>many other countries have a cultural acceptance of that position that negates the need.
I don't know for Asia but in Europe this separation of state and church is not something so obvious: people had to fight to get it!
I agree that now it is a accepted in some parts of Europe (France for example) but in other (Italy) for example this is much less obvious: church has still a big power on the state even though it's separated..
This is also linked to the number of non-believers: France has something like 30% of non-believers, so of course church and state are quite separated!
It is partly Apple's fault that there is so few games for its computers: if they had backed OpenGL instead of their own 3D API back when their marketshare was still significant, then games producers would have used OpenGL instead of Direct3D..
They suffered from NIH and are paying the price: too bad! [ yes I know that now they are using OpenGL but their marketshare is not very significant nowadays..]
But I suspect that what they call the normal "parachuting" effect is what occurs with round parachute, now modern parachute are wing-like so they are more efficient.. Now I'm not sure because of the imprecise wording of the articles:-(
>You're talking about one relatively obscure thing. Hmm, accents are quite used on the non-English speaking part of the world which is the vast majority of the world last I looked, so it should not be obscure.
I'm French and the issue is fixed now but it was RedHat Enterprise 9.
>Or maybe you clicked through the localization part of the installation? It wasn't me who installed it so this is a possibility, but one of the common problem with distros is that there easy to configure during the installation but hard to reconfigure afterwards if the choice made during the installation are not good: the keyboard configuration in KDE/Gnome is not polished enough for normal users.
I was able to configure the keyboard correctly, but 1) it took me hours 2) the documentation sucks 3) English is mandatory.
So when I read an article saying that Linux is ready for the 'common users' let me be a little dubious: there is still a severe lack of polish, it works fine when you want to do 'normal thing' but it gets very complicated easily if what you want to do is just a little not frequent.
*Cough* I spent three hours trying to understand how XKB work to be able to make accent with a QWERTY keyboard.. The KDE control window and help weren't helpful so I had to look on the web.
> KNode is a newsreader. It uses the news protocol. Why would it need disconnected operations?
Because it can be usefull for the user? Especially when you have a payed metered connexion.
Well I find that saying 'KDE break the network barrier' and at the same time knowing that it isn't true for the news reading, for me it's pure bragging.. KDE sometimes break the network barrier would be be more accurate!
Note that some KDE applications are NOT location independant such as KNode which doesn't allow you to do 'disconnected operations': if memory serves you have to use a different application for this..
So while the location independance features of KDE are nice, they are far from being good.
I'm not too worried about safety: if you limit the maximum power output of the laser, even in case of short-circuit, it shouldn't be a problem. This is a technical problem, engineers have been good at solving those.
The human limitations may be much more difficult to overcome: show a 'static image' to a moving man and you have a problem: eye say static, inner ear say 'you're moving' --> conflict --> sea-sickness!
Well I French and I dislike very much HID that I find too bright, even on brand new cars (so this is not a mistake done by a modification), if it is even worse in the US, I pity you!
I disagree, I think that even normal installation is too blinding: I travelled with a guy which had a brand new car: on a 400km travel often one or two cars would flash their lights at him because they belieived he had forgotten to set them correctly..
Part of this was probably because the lamp were of a new type (much smaller than usual but very bright), but I really found its light too bright, and it wasn't only his car: all the same type of cars were similary blinding: laws are too lax here I think: car makers shouldn't be allowed to have so blinding lights!
Amusingly, he was very sensible to the 'mighty rear fog lamp' which he hated whereas I don't find them disturbing the least, on the contrary I find them useful..
>Multiprocessing doesn't give you speed improvements for a single-threaded application, but it sure as hell makes a system a lot smoother and more responsive when it's running multiple applications concurrently.
Depends on the apps: if both your "background" and your "active" task do disk intensive stuff at the same time, your "active" task will run badly.. And you'll curse your "slow" system!
Well you forget that Mozilla is a 'multi-view' application with the tabs: I hate it when it freezes because it is doing too much work contacting servers or rendering: the UI should stay responsive whatever I throw to it!
> I'd rather see chipmakers use new technology to improve thermal/power ratio of their chips.
Agreed and there working on it, but it'll take a long time before we see tripple gated transistors and the like: those take quite some times to research.
>There's lots of room for improvement here. Examples: when a CPU sits idle, does that mean a drastic drop in power consumption?
*Uh?* Who cares really for a desktop at what the CPU consumes when it is idle? What is interesting is how much the CPU consumes under 'maximal load'!
> I do know AMD is on the right track here with their x86-64 chips Well AFAIK, Intel holds the leads in low power x86 CPU with their Pentium-M: they're very good on SpecInt/Watt (don't know on SpecFP, but I doubt)! The only problem is that Intel is making customers pay a lot for the priviledge of buying a Pentium-M..:-( Too bad: my computer will stay noisy for a long time..
The *BIG* thing for x86 for "64bit computing" is not in fact the 64 bitness but doubling the number of GPR!
As the PPC instruction set is sane (x86 is not, urgh), beside the extra-instruction needed for 64 bit computing, there are very few difference between a PPC running on 64bit code or a PPC running on 32bit unless of course you have an app which needs more than 4GB of memory or do lots of 64-bit integer calculation..
> and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.
Have you any proof? Many people don't care about any music quality above 192kb/s MP3, so it is not sure that all that high music quality is a big selling point.
> x86 is cheaper than mac, but only if your time has no value
Well there are quite a few application which runs on x86 that won't run on the Mac (PC-style games for example) so.. the price argument is not the only one who keep people using PC and the 'network effect' is playing against the Mac.
> related to the existence of several completely different and wholly unrelated languages that only an imbecile would expect to be remotely similar?
Except that they all more or less embodies the 'function programming language' concept.
> You might as well say that scripting languages will never catch on for as long as their supporters are battling for Perl, Python, Ruby... > Oh, wait, they went and caught on anyway, didn't they?
Perl is mainstream, yes. Python and Ruby? Hardly! In my current project, it was refused to use Ruby, the reason: not enough developers know Ruby and we're going to use Perl even though we've already lost many, many days rewriting Perl applications because developpers usually creates ugly unmaintenable Perl script: the language really doesn't help!
And what is preventing Ruby and Python to become mainstream? First that Perl is there yes, but also those two are battling for the 'clean script language' niche and two is one too many, remember this is a fashion industry!
>The original Mac had all the hooks and development stuff in Pascal.
I bet it was in the standard Pascal, but in some dialect which added some much needed thing (like dynamic memory allocation)..
IMHO that's what killed Pascal: the standard was too restrictive and everyone had his own extension which was of course incompatible with each other: at some point too much diversity in a language is bad as it prevents portability..
IMHO this is why functionnal language will mostly stay in the academy realm for a long time about as long as their supporter battles for Haskell, OCaml, Scheme..
But you and I have a different set of genes, so wouldn't be more correct to say that the number of genomes in the human genome is equal to the number of men living in the earth?
With the number of 'real twins' substracted of course..
> I donno. It's already a pain in the ass to find anything generic on Google.
I disagree: don't you remember what was the situation before Google? It was really a pain to find anything! OK, some a*** manage sometimes to fool even Google, but still the situation has improved.
Also the arrival of ADSL/Cable has really improved the situation, I was so fed up of slow as molasse modem (and in Europe, we were paying by the duration of the phone call!). For me, Internet's user situation has really improved with high-bandwith (well for the users which use still a modem, let's just say that I'm sorry for them).
So ok, now there is more SPAM (anti-spam filter are doing a good job, not perfect but good), more viruses (brain, firewall, anti-virus --> quite easy to avoid those), but saying that the situation is worse than what it was before in the "good old time" before Google and high bandwith is really having a 'short memory'..
Well, unfortunately this is a pretty common mistake, blame it on K&R to introduce such an easy pitfall.
Unfortunately, if I'm not mistaking neither C++ or Java designer had the guts to make {} mandatory after an if,for..
C is a language with lots of pitfall, but usually they are not too difficult to catch: 1. read a document which list the pitfall. 2. when you have a problem, first a. stop 10min to free the mind, b. use debugger, printf to narrow the search, c. if it doesn't work ask for help: two are better than one. Of course it means that you two must work to solve it on the same screen, as you will probably be the one who catch the bug anyway (don't send by email the code waiting for the magic answer).
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>many other countries have a cultural acceptance of that position that negates the need.
I don't know for Asia but in Europe this separation of state and church is not something so obvious: people had to fight to get it!
I agree that now it is a accepted in some parts of Europe (France for example) but in other (Italy) for example this is much less obvious: church has still a big power on the state even though it's separated..
This is also linked to the number of non-believers: France has something like 30% of non-believers, so of course church and state are quite separated!
It is partly Apple's fault that there is so few games for its computers: if they had backed OpenGL instead of their own 3D API back when their marketshare was still significant, then games producers would have used OpenGL instead of Direct3D..
They suffered from NIH and are paying the price: too bad!
[ yes I know that now they are using OpenGL but their marketshare is not very significant nowadays..]
Mod parent up!
The PCxxx has a meaning wether one like it or not it arctually means something: the maxmimum bandwith of the memory.
Of course it lacks the latency but still it is better than the infamous marketing numbers that Intel use for its CPU which means nearly nothing.
And who really cares if it is 266MHz or 133*2 ?
> normal "parachuting" effect.
:-(
But I suspect that what they call the normal "parachuting" effect is what occurs with round parachute, now modern parachute are wing-like so they are more efficient..
Now I'm not sure because of the imprecise wording of the articles
>You're talking about one relatively obscure thing.
Hmm, accents are quite used on the non-English speaking part of the world which is the vast majority of the world last I looked, so it should not be obscure.
I'm French and the issue is fixed now but it was RedHat Enterprise 9.
>Or maybe you clicked through the localization part of the installation?
It wasn't me who installed it so this is a possibility, but one of the common problem with distros is that there easy to configure during the installation but hard to reconfigure afterwards if the choice made during the installation are not good: the keyboard configuration in KDE/Gnome is not polished enough for normal users.
I was able to configure the keyboard correctly, but 1) it took me hours 2) the documentation sucks 3) English is mandatory.
So when I read an article saying that Linux is ready for the 'common users' let me be a little dubious: there is still a severe lack of polish, it works fine when you want to do 'normal thing' but it gets very complicated easily if what you want to do is just a little not frequent.
>2. It's easy enough to install
*Cough* I spent three hours trying to understand how XKB work to be able to make accent with a QWERTY keyboard.. The KDE control window and help weren't helpful so I had to look on the web.
"Easy enough" right!
> KNode is a newsreader. It uses the news protocol. Why would it need disconnected operations?
..
Because it can be usefull for the user? Especially when you have a payed metered connexion.
Well I find that saying 'KDE break the network barrier' and at the same time knowing that it isn't true for the news reading, for me it's pure bragging
KDE sometimes break the network barrier would be be more accurate!
> Then use Konqueror, and KMail.
Note that some KDE applications are NOT location independant such as KNode which doesn't allow you to do 'disconnected operations': if memory serves you have to use a different application for this..
So while the location independance features of KDE are nice, they are far from being good.
I'm not too worried about safety: if you limit the maximum power output of the laser, even in case of short-circuit, it shouldn't be a problem.
This is a technical problem, engineers have been good at solving those.
The human limitations may be much more difficult to overcome: show a 'static image' to a moving man and you have a problem: eye say static, inner ear say 'you're moving' --> conflict --> sea-sickness!
Well I French and I dislike very much HID that I find too bright, even on brand new cars (so this is not a mistake done by a modification), if it is even worse in the US, I pity you!
I disagree, I think that even normal installation is too blinding: I travelled with a guy which had a brand new car: on a 400km travel often one or two cars would flash their lights at him because they belieived he had forgotten to set them correctly..
Part of this was probably because the lamp were of a new type (much smaller than usual but very bright), but I really found its light too bright, and it wasn't only his car: all the same type of cars were similary blinding: laws are too lax here I think: car makers shouldn't be allowed to have so blinding lights!
Amusingly, he was very sensible to the 'mighty rear fog lamp' which he hated whereas I don't find them disturbing the least, on the contrary I find them useful..
>Multiprocessing doesn't give you speed improvements for a single-threaded application, but it sure as hell makes a system a lot smoother and more responsive when it's running multiple applications concurrently.
Depends on the apps: if both your "background" and your "active" task do disk intensive stuff at the same time, your "active" task will run badly..
And you'll curse your "slow" system!
Well you forget that Mozilla is a 'multi-view' application with the tabs: I hate it when it freezes because it is doing too much work contacting servers or rendering: the UI should stay responsive whatever I throw to it!
This is multi-threading done badly..
Mod the parent up!
Having multi-threaded app means nothing if only one thread is doing real work!
> I'd rather see chipmakers use new technology to improve thermal/power ratio of their chips.
:-(
Agreed and there working on it, but it'll take a long time before we see tripple gated transistors and the like: those take quite some times to research.
>There's lots of room for improvement here. Examples: when a CPU sits idle, does that mean a drastic drop in power consumption?
*Uh?* Who cares really for a desktop at what the CPU consumes when it is idle? What is interesting is how much the CPU consumes under 'maximal load'!
> I do know AMD is on the right track here with their x86-64 chips
Well AFAIK, Intel holds the leads in low power x86 CPU with their Pentium-M: they're very good on SpecInt/Watt (don't know on SpecFP, but I doubt)!
The only problem is that Intel is making customers pay a lot for the priviledge of buying a Pentium-M..
Too bad: my computer will stay noisy for a long time..
The *BIG* thing for x86 for "64bit computing" is not in fact the 64 bitness but doubling the number of GPR!
As the PPC instruction set is sane (x86 is not, urgh), beside the extra-instruction needed for 64 bit computing, there are very few difference between a PPC running on 64bit code or a PPC running on 32bit unless of course you have an app which needs more than 4GB of memory or do lots of 64-bit integer calculation..
> and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.
Have you any proof? Many people don't care about any music quality above 192kb/s MP3, so it is not sure that all that high music quality is a big selling point.
> x86 is cheaper than mac, but only if your time has no value
Well there are quite a few application which runs on x86 that won't run on the Mac (PC-style games for example) so.. the price argument is not the only one who keep people using PC and the 'network effect' is playing against the Mac.
>So take your Pentium-M and advance it already!
Pentium-M are low power and good at SpecInt ok, but are they good at SpecFP?
Games need serious FP power usually..
> related to the existence of several completely different and wholly unrelated languages that only an imbecile would expect to be remotely similar?
Except that they all more or less embodies the 'function programming language' concept.
> You might as well say that scripting languages will never catch on for as long as their supporters are battling for Perl, Python, Ruby...
> Oh, wait, they went and caught on anyway, didn't they?
Perl is mainstream, yes.
Python and Ruby? Hardly!
In my current project, it was refused to use Ruby, the reason: not enough developers know Ruby and we're going to use Perl even though we've already lost many, many days rewriting Perl applications because developpers usually creates ugly unmaintenable Perl script: the language really doesn't help!
And what is preventing Ruby and Python to become mainstream? First that Perl is there yes, but also those two are battling for the 'clean script language' niche and two is one too many, remember this is a fashion industry!
>The original Mac had all the hooks and development stuff in Pascal.
I bet it was in the standard Pascal, but in some dialect which added some much needed thing (like dynamic memory allocation)..
IMHO that's what killed Pascal: the standard was too restrictive and everyone had his own extension which was of course incompatible with each other: at some point too much diversity in a language is bad as it prevents portability..
IMHO this is why functionnal language will mostly stay in the academy realm for a long time about as long as their supporter battles for Haskell, OCaml, Scheme..
>In fact, since profiling feedback is close at hand, it has an advantage
Yes, but on the other hand, the time used to instrument the currently running executable and optimising it is slowing down the execution.
Whereas on a profiling computer, the profiling run is used to accelerate the executions which occurs *after* this one..
But you and I have a different set of genes, so wouldn't be more correct to say that the number of genomes in the human genome is equal to the number of men living in the earth?
With the number of 'real twins' substracted of course..
> I donno. It's already a pain in the ass to find anything generic on Google.
I disagree: don't you remember what was the situation before Google?
It was really a pain to find anything! OK, some a*** manage sometimes to fool even Google, but still the situation has improved.
Also the arrival of ADSL/Cable has really improved the situation, I was so fed up of slow as molasse modem (and in Europe, we were paying by the duration of the phone call!). For me, Internet's user situation has really improved with high-bandwith (well for the users which use still a modem, let's just say that I'm sorry for them).
So ok, now there is more SPAM (anti-spam filter are doing a good job, not perfect but good), more viruses (brain, firewall, anti-virus --> quite easy to avoid those), but saying that the situation is worse than what it was before in the "good old time" before Google and high bandwith is really having a 'short memory'..
Well, unfortunately this is a pretty common mistake, blame it on K&R to introduce such an easy pitfall.
Unfortunately, if I'm not mistaking neither C++ or Java designer had the guts to make {} mandatory after an if,for..
C is a language with lots of pitfall, but usually they are not too difficult to catch:
1. read a document which list the pitfall.
2. when you have a problem, first a. stop 10min to free the mind, b. use debugger, printf to narrow the search, c. if it doesn't work ask for help: two are better than one. Of course it means that you two must work to solve it on the same screen, as you will probably be the one who catch the bug anyway (don't send by email the code waiting for the magic answer).
> Bloated compared to what?! Slow compared to what?
Bloated and slow compared to Opera for sure.