I'd really appreciate a web site full of reasonable comments and snippets that I could pick from to compose a reasoned letter to my legislators.
It would help immensely to have short, concise statements of why this is bad in simple terms that even Joe Sixpack can understand in the 40 seconds that it takes him to read a Letter to the Editor in the local newspaper. Such simple expressions that they cannot be dislodged casually by the vested interests that stand to profit at everyone else's expense, should such misguided legislation sneak through because a full review by unbiased experts has not been done.
I'm thinking here of messages along the lines of alerting citizens that if their digital rights to read are delineated by this legislation, that their future use of technology will in no way resemble that to which they've become accustomed for newspapers, magazines, books, LP records, CDs, etc.
That is, I can buy a newspaper anonymously and no one will know who I am or what I read. If I choose to sell my or even give away my newspaper to someone else, then that is my perogative and mine alone. Neither is it necessary for the transaction between me and that other person to be the business of anyone else. If I choose to scan in a book I just bought and read it on my laptop computer, then that is my current right. As long as I don't reproduce copyrighted work and sell it, then it should be within my rights. None such rights can be taken for granted in future society in which "Digital Copyright Management" is dictated so that no individual may be exposed to media without intrusive measures to insure that the Rights Owner (not necessarily the Creator) of the Original Digital Media is paid for this and every instance of Use.
Likewise, ramming down DMCA and related technology restrictions like this SSSCA is morally equivalent to mandating that crowbars, a technology that could be used for breaking into houses, be outlawed and only specially licensed crowbar researchers on a government maintained list may have access to crowbars. Leave the technology open. Force manufacturers to come up with a different system, a voluntary system, one where consumers have a choice and one which does not abridge the rights to fair use that consumers currently enjoy.
Finally, under no circumstances should burdensome government regulations on technology be used as an excuse to prop up a revenue model for a specific commercial lobby.
Neither should legitimate concerns for national security be applied with an unthinking broad brush to remove the liberties of expression enjoyed by the citizens of this free nation.
I'm not as good at formulating compelling arugments as some of you are. Herein I have probably used more lighter fluid than should be put into a letter to my legislator. I want it to have the most impact that it can.
Linus grants RMS and the FSF kudoes for developing gcc and accepts that the rest of the GNU system is useful in most contexts, but where I find his appreciation lacking is not necessarily in kowtowing to RMS' demand that the system be called "GNU/Linux", but public recognition of just how valuable and critical the entire concept of the GPL ("Share and share alike") has been to Linux kernel development.
Perhaps I'm being unfair, that Linus has mentioned the importance of the GPL to the Linux kernel in public forums and I have simply missed it. But, if I've missed it, then you can bet a lot of other people have missed it as well and a great number of people are ignorant of just how important the GPL has been to this development process.
I really applaud MIT's move to make their curriculum available for free over the Internet. It shows an interest in the advancement of science that trumps the growing trend to patent and close-off avenues for technology growth by businesses intent on exploiting technology-related law (who can blame them for doing so?).
The reason I think it shows real guts is that MIT traditionally has been very focussed on maintaing good relations with industry, and industry that profits from the current base of technology laws, and an industry that donates money to MIT. They are more closely tied together with industry as an engineering school, where a liberal arts school is pretty much independent of direct industrial largesse.
I was a student at MIT in my past. You may not know this, but MIT is actually run by MIT Corporation. Furthermore, upon entrance to the school, I "had" to sign some kind of paperwork that essentially insured that patents and ideas that I came up with while at MIT were theirs and not mine. Theses, too, are copyrighted by MIT, and generally more difficult to obtain than theses from other universities that are listed by University Microfilms.
Thus, you can see why I'm impressed at the turnaround evidenced by this move.
What would be even better would be if they were to release streaming video of classroom lectures, sessions with teaching assistants, as well as lecture notes, problem sets, exams, solutions.
I had credited the German government with a great deal more early enlightenment than other governments (U.S. and France, for example) because of their support of Gnu Privacy Guard development.
I think the NSA's efforts to comb through Linux and make SE suggestions is a real positive development.
I'm sure others will mention this, but there has been a non-trivial use of Linux in the Department of Energy laboratories and research centers.
Mike Warren and colleagues at Los Alamos built Loki and Avalon clusters some years ago - they were featured in Linux Journal, IIRC. CPLant at Sandia uses Linux as its code base for research into very large clusters.
And those are just a few of the higher profile news-making uses of open source. If you were to carefully comb through DOE LANs at over two dozen laboratories, I think you'd find hundreds of open source powered boxes in all kinds of capacities ranging from economical compute servers, web servers, data acquisition interfaces, etc. They are incredibly economical and powerful app servers.
What they need to do is enforce stiff monetary penalties (they are one of the richest companies on the planet) payable to the companies they screwed over (at least the ones named in the antitrust case). That would help force them to crank the price of WinXP (and their licensing schemes) to even more ridiculous price levels, thereby forcing companies to switch to a better, and cheaper OS.
Well, yes.
IIRC, MS has something on the order of $3e10 cash reserves, enough to make it the envy of every company that has sought a good credit rating from Standard & Poors.
What that means, though, is that the monetary penalties would have to be stiff to an almost unprecedented degree. Something on the order of the tobacco company settlements, to give you some idea of just how stiff.
They have enough of a market lock and cash reserves that it would take an extremely stiff penalty before they would raise the price of XP even more than they already have.
Besides, am I mistaken, or are most corporate IT departments facing unprecedented increases in costs for licenses from MS and, for all practical purposes, looking to take those lumps? Sure Linux exists, but to their eyes not so much as an alternative that they would really take but more as a bargaining chip when they sit down with MS to negotiate how much they have to pay for Enterprise License Agreements.
If I were a PC hardware manufacturer, especially in the current slump, I'd be pretty peeved that MS was about to swallow an even bigger piece of the pie from corporate IT budgets and leave the crumbs for hardware upgrades.
No, I think the only resolution is to pry open the clo$ed interfaces that have been abused. All Office formats (including rendering rules), win16 APIs, win32 APIs, HALs in NT need to be shown the light of day, free for anyone to implement and free for anyone to interface into without the need for purchasing any agreements or worrying that the interface will subtly break their app.
Let everyone innovate, and not just the company that happens to own the standards.
Let MS introduce.NET, but give them, or anyone else, a drastically curtailed time window of monopoly power on it. Once it is running an installed on 80% of computers or, say, 17 months, force it open also as a standard.
Let innovation be in implementations, with less emphasis upon the supposedly "new". Let's not accept the abuse of the term "innovation" as an excuse to lock down new technology indefinitely and to force payment for the right to use that technology long after it's innovative value has been established.
The MS of old had a lot more incentive to innovate (improve their product) when there viable competitors breathing down their necks. That's no longer the case and hasn't been for many years.
Actually, no court remedy would be necessary if a very large customer base, such as federal, state and local governments, mandated that all of their computing be done with precisely documented open interfaces. MS could choose to retain business from those clients if they were to open up, or else face the prospect of all those customers migrating to alternative platforms and applications based upon open standards. Such a move would seem logical, given how much ostensibly public business is locked up in proprietary.doc formats already. Imagine if the U.S. Constitution were only viewable from Word!
Not to be demeaning, but most of our elected public officials have little background in technical issues.
Which is a shame, of course, because these officials are in positions of authority that can make life miserable if they happen to choose wrong-headed policy.
In your experience, given that our public officials must make policies for an environment that they don't natively understand, are these officials thereby more susceptible to being hoodwinked by vested interests than they are for other, more easily understood issues?
I was under the vague impression that the IBM drives were better than average quality. I am not always diligent about checking storagereview.com, but that's the impression I had from word of mouth.
So thinking, I purchased a 75GXP as a 2nd drive for my TiVo. It's been working day in and day out for two months now. It's a little noisier than I'd like, but it works.
Your bad experience, though, prompts me to think a little more about reliability and the quoted figures for it.
When a vendor reports a MTBF for a component like a disk drive, is it the vendor that measures this figure or an independent organization?
What kinds of testing conditions are used in the MTBF tests and do they account for the typical variations in use in the field?
Other posts have mentioned something about cheap power supplies and the possibility that this can shorten the life of your components. Perhaps the IBM drives are more sensitive to such perturbations than drives from other vendors.
Some users may power their systems off and on more frequently than other users, thereby shortening the life of their equipment.
I live off a dirt road, so I have more air-borne dust that can damage moving parts. (I don't know if it's just me, but I've had to contend with CPU cooling fan failures more than I thought was reasonable.)
In summary, field use of equipment can vary substantially from a lab bench. Do the MTBF figures we see reported take that variation into account?
Re:Still Needs a New Killer App
on
Webpads, Anyone?
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· Score: 2
Sigh. Too bad this wan't 1998.
I could cut n' paste the posts and call it a business plan, we'd have VC funding by Friday!
that the Alpha 21364 is not here to provide the Power4 with a worthy competitor.
At least it sets a standard of performance so that Itania (cubic Zirconia?) cannot be simply passed off as "great" just as they are.
Intel will have some real hard work to do to match the Power4, which not only has some good processing speed, but some BW to memory that should propel to the top of the heap in some benchmark categories.
You know this Beowulf business is getting to be pretty staid and routine by now.
In fact, I'd almost say it would be newsworthy if there were any organization (university, company, govt lab) that had not yet built "a supercomputer from the COTS components".
What I'd like to see now is more metrics (some of which the article does, admittedly, reveal).
hardware cost per FLOP (everyone already tells you this)
FLOPS per human time to build
FLOPS per sysadmin time to maintain
FLOPS per kilowatt of electricity
FLOPS per cubic foot of rack space
can it run smoothly if Bad Andy goes behind the rack and unplugs a few network connections, a few power cords to some nodes?
Everyone knows that you can spend your own time scouring dumpsters for cast-off computers and coaxing them to life, bringing up an old 486 with an ISA 10bT card as a member of your cluster. Unless you're doing it for your own educational benefit, it's just not worth it.
Don't get wrong. I love these clusters and want to use them. It's just that, in 2001, their mere existence is no longer as exciting as it was in the mid 1990s.
Now days, I care more about ease of use and ease of maintenance, taking the low cost of a Beowulf cluster as a given.
With the size of these clusters going up and the ratio of hardware cost to human time constantly decreasing, I'd be more impressed to see how a system with many hundreds of nodes was brought up in a short time, never rebooted for a year, even as 13 of the nodes developed variously problems and become unproductive members of the cluster.
Still Needs a New Killer App
on
Webpads, Anyone?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes, yes, I'd like to be able to browse the web in my living room using a comfortable wireless webpad about the size of an etch-a-sketch. But what about when I have to move beyond point and clicking to enter text. Laptops, especially when balanced precariously on knees, cause my shoulders to stress up because I have to be soooo careful not to hit the wrong key.
Yes, I need a personal organizer, but this is too big to strap to my belt.
Things that could really ingratiate this into a living room setting:
is there an Uber-remote app for it and necessary IR hardware peripheral
make it a nicely integrated controller to a media server in a different part of the house to stream digital video and digital audio to your TV and stereo.
My current home electronics system is a mess due to the multiple I/O ports on the VCR, DVD player, satellite TV, TiVo, TV, Receiver. If this device could make my life more convenient from that perspective (and it sure looks like it could), then it would get my vote for a purchase.
You really hit the nail on the head with the idea of distributing a set of open, multiplatform, useful apps on millions of CDs for people to use.
No "Linuxish" organization has the wherewithal to make and distribute that many CDs or man the support lines at 1-800-HELPME.
But AOL does.
After MS has strongarmed MSN into XP and put AOL and other ISPs at a disadvantage, it would be justdeserts if 30 million CDs of
AOL 7.0!
just so happened to include a slew of free apps that walk all and cross integrate out of MS in the same way. Unfortunately, if it were done, I'm sure AwOL would probably just insert themselves with insidious links the same way that MS has (a la, meet the new boss. same as the old boss.)
My money says it's all because of the September 11 attacks. From being a "cool" thing, companies offering anonymity services seem to be less cool in the eyes of the unwashed masses.
Sadly so.
The "unwashed masses" won't find anonymity "cool" until the government becomes overtly repressive, say along the lines of the governments of Afghanistan or Myanmar, for example.
Of course by the time a repressive regime is widely recognized, it will be too late to officially re-introduce anonymity as an effective tool for, and guarantee of, free expression and political dissent. Citizens will have to make do with only those rights embedded in the Constitution two hundred years ago that are practically difficult to rescind.
I'm not surprised, but sad nevertheless, that our leaders are reacting without giving thought and credence to liberties that promote and enhance a free society; proposed legislation seems to me rather more hurried and less thoughtful than, say, the legislation after the American Revolution (except for Alien & Sedition Acts).
But then I thought: while you and I hate them for their annoying advertising barrage, we have been satisfactorily indoctrinated that:
X10 ~ web cameras
as well as dozens of the usual time-proven suggestions that if you get $PRODUCT that sexy attractive young women will find you irresitably sexy and attractive.
If the message was delivered, then despite your protests, you can expect more of the same annoyance.
Ditto here. Running Netscape, even on `doze. Netscape runs on 99% of our platforms, while IE runs on 80% of our platforms.
And while Netscape definitely shows its age when compared to the latest releases of IE in terms of performance and standards compliance, those shrilling most loudly urging a switch from Netscape to IE were very recently seen removing egg from face deposited by nimda.
With the mention of wristwatches I'm reminded of a Seiko watch I saw advertised a few years ago that had some kind of internal mechanism for capturing kinetic motions (via ratchets?) into a windup spring that subsequently would provide sufficient electric power to run the wristwatch.
So I'm wondering how much electric power can be reasonably gotten from each source.
You'd have to set limits, so the thermoelectric generation doesn't consider an extreme case of someone naked sitting in artic temperatures full encased with thermo electric generators sucking off the terrific temperature gradient at their disposal. Likewise, a kinetic watch that weighs many kilograms and requires that it be shaken vigorously and constantly at 2 Hz in order to provide many watts is kind of a ridiculous proposition as well.
So what's next - hemoelectric generators powered by little turbines in major arteries?
Our site has ~300 RISC (Sun SPARC) desktops that we'll probably replace with Linux boxes due to the superior economics.
Not only that, but our boxes will likely come from HP, because we're looking for a company with UNIX support experience (eliminating Dell as a supplier, who gets a lot of the NT/2K business here).
So, the upshot is that things are changing fast.
In a nutshell, the expensive UNIX workstations are being squeezed by cheap Linux boxes.
For small and medium servers, Linux is great, but our heavy lifting is still done on Sun ES10K machines. I don't see that changing for a few years.
Your question is really appropriate, though, as more and more enterprises, particularly technical oriented shops are looking at desktop Linux seriously.
In my mind, the big questions are: ease of management of a Linux LAN, managing users, system upgrades, interoperability with the rest of the enterprise, whether the video card options support hardware OpenGL to the level needed for scientific visualization, and whether various commercial applications are available (PATRAN, ProEngineer, Framemaker, Purify, Quantify, etc.).
Generally, I think the answers bode well, but we're all looking for an example site with hundreds of users for some feedback to confirm our optimism.
Sounds very practical, and I'm sure almost everyone in Deutschland trusts their government not to abuse the system of identification.
In the United States, from a practical perspective we probably don't have any much more reason than you do to distrust our government's intentions if they were permitted to institute a similar system.
It's just that we still cling nostalgically to the idea that we are empowered with not just votes to change our government, but guns, (just in case!).
That's the part that is interesting, because conservative politicians have to walk a fine balance between being pro-law enforcement and pro-gun ownership.
Remember that the deciding factor in Bush's election was white, male, rural voters that helped him get electoral college majority despite a popular vote minority.
The current administration can't afford to alienate their constituency too much with measures that smack of a police state.
If I were in the administration and facing this situation, I'd take advantage of the fact that citizen's object vehemently to government intrusions into their affairs, but think little or nothing about corporate intrusions into their private lives. The wise move would simply be for the government to start buying information from all the direct marketers, credit card companies, frequent shopper cards, etc. Those profiles are already light years ahead of a national identity card.
or at least I hope users will be able to voice their discontent this way.
Reminds me of some XML information site that I found once. It had loads of useful information that I really wanted to see, but some of the most annoying pop-ups I had seen.
So, despite wanting to see the content, I found the advertising assault too high a price to pay, and do not frequent the site specifically for that reason.
So, I would say that repeat visitor traffic will be what suffers most. Whether first-time, one-time traffic is enough for their advertisers depends on whether they think such exposure is still to their advantage. This is not necessarily a given, however. Despite cussing at X10 camera pop-ups, I still know they exist as a vendor of such things.
But, does the ill-will their advertising generates counterbalance the value of the basic message that they want to implant, namely
I think the public's perception with regard to software is more along these lines:
If it came with MyPC instead of jewel-cased CD, then it's probably too hard to get off the hard drive and would be too hard to get to work with the new MyPC, which comes with a new OS anyway (no choice, there), so it's not worth hassling with.
In other words, the software comprising the OS is regarded much like any other piece of hardware that comes with MyPC. The analogy to hardware becomes more complete because there is an element of obsolescence, that ties the old OS to the old hardware, makes it hard to run on new hardware, makes running the new OS with old hardware difficult, etc.
OTOH, if I buy a jewel-cased CD with manuals, etc., I sure would like to able to use it on my new PC. If I can't, then maybe I'll buy Rev N+1 that runs on my new OS that came with the new MyPC.
From what I've seen, average consumers haven't given much thought to the details of software licenses/use/ownership issues.
But I have seen rumblings that indicate that they do not much care for having to rent software that expires and causes their computer to cease functioning unless more money is paid. That starts to resemble an essential utility, like electric, phone, or, in this era, the Internet Service Provider.
I can't tell yet whether the average consumer will make such a transition easily, or will look to see if there are any alternatives to the software subscription model.
get the point? if not, then why don't you just post the above information...let's start with your salary
Happy to oblige!
I have $24.05 in the bank, suffer from hemorrhoids, have had 2 appendectomies, have Alzheimer's disease since I was 93, shop at Walmart 4 times per week, was the son of George Bush and Elvis Presley, and run Windows 95 on a IBM AT at home! My salary is $19,000 per year and I am a decision maker in charge of IT purchases for a firm of 5000-10000!
I've been supplying this kind of information for years to businesses that want nothing more than to get to know me better and to serve me better!
I don't suppose it would help the cell phone service providers if I indicated that the audio stream doesn't need to be quite as interactive as a regular cell-phone conversation with a live human on the other end?
If my portable phone could buffer up enough data between bursts, then it could work.
OTOH, extrapolating this portable device to larger buffer spaces with less frequent need for communication would result something like a 128 MB Rio, but with a wireless connection to my home computer that is activated every 24 hours. Is there anything like that yet?
Obviously, you never went to elementary or high school,
I don't believe public ridicule and embarrassment are any more appropriate now than when I was young.
As near as I can tell from the article, we're talking about college students here.
If they're not going to behave responsibly, they'll get what's coming to them without these heavy-handed tactics.
If they want to pay tuition for the right to surf porn in math class, let them.
If they want to send instant messages instead of pay attention to the lesson, then let them.
They won't last long if they don't exercise responsibility. Frankly, elementary and high schools should require enough dedication and diligence that this should not be a problem in any college worthy of the name.
And that's my main point: the students should learn to exercise their own responsibility and to take consequences for their own choices. If you don't trust them to do that and think measures like this are in order, then I wish you good luck in finding a totalitarian state in which to live, one where the authorities are more enlightened than most of the people in this world.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really appreciate a web site full of reasonable comments and snippets that I could pick from to compose a reasoned letter to my legislators.
It would help immensely to have short, concise statements of why this is bad in simple terms that even Joe Sixpack can understand in the 40 seconds that it takes him to read a Letter to the Editor in the local newspaper. Such simple expressions that they cannot be dislodged casually by the vested interests that stand to profit at everyone else's expense, should such misguided legislation sneak through because a full review by unbiased experts has not been done.
I'm thinking here of messages along the lines of alerting citizens that if their digital rights to read are delineated by this legislation, that their future use of technology will in no way resemble that to which they've become accustomed for newspapers, magazines, books, LP records, CDs, etc.
That is, I can buy a newspaper anonymously and no one will know who I am or what I read. If I choose to sell my or even give away my newspaper to someone else, then that is my perogative and mine alone. Neither is it necessary for the transaction between me and that other person to be the business of anyone else. If I choose to scan in a book I just bought and read it on my laptop computer, then that is my current right. As long as I don't reproduce copyrighted work and sell it, then it should be within my rights. None such rights can be taken for granted in future society in which "Digital Copyright Management" is dictated so that no individual may be exposed to media without intrusive measures to insure that the Rights Owner (not necessarily the Creator) of the Original Digital Media is paid for this and every instance of Use.
Likewise, ramming down DMCA and related technology restrictions like this SSSCA is morally equivalent to mandating that crowbars, a technology that could be used for breaking into houses, be outlawed and only specially licensed crowbar researchers on a government maintained list may have access to crowbars. Leave the technology open. Force manufacturers to come up with a different system, a voluntary system, one where consumers have a choice and one which does not abridge the rights to fair use that consumers currently enjoy.
Finally, under no circumstances should burdensome government regulations on technology be used as an excuse to prop up a revenue model for a specific commercial lobby.
Neither should legitimate concerns for national security be applied with an unthinking broad brush to remove the liberties of expression enjoyed by the citizens of this free nation.
I'm not as good at formulating compelling arugments as some of you are. Herein I have probably used more lighter fluid than should be put into a letter to my legislator. I want it to have the most impact that it can.
He's only focused on the code.
Almost.
Linus grants RMS and the FSF kudoes for developing gcc and accepts that the rest of the GNU system is useful in most contexts, but where I find his appreciation lacking is not necessarily in kowtowing to RMS' demand that the system be called "GNU/Linux", but public recognition of just how valuable and critical the entire concept of the GPL ("Share and share alike") has been to Linux kernel development.
Perhaps I'm being unfair, that Linus has mentioned the importance of the GPL to the Linux kernel in public forums and I have simply missed it. But, if I've missed it, then you can bet a lot of other people have missed it as well and a great number of people are ignorant of just how important the GPL has been to this development process.
I really applaud MIT's move to make their curriculum available for free over the Internet. It shows an interest in the advancement of science that trumps the growing trend to patent and close-off avenues for technology growth by businesses intent on exploiting technology-related law (who can blame them for doing so?).
The reason I think it shows real guts is that MIT traditionally has been very focussed on maintaing good relations with industry, and industry that profits from the current base of technology laws, and an industry that donates money to MIT. They are more closely tied together with industry as an engineering school, where a liberal arts school is pretty much independent of direct industrial largesse.
I was a student at MIT in my past. You may not know this, but MIT is actually run by MIT Corporation. Furthermore, upon entrance to the school, I "had" to sign some kind of paperwork that essentially insured that patents and ideas that I came up with while at MIT were theirs and not mine. Theses, too, are copyrighted by MIT, and generally more difficult to obtain than theses from other universities that are listed by University Microfilms.
Thus, you can see why I'm impressed at the turnaround evidenced by this move.
What would be even better would be if they were to release streaming video of classroom lectures, sessions with teaching assistants, as well as lecture notes, problem sets, exams, solutions.
Strange.
I had credited the German government with a great deal more early enlightenment than other governments (U.S. and France, for example) because of their support of Gnu Privacy Guard development.
I think the NSA's efforts to comb through Linux and make SE suggestions is a real positive development.
I'm sure others will mention this, but there has been a non-trivial use of Linux in the Department of Energy laboratories and research centers.
Mike Warren and colleagues at Los Alamos built Loki and Avalon clusters some years ago - they were featured in Linux Journal, IIRC. CPLant at Sandia uses Linux as its code base for research into very large clusters.
And those are just a few of the higher profile news-making uses of open source. If you were to carefully comb through DOE LANs at over two dozen laboratories, I think you'd find hundreds of open source powered boxes in all kinds of capacities ranging from economical compute servers, web servers, data acquisition interfaces, etc. They are incredibly economical and powerful app servers.
What they need to do is enforce stiff monetary penalties (they are one of the richest companies on the planet) payable to the companies they screwed over (at least the ones named in the antitrust case). That would help force them to crank the price of WinXP (and their licensing schemes) to even more ridiculous price levels, thereby forcing companies to switch to a better, and cheaper OS.
Well, yes.
IIRC, MS has something on the order of $3e10 cash reserves, enough to make it the envy of every company that has sought a good credit rating from Standard & Poors.
What that means, though, is that the monetary penalties would have to be stiff to an almost unprecedented degree. Something on the order of the tobacco company settlements, to give you some idea of just how stiff.
They have enough of a market lock and cash reserves that it would take an extremely stiff penalty before they would raise the price of XP even more than they already have.
Besides, am I mistaken, or are most corporate IT departments facing unprecedented increases in costs for licenses from MS and, for all practical purposes, looking to take those lumps? Sure Linux exists, but to their eyes not so much as an alternative that they would really take but more as a bargaining chip when they sit down with MS to negotiate how much they have to pay for Enterprise License Agreements.
If I were a PC hardware manufacturer, especially in the current slump, I'd be pretty peeved that MS was about to swallow an even bigger piece of the pie from corporate IT budgets and leave the crumbs for hardware upgrades.
No, I think the only resolution is to pry open the clo$ed interfaces that have been abused. All Office formats (including rendering rules), win16 APIs, win32 APIs, HALs in NT need to be shown the light of day, free for anyone to implement and free for anyone to interface into without the need for purchasing any agreements or worrying that the interface will subtly break their app.
Let everyone innovate, and not just the company that happens to own the standards.
Let MS introduce .NET, but give them, or anyone else, a drastically curtailed time window of monopoly power on it. Once it is running an installed on 80% of computers or, say, 17 months, force it open also as a standard.
Let innovation be in implementations, with less emphasis upon the supposedly "new". Let's not accept the abuse of the term "innovation" as an excuse to lock down new technology indefinitely and to force payment for the right to use that technology long after it's innovative value has been established.
The MS of old had a lot more incentive to innovate (improve their product) when there viable competitors breathing down their necks. That's no longer the case and hasn't been for many years.
Actually, no court remedy would be necessary if a very large customer base, such as federal, state and local governments, mandated that all of their computing be done with precisely documented open interfaces. MS could choose to retain business from those clients if they were to open up, or else face the prospect of all those customers migrating to alternative platforms and applications based upon open standards. Such a move would seem logical, given how much ostensibly public business is locked up in proprietary .doc formats already. Imagine if the U.S. Constitution were only viewable from Word!
Not to be demeaning, but most of our elected public officials have little background in technical issues.
Which is a shame, of course, because these officials are in positions of authority that can make life miserable if they happen to choose wrong-headed policy.
In your experience, given that our public officials must make policies for an environment that they don't natively understand, are these officials thereby more susceptible to being hoodwinked by vested interests than they are for other, more easily understood issues?
I was under the vague impression that the IBM drives were better than average quality. I am not always diligent about checking storagereview.com, but that's the impression I had from word of mouth.
So thinking, I purchased a 75GXP as a 2nd drive for my TiVo. It's been working day in and day out for two months now. It's a little noisier than I'd like, but it works.
Your bad experience, though, prompts me to think a little more about reliability and the quoted figures for it.
- When a vendor reports a MTBF for a component like a disk drive, is it the vendor that measures this figure or an independent organization?
- What kinds of testing conditions are used in the MTBF tests and do they account for the typical variations in use in the field?
Other posts have mentioned something about cheap power supplies and the possibility that this can shorten the life of your components. Perhaps the IBM drives are more sensitive to such perturbations than drives from other vendors.Some users may power their systems off and on more frequently than other users, thereby shortening the life of their equipment.
I live off a dirt road, so I have more air-borne dust that can damage moving parts. (I don't know if it's just me, but I've had to contend with CPU cooling fan failures more than I thought was reasonable.)
In summary, field use of equipment can vary substantially from a lab bench. Do the MTBF figures we see reported take that variation into account?
Sigh. Too bad this wan't 1998.
I could cut n' paste the posts and call it a business plan, we'd have VC funding by Friday!
Oh well.
that the Alpha 21364 is not here to provide the Power4 with a worthy competitor.
At least it sets a standard of performance so that Itania (cubic Zirconia?) cannot be simply passed off as "great" just as they are.
Intel will have some real hard work to do to match the Power4, which not only has some good processing speed, but some BW to memory that should propel to the top of the heap in some benchmark categories.
You know this Beowulf business is getting to be pretty staid and routine by now.
In fact, I'd almost say it would be newsworthy if there were any organization (university, company, govt lab) that had not yet built "a supercomputer from the COTS components".
What I'd like to see now is more metrics (some of which the article does, admittedly, reveal).
- hardware cost per FLOP (everyone already tells you this)
- FLOPS per human time to build
- FLOPS per sysadmin time to maintain
- FLOPS per kilowatt of electricity
- FLOPS per cubic foot of rack space
- can it run smoothly if Bad Andy goes behind the rack and unplugs a few network connections, a few power cords to some nodes?
Everyone knows that you can spend your own time scouring dumpsters for cast-off computers and coaxing them to life, bringing up an old 486 with an ISA 10bT card as a member of your cluster. Unless you're doing it for your own educational benefit, it's just not worth it.Don't get wrong. I love these clusters and want to use them. It's just that, in 2001, their mere existence is no longer as exciting as it was in the mid 1990s.
Now days, I care more about ease of use and ease of maintenance, taking the low cost of a Beowulf cluster as a given.
With the size of these clusters going up and the ratio of hardware cost to human time constantly decreasing, I'd be more impressed to see how a system with many hundreds of nodes was brought up in a short time, never rebooted for a year, even as 13 of the nodes developed variously problems and become unproductive members of the cluster.
Yes, yes, I'd like to be able to browse the web in my living room using a comfortable wireless webpad about the size of an etch-a-sketch. But what about when I have to move beyond point and clicking to enter text. Laptops, especially when balanced precariously on knees, cause my shoulders to stress up because I have to be soooo careful not to hit the wrong key.
Yes, I need a personal organizer, but this is too big to strap to my belt.
Things that could really ingratiate this into a living room setting:
- is there an Uber-remote app for it and necessary IR hardware peripheral
- make it a nicely integrated controller to a media server in a different part of the house to stream digital video and digital audio to your TV and stereo.
My current home electronics system is a mess due to the multiple I/O ports on the VCR, DVD player, satellite TV, TiVo, TV, Receiver. If this device could make my life more convenient from that perspective (and it sure looks like it could), then it would get my vote for a purchase.You really hit the nail on the head with the idea of distributing a set of open, multiplatform, useful apps on millions of CDs for people to use.
No "Linuxish" organization has the wherewithal to make and distribute that many CDs or man the support lines at 1-800-HELPME.
But AOL does.
After MS has strongarmed MSN into XP and put AOL and other ISPs at a disadvantage, it would be justdeserts if 30 million CDs of
just so happened to include a slew of free apps that walk all and cross integrate out of MS in the same way. Unfortunately, if it were done, I'm sure AwOL would probably just insert themselves with insidious links the same way that MS has (a la, meet the new boss. same as the old boss.)My money says it's all because of the September 11 attacks. From being a "cool" thing, companies offering anonymity services seem to be less cool in the eyes of the unwashed masses.
Sadly so.
The "unwashed masses" won't find anonymity "cool" until the government becomes overtly repressive, say along the lines of the governments of Afghanistan or Myanmar, for example.
Of course by the time a repressive regime is widely recognized, it will be too late to officially re-introduce anonymity as an effective tool for, and guarantee of, free expression and political dissent. Citizens will have to make do with only those rights embedded in the Constitution two hundred years ago that are practically difficult to rescind.
I'm not surprised, but sad nevertheless, that our leaders are reacting without giving thought and credence to liberties that promote and enhance a free society; proposed legislation seems to me rather more hurried and less thoughtful than, say, the legislation after the American Revolution (except for Alien & Sedition Acts).
And I thought X-10 was bad!
So did I.
But then I thought: while you and I hate them for their annoying advertising barrage, we have been satisfactorily indoctrinated that:
as well as dozens of the usual time-proven suggestions that if you get $PRODUCT that sexy attractive young women will find you irresitably sexy and attractive.If the message was delivered, then despite your protests, you can expect more of the same annoyance.
Ditto here. Running Netscape, even on `doze. Netscape runs on 99% of our platforms, while IE runs on 80% of our platforms.
And while Netscape definitely shows its age when compared to the latest releases of IE in terms of performance and standards compliance, those shrilling most loudly urging a switch from Netscape to IE were very recently seen removing egg from face deposited by nimda.
With the mention of wristwatches I'm reminded of a Seiko watch I saw advertised a few years ago that had some kind of internal mechanism for capturing kinetic motions (via ratchets?) into a windup spring that subsequently would provide sufficient electric power to run the wristwatch.
So I'm wondering how much electric power can be reasonably gotten from each source.
You'd have to set limits, so the thermoelectric generation doesn't consider an extreme case of someone naked sitting in artic temperatures full encased with thermo electric generators sucking off the terrific temperature gradient at their disposal. Likewise, a kinetic watch that weighs many kilograms and requires that it be shaken vigorously and constantly at 2 Hz in order to provide many watts is kind of a ridiculous proposition as well.
So what's next - hemoelectric generators powered by little turbines in major arteries?
Funny but true.
Our site has ~300 RISC (Sun SPARC) desktops that we'll probably replace with Linux boxes due to the superior economics.
Not only that, but our boxes will likely come from HP, because we're looking for a company with UNIX support experience (eliminating Dell as a supplier, who gets a lot of the NT/2K business here).
So, the upshot is that things are changing fast.
In a nutshell, the expensive UNIX workstations are being squeezed by cheap Linux boxes.
For small and medium servers, Linux is great, but our heavy lifting is still done on Sun ES10K machines. I don't see that changing for a few years.
Your question is really appropriate, though, as more and more enterprises, particularly technical oriented shops are looking at desktop Linux seriously.
In my mind, the big questions are: ease of management of a Linux LAN, managing users, system upgrades, interoperability with the rest of the enterprise, whether the video card options support hardware OpenGL to the level needed for scientific visualization, and whether various commercial applications are available (PATRAN, ProEngineer, Framemaker, Purify, Quantify, etc.).
Generally, I think the answers bode well, but we're all looking for an example site with hundreds of users for some feedback to confirm our optimism.
The usual punishment of:
- a hosed server first thing in the morning, before coffee,
- a stack o mail from other irate sysadmins that are getting hit on by the infected zombie to which your name is attached,
- some urgent voicemails and pages from users and from your management asking what the !&%$ is happening.
The usual...ho humm.Otherwise, Friday morning would have been relatively pleasant.
Sounds very practical, and I'm sure almost everyone in Deutschland trusts their government not to abuse the system of identification.
In the United States, from a practical perspective we probably don't have any much more reason than you do to distrust our government's intentions if they were permitted to institute a similar system.
It's just that we still cling nostalgically to the idea that we are empowered with not just votes to change our government, but guns, (just in case!).
That's the part that is interesting, because conservative politicians have to walk a fine balance between being pro-law enforcement and pro-gun ownership.
Remember that the deciding factor in Bush's election was white, male, rural voters that helped him get electoral college majority despite a popular vote minority.
The current administration can't afford to alienate their constituency too much with measures that smack of a police state.
If I were in the administration and facing this situation, I'd take advantage of the fact that citizen's object vehemently to government intrusions into their affairs, but think little or nothing about corporate intrusions into their private lives. The wise move would simply be for the government to start buying information from all the direct marketers, credit card companies, frequent shopper cards, etc. Those profiles are already light years ahead of a national identity card.
or at least I hope users will be able to voice their discontent this way.
Reminds me of some XML information site that I found once. It had loads of useful information that I really wanted to see, but some of the most annoying pop-ups I had seen.
So, despite wanting to see the content, I found the advertising assault too high a price to pay, and do not frequent the site specifically for that reason.
So, I would say that repeat visitor traffic will be what suffers most. Whether first-time, one-time traffic is enough for their advertisers depends on whether they think such exposure is still to their advantage. This is not necessarily a given, however. Despite cussing at X10 camera pop-ups, I still know they exist as a vendor of such things.
But, does the ill-will their advertising generates counterbalance the value of the basic message that they want to implant, namely
Perhaps notI think the public's perception with regard to software is more along these lines:
From what I've seen, average consumers haven't given much thought to the details of software licenses/use/ownership issues.
But I have seen rumblings that indicate that they do not much care for having to rent software that expires and causes their computer to cease functioning unless more money is paid. That starts to resemble an essential utility, like electric, phone, or, in this era, the Internet Service Provider.
I can't tell yet whether the average consumer will make such a transition easily, or will look to see if there are any alternatives to the software subscription model.
Happy to oblige!
I have $24.05 in the bank, suffer from hemorrhoids, have had 2 appendectomies, have Alzheimer's disease since I was 93, shop at Walmart 4 times per week, was the son of George Bush and Elvis Presley, and run Windows 95 on a IBM AT at home! My salary is $19,000 per year and I am a decision maker in charge of IT purchases for a firm of 5000-10000!
I've been supplying this kind of information for years to businesses that want nothing more than to get to know me better and to serve me better!
Um, yes, but I was hoping you'd overlook that.
I don't suppose it would help the cell phone service providers if I indicated that the audio stream doesn't need to be quite as interactive as a regular cell-phone conversation with a live human on the other end?
If my portable phone could buffer up enough data between bursts, then it could work.
OTOH, extrapolating this portable device to larger buffer spaces with less frequent need for communication would result something like a 128 MB Rio, but with a wireless connection to my home computer that is activated every 24 hours. Is there anything like that yet?
To give an example, if I were to say the word "Fjornborgi" to a complete stranger (as most of you are) he would have no idea what I was talking about.
No, not tonight dear, I have a headache!
I don't believe public ridicule and embarrassment are any more appropriate now than when I was young.
As near as I can tell from the article, we're talking about college students here.
If they're not going to behave responsibly, they'll get what's coming to them without these heavy-handed tactics.
If they want to pay tuition for the right to surf porn in math class, let them.
If they want to send instant messages instead of pay attention to the lesson, then let them.
They won't last long if they don't exercise responsibility. Frankly, elementary and high schools should require enough dedication and diligence that this should not be a problem in any college worthy of the name.
And that's my main point: the students should learn to exercise their own responsibility and to take consequences for their own choices. If you don't trust them to do that and think measures like this are in order, then I wish you good luck in finding a totalitarian state in which to live, one where the authorities are more enlightened than most of the people in this world.