Serious suggestion: try them in Wine on Linux. Wine is frequently a better Windows than Vista.
It's still beta-quality, but we use it on production machinery at work (one app which we didn't want to run a whole Windows box for, so it runs on CentOS in Wine). So it's "enterprise quality," whatever that is.
It's a good way to get rid of that one last Windows box you have running because of one legacy app you can't even find the developer for, let alone ask them to port or open source it.
Wine doesn't work well under Cygwin as yet, unfortunately, so Wine on Windows is not so good yet. More development eyes needed;-)
Unfortunately, when the original poster said "Nvidia card" I went "uh, yep."
Nvidia is responsible for, what, 50% of blue screens on Windows? And anyone expects the Linux drivers to be better?
Intel's drivers are fantastic, which is just a little to do with employing Keith Packard to do nothing but hack on X all day long. AMD/ATI will get there in due course as they negotiate the tricky straits between open source expectations and the lawyers. Nvidia will only respond to market pressure and Nouveau ever making it out of alpha.
FWIW, I'm finding Kubuntu Intrepid (KDE4) way superior to the KDE4 I was running before on Hardy.
KDE 4.1 is still not IMO consumer-ready, I still need to sysadmin it too much, but it's highly usable and I'd never choose to go back to KDE3. I'm very much looking forward to KDE 4.2.
A good bad car analogy is: the ionosphere is like a Trabant, with an engine spewing out all manner of charged particles wrapped in a thin shell at best. And the effect being seen is like a stretch Trabant, as the thin shell is pulled beyond its limits. A pink one.
A stretch Trabant is also what government-subsidised car makers would result in, resulting in worse ionosphere damage. Perfect!
(Further) Off-topic: here's a heavy-duty Trabi mod: a V8 Trabant. They basically had to build an entire car frame and put the original plastic shell around it.
"We have buttiduously canvbutted the industry, buttessed what is available and buttembled the finest selection of contractors for this buttignment. The filters will buttociatively clbuttify all communications and filter then, I can butture you, rebuttemble them with surpbutting exacbreastude in any quanbreasty. Consbreastuents can be rebuttured that a mulbreastude of industry compebreastors will butture quality and keep our clbuttrooms safe. EDS Capita Goatse will not embarbutt us."
The plans have attracted wide criticism. "It will only give supersbreastious rebutturance to medireview thinkers," said EFA. "Automated systems won't solve human problems like loveual harbuttment. Mbuttacring the written word into a Picbutto painting is not the anbreastank missile of Internet safety."
Unions also butterted that such close buttessment of staff in the workplace would hamper efficiency and could verge on workplace harbuttment. "Watermeloning cranberries."
The government was unfazed. "Butterting free speech is one thing, but a triparbreaste committee considers that that does not justify mere pbuttive breastillation at the expense of others."
The first filtering offices will be set up in Arsenal, Penistone and Scunthorpe.
(That's actually the work of a Dublin graffiti artist, quite a clever one. "maser" stuff is all over Dublin. You need to look through his website and Flickr stream.)
As a rule of thumb, when a judge answers you with a single paragraph of "go away," you were stupid to even bring the case and pushing it is likely to lead only to heartbreak (and paying attorneys' fees) for you and your client.
I heartily recommend a diet of Groklaw, to teach you as a technologist WTF the lawyers mean.
Depends. We use a lot of Sun boxes and a lot of Dell boxes. Solaris 10 on a Sun box (even an x86) is way easier to administer than Linux - particularly when things go wrong. The OS indicates problems very nicely in messages and syslog, better than RHEL does.
The downside is that modern open source software is too often written by coders who think "cross-platform" means "works on Fedora and Ubuntu."
So we end up doing things like running Solaris 10 on Dell boxes and RHEL on Sun servers;-)
Sun's hardware is competitively priced and their service is really good (I'm in London), so we're very happy to stay with Sun boxes even running Linux.
Now all we need is a semi-competent coder. I routinely find myself tearing out my remaining hair at work trying to get some piece o' crap written by a coder for whom "cross-platform" means "Fedora and Ubuntu" working properly on Solaris 10. Latest offender: PerlMagick, which requires idiot makefile hacks after./configure to get to install properly.
Europanto. The proto-language of bureaucratic circumlocutions and evasions that translates equally meaninglessly into all standard European languages. After a while, Eurocrats begin to think in it.
We are a group of UK film and TV producers, directors and writers. We are concerned that the successes of the creative industries in the UK are being undermined by the illegal online file-sharing of film and TV.
We are asking the Government to show its support by ensuring that internet service providers play their part in tackling this huge problem by giving us money. Lots of money. Just keep piling it in, we'll tell you when it's enough.
In 2007, up to (well, it could be) 25 per cent of all online TV piracy took place in the UK. Popular shows are downloaded illegally hundreds of thousands of times per episode, and some of them might even be ours rather than something American made with an actual budget.
It is true that in 2008, UK commercial TV broadcasters enjoyed the highest viewing figures in five years, that total TV viewing was up 10% year-on-year, and the valuable yet hard-to-reach 16 to 24-year-old demographic (the typical file-sharer) watched 4.9% more commercial TV and saw 12% more ads. But it's the principle of the thing: someone is getting money from something that touches something one of us once touched, therefore the money belongs to us. This is the style of corporate thinking that brought Britain its great economic gains from 1997 to 2007, after all.At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that our gravy train be maintained.
Internet service providers have the ability to change the behaviour of those customers who illegally distribute content online. They have the power to make significant change and to prevent their infrastructure from being used on a wholesale scale for illegal activity. They have the power to stop people looking at the cover of Virgin Killer. They have a secret magic wand that will fix everything wrong with the media industry's income streams and they are refusing, with malice aforethought, to use it. If they are not prepared to give us all the free money we ask for and a bit more besides, they should be compelled to do so.
Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the annual Intel developers forum in San Francisco yesterday.
Rattner demonstrated this by causing his ears to light up at 60 watts of power a yard from a power transmitter operated by his assistant Igor. Only four journalists were incinerated when the power earthed through them from his fingertips.
Rattner reassured us that pumping kilowatts of power around the home through magnetic induction power is absolutely harmless. "The human body is not affected by magnetic fields," he said as one journalist with a pacemaker collapsed and another with a knee replacement watched his leg catch fire. "There's no danger whatsoever from it, any more than there is from mobile phones cooking your brain, microwave leakage blinding you, chemical waste unraveling all the DNA in your balls or statistical clusters of kids with cancer wherever high-tension power lines run overhead. Asbestos and thalidomide were horribly slandered in their day too."
"Of course, Nikola Tesla did it first in 1899," said enthusiast Albert Tedious-Anorak, 54, of Little Boring. "I detailed this at length on Wikipedia, but they refused to believe the value of my revelations on this matter due to a conspiracy of Edison fans amongst the site administrators."
Also, the linked article includes links to Bloomberg noting that Microsoft is failing to make its numbers. Microsoft has always made its numbers, pulling whatever cash-shuffling is necessary. Failing to do so means things are not good.
Despite the sales numbers, they are in fact bleeding badly. The stock has been flatline since 2000. They just tried pushing it up with a buyback when everyone's stock was dropping. Their cash reserve of billions has been demolished by bad buys and stock propping.
2008 was the year of Linux on the desktop. Does anyone really think Microsoft would have kept XP alive without netbooks? Does anyone really think Microsoft isn't shitting itself at 30% of netbooks running Linux?
Microsoft is reeling from the vicious and unwarranted slanders of security companies and the US government's Computer Emergency Response Team that its Internet Explorer web browser has alleged "security holes" or is in any way less than the finest software known to mankind and excellent value for your money.
The festering paedophiles of CERT have gone so outrageously far as to make the ludicrous claim that just viewing a malicious webpage in IE could leave your computer open to being hacked and turned into a Russian Mafia spam server. "We don't know what could have triggered such vindictiveness," sobbed Microsoft marketing marketer's marketer Steve Ballmer. "Do they hate free enterprise that much?"
There are things you can do to make your computing experience even more secure. Microsoft's official suggestion — make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and using an entire CPU doing nothing much, click through five screens to run IE in "protected mode," click through four screens to set zone security to "high," click "JUST BLOODY DO IT WILL YOU" when the User Access Control asks if you really want to do this, enable automatic updates with the minor side-effect of installing Microsoft DRM on your system or Windows Genuine Advantage randomly turning your computer into a paperweight, and sacrifice a goat to Microsoft at midnight on a moonless night — is simple and straightforward. "It's the quality you're paying for."
On no account should you consider that there might be other web browsers out there, as researchers have demonstrated that all of them automatically download the cover of Virgin Killer. "I saw a report," said marketing marketer John Curran of Microsoft Completely Enderlependent Analysts, Inc., "that another browser had more vulnerabilities than ours! People would be very foolish indeed to move from the latest IE to Netscape 4.01."
"These CERT wankers are Mactards and trolls," said Guardian marketing marketer Jack Schofield. "They just want to take IE users out, brutally sodomise them, gas them in concentration camps and" [This comment has been removed by a Guardian moderator. Replies may also be deleted.]
Slashdot Mirror
Serious suggestion: try them in Wine on Linux. Wine is frequently a better Windows than Vista.
It's still beta-quality, but we use it on production machinery at work (one app which we didn't want to run a whole Windows box for, so it runs on CentOS in Wine). So it's "enterprise quality," whatever that is.
It's a good way to get rid of that one last Windows box you have running because of one legacy app you can't even find the developer for, let alone ask them to port or open source it.
Wine doesn't work well under Cygwin as yet, unfortunately, so Wine on Windows is not so good yet. More development eyes needed ;-)
That's GNOME. There's a reason I use KDE: it doesn't feel like a two-dimensional straightjacket.
Unfortunately, when the original poster said "Nvidia card" I went "uh, yep."
Nvidia is responsible for, what, 50% of blue screens on Windows? And anyone expects the Linux drivers to be better?
Intel's drivers are fantastic, which is just a little to do with employing Keith Packard to do nothing but hack on X all day long. AMD/ATI will get there in due course as they negotiate the tricky straits between open source expectations and the lawyers. Nvidia will only respond to market pressure and Nouveau ever making it out of alpha.
FWIW, I'm finding Kubuntu Intrepid (KDE4) way superior to the KDE4 I was running before on Hardy.
KDE 4.1 is still not IMO consumer-ready, I still need to sysadmin it too much, but it's highly usable and I'd never choose to go back to KDE3. I'm very much looking forward to KDE 4.2.
Where's the car? We need cars!
A good bad car analogy is: the ionosphere is like a Trabant, with an engine spewing out all manner of charged particles wrapped in a thin shell at best. And the effect being seen is like a stretch Trabant, as the thin shell is pulled beyond its limits. A pink one.
A stretch Trabant is also what government-subsidised car makers would result in, resulting in worse ionosphere damage. Perfect!
(Further) Off-topic: here's a heavy-duty Trabi mod: a V8 Trabant. They basically had to build an entire car frame and put the original plastic shell around it.
"We have buttiduously canvbutted the industry, buttessed what is available and buttembled the finest selection of contractors for this buttignment. The filters will buttociatively clbuttify all communications and filter then, I can butture you, rebuttemble them with surpbutting exacbreastude in any quanbreasty. Consbreastuents can be rebuttured that a mulbreastude of industry compebreastors will butture quality and keep our clbuttrooms safe. EDS Capita Goatse will not embarbutt us."
The plans have attracted wide criticism. "It will only give supersbreastious rebutturance to medireview thinkers," said EFA. "Automated systems won't solve human problems like loveual harbuttment. Mbuttacring the written word into a Picbutto painting is not the anbreastank missile of Internet safety."
Unions also butterted that such close buttessment of staff in the workplace would hamper efficiency and could verge on workplace harbuttment. "Watermeloning cranberries."
The government was unfazed. "Butterting free speech is one thing, but a triparbreaste committee considers that that does not justify mere pbuttive breastillation at the expense of others."
The first filtering offices will be set up in Arsenal, Penistone and Scunthorpe.
Smile, maser loves u!
(That's actually the work of a Dublin graffiti artist, quite a clever one. "maser" stuff is all over Dublin. You need to look through his website and Flickr stream.)
Save me, Xenu!
As a rule of thumb, when a judge answers you with a single paragraph of "go away," you were stupid to even bring the case and pushing it is likely to lead only to heartbreak (and paying attorneys' fees) for you and your client.
I heartily recommend a diet of Groklaw, to teach you as a technologist WTF the lawyers mean.
That sorta thing is helping. Blastwave (now OpenCSW after a developer bitchfight) is the other way we do this shit without going insane.
The hair-tearing bit is when some dev thinks "compiles on Fedora, ship it" is a suitable release criterion for CPAN. Fail.
*applause* I'll remember that for the next version ;-p
Depends. We use a lot of Sun boxes and a lot of Dell boxes. Solaris 10 on a Sun box (even an x86) is way easier to administer than Linux - particularly when things go wrong. The OS indicates problems very nicely in messages and syslog, better than RHEL does.
The downside is that modern open source software is too often written by coders who think "cross-platform" means "works on Fedora and Ubuntu."
So we end up doing things like running Solaris 10 on Dell boxes and RHEL on Sun servers ;-)
Sun's hardware is competitively priced and their service is really good (I'm in London), so we're very happy to stay with Sun boxes even running Linux.
Now all we need is a semi-competent coder. I routinely find myself tearing out my remaining hair at work trying to get some piece o' crap written by a coder for whom "cross-platform" means "Fedora and Ubuntu" working properly on Solaris 10. Latest offender: PerlMagick, which requires idiot makefile hacks after ./configure to get to install properly.
I've actually just now sent the above text as a letter to the Times ;-)
Europanto. The proto-language of bureaucratic circumlocutions and evasions that translates equally meaninglessly into all standard European languages. After a while, Eurocrats begin to think in it.
Dear Sir,
We are a group of UK film and TV producers, directors and writers. We are concerned that the successes of the creative industries in the UK are being undermined by the illegal online file-sharing of film and TV.
We are asking the Government to show its support by ensuring that internet service providers play their part in tackling this huge problem by giving us money. Lots of money. Just keep piling it in, we'll tell you when it's enough.
In 2007, up to (well, it could be) 25 per cent of all online TV piracy took place in the UK. Popular shows are downloaded illegally hundreds of thousands of times per episode, and some of them might even be ours rather than something American made with an actual budget.
It is true that in 2008, UK commercial TV broadcasters enjoyed the highest viewing figures in five years, that total TV viewing was up 10% year-on-year, and the valuable yet hard-to-reach 16 to 24-year-old demographic (the typical file-sharer) watched 4.9% more commercial TV and saw 12% more ads. But it's the principle of the thing: someone is getting money from something that touches something one of us once touched, therefore the money belongs to us. This is the style of corporate thinking that brought Britain its great economic gains from 1997 to 2007, after all.At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that our gravy train be maintained.
Internet service providers have the ability to change the behaviour of those customers who illegally distribute content online. They have the power to make significant change and to prevent their infrastructure from being used on a wholesale scale for illegal activity. They have the power to stop people looking at the cover of Virgin Killer. They have a secret magic wand that will fix everything wrong with the media industry's income streams and they are refusing, with malice aforethought, to use it. If they are not prepared to give us all the free money we ask for and a bit more besides, they should be compelled to do so.
Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the annual Intel developers forum in San Francisco yesterday.
Rattner demonstrated this by causing his ears to light up at 60 watts of power a yard from a power transmitter operated by his assistant Igor. Only four journalists were incinerated when the power earthed through them from his fingertips.
Rattner reassured us that pumping kilowatts of power around the home through magnetic induction power is absolutely harmless. "The human body is not affected by magnetic fields," he said as one journalist with a pacemaker collapsed and another with a knee replacement watched his leg catch fire. "There's no danger whatsoever from it, any more than there is from mobile phones cooking your brain, microwave leakage blinding you, chemical waste unraveling all the DNA in your balls or statistical clusters of kids with cancer wherever high-tension power lines run overhead. Asbestos and thalidomide were horribly slandered in their day too."
"Of course, Nikola Tesla did it first in 1899," said enthusiast Albert Tedious-Anorak, 54, of Little Boring. "I detailed this at length on Wikipedia, but they refused to believe the value of my revelations on this matter due to a conspiracy of Edison fans amongst the site administrators."
It sorta failed at this point, didn't it.
Also, the linked article includes links to Bloomberg noting that Microsoft is failing to make its numbers. Microsoft has always made its numbers, pulling whatever cash-shuffling is necessary. Failing to do so means things are not good.
ARM and MIPS based laptop run Linux desktops just like x86 Linux desktops - but you can't run Windows on them.
Damn, imagine if the Eee had been an ARM or MIPS box. Would Microsoft have pulled out NT4 for MIPS to compete?
Despite the sales numbers, they are in fact bleeding badly. The stock has been flatline since 2000. They just tried pushing it up with a buyback when everyone's stock was dropping. Their cash reserve of billions has been demolished by bad buys and stock propping.
Lack of a stable binary driver interface is an engineering issue, not a religious one. "Stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model".
2008 was the year of Linux on the desktop. Does anyone really think Microsoft would have kept XP alive without netbooks? Does anyone really think Microsoft isn't shitting itself at 30% of netbooks running Linux?
Microsoft is reeling from the vicious and unwarranted slanders of security companies and the US government's Computer Emergency Response Team that its Internet Explorer web browser has alleged "security holes" or is in any way less than the finest software known to mankind and excellent value for your money.
The festering paedophiles of CERT have gone so outrageously far as to make the ludicrous claim that just viewing a malicious webpage in IE could leave your computer open to being hacked and turned into a Russian Mafia spam server. "We don't know what could have triggered such vindictiveness," sobbed Microsoft marketing marketer's marketer Steve Ballmer. "Do they hate free enterprise that much?"
There are things you can do to make your computing experience even more secure. Microsoft's official suggestion — make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and using an entire CPU doing nothing much, click through five screens to run IE in "protected mode," click through four screens to set zone security to "high," click "JUST BLOODY DO IT WILL YOU" when the User Access Control asks if you really want to do this, enable automatic updates with the minor side-effect of installing Microsoft DRM on your system or Windows Genuine Advantage randomly turning your computer into a paperweight, and sacrifice a goat to Microsoft at midnight on a moonless night — is simple and straightforward. "It's the quality you're paying for."
On no account should you consider that there might be other web browsers out there, as researchers have demonstrated that all of them automatically download the cover of Virgin Killer. "I saw a report," said marketing marketer John Curran of Microsoft Completely Enderlependent Analysts, Inc., "that another browser had more vulnerabilities than ours! People would be very foolish indeed to move from the latest IE to Netscape 4.01."
"These CERT wankers are Mactards and trolls," said Guardian marketing marketer Jack Schofield. "They just want to take IE users out, brutally sodomise them, gas them in concentration camps and" [This comment has been removed by a Guardian moderator. Replies may also be deleted.]
DysFunctional Programming.
Computers allow you to make Godawful mistakes so much faster than your competitors.