Actually, for me the ad banners are also the fastest things to load, then the main Slash banner (since it's locally cached), and then it takes longer for Netscape to _render_ the slash html than it does to download it!! The little status bar finishes in the lower right of the window, and a half-second later the rest of the page pops up! (of course, I am using a cable modem, so that explains part of it, but for everything except pages w/ lots of articles,/. is lightning fast now!!)
I guess all of us "power users" who open many many many transparent Eterms and get lots of "actual work" done (while still having a desktop that is cooler than yours) should just delete E and go back to fvwm, huh???
I actually used to use just plain X (no WM at all), starting up a couple of xterms and an editor in the right places in ~/.xinitrc . Than I tried fvwm/fvwm2/afterstep/windowmaker/etc... But now I have been "enlightened" and have a 3x3 virtual screen full of windows, where I can do quite a lot of real work. I will even be going multihead after Xfree4 comes out (depends on $$$). So after adding another 21" monitor and streching E across it, I will be one happy camper!!
1. The alleged NSA key allows new security services to be installed. Fine, but what if one of these services is installed w/o the user's knowledge (Outlook/Office, anyone?)
2. "It doesn't give you access to any information encrypted by other providers." Do you know this? I am not a crypto person, but what if the alleged NSA key triggered some hidden portions _within_ the CryptoAPI that allow programs using _this_ key to do just that?
Combine the two, and you've got yourself a nice digital "wiretap", courtesy of MS and NSA.
I'm not as paranoid as some, but more paranoid than most:)
Quit bitching to us about lack of driver support, and either:
a) complain to the hardware manufacturers for ignoring a large portion of their userbase by not releasing non-windows/mac drivers or making specs available to the Free Software community.
b) open up an editor and start coding some drivers for the parts that we do have specs for.
c) go back to windows or mac
BTW, USB is in the 2.3.x devel tree, which Linus has stated won't take near as long to go to 2.4.x (stable) as 2.1.x took. AFAIR, by the end of the year, if not sooner.
I know very little about XML, but isn't the definition of those new tags included in the document so that all XML parsers can implement them? What the other poster talked aboout was extending the actual XML _specifications_ not using the sepcs to create new tags.
Look at it this way. MS added a keyword to Java, breaking their code on non-MS J++ machines. Whatever functionality they _claim_ they provided with this new keyword could probably have been implemented by adding a new class or something, working _within_ the Java standard, not extending it. So with XML, they can add whatever tags they want, since that is the flexibilty of XML, but they will prolly add some "new, improved" XML command or keyword, and call their format MS-ML++ or something.
This is even more exciting than the original article, and deserves an article of its own.
Yields as low as %10?!?!? No wonder CPU prices are so high, even after all these years of designing and manufacturing them
<conspiracymode> I doubt Intel would use this, though. It might cut into their profits if they could suddenly make a lot more processors with the same fabs, and make them more reliable at higher clock speeds:) </conspiracymode>
Re:Why it's sooo hard for this stuff to happen....
on
911 Calls Linux
·
· Score: 1
Well, since the EULA specifically says that MS _doesn't_ support NT being used in life-or-death situations, I doubt they could sue them for this. Actually, the MS EULA is so full of legaleze, that once you really boil it all down, MS is responsible for absolutely NOTHING!
They've always done this. Remember the 486SX/DX? No one really needed the 387 FPU, and when Intel put the FPU into the 486 chip it raised the cost somewhat. Then came cheap alternatives, and BLAMMO! "lets take a fully functioning chip, disable the FPU, and sell it cheap to undercut competitors, even though it still costs the same to make!" sounds a lot like "lets take a fully functioning Celeron, disable the SMP pin from the core to teh package, and force people who want SMP systems to get dual PIII's!"
Celerons are not a "stripped down" version of the p2, they use EXACTLY the same CPU core for both p2 and Celeron. The only difference is cache and packaging, and the only reason that the first celerons were not SMP capable (easily) was that the package did not connect the pin to the outside world. The pin was still there, and knowledgable people found that out, and told the world about the "drill and solder" technique for making SMP celerys. As the slotckets and dual celery mobos came out, Intel said "hrm... we're going to.18 micron anyway, so why not rearrange the package a little, and while we're at it we'll cut ALL traces to the AN15 pin. externally and internally!", thus completely disabling any hopes of SMP capability.
It is the same thing as with the overclocking protection. Why the hell should Intel care if we run "their" CPUs out of spec. If I fry a CPU, well, then I won't complain to Intel about it. But at least give me the option!!
CakeWalk is not a MIDI composer/synthesizer, it is an audio mixing environment that handles multitrack analog, digital, and MIDI mixdown and production. It is what the pro's use in their milion dollar recording studios and in commercial/movie studios. The cool thin is that the full "pro" version only costs $300 retail, and lets you have an unlimited number of tracks (well, as many as you have hard disk space to store and RAM capacity to process)
I am a nerd. This is news to me. Rob and/or Hemos thought it was newsworthy, and so do I. That is two nerds that think this is news (plural of "nerd" is "nerds", BTW).
I am also a programmer and sysadmin who maintains an Apache server. The fact that they released a new version was unknown to me until I read it here. As part of my job, this info concerns me very much. Therefore it matters to me.
I guess this article fulfills the only obligations that this site must fullfill, namely: 1. at least two nerds must think that this is news 2. it must matter to at least one of those nerds
while ($rantMode eq "true") { I have been following this site since way before it was slashdot, when it was "Chips and Dips" and only got updated once every day or two. I will say to you what I say to everyone who whines about the stories here: "This is a user-driven website. If you do not like the quality or content of the stories, then post stories you want to read about, otherwise SHUT UP OR GET THE HELL OUT!!" }
Re:Technical Question: Scrollbar placement.
on
The Future of KDE
·
· Score: 1
I disagree, the new license is pretty well thought out from a business standpoint. They get money from people who develop cross-platform apps, so why not go ahead and let the Free Software people use the toolkit gratis? Since KDE runs on a variety of OS/hardware combos, it may well be the desktop environment across Unices that CDE tried and failed to be.
Companies looking for a cross-platform toolkit can now purchase devel licenses to develop a QT app that just _happens_ to integrate with your desktop _if_ you run the full KDE environment. It's all about mind (and desktop) share. Rather than take the widget set and try to create a CDE-like desktop, they let us do it for free, distribute it for free, and ride the commercial licensing wave. I think this (along with VA's "you write the OS and we'll make kick-ass high-end hardware for it and give back any changes we make") is an excellent example of how businesses can work _with_ the Free Software community, not against it. (even though TT _did_ start out on the wrong foot with us)
$1500 for a devel seat is not really that much for a smallish medium to large company after all. We worked on a project a while back, and in the middle of it we found some references to some libraries that we couldn't find with the source. After tracking down the company who owned those libs, we found out that they wanted several $1000 PER SEAT for just the "rights" to _negotiate_ the actual devel costs!!! Needless to say, we found some replacement libs really quick!!
I have to go with the Perl philosophy on this one -- programmers shouldn't touch class internals because they aren't supposed to, not because they aren't allowed to.
To paraphrase the Camel: "People should stay out of my house because it's the polite thing to do, not because I have a shotgun"
I forgot to mention that by tying VBA into Office and outlook is a major security hole (as has been seen in the last couple of months. Oh, that's right, MS has no interest in security (BO2k anyone?).
Could this possibly be because the details of making Windows-based apps are a tightly held secret of a certain company??
Why should the users care what operating system they are running?? If the windows API was truly open, then anyone would be free to implement a way to run windows apps on another OS (IBM tried in OS/2, but couldn't get "real" win32 due to licensing). MS dominance is not the OS, as some people believe, it is in the apps. My favorite newsreader is Agent, but I can't run it on linux w/o a reverse-engineered compatibility layer that doesn't work correctly (WINE) or a $200 commercial VM (VMWare, which still requires you to pay the MS tax by buying a copy of Win9x or NT).
I would love to see the Win32 API turned over to a standards body and fully disclosed, so that anyone could make a "better Windows than Windows" and end the dependence on win32. Let MS still make bloated office suites filled with features no one uses. See if they can still ramrod it down people's throats without "free" bundles added on to hardware purchases.
Perhaps he bought the full version, not the upgrade. The upgrade cost $89, the full version cost ~$180 retail AFAIR.
Hmm...Why do windows users insist on defending their crap?
As for tall tales, I will give you my stock answer as to my reasons for deciding that MS products are crap -- I've used them, and found them lacking.
For example: I received a free copy of NT 4.0 with some other piece of MS shovelware I had to purchase. I thought "what the hell, I'll install it and use it for a while". I installed it on a Tuesday onto a machine that previously ran win95 and linux, but after getting a new machine was relegated to a test box. I am a firm believer in getting quality parts, so at the time the machine was built, it was a quality machine that I built myself (Tyan Tomcat, good RAM, Matrox Millenium video, Intel P133, etc...), and only about 18 months old. I say this was a quality machine because I don't want any "it was prolly your crappy hardware or something" posts. This machine is now a linux fileserver and has run great for years now (with various OS and part combos, but the mobo, RAM, and CPU are all still there).
After the installation I went to bed, just turning off the monitor and letting the machine run. I made absolutely no configuration changes. I didn't have a chance to get to it again until Thursday. Getting home and turning on the monitor, I was surprised to see...The Blue Screen of Death!!! This was MS's flagship product? The one where, with only a few registry settings difference (as NT Server), was supposed to take the Unix world by storm and blow it out of the water?? A fresh install on known good hardware running in a climate controlled room with no network services running (not even plugged in to the network, BTW) under ABSOLUTELY NO LOAD caused this OS to crash!?!?!
This is my "tall tale" as you call it, and every word is true. I now have to support some NT machines at work and hate every minute of it. My boss is subcontracted out to a large corporation as a Unix admin, and he and the 2 other Unix guys sit back and babysit their machines from their desks, while the NT LAN admins run themselves to death fixing problems.
1. E isn't the "Gnome Window Manager", just the "RedHat Gnome Window Manager". 2. E was started waaaaay before gnome was, and E had an iconbox in the previous (0.14) version. 3. The miniviews in the new pager ROCK!!! and have nothing to do with the gnome pager.
In short, E has always been "standalone". I do think that they are trying to distance E from Gnome a little more, though.
Funky. We've come a long way, I guess.. I remember being in awe when I saw my first non-beige machine back in '88 or so..I'm really surprised nobody has gotten into the market for selling customized parts for cases. I think my box would look excellent with 15 coats of cherry red paint and some chrome on the front.:)
My uncle managed a company in the late 70's/early 80's that painted phones for AT&T. He tried to talk the owners of the company into approaching IBM about painting their new (at the time) XT desktop machines. No matter how bad he tried to talk them into it, they kept saying that it was a bad idea, and that no one would ever want a computer in any other color. If he had pressed harder, maybe we wouldn't be in this blah beige world.
I don't really want any funky designs, anyway. I just want a seven foot high rack case filled to the brim with quad Xeon III's and a couple hundred gigs of storage!
Maybe it was Gandhi that said somtehing like that, but Ghandi didn't.;)
Re:Ironic? In more ways than one.
on
SCO does Linux
·
· Score: 1
Unixware does scale better, but SCO bought that from Novell a couple of years ago. OpenServer is their lower-end Unix, and what they wrote themselves. It is what is in most of the low-end unix boxes at a lot of small businesses. It is not bad, but it is not good, either:)
Unfortunately, I have to support several SCO machines.
Slashdot Mirror
s/lower right/lower left/
:(
didn't preview
Actually, for me the ad banners are also the fastest things to load, then the main Slash banner (since it's locally cached), and then it takes longer for Netscape to _render_ the slash html than it does to download it!! The little status bar finishes in the lower right of the window, and a half-second later the rest of the page pops up! (of course, I am using a cable modem, so that explains part of it, but for everything except pages w/ lots of articles, /. is lightning fast now!!)
I guess all of us "power users" who open many many many transparent Eterms and get lots of "actual work" done (while still having a desktop that is cooler than yours) should just delete E and go back to fvwm, huh???
I actually used to use just plain X (no WM at all), starting up a couple of xterms and an editor in the right places in ~/.xinitrc . Than I tried fvwm/fvwm2/afterstep/windowmaker/etc... But now I have been "enlightened" and have a 3x3 virtual screen full of windows, where I can do quite a lot of real work. I will even be going multihead after Xfree4 comes out (depends on $$$). So after adding another 21" monitor and streching E across it, I will be one happy camper!!
(btw, I remember when E was fvwm-xpm, so there!)
Reading this, I started thinking...
:)
1. The alleged NSA key allows new security services to be installed. Fine, but what if one of these services is installed w/o the user's knowledge (Outlook/Office, anyone?)
2. "It doesn't give you access to any information encrypted by other providers." Do you know this? I am not a crypto person, but what if the alleged NSA key triggered some hidden portions _within_ the CryptoAPI that allow programs using _this_ key to do just that?
Combine the two, and you've got yourself a nice digital "wiretap", courtesy of MS and NSA.
I'm not as paranoid as some, but more paranoid than most
hehe
Quit bitching to us about lack of driver support, and either:
a) complain to the hardware manufacturers for ignoring a large portion of their userbase by not releasing non-windows/mac drivers or making specs available to the Free Software community.
b) open up an editor and start coding some drivers for the parts that we do have specs for.
c) go back to windows or mac
BTW, USB is in the 2.3.x devel tree, which Linus has stated won't take near as long to go to 2.4.x (stable) as 2.1.x took. AFAIR, by the end of the year, if not sooner.
I know very little about XML, but isn't the definition of those new tags included in the document so that all XML parsers can implement them? What the other poster talked aboout was extending the actual XML _specifications_ not using the sepcs to create new tags.
Look at it this way. MS added a keyword to Java, breaking their code on non-MS J++ machines. Whatever functionality they _claim_ they provided with this new keyword could probably have been implemented by adding a new class or something, working _within_ the Java standard, not extending it. So with XML, they can add whatever tags they want, since that is the flexibilty of XML, but they will prolly add some "new, improved" XML command or keyword, and call their format MS-ML++ or something.
This is even more exciting than the original article, and deserves an article of its own.
:)
Yields as low as %10?!?!? No wonder CPU prices are so high, even after all these years of designing and manufacturing them
<conspiracymode>
I doubt Intel would use this, though. It might cut into their profits if they could suddenly make a lot more processors with the same fabs, and make them more reliable at higher clock speeds
</conspiracymode>
Well, since the EULA specifically says that MS _doesn't_ support NT being used in life-or-death situations, I doubt they could sue them for this. Actually, the MS EULA is so full of legaleze, that once you really boil it all down, MS is responsible for absolutely NOTHING!
They've always done this. Remember the 486SX/DX? No one really needed the 387 FPU, and when Intel put the FPU into the 486 chip it raised the cost somewhat. Then came cheap alternatives, and BLAMMO! "lets take a fully functioning chip, disable the FPU, and sell it cheap to undercut competitors, even though it still costs the same to make!" sounds a lot like "lets take a fully functioning Celeron, disable the SMP pin from the core to teh package, and force people who want SMP systems to get dual PIII's!"
Celerons are not a "stripped down" version of the p2, they use EXACTLY the same CPU core for both p2 and Celeron. The only difference is cache and packaging, and the only reason that the first celerons were not SMP capable (easily) was that the package did not connect the pin to the outside world. The pin was still there, and knowledgable people found that out, and told the world about the "drill and solder" technique for making SMP celerys. As the slotckets and dual celery mobos came out, Intel said "hrm... we're going to .18 micron anyway, so why not rearrange the package a little, and while we're at it we'll cut ALL traces to the AN15 pin. externally and internally!", thus completely disabling any hopes of SMP capability.
It is the same thing as with the overclocking protection. Why the hell should Intel care if we run "their" CPUs out of spec. If I fry a CPU, well, then I won't complain to Intel about it. But at least give me the option!!
When you buy CPU's by the gross, the price difference between a Celeron and a PIII really adds up!
BTW, it's "Beowulf", not "Beowolf"
CakeWalk is not a MIDI composer/synthesizer, it is an audio mixing environment that handles multitrack analog, digital, and MIDI mixdown and production. It is what the pro's use in their milion dollar recording studios and in commercial/movie studios. The cool thin is that the full "pro" version only costs $300 retail, and lets you have an unlimited number of tracks (well, as many as you have hard disk space to store and RAM capacity to process)
I am a nerd. This is news to me. Rob and/or Hemos thought it was newsworthy, and so do I. That is two nerds that think this is news (plural of "nerd" is "nerds", BTW).
I am also a programmer and sysadmin who maintains an Apache server. The fact that they released a new version was unknown to me until I read it here. As part of my job, this info concerns me very much. Therefore it matters to me.
I guess this article fulfills the only obligations that this site must fullfill, namely:
1. at least two nerds must think that this is news
2. it must matter to at least one of those nerds
while ($rantMode eq "true") {
I have been following this site since way before it was slashdot, when it was "Chips and Dips" and only got updated once every day or two. I will say to you what I say to everyone who whines about the stories here: "This is a user-driven website. If you do not like the quality or content of the stories, then post stories you want to read about, otherwise SHUT UP OR GET THE HELL OUT!!"
}
I disagree, the new license is pretty well thought out from a business standpoint. They get money from people who develop cross-platform apps, so why not go ahead and let the Free Software people use the toolkit gratis? Since KDE runs on a variety of OS/hardware combos, it may well be the desktop environment across Unices that CDE tried and failed to be.
Companies looking for a cross-platform toolkit can now purchase devel licenses to develop a QT app that just _happens_ to integrate with your desktop _if_ you run the full KDE environment. It's all about mind (and desktop) share. Rather than take the widget set and try to create a CDE-like desktop, they let us do it for free, distribute it for free, and ride the commercial licensing wave.
I think this (along with VA's "you write the OS and we'll make kick-ass high-end hardware for it and give back any changes we make") is an excellent example of how businesses can work _with_ the Free Software community, not against it. (even though TT _did_ start out on the wrong foot with us)
$1500 for a devel seat is not really that much for a smallish medium to large company after all. We worked on a project a while back, and in the middle of it we found some references to some libraries that we couldn't find with the source. After tracking down the company who owned those libs, we found out that they wanted several $1000 PER SEAT for just the "rights" to _negotiate_ the actual devel costs!!! Needless to say, we found some replacement libs really quick!!
To paraphrase the Camel: "People should stay out of my house because it's the polite thing to do, not because I have a shotgun"
I love that line!!
I forgot to mention that by tying VBA into Office and outlook is a major security hole (as has been seen in the last couple of months. Oh, that's right, MS has no interest in security (BO2k anyone?).
Could this possibly be because the details of making Windows-based apps are a tightly held secret of a certain company??
Why should the users care what operating system they are running?? If the windows API was truly open, then anyone would be free to implement a way to run windows apps on another OS (IBM tried in OS/2, but couldn't get "real" win32 due to licensing). MS dominance is not the OS, as some people believe, it is in the apps. My favorite newsreader is Agent, but I can't run it on linux w/o a reverse-engineered compatibility layer that doesn't work correctly (WINE) or a $200 commercial VM (VMWare, which still requires you to pay the MS tax by buying a copy of Win9x or NT).
I would love to see the Win32 API turned over to a standards body and fully disclosed, so that anyone could make a "better Windows than Windows" and end the dependence on win32. Let MS still make bloated office suites filled with features no one uses. See if they can still ramrod it down people's throats without "free" bundles added on to hardware purchases.
Did I mention that the Unix admins (not my boss, since he is a contractor) make a lot more money than the NT drones??
Perhaps he bought the full version, not the upgrade. The upgrade cost $89, the full version cost ~$180 retail AFAIR.
Hmm...Why do windows users insist on defending their crap?
As for tall tales, I will give you my stock answer as to my reasons for deciding that MS products are crap -- I've used them, and found them lacking.
For example:
I received a free copy of NT 4.0 with some other piece of MS shovelware I had to purchase. I thought "what the hell, I'll install it and use it for a while". I installed it on a Tuesday onto a machine that previously ran win95 and linux, but after getting a new machine was relegated to a test box. I am a firm believer in getting quality parts, so at the time the machine was built, it was a quality machine that I built myself (Tyan Tomcat, good RAM, Matrox Millenium video, Intel P133, etc...), and only about 18 months old. I say this was a quality machine because I don't want any "it was prolly your crappy hardware or something" posts. This machine is now a linux fileserver and has run great for years now (with various OS and part combos, but the mobo, RAM, and CPU are all still there).
After the installation I went to bed, just turning off the monitor and letting the machine run. I made absolutely no configuration changes. I didn't have a chance to get to it again until Thursday. Getting home and turning on the monitor, I was surprised to see...The Blue Screen of Death!!! This was MS's flagship product? The one where, with only a few registry settings difference (as NT Server), was supposed to take the Unix world by storm and blow it out of the water?? A fresh install on known good hardware running in a climate controlled room with no network services running (not even plugged in to the network, BTW) under ABSOLUTELY NO LOAD caused this OS to crash!?!?!
This is my "tall tale" as you call it, and every word is true. I now have to support some NT machines at work and hate every minute of it.
My boss is subcontracted out to a large corporation as a Unix admin, and he and the 2 other Unix guys sit back and babysit their machines from their desks, while the NT LAN admins run themselves to death fixing problems.
hahahaha....
infer (sorry, I had to do it)
1. E isn't the "Gnome Window Manager", just the "RedHat Gnome Window Manager".
2. E was started waaaaay before gnome was, and E had an iconbox in the previous (0.14) version.
3. The miniviews in the new pager ROCK!!! and have nothing to do with the gnome pager.
In short, E has always been "standalone". I do think that they are trying to distance E from Gnome a little more, though.
My uncle managed a company in the late 70's/early 80's that painted phones for AT&T. He tried to talk the owners of the company into approaching IBM about painting their new (at the time) XT desktop machines. No matter how bad he tried to talk them into it, they kept saying that it was a bad idea, and that no one would ever want a computer in any other color. If he had pressed harder, maybe we wouldn't be in this blah beige world.
I don't really want any funky designs, anyway. I just want a seven foot high rack case filled to the brim with quad Xeon III's and a couple hundred gigs of storage!
Maybe it was Gandhi that said somtehing like that, but Ghandi didn't. ;)
Unixware does scale better, but SCO bought that from Novell a couple of years ago. OpenServer is their lower-end Unix, and what they wrote themselves. It is what is in most of the low-end unix boxes at a lot of small businesses. It is not bad, but it is not good, either :)
Unfortunately, I have to support several SCO machines.