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But the question is, how many VM's do you plan on running at once?

I installed a 2 Node RAC environment on Vmware using my laptop which was a 2Gz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of ram. (Instructions here )

So you don't need something super powerful if you don't plan on leaving them all running 24x7 and just startup the ones you are playing with at the time. A Quad core system with at least 4GB of ram should and lots of disk should be plenty.

I would stay away from running any of your environments on external USB drives. I have a 1 TB USB 2.0 drive and its too slow for anything heavy such as installing Oracle E-Business Suite.. However databases and RAC worked fine.

I've played around a fair bit with Oracle and VMware so if you have any questions feel free to ask.

You think big business is giving up control that easily? The voters have to stop voting for crooks.

THX PKD

android on the Axim http://axdroid.blogspot.com/

my Axim is still in use every day - it is only the battery that is letting it down

Dell just needs to spec some good hardware again and let android developers make it "sexy"

Do you have a link to those photos?

The only ones I found were here In that photo I don't see anything conclusive proving that the sail is bent.

Most people do not realize that the sail is built a few degrees off of vertical.

USS New Orleans (LPD-18), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, is the fourth commissioned ship of the United States Navy to be named for the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. She is designed to be able to deliver a fully-equipped battalion of 700 Marines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_New_Orleans_(LPD-18) and not the old USS New Orleans USS New Orleans (CA-32) (formerly CL-32) was a United States Navy heavy cruiser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_New_Orleans_(CA-32) as suggested in the article. A fair account of what happened in the Strait of Hormuz can be found at http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2009/03/navy-ships-collide-in-strait-of-hormuz.html

By Aether Wave Theory the so called "free will" of particles is given by fact, every particle appears as being composed from many others, so that their surface and behavior reveals only part of internal complexity. Nothing deeper is about it. http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-much-universe-appears-clever-for-us.html http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2008/09/aether-and-anthropic-principle.html

By Aether Wave Theory the so called "free will" of particles is given by fact, every particle appears as being composed from many others, so that their surface and behavior reveals only part of internal complexity. Nothing deeper is about it. http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-much-universe-appears-clever-for-us.html http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2008/09/aether-and-anthropic-principle.html

The next major release of Java (Java 7) is going to be 100% open source. Even if Sun (or IBM for that matter) drops the language, which is very unlikely, Java is going to persist as it has a strong community.

I don't think IBM would let Java drop and die. Nor would Google, for that matter. Both have invested too much into it. But neither seem to be particularly interested in evolving it further as a language or a platform. Today, Java is the conservative choice - that's part of its strength, but that's also what spells out its eventual demise. There's nothing wrong with that - there's always a need for a stable "legacy" platform, even if it's outdated, and Java is a good candidate for that role. But it's something worth keeping in mind when making career choice.

Note that it wasn't my argument, anyway. I foresee Java to be supported for decades to come. Just not in a dominant ("forall X. Must be written (X) => let's write X in Java!") role it used to be.

OSS - yes, that's a strong argument in favor of Java, but on its own it's not sufficient. If it's not good enough, who cares if it's OSS or not?

) It's true that the evolution of the Java language has been quite slow and conservative in the past. But I believe that the rise of new dynamic and hip languages with indeed cool features didn't pass Sun without notice. Java 7 is going to have closures, for example.

I'm sorry to tell you, but Java 7 won't have closures. It won't have a lot of other stuff that was hoped for, either - e.g. no RAII in form of "do" blocks (similar to C# "using"), no generics reification, no properties... basically it's going to be a very minor change as far as language is concerned. And there is no plan to have those in Java 8 either (indeed, there's no Java 8 schedule for now at all!). In fact, we don't even have a JSR for Java 7 yet, so God knows when that is going to be released, even...

It may come as a further blow that the guy who had the most deep and thought-out proposal for closures in Java - Neal Gafter - has joined Microsoft to work on .NET languages. Here's what he had to say about closures in Java, and Java in general, since then.

As for Groovy (and I think you should've mentioned Scala). It's all great, but the tooling is nowhere near as mature as that of Java - I mean IDE, debugging, and so on. Meanwhile, in .NET land, I have first-class lambdas complete with type inference in C#, so the question of support doesn't even enter into it - it just works.

The next major release of Java (Java 7) is going to be 100% open source. Even if Sun (or IBM for that matter) drops the language, which is very unlikely, Java is going to persist as it has a strong community.

I don't think IBM would let Java drop and die. Nor would Google, for that matter. Both have invested too much into it. But neither seem to be particularly interested in evolving it further as a language or a platform. Today, Java is the conservative choice - that's part of its strength, but that's also what spells out its eventual demise. There's nothing wrong with that - there's always a need for a stable "legacy" platform, even if it's outdated, and Java is a good candidate for that role. But it's something worth keeping in mind when making career choice.

Note that it wasn't my argument, anyway. I foresee Java to be supported for decades to come. Just not in a dominant ("forall X. Must be written (X) => let's write X in Java!") role it used to be.

OSS - yes, that's a strong argument in favor of Java, but on its own it's not sufficient. If it's not good enough, who cares if it's OSS or not?

) It's true that the evolution of the Java language has been quite slow and conservative in the past. But I believe that the rise of new dynamic and hip languages with indeed cool features didn't pass Sun without notice. Java 7 is going to have closures, for example.

I'm sorry to tell you, but Java 7 won't have closures. It won't have a lot of other stuff that was hoped for, either - e.g. no RAII in form of "do" blocks (similar to C# "using"), no generics reification, no properties... basically it's going to be a very minor change as far as language is concerned. And there is no plan to have those in Java 8 either (indeed, there's no Java 8 schedule for now at all!). In fact, we don't even have a JSR for Java 7 yet, so God knows when that is going to be released, even...

It may come as a further blow that the guy who had the most deep and thought-out proposal for closures in Java - Neal Gafter - has joined Microsoft to work on .NET languages. Here's what he had to say about closures in Java, and Java in general, since then.

As for Groovy (and I think you should've mentioned Scala). It's all great, but the tooling is nowhere near as mature as that of Java - I mean IDE, debugging, and so on. Meanwhile, in .NET land, I have first-class lambdas complete with type inference in C#, so the question of support doesn't even enter into it - it just works.

functionally, Agnosticism is equivalent to Atheism.

In no way, shape, or form are agnosticism and atheism equivalent. Agnostic is "a", without and "gnosis" knowledge, "without knowledge". Atheism on the other hand is "a", without and "theism" belief in a god, ie there is no god, or "God". I am an agnostic, meaning I do not know if a god exists, but I certainly want to know one way or the other. Whereas Agnostics are open minded Atheists are not.

In the beginning, of Christianity, there were Christians who were the same and didn't believe in a god, Agnostic Christians. The early churches though persecuted them.

Falcon

There is actually already a chair in parapsychology in Lund university, sweden. They are looking for PhD students:

http://publicparapsychology.blogspot.com/2009/02/phd-opportunity-in-parapsychology-at.html

There is some true irony here as one of the Plaintiffs in this case who is arguing that such damages shouldn't be limited to a single-digit ratio of actual damages, argued (and won) in an Appeals Court case when they were the Defendant that such damages should be so limited.

Yes, when UMG Recordings was a defendant it was crying a very different tune. All of a sudden the Constitution counted, and 'deterrence' wasn't so important.

The FSF is working with The Recording Industry vs. the People to provide an Expert Witnesses Fund. Basically, they're providing computer experts to combat the misinformation spouted by the RIAA concerning technology.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/11/expert-witness-defense-fund-for-riaa.html
https://www.fsf.org/associate/riaa

Well they don't actually supply the experts. They've administered a separate fund, the Expert Witness Defense Fund, the purpose of which is to provide funds to the defendants with which to hire their own technical experts and/or consultants. The fund has provided financial support to the UMG v. Lindor case, and to the Capitol v. Thomas case.

The FSF is working with The Recording Industry vs. the People to provide an Exper Witnesses Fund. Basically, they're providing computer experts to combat the misinformation spouted by the RIAA concerning technology.

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/11/expert-witness-defense-fund-for-riaa.html

https://www.fsf.org/associate/riaa

Get rid of the pollution, with a Fibonacci chimney no less! How geeky is that?! Almost on par with robot fish. :)

http://hyperstring.blogspot.com/2006/09/fibonacci-chimney.html#links

New punctuation update "~" at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. http://harns.blogspot.com/

I guess all those times I thought emacs was backing up my documents and source code files, it was actually just mocking what I had written in an ironic tone.

Google's own Open Source Blog has a bunch of success stories from last year.

I agree with NevarMore. Anti-abortion sites can have some stomach-turning pics. But that's not the real problem. The real reason why that one was blacklisted is pre-term porn. Yep, it's a growing evil. All those nekkid pictures of poor defenceless foetuses: Pre-term porn, a social disaster just waiting to happen. http://vmlojwclog.blogspot.com/2009/03/official-concern.html

Let people know that Linux is not exactly the new kid on the block!

When are these long, redundant and stupid arguments about units every time a story mentions "degrees" going to die?

Yes this is a nerd site. So use your brains to figure out what unit is being used, then use Google or something to convert if necessary.

If the US people want to use Fahrenheit let them.

IIRC people working for Verizon had problems with decimal places, dollars and cents[1]. So maybe it's better to avoid scary/confusing stuff like "23.5" on US air conditioners.

[1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

More of a POC at the moment, but at least there's hope.

http://downwithjugears.blogspot.com/2008/10/heretical-two-denied-bail.html The "Heretical Two" were convicted of eleven and five counts respectively of "hate speech" in the United Kingdom under acts passed in 1986 and 2000,for material they posted on the Internet which wasn't even hosted in the UK. They are currently awaiting a hearing on asylum in the United States. Apparently this UK "Human Rights Act" gives a positive right to "free speech" so long as the speech doesn't infringe on any number of other speech prohibitions - such as being against immigration or denying the Holocaust.

Who cares about 90% of software, we are talking about browsers. Browsers come on all platforms these days. And to top this Chome is advertising on slashdot which is known for have tons of Windows Loving users and users who like to talk about windows only software in positive ways. As long as Chrome does not exist on LInux or exists in a form that is a joke expect it to get trashed on slashdot. And for the second part I have contributed to Chrome to help get it to compile on Linux, but it is a long way off before these is anything close to what a user would expect. Chrome really has a PR problem with Linux which a lot of early adopters use.

I have no idea why that's flamebait. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction:

http://fascinatinghistory.blogspot.com/2005/07/duchess-of-argyll-and-headless-men.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret,_Duchess_of_Argyll

"SABLE-3 was launched on Saturday, August 11th, 2007, at 9:31 AM with a payload, consisting of a Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera set to take 1 image every minute and a Byonics MicroTrak 300 APRS Tracker, that the Kaysam 1200 gram balloon carried to over 117,597 feet. The last payload camera photo from the ground was just before it was launched, at 9:31 AM, and the last photo before the balloon burst was the photo above, at 12:01 PM, exactly 2.5 hours or 150 images later." link - more info here

Perhaps the larger issue is that people are looking for alternative fuels as an all or nothing proposition. Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline is a loser for many reasons (read here: http://economicefficiency.blogspot.com/2008/07/adding-up-cost-of-ethanol.html) such as it takes 1.3 gallons of gas to make one gallon of ethanol. However, the addition of bio diesel to the existing supply of petroleum diesel is a good thing, as its production is usually the result of waste materials. Alternative fuels should be seen as a supplement to the existing hydrocarbon fuels, and not as a replacement. As such, the market will determine how much of the supplement it wants. If production of the supplement becomes cost neutral or less expensive than hydrocarbons, the supplement becomes the main fuel. The same is true for alternative energy. Base loads are most efficiently generated through nuclear and coal plants. Solar, wind, etc, should be seen as supplements and priced accordingly, i.e., no subsidies.

Most trials are perfectly fine. Yes sometimes it gets it wrong, and yes improvement is always nice.

This reminded me t post something I've been thinking about since the end of the O.J. trial:
http://harns.blogspot.com/2009/03/criminal-trial-experiments.html

Some related insight from his blog http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/shareware-is-dead-long-live-shareware.html

I have some screen shots on my blog for anyone who cares to check it out. Also working on a script to ease the installation of Mac4lin. http://anothergeekrambling.blogspot.com/ I've been able to run Word, Excel, Publisher, and One-note with no problems so far. I've experienced some file corruption with PowerPoint and have not been able to save files.

We had a ball too at the McMADSAT smaller and less-official Maker Faire event in Glasgow on Saturday -- an unfortunate clash. http://mcmadsat.blogspot.com/

We definitely need more of these.

"In college I drove an Austin-Healey 3000 that somehow felt faster at 45 mph than my Mazda RX-8 (or even my Toyota Highlander Hybrid) feels at 75 mph. That was a good thing."

Not only was it a good thing, but it probably made the Austin-Healey MORE FUN TO DRIVE. That is a very GOOD thing in my book.

I love to point out this blog post to car crazy friends: http://poorbenjamin.blogspot.com/2005/08/i-intended-my-first-posting-to-be-on.html

Don't believe me, consider this; a new stock Honda Accord V6 (boring right?) can out accelerate most stock muscle cars from the muscle car era. This is due to a decrease in car weight, better transmissions, and more advanced engines. You have to wonder why a "boring, practical" car needs to be able to out accelerate some of the fastest cars made.

Go to an all MICROSOFT infrastructure! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

I had couple of pairs of apple ipod and one iphone headphones but they are all the same concerning the build quality.

The rubber rim on the earbuds start to crack and disintegrates whether you use them or not after couple of months. After that the rubber which is around the (male) connector likes to get loose because it dilates after a while. After it gets loose, it starts to crack, and in couple of weeks time it will fall apart too. Lastly, as the rubber around the connector is finished, the wire will snap just at the connection with the plastic at the connector itself. This happened 3.5 times now (I managed to save the last pair with alot of electrical tape and handling it like its a grat mogul diamond) out of 4 pairs I have. I have never seen such poor quality from so expensive players/phones before.

If you don't believe me, take a look at the pictures here and here.

Lastly, I would have bought some other iphone compatible headphones but there are none in croatia unfortunately. Moreover, I still haven't found the adapter to use any other headphones in my first gen iphone.

I had couple of pairs of apple ipod and one iphone headphones but they are all the same concerning the build quality.

The rubber rim on the earbuds start to crack and disintegrates whether you use them or not after couple of months. After that the rubber which is around the (male) connector likes to get loose because it dilates after a while. After it gets loose, it starts to crack, and in couple of weeks time it will fall apart too. Lastly, as the rubber around the connector is finished, the wire will snap just at the connection with the plastic at the connector itself. This happened 3.5 times now (I managed to save the last pair with alot of electrical tape and handling it like its a grat mogul diamond) out of 4 pairs I have. I have never seen such poor quality from so expensive players/phones before.

If you don't believe me, take a look at the pictures here and here.

Lastly, I would have bought some other iphone compatible headphones but there are none in croatia unfortunately. Moreover, I still haven't found the adapter to use any other headphones in my first gen iphone.

That actually sounds pretty cool. A friend of mine developed game system called "pulp in a cup" and I was there when he first ran it at a gaming con. I was really impressed!

We had four hours to play a complete scenario. He described the world and the mission (in that case Japanese cyberpunk, but any setting would work) and asked the players to describe their characters, their special powers, backgrounds, etc. So character generation took about 10 minutes, involved no paper, and it was interesting. Then we'd ask questions to get a better understanding of the situation, and try to just accomplish the task. I was amazed at how well that worked! We were just able to immerse in the story and not fiddle with any mechanics. I wish John would publish the (very short) outline of instructions for how to run the system. So far, this is the only mention I found.

That's because the EPA recently changed how they calculate MPG ratings, making them more "accurate" with real-world usage

And reliable. I just ran across this from another source. The comments that follow the blog are just as interesting as the blog. We make jokes about job security, but if something happens regularly enough it's going to become part of the budget:

The Fine Article

Back in the days when Microsoft was making inroads against Novell on the server side, I was employed by a company who had an official internal policy of selling up Windows against Novell.

The reason?

Novell was reliable and technicians seldom had to go back to site to attend to billable issues.

I recently (about 4 months ago) had contact with the same company and they still operate the same way, slagging GNU/Linux, Novell and Apple merely to ensure the regular call out fees.

Now mind you, i have 0 sympathy for this business model. It's the same mentality present in corporate gamblers taking half a trillion dollars of our tax money when they all bet on the same horse and lose, then telling the White House that the government "should have no say" in what compensation they get [flap about the $500k exec cap]. Really? I agree! Give us the bailout money back, you bastards.

The sense of entitlement these ignorance-dependent industries of failure have is astounding.

societies do not need to be terrorized with this dimwit copyright crusade by their governments against their own people

I for one welcome the control of our RIAA overlords, and their kind offer to permit the defendant to reduce his "restitution" by making a "public service announcement" to help them make more money.

Lots of carriers have SMS gateways. :)

Inner Fence's Official Statement

Google will soon block Infinite SMS and all other non-Google software from sending free text messages.

For now, Infinite SMS will continue to work, but when the block goes into effect, you'll start getting an error every time you try to send a text message.

If you have comments for Google, you can visit their Text Messaging Google Group.

Google has claimed no grievance with Infinite SMS other than its success. Their given reason for the block isn't abuse or wrongdoing; it's that we brought too many users (and thus too much cost) to an experimental service.

We acted in good faith, accessing a feature publicly announced by Google over open protocols they made available. Other non-Google apps have been able to access the SMS feature since its launch. To us, this was no different from accessing Gmail's near limitless storage over the open IMAP protocol. We never could have guessed that the two of us would write an app too big for Google.

Our first warning was an unexpected call from Google on Monday, 9 March 2009, indicating that the service might be blocked as soon as the very next day.

We asked them to reconsider or at least give us more time to change our program or migrate our users. We scheduled a call for the next morning to hear Google's final time line.

We immediately removed Infinite SMS from sale, since we could not in good conscience continue to sell a product whose lifetime was so likely to be cut short.

This morning, Tuesday, 10 March 2009, our email is overflowing with questions about why Infinite SMS is not available in the app store. We've decided we need to get real information out there for people, despite not having the complete picture yet. We will update this page when we hear from Google again.

We hope that Infinite SMS users will see this announcement and have some warning before they can no longer use our app for messaging.

Apple does not give app developers any way to perform refunds. Hopefully, at 99ï people will feel like our app paid for itself after only a few messages.

Google's free SMS feature isn't entirely gone. They've only blocked non-Google apps like Infinite SMS. You can still send free text messages through the Gmail web interface (but it doesn't seem like it works in Mobile Safari). The instructions are in their original SMS chat announcement.

Google's Official Statement

Infinite SMS is a third party app that has been using Google technology to provide free SMS for users, while we were paying for the cost of the text messages. While Google is supportive of third party apps, we've decided we can't support this particular usage of our system at this time. SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. We're blocking all external XMPP clients from sending SMS; we're not singling out Inner Fence.

Inner Fence's Official Statement

Google will soon block Infinite SMS and all other non-Google software from sending free text messages.

For now, Infinite SMS will continue to work, but when the block goes into effect, you'll start getting an error every time you try to send a text message.

If you have comments for Google, you can visit their Text Messaging Google Group.

Google has claimed no grievance with Infinite SMS other than its success. Their given reason for the block isn't abuse or wrongdoing; it's that we brought too many users (and thus too much cost) to an experimental service.

We acted in good faith, accessing a feature publicly announced by Google over open protocols they made available. Other non-Google apps have been able to access the SMS feature since its launch. To us, this was no different from accessing Gmail's near limitless storage over the open IMAP protocol. We never could have guessed that the two of us would write an app too big for Google.

Our first warning was an unexpected call from Google on Monday, 9 March 2009, indicating that the service might be blocked as soon as the very next day.

We asked them to reconsider or at least give us more time to change our program or migrate our users. We scheduled a call for the next morning to hear Google's final time line.

We immediately removed Infinite SMS from sale, since we could not in good conscience continue to sell a product whose lifetime was so likely to be cut short.

This morning, Tuesday, 10 March 2009, our email is overflowing with questions about why Infinite SMS is not available in the app store. We've decided we need to get real information out there for people, despite not having the complete picture yet. We will update this page when we hear from Google again.

We hope that Infinite SMS users will see this announcement and have some warning before they can no longer use our app for messaging.

Apple does not give app developers any way to perform refunds. Hopefully, at 99ï people will feel like our app paid for itself after only a few messages.

Google's free SMS feature isn't entirely gone. They've only blocked non-Google apps like Infinite SMS. You can still send free text messages through the Gmail web interface (but it doesn't seem like it works in Mobile Safari). The instructions are in their original SMS chat announcement.

Google's Official Statement

Infinite SMS is a third party app that has been using Google technology to provide free SMS for users, while we were paying for the cost of the text messages. While Google is supportive of third party apps, we've decided we can't support this particular usage of our system at this time. SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. We're blocking all external XMPP clients from sending SMS; we're not singling out Inner Fence.

Makes my sales statistics look a bit rubbish.

As a result of this discussion, the Association of Former Information Warriors was created.

LinkedIn Group:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=1847393

Blog:

http://aofiw.blogspot.com/

The good old symbian myths:

- No c++ exceptions, below the rebuttal:
http://developer.symbian.com/main/downloads/papers/Exception_Handling_in_Symbian_OS-v1.02.pdf

- Descriptors: yes, they are weird, but they do make sense:
http://descriptors.blogspot.com/

- Standards: Open C, pips (posix compliancy), S60Python. Is hard to build an OS on a language which was not standard when it was being designed.

- there are more runtimes than symbian c++ (if that is too hard for you):
http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/hartti-suomelas-forum-nokia-blog/2007/05/17/slides-for-the-s60-runtimes-presentation-on-svsig

plus: QT for s60 is around the corner and will remove some of the pain for developers.

http://www.qtsoftware.com/developer/technical-preview-qt-for-s60

about the debugger: I still don't see the problem with carbide.c++ 2.0 and trk to debug symbian phones. You can also go fancy an use lauterbach or any other ICE that you like. Also you can use the emulator for 90% of app developement, so unless you are making something tied to the HW your target debugging should be a breeze (if you know what you are doing).

and about android: Please go on an read the code, run a grep for "fixme", then another for "??" and another for "hack". I specially like the TI AT command workarounds in the their telephony RIL reference implementation. This guys have put it together with gum and tape, product quality my ass.

Yes, they have good ideas, they are not reinventing the wheel and is easier to use (sometimes), but feature wise, production quality wise, android is not just there...yet.

First off, what's currently broken about the bits that nVidia has reimplemented?

In which case I don't see how they're holding back the project.

Meh. You're right I was overreaching. The only thing that I have to that _remotely_ supports my position is a post by Aaron Siego:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/09/on-kde4-performance.html

The money quote is here:

This isn't the only issue in x.org, but it sort of highlights one of the big ones: x.org has some pretty big issues when it comes to doing graphics. That's why nVidia includes in their driver a rewrite of pretty much every bit of x.org that touches graphics. This in turn causes havoc of a new variety: does nVidia's twinview map nicely to xrandr/xinerama or does it get screwed up? (Answer: often the latter.) Issues that get addressed in x.org need to also be fixed in the nVidia driver if they exist there too, and vice versa. It's just not pretty.

This is one of the primary reasons why I'm very excited about Gallium3D: it's a modern graphic stack done by graphics gurus that is designed for the real world of hardware. I've seen it action, and it's impressive.

If I understand correctly, nVidia was (and still is?) pouring a lot of effort into rewriting x.org features, then keeping the improvements to themselves. They could be better citizens and distribute their modifications to the x.org folks. However, it's their code, and their hardware. They can do what they want with it. No rational person is gonna try to force them to relinquish their changes. :)

Now, the future of *any* open source project that has a large portion of its userbase which depends on a proprietary, closed-source component is threatened. What happens when the vendor goes tits-up? Fails to update for a new kernel? A new version of x.org? Stops updating the "Legacy" driver? Your users are sort of SOL, and there's nothing that you can do about it.
OTOH, who says that the users *have* to update to the latest and greatest? It would certainly be nice for those of us who are creating next-gen desktop environments, but it's certainly not needed to get OpenGL functionality and a basic windowing system.
*shrug* My weak arguments are weak.

I'm not convinced that using nVidia is bad for X.org anyway.

I'm not pushing the "nVidia is evil" POV. I'm pushing the "Relying on closed-source components is foolish" POV. Many folks don't agree with this. That's fine. I've never really convinced anyone of anything anyway. I'd be surprised if my weak-ass arguments did the trick in this instance. :)

When there is more CO2, plants do better.

Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.

Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".

So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.

I suggest you do the same.

Falcon

You mean like this study. Let me quote from it:

"Most studies have looked at the effects of carbon dioxide on plants in pots or on very simple ecosystems and concluded that plants are going to grow faster in the future," said Field, co-author of the Science study. "We got exactly the same results when we applied carbon dioxide alone, but when we factored in realistic treatments -- warming, changes in nitrogen deposition, changes in precipitation -- growth was actually suppressed."

In other words, higher levels of CO2 really did cause all plants to grow more, until they started screwing with other environmental variables based on what they THINK a future atmosphere (and temperature) will be like. In other words, they screwed with the gas and baked the plants in the oven until they stopped growing so they can say, "See, GW is bad!"

So when you say, I should do the same, I already did.

In addition to asking for Mr. Kogill's imprisonment, the RIAA is asking the Judge to order Mr. Kogill to pay them $30,000 "restitution" and make a "public service announcement". I think directing Mr. Kogill to do a "public service announcement" for the RIAA would be "cruel and unusual punishment".

When there is more CO2, plants do better.

Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.

Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".

So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.

I suggest you do the same.

Falcon

...conspiracy literature and impact drills to students with number affinity should not be recommended considering the consequences where they may already suffer from teachers like these.

Try not to speak authoritatively about things you clearly know nothing about:

http://www.rungeek.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/taskmanager2.jpg

And if you want detail:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768048.aspx

The "poor utilization" in the article is a relative term. For most apps running under Windows, scalability to multiple CPUs is not hampered by the kernel. There have been improvements to I/O and networking on many-CPU servers, but it's just a fine tuning, not a massive leap forward.

600% scalability on 8 CPUs - this is SQL 7 on NT4 mind you!
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/technology/images/performancepreview-chart1.gif

Is that a nice linear scalability graph of a Windows application I see?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_oGCeAi-2i3Q/RuWC4LFEeQI/AAAAAAAAAD0/7B6g8tYUVac/s1600-h/BarcaWinrar.gif

But clearly I'm an idiot. I run Windows XP 64-bit on a quad-core CPU, and I really do get 4x the WinRar compression speed. I've timed it, because I use it to compress my backups, so it matters. It's 4x faster. Am I an idiot? Do I have difficulty telling time? You tell me.