"W2K runs great on my old P 350, but Redhat makes the hard drive spin ad infinitum and opening a window in KDE or Gnome is a major undertaking. I actually can't run a Linux with a GUI on any of my machines. It's too damn slow. But, I can run W2K on any of 'em. Funny, huh?"
KDE and Gnome are both a little too bloated.
True, but the original poster is just a troll. Maybe if you go back to 2.2.14 you might find a linux kernel that acts like he says, but since then it's been perfectly usable on low end machines, and if you're talking about recent kernels, that's double emphasis on the "perfectly". And I am talking about machines much less powerful than he is. KDE3 is solid as a rock on a 233MHz K6, and perfectly usable less powerful machines than that.
heh. I'm a coder and a hardware whore (nine working machines in my home cave, including a uVAX II), and up until last November my main machine was a PPro 200 w/ 128 MB RAM running NT 4.0.
My wife runs a K6 233 MHz with KDE 3, OpenOffice, Mozilla, audio apps, lots more, short of fullscreen video. OpenOffice takes 30 seconds or so to start, but once going it's nice and responsive. 2D graphics are rock solid, e.g., fullscreen window moves are accelerated/smooth. While I run a considerably more powerful machine, mainly for compiling, she's perfectly happy with hers for what she does with it. This is a vintage 1996 machine or so, still in full service and likely to remain so for quite some time. I added some memory, bumped the disk space to 95 GB (noticable performance improvement there from faster IDE disks), put in a more quieter fan and added USB ports for scanning, webcam and so on. Besides doing her surfing, word processing etc, it acts as our file server and music jukebox. It's often doing heavy file transfers over the network, and she doesn't even notice. I think I might add in another 120 GB, and make it 7200 rpm for a little more speed. Even on that slow processor, a 5400 rpm disk does 16 MB/sec. With KDE it's super smooth to use and looks slick, and needless to say, it never, ever needs to be rebooted except to add hardware.
Yes, I can go down the street and get her a K7 machine that's 15-20 times more powerful for $600, but why?
Thats all. I dont use paypal, and I dont condone paypal. But everyone knows it sucks,
That's where you are sadly, horribly wrong. Most people out there don't know it sucks,, and nonetheless do not deserve to be abused because of that. Sure, if you know and you get burned, well, you knew what you were doing. But if you didn't... that's why there are consumer protection laws. To keep people from serving you icecream with dioxin in it. Otherwise, they would - it's a big old world, and there is always someone willing to step across the line for a buck.
and if you choose to use it, its at your own risk. Essentially, do what you will. But don't crying to me when you get fucked.
OK, so I see where you are coming from, you just don't think things all the way through, and you get defensive when you get called. Plus you have all day to sit and post on Slashdot;-)
Or instead of writing you a check, or getting a cashier's check, or getting a money order...
"Hey honey, let's ignore tried and true banking principles that have been in place for years and are regulated by the government and let's use this new website that just opened up instead!" "Ok, sounds great!"
[beep][beep][beep]Oh sorry, gotta run, my bullshit detector is going off...
It might seem funny now, but at the time we believed that Pay Pal was reputable, and did not see any reason not to transfer money through them. Hopefully, it would have been faster than a cheque or a wire transfer. Instead it turned out to be a real horror. Just don't use them... for anything.
There is no good reason to patronize an unethical business.
"There is no excuse for not having live telephone-answering customer service. Imagine if your local bookstore quit answering the phone because they do all their business in the store and none on the phone."
I dont see that'd be a problem. I live in area with sidewalk merchants. Are they dastardly because they dont have phone numbers? No. Of course not.
Make your choices, and have fun. But I think its stupid. If you perform 99% of all transactions with a company online, why should you switch to phone for that last 1%? It doesn't make sense.
The whole point of the Internet is that Its Not Phone.
Where are you coming from? It sounds like you are arguing that fraudulent business conduct should be condoned; you'd prefer we all just wink and look the other way. What, you don't think Pay Pal really does anything wrong? You'd do well to stop spouting and start doing your research.
Read here. I can personally assure you that this is highly accurate, as it has in fact happened to me.
Or if you prefer, read court documents. Yes, there are plenty of those to read.
My wife opened a Paypal account for me, and one for herself, then transferred $6,000 from my account to hers. We didn't see that money again for three months, as they pretended to be "investigating" the transaction for possible fraud. Never mind that we talked to them many times on the telephone, and send proof of our ownership of the accounts several times, and pleaded with them to resolve this, as we needed the money.
The delay was beyond any point of being able to pretend that they actually made any effort to resolve the situation. It was in fact more than 10 days after we first contacted them before they would even open what they call an "investigation". They claim that their procedures are set up to combat fraud, but it's just a way of establishing deniability. That is, they pretend that they have no intention whatever of stringing me along as long as they can, while they collect interest on my money. (And no, they never did offer any compensation for the lost interest, let alone the many hours we were forced to spend pursuing them, to get our money back.)
You think mine is an isolated case? It is by no means. Just do a web search for paypal+complaint. See all the distressed people. See the lawsuits.
It's a transparent scam: by locking up the money of only a certain percentage of their customers, and treating the rest reasonably well, the people who claim that Pay Pal engages in a pattern of sleazy misconduct will never be believed, because they will always be outnumbered by customers who have never had a problem.
Conventional wisdom, sometimes called Amdahl's second law of computing, says you need as many bytes as flops, i.e. a one second main memory buffer. This computer only has 1/60 sufficient memory- 16 terabytes for one petaflop. Anything that involves serious dataprocessing, e.g. sensor signals, won't run at top speed due to the seriousmemory deficiency.
Just think of the 16 terabytes as cache, and the main memory resides virtually on the filesystem, which is specced in the multi-petabyte range,with transfer rate to match. Note that the new generation of network interfaces provide roughly half the bandwidth of main memory. The storage system is divided up across thousands of inexpensive boxes full of cheap IDE drives, feeding into the big network switch through commodity (probably 10Ge by that time) network interfaces.
Although software libre developers can't get access to Microsoft's specs or API source, it's quite possible to work around the problem...
That's not the point. The question is whether Microsoft is living up to their so-called voluntary compliance with the proposed DOS settlement.
Anyway, the Samba team know this protocol better than Microsoft does at this point, so there's no possible argument for making use of information Microsoft has not placed unambiguously in the public domain. That would just create an opportunity for Microsoft to attack the Samba project legally, which they would no doubt love to do.
This turn of events is worth far more in terms of demonstrating to Judge Kollar-Kotelly that Microsoft is not now abiding by the terms of the DOJ settlement, and cannot be expected to in the future.
why does it exist?
- because some stupid guy did not take the sources of blender in 1996 or so when he started moonlight
- because some other stupid guys liked moonlight and used it
- because it's easier to cope with without learning yet-another-GUI-paradigm
- because it's fun hacking it (blender doesn't even build yet afaik)
- because blender sources weren't free in january, when I started
- and finally, because I guess that the blender sources are much bigger and less understandable than source that was once meant to be open instead of some corporate beast that wasn't supposed to see the light
- and because you are one cool dude
Seriously, let me say, um, 5 things: 1) Thanks a lot for doing this 2) Congratulations on your release 3) Keep it up 4) The glass angel is gorgeous! 5) Please ignore the clueless dickheads who probably never coded anything in their lives and never contributed to any project, yet think they know who should work on which project and why.
Blender being GPL'd was aboslutely newsworthy. Why is Moonlight's resurrection newsworthy? A program sits around a long time, it gets an update, front page news on slashdot.
OK, I'll bite. Note that Moonlight's focus is on intuitive interface, a important niche to stake out in the OS/3D ecology, don't you think? On the face of it, a little competition on the UI front would not hurt Blender at all. Also, maybe we'll see some useful cross-package code and file standards developed as a result of users using both tools for different strengths, and wanting to port between them. With just one major modeling package, this important area might not get as much attention as it needs.
Anyway, OS/3D modelling *is* front page news because it strengthens our hand on the 3D game front, one of the few major areas where free software is still weak. But it's coming, it's coming...
Larry McVoy looked at the way the kernel was developed and figured that Linus would end up burnt out and collapse, and decided that the best way he could help prevent that was to develop a source control system that would ease Linus' load. Thus BitKeeper was born . ..
No, more like Larry learned the ropes of writing source versioning software while on salary at Sun and SGI, and as he figured he was getting pretty good at it, he thought he could start his own company, write a new version of the same software he already worked on twice before, and make a pile of dough. Getting Linus to use it was just his plan for getting free PR, so he could go boast about that to his business customers. I don't see anything altruistic there at all.
Please, do a little bit of research before posting thoughts on this kind of thing - posting without knowing what you're talking about tends to make you look rather ignorant.
Unless I missed the announcement, linux is still stuck with 2GB RAM max, at least on x86.
You missed the announcement. Linux upports up to 64 GB per ia32 processor, has done for years, with at least one 32 GB system out there in the wild and 8 GB systems fairly common.
Yes, and you can run Linux on it just fine. Not only that, but some of these Apple products are getting into the price competitive zone as well, especially the server products.
The key item here though, is the PPC, which so far has no DRM in its guts. This has caused me to change my plans re what I design new projects around.
Plus, rumours are flying of new, power-efficient PPCs for desktop and embedded use. As far as I'm concerned, that tears it. As soon as these hit the market, it's goodbye Intel, there no longer is any reason to stay with the bad old bad old. And so long as AMD sticks to their DRM guns, it's goodbye AMD too.
Christ, palladium comes with an off switch. Turn it off and run your 'untrusted' code on your machine. Your corporate firewall may not let you throw if you aren't in Pallidum mode, but so be it. It has nothing to do with the gov't throwing you in jail.
Sure, and the first thing you'll find is tons of software refusing to run with the switch in the off position, whether or not it has anything to do with digitial media. Don't be naive.
I'm feeling sad. If the future (2-5 years) means PC's are gone and all we will have are X-Box type boxen on the desktop, I'll cry.
Me too. Funny how things go, isn't it? Now I'm looking to IBM for the way out here. I'd happily drop x86 instantly if IBM keeps their spine stiff and keeps DRM out of PPC. Plus, these chips are really kick-ass, no legacy goo.
I dug up this link to the opinion and order re the Markham phase of the trial, which concerns how the claims of the patent are construed.
<ramble> Since it's apparently necessary for all free developers to know the u.s. patent system well in order to more effectively undermine it, here's a good place to start. Hats off to this judge for presenting the material in a clear, almost tutorial manner.
It's essential to be able to read patent claims the way a judge does. It's not as hard as it first appears - remember, the Judge has just as much trouble with technical aspects as we have with the patent legalese. One thing to keep in mind is that it's the claims that matter, and these are generally a fairly small part of the patent.
Once you figure out what the claims mean, it's a lot easier to go hunting prior art or find a workaround.
Of course I'm not suggesting that all developers have to stop coding now and become patent lawyers, but we do need a lot more eyeballs on these things to help counterbalance the prevailing insanity. Besides, undermining patents is an interesting sport in and of itself.</ramble>
Slashdot Mirror
"W2K runs great on my old P 350, but Redhat makes the hard drive spin ad infinitum and opening a window in KDE or Gnome is a major undertaking. I actually can't run a Linux with a GUI on any of my machines. It's too damn slow. But, I can run W2K on any of 'em. Funny, huh?"
KDE and Gnome are both a little too bloated.
True, but the original poster is just a troll. Maybe if you go back to 2.2.14 you might find a linux kernel that acts like he says, but since then it's been perfectly usable on low end machines, and if you're talking about recent kernels, that's double emphasis on the "perfectly". And I am talking about machines much less powerful than he is. KDE3 is solid as a rock on a 233MHz K6, and perfectly usable less powerful machines than that.
heh. I'm a coder and a hardware whore (nine working machines in my home cave, including a uVAX II), and up until last November my main machine was a PPro 200 w/ 128 MB RAM running NT 4.0.
My wife runs a K6 233 MHz with KDE 3, OpenOffice, Mozilla, audio apps, lots more, short of fullscreen video. OpenOffice takes 30 seconds or so to start, but once going it's nice and responsive. 2D graphics are rock solid, e.g., fullscreen window moves are accelerated/smooth. While I run a considerably more powerful machine, mainly for compiling, she's perfectly happy with hers for what she does with it. This is a vintage 1996 machine or so, still in full service and likely to remain so for quite some time. I added some memory, bumped the disk space to 95 GB (noticable performance improvement there from faster IDE disks), put in a more quieter fan and added USB ports for scanning, webcam and so on. Besides doing her surfing, word processing etc, it acts as our file server and music jukebox. It's often doing heavy file transfers over the network, and she doesn't even notice. I think I might add in another 120 GB, and make it 7200 rpm for a little more speed. Even on that slow processor, a 5400 rpm disk does 16 MB/sec. With KDE it's super smooth to use and looks slick, and needless to say, it never, ever needs to be rebooted except to add hardware.
Yes, I can go down the street and get her a K7 machine that's 15-20 times more powerful for $600, but why?
Thats all. I dont use paypal, and I dont condone paypal. But everyone knows it sucks,
;-)
That's where you are sadly, horribly wrong. Most people out there don't know it sucks,, and nonetheless do not deserve to be abused because of that. Sure, if you know and you get burned, well, you knew what you were doing. But if you didn't... that's why there are consumer protection laws. To keep people from serving you icecream with dioxin in it. Otherwise, they would - it's a big old world, and there is always someone willing to step across the line for a buck.
and if you choose to use it, its at your own risk. Essentially, do what you will. But don't crying to me when you get fucked.
OK, so I see where you are coming from, you just don't think things all the way through, and you get defensive when you get called. Plus you have all day to sit and post on Slashdot
(Earth to Dan Heskett.)
Or instead of writing you a check, or getting a cashier's check, or getting a money order...
"Hey honey, let's ignore tried and true banking principles that have been in place for years and are regulated by the government and let's use this new website that just opened up instead!" "Ok, sounds great!"
[beep][beep][beep]Oh sorry, gotta run, my bullshit detector is going off...
It might seem funny now, but at the time we believed that Pay Pal was reputable, and did not see any reason not to transfer money through them. Hopefully, it would have been faster than a cheque or a wire transfer. Instead it turned out to be a real horror. Just don't use them... for anything.
There is no good reason to patronize an unethical business.
"My wife opened a Paypal account for me, and one for herself, then transferred $6,000 from my account to hers."
Why? *WHY*?
There must be something in the water, cuz all I smell is bullshit.
It was instead of a wire transfer, junior.
Western Union isn't a bank, and neither is PayPal.
Why did you just post 17 articles in defense of Pay Pal?
"There is no excuse for not having live telephone-answering customer service. Imagine if your local bookstore quit answering the phone because they do all their business in the store and none on the phone."
I dont see that'd be a problem. I live in area with sidewalk merchants. Are they dastardly because they dont have phone numbers? No. Of course not.
Make your choices, and have fun. But I think its stupid. If you perform 99% of all transactions with a company online, why should you switch to phone for that last 1%? It doesn't make sense.
The whole point of the Internet is that Its Not Phone.
Where are you coming from? It sounds like you are arguing that fraudulent business conduct should be condoned; you'd prefer we all just wink and look the other way. What, you don't think Pay Pal really does anything wrong? You'd do well to stop spouting and start doing your research.
Read here. I can personally assure you that this is highly accurate, as it has in fact happened to me.
Or if you prefer, read court documents. Yes, there are plenty of those to read.
My wife opened a Paypal account for me, and one for herself, then transferred $6,000 from my account to hers. We didn't see that money again for three months, as they pretended to be "investigating" the transaction for possible fraud. Never mind that we talked to them many times on the telephone, and send proof of our ownership of the accounts several times, and pleaded with them to resolve this, as we needed the money.
The delay was beyond any point of being able to pretend that they actually made any effort to resolve the situation. It was in fact more than 10 days after we first contacted them before they would even open what they call an "investigation". They claim that their procedures are set up to combat fraud, but it's just a way of establishing deniability. That is, they pretend that they have no intention whatever of stringing me along as long as they can, while they collect interest on my money. (And no, they never did offer any compensation for the lost interest, let alone the many hours we were forced to spend pursuing them, to get our money back.)
You think mine is an isolated case? It is by no means. Just do a web search for paypal+complaint. See all the distressed people. See the lawsuits.
It's a transparent scam: by locking up the money of only a certain percentage of their customers, and treating the rest reasonably well, the people who claim that Pay Pal engages in a pattern of sleazy misconduct will never be believed, because they will always be outnumbered by customers who have never had a problem.
That doesn't make it right.
Conventional wisdom, sometimes called Amdahl's second law of computing, says you need as many bytes as flops, i.e. a one second main memory buffer. This computer only has 1/60 sufficient memory- 16 terabytes for one petaflop. Anything that involves serious dataprocessing, e.g. sensor signals, won't run at top speed due to the seriousmemory deficiency.
Just think of the 16 terabytes as cache, and the main memory resides virtually on the filesystem, which is specced in the multi-petabyte range,with transfer rate to match. Note that the new generation of network interfaces provide roughly half the bandwidth of main memory. The storage system is divided up across thousands of inexpensive boxes full of cheap IDE drives, feeding into the big network switch through commodity (probably 10Ge by that time) network interfaces.
"The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory."
That's a LOT of processors.
But it's only 2K nodes, considerably fewer than planned for Ascii Purple.
While they probably won't profit share, they'll likely share in other ways, by code improvements etc.
Yes, and by sponsoring at-large Linux developers like Ted Ts'o (maintainer of e2fsck, Kerberos developer, etc.).
You mean it was determined the kernel is going to be called 3.0 instead of being called 2.6 after all?
It was not. Linus will decide that, not Rob Landry.
Although software libre developers can't get access to Microsoft's specs or API source, it's quite possible to work around the problem...
That's not the point. The question is whether Microsoft is living up to their so-called voluntary compliance with the proposed DOS settlement.
Anyway, the Samba team know this protocol better than Microsoft does at this point, so there's no possible argument for making use of information Microsoft has not placed unambiguously in the public domain. That would just create an opportunity for Microsoft to attack the Samba project legally, which they would no doubt love to do.
This turn of events is worth far more in terms of demonstrating to Judge Kollar-Kotelly that Microsoft is not now abiding by the terms of the DOJ settlement, and cannot be expected to in the future.
why does it exist?
- because some stupid guy did not take the sources of blender in 1996 or so when he started moonlight
- because some other stupid guys liked moonlight and used it
- because it's easier to cope with without learning yet-another-GUI-paradigm
- because it's fun hacking it (blender doesn't even build yet afaik)
- because blender sources weren't free in january, when I started
- and finally, because I guess that the blender sources are much bigger and less understandable than source that was once meant to be open instead of some corporate beast that wasn't supposed to see the light
- and because you are one cool dude
Seriously, let me say, um, 5 things: 1) Thanks a lot for doing this 2) Congratulations on your release 3) Keep it up 4) The glass angel is gorgeous! 5) Please ignore the clueless dickheads who probably never coded anything in their lives and never contributed to any project, yet think they know who should work on which project and why.
Blender being GPL'd was aboslutely newsworthy. Why is Moonlight's resurrection newsworthy? A program sits around a long time, it gets an update, front page news on slashdot.
OK, I'll bite. Note that Moonlight's focus is on intuitive interface, a important niche to stake out in the OS/3D ecology, don't you think? On the face of it, a little competition on the UI front would not hurt Blender at all. Also, maybe we'll see some useful cross-package code and file standards developed as a result of users using both tools for different strengths, and wanting to port between them. With just one major modeling package, this important area might not get as much attention as it needs.
Anyway, OS/3D modelling *is* front page news because it strengthens our hand on the 3D game front, one of the few major areas where free software is still weak. But it's coming, it's coming...
1) wget http://www.microsoft.com/insider/downloads/ShowOff YourSkills.pdf
2) strings ShowOffYourSkills.pdf
Larry McVoy looked at the way the kernel was developed and figured that Linus would end up burnt out and collapse, and decided that the best way he could help prevent that was to develop a source control system that would ease Linus' load. Thus BitKeeper was born . . .
;-)
No, more like Larry learned the ropes of writing source versioning software while on salary at Sun and SGI, and as he figured he was getting pretty good at it, he thought he could start his own company, write a new version of the same software he already worked on twice before, and make a pile of dough. Getting Linus to use it was just his plan for getting free PR, so he could go boast about that to his business customers. I don't see anything altruistic there at all.
Please, do a little bit of research before posting thoughts on this kind of thing - posting without knowing what you're talking about tends to make you look rather ignorant.
Good advice
Question: is the average Word user made more or less free by having the source code to Word?
Answer: more free
On the contrary, proprietary software must respect the needs of its users, otherwise they won't buy it.
Unless the seller has a monopoly, or has otherwise locked in the buyer.
There are no such incentives for free software, which doesn't have to respect the needs of anyone but its author.
Nonsense. If there was a free software project that didn't respect the needs of its users, you'd never hear about it.
Unless I missed the announcement, linux is still stuck with 2GB RAM max, at least on x86.
You missed the announcement. Linux upports up to 64 GB per ia32 processor, has done for years, with at least one 32 GB system out there in the wild and 8 GB systems fairly common.
Nobody downloads video on a 56K dialup. The 8-9 Gig will take roughly 24 hours. It will be done long before the snail mail gets there. Get a clue.
However, send a truckload of video disks and somebody has a point. A boring, irrelevant point.
Ogg Vorbis is not the greatest thing known to man.. let's face it.. and NO I AM NOT TROLLING...
Linux Zealots LOVE Ogg.. why? Because of the licensing.. not the compression rate..
No, you're not trolling, and I am Elvis.
Yes, and you can run Linux on it just fine. Not only that, but some of these Apple products are getting into the price competitive zone as well, especially the server products.
The key item here though, is the PPC, which so far has no DRM in its guts. This has caused me to change my plans re what I design new projects around.
Plus, rumours are flying of new, power-efficient PPCs for desktop and embedded use. As far as I'm concerned, that tears it. As soon as these hit the market, it's goodbye Intel, there no longer is any reason to stay with the bad old bad old. And so long as AMD sticks to their DRM guns, it's goodbye AMD too.
Christ, palladium comes with an off switch. Turn it off and run your 'untrusted' code on your machine. Your corporate firewall may not let you throw if you aren't in Pallidum mode, but so be it. It has nothing to do with the gov't throwing you in jail.
Sure, and the first thing you'll find is tons of software refusing to run with the switch in the off position, whether or not it has anything to do with digitial media. Don't be naive.
DRM at twice the speed then.
I'm feeling sad. If the future (2-5 years) means PC's are gone and all we will have are X-Box type boxen on the desktop, I'll cry.
Me too. Funny how things go, isn't it? Now I'm looking to IBM for the way out here. I'd happily drop x86 instantly if IBM keeps their spine stiff and keeps DRM out of PPC. Plus, these chips are really kick-ass, no legacy goo.
I dug up this link to the opinion and order re the Markham phase of the trial, which concerns how the claims of the patent are construed.
<ramble>
Since it's apparently necessary for all free developers to know the u.s. patent system well in order to more effectively undermine it, here's a good place to start. Hats off to this judge for presenting the material in a clear, almost tutorial manner.
It's essential to be able to read patent claims the way a judge does. It's not as hard as it first appears - remember, the Judge has just as much trouble with technical aspects as we have with the patent legalese. One thing to keep in mind is that it's the claims that matter, and these are generally a fairly small part of the patent.
Once you figure out what the claims mean, it's a lot easier to go hunting prior art or find a workaround.
Of course I'm not suggesting that all developers have to stop coding now and become patent lawyers, but we do need a lot more eyeballs on these things to help counterbalance the prevailing insanity. Besides, undermining patents is an interesting sport in and of itself.</ramble>