1. Memory stick -- proprietary overpriced Sony technology with Sony's idea of copyright protection incorporated. Woo-hoo.
2. High res color screen -- You don't get something for nothing. Much lower battery life, much higher price ($499, compared to $299, it appears).
3. Palm + mp3 player -- Neat. But not as neat as the Handspring 'Springboard' expansion slot, which supports modules for (yes, you guessed it) an mp3 player, several GPS modules, industry standard memory expansion (SmartMedia adapters, etc) and many others.
Handspring still definitely leads in terms of Geek Factor [tm] on the basis of the Springboard modules alone.
Any of the online competitions (like "most obfuscated C code") where content of code is more important than what the code actually does. Obfuscated code is expressive in it's illegibility to (normal) human eyes, but ability to perform a function.
Fair use:
Traditionally been limited by length. A illegible photocopy of a manuscript is not "fair use". If the original version has, for example, a minor detail in a background of a scene (a book title on a bookshelf) that you want to refer to in a scholarly work or essay that would be obscured or unseen in an inferior version of the film clip, I think that interferes with fair use.
I've heard nothing but bad comments about
AT&T's cable modem service. I use Qwest
DSL (the business package). Aside from
the tremendous expense (close to $100 a
month for 640K DSL, 5 static IPs and
domain hosting), I've been very happy with
the service. I wish I could get service
for closer to $50 for 1 static IP (hello,
NAT!) and the above.
I have to disagree with two points. First, you state:
> among other things, the Green Revolution in > agriculture and the plummeting price of food > means that the Great Plains aren't getting > chewed up by clueless undereducated farmers > as they were in the 1930s
Well, that's a loaded statement; I'll ignore the elitism, but the fact is, most of the farming areas of the U.S. are now being chewed up by enormous corporations who care much more about profit and yield today, than any long term land management. The possible ramifications of the lack of species diversification in food crops (if sub-type X produces more than sub-type Y, screw sub-type Y, even though it may prove to be resistant to a as yet unknown disease) could make the Great Dust Bowl look like the bald patch on your lawn. Let's not forget poorly thought out, supposed "Green" policies, like the introduction of Cane Toads into Australia.
Second, you state: > People like Sterling probably didn't see any > point in financing Columbus' expedition, either.
This is a fictional essay, Sterling is not saying that he doesn't believe space exploration was worthless, he just believes (backed up by most of the research I've seen) that space exploration will lack _monetary_ profit in the near future.
Options of 50, 100, and 140 shares...
on
VA Reprices Again
·
· Score: 1
When I talked to DB Alex. Brown a few minutes ago (7:45am PST), I was given the option of purchasing 50, 100, or 140 shares as part of the Directed Share program. So it looks like they're actually being a bit more flexible than the original documents made it sound (100 shares, no more, no less). Shame I didn't have an extra $1200 lying around! IPO initial price is $30/share. I could have spent it, but never violate the first rule of gambling (and this IS a gamble, albeit with better odds than a casino offers) -- don't risk what you can't afford to lose.
Let's see. Limited social skills, and limited social time (that's time available to spend with other people, rather than sitting in front of a CRT) are the oft quoted reasons for why these individuals are single. The only thing these guys have going for them is that they have large amounts of disposable income. Not exactly the strongest base for a meaningful relationship.
In a -very- informal test, according to Windows task manager, Winamp 2.10 playing back a mp3 takes approximately 17% of the CPU, Windows Media Player 6.01.05.0217 takes approximately 22% of the CPU. Winamp was playing the.mp3 version of a song, Windows Media Player was playing the same song, converted to a.asf file (same bitrate) with the supplied encoder. When Windows Media Player was playing back the original mp3 file, it used 19-20% of the CPU, so it appears the decoding horsepower required by the.asf decompression process (at least for the Windows Media Player implementation) is slightly higher than for mp3 decoding.
This was on a K-6 233MHz, 128MB of RAM, Windows NT 4.0SP4.
The Linux distributions aren't really one OS; the lowest common denominator is the Linux kernel. All distributions use a mix of the Linux kernel, GNU utilities, (frequently) in-house developed software, and (sometimes) commercial third-party software.
In binary compatibility terms, all x86 Linux distributions can run the same binaries (well, *cough*, we'll leave out little things like a.out, ELF, libc5 and libc6, to keep this simple). However, most have very different filesystem layouts, ways of starting software at boot, etc.
This doesn't even cover the fact that all major distributions use a different packaging scheme (RPM, pkg, deb).
So, the short answer is that there are enough differences between Linux distributions to make ports between distributions, if only to deal with filesystem & package differences, necessary.
Not all is lost, though;-) These are things that some people are working to standardize in order to offer more base compatibility between distributions.
Blackhawk wrote: If Red Hat and its people are "good and true" members of the community, their behavior will show them to be such, and we'll rightly respect them. If they aren't, a watchful eye now will serve us better than a thousand voices raised in protest later.
RedHat has shown themselves to be "good and true". All of their software development is released as open source, they have paid developers working on GNOME and KDE, and they're continuing to evangelize Linux to the suits, while making huge inroads into making an easy to use for Joe Q. Public distro. They did not, for example, take the easy way out in the desktop game, and "embrace and extend" CDE.
Will people please stop with this raving paranoia and actually wait until there's something to be paranoid about?:-)
As has been said by many (perhaps most notably by ESR), the primary motivation for many free software developers is recognition. In many ways, RMS has been short-changed of the recognition he deserves for his work. I think it's perfectly reasonable for him to be upset that he, and the FSF / GNU, receive very little recognition for their work. I would be--wouldn't you?
As for many Slashdotters being arrogant, no argument there.
1. Don't make everyone see the customized home page view by default. Store the fact they've got a customized home page in a cookie. If a bite of their cookie indicates they don't have a personalized home page, give 'em a static page that has everything (this page would be build every few minutes).
DON'T do a if..end if for each article on the page. Get all this info from their cookie, grab all of the article data in one select, and layout the page.
2. Set up some stored procedures to run fairly frequently to reduce the DB hit on selects.
3. You should be able to use joins to stay to one db call per home page load.
I'm running GNOME 0.99.8 at the moment (will be upgrading to 1.0 later today), and have no problems. GNOME 0.99.8 included a package called GTK+10, which is a set of compatibility libraries to run apps linked against GTK / glib 1.0.x.
I don't see gtk+10 in GNOME 1.0, which tells me something may have changed between GTK+ 1.1.x and GTK+ 1.2 in regards to backwards compatibility, so you may want to do some digging on www.gtk.org.
AFAIK, GTK+ 1.2 can co-exist with GTK+ 1.0; however, you must make sure that you remove any existing development packages from 1.0 before installing 1.2 development packages.
If anyone has a definitive answer on this issue, I'd love to hear it as well!
sod.res.cmu.edu is up to date, as are several mirrors I tried (sod seemed the fastest, so that's the one I pulled most of the packages from).
That said, there has been a history of what could be called premature announcements on Slashdot, which have overwhelmed the main server for something before the mirrors for the software had a chance to grab it.
I believe that GNOME is trying to follow the FSF philosophy of LGPLing things for which there are many or a common non-free alternative(s), and using the GPL where this isn't the case.
This is one of those multi-thousand dollar modelling packages, isn't it?
Personally, I think the open source modellers are getting to the point where they are adequate (if not ideal) for most modelling purposes.
The not open source but free modeller, Blender, from Not a Number is quite powerful, as well (though it's UI is the worst of any program I've ever used. A good example of how a UI can look good but be absolutely impossible to use). Moonlight Creator is open source, and was getting quite good; unfortunately, there's not been a release or any update by the author since June of last year.
For rendering, the open source renderers can for the most part compete with commercial packages in technical features, though do lack a bit of the UI polish.
With all that said, having a high quality, polished commercial package available would be nice!
SGI has made a good decision here, one that should help both 3D accelerated applications on top of XFree86, and SGI.
I'll be thrilled if I can purchase one of SGIs Visual workstations in the near future, install Linux on it, and be able to take full advantage of the graphic horsepower of the machine.
Thanks to everyone at SGI that made this possible!
Make a machine without whoopass 3D -capabilities-, yes. Actually adding the necessary software so that the whoopass 3D could be used under Linux is a different story.
However, according to ye olde rumor mill, SGI is working to add 3D support for their hardware under Linux. Whether that means one engineer working part-time, or a volunteer fed tidbits of technical info, who knows.
An official statement from SGI would be nice *hint hint*:-)
Code Crusader is really quite nice, though I think the author perhaps suffers a bit from the NIH (not-invented-here) syndrome;)
It's a very full featured IDE that integrates well with a graphical debugger (Code Medic) by the same author. Try it out if you do C or C++ development on Linux.
Scott McNealy's comment, while true, really wasn't smart. He's (unfairly, I think) going to get a lot of flack for stating the obvious.
It constantly amazes me how little personal privacy we have, even in a strictly legal sense. This is especially true for US citizens.
US citizens need to take our national anthem with a grain of salt; when it comes to privacy issues, the USA is -not- the land of the free. Lately, even your grocery purchases may not remain private (with the advent of "discount cards" at chains like Safeway). After all, when one is saving a great deal of money off artificially marked-up prices, one doesn't think about the wealth of information (modern society's most precious commodity) you are giving that store. Thanks, I'd rather have to remember by myself when next to buy toilet paper if it means keeping some semblance of privacy.
The EU has -vastly- superior personal privacy protections (for some information on this, see this link), hence the nervousness of people in EU member countries about the US's disgustingly lax privacy protections. We should be putting pressure on our lawmakers here in the US to adopt similar laws and privacy protections.
I really hope people in the US wake up and do something before it's too late, and Big Brother (in the form of your friendly mega-corporation, rather than the government) is rifling through everything you have.
As to media being more important on the desktop than servers, not necessarily. Welcome to the networked world, where every internet user is a potential publishing company. As the speed of home connections increases (DSL & cable modems become more commonplace, etc), I think it'll become more and more common for users to host information themselves rather than at some ISP or hosting service. A rock-solid OS that can provide these server capabilities will definitely be popular, as most people will probably not have multiple desktop computers in the home.
Though I'm a long-time Linux user (over five years now), BeOS definitely looks interesting but lacks what I love most about Linux - a from-the-ground-up open source tradition. The availability of ported open source apps is nice, but (spiritually) would feel a bit like running Cygwin's kit on Microsoft Windows. The appropriation of at least one driver by Be from the Linux kernel source, while no doubt an honest mistake by someone unfamiliar with licensing issues, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Another "alternative" OS I'm keeping my eye on is GNU HURD. It should share many of the advantages of a microkernel based OS ("pervasive multithreading" (if I hear that expression one more time in a BeOS -review-, I'm going to puke. At least Be's marketing department is having success with journalists adopting their buzzwords), etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Let's think outside the box and come up with a new paradigm.
*retch*
1. Memory stick -- proprietary overpriced Sony technology with Sony's idea of copyright protection incorporated. Woo-hoo.
2. High res color screen -- You don't get something for nothing. Much lower battery life, much higher price ($499, compared to $299, it appears).
3. Palm + mp3 player -- Neat. But not as neat as the Handspring 'Springboard' expansion slot, which supports modules for (yes, you guessed it) an mp3 player, several GPS modules, industry standard memory expansion (SmartMedia adapters, etc) and many others.
Handspring still definitely leads in terms of Geek Factor [tm] on the basis of the Springboard modules alone.
Good example of expressive speech:
Any of the online competitions (like "most obfuscated C code") where content of code is more important than what the code actually does. Obfuscated code is expressive in it's illegibility to (normal) human eyes, but ability to perform a function.
Fair use:
Traditionally been limited by length. A illegible photocopy of a manuscript is not "fair use". If the original version has, for example, a minor detail in a background of a scene (a book title on a bookshelf) that you want to refer to in a scholarly work or essay that would be obscured or unseen in an inferior version of the film clip, I think that interferes with fair use.
I've heard nothing but bad comments about
AT&T's cable modem service. I use Qwest
DSL (the business package). Aside from
the tremendous expense (close to $100 a
month for 640K DSL, 5 static IPs and
domain hosting), I've been very happy with
the service. I wish I could get service
for closer to $50 for 1 static IP (hello,
NAT!) and the above.
Damn those drop-bears -- they're nearly as dangerous as the pernicious North American Snipe.
I think many people are confusing Jeremy Allison with Andrew Tridgell; the latter _is_ from Australia, and no doubt eats koala and emu twice daily.
That's Aliens, not Alien.
I have to disagree with two points. First, you state:
> among other things, the Green Revolution in
> agriculture and the plummeting price of food
> means that the Great Plains aren't getting
> chewed up by clueless undereducated farmers
> as they were in the 1930s
Well, that's a loaded statement; I'll ignore the elitism, but the fact is, most of the farming areas of the U.S. are now being chewed up by enormous corporations who care much more about profit and yield today, than any long term land management. The possible ramifications of the lack of species diversification in food crops (if sub-type X produces more than sub-type Y, screw sub-type Y, even though it may prove to be resistant to a as yet unknown disease) could make the Great Dust Bowl look like the bald patch on your lawn. Let's not forget poorly thought out, supposed "Green" policies, like the introduction of Cane Toads into Australia.
Second, you state:
> People like Sterling probably didn't see any
> point in financing Columbus' expedition, either.
This is a fictional essay, Sterling is not saying that he doesn't believe space exploration was worthless, he just believes (backed up by most of the research I've seen) that space exploration will lack _monetary_ profit in the near future.
When I talked to DB Alex. Brown a few minutes ago (7:45am PST), I was given the option of purchasing 50, 100, or 140 shares as part of the Directed Share program. So it looks like they're actually being a bit more flexible than the original documents made it sound (100 shares, no more, no less). Shame I didn't have an extra $1200 lying around! IPO initial price is $30/share. I could have spent it, but never violate the first rule of gambling (and this IS a gamble, albeit with better odds than a casino offers) -- don't risk what you can't afford to lose.
Let's see. Limited social skills, and limited social time (that's time available to spend with other people, rather than sitting in front of a CRT) are the oft quoted reasons for why these individuals are single. The only thing these guys have going for them is that they have large amounts of disposable income. Not exactly the strongest base for a meaningful relationship.
In a -very- informal test, according to Windows task manager, Winamp 2.10 playing back a mp3 takes approximately 17% of the CPU, Windows Media Player 6.01.05.0217 takes approximately 22% of the CPU. Winamp was playing the .mp3 version of a song, Windows Media Player was playing the same song, converted to a .asf file (same bitrate) with the supplied encoder. When Windows Media Player was playing back the original mp3 file, it used 19-20% of the CPU, so it appears the decoding horsepower required by the .asf decompression process (at least for the Windows Media Player implementation) is slightly higher than for mp3 decoding.
This was on a K-6 233MHz, 128MB of RAM, Windows NT 4.0SP4.
The Linux distributions aren't really one OS; the lowest common denominator is the Linux kernel. All distributions use a mix of the Linux kernel, GNU utilities, (frequently) in-house developed software, and (sometimes) commercial third-party software.
;-) These are things that some people are working to standardize in order to offer more base compatibility between distributions.
In binary compatibility terms, all x86 Linux distributions can run the same binaries (well, *cough*, we'll leave out little things like a.out, ELF, libc5 and libc6, to keep this simple). However, most have very different filesystem layouts, ways of starting software at boot, etc.
This doesn't even cover the fact that all major distributions use a different packaging scheme (RPM, pkg, deb).
So, the short answer is that there are enough differences between Linux distributions to make ports between distributions, if only to deal with filesystem & package differences, necessary.
Not all is lost, though
If Red Hat and its people are "good and true" members of the community, their behavior will show them to be such, and we'll rightly respect them. If they aren't, a watchful eye now will serve us better than a thousand voices raised in protest later.
RedHat has shown themselves to be "good and true". All of their software development is released as open source, they have paid developers working on GNOME and KDE, and they're continuing to evangelize Linux to the suits, while making huge inroads into making an easy to use for Joe Q. Public distro. They did not, for example, take the easy way out in the desktop game, and "embrace and extend" CDE.
Will people please stop with this raving paranoia and actually wait until there's something to be paranoid about? :-)
As has been said by many (perhaps most notably by ESR), the primary motivation for many free software developers is recognition. In many ways, RMS has been short-changed of the recognition he deserves for his work. I think it's perfectly reasonable for him to be upset that he, and the FSF / GNU, receive very little recognition for their work. I would be--wouldn't you?
As for many Slashdotters being arrogant, no argument there.
1. Don't make everyone see the customized home page view by default. Store the fact they've got
a customized home page in a cookie. If a bite of their cookie indicates they don't have a personalized home page, give 'em a static page that has everything (this page would be build every few minutes).
DON'T do a if..end if for each article on the page. Get all this info from their cookie, grab all of the article data in one select, and layout the page.
2. Set up some stored procedures to run fairly frequently to reduce the DB hit on selects.
3. You should be able to use joins to stay to one db call per home page load.
man 5 ftpaccess
(you're looking for the limit directive).
Drel
I'm running GNOME 0.99.8 at the moment (will be upgrading to 1.0 later today), and have no problems. GNOME 0.99.8 included a package called GTK+10, which is a set of compatibility libraries to run apps linked against GTK / glib 1.0.x.
I don't see gtk+10 in GNOME 1.0, which tells me something may have changed between GTK+ 1.1.x and GTK+ 1.2 in regards to backwards compatibility, so you may want to do some digging on www.gtk.org.
AFAIK, GTK+ 1.2 can co-exist with GTK+ 1.0; however, you must make sure that you remove any existing development packages from 1.0 before installing 1.2 development packages.
If anyone has a definitive answer on this issue, I'd love to hear it as well!
sod.res.cmu.edu is up to date, as are several mirrors I tried (sod seemed the fastest, so that's the one I pulled most of the packages from).
That said, there has been a history of what could be called premature announcements on Slashdot, which have overwhelmed the main server for something before the mirrors for the software had a chance to grab it.
Actually, many of the components of GNOME fall under the GPL, rather than the LGPL. Run the following command against the GNOME 1.0 RPMs, for example:
rpm -qip * |grep GPL |grep -v LGPL
...
Size : 479065 License: GPL
Size : 3931709 License: GPL
Size : 424189 License: GPL
Size : 188812 License: GPL
...
I believe that GNOME is trying to follow the FSF philosophy of LGPLing things for which there are many or a common non-free alternative(s), and using the GPL where this isn't the case.
Regards,
Drel
This is one of those multi-thousand dollar modelling packages, isn't it?
Personally, I think the open source modellers are getting to the point where they are adequate (if not ideal) for most modelling purposes.
The not open source but free modeller, Blender, from Not a Number is quite powerful, as well (though it's UI is the worst of any program I've ever used. A good example of how a UI can look good but be absolutely impossible to use). Moonlight Creator is open source, and was getting quite good; unfortunately, there's not been a release or any update by the author since June of last year.
For rendering, the open source renderers can for the most part compete with commercial packages in technical features, though do lack a bit of the UI polish.
With all that said, having a high quality, polished commercial package available would be nice!
SGI has made a good decision here, one that should help both 3D accelerated applications on top of XFree86, and SGI.
I'll be thrilled if I can purchase one of SGIs Visual workstations in the near future, install Linux on it, and be able to take full advantage of the graphic horsepower of the machine.
Thanks to everyone at SGI that made this possible!
Make a machine without whoopass 3D -capabilities-, yes. Actually adding the necessary software so that the whoopass 3D could be used under Linux is a different story.
:-)
However, according to ye olde rumor mill, SGI is working to add 3D support for their hardware under Linux. Whether that means one engineer working part-time, or a volunteer fed tidbits of technical info, who knows.
An official statement from SGI would be nice *hint hint*
Code Crusader is really quite nice, though I think the author perhaps suffers a bit from the NIH (not-invented-here) syndrome ;)
It's a very full featured IDE that integrates well with a graphical debugger (Code Medic) by the same author. Try it out if you do C or C++ development on Linux.
Scott McNealy's comment, while true, really wasn't smart. He's (unfairly, I think) going to get a lot of flack for stating the obvious.
It constantly amazes me how little personal privacy we have, even in a strictly legal sense. This is especially true for US citizens.
US citizens need to take our national anthem with a grain of salt; when it comes to privacy issues, the USA is -not- the land of the free. Lately, even your grocery purchases may not remain private (with the advent of "discount cards" at chains like Safeway). After all, when one is saving a great deal of money off artificially marked-up prices, one doesn't think about the wealth of information (modern society's most precious commodity) you are giving that store. Thanks, I'd rather have to remember by myself when next to buy toilet paper if it means keeping some semblance of privacy.
The EU has -vastly- superior personal privacy protections (for some information on this, see this link), hence the nervousness of people in EU member countries about the US's disgustingly lax privacy protections. We should be putting pressure on our lawmakers here in the US to adopt similar laws and privacy protections.
I really hope people in the US wake up and do something before it's too late, and Big Brother (in the form of your friendly mega-corporation, rather than the government) is rifling through everything you have.
As to media being more important on the desktop than servers, not necessarily. Welcome to the networked world, where every internet user is a potential publishing company. As the speed of home connections increases (DSL & cable modems become more commonplace, etc), I think it'll become more and more common for users to host information themselves rather than at some ISP or hosting service. A rock-solid OS that can provide these server capabilities will definitely be popular, as most people will probably not have multiple desktop computers in the home.
Though I'm a long-time Linux user (over five years now), BeOS definitely looks interesting but lacks what I love most about Linux - a from-the-ground-up open source tradition. The availability of ported open source apps is nice, but (spiritually) would feel a bit like running Cygwin's kit on Microsoft Windows. The appropriation of at least one driver by Be from the Linux kernel source, while no doubt an honest mistake by someone unfamiliar with licensing issues, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Another "alternative" OS I'm keeping my eye on is GNU HURD. It should share many of the advantages of a microkernel based OS ("pervasive multithreading" (if I hear that expression one more time in a BeOS -review-, I'm going to puke. At least Be's marketing department is having success with journalists adopting their buzzwords), etc).