The technology is neat, but the technology can't actually win the race. It's still about the riders.
Lance has a cool bike, but all the Tour de France riders have good bikes. There is a limit to how much benefit you can get with a better bike, and all the tour guys have bikes that are close to this limit.
The slowest of the Tour riders, on a bad day, could ride me into the ground on a 20-year-old piece-of-junk bike, even if I were on my good bike. Sure I could climb Alpe d'Huez, but it would take me at least a couple of hours, and the Tour guys race up it in 40 minutes or so, as just part of a 5 or 6 hour day of racing!
The most important tech to Lance is the tech he uses in training. He trains and trains. They measure his power output in Watts, how many Calories he burns, how much wind drag he has on his time trial bike. It's his training that will win the race, his training and good tactics (both his and his team director, Johan Bruyneel).
P.S. The Tour rules have a lower limit on how much a bike can weigh. I think this is a good idea. There is a point at which "light" becomes "stupid light"; where the too-light components aren't strong enough and things start to break. The minimum weight will keep the bikes from getting into a stupid-light arms race.
The Tour rules also now require helmets, and the helmets have to actually be able to protect the riders' heads. Last year riders wore lightweight helmets for the time trial stages, and the lightweight helmets were basically just streamlined shells that wouldn't protect them at all in a crash. This year even the time trial helmets are required to meet crash safety standards. I'm in favor of the idea.
Lance and his guys have incredible focus on just one thing: Lance finishes the race with the fastest time. They have been doing an excellent job of tracking that goal.
They don't waste energy trying to win stages needlessly, but when riding hard will give them an advantage, they do it (e.g. stage 3, they rode hard and fast to stay ahead of the crashes expected on the cobblestones). When Lance got the yellow jersey after stage 4, they let everyone know he wouldn't work to defend it because he didn't need it that early, and they let it go.
Part of winning the Tour de France is simply enduring the abuse. If you burn yourself out on one stage, you may find yourself in trouble on the next stage. That's okay if all you care about is winning one stage, but Lance absolutely needs to avoid burning himself out. He needs to out-ride everyone, and part of that is not wasting energy. Use it when you need it, and when you don't need it, save it for later.
On flat road stages, it's basically impossible for any of the GC contenders (Lance, Jan, Tyler, etc.) to gain any significant time advantage. The peloton is faster than any single bicyclist. Since the race is structured this year with a whole bunch of flat road stages up front, we have been watching Lance and his guys spend their time riding mostly defensively. That's okay.
If you look at the race standings, Lance seems far from a win. But the guys ahead of him will lose big time in the mountains! And his real rivals, the guys he worries about (Jan, Tyler, etc.) are all behind him on time. Jan is almost a minute behind him.
Lance's big chances to gain a time advantage are time trial stages and mountain stages. When he hits those stages, expect him to really pour on the effort. But it's just not true that he's slacking now.
what the hell is the name of the thing that connects the crank arms?
The bottom bracket, which has a shell containing some bearings and a spindle. If that doesn't answer your question, try googling for "bottom bracket parts" or some such.
Lance's team came in a full minute ahead of the second-place team. Under the old rules, Lance and his guys would all have picked up over a minute of advantage compared to Jan Ullrich and his team. Under the new rules, the second-place team was scored as having come in exactly 20 seconds behind Lance's team, thus wiping out about 40 seconds of advantage for Lance and his guys.
Last year, Jan wanted to make up time on the last time trial, but the sloppy weather did him in. He slid out on a turn and thus lost 8-10 seconds; there was no way he could make up enough time to win. (One of the OLN commentators said that Lance slowed to 5 MPH on the part where Jan slid out, and his rear wheel still skidded a bit. Dangerous! All Lance had to do was ride very carefully and not crash, to secure the win... he already had a time advantage.)
On flat road stages, there is no way for Lance to get a time advantage on Jan, or for Jan to get an advantage on Lance. If either of them gets in a breakaway, the peloton will reel them in immediately. They both know it. Jan didn't "do nothing" during the last few days; he did what he could, which wasn't enough to pull out the win.
So don't run "Linux" applications. Pick a desktop -- GNOME, or KDE -- and run applications designed for that desktop.
There are some admin tasks that still require CLI use, but I think even that will be sorted before a year or two have gone by. Certainly you can avoid it now if you take a computer that is well-supported by Linux, equip it with all hardware that is well-supported by Linux, and then run a distro with good automatic updates. You won't need to touch the command line; everything will be automatic.
You will still have some problems, because you always will. With Windows you have problems too, but they are different problems. I happen to prefer the Linux problems to the Windows ones but you may disagree.
I don't use KDE, and I'm not an expert, but I don't believe Konqueror has the same horrible security issues as IE.
IE has tentacles all through your system. You can use IE to install software automatically onto your system (and you do use IE to install software every time you run Windows Update). I don't think Konq has special install privileges in KDE. I'll bet that even if it does, you will be prompted for a root password every time it tries to install something (compare with Windows XP, where by default everyone is an Administrator).
The problem with switching people over to Linux is that Linux is largely unusable by 99% of the population.
Oh, nonsense.
Set up a nice GNOME desktop, or a KDE desktop if that is your preference, and set it up with all modern apps (GNOME apps for GNOME, or KDE apps for KDE). It's just as usable as a Windows desktop.
I moved my wife onto Linux with a GNOME desktop, and all the retraining I did was to show her:
0) pull down "Applications" instead of clicking on the "Start" menu
1) how to mount a CD (you don't have to do that in Windows, and GNOME has an update that now allows you to avoid needing to do that)
2) how to use the features she never had before (e.g. 4 virtual desktops).
We only spent about ten minutes going over this stuff, and she was fine using GNOME after that. She still comes to me from time to time with issues that wouldn't be a problem under Windows (e.g. PDFs never seem to do the right thing in her web browser) but she never gets spyware, her computer doesn't need to be rebooted daily anymore, and she's content.
When you first set up your system, it configures your/etc/apt/sources.list file to point to a repository. If all else fails, you can set it for the main, default server. I have mine set to my old university, which is a Debian mirror.
As for nVidia drivers, if you want the actual nVidia drivers you do need to do what you described.
(Actually, the way I shut down X is to kill the "gdm" process. I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to a text console, login as root, and type "killall gdm". On my system, the gdm process starts up X, so when that shuts down it shuts down X too. On your system you might be using xdm, or you might be using the KDE equivalent kdm, or you might even be launching X directly, in which case you could do "killall X".)
But if you were using the FOSS drivers, the "nv" drivers that are part of XFree86, then apt-get can install them for you and you don't have to manually shutdown X or anything like that. nVidia could provide a.deb file that would Do The Right Thing with apt-get for you, but they don't want to do that extra work; they want to release one package for all flavors of Linux. I don't really blame them, even though I wish they would support my favorite distro better.
steveha
Re:Not ONLY Faster, lighter, but also IE-compatibl
on
Browser Wars 2004
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· Score: 1
Any new Microsoft browser will have to retain backward compatibility or people won't bother to use it.
True. But I don't think most people would consider broken CSS and other standards to be "features" with which backward compatibility is important.
And we have a unique opportunity here: since there are so many horrible, critical, awful security flaws in IE, people need to upgrade. If MS can fix the standards while they fix the security holes, they can hit people with the same update.
Then webmasters could, in good conscience, detect an old version of IE and pop up a "you NEED to upgrade your browser NOW!" rather than working to make their web site render correctly on old IEs.
MS may not care enough about this, though. MS used to care very much that IE be the most popular browser, but I'm not sure they still care. If they do care, though, fixing the standards as well as the security holes would be their best way to stave off defections from IE to Firefox.
steveha
Re:Not ONLY Faster, lighter, but also IE-compatibl
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 3, Informative
while MS does not respect W3C standards, the only way to compete with IE is being able to render the pages exactly like IE does.
The jargon for this: "bug-compatible". You want to make a browser that is so compatible with IE that it's even broken in the same ways, so that pages render the same.
The problem with this is that you are trying to shoot a moving target. If the spec is "do whatever IE does", then you spend all your time tracking changes to IE. (Microsoft has been letting dust pile up on IE, but that's about to change anyway. And any strategy that relies on Microsoft to just lie back and not interfere is doomed.)
IE has been ruling the world, but there are several cracks in its armor.
0) Mac users have Safari, and they will scream at any web site that breaks it. They tend to be rather vocal. Alas they are a small group as a percentage, but they are vocal out of proportion. Safari has much better standards compliance than IE, so this is pressure in the right direction.
1) IE has so many security holes that people are actually getting annoyed at it. As long as IE "just works" it meets the Good Enough test and people will continue to use it. But now that people are getting more annoyed with it, browsers like Firefox get their chance. I just tonight put Firefox on a friend's computer, and he's so fed up with spyware that he was eager to switch.
Rather than testing IE so much you understand it better than Microsoft does, it would be better to just insist on web browsers that actually follow the standards. Besides, testing IE and coding bug-compatible features aren't as much fun as adding cool new stuff to Mozilla. Unless you are volunteering to lead the IE cloning effort, there probably won't be many people working on this.
suggesting that they just use OpenSSL for free rather than paying a commercial supplier for it is an "out of the box move" that "took guts"?
Yes.
We are talking about a huge bureaucracy here, one that has procedures established. These guys bucked the procedures and did something different, rather than doing the safe and expected thing. I can well believe that this took guts.
Given the fact that I have one computer that can dual-boot into Windows, you extrapolated this elaborate fantasy about what I think, what I do, who I am. Grow up.
Hey, check this out: the computer I'm using to type this has a GeForce2 card, and it uses the nv drivers. It even uses the DFSG special extra-free edition of Xfree86 4.3! This computer has exactly one piece of proprietary software on it, the Linux Flash player plugin. Now, tell me all about myself some more! Will Linux ever be for me?
Do you really think NVIDIA's staff are the only people in the world who do cutting edge graphics programming?
No, and I never said so, either. It's simply true that their drivers are the best around; go read what John Carmack has to say about them. From what I've read, nVidia's hardware isn't quite as good as ATI's; they make up the difference with the drivers. And nVidia spent real money paying real people to write and debug those drivers. They don't want to just give that away, and that's fine with me.
I'll bet that the FOSS drivers for the Radeon 9600 will be good enough to play Unreal Tournament 2004 within a year or two, and I'm looking forward to switching. I'd just as soon play the game between now and then, though.
Methinks the only real reason you'd want to keep your drivers closed off is because you're artificially handicapping your hardware
Um, no.
0) nVidia might not own all the code they compile into their drivers. The license they have the code under might permit binary distribution, but not source.
1) nVidia's drivers contain large amounts of software that is better than any of their competition. They spent money developing this, and they want to milk the competitive edge it gives them. And that is okay.
2) nVidia has more control this way. The Firefox guys are holding control over their cool icons, because they don't want the cool icons slapped onto broken code; only Mozilla-official builds of Firefox get the cool icons. nVidia might want to be sure that no one runs with broken drivers, then thinks nVidia cards are all junk, when in reality some guy made a few "improvements" that broke things, and distributed the changed version anyway.
3) Other reasons are possible. "the only real reason" my left foot.
Personally, I would much much rather have FOSS drivers. But even more than that, I want drivers that work. I switched from a GeForce 4600 to a Radeon 9600 XT, and even though the Radeon is a much better card, it runs slower under Linux than the older GeForce. It's the drivers. ATI's Linux drivers for the 9600 XT are lame. I actually boot into Windows to play Unreal Tournament 2004, because the performance is so much better under Windows. When I had an nVidia card, my Linux 3D gaming performance was just fine.
If nVidia would make a programmable-shaders card that doesn't double as a space heater, I would probably buy it and replace the Radeon. I know that the Unreal Tournament guys check the server stats, and I want to be "voting" for Linux gaming, so I want them to see me running Linux when the check stats on the servers I have been visiting.
Yes, it is. And it has a nice graphical thingy that lets you see visually which label you have selected. And it handles all formats of labels that gLabels can deal with.
I recently used it to mass-print a bunch of name badges on name badge stock in my laser printer.
I have also used it for labels; you can print just a few labels from a sheet, by specifying which label to start printing upon. So, if you have a sheet of labels, and you have used up the first 11, you can tell gLabels to start printing labels on the 12th label on the sheet. It's slick.
Finally, this is just the thing for address labels on a dedicated mini-label printer. I don't have that set up yet, but I intend to soon.
Someone asked why you can't just use OpenOffice for your labels; I want to have OpenOffice print by default to my laser printer, and gLabels by default print to the mini labels-only printer. I wouldn't object to OpenOffice knowing how to pass labels off to the mini-label printer too, of course.
Before - "sudo tar xvzf" the downloaded file, run./firefox/firefox
And you lose most people at "sudo".
Just how is the "after" step simpler?
Because it allows the sysadmin to double-click on a binary file. And presumably it will do smart things like migrating a previous install, instead of just overwriting a previous install and possibly not working.
Like you, I don't spend a lot of time looking at a root X session. You should be able to run a graphical sudo program, though, like gnomesu.
But I don't really care about the graphical installer because I run Debian. With Debian, this is how the install worked before, and how it works now:
apt-get install mozilla-firefox
That's pretty easy for me. Depending on what distro you use, there might be apt-get, yum, etc. for you to install Firefox.
Actually, I would prefer a clear distinction between my word processor and the net-enabled application space. I don't want a risk that anything I write may possibly be remotely seen, and I don't want anything from the Net to surreptitiously enter my document.
So to think that all traditional software is dead is wrong, it too can become net enabled.
I didn't ever say "dead". But I do predict that the current profit margins Microsoft is making on Office will not be sustainable.
Note that Microsoft may very well be the first company to make a net-enabled word processor! Most likely you will need to pay a subscription to keep it going. Microsoft really likes getting money, and getting money on a predictable, regualr basis is even better. MS Office may become cheaper, with net-enabled features to make up the difference plus more profit.
One point in the article I found very interesting: Net software is different from simple applications. It's an important shift.
Take an old word processor; put it on a compatible computer and fire it up. It still works to process words.
Take an old Internet system (such as an old search engine). It's useless unless it contains up-to-date data, which means continual upkeep, and if it's old perhaps there's no one left who remembers how to tend it. A system like Google can include input from the rest of the Web automatically, which helps it stay up to date, but it's useless in isolation. And feedback systems in eBay and Amazon are very important factors in their success.
We will still need word processors and such in the future, but they won't be as important as they have been in the past. The value of word processors and similar software will plummet towards zero, as the free programs like OpenOffice get better and are more accepted; but Google, not even ten years old yet, is essential and growing.
General-purpose software like word processors will be a commodity. Custom apps for business will remain as a niche. Net-enabled software will be where the real value will lie.
Tim O'Reilly is right more than he is wrong, though. IBM did choose to make the PC open. The early PCs from IBM actually came with schematics! You could easily get the source for the BIOS! (Not useful for cloning a PC since the BIOS was still under a proprietary license.) IBM made no effort to exclude anyone from making accessories for the PC, or software for it.
It's widely believed that IBM did these things because it didn't take PCs very seriously; it didn't view PCs as a threat to its other lines of business. Ironically, it was the very openness of IBM's PCs that led to them demolishing so much of IBM's old lines of business.
The Apple II came with a schematic and with code listings. It seems probable that IBM was deliberately doing things the same way the Apple guys did things, hoping to duplicate the success with a similar recipe. But an open platform with the IBM brand turned out to be a huge success, far beyond what IBM ever expected.
P.S. I have no special inside knowledge of what was going on at IBM, but there are a few things I consider interesting that may indicate what IBM was worried about.
The original PC keyboard was painful for typing; in particular it was hard to hit the right shift key. I believe this was just to help ensure that IBM's word processors (single-task computers, that did nothing but word processing) were not put out of business by the PC. Of course, after-market keyboards came out with saner key arrangements, word processing software became popular, and dedicated word-processor boxes were in fact put out of business by the PC.
The original IBM AT came with a socketed clock chip, which ran the AT at 6 MHz. But the schematic clearly showed that the system was designed to run at 8 MHz. People replaced the socketed crystal and pushed their ATs to 8 MHz, and found they ran perfectly stable. (Overclocking!) I believe this was because IBM's minicomputer group was starting to worry about PCs displacing IBM's lower-end minis. Of course, clones of the AT came out with faster and faster 286 chips.
When the 386 came out, everyone waited for IBM to release a PC with a 386. Months went by. Finally Compaq, in a bold move, made a Compaq AT clone that had a 386 instead of a 286, and the rest is history. IBM had abandoned its leadership role, and never reclaimed it. I believe that IBM's minicomputer group was seriously worried about 386-based PCs, and IBM couldn't come to the decision to launch a 386-based computer in time to be first. (IBM was the leader only as long as it was leading. When it tried to lead the customers to a place they didn't want to go -- the proprietary, locked-down PS/2 computers -- the customers didn't follow.)
Okay, I messed up. It turns out that the copy-protected CDs still contain audio; they just also contain a data section that behaves as described. If you click on the link in the article (this one), you will see that Macrovision promises it will play on an ordinary CD player.
That means this DRM is lamer than lame, because all you need is decent ripping software that can ignore the data section of the CD, and you can do whatever you want with the audio files on the CD.
So this means that if you use a CD-ROM as a plain old CD player, you would be able to listen to even a Europe-release Beastie Boys CD. I apologize for the error.
Well, if you read the article, it explains that in the US and the UK the CDs are actual, ordinary CDs. But in Europe, the CDs are not audio CDs, but special DRM CDs. The special DRM CDs, under Windows and Mac, autoplay a special player, that then plays encrypted Windows Media Audio files.
So yes, I'm saying that ordinary boombox CD players can't play these disks, unless the article was wrong.
Last time I was in Japan, I saw some CDs that worked this way. They were clearly labeled "WILL NOT PLAY IN A CD PLAYER" in English and Japanese (not that I could actually read the Japanese).
P.S. The article didn't say, but I wonder whether the special DRM player will refuse to work unless you have a "Secure Audio Path" on your computer. That would prevent you from installing an "audio driver" that actually takes the audio data and writes it to your hard disk.
This will work with audio CDs. It will not work with the DRM CDs, which are data CDs that run some kind of DRM player when you insert them on a Mac or a Windows PC.
Thus, this trick will not work with the Beastie Boys CD. It doesn't do anything an ordinary CD player doesn't do.
Perhaps you should build a system with an Athlon, but just underclock and undervolt the heck out of it. In previous Slashdot discussions of the C3, I have read claims that an Athlon running at around 600 MHz is drastically more powerful than a C3 running at full speed.
If you want to try this, I suggest you use a Barton core Athlon. If you want to use an Intel chip, the best would be if you could get a Pentium M somehow (the laptop CPU) but maybe if you could find a 130 nm version of the Pentium 4 it would be okay. But Athlons should be better for an underclocking project because they get more done per clock cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
The technology is neat, but the technology can't actually win the race. It's still about the riders.
Lance has a cool bike, but all the Tour de France riders have good bikes. There is a limit to how much benefit you can get with a better bike, and all the tour guys have bikes that are close to this limit.
The slowest of the Tour riders, on a bad day, could ride me into the ground on a 20-year-old piece-of-junk bike, even if I were on my good bike. Sure I could climb Alpe d'Huez, but it would take me at least a couple of hours, and the Tour guys race up it in 40 minutes or so, as just part of a 5 or 6 hour day of racing!
The most important tech to Lance is the tech he uses in training. He trains and trains. They measure his power output in Watts, how many Calories he burns, how much wind drag he has on his time trial bike. It's his training that will win the race, his training and good tactics (both his and his team director, Johan Bruyneel).
P.S. The Tour rules have a lower limit on how much a bike can weigh. I think this is a good idea. There is a point at which "light" becomes "stupid light"; where the too-light components aren't strong enough and things start to break. The minimum weight will keep the bikes from getting into a stupid-light arms race.
The Tour rules also now require helmets, and the helmets have to actually be able to protect the riders' heads. Last year riders wore lightweight helmets for the time trial stages, and the lightweight helmets were basically just streamlined shells that wouldn't protect them at all in a crash. This year even the time trial helmets are required to meet crash safety standards. I'm in favor of the idea.
steveha
Has Lance started trying yet? Um, yes.
Lance and his guys have incredible focus on just one thing: Lance finishes the race with the fastest time. They have been doing an excellent job of tracking that goal.
They don't waste energy trying to win stages needlessly, but when riding hard will give them an advantage, they do it (e.g. stage 3, they rode hard and fast to stay ahead of the crashes expected on the cobblestones). When Lance got the yellow jersey after stage 4, they let everyone know he wouldn't work to defend it because he didn't need it that early, and they let it go.
Part of winning the Tour de France is simply enduring the abuse. If you burn yourself out on one stage, you may find yourself in trouble on the next stage. That's okay if all you care about is winning one stage, but Lance absolutely needs to avoid burning himself out. He needs to out-ride everyone, and part of that is not wasting energy. Use it when you need it, and when you don't need it, save it for later.
On flat road stages, it's basically impossible for any of the GC contenders (Lance, Jan, Tyler, etc.) to gain any significant time advantage. The peloton is faster than any single bicyclist. Since the race is structured this year with a whole bunch of flat road stages up front, we have been watching Lance and his guys spend their time riding mostly defensively. That's okay.
If you look at the race standings, Lance seems far from a win. But the guys ahead of him will lose big time in the mountains! And his real rivals, the guys he worries about (Jan, Tyler, etc.) are all behind him on time. Jan is almost a minute behind him.
Lance's big chances to gain a time advantage are time trial stages and mountain stages. When he hits those stages, expect him to really pour on the effort. But it's just not true that he's slacking now.
what the hell is the name of the thing that connects the crank arms?
The bottom bracket, which has a shell containing some bearings and a spindle. If that doesn't answer your question, try googling for "bottom bracket parts" or some such.
steveha
Lance's team came in a full minute ahead of the second-place team. Under the old rules, Lance and his guys would all have picked up over a minute of advantage compared to Jan Ullrich and his team. Under the new rules, the second-place team was scored as having come in exactly 20 seconds behind Lance's team, thus wiping out about 40 seconds of advantage for Lance and his guys.
steveha
About Jan Ullrich:
Last year, Jan wanted to make up time on the last time trial, but the sloppy weather did him in. He slid out on a turn and thus lost 8-10 seconds; there was no way he could make up enough time to win. (One of the OLN commentators said that Lance slowed to 5 MPH on the part where Jan slid out, and his rear wheel still skidded a bit. Dangerous! All Lance had to do was ride very carefully and not crash, to secure the win... he already had a time advantage.)
On flat road stages, there is no way for Lance to get a time advantage on Jan, or for Jan to get an advantage on Lance. If either of them gets in a breakaway, the peloton will reel them in immediately. They both know it. Jan didn't "do nothing" during the last few days; he did what he could, which wasn't enough to pull out the win.
steveha
So don't run "Linux" applications. Pick a desktop -- GNOME, or KDE -- and run applications designed for that desktop.
There are some admin tasks that still require CLI use, but I think even that will be sorted before a year or two have gone by. Certainly you can avoid it now if you take a computer that is well-supported by Linux, equip it with all hardware that is well-supported by Linux, and then run a distro with good automatic updates. You won't need to touch the command line; everything will be automatic.
You will still have some problems, because you always will. With Windows you have problems too, but they are different problems. I happen to prefer the Linux problems to the Windows ones but you may disagree.
steveha
I don't use KDE, and I'm not an expert, but I don't believe Konqueror has the same horrible security issues as IE.
IE has tentacles all through your system. You can use IE to install software automatically onto your system (and you do use IE to install software every time you run Windows Update). I don't think Konq has special install privileges in KDE. I'll bet that even if it does, you will be prompted for a root password every time it tries to install something (compare with Windows XP, where by default everyone is an Administrator).
steveha
The problem with switching people over to Linux is that Linux is largely unusable by 99% of the population.
Oh, nonsense.
Set up a nice GNOME desktop, or a KDE desktop if that is your preference, and set it up with all modern apps (GNOME apps for GNOME, or KDE apps for KDE). It's just as usable as a Windows desktop.
I moved my wife onto Linux with a GNOME desktop, and all the retraining I did was to show her:
0) pull down "Applications" instead of clicking on the "Start" menu
1) how to mount a CD (you don't have to do that in Windows, and GNOME has an update that now allows you to avoid needing to do that)
2) how to use the features she never had before (e.g. 4 virtual desktops).
We only spent about ten minutes going over this stuff, and she was fine using GNOME after that. She still comes to me from time to time with issues that wouldn't be a problem under Windows (e.g. PDFs never seem to do the right thing in her web browser) but she never gets spyware, her computer doesn't need to be rebooted daily anymore, and she's content.
steveha
When you first set up your system, it configures your /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to a repository. If all else fails, you can set it for the main, default server. I have mine set to my old university, which is a Debian mirror.
.deb file that would Do The Right Thing with apt-get for you, but they don't want to do that extra work; they want to release one package for all flavors of Linux. I don't really blame them, even though I wish they would support my favorite distro better.
As for nVidia drivers, if you want the actual nVidia drivers you do need to do what you described.
(Actually, the way I shut down X is to kill the "gdm" process. I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to a text console, login as root, and type "killall gdm". On my system, the gdm process starts up X, so when that shuts down it shuts down X too. On your system you might be using xdm, or you might be using the KDE equivalent kdm, or you might even be launching X directly, in which case you could do "killall X".)
But if you were using the FOSS drivers, the "nv" drivers that are part of XFree86, then apt-get can install them for you and you don't have to manually shutdown X or anything like that. nVidia could provide a
steveha
Any new Microsoft browser will have to retain backward compatibility or people won't bother to use it.
True. But I don't think most people would consider broken CSS and other standards to be "features" with which backward compatibility is important.
And we have a unique opportunity here: since there are so many horrible, critical, awful security flaws in IE, people need to upgrade. If MS can fix the standards while they fix the security holes, they can hit people with the same update.
Then webmasters could, in good conscience, detect an old version of IE and pop up a "you NEED to upgrade your browser NOW!" rather than working to make their web site render correctly on old IEs.
MS may not care enough about this, though. MS used to care very much that IE be the most popular browser, but I'm not sure they still care. If they do care, though, fixing the standards as well as the security holes would be their best way to stave off defections from IE to Firefox.
steveha
while MS does not respect W3C standards, the only way to compete with IE is being able to render the pages exactly like IE does.
The jargon for this: "bug-compatible". You want to make a browser that is so compatible with IE that it's even broken in the same ways, so that pages render the same.
The problem with this is that you are trying to shoot a moving target. If the spec is "do whatever IE does", then you spend all your time tracking changes to IE. (Microsoft has been letting dust pile up on IE, but that's about to change anyway. And any strategy that relies on Microsoft to just lie back and not interfere is doomed.)
IE has been ruling the world, but there are several cracks in its armor.
0) Mac users have Safari, and they will scream at any web site that breaks it. They tend to be rather vocal. Alas they are a small group as a percentage, but they are vocal out of proportion. Safari has much better standards compliance than IE, so this is pressure in the right direction.
1) IE has so many security holes that people are actually getting annoyed at it. As long as IE "just works" it meets the Good Enough test and people will continue to use it. But now that people are getting more annoyed with it, browsers like Firefox get their chance. I just tonight put Firefox on a friend's computer, and he's so fed up with spyware that he was eager to switch.
Rather than testing IE so much you understand it better than Microsoft does, it would be better to just insist on web browsers that actually follow the standards. Besides, testing IE and coding bug-compatible features aren't as much fun as adding cool new stuff to Mozilla. Unless you are volunteering to lead the IE cloning effort, there probably won't be many people working on this.
steveha
suggesting that they just use OpenSSL for free rather than paying a commercial supplier for it is an "out of the box move" that "took guts"?
Yes.
We are talking about a huge bureaucracy here, one that has procedures established. These guys bucked the procedures and did something different, rather than doing the safe and expected thing. I can well believe that this took guts.
steveha
Are you a troll, or just an arrogant elitist?
Given the fact that I have one computer that can dual-boot into Windows, you extrapolated this elaborate fantasy about what I think, what I do, who I am. Grow up.
Hey, check this out: the computer I'm using to type this has a GeForce2 card, and it uses the nv drivers. It even uses the DFSG special extra-free edition of Xfree86 4.3! This computer has exactly one piece of proprietary software on it, the Linux Flash player plugin. Now, tell me all about myself some more! Will Linux ever be for me?
Do you really think NVIDIA's staff are the only people in the world who do cutting edge graphics programming?
No, and I never said so, either. It's simply true that their drivers are the best around; go read what John Carmack has to say about them. From what I've read, nVidia's hardware isn't quite as good as ATI's; they make up the difference with the drivers. And nVidia spent real money paying real people to write and debug those drivers. They don't want to just give that away, and that's fine with me.
I'll bet that the FOSS drivers for the Radeon 9600 will be good enough to play Unreal Tournament 2004 within a year or two, and I'm looking forward to switching. I'd just as soon play the game between now and then, though.
steveha
Methinks the only real reason you'd want to keep your drivers closed off is because you're artificially handicapping your hardware
Um, no.
0) nVidia might not own all the code they compile into their drivers. The license they have the code under might permit binary distribution, but not source.
1) nVidia's drivers contain large amounts of software that is better than any of their competition. They spent money developing this, and they want to milk the competitive edge it gives them. And that is okay.
2) nVidia has more control this way. The Firefox guys are holding control over their cool icons, because they don't want the cool icons slapped onto broken code; only Mozilla-official builds of Firefox get the cool icons. nVidia might want to be sure that no one runs with broken drivers, then thinks nVidia cards are all junk, when in reality some guy made a few "improvements" that broke things, and distributed the changed version anyway.
3) Other reasons are possible. "the only real reason" my left foot.
Personally, I would much much rather have FOSS drivers. But even more than that, I want drivers that work. I switched from a GeForce 4600 to a Radeon 9600 XT, and even though the Radeon is a much better card, it runs slower under Linux than the older GeForce. It's the drivers. ATI's Linux drivers for the 9600 XT are lame. I actually boot into Windows to play Unreal Tournament 2004, because the performance is so much better under Windows. When I had an nVidia card, my Linux 3D gaming performance was just fine.
If nVidia would make a programmable-shaders card that doesn't double as a space heater, I would probably buy it and replace the Radeon. I know that the Unreal Tournament guys check the server stats, and I want to be "voting" for Linux gaming, so I want them to see me running Linux when the check stats on the servers I have been visiting.
steveha
That's slick?
Yes, it is. And it has a nice graphical thingy that lets you see visually which label you have selected. And it handles all formats of labels that gLabels can deal with.
steveha
I recently used it to mass-print a bunch of name badges on name badge stock in my laser printer.
I have also used it for labels; you can print just a few labels from a sheet, by specifying which label to start printing upon. So, if you have a sheet of labels, and you have used up the first 11, you can tell gLabels to start printing labels on the 12th label on the sheet. It's slick.
Finally, this is just the thing for address labels on a dedicated mini-label printer. I don't have that set up yet, but I intend to soon.
Someone asked why you can't just use OpenOffice for your labels; I want to have OpenOffice print by default to my laser printer, and gLabels by default print to the mini labels-only printer. I wouldn't object to OpenOffice knowing how to pass labels off to the mini-label printer too, of course.
steveha
Before - "sudo tar xvzf" the downloaded file, run ./firefox/firefox
And you lose most people at "sudo".
Just how is the "after" step simpler?
Because it allows the sysadmin to double-click on a binary file. And presumably it will do smart things like migrating a previous install, instead of just overwriting a previous install and possibly not working.
Like you, I don't spend a lot of time looking at a root X session. You should be able to run a graphical sudo program, though, like gnomesu.
But I don't really care about the graphical installer because I run Debian. With Debian, this is how the install worked before, and how it works now:
apt-get install mozilla-firefox
That's pretty easy for me. Depending on what distro you use, there might be apt-get, yum, etc. for you to install Firefox.
steveha
Actually, I would prefer a clear distinction between my word processor and the net-enabled application space. I don't want a risk that anything I write may possibly be remotely seen, and I don't want anything from the Net to surreptitiously enter my document.
So to think that all traditional software is dead is wrong, it too can become net enabled.
I didn't ever say "dead". But I do predict that the current profit margins Microsoft is making on Office will not be sustainable.
Note that Microsoft may very well be the first company to make a net-enabled word processor! Most likely you will need to pay a subscription to keep it going. Microsoft really likes getting money, and getting money on a predictable, regualr basis is even better. MS Office may become cheaper, with net-enabled features to make up the difference plus more profit.
steveha
One point in the article I found very interesting: Net software is different from simple applications. It's an important shift.
Take an old word processor; put it on a compatible computer and fire it up. It still works to process words.
Take an old Internet system (such as an old search engine). It's useless unless it contains up-to-date data, which means continual upkeep, and if it's old perhaps there's no one left who remembers how to tend it. A system like Google can include input from the rest of the Web automatically, which helps it stay up to date, but it's useless in isolation. And feedback systems in eBay and Amazon are very important factors in their success.
We will still need word processors and such in the future, but they won't be as important as they have been in the past. The value of word processors and similar software will plummet towards zero, as the free programs like OpenOffice get better and are more accepted; but Google, not even ten years old yet, is essential and growing.
General-purpose software like word processors will be a commodity. Custom apps for business will remain as a niche. Net-enabled software will be where the real value will lie.
steveha
Tim O'Reilly is right more than he is wrong, though. IBM did choose to make the PC open. The early PCs from IBM actually came with schematics! You could easily get the source for the BIOS! (Not useful for cloning a PC since the BIOS was still under a proprietary license.) IBM made no effort to exclude anyone from making accessories for the PC, or software for it.
It's widely believed that IBM did these things because it didn't take PCs very seriously; it didn't view PCs as a threat to its other lines of business. Ironically, it was the very openness of IBM's PCs that led to them demolishing so much of IBM's old lines of business.
The Apple II came with a schematic and with code listings. It seems probable that IBM was deliberately doing things the same way the Apple guys did things, hoping to duplicate the success with a similar recipe. But an open platform with the IBM brand turned out to be a huge success, far beyond what IBM ever expected.
P.S. I have no special inside knowledge of what was going on at IBM, but there are a few things I consider interesting that may indicate what IBM was worried about.
The original PC keyboard was painful for typing; in particular it was hard to hit the right shift key. I believe this was just to help ensure that IBM's word processors (single-task computers, that did nothing but word processing) were not put out of business by the PC. Of course, after-market keyboards came out with saner key arrangements, word processing software became popular, and dedicated word-processor boxes were in fact put out of business by the PC.
The original IBM AT came with a socketed clock chip, which ran the AT at 6 MHz. But the schematic clearly showed that the system was designed to run at 8 MHz. People replaced the socketed crystal and pushed their ATs to 8 MHz, and found they ran perfectly stable. (Overclocking!) I believe this was because IBM's minicomputer group was starting to worry about PCs displacing IBM's lower-end minis. Of course, clones of the AT came out with faster and faster 286 chips.
When the 386 came out, everyone waited for IBM to release a PC with a 386. Months went by. Finally Compaq, in a bold move, made a Compaq AT clone that had a 386 instead of a 286, and the rest is history. IBM had abandoned its leadership role, and never reclaimed it. I believe that IBM's minicomputer group was seriously worried about 386-based PCs, and IBM couldn't come to the decision to launch a 386-based computer in time to be first. (IBM was the leader only as long as it was leading. When it tried to lead the customers to a place they didn't want to go -- the proprietary, locked-down PS/2 computers -- the customers didn't follow.)
steveha
Okay, I messed up. It turns out that the copy-protected CDs still contain audio; they just also contain a data section that behaves as described. If you click on the link in the article (this one), you will see that Macrovision promises it will play on an ordinary CD player.
That means this DRM is lamer than lame, because all you need is decent ripping software that can ignore the data section of the CD, and you can do whatever you want with the audio files on the CD.
So this means that if you use a CD-ROM as a plain old CD player, you would be able to listen to even a Europe-release Beastie Boys CD. I apologize for the error.
steveha
Well, if you read the article, it explains that in the US and the UK the CDs are actual, ordinary CDs. But in Europe, the CDs are not audio CDs, but special DRM CDs. The special DRM CDs, under Windows and Mac, autoplay a special player, that then plays encrypted Windows Media Audio files.
So yes, I'm saying that ordinary boombox CD players can't play these disks, unless the article was wrong.
Last time I was in Japan, I saw some CDs that worked this way. They were clearly labeled "WILL NOT PLAY IN A CD PLAYER" in English and Japanese (not that I could actually read the Japanese).
P.S. The article didn't say, but I wonder whether the special DRM player will refuse to work unless you have a "Secure Audio Path" on your computer. That would prevent you from installing an "audio driver" that actually takes the audio data and writes it to your hard disk.
MSDN Secure Audio Path page
steveha
This will work with audio CDs. It will not work with the DRM CDs, which are data CDs that run some kind of DRM player when you insert them on a Mac or a Windows PC.
Thus, this trick will not work with the Beastie Boys CD. It doesn't do anything an ordinary CD player doesn't do.
steveha
Perhaps you should build a system with an Athlon, but just underclock and undervolt the heck out of it. In previous Slashdot discussions of the C3, I have read claims that an Athlon running at around 600 MHz is drastically more powerful than a C3 running at full speed.
I did a quick google and found a howto from 2002:
Ultimate Underclock & Undervolt Project
Here's a really cool resource: a list of processors and their electrical and heat numbers.
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm
If you want to try this, I suggest you use a Barton core Athlon. If you want to use an Intel chip, the best would be if you could get a Pentium M somehow (the laptop CPU) but maybe if you could find a 130 nm version of the Pentium 4 it would be okay. But Athlons should be better for an underclocking project because they get more done per clock cycle.
steveha
I have an M10000 motherboard. I consider it a great board for a Linux server.
I built a computer with Linux software RAID, and for a server it's pretty darn quiet.
Maybe it's not what you are looking for in a desktop workstation, but you might like it better if you convert it to a server.
steveha
Give it 1 GB of RAM, and have it do a net boot. The various EPIA motherboards all can net boot.
steveha