There seems to be a lot of people talking about
how Mozilla is slow, or Konquerer is slow, or IE
is the fastest thing on the planet, all offering
some vague timings that they seem to recall.
What seems to be needed are some regular benchmarks, spanning a whole class of machines (not just your top of the line PIII, or the bottom of the line p-90). There are a lot of different tests that are needed. Some people (like me) don't really care about the load time, since we load it up once and that's it. How about speeds for rendering, accuraccy, conformance to standards, comparison of features,...
A few weeks back, one such comparison was posted, but was heavily critized by this audence. Perhaps the Mozilla team and KDE can decide on what constitutes a good test, run it will their current releases, and then the users can decide for themselves what is important. This will also
let the developers know where their effort is needed.
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 1
MIPS is lost somewhere in the low end
Umm... have you ever used a MIPS chip? The R10k and R12k are beautiful processors and very fast. Don't let the low MHz rating fool you. The SGI compilers are also very good -- they do a lot of optimization and the profiling tools are some of the best around. There are lots of hardware counters on the R10k (32 I believe) that make it easy to find out where in your code to all your FLOPS are, the secondary cache misses, branch mispredictions,...
I wish SGI/MIPS would continue along with these chips. They are a wonderful platform to develop on.
Also important to note is the bandwidth pollution making astronomical observations more and more difficult. The Iridium satellites leaked over into the OH molecular bands (I think that was the one) that are very important to astronomy.
It might cause a chain of people doing the same to "boycott" the government's decision. Who knows, maybe he has a couple of friends who are lining up to do the same thing that we don't know about. Who knows how effective that would be, though.
I think the best chance it has to work is if several other high profile boycotts come out shortly. I fear that even though $60 million is a lot of money to me, it is not enough to perturb Congress.
then you must accept ALL types of thinking! Bush (not my favorite president to say the least) was struggling with some legitimate moral issues regarding stem cells from aborted fetus
It was my understanding that not all of the stem cells (or even a majority) came from people getting abortions. I believe the vast majority come from fetuses that were created for people having trouble conceiving. Eggs are harvested, fetuses are created, kept on ice, and a few are implanted. If the procedure was successful, the remaining 'backup' fetuses are destroyed.
In my opinion, I would prefer that those remaining fetuses be used for research, in the hopes that they can be used to save someone else. It sure beats destroying them. Perhaps we can allow people to decide what happens to their own fetuses, much like we require permission for organ donations.
It will be interesting to see what sort of response this letter generates. What he appears
to be waiting for is a firm decision from Congress and the President. If they should decide against his wished, I assume that he will withhold his money. If they do an about face and expand the types of research that can be federally funded, then Standford wil lget the remainder of the check. The question is, How important is Stanford getting the remainder of this check to the government? I assume the congressman/woman representing Stanford's district will voice some concern, but I cannot imagine this having all that much of an input.
If more and more people started coming out like this, then prehaps we would start to see some change. It is a very well written letter and brings up some good points. He is absolutely right that the absence of federal $$ could crush this field in the US.
I don't agree with the article that teaching high school is a job for PhDs. You don't get one of those unless you've made an original contribution to the science. These people are qualified researchers, and their time ought to be spent on adding to our body of knowledge.
This is true, but it is not always easy to find a research position even when you have a Ph.D. And faculty positions are even fewer. Some fields do not really have industry jobs, so you either jump around from postdoc to postdoc, or get a job at one of the national labs.
A lot of school districts don't make it easy for someone with a Ph.D. to teach high school in their field of expertise. Sometime people are burned out of research and want to give back to society by teaching (just like their original research enabled them to give back to society). We should do what is necessary to lower the barriers that prevent Ph.D. from entering the public school system, otherwise, you may lose these people who choose to left the field to business.
From the article, it sounds to me like RH has been doing quite a lot of research. Before 7.1 came out, they announced that they would not go with
ReiserFS because of data corruption problems. They employ ext3 developers, and from the sound of the article, they have been doing quite a bit of research on stability.
RH makes its name on being a trusted linux distribution that can be run on servers. They
certainly need all this testing for business to
start adopting ext3. Of course if you don't like ext3, stick with ext2, don't check any of the upgrade boxes when you are installing.
The second paragraph in my original post should have been in emphasis as well, those are the words from the release notes, not my own. I think I keep forgetting to switch the post to use HTML in the/. 2.2.
The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back. NEVER voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the right to make decisions for the project.
The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would be counter-productive to the Free Software course. Then came, what would be called embrace-and-extend if performed by the Evil of the North-West, and his claim for everything which lead to Linux's
success.
I assume that he is suggesting not to sign the copyright over to GNU, but still supports using the GPL as a license for software. The bit about the Hurd is interesting. We've been hearing about the Hurd for a long time, and now that Linux is so strong, the Hurd will have a hard time taking over.
I'm sorry, but aren't the versions of the browsers used somehow important to the story? Was it Mozilla 0.9, or 0.9.2? Netscape 4.08 or Netscape 4.7, or Netscape 6? Hard to tell what these tests mean, especially if not the latest versions of each browser are being used.
He did say the verisons indirectly, since he claims that the Mandrake 8.0 defaults were used. I agree though, explicitly stating the version numbers in the article is important.
The Mozilla version shipping with Mandrake 8.0 is 0.8.7. While stability is pretty much unchanged since then, Mozilla has gotten noticably faster during the 0.9.x cycle
Umm...perhaps for you stability has not changed, but the release notes for the latest Mozilla build keep listing the bugs they fixed. For instance Mozilla 0.9.2 fixed 25 bugs over the previous version. This is largely due to the reporting from the growing user base. The reviewer should have made sure he used the latest versions of the browser in the comparison.
Also, I don't remember Mozilla ever officially releasing a 0.8.7 -- they went 0.8., 0.8.1, 0.9,...
This proves once again, that there still isn't a good browser for Linux. So we have to decide on which one is less crappy, and not which one is better.
I don't think this proves that at all. I have been happily using Mozilla since version 0.8, and I like 0.93 much better than anything else I've tried. This of course is my opinion, some people like Konquerer (sp?) but I would say that there are good browsers for Linux.
Mozilla has been very stable for me. I have not had any crashes. I encourage you to evaluate the browsers for yourself.
Loading time for a browser is a non-issue for me. I load it once and that's it. I don't have to do that again until I reboot. There are other measures that I would have like to see in this comparison, like adherence to the stardards, implementation of different features. One/. page is not the end all of HTML rendering.
My own PowerBook Titanium G4 was $2,599. I couldn't find a single laptop for less money that could beat the Ti that I bought.
There are a lot of nice options in the x86 world that compare favorably to the Ti powerbook. The Ti power book is absolutely enormous compared to the IBM x20 that I use. Light weight is important to me. Someone else would have other priorities, and will choose a laptop to suit them.
There was originally no science planned. Only when scrutiny increased to it were some basic instruments added to make the excuse of it being a research tool float.
Granted the science offered by this instrument may be limited, especially when compared with the
HST. One question though is how does the science per dollar produced by this compare to the science per dollar of the Internation Space Station?
Why on Earth would you want to download an ISO over a dial-up connection? Just update the
packages that have changed and you'll end up with the essentially the same thing as the new
version. Or you could pay for it. $50 is a lot less than the cost in pain involved in downloading
650MB over a dial-up connection.
In addition to offsetting the pain of a long download, if you really like the product, dropping $50 every so often on a Linux distribution helps support the company, so future version will continue to be produced.
It is interesting to see in the Release notes that they do not support upgrading to Roswell is you are currently running Ximian GNOME, due to differences in package naming. They tell you to either remove Ximian GNOME before installing, upgrade your Ximiam GNOME immediately after upgrading, or explicitly install all of the RH GNOME packages immediately after upgrading.
I thought RH and Ximian were playing nicely together. Hopefully this is something that will be sorted out before the final release, but it does not look that way from the comments in the release note.
The X.2 releases of Redhat are usually pretty
refined. There is not much ground breaking stuff
in here, just evolution of the existing packages (gcc 3.0 is not used by default, just included in addition to 2.96).
2.4.6 is now included, as is Xfree 4.1.0 and
Gnome 1.4
RH 7.1 is already a pretty nice distribution. It will be interesting to see what the installer changes look like.
I have been reading the 'Practice of Programming' lately, after being a coder day in and day out for ~ 9 years (and as a hobby for much longer). This is a really clear book. It may be a bit old, but it presents topics in a good order.
K&R, 'The C Programming Language' also gets my vote. This is the best C reference out there.
Just buy all the books of the O'Reilly collection. With the exception of one or two black sheeps, they are all
very good.
But O'Reilly lacks on the theory side. I would recommend going to your local university bookstore and have a look around. (Here's a tip: if the bookcover is flashy, the book is already outdated. And here's another: avoid everything from Microsoft Press or written by Microsoft employees. They suck more than you can imagine.)
I think that this is really an over generalization. I have heard nothing but praise about a book called 'Code Complete' by Steve C McConnell, which is published by Microsoft. While I don't agree with Microsoft's business practices and use Windows as little as possible, I think it is important to keep an open mind.
You don't have to learn to fly a 747 to be a passenger in one, so why should a space tourist be any different? Obvuiously the risk level is different, but assuming he's signed appropriate waivers, then all they need to be assured of is that he isn't a whacko and wouldn't freak out in an emergency and endanger the other astronauts... which come to think of it is rather hard to guarantee if you don't have the military/astronaut discipline background...
The situation is a little different than the case of a 747. When you are a passenger on a 747,
they don't remove a crew member to make room for
you. They also have someone there to help you
in the event of an emergency (the flight attendents). In the space tourist case right now,
the tourist will be going in place of someone who
would otherwise have had duties. There will also
be no one there to help him out in an emergency. I would imagine that a rather good understanding of what's going on around him will be desired. If something should come up, he may have to help out.
Slashdot Mirror
What seems to be needed are some regular benchmarks, spanning a whole class of machines (not just your top of the line PIII, or the bottom of the line p-90). There are a lot of different tests that are needed. Some people (like me) don't really care about the load time, since we load it up once and that's it. How about speeds for rendering, accuraccy, conformance to standards, comparison of features, ...
A few weeks back, one such comparison was posted, but was heavily critized by this audence. Perhaps the Mozilla team and KDE can decide on what constitutes a good test, run it will their current releases, and then the users can decide for themselves what is important. This will also let the developers know where their effort is needed.
Umm... have you ever used a MIPS chip? The R10k and R12k are beautiful processors and very fast. Don't let the low MHz rating fool you. The SGI compilers are also very good -- they do a lot of optimization and the profiling tools are some of the best around. There are lots of hardware counters on the R10k (32 I believe) that make it easy to find out where in your code to all your FLOPS are, the secondary cache misses, branch mispredictions, ...
I wish SGI/MIPS would continue along with these chips. They are a wonderful platform to develop on.
Also important to note is the bandwidth pollution making astronomical observations more and more difficult. The Iridium satellites leaked over into the OH molecular bands (I think that was the one) that are very important to astronomy.
I think the best chance it has to work is if several other high profile boycotts come out shortly. I fear that even though $60 million is a lot of money to me, it is not enough to perturb Congress.
It was my understanding that not all of the stem cells (or even a majority) came from people getting abortions. I believe the vast majority come from fetuses that were created for people having trouble conceiving. Eggs are harvested, fetuses are created, kept on ice, and a few are implanted. If the procedure was successful, the remaining 'backup' fetuses are destroyed.
In my opinion, I would prefer that those remaining fetuses be used for research, in the hopes that they can be used to save someone else. It sure beats destroying them. Perhaps we can allow people to decide what happens to their own fetuses, much like we require permission for organ donations.
If more and more people started coming out like this, then prehaps we would start to see some change. It is a very well written letter and brings up some good points. He is absolutely right that the absence of federal $$ could crush this field in the US.
just about 6 mos (?) after the 64-bit linux stuff was announced. It's incredible how much progress you can make with billions of $$s backing you up.
This is true, but it is not always easy to find a research position even when you have a Ph.D. And faculty positions are even fewer. Some fields do not really have industry jobs, so you either jump around from postdoc to postdoc, or get a job at one of the national labs.
A lot of school districts don't make it easy for someone with a Ph.D. to teach high school in their field of expertise. Sometime people are burned out of research and want to give back to society by teaching (just like their original research enabled them to give back to society). We should do what is necessary to lower the barriers that prevent Ph.D. from entering the public school system, otherwise, you may lose these people who choose to left the field to business.
RH makes its name on being a trusted linux distribution that can be run on servers. They certainly need all this testing for business to start adopting ext3. Of course if you don't like ext3, stick with ext2, don't check any of the upgrade boxes when you are installing.
The second paragraph in my original post should have been in emphasis as well, those are the words from the release notes, not my own. I think I keep forgetting to switch the post to use HTML in the /. 2.2.
The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would be counter-productive to the Free Software course. Then came, what would be called embrace-and-extend if performed by the Evil of the North-West, and his claim for everything which lead to Linux's success.
I assume that he is suggesting not to sign the copyright over to GNU, but still supports using the GPL as a license for software. The bit about the Hurd is interesting. We've been hearing about the Hurd for a long time, and now that Linux is so strong, the Hurd will have a hard time taking over.
He did say the verisons indirectly, since he claims that the Mandrake 8.0 defaults were used. I agree though, explicitly stating the version numbers in the article is important.
Umm...perhaps for you stability has not changed, but the release notes for the latest Mozilla build keep listing the bugs they fixed. For instance Mozilla 0.9.2 fixed 25 bugs over the previous version. This is largely due to the reporting from the growing user base. The reviewer should have made sure he used the latest versions of the browser in the comparison.
Also, I don't remember Mozilla ever officially releasing a 0.8.7 -- they went 0.8., 0.8.1, 0.9, ...
I don't think this proves that at all. I have been happily using Mozilla since version 0.8, and I like 0.93 much better than anything else I've tried. This of course is my opinion, some people like Konquerer (sp?) but I would say that there are good browsers for Linux.
Mozilla has been very stable for me. I have not had any crashes. I encourage you to evaluate the browsers for yourself.
Loading time for a browser is a non-issue for me. I load it once and that's it. I don't have to do that again until I reboot. There are other measures that I would have like to see in this comparison, like adherence to the stardards, implementation of different features. One /. page is not the end all of HTML rendering.
There are a lot of nice options in the x86 world that compare favorably to the Ti powerbook. The Ti power book is absolutely enormous compared to the IBM x20 that I use. Light weight is important to me. Someone else would have other priorities, and will choose a laptop to suit them.
Granted the science offered by this instrument may be limited, especially when compared with the HST. One question though is how does the science per dollar produced by this compare to the science per dollar of the Internation Space Station?
I'm using wireless right now. Good thing I'm not encrypted, or someone would be able to break it and snoop on me to see that I am reading /.
In addition to offsetting the pain of a long download, if you really like the product, dropping $50 every so often on a Linux distribution helps support the company, so future version will continue to be produced.
You don't have to update. If you are happy with what you are currently running, and everything is working for you, keep your system as is.
I thought RH and Ximian were playing nicely together. Hopefully this is something that will be sorted out before the final release, but it does not look that way from the comments in the release note.
The X.2 releases of Redhat are usually pretty refined. There is not much ground breaking stuff in here, just evolution of the existing packages (gcc 3.0 is not used by default, just included in addition to 2.96).
2.4.6 is now included, as is Xfree 4.1.0 and Gnome 1.4
RH 7.1 is already a pretty nice distribution. It will be interesting to see what the installer changes look like.
Hmmm.... I've been using lynx for years and have never see a popup with it.
K&R, 'The C Programming Language' also gets my vote. This is the best C reference out there.
But O'Reilly lacks on the theory side. I would recommend going to your local university bookstore and have a look around. (Here's a tip: if the bookcover is flashy, the book is already outdated. And here's another: avoid everything from Microsoft Press or written by Microsoft employees. They suck more than you can imagine.)
I think that this is really an over generalization. I have heard nothing but praise about a book called 'Code Complete' by Steve C McConnell, which is published by Microsoft. While I don't agree with Microsoft's business practices and use Windows as little as possible, I think it is important to keep an open mind.
The situation is a little different than the case of a 747. When you are a passenger on a 747, they don't remove a crew member to make room for you. They also have someone there to help you in the event of an emergency (the flight attendents). In the space tourist case right now, the tourist will be going in place of someone who would otherwise have had duties. There will also be no one there to help him out in an emergency. I would imagine that a rather good understanding of what's going on around him will be desired. If something should come up, he may have to help out.