Hmmm... I was rather happy to hear that, so I checked it out. However, if you look here: http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/hardware/bre akdown/index.php?hw_cat_id=4
It basically says, that with the 17" there's no video, and due to lack of thermal management, you may damage your laptop. As for the 12", they say: Maximum number of colors: thousands 2D acceleration: No 3D acceleration: No Dual head: No AirPort Extreme: No Bluetooth: No
I expect the situation to not be very different with the new 15", sadly enough. This is one reason why I hate binary-only driver support: other archs are usually unsupported because they're a smaller market share.
Nice. great GPU. Frankly I couldn't care less about 100Mhz more or less CPU-clock wise.
One question, however: does anyone know if the drivers for the R300 series are (or will be) available for PowerPC?
iirc, the R300 has a binary-only DRI/xfree86 module for x86. Fine, but do they have it for PPC?
I know nVidia couldn't care less about linux/ppc - I wonder if ATI does (doubt it, for fear of pissing off Apple maybe?)
I'm also assuming the Airport Extreme card is still unsupported in Linux? That's not a big deal if you have a cardbus slot like on the 15" and 17", but it is a big deal on the 12" - having no wireless support whatsoever in Linux would be a bummer. (And I doubt you can put an old Airport card in them - if I remember correctly they didn't have the same interface)
Oh, and don't give me "MacOSX is at least as good as Linux" - It may be true, but I'd like to have a choice, if at all possible. There's a lot of Linux programs I've grown used to, and Fink, while good, doesn't cut it compared to Debian for instance.
It's hard to find a decent laptop. I wish the 12" came out with the ATI Radeon 9200.
Right now I'm hesitating between the Apple AlBook 15" and the Sony TR1 series. They both have issues with Linux though.:-(
Cool to see someone who doesn't have misconceptions about fresco. However, can you elaborate a bit on why you think putting as much policy as possible in the server is a bad thing?
- it offers possibilities to take advantage of and adapt to the available hardware. (server knows if the screen is only a 4" PDA screen, or a 30" 3D display - the application shouldn't have to know these things) - it should be the user (where the server is) who decides on policy, not the application - it's bandwith friendly if you're only transferring high-level info to/from the servers. - you don't get different apps using different policies on the same server.
Well, people shouldn't have to go to jail because they're assholes.
Okay, he sent a lot of mails. Would he have received the same sentence if he was a garden variety spammer?
Clearly it has something to do with the content of the mail or with the intent of the "attack".
If it disclosed some confidential information, it could be tried in a civil court I guess, if there was a confidentiality clause in his contract which was still in effect. But even then, he could be considered a whistleblower.
The only thing that they could try him on would be his intention to use some sort of DOS attack against the mailservers, but considering he didn't use anything special (just email) it begs the question: what's the difference with a bulk-emailer. Also, if he was really trying to disclose this info to the customers, I don't think his intention was to bring down his channel of communication to them (the mailservers).
Either way, I don't see anything that warrants jail time. I just see an incompetent ISP, and someone that's probably a bit too annoying for his own good.
I've thought about this before, and it could be interesting for metropolitan areas:
a mini-distro for AP's that: - shields the internal (personal) net, from a public, wireless net. - routes between the private net, the public net, and the internet. - do proper routing between AP's: it would be nice if there was a way to use your neighbours excess bandwidth to the internet, or use them as a failover when there's an outage just for you. - provide proper limits: stop providing to the public if you reach 80% of your monthly bandwith limit, prioritize a bit of the bandwith for your personal net (so that other people can't use up all the available bandwith so there's none left for you), maybe only provide your connection to "members" of the network, etc. - make it available in an easy updatable flash image for homemade and commercial AP's. - make it configurable for people who have even more interfaces: multihoming with adsl and cable for instance, IR/visible light links/...
The idea would be that while not everyone has the expertise to configure their routers for all these features, everyone who wants to can just reflash their AP with an image, and be able to provide/get wireless services, and be a part of a real emergent wireless network. It'd be interesting for other reasons too: where I live for instance, all upload speed for residential cable/adsl connections is capped at 128kbit. If I want to send files fast to a friend a couple of blocks away, they could be just routed over the wireless network, via a couple of hops: no need to go over the internet - chances are the speed will be a lot better than 128kbit that way. Also by cooperating in a network like this, you'd have increased speed and reliability for all - not everyone uses up their bandwith / monthly volume limit all the time.
The answer's simple: I've got a whole bunch of machines here running Debian. OSX is definately cool, and I would keep it on the machine for when I need to run soft that doesn't run on Linux. But it's nice to have the same environment everywhere to develop in.
Also, debian is a godsend for me with all its software, and I'm not too happy with fink up till now...
Now if there was a debian/osx like there's a debian/bsd, now that would be cool.
Yeah, unless you count the Airport Extreme (broadcom won't release the specs) and the nVidia on PPC 3D card (nVidia don't want to recompile theor drivers for PPC).
> Perhaps. Perhaps I'd be more agreeable if the > common tools for creating SWF came with a sane > set of defaults that gave the behaviour you've > described.
Amen to that. The Flash MX editor is just plain crap. It's a usability nightmare, buggy (understatement of the year), bloated POS. And it's the _only_ program that I need to boot back to Windows for, and I doubt we'll see it soon on Linux.
All these things don't come "automatically", you have to choose whether you enable it or not.
(that in itself might be a major downside, but it's not that it's impossible, it just becomes the responsibility of the designer - blame the people, not the format)
* back button example/"experiment" http://www.robertpenner.com/ experiments/backbutton/backbutton.html
* resizing text You can make the swf scale with the browser window (easy, and I don't see why alot of designers choose to use a fixed size for their sites - it's also what happens if you load the swf straight in your browser), and/or detect changes in the browser window size, and choose how to respond accordingly.
* cutting/pasting text: it's just a checkbox you have to tick - you can choose if you want it or not.
So: the implementation and format make all these things possible, and doesn't even steer developers in one particular direction, it just lets them make a choice. So again, don't blame the format, blame the designers.
I agree with those points... however, you don't need the spec to reverse engineer swf's to make a proper player, no sueing involved, and the format seems clean enough from what I saw of it.
It's not open, but it's better than the alternative: SVG is just too complex to create a useful implementation (ie that can compete with SWF) at this point in time.
The problem with the (albeit open) W3C specs, is that they reek of "design by committee".
It's not because it's open that it's automatically "good"
* back/forward works. * resizing text works, in fact you can easily resize/zoom the entire flash movie. I never have a problem with unreadable flash files, often I have a problem with unreadable html files (with hard-fixed CSS fonts) at 1600x1200, it starts to become an issue. I guess the only "problem" is that Flash usually uses unhinted anti-aliased fonts, but you can use the systems font renderer if you want it. And, as resolutions go up, this downside becomes an advantage. * cutting and pasting text works, I do it often from flash based sites. * That key intercepting thing was something I hadn't realized, and I agree something should be done about it. But it's something I personally never encountered, and is a problem with the implementation not the format. * indexing content: I don't think that's so hard: first of, there's an option (in the editor) to put all the text in comments in the enclosing HTML, and second, if google can parse PDF's, why not SWF's, it's not like it's that much harder...?
I like flash because it's a relatively small and simple format, which makes sure implementations are actually possible. I dislike the fact that the format gets defined by what get's implemented in Macromedia's implementation, and that there's no real editor out there in Linux-land (maybe with flasm.sf.net, things will change)
SVG just seems so huge, that after all this time, there's still no viable implementation. And after seeing the performance problems of the huge Adobe SVG plugin - which doesn't even support all of the spec - I still haven't seen anything that could compete with Flash.
It's not because it's an official W3C standard that it's good. It just seems way too fat, bloated,... I really wished they would've kept things simple.
(oh and by the way, the fact that flash is a binary format is not a big deal in my mind - I started generating swf's in pure php (no external libraries like MING needed) and it works out great so far.)
Well, the problem is often that politicians don't always do what they say they were going to do before the elections. It's very hard for the general public to get a clear picture of what politicians stand for, or are going to do if elected. On top of that the power and money steers the media in a certain direction too. So there's a lot of reasons why a nice/honest representative might not get elected if he doesn't get backed by the right "interests"/money/power.
Don't you know practically all of this SGI 3D stuff, IP, people has been transfered from SGI to nVidia?
If you are still really unsure, well, know that SGI opensourced GLX (old news) but also the "OpenGL sample implementation" on which practically all commercial opengl drivers (more than likely including SGI) are normally based.
see http://oss.sgi.com/projects/
The reason nVidia keeps their drivers closed, is probably not because of some mysterious "IP" that crept its way into their drivers, but I believe it's because it's one of their major advantages over other companies - a lot of work and techniques (memory management, features, hacks) have gone in them. They also would want to use the same codebase for Windows and Apple (obviously).
Now, I personally find this annoying (no nVidia based powerbook for me, because no PPC Linux drivers for instance - when all it would take is a recompile) - but it is their right.
The people who would have something to gain from using opensource drivers, would be the smaller 3D chipset makers: SIS, S3/VIA, PowerVR, even Matrox etc.
They usually have crap 3D drivers for windows - it would be cool to see them have a mesa based implementation working for both Linux/Windows/Apple. By pooling the common code together, and improving it together they'd get a solid base, and they would take advantage when another company improves a part of the foundation.
I mean, how can someone like SIS or Via, or even Matrox compete against the huge driver development labs of ATI/nVidia.
Don't forget, they 're not in the driver writing business. They're in the "selling hardware" business. Clients don't care and don't need to know that their driver was made in an opensource way.
Those are nice, but they have thesame problem all subnotebooks have: crappy 3D.
God, I really wish someone would come out with a subnotebook, preferably a form factor like the Portege 2000/R100 series, or Vaio SR-series, or anything small and cool like you find on http://www.dynamism.com/ - but with some muscle for 3D, an Radeon mobility 9000 would be nice for instance. I don't care that much about processor speed, harddrive space, optical drive, etc.
The closest I got was the 12" Powerbook, but Nvidia on PPC is a bad match for Linux sadly enough.
It pisses me off. I've been looking for a decent laptop for a while now, and haven't found anything that matches these criteria: linux on a small notebook with good (and supported) 3D card (a 7500 with 32MB I could just live with, Nvidia on x86 too, radeon mobility 9000 or higher would be great)
He doesn't assume his audience is familiar with everything geeks are, so he builds his case from scratch. He has very good arguments. He gives pertinent real world cases. He explores hypothetical, but very realistic cases to illustrate the possible dangers.
All in all, he's a very good speaker, and I don't get where the idea he's a raving lunatic comes from. Maybe it's because he hammers too much on the GNU/Linux thing, which, I agree is a bit silly. (Personally, I say something to the effect of "systems based on the linux kernel" which avoids the whole issue.)
But I do think he's a good speaker, and he spends a lot of effort to get important points across.
Linus is great, but not interested in the politics of open source, and rightly so. Stallman is, and has a good grasp of all the issues involved, and contrary to what alot of people seem to think he is not a scary zealot at all when you see him in real life.
Okay, this guy declared his protocol to be Gnutella2 without any agreement from the other players. Why don't the other players just name their next generation protocol Gnutella3, and be done with it.
It would drive the point home that you shouldn't hijack an existing protocol's name. Maybe that way everyone will play nice in future. Or we get a protocol version number arms race (...Gnutella16, no, Gnutella17,...) - but then everyone will see how lame the people involved are.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... I was rather happy to hear that, so I checked it out. However, if you look here: http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/hardware/bre akdown/index.php?hw_cat_id=4
It basically says, that with the 17" there's no video, and due to lack of thermal management, you may damage your laptop. As for the 12", they say:
Maximum number of colors: thousands
2D acceleration: No
3D acceleration: No
Dual head: No
AirPort Extreme: No
Bluetooth: No
I expect the situation to not be very different with the new 15", sadly enough. This is one reason why I hate binary-only driver support: other archs are usually unsupported because they're a smaller market share.
Nice. great GPU. Frankly I couldn't care less about 100Mhz more or less CPU-clock wise.
:-(
One question, however: does anyone know if the drivers for the R300 series are (or will be) available for PowerPC?
iirc, the R300 has a binary-only DRI/xfree86 module for x86. Fine, but do they have it for PPC?
I know nVidia couldn't care less about linux/ppc - I wonder if ATI does (doubt it, for fear of pissing off Apple maybe?)
I'm also assuming the Airport Extreme card is still unsupported in Linux? That's not a big deal if you have a cardbus slot like on the 15" and 17", but it is a big deal on the 12" - having no wireless support whatsoever in Linux would be a bummer. (And I doubt you can put an old Airport card in them - if I remember correctly they didn't have the same interface)
Oh, and don't give me "MacOSX is at least as good as Linux" - It may be true, but I'd like to have a choice, if at all possible. There's a lot of Linux programs I've grown used to, and Fink, while good, doesn't cut it compared to Debian for instance.
It's hard to find a decent laptop. I wish the 12" came out with the ATI Radeon 9200.
Right now I'm hesitating between the Apple AlBook 15" and the Sony TR1 series. They both have issues with Linux though.
Cool to see someone who doesn't have misconceptions about fresco. However, can you elaborate a bit on why you think putting as much policy as possible in the server is a bad thing?
- it offers possibilities to take advantage of and adapt to the available hardware. (server knows if the screen is only a 4" PDA screen, or a 30" 3D display - the application shouldn't have to know these things)
- it should be the user (where the server is) who decides on policy, not the application
- it's bandwith friendly if you're only transferring high-level info to/from the servers.
- you don't get different apps using different policies on the same server.
etc.
Anything I'm missing?
Well, people shouldn't have to go to jail because they're assholes.
Okay, he sent a lot of mails. Would he have received the same sentence if he was a garden variety spammer?
Clearly it has something to do with the content of the mail or with the intent of the "attack".
If it disclosed some confidential information, it could be tried in a civil court I guess, if there was a confidentiality clause in his contract which was still in effect. But even then, he could be considered a whistleblower.
The only thing that they could try him on would be his intention to use some sort of DOS attack against the mailservers, but considering he didn't use anything special (just email) it begs the question: what's the difference with a bulk-emailer. Also, if he was really trying to disclose this info to the customers, I don't think his intention was to bring down his channel of communication to them (the mailservers).
Either way, I don't see anything that warrants jail time. I just see an incompetent ISP, and someone that's probably a bit too annoying for his own good.
you have to do server-side input validation in any case. Never trust the client.
I've thought about this before, and it could be interesting for metropolitan areas:
a mini-distro for AP's that:
- shields the internal (personal) net, from a public, wireless net.
- routes between the private net, the public net, and the internet.
- do proper routing between AP's: it would be nice if there was a way to use your neighbours excess bandwidth to the internet, or use them as a failover when there's an outage just for you.
- provide proper limits: stop providing to the public if you reach 80% of your monthly bandwith limit, prioritize a bit of the bandwith for your personal net (so that other people can't use up all the available bandwith so there's none left for you), maybe only provide your connection to "members" of the network, etc.
- make it available in an easy updatable flash image for homemade and commercial AP's.
- make it configurable for people who have even more interfaces: multihoming with adsl and cable for instance, IR/visible light links/...
The idea would be that while not everyone has the expertise to configure their routers for all these features, everyone who wants to can just reflash their AP with an image, and be able to provide/get wireless services, and be a part of a real emergent wireless network. It'd be interesting for other reasons too: where I live for instance, all upload speed for residential cable/adsl connections is capped at 128kbit. If I want to send files fast to a friend a couple of blocks away, they could be just routed over the wireless network, via a couple of hops: no need to go over the internet - chances are the speed will be a lot better than 128kbit that way. Also by cooperating in a network like this, you'd have increased speed and reliability for all - not everyone uses up their bandwith / monthly volume limit all the time.
The answer's simple: I've got a whole bunch of machines here running Debian. OSX is definately cool, and I would keep it on the machine for when I need to run soft that doesn't run on Linux. But it's nice to have the same environment everywhere to develop in.
Also, debian is a godsend for me with all its software, and I'm not too happy with fink up till now...
Now if there was a debian/osx like there's a debian/bsd, now that would be cool.
Nope, that's out: it's a Geforce4Go 420, running on a PowerPC chip . There's no PPC Linux drivers for nVidia cards.
Anyone know of something with this or similar formfactor (light/thin/10"-12"), and a decent, linux-supported 3D chip?
I think there's DRI drivers for the 855 in this sony, but I doubt the chip is a good performer (can anyone shed some light on it?)
I love this one, or the Toshiba R100 form factor, but I really want some proper 3D in my next laptop.
Yeah, unless you count the Airport Extreme (broadcom won't release the specs) and the nVidia on PPC 3D card (nVidia don't want to recompile theor drivers for PPC).
Centrino works, aside from the wavelan card.
> Perhaps. Perhaps I'd be more agreeable if the
> common tools for creating SWF came with a sane
> set of defaults that gave the behaviour you've
> described.
Amen to that. The Flash MX editor is just plain crap. It's a usability nightmare, buggy (understatement of the year), bloated POS. And it's the _only_ program that I need to boot back to Windows for, and I doubt we'll see it soon on Linux.
All these things don't come "automatically", you have to choose whether you enable it or not.
/ experiments/backbutton /backbutton.html
(that in itself might be a major downside, but it's not that it's impossible, it just becomes the responsibility of the designer - blame the people, not the format)
* back button example/"experiment"
http://www.robertpenner.com
* resizing text
You can make the swf scale with the browser window (easy, and I don't see why alot of designers choose to use a fixed size for their sites - it's also what happens if you load the swf straight in your browser), and/or detect changes in the browser window size, and choose how to respond accordingly.
* cutting/pasting text: it's just a checkbox you have to tick - you can choose if you want it or not.
So: the implementation and format make all these things possible, and doesn't even steer developers in one particular direction, it just lets them make a choice. So again, don't blame the format, blame the designers.
I agree with those points... however, you don't need the spec to reverse engineer swf's to make a proper player, no sueing involved, and the format seems clean enough from what I saw of it.
It's not open, but it's better than the alternative: SVG is just too complex to create a useful implementation (ie that can compete with SWF) at this point in time.
The problem with the (albeit open) W3C specs, is that they reek of "design by committee".
It's not because it's open that it's automatically "good"
Check out my answer to that:
4 85 706
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=71668&cid=6
I don't think these numerous problems are problems at all.
There's numerous people that misuse HTML/javascript/css/... but there we rarely blame the formats...? What's so different about Flash?
well:
... I really wished they would've kept things simple.
* back/forward works.
* resizing text works, in fact you can easily resize/zoom the entire flash movie. I never have a problem with unreadable flash files, often I have a problem with unreadable html files (with hard-fixed CSS fonts) at 1600x1200, it starts to become an issue. I guess the only "problem" is that Flash usually uses unhinted anti-aliased fonts, but you can use the systems font renderer if you want it. And, as resolutions go up, this downside becomes an advantage.
* cutting and pasting text works, I do it often from flash based sites.
* That key intercepting thing was something I hadn't realized, and I agree something should be done about it. But it's something I personally never encountered, and is a problem with the implementation not the format.
* indexing content: I don't think that's so hard: first of, there's an option (in the editor) to put all the text in comments in the enclosing HTML, and second, if google can parse PDF's, why not SWF's, it's not like it's that much harder...?
I like flash because it's a relatively small and simple format, which makes sure implementations are actually possible. I dislike the fact that the format gets defined by what get's implemented in Macromedia's implementation, and that there's no real editor out there in Linux-land (maybe with flasm.sf.net, things will change)
SVG just seems so huge, that after all this time, there's still no viable implementation. And after seeing the performance problems of the huge Adobe SVG plugin - which doesn't even support all of the spec - I still haven't seen anything that could compete with Flash.
It's not because it's an official W3C standard that it's good. It just seems way too fat, bloated,
(oh and by the way, the fact that flash is a binary format is not a big deal in my mind - I started generating swf's in pure php (no external libraries like MING needed) and it works out great so far.)
Well, the problem is often that politicians don't always do what they say they were going to do before the elections. It's very hard for the general public to get a clear picture of what politicians stand for, or are going to do if elected.
On top of that the power and money steers the media in a certain direction too. So there's a lot of reasons why a nice/honest representative might not get elected if he doesn't get backed by the right "interests"/money/power.
Unison is pretty cool, it's like two-way rsync, and works over SSH.
Well, the only problem is that when you work with other people (or opensource projects), you don't get to choose what features you're using.
In other languages you can usually read other peoples' code without too much problems... can't say the same about C++
really?
Don't you know practically all of this SGI 3D stuff, IP, people has been transfered from SGI to nVidia?
If you are still really unsure, well, know that SGI opensourced GLX (old news) but also the "OpenGL sample implementation" on which practically all commercial opengl drivers (more than likely including SGI) are normally based.
see http://oss.sgi.com/projects/
The reason nVidia keeps their drivers closed, is probably not because of some mysterious "IP" that crept its way into their drivers, but I believe it's because it's one of their major advantages over other companies - a lot of work and techniques (memory management, features, hacks) have gone in them. They also would want to use the same codebase for Windows and Apple (obviously).
Now, I personally find this annoying (no nVidia based powerbook for me, because no PPC Linux drivers for instance - when all it would take is a recompile) - but it is their right.
The people who would have something to gain from using opensource drivers, would be the smaller 3D chipset makers: SIS, S3/VIA, PowerVR, even Matrox etc.
They usually have crap 3D drivers for windows - it would be cool to see them have a mesa based implementation working for both Linux/Windows/Apple. By pooling the common code together, and improving it together they'd get a solid base, and they would take advantage when another company improves a part of the foundation.
I mean, how can someone like SIS or Via, or even Matrox compete against the huge driver development labs of ATI/nVidia.
Don't forget, they 're not in the driver writing business. They're in the "selling hardware" business. Clients don't care and don't need to know that their driver was made in an opensource way.
Oh well...
Those are nice, but they have thesame problem all subnotebooks have: crappy 3D.
God, I really wish someone would come out with a subnotebook, preferably a form factor like the Portege 2000/R100 series, or Vaio SR-series, or anything small and cool like you find on http://www.dynamism.com/ - but with some muscle for 3D, an Radeon mobility 9000 would be nice for instance. I don't care that much about processor speed, harddrive space, optical drive, etc.
The closest I got was the 12" Powerbook, but Nvidia on PPC is a bad match for Linux sadly enough.
It pisses me off. I've been looking for a decent laptop for a while now, and haven't found anything that matches these criteria: linux on a small notebook with good (and supported) 3D card (a 7500 with 32MB I could just live with, Nvidia on x86 too, radeon mobility 9000 or higher would be great)
You obviously haven't heard him speak yet.
He doesn't assume his audience is familiar with everything geeks are, so he builds his case from scratch. He has very good arguments. He gives pertinent real world cases. He explores hypothetical, but very realistic cases to illustrate the possible dangers.
All in all, he's a very good speaker, and I don't get where the idea he's a raving lunatic comes from. Maybe it's because he hammers too much on the GNU/Linux thing, which, I agree is a bit silly. (Personally, I say something to the effect of "systems based on the linux kernel" which avoids the whole issue.)
But I do think he's a good speaker, and he spends a lot of effort to get important points across.
Linus is great, but not interested in the politics of open source, and rightly so. Stallman is, and has a good grasp of all the issues involved, and contrary to what alot of people seem to think he is not a scary zealot at all when you see him in real life.
Yea, wonder if people will still claim that code isn't/shouldn't be protected speech...
what about making holes on either side and aiming/aligning them properly? :)
It's known that for modern networks (GSM, I suppose CDMA too), the providers can easily access the actual location of the phone.
I don't know with what precision, but I wonder how much precision you really need for the applications they want to provide...
Okay, this guy declared his protocol to be Gnutella2 without any agreement from the other players. Why don't the other players just name their next generation protocol Gnutella3, and be done with it.
...) - but then everyone will see how lame the people involved are.
It would drive the point home that you shouldn't hijack an existing protocol's name. Maybe that way everyone will play nice in future. Or we get a protocol version number arms race (...Gnutella16, no, Gnutella17,