grab one of the other million and 1/2 great open source mathematical packages
Okay, why?
The scientific community is already coalescing around SciPy. You are arguing that DARPA should send money to anything but SciPy but you didn't give a reason.
I predict that a tipping point is coming, and after we reach that tipping point, Matlab will become a legacy language and all the new projects will be SciPy.
Right now Matlab is benefiting from network effect: everyone uses Matlab because everyone uses Matlab. It's the standard, you expect to see everyone using it in certain industries. But it's a proprietary product controlled by a single company that is doing its best to extract maximum revenue from it.
Meanwhile, Python and SciPy are free and open-source software. There is a generation of college students who are using SciPy for free rather than buying even a student license for Matlab, and they will be heading into the jobs market soon. In some sciences, such as astronomy, SciPy is rapidly displacing niche solutions and becoming the standard.
The day is coming when paying for Matlab will be as unusual as paying for a web browser. (I remember the days when everyone bought Netscape Navigator, and it seemed that a real open-source free browser was a dauntingly huge difficult project that might take forever to happen. The actual tipping point was, in retrospect, pretty fast.)
I resorted to using Fortran and MATLAB for visualisation. So I managed to learn basic Fortran over the weekend and then use it to write a working program for a cluster, all within 1 week time. I just don't think I could have done that with Python.
Python with SciPy is a lot like MATLAB. Python, the language, is far superior to MATLAB's language; I hate 1-based array indexing, for example. MATLAB's language does have a few special features for matrices that Python lacks, but that is just syntactic sugar (there are functions to do everything in Python).
When you use SciPy, there is a bunch of compiled Fortran and C code that is running under the covers. The heavy lifting of matrix work is all done as fast as Fortran, because it is being done in Fortran; you just didn't write the Fortran.
So Python is an expressive and pleasant language that lets you set up your calculations, and then the calculations run at full speed. This is the reason why scientists who just need to get their work done are turning to Python.
The big win is that you don't need to write two versions, the code in MATLAB for looking at graphs, and the code in Fortran for doing the real work; you just write the code once in Python.
I've talked to people who use Python on supercomputer clusters. There are Python libraries to support this. I haven't done this work myself so I don't want to try to say how easy or hard these libraries are, but if I needed to write a weather simulation I would try that route.
If I wanted to buy an AMD graphics card, or an integrated "APU" with graphics onboard, which one should I pick for the best Linux experience?
If I want to be able to play Steam games without rebooting, is there any AMD card that would give me a decent experience? Someday I would like to run 100% free software drivers, but in the near term I'd be willing to run fglrx if that is the way to go.
TFA is about bleeding-edge drivers that aren't ready yet. If I buy ancient hardware it will be fully supported, but the hardware will be too slow. Somewhere in the middle there must be a sweet spot.
Devices prepped for the harsh environments will take longer to build than consumer devices, so the spec gets frozen sooner.
Plus, as long as it has enough horsepower, why mess with the design to upgrade it?
P.S. This is not really a new observation. Consider PhoneSat, the project to take an off-the-shelf Android phone and use it as the heart of a micro-satellite. Clearly the processing power is enough, plus they can use the camera, inertial sensors, and I guess even GPS. (I wonder if the GPS software can cope with orbital altitude?)
My main use for Rhapsody and Pandora, and even for streaming "radio" stations, is to discover music. When I find stuff I like, I try to buy it on CD (and then rip the CD to FLAC and never touch the disc again).
What I like best about Rhapsody is that it is a world-wide web for music, where I can listen to the entire track or entire album and decide if I like it. (Sometimes it takes me a few listens to decide whether I like something!)
For example, on Rhapsody I went to the "Electronic Music" section and looked at what was most popular, and found a band I had never heard of called "Zero 7". I bought a CD by them. (It's called Simple Things and I do recommend it; I like every song on that album.)
I go to the page for bands I like, and click on one of the "related" links, and find bands I had never heard of. And sometimes I buy CDs.
When I was in college I pretty much bought music by bands I already knew. Now, with the help of the Internet, I'm branching out and finding all kinds of new stuff.
Trust me, I have never heard of this avant garde celloist, but with an Internet service there is at least a chance I might. So, instead of looking at this as lost revenue, she might want to look at it as advertising that pays her (albeit not very much).
Streaming services like Rdio, MOG and Rhapsody are poor analogs to broadcast radio, as the listener chooses exactly what they want to hear from a vast library of music.
In the case of Rhapsody, there is an option to listen to a "radio" channel based on an artist you choose.
For example, I just selected "Cal Tjader Radio" (listed in the sidebar under "Artist Channel") and it says:
Artists in rotation include Poncho Sanchez, Mongo Santamaria, Lionel Hampton, Dave Samuels, Vince Gueraldi, Tito Puente, Stan Getz, Eddie Palmieri, Dave Brubeck, Milt Jackson, Paul Desmond, Gary Burton, Ray Barreto
I tried it for Cheap Trick and the rotation includes KISS, Todd Rundgren, Thin Lizzy, The Cars, Queen, and others.
It makes sense: Rhapsody has the ability to play the songs you choose, but there is no reason they can't randomly play related songs like Pandora does. They don't have the thumbs-up/thumbs-down UI like Pandora, though. (You can click on songs and assign a star rating, but I don't know if the "Radio" channels take your star ratings into account.)
this is the Northwest...it rains. A lot. An umbrella wouldn't be a bad idea. Really.
Meh. Most of us in the Northwest don't fuss with umbrellas, because most of the time it rains very gently. You can walk around quite a while without really getting wet. I wear a hat to keep rain off my glasses, and I wear a coat if I will be out for more than a couple of minutes, but you should be able to make it from the parking lot to the fest without melting.
In the Pacific Northwest, it sort of mists for days or weeks or months at a time, so the ground is usually damp, the sun is hidden behind grey clouds, and it's dreary and depressing. But it rarely pours down so hard you get really wet walking around in it. (I'm in the Seattle area but I think Bellingham is pretty similar.)
If you're staying in a local motel, AVOID THOSE LOCATED ON SOUTH SAMISH BLVD. The local cops keep all the crack-heads, tweakers and other various riff-raff confined to the daily/weekly/monthly motels along this street--no need for you to go looking for trouble, it will find you if you stay there for long.
Hmm. I have stayed many times at the Motel 6 at the south end of Samish Way, and I haven't seen any trouble. Of course, I was early to bed and early to rise; maybe if I had walked around at 2am I might have seen the riff-raff.
But if you check the LinuxFest NW hotels guide page you will note that none of the recommended hotels are on Samish Way. (And of course, LFNW is on the north end of town, so why not stay in a place on the north end.)
The one exception to this rule is the Shamrock Motel in North Bellingham--I hear more call-outs on the police-dispatch frequencies referencing this motel then any other address in Bellingham. Avoid it.
Ironically, I stayed at the Shamrock Motel last year before LinuxFest. I believe you about the police call-outs.
The Shamrock Motel is very inexpensive. It's also old... I'd estimate it was built in the early 50's or something like that. Rooms have electric baseboard heaters and no air conditioning (not that you need AC in April in Bellingham). The room was shabby but clean; the sheets smelled like bleach. There was a flat panel TV on the wall, the newest thing about the room. Their web site says they have free WiFi, but I couldn't get a decent signal from my room; I reckon they probably have a single consumer-grade WiFi access point set up in their office!
I don't think the folks who run the place are trying to make a den of iniquity... but I remember there was a sign up front saying something like "if you stay here you need to pay, don't ask us to let you owe us." I think the people staying at the Shamrock are likely to be poor.
I stayed there because I didn't plan far enough ahead and the places I wanted to go were already booked. I'm not in a hurry to stay at the Shamrock again. But as I said, the room was clean, and I wish no ill will upon the folks who run the place.
Most years I have just driven my car up from home, and not used a motel at all. Last year I decided to take Friday off from work and ride my bicycle to Bellingham, so I needed a place to sleep. I'm planning to do the same thing again this year, but this year I want to stay at the Hampton Inn because it is the one that will have a hacker room. I don't know what the hacker room will be like but I figure that is the place to stay.
Oh, and if you have a car and want to stay somewhere really nice, the LFNW hotels page has the Fairhaven Inn. I have never stayed there, but Fairhaven is an old neighborhood that has been transformed into an upscale place with shops and restaurants, so my guess is that the Fairhaven Inn is the nicest place on the LFNW hotels page.
Bring an UP TO DATE street map, especially if you're going to be driving anywhere besides the Technical College--Bellingham has the most ill-designed s
At LFNW I have attended some really outstanding lectures, sometimes by famous or important people. George Dyson lives in the area and he sometimes gives a talk; every time I have attended one of his talks it was great.
They have a raffle with some cool prizes every year. There are always O'Reilly books, and sometimes they have things like "one year of virtual server hosting".
The Bellingham Technical College is a great venue for the event. Lots of parking, lots of classrooms for talks, lots of space for the vendor hall, a snack bar that serves espresso drinks... they also serve up a lunch; usually on Saturday the lunch offers salmon grilled over a wood fire.
I really liked this article. It explains what they did, with discussion at each step for tricky points or ideas for future improvement. Then it provides an example of a simple way that the modified printer can be put to use.
At the end it compares the size of the ink nozzles with the size of various cells, and concludes that a purpose-built printer would probably be better. Especially because there seems to be an ink filter with a very small screen inside the cartridge!
One idea left unexplored: would an older inkjet printer work better? Nozzle sizes would be larger. Possibly old cartridges might not even have an ink filter?
These boards don't seem to be worried about emitting radio frequency interference (RFI). That "paper" system case is slick but I don't think it effectively shields RFI.
Is RFI somehow not a problem with these? Is it because they are very low-power, or is it because they are somehow not regulated by the FCC for RFI, or what?
Would operating one of these make the amateur radio enthusiasts down the block from you curse you?
As the vehicle bleeds off energy to atmospheric drag and gravitational forces as it coasts upward, it has to leave the muzzle of the gun at considerably more than orbital velocity... essentialy exposing the payload to re-entry conditions at launch.
The video discusses this point. He really did cover all the bases.
Nobody that I'm aware that's even remotely serious is proposing to do [an Apollo-style mission to Mars]
NASA seems to be at least remotely serious about this mission, an Apollo-style launch. It's not a manned launch (even though Wikipedia seems to report that it is). The plan seems to be that astronauts would rendezvous with the sample return package, but astronauts would not ride this thing to Mars and back. Still, the sample-return mission is indeed an Apollo-style mission: everything launches on a single heavy lift rocket.
This would be ideal for sending inert things like oxygen, water, rocket fuel, or some kinds of food. It would even work for structural parts or electronics if they could take the accelerations without damage.
For that matter, one of the problems of a Mars flight is having adequate shielding against the radiation the craft would encounter between Earth and Mars. With a system like this, the cost of getting the shielding up would be as cheap as possible. (I guess the mass of the shielding would affect the accelerations the craft could make and thus affect the length of the trip.)
One problem, as I understand it: a projectile launched from a big space gun would need to have its orbit adjusted or it will return to Earth. Either you need to catch it while in orbit (you get one chance) and add additional acceleration to put it in a stable orbit, or else the projectile needs to have rockets or something to adjust its speed. The video mentioned this issue briefly (the part about Newton figuring out that the projectile would return to the point of launch if no other forces acted upon it).
P.S. I saw proposals for an Apollo-style mission from Earth to Mars: a single giant rocket launches everything in one launch. Why is anyone even looking at doing it that way? Send the craft to space without fuel or consumables; send it up in parts even and assemble it in space. Then, as it is in orbit, fuel it up, load it with consumables, and then when it is ready send it on its way.
We don't really need giant space guns to make space access more affordable; we just need practical, reusable craft that can carry a small load to orbit, return, and do it again soon. It must not need man-decades of work to completely overhaul it, as the Space Shuttle needed. Single stage to orbit, two stage to orbit, whatever... but not single-use rockets. Rockets that fall into pieces as they ascend, where you never get a test flight because each flight uses up one rocket, will never give us cheap access to space.
According to Jerry Pournelle, the fuel cost of putting something into orbit is similar to the cost of flying it most of the way around the world on an aircraft. Because the aircraft isn't consumed by the flight, we can do this for much less than the cost of sending something into orbit. Practical, reusable transportation would be a total game-changer.
I know the consensus on/. is going to be that this idea is totally silly.
But, I can think of a few features I wouldn't mind having on a smart oven:
* It joins my home network, and I can put a widget on my desktop showing current oven temperature and the value of any countdown timers running.
* It has optional temperature probes, so if you want to do your meat right, instead of cooking by time you cook until the meat hits the correct temperature. And the current temperature appears on the desktop widget I mentioned above, and an alert fires when the temperature hits a certain value.
I have a meat temperature probe that came complete with a remote display/alarm. (The worst thing about it: if you take it out of range, it never goes off. It really should have a "watchdog" feature where it says "hey, I haven't received a heartbeat in a while, I must be out of range or something" and the alarm goes off.) I would love having the oven on my home network, using open protocols; let's face it, if I'm waiting for a pie to cook or something I'm going to be at my computer.
I can think of sillier ideas.
* Lots of fancy cook cycles. I looked at TFA and it seems they already have this one covered.
* QR codes on foods you cook in the oven, and you wave them past a cheap camera on the oven and it sets up the cook cycle!
* Multiple, convenient, named timers. The "Pie0" timer is almost done, but the "Pie1" timer has another ten minutes on it. I wouldn't buy one just for this, but I'd use it if I had it.
* Voice input for things like setting timer names?
This isn't the hottest idea I've ever heard, but it's not completely half-baked.
This is a way to have a movie theater in their town without driving an hour. You need to factor that into your estimations.
If I lived an hour away from any other movie theater, I would pay $20/month to keep my local theater alive. Sometimes it's fun to see a movie on the big screen, with your friends.
If that experience isn't something you care about, there's Netflix.
It's the best pocket flashlight I have ever owned. Bright and useful on "low" power (32 Lumens) and very bright on high (105 Lumens). 500 minutes of light (over 8 hours) from a single AA cell on low, or 110 minutes on high. (I'm trusting the manufacturer's numbers here, but I can verify that it actually is bright and lasts a long time.) Anyway, that's a Cree LED, and it doesn't have the horrible bluish tint of older LEDs I have bought in the past.
More recently I bought an Ecosmart light bulb at Home Depot. "Ecosmart" is a Home Depot house brand, and uses Cree LED chips. For $10 I got a light bulb that claims to give equivalent light to a 40 Watt incandescent bulb, but seems brighter than that (I think because it's much more directional; it's in a downward-facing fixture so that's fine).
And just two days ago I got a fixture that retrofits a 6" can fixture with an LED light. I bought one with the 2700K color temperature, because I like that better than the "colder" lights (bluer, which actually have higher color temperatures). I walked into the store planning to just buy a bulb for my can light fixture, and now I'm very glad I bought the whole Ecosmart fixture. I found an LED light geek web site, and the guy bought one of these just to do a teardown; he found 5 Cree LED chips inside it. Where I live, the power company is subsidizing these lights, so I only had to pay $20 for this light. This dissipates only 9.5 Watts, yet it's very bright. I love the design: it includes three spring fingers to hold it into place, but if you rotate it the fingers collapse and stop holding it. So two decades from now when the LED stops working, it will be easy to remove.
So now I want to see Cree make some sort of flush-mount ceiling fixture. I have only found a few flush-mount LED fixtures, and they are all super expensive and I can't find the 2700 K color temperature. I did find one promising looking cheap fixture, but on eBay only and it's an import from China... I have no way to be sure of the quality, other than just buying one and trying it.
My current plans are just to install some fixtures that have air gaps for circulation, so I can use the Phillips LED bulbs (omnidirectional, not directional like the Ecosmart ones). I'm going to install one of these tomorrow and see how we like it. In case the URL doesn't work right, this is a "Project Source 2-Pack White Ceiling Flush Mount" from lowes.com.
Based on my experience with these lights, we are just on the cusp of these becoming mainstream and common. I've been buying these because they are subsidized, but electronics always gets cheaper over time, and within a couple of years or so LED lights should be cheap enough without subsidy that everyone starts buying them. (Even without the subsidy, they make sense long-term versus incandescent bulbs. If you have incandescent lights, consider LED rather than compact fluorescent.)
P.S. I haven't bought these, but I wish the office where I work would buy them. These are Cree replacement lights for standard fluorescent fixtures. Some companies are making LED lights that are the exact size of a T8 fluorescent bulb, with matching pins; for $60 or $80 or so each bulb, you can replace fluorescents (but you must rewire the fixture to bypass the ballas
I have said it before: with ARM, you can choose from multiple, competing chip vendors, or you can license the ARM technology yourself and make your own chips if you are big enough; with x86, you would be chaining yourself to Intel and hoping they treat you well. So, if low-power x86 is neck and neck with ARM, that's not good enough.
Intel is used to high margins on CPUs, much higher than ARM chip makers collect. Intel won't want to give up on collecting those high margins. If Intel can get the market hooked on their chips, they will then ratchet up the margins just as high as they think they can.
The companies making mobile products know this, and will not lightly tie themselves to Intel. So long as ARM is viable, Intel is fighting an uphill battle.
I know that, at least in the past, Intel used to issue TDP numbers that represented "typical" heat, while AMD used to issue TDP numbers that represented worst-case heat (which is what TDP ought to be IMHO). I have read here on Slashdot that more recently, AMD has started playing those games as well.
But according to NordicHardware, in this case Intel is under-promising and over-delivering, and the chips really do dissipate only 77W despite being rated for 95W. (But how did they measure that? Is this a "typical" 77W? I guess it's not that hard to run a benchmark test that should hammer the chip and get a worst-case number that way.)
Curiously the AMD processors tend to stack up better on the Linux benchmark suites.
This is probably because Linux benchmarks were compiled with GCC or Clang rather than the Intel compiler. The Intel compiler deliberately generates code that makes the compiled code run poorly on non-Intel processors. The code checks the CPU ID, and the code has two major branches: the good path, which Intel chips get to run, and the poor path, which other chips run.
The irony is that Intel, by investing heavily in fab technology, is about two generations ahead of everyone else, so they can make faster and/or lower-power parts than everyone else. This means they could be competing fairly and win.
But because Intel does evil things like making their compiler sabotage their competition, I refuse to buy Intel. They have lost my business. They don't care of course, because there aren't many like me who are paying attention and care enough to change their buying habits.
If you want the fastest possible desktop computer, pay the big bucks for a top-of-the-line i7 system. But if you merely want a very fast desktop computer that can play all the games, an AMD will do quite well, and will cost a bit less. So giving up Intel isn't a hard thing to do, really.
Wow, thank you for the fact check. It just goes to show that subjective memories aren't the best guides. I was sure that the gap between 2.3 and 4.0 was much longer than ten months! This is probably because I pay more attention to available devices than to software release dates.
The changes between Gingerbread and ICS were big, and the rollout took quite a while for pretty much all brands of phone. Once a phone company successfully adopted ICS, it must not have been nearly as hard to upgrade to Jelly Bean, because updates came faster.
Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" was the newest phone OS for a long time, because it was followed by Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" which was only for tablets. A whole bunch of phones shipped with Gingerbread.
After a long time Google released Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" and then, after a much shorter time, Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean". ICS was a big enough change that the phone companies were a bit slow to roll it out, with many phones shipping with Gingerbread and a promise that ICS would be provided as an update. Early adopters made an effort to get new phones, but most people kept on using their existing phones (which after all still worked).
Thus I would expect Gingerbread to still be a large chunk of the Android phones in current use, with ICS or Jelly Bean as an ever-growing segment. I've seen articles claiming that the large amount of Gingerbread still in use is a "problem" or a "failure" but I don't see it that way.
At this point, new phones no longer come with Gingerbread so over time the old phones will be replaced with ICS or Jelly Bean.
I don't think we can learn anything useful about the merits or weaknesses of Android 2.x versus Android 4.x by looking at market share. It's almost purely related to what was available and when. Early adopters always want the newest, other users mostly just buy a new phone when they need one and take whatever system the phone is running.
But I will say that there is no way the Galaxy SIII would be as popular as it is if it were saddled with Gingerbread.
why would any "enthusiast" go for an ARM CPU with about one tenth of the power a current Intel CPU has? I call this story b/s.
You could try reading the fine article. If you did so you would learn that he is talking about overclocking enthusiasts, who are now having fun overclocking ARM chips. He linked an article about Android running at 3.0 GHz (on an OMAP chip rated for about 1 GHz).
Why will overclocking desktop chips end? From TFA:
there is a very good chance that Broadwell's successor, Sky Lake, will bring back a socketed CPU. Unfortunately it will only be for a generation, possibly two, nothing permanent. By then, the last remaining overclockers and experimenters on the PC front will be gone, and for good technical reasons. Increasing integration will make this minor backpedalling step a rather moot point, there won't be anything left to tweak, and any headroom will have been screened out at the fab prior to fuses being blown. Worse yet, margin requirements will effectively make it not worth extreme cost.
Overclocking first got everyone's attention when a 300 MHz Intel CPU was easily overclockable to 450 MHz. That was a really significant overclock; a cheap part, stable when overclocked, and a huge performance boost. It is harder to get excited about overclocking some recent CPU chip from 3.2 GHz to 3.3 GHz. But oh hey, some guys have overclocked an ARM chip from 1.5 GHz to 3.0 GHz... does the story still sound like "b/s" to you?
Also, the quoted section says that "any headroom will have been screened out at the fab" implying that there won't be any overclocking potential in the new chips. I don't quite understand exactly how that will work, however. The reason overclocking works is that CPUs at high clock rates cost more, which means fewer are needed at the highest clock rates; yet the lower-cost slower CPUs are basically the same silicon, just not guaranteed at the higher speed. In other words there is a supply of chips capable of higher speeds, being sold more cheaply as a lower-speed part. How does improved screening change this situation? Unless Intel has some way of making the chip yields come out to exactly the number of fast chips they need, it seems like there will always be a chance to find a chip that could have been in a more expensive bin. It hardly seems likely that Intel will just shred chips that overperform their bins!
Now, Intel could be implementing actual anti-overclocking measures, but that's not how I interpreted the quoted text, so as I said I don't quite understand.
MS typically makes shitty clones of popular products.
That oversimplifies the situation to the point of not being a useful statement.
Windows 3.11 was an ugly clone and copy of the Mac.
No, both the Mac and Windows were attempts to make something similar to the Xerox GUI system (that both Jobs and Gates had seen). And in those wild and woolly early days there was a lot of cross-pollination between the Windows and Mac worlds.
At the time, the Mac was hands-down more beautiful, more elegant, and more polished. Windows 3.x was partially burdened by a bunch of GUI conventions invented by IBM called "CUA" (Common User Access); this is why the shortcut for "save file" was not Ctrl+S, but rather Shift+F12 or something like that.
I'm sure there is stuff in Windows that was on the Mac first, but it is hardly accurate to say that Windows 3.x was a "clone" of the Mac. Heck, I think it was 1987 before Mac OS could even do color, and Windows was full color all along. Windows always had menus on each window, Mac always had a top-of-screen menu bar. All sorts of differences.
Netbios was their poor attempt of copying VMS networking technologies.
I don't know anything about this so I will take your word for it.
Word was a copy of Wordperfect.
Good grief, no! Where are you getting this? Word was originally released with the so-called "multitool" interface, a weird sort of menu system. WordPerfect was designed to be used mostly via the function keys (and everyone had little function key overlays to remind them what Shift+Control+Alt+F9 did and all the others). WordPerfect used embedded codes and had a "reveal codes" command; Word used properties that were attached to characters, paragraphs, sections, or styles.
Word for Windows was available before there ever was a WordPerfect for Windows, so I don't think your claim makes sense in the GUI world either.
Excel was bought and was a cheap clone of Lotus.
Just as Word evolved from the "multitool" version of Word, Excel evolved from Multiplan, Microsoft's first spreadsheet. Per Wikipedia, Multiplan was first sold in 1982, and Lotus 1-2-3 came out in 1983. Excel was not bought; you are mistaken on that point.
Multiplan and Excel were nothing like Lotus 1-2-3; Borland tried making a menu-compatible spreadsheet that actually was like 1-2-3, and got sued.
IE a buggy clone of Netscape etc.
Microsoft licensed a browser called Spyglass Mosaic and customized that into IE 1.0. Spyglass Mosaic was sort of based on NCSA Mosaic, the first popular web browser ever. In no sense can either Mosaic be considered a clone of Netscape, given that Netscape 1.0 was also based upon NCSA Mosaic!
Probably as IE evolved, it copied stuff from other browsers. That happens. IE also pioneered stuff, a lot of stuff we don't really want (remember ActiveX?).
Let me rephrase and see if that helps you understand my point.
MATE is a fork of GNOME 2.x. It should work just as well as GNOME 2.x ever did (barring bugs). But people have moved on from writing to the GNOME 2.x API; the new apps are written to the GNOME 3.x API.
Well okay then, just install the GNOME 3.x libraries alongside MATE and run the new apps. That will work, at least for now. But if the apps feature integration features with the desktop environment, they won't work with a GNOME 2.x flavored environment (i.e. MATE).
Well okay then, MATE isn't really a frozen fork, it's being developed; how about porting it to the GNOME 3.x world? Well, that would be a huge amount of work. And the longer the GNOME guys keep adding features to GNOME 3.x, the wider the gap becomes and even more work to bridge that gap.
But wait, the GNOME 3.x guys made it possible to write plugins and such and adapt the GNOME 3.x desktop... if you did that, you could make something that works just like GNOME 2.x, but is native GNOME 3.x, so it would naturally inherit the changes to GNOME as it evolves. That sounds like a nice future-proof solution. Okay, that's Cinnamon.
So if you want a smoothly polished desktop now you can run MATE now, and you have the option of transitioning to Cinnamon later if MATE becomes too outdated. If you want to run nothing but GNOME 3.x programs and you want a pure GNOME 3.x desktop, you can run Cinnamon right now; it's not as polished but it does work well.
I hope this clears things up for you. I do understand that MATE is being developed, but I believe it will never seamlessly integrate with GNOME 3.x technology, and I think that once Cinnamon becomes smooth and polished, MATE development may slow or cease. But I am very glad that they took the trouble to build MATE for us; it's a perfectly good solution for at least the near to middle term, and possibly forever.
I've used both, and I would rather use either one than use GNOME Shell or Unity.
Slashdot Mirror
grab one of the other million and 1/2 great open source mathematical packages
Okay, why?
The scientific community is already coalescing around SciPy. You are arguing that DARPA should send money to anything but SciPy but you didn't give a reason.
Have they heard of Matlab?
Have you heard of SciPy?
I predict that a tipping point is coming, and after we reach that tipping point, Matlab will become a legacy language and all the new projects will be SciPy.
Right now Matlab is benefiting from network effect: everyone uses Matlab because everyone uses Matlab. It's the standard, you expect to see everyone using it in certain industries. But it's a proprietary product controlled by a single company that is doing its best to extract maximum revenue from it.
Meanwhile, Python and SciPy are free and open-source software. There is a generation of college students who are using SciPy for free rather than buying even a student license for Matlab, and they will be heading into the jobs market soon. In some sciences, such as astronomy, SciPy is rapidly displacing niche solutions and becoming the standard.
The day is coming when paying for Matlab will be as unusual as paying for a web browser. (I remember the days when everyone bought Netscape Navigator, and it seemed that a real open-source free browser was a dauntingly huge difficult project that might take forever to happen. The actual tipping point was, in retrospect, pretty fast.)
I resorted to using Fortran and MATLAB for visualisation. So I managed to learn basic Fortran over the weekend and then use it to write a working program for a cluster, all within 1 week time. I just don't think I could have done that with Python.
Python with SciPy is a lot like MATLAB. Python, the language, is far superior to MATLAB's language; I hate 1-based array indexing, for example. MATLAB's language does have a few special features for matrices that Python lacks, but that is just syntactic sugar (there are functions to do everything in Python).
When you use SciPy, there is a bunch of compiled Fortran and C code that is running under the covers. The heavy lifting of matrix work is all done as fast as Fortran, because it is being done in Fortran; you just didn't write the Fortran.
So Python is an expressive and pleasant language that lets you set up your calculations, and then the calculations run at full speed. This is the reason why scientists who just need to get their work done are turning to Python.
The big win is that you don't need to write two versions, the code in MATLAB for looking at graphs, and the code in Fortran for doing the real work; you just write the code once in Python.
I've talked to people who use Python on supercomputer clusters. There are Python libraries to support this. I haven't done this work myself so I don't want to try to say how easy or hard these libraries are, but if I needed to write a weather simulation I would try that route.
If I wanted to buy an AMD graphics card, or an integrated "APU" with graphics onboard, which one should I pick for the best Linux experience?
If I want to be able to play Steam games without rebooting, is there any AMD card that would give me a decent experience? Someday I would like to run 100% free software drivers, but in the near term I'd be willing to run fglrx if that is the way to go.
TFA is about bleeding-edge drivers that aren't ready yet. If I buy ancient hardware it will be fully supported, but the hardware will be too slow. Somewhere in the middle there must be a sweet spot.
Devices prepped for the harsh environments will take longer to build than consumer devices, so the spec gets frozen sooner.
Plus, as long as it has enough horsepower, why mess with the design to upgrade it?
P.S. This is not really a new observation. Consider PhoneSat, the project to take an off-the-shelf Android phone and use it as the heart of a micro-satellite. Clearly the processing power is enough, plus they can use the camera, inertial sensors, and I guess even GPS. (I wonder if the GPS software can cope with orbital altitude?)
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/home/PhoneSat.html
My main use for Rhapsody and Pandora, and even for streaming "radio" stations, is to discover music. When I find stuff I like, I try to buy it on CD (and then rip the CD to FLAC and never touch the disc again).
What I like best about Rhapsody is that it is a world-wide web for music, where I can listen to the entire track or entire album and decide if I like it. (Sometimes it takes me a few listens to decide whether I like something!)
For example, on Rhapsody I went to the "Electronic Music" section and looked at what was most popular, and found a band I had never heard of called "Zero 7". I bought a CD by them. (It's called Simple Things and I do recommend it; I like every song on that album.)
I go to the page for bands I like, and click on one of the "related" links, and find bands I had never heard of. And sometimes I buy CDs.
When I was in college I pretty much bought music by bands I already knew. Now, with the help of the Internet, I'm branching out and finding all kinds of new stuff.
Trust me, I have never heard of this avant garde celloist, but with an Internet service there is at least a chance I might. So, instead of looking at this as lost revenue, she might want to look at it as advertising that pays her (albeit not very much).
Streaming services like Rdio, MOG and Rhapsody are poor analogs to broadcast radio, as the listener chooses exactly what they want to hear from a vast library of music.
In the case of Rhapsody, there is an option to listen to a "radio" channel based on an artist you choose.
For example, I just selected "Cal Tjader Radio" (listed in the sidebar under "Artist Channel") and it says:
I tried it for Cheap Trick and the rotation includes KISS, Todd Rundgren, Thin Lizzy, The Cars, Queen, and others.
It makes sense: Rhapsody has the ability to play the songs you choose, but there is no reason they can't randomly play related songs like Pandora does. They don't have the thumbs-up/thumbs-down UI like Pandora, though. (You can click on songs and assign a star rating, but I don't know if the "Radio" channels take your star ratings into account.)
this is the Northwest...it rains. A lot. An umbrella wouldn't be a bad idea. Really.
Meh. Most of us in the Northwest don't fuss with umbrellas, because most of the time it rains very gently. You can walk around quite a while without really getting wet. I wear a hat to keep rain off my glasses, and I wear a coat if I will be out for more than a couple of minutes, but you should be able to make it from the parking lot to the fest without melting.
In the Pacific Northwest, it sort of mists for days or weeks or months at a time, so the ground is usually damp, the sun is hidden behind grey clouds, and it's dreary and depressing. But it rarely pours down so hard you get really wet walking around in it. (I'm in the Seattle area but I think Bellingham is pretty similar.)
If you're staying in a local motel, AVOID THOSE LOCATED ON SOUTH SAMISH BLVD. The local cops keep all the crack-heads, tweakers and other various riff-raff confined to the daily/weekly/monthly motels along this street--no need for you to go looking for trouble, it will find you if you stay there for long.
Hmm. I have stayed many times at the Motel 6 at the south end of Samish Way, and I haven't seen any trouble. Of course, I was early to bed and early to rise; maybe if I had walked around at 2am I might have seen the riff-raff.
But if you check the LinuxFest NW hotels guide page you will note that none of the recommended hotels are on Samish Way. (And of course, LFNW is on the north end of town, so why not stay in a place on the north end.)
The one exception to this rule is the Shamrock Motel in North Bellingham--I hear more call-outs on the police-dispatch frequencies referencing this motel then any other address in Bellingham. Avoid it.
Ironically, I stayed at the Shamrock Motel last year before LinuxFest. I believe you about the police call-outs.
The Shamrock Motel is very inexpensive. It's also old... I'd estimate it was built in the early 50's or something like that. Rooms have electric baseboard heaters and no air conditioning (not that you need AC in April in Bellingham). The room was shabby but clean; the sheets smelled like bleach. There was a flat panel TV on the wall, the newest thing about the room. Their web site says they have free WiFi, but I couldn't get a decent signal from my room; I reckon they probably have a single consumer-grade WiFi access point set up in their office!
I don't think the folks who run the place are trying to make a den of iniquity... but I remember there was a sign up front saying something like "if you stay here you need to pay, don't ask us to let you owe us." I think the people staying at the Shamrock are likely to be poor.
I stayed there because I didn't plan far enough ahead and the places I wanted to go were already booked. I'm not in a hurry to stay at the Shamrock again. But as I said, the room was clean, and I wish no ill will upon the folks who run the place.
Most years I have just driven my car up from home, and not used a motel at all. Last year I decided to take Friday off from work and ride my bicycle to Bellingham, so I needed a place to sleep. I'm planning to do the same thing again this year, but this year I want to stay at the Hampton Inn because it is the one that will have a hacker room. I don't know what the hacker room will be like but I figure that is the place to stay.
Oh, and if you have a car and want to stay somewhere really nice, the LFNW hotels page has the Fairhaven Inn. I have never stayed there, but Fairhaven is an old neighborhood that has been transformed into an upscale place with shops and restaurants, so my guess is that the Fairhaven Inn is the nicest place on the LFNW hotels page.
Bring an UP TO DATE street map, especially if you're going to be driving anywhere besides the Technical College--Bellingham has the most ill-designed s
LinuxFest Northwest is a great event. I encourage you to go if you can.
Here are a couple of articles I wrote for Linux Journal about LFNW:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6839
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8339
At LFNW I have attended some really outstanding lectures, sometimes by famous or important people. George Dyson lives in the area and he sometimes gives a talk; every time I have attended one of his talks it was great.
They have a raffle with some cool prizes every year. There are always O'Reilly books, and sometimes they have things like "one year of virtual server hosting".
The Bellingham Technical College is a great venue for the event. Lots of parking, lots of classrooms for talks, lots of space for the vendor hall, a snack bar that serves espresso drinks... they also serve up a lunch; usually on Saturday the lunch offers salmon grilled over a wood fire.
I hope to see you there.
I really liked this article. It explains what they did, with discussion at each step for tricky points or ideas for future improvement. Then it provides an example of a simple way that the modified printer can be put to use.
At the end it compares the size of the ink nozzles with the size of various cells, and concludes that a purpose-built printer would probably be better. Especially because there seems to be an ink filter with a very small screen inside the cartridge!
One idea left unexplored: would an older inkjet printer work better? Nozzle sizes would be larger. Possibly old cartridges might not even have an ink filter?
These boards don't seem to be worried about emitting radio frequency interference (RFI). That "paper" system case is slick but I don't think it effectively shields RFI.
Is RFI somehow not a problem with these? Is it because they are very low-power, or is it because they are somehow not regulated by the FCC for RFI, or what?
Would operating one of these make the amateur radio enthusiasts down the block from you curse you?
As the vehicle bleeds off energy to atmospheric drag and gravitational forces as it coasts upward, it has to leave the muzzle of the gun at considerably more than orbital velocity... essentialy exposing the payload to re-entry conditions at launch.
The video discusses this point. He really did cover all the bases.
Nobody that I'm aware that's even remotely serious is proposing to do [an Apollo-style mission to Mars]
NASA seems to be at least remotely serious about this mission, an Apollo-style launch. It's not a manned launch (even though Wikipedia seems to report that it is). The plan seems to be that astronauts would rendezvous with the sample return package, but astronauts would not ride this thing to Mars and back. Still, the sample-return mission is indeed an Apollo-style mission: everything launches on a single heavy lift rocket.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/11/nasa-interest-2024-mars-sample-return-sls-orion/
I'm pretty sure I saw some newspaper article about a manned mission done with a single launch, but perhaps I was mistaken.
This would be ideal for sending inert things like oxygen, water, rocket fuel, or some kinds of food. It would even work for structural parts or electronics if they could take the accelerations without damage.
For that matter, one of the problems of a Mars flight is having adequate shielding against the radiation the craft would encounter between Earth and Mars. With a system like this, the cost of getting the shielding up would be as cheap as possible. (I guess the mass of the shielding would affect the accelerations the craft could make and thus affect the length of the trip.)
One problem, as I understand it: a projectile launched from a big space gun would need to have its orbit adjusted or it will return to Earth. Either you need to catch it while in orbit (you get one chance) and add additional acceleration to put it in a stable orbit, or else the projectile needs to have rockets or something to adjust its speed. The video mentioned this issue briefly (the part about Newton figuring out that the projectile would return to the point of launch if no other forces acted upon it).
P.S. I saw proposals for an Apollo-style mission from Earth to Mars: a single giant rocket launches everything in one launch. Why is anyone even looking at doing it that way? Send the craft to space without fuel or consumables; send it up in parts even and assemble it in space. Then, as it is in orbit, fuel it up, load it with consumables, and then when it is ready send it on its way.
We don't really need giant space guns to make space access more affordable; we just need practical, reusable craft that can carry a small load to orbit, return, and do it again soon. It must not need man-decades of work to completely overhaul it, as the Space Shuttle needed. Single stage to orbit, two stage to orbit, whatever... but not single-use rockets. Rockets that fall into pieces as they ascend, where you never get a test flight because each flight uses up one rocket, will never give us cheap access to space.
According to Jerry Pournelle, the fuel cost of putting something into orbit is similar to the cost of flying it most of the way around the world on an aircraft. Because the aircraft isn't consumed by the flight, we can do this for much less than the cost of sending something into orbit. Practical, reusable transportation would be a total game-changer.
I know the consensus on /. is going to be that this idea is totally silly.
But, I can think of a few features I wouldn't mind having on a smart oven:
* It joins my home network, and I can put a widget on my desktop showing current oven temperature and the value of any countdown timers running.
* It has optional temperature probes, so if you want to do your meat right, instead of cooking by time you cook until the meat hits the correct temperature. And the current temperature appears on the desktop widget I mentioned above, and an alert fires when the temperature hits a certain value.
I have a meat temperature probe that came complete with a remote display/alarm. (The worst thing about it: if you take it out of range, it never goes off. It really should have a "watchdog" feature where it says "hey, I haven't received a heartbeat in a while, I must be out of range or something" and the alarm goes off.) I would love having the oven on my home network, using open protocols; let's face it, if I'm waiting for a pie to cook or something I'm going to be at my computer.
I can think of sillier ideas.
* Lots of fancy cook cycles. I looked at TFA and it seems they already have this one covered.
* QR codes on foods you cook in the oven, and you wave them past a cheap camera on the oven and it sets up the cook cycle!
* Multiple, convenient, named timers. The "Pie0" timer is almost done, but the "Pie1" timer has another ten minutes on it. I wouldn't buy one just for this, but I'd use it if I had it.
* Voice input for things like setting timer names?
This isn't the hottest idea I've ever heard, but it's not completely half-baked.
This is a way to have a movie theater in their town without driving an hour. You need to factor that into your estimations.
If I lived an hour away from any other movie theater, I would pay $20/month to keep my local theater alive. Sometimes it's fun to see a movie on the big screen, with your friends.
If that experience isn't something you care about, there's Netflix.
A year ago, I had no idea who "Cree" might be.
Then I bought one of these:
http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=151
It's the best pocket flashlight I have ever owned. Bright and useful on "low" power (32 Lumens) and very bright on high (105 Lumens). 500 minutes of light (over 8 hours) from a single AA cell on low, or 110 minutes on high. (I'm trusting the manufacturer's numbers here, but I can verify that it actually is bright and lasts a long time.) Anyway, that's a Cree LED, and it doesn't have the horrible bluish tint of older LEDs I have bought in the past.
More recently I bought an Ecosmart light bulb at Home Depot. "Ecosmart" is a Home Depot house brand, and uses Cree LED chips. For $10 I got a light bulb that claims to give equivalent light to a 40 Watt incandescent bulb, but seems brighter than that (I think because it's much more directional; it's in a downward-facing fixture so that's fine).
http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202188260/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053
And just two days ago I got a fixture that retrofits a 6" can fixture with an LED light. I bought one with the 2700K color temperature, because I like that better than the "colder" lights (bluer, which actually have higher color temperatures). I walked into the store planning to just buy a bulb for my can light fixture, and now I'm very glad I bought the whole Ecosmart fixture. I found an LED light geek web site, and the guy bought one of these just to do a teardown; he found 5 Cree LED chips inside it. Where I live, the power company is subsidizing these lights, so I only had to pay $20 for this light. This dissipates only 9.5 Watts, yet it's very bright. I love the design: it includes three spring fingers to hold it into place, but if you rotate it the fingers collapse and stop holding it. So two decades from now when the LED stops working, it will be easy to remove.
http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202240932/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053
So now I want to see Cree make some sort of flush-mount ceiling fixture. I have only found a few flush-mount LED fixtures, and they are all super expensive and I can't find the 2700 K color temperature. I did find one promising looking cheap fixture, but on eBay only and it's an import from China... I have no way to be sure of the quality, other than just buying one and trying it.
My current plans are just to install some fixtures that have air gaps for circulation, so I can use the Phillips LED bulbs (omnidirectional, not directional like the Ecosmart ones). I'm going to install one of these tomorrow and see how we like it. In case the URL doesn't work right, this is a "Project Source 2-Pack White Ceiling Flush Mount" from lowes.com.
http://www.lowes.com/pd_394606-43501-87822-01_0__?productId=3745415
Based on my experience with these lights, we are just on the cusp of these becoming mainstream and common. I've been buying these because they are subsidized, but electronics always gets cheaper over time, and within a couple of years or so LED lights should be cheap enough without subsidy that everyone starts buying them. (Even without the subsidy, they make sense long-term versus incandescent bulbs. If you have incandescent lights, consider LED rather than compact fluorescent.)
P.S. I haven't bought these, but I wish the office where I work would buy them. These are Cree replacement lights for standard fluorescent fixtures. Some companies are making LED lights that are the exact size of a T8 fluorescent bulb, with matching pins; for $60 or $80 or so each bulb, you can replace fluorescents (but you must rewire the fixture to bypass the ballas
I have said it before: with ARM, you can choose from multiple, competing chip vendors, or you can license the ARM technology yourself and make your own chips if you are big enough; with x86, you would be chaining yourself to Intel and hoping they treat you well. So, if low-power x86 is neck and neck with ARM, that's not good enough.
Intel is used to high margins on CPUs, much higher than ARM chip makers collect. Intel won't want to give up on collecting those high margins. If Intel can get the market hooked on their chips, they will then ratchet up the margins just as high as they think they can.
The companies making mobile products know this, and will not lightly tie themselves to Intel. So long as ARM is viable, Intel is fighting an uphill battle.
The i7 3770K has a TDP of 95W.
I know that, at least in the past, Intel used to issue TDP numbers that represented "typical" heat, while AMD used to issue TDP numbers that represented worst-case heat (which is what TDP ought to be IMHO). I have read here on Slashdot that more recently, AMD has started playing those games as well.
But according to NordicHardware, in this case Intel is under-promising and over-delivering, and the chips really do dissipate only 77W despite being rated for 95W. (But how did they measure that? Is this a "typical" 77W? I guess it's not that hard to run a benchmark test that should hammer the chip and get a worst-case number that way.)
Curiously the AMD processors tend to stack up better on the Linux benchmark suites.
This is probably because Linux benchmarks were compiled with GCC or Clang rather than the Intel compiler. The Intel compiler deliberately generates code that makes the compiled code run poorly on non-Intel processors. The code checks the CPU ID, and the code has two major branches: the good path, which Intel chips get to run, and the poor path, which other chips run.
http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
The irony is that Intel, by investing heavily in fab technology, is about two generations ahead of everyone else, so they can make faster and/or lower-power parts than everyone else. This means they could be competing fairly and win.
But because Intel does evil things like making their compiler sabotage their competition, I refuse to buy Intel. They have lost my business. They don't care of course, because there aren't many like me who are paying attention and care enough to change their buying habits.
If you want the fastest possible desktop computer, pay the big bucks for a top-of-the-line i7 system. But if you merely want a very fast desktop computer that can play all the games, an AMD will do quite well, and will cost a bit less. So giving up Intel isn't a hard thing to do, really.
Wow, thank you for the fact check. It just goes to show that subjective memories aren't the best guides. I was sure that the gap between 2.3 and 4.0 was much longer than ten months! This is probably because I pay more attention to available devices than to software release dates.
The changes between Gingerbread and ICS were big, and the rollout took quite a while for pretty much all brands of phone. Once a phone company successfully adopted ICS, it must not have been nearly as hard to upgrade to Jelly Bean, because updates came faster.
Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" was the newest phone OS for a long time, because it was followed by Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" which was only for tablets. A whole bunch of phones shipped with Gingerbread.
After a long time Google released Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" and then, after a much shorter time, Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean". ICS was a big enough change that the phone companies were a bit slow to roll it out, with many phones shipping with Gingerbread and a promise that ICS would be provided as an update. Early adopters made an effort to get new phones, but most people kept on using their existing phones (which after all still worked).
Thus I would expect Gingerbread to still be a large chunk of the Android phones in current use, with ICS or Jelly Bean as an ever-growing segment. I've seen articles claiming that the large amount of Gingerbread still in use is a "problem" or a "failure" but I don't see it that way.
At this point, new phones no longer come with Gingerbread so over time the old phones will be replaced with ICS or Jelly Bean.
I don't think we can learn anything useful about the merits or weaknesses of Android 2.x versus Android 4.x by looking at market share. It's almost purely related to what was available and when. Early adopters always want the newest, other users mostly just buy a new phone when they need one and take whatever system the phone is running.
But I will say that there is no way the Galaxy SIII would be as popular as it is if it were saddled with Gingerbread.
A Realistic Plan for World Peace
a.k.a
Nuke the Moon
http://www.imao.us/docs/NukeTheMoon.htm
why would any "enthusiast" go for an ARM CPU with about one tenth of the power a current Intel CPU has? I call this story b/s.
You could try reading the fine article. If you did so you would learn that he is talking about overclocking enthusiasts, who are now having fun overclocking ARM chips. He linked an article about Android running at 3.0 GHz (on an OMAP chip rated for about 1 GHz).
Why will overclocking desktop chips end? From TFA:
Overclocking first got everyone's attention when a 300 MHz Intel CPU was easily overclockable to 450 MHz. That was a really significant overclock; a cheap part, stable when overclocked, and a huge performance boost. It is harder to get excited about overclocking some recent CPU chip from 3.2 GHz to 3.3 GHz. But oh hey, some guys have overclocked an ARM chip from 1.5 GHz to 3.0 GHz... does the story still sound like "b/s" to you?
Also, the quoted section says that "any headroom will have been screened out at the fab" implying that there won't be any overclocking potential in the new chips. I don't quite understand exactly how that will work, however. The reason overclocking works is that CPUs at high clock rates cost more, which means fewer are needed at the highest clock rates; yet the lower-cost slower CPUs are basically the same silicon, just not guaranteed at the higher speed. In other words there is a supply of chips capable of higher speeds, being sold more cheaply as a lower-speed part. How does improved screening change this situation? Unless Intel has some way of making the chip yields come out to exactly the number of fast chips they need, it seems like there will always be a chance to find a chip that could have been in a more expensive bin. It hardly seems likely that Intel will just shred chips that overperform their bins!
Now, Intel could be implementing actual anti-overclocking measures, but that's not how I interpreted the quoted text, so as I said I don't quite understand.
But also some stuff we do: XMLHTTP requests (now AJAX) and iframes.
I'm not a MSFT fanboi, but credit where it's due... in tune with the rest of your post.
Good points. I agree.
MS typically makes shitty clones of popular products.
That oversimplifies the situation to the point of not being a useful statement.
Windows 3.11 was an ugly clone and copy of the Mac.
No, both the Mac and Windows were attempts to make something similar to the Xerox GUI system (that both Jobs and Gates had seen). And in those wild and woolly early days there was a lot of cross-pollination between the Windows and Mac worlds.
At the time, the Mac was hands-down more beautiful, more elegant, and more polished. Windows 3.x was partially burdened by a bunch of GUI conventions invented by IBM called "CUA" (Common User Access); this is why the shortcut for "save file" was not Ctrl+S, but rather Shift+F12 or something like that.
I'm sure there is stuff in Windows that was on the Mac first, but it is hardly accurate to say that Windows 3.x was a "clone" of the Mac. Heck, I think it was 1987 before Mac OS could even do color, and Windows was full color all along. Windows always had menus on each window, Mac always had a top-of-screen menu bar. All sorts of differences.
Netbios was their poor attempt of copying VMS networking technologies.
I don't know anything about this so I will take your word for it.
Word was a copy of Wordperfect.
Good grief, no! Where are you getting this? Word was originally released with the so-called "multitool" interface, a weird sort of menu system. WordPerfect was designed to be used mostly via the function keys (and everyone had little function key overlays to remind them what Shift+Control+Alt+F9 did and all the others). WordPerfect used embedded codes and had a "reveal codes" command; Word used properties that were attached to characters, paragraphs, sections, or styles.
Here's a primary reference: My mission: write the world's first wordprocessor with a spreadsheet user-interface. It took five years to repair the damage.
Word for Windows was available before there ever was a WordPerfect for Windows, so I don't think your claim makes sense in the GUI world either.
Excel was bought and was a cheap clone of Lotus.
Just as Word evolved from the "multitool" version of Word, Excel evolved from Multiplan, Microsoft's first spreadsheet. Per Wikipedia, Multiplan was first sold in 1982, and Lotus 1-2-3 came out in 1983. Excel was not bought; you are mistaken on that point.
Multiplan and Excel were nothing like Lotus 1-2-3; Borland tried making a menu-compatible spreadsheet that actually was like 1-2-3, and got sued.
IE a buggy clone of Netscape etc.
Microsoft licensed a browser called Spyglass Mosaic and customized that into IE 1.0. Spyglass Mosaic was sort of based on NCSA Mosaic, the first popular web browser ever. In no sense can either Mosaic be considered a clone of Netscape, given that Netscape 1.0 was also based upon NCSA Mosaic!
Probably as IE evolved, it copied stuff from other browsers. That happens. IE also pioneered stuff, a lot of stuff we don't really want (remember ActiveX?).
Let me rephrase and see if that helps you understand my point.
MATE is a fork of GNOME 2.x. It should work just as well as GNOME 2.x ever did (barring bugs). But people have moved on from writing to the GNOME 2.x API; the new apps are written to the GNOME 3.x API.
Well okay then, just install the GNOME 3.x libraries alongside MATE and run the new apps. That will work, at least for now. But if the apps feature integration features with the desktop environment, they won't work with a GNOME 2.x flavored environment (i.e. MATE).
Well okay then, MATE isn't really a frozen fork, it's being developed; how about porting it to the GNOME 3.x world? Well, that would be a huge amount of work. And the longer the GNOME guys keep adding features to GNOME 3.x, the wider the gap becomes and even more work to bridge that gap.
But wait, the GNOME 3.x guys made it possible to write plugins and such and adapt the GNOME 3.x desktop... if you did that, you could make something that works just like GNOME 2.x, but is native GNOME 3.x, so it would naturally inherit the changes to GNOME as it evolves. That sounds like a nice future-proof solution. Okay, that's Cinnamon.
So if you want a smoothly polished desktop now you can run MATE now, and you have the option of transitioning to Cinnamon later if MATE becomes too outdated. If you want to run nothing but GNOME 3.x programs and you want a pure GNOME 3.x desktop, you can run Cinnamon right now; it's not as polished but it does work well.
I hope this clears things up for you. I do understand that MATE is being developed, but I believe it will never seamlessly integrate with GNOME 3.x technology, and I think that once Cinnamon becomes smooth and polished, MATE development may slow or cease. But I am very glad that they took the trouble to build MATE for us; it's a perfectly good solution for at least the near to middle term, and possibly forever.
I've used both, and I would rather use either one than use GNOME Shell or Unity.