Of course, producing hydrogen with solar power is so inefficient, it is incredibly expensive.
Run some numbers on solar cell efficiency. And then run some numbers on .
And after that, you just have hydrogen gas. You also have to cool it and compress it to get LH2. This also takes considerable energy, and it is a hassle to transport, because it is need to be very cold. You wouldn't think a few degrees K would make such a difference. But transport/storage of LN2 or LOX is much less expensive than for LH2.
I truly wish it wasn't the case, but you'll go broke replacing solar cells before you make a profit at this operation.
What you said is true, but you've left out a couple things.
The original SCO still exists, it is now called Tarantella. Caldera only bought a portion of SCO. Then decided to rename itself SCO. What exactly did they buy? Don't know. We haven't seen that contract.
Also, any contract, such as the Project Monterey one, may have specific clauses which address change-of-control issues.
Remember, you can put just about anything into a contract, if both parties agree to it. We could have a contract that states that if you should ever paint your face blue, I have to pay to five bucks. And that you have to give me all your IP rights if you paint your face green instead.
If anyone at SCOX (the current SCO) honestly believes they have a case against IBM (as opposed to the bunch of dishonest thieves I believe inhabit their headquarters), then they did a very poor job of due dilligence prior to giving cash to original SCO (now Tarantella). They didn't understand whtat they got, what they didn't get, and what their obligations were. The SCOX investors should be suing the managment, if anything.
OK, I learned what CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA meant. I started to to get a little fuzzy starting with SVGA and XGA. And anything beyond SXGA is pure fog to me.
And now we're up to WQUXGA? Ack. Who or what industry consortium is thinking these up?
I'm glad people like DumbSwede are also mentioning the actual resolution as well. But isn't that a sign that the acronyms have now become nearly useless?
Becuase, at the end of the day, all I care about is the actual resolution (in pixels), the size, and the contrast ratio. XSVUQGA doesn't tell me anything. (*)
(*) Yes, I made that up, but someone will pick a resolution for it sooner or later.
Everyone would have thought it ridiculous if Picasso took some of his earlier work back, and touched it up to make it more realistic, or in fashion. I think the same way about the Star Wars Films.
Leonardo Da Vinci was known for going back to his previous works, studying them for a while, and sometimes making changes. I guess he just wasn't satisfied either.
I still don't see the need for Greedo shooting first, however...
I would prefer that Lucas use modern tech to clean up visuals, and leave it at that. There is some argument to allowing back in deleted scenes which were cut because the studio thought the run time was too long. But that should be about it. Just leave it as it was, warts and all.
Lucas needs to realize that making mistakes is a part of life. And trying to re-write history doesn't mean those mistakes were never made.
Most directors aren't worried about fixing their previous movies. They are usually worried about making their next one better.
So what's going to happen with the Indiana Jones series in a few years?
I've picked Debian for an embedded systems project we're working on.
The problem with the distros out there is that some are updated 2-3 times per year (stable release to stable release) and then the old releases are supported for maybe another year.
We wanted something with a longer release cycle. Sure, we could have picked RHEL, but the client is cheap, and didn't want to pay big bucks for support.
So we're going with Debian Sarge. It should go stable well before the project has finished development, and with any luck (i.e. Debian again takes forever to push out another release), we'll still get security updates for 3 years or so.
But this is an embedded application without a lot of external software dependancies. We're using a free database, for example.
I've experimented with several distros, but I've stuck with Debian for our servers and workstations. Our main fileserver, for example, has never, never ever crashed. I'd have 4 years of continuous uptime if it wasn't for various office moves and OS upgrades. I attribute it to very solid, somewhat expensive hardware, a good UPS, and Debian. It first ran 2.2, and now runs 3.0. And in a few months, it will probably run sarge (3.1)... or be retired because it really doesn't have that much free disk space left.:-)
Well, looking through your terminal window is OK I guess.
The real solution, though, is to get a 2nd monitor.
I thought I had enough screen real estate with my SGI 1600SW. But then I got around to hooking up my 2nd one to the same machine. It is very convenient. I can have a couple PDFs for reference open on one, and the other has my big edit window (VIM Rulez!!!, how did I get anything done before syntax highlighting?), a compile window, and the run window.
But even a couple 1280x1024 LCD screens would be pretty good. Years ago, Xinerama was difficult to set up, but with recent versions of X it is a snap. The HOWTO is very easy to follow.
I found the link to 'The Cookie Monster' and read it just now.
Prof. Vinge is my favorite author, and here he delivers the goods again. Bravo! Good show!
I'm used to the idea that a good author (or band, or other artist) usually has just X number of good ideas, and sooner or later, they all run their course. In my experience, 'X' is about 2 novels, or 2 albums, YMMV.
Prof. Vinge, however, has yet to disappoint me. Perhaps that is because his output is relatively low compared to his SF peers. It has been hard to wait years between his novels. But I suppose it is better to do it this way, than to let your quality drop.
Nope. If they shipped even one binary without source, they must make the source available to all comers, in order to make it available to anyone to whom a copy of the binary-only release was transferred.
I don't believe this is the case.
They need to make the source available to anyone they gave the binary to, but that's it. If I got the binary 2nd-hand (from one of the original recipients), then it is that entity, not the original distributor who is obligated to make the source available to me.
Now would probably be a good time for me to re-read the GPL.
At any rate, even if I'm wrong about the above, there is no need to put up the source on anon-ftp. They just need to offer it to anyone who asks. Anon-ftp is the most convenient way for all parties, but not the only way to make the source available.
So, in my non-lawyer view, SCOX has done hardly anything to mitigate the damages from the inclusion of "their" precious IP into the Linux kernel. That's what IBM is arguing, and I don't see how the judge can ignore that.
It was supposed to be a spoof of badly made Kung Fu movies. The Steve Oedekerk and the producers bought the rights to some old, crappy movie, and proceded to re-cut it, and add Steve into the scenes.
Well, I thought it was crap. It might have made more sense as a parody if I had seen the original movie. But since I had no idea what the original plot was, I had no idea what exactly they were trying to make fun of.
And it didn't help that they just beat to death all the same jokes again and again.
So I think Kung Pow is an example of the worst kind of movie. A movie which is bad because it fails to be bad enough!
At the founding of our country, the Constitution listed (enumerated) the powers of the central government. Now, however, anything not explicitly disallowed by the Constitution is fair game for Congress to legislate.
One of the founding fathers was opposed to the Bill of Rights, not because he disagreed with the sentiments of free speech, freedom of religion, etc., but because he thought it would set a bad precedent, leading to just such an attitude as above.
Too bad he was right. Which one was that anyway? Jefferson?
Indeed. As Armadillo Aerospace has shown, there are lots of little things which could go wrong that you never anticipated.
The problem is that no one's brain is big enough to think of all the possibilities, and prevent them.
It takes experience to build a reliable system. And bending metal (in both senses of the word).
Carmack's team is on the right track finally, they've just got a lot of work ahead of them. They're not going to win the X-Prize, but that's OK. They are learning and having fun. And people like me are learning and having fun just watching them.
I have some severe problems with the design of Java. But I don't think that people who choose Java are automatically stupid or something.
It's all about the tools. How many times have I needed to write a program which does X, but there isn't a library for X in Python? And there are libraries for C and Java. (The situation with Python is continually improving, but still...)
I like Python much better than either of those, but unless I want to re-write the entire world, I've got to go where there is support. To where there are the building blocks I need.
At any rate, it is possible to write good, bug-free, and reasonably elegant code in just about any language. It is just that some languages/environments make that more difficult.
But that doesn't stop me from griping about Java or C. My current dream is to take a couple years off work, and write an entire operating system in a high-level language. Something where a Python VM is integrated into the kernel. And all the userland is written in that. All the daemons, libraries, everything. But with this whole work-for-a-living thing, this isn't going to happen anytime soon.:-(
Because Vader had become too powerful and ambitious and had revealed his desire to become the Master.
I really didn't get that impression from 4,5,6. The only time Vader showed any backbone w.r.t. Palpatine was at the very, very end. Sure, he talks to Luke about offing Palpatine at the end of 5, but we didn't see any other concrete plans to get rid of Palpatine.
Vader was showing some incompetence in dispatching the rebels: lost the Death Star I, let the rebels escape (yeah, wasn't really his fault, but still), couldn't ever find their base, etc.. By this point he seemed to be getting soft. That would have been a more plausible reason for Palpatine to get rid of Vader.
Unless, of course, playing the rebels against Palpatine was part of Vader's plan... And he was going to co-opt them later or something. Which could have been why they always "escaped". He needed a constant threat to keep Palpatine always a little off balance. Have Palpatine reacting to events, when he thought he was acting decisively (setting up the ambush at Death Star II). I now wonder if Vader was responsible for replacing the "crack troops" on Endor with the bunch of losers who had their asses kicked by a bunch of neolithic furballs.
They could simply kill him, but they both know that he may be worth more to each of their personal agendas alive. They know that one of the three of them will have to die.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's seriously wacky. "Hey you, I need you to go out and train your replacement. Oh, and that retirement home by the beach you were looking to buy on Naboo... don't bother."
Meanwhile, Palpatine has had Anakin on deck for over a decade ready to take Dooku's place.
So you're saying Doku really wanted freaky bald chick to kill Skywalker? That this wasn't part of the plan to turn Skywalker to the dark side in the process of defeating her? I was under the impression that Doku recruiting freaky bald chick was under Palpatine's direction. But it has been a while since I've seen the series.
I took the "there is always a master and an apprentice" to mean the Sith came in pairs. The hard limit of two Sith in all the universe was news to me today. It will take me a little time to get used to the idea.
I still don't buy the desire for revenge as a motivation for Darth Maul. The Sith are not some grand institution stretching through time, they're just two guys. There is no "you killed my father, prepare to die" thing going on here. Or at least, there wasn't one in Ep1.
The Sith had plenty of reasons for wanting to destroy the Jedi, but I didn't really think revenge was a part of it.
Huh. Just when you think you know something inside and out, you can learn something new.
the doctorine of only two sith at a time - Master and Apprentice.
Well, that's all great. Of course, it is contradicted by the 2nd movie and the animated series on Cartoon Network.
Because there were more Sith. Like Count Doku. I find it hard to believe he was only converted to the dark side after the demise of Darth Maul. The Clone War was a long time in preparation.
Dunno. Maybe he wasn't officially Sith. Like he didn't complete the paperwork or something.
And then, in the cartoon series, Doku is recruiting his own apprentice (the freaky bald chick). And in the mean time, Palpatine is recruiting Skywalker. The series, BTW, is supposed to be occuring in between Ep2 and Ep3.
Or maybe Palpatine said "screw it, I need more Sith".
Your comments on the LS battle with QG, OK and DM was quite interesting and insightful.
I have mixed feelings about the entire series. Loved eps 4,5,6 as a kid. Eps 1 and 2 have been hit-and-miss to my adult eyes.
Some bits were really cool. It wasn't communicated that well in 4,5,6 how bad-ass the jedi are/were. You really got to see that in Ep1. And I liked Palpatine's "I lost but I still won" planning. That's exactly what I'd expect from someone able to take over an entire empire. But Jar Jar, the midicloridians, and stuff like that turned me off.
They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.
Take a look at their P&L's. Seven billion doesn't last that long with a company that size if you're not making money.
They're not going anywhere. Either is McNealy.
That's exactly the problem, if you read the article. I hope some of that new research on running multiple tasks simultaneously works out for them.
However, I think a billion spent on cluster computing would be a better bet. I think they were going in the right direction with the hot desktop switching. They just need to take it to the next level. A PC is more than a screen and a keyboard+mouse.
We have scanners, CD burners, webcams, and all kinds of other peripherals we want to use. Give me all that, and give me reliable access to my applications (office, ERP, calendars, development tools, etc. served off off a big fault-tolerant cluster) and now you're talking.
I was reading the examples of using DTrace to spot performance issues.
It seems to be that most of them could have been caught with code reviews.
Perhaps with tools like DTrace, you can spot performance issues more quickly. But I believe a good code inspection regime could catch these problems and more.
Regarding the incompatible versison... you whine about 1.3x versus 1.3y.... we are at 1.5 beta now, that one fixes all your complains about int versus Integer and Container classes.
And how long has it taken to finally fix these issues? Years and years and years. Sheesh.
Oh, and unless you're like stupid or something, you're not going to use a beta for any kind of serious SW development. You've got to test it a while, after the feature freeze, to see if you can move to it. And if all the platforms you want to run it on support it, etc.
I've used Java a bit, and while it isn't bad for certain types of SW development, I haven't been very impressed with Sun's stewardship so far. I'd like to see what the community can do.
That would be excellent. If I could get anything, and I mean anything ever released on CD anywhere in the world for a reasonable price, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
Isn't this what information technology is supposed to enable? Why is the music industry fighting this so hard? Don't any of them have any imagination?
Feh. Like writing an BASIC program to just read and write all the raw sectors was that hard to do. Heck, I had to write such a program just to copy my own floppy discs, because I had a single drive system and the utility I had was far, far too slow (too many swaps).
It wasn't until people started using non-standard formats or floppies with a non-writable track did things start to get interesting.
Indeed. I just wanted to disabuse people of the notion that a PDF is "uneditable". It's just a little harder, that's all. A bitmap format is only slightly more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, producing hydrogen with solar power is so inefficient, it is incredibly expensive.
Run some numbers on solar cell efficiency. And then run some numbers on .
And after that, you just have hydrogen gas. You also have to cool it and compress it to get LH2. This also takes considerable energy, and it is a hassle to transport, because it is need to be very cold. You wouldn't think a few degrees K would make such a difference. But transport/storage of LN2 or LOX is much less expensive than for LH2.
I truly wish it wasn't the case, but you'll go broke replacing solar cells before you make a profit at this operation.
What you said is true, but you've left out a couple things.
The original SCO still exists, it is now called Tarantella. Caldera only bought a portion of SCO. Then decided to rename itself SCO. What exactly did they buy? Don't know. We haven't seen that contract.
Also, any contract, such as the Project Monterey one, may have specific clauses which address change-of-control issues.
Remember, you can put just about anything into a contract, if both parties agree to it. We could have a contract that states that if you should ever paint your face blue, I have to pay to five bucks. And that you have to give me all your IP rights if you paint your face green instead.
If anyone at SCOX (the current SCO) honestly believes they have a case against IBM (as opposed to the bunch of dishonest thieves I believe inhabit their headquarters), then they did a very poor job of due dilligence prior to giving cash to original SCO (now Tarantella). They didn't understand whtat they got, what they didn't get, and what their obligations were. The SCOX investors should be suing the managment, if anything.
OK, I learned what CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA meant. I started to to get a little fuzzy starting with SVGA and XGA. And anything beyond SXGA is pure fog to me.
And now we're up to WQUXGA? Ack. Who or what industry consortium is thinking these up?
I'm glad people like DumbSwede are also mentioning the actual resolution as well. But isn't that a sign that the acronyms have now become nearly useless?
Becuase, at the end of the day, all I care about is the actual resolution (in pixels), the size, and the contrast ratio. XSVUQGA doesn't tell me anything. (*)
(*) Yes, I made that up, but someone will pick a resolution for it sooner or later.
Everyone would have thought it ridiculous if Picasso took some of his earlier work back, and touched it up to make it more realistic, or in fashion. I think the same way about the Star Wars Films.
Leonardo Da Vinci was known for going back to his previous works, studying them for a while, and sometimes making changes. I guess he just wasn't satisfied either.
I still don't see the need for Greedo shooting first, however...
I would prefer that Lucas use modern tech to clean up visuals, and leave it at that. There is some argument to allowing back in deleted scenes which were cut because the studio thought the run time was too long. But that should be about it. Just leave it as it was, warts and all.
Lucas needs to realize that making mistakes is a part of life. And trying to re-write history doesn't mean those mistakes were never made.
Most directors aren't worried about fixing their previous movies. They are usually worried about making their next one better.
So what's going to happen with the Indiana Jones series in a few years?
I've picked Debian for an embedded systems project we're working on.
The problem with the distros out there is that some are updated 2-3 times per year (stable release to stable release) and then the old releases are supported for maybe another year.
We wanted something with a longer release cycle. Sure, we could have picked RHEL, but the client is cheap, and didn't want to pay big bucks for support.
So we're going with Debian Sarge. It should go stable well before the project has finished development, and with any luck (i.e. Debian again takes forever to push out another release), we'll still get security updates for 3 years or so.
But this is an embedded application without a lot of external software dependancies. We're using a free database, for example.
I've experimented with several distros, but I've stuck with Debian for our servers and workstations. Our main fileserver, for example, has never, never ever crashed. I'd have 4 years of continuous uptime if it wasn't for various office moves and OS upgrades. I attribute it to very solid, somewhat expensive hardware, a good UPS, and Debian. It first ran 2.2, and now runs 3.0. And in a few months, it will probably run sarge (3.1)... or be retired because it really doesn't have that much free disk space left. :-)
Well, looking through your terminal window is OK I guess.
The real solution, though, is to get a 2nd monitor.
I thought I had enough screen real estate with my SGI 1600SW. But then I got around to hooking up my 2nd one to the same machine. It is very convenient. I can have a couple PDFs for reference open on one, and the other has my big edit window (VIM Rulez!!!, how did I get anything done before syntax highlighting?), a compile window, and the run window.
But even a couple 1280x1024 LCD screens would be pretty good. Years ago, Xinerama was difficult to set up, but with recent versions of X it is a snap. The HOWTO is very easy to follow.
I found the link to 'The Cookie Monster' and read it just now.
Prof. Vinge is my favorite author, and here he delivers the goods again. Bravo! Good show!
I'm used to the idea that a good author (or band, or other artist) usually has just X number of good ideas, and sooner or later, they all run their course. In my experience, 'X' is about 2 novels, or 2 albums, YMMV.
Prof. Vinge, however, has yet to disappoint me. Perhaps that is because his output is relatively low compared to his SF peers. It has been hard to wait years between his novels. But I suppose it is better to do it this way, than to let your quality drop.
Nope. If they shipped even one binary without source, they must make the source available to all comers, in order to make it available to anyone to whom a copy of the binary-only release was transferred.
I don't believe this is the case.
They need to make the source available to anyone they gave the binary to, but that's it. If I got the binary 2nd-hand (from one of the original recipients), then it is that entity, not the original distributor who is obligated to make the source available to me.
Now would probably be a good time for me to re-read the GPL.
At any rate, even if I'm wrong about the above, there is no need to put up the source on anon-ftp. They just need to offer it to anyone who asks. Anon-ftp is the most convenient way for all parties, but not the only way to make the source available.
So, in my non-lawyer view, SCOX has done hardly anything to mitigate the damages from the inclusion of "their" precious IP into the Linux kernel. That's what IBM is arguing, and I don't see how the judge can ignore that.
It was supposed to be a spoof of badly made Kung Fu movies. The Steve Oedekerk and the producers bought the rights to some old, crappy movie, and proceded to re-cut it, and add Steve into the scenes.
Well, I thought it was crap. It might have made more sense as a parody if I had seen the original movie. But since I had no idea what the original plot was, I had no idea what exactly they were trying to make fun of.
And it didn't help that they just beat to death all the same jokes again and again.
So I think Kung Pow is an example of the worst kind of movie. A movie which is bad because it fails to be bad enough!
BTW, fawellsucks.com is still not registered.
Sadly, this is how things are turning out to be.
At the founding of our country, the Constitution listed (enumerated) the powers of the central government. Now, however, anything not explicitly disallowed by the Constitution is fair game for Congress to legislate.
One of the founding fathers was opposed to the Bill of Rights, not because he disagreed with the sentiments of free speech, freedom of religion, etc., but because he thought it would set a bad precedent, leading to just such an attitude as above.
Too bad he was right. Which one was that anyway? Jefferson?
Indeed. As Armadillo Aerospace has shown, there are lots of little things which could go wrong that you never anticipated.
The problem is that no one's brain is big enough to think of all the possibilities, and prevent them.
It takes experience to build a reliable system. And bending metal (in both senses of the word).
Carmack's team is on the right track finally, they've just got a lot of work ahead of them. They're not going to win the X-Prize, but that's OK. They are learning and having fun. And people like me are learning and having fun just watching them.
Indeed, transcoding in general drastically reduces audio quality.
A friend of mind bought a Sony mini disc player, and transcoded MP3's downloaded off the net.
I don't know what the originals sounded like, but the transcoded versions sounded completely awful. I had to tell him to shut it off.
The mini disc player was a good idea, back in the late ninties. However, its time has passed. I think the new Walkman's time will pass... quickly.
I have some severe problems with the design of Java. But I don't think that people who choose Java are automatically stupid or something.
It's all about the tools. How many times have I needed to write a program which does X, but there isn't a library for X in Python? And there are libraries for C and Java. (The situation with Python is continually improving, but still...)
I like Python much better than either of those, but unless I want to re-write the entire world, I've got to go where there is support. To where there are the building blocks I need.
At any rate, it is possible to write good, bug-free, and reasonably elegant code in just about any language. It is just that some languages/environments make that more difficult.
But that doesn't stop me from griping about Java or C. My current dream is to take a couple years off work, and write an entire operating system in a high-level language. Something where a Python VM is integrated into the kernel. And all the userland is written in that. All the daemons, libraries, everything. But with this whole work-for-a-living thing, this isn't going to happen anytime soon. :-(
Because Vader had become too powerful and ambitious and had revealed his desire to become the Master.
I really didn't get that impression from 4,5,6. The only time Vader showed any backbone w.r.t. Palpatine was at the very, very end. Sure, he talks to Luke about offing Palpatine at the end of 5, but we didn't see any other concrete plans to get rid of Palpatine.
Vader was showing some incompetence in dispatching the rebels: lost the Death Star I, let the rebels escape (yeah, wasn't really his fault, but still), couldn't ever find their base, etc.. By this point he seemed to be getting soft. That would have been a more plausible reason for Palpatine to get rid of Vader.
Unless, of course, playing the rebels against Palpatine was part of Vader's plan... And he was going to co-opt them later or something. Which could have been why they always "escaped". He needed a constant threat to keep Palpatine always a little off balance. Have Palpatine reacting to events, when he thought he was acting decisively (setting up the ambush at Death Star II). I now wonder if Vader was responsible for replacing the "crack troops" on Endor with the bunch of losers who had their asses kicked by a bunch of neolithic furballs.
They could simply kill him, but they both know that he may be worth more to each of their personal agendas alive. They know that one of the three of them will have to die.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's seriously wacky. "Hey you, I need you to go out and train your replacement. Oh, and that retirement home by the beach you were looking to buy on Naboo... don't bother."
Meanwhile, Palpatine has had Anakin on deck for over a decade ready to take Dooku's place.
So you're saying Doku really wanted freaky bald chick to kill Skywalker? That this wasn't part of the plan to turn Skywalker to the dark side in the process of defeating her? I was under the impression that Doku recruiting freaky bald chick was under Palpatine's direction. But it has been a while since I've seen the series.
I took the "there is always a master and an apprentice" to mean the Sith came in pairs. The hard limit of two Sith in all the universe was news to me today. It will take me a little time to get used to the idea.
I still don't buy the desire for revenge as a motivation for Darth Maul. The Sith are not some grand institution stretching through time, they're just two guys. There is no "you killed my father, prepare to die" thing going on here. Or at least, there wasn't one in Ep1.
The Sith had plenty of reasons for wanting to destroy the Jedi, but I didn't really think revenge was a part of it.
Huh. Just when you think you know something inside and out, you can learn something new.
the doctorine of only two sith at a time - Master and Apprentice.
Well, that's all great. Of course, it is contradicted by the 2nd movie and the animated series on Cartoon Network.
Because there were more Sith. Like Count Doku. I find it hard to believe he was only converted to the dark side after the demise of Darth Maul. The Clone War was a long time in preparation.
Dunno. Maybe he wasn't officially Sith. Like he didn't complete the paperwork or something.
And then, in the cartoon series, Doku is recruiting his own apprentice (the freaky bald chick). And in the mean time, Palpatine is recruiting Skywalker. The series, BTW, is supposed to be occuring in between Ep2 and Ep3.
Or maybe Palpatine said "screw it, I need more Sith".
Your comments on the LS battle with QG, OK and DM was quite interesting and insightful.
I have mixed feelings about the entire series. Loved eps 4,5,6 as a kid. Eps 1 and 2 have been hit-and-miss to my adult eyes.
Some bits were really cool. It wasn't communicated that well in 4,5,6 how bad-ass the jedi are/were. You really got to see that in Ep1. And I liked Palpatine's "I lost but I still won" planning. That's exactly what I'd expect from someone able to take over an entire empire. But Jar Jar, the midicloridians, and stuff like that turned me off.
They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.
Take a look at their P&L's. Seven billion doesn't last that long with a company that size if you're not making money.
They're not going anywhere. Either is McNealy.
That's exactly the problem, if you read the article. I hope some of that new research on running multiple tasks simultaneously works out for them.
However, I think a billion spent on cluster computing would be a better bet. I think they were going in the right direction with the hot desktop switching. They just need to take it to the next level. A PC is more than a screen and a keyboard+mouse.
We have scanners, CD burners, webcams, and all kinds of other peripherals we want to use. Give me all that, and give me reliable access to my applications (office, ERP, calendars, development tools, etc. served off off a big fault-tolerant cluster) and now you're talking.
I was reading the examples of using DTrace to spot performance issues.
It seems to be that most of them could have been caught with code reviews.
Perhaps with tools like DTrace, you can spot performance issues more quickly. But I believe a good code inspection regime could catch these problems and more.
Regarding the incompatible versison ... you whine about 1.3x versus 1.3y .... we are at 1.5 beta now, that one fixes all your complains about int versus Integer and Container classes.
And how long has it taken to finally fix these issues? Years and years and years. Sheesh.
Oh, and unless you're like stupid or something, you're not going to use a beta for any kind of serious SW development. You've got to test it a while, after the feature freeze, to see if you can move to it. And if all the platforms you want to run it on support it, etc.
I've used Java a bit, and while it isn't bad for certain types of SW development, I haven't been very impressed with Sun's stewardship so far. I'd like to see what the community can do.
Eh, what is this? You're making wild assumptions about the nature of IDE and SCSI just by taking apart a couple drives?
The only consistent difference between IDE and SCSI drives is that their interfaces are differnent (IDE and SCSI).
Everything else may (or may not) be the same between drives from the same manufacturer of approximately the same size.
I'm not going to bother going point-by-point. You need to read up on IDE and SCSI technology in general, rather than just use a screwdriver.
And here's a link without advertisement: RAID.
That would be excellent. If I could get anything, and I mean anything ever released on CD anywhere in the world for a reasonable price, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
Isn't this what information technology is supposed to enable? Why is the music industry fighting this so hard? Don't any of them have any imagination?
Feh. Like writing an BASIC program to just read and write all the raw sectors was that hard to do. Heck, I had to write such a program just to copy my own floppy discs, because I had a single drive system and the utility I had was far, far too slow (too many swaps).
It wasn't until people started using non-standard formats or floppies with a non-writable track did things start to get interesting.
Indeed. I just wanted to disabuse people of the notion that a PDF is "uneditable". It's just a little harder, that's all. A bitmap format is only slightly more difficult.
Why not submit your resume in PDF format? It'll be smaller, uneditable, and almost everyone has a PDF viewer of some kind.
Uneditable? I used to think so too. Then someone showed me what a modern image editor can do...
Dunno which version of PDF file it was, and I don't remember the image editor (prolly was Photoshop).
It's official though. You've been warned.