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Wow. You are so totally wrong you don't deserve a single "insightful" mod. Since Slashdot still lacks a "-1. factually incorrect" mod option, I feel compelled to reply, lest people stand in awe of your "+5, Insightful" score and think you're actually right.

"There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes). Internet ads are no different. I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason."

Wrong, wrong, WRONG. The ads you see WHEN YOU VISIT A SITE THAT SOMEONE ELSE IS RUNNING are NOT "unsolicited." Let me put it to you this way: if some junk mail arrives at your house, that's unsolicited. If a magazine that you subscribe to arrives and it contains ads, those ads are NOT "unsolicited." If someone sends you an ad via fax, that is unsolicited. If you're watching a TV show and it has ads, those ads are not. See the difference?

Ars is a business. They choose to pay writers to create content, they buy servers and pay for electricity to keep them running, and they pay for bandwidth to--believe it or not, they do not get ONE PENNY of the money you give your ISP. And since they spent all this money to create content, they get to choose how to pay for it. They offer subscriptions but obviously your cheap ass isn't paying for that--if you were, you would not be here complaining about the ads because you wouldn't see them. Pretty much the only other option they have to make money is to sell ads. It's their product that comes along with these ads, so they are fully within their rights to do whatever the hell they want to with it.

It breaks down like this:

• They pay to create content.
• They use ads to pay for the content.
• You are free to block their ads.
• They are free to deny you the content they paid to produce.

And that's the deal. You don't like it? Then block their ads or don't visit them. If they go out of business it is, as you say, "their problem." But get the idea out of your head that they're supposed to pay a staff to create content, pay to keep a bunch of servers running, AND then give that content away.

If somebody wants to run a site as a hobby and give away content, that's fine. If someone decides to run a site as a business, they are free to do so, and like EVERY OTHER BUSINESS N THE PLANET you are free to patronize them or not. It's just that simple. You don't like it? Then pay for some writers, start your own site, and give away the content, or "get creative" and find a way to monetize it that doesn't make whiny freeloaders like you unhappy. Otherwise, please STFU.

In any case, there is prior art for the zooming icons, see BeOS' Twitcher:
http://www.ars-technica.com/beos/reviews/1298/r4gu i-2.html

you obviously haven't read ars-technica lately.

The dumbest compliant is implied. He acts as if though desktop Linux will be harmed by his inability to understand Gnome. Sure, his article is harmful for not mentioning the many fine alternatives to Gnome that you can have on your computer without interfeering with Gnome. Nicholas, if you want a file browser that works the way you like it and you can't figure out the keystrokes within Gnome, just call up Konqueror. It and Gnome's file manager run just fine in Window Maker, OLVDM, Enlightenment, Fluxbox or even KDE or Gnome. You always have other options with free software.

Um... South Park is rendered.

So is most of "the anime stuff."

"In contrast, the RISC architecture, at the root of chips from Sun Microsystems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and ARM, isn't proliferating at the same rate."

I was under the impression that in the core there isn't much difference between CISC and RISC these days, as described by Ars Technica last century.

Ars-Technica is a great resource for this kind of thing. Also Experts-Exchange is another good source. Write an article at the least. Submit or post as others have suggested with Wiki, blog, above sites or any other methods mentioned. Hopefully your company has a method to share information. Good on ya for trying to pass on some knowledge.

Ars Technica had this yesterday (scroll down a bit). Al Jazeera is basically toast (last time I tried to access it) but it's hard to say on this end whether that is [a] DoS attack(s) or just everyone suddenly going, "I should check that out ..."

---------------
This space for rent.

This reminds me of an article on ArsTechnica which was published a couple of years ago. Take a look and draw your own conclusions

I know a fairly good portion of the slashdot population reads Ars Technica also, but for those who don't, they also have their own program like this.

Their Premier Membership has been around for a while. It uses Pay Pal or Amazon's Honor System (gak. No nice link there. You know how to find it.) or even snail mail to receive payment.

Currently the service is completely voluntary. You would "subscribe" only because you want to see the site be maintained without getting blanketed with ads. The subscription amount may be anything, and you don't get anything really cool for paying them, except a little moniker near your name in their forums, but you also don't lose anything for NOT paying them.

It's interesting how these different systems are sprouting up. We will probably see a bunch of these popping up rather soon. Eventually we may see one or two dominant methods because that's how it is with everything, isn't it?

So go check them out! And *maybe* I'd pay for slashdot, but I would imagine that they get plethora dollars from andover or whomeve is sponsoring them. :)

I know a fairly good portion of the slashdot population reads Ars Technica also, but for those who don't, they also have their own program like this.

Their Premier Membership has been around for a while. It uses Pay Pal or Amazon's Honor System (gak. No nice link there. You know how to find it.) or even snail mail to receive payment.

Currently the service is completely voluntary. You would "subscribe" only because you want to see the site be maintained without getting blanketed with ads. The subscription amount may be anything, and you don't get anything really cool for paying them, except a little moniker near your name in their forums, but you also don't lose anything for NOT paying them.

It's interesting how these different systems are sprouting up. We will probably see a bunch of these popping up rather soon. Eventually we may see one or two dominant methods because that's how it is with everything, isn't it?

So go check them out! And *maybe* I'd pay for slashdot, but I would imagine that they get plethora dollars from andover or whomeve is sponsoring them. :)

I already pay for newspapers. I already pay for magazines. If someone can get me better information in a better package than what I can currently get on the Internet, then why not?

Look, I know full well I can go to, say NY Times (free registration required) and get a pretty good read that way. But what if I'm looking for something that's a bit more insightful? Let's face it. Alot of the web sites out there right now are nothing more than, say, a fancy newsletter. Sure, they get updated everyday, but there aren't really alot of Pulitzer prize winners writing for Ars Technica for instance.

What if there were a service that paid the authors a small amount, and you were able to customize which authors you received. So each morning, your favorite writers would show up, bring you the news and their opinions (since anyone can give you the news for free), and you'd pick which articles you liked, and the site would continually customize itself for you. Now THAT would be worth something!

Maybe its just me. I have geek interests, and yet I have never heard of this company or their product before. The details on their website are very sketchy. There are no downloads, the pages look very second-rate, and their on-line ordering isn't over SSL. There are broken images everywhere, where you would expect pictures of flashy shrink-wrap. The user manual for this 'super o/s' is full of screen-shots of a DOS app running in a Win9x comand window. And although they claim to be a US company, the text gives the feeling it was written by someone who doesn't often use the English language.

OK, I am a constant skeptic. Is it just me, or does this look like a hoax to anyone else? Isn't it the sort of thing one would expect to have seen a feature on at a geek site like Ars Technica? Can anyone present any evidence that this is real?

I keep hearing MP3 and Napster, et. al., discussed in the popular press, and no one is getting it right. They (including Lars) keep talking about "perfect digital copies (pdc)." But no one is swapping pdc's, and MP3s are no such thing. They're compressed, lower quality copies. They are the PC equivalent to the cassette tape. They may sound the same on your cheap PC speakers, but pump them through a stereo and crank the volume and the difference is very clear, especially at 128 Kb/s, which is the encoding bitrate most used on Napster. (Ars has a review of different MP3 encoders and how their output compares to the original here . If they were pdc's, would there be a need for this?) A pdc is the wave file from the CD, which runs about 50MB for the average cut from a 10-cut CD. That's too large for the average use to pull down over the net with anything but a blazing connection, and even at that, you aren't going to be able to pull many down per day. It can be done, just like you can rip DVDs and post the movies to the net, but only the very persistent and very lucky (others on your LAN?) are going to be able to pull them down illegally. Please call into talk radio/TV/whatever and draw this disticntion, the RIAA has convinced the press that MP3=CD quality. Stop the misinformation!!!

All of these sites occasionally do exhaustive introductory articles, and even if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, you'll probably still learn a lot from their tangential remarks etc. (kinda like the LDP).

Ars-Technica also has a number of discussion forums that might be able to give you a hand.

I have a feeling this sounds like a storage machine - means you should have a good amount of ram, but regular PC100 or PC133 will work fine. Dual processors? maybe, if you are doing stripeing or mirroring with your disks.

Also don't limit yourself to RedHat - remember redhat is not linux - you can go ahead and look at debian, stormix, mandrake, suse, and the rest for a distribution that fits your needs, or one that just spikes your interest. (I personally like stormix)

if you can get past the windows mentions, look at the god-box and the other boxes over at Ars Technica. They have some great reccommendations on good value hardware.

Lastly, i saw a few complaints about the 3c905b cards in earlier posts. We religiously use these cards (albiet in windows NT machines) here at work and have had nothing but good experiences with them. I love the 3com and i have a hard time using anything else (execpt if it is free of course :-> )

I have an AMD Athlon 700, 192 MB PC100 RAM, and 13 GB Ultra ATA 7200 RPM drive. These results are from my workstation system running RedHat 6.1.

Apache 1.3.9:
less than 30 seconds (25-30 sec. on three different runs) to compile Apache 1.3.9 from source with DSO support the only configuration option.

Tomcat 3.0
42-47 seconds to build Tomcat 3.0 from source (three different runs for comparison). Compiler used was javac shipped with Blackdown 1.2.2rc3 JDK.

2.2.13 kernel
Just under 2min 30 sec. to compile with a pretty standard config for my system (no sound, no SCSI suport) on two runs.

Here are some enlightening links on AMD Athlon performance and benchmarks:

• ars-technica.com Linux compile benchmarks
• sysopt.com Athlon 700 review (excellent)
• CPUReview.com review of Athlon 600 running RedHat 6.0
• compiler optimization benchmarks with Athlon 600

Note: none of the benchmarks I gave above used any custom compiler optimization settings.

• Sharky Extreme
• Ars Technica
• AnandTech
• Hard OCP
• Ace's Hardware
• CompHardware
• Tom's Hardware
• The Tech Zone
• Thresh's FiringSquad
• Review News

--

Here's a cool review/comparison I found on Ars-Technica.

There's a lot of benchmark comparison stuff, so if you want to skip to the final analysis....

I just got my BP6 and 2 Celeron 466's in the mail yesterday...maybe I'll call in sick today.

Here's a cool review/comparison I found on Ars-Technica.

There's a lot of benchmark comparison stuff, so if you want to skip to the final analysis....

I just got my BP6 and 2 Celeron 466's in the mail yesterday...maybe I'll call in sick today.

I did it! My lone Celeron 300A is now 504MHz. Doesn't seem any faster, but RC5 might be able to crunch a few more keys... I had to change the core voltage to 2.4volts and set the BIOS to ignore the "error" of this higher voltage. The CPU did not like 2.0volts and scrambled the eggs on the hard drive with 2.2volts while compiling the kernel. The CPU does not seem to put out any heat, so 504/113MHz it is!

Yeah, I was one of the people who submitted a link about this dual Linux/BeOS stuff.

However, then I read this story on ars which confirms what other people have been saying: it just runs Be.

As Millenium is obviously a GNOME user who has used KDE only occasionally, I will try to reply to his points.
For some more comprehensive - and maybe objective - comparisons, you mau consider looking at Ars Technica about KDE, Mininco about GNOME (sorry, has vanished), and Predawnia for a comparison.
Another GNOME article is on Linuxworld.
Interestingly, only the entirely positive articles about GNOME are posted on Slashdot.

Now for the points mentioned above:
Stability
I've never had either Gnome or KDE crash my machine.
So So you're either very lucky or very lazy. Look at the newsgroups, mailing lists and reviews and you'll see people are *very* annoyed about GNOME's instability. Look at the Predawnia article for more.

functionality
In terms of functionality KDE excels in areas Gnome does not, but Gnome too is way ahead of KDE in some areas. I'd call it a flat-out draw in that area.
Sorry, but that's an illusion. KDE offers undoubtedly more functionality, if you look at productivity features.
You may argue that for technology (CORBA) and eyecandy (widget themes), but there you should compare GNOME -at least until it is really stable- to the most recent KDE, and KOffice technology, which is far ahead of GNOME (CORBA object model technology working for many months, while Baboon isn't even finished).

Looks
In terms of looks I doubt anyone can argue against the assertion that Gnome wins, so I won't go into that one here.
You are using geeks' standards here: GNOME looks screamingly flashy (what I'd call kitsch; maybe cool for you). KDE looks cleaner and more elegant. All that is a matter of taste. Look at kde.t.o for WM themes or these brand new icons!

Speed and Resources
Now, we come to speed. [...] KWM is a BIG problem for KDE; it makes E look stunningly fast and stable.[...]
Now there's the matter of resources. I'm afraid Gnome wins it here. It appears to use far less in the way of resources than KDE does.
This was probably true for KDE 1.0, it's certainly wrong for KDE 1.1. This is *much* faster and leaner than KDE 1.0.
As for resources: Surely you're joking Mr Mil! GNOME needs 3 times as much diskspace than KDE (for about the same functionality), and GNOME panel applets eat memory like crazy! (But that's partly a general problem of CORBA, not so much GNOME's fault)
Besides that, many WM are already KDE aware, so you can use Window Maker, Afterstep, or the lean blackbox or flwm if you find KWM too bulky.
As much as I love the eyecandy of Enlightenment, saying that E is faster/more stable than KWM is IMHO fiction instead of fact...

Toolkits
Raw toolkits: Strip out the desktop environments, and GTK wins out over Qt. This is simply a matter of functionality: GTK offers more than a few things which you can't get with Qt alone.
I don't know where you get this information from. Even gtk advocate concede that QT is way ahead in terms of productive features, simply because they started earlier. Take e.g. printing, a pretty basic thing: gtk doesn't offer the respective widgets yet, while it is very easy to implement with QT. (And with all due respect, having pinnable or themable toolbar is not such a top priority).
More importantly, we're talking about QT 1.4x here. QT 2 is currently in late beta, and it offers many major improvements.
Don't get me wrong, gtk is a nice toolkit, and I'd love to see KDE support for it (like for fltk and tcl/tk), but we should stay realistic.

Programming Language
The language issue is irrelevant; several C++ bindings exist for GTK and a set of C bindings is being worked on for Qt
You are not an OO programmer, I presume. There is a big difference whether you have OO bindings or a entirely OO structure. Many Object Oriented features (overloading, inheritance etc.) are restricted if you have just bindings.
Making a OO lib like QT "flat" by offering a procedural interface (like C) is easier, but many C advocates will still say it's not the ideal solution (less efficient that plain C etc.)
Thus, Gtk is still the best choice for C, and QT for OOP and C++ programming. As OOP is more appropriate for GUIs, things look maybe a bit better for QT, but with the large C coder base on Linux, this may still be a draw.

Conclusion: Due to the longer development period, KDE is undoubtedly ahead of GNOME in terms of stability, maturity and productivity. It's much better than its reputation among geeks.
GNOME does a good job in offering a more individual and artistic look, so it is well suited for experiments at home.

This is stupid. It isn't even all that imaginative. Rob, you're really passing some pure crap on to your readers. Ars-technica is quickly overtaking Slashdot as the coolest nerd news site on the web. Get with it before this site becomes as popular as Segfault.

Believe it or not, not everyone who loves Linux and uses it is a frickin' Linux Nazi.

And more importantly, although I use Linux as my Primary, I still wouldn't wish it on the masses. Windows and the MacOS were made for those folks. That's one of the reaons why I like sites like this: they don't pontificate 24/7.

Not that Rob does, but these message boards are too stuffed with bloated jerks.

ciao

1)Most of the posts here seem to be addressing which chip is "fastest." We've got people calling x86 CISC outdated (probably), and saying that G3s'4s are faster because they are RISCian. These arguments just don't hold up. Why? Because the G3/4 design is RISCian, but the instruction set is not. The same holds true with x86, be it Intel or AMD. Check out this article at Ars-Technica for greater explanation of RISC vs. CISC.

2)It's not just about the speed!!! If it was, why not argue that someone buy and SGI MIPS box and get all the great FPU performance? Because it costs too much. Sure, at clock speed, the G3/4 kicks x86 (at least integer wise, not sure about fpu). AMD and Cyrix also beat Intel at clock speed. But Intel just ups MHz. Now, the G3/4, probably not only beat Intel chips at clock speed, but at one or two higher clock speeds as well. Here's the thing: you can still get a faster x86 system for much cheaper (note: since we're just talking about speed here, we don't care about friendliness. That's the usual explanation for Mac prices, that you pay for the easiness and friendliness of the system). In october, I put together a Dual P2-350 system, with UW SCSI card, and UW SCSI hard drive, and 64 MB RAM, Matrox G200 vidcard, SB AWE 64, PCI ethernet, and a 12x SCSI cdrom, for $1000. No monitor. But with a monitor, that would have cost the same as an iMac. And there's just no way that the 233 MHz G3 running on a 66MHz bus was gonna beat that system.

So, when the K7, G4, and P3 are all out later this year, if I (a power user), feel like upgrading for more speed, it will most likely be to another x86 chip because speed/$ is much greater.

NOTE: I'm no x86 fanatic (I'm the guy who posted about cheap alphas yesterday), and this discussion does not apply to normal computer users, because to them speed is not all that is important, and they don't understand what makes a computer fast. Fast is not what sells, marketing and gimmicks sell.

1)Most of the posts here seem to be addressing which chip is "fastest." We've got people calling x86 CISC outdated (probably), and saying that G3s'4s are faster because they are RISCian. These arguments just don't hold up. Why? Because the G3/4 design is RISCian, but the instruction set is not. The same holds true with x86, be it Intel or AMD. Check out this article at Ars-Technica for greater explanation of RISC vs. CISC.

2)It's not just about the speed!!! If it was, why not argue that someone buy and SGI MIPS box and get all the great FPU performance? Because it costs too much. Sure, at clock speed, the G3/4 kicks x86 (at least integer wise, not sure about fpu). AMD and Cyrix also beat Intel at clock speed. But Intel just ups MHz. Now, the G3/4, probably not only beat Intel chips at clock speed, but at one or two higher clock speeds as well. Here's the thing: you can still get a faster x86 system for much cheaper (note: since we're just talking about speed here, we don't care about friendliness. That's the usual explanation for Mac prices, that you pay for the easiness and friendliness of the system). In october, I put together a Dual P2-350 system, with UW SCSI card, and UW SCSI hard drive, and 64 MB RAM, Matrox G200 vidcard, SB AWE 64, PCI ethernet, and a 12x SCSI cdrom, for $1000. No monitor. But with a monitor, that would have cost the same as an iMac. And there's just no way that the 233 MHz G3 running on a 66MHz bus was gonna beat that system.

So, when the K7, G4, and P3 are all out later this year, if I (a power user), feel like upgrading for more speed, it will most likely be to another x86 chip because speed/$ is much greater.

NOTE: I'm no x86 fanatic (I'm the guy who posted about cheap alphas yesterday), and this discussion does not apply to normal computer users, because to them speed is not all that is important, and they don't understand what makes a computer fast. Fast is not what sells, marketing and gimmicks sell.

Care to elaborate as to WHY this is good?

If Intel wants to sell us the same damn chip core at 5 different speeds, well, ok, fine, but I personally think it's foolish to buy a good core that is rated for 300MHz and not try to get it to run at 400MHz or higher. There's no difference between much of this stuff. My 300 runs at 450 without a hitch, and it's not some kind of dangerous trick. It's Intel messin' with your head, selling you things that are way underpowered and under rated.

Check out the Celeron FAQ for more information on how easy it is, and on how stable these systems really are.