paired together with computer-based/automated facial recognition, all this monitoring is going to make life really hard for dissidents eventually. at some point they're really going to be forced to live/hide out in the sewers, if they're going to remain in built-up areas.
considering Orwell was British (and the widespread deployment of CCTVs seems to have begun there), it makes sense that resistance to this pervasive monitoring began there, but even with these (generally fringe) groups, it's still happening. You've got to wonder if the reason the totalitarian regimes we've had crumble, is because the technology wasn't available yet. What happens when it IS available?
Just to play devil's advocate, linux runs any X11 app and that goes back decades and decades
in my experience it's not quite that straightforward, in that even if you want to run older apps, you can run into all sorts of library/dependency issues. it wouldn't be a problem if that app was the ONLY thing you wanted to run, but it's a real bitch if an old app wants a particular library version while a newer app that you want to live on the same machine, doesn't
there are often little inconsistencies between behaviour of different versions...
I've been told by a friend that this is also one of the reasons why Sun was losing customers - they EOL-ed Solaris 8, and (Sun's forwards-binary-compatibility-guarantee notwithstanding) the customers decided if they weren't going to be able to just "keep the old stuff going" (what with new SPARC hardware not being able to run older versions of Solaris), and were going to have to move off Solaris 8 (or even 7), they may as well move to linux/windows/anything-other-than-Solaris.
this makes a big difference because of the number of Sun customers during the Solaris 7-8 days...
yeah, when I read this:
would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years
I was also wondering, "what's the track record of the people making these predictions"?
MySQL is in a very different niche than Oracle.
I'd think MySQL is one of the reasons Oracle bought Sun. Whatever its failings, MySQL is the "default" choice for most new (small) deployments (I mean, to the extent there's the LAMP acronym for it), the ones that are too small for Oracle to care about.
Now that Oracle has it, they're in a position to "upsell" them once they get far enough. They now control both the high end AND the low end ("... the horizontal and the vertical..."). I'd expect an upper limit to the effort put into scaling MySQL up ("we already have a high-end DB, why waste the effort?"), but I don't see them abandoning it.
Being able to sell a complete vertical solution, with their own CPU, OS, and DB system is probably quite appealing to Oracle.
and now, IBM execs are starting to wonder if maybe they shouldn't have walked away
Why would you buy Sun if you didn't want their hardware? It would be a questionable move at best.
Agreed. I think what this means is that Oracle DOES want Sun's hardware. Maybe not SPARC (which I guess they could hive off completely to Fujitsu), but they now can provide every single item in the checklist.
and let's not forget Larry Ellison's foray into network computing...
Actually. I think it might well go the other way. That Oracle decided to fork/clone Red Hat shows one thing - Oracle WANTS to have an OS.
Now they have one.
Now, imagine if you could fetch that 100% oomph when needed from a server farm instead of your own computer...
I think that just shifts the problem from CPU power to bandwidth (which is already a problem area).
this is why PCs evolved in the first place - mainframes were essentially a server with
the raw performance figures keep going up, but the relationship shifts back and forth. putting all the smarts in the cloud just makes bandwidth that much more critical. if you can't have the bandwidth, maybe it makes sense to have the smarts at the end nodes.
Second, Creationism is currently operating under the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity. They don't actually want to be 'accepted', they just want to grab as many headlines as possible. They want big, showy, and silly public debates with well-respected scientists.
I'd second that. Creationism seems to appeal to the segment of the religio-fundies that thrive on a "siege mentality", that "everybody is against us". What's useful to them is a large number of people "attacking" them, they don't (and won't) care about the legitimacy or quality of the criticisms of their ideas.
The third, and biggest problem with Creationism is that it is a concept, not a field of study. You don't grant degrees in 'ideas'. We don't have a degree for perpetual motion machines, proving Goldbach's conjecture, or any other crackpottery you can imagine. A degree is rewarded for a field of study. What exactly are Creationists going to study?
Does anybody offer a "degree in evolution"?
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. -- James F. Byrnes