It works, and with iSSH you can even do some remote X. But it feels like telnet in the early nineties. And Unix wasn't really designed for a keyboard that doesn't have Alt/Ctrl keys. The iSSH app adds them, but you first have to click the Ctrl key, and then the C key to do for example Ctrl-C.
It's good enough for a quick check on a log file, to change a config file or see if a process is still running. But I wouldn't try to use something like Emacs on it for anything serious. It works in an emergency, but the small screen, on screen keyboard and low resolution do limit you. (I have an iPhone 3G).
And 480 by 320 resolution makes a lot of X applications hard to use, even if you can have a vitual desktop that's much larger, constantly having to scroll is a pain.
The three games I played on the net heavily before the advent of www, were: AberMud: Infinity of the Virual World Club of New Mexico DikuMud: Dutch Mountains at the RuG VGA-Planets: Play by e-mail strategy game.
I personally find that in my country and the european parliament the greens party sufficiently has an anti-copyright and software patents stance that I voted for them instead of a single issue party like the Pirate Party. I also like a lot of the other policies they stand for.
I think AMD really only One-upped Intel twice: When they were the first past the 1GHz mark and when they developed AMD64 while Intel was mucking around with Itanium.
I've owned many non-Intel machines, the full list goes like this: Intel 8086-4.77, NEC V20-8, Cyrix 286-20, AMD 386-40, Cyrix 486DX2-66, AMD DX4-120, Cyrix P166+, AMD K6-300, AMD Duron-700, AMD K7-1,400, Intel PIV-3,06 Intel PentiumM-1,7, AMD Athlon64 X2-2,0, AMD Phenom X6-3,2
I've never had any trouble with any of them, even though some had motherboard chipsets from SIS or VIA. The DX4-120, K6-300, K7-1,4 and all the newer ones are still running. (The DX4 is a stand-alone DOSbox for my dad to run some ancient software (on 360k floppies!), The K6 serves as a firewall somewhere, the K7 is used when my mom needs Windows (she's got 2 macbooks), the P4 is now in a laptop and now a media server, the PentiumM is in my current laptop, the Athlon64 is in my dads current computer and I run on the X6). Now I look at it, even though I left my parents over 15 years ago, they are still a kind of dumping ground for my old computers.:-D
The original Civ ran fine on a 286. Current computers have many many many more times that power. Sure, it's gotten a little more complex, but I don't think the demands on the CPU should be extensive.
I see religion as something that had a function in the past when we didn't understand the world around us very well and many things were an "Act of God". From the seasons, to eclipses to floods, to many other things have been attributed or still are to gods or mythical creatures in the history of mankind. Man is very good in seeing cause and effect in things, even if there is none. I think that is how mysticism and religion came into existence, as a need for mankind to explain phenomena around him that he didn't understand and could not predict. I even think it's what defines us as a species in the sense that we have always tried to figure out cause and effect and then use the knowledge to our advantage to predict the future.
I think over time this simple attempt at explaining the world around us evolved into a way to order our society when we started to live together in larger and larger groups. Successful religions usually seem to do three things: They offer a social structure, they promote procreation and they try to give people control over the unpredictable things in their lives. If you look at Christianity it's very clear that the current Church is very much based around these three cores.
I think in a way humanity developed religion as an evolutionary survival strategy that has proven highly successful.
Promoting procreation is the most essential. All versions of Christianity that were to averse to this (there were many in the first few centuries), have since died out. This is probably true for other religions as well, but my knowledge is less detailed.
The second thing is offering social structure. From Kings ruling by God given right, to clerical hierarchies to the Ten Commandments. Knowing your place in society, keeping those in power secure and giving rules to judge disputes by are the core of many if not all of the older religions.
The third thing hark back to how I think religion started. People do not cope well with uncertainty. Knowing that if you pray to the gods you will have a good hunt or bountiful harvest makes life predictable. And if things don't turn out well, you must have Sinned, failed to perform a ritual or something like that.
The last thing of course reinforces the previous, as the need for explanation and rules and guidelines helps keep the clergy in power.
Religion is a very powerful tool that humanity used in it's evolution. It is one of the big contributing factors that made us the dominant species on this planet. But I think that it has largely served it's purpose having been replaced by Science, insurance, law and newer forms of government like Democracy.
We now know that spring returns because of the orbit the Earth has around the Sun, not because we sacrifice an animal on midwinter.
Those that defend religion are proof of how powerful a mechanism it is and how good it is at defending itself and surviving. But they are defending something that is entirely constructed by man itself with no actual supernatural beings, powers or world existing. It has helped humanity survive and evolve but it's no longer needed, we now have better ways to organise ourselves and explain the world around us.
I think that's exactly the problem with Android: very very few devices actually run version 2.2. Many are stuck on 1.5, 1.6 or 2.0 with apparently no, or very slow support from the manufacturer in updating the OS, especially for models that are no longer in the market.
I think that's what Android really needs: a simple way to update the OS which is not dependent on support from the hardware manufacturer.
I would like to add: People who want these kinds of things on an iPhone have in my view just the wrong phone and should get an Adroid phone instead. It's a different mindset and Adroid caters much more to them than iPhone does.
I'm not saying one or the other is better. I'm just saying that if you want a polished no hassle experience, and are prepared to pay some to get that, then iPhone is for you, if you like to tinker with your gadgets, then get an Android phone.
I can completely concur with this. iSSH is great. They do all kinds of smart things with the on screen keyboard, so even things like Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-C are easy to do, and they have a built in XServer, so you can even run remote X.
It's the difference between the Linux/Android and OSX/iOS philosophy. ON OSX you pay a few bucks, but then you got a nice, well designed and polished application and can just go and do the job at hand, while on Linux/Android things are very often free, but you spend much more time struggling with the limitations of the software, solving configuration problems and such.
My time is precious enough for me, that I'm happy to pay the developer if iSSH a couple of euros so I can just do my work, instead of having to fiddle with all these things. I find that Windows and Linux are very similar in this regard.
I'm writing this as a long term Linux user, who switched to Mac 3 years ago and now also has a iPhone for a year, while I used Windows Mobile and Symbian before that.
At first I thought the same: That the thighter the controls, the more people will protest.
I have since changed my stance: In the end it's much easier to defend existing liberties that it is to regain ones already lost.
I think past experiences with restrictive regimes have shown that it takes a long time before the pendulum starts to swing back, and much is lost before it does.
I think this can end up being the major downfall of Android, the fragmentation of the market. In effect it means that 2.2 and Flash only run on a few Android phones.
Even now that iOS 4 isn't going to be available on the original iPhone (that was never sold in my country anyways), it's still a lot more homogeneous market than Android.
The last word definitely hasn't been said about this yet, but I tend to agree that Australia slightly edges out SA at the moment. As for the technology, there are a few more options than only MeerKAT or ASKAP technology. Here at ASTRON we work on EMBRACE and LOFAR.
While you are correct, long baselines come with a couple big drawbacks: - You need higher time resolution to prevent bandwidth smearing. - You need intermediate length baselines as well, or your uv coverage will be poor. - To grid your data in the uv plane becomes very hard as the grid becomes very large.
This means that the size of the data you need to manipulate and processing requirements go up very quickly with longer baselines. For LOFAR we now have baselines of about 1000km and we will go even longer to 2-3000km. processing requirements for observations that contain all our stations, both short and long baselines are huge. I'm talking PFlops if you want to do it real time. Partially you can get around this by using only long baselines, like in VLBI, and just imaging small things, but for SKA you'll have many short baselines as well.
Disclaimer: I work for ASTRON operating the 14 25m dish 3km WSRT, 7000 antenna 44 station 3000km LOFAR and the 3 station EMBRACE SKA demonstrator project. Although I'm not an astronomer.;-) I just visited a friend of mine at the University of Canterbury in ChristChurch, working with the MOA, astrophysics is a small world in NZ, good luck getting involved in SKA!
One of the stories I heard, about another VLBI telescope, was that getting to within about 15km was easy, but the last stretch costed about 400,000 euro. These telescopes tend to be in rather inaccessible terrain.
Well, that's partially true. The online/realtime processing doesn't store the data. We have the data coming in at about 150 Gbit/s into the BlueGene supercomputer (34 TFlop), which does initial realtime processing and writes resulting files at about 50 Gbit/s on a roughly 1 Petabyte intermediate storage system for offline processing. From there it gets initial processing/calibration and a factor of 16 to 64 reduction in size on the offline processing cluster (about 200 8core machines). Also some inspection of the data is done for quality assessment, and sky images are made. If the quality is good, the resulting data and images are moved to out 4+ Petabyte long term archive, where further processing can also be done to achieve publication ready results. On average we are expected to be producing about 20 TB/hour raw data, and about 700 GB/hour data that gets archived (life time of more than a week).
As I speak we are 2 weeks away from the system being opened by the Dutch Queen, and we are operating on about half the above numbers with about 25 antenna fields online. By the end of 2010 we should be operating at full strength. Also, those numbers are from the top of my head, so I might be off a bit here and there.
LOFAR is seen as a precursor to SKA, the first of a new generation of telescopes based much more on software and firmware and cheap off the shelve instead of expensive dishes and custom DSP hardware. After the various VLBI efforts (Including JIVE, which is housed in the same building as ASTRON and LOFAR), LOFAR now is the biggest telescope on Earth. http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100421 http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100125
There are some rather nice images starting to come out of the system, if you're a radioastronomer, but most are under embargo until the opening. I can show you this older image: http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100208
If you are willing to shell out the money, similar administration tools are available from for example RedHat. A place I often visit, there is a 2 man IT department administering a department of about 400 people at a university. They've gone with RedHat solutions and manage a couple of different "streams", like student, researcher, administrative, server, cluster. This way they offer a lot of flexibility to their users, and still have a very low administration workload. I am impressed how often they just sit there twiddling their thumbs given the flexibility of their setup and the size of the department. But it does take skill to set it up in the first place.
And it's no longer free, something people often associate with Linux solutions.
As to research requiring open software. I have to agree with you there. It often doesn't matter, a lot of research depends on tools like Matlab, but that doesn't make it less valid. Open Source solutions also contain errors. The litmus test is indeed if results can be independently reproduced.
You're going to run into one of two problems. 1) By time the kids grow up everything in industry will have changed. 2) You can't afford what they use in industry with a HS budget, even the [college] student licenses.
I have to agree here and have a few things to add. It also depends a lot on which field of engineering or science you go to. Some are dominantly Windows, others are mainly Linux/OSX/Unix based.
If cost is an issue, then going Linux and open source is definitely an option, although it will depend on the quality of the administrators if that can be managed. If done well, the admin workload can be low, but if the IT department doesn't have enough skill, it easily becomes a nightmare.
Windows is a stable choice as it will be what most people have at home and what is used in a lot of areas.
I wouldn't go to Mac alone, even though it's my personal favourite. Even with educational discounts, it's often the most pricey option, although I find they often have a longer lifetime before they become obsolete.
I would advocate against a Windows only environment, as I think it's good for educational purposes to show students that there are other options out there. I think it's a must for Computer Science, and with Linux/OSX/Unix dominant in a lot of computational heavy science and industry, also something that people should have at least a passing experience with if they go into Physics, large parts of Chemistry, Genetics and such.
I think a lot depends on the skill of the IT department. Not so much on it's numbers, but if they familiar with the right management tooling, and have the skill to organise the management such that it's not labour intensive. When set up right, one person can manage hundreds of computers.
In the end the choice should be largely based on money and IT department skills. I do think that it would be unwise to go to any mono-culture though, especially not Windows because of the educational value of bringing students into contact with the different options out there, even though by the time they get to their first job, times and circumstances will have changed again.
When I was at the University, now 10-15 years ago, there was Windows 3, NT and 95. But also HP-UX, IRIX, early Linux and a few Macs. Learning what the good and the bad points of each were, and developing a broad and OS independent skill set as a result has helped me a lot in finding jobs later. Currently I work mostly on Linux and OSX, but before that I worked in a Windows environment for 5 years. In both cases it has helped me a lot that I had a wider experience, because it allowed me to cherry pick the best tool for the job.
Because it's working exactly how it should, and exactly the same way it does on other systems.
BS. If I want to delete an icon from my desktop or dock, I drag it to the recycle bin, or right-click->remove, or shift-delete and it's gone. No dialogs whatsoever. Same thing with lots of other changes. If I want to change the background image or the resolution of my desktop, it just does, no dialogs.
In general, there are a lot of flaws in Windows' design when using it multi-user, like the All Users Desktop paradigm, that make that it requires unnecessary confirmation or privilege elevation dialogs.
What it should do, is, have a default desktop for new users, which will be copied to new users when their account is created. And from that point on users decide what it looks like and can muck around with their own copy as they please. Nobody else should be able to alter it. New applications that get installed system wide should be added to the list of applications/start menu, but not to people's desktop or whatever. Even adding them to the start menu is debatable as that can also be customized, but Windows doesn't really have a list of installed applications that is easily accessible otherwise.
The basic design is just not well thought out in a multi-user fashion, but the whole thing is a single user OS with some multi-user functions bolted on. That is what makes it need admin privileges so much, even 15 years after NT and Windows for Workgroups and 95 started it on it's path. It's still a kludge that kind-of-works but often is very inconsistent.
Linux has become a great server OS, basically replacing the traditional offerings like HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, VMS and others to a large extent.
It hasn't yet shown to be a credible contender in the Desktop arena. We've been hearing that this year is the year of Linux on the Desktop for over 10 years now. There are plenty of reasons which I will not enumerate here now.
Sorry, this is just plain prejudice. For business purposes EU is one big country.
Not true. I live in The Netherlands. The iTunes stores in our neighbouring countries of Germany and the UK have much larger selections than the Dutch iTunes store.
I could buy an AppleTV at the Apple Store 5 km from here, but I would not be able to buy a single movie or TV series online, while if I lived 50km from here in Germany I would have no trouble.
The borders are very real, and apparently the legal rules around copyright, or whom administers them vary a lot.
I live in the Netherlands, not Eastern Europe, but the selection in out iTunes store is also very poor compared to neighbouring countries like the UK or Germany.
The only reason for the difference I can see, given that Apple does sell all hardware and has an iTunes store, is legal.
My guess would be that anyone else trying to fill the gap would have an even harder time than Apple, given that they will have a lot less leverage on the content providers compared to an established player like Apple.
I think it would be very profitable to offer for example Movies and TV series would be available. Currently everything I try, iTunes, Amazon, nexflix, CWtv, they all refuse to show me anything based on my location.
"Your inability to understand the difference between the words "distributor" and "reseller" is not a web-site design problem. It's a literacy problem on your part. In any product supply chain, distributors operate in the levels between manufacturer and resellers. Distributors don't sell to consumers."
Except that there is no this distinction in Russian. Distributors certainly can sell things directly to customers.
And the whole point of the exercise was to find the website in your own language. You can't fault someone who can't read English and is trying to find the Ukrainian site for not understanding the difference!
I live in the Netherlands. We can buy iPhones and Macs localized in Dutch at the Apple Store here. But the amount of stuff available on iTunes is severely limited.
The only reason I can see is copyright legislation or lawyer barricades by the copyright holders. There are no limits in infrastructure, finances, localization or market size that I can see are relevant.
I don't think it has anything to do with this. I think it's purely the amount of obstruction that copyright holders are putting up in the various countries.
I live in the Netherlands and see no reason why ROI would be an issue but we face largely the same problems.
It must purely be differences in legal system or lawyer barricades that are the issue here.
What we need is sweeping Copyright reform and unification, but I'm afraid that ATCA will not be the answer we're looking for.
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It works, and with iSSH you can even do some remote X. But it feels like telnet in the early nineties.
And Unix wasn't really designed for a keyboard that doesn't have Alt/Ctrl keys. The iSSH app adds them, but you first have to click the Ctrl key, and then the C key to do for example Ctrl-C.
It's good enough for a quick check on a log file, to change a config file or see if a process is still running. But I wouldn't try to use something like Emacs on it for anything serious. It works in an emergency, but the small screen, on screen keyboard and low resolution do limit you. (I have an iPhone 3G).
And 480 by 320 resolution makes a lot of X applications hard to use, even if you can have a vitual desktop that's much larger, constantly having to scroll is a pain.
The three games I played on the net heavily before the advent of www, were:
AberMud: Infinity of the Virual World Club of New Mexico
DikuMud: Dutch Mountains at the RuG
VGA-Planets: Play by e-mail strategy game.
I personally find that in my country and the european parliament the greens party sufficiently has an anti-copyright and software patents stance that I voted for them instead of a single issue party like the Pirate Party. I also like a lot of the other policies they stand for.
I think AMD really only One-upped Intel twice: When they were the first past the 1GHz mark and when they developed AMD64 while Intel was mucking around with Itanium.
I've owned many non-Intel machines, the full list goes like this: Intel 8086-4.77, NEC V20-8, Cyrix 286-20, AMD 386-40, Cyrix 486DX2-66, AMD DX4-120, Cyrix P166+, AMD K6-300, AMD Duron-700, AMD K7-1,400, Intel PIV-3,06 Intel PentiumM-1,7, AMD Athlon64 X2-2,0, AMD Phenom X6-3,2
I've never had any trouble with any of them, even though some had motherboard chipsets from SIS or VIA. The DX4-120, K6-300, K7-1,4 and all the newer ones are still running. (The DX4 is a stand-alone DOSbox for my dad to run some ancient software (on 360k floppies!), The K6 serves as a firewall somewhere, the K7 is used when my mom needs Windows (she's got 2 macbooks), the P4 is now in a laptop and now a media server, the PentiumM is in my current laptop, the Athlon64 is in my dads current computer and I run on the X6). :-D
Now I look at it, even though I left my parents over 15 years ago, they are still a kind of dumping ground for my old computers.
I still liked the Call to Power series more then the direction Civilization took. I'm sad no more CtP sequels are being made.
The original Civ ran fine on a 286. Current computers have many many many more times that power. Sure, it's gotten a little more complex, but I don't think the demands on the CPU should be extensive.
I see religion as something that had a function in the past when we didn't understand the world around us very well and many things were an "Act of God".
From the seasons, to eclipses to floods, to many other things have been attributed or still are to gods or mythical creatures in the history of mankind. Man is very good in seeing cause and effect in things, even if there is none. I think that is how mysticism and religion came into existence, as a need for mankind to explain phenomena around him that he didn't understand and could not predict. I even think it's what defines us as a species in the sense that we have always tried to figure out cause and effect and then use the knowledge to our advantage to predict the future.
I think over time this simple attempt at explaining the world around us evolved into a way to order our society when we started to live together in larger and larger groups. Successful religions usually seem to do three things: They offer a social structure, they promote procreation and they try to give people control over the unpredictable things in their lives.
If you look at Christianity it's very clear that the current Church is very much based around these three cores.
I think in a way humanity developed religion as an evolutionary survival strategy that has proven highly successful.
Promoting procreation is the most essential. All versions of Christianity that were to averse to this (there were many in the first few centuries), have since died out. This is probably true for other religions as well, but my knowledge is less detailed.
The second thing is offering social structure. From Kings ruling by God given right, to clerical hierarchies to the Ten Commandments. Knowing your place in society, keeping those in power secure and giving rules to judge disputes by are the core of many if not all of the older religions.
The third thing hark back to how I think religion started. People do not cope well with uncertainty. Knowing that if you pray to the gods you will have a good hunt or bountiful harvest makes life predictable. And if things don't turn out well, you must have Sinned, failed to perform a ritual or something like that.
The last thing of course reinforces the previous, as the need for explanation and rules and guidelines helps keep the clergy in power.
Religion is a very powerful tool that humanity used in it's evolution. It is one of the big contributing factors that made us the dominant species on this planet. But I think that it has largely served it's purpose having been replaced by Science, insurance, law and newer forms of government like Democracy.
We now know that spring returns because of the orbit the Earth has around the Sun, not because we sacrifice an animal on midwinter.
Those that defend religion are proof of how powerful a mechanism it is and how good it is at defending itself and surviving. But they are defending something that is entirely constructed by man itself with no actual supernatural beings, powers or world existing. It has helped humanity survive and evolve but it's no longer needed, we now have better ways to organise ourselves and explain the world around us.
I think that's exactly the problem with Android: very very few devices actually run version 2.2. Many are stuck on 1.5, 1.6 or 2.0 with apparently no, or very slow support from the manufacturer in updating the OS, especially for models that are no longer in the market.
I think that's what Android really needs: a simple way to update the OS which is not dependent on support from the hardware manufacturer.
I would like to add: People who want these kinds of things on an iPhone have in my view just the wrong phone and should get an Adroid phone instead. It's a different mindset and Adroid caters much more to them than iPhone does.
I'm not saying one or the other is better. I'm just saying that if you want a polished no hassle experience, and are prepared to pay some to get that, then iPhone is for you, if you like to tinker with your gadgets, then get an Android phone.
I can completely concur with this. iSSH is great. They do all kinds of smart things with the on screen keyboard, so even things like Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-C are easy to do, and they have a built in XServer, so you can even run remote X.
It's the difference between the Linux/Android and OSX/iOS philosophy. ON OSX you pay a few bucks, but then you got a nice, well designed and polished application and can just go and do the job at hand, while on Linux/Android things are very often free, but you spend much more time struggling with the limitations of the software, solving configuration problems and such.
My time is precious enough for me, that I'm happy to pay the developer if iSSH a couple of euros so I can just do my work, instead of having to fiddle with all these things. I find that Windows and Linux are very similar in this regard.
I'm writing this as a long term Linux user, who switched to Mac 3 years ago and now also has a iPhone for a year, while I used Windows Mobile and Symbian before that.
At first I thought the same: That the thighter the controls, the more people will protest.
I have since changed my stance: In the end it's much easier to defend existing liberties that it is to regain ones already lost.
I think past experiences with restrictive regimes have shown that it takes a long time before the pendulum starts to swing back, and much is lost before it does.
I think this can end up being the major downfall of Android, the fragmentation of the market. In effect it means that 2.2 and Flash only run on a few Android phones.
According to Wikipedia: "As of May 2010, only 32% of Android phones run the 2.1 version, and 37% still run the 1.5 version"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)
Even now that iOS 4 isn't going to be available on the original iPhone (that was never sold in my country anyways), it's still a lot more homogeneous market than Android.
The last word definitely hasn't been said about this yet, but I tend to agree that Australia slightly edges out SA at the moment. As for the technology, there are a few more options than only MeerKAT or ASKAP technology. Here at ASTRON we work on EMBRACE and LOFAR.
While you are correct, long baselines come with a couple big drawbacks:
- You need higher time resolution to prevent bandwidth smearing.
- You need intermediate length baselines as well, or your uv coverage will be poor.
- To grid your data in the uv plane becomes very hard as the grid becomes very large.
This means that the size of the data you need to manipulate and processing requirements go up very quickly with longer baselines. For LOFAR we now have baselines of about 1000km and we will go even longer to 2-3000km. processing requirements for observations that contain all our stations, both short and long baselines are huge. I'm talking PFlops if you want to do it real time.
Partially you can get around this by using only long baselines, like in VLBI, and just imaging small things, but for SKA you'll have many short baselines as well.
Disclaimer: I work for ASTRON operating the 14 25m dish 3km WSRT, 7000 antenna 44 station 3000km LOFAR and the 3 station EMBRACE SKA demonstrator project. Although I'm not an astronomer. ;-)
I just visited a friend of mine at the University of Canterbury in ChristChurch, working with the MOA, astrophysics is a small world in NZ, good luck getting involved in SKA!
One of the stories I heard, about another VLBI telescope, was that getting to within about 15km was easy, but the last stretch costed about 400,000 euro. These telescopes tend to be in rather inaccessible terrain.
Well, that's partially true. The online/realtime processing doesn't store the data. We have the data coming in at about 150 Gbit/s into the BlueGene supercomputer (34 TFlop), which does initial realtime processing and writes resulting files at about 50 Gbit/s on a roughly 1 Petabyte intermediate storage system for offline processing. From there it gets initial processing/calibration and a factor of 16 to 64 reduction in size on the offline processing cluster (about 200 8core machines). Also some inspection of the data is done for quality assessment, and sky images are made. If the quality is good, the resulting data and images are moved to out 4+ Petabyte long term archive, where further processing can also be done to achieve publication ready results.
On average we are expected to be producing about 20 TB/hour raw data, and about 700 GB/hour data that gets archived (life time of more than a week).
As I speak we are 2 weeks away from the system being opened by the Dutch Queen, and we are operating on about half the above numbers with about 25 antenna fields online. By the end of 2010 we should be operating at full strength. Also, those numbers are from the top of my head, so I might be off a bit here and there.
LOFAR is seen as a precursor to SKA, the first of a new generation of telescopes based much more on software and firmware and cheap off the shelve instead of expensive dishes and custom DSP hardware. After the various VLBI efforts (Including JIVE, which is housed in the same building as ASTRON and LOFAR), LOFAR now is the biggest telescope on Earth.
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100421
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100125
There are some rather nice images starting to come out of the system, if you're a radioastronomer, but most are under embargo until the opening. I can show you this older image:
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100208
When mentioning SKA precursors, it's also noteworthy to mention that the 14 25meter dish WSRT array will be upgraded with focal plane arrays over the next two years, and the EMBRACE test bed has almost finished building it's first three stations.
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20070801
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20091012
If you are willing to shell out the money, similar administration tools are available from for example RedHat. A place I often visit, there is a 2 man IT department administering a department of about 400 people at a university. They've gone with RedHat solutions and manage a couple of different "streams", like student, researcher, administrative, server, cluster. This way they offer a lot of flexibility to their users, and still have a very low administration workload. I am impressed how often they just sit there twiddling their thumbs given the flexibility of their setup and the size of the department. But it does take skill to set it up in the first place.
And it's no longer free, something people often associate with Linux solutions.
As to research requiring open software. I have to agree with you there. It often doesn't matter, a lot of research depends on tools like Matlab, but that doesn't make it less valid. Open Source solutions also contain errors. The litmus test is indeed if results can be independently reproduced.
You're going to run into one of two problems.
1) By time the kids grow up everything in industry will have changed.
2) You can't afford what they use in industry with a HS budget, even the [college] student licenses.
I have to agree here and have a few things to add. It also depends a lot on which field of engineering or science you go to. Some are dominantly Windows, others are mainly Linux/OSX/Unix based.
If cost is an issue, then going Linux and open source is definitely an option, although it will depend on the quality of the administrators if that can be managed. If done well, the admin workload can be low, but if the IT department doesn't have enough skill, it easily becomes a nightmare.
Windows is a stable choice as it will be what most people have at home and what is used in a lot of areas.
I wouldn't go to Mac alone, even though it's my personal favourite. Even with educational discounts, it's often the most pricey option, although I find they often have a longer lifetime before they become obsolete.
I would advocate against a Windows only environment, as I think it's good for educational purposes to show students that there are other options out there. I think it's a must for Computer Science, and with Linux/OSX/Unix dominant in a lot of computational heavy science and industry, also something that people should have at least a passing experience with if they go into Physics, large parts of Chemistry, Genetics and such.
I think a lot depends on the skill of the IT department. Not so much on it's numbers, but if they familiar with the right management tooling, and have the skill to organise the management such that it's not labour intensive. When set up right, one person can manage hundreds of computers.
In the end the choice should be largely based on money and IT department skills. I do think that it would be unwise to go to any mono-culture though, especially not Windows because of the educational value of bringing students into contact with the different options out there, even though by the time they get to their first job, times and circumstances will have changed again.
When I was at the University, now 10-15 years ago, there was Windows 3, NT and 95. But also HP-UX, IRIX, early Linux and a few Macs. Learning what the good and the bad points of each were, and developing a broad and OS independent skill set as a result has helped me a lot in finding jobs later. Currently I work mostly on Linux and OSX, but before that I worked in a Windows environment for 5 years. In both cases it has helped me a lot that I had a wider experience, because it allowed me to cherry pick the best tool for the job.
Because it's working exactly how it should, and exactly the same way it does on other systems.
BS. If I want to delete an icon from my desktop or dock, I drag it to the recycle bin, or right-click->remove, or shift-delete and it's gone. No dialogs whatsoever.
Same thing with lots of other changes. If I want to change the background image or the resolution of my desktop, it just does, no dialogs.
In general, there are a lot of flaws in Windows' design when using it multi-user, like the All Users Desktop paradigm, that make that it requires unnecessary confirmation or privilege elevation dialogs.
What it should do, is, have a default desktop for new users, which will be copied to new users when their account is created. And from that point on users decide what it looks like and can muck around with their own copy as they please. Nobody else should be able to alter it. New applications that get installed system wide should be added to the list of applications/start menu, but not to people's desktop or whatever. Even adding them to the start menu is debatable as that can also be customized, but Windows doesn't really have a list of installed applications that is easily accessible otherwise.
The basic design is just not well thought out in a multi-user fashion, but the whole thing is a single user OS with some multi-user functions bolted on. That is what makes it need admin privileges so much, even 15 years after NT and Windows for Workgroups and 95 started it on it's path. It's still a kludge that kind-of-works but often is very inconsistent.
Linux has become a great server OS, basically replacing the traditional offerings like HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, VMS and others to a large extent.
It hasn't yet shown to be a credible contender in the Desktop arena. We've been hearing that this year is the year of Linux on the Desktop for over 10 years now.
There are plenty of reasons which I will not enumerate here now.
Sorry, this is just plain prejudice. For business purposes EU is one big country.
Not true. I live in The Netherlands. The iTunes stores in our neighbouring countries of Germany and the UK have much larger selections than the Dutch iTunes store.
I could buy an AppleTV at the Apple Store 5 km from here, but I would not be able to buy a single movie or TV series online, while if I lived 50km from here in Germany I would have no trouble.
The borders are very real, and apparently the legal rules around copyright, or whom administers them vary a lot.
I live in the Netherlands, not Eastern Europe, but the selection in out iTunes store is also very poor compared to neighbouring countries like the UK or Germany.
The only reason for the difference I can see, given that Apple does sell all hardware and has an iTunes store, is legal.
My guess would be that anyone else trying to fill the gap would have an even harder time than Apple, given that they will have a lot less leverage on the content providers compared to an established player like Apple.
I think it would be very profitable to offer for example Movies and TV series would be available. Currently everything I try, iTunes, Amazon, nexflix, CWtv, they all refuse to show me anything based on my location.
"Your inability to understand the difference between the words "distributor" and "reseller" is not a web-site design problem. It's a literacy problem on your part. In any product supply chain, distributors operate in the levels between manufacturer and resellers. Distributors don't sell to consumers."
Except that there is no this distinction in Russian. Distributors certainly can sell things directly to customers.
And the whole point of the exercise was to find the website in your own language. You can't fault someone who can't read English and is trying to find the Ukrainian site for not understanding the difference!
It has nothing to do with those reasons.
I live in the Netherlands. We can buy iPhones and Macs localized in Dutch at the Apple Store here. But the amount of stuff available on iTunes is severely limited.
The only reason I can see is copyright legislation or lawyer barricades by the copyright holders. There are no limits in infrastructure, finances, localization or market size that I can see are relevant.
I don't think it has anything to do with this. I think it's purely the amount of obstruction that copyright holders are putting up in the various countries.
I live in the Netherlands and see no reason why ROI would be an issue but we face largely the same problems.
It must purely be differences in legal system or lawyer barricades that are the issue here.
What we need is sweeping Copyright reform and unification, but I'm afraid that ATCA will not be the answer we're looking for.