I bought a IBM Z50 Windows CE 2.11 device off of ebay, for $195. It has 48mb of ram, no moving parts, a 640x480 color screen, a CF slot, a PCMCIA slot, builtin 56k modem, builtin audio-recorder, its instant on and off, and its about 1" thick.
It's not really too fast, but its great for what I use it for - it syncs with exchange out of the box, and moving word/excel documents back and forth is also very easy. It has a WTS client and of course you can get ssh and telnet clients for it. It will work with Aironet cards (mine are hopefully in the mail).
1) PostScript is great, but most printers dont speak postscript natively. So now you're talking about some filtering system that does something with the postscript. Which may or may not work right with everything you're trying to print. And where is the standard "Printer Prefs" panel for Linux postscript printers ? If Linux/UNIX has printing down so well, why does WP/Solaris (btw, Solaris _does_ have a tightly integrated PS printing system) still use its own custom printer config system ? Why have I never seen any two UNIX programs print the same way ?
The level of functionality in UNIX printing is similar to what you had dos - you shat stuff at LPT1, well, in UNIX you shat stuff (even if its as elegant as Postscript) at the parallel port, or maybe if you're like most people, at some filters that turn PS into device-dependant printer languages.
So, commong Office Printing
Linux 0: MS: 1
Next, GUI APIs:
Well, so part of the problem here is that you're basically talking about Win32 vs Xwindows. There have been lots of attempts at coming up with a good X based desktop environment. None have really universally caught on...but lets look at a few of ths most common:
CDE - people bitch about it being too bloated, yet its the most consistantly designed and implemented of the available envs. Even so, since it builds on Motif+Xt, you get the usual "where the FUCK are those stupid Xresources coming from" problems. Note that I dont have these problems, but I typically dont try and do anything special/interesting with my Xresources. However, try running an X program like Knews under CDE, and see how awful the CDE colorschemes look. You'll need to screw with Xt settings to fix that.
The ridiculousness of setting per-app preferences (in different files, according to different systems, etc) makes it difficult to have consistant feel and configuration.
This is just CDE. Of CDE, KDE, and Gnome, only CDE isn't a moving target (Gnome is the worst offender here).
Gnome - What minor revision of GTK are you running ? What about Glib ? What about imlib/gdkpixbuf/whoknows. Forget that, im not interested. And all that time you spent learning how Xt worked so you could _try_ and debug the resources for 90% of all X programs ? Forget it, GTK throws your time/knowledge investments away. Maybe rightfully so, but its just more shit for app developers and users to keep track of.
Linux: 0 MS: 2
Database-independant data access:
Not much to say here. Having done Sybase programming from C/C++ under IRIX, I can say that its not especially pretty, but I dont imagine its any different under W32 C. That said, php makes mysql lovely to access, but on the other hand mysql from C isn't as hot. as far as using ODBC under UNIX, i've never tried it.
Conclusion: I'm not qualified to judge
Networked File Services:
Well, NFS on linux _sucks_. Samba on linux is a great connectivity tool when compared with "not connecting", but its always going to be a 2nd class citizen in the CIFS world. I don't necessarily see what NFS or CIFS has to do with porting MS Office though..
As far as "etc etc"...
well yes, lets see what you get with MS. Oh, COM! Like, basically anything anyone has released is COM. So you can run it just about anywhere. What about a common installer framework (MSI) ? Dont say RPM - it barely works right on redhat, much less all the other linux distros. What about library versioning.. Kernel versioning.. multiple interfaces coexisting correctly ?
These are things that are probably possible, but no one seems to ship systems that way. Is it even possible to ship a large complex component based peice of software for Linux, given all the library churn ?
Antying is possible - its just software. When you take Office as designed for windows, and try to port to linux - you lose a lot of the thigns windows give you for free. Some of which that do NOT have equal counterparts on Linux. A port of Office would be damn hard, and as I said earlier, its not clear anyone would buy it.
Microsoft will be happy to put Office on linux when:
1) Linux is as easy to develop business-class software for as Windows
2) When a Linux user is willing to pay for a peice of software
People often assume that if you break apart OS+Apps, then immediately everything gets ported to linux. Nothing could be further from the truth. So much that the OS provodies is just not there at all in linux.
Let me show my unimaginably endless ignorance here, but doesn't africa need to nail down things like "shitting and drinking in separate places" and "not having civil wars over who's pissant do-nothing government is not running anything--today" before they worry about highspeed net access ?
Seems like all the interesting wildlife there is about extinct, and DeBeers has the relevant natural resources all locked up.
Africa reminds me of a funny newsgroup name I saw once - alt.pave.the.earth
Microsofts Market cap is hovering around 400billion.
They have 0 debt.
$0.
They have about 28billion in cash and equivalents.
Look, MS makes so much money off of loan interest (MS loans cash to banks and other financial institutions) that their company wide investment income is larger than some of their product groups.
Guess which tech company is _not_ doing layoffs, forced vacations, etc etc. No no. Instead of fucking its employees, Microsofts idea of "cost cutting" is "we'll hire less people for a while", and "from now on, we're going to look over expense reports when you turn them in"
1) There isn't much of a support gravy train - PSS at microsoft has traditionally been a free resource.
2) XP is monumental in that it brings SMP, JFS, firewalling, NAT, etc etc and other modern OS features to a consumer OS. Only Mac OS X** has tried to bring any of those features to home users. Wether or not OSX will be the commercial success apple hopes it will be remains to be seen.
XP is finally going to unify the Win32 platform (sort of):)
** OS/2 doesn't really count as a consumer OS anymore than AmigaDOS does:)
its a "platform" to build distributed applications and services on.
the goal of it is to make it very easy on the developer, and very seamless for the user.
there are many different peices to.NET, but most of the stuff I've seen is in the way of easy-to-use powerful development tools.
If you've seen the VS.NET betas, you may or may not have seen the new demo. Basically, making a web site or web service is now just as easy as making a silly windows app in VB 6 was. Except now your web service can be called from anywhere on the net, handles authentication for you, does something analagous to XML-RPC, does browser-capability negotiation, etc etc
...all without you having to worry about it... or write code to do it all for you..
so the upside is that for web site developers, they need not blow their time making half their html javascript to figure out how to change the mouse cursor on 234 different browsers... or you wont necessarily have to worry about what stupid sort of broken authentication scheme they have (and the silly password scheme/policy their website uses) if they happen to just say "this service uses your passport account"
similarly, it brings to the forefront the need to have a cross platform way to sharing objects, code, and semantics between otherwise anonymous and unknown servers "in the cloud". (wsdl/uddi)
building on that, and the heavy reliance on XML, makes it very easy to target an app/service at any device.. the "richness" of the end user experience depends only on what capabilities they understand in the objects presented...for instance if im just sending around XML data, my cell phone will present it in a useful way and so will somethign like MS Office. but my app sent out the same data both times.
if more nad more services start using passport, then users will want stronger passport integration. many developers are already very impressed with VS.NET, so perhaps it behooves the kde developers to investigate what can be done with the various qt/kde devtools w.r.t. developing retargetable services and applicatinos that can communicate with others via soap ?
This sentiment is exactly what a certain large company with a bad reputation on slashdot is painfully trying to express.
The GPL is _not_ a "Free" or "unrestrictive" license in any way shape or form.
BSD licensed software is effectively worry free. Paste in the banner into your about box, done.
But to a traditional software company, the GPL is the most frightening thing ever. Nearly every aspect of it is legally dubious.. including the extent and conditions of its viral nature. To those organizations that are currently IP-focused for revenue, the prospect of a court randomly deciding to strip them of their assets is easily reason enough to not bother.
For a number of reasons, which Dan and others have hinted at or expressed directly, "safe" GPL development from a traditional software company is very tricky, and needs lots of spendy lawyers to sort through specific issues on a case by case basis.
The situations where GPL is a worry free endeavour are few and far between. That it hasn't gotten anyone into serious trouble yet doesn't mean it wont.
Thats a total load of shit, unless you have a very selective idea about "often".
The Sun ELC and SLC (SPARCintosh - sun4c machines builtinto monitor housings) didn't have fans.
The Sun Blade 100 doesn't have a fan (or has a fan that can turn on and off, but i cant remember which)
Fwiw, the only reason the blade 100 has reduced cooling needs is because it uses a USIIe, which is an embedded chip. Uses like 10w or something trivially small.
Anyway, every other sun i've ever seen not only has fans, but _lots_ of fans. Look at the power supply on an SS10 or SS20 sometime. ALL FANS.
id Software, makers of the DOOM and QUAKE series games, present their most realistic and electrifying game yet..
SENATE RAMPAGE
A radical new first-person shooter that finally puts you back in charge of the government!
Run through the 51 beautifully detailed and painstakingly re-created senatorial chambers... including the final confrontation with corruption - the UNITED STATES CONGRESS.
Choose from a wide variety of anti-congressional weapons - honesty, free speech, human rights, privacy, and the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.
Eliminate multiple "bosses" to make sure you are the most righteous - 100 bosses in all!"
Here's what the industry is saying about our latest mega-action thriller:
"[Senate Rampage] is the best game ID has released since Q3: Team Arena!! AMAZING!"
- Game Spot
"[Senate Rampage] it's so real. I could actually see the helpless senators bleeding from multiple exit woulds! Details like this are what keep id on top!"
- IGN PC
"This [Senate Rampage] redefines the FPS genre, and is id's first foray into sim and realism gaming. After playing through a few of the senate chambers, for the first time ever, i felt like my "votes" had really counted"
- Next Generation
Nuclear plants have fuel changes once every few _Years_. You can build a whole new underground complex in less time than it takes a nuclear plant to need more fuel.
You're also not keeping very up todate with reactor technology (no doubt because you're just as clueless as President Carter).
Breeder reactors can do much to alleviate the pileup of un-usable radioactive byproducts...they can use non-uranium materials and if you put the right fuel in them to begin with, they'll create further fissionable material. Infact, i once read long ago that a breeder type reactor produces enough "waste product" after 10 years of operation to start fueling an additional power plant.
IIRC this works because breeders _dont_ start with U235*, which quickly turns into boring lead. On the other hand, if you start with an element (PU244?) that has a decay series with many many more fissionalbe isotypes, you get a longer run of fuel.
#define RANT
All I can figure is that opponents of nuclear power are just looking for something to cry about. You take more radiation from a TV, a brick building, or a flight in an airplane than you do from any man made nuclear plant (that functions correctly.. and the world has seen.. what.. _1_ serious nuclear accident ?)
And as far as where to put the waste we do have ?
Pave Africa and ship it over there. I'm sick of their diseases coming across the pond--not to mention all the commercials with fly infested kids that can be fed for just 4 cents per year or whatever it is. If I'm doing my math right, the TV airtime thats ruining my evening costs a boatload more than any possible amount of donations they could take in.
#undef RANT
*Now that i think about it, i can't remember if its U235 or U238 (or 236 even?) thats used in reactors.. i remember quite cleraly that 235 was needed for weapons...but i dont remember if reactor core material was more or less straight 238 or just less "pure" 235.
I donno how game support works, but the XBox hardware can render at HDTV (and beyond) resolutions.. something like 1900x1000.. probably better than your monitor.
In other words, dont expect X-Box to be the weak link in your home entertainment system.
XBox doesn't run CE - it runs a modified (and very pruned) W2k derived OS.
It also wont be a "hobbled" GPU - infact in some places it will have twice the number of pipelines
as the GF3 retail boards.
Thats right. When XBox ships you will _not_ be able to say "the games on my PC look better because my video card is better". It wont be. THe games _might_ look better but that would only be because of piss-poor programming on the part of the xbox programmers.
Finally, the XBox system architecture is different from a PC, but not to "make it unique" - its to make it a better console. What need does a console have for a bunch of serial ports, or PCI slots, or what have you.
Did you forget about fallout ? Or how eating meat in europe was a bad idea for a few months post-Chernobyl ?
I make no argument with you about the ramifactions of genetic or even viral warfare - i've read "The Stand":)
I just take issue with discounting the effects of radioactive fallout - especially to the extent that would be produced in an actual warfare.
There have been less than 10 (known) large-scale radioactive releases near populated areas in history.
Nuclear war is only less dangerous if you think of it as 1 bomb taking out a town as opposed to the reality of the situation: 1 Sub in our ballistic missle fleet has over 200 independant warheads. (aren't MIRV's a bitch ?). How many subs do we have ? How many silos do we have ? How many things do we have that the public doesn't even know about ?
Acutally, if the attack mechanism is something thats "alive" or acts alive, then it can be killed or thwarted (eventually, and with enough research). While 95% of earths population might rot and spontaneously explode, there'd probably be enough people randomly unaffected to survive and figure out a "cure" or an antigen.
On the other hand, short of a metric assload of lead sheilding, theres nothing you can do about a neutron bomb. You're just fucked if you happen to be nearby.
A fun excercize if we were allowed to know the numbers involved would be "how many nukes do we have per square mile of 1% or lower survivability fallout levels".
the fermi "reactor" was hardly a reactor.. he called it an "atomic pile". It was little more than a stack of radioisotype, with a few hand operated control rods. It was built under the bleachers at the squash courts at chicago uni, iirc.
You're right though. The bomb came later, in
44. June or July of 44, near Alamagordo NM.
It was suspended from a steel tower and detonated above ground.
I want to say it was June 22nd but I haven't read about it in quite a long time.
The two wartime nukes were August 6 and 9th, respectively, in 1945.
Your history of SPARC processors and sun machines is basically entirely off:)
the sun4c was _not_ the first SPARC architecture. The plain old sun4 was. As seen in the sun4/110 VME workstation, (first desktop sparc box).
The Sun4c was infact sparc V8, iirc.
Sun4m != SuperSPARC. The sun4m is a _family_ of processors, of which, SuperSPARC happened to be one member. There was also superSPARC II, microSPARC II, HyperSPARC (ROSS/Cypress) and probably others I am forgetting. the superSPARC specifically added larger e-cache and multiple execution units.
The ultras have been shipping since '95, iirc.
For those interested, the maunal for Suns C compiler gives the sparc arch version and so on for each of these processors, and you can target code at any of them specifically (in addition to specifying their cache configuration - hows that for an optimizer ?)
SPARC is hardly dead. It was just _very_ recently that Sun dropped support for sun4c architecture machines from Solaris (sun4c's are things like Sparcstation 1, 1+, 2, SLC, ELC, IPC, IPX..)
The Ultra is not so different. Its V9 of the architecture. Saying that SPARCs are dead because UltraSPARC is the future is like saying the PIII is dead because the PIV is out.
The UltraSPARC has been shipping for a _long_ time. Even so, many many places run production systems on sun4m (ss5, ss10, ss20, etc). Additionally, there are a boatload of clone manufacturers with Sun4m offerings.
I also disagree with the equivalency statement you make regarding OSes.
Solaris is unusable on an old sun4c. So is linux. I suspect OpenBSD is better, but cannot be sure. Incidentally, one way to really help these machines is to put fast modern disks in them (fast as in high xfer rate and very low latency)... perhaps the fs speedups checked into obsd 2.9 will breathe some more life into the older sun4c's..
On the other end of the spectrum, Solaris is by far the most feature rich of the oses you list. Linux is [cheerleader speak: on] _so_ not even in the same ballpark. Wheres the multi-pathing ? Wheres the kernel re-entrancy. Wheres the support for more exotic sun hardware ?
Hell, wheres NFS ?
IMO linux has no niche on the sparc - solaris beats it on the high end, and its too big and slow compared to {open,net}bsd on the lowend.
NT and Win2k have fork, exec, and exit, all via the POSIX subsystem. Does that make it UNIX ?
(aside: the POSIX subsystem as shipped is all but useless (mostly because if if its a posix app it cant make win32 calls))
You can run apache on W2k out of the box. Does that make it unix ?
You can write scripts in NT. You can compile gcc for NT. You can use gcc to compile other code.
Does that make it unix ?
(heres where i get modded to "troll")
Its amusing that LINUX die hards give a damn about judging some other OSes "unixness" - linux makes some deviations of its own. It's own IP stack, it's own notion of userspace threading (has that been worked out yet ?), its own version of VFS, etc etc.
Each UNIX is different enough that portability for a non-trivial app takes a competant C programmer. People that think autoconf is a solves-all should be gut from throat to anus (or should have to compile your average "pengiun pimp powered" GTK app on an IRIX box with MIPS compilers)
One of NTs design requirements was that it is POSIX compliant. They put enough of a posix subsystem in there to meet the spec, which allowed them to have NT compete for certain contracts. Good luck trying to make anything unixy work on the NT posix subsystem without SFU or standing on the shoulders of cygwin.
Look at "reparse points" on NTFS, and if you have the reskit for w2k, look for "linkd"
Microsoft has no problem giving people what they want - its not that microsoft doesn't "Want something in there". The issue is more like "hey, what should all these _millions_ of apps do when they see a symlink when they've never worried about them before ?"
Thats a big problem.
If you want a singly rooted fs, symlinks, inetd, and all those on NT/w2k , you can get them today, via Services for Unix. It's a very slick package, i use it on my w2k box at work when i just cant deal with "cmd.exe" any more:)
Also, the vi that comes with it is significantly faster than notepad for large files.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a IBM Z50 Windows CE 2.11 device off of ebay, for $195. It has 48mb of ram, no moving parts, a 640x480 color screen, a CF slot, a PCMCIA slot, builtin 56k modem, builtin audio-recorder, its instant on and off, and its about 1" thick.
It's not really too fast, but its great for what I use it for - it syncs with exchange out of the box, and moving word/excel documents back and forth is also very easy. It has a WTS client and of course you can get ssh and telnet clients for it. It will work with Aironet cards (mine are hopefully in the mail).
Best of all ?
10+ hours of battery life.
Who else has a 2 pound 10hr VGA wireless device ?
How is NS 4.7 an old browser ?
What newer browser would you recommend, for someone who is running SPARC Solaris on a ss10/612 ?
1) PostScript is great, but most printers dont speak postscript natively. So now you're talking about some filtering system that does something with the postscript. Which may or may not work right with everything you're trying to print. And where is the standard "Printer Prefs" panel for Linux postscript printers ? If Linux/UNIX has printing down so well, why does WP/Solaris (btw, Solaris _does_ have a tightly integrated PS printing system) still use its own custom printer config system ? Why have I never seen any two UNIX programs print the same way ?
The level of functionality in UNIX printing is similar to what you had dos - you shat stuff at LPT1, well, in UNIX you shat stuff (even if its as elegant as Postscript) at the parallel port, or maybe if you're like most people, at some filters that turn PS into device-dependant printer languages.
So, commong Office Printing
Linux 0: MS: 1
Next, GUI APIs:
Well, so part of the problem here is that you're basically talking about Win32 vs Xwindows. There have been lots of attempts at coming up with a good X based desktop environment. None have really universally caught on...but lets look at a few of ths most common:
CDE - people bitch about it being too bloated, yet its the most consistantly designed and implemented of the available envs. Even so, since it builds on Motif+Xt, you get the usual "where the FUCK are those stupid Xresources coming from" problems. Note that I dont have these problems, but I typically dont try and do anything special/interesting with my Xresources. However, try running an X program like Knews under CDE, and see how awful the CDE colorschemes look. You'll need to screw with Xt settings to fix that.
The ridiculousness of setting per-app preferences (in different files, according to different systems, etc) makes it difficult to have consistant feel and configuration.
This is just CDE. Of CDE, KDE, and Gnome, only CDE isn't a moving target (Gnome is the worst offender here).
Gnome - What minor revision of GTK are you running ? What about Glib ? What about imlib/gdkpixbuf/whoknows. Forget that, im not interested. And all that time you spent learning how Xt worked so you could _try_ and debug the resources for 90% of all X programs ? Forget it, GTK throws your time/knowledge investments away. Maybe rightfully so, but its just more shit for app developers and users to keep track of.
Linux: 0 MS: 2
Database-independant data access:
Not much to say here. Having done Sybase programming from C/C++ under IRIX, I can say that its not especially pretty, but I dont imagine its any different under W32 C. That said, php makes mysql lovely to access, but on the other hand mysql from C isn't as hot. as far as using ODBC under UNIX, i've never tried it.
Conclusion: I'm not qualified to judge
Networked File Services:
Well, NFS on linux _sucks_. Samba on linux is a great connectivity tool when compared with "not connecting", but its always going to be a 2nd class citizen in the CIFS world. I don't necessarily see what NFS or CIFS has to do with porting MS Office though..
As far as "etc etc"...
well yes, lets see what you get with MS. Oh, COM! Like, basically anything anyone has released is COM. So you can run it just about anywhere. What about a common installer framework (MSI) ? Dont say RPM - it barely works right on redhat, much less all the other linux distros. What about library versioning.. Kernel versioning.. multiple interfaces coexisting correctly ?
These are things that are probably possible, but no one seems to ship systems that way. Is it even possible to ship a large complex component based peice of software for Linux, given all the library churn ?
Antying is possible - its just software. When you take Office as designed for windows, and try to port to linux - you lose a lot of the thigns windows give you for free. Some of which that do NOT have equal counterparts on Linux. A port of Office would be damn hard, and as I said earlier, its not clear anyone would buy it.
Microsoft will be happy to put Office on linux when:
1) Linux is as easy to develop business-class software for as Windows
2) When a Linux user is willing to pay for a peice of software
People often assume that if you break apart OS+Apps, then immediately everything gets ported to linux. Nothing could be further from the truth. So much that the OS provodies is just not there at all in linux.
.NET is better than Java
.NET is better than Java is similar to saying "OpenBSD is better than perl"
.NET is a platform for distributed computing. Platform/Language neutrality is a key part of that.
Why do people say this ?
.NET is soooooooo much more than Java.
Do you mean C# is better than Java ?
because saying
Remember,
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
"Africa Needs Net Access, NOW!"
Let me show my unimaginably endless ignorance here, but doesn't africa need to nail down things like "shitting and drinking in separate places" and "not having civil wars over who's pissant do-nothing government is not running anything--today" before they worry about highspeed net access ?
Seems like all the interesting wildlife there is about extinct, and DeBeers has the relevant natural resources all locked up.
Africa reminds me of a funny newsgroup name I saw once - alt.pave.the.earth
Better words were never spoken.
what part of "consumer OS" did you miss ?
Does your grandma run IRIX ?
Microsofts Market cap is hovering around 400billion.
They have 0 debt.
$0.
They have about 28billion in cash and equivalents.
Look, MS makes so much money off of loan interest (MS loans cash to banks and other financial institutions) that their company wide investment income is larger than some of their product groups.
Guess which tech company is _not_ doing layoffs, forced vacations, etc etc. No no. Instead of fucking its employees, Microsofts idea of "cost cutting" is "we'll hire less people for a while", and "from now on, we're going to look over expense reports when you turn them in"
You are dumb.
:)
:)
1) There isn't much of a support gravy train - PSS at microsoft has traditionally been a free resource.
2) XP is monumental in that it brings SMP, JFS, firewalling, NAT, etc etc and other modern OS features to a consumer OS. Only Mac OS X** has tried to bring any of those features to home users. Wether or not OSX will be the commercial success apple hopes it will be remains to be seen.
XP is finally going to unify the Win32 platform (sort of)
** OS/2 doesn't really count as a consumer OS anymore than AmigaDOS does
.net is very simple really.
.NET, but most of the stuff I've seen is in the way of easy-to-use powerful development tools.
its a "platform" to build distributed applications and services on.
the goal of it is to make it very easy on the developer, and very seamless for the user.
there are many different peices to
If you've seen the VS.NET betas, you may or may not have seen the new demo. Basically, making a web site or web service is now just as easy as making a silly windows app in VB 6 was. Except now your web service can be called from anywhere on the net, handles authentication for you, does something analagous to XML-RPC, does browser-capability negotiation, etc etc
...all without you having to worry about it... or write code to do it all for you..
so the upside is that for web site developers, they need not blow their time making half their html javascript to figure out how to change the mouse cursor on 234 different browsers... or you wont necessarily have to worry about what stupid sort of broken authentication scheme they have (and the silly password scheme/policy their website uses) if they happen to just say "this service uses your passport account"
similarly, it brings to the forefront the need to have a cross platform way to sharing objects, code, and semantics between otherwise anonymous and unknown servers "in the cloud". (wsdl/uddi)
building on that, and the heavy reliance on XML, makes it very easy to target an app/service at any device.. the "richness" of the end user experience depends only on what capabilities they understand in the objects presented...for instance if im just sending around XML data, my cell phone will present it in a useful way and so will somethign like MS Office. but my app sent out the same data both times.
if more nad more services start using passport, then users will want stronger passport integration. many developers are already very impressed with VS.NET, so perhaps it behooves the kde developers to investigate what can be done with the various qt/kde devtools w.r.t. developing retargetable services and applicatinos that can communicate with others via soap ?
just some thoughts..
Actually that makes me wonder.
Does the Heisenburg (?) uncertainty principle apply at a macroscopic level ?
If we observe the weather, can we do so without modifying it ?
fwiw, i've always wanted to somehow work that into my defense whilst protesting a speeding ticket..
"boy, i clocked you doing 77mph back there"
"do you know which way i was going ?"
"yes"
"then you couldn't possibly have known how fast I was going"
This sentiment is exactly what a certain large company with a bad reputation on slashdot is painfully trying to express.
The GPL is _not_ a "Free" or "unrestrictive" license in any way shape or form.
BSD licensed software is effectively worry free. Paste in the banner into your about box, done.
But to a traditional software company, the GPL is the most frightening thing ever. Nearly every aspect of it is legally dubious.. including the extent and conditions of its viral nature. To those organizations that are currently IP-focused for revenue, the prospect of a court randomly deciding to strip them of their assets is easily reason enough to not bother.
For a number of reasons, which Dan and others have hinted at or expressed directly, "safe" GPL development from a traditional software company is very tricky, and needs lots of spendy lawyers to sort through specific issues on a case by case basis.
The situations where GPL is a worry free endeavour are few and far between. That it hasn't gotten anyone into serious trouble yet doesn't mean it wont.
Thats a total load of shit, unless you have a very selective idea about "often".
The Sun ELC and SLC (SPARCintosh - sun4c machines builtinto monitor housings) didn't have fans.
The Sun Blade 100 doesn't have a fan (or has a fan that can turn on and off, but i cant remember which)
Fwiw, the only reason the blade 100 has reduced cooling needs is because it uses a USIIe, which is an embedded chip. Uses like 10w or something trivially small.
Anyway, every other sun i've ever seen not only has fans, but _lots_ of fans. Look at the power supply on an SS10 or SS20 sometime. ALL FANS.
id Software, makers of the DOOM and QUAKE series games, present their most realistic and electrifying game yet..
SENATE RAMPAGE
A radical new first-person shooter that finally puts you back in charge of the government!
Run through the 51 beautifully detailed and painstakingly re-created senatorial chambers... including the final confrontation with corruption - the UNITED STATES CONGRESS.
Choose from a wide variety of anti-congressional weapons - honesty, free speech, human rights, privacy, and the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.
Eliminate multiple "bosses" to make sure you are the most righteous - 100 bosses in all!"
Here's what the industry is saying about our latest mega-action thriller:
"[Senate Rampage] is the best game ID has released since Q3: Team Arena!! AMAZING!"
- Game Spot
"[Senate Rampage] it's so real. I could actually see the helpless senators bleeding from multiple exit woulds! Details like this are what keep id on top!"
- IGN PC
"This [Senate Rampage] redefines the FPS genre, and is id's first foray into sim and realism gaming. After playing through a few of the senate chambers, for the first time ever, i felt like my "votes" had really counted"
- Next Generation
Moan moan moan. Cry cry cry.
Nuclear plants have fuel changes once every few _Years_. You can build a whole new underground complex in less time than it takes a nuclear plant to need more fuel.
You're also not keeping very up todate with reactor technology (no doubt because you're just as clueless as President Carter).
Breeder reactors can do much to alleviate the pileup of un-usable radioactive byproducts...they can use non-uranium materials and if you put the right fuel in them to begin with, they'll create further fissionable material. Infact, i once read long ago that a breeder type reactor produces enough "waste product" after 10 years of operation to start fueling an additional power plant.
IIRC this works because breeders _dont_ start with U235*, which quickly turns into boring lead. On the other hand, if you start with an element (PU244?) that has a decay series with many many more fissionalbe isotypes, you get a longer run of fuel.
#define RANT
All I can figure is that opponents of nuclear power are just looking for something to cry about. You take more radiation from a TV, a brick building, or a flight in an airplane than you do from any man made nuclear plant (that functions correctly.. and the world has seen.. what.. _1_ serious nuclear accident ?)
And as far as where to put the waste we do have ?
Pave Africa and ship it over there. I'm sick of their diseases coming across the pond--not to mention all the commercials with fly infested kids that can be fed for just 4 cents per year or whatever it is. If I'm doing my math right, the TV airtime thats ruining my evening costs a boatload more than any possible amount of donations they could take in.
#undef RANT
*Now that i think about it, i can't remember if its U235 or U238 (or 236 even?) thats used in reactors.. i remember quite cleraly that 235 was needed for weapons...but i dont remember if reactor core material was more or less straight 238 or just less "pure" 235.
I donno how game support works, but the XBox hardware can render at HDTV (and beyond) resolutions.. something like 1900x1000.. probably better than your monitor.
In other words, dont expect X-Box to be the weak link in your home entertainment system.
XBox doesn't run CE - it runs a modified (and very pruned) W2k derived OS.
It also wont be a "hobbled" GPU - infact in some places it will have twice the number of pipelines
as the GF3 retail boards.
Thats right. When XBox ships you will _not_ be able to say "the games on my PC look better because my video card is better". It wont be. THe games _might_ look better but that would only be because of piss-poor programming on the part of the xbox programmers.
Finally, the XBox system architecture is different from a PC, but not to "make it unique" - its to make it a better console. What need does a console have for a bunch of serial ports, or PCI slots, or what have you.
Go to www.xbox.com
MS says they'll have between 600k and 800k units
available instores on Nov 8th. What they have on the following days/weeks hasn't been disclosed.
Heh.
:)
Did you forget about fallout ? Or how eating meat in europe was a bad idea for a few months post-Chernobyl ?
I make no argument with you about the ramifactions of genetic or even viral warfare - i've read "The Stand"
I just take issue with discounting the effects of radioactive fallout - especially to the extent that would be produced in an actual warfare.
There have been less than 10 (known) large-scale radioactive releases near populated areas in history.
Nuclear war is only less dangerous if you think of it as 1 bomb taking out a town as opposed to the reality of the situation: 1 Sub in our ballistic missle fleet has over 200 independant warheads. (aren't MIRV's a bitch ?). How many subs do we have ? How many silos do we have ? How many things do we have that the public doesn't even know about ?
Acutally, if the attack mechanism is something thats "alive" or acts alive, then it can be killed or thwarted (eventually, and with enough research). While 95% of earths population might rot and spontaneously explode, there'd probably be enough people randomly unaffected to survive and figure out a "cure" or an antigen.
On the other hand, short of a metric assload of lead sheilding, theres nothing you can do about a neutron bomb. You're just fucked if you happen to be nearby.
A fun excercize if we were allowed to know the numbers involved would be "how many nukes do we have per square mile of 1% or lower survivability fallout levels".
the fermi "reactor" was hardly a reactor.. he called it an "atomic pile". It was little more than a stack of radioisotype, with a few hand operated control rods. It was built under the bleachers at the squash courts at chicago uni, iirc.
You're right though. The bomb came later, in
44. June or July of 44, near Alamagordo NM.
It was suspended from a steel tower and detonated above ground.
I want to say it was June 22nd but I haven't read about it in quite a long time.
The two wartime nukes were August 6 and 9th, respectively, in 1945.
Heh.
:)
Your history of SPARC processors and sun machines is basically entirely off
the sun4c was _not_ the first SPARC architecture. The plain old sun4 was. As seen in the sun4/110 VME workstation, (first desktop sparc box).
The Sun4c was infact sparc V8, iirc.
Sun4m != SuperSPARC. The sun4m is a _family_ of processors, of which, SuperSPARC happened to be one member. There was also superSPARC II, microSPARC II, HyperSPARC (ROSS/Cypress) and probably others I am forgetting. the superSPARC specifically added larger e-cache and multiple execution units.
The ultras have been shipping since '95, iirc.
For those interested, the maunal for Suns C compiler gives the sparc arch version and so on for each of these processors, and you can target code at any of them specifically (in addition to specifying their cache configuration - hows that for an optimizer ?)
Why was this modded as a troll ?
It's a simple _question_.
People that think linux is the magic bullet to solve every computing problem don't deserve moderator points. Or to be taken seriously.
SPARC is hardly dead. It was just _very_ recently that Sun dropped support for sun4c architecture machines from Solaris (sun4c's are things like Sparcstation 1, 1+, 2, SLC, ELC, IPC, IPX..)
The Ultra is not so different. Its V9 of the architecture. Saying that SPARCs are dead because UltraSPARC is the future is like saying the PIII is dead because the PIV is out.
The UltraSPARC has been shipping for a _long_ time. Even so, many many places run production systems on sun4m (ss5, ss10, ss20, etc). Additionally, there are a boatload of clone manufacturers with Sun4m offerings.
I also disagree with the equivalency statement you make regarding OSes.
Solaris is unusable on an old sun4c. So is linux. I suspect OpenBSD is better, but cannot be sure. Incidentally, one way to really help these machines is to put fast modern disks in them (fast as in high xfer rate and very low latency)... perhaps the fs speedups checked into obsd 2.9 will breathe some more life into the older sun4c's..
On the other end of the spectrum, Solaris is by far the most feature rich of the oses you list. Linux is [cheerleader speak: on] _so_ not even in the same ballpark. Wheres the multi-pathing ? Wheres the kernel re-entrancy. Wheres the support for more exotic sun hardware ?
Hell, wheres NFS ?
IMO linux has no niche on the sparc - solaris beats it on the high end, and its too big and slow compared to {open,net}bsd on the lowend.
NT and Win2k have fork, exec, and exit, all via the POSIX subsystem. Does that make it UNIX ?
(aside: the POSIX subsystem as shipped is all but useless (mostly because if if its a posix app it cant make win32 calls))
You can run apache on W2k out of the box. Does that make it unix ?
You can write scripts in NT. You can compile gcc for NT. You can use gcc to compile other code.
Does that make it unix ?
(heres where i get modded to "troll")
Its amusing that LINUX die hards give a damn about judging some other OSes "unixness" - linux makes some deviations of its own. It's own IP stack, it's own notion of userspace threading (has that been worked out yet ?), its own version of VFS, etc etc.
Each UNIX is different enough that portability for a non-trivial app takes a competant C programmer. People that think autoconf is a solves-all should be gut from throat to anus (or should have to compile your average "pengiun pimp powered" GTK app on an IRIX box with MIPS compilers)
One of NTs design requirements was that it is POSIX compliant. They put enough of a posix subsystem in there to meet the spec, which allowed them to have NT compete for certain contracts. Good luck trying to make anything unixy work on the NT posix subsystem without SFU or standing on the shoulders of cygwin.
Look at "reparse points" on NTFS, and if you have the reskit for w2k, look for "linkd"
:)
Microsoft has no problem giving people what they want - its not that microsoft doesn't "Want something in there". The issue is more like "hey, what should all these _millions_ of apps do when they see a symlink when they've never worried about them before ?"
Thats a big problem.
If you want a singly rooted fs, symlinks, inetd, and all those on NT/w2k , you can get them today, via Services for Unix. It's a very slick package, i use it on my w2k box at work when i just cant deal with "cmd.exe" any more
Also, the vi that comes with it is significantly faster than notepad for large files.