Posts by E 573 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2007
I've been to one of these - the FTAA meeting in Quebec City in 2001. It wasn't especially violent, protest organizers did a lot of education beforehand. Most of the violence that did occur was rubber and plastic bullets, and teargas. These things were used by the state not the protesters.
I found out that I love the smell of stale teargas in the morning.
No offense intended, but anyone who relies on Promise chips for RAID arrays for *important* data has rocks in her/his head. Yeah, Promise is cheap, but the reason 3Ware, Adaptec, LSI, AMI, IBM, HP (and so on) RAID controllers cost is because they have solid fully hardware implementations. Promise RAID exists at least partly somewhere in kernel driver space.
You said it, mate. Leave aside installations of various FPS games:
XP + Visual Studio + Office + Firebadger = somewhere north of 20 GB.
Linux* + KDE** + GCC + libraries + kitchen sink = less than 12 GB.
*Fedora 8 or 10, SuSE 9.x thru 11.2, Slackware to 12.x
**I just like it.
Can't speak for Ubuntu, it drives me nuts. To each his own.
Now... which version of Emacs do you use?
Up to six minutes to boot with a high clocked quad core?
"Windows, ZoneAlarm firewall, Windows Defender, Sophos..." plus what else? Got lots of pretty icons in your task tray, my friend - do they make you feel important or well provisioned?
A clean system that's getting old? That's utterly ridiculous. Computers running Windows do not slow down because they get old. They slow down because Windows collects cruft like a stray dog collects fleas, and the registry collects errors like the DNA of a radiation poisoning victim. This is a maintenance issue, not an age issue.
You ought to take a look in the run keys in the registry and removed all your vendor cruft-ware. Then clean out the run-on-login folder in your start menu. Then run regclean about twenty times.
Statements like "...system that's getting old" to explain those boot times do not inspire confidence, buddy.
All I can say is that my one and only Apple Store experience (Pacific Centre, BC) left me with the impression that all the staff were indoctrinated past the capacity for independent thought. I don't think the staff was capable of malice anymore
I asked for a wireless keyboard: two of them started to wave iPhones and iPods at me in a somewhat lascivious manner. On my way out, these two slammin' asian Apple chicks tried to interest me in Macbook Pros with a nice lead in of cocked hips and slightly out thrust breast, nearly succeeded too. The place was weirder than a high end Shinjuku department store with all it's silent, bowing semi-kawaii shop girls.
Then again this was in Vancouver, perhaps they all were just really stoned.
Just FYI. PHP has four database abstraction APIs.
* DBA — Database (dbm-style) Abstraction Layer
* dbx
* ODBC — ODBC (Unified)
* PDO — PHP Data Objects
I've used PDO a lot, my code runs equally on Postgres and MySQL. PDO does not isolate one from SQL, so some PGSQL'ism won't work with MySQL & vice versa. But that's what standard SQL is for. How generic do you want is the question.
I agree about thread safety, but that may just be an artifact of Apache only acquiring a threaded engine fairly recently.
vb script! I remember using vb script in 2000: it could not reliably take an integer value and turn it into a string representation so I could concat a string with a number! vb script (was) is very tricky to use.
'marginal buyer' - I can't agree. I've got three very nice desktops at home. I just wanted a very light notebook with good battery life and my requirements of a laptop are not heavy. As for Linux, every OS has irritating things - I prefer Linux/UNIX irritations to Windows irritations.
Big bear - Matter of perspective I guess. I had a Macbook Pro, nice machine and it got about 3.5 hours to the battery charge. But it ran MySQL, Apache quite as well as an average desktop for development work and I just don't need that kind of power or it's approx 5 lb in my briefcase. I have network access at work and at home to some fairly heavy iron and most of what I use the eee for is either running ssh sessions or reading the Inq and el Reg. It's not a cloud front end, but it is I guess a front end for better machines. FWIW, I would not trust anything very important to Google or Amazon (or whoever's) cloud - I have no belief they would not at some point attempt to assert ownership, or perhaps mine the files people store on their clouds.
I recently bought an eee pc 1000HA and I find it an excellent tool. Laptops have always suffered from having short battery life and being heavy. Netbooks are light, and the eee pc 1000 series demonstrates that battery life can be 5 or 6 hours. The machine can do voip/skype/whatever and it runs a browser and SSH client nicely. Heavy word processors are over-rated, a lightweight word processor is good enough for most purposes.
Way, way, way, way back in the day there was a competition between x86, RISC, SPARC and PPC for the desktop: x86 won then but this is a market where competition could again have an effect and drive the price/performance ratio. Linux has an advantage over Windows in that it runs on x86/x64, also ARM, also pick your CPU. So do the vast majority of KDE & Gnome apps.
Therefore Linux has a competitive advantage in a market - netbooks - where the CPU price is extremely sensitive and (IMHO) there is real reason for competition against Intel & AMD processors. A portable OS applied to heterogenous hardware competing in a fairly common form factor could cause a (I hate to use jargon) paradigm shift.
Netbooks are already extremely successful, it would be very nice if they were adopted as value added marketing tools. Certainly with Linux there would be little likelyhood of vendor/OS lock-in: people would make RPMs or distros for the little beasties. A telco giving me a netbook with an ADSL contract would have a hard time stopping me or charging me for installing GCC, for example.
Problem is, they'll eviscerate the high margin Core2 & Phenom market. Then again, with 32 nm process tech soon ready and the small size of a netbook CPU, margins on netbook CPUs could be high enough to make up the difference.
If that is actually the case, who wants to bet a beer that Intel executes, AMD vacillates, and ARM & Fujitsu (sparc) & co. retrench ;-(
I've dealt with a lot of NAS boxes and to a one they are underpowered qua CPU. They have GigE interfaces and lots of SATA disks but can't top 50 MB/s on sustained reads of large files.
If you want a lot of slow RAID, I suppose that kind of box is fine...
Maybe a 1.5 GHz Via is a fast enough CPU.
-40F is *cold*.
Really seriously though...
Good on ya Ted. That's the most interesting OS possibility I've seen since Atheos mysteriously disappeared. I'll keep my eyes peeled.
Prior art and some OSes that have no market share aside... if I can download it and run it on an x86 or x64 box then I will and I can see some ways it is good.
If you seriously believe Russia will honour the American loose-patent-as-business-tactic then you are dreaming.
I don't know if it is vapourware, hope not. Just having an OS to play with that keeps persistent state will be fun and possibly extremely useful. I hope it is a real product.
All the nay-sayers and it's-been-done-before-criers should consider that none of us have easy access to such an OS outside of closed PDAs/cells/Crays/etc. Wouldn't it be nice if we did?
Of course, I have no idea from the article about the license.
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