looks as if he is claiming that Linux will be bigger than Windows 2000 when it comes out in 2002 (*chuckle*).
I also absolutely disagree with his issue about support. Usenet support is far superior to MS's online (or telephone...who bothers to try THAT these days?) support, and far more responsive. Additionally, online HOWTOs and included man pages are much better than anything Win98 has to offer. Just the other day, I swapped out my modem for a USR internal (non-Win) modem so that I could maybe connect up to my ISP after rebooting in Linux. After tiring of this, I removed it and reinstalled my original modem. Ohmigod...endless headaches. There's nothing in any MS docs or help files that addresses anything that I ran into. (PortDriver busy or missing on COM4? Nothing is even USING COM4!) My lesson out of all this? Don't even think about fscking with your modem. Plug'n'Play...doesn't. His assertion that Linux advocates are inherent microsoft-bashers is partially true...to the extent that people are sick and tired of crap like I just described, and want software that is written for them, not dumped on them.
Why? You can't patent something that is a process that involves no new technologies. After all, software is distributed over the internet for pay, and that is essentially what they are talking about here...exchanging data for money.
I read the whole patent application, and if this is valid, well, I can patent this cool parametric equalizer I built in 1983, which would entitle me to royalties on all stereo equipment sold everywhere. The wording is vague and non-technical (actually, the guy doesn't seem to even be familiar with the correct terminology), and the figures are laughable. Everyone, you should send scathing email to SightSound.com. I basically told them any judge trying the case should kick their asses for being so stupid as to try a stunt like this.
It's really easy. Take any old machine. Yeah, even your old 486 that you don't even bother to boot anymore. Now, here's the key: ACTUALLY INSTALL LINUX FROM THE CDROM. Got problems? NOW'S the time to go read all those manuals. Nothing from those will stick unless it's relevant to what you are doing. I like your writing, despite lack of proof-reading (and I'm pretty anal about that kind of thing), but installing Linux is one of those things you just have to hurl yourself into. No amount of preparation (even a couple of prior installs) will guarantee that you won't run into problems on your current install. I have heard of people who don't know squat about hardware or software getting everything to work the first time. Then, there's me, armed with somewhat better than a vague understanding, faced with an apparently endless series of problems. What the hell...if you don't run into any problems, then you don't learn much, do you?