Slashdot Mirror

funny?!?!

since when is trolling worth a +5 funny???

Stop with the hate group propaganda already, this is really old and tiresome, as more and more of the MATURE slashdot croud leave for another site that acts mature and helpful no matter what the OS is.

according to them, if the CPU's are trully to ever reach such temperature we'll need some serious termal isolation in our casing, not for the CPUs, for us.

The Word version is still lame compared to Word Perfect. Try typing in a sentence, then changing one word in the middle to a slightly different font. In Word, all you get is a bar on the right that lists the formatting for the current paragraph, where in Word Perfect you could very quickly catch any problem like this by simply scanning for the the font begin and end tags. To see the format of each element in Word, you still would have to click every single word in the document (and wait for the 2 second lag while the new layout is loaded into the formatting pane).

That was a very simple example, but in a long document that has been touched by many hands there could be any number of small formatting discrepancies that would never be caught until the print run of 20,000 copies came back from the print shop looking like crap.

Compare the screenshot of Reveal Formatting to the screenshot of Reveal codes.

Even CrossEyes doesn't give you the ability to directly edit the codes in Word, instead popping up a formatting dialog. Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't this make it much clumsier to just move or delete an existing formatting element?

I'll second the vote for an iPod if you want more than that. I just bought a 20GB 3G iPod from our local university bookstore for $250, since the new 4G model just came out.

Other than a new system, I'd second the other suggestions about a used laptop. I may be buying one or more used tiny Compaqs for $300 a pop, so they can be had. If you're looking for a note-taking machine, an older, less powerful laptop shouldn't be hard to find on the cheap.

= 9J =

I don't know of any study funded directly by Microsoft. Microsoft funds AdTI, which came up with that balony all on its own. (We are talking about the Ken Brown/Minix load of crap right?) Because apparently even Microsoft saw right through that.

It isn't stealing in Canada. It probably isn't immoral either, as we have already paid for the music even if we never actually copy it, though the moral issues here are more debateable.

The marketing department at Unisys has a lot to learn. Last October, they ran an ad that said:

We helped JetBlue Airways do something unique with their data: treat customers like people.
Unisys
Imagine it. Done.

This wasn't a terrible ad, except that they ran it right after the JetBlue scandal. It was like they were completely out of touch with what was going on in the industry. I couldn't help but send them a little message asking if I could work for their marketing department, since there was no possible way I could do any worse than the one they presently have.

Unfortunately, according to the Ars Technica article earlier this week, Starter Edition won't run at a resolution higher than 800 by 600 pixels, won't support Microsoft Networking, and might not even support Direct X 9.0, rendering it pretty weak for playing games.

Of course, on the other hand, I guess it's better than nothing if you're Asia and you want to stay legal.

You can look through the ECMA document for a Hello World example. Also check out last months Ars Technica Linux.Ars article on Mono as it provides a couple of examples too.

It's like when some time ago on this site somebody said Java could be faster than C due to JIT and all that. I replied that no way, Java could never be faster than an optimal implementation in machine code, and C is only a bit above it.

that's correct, but useless. it's useless because, for this to do you any good, you need to have an optimal implementation in machine code at hand. such beasts are very hard to even recognize, never mind write.

your friend was at least potentially right, because JIT compiling (and other recompile-at-runtime schemes) all have access to more info than a static compiler does: the code to be compiled is running, so a lot of knowledge about what it's actually doing right then and how it's been dynamically behaving since started up is at hand. optimizations can be based on this that static compilers can't perform.

consider byte-compiling at runtime from one processor's native machine code to another one's (Crusoe), or -- as a degenerate case -- to the same processor's machine code. HP have done a lot of research on this; their Dynamo project byte-compiles PA8000 code to PA8000 at run-time. the weird thing is that programs so interpreted occasionally run up to 20% faster than "native" machine code... because the system could micro-optimize the running program as it ran, focusing automatically on the pieces that needed optimization the most, and performing optimizations that no static compiler could do at all for lack of knowledge of how the code behaved dynamically.

To this what I say is: If you really needed it, you could use C to write your own bytecode interpreter in it, with its own JIT, that would be faster than Java's because you could make it optimal for your application.

yeah, you could. but Phil Greenspun would just shake his head at hearing of it and, perhaps, mildly pity you for your wasted effort. if you're going to go down that route, at least you could reimplement Common Lisp...

It's like when some time ago on this site somebody said Java could be faster than C due to JIT and all that. I replied that no way, Java could never be faster than an optimal implementation in machine code, and C is only a bit above it.

that's correct, but useless. it's useless because, for this to do you any good, you need to have an optimal implementation in machine code at hand. such beasts are very hard to even recognize, never mind write.

your friend was at least potentially right, because JIT compiling (and other recompile-at-runtime schemes) all have access to more info than a static compiler does: the code to be compiled is running, so a lot of knowledge about what it's actually doing right then and how it's been dynamically behaving since started up is at hand. optimizations can be based on this that static compilers can't perform.

consider byte-compiling at runtime from one processor's native machine code to another one's (Crusoe), or -- as a degenerate case -- to the same processor's machine code. HP have done a lot of research on this; their Dynamo project byte-compiles PA8000 code to PA8000 at run-time. the weird thing is that programs so interpreted occasionally run up to 20% faster than "native" machine code... because the system could micro-optimize the running program as it ran, focusing automatically on the pieces that needed optimization the most, and performing optimizations that no static compiler could do at all for lack of knowledge of how the code behaved dynamically.

To this what I say is: If you really needed it, you could use C to write your own bytecode interpreter in it, with its own JIT, that would be faster than Java's because you could make it optimal for your application.

yeah, you could. but Phil Greenspun would just shake his head at hearing of it and, perhaps, mildly pity you for your wasted effort. if you're going to go down that route, at least you could reimplement Common Lisp...

As seen on Ars Technica it is legit.

My understanding was that the SLI interface allowed both cards to "share" the memory with low latency.

Maybe Ars might help?

See this article.

PCIe is a switched network on your motherboard. If you're technically inclined, read this article for further details.

You said 28mpg highway before, you know, and you keep mixing it with city!

And to counter *your* anecdote, Ars reviewed the Honda Civic Hybrid, rated for 47mpg city and got 48mpg. It's rated for 48mpg highway and they can get 55mpg.

How is one review better than the other? Only that careful driving and a good environment means hybrid electrics *can* meet the EPA guidelines.

The Sager is good for things like Half-Life, but anything recent like Far Cry will kill it instantly. There's just no comparison between graphics cards for FPS. However, it plays Total Annihilation like no-one's business.

If you want a games machine, get a small form factor PC. Arstechnica has a handy buyer's guide, and the hot rod comes out to less than 2K (although w/o monitor).

Also, Anandtech just posted a new roadmap with some info on upcoming 64-bit Pentium 4 CPU/chipsets for the desktop. The Intel 925XE chipset (with 1066MHz FSB) will ship in October along with 64-bit Pentium 4 "F" processors. "F" supposedly means it's a 64-bit Prescott.

Where could I have seen it before.

A link to the original on Ars might've been nice:

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040804-4070.ht ml

According to this Ars Technica column, Sun's CEO was just playing the media.

Disclaimer: I, myself, prefer the browser-based file manager. So I'm not a "spatial fanboy". But I do think spatial is the right way to go for a total newbie. (I routinely work with directories nested deeply, but newbies tend to have few files and probably will only use one or two directories.)

Is there a fucking guide somewhere that says, "Hey, here's why spacial rocks and here's how to use it effectively."

Here are two such guides.

About the Finder...

This article, if you read all the way through it, will convince you. It might not convince you that spatial is for you, but it will at a minimum convince you that the spatial fanboys are not all insane.

The Spatial Way

This is a good article that covers the basics. At the end it has a list of things you can read to find out more, and some of them are really worth reading. I especially liked the "What were you thinking?" thread; my favorite single email from that thread is here.

the fact that I have to open up the gConf editor just to turn that ridiculous, annoying, FUCKING RETARDED default off is insanity.

I concur. The GNOME developers have realized this as well, and the next release of GNOME will have a preference someplace you can actually find it.

But, I have to say I understand where they are coming from. They feel that if you have outgrown spatial, you are a power user, and if you are a power user, you won't be scared to run GConf. And it really isn't hard to change the option using GConf.

(I'm a dual pane junkie myself.)

I use Nautilus, in its "browser" mode, as a sort of dual-pane browser. I have two or more Nautilus windows open, and I use them to copy and move my files.

One of the points the spatial guys make is that it's easy to shuffle your files around when you have multiple windows open for multiple folders. That's true, but I just open as many Nautilus windows as I wish, and then set them where I want them.

steveha

I think it is fairly apparent that the RIAA (and perhaps MPAA) aren't really concerned over P2P networks' effect on sales. It is a control issue. If they do not have control power over the distribution channel, they have less power.

P2P networks are decentralized and completely out of their sphere of influence. I am sure that the people running the RIAA are not morons--CD sales are up and there is greater and greater evidence that P2P networks slightly improve sales. However, this evidence is used to argue with a point that I think the RIAA is using to push anti-P2P legislation through, but not a point that the RIAA actually believes.

If it were purely a sales problem, the RIAA would be going after commercial CD pirates -- These are the real bad guys. They are commercially profiting from the work of others (not just sharing it), and have reportedly built an economy in and of themselves of 4.5 BILLION dollars .

Of course, this doesn't mean 4.5 billion in losses--that is a BSA/piracy argument which is quite absurd--but I am sure that they do lose some money.

This article describes, basically, the perfect way to create an interface that makes use of spatial and browser metaphors without getting anything mixed up:

http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht ml

The true pity is that, apparently, nobody at Apple or Gnome has read the damned thing. Oh well, let's see what Microsoft does with Longhorn...

The analysis reveals that this moribund operating system, in the throes of a long, agonizing death since approximately 1990, is only weeks away from death.

Why? Because FreeBSD is stealing code from Linux and the FreeBSD project will soon be named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Free Software Foundation.

It comes as a shock to the entire Open Source community that the FreeBSD developers would resort to such measures, but, faced with the imment demise and subsequent rigor mortis of their labor of love, they have been driven to outright theft.

At this point, it's only a matter of weeks. This embattled, dying OS will soon be only a memory kept alive by tinkering hackers--as well as in the annals of shameful history, to be studied as an example of "what not to do" by software engineers and law students alike.

I'd suggest checking out the "Technical Blackpapers" over at arstechnica for a much better look at memory timings, latency, and bandwidth.

http://arstechnica.com/

There is a compreshensive howto and places to get parts over on Ars Technica.

Every one hates spatial? News to me. In fact, I'd say there are many rather strong proponents of a spatial interface, that Ars article just being the tip of the iceberg.

Personally, I've found Spatial Nautilus to be excellent for situations where you have a relatively shallow directory tree - it lets you treat files more like objects than abstract collections of data, which is the whole point of a spatial interface. It has its weaknesses, sure, but a less than perfect initial implementation doesn't mean the whole concept is flawed.

Either way, it'd help people take you more seriously if you weren't essentially jumping up and down screaming "Look at me! I'm flamebait!"

Correct. You said that much better than I did :)

Anyway, I just learned this today myself, from the Ars Technica review.

Bridging and the Linksys WRT54G

Wrong wrong wrong. The P-90 was a 1.5x multiplied 60MHz bus. The pentinum came in 3 bus speeds:

50MHz - P-50, p-75
60MHz - P-60, p-90, p-120
66MHz - P-66, P-100, P-133, P-166, P-200, P-233

I might be wrong about the P-100. Ars Technica agrees with me: see here.

Note that the fastest 486s were AMD parts - their 486DX went up to 40 MHz, and the "486DX4" (clock tripled, not 4x as the name would imply") had 100MHz and 120 MHz versions!

And if you would just like a short introduction to what the heck RAM speed means, check out this excellent Arstechnica.com article:

FSB and memory speeds

---------------------
Freedom or Evil: Freevil.net
G. W. Bush says, "You decide!"

They broke down eMac/iMac this quarter: iMac Sales were at Cube levels

I think he meant, "They'll be showing off a working model at E3, the launch isn't expected until 2006."

Or get more useful info from Ars Technica.

YHL , HAND

Perceived speed is actually quite important; from the perspective of a personal computer user, it is quite possibly more important than actual throughput. It influences a user's beliefs about his own productivity on the machine, which in turn affects actual productivity. I don't know about you, but on a machine where widgets just zip, I work faster... slow GUIs have the effect of insidiously slowing me down.

Somehow the responsiveness of the Panther UI leaves something to be desired. (I'm running OS X 10.3.4 on a 1GHz G4/768MB RAM)

It is a well known fact that the UI in Cocoa apps are a little sluggish, and in some cases more sluggish than in Windows apps. High-end G5 Mac users probably don't notice it, but it is actually quite obvious on midrange Macs. One gets used to it, of course, and very soon one ceases to be bothered by it--but one cannot help but feel it when one uses a Windows machine at work.

John Siracusa at ArsTechnica actually did an informal test (on scrolling and such, somewhere in this review) and recorded the results in a Quicktime movie file. He compared the speed of Cocoa controls to Win32 controls.

This is also evident if you compare Cocoa to X11. Even the UI in X11 apps running under OS X is more responsive than Cocoa, especially in scrolling. I'm not entirely sure why this is but some people attribute it to overheads in Cocoa.

In my own experience, I have come to the (unscientific) conclusion that for now, Windows apps do seem more responsive than Mac OS X apps on comparable machines (1GHz G4/768MB RAM vis-a-vis a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4/256MB RAM). That doesn't mean the Win32 apps are actually faster, mind you, just that their UIs feel that way. This would one area where Apple could make improvements on, and I think it will.

P.S. Having said all that, Mac OS X has many productivity enhancing features that compensate for its UI sluggishness: robust and fast multitasking, extensive keyboard control, aesthetically pleasant UI, automation capabailities, exceptionally well-designed tools, creatively crafted free apps (like Butler and Tofu) from the community etc. Yes, I cannot deny that I am actually more productive and creative in je ne sais quoi ways on my Mac than on Windows.... for the most part, it's just more pleasant to work on a Mac.

You're generally right about "perceived speed". This article explains how:
10 Things Apple did to make Mac OS X faster.

I agree with Loopy that prohibiting commercial use is selfish a lot of the time, but I wouldn't say *always*.

I think corporations are selfishly trying to make as much profit as possible for their top management and shareholders.

But ah, maybe I was smoking crack when I was reading ,a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith'>Ada m Smith.

My problem with the GPL is that it allows companies to profit off of other people's code without sharing those profits with the creators of that code.

Yes, they have to share their (modified) code, and sometimes that balances things out. On the other hand, sometimes al they add is their company logo, and you often see software "agregators" selling CDs of GPL'd software, without ever clearly explaining this stuff is freely available.

Given that companies also use those profits to buy legislation like the INDUCE Act, writing code as "charity work" for for-profit companies is tantamount to volunteering to forge your own shackles and chains for your enslavers.

Very few of Verizon's markets have greater than 144kbps.

In areas with Analog-only service, you won't get any data! (Which tends to be in areas that have extremely low population densities...in other words, you'll probably not spend much time in those areas.

With the exception of the above areas, just about everywhere in the US has CDMA One, which supports data rates of up to 14.4kbps. (Note, there was a 128kbps support added to the standard, but I don't think that any network supported that)

All of the major cities and highways are covered with "CDMA 2000 1xRTT" which will deliver a sustained transfer rate of about 50-80kbps depending on network congestion (burst up to 144kbps)

In San Diego & Washington, DC (with many more major cities coming online before the end of 2004), Verizon supports a standard called CDMA 1xev-do. This supports burst rates up to 2.4mbps, with sustained likely in the 300-500kbps range. (See Ars' review)

Slashdot linked to this Ars Technica review of USB flash drives a while back. The nice thing is that the article lists which drives are bootable.

Version 5 of Netscape Navigator was prepared, but several weeks before it should be finished, some manager decided, that Netscape have to come ASAP with Gecko-based browser. So Netscape 6 was released.

Possibly also because Netscape 5 is still sitting around on mozilla.org - the code that actually was open sourced and discarded.

Appearently some people inside Netscape actually wanted to release 5 based on the old code, and concurrently work on 6 based on the new code (NGLayout/Gecko). See interview on ars technica with Scott Collins.

It's true to say that OS X has gottten a lot faster since it first came out... But it's still not as snappy as XP. I own Macs and PCs and you notice the difference the second you jump off your mac after working on it for a while and get on your XP box...

Two points:

Your Mac box probably isn't CPU/drive/RAM comparable to the XP box.

When XP has every pixel on the screen double-buffered, alpha-channeled, and mapped into memory, and every character is dynamically rendered, THEN make the fair comparison!

There's a price to pay for third generation graphics.

That said, if Panther was any snappier on my G5, it'd take my hand off...

First off, the ability to use file type and other arbitrary metadata still exists in OSX (or HFS+, as the case may be). (More here.) This is above and beyond the much maligned resource fork.

The real issue both with resource forks and (to a lesser extent) filesystem level metadata is inter-system transport, ie how do you ftp the metadata along with the file. This is what made resource forks such a PITA.

Apple, it seems, has now moved away from putting the metadata in the FS, despite having the ability to do so, even as MS scrambles to stick metadata in their FS. I'm skeptical of the centralized DB approach, the FS approach seems a cleaner design, but the central DB does have the advantage of constantly pulling metadata out of the files and apps, thereby updating itself on the fly. Furthermore, in the separate DB approach, if the DB gets corrupted, you can trash and rebuild, if your FS gets corrupted.... that's a bigger headache. Time will tell which approach is better.

The author of the linked article seems to propose RDF as a solution, but I'm not convinced how well storing all that metadata as text in a "dot-file" will scale. And you still have the problem of getting that metadata from one system to another, despite having a common format.

One hopes that both Apple and MS can solve the problem of having their own systems cleanly exchange metadata.

Just some thoughts...

hmm... i think i said this same thing a little earlier... in a slightly less verbose fashion here, here and here. but whatever...

And it's gotten even worse with Mac OS 10.4 because now:
Linux copies Windows which copies Mac which copies Linux
(I'm sure SCO Unix gets copied in there somewhere too)

Uh oh... doesn't that sort of relationship end the universe in some sort of giant BLIP!?

Now, for those who want to actually read something that matters, Ars Technica has a primer on PCI-Express. Impress your friends, neighbors, and countrymen!

Here's the actual Ars Technica story that wasn't linked, but copied and pasted as the Slashdot story.

Something I've been wondering about though is SpamCop's yearly stats. Since April, spam reporting has been going down. Is it simply fewer people reporting/people reporting fewer spam, or is it a sign that actual spam is going down or at least being better handled? I know on my mail server I've implemented some straight blacklist checks primarily using sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org and it's been working great with no false positives. Some spam still gets through, but SpamAssassin usually catches it with other checks.

I second that! Although, as an info junkie, most of the "news" in the issues I've already read online a couple weeks before on ArsTechnica, Slashdot, or any of the other tech news sites that I have pumped directly into my veins. But for a print periodical, a two week gap for tech news is pretty good. Their time to print is incredible.

Also, as pointed out previously, the regular columnists are quite an accomplished and respected conglomerate. An impressive read every month.

A subscription is very affordable at $37/month USD. An extreme discount from the $5.99/month USD coverprice.

and, no, I am not an employee of Computer Power User magazine. Just a thrilled subscriber.

Take another look at the text involved.

The exemption is *only* WRT reverse-engineering on anti-circumvention on software to which you are able to do what you're doing under copyright law. It does *not* provide a new fair-use exemption under copyright law.

The DMCA's clauses providing exemptions for reverse engineering to ensure compatibility do not extend to shielding one from copyright infringement. The original work is still copyrighted. Just because you (may) not be hit by the DMCA's anticircumvention laws doesn't mean that you are legally clear in regard to the actual copyright on the software. You have modified a disassembled copy of the original (rather than producing a clone, which would be legal), and hence are distributing a derivative copy of a copyrighted work to which you do not own the copyright or a license to the copyright. The DMCA doesn't concern you -- traditional copyright law does.

The clause in the DMCA gives the example of the Internet Archive needing to be able to put software to which they *have rights* and are not infringing on copyright ("If the Internet Archive is given computer software..."). The exemption only allows them to modify the software. It does not grant them more rights under copyright law.

Read discussion here

The extent of this ruling is to cover people that write and apply cracks that allow software to run on newer media formats that would otherwise not have the right to do so (If the CD becomes obsolete, it is legal to bypass Safe CD). It does not mean that any works that are protected by Safe CD become public domain.

It is possible that Silas' widow owns the copyright, if Silas published his own game. In this case, she probably *does* have the ability to grant you distribution rights, and you're fine.