32MB of RAM? Are you *kidding* me? Even my minimal setup (X.Org + Fluxbox 0.9 + Firefox 1.0 + rxvt) is using 221MB as reported by free, with one instance of each running. (Not counting caches, buffers, etc).
You're doing something wrong. My Debian system (mixture of unstable and experimental) running GNOME 2.8 is using 71MB after I've logged in. That's with Nautilus and a Gnome Terminal running (plus all the silly applets in my panel). It's only just over 100MB after starting Firefox. Even after starting Evolution and OpenOffice I haven't broken 200MB. I've done nothing special to my Gnome setup. It's a plain jane installation from Debian apt sources.
You might be misreading the output from free, or your free might be misreporting actual usage, or you have something abnormal starting up in your session.
but X alone uses 59MB.
I'm also using X.org (from CVS) and my usage is far less than that. I suspect your tools are not matched with your kernel and they are giving you false figures.
Re:Sacrifice hardware for the good of software?
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
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· Score: 5, Funny
Have you priced Office 2003 lately? Absolutely REDICULOUS pricing model MS has.
But Office 2003 comes with a spellchecker. Could be the best investment you've ever made.
Now, did you have any valid criticism of the site, or did you just want to point out that calling someone a troll doesn't refute what they say
Just the latter. I think the site's great but I have a problem with people who cry "troll" simply because they don't have anything constructive to say. It's depressing that all the dimwits have ruined the Groklaw comments section with "troll sections" and "back under your bridge, troll" comments. They're not being witty and they're not worth reading, but of course you have to waste your time reading them before you realise that. I wish they'd keep quiet instead. It's increasingly difficult to wade through the junk to find the thoughtful and insightful comments.
I honestly think the anti-trolls are a bigger problem than the trolls. They certainly inject more noise into the comments than the real trolls! I used to read the comments section each day. Now I can't bear it and just stick to the articles. The anti-troll brigade has done a far better job of ruining the comments section than the actual trolls had ever done, IMHO.
NB: I wrote something similar to this comment once on Groklaw and, you know what's coming, I was called a troll.
Until these players are gapless I am simply not interested. Too many of my albums are continuous movements. There's nothing more frustrating than a two-second moment of silence during the music.
The other thing these players seem to be missing is a simple text reader. My #1 use for my PDA is an e-book reader. It would be really sweet if the PMP could double-up as an e-book reader.
Nvidia are extremely open-OS friendly. Their driver itself may not be opensource but they have excellent driver and developer support under Linux and BSD,
Not if you're using LinuxPPC. They only support x86 users. nVidia can go to hell.
Yes, it would be nice if they could opensource more of their technology but I can't see that happening. I think they've bent over backwards to provide support to Linux,
I think they've provided lip service while screwing us. Especially after they reneged on their earlier promises of open-source 3D drivers.
That's not the same at all. In Gattaca, he was actually doing all the same work as the other astronauts. More and better, actually.
No he wasn't doing "all the same work". He was cheating on his fitness exams. He was physically unfit for the role of astronaut. You can theorise all you like that he didn't need to be fit, but you clearly miss the point that the directors of the space program thought that fitness was a requirement.
Answer me this. If the "hero" of the movie had been a genetic misfit who was physically very fit but of low intelligence, yet cunning so he could fake his way through daily work, and had cheated in all the intelligence and mental exams, would you be so quick to defend him? Knowing that this muscle-bound yet stupid misfit was about to fly into space and possibly risk the lives of the other astronauts?
You misunderstand. I didn't say you were religious. I said that you were reacting similarly to the religious, who often get all riled up over a matter of opinion -- just like you did.
I'm not riled up. I made an observation on the nature of your comment, not on the material. I really couldn't care less about the argument. You still don't know my actual position, or my own opinion, because I haven't told you. But I simply found it amusing that you chose to blame everybody else - the "Slashbots", the "religious" people - rather than recognise your own mistake. I pointed out that you most definitely were to blame for receiving the flames from others. You made a false claim and then denied any wrongdoing. Now after half a dozen posts you're saying you "misspoke". I suppose that's an improvement.
"loaded words and false claims" -- I think you're reaching here. The most you can say is that I misspoke, and that you overreacted in typical Slashbot fashion.
You're still claiming it's all somebody else's fault. I spy a pattern of denial.
No he wasn't. Even today, "astronaut" is an artificially elevated profession. Although there are high-G events at the beginning and end of a trip, that's a brief effect that even average people can survive with no trouble.
What hubris! So you know more about the requirements of space travel than the people who run it? Even in the context of the movie, the directors thought that a fit astronaut was a requirement. Yet they're wrong and you're right?
He's plainly not an idiot, because he's doing a mentally challenging job, on top of fooling everyone around him.
By the same argument a conman deserves the money he fleeces from the mark, and a thief deserves the goods he steals from a house. They perform a mentally challenging job on top of "fooling" the police who are trying to catch them!
The movie was about a couple unfairly barred from positions for which they were perfectly eligible.
The two examples I gave - the lack of fitness and the poor eyesight - clearly demonstrate that he wasn't _perfectly_ eligible.
I didn't lie about a thing. You don't consider an embryo to be a human being, or even a potential human being. I consider it to be one stage in the development of a human being, a totally arbitrarily defined one at that. So, who's right? It's a matter of opinion, not fact, a culturally and arbitrarily defined concept. By accusing me of lying, you merely asserted that you were right -- without actually being right.
No. I intentionally avoided the pitfall of arguing over when a life begins, because I know opinions will differ. I only pointed out that you crossed the line when you made the claim the experimenters will experiment on children. By saying that without clarifying that you think an embryo is a child, you conjure up images of Dr Frankensteins keeping children captive in dungeons, chained to walls, screaming while the evil mad scientists perform their cruel and painful experiments.
The researchers won't be doing that. The embryos they experiment upon won't even have nervous systems. You made an appeal to emotion through loaded words and false claims.
This is my position; it is just as valid as yours. And, no, you aren't right to attack me for it.
The delicious irony here is that you people are just like the religious right.
You don't even know my position. I was very careful not to reveal it. That you can't take my constructive criticism without assuming that I'm a "religious" person out to "attack" you is all the proof I need that you are acting irrational.
What I don't like is that I'm labelled as an "Evil and ignorant religious" extremist because I voiced the opinion that they should get their stem cells from already-dead aborted fetuses from clinics rather than cloning their own supply.
Well that's not the only opinion you voiced. I think you actually got "attacked" for this comment.
Imagine creating a human child just to perform experiments on it. And, no, just because it is an embryo doesn't make it right. This is nightmare stuff.
Human child? They're not trying to clone a human child. They're going to clone a human embryo. They're definitely not going to perform experiments on a human child.
No wonder you were accused of being a religious extremist. You lied in order to make the researchers sound like evil monsters who would abuse children. That's a favourite tactic of religious extremists.
I voiced an opinion, and this being slashdot, I got instantly attacked for it.
So you're not to blame? This is all Slashdot's fault? I came into the argument late and even I thought you stepped over the line when you accused the researchers of attempting to experiment on children.
People will likely look back one day on the movie Gattaca [imdb.com] as amazingly prophetic. For those unfamiliar with the film, it did an amazing job portraying what society may be like when genetic engineering becomes perfected.
I've never understood the premise of the movie Gattaca. In the movie, the "hero" cheats his way into an astronaut's position by using the DNA of another man. But the "hero" should never have been an astronaut. In one scene, he's running on a treadmill and his fitness is not up to par, so he fakes his heartbeat to fool the medical doctors. In another scene, he loses his contact lenses on a busy road and is almost killed rather than admit he can't see. The "hero" was entirely inadequate for the position of an astronaut. He circumvented the genetic and non-genetic screening that would have proven he lacked the basic requirements for fitness and eyesight.
But at the end of the movie, when he flies up in the spaceship, possibly putting the entire mission and the rest of the crew at great risk due to his physical inadequacies, we're supposed to feel happy for this idiot?
I personally look forward to the day when genetic screening is as accurate as that in the movie. I'd like nothing better than for imbeciles to be sacked from positions they should never have held in the first place.
The only proprietary BSD fork was BSD/OS, but that was a fork created by one of the orginal developers.
BSD/OS was not the only proprietary fork. There were literally dozens. From an article by Eugene Kim: "Indeed, most of the commercial versions of UNIX in the 1980s were based on BSD UNIX". A partial list of BSDs was prepared by Levenez for his UNIX History. And don't feel tempted to discredit or dismiss Levenez just because SCO intentionally misrepresents the information on his website. Levenez is a decent bloke who does a good job of documenting UNIX history.
And that fork actually predates any of the current free and open source BSD projects.
I fail to see what relevance that has to my comment.
Thus, your use of the word "notorious" borders on the disingenuous.
Not "poisonous" at all. Keep your FUD out of this. While one can take BSD licensed source code and create a binary closed source product, this is not "poisonous". The orginal source code is still there. The orginal project is still there.
The code itself is fairly useless to me. The value in a project is a sum of the code plus the number of developers plus the number of users plus the number of third party applications. Software is a dynamic "living" thing. It must be constantly tended to and improved or it figuratively dies.
The danger of BSD licensed software is that every proprietary fork reduces the number of developers and users from the original project. This increases the risk of the project dying due to lack of activity and interest. There's also an increased risk that some third party applications will only work on the proprietary fork.
The GPL legalese doesn't prevent forks but in practise it seems to guard against the damages when forks inevitably occur. The BSD projects are notorious for producing multiple incompatible forks, some of those forks being proprietary, all of them spreading the developers and users and applications ever thinner.
OOo is solid, and it's free. This is good. It's also a great big resource-hungry lump. This is not good. I'd love to see the applications separated, kinda like Firefox and Thunderbird, so there's no need to install the spreadsheet if all you want is the word processor.
Maybe separating the applications would save you a bit of disk space, but it wouldn't do much else. Binaries in Linux are demand-paged; only the code that is needed will be read off disk. The memory usage you see when you start Writer would not decrease if you uninstalled Calc.
Uh, it's hard to imagine what people mean when they say "theft of services", then. If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.
It's not a sufficiently accurate analogy to copyright infringement. When you sat down for your haircut there was an implicit contract. You would get your haircut and the barber would get your money. When you ran away after getting your haircut it wasn't the haircut you were "stealing", it was the money you owed the barber.
With copyright infringement you never even meet the owner of the copyright work. You put all the effort into making the copy. Although the owner has been "ripped off" it's not money you've "stolen"; what you've done is violated their exclusive right to copy or to permit copying. The lost opportunity cost - what you would have paid for the copyrighted work if you'd bought one of the owner's sanctioned copies - is not the same thing as theft. Look up "opportunity cost". It's a standard economic term. It's not theft.
While I agree copyright infringement is illegal I don't think your "haircut analogy" cuts it (pun!).
I don't think MythTV can be described as cheap. A VIA based MythTV box, using a Hauppauge 250 in an aesthetically acceptable case will set you back about $600. That's more than enough to pay for Tivo.
Yeah, well you're doing it all wrong. Try an xbox frontend, softmodded, with a Celeron 333MHz backend and a cheap-as-dirt DVB-T card. You can build that whole setup for under $300. Even less if you have a spare Celeron lying around (like probably 90% of/.ers).
And as an improvement over Tivo, you also get an Xbox console out of the deal.
Plus you've missed the real point. You're not supposed to be a baa-baa consumer. You're meant to be a geek. There's enjoyment in the challenge of building something. TV is generally boring but building a computer system to watch TV for me... that's fun.
I'll agree that there are probably more layers than you'd ideally want for a desktop (eg: KDE -> Corba -> Underlying KDE stuff -> QT -> Xlib -> X11 client -> X11 protocol -> X server) but it's not horrible and most of the problem is caused by X11's design, which is very much a concept of layers on layers.
Yes, well it would be bloated when you insert mythical layers. KDE doesn't use Corba and Xlib doesn't layer on top of an X11 client; the KDE application *is* the X11 client. And calling the X11 protocol a "layer" is a bit of a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer Linux.
Not really. Everything that Bush says is humorous.
"Fool me once, shame... shame on... shame on you."
You're doing something wrong. My Debian system (mixture of unstable and experimental) running GNOME 2.8 is using 71MB after I've logged in. That's with Nautilus and a Gnome Terminal running (plus all the silly applets in my panel). It's only just over 100MB after starting Firefox. Even after starting Evolution and OpenOffice I haven't broken 200MB. I've done nothing special to my Gnome setup. It's a plain jane installation from Debian apt sources.
You might be misreading the output from free, or your free might be misreporting actual usage, or you have something abnormal starting up in your session.
I'm also using X.org (from CVS) and my usage is far less than that. I suspect your tools are not matched with your kernel and they are giving you false figures.But Office 2003 comes with a spellchecker. Could be the best investment you've ever made.
Just the latter. I think the site's great but I have a problem with people who cry "troll" simply because they don't have anything constructive to say. It's depressing that all the dimwits have ruined the Groklaw comments section with "troll sections" and "back under your bridge, troll" comments. They're not being witty and they're not worth reading, but of course you have to waste your time reading them before you realise that. I wish they'd keep quiet instead. It's increasingly difficult to wade through the junk to find the thoughtful and insightful comments.
I honestly think the anti-trolls are a bigger problem than the trolls. They certainly inject more noise into the comments than the real trolls! I used to read the comments section each day. Now I can't bear it and just stick to the articles. The anti-troll brigade has done a far better job of ruining the comments section than the actual trolls had ever done, IMHO.
NB: I wrote something similar to this comment once on Groklaw and, you know what's coming, I was called a troll.
Perfect! You fit the Groklaw shill just right:
"I will ignore your criticism by calling you a troll..."
Until these players are gapless I am simply not interested. Too many of my albums are continuous movements. There's nothing more frustrating than a two-second moment of silence during the music.
The other thing these players seem to be missing is a simple text reader. My #1 use for my PDA is an e-book reader. It would be really sweet if the PMP could double-up as an e-book reader.
Not if you're using LinuxPPC. They only support x86 users. nVidia can go to hell.
I think they've provided lip service while screwing us. Especially after they reneged on their earlier promises of open-source 3D drivers.
Uhh, works fine for me. External firewire HDD hooked up to PowerBook G4 running Debian.
Because I prefer Linux (honest) and Apple's hardware is really nice. Fortunately I can get the best of both worlds. Viva LinuxPPC.
No he wasn't doing "all the same work". He was cheating on his fitness exams. He was physically unfit for the role of astronaut. You can theorise all you like that he didn't need to be fit, but you clearly miss the point that the directors of the space program thought that fitness was a requirement.
Answer me this. If the "hero" of the movie had been a genetic misfit who was physically very fit but of low intelligence, yet cunning so he could fake his way through daily work, and had cheated in all the intelligence and mental exams, would you be so quick to defend him? Knowing that this muscle-bound yet stupid misfit was about to fly into space and possibly risk the lives of the other astronauts?
No. Where's that? Do they have oil?
That's OK. You have no oil in your backyard so you're perfectly safe, just like North Korea.
I'm not riled up. I made an observation on the nature of your comment, not on the material. I really couldn't care less about the argument. You still don't know my actual position, or my own opinion, because I haven't told you. But I simply found it amusing that you chose to blame everybody else - the "Slashbots", the "religious" people - rather than recognise your own mistake. I pointed out that you most definitely were to blame for receiving the flames from others. You made a false claim and then denied any wrongdoing. Now after half a dozen posts you're saying you "misspoke". I suppose that's an improvement.
You're still claiming it's all somebody else's fault. I spy a pattern of denial.
What hubris! So you know more about the requirements of space travel than the people who run it? Even in the context of the movie, the directors thought that a fit astronaut was a requirement. Yet they're wrong and you're right?
By the same argument a conman deserves the money he fleeces from the mark, and a thief deserves the goods he steals from a house. They perform a mentally challenging job on top of "fooling" the police who are trying to catch them!
The two examples I gave - the lack of fitness and the poor eyesight - clearly demonstrate that he wasn't _perfectly_ eligible.
No. I intentionally avoided the pitfall of arguing over when a life begins, because I know opinions will differ. I only pointed out that you crossed the line when you made the claim the experimenters will experiment on children. By saying that without clarifying that you think an embryo is a child, you conjure up images of Dr Frankensteins keeping children captive in dungeons, chained to walls, screaming while the evil mad scientists perform their cruel and painful experiments.
The researchers won't be doing that. The embryos they experiment upon won't even have nervous systems. You made an appeal to emotion through loaded words and false claims.
You don't even know my position. I was very careful not to reveal it. That you can't take my constructive criticism without assuming that I'm a "religious" person out to "attack" you is all the proof I need that you are acting irrational.
Well that's not the only opinion you voiced. I think you actually got "attacked" for this comment.
Human child? They're not trying to clone a human child. They're going to clone a human embryo. They're definitely not going to perform experiments on a human child.
No wonder you were accused of being a religious extremist. You lied in order to make the researchers sound like evil monsters who would abuse children. That's a favourite tactic of religious extremists.
So you're not to blame? This is all Slashdot's fault? I came into the argument late and even I thought you stepped over the line when you accused the researchers of attempting to experiment on children.
I've never understood the premise of the movie Gattaca. In the movie, the "hero" cheats his way into an astronaut's position by using the DNA of another man. But the "hero" should never have been an astronaut. In one scene, he's running on a treadmill and his fitness is not up to par, so he fakes his heartbeat to fool the medical doctors. In another scene, he loses his contact lenses on a busy road and is almost killed rather than admit he can't see. The "hero" was entirely inadequate for the position of an astronaut. He circumvented the genetic and non-genetic screening that would have proven he lacked the basic requirements for fitness and eyesight.
But at the end of the movie, when he flies up in the spaceship, possibly putting the entire mission and the rest of the crew at great risk due to his physical inadequacies, we're supposed to feel happy for this idiot?
I personally look forward to the day when genetic screening is as accurate as that in the movie. I'd like nothing better than for imbeciles to be sacked from positions they should never have held in the first place.
BSD/OS was not the only proprietary fork. There were literally dozens. From an article by Eugene Kim: "Indeed, most of the commercial versions of UNIX in the 1980s were based on BSD UNIX". A partial list of BSDs was prepared by Levenez for his UNIX History. And don't feel tempted to discredit or dismiss Levenez just because SCO intentionally misrepresents the information on his website. Levenez is a decent bloke who does a good job of documenting UNIX history.
I fail to see what relevance that has to my comment.
I disagree.
The code itself is fairly useless to me. The value in a project is a sum of the code plus the number of developers plus the number of users plus the number of third party applications. Software is a dynamic "living" thing. It must be constantly tended to and improved or it figuratively dies.
The danger of BSD licensed software is that every proprietary fork reduces the number of developers and users from the original project. This increases the risk of the project dying due to lack of activity and interest. There's also an increased risk that some third party applications will only work on the proprietary fork.
The GPL legalese doesn't prevent forks but in practise it seems to guard against the damages when forks inevitably occur. The BSD projects are notorious for producing multiple incompatible forks, some of those forks being proprietary, all of them spreading the developers and users and applications ever thinner.
Maybe separating the applications would save you a bit of disk space, but it wouldn't do much else. Binaries in Linux are demand-paged; only the code that is needed will be read off disk. The memory usage you see when you start Writer would not decrease if you uninstalled Calc.
I don't think Microsoft has ever sued another company or individual for patent infringement, unless it was in defence.
IBM, on the other hand...
It's not a sufficiently accurate analogy to copyright infringement. When you sat down for your haircut there was an implicit contract. You would get your haircut and the barber would get your money. When you ran away after getting your haircut it wasn't the haircut you were "stealing", it was the money you owed the barber.
With copyright infringement you never even meet the owner of the copyright work. You put all the effort into making the copy. Although the owner has been "ripped off" it's not money you've "stolen"; what you've done is violated their exclusive right to copy or to permit copying. The lost opportunity cost - what you would have paid for the copyrighted work if you'd bought one of the owner's sanctioned copies - is not the same thing as theft. Look up "opportunity cost". It's a standard economic term. It's not theft.
While I agree copyright infringement is illegal I don't think your "haircut analogy" cuts it (pun!).
Yeah, well you're doing it all wrong. Try an xbox frontend, softmodded, with a Celeron 333MHz backend and a cheap-as-dirt DVB-T card. You can build that whole setup for under $300. Even less if you have a spare Celeron lying around (like probably 90% of /.ers).
And as an improvement over Tivo, you also get an Xbox console out of the deal.
Plus you've missed the real point. You're not supposed to be a baa-baa consumer. You're meant to be a geek. There's enjoyment in the challenge of building something. TV is generally boring but building a computer system to watch TV for me... that's fun.
Yes, well it would be bloated when you insert mythical layers. KDE doesn't use Corba and Xlib doesn't layer on top of an X11 client; the KDE application *is* the X11 client. And calling the X11 protocol a "layer" is a bit of a stretch.
Amended diagram: KDE -> Kparts/Klibs -> Qt -> Xlib -> Xserver.