Good enough has changed because Linux keeps up with the Windows upgrade cycle...I attempted to dust off a Pentium II 300 with 448mb RAM, 40 gig hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD/CD-RW, ESS Mastro II PCI sound card, and an Nvidia TNT2 (32 mb). To a get a mostly usable system (partially attributable to broken ACPI), I went from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 to XUbuntu 8.10 before ultimately making a reasonable net appliance with FreeBSD-7.1 & XFce4...
I'm running Gentoo on a Celeron 400 with 256 megs of ram just fine. No, I do not run Gnome nor KDE on it, but it runs Openbox brilliantly.
From that video: "If you've ever installed the Flash Plugin, you can't work on Gnash."
Seriously, WTF? That can't be true, can it? If you've installed Adobe Flash even once, you can never work on Gnash again? (or other Flash projects, I guess).
I'm kind of on the fence about my country's censorship (The UK, that is). As far as I know, it's only child porn that is actively censored, and whilst I don't mind it being censored due to what it is, it does spark the question "Where will it stop?"
I think the real question to ask is "what is the use of the censorship?" For example, when it comes to child pornography, how many children are actually saved by blocking child pornography sites? The blocking itself, obviously, does nothing to help the problem.
And what about distribution of child porn? Does the censorship make that more difficult? Clearly it would be quite impossible to make studies on this, but I'd hazard a guess that the censorship lists do nothing to stop the distribution either, because the distribution can be easily done through much more secure (and private) channels, once there is a contact between the customer and the provider. This could be one of the potential uses of the blocking; it might make it more difficult for CP distributors to find customers, if their public sites were blocked. But of course this isn't true at the moment either, because it is very easy to circumvent the censorship and because the leaked blocklists are a "nice way" to find these illegal sites in the first place.
On the contrary, I think these blocklists are downright harmful, because they lull people into a false sense of security and into thinking that something is actually being done about the problem. Instead of making secret blocklists and coming up with even more useless ways to filter and block "harmful content", I think the authorities should concentrate more on actually closing the sites and finding the people responsible for them and the material on them, because in the end that is the only way you can get these sites out of the Internet and help the children that are being exploited.
Just wait. Pretty soon the Used CD market won't exist, because corporations will wisely only make songs/albums available by download. You'll have no choice but to "buy new".
You'll always have the choice of not buying. There's a lot of free stuff available and there are also indie labels that are not affiliated with RIAA and buddies.
The really interesting thing about this trial is that the record companies seem not to have done their homework at all (although part of that could be bias from TorrentFreak, which seems to be the major English news source about this trial). They seem to have failed in pretty much every front: they failed to show any real statistics on the effects of file sharing or the amount of copyright infringing material on the Pirate Bay, their "evidence" of illegally downloading things from the Pirate Bay didn't hold water (because they could not show that the Pirate Bay tracker was actually used in their downloads), and they couldn't even show that what the Pirate Bay is doing is illegal in Sweden.
I can't really understand why they failed so hard. They had time to do their homework and I'm sure that they are not lacking in funds or other resources either. They could have collected some actual statistics on the amount of copyright infringing torrents or they could have done much better research on downloading copyright infringing stuff through the Pirate Bay -- disable DHT and all the other trackers beside the Pirate Bay, and you can be sure that the Pirate Bay tracker is used for the download.
Are the record companies really this inept at grasping the Internet (and hiring people that do understand it) or did they just think that they would win by default? Either one seems unlikely to me, but who knows?
A few years back there was a smallish competition to code Knight's Tour in x86 assembler (limited to 8x8 board, though). The winning entries were only 46 bytes compiled to a DOS.com file. Fond memories, despite my entry being almost 60 bytes of bloat;)
Right you are, and it's not the only mistake I made in my post -- I'm feeling rather numb in the skull at the moment. (It would be "interesting" to have two different 7.1 versions, though;)
Something tells me that a lot of people are going to be looking up Oort Cloud on Wikipedia in the next few minutes...
Not me, since I was a victim of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. But something tells me that people who read this message are going to be looking Wikipedia for something else...
I just don't understand why there needs to be OS specific stuff in the ACPI. I doubt it's there to fix OS specific problems? (Because that sounds rather silly; wouldn't it make more sense to fix the problems in the OS/drivers?)
Just out of curiosity I disassembled the ACPI DSDT of my laptop mobo (no idea about the manufacturer) and, sure enough, there's some Linux and "Windows 2006" (?) specific code in it. No idea what it does, though, as I had never even heard of ACPI having byte-code in it before.
I run Vista beautifully. It doesn't get in my way, it runs the software I want it to, it just works. So yes, it is possible. Without much effort, either, I might add.
Really? So, I guess it's the user's fault then when WGA decides that your (genuine) copy of Vista is a pirate and requires you to validate it again? Or when a security update completely breaks IE (I think this actually happened to a lot of people)? Or when a broken printer driver causes all kinds of havoc on your system?
Perhaps I've just been (very) unlucky with all the mishaps I've had with literally every operating system [1] I've used for the last ten years, but I've come to the conclusion that you just cannot expect an operating system to work without problems. They are simply too complex and have too many breaking parts in them.
[1] I never had any problems with FreeBSD, and all my hardware "just worked", but I'm quite sure that I would have soon run into something unpleasant, had I used it a bit longer or tried to install it on another computer.
A decently built PC should be practically noiseless, if you choose the right parts. An SSD does eliminate one spindle, but the HDD should already be the quietest spindle in the system - the CPU/GPU/PSU fans are the troublemakers here.
Note that we are talking mainly about laptops here. Most of the time the fan(s?) on my laptop are almost completely silent, and the noisiest part of the computer is the hard drive. Not that it's a problem, though, since I don't usually even notice the sound it makes, unless it is really quiet (like now, 4am in the morning;).
No, the packaging is designed to keep the bits in, even if you drop the drive. However, the force of the impact can clutter all the bits in one corner of the drive, giving them no space to move and change their state, so you should give the drive a good solid shake if you happen to drop it. That way the bits will be spread evenly inside the drive again, and they may happily continue their data storing existence, without the fear of bumping to their grumpy neighbour.
Some very nominal special purpose hardware would eat this alive. Remember intel is using unaccelerated general purpose processors to do this! Exactly, this is what most people seem to forget. While 4 quad-cores (quad quad-core?) might seem like a lot, it is nothing compared to the recent GPUs that have hundreds of cores. If a specialized ray tracing processor could get you even half of the processing power of a single core of these general purpose CPUs (with a fraction of the cost/power usage), imagine what 100-200 of these on a GPU could do... (Keep in mind that ray tracing scales extremely well when you add processing units).
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Good enough has changed because Linux keeps up with the Windows upgrade cycle...I attempted to dust off a Pentium II 300 with 448mb RAM, 40 gig hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD/CD-RW, ESS Mastro II PCI sound card, and an Nvidia TNT2 (32 mb). To a get a mostly usable system (partially attributable to broken ACPI), I went from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 to XUbuntu 8.10 before ultimately making a reasonable net appliance with FreeBSD-7.1 & XFce4...
I'm running Gentoo on a Celeron 400 with 256 megs of ram just fine. No, I do not run Gnome nor KDE on it, but it runs Openbox brilliantly.
From that video: "If you've ever installed the Flash Plugin, you can't work on Gnash."
Seriously, WTF? That can't be true, can it? If you've installed Adobe Flash even once, you can never work on Gnash again? (or other Flash projects, I guess).
Sheesh, talk about restrictive licensing...
I'm kind of on the fence about my country's censorship (The UK, that is). As far as I know, it's only child porn that is actively censored, and whilst I don't mind it being censored due to what it is, it does spark the question "Where will it stop?"
I think the real question to ask is "what is the use of the censorship?" For example, when it comes to child pornography, how many children are actually saved by blocking child pornography sites? The blocking itself, obviously, does nothing to help the problem.
And what about distribution of child porn? Does the censorship make that more difficult? Clearly it would be quite impossible to make studies on this, but I'd hazard a guess that the censorship lists do nothing to stop the distribution either, because the distribution can be easily done through much more secure (and private) channels, once there is a contact between the customer and the provider. This could be one of the potential uses of the blocking; it might make it more difficult for CP distributors to find customers, if their public sites were blocked. But of course this isn't true at the moment either, because it is very easy to circumvent the censorship and because the leaked blocklists are a "nice way" to find these illegal sites in the first place.
On the contrary, I think these blocklists are downright harmful, because they lull people into a false sense of security and into thinking that something is actually being done about the problem. Instead of making secret blocklists and coming up with even more useless ways to filter and block "harmful content", I think the authorities should concentrate more on actually closing the sites and finding the people responsible for them and the material on them, because in the end that is the only way you can get these sites out of the Internet and help the children that are being exploited.
Just wait. Pretty soon the Used CD market won't exist, because corporations will wisely only make songs/albums available by download. You'll have no choice but to "buy new".
You'll always have the choice of not buying. There's a lot of free stuff available and there are also indie labels that are not affiliated with RIAA and buddies.
The really interesting thing about this trial is that the record companies seem not to have done their homework at all (although part of that could be bias from TorrentFreak, which seems to be the major English news source about this trial). They seem to have failed in pretty much every front: they failed to show any real statistics on the effects of file sharing or the amount of copyright infringing material on the Pirate Bay, their "evidence" of illegally downloading things from the Pirate Bay didn't hold water (because they could not show that the Pirate Bay tracker was actually used in their downloads), and they couldn't even show that what the Pirate Bay is doing is illegal in Sweden.
I can't really understand why they failed so hard. They had time to do their homework and I'm sure that they are not lacking in funds or other resources either. They could have collected some actual statistics on the amount of copyright infringing torrents or they could have done much better research on downloading copyright infringing stuff through the Pirate Bay -- disable DHT and all the other trackers beside the Pirate Bay, and you can be sure that the Pirate Bay tracker is used for the download.
Are the record companies really this inept at grasping the Internet (and hiring people that do understand it) or did they just think that they would win by default? Either one seems unlikely to me, but who knows?
You could fit all your porn on one SD Card.
Nope. No, I couldn't (but I'm sure you didn't want to know what).
A few years back there was a smallish competition to code Knight's Tour in x86 assembler (limited to 8x8 board, though). The winning entries were only 46 bytes compiled to a DOS .com file. Fond memories, despite my entry being almost 60 bytes of bloat ;)
Clicky here
Right you are, and it's not the only mistake I made in my post -- I'm feeling rather numb in the skull at the moment. (It would be "interesting" to have two different 7.1 versions, though ;)
It starts with two ones. Why does everyone always get that wrong :(
Something tells me that a lot of people are going to be looking up Oort Cloud on Wikipedia in the next few minutes...
Not me, since I was a victim of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. But something tells me that people who read this message are going to be looking Wikipedia for something else...
For reference, see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_Phenomenon
I just don't understand why there needs to be OS specific stuff in the ACPI. I doubt it's there to fix OS specific problems? (Because that sounds rather silly; wouldn't it make more sense to fix the problems in the OS/drivers?)
Just out of curiosity I disassembled the ACPI DSDT of my laptop mobo (no idea about the manufacturer) and, sure enough, there's some Linux and "Windows 2006" (?) specific code in it. No idea what it does, though, as I had never even heard of ACPI having byte-code in it before.
I run Vista beautifully. It doesn't get in my way, it runs the software I want it to, it just works. So yes, it is possible. Without much effort, either, I might add.
Really? So, I guess it's the user's fault then when WGA decides that your (genuine) copy of Vista is a pirate and requires you to validate it again? Or when a security update completely breaks IE (I think this actually happened to a lot of people)? Or when a broken printer driver causes all kinds of havoc on your system?
Perhaps I've just been (very) unlucky with all the mishaps I've had with literally every operating system [1] I've used for the last ten years, but I've come to the conclusion that you just cannot expect an operating system to work without problems. They are simply too complex and have too many breaking parts in them.
[1] I never had any problems with FreeBSD, and all my hardware "just worked", but I'm quite sure that I would have soon run into something unpleasant, had I used it a bit longer or tried to install it on another computer.
Instant "Score:5, Math Geek", had it not been taken from Wikipedia :(
Noise ?
A decently built PC should be practically noiseless, if you choose the right parts. An SSD does eliminate one spindle, but the HDD should already be the quietest spindle in the system - the CPU/GPU/PSU fans are the troublemakers here.
Note that we are talking mainly about laptops here. Most of the time the fan(s?) on my laptop are almost completely silent, and the noisiest part of the computer is the hard drive. Not that it's a problem, though, since I don't usually even notice the sound it makes, unless it is really quiet (like now, 4am in the morning ;).
No, the packaging is designed to keep the bits in, even if you drop the drive. However, the force of the impact can clutter all the bits in one corner of the drive, giving them no space to move and change their state, so you should give the drive a good solid shake if you happen to drop it. That way the bits will be spread evenly inside the drive again, and they may happily continue their data storing existence, without the fear of bumping to their grumpy neighbour.
is there anything Emacs can't do?
It's missing a good text editor.
Don't worry, that is going to be remedied very soon -- I heard that Vim 8 is going to be implemented in elisp on top of Emacs!