No. The 486 did not have any graphics-specific capabilities. VLB was just a faster bus than ISA, so the cpu could push more data to the card. VLB was quickly replaced by PCI and then the increasingly fast iterations of the AGP spec.
It's not just the rest of the world that opposes the new policy. In creating NASA, Eisenhower clearly sent the message that the US would go to space peacefully. Even though the military was not banned from space, their space programs shut down. The "peaceful exploration" doctrine was literally carried to the moon in the Apollo program.
By releasing this new policy, Bush has pissed off our astronauts. I went to a talk by Edgar Mitchell yesterday, and he expressed strong dissagreement with the new policy. He said that the policy of putting weapons into space is an "abomination." I am pretty sure that he can speak for all astronauts on this one. When he was telling us about his return trip, he said that watching Earth come closer was a very powerful sight. You can't see national borders from up there. You realize that you are from Earth and to talk in terms of nationality is shortsighted. He said they realized we are not ready to be exploring space, divided as we are. They will probably have trouble finding experienced astronauts willing to put this policy into practice.
One has to wonder who from NASA, if anybody, was consulted before this policy was released. This certainly is an insult to the people who went to the moon "in peace, for all mankind." Nothing Bush has done can compare to what they did, and it is not Bush's place to dishonor those national heroes.
I am sorry if I implied that the Seamonkey/Mozilla/Netscape suite's browser could not be decoupled. Such was not my intent. Thank you for clarifying things.
I disagree that FF is a re-invention of the wheel. Since it uses the same rendering engine (Gecko) and shares most other backend technologies with the suite (XUL, etc.), FF amounts to a new frontend for the browser component. Since the new frontend incorporates design philosophies that would be inappropriate for the suite, it was reasonable for FF to be created as a separate product. Since the popularity of FF has led to the suite being improved along with the rest of the mozilla products, I think that the creation of FF was worth the effort. The several years during which FF was being developed also saw major improvements to Gecko and XUL, which improved the suite. That time was hardly wasted, and the mozilla project was definitely set back any.
When I perform that kind of task, I usually am doing it as part of a larger document in a word processor/desktop publishing tool. It is really easy to do that kind of drawing in Word and OOWriter. On the rare occasions that I want the image as a standalone file with text embedded, but not a PDF, I can just import it into MSPaint or the equivalent once the underlying photo is ready.
Good point about tar. The most common use of tar is to make a compressed archive, so they added options for compression. The thing is that tar only calls the still-separate gzip or bzip2. This gives users the best of both worlds- the common task is easy, but the uncommon tasks are no harder.
In that case, the GIMP would be overkill. The job could be half over before the GIMP is up and running. Simpler paint-like programs would be suitable. KIconEdit comes to mind for some reason.
Another good example: Apple's Webkit. They forked the KHTML engine to add major funcionality that only their userbase wanted (Cocoa APIs). They are now working with the KDE devs to merge the other changes they made, such as the improvements to page rendering (better CSS handling). Both sides are benefiting from this exchange, and both sides get the product they need.
By pointing users to drawing programs, the GIMP developers would be at least as helpful as the Excel devs who add functionality for making lists. They might even be more helpful, since good drawing tools already exist and installing one would be quicker than waiting for the next release. I would like to point out that switching to a drawing program to draw circles is not strictly necessary, but it is usually a smart move. I still do not think that somebody touching up a photo has much need for drawing circles on it. Such situations are surely uncommon.
Of course not, but then, that is not the point. Inkscape, or whatever our hypothetical GIMP developer suggests, makes it much easier to draw circles, making it the right tool for the job. Inscape is not at all designed for bitmap manipulation, but it is wonderful for drawing. I think you are having trouble understanding that bitmap (picture) manipulation and drawing are very different things, and it is seldom necessary to do a lot of both at the same time. It is hard to create a tool that is very good for both tasks, and there very little demand for a program that integrates both tasks. Most of the time, either Inkscape or GIMP will do the entire job well.
Firefox is the direct result of stripping out the mail client, composer, and other extras from the Mozilla suite. FF was created to be a bloat-resistant product to fill exactly one niche- that of a web browser. That is what led to it's incredible rise to popularity. If somebody were to complain that the FF developers are stupid not to integrate a chat client, they would be laughed at and ignored. Why can't the GIMP developers limit themselves to making a good product that serves a specific purpose?
I fail to see how referring a user to a more suitable piece of free software could be detrimental. If anything, it will give the aspiring user a better appreciation of the broad range of powerful and specialized tools that have been developed by the community. The only harm would be if the developers were rude about telling the user they are shopping at the wrong place.
Learn to use hibernate, and consider getting a better OS or tweaking the current one to boot faster. My pentium MMX can boot a modern linux distribution in under 2 minutes. My iMac boots cold in under 20 seconds. The short time it would take to tweak your boot process would be well worth it. If you are going to be away for more than an hour or so, hibernating your computer is a good option.
On the other hand, kudos to you for using power management. Not enough people do, although I think more would if they realized that it is also noise management.
So you bought a U3 drive instead of a regular drive. Boo Hoo. I really doubt there was any misleading advertising for your drive, and as you discovered, U3 functionality can be disabled and uninstalled. Next time, be more careful, since you seem to have an adverse reaction to getting more features than you paid for. SanDisk is still a great company to buy flash devices from, even if they surprised you.
I'm pretty sure GRUB doesn't require its own partition for anything, even when you are using BSD disklabels. The stage1 goes in the MBR, the stage1_5 filesystem driver goes in the slack space after the MBR, and the full stage 2 image goes in a directory on a filesystem. If you are putting GRUB on a floppy or a partition of its own, you don't need a stage1_5. Once the stage 2 is loaded, you have the full functionality of grub accessible and it will proceed to look for the config file, if that is the way you set it up. If it is not set up to look for a config file, you get the powerful command line from which you can either directly load most free operating systems, or you can chainload any other PC OS you have installed. Sure, it is more than 448 bytes, but it is far from bloated. I have used almost all of its fuctionality in the course of running various operating systems, and there was no situation that GRUB couldn't handle.
By the way, the BSD bootloader does not fit in the MBR, either. Just the first stage, which is just a boot manager that loads other bootloaders. It really is not much better than anything else - it just gives you that very basic menu, after which you almost certainly get another menu. Actually booting FreeBSD still uses three stages.
For PC power consumption issues, off means shutdown, with the monitor off and the way to turn it back on is to press the power button.
Peak usage is something that happens only in spikes for most users. Those that run boinc, etc. do so by choice. Peak power consumption is pretty much only achieved during bootup, and it is easy to reduce. Get rid of the P4 and buy a processor that can handle a quiet fan. It is very easy to lower peak power consumption by a factor of 3 or 4, and more work is being done all the time to improve the efficiencies of cpus and other chips.
Pretty much every computer these days has some way of bringing its idle power consumption close to the off level - automatically spinning down the disks and turning off the monitor are the most significant and common. The problem is that even when off, these devices consume far more power than most people realize. When you add it up, the 24-hour slow drains often are more costly than the 5-minute bootup or the 1-hour fps session.
Mensa is full of the haughty smart people who like to do inane mind-bending puzzles and brag about their high IQ. They piss off almost everybody else on the planet, including the managers that could promote them.
Something a lot like that should be feasible once FF runs on top of XULRunner. That or Thunderbird will crash along with FF when there is a rouge extension.
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No. The 486 did not have any graphics-specific capabilities. VLB was just a faster bus than ISA, so the cpu could push more data to the card. VLB was quickly replaced by PCI and then the increasingly fast iterations of the AGP spec.
I think you are now older than the average slashdotter.
It's not just the rest of the world that opposes the new policy. In creating NASA, Eisenhower clearly sent the message that the US would go to space peacefully. Even though the military was not banned from space, their space programs shut down. The "peaceful exploration" doctrine was literally carried to the moon in the Apollo program.
By releasing this new policy, Bush has pissed off our astronauts. I went to a talk by Edgar Mitchell yesterday, and he expressed strong dissagreement with the new policy. He said that the policy of putting weapons into space is an "abomination." I am pretty sure that he can speak for all astronauts on this one. When he was telling us about his return trip, he said that watching Earth come closer was a very powerful sight. You can't see national borders from up there. You realize that you are from Earth and to talk in terms of nationality is shortsighted. He said they realized we are not ready to be exploring space, divided as we are. They will probably have trouble finding experienced astronauts willing to put this policy into practice.
One has to wonder who from NASA, if anybody, was consulted before this policy was released. This certainly is an insult to the people who went to the moon "in peace, for all mankind." Nothing Bush has done can compare to what they did, and it is not Bush's place to dishonor those national heroes.
When did you submit the patch for inclusion? For that matter, when has anybody tried to add a circle tool and been blocked? Do please tell.
I am sorry if I implied that the Seamonkey/Mozilla/Netscape suite's browser could not be decoupled. Such was not my intent. Thank you for clarifying things.
I disagree that FF is a re-invention of the wheel. Since it uses the same rendering engine (Gecko) and shares most other backend technologies with the suite (XUL, etc.), FF amounts to a new frontend for the browser component. Since the new frontend incorporates design philosophies that would be inappropriate for the suite, it was reasonable for FF to be created as a separate product. Since the popularity of FF has led to the suite being improved along with the rest of the mozilla products, I think that the creation of FF was worth the effort. The several years during which FF was being developed also saw major improvements to Gecko and XUL, which improved the suite. That time was hardly wasted, and the mozilla project was definitely set back any.
When I perform that kind of task, I usually am doing it as part of a larger document in a word processor/desktop publishing tool. It is really easy to do that kind of drawing in Word and OOWriter. On the rare occasions that I want the image as a standalone file with text embedded, but not a PDF, I can just import it into MSPaint or the equivalent once the underlying photo is ready.
Good point about tar. The most common use of tar is to make a compressed archive, so they added options for compression. The thing is that tar only calls the still-separate gzip or bzip2. This gives users the best of both worlds- the common task is easy, but the uncommon tasks are no harder.
In that case, the GIMP would be overkill. The job could be half over before the GIMP is up and running. Simpler paint-like programs would be suitable. KIconEdit comes to mind for some reason.
Another good example: Apple's Webkit. They forked the KHTML engine to add major funcionality that only their userbase wanted (Cocoa APIs). They are now working with the KDE devs to merge the other changes they made, such as the improvements to page rendering (better CSS handling). Both sides are benefiting from this exchange, and both sides get the product they need.
By pointing users to drawing programs, the GIMP developers would be at least as helpful as the Excel devs who add functionality for making lists. They might even be more helpful, since good drawing tools already exist and installing one would be quicker than waiting for the next release. I would like to point out that switching to a drawing program to draw circles is not strictly necessary, but it is usually a smart move. I still do not think that somebody touching up a photo has much need for drawing circles on it. Such situations are surely uncommon.
Of course not, but then, that is not the point. Inkscape, or whatever our hypothetical GIMP developer suggests, makes it much easier to draw circles, making it the right tool for the job. Inscape is not at all designed for bitmap manipulation, but it is wonderful for drawing. I think you are having trouble understanding that bitmap (picture) manipulation and drawing are very different things, and it is seldom necessary to do a lot of both at the same time. It is hard to create a tool that is very good for both tasks, and there very little demand for a program that integrates both tasks. Most of the time, either Inkscape or GIMP will do the entire job well.
Firefox is the direct result of stripping out the mail client, composer, and other extras from the Mozilla suite. FF was created to be a bloat-resistant product to fill exactly one niche- that of a web browser. That is what led to it's incredible rise to popularity. If somebody were to complain that the FF developers are stupid not to integrate a chat client, they would be laughed at and ignored. Why can't the GIMP developers limit themselves to making a good product that serves a specific purpose?
I fail to see how referring a user to a more suitable piece of free software could be detrimental. If anything, it will give the aspiring user a better appreciation of the broad range of powerful and specialized tools that have been developed by the community. The only harm would be if the developers were rude about telling the user they are shopping at the wrong place.
Learn to use hibernate, and consider getting a better OS or tweaking the current one to boot faster. My pentium MMX can boot a modern linux distribution in under 2 minutes. My iMac boots cold in under 20 seconds. The short time it would take to tweak your boot process would be well worth it. If you are going to be away for more than an hour or so, hibernating your computer is a good option.
On the other hand, kudos to you for using power management. Not enough people do, although I think more would if they realized that it is also noise management.
So you bought a U3 drive instead of a regular drive. Boo Hoo. I really doubt there was any misleading advertising for your drive, and as you discovered, U3 functionality can be disabled and uninstalled. Next time, be more careful, since you seem to have an adverse reaction to getting more features than you paid for. SanDisk is still a great company to buy flash devices from, even if they surprised you.
I'm pretty sure GRUB doesn't require its own partition for anything, even when you are using BSD disklabels. The stage1 goes in the MBR, the stage1_5 filesystem driver goes in the slack space after the MBR, and the full stage 2 image goes in a directory on a filesystem. If you are putting GRUB on a floppy or a partition of its own, you don't need a stage1_5. Once the stage 2 is loaded, you have the full functionality of grub accessible and it will proceed to look for the config file, if that is the way you set it up. If it is not set up to look for a config file, you get the powerful command line from which you can either directly load most free operating systems, or you can chainload any other PC OS you have installed. Sure, it is more than 448 bytes, but it is far from bloated. I have used almost all of its fuctionality in the course of running various operating systems, and there was no situation that GRUB couldn't handle.
By the way, the BSD bootloader does not fit in the MBR, either. Just the first stage, which is just a boot manager that loads other bootloaders. It really is not much better than anything else - it just gives you that very basic menu, after which you almost certainly get another menu. Actually booting FreeBSD still uses three stages.
For PC power consumption issues, off means shutdown, with the monitor off and the way to turn it back on is to press the power button. Peak usage is something that happens only in spikes for most users. Those that run boinc, etc. do so by choice. Peak power consumption is pretty much only achieved during bootup, and it is easy to reduce. Get rid of the P4 and buy a processor that can handle a quiet fan. It is very easy to lower peak power consumption by a factor of 3 or 4, and more work is being done all the time to improve the efficiencies of cpus and other chips. Pretty much every computer these days has some way of bringing its idle power consumption close to the off level - automatically spinning down the disks and turning off the monitor are the most significant and common. The problem is that even when off, these devices consume far more power than most people realize. When you add it up, the 24-hour slow drains often are more costly than the 5-minute bootup or the 1-hour fps session.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/rhymes.asp
Mensa is full of the haughty smart people who like to do inane mind-bending puzzles and brag about their high IQ. They piss off almost everybody else on the planet, including the managers that could promote them.
Something a lot like that should be feasible once FF runs on top of XULRunner. That or Thunderbird will crash along with FF when there is a rouge extension.
Wouldn't that just be a LaserDisc?
>Pentium III? IANAL, but isn't this defined as failing to defend your patent in the first place?
Patents, unlike trademarks, do not go stale if you do not defend them. Hence the term "submarine patent."