A lot of keyboards were still using the old 'keyboard port' (was this called PS/1? I never heard it described as anything other than the 'keyboard port').
The connector you are talking about is called a DIN-connector, where DIN means "Deutsche IndustrieNorm" (German industry standard):
Um, OpenOffice has a very long history as being a commercial, closed source program (Star Office). It has changed since its Open Source release, yes, but not that much so that you wouldn't feel at home. And I bet people wouldn't bash its GUI, if it still were a commercial program.
Oh wait, it is still commercial! I think OOo 2.0 and also Star Office have a nice GUI, which is highly customizable and allows for a lot of efficient keyboard shortcuts. I also think that the changes from 1.x to 2.0 increased usability a lot. This all sounds a bit too much like the usual OpenSource == bad GUI bashing. Yeah, the charting tool is not the best. So what? It is getting better, and for the time being, for more complex tasks you can use Gnuplot, R, or whatever. For example: When doing mathematical graphs, Maple sucks totally, I always do that with other tools, too. Although I produce the data with Maple.
"they have returned to the command line. From the article: 'Our operations group never wants to rely on any sort of user interface"
I always thought that the command line was a user interface. You know, interfacing between a user and a computer.
No, this is Hotmail. They do not need any user interface. They managed to configure the servers so that they send each other billions of SPAM emails each day. Totally automatically. Then they deleted all user interfaces. That is also why the spam levels have stabilized -- at 100 percent.
You need at least a dozen concurrent threads or processes before you can make good use of this CPU's power. Certainly not a good idea for desktops.
Not for the average Joe's desktop. But definitely a good developer workstation. Concurrent compiling... It might also be quite nice as a graphics workstation. If you have a threaded rendering application, this would also be nice.
This isn't simply a matter of Western governments "not giving enough" to fight Malaria. Fighting malaria is cheap and easy, and most government can handle the problem with just a little help. This is a case of Western governments using their money and power to force policies on other countries that kill millions.
This is a typical short sighted opinion. Fighting Malaria with DDT might be cheap and easy, but WTF do people ever only think short term? Take a look at the WP article about DDT for example, or other material. DDT is accumulating in the food chain, and with time killing more and more advanced animals, like birds. Due to its estrogen-like properties, it leads to infertility in polar bears; in animals it can also produce cancer, although it is not clear if it is carcinogenic in humans. I mean, come on, we live in the 21st century! We should by now have learned from the mistakes made 50 years ago...
Don't make a step backwards, make a step forward and try to fight Malaria in a better way, that does not kill/harm our environment or us self in 20 years.
Yes, but you still cannot do it in constant time. To compute the nth digit in base 10, you need at least quadratic time. So adding more CPUs to the calculation of Pi does not necessarily scale well.
I think the same applies to modeling in general. Take the office image for example. The lighting is very good - if you look along the edges where the walls meet the ceiling, you'll see subtle light "spots". It's not that this is anything unique, but that they were rather well done.
I might be wrong, but I guess this might be due to the "radiosity" feature of povray. PoV does not use the classical radiosity approach, but a distribuion raytracer with an irradiance cache. These dark specks result from incorrect interpolation of the irradiance samples. So though they might look good, they are not correct, just plausible.
Not sure about that. It's a diploma thesis, in cooperation with some milling company. Don't ask me what their name is... But who knows! Maybe there will be a paper or something. Can't say that, since I'm not really involved in this. Seems like a hot topic though.
You are thinking about Ant Colony Optimization. Just google for it. You can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem with it approximately, and also a variation where you have a start and end city as a constraint. Many problems have similarities to these problems and can also be solved. A friend of mine has just implemented ACO for optimizing milling paths.
I think this card is not (yet) for gamers. Or just very stupid gamers.:-) But this card is great for visualization and general purpose graphics development. You can't have enough RAM on a graphics card, if you are developing state of the art algorithms that run on the GPU. For example visualization of MRI data scales cubic (of course, because of its volumetric 3D nature). And with 512 MB RAM you can display much more detailed MRI images than before. Also more RAM is great for other GPU heavy algorithms. Just have a look at GPU Gems Part 1 and 2. Games, User Interfaces, Video, Applications,... everything with images will get more and more GPU centric.
There's nothing wrong with PDFs. I can create and open PDFs easily and speedily in OS X with Preview.
Exactly the same on Linux -- I have my PDF-workflow there due to LaTeX, OpenOffice and most of all KDE, with kprinter (PDF export from every application that can print) and kpdf. The latter one totally rocks in KDE 3.4 and is in my opinion the best PDF reader around in the Linux world. Plus it starts very fast.;-)
or go the AbiWord route and rewrite the whole GUI to use native MacOS widgets (means rewriting almost all the GUI code in OpenOffice)
I wonder how SuSE managed to get OpenOffice to display with the Qt-theme that the user specified. It is very nice, since it lets one to choose an arbitrary theme for Qt, and especially let it look exactly like KDE. Maybe one could use this to get the Aqua Look and Feel on Mac OS, since Qt has got a native Aqua mode on the Mac, as far as I know.
> Plus it is way small if you plan to have a family.
Man, you americans sometimes seem so weird. Sorry, for saying this, but here in Germany, a house with 240 square meters is more than average. A lot of families WITH children live in flats of 60-70 square meters or houses around 120-140 square meters. 240 square meters would be considered luxurious. I guess the US are really just bigger than Europe...:)
But you must not forget that plutonium is a heavy metal and toxic. Guess why we are proud to finally produce lead-free batteries, microchips and such? So disposal and processing of plutonium based products will be some nasty job. The radiation -- as you said -- is not that big of a problem, though inhalation of plutonium particles in almost the tiniest quantity will very likely lead to cancer, since plutonium is known to highly carcinogenic. This and other articles state that the toxicity of Pu is not that critical, since it will be immobilized in sediments or soil. But I do not fully trust this argument. Pu just like Pb is stored in living organism to some extent, and will probably accumulate in animals along the food chain. Maybe this is not a problem in the short term, like it was a problem with lead from car fuels, but probably in the mid to long term.
> The only good video editing software isn't > GPL.
Have you ever used Cinerella? In conjunction with transcode and the like? I think it's rather good -- with Firewire support for your DV-camera and everything.
> Blender couples the simplicity of emacs with > the interface of vim.
That, my good sir, is plain trolling. Look at other 3D-suites like Lightwave or some in-house tools (which Blender has been for years) and you will also find "strange" UIs. Those UIs do not follow ordinary guidelines that are applicable to a wordprocessor or a web browser, but they support the creative workflow of artists, I would say. Blender's UI for example is all about speed and ease of accessing editing commands to manipulate your meshes.
And I'd say that opensource software innovates *a lot* -- albeit not that much on the desktop, but on the side of developer tools and server software. On the desktop innovation may be sometimes a bit slim, but for example: I have not seen anything like JuK before -- well, correct me if that is also a clone. Or the kio-system and the gnome-vfs system that you haven't got in any Windows-application and which gives you access to all file-protocols you can think of in every application!
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, I am a bit stupid today. DIN seemingly means "Deutsches Institut für Normung"...
The connector you are talking about is called a DIN-connector, where DIN means "Deutsche IndustrieNorm" (German industry standard):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_connectorIt was also used for MIDI, tape recorders and lots more.
Um, OpenOffice has a very long history as being a commercial, closed source program (Star Office). It has changed since its Open Source release, yes, but not that much so that you wouldn't feel at home. And I bet people wouldn't bash its GUI, if it still were a commercial program.
Oh wait, it is still commercial! I think OOo 2.0 and also Star Office have a nice GUI, which is highly customizable and allows for a lot of efficient keyboard shortcuts. I also think that the changes from 1.x to 2.0 increased usability a lot. This all sounds a bit too much like the usual OpenSource == bad GUI bashing. Yeah, the charting tool is not the best. So what? It is getting better, and for the time being, for more complex tasks you can use Gnuplot, R, or whatever. For example: When doing mathematical graphs, Maple sucks totally, I always do that with other tools, too. Although I produce the data with Maple.
No, this is Hotmail. They do not need any user interface. They managed to configure the servers so that they send each other billions of SPAM emails each day. Totally automatically. Then they deleted all user interfaces. That is also why the spam levels have stabilized -- at 100 percent.
It was the same as with Larry 5... They vowed never to make Superman 4, after they finished Superman 3.
Not for the average Joe's desktop. But definitely a good developer workstation. Concurrent compiling... It might also be quite nice as a graphics workstation. If you have a threaded rendering application, this would also be nice.
This is a typical short sighted opinion. Fighting Malaria with DDT might be cheap and easy, but WTF do people ever only think short term? Take a look at the WP article about DDT for example, or other material. DDT is accumulating in the food chain, and with time killing more and more advanced animals, like birds. Due to its estrogen-like properties, it leads to infertility in polar bears; in animals it can also produce cancer, although it is not clear if it is carcinogenic in humans. I mean, come on, we live in the 21st century! We should by now have learned from the mistakes made 50 years ago...
Don't make a step backwards, make a step forward and try to fight Malaria in a better way, that does not kill/harm our environment or us self in 20 years.
But what if someone you know calls you from a foreign phone? And what if that call were urgent, for example?
Yes, but you still cannot do it in constant time. To compute the nth digit in base 10, you need at least quadratic time. So adding more CPUs to the calculation of Pi does not necessarily scale well.
I might be wrong, but I guess this might be due to the "radiosity" feature of povray. PoV does not use the classical radiosity approach, but a distribuion raytracer with an irradiance cache. These dark specks result from incorrect interpolation of the irradiance samples. So though they might look good, they are not correct, just plausible.
Not sure about that. It's a diploma thesis, in cooperation with some milling company. Don't ask me what their name is... But who knows! Maybe there will be a paper or something. Can't say that, since I'm not really involved in this. Seems like a hot topic though.
You are thinking about Ant Colony Optimization. Just google for it. You can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem with it approximately, and also a variation where you have a start and end city as a constraint. Many problems have similarities to these problems and can also be solved. A friend of mine has just implemented ACO for optimizing milling paths.
I think this card is not (yet) for gamers. Or just very stupid gamers. :-) But this card is great for visualization and general purpose graphics development. You can't have enough RAM on a graphics card, if you are developing state of the art algorithms that run on the GPU. For example visualization of MRI data scales cubic (of course, because of its volumetric 3D nature). And with 512 MB RAM you can display much more detailed MRI images than before. Also more RAM is great for other GPU heavy algorithms. Just have a look at GPU Gems Part 1 and 2. Games, User Interfaces, Video, Applications, ... everything with images will get more and more GPU centric.
Not really -- I guess he means "hell". You know, as in "Debian Sarge will be released when hell freezes over", because it took so long... :-)
There's nothing wrong with PDFs. I can create and open PDFs easily and speedily in OS X with Preview.
Exactly the same on Linux -- I have my PDF-workflow there due to LaTeX, OpenOffice and most of all KDE, with kprinter (PDF export from every application that can print) and kpdf. The latter one totally rocks in KDE 3.4 and is in my opinion the best PDF reader around in the Linux world. Plus it starts very fast. ;-)
I always planned to be playing Duke Nukem on my E17 desktop running on GNU/Hurd.
Oh man, now even the running gags are presented wrongly. It should be Duke Nukem Forever.I didn't find this info on the Open Group's website...
Have a look here: http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/docs/LSB_Fee_Sch edule.html
I wonder how SuSE managed to get OpenOffice to display with the Qt-theme that the user specified. It is very nice, since it lets one to choose an arbitrary theme for Qt, and especially let it look exactly like KDE. Maybe one could use this to get the Aqua Look and Feel on Mac OS, since Qt has got a native Aqua mode on the Mac, as far as I know.
I have used xf4vnc, which loads as a module into your X server. That makes it really fast. Plus it supports GLX.
http://xf4vnc.sourceforge.net/
> Plus it is way small if you plan to have a family.
:)
Man, you americans sometimes seem so weird. Sorry, for saying this, but here in Germany, a house with 240 square meters is more than average. A lot of families WITH children live in flats of 60-70 square meters or houses around 120-140 square meters. 240 square meters would be considered luxurious. I guess the US are really just bigger than Europe...
Most probably something like "Oh, yes, yes! Give it to me!"...
Oh no, it's slashdotted. Check this out -- a google cached version.
But you must not forget that plutonium is a heavy metal and toxic. Guess why we are proud to finally produce lead-free batteries, microchips and such? So disposal and processing of plutonium based products will be some nasty job. The radiation -- as you said -- is not that big of a problem, though inhalation of plutonium particles in almost the tiniest quantity will very likely lead to cancer, since plutonium is known to highly carcinogenic.
This and other articles state that the toxicity of Pu is not that critical, since it will be immobilized in sediments or soil. But I do not fully trust this argument. Pu just like Pb is stored in living organism to some extent, and will probably accumulate in animals along the food chain. Maybe this is not a problem in the short term, like it was a problem with lead from car fuels, but probably in the mid to long term.
> The only good video editing software isn't
> GPL.
Have you ever used Cinerella? In conjunction with transcode and the like? I think it's rather good -- with Firewire support for your DV-camera and everything.
> Blender couples the simplicity of emacs with
> the interface of vim.
That, my good sir, is plain trolling. Look at other 3D-suites like Lightwave or some in-house tools (which Blender has been for years) and you will also find "strange" UIs. Those UIs do not follow ordinary guidelines that are applicable to a wordprocessor or a web browser, but they support the creative workflow of artists, I would say. Blender's UI for example is all about speed and ease of accessing editing commands to manipulate your meshes.
And I'd say that opensource software innovates *a lot* -- albeit not that much on the desktop, but on the side of developer tools and server software. On the desktop innovation may be sometimes a bit slim, but for example: I have not seen anything like JuK before -- well, correct me if that is also a clone. Or the kio-system and the gnome-vfs system that you haven't got in any Windows-application and which gives you access to all file-protocols you can think of in every application!
>This mission is a landing mission in the inner
> solar system, where the sun is bright enough
> to power the landers.
Yes, but remember that the Viking landers back at the end of the 70s also used nuclear thermoelectric batteries. And they truly operated for *years*.