So that begs the question: apart from issues of reliability, stability, do the Intel compilers make a Linux system perform better or worse than one built with gcc?
The correct answer to that question is: It depends
I've made use of the new Intel compiler on some Linux projects. Initial results showed that it had about the same performance as gcc. But at this point we know a lot about the gcc compiler tuning and not a lot about the characteristics of the Intel compiler, so only time will tell how much performance can be (safetly) wrung out of the Intel compiler.
No no no! Thats not what I meant (mayb I'm tired too:-) )! JPEG compression of simple maps produces worse images and larger files than PNG. So choosing JPEG for a map is a worse decision than using PNG on all counts.
While compressing your images should be right up there on the Web designer 101 course, sometimes I despair that the wrong types of compression are chosen.
JPEG is an excellent compression method for photographic images, both colour and greyscales. The image distortion is not noticeable by most people even at high compression ratios and the resulting image is close enough to the original.
JPEG is NOT an excellent compression method for line diagrams, maps and bitmaps featuring a limited colour palette - the artifacts created by the transforms used by the algorithms blur rapid changes in colour and can make text unreadable. Even worse, for most diagrams, PNG lossless compression yields smaller results because of the limited palette and large amount of redundancy inherent in the data.
JPEG 2000 promises even better compression ratios with superior image quality. Wavelet compression methods tend to reduce the amount of blur caused by the discrete cosine transforms and are better at handling rapid changes in colours. But that doesn't mean that it is a blanket solution.
I also look forward to the day when SVG is a widely available and widely supported browser option. We can all benefit when complex layouts can be described in terms of vectors and colour fills rather than overlarge and complex bitmaps for the classic web page touches like 3D colour balls and arrows. That will also save bandwidth while increasing the flexibility and variety of images on the web.
My friend got an x-box a while ago, and the only game he has found for it that he likes is Halo, which MS stole from Mac/PC (the bastards)).
If you really wanted Halo, wait for the PC/Mac release which should happen some time this year. And as you can imagine, it will be somewhat more expandable than the console version - Bungie are not the sort of company to waste the extra complexity available on a PC.
I just hope it runs in WINE, because my guess is the chances of a Linux port are low to zero.
I'm sorry but I'll take Visual Studio's debugger _any day_ over gdb. I'm not a GUI weenie either. It's just way, way more useable and powerful.
You've got to be kidding! Or maybe you just haven't RTFM'd the gdb manual. GDB has so many more options for memory tracking, accesses, data display than VS - you just need to be able to learn the commands. If you need a fancy GUI on top of your base-level debugger, run DDD on top of it and get graphs of variable values over time, charts of structure layouts and other goodies.
What is the average price for a new cd in the UK, assuming 1.43 conversion rate to US dollar? I'm just curious.
Depends where you buy them. If you want to get fleeced, you buy them at HMV and you'll not have much change from UKP16.
However, support your local independant record store and you can usually find CDs (mainstream) for less than UKP10. Most of the ones I bought were between UKP6 and UKP11.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers
on
ROX Desktop Update
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Wow, I just took a look and the ROX Filer is truly revolutionary. This is the first simple example of the powerful Nextstep and MacOS X concept of "app wrappers" brought to Linux.
Funny you should call them MacOS X style app wrappers because they are based on a much older system from Acorn RiscOS:-) Hence ROX - Risc Os on X.
Other really nice things are the Drag-and-drop save - why the hell hasn't this caught on elsewhere? After all, we drag things into windows to indicate the movement of data from one window to another. We drag files into apps to load them. Why hasn't dragging a 'file' out of an app to a filer window caught on as the most obvious way to save a file?
As an avid user of Acorn RiscOS back in its hey day (when men were Real Men, women were Real Women and real furry creatures from Alpha Centuri were Real Furry Creatures from Alpha Centuri), ROX allows me to get passed all the normal windowing cruft and really allow me to use the desktop.
Yep - thats the article I read and used. There are lots of symbols already predefined in XFree86 4.x - read the comments on that URL talks about setkbdmap.
For some tricks you need to make use of utilities like XMMS Pipe to fire commands at XMMS from hotkeys. That way you can bind a key like VolumeUp to a command to send a message to XMMS to raise the volume. Similar tricks can be used with other players (like cymbaline which isn't pretty but has random album play).
Why are you missing keys when in Linux? Every key on my keyboard is active including the speaker volume adjust, play, stop (mapped to XMMS), shopping, browser, etc. They all work. You just need to configure them.
And as they get easier to use, the number of people who really understand computers will also decrease.
As less and less people need to understand how a computer ticks in order to use it, the current class of knowledgable computer users will become a smaller and smaller subgroup of computer users.
This elite class of computer 'brains' will be increasingly in demand for those cases where VB Programming 101 is not sufficient.
This elite class will be paid vast sums to keep the rest of the computer-using world happy (I can dream can't I?:-) )
Rumour has that the problems lay with Ion Storm, rather than Loki. But like all rumours, facts are extremely sparse. There definitely was a working demo of Deus Ex - it was on display at one of the Linux shows. So at least the principle part of the coding was done. Then there were layoffs at Loki - maybe (probably) key personnel left. The port gets mired down, contractual problems crop up. NDAs stop anyone saying anything and we are all totally left in the dark.
To be honest, the delays in Civ:CTP were probably similar - it must be frustrating to be a developer stuck in contractual problems with potential buyers wanting to know what is going on/ETAs and not being able to give any information out...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
And no - I don't work for Loki. I just bought their games and read their newsgroups.
Some VM implementations use a sophisticated comprimize between interpreters and JIT compilers [sun.com]. If you can identify the small part of the program that does most of the actual work, you know what parts of the program really need to be compiled. How do you do this? You wait until the program actually starts running!
Advocates of this approach claim that it has the potential to be faster than C++ and other native-code languages. A traditional optimizing compiler can only make decisions based on general predictions as to how the program will behave at run time. But if you watch the program's behavior, you have specific knowledge of what needs to be optimized.
Err - but you can do that with C++. Ever heard of Feedback Directed Program Restructuring (FDPR)? You run your code under whatever load you feel like optimizing and use the FDPR tools to rebuild the code, changing the ordering and ensuring that cache misses are minimized as much as possible. Try taking a look here for some more details.
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
Lets see. I moved to Canada from the UK. I pay Can$35 a month to watch telly through my cable provider - thats about UKP180/year. And what do I actually watch? Reruns of British shows mostly, plus the occassional gem like 'Nero Wolfe'. So for that extra 80quid I'm spending I get to watch LESS decent TV. The rest is bunk - there are only so many times I can watch the Buffy reruns (on six channels simultaneously...)
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world.
Guess you haven't lived abroad then. The number of decent productions outside the A&E/BBC productions is pretty small
Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that.
Well I pity you then...
2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
Trust me - even 70+channels of rubbish is still rubbish.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
So you are complaining that that 100UKP also covers something like 6 national radio stations plus about 50+ local stations, all free of advertising...
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
You prefer Chicken Noodle News? Did you find that last lobotomy was good value? CNN has lost the plot bigtime - it fails to find any depth or balance these days and replays the exploding World Trade Towers at the smallest excuse. There is no serious debate on CNN anymore - any kudos they got from having reporters inside Iraq during the Gulf war is long gone...
Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
If the BBC disappeared, the quality of broadcasting in the UK would quickly look like it does elsewhere - lowest common denominator productions aimed at maximal viewers for minimal cost. Expect massively overrun reruns of cheap programming, budget chat shows, game shows and agro-shows filling up the airwaves. Radio 4 would cease to exist and nothing would replace it - for a commercial radio station relying on ads, there isn't the market. Any in-depth scientific programs would die a death - they are expensive to produce and research. Historical programs would also feel the breath of marketing and fade away.
To be honest, I'd be quite happy to pay UKP40-50/year to access premium web services on the BBC website. It seems you don't realise what value you are getting.
For those in a hurry, here is the editted summary...
A quantum... revolutionary... and... Mac... floating... fearsomely fast... through the... barrier... runs... and crunches... Pentium 4-based... super models.
Off the charts, with hot... fluid motion and... phenomenal... overdrive...snap... three brilliant... creative professionals.
Faster-than-light... ultrafast... massively enhanced throughput... significantly faster... even faster... boosting... for shooting large... Keyboard features.
If you get a decent telescope with a decent CCD camera, you can do a lot of semi-serious astronomy with the tools available in the academic astronomy community. While these tools lack something in the pretty front-end department, their underlying image processing algorithms and catalogue analysis software is capable of some serious data crunching.
The first thing you should get hold of Xephem - a pretty good starmap/night sky program useful for locating things you want to observe. Once you have that, you should get some heavy duty image software, such as IRAF which I used extensively during my PhD. Take time to read the documentation available and absorb the methods used for analysing optical images - plenty of papers reveal in detail the methods used to identify objects and classify them according to morphology, colour profile or similar.
There are other sky plate analysis packages out there. Look for SExtractor (Source extractor) which some people prefer and which may make a better job of analysing nearby galaxies.
Also look out for tools in the links off a lot of these academic pages - there are lots of tricks available to flat-field images properly and get good catalogues built. If you are used to driving things from the command line you'll feel right at home. If you are used to GUIs with everything the learning curve will be steeper... But read papers on analysing optical CCD images - the http://xxx.lanl.gov/ preprint server gives you searchable access to lots of astro-ph preprints.
There I was, foaming at the mouth and ready to launch into a "how can you be so stupid?" diatribe.
You should read the Independant paper/web site more often then. While I don't agree with everything written in the paper by any stretch, it's one of the best written newspapers in the UK and was the one I subscribed to until I left for other shores.
The PPC spec has included 64-bit instructions from day 1, but they've only been used in IBM's mainframes. The problem with apple using a standard 64-bit PPC is that there are a few minor differences in how certain generic instructions are handled (most instructions are specific to single- or double-words) which make running code compiled for 32-bit PPC uncertain on 64-bit PPC.
Is this really true? I run on a mixture of 32bit and 64bit 4-way POWER RS6000 machines - all the software is compiled up on the 32bit platforms and runs seemlessly everywhere. So either your statement doesn't apply on AIX or the PowerPC chips are subtly different to the POWER platform when it comes to 32bit/64bit.
This only runs on Windows. Slight problem with those commands then.
Only if it can't be run on WINE. Or coaxed into running in a winelib application (in much the same way as Mplayer uses the Windows Media Player DLLs). If that works, then the ALSA sound system will still gives you a file to work with. On ANY Unix system, the everything-is-a-file design makes it pretty trivial to hook up an extra file redirection and store the resulting pcm data.
That is a little extreme! Just add 'robots = off' to your.wgetrc file and wget will ignore any robots.txt on the site it is crawling. This is extremely bad netiquette so DON'T DO IT
The unix system doesn't really dump all the files in/usr/bin. These are, almost without exception, executable files. For each executable, support files are usually installed into one or more directory trees, such as/usr/share/executable_name/. The main convenience gained by having all the main binaries in one place (or two - I usually try to leave system binaries in/usr/bin and my own installations in/usr/local/bin) is convenience for searching paths when looking for the binaries.
However, this paradigm is pretty ugly if you are browsing through your files graphically. It would be nice if each application/package installed into one directory tree, so you could reorganise the system simply by moving applications around. For example,
/usr/applications/
/usr/applications/games/
/usr/applications/games/quake3/
.. this dir holds all quake 3 files...
...etc..
/usr/applications/graphics/
/usr/applications/graphics/gimp/
... this dir hold all gimp files
...etc...
If this appeals to you, you might like to check out the ROX project. This sort of directory tree layout was the standard on the Acorn Risc OS and made life extremely easy for GUI organisation. It makes a lot of sense to use the directory tree to categorise the apps and files.
Looks like this document is full of quotes for us to enjoy here. But for those of us looking to play DVDs on Linux using DeCSS or the information contain therein, this line was particularly reassuring:
Although the social value of DeCSS may be questionable, it is nonetheless pure speech
Slashdot Mirror
So that begs the question: apart from issues of reliability, stability, do the Intel compilers make a Linux system perform better or worse than one built with gcc?
The correct answer to that question is: It depends
I've made use of the new Intel compiler on some Linux projects. Initial results showed that it had about the same performance as gcc. But at this point we know a lot about the gcc compiler tuning and not a lot about the characteristics of the Intel compiler, so only time will tell how much performance can be (safetly) wrung out of the Intel compiler.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
No no no! Thats not what I meant (mayb I'm tired too :-) )! JPEG compression of simple maps produces worse images and larger files than PNG. So choosing JPEG for a map is a worse decision than using PNG on all counts.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
While compressing your images should be right up there on the Web designer 101 course, sometimes I despair that the wrong types of compression are chosen.
JPEG is an excellent compression method for photographic images, both colour and greyscales. The image distortion is not noticeable by most people even at high compression ratios and the resulting image is close enough to the original.
JPEG is NOT an excellent compression method for line diagrams, maps and bitmaps featuring a limited colour palette - the artifacts created by the transforms used by the algorithms blur rapid changes in colour and can make text unreadable. Even worse, for most diagrams, PNG lossless compression yields smaller results because of the limited palette and large amount of redundancy inherent in the data.
JPEG 2000 promises even better compression ratios with superior image quality. Wavelet compression methods tend to reduce the amount of blur caused by the discrete cosine transforms and are better at handling rapid changes in colours. But that doesn't mean that it is a blanket solution.
I also look forward to the day when SVG is a widely available and widely supported browser option. We can all benefit when complex layouts can be described in terms of vectors and colour fills rather than overlarge and complex bitmaps for the classic web page touches like 3D colour balls and arrows. That will also save bandwidth while increasing the flexibility and variety of images on the web.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
My friend got an x-box a while ago, and the only game he has found for it that he likes is Halo, which MS stole from Mac/PC (the bastards)).
If you really wanted Halo, wait for the PC/Mac release which should happen some time this year. And as you can imagine, it will be somewhat more expandable than the console version - Bungie are not the sort of company to waste the extra complexity available on a PC.
I just hope it runs in WINE, because my guess is the chances of a Linux port are low to zero.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
You mean Void? Or did you have another one in mind?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm sorry but I'll take Visual Studio's debugger _any day_ over gdb. I'm not a GUI weenie either. It's just way, way more useable and powerful.
You've got to be kidding! Or maybe you just haven't RTFM'd the gdb manual. GDB has so many more options for memory tracking, accesses, data display than VS - you just need to be able to learn the commands. If you need a fancy GUI on top of your base-level debugger, run DDD on top of it and get graphs of variable values over time, charts of structure layouts and other goodies.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
What is the average price for a new cd in the UK, assuming 1.43 conversion rate to US dollar? I'm just curious.
Depends where you buy them. If you want to get fleeced, you buy them at HMV and you'll not have much change from UKP16.
However, support your local independant record store and you can usually find CDs (mainstream) for less than UKP10. Most of the ones I bought were between UKP6 and UKP11.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Wow, I just took a look and the ROX Filer is truly revolutionary. This is the first simple example of the powerful Nextstep and MacOS X concept of "app wrappers" brought to Linux.
Funny you should call them MacOS X style app wrappers because they are based on a much older system from Acorn RiscOS :-) Hence ROX - Risc Os on X.
Other really nice things are the Drag-and-drop save - why the hell hasn't this caught on elsewhere? After all, we drag things into windows to indicate the movement of data from one window to another. We drag files into apps to load them. Why hasn't dragging a 'file' out of an app to a filer window caught on as the most obvious way to save a file?
As an avid user of Acorn RiscOS back in its hey day (when men were Real Men, women were Real Women and real furry creatures from Alpha Centuri were Real Furry Creatures from Alpha Centuri), ROX allows me to get passed all the normal windowing cruft and really allow me to use the desktop.
As someone else has already said, ROX rocks.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Yep - thats the article I read and used. There are lots of symbols already predefined in XFree86 4.x - read the comments on that URL talks about setkbdmap.
For some tricks you need to make use of utilities like XMMS Pipe to fire commands at XMMS from hotkeys. That way you can bind a key like VolumeUp to a command to send a message to XMMS to raise the volume. Similar tricks can be used with other players (like cymbaline which isn't pretty but has random album play).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Why are you missing keys when in Linux? Every key on my keyboard is active including the speaker volume adjust, play, stop (mapped to XMMS), shopping, browser, etc. They all work. You just need to configure them.
And yes - having shortcut keys is really useful.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Computers will become easier to use.
And as they get easier to use, the number of people who really understand computers will also decrease.
As less and less people need to understand how a computer ticks in order to use it, the current class of knowledgable computer users will become a smaller and smaller subgroup of computer users.
This elite class of computer 'brains' will be increasingly in demand for those cases where VB Programming 101 is not sufficient.
This elite class will be paid vast sums to keep the rest of the computer-using world happy (I can dream can't I? :-) )
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
To be honest, the delays in Civ:CTP were probably similar - it must be frustrating to be a developer stuck in contractual problems with potential buyers wanting to know what is going on/ETAs and not being able to give any information out...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
And no - I don't work for Loki. I just bought their games and read their newsgroups.
Some VM implementations use a sophisticated comprimize between interpreters and JIT compilers [sun.com]. If you can identify the small part of the program that does most of the actual work, you know what parts of the program really need to be compiled. How do you do this? You wait until the program actually starts running!
Advocates of this approach claim that it has the potential to be faster than C++ and other native-code languages. A traditional optimizing compiler can only make decisions based on general predictions as to how the program will behave at run time. But if you watch the program's behavior, you have specific knowledge of what needs to be optimized.
Err - but you can do that with C++. Ever heard of Feedback Directed Program Restructuring (FDPR)? You run your code under whatever load you feel like optimizing and use the FDPR tools to rebuild the code, changing the ordering and ensuring that cache misses are minimized as much as possible. Try taking a look here for some more details.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
Lets see. I moved to Canada from the UK. I pay Can$35 a month to watch telly through my cable provider - thats about UKP180/year. And what do I actually watch? Reruns of British shows mostly, plus the occassional gem like 'Nero Wolfe'. So for that extra 80quid I'm spending I get to watch LESS decent TV. The rest is bunk - there are only so many times I can watch the Buffy reruns (on six channels simultaneously...)
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world.
Guess you haven't lived abroad then. The number of decent productions outside the A&E/BBC productions is pretty small
Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that.
Well I pity you then...
2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
Trust me - even 70+channels of rubbish is still rubbish.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
So you are complaining that that 100UKP also covers something like 6 national radio stations plus about 50+ local stations, all free of advertising...
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
You prefer Chicken Noodle News? Did you find that last lobotomy was good value? CNN has lost the plot bigtime - it fails to find any depth or balance these days and replays the exploding World Trade Towers at the smallest excuse. There is no serious debate on CNN anymore - any kudos they got from having reporters inside Iraq during the Gulf war is long gone...
Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
If the BBC disappeared, the quality of broadcasting in the UK would quickly look like it does elsewhere - lowest common denominator productions aimed at maximal viewers for minimal cost. Expect massively overrun reruns of cheap programming, budget chat shows, game shows and agro-shows filling up the airwaves. Radio 4 would cease to exist and nothing would replace it - for a commercial radio station relying on ads, there isn't the market. Any in-depth scientific programs would die a death - they are expensive to produce and research. Historical programs would also feel the breath of marketing and fade away.
To be honest, I'd be quite happy to pay UKP40-50/year to access premium web services on the BBC website. It seems you don't realise what value you are getting.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
For those in a hurry, here is the editted summary ...
A quantum ... revolutionary ... and ... Mac ... floating ... fearsomely fast ... through the ... barrier ... runs ... and crunches ... Pentium 4-based ... super models.
Off the charts, with hot ... fluid motion and ... phenomenal ... overdrive ...snap ... three brilliant ... creative professionals.
Faster-than-light ... ultrafast ... massively enhanced throughput ... significantly faster... even faster ... boosting ... for shooting large ... Keyboard features.
What more do you need to know?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The first thing you should get hold of Xephem - a pretty good starmap/night sky program useful for locating things you want to observe. Once you have that, you should get some heavy duty image software, such as IRAF which I used extensively during my PhD. Take time to read the documentation available and absorb the methods used for analysing optical images - plenty of papers reveal in detail the methods used to identify objects and classify them according to morphology, colour profile or similar.
There are other sky plate analysis packages out there. Look for SExtractor (Source extractor) which some people prefer and which may make a better job of analysing nearby galaxies.
Also look out for tools in the links off a lot of these academic pages - there are lots of tricks available to flat-field images properly and get good catalogues built. If you are used to driving things from the command line you'll feel right at home. If you are used to GUIs with everything the learning curve will be steeper... But read papers on analysing optical CCD images - the http://xxx.lanl.gov/ preprint server gives you searchable access to lots of astro-ph preprints.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There I was, foaming at the mouth and ready to launch into a "how can you be so stupid?" diatribe.
You should read the Independant paper/web site more often then. While I don't agree with everything written in the paper by any stretch, it's one of the best written newspapers in the UK and was the one I subscribed to until I left for other shores.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The PPC spec has included 64-bit instructions from day 1, but they've only been used in IBM's mainframes. The problem with apple using a standard 64-bit PPC is that there are a few minor differences in how certain generic instructions are handled (most instructions are specific to single- or double-words) which make running code compiled for 32-bit PPC uncertain on 64-bit PPC.
Is this really true? I run on a mixture of 32bit and 64bit 4-way POWER RS6000 machines - all the software is compiled up on the 32bit platforms and runs seemlessly everywhere. So either your statement doesn't apply on AIX or the PowerPC chips are subtly different to the POWER platform when it comes to 32bit/64bit.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This only runs on Windows. Slight problem with those commands then.
Only if it can't be run on WINE. Or coaxed into running in a winelib application (in much the same way as Mplayer uses the Windows Media Player DLLs). If that works, then the ALSA sound system will still gives you a file to work with. On ANY Unix system, the everything-is-a-file design makes it pretty trivial to hook up an extra file redirection and store the resulting pcm data.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
cat
Now play that funky music and...
oggenc --raw
Wow. Making a copy of this music is gonna be reaaaaallly difficult.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There's no funky name like "linmodem" that's appropriate for BSD.
BuSteDmodem.
moDaemon
Or even (and you might take this as advice if you have a winmodem) Binmodem.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This is extremely bad netiquette so DON'T DO IT
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The unix system doesn't really dump all the files in /usr/bin. These are, almost without exception, executable files. For each executable, support files are usually installed into one or more directory trees, such as /usr/share/executable_name/. The main convenience gained by having all the main binaries in one place (or two - I usually try to leave system binaries in /usr/bin and my own installations in /usr/local/bin) is convenience for searching paths when looking for the binaries.
However, this paradigm is pretty ugly if you are browsing through your files graphically. It would be nice if each application/package installed into one directory tree, so you could reorganise the system simply by moving applications around. For example,
.. this dir holds all quake 3 files ...
... this dir hold all gimp files
/usr/applications/
/usr/applications/games/
/usr/applications/games/quake3/
...etc..
/usr/applications/graphics/
/usr/applications/graphics/gimp/
...etc...
If this appeals to you, you might like to check out the ROX project. This sort of directory tree layout was the standard on the Acorn Risc OS and made life extremely easy for GUI organisation. It makes a lot of sense to use the directory tree to categorise the apps and files.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
10,000 machines running Win NT to be converted to Linux. Existing hardware == No cost
1 Redhat distribution from Best Buy: $70
Effective budget requirements (staff are already employed to do this sort of thing) for complete Linux installation. Total cost: $70.
cf: Windows XP rollout - $100 upgrade per machine. $1million dollars plus extra new software
It's not exactly a big suprise that Linux isn't costing the earth for these companies - and this survey is talking to the Financial officers.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Looks like this document is full of quotes for us to enjoy here. But for those of us looking to play DVDs on Linux using DeCSS or the information contain therein, this line was particularly reassuring:
Although the social value of DeCSS may be questionable, it is nonetheless pure speech
Cheers,
Toby Haynes