I forgot to mention that @home scans your machine daily to make sure you are not running a news server.
They were pressured to do this by Usenet administrators. If they had not, their IPs would have been blocked by many usenet servers. The levels of spam from @Home addresses were unacceptable. These scans fixed the problem.
Never mind they *don't provide the bandwith* to run a news server
Right. They provide fucking insane downstream bandwidth and fairly modest upstream, suitable for clients. I would prefer more upstream, too, but not if it means paying more...which of course it would. Bandwidth costs money. If you haven't noticed, @Home isn't in the best financial shape.
Why would you run a Usenet server anyway? This is a huge resource drain (much more content than you actually read is sent to you), when there are plenty of other usenet servers (for modest fees, or even using the ones @Home provides) or alternatives to Usenet entirely.
... and more often than not the *scans* will disrupt your downloads!
Bullshit. Their scans consist of SYN packets to port nntp (119/tcp). If your machine properly issues a ICMP connection refused packet, nothing more will happen. I am an @Home customer and was when they started doing this. I have not experienced any problems due to these scans.
Seriously, look at the heart of what I am saying: you are paying the same, or more, and getting less and less as @home can take from you. Is this the way to run a business?
Given their terrible financial situation, they must do this or go broke. In that case, they would charge you nothing and provide no service. You have that option now. Take it if you like.
My complaint with @Home is that their support is absolutely terrible. When I call about service interruptions, I'm put on hold for way too long before talking to someone who does not have a clue. I'd much rather see them pour money into fixing this problem than into a little more upstream bandwidth.
Actually, the VM is "the subsystem which keeps you from getting short on RAM, by dumping pages to the hard drive when they get stale, while not swapping unnecessarily because of the big impact that disk I/O has on system performance."
It's not that simple, either;)
It does everything you said but also tries to minimize disk I/O by caching parts of the disk in memory. It has to maintain a balance between maximizing the cache and minimizing swap usage. I believe recently they've also talked about doing quite a bit more lookahead on the cache...if you're accessing one disk block/page/whatever, grabbing subsequent ones as well. (I'm not sure if this is the next block of the physical disk or the file, but that's not the point.) That would be an additional complication.
NOTE - im posting this under my user name in the full awerness that someone brave and wise (enter sarcasm mode)will likely mark me down for being offtopic etc etc - but as this topic is a load of bull how can anything be off topic ?
I'm really tired of people talking about how they are taking a stand and will get moderated down by some coward. You aren't opposing the Slashdot majority view at all. People have wished for the editors to do basic journalism since Slashdot was created, and it's never happened. Your post is fairly redundant.
If I had mod points right now, though, I wouldn't moderate you down for being redundant. I rarely actually mod people down for that, though I tend to vote "unfair" in metamod when Insightful/Interesting/Informative are given to posts which state common views without adding anything new or relating very closely to the story (for example, most RIAA-related posts).
I would, however, moderate you down as "Troll" solely because of that damn moderation comment.. Get over your crusader dreams.
HardOCP.com ran an article the other day that said they were installing an 1800+ XP processor, and reached across the desk to grab something, bumping a key on the keyboard, which booted the machine with no heatsink and destroyed the processor.
You're saying that they worked on a powered machine and blamed AMD when they fucked it up.
ATX power supplies, unlike AT power supplies, run power through the motherboard whether the system is on or not. Some newer motherboards have a giant green LED in the middle of the board to alert you of this fact. (It even glows for like five seconds after you pull the power, since the capaciters take some time to discharge.) This is what makes possible the keyboard power-on feature that you described, as well as scheduled power-on and such.
You never work on a machine that is receiving power. Since they made such a basic mistake, I wouldn't trust their diagnostic skills. Don't believe them when they say heat fried the processor.
(Side note: while you don't want the machine to be powered, it is a good idea to make sure the machine is grounded to avoid static damage. For this reason, I'd suggest plugging it into a power strip and turning off the power strip. Ground but no power.)
the probability that your heatsink is just going to fall off is pretty low anyway. If the lack of heat protection keeps the cost down, then I'm all for it.
Agreed. Someone made the comparison between running a processor with no heat sink and running a car with no coolant. The car isn't exactly going to like it, either. Why do we consider this such a problem for PCs? Heatsinks don't just fall off. If they did, it couldn't be good for the system anyway to have a huge conductor rolling around on your motherboard.
Thanks for the link. It was very convincing. My library project will soon have a single global Makefile, once I get that idea working with the autoconf stuff already in place.
Here's Intervideo's WinDVD compatibility list (shows a lot of cards support 5.1 and S/PDIF). I would assume that other cards would work fine with WinDVD if they support it, but I skipped over all the ones in the list that don't have those checked.
Midiman's Delta Series. These are professional cards, but the bottom ones might be affordable (the Audiophile 2496 in particular). Good Linux support. I'm considering going all the way and getting the Delta 66 (quite expensive...one place has it at $350) to be sure I have something that works. The audio quality would be much, much better than I need for sure. One thing I'll certainly check out more before spending all that money: I don't know if the Windows drivers support consumer game APIs like EAX and such. None of the professional cards mention this and I'm not sure if it's a "of course, even the consumer cards do that, why bother to mention it" or a "these are for recording, not games" sort of deal.
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. One review site said they had crappy drivers as well (stability problems under 95/98), so I'm not too likely to get this one. It was an old review, though. I hadn't realized Turtle Beach was in danger of going out of business.
I just ordered an audigy yesterday.
Hopefully Creative labs will support this product better. Actually, I don't even need support, I just need the card not to go bad for 2-3 years.
I've never had a Creative Labs card fail, but the drivers are absolutely miserable and their support refuses to acknowledge problems. My advice to you is to return the Audigy. Don't even bother opening the box. You don't want it.
Addendum: I'm not the only one who has these problems. There are entire forums filled with people who have the same problem with these cards, unofficial drivers, the works. Don't ever buy from Creative, no matter how good their cards are physically. The drivers suck. The support sucks.
Their support is absolutely terrible. I think these two messages illustrate my point very well:
Response from Creative: 8/22/01 10:48:01 AM
Scott,
The if you are running the digital output threw a S/PDIF cable then there is
only 2 speakers going to be 2 speaker signal from the sound card. Unless you
are in a Enviroment that support 4 or more speakers, such as Games, and DVD
movies.
Geoffrey
Creative Labs Technical Support
Response from Customer: 8/22/01 1:14:17 PM
[...]
In the future, I would appreciate answers from people
who are literate. The number of grammatical and
spelling errors in this reply indicate to me that
Geoffrey is a semi-trained chimp. As a paying
customer, I feel I can reasonably expect better
support than this.
Essentially, the problem here was that I wanted to get 5.1 Dolby Digital output. The problem, as I discovered in spite of Geoffrey's confused ramblings, was that the card is just not capable of this in most situations. It has an AC-3 decoder but not an encoder...so you can use the Dolby Digital output only from DVDs. And then not under Windows 2000, because of driver problems. Their newest driver claims to fix the problem but doesn't.
I've still got the card...using the analog outputs, I can get it to output real applications (WinDVD, Counterstrike) 5.1 almost. The center channel only works in Creative's speaker test application. It pretty much has to be a driver problem, but try getting them to admit that, I dare you...
How much do you think VA makes on those Thinkgeek banners?
if I had to guess, I'd say quite a bit. Thinkgeek is one of the few advertisers that probably gets an awful lot of hits from the Slashdot crowd. They sell physical objects (no piracy even possible) that a lot of the Slashdot crowd wants. Plus, those items can be much harder to find elsewhere. It's a winning formula for advertising on Slashdot.
Option to mod down non-subscription posts?
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
I would actually like to see subscription.
But: I'd want to get more value out of it, and I don't just mean not seeing banner ads. I want to see:
Logged-in anonymous posts. I.e., you click "Post Anonymously" and the post still displays as being posted by "Anonymous Coward". However, it is tied to your account for karma adjustments (both you can specify the post's karma with the +1 bonus and the moderation of the post affects your karma), the reply/moderation tracking feature, and your subscription status.
No-subscription penalty. An optional (it must be optional!) penalty for non-subscription posts similar to the anonymous coward one.
The idea being that I could set it to not moderate AC posts down at all but moderate non-subscription posts down. Every post I see either would have a real person's identity behind it (which I can't necessarily see, but the idea is they are accountable) or have been moderated up significantly.
In other words, if the subscription feature is done well, it could be a way for us to improve the signal-to-noise ratio as well as support the site and avoid banner ads.
RH 7.2 solves a real issue - sometimes (once a month) her harddisk stops working. A hardware error.
While it's great that journalling filesystems let you get started up more quickly, this doesn't solve the problem*. If the hard disk does not consistently spin up, you can be assured that some day it will never spin up again. Get the data off it before this happens.
Hard disks are cheap. I just bought a Seagate ATA IV ST380021A yesterday. It's 80GB with transfer rates from 24 to 41 MBytes/sec and unbelievably quiet: 2.1 bels idle (below a whisper). It only cost me $200.
* - "issue" is a pet peeve of mine. A problem is something that needs to be solved. An issue is a point of discussion. While this has become a point of discussion, it was first a problem and hasn't ceased to be. Don't be like Microsoft. Admit there are such things as problems and bugs.
Wonderful, now go and tell that to the barely computer literate masses that GNOME and even KDE are being designed for. They will look at you with a "What the heck did you just say? RP..What?"
If they don't know how to use the package management system, they shouldn't delete these packages. Having kde1-compat around isn't going to slow your system to a crawl. It takes up about two megs of disk space in RPM format; at most twice that uncompressed. If nothing uses it, it won't ever be loaded into RAM. I only said how to do it because you seemed concerned about hunting down all those 1.x libraries, as you would have to do on a Windows system. Package management does the "hunting" for you here.
As for having prior DirectX versions in the latest release. That I doubt. I have more than a few apps and games that fail to run under newer releases of DirectX. Some that fail to run even under the "Compatibility Feature" in 2000 and XP.
*shrug* Don't know what to say. As I said, there I was relaying what I had heard from someone else. It could be wrong, or those applications could be not conveying properly what version of the API they expect. (I believe you have to make a specific functional call for it.)
I would have to agree with the primary poster here. I do think that it is good to keep that backward compatibility. It is also good to see that the GNOME team is working on a backward compatibility feature...
The GNOME people aren't creating a new binary compatibility feature; they are taking advantage of the versioning support already in ld.so. That's why there are major and minor versions of all your libraries. Major versions represent API changes; minor versions do not. An application gets the major number it requests, with the highest minor number available.
This is the case with KDE as well. If you install RedHat, you will notice kde-2.x packages and kde1-compat-1.x packages. The kde1-compat packages are necessary only for backward compatibility, as the name suggests. When 3.0 gets out of beta, RedHat will likely move the current kdelibs package to kde2-compat and create new packages for KDE 3.0.
How many diferent revisions are you going to need to keep on your hard drive to be able to run that really old 1.x GNOME app when there is no GNOME 8.x version available?
It's no worse than in Microsoftland. I'm told that every new version of DirectX includes every previous version of DirectX for this reason. Other Microsoft packages have the incredibly crusty APIs Reality Master mentioned because I don't believe versioning is natively supported.
What do you do when you get rid of your 1.x legacy apps? Hunt down all the 1.x GNOME Libraries?
If you have package management, this is easy. rpm -e kde1-compat kde1-compat-devel. Done. If something requires these libraries, rpm will tell you. (This is the same for GNOME stuff. There are gtk+10 and gtk+ packages, for example.)
This is a great move. Essentially, they want to create a large, secure, reliable, high-bandwidth infranet. That's a huge task. It will mean huge contracts, lots of money, and many jobs for networking companies that have recently hit hard times.
Will the network actually be more secure? Maybe, maybe not. If it isn't...so what? Just the act of trying circulates money.
Anyone else feel cheated? Moore's law states a doubling should occur every 18 months. 6 years is four doublings but, instead of 32 GHz, we get 20.....what a crock....;)
Yeah, I know where you're coming from.
But Moore's Law is just an observation of something that seems to hold fairly true. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever come close to even hypothesizing why it should be true, much less proving it.
This statement is also true of some more established laws, though. We've changed our understanding of physics quite a lot, for example. The universe doesn't obey our laws...our laws attempt to model the universe.
Artifical intelligence should be able to translate speech from any language to any language and add new patterns without reprogramming.
Oh, okay. I'll have that for you tomorrow.
I'm really tired of people making these dramatic statements that are all but impossible to realize. There are people who have spent their careers trying to do what you mentioned in that paragraph, and they've gotten nowhere, because the task is so enormously complex. Translating from one language involves taking one set of nonsensical rules and ambiguities and replacing them with another. It can not be done without a complete understand of what is being translated. That's...hard, to make the understatement of the year.
What if we could build layers of software on top of layers of software, which are then again used to build greater layers of software? This would require that we accept standard functionality at each level of the layering process and then allow people to write ever simpler code due to this great deal of layering. Why should anyone be required to rewrite a quicksort once it has been written?
There are already so many levels of complexity in any piece of software that it's completely insane. Your idea is nothing new. Here's a partial list of the layers involved in a Java Virtual Machine I'm sure I am leaving many things out, putting them in a bad order, etc.:
Gates. Operations on ones and zeros.
Hardware components. I'm sure there are layers I am leaving out here and much more descriptive ways to say this...but I have only a token knowledge of these layers.
The instruction set architecture of the machine. Already a huge step up, this is a layer at which I can (slowly and painfully) produce useful software.
Assemblers. They take somewhat human-readable code and generate machine code from it. (Ever had to do this by hand? Not fun.)
High-level programming languages. They take relatively abstract concepts like loops, functions, etc. and create assembler from them.
Operating systems. (At this point, the "layers" metaphor shows its imperfections...high-level programming languages and operating system functionality are orthogonal, meaning they abstract different things. My order is arbitrary.) They make it possible to access devices in abstract ways, plus a million other useful things for software.
The core library. (libc on C-based machines.) Makes system calls to the operating system easier. Implements stuff common to lots and lots of programs.
Other libraries. There's actually many layers hidden here. For example, on UNIX, libxpm depends on libXt which depends on libX11 which depends on libm which depends on libc.
Various other processes, like the X11 server. These interact with client-side libraries through communication primitives provided by the operating system layer and made more accessible by the libc layer.
The Brahm GC. (For Kaffe. I don't know what GC Sun's VM uses or where exactly it fits in.) This makes memory allocation easier.
C-side Java support stuff. Part of the String class implementation, for example.
The virtual machine. Implements a completely different instruction set.
Java-side support libraries. A lot of the java.lang stuff, for example.
More Java-side support libraries. GUI stuff. This depends on stuff below. Extend to arbitrary depth.
Your code.
My point? Layering software is nothing new. If you want to add a layer, say so, but don't pretend it's a new concept.
So here is my challenge to every programmer/newbie/manager/hardware designer in existance. Stop trying to focus on how we can optimize or tweak each individual computer function so that you gain temporary marketshare, outperform your competitor, or push your political agenda. Instead, begin pushing for hard standards in the industry.
You know, I really hate it when people push for other people to make dramatic changes I suspect they don't understand (evidence: above) and use the word "we". It's entirely inappropriate.
Stop worrying about making languages that allow you to produce specific functionality in fewer lines of code, and worry about producing the highest level of quality
The language is one of those layers you advocated. The language itself is a piece of software to be reused. You suggested people add layers to make things possible with simpler code, and this is one way to do it. Don't knock it.
There's a time and a place for diplomacy, and this isn't it.
<div diplomacy="off"> That's a dumb idea. </div>
My attention wanders and consequently my eyes do as well. I blink subconsciously. You can't change these things, and it's stupid to try. Don't make an input system that fails when they happen.
I think Douglas Adams does a good job of describing the failings of this type of input system:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wavebands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That's not even taking into account the way the eye inherently jitters, according to the other replies. Even without that, this wouldn't work out well except for extremely disabled people who have little other choice and aren't likely to complain about something that makes it at all possible for them to use a computer.
There's a good chance that the resolutions have gone from the 4/8 megapixel (best of the 80s) to the 268+ megapixels. (The optics will probably never get much better).
Does this increased CCD density actually improve image quality when the optics and atmospheric distortion don't change? I'm inclined to say no, but I'd be interested to know.
Seeing as Mozilla is supposed to be an application platform, the same argument could be made.
True, but I don't believe Mozilla will ever have even a fraction of the support Java does. Java is a very well-thought-out lanaguage with some interesting concepts (the first widespread VM and really widespread GC), a really good API, a huge install base, and lots of resources on it available. As much as apples and oranges can be compared (a programming language vs. a web browser, although they both are more than that), Java comes out far ahead.
And such a book on Mozilla is coming from O'Reilley (can't recall the title at the moment).
This was the worst design decision(?spelling?) with Mozilla. Big, bloated GUI, slowing down the good, fast rendering engine.
I also think this was a terrible decision, but not for the same reason. There is a reason that damn near every program on any given GUI (with the notable exception of X11) looks about the same, and it's not because programmers are unimaginative.
It's because users are happier when the interface adheres to consistent guidelines. Each platform has its own set of guidelines. A few examples:
How many times have you been annoyed when you hit the wheel mouse and it didn't work right? That's almost always because of some moronic programmer who decided it would be better to write his/her own widgets. Wheel mice are one of the places this becomes most obvious, because they didn't exist when a lot of these programs were designed. The GUI vendor added support to the native widgets, but the stupid replacement ones in a lot of cases don't have support. Or when they do, it doesn't work quite the same. (I.e., seperate preferences for the number of lines to scroll.)
Mozilla is one of the worst offenders here, completely scrapping the idea of an interface consistent with anything else.
(Java is a bit of an exception. It doesn't have a system of its own, so arguably it also violates the other interface guidelines. However, it makes sense to have a single interface for Java, since applications are intended to be very cross-platform. Plus, Java has actually taken on the challenge of designing a good GUI of their own...observe the fact that there is a book out on the Java look and feel. I'm not aware of a similar one for Mozilla.)
2.4.2 was the latest kernel available at the time of release, and since there have been no gaping security holes and that kernel has proven fairly stable, there's no reason to mess with a good thing.
I beg to differ. There are lots of reported data corruption bugs in all 2.4 kernels prior to 2.4.6:
Linux 2.4.3 ate my hard drive. I booted up, got weird problems...ran an fsck, it failed, saying the superblock was invalid. I specified one of the alternate superblocks...it kept giving me errors. I piped yes into it and let it run. When it was done, my entire filesystem was in little pieces in/lost+found.
That's the most important problem, but there are also a couple reported crashes I believe and, of course, the VM problems (which are still an issue. 2.4.10 has a huge patch to the VM system.)
I've been pretty disappointed by Linux 2.4 so far and at this point I'd say I still would not run it on a server. (I use FreeBSD, but Linux 2.2, though old, is good as well.)
I'm used to running bleeding edge stuff on my desktop, though. I'm not too upset about the losing my Linux partition thing, since I had most stuff backed up elsewhere.
(In fairness to Linux, I have a VIA686b South Bridge Controller. I think that's the chipset they had the most trouble with by far, though from the descriptions, not all of these bugs are related to it.)
As I understand it, it's not the standard behavior because to take advantage of it, you need to have much finer-grained locking in the kernel. But...they added that anyway in 2.4, for SMP. This guy just took the existing locks and made them work for a new purpose.
The first page I ignored...I never pay much attention to testimonials unless they're from someone overwhelmingly authoritative (in this case, basically only the W3C) and even then with some skepticism.
The second page was more interesting. It said very convincingly that Netscape 6's and Mozilla's CSS1 support are better than IE 5.0 or 5.5's. The bug count was significantly lower and the bugs seemed less severe. I looked at their 5.5 bug sheets and did see the problems they mentioned (using IE5.5, not 6.0).
However, this still doesn't prove your original statement because:
Those pages don't mention IE6. I deliberately chose IE6 for comparison because it is so new that how it does compared to Mozilla is unprovable at this point; it hasn't been out for long enough for anyone to have done a thorough job testing it. I'm not trying to convince anyone with that statement (I have no clue if it is true or not) but playing devil's advocate, trying to get people to question the doctrine that Mozilla is the best.
Konqueror isn't mentioned either. Not sure why this is; it's been out long enough to have been tested. I've heard its CSS support is good as well. Some people claim it is better than Mozilla's, though they haven't justified their statements either.
CSS isn't the only standard Mozilla and IE both claim to support. XML comes to mind, for example.
Of course, I haven't disproven your statement either. I don't have to. When you claim things as fact, the burden of proof is yours. Believing everything anyone says would be dumb, and it would take far too much time to attempt to prove/disprove every statement someone offers.
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I forgot to mention that @home scans your machine daily to make sure you are not running a news server.
They were pressured to do this by Usenet administrators. If they had not, their IPs would have been blocked by many usenet servers. The levels of spam from @Home addresses were unacceptable. These scans fixed the problem.
Never mind they *don't provide the bandwith* to run a news server
Right. They provide fucking insane downstream bandwidth and fairly modest upstream, suitable for clients. I would prefer more upstream, too, but not if it means paying more...which of course it would. Bandwidth costs money. If you haven't noticed, @Home isn't in the best financial shape.
Why would you run a Usenet server anyway? This is a huge resource drain (much more content than you actually read is sent to you), when there are plenty of other usenet servers (for modest fees, or even using the ones @Home provides) or alternatives to Usenet entirely.
Bullshit. Their scans consist of SYN packets to port nntp (119/tcp). If your machine properly issues a ICMP connection refused packet, nothing more will happen. I am an @Home customer and was when they started doing this. I have not experienced any problems due to these scans.
Seriously, look at the heart of what I am saying: you are paying the same, or more, and getting less and less as @home can take from you. Is this the way to run a business?
Given their terrible financial situation, they must do this or go broke. In that case, they would charge you nothing and provide no service. You have that option now. Take it if you like.
My complaint with @Home is that their support is absolutely terrible. When I call about service interruptions, I'm put on hold for way too long before talking to someone who does not have a clue. I'd much rather see them pour money into fixing this problem than into a little more upstream bandwidth.
Actually, the VM is "the subsystem which keeps you from getting short on RAM, by dumping pages to the hard drive when they get stale, while not swapping unnecessarily because of the big impact that disk I/O has on system performance."
It's not that simple, either ;)
It does everything you said but also tries to minimize disk I/O by caching parts of the disk in memory. It has to maintain a balance between maximizing the cache and minimizing swap usage. I believe recently they've also talked about doing quite a bit more lookahead on the cache...if you're accessing one disk block/page/whatever, grabbing subsequent ones as well. (I'm not sure if this is the next block of the physical disk or the file, but that's not the point.) That would be an additional complication.
NOTE - im posting this under my user name in the full awerness that someone brave and wise (enter sarcasm mode)will likely mark me down for being offtopic etc etc - but as this topic is a load of bull how can anything be off topic ?
I'm really tired of people talking about how they are taking a stand and will get moderated down by some coward. You aren't opposing the Slashdot majority view at all. People have wished for the editors to do basic journalism since Slashdot was created, and it's never happened. Your post is fairly redundant.
If I had mod points right now, though, I wouldn't moderate you down for being redundant. I rarely actually mod people down for that, though I tend to vote "unfair" in metamod when Insightful/Interesting/Informative are given to posts which state common views without adding anything new or relating very closely to the story (for example, most RIAA-related posts).
I would, however, moderate you down as "Troll" solely because of that damn moderation comment.. Get over your crusader dreams.
HardOCP.com ran an article the other day that said they were installing an 1800+ XP processor, and reached across the desk to grab something, bumping a key on the keyboard, which booted the machine with no heatsink and destroyed the processor.
You're saying that they worked on a powered machine and blamed AMD when they fucked it up.
ATX power supplies, unlike AT power supplies, run power through the motherboard whether the system is on or not. Some newer motherboards have a giant green LED in the middle of the board to alert you of this fact. (It even glows for like five seconds after you pull the power, since the capaciters take some time to discharge.) This is what makes possible the keyboard power-on feature that you described, as well as scheduled power-on and such.
You never work on a machine that is receiving power. Since they made such a basic mistake, I wouldn't trust their diagnostic skills. Don't believe them when they say heat fried the processor.
(Side note: while you don't want the machine to be powered, it is a good idea to make sure the machine is grounded to avoid static damage. For this reason, I'd suggest plugging it into a power strip and turning off the power strip. Ground but no power.)
the probability that your heatsink is just going to fall off is pretty low anyway. If the lack of heat protection keeps the cost down, then I'm all for it.
Agreed. Someone made the comparison between running a processor with no heat sink and running a car with no coolant. The car isn't exactly going to like it, either. Why do we consider this such a problem for PCs? Heatsinks don't just fall off. If they did, it couldn't be good for the system anyway to have a huge conductor rolling around on your motherboard.
Thanks for the link. It was very convincing. My library project will soon have a single global Makefile, once I get that idea working with the autoconf stuff already in place.
Here's Intervideo's WinDVD compatibility list (shows a lot of cards support 5.1 and S/PDIF). I would assume that other cards would work fine with WinDVD if they support it, but I skipped over all the ones in the list that don't have those checked.
Here's Neoseeker's audio card reviews. Links to other review sites as well. PC AV Tech seems good as well.
And the list of ones I'm still looking at:
I just ordered an audigy yesterday. Hopefully Creative labs will support this product better. Actually, I don't even need support, I just need the card not to go bad for 2-3 years.
I've never had a Creative Labs card fail, but the drivers are absolutely miserable and their support refuses to acknowledge problems. My advice to you is to return the Audigy. Don't even bother opening the box. You don't want it.
Addendum: I'm not the only one who has these problems. There are entire forums filled with people who have the same problem with these cards, unofficial drivers, the works. Don't ever buy from Creative, no matter how good their cards are physically. The drivers suck. The support sucks.
Their support is absolutely terrible. I think these two messages illustrate my point very well:
Essentially, the problem here was that I wanted to get 5.1 Dolby Digital output. The problem, as I discovered in spite of Geoffrey's confused ramblings, was that the card is just not capable of this in most situations. It has an AC-3 decoder but not an encoder...so you can use the Dolby Digital output only from DVDs. And then not under Windows 2000, because of driver problems. Their newest driver claims to fix the problem but doesn't.
I've still got the card...using the analog outputs, I can get it to output real applications (WinDVD, Counterstrike) 5.1 almost. The center channel only works in Creative's speaker test application. It pretty much has to be a driver problem, but try getting them to admit that, I dare you...
Creative sucks.
How much do you think VA makes on those Thinkgeek banners?
if I had to guess, I'd say quite a bit. Thinkgeek is one of the few advertisers that probably gets an awful lot of hits from the Slashdot crowd. They sell physical objects (no piracy even possible) that a lot of the Slashdot crowd wants. Plus, those items can be much harder to find elsewhere. It's a winning formula for advertising on Slashdot.
I would actually like to see subscription.
But: I'd want to get more value out of it, and I don't just mean not seeing banner ads. I want to see:
The idea being that I could set it to not moderate AC posts down at all but moderate non-subscription posts down. Every post I see either would have a real person's identity behind it (which I can't necessarily see, but the idea is they are accountable) or have been moderated up significantly.
In other words, if the subscription feature is done well, it could be a way for us to improve the signal-to-noise ratio as well as support the site and avoid banner ads.
RH 7.2 solves a real issue - sometimes (once a month) her harddisk stops working. A hardware error.
While it's great that journalling filesystems let you get started up more quickly, this doesn't solve the problem*. If the hard disk does not consistently spin up, you can be assured that some day it will never spin up again. Get the data off it before this happens.
Hard disks are cheap. I just bought a Seagate ATA IV ST380021A yesterday. It's 80GB with transfer rates from 24 to 41 MBytes/sec and unbelievably quiet: 2.1 bels idle (below a whisper). It only cost me $200.
* - "issue" is a pet peeve of mine. A problem is something that needs to be solved. An issue is a point of discussion. While this has become a point of discussion, it was first a problem and hasn't ceased to be. Don't be like Microsoft. Admit there are such things as problems and bugs.
Wonderful, now go and tell that to the barely computer literate masses that GNOME and even KDE are being designed for. They will look at you with a "What the heck did you just say? RP..What?"
If they don't know how to use the package management system, they shouldn't delete these packages. Having kde1-compat around isn't going to slow your system to a crawl. It takes up about two megs of disk space in RPM format; at most twice that uncompressed. If nothing uses it, it won't ever be loaded into RAM. I only said how to do it because you seemed concerned about hunting down all those 1.x libraries, as you would have to do on a Windows system. Package management does the "hunting" for you here.
As for having prior DirectX versions in the latest release. That I doubt. I have more than a few apps and games that fail to run under newer releases of DirectX. Some that fail to run even under the "Compatibility Feature" in 2000 and XP.
*shrug* Don't know what to say. As I said, there I was relaying what I had heard from someone else. It could be wrong, or those applications could be not conveying properly what version of the API they expect. (I believe you have to make a specific functional call for it.)
I would have to agree with the primary poster here. I do think that it is good to keep that backward compatibility. It is also good to see that the GNOME team is working on a backward compatibility feature...
The GNOME people aren't creating a new binary compatibility feature; they are taking advantage of the versioning support already in ld.so. That's why there are major and minor versions of all your libraries. Major versions represent API changes; minor versions do not. An application gets the major number it requests, with the highest minor number available.
This is the case with KDE as well. If you install RedHat, you will notice kde-2.x packages and kde1-compat-1.x packages. The kde1-compat packages are necessary only for backward compatibility, as the name suggests. When 3.0 gets out of beta, RedHat will likely move the current kdelibs package to kde2-compat and create new packages for KDE 3.0.
How many diferent revisions are you going to need to keep on your hard drive to be able to run that really old 1.x GNOME app when there is no GNOME 8.x version available?
It's no worse than in Microsoftland. I'm told that every new version of DirectX includes every previous version of DirectX for this reason. Other Microsoft packages have the incredibly crusty APIs Reality Master mentioned because I don't believe versioning is natively supported.
What do you do when you get rid of your 1.x legacy apps? Hunt down all the 1.x GNOME Libraries?
If you have package management, this is easy. rpm -e kde1-compat kde1-compat-devel. Done. If something requires these libraries, rpm will tell you. (This is the same for GNOME stuff. There are gtk+10 and gtk+ packages, for example.)
This is a great move. Essentially, they want to create a large, secure, reliable, high-bandwidth infranet. That's a huge task. It will mean huge contracts, lots of money, and many jobs for networking companies that have recently hit hard times.
Will the network actually be more secure? Maybe, maybe not. If it isn't...so what? Just the act of trying circulates money.
Anyone else feel cheated? Moore's law states a doubling should occur every 18 months. 6 years is four doublings but, instead of 32 GHz, we get 20.....what a crock....;)
Yeah, I know where you're coming from.
But Moore's Law is just an observation of something that seems to hold fairly true. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever come close to even hypothesizing why it should be true, much less proving it.
This statement is also true of some more established laws, though. We've changed our understanding of physics quite a lot, for example. The universe doesn't obey our laws...our laws attempt to model the universe.
Artifical intelligence should be able to translate speech from any language to any language and add new patterns without reprogramming.
Oh, okay. I'll have that for you tomorrow.
I'm really tired of people making these dramatic statements that are all but impossible to realize. There are people who have spent their careers trying to do what you mentioned in that paragraph, and they've gotten nowhere, because the task is so enormously complex. Translating from one language involves taking one set of nonsensical rules and ambiguities and replacing them with another. It can not be done without a complete understand of what is being translated. That's...hard, to make the understatement of the year.
What if we could build layers of software on top of layers of software, which are then again used to build greater layers of software? This would require that we accept standard functionality at each level of the layering process and then allow people to write ever simpler code due to this great deal of layering. Why should anyone be required to rewrite a quicksort once it has been written?
There are already so many levels of complexity in any piece of software that it's completely insane. Your idea is nothing new. Here's a partial list of the layers involved in a Java Virtual Machine I'm sure I am leaving many things out, putting them in a bad order, etc.:
My point? Layering software is nothing new. If you want to add a layer, say so, but don't pretend it's a new concept.
So here is my challenge to every programmer/newbie/manager/hardware designer in existance. Stop trying to focus on how we can optimize or tweak each individual computer function so that you gain temporary marketshare, outperform your competitor, or push your political agenda. Instead, begin pushing for hard standards in the industry.
You know, I really hate it when people push for other people to make dramatic changes I suspect they don't understand (evidence: above) and use the word "we". It's entirely inappropriate.
Stop worrying about making languages that allow you to produce specific functionality in fewer lines of code, and worry about producing the highest level of quality
The language is one of those layers you advocated. The language itself is a piece of software to be reused. You suggested people add layers to make things possible with simpler code, and this is one way to do it. Don't knock it.
There's a time and a place for diplomacy, and this isn't it.
<div diplomacy="off"> That's a dumb idea. </div>
My attention wanders and consequently my eyes do as well. I blink subconsciously. You can't change these things, and it's stupid to try. Don't make an input system that fails when they happen.
I think Douglas Adams does a good job of describing the failings of this type of input system:
That's not even taking into account the way the eye inherently jitters, according to the other replies. Even without that, this wouldn't work out well except for extremely disabled people who have little other choice and aren't likely to complain about something that makes it at all possible for them to use a computer.
There's a good chance that the resolutions have gone from the 4/8 megapixel (best of the 80s) to the 268+ megapixels. (The optics will probably never get much better).
Does this increased CCD density actually improve image quality when the optics and atmospheric distortion don't change? I'm inclined to say no, but I'd be interested to know.
Seeing as Mozilla is supposed to be an application platform, the same argument could be made.
True, but I don't believe Mozilla will ever have even a fraction of the support Java does. Java is a very well-thought-out lanaguage with some interesting concepts (the first widespread VM and really widespread GC), a really good API, a huge install base, and lots of resources on it available. As much as apples and oranges can be compared (a programming language vs. a web browser, although they both are more than that), Java comes out far ahead.
And such a book on Mozilla is coming from O'Reilley (can't recall the title at the moment).
Interesting. News to me.
This was the worst design decision(?spelling?) with Mozilla. Big, bloated GUI, slowing down the good, fast rendering engine.
I also think this was a terrible decision, but not for the same reason. There is a reason that damn near every program on any given GUI (with the notable exception of X11) looks about the same, and it's not because programmers are unimaginative.
It's because users are happier when the interface adheres to consistent guidelines. Each platform has its own set of guidelines. A few examples:
How many times have you been annoyed when you hit the wheel mouse and it didn't work right? That's almost always because of some moronic programmer who decided it would be better to write his/her own widgets. Wheel mice are one of the places this becomes most obvious, because they didn't exist when a lot of these programs were designed. The GUI vendor added support to the native widgets, but the stupid replacement ones in a lot of cases don't have support. Or when they do, it doesn't work quite the same. (I.e., seperate preferences for the number of lines to scroll.)
Mozilla is one of the worst offenders here, completely scrapping the idea of an interface consistent with anything else.
(Java is a bit of an exception. It doesn't have a system of its own, so arguably it also violates the other interface guidelines. However, it makes sense to have a single interface for Java, since applications are intended to be very cross-platform. Plus, Java has actually taken on the challenge of designing a good GUI of their own...observe the fact that there is a book out on the Java look and feel. I'm not aware of a similar one for Mozilla.)
2.4.2 was the latest kernel available at the time of release, and since there have been no gaping security holes and that kernel has proven fairly stable, there's no reason to mess with a good thing.
I beg to differ. There are lots of reported data corruption bugs in all 2.4 kernels prior to 2.4.6:
Linux 2.4.3 ate my hard drive. I booted up, got weird problems...ran an fsck, it failed, saying the superblock was invalid. I specified one of the alternate superblocks...it kept giving me errors. I piped yes into it and let it run. When it was done, my entire filesystem was in little pieces in /lost+found.
That's the most important problem, but there are also a couple reported crashes I believe and, of course, the VM problems (which are still an issue. 2.4.10 has a huge patch to the VM system.)
I've been pretty disappointed by Linux 2.4 so far and at this point I'd say I still would not run it on a server. (I use FreeBSD, but Linux 2.2, though old, is good as well.)
I'm used to running bleeding edge stuff on my desktop, though. I'm not too upset about the losing my Linux partition thing, since I had most stuff backed up elsewhere.
(In fairness to Linux, I have a VIA686b South Bridge Controller. I think that's the chipset they had the most trouble with by far, though from the descriptions, not all of these bugs are related to it.)
I would love to see a thourough, unbiased shootout between Konqueror, Moz, ie6 and Opera... let me know if you see any.
Will do, and I'll keep my eyes open.
As I understand it, it's not the standard behavior because to take advantage of it, you need to have much finer-grained locking in the kernel. But...they added that anyway in 2.4, for SMP. This guy just took the existing locks and made them work for a new purpose.
The first page I ignored...I never pay much attention to testimonials unless they're from someone overwhelmingly authoritative (in this case, basically only the W3C) and even then with some skepticism.
The second page was more interesting. It said very convincingly that Netscape 6's and Mozilla's CSS1 support are better than IE 5.0 or 5.5's. The bug count was significantly lower and the bugs seemed less severe. I looked at their 5.5 bug sheets and did see the problems they mentioned (using IE5.5, not 6.0).
However, this still doesn't prove your original statement because:
Of course, I haven't disproven your statement either. I don't have to. When you claim things as fact, the burden of proof is yours. Believing everything anyone says would be dumb, and it would take far too much time to attempt to prove/disprove every statement someone offers.