So wait, you got sick of "unnamed distro" making it a pain to get nVidia drivers and mp3 playback, so you went the simple route and tried Gentoo? And you think that steaming pile of a "we don't care about testing anything, 'cause if it doesn't work, it's the luser's fault for thinking that there's a difference between stable 'n testing" Linux distro is second only to OS X in ease-of-use?
Oh man. Slashdot's always good for a "WTF"-inspired laugh.
On a related note, I recently bought two nVidia-based cards explicitly because the company actually supports Linux, and the cards work well.
That silly old System V IPC couldn't possibly be used for allowing forked processes to communicate - everyone has to use threads. And who cares that Linux's fork implementation takes about the same overhead as creation of a new thread - fork is old. Yay new stuff!
It's not just the high octane, but also the cooler burn that allow high compression. While it's true that you could reduce the size of the combustion chamber through things like piston and head changes, there's another way that's pretty common. You're almost there with the supercharger - but you want a turbocharger. The main reason you want a turbo for this application is the ease of changing the boost level. If you need to run "regular" gas, you just reduce the boost, which can be done electronically without adding a significant drain on the engine (it takes more energy to run a supercharger). When you have E85 available, just keep the blow-off valve closed a little longer so you build more pressure.
That's pretty much how Saab (I think) is doing it. It seems to work out pretty well.
I'd personally probably end up using a megasquirt controller to handle it, since it shouldn't be a big deal to switch between two spark tables and fuel curves depending on what's in the tank...:)
Those warnings are precisely why I make a copy of videos (purchased or rented) before watching them. When I make a copy, I only grab the actual video, skiping over all the menus, previews, and whatever other crap is on there (including that "you wouldn't steal a car or a purse" clip with the dramatic music). It really irritates me when I have to watch all that crap on videos that I purchased for full retail price...
A bar and pool table in your house, eh? So, recreating Star Trek is silly, but recreating Cheers is a great idea? I'd like to see the numbers of home buyers who watch video material v/s the number of people who drink so much that they need a full bar.
Agreed - if I hadn't known better, I would have thought I was dealing with some small-time company who's never hired an IT person of any sort before. I quit the interview process a few steps in, because no job's worth that kind of pain in the ass.
Portage update disasters only occur when you don't check what emerge --update world will actually install before you do it
That's exactly the problem with Gentoo - too many packages are marked as "stable" without anyone actually doing the above quality check (or any check, it often appears). Good suggestion, though. Maybe pass it along to the developers. Particularly interested in this revelation would be the ones handling the kernel patches and X.org, but several other groups would also benefit.
That third button isn't a traditional middle button - it's a "turn on scrolling with the trackpoint instead of moving the mouse" button, or something like that. Maybe it can be mapped to a middle-click somehow, but I've yet to figure out how to do so on my new Thinkpad (which works with Ubuntu very well).
That, BTW, is why there are only two buttons duplicated down to the trackpad.
I canceled an account after the number was stolen (at a hotel - avoid all Best Westerns anywhere close to the St. Louis Airport). One of the things the jerk did was sign up for an AOL account. The card company (Chase) forwarded the monthly charges on to the new account. So I canceled the account with Chase completely. Months later, I was still getting bills from Chase for new charges from AOL, even though I had filled out the affidavit saying the card was stolen and that the AOL charges were not authorized by me. Every month, my wife would call up Chase and tell them that the new charge on a closed account was still unauthorized. They'd assure her that they'd take care of it, and then there'd be a new bill the next month. We finally had to call AOL to cancel, they sent us a form, and insisted that we need the original card number to cancel - which had been canceled, cut up, and thrown away months ago.
I've never had AOL service, and even stopped using Netscape when AOL bought them. And now I'll be damned if I ever let anyone I know give those bastards a dime. I've gotta say that I'm pretty disappointed in Chase, too, letting people continue to charge a closed account.
The last four banks (one of which is a credit union) I've used have had a minimum balance requirement ranging from $0 to $25 in order to have free checking. If you don't have "the cashflow" required to put $25 down up front and consider it spent until you leave the bank (it's not taken from you - you get it back if you leave), then it's arguable whether you need to actually use a bank at all.
They're not soaking the poor, they're soaking the lazy and/or stupid. I guess there's some overlap...
Yup, just the clock speed. You want something like FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) or MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) for a slightly more menaingful comparison, but that still suffers from neglecting to compare efficiency in parallel pipelines, accuracy of pre-fetches, etc.
Make's AMD's "Athlon XP 2400" marketing seem a little less deceptive when you realize that their GHz were getting more things done than Intel's GHz, doesn't it?
Number of users for whom I've lost email: 0 Number of users for whom Google has lost email: >0
You forget, those people who run "enterprise" systems - they're just people who go home sometimes, and when they're home, they don't forget how to run a proper system. My mail servers are faster, though, and will remain that way until Google starts offering dedicated machines with gigabit connectivity to my workstation. Maybe you can't manage to figure out how to automate backups, and maybe you think that working for a big company somehow makes people smarter (even though I presently work for a huge company), but the fact remains - the ISP in my basement is more reliable than Google, in terms of reliability that matter to me. I don't have the *capacity*, but that is 100% irrelevant. I also don't have several layers of clueless management and CYA forms to fill out.:)
Lots of people who read and post to the dot here aren't your average "just know enough to be dangerous" home sysadmins. Some of us actually know what we're doing.
"To get an even better Windows Vista experience, including the Windows Aero user experience, ask for a Windows Vista Capable PC that is designated Premium Ready, or choose a PC that meets or exceeds the Premium Ready requirements"
This would suggest that, to get the Aero User Experience(TM), one needs a Premium Ready PC. You might ask "What's a Premium-ready PC?" Well, on the same page:
"A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1. 1 GB of system memory. Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)2, Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel."
That 1GB RAM is more than the motherboard supports on two of my machines which support 1GHz processors. 512MB will work, but even with the video card (which will run $50 or so in most retail establishments I've seen), that means no Aero for me. Well, my desire to run Linux also means no Aero for me, but that's not the point...
Also worth noting, the "bit locker" drive encryption thing requires one to buy a "TPM" USB 2.0 key or have a system with the "trusted" chip integrated. So, no drive encryption for your machine with only USB 1 support.
The minimum, no-Aero requirement is an 800MHz processor (not 1GHz), 512MB RAM, and the same (basically) video card, which suggests that you'll probably want a lot more than a 1GHz processor if 800 is the bare minimum to run at all...
What? You don't like the interface of a debian-derived distro, so you went with debian? Because you like windowmaker? You can run windowmaker in Ubuntu, too...
Like I said, Ubuntu has not experienced a single crash for me. I'm pretty sure it's not possible to be more stable than that. Grad the server install, then do the "apt-get install wmaker" thing to get Ubuntu without the ubuntu desktop. It'll be just like Debian, except for the updates happening more than once every decade.;)
There is no Ubuntu 6. Which would explain why your point number 1 is just wrong (hasn't been neccesary since pre 5.x). Your point number 2 and 5 are just "I like Windows software better", which is a valid Linux v/s Windows thing, but is not Ubuntu specific. So we'll throw those three out, leaving two complaints.
Point 3 disagrees with my experience across multiple video adapters, but maybe yours was misconfigured. Point taken - it's probably better in another release, but you may want to contribute a bug report. ATI or Nvidia? The nVidia drivers work better than the free open source drivers that Ubuntu uses by default. The drivers for ATI stuff general suck either way. Other stuff probably sucks too, in general. Sorry, but it's tough to support hardware without the hardware maker's support.
Point 4 is due to bad hardware support, and conflicts with my experience as well. I've researched wireless hardware Linux compatability before buying hardware, and found things that work out of the box. Both of my laptops and my desktop machine with wireless all have a nice little wireless network interface that I personally prefer to XP's thing.
As I'm fond of saying, though, I'm a professional systems administrator, so my experience may vary. But really, the problems people have fall into two categories, generally.
1) they like some software that someone wrote for Windows. Well, sure, I guess it'd be great if everyone in the world developed for all possible platforms. Then I could actually do something useful with BeOS and my Color Turbo NeXT. But they don't. So lack of software support is just a fact of life. Kinda like graphics software used to mainly be MacOS, with maybe a Windows version. Now, that's not so much the case.
2) People have hardware which doesn't have Linux drivers. Well, again, it'd be great if hardware vendors would write drivers for every possible OS. But they don't. They also don't release specs for us to write our own. I'm sorry that you chose hardware badly, but it's not Linux's fault that developers working on their own free time haven't managed to write optimized drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware out there. I have a 5.25" form factor scanner (a "photo drive", IIRC) that I bought a long time ago. I can't use it with Windows *or* Linux, because no one wrote drivers for it. I'm more likely to find someone who can help me do it for Linux than Windows, though.
Either way, though, the complaints are usually things that aren't really the fault of Linux itself. The beauty of Linux, though, is that you can actually help mke it work better if you want to do so. Call up a Microsoft office somewhere and suggest that you'd like to help them support an old piece of hardware or if an annoying interface bug in Windows. Then post to the Linux Kernel mailing list, or contact the author of a favorite piece of software. Lemme know which one's more receptive to your ideas. Lemme know which one will give you the code so that you can fix it yourself or let you hire someone who can fix it for you.
That machine (stain) is running at near 100% load 24x7. It's not on a UPS, which is why it's only been up 45 days - the last power failure was 45 days ago. It has not experienced a software problem since Ubuntu 5.04 was installed (which was apt-get dist-upgrade'd to Hoary and then Dapper). In fact, of the machines I'm running Ubuntu on at my location right now - including two daily-use desktops, two mythtv backends, three mythtv frontends, a MySQL cluster, two mail servers, three web servers, and a wireless router - I have not experienced a *single* notable failure due to Ubuntu's software (from warty up to feisty). I have experienced hardware problems, but that's not Ubuntu's fault. I have experienced misconfiguration problems, but again, that's the sysadmin's fault - not Ubuntu. Other people have reportedly had problems, but I wonder how many of them may have had a hand in the failure happening, since I seem able to avoid them just fine... I've had similar luck with Debian, FWIW, but I like Ubuntu's release cycle better (among other things).
So yeah, Debian's great. But seriously, the jealousy at Ubuntu's success while Debian's still semi-obscure is just petty. Ubuntu contributes their changes back to Debian, and the whole "free software" thing Debian pushes is supposed to encourage others to reuse the software.
Sorry, I don't have "funny" mod points to apply to this.:)
Just in case you seriously didn't know, though, the displacement is the difference in volume of the cylinder with the piston at top dead center and bottom dead center. That's a space filled with air (and atomized fuel, ideally), and the air is *displaced* by the piston moving through the cylinder. You change displacement one of two ways - change stroke length or change bore diameter. In other words, either the cylinder of air being displaced gets taller or gets wider. Oil's got nothing to do with it.
The compression ratio, while we're on topic, is the ratio of the total cylinder volume (including the combustion chamber in the head) with the piston at BDC (uncompressed) and TDC (compressed). In a piston engine with zero deck height (pistons are level with the top of the block at TDC) and flat-top pistons, compression ratio is 1 + ((displacement / number of cylinders) / combustion chamber volume). Make sure you keep track of those units (hint, 1L=1000cc, a small block Chevy will usually have either 65cc or 72cc combustion chambers, and a zero deck 5.7L V8 engine will be running around 10.5 or 11:1 compression).:)
You might not have noticed, but forced induction is just adding [somewhat more efficient] cubic inches to the outside of the engine. Displacement is the air moved by the engine, and forced induction is simply moving more air (in other words, increased displacement).:)
If you had said "Nitrous", now *that* would've been different.;)
Slashdot Mirror
So wait, you got sick of "unnamed distro" making it a pain to get nVidia drivers and mp3 playback, so you went the simple route and tried Gentoo? And you think that steaming pile of a "we don't care about testing anything, 'cause if it doesn't work, it's the luser's fault for thinking that there's a difference between stable 'n testing" Linux distro is second only to OS X in ease-of-use?
Oh man. Slashdot's always good for a "WTF"-inspired laugh.
On a related note, I recently bought two nVidia-based cards explicitly because the company actually supports Linux, and the cards work well.
That silly old System V IPC couldn't possibly be used for allowing forked processes to communicate - everyone has to use threads. And who cares that Linux's fork implementation takes about the same overhead as creation of a new thread - fork is old. Yay new stuff!
It's not just the high octane, but also the cooler burn that allow high compression. While it's true that you could reduce the size of the combustion chamber through things like piston and head changes, there's another way that's pretty common. You're almost there with the supercharger - but you want a turbocharger. The main reason you want a turbo for this application is the ease of changing the boost level. If you need to run "regular" gas, you just reduce the boost, which can be done electronically without adding a significant drain on the engine (it takes more energy to run a supercharger). When you have E85 available, just keep the blow-off valve closed a little longer so you build more pressure.
:)
That's pretty much how Saab (I think) is doing it. It seems to work out pretty well.
I'd personally probably end up using a megasquirt controller to handle it, since it shouldn't be a big deal to switch between two spark tables and fuel curves depending on what's in the tank...
Loonies? Those are Canadian. Of course you don't have a problem with US pennies.
Those warnings are precisely why I make a copy of videos (purchased or rented) before watching them. When I make a copy, I only grab the actual video, skiping over all the menus, previews, and whatever other crap is on there (including that "you wouldn't steal a car or a purse" clip with the dramatic music). It really irritates me when I have to watch all that crap on videos that I purchased for full retail price...
A bar and pool table in your house, eh? So, recreating Star Trek is silly, but recreating Cheers is a great idea? I'd like to see the numbers of home buyers who watch video material v/s the number of people who drink so much that they need a full bar.
That's kind of ironic, considering Apple brazenly stole the trademarked name of their product from Linksys/Cisco...
I went to a public school, and can confidently state that no one learned anything of financial value there.
Agreed - if I hadn't known better, I would have thought I was dealing with some small-time company who's never hired an IT person of any sort before. I quit the interview process a few steps in, because no job's worth that kind of pain in the ass.
Portage update disasters only occur when you don't check what emerge --update world will actually install before you do it
That's exactly the problem with Gentoo - too many packages are marked as "stable" without anyone actually doing the above quality check (or any check, it often appears). Good suggestion, though. Maybe pass it along to the developers. Particularly interested in this revelation would be the ones handling the kernel patches and X.org, but several other groups would also benefit.
Admittedly, I've never had home-made granola. Perhaps it's well worth the investment. :) Baked good certainly are.
That third button isn't a traditional middle button - it's a "turn on scrolling with the trackpoint instead of moving the mouse" button, or something like that. Maybe it can be mapped to a middle-click somehow, but I've yet to figure out how to do so on my new Thinkpad (which works with Ubuntu very well).
That, BTW, is why there are only two buttons duplicated down to the trackpad.
You know that you can buy a box of granola for about the same cost as just buying a can of rolled oats, right? "Saving time", bah.
:)
The bread, though, I'll grant you - home made bread rocks.
I canceled an account after the number was stolen (at a hotel - avoid all Best Westerns anywhere close to the St. Louis Airport). One of the things the jerk did was sign up for an AOL account. The card company (Chase) forwarded the monthly charges on to the new account. So I canceled the account with Chase completely. Months later, I was still getting bills from Chase for new charges from AOL, even though I had filled out the affidavit saying the card was stolen and that the AOL charges were not authorized by me. Every month, my wife would call up Chase and tell them that the new charge on a closed account was still unauthorized. They'd assure her that they'd take care of it, and then there'd be a new bill the next month. We finally had to call AOL to cancel, they sent us a form, and insisted that we need the original card number to cancel - which had been canceled, cut up, and thrown away months ago.
I've never had AOL service, and even stopped using Netscape when AOL bought them. And now I'll be damned if I ever let anyone I know give those bastards a dime. I've gotta say that I'm pretty disappointed in Chase, too, letting people continue to charge a closed account.
The last four banks (one of which is a credit union) I've used have had a minimum balance requirement ranging from $0 to $25 in order to have free checking. If you don't have "the cashflow" required to put $25 down up front and consider it spent until you leave the bank (it's not taken from you - you get it back if you leave), then it's arguable whether you need to actually use a bank at all.
They're not soaking the poor, they're soaking the lazy and/or stupid. I guess there's some overlap...
Yup, just the clock speed. You want something like FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) or MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) for a slightly more menaingful comparison, but that still suffers from neglecting to compare efficiency in parallel pipelines, accuracy of pre-fetches, etc.
Make's AMD's "Athlon XP 2400" marketing seem a little less deceptive when you realize that their GHz were getting more things done than Intel's GHz, doesn't it?
What? OpenBSD is Open Source Software? How are common people supposed to know that?
Number of users for whom I've lost email: 0
:)
Number of users for whom Google has lost email: >0
You forget, those people who run "enterprise" systems - they're just people who go home sometimes, and when they're home, they don't forget how to run a proper system. My mail servers are faster, though, and will remain that way until Google starts offering dedicated machines with gigabit connectivity to my workstation. Maybe you can't manage to figure out how to automate backups, and maybe you think that working for a big company somehow makes people smarter (even though I presently work for a huge company), but the fact remains - the ISP in my basement is more reliable than Google, in terms of reliability that matter to me. I don't have the *capacity*, but that is 100% irrelevant. I also don't have several layers of clueless management and CYA forms to fill out.
Lots of people who read and post to the dot here aren't your average "just know enough to be dangerous" home sysadmins. Some of us actually know what we're doing.
To clarify a couple of things which are close, but not quite right above...
p able.mspx :
From http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/ca
"To get an even better Windows Vista experience, including the Windows Aero user experience, ask for a Windows Vista Capable PC that is designated Premium Ready, or choose a PC that meets or exceeds the Premium Ready requirements"
This would suggest that, to get the Aero User Experience(TM), one needs a Premium Ready PC. You might ask "What's a Premium-ready PC?" Well, on the same page:
"A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
1 GB of system memory.
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)2, Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel."
That 1GB RAM is more than the motherboard supports on two of my machines which support 1GHz processors. 512MB will work, but even with the video card (which will run $50 or so in most retail establishments I've seen), that means no Aero for me. Well, my desire to run Linux also means no Aero for me, but that's not the point...
Also worth noting, the "bit locker" drive encryption thing requires one to buy a "TPM" USB 2.0 key or have a system with the "trusted" chip integrated. So, no drive encryption for your machine with only USB 1 support.
The minimum, no-Aero requirement is an 800MHz processor (not 1GHz), 512MB RAM, and the same (basically) video card, which suggests that you'll probably want a lot more than a 1GHz processor if 800 is the bare minimum to run at all...
echo << ENDHELP >> /etc/cron.hourly /trusted/upload/dir -type f -name '*.dpkg' -exec autosign '{}' \;
find
ENDHELP
What? You don't like the interface of a debian-derived distro, so you went with debian? Because you like windowmaker? You can run windowmaker in Ubuntu, too...
;)
http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/x11/wmaker
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/x11/wmaker
Like I said, Ubuntu has not experienced a single crash for me. I'm pretty sure it's not possible to be more stable than that. Grad the server install, then do the "apt-get install wmaker" thing to get Ubuntu without the ubuntu desktop. It'll be just like Debian, except for the updates happening more than once every decade.
There is no Ubuntu 6. Which would explain why your point number 1 is just wrong (hasn't been neccesary since pre 5.x). Your point number 2 and 5 are just "I like Windows software better", which is a valid Linux v/s Windows thing, but is not Ubuntu specific. So we'll throw those three out, leaving two complaints.
Point 3 disagrees with my experience across multiple video adapters, but maybe yours was misconfigured. Point taken - it's probably better in another release, but you may want to contribute a bug report. ATI or Nvidia? The nVidia drivers work better than the free open source drivers that Ubuntu uses by default. The drivers for ATI stuff general suck either way. Other stuff probably sucks too, in general. Sorry, but it's tough to support hardware without the hardware maker's support.
Point 4 is due to bad hardware support, and conflicts with my experience as well. I've researched wireless hardware Linux compatability before buying hardware, and found things that work out of the box. Both of my laptops and my desktop machine with wireless all have a nice little wireless network interface that I personally prefer to XP's thing.
As I'm fond of saying, though, I'm a professional systems administrator, so my experience may vary. But really, the problems people have fall into two categories, generally.
1) they like some software that someone wrote for Windows. Well, sure, I guess it'd be great if everyone in the world developed for all possible platforms. Then I could actually do something useful with BeOS and my Color Turbo NeXT. But they don't. So lack of software support is just a fact of life. Kinda like graphics software used to mainly be MacOS, with maybe a Windows version. Now, that's not so much the case.
2) People have hardware which doesn't have Linux drivers. Well, again, it'd be great if hardware vendors would write drivers for every possible OS. But they don't. They also don't release specs for us to write our own. I'm sorry that you chose hardware badly, but it's not Linux's fault that developers working on their own free time haven't managed to write optimized drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware out there. I have a 5.25" form factor scanner (a "photo drive", IIRC) that I bought a long time ago. I can't use it with Windows *or* Linux, because no one wrote drivers for it. I'm more likely to find someone who can help me do it for Linux than Windows, though.
Either way, though, the complaints are usually things that aren't really the fault of Linux itself. The beauty of Linux, though, is that you can actually help mke it work better if you want to do so. Call up a Microsoft office somewhere and suggest that you'd like to help them support an old piece of hardware or if an annoying interface bug in Windows. Then post to the Linux Kernel mailing list, or contact the author of a favorite piece of software. Lemme know which one's more receptive to your ideas. Lemme know which one will give you the code so that you can fix it yourself or let you hire someone who can fix it for you.
sauer@midnight:~$ ssh stain uptime /etc/debian_version
07:12:48 up 43 days, 2:31, 1 user, load average: 1.01, 1.09, 1.09
sauer@midnight:~$ ssh stain cat
testing/unstable
That machine (stain) is running at near 100% load 24x7. It's not on a UPS, which is why it's only been up 45 days - the last power failure was 45 days ago. It has not experienced a software problem since Ubuntu 5.04 was installed (which was apt-get dist-upgrade'd to Hoary and then Dapper). In fact, of the machines I'm running Ubuntu on at my location right now - including two daily-use desktops, two mythtv backends, three mythtv frontends, a MySQL cluster, two mail servers, three web servers, and a wireless router - I have not experienced a *single* notable failure due to Ubuntu's software (from warty up to feisty). I have experienced hardware problems, but that's not Ubuntu's fault. I have experienced misconfiguration problems, but again, that's the sysadmin's fault - not Ubuntu. Other people have reportedly had problems, but I wonder how many of them may have had a hand in the failure happening, since I seem able to avoid them just fine... I've had similar luck with Debian, FWIW, but I like Ubuntu's release cycle better (among other things).
So yeah, Debian's great. But seriously, the jealousy at Ubuntu's success while Debian's still semi-obscure is just petty. Ubuntu contributes their changes back to Debian, and the whole "free software" thing Debian pushes is supposed to encourage others to reuse the software.
Sorry, I don't have "funny" mod points to apply to this. :)
:)
Just in case you seriously didn't know, though, the displacement is the difference in volume of the cylinder with the piston at top dead center and bottom dead center. That's a space filled with air (and atomized fuel, ideally), and the air is *displaced* by the piston moving through the cylinder. You change displacement one of two ways - change stroke length or change bore diameter. In other words, either the cylinder of air being displaced gets taller or gets wider. Oil's got nothing to do with it.
The compression ratio, while we're on topic, is the ratio of the total cylinder volume (including the combustion chamber in the head) with the piston at BDC (uncompressed) and TDC (compressed). In a piston engine with zero deck height (pistons are level with the top of the block at TDC) and flat-top pistons, compression ratio is 1 + ((displacement / number of cylinders) / combustion chamber volume). Make sure you keep track of those units (hint, 1L=1000cc, a small block Chevy will usually have either 65cc or 72cc combustion chambers, and a zero deck 5.7L V8 engine will be running around 10.5 or 11:1 compression).
You might not have noticed, but forced induction is just adding [somewhat more efficient] cubic inches to the outside of the engine. Displacement is the air moved by the engine, and forced induction is simply moving more air (in other words, increased displacement). :)
;)
If you had said "Nitrous", now *that* would've been different.