In MP3 vs Vorbis nearly all agreed that Vorbis could produce superior sounding files at the same bitrate but there is nowhere near such a consensus with H264 vs WebM. Further, in the audio format wars there was also AAC which was considered better than MP3 and trades blows with Vorbis. MP3/AAC combined were too big too stop and had popularity/quality on their side. I agree the patent issue was pretty much the same though.
One thing that is curious though is that the "WebM" browsers don't have people clamouring for them to support the MP3 codec...
Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan writes about why Firefox doesn't use (DirectShow) system codecs. It is also worth noting that neither IE nor Safari use a codec system their vendor doesn't control.
Just to be pedantic, the first gen Intel iMacs shipped with one stick of 512Mbytes of RAM in 2006 (I know this because my family has one). Putting an extra 1Gbyte stick of RAM in the bottom is straight forward but the machine can only take a maximum of 2Gbytes RAM in total.
You don't say which kernel you are using so it could be the problem you are seeing has been fixed by a previous kernel. However it is unlikely the removal of the BKL will make a difference to you if you're using 2.6.36 since most subsystems were already using fine grained locks of their own before this. There might be another different change in 2.6.37 that helps but I'd say its unlikely...
The problem is that there is no proof that what is in that paper can be made to hold for modern hard disk technology with vastly increased densities (SSDs and "secret" block remapping are another matter of course)... You can see a more aggressive complaint about recovery after zeroing on this old Slashdot story. This is one of those Slashdot arguments that keeps recurring though.
The point about going to the moon is that it is that we know about it - it's "just" expensive. Recovering data on modern disks after zeroing is either currently so hard to do as to be impractical for more than a few bytes or someone is doing a fantastic job of keeping it quiet.
Netbeans developers claim that fowl play is at the heart of the latest Eclipse GUI code and existing steps in that direction may have been responsible for Eclipse's legendary slowness. The developers' claims stem from their exploratory search of the donated code, where a new GUI code a class called "Beak" was found to contain methods such as doPeck(), doSquark(), doScratch(). Further suspicions were raised when an existing Eclipse non-GUI class called Headless was found to be extending Thread class while overriding the run() method.
you can do quite a bit better than a Chrome OS netbook can. The question becomes - how much did it cost to buy the Macbook Pro and then put a 3rd party SSD in it? Is a Chrome OS netbook without such power going to cost less (it certainly going to DO less than your setup so I can't imagine it would be as expensive)?
...but Super Tofu Boy seems to lack the polish of the original. The controls feel sticky, the ideas in the levels feel lifted from Super Meat Boy, the difficulties in the levels spike quite aggressively compared to those of Super Meat Boy (I'm not quite sure how to get past Golden Arches 2) and the animation doesn't feel quite so smooth. Is tofu inferior to meat in this case?
...by Pulseaudio. I need to test Fedora 14 to find out if this has been fixed yet (it was still there in a beta from a month ago but that doesn't mean it hasn't been fixed). A workaround (which worked for me on F13) was to set --resample-method=ffmpeg (or any other cheaper mixing). Still, a very frustrating issue if this is what you ran into...
AFAIK there are only two I/O schedulers remaining in recent Linux (and if you squint you might say that RHEL 5's kernel could have been related to 2.6.34 at one point right?:) - CFQ and deadline (three if you count noop I guess). The anticipatory scheduler was removed in 2.6.33...
If you are using the CFQ I/O scheduler on Linux a process' nice value also impacts its default I/O priority. From the ionice man page:
For kernels after 2.6.26 with CFQ io scheduler a process that has not asked for an io priority inherits CPU scheduling class. The io priority is derived from the cpu nice level of the process
I've been seeing something similar for sometime too but thought it might be an isolated case. Now I've just searched I notice there is a Slashdot comment paste issues in Chrome which describes what I see (very slow pasting doesn't necessarily succeed in pasting).
On a machine with a recent Ubuntu desktop install do:
cat/etc/hosts
There should at least be 127.0.0.1 for localhost but you will often also see a 127.0.1.1 with (only) the machine's name. I think (agree?) the OP was just making a joke rather than a serious point though!
With kernel modesetting, it is possible to run an accelerated X without root privileges (MeeGo does this) but currently there are safety caveats. To support multiple simultaneous users there is a need for a revoke syscall otherwise other users could snoop your input devices by not dropping previous access to devices (you can watch some X devs discussing the issue on Phoronix).
For 32 bit Flash 10.1, if you use Ubuntu 9.04 (or later) Flash is distributed via the partner repository. If you use Fedora/RHEL (or a distro that uses yum) you can add a yum repo from the Adobe website. The last link also has RPM and deb packages too. SUSE package Flash directly in their repositories too.
I think for a preview release the need to use package management for a single binary could be considered overkill. Further it's really the repositories that are useful in this case so you are automatically to newer versions when issues are fixed and Adobe are only have devote resources for "official" releases.
While I can somewhat agree with your sentiment (64GBytes isn't a lot when you are saving media data) I feel you have exaggerated a bit in the OS numbers:
The OS I'm typing this on (which is on a Intel Core 2 laptop with 4GBytes of RAM) is taking up 6GBytes and has various development tools and libraries installed on it. The OS on my EeePC takes up 3GBytes.
Even on the bigger computer the current Chromium cache size is 437MBytes. Perhaps it scales with disk size?
On all but the most unusual of setups (I know people who do FPGA development whose tools take up 20GBytes by themselves) it's going to be "user data" that is taking up the vast majority of the disk space - not the operating system and applications (given that most operating systems still ship on no more than a single 4GByte DVD you would need compression of about 8:1 to fill up the disk from that alone). I have no doubt that if you take photos or have a big movie collection 500GBytes is not going to see like all that much though.
Recent Ubuntu's ship with an OpenOffice from go-oo - why do you think otherwise (perhaps there's a source I've overlooked)? If you dig into the Ubuntu Lucid source for OpenOffice.org you will see it claims the upstream is go-oo and contains many patches (SVG support, write support for DOCX etc) from go-oo. A quick web search shows the Ubuntu OpenOffice maintainer says Ubuntu's OOo is based off go-oo. This has probably been the case since at least Ubuntu 8.10 (possibly earlier).
Slashdot Mirror
In MP3 vs Vorbis nearly all agreed that Vorbis could produce superior sounding files at the same bitrate but there is nowhere near such a consensus with H264 vs WebM. Further, in the audio format wars there was also AAC which was considered better than MP3 and trades blows with Vorbis. MP3/AAC combined were too big too stop and had popularity/quality on their side. I agree the patent issue was pretty much the same though.
One thing that is curious though is that the "WebM" browsers don't have people clamouring for them to support the MP3 codec...
Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan writes about why Firefox doesn't use (DirectShow) system codecs. It is also worth noting that neither IE nor Safari use a codec system their vendor doesn't control.
Wheelborrow theft urban legend on Snopes (as other posters say there are versions with bikes and donkeys too but others know your version too). According to Snopes it's been around for years and was also mentioned in a Crocodile Dundee movie,,,
Just to be pedantic, the first gen Intel iMacs shipped with one stick of 512Mbytes of RAM in 2006 (I know this because my family has one). Putting an extra 1Gbyte stick of RAM in the bottom is straight forward but the machine can only take a maximum of 2Gbytes RAM in total.
You don't say which kernel you are using so it could be the problem you are seeing has been fixed by a previous kernel. However it is unlikely the removal of the BKL will make a difference to you if you're using 2.6.36 since most subsystems were already using fine grained locks of their own before this. There might be another different change in 2.6.37 that helps but I'd say its unlikely...
The problem is that there is no proof that what is in that paper can be made to hold for modern hard disk technology with vastly increased densities (SSDs and "secret" block remapping are another matter of course)... You can see a more aggressive complaint about recovery after zeroing on this old Slashdot story. This is one of those Slashdot arguments that keeps recurring though.
The point about going to the moon is that it is that we know about it - it's "just" expensive. Recovering data on modern disks after zeroing is either currently so hard to do as to be impractical for more than a few bytes or someone is doing a fantastic job of keeping it quiet.
Netbeans developers claim that fowl play is at the heart of the latest Eclipse GUI code and existing steps in that direction may have been responsible for Eclipse's legendary slowness. The developers' claims stem from their exploratory search of the donated code, where a new GUI code a class called "Beak" was found to contain methods such as doPeck(), doSquark(), doScratch(). Further suspicions were raised when an existing Eclipse non-GUI class called Headless was found to be extending Thread class while overriding the run() method.
Apache foundation members were heard murmuring that these revelations should be no surprise given the way the Eclipse Foundation members voted in the recent JCP vote.
you can do quite a bit better than a Chrome OS netbook can. The question becomes - how much did it cost to buy the Macbook Pro and then put a 3rd party SSD in it? Is a Chrome OS netbook without such power going to cost less (it certainly going to DO less than your setup so I can't imagine it would be as expensive)?
The chromium sandbox design documents discuss how on Windows Vista and later different parts of the browser run with low integrity mode like IE 7+.
...but Super Tofu Boy seems to lack the polish of the original. The controls feel sticky, the ideas in the levels feel lifted from Super Meat Boy, the difficulties in the levels spike quite aggressively compared to those of Super Meat Boy (I'm not quite sure how to get past Golden Arches 2) and the animation doesn't feel quite so smooth. Is tofu inferior to meat in this case?
...by Pulseaudio. I need to test Fedora 14 to find out if this has been fixed yet (it was still there in a beta from a month ago but that doesn't mean it hasn't been fixed). A workaround (which worked for me on F13) was to set --resample-method=ffmpeg (or any other cheaper mixing). Still, a very frustrating issue if this is what you ran into...
...then often people feel cheated out of your money. There is a Youtube video of a UK comic complaining about games that "hide" their content (either through difficulty or longevity tactics).
One of the 2.6.36 patches explicitly mentions addressing poor responsiveness when doing IO on slow (e.g. USB) devices. The CentOS 4 kernel seems to be a heavily patched 2.6.9 though...
AFAIK there are only two I/O schedulers remaining in recent Linux (and if you squint you might say that RHEL 5's kernel could have been related to 2.6.34 at one point right? :) - CFQ and deadline (three if you count noop I guess). The anticipatory scheduler was removed in 2.6.33...
I would guess the Slashdot article about painful fsync behaviour on ext3 was "Kernel Hackers On Ext3/4 After 2.6.29 Release".
(And wow - a developer who still reads and posts to Slashdot! I've got to ask, which tech news site did you all migrate to in the end?)
Assuming your SSD is detected correctly, the Linux block layer maintainer is proposing changes to improve SSD performance. The idea of waiting for requests (so as to be able to reorder them in a ladder fashion) is not used on SSD devices since 2.6.28 though.
If you are using the CFQ I/O scheduler on Linux a process' nice value also impacts its default I/O priority. From the ionice man page:
For kernels after 2.6.26 with CFQ io scheduler a process that has not asked for an io priority inherits CPU scheduling class. The io priority is derived from the cpu nice level of the process
I've been seeing something similar for sometime too but thought it might be an isolated case. Now I've just searched I notice there is a Slashdot comment paste issues in Chrome which describes what I see (very slow pasting doesn't necessarily succeed in pasting).
On a machine with a recent Ubuntu desktop install do:
cat /etc/hosts
There should at least be 127.0.0.1 for localhost but you will often also see a 127.0.1.1 with (only) the machine's name. I think (agree?) the OP was just making a joke rather than a serious point though!
Perhaps. However, real people know how any *nix "editor" one-upmanship ends:
C-x M-c M-butterfly.
'Nuff said.
With kernel modesetting, it is possible to run an accelerated X without root privileges (MeeGo does this) but currently there are safety caveats. To support multiple simultaneous users there is a need for a revoke syscall otherwise other users could snoop your input devices by not dropping previous access to devices (you can watch some X devs discussing the issue on Phoronix).
For 32 bit Flash 10.1, if you use Ubuntu 9.04 (or later) Flash is distributed via the partner repository. If you use Fedora/RHEL (or a distro that uses yum) you can add a yum repo from the Adobe website. The last link also has RPM and deb packages too. SUSE package Flash directly in their repositories too.
I think for a preview release the need to use package management for a single binary could be considered overkill. Further it's really the repositories that are useful in this case so you are automatically to newer versions when issues are fixed and Adobe are only have devote resources for "official" releases.
While I can somewhat agree with your sentiment (64GBytes isn't a lot when you are saving media data) I feel you have exaggerated a bit in the OS numbers:
On all but the most unusual of setups (I know people who do FPGA development whose tools take up 20GBytes by themselves) it's going to be "user data" that is taking up the vast majority of the disk space - not the operating system and applications (given that most operating systems still ship on no more than a single 4GByte DVD you would need compression of about 8:1 to fill up the disk from that alone). I have no doubt that if you take photos or have a big movie collection 500GBytes is not going to see like all that much though.
Recent Ubuntu's ship with an OpenOffice from go-oo - why do you think otherwise (perhaps there's a source I've overlooked)? If you dig into the Ubuntu Lucid source for OpenOffice.org you will see it claims the upstream is go-oo and contains many patches (SVG support, write support for DOCX etc) from go-oo. A quick web search shows the Ubuntu OpenOffice maintainer says Ubuntu's OOo is based off go-oo. This has probably been the case since at least Ubuntu 8.10 (possibly earlier).
Sounds like a lot of your wishlist won't be implemented any time soon: