I'm amused to note that the author list stretches over three pages, which I gather is common for this sort of paper.
This is a standard in academia, where the number of publications you co-author is critical in getting grants or achieving tenure. It is informally known as the "publication of the month club", and is a variant of the you-scratch-my-back strategy. One of the club members writes an article and adds all of the others as co-authors. In return, that person can expect to be listed as a co-author in the next article written by each of the others.
I decided to revitilize my grandparent's old Celeron 500 w/ 128MB of RAM with Xubuntu. I couldn't install it with the live CD, but I got it on there. And it ran like crap. Very, very slow and sluggish...I was kind of suprised So I was about to throw it out, and figured, what the hell, and put XP on it. I turned off the Fisher Price UI, and it ran a HELL of a lot better than Xubuntu. Enough that it turned from unusuable to usable. I was stunned.
I have a 450MHz P3 system (an elderly Dell) which had 128MB and ran Win2000 tolerably well. Before upgrading to Linux, I added another 256MB of cheapo RAM giving it 384MB total. This was because I really wanted to check the hardware support with a LiveCD, and the extra RAM would be useful in Win2000 anyway.
Xubuntu was installed, and runs, but a bit slowly. Programs such as Firefox operate well enough, but start slowly. The issue is not RAM (usually around 50% just for web browsing and some editing), but CPU. The CPU utilization is usually at 100% if you're actually doing something. The disk is not the newest, but not the original clunker either.
PCLinuxOS has also been installed, and is a little snappier than Xubuntu. It has KDE 3.5, and also maxes out the CPU most of the time, but is a little more responsive. Applications still start slowly, but it is an ancient system.
Windows 2000 runs somewhat better than Linux on this box, but I would not call it a speed demon either. It also is a bit slow to load applications.
I have not tried any of the really lightweight Linux distributions yet.
Heh. A lot of Scandinavian candy contains ammonium chloride...
I've yet to meet any non-Scandinavian that likes it, though apparently they sell they stuff in the Netherlands and Germany too.
Minor nit-pick: you should probably have said "non-Nordic", since Finns also like salmiak, and Finland is non-Scandinavian.
I'm a non-Nordic, and I happen to like salmiak flavoured chewing gum. Living in Finland for several years has clearly had an adverse effect. The flavour of salmiak is like slightly salty licorice.
Then stop riding in the goddamn street, motherfucker. It's common courtesy. Ride on the damn sidewalk. go ahead, scaredy-cat. Just try it, I promise that passing policemen will not stop and ticket you.
In Germany, Finland and numerous other countries, cyclists are expected to stay on the sidewalk, and not on the road. They might be ticketed if caught cycling on the road if the road has a sidewalk.
In Great Britain, Ireland, and numerous other countries, cyclists are expected to stay on the road, and not on the sidewalk. They might be ticketed if caught cycling on the sidewalk.
From the OP:... that low income and cheapskate buyers are starting to use iPhones as replacements or substitutes for netbook,....
An iPhone costs more than some existing netbooks, so these must be affluent imbeciles or ardent fashionistas (both groups being significant subsets of the iPhone demographic), rather than "cheapskates" or "low income". Of course, these are exactly the right target market for selling a netbook with a locked-in WLAN communication contract, preferably at an eye-watering overall profit level.
A mysterious Nigerian benefactor has offered to transfer the entire.spam TLD to me. I'll receive 10% of everything, and all I need to do is transfer a few personal details to him...
Actually ministry of justice itself described 2% failure rate as "very high" compared to ordinary paper ballot. In Finland an ordinary failure rate for paper ballots cast would afaik be around 0,5% and that includes Donald Duck and offensive drawings, which are not available to evoters.
Only half of 1%?! Wow. Finnish voters must be much more careful (or draw less Donald Ducks) than Australian voters then. Or perhaps, it's the result of compulsory voting, or that our exhaustive preferential system is a little more complicated.
Voting is not compulsory in Finland. We don't get those Soviet-style 99.9% turnouts. And I'm sot saying whether I voted or not - it's a secret...
Personally, I'd prefer if we used the STV or AV style of proportional representation, as is used in Australia and Ireland. Electronic voting and tabulation (incorporating a paper trail for random validation and mandated recounts) would greatly accellerate the counting process.
The support for power management (including cpu scaling) has improved in the successive versions of Ubuntu, largely due to kernel improvements. I've certainly noticed this on my laptop, which has had Ubuntu since the beta of Breezy. The result has been better support for hibernation and so forth, but not any particular change in application performance.
TFA said that speedstep was disabled for the tests, but were there any other laptop power saving features which would slow down user processes?
I'd like to see the same set of benchmarks run on a desktop.
I've been running Xubuntu on a 10-year-old Dell (450MHz P3, upgraded to 384MB) since Dapper, and have not noticed any degradation in its admittedly modest performance.
I've also been running Ubuntu since Feisty on a 5 year old Dell (2GHz, 1GB), also without any particular performance changes.
What's the problem now? Are our engineers less smart? Do we have fewer materials? Are we under a budget that's too strict? There has to be something that's keeping us from being able to do this.
Well, we've got all these neat new development processes and guidelines to ensure that our development activities comply fully with the imposed development processes, whether they are sensible or not. In other words, we have process compliance at the expense of results, and many of the processes are complete pigs which are often inflexible (think of Six Sigma, for instance). The main problem in recent decades has been the succession of Fad-of-the-year dogmas excreted by business schools and accumulating in R&D departments.
I doubt OOo3 was downloaded by the majority of Windows users.
And I doubt that it was downloaded by the majority of Linux users also.
Most Linux users prefer to upgrade software using the channels for their distrobution. None of my 3 systems have been upgraded to OOo3 yet, but they will be, as soon as it shows up in the repos.
VAX/VMS had a wonderful system of versioning baked right into things, if you worked on a file, it kept versions for you as you saved them....
login.com;1
login.com;2
login.com;3.. etc.
The default was the last version, unless you explicitly chose a different one. This is an incredibly useful tool, and I still miss it to this day, 20 years after I last used it.
Indeed. Files-11 originated on RSX (PDP-11) even before VMS (VAX). I recall using it almost 30 years ago. I also recall being appalled on exposure to the file systems of personal computers (PET, Apple-II, IBM PC), and discovering that they lacked file versions. This is probably less of an issue nowadays, since big cheap disks are common. It would cause problems (and give benefits) for those who do a lot of image/media editing and use a significant amount of disk space for images or other media.
There is a substantial disk space overhead in versioning file systems, which was probably one argument against them in early personal computer days. The number of versions of a file increases on each modification, and each version occupies disk space.
However, there is also an administrative overhead in versioning file systems. To prevent disk space exhaustion, it is necessary to limit the number of versions kept or to purge older versions. This can be automatic (losing some of the benefit of versioning), or on request (requiring thought and action from the user: bad idea). I recall having various command files in RSX to purge different UICs in various ways and regularly issuing commands such as
PIP DL:[10,33]*.*/PU:4
Assembler? Bah. Us Real Programmers use a floppy diskette, a needle and a horseshoe magnet.
Bloody kids and their magnetic media. Some of us have used easily repaired, humanly-readable punched cards (IBM-360), which never seemed to have hanging chads. Then there was good old paper tape (PDP-8).
Paper tape needed repairing more often than the punched cards. There was always some good sticky tape and a couple of round hole punches available to repair breaks in the paper tape. Breaks tended to occur a few times per furlong when reading a freshly written tape, but were very rare when writing. Breaks became more frequent on repeat reading of the paper tape, however, and eventually a new copy would need to be written.
You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.
A good fraction of said installed base has money to spend. All of them have a track record of being separated from their money with only moderate effort.
And separating other people from their money is the primary motivation for going into any business.
The problem with an evolution game is that it's completely non-interactive. At most you might be able to design the environment and maybe tweak a couple of universal constants but I doubt that there is really any game that could make evolution an engaging experience.
But the environment need not be static, and cataclysmic events have repeatedly wiped out major clades in Earth's history. Evolution by creeps between these events, and evolution by jerks during and after them.
So, you could chuck an asteroid at the planet every now and then (different extinctions if it lands in ocean vs continent), or have a passing star perturb the planet's orbit (radical long term climate shift), or have a nearby star go supernova (x-rays, gamma rays, death except in deep water), or just watch the biosphere occasionally destabilize its environment without external impetus.
Convict Volunteers?
I dunno if that's a good idea, we tried that with Australia and remember what a punishment that was? If we did, there would probably turn out to be hot alien babes who produce beer instead of milk or something, and we'd all have no idea back here on Earth.
Britain tried it also with their colonies in New England - about 60000 convicts were sent there involuntarily in the hundred years before US independence . The numbers would have risen much higher in the following hundred years if it had remained under British rule - they sent 165000 to Australia in that period, despite the longer and more expensive trip. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convictism_in_Australia
Microsoft is staffed by people that do, among other things, throw chairs at people, describe open source as "cancer", and want to "$#%^&*@ kill Google".
Please, attack Microsoft on legitimate issues (e.g. prior extreme anticompetitive behavior, and incomplete reform), not pointless ad hominem attacks.
"Qualis rex, talis grex."
The symptoms of systematic dysfunction were well known to the Romans. Leadership is a very legitimate issue.
About 25 years ago we really were going to be frozen into a big ball of ice by 2025.
Actually, it was more like 35 years ago. The best climate models available at that time (and using the measurements available at that time) predicted that we were near or perhaps past the maximum of the current interglacial. The exact time of return of glacial conditions depended on how the model was tweaked, and could be centuries to millennia.
The popularizations which followed about 25 years ago exaggerated the rapidity and severity of the projected outcome, of course.
Please don't say that word. It sounds like something my 3 month old niece says. Rather, call it Decimal/fake terabyte (found on hard drives) or just a (real) 'terabyte'. I think it's pathetic people have come up with some new (baby sounding) word because hard drive manufacturers are too f'ing arrogant to make 'true' sizes. In marketing 1TB/1000GB sounds a little bit better than 931GB..
Please don't abuse the word Terabyte, or attempt to usurp any of the other base-10 prefixes which were defined long before computers were invented. It is the base-2 interpretation of these prefixes which is fake.
The abuse started with use of kilo to denote 2^10 instead of 10^3, often using K instead of k as prefix. This was relatively innocuous, since the case of the letter could ensure the prefixes were somewhat distinct. However, for 10^6, the prefix for mega is M (and m is also allocated for milli), and abusing this prefix to mean 2^20 is unconscionable.
The kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. prefixes were created to solve a real need. The base-10 prefixes were already assigned, and could not be usurped.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amused to note that the author list stretches over three pages, which I gather is common for this sort of paper.
This is a standard in academia, where the number of publications you co-author is critical in getting grants or achieving tenure. It is informally known as the "publication of the month club", and is a variant of the you-scratch-my-back strategy. One of the club members writes an article and adds all of the others as co-authors. In return, that person can expect to be listed as a co-author in the next article written by each of the others.
I learned this and many other useful things about academia from the book "Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality" http://www.amazon.com/Oral-Sadism-Vegetarian-Personality-Polymorphous/dp/0345347005.
Should we hide in our basements, crack our neighbour's heads open and feast on the goo inside?
I am interested in your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Small, light and efficient, eh?
I decided to revitilize my grandparent's old Celeron 500 w/ 128MB of RAM with Xubuntu. I couldn't install it with the live CD, but I got it on there. And it ran like crap. Very, very slow and sluggish...I was kind of suprised So I was about to throw it out, and figured, what the hell, and put XP on it. I turned off the Fisher Price UI, and it ran a HELL of a lot better than Xubuntu. Enough that it turned from unusuable to usable. I was stunned.
I have a 450MHz P3 system (an elderly Dell) which had 128MB and ran Win2000 tolerably well. Before upgrading to Linux, I added another 256MB of cheapo RAM giving it 384MB total. This was because I really wanted to check the hardware support with a LiveCD, and the extra RAM would be useful in Win2000 anyway.
Xubuntu was installed, and runs, but a bit slowly. Programs such as Firefox operate well enough, but start slowly. The issue is not RAM (usually around 50% just for web browsing and some editing), but CPU. The CPU utilization is usually at 100% if you're actually doing something. The disk is not the newest, but not the original clunker either.
PCLinuxOS has also been installed, and is a little snappier than Xubuntu. It has KDE 3.5, and also maxes out the CPU most of the time, but is a little more responsive. Applications still start slowly, but it is an ancient system.
Windows 2000 runs somewhat better than Linux on this box, but I would not call it a speed demon either. It also is a bit slow to load applications.
I have not tried any of the really lightweight Linux distributions yet.
Yes, 500 millihertz. That's two clocks every second.
500 millihertz is one clock every two seconds...
Heh. A lot of Scandinavian candy contains ammonium chloride...
I've yet to meet any non-Scandinavian that likes it, though apparently they sell they stuff in the Netherlands and Germany too.
Minor nit-pick: you should probably have said "non-Nordic", since Finns also like salmiak, and Finland is non-Scandinavian.
I'm a non-Nordic, and I happen to like salmiak flavoured chewing gum. Living in Finland for several years has clearly had an adverse effect. The flavour of salmiak is like slightly salty licorice.
Then stop riding in the goddamn street, motherfucker. It's common courtesy. Ride on the damn sidewalk. go ahead, scaredy-cat. Just try it, I promise that passing policemen will not stop and ticket you.
In Germany, Finland and numerous other countries, cyclists are expected to stay on the sidewalk, and not on the road. They might be ticketed if caught cycling on the road if the road has a sidewalk.
In Great Britain, Ireland, and numerous other countries, cyclists are expected to stay on the road, and not on the sidewalk. They might be ticketed if caught cycling on the sidewalk.
These laws are unevenly enforced.
....untie the knot my cat did with the mop?
A cat and a mop tied in a knot? I'm impressed by your skills, but also somewhat perturbed.
From the OP: ... that low income and cheapskate buyers are starting to use iPhones as replacements or substitutes for netbook, ....
An iPhone costs more than some existing netbooks, so these must be affluent imbeciles or ardent fashionistas (both groups being significant subsets of the iPhone demographic), rather than "cheapskates" or "low income". Of course, these are exactly the right target market for selling a netbook with a locked-in WLAN communication contract, preferably at an eye-watering overall profit level.
A mysterious Nigerian benefactor has offered to transfer the entire .spam TLD to me. I'll receive 10% of everything, and all I need to do is transfer a few personal details to him...
and there is already an uproar over the e-voting mishaps http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/29/0137202
Actually ministry of justice itself described 2% failure rate as "very high" compared to ordinary paper ballot. In Finland an ordinary failure rate for paper ballots cast would afaik be around 0,5% and that includes Donald Duck and offensive drawings, which are not available to evoters.
Only half of 1%?! Wow. Finnish voters must be much more careful (or draw less Donald Ducks) than Australian voters then. Or perhaps, it's the result of compulsory voting, or that our exhaustive preferential system is a little more complicated.
Voting is not compulsory in Finland. We don't get those Soviet-style 99.9% turnouts. And I'm sot saying whether I voted or not - it's a secret...
Personally, I'd prefer if we used the STV or AV style of proportional representation, as is used in Australia and Ireland. Electronic voting and tabulation (incorporating a paper trail for random validation and mandated recounts) would greatly accellerate the counting process.
>
Yup and with some computers you hear static over the speakers before the cell phone rings.
And you hear it occasionally even if there is no incoming call. Either the phone is touching the base or the base is touching the phone.
But as others have pointed out, this has always occurred with GSM phones. I've experienced it often enough in the last 8 years.
The support for power management (including cpu scaling) has improved in the successive versions of Ubuntu, largely due to kernel improvements. I've certainly noticed this on my laptop, which has had Ubuntu since the beta of Breezy. The result has been better support for hibernation and so forth, but not any particular change in application performance.
TFA said that speedstep was disabled for the tests, but were there any other laptop power saving features which would slow down user processes?
I'd like to see the same set of benchmarks run on a desktop.
I've been running Xubuntu on a 10-year-old Dell (450MHz P3, upgraded to 384MB) since Dapper, and have not noticed any degradation in its admittedly modest performance.
I've also been running Ubuntu since Feisty on a 5 year old Dell (2GHz, 1GB), also without any particular performance changes.
What's the problem now? Are our engineers less smart? Do we have fewer materials? Are we under a budget that's too strict? There has to be something that's keeping us from being able to do this.
Well, we've got all these neat new development processes and guidelines to ensure that our development activities comply fully with the imposed development processes, whether they are sensible or not. In other words, we have process compliance at the expense of results, and many of the processes are complete pigs which are often inflexible (think of Six Sigma, for instance). The main problem in recent decades has been the succession of Fad-of-the-year dogmas excreted by business schools and accumulating in R&D departments.
I doubt OOo3 was downloaded by the majority of Windows users.
And I doubt that it was downloaded by the majority of Linux users also.
Most Linux users prefer to upgrade software using the channels for their distrobution. None of my 3 systems have been upgraded to OOo3 yet, but they will be, as soon as it shows up in the repos.
They are welcoming them. The next step is to block any content which discusses these problems.
VAX/VMS had a wonderful system of versioning baked right into things, if you worked on a file, it kept versions for you as you saved them....
login.com;1 login.com;2 login.com;3 .. etc.
The default was the last version, unless you explicitly chose a different one. This is an incredibly useful tool, and I still miss it to this day, 20 years after I last used it.
Indeed. Files-11 originated on RSX (PDP-11) even before VMS (VAX). I recall using it almost 30 years ago. I also recall being appalled on exposure to the file systems of personal computers (PET, Apple-II, IBM PC), and discovering that they lacked file versions. This is probably less of an issue nowadays, since big cheap disks are common. It would cause problems (and give benefits) for those who do a lot of image/media editing and use a significant amount of disk space for images or other media.
There is a substantial disk space overhead in versioning file systems, which was probably one argument against them in early personal computer days. The number of versions of a file increases on each modification, and each version occupies disk space.
However, there is also an administrative overhead in versioning file systems. To prevent disk space exhaustion, it is necessary to limit the number of versions kept or to purge older versions. This can be automatic (losing some of the benefit of versioning), or on request (requiring thought and action from the user: bad idea). I recall having various command files in RSX to purge different UICs in various ways and regularly issuing commands such as
PIP DL:[10,33]*.*/PU:4
Assembler? Bah. Us Real Programmers use a floppy diskette, a needle and a horseshoe magnet.
Bloody kids and their magnetic media. Some of us have used easily repaired, humanly-readable punched cards (IBM-360), which never seemed to have hanging chads. Then there was good old paper tape (PDP-8).
Paper tape needed repairing more often than the punched cards. There was always some good sticky tape and a couple of round hole punches available to repair breaks in the paper tape. Breaks tended to occur a few times per furlong when reading a freshly written tape, but were very rare when writing. Breaks became more frequent on repeat reading of the paper tape, however, and eventually a new copy would need to be written.
Now, you kids get off my retirement home's lawn!
>
You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.
A good fraction of said installed base has money to spend. All of them have a track record of being separated from their money with only moderate effort.
And separating other people from their money is the primary motivation for going into any business.
The problem with an evolution game is that it's completely non-interactive. At most you might be able to design the environment and maybe tweak a couple of universal constants but I doubt that there is really any game that could make evolution an engaging experience.
But the environment need not be static, and cataclysmic events have repeatedly wiped out major clades in Earth's history. Evolution by creeps between these events, and evolution by jerks during and after them.
So, you could chuck an asteroid at the planet every now and then (different extinctions if it lands in ocean vs continent), or have a passing star perturb the planet's orbit (radical long term climate shift), or have a nearby star go supernova (x-rays, gamma rays, death except in deep water), or just watch the biosphere occasionally destabilize its environment without external impetus.
The first PC's came out in the mid 1980's - they had 4.77 Mhz 8088 CPU with a 10 MByte hard disk drive, CGA/EGA video cards, and cost around $3000.
With a hard disk? That was the PC-XT around 1986. It was preceded by the PC, which came with either one or two full-height 5.25inch floppy drives.
Convict Volunteers? I dunno if that's a good idea, we tried that with Australia and remember what a punishment that was? If we did, there would probably turn out to be hot alien babes who produce beer instead of milk or something, and we'd all have no idea back here on Earth.
Britain tried it also with their colonies in New England - about 60000 convicts were sent there involuntarily in the hundred years before US independence . The numbers would have risen much higher in the following hundred years if it had remained under British rule - they sent 165000 to Australia in that period, despite the longer and more expensive trip. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convictism_in_Australia
Microsoft is staffed by people that do, among other things, throw chairs at people, describe open source as "cancer", and want to "$#%^&*@ kill Google".
Please, attack Microsoft on legitimate issues (e.g. prior extreme anticompetitive behavior, and incomplete reform), not pointless ad hominem attacks.
"Qualis rex, talis grex."
The symptoms of systematic dysfunction were well known to the Romans. Leadership is a very legitimate issue.
About 25 years ago we really were going to be frozen into a big ball of ice by 2025.
Actually, it was more like 35 years ago. The best climate models available at that time (and using the measurements available at that time) predicted that we were near or perhaps past the maximum of the current interglacial. The exact time of return of glacial conditions depended on how the model was tweaked, and could be centuries to millennia.
The popularizations which followed about 25 years ago exaggerated the rapidity and severity of the projected outcome, of course.
Please don't say that word. It sounds like something my 3 month old niece says. Rather, call it Decimal/fake terabyte (found on hard drives) or just a (real) 'terabyte'. I think it's pathetic people have come up with some new (baby sounding) word because hard drive manufacturers are too f'ing arrogant to make 'true' sizes. In marketing 1TB/1000GB sounds a little bit better than 931GB..
Please don't abuse the word Terabyte, or attempt to usurp any of the other base-10 prefixes which were defined long before computers were invented. It is the base-2 interpretation of these prefixes which is fake.
The abuse started with use of kilo to denote 2^10 instead of 10^3, often using K instead of k as prefix. This was relatively innocuous, since the case of the letter could ensure the prefixes were somewhat distinct. However, for 10^6, the prefix for mega is M (and m is also allocated for milli), and abusing this prefix to mean 2^20 is unconscionable.
The kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. prefixes were created to solve a real need. The base-10 prefixes were already assigned, and could not be usurped.