5 megapixels is overkill for a lot of applications. For ordinary 15cm (~6") photo paper printouts of vacation photos, 3 Mpixels is enough. For web use I'd say 1Mpixel is plenty good enough.
Bad quality is more often due to crappy lenses and ultra-low quality CCD's than low resolution. If a 2Mpixel CCD is cheaper than an equivalent 4Mpixel one, it has a place in the market.
For those of us who have always used unix on the desktop, it feels quite odd when these reports come around saying it's almost ready.
I have been exclusively using Slackware GNU/Linux on the desktop since late last century. The most noticable change I have noticed during this time is decreasing stability. XFree86 4.x is nowhere near as stable as 3.x (and takes much longer to start up, too). Applications tend to crash now and then, something which pretty much never happened four or five years ago. Granted, they have much more features now.
I first used graphical unix UI's about ten years ago. That was SunOS with OpenLook (XView), and I instantly loved the interface (including the standard apps, MailTool and whatnot). I don't think I would have the same love at first sight experience if I was new to unix today. Perhaps focus has been too much on mimicking eye candy and too little on improving (or even preserving) quality?
I believe the storage capacity of a standard coin is 1 bit, heads or tails. Some coins can also be placed on their edge, producing a third result. This is however considered out of spec, and will generally stabilize to one of the two defined states.
You might have misunderstood the client/server part. X is just a server. Programs that want to display things connect to the X server. Thus, applications like xterm, mozilla or quake are the clients.
Please disregard this post if this is what you meant.
In my experience, a relatively fast 35mm film (say ASA400) is about equivalent to a 4 Mpixel digital camera. This is more than enough for standard size photo prints, but as you imply, not quite enough for a blowup.
Professional and high-end amateur digital cameras are at 10Mpixel, so they should give you 40% better resolution. What that means in terms of film grain equivalency beats me, though. I've never had access to such a camera, and don't have any high-quality scans of slow speed grade film photos to analyze.
Well, cursed be technological advances! I bought a Sony MD last week, and perhaps wouldn't have had I known this then. Oh, well, it's still as good as it was last week, I suppose.
The DRM might just be the same as all MD players/recorders use, and have always used; they all honour a "Digital original/copy" flag which tells them each original may only be digitally copied once, after which the copy is marked as a digital copy, and may not be digitally subcopied.
The effect is that every other copy must be analogue and repacked, thus degrading quality. This has turned out to be an acceptable balance between consumers' rights/convenience and publishers' concern, enabling the minidisc's market dominance.
I think the article had been a good one if it had passed all mention of GNU and the Free Software movement completely. After all, Linus has never been a part of the Free Software movement, he has in fact stated several times that he does not care for politics and idealism.
Now, I can accept the argument that GNU/Linux is not technically an operating system. It is still a technical platform, and one that nearly all Linux desktop or server users use. Most programs that are distributed for Linux (Of course C is portable, but binaries generally are not) are in fact linked against GNU libraries and will only run on GNU/Linux systems.
As I said, the term Operating System can refer to a great many things. In a general interest, non-technical article, which specifically mentions both kernels and operating systems, I think it is quite clear it does not refer to the kernel.
As for trying to rename Linux GNU/Linux, I have been searching the FSF website for evidence of these claims (after all, if the FSF actually does claim that the Linux kernel should be renamed GNU/Linux, I am the one who needs to get my facts straight), but the only references to GNU/Linux I can find specifically state that the kernel is called nothing but Linux, and that GNU/Linux refers to a larger system.
The FSFs official stand on this can be found here: http://www.fsf.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
Oh, bother! Unless someone posts something very intruiging I won't participate any more in this debate. I hope I have made my position clear. There are much better resources on the Free Software movement on the web than me. Check them out if you're wondering why it is you can have complete systems with applications and all for free.
This entire debate has been exceptionally pleasant considering it's on Slashdot.
Yes, Stallman is stubborn and more than a bit pig-headed. I think we all know this. My point is, he has a very real reason for preferring Free Software over Open Source, and it is not because he coined the first. The Open Source Initiative was founded for the very purpose of denouncing Stallman's ideas (or more precisely, his rhetoric), which he has devoted much of his life to. Free Software and Open Source are not the same thing.
I'm not saying the OSI is evil, I'm just saying they have a different ideological base than the FSF, and Stallman is an ideologist. The reporter should have looked up Stallman's reasons for not using the term open source, and not just assume it's an ego thing.
The term operating system can refer to a great range of things. The system Stallman calls GNU/Linux is not the Linux kernel, or even the Linux kernel with bootloaders and init systems, but the Linux kernel with the GNU libraries and GNU tools. This could arguably be called an operating system. When Linux is used without these GNU components (I have such a system), nobody ever suggested calling the system GNU/Linux. Incidentally, such systems run very few "Linux" programs, since these often rely on the GNU environment.
The article states that "Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux", which seems false to me. Of course, I don't know what Stallman said to the reporter, but this would go against his and the FSF's official policy.
Stallman is stubborn because he beleives strongly in what he is doing. Look through the comments here on Slashdot and see how many think GNU is irrelevant, and that are confused as to what exactly the term GNU/Linux refers to (whether they think it's a correct name for the OS or not, people should at least look into what it means before they bash it). Clueless articles like the one in Wired often do more harm than outright malignity, in that they reinforce widespread misunderstandings.
I agree that in some contexts the term operating system refers to the kernel (or, in the case of microkernel architectures, the microkernel and its servers). On the outside of a retail box, however, or in a general interest news article, it means a complete system for operating your computer, which includes a standard library API and a set of utilities, such as a command parser (shell).
This article specifically uses both the term kernel and the term operating system, thereby implying that an operating system is more than just the kernel.
Stallman is not very good at public relations, I agree that he is very clumsy at times. The point is, Linux and GNU live in symbiosis. Neither would thrive without the other.
However, a system consists of several parts, XFree86 and KDE or Gnome can be as important parts of a system as anything else, or perhaps that one killer app that the system is used for, be it the web browser, the video editor or whatever.
What all operating systems that are distributions of GNU/Linux have in common, though, are the Linux kernel and the GNU userland. These form the foundation upon which all else is built. My firewall runs Linux, but not GNU. Several other machines I administrate run variants of GNU/Linux.
I am not usually one to get into flamewars over naming schemes, I don't really care that much. This article was littered with factual fallacies, however. I really think a writer has a responsibility to do a little more fact checking.
First off, let me say that I am terribly sorry if I have offended you by having a less than perfect grasp of a foreign language.
Secondly; my point exactly! Credit is what drives the free and open software movement, and as such should be placed where it is due. Note that Stallman does not call the system a RMS/Torvalds system, he acknowledges everyone who has worked on the GNU project, as well as everyone who has worked on Linux.
The thing is, Linux is not a derivative of GNU. Nobody ever wanted to call the Linux kernel GNU/Linux. It is quite obviously named "Linux". Some of us think that calling entire GNU systems Linux just because they include Linux is as wrong as calling Windows "Notepad". As an aside, I would call the actual OS "Slackware" or "SUSE" or whatever.
Quite sad really, the way he dismisses Richard Stallman and the GNU project as a failed project predating Linux and now trying to cash in on Linux' good name by renaming it GNU/Linux.
Stallman refused to appear in the article unless the reporter got his terminology straight, which is reported as "Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux, because early contributors adapted GNU components for Linux - never mind that the Linux core is non-GNU and now approaches 6 million lines of code."
He further reports that "He obstinately rejects the term open source despite its now near universal use, preferring free software, the name he coined."
If the reporter had checked his facts just a little bit, he would have realised that GNU/Linux refers to GNU systems using the Linux kernel. Further, he would learn and that open source was coined to renounce some of the ideas behind free software. The names can never be interchangable.
The article also clearly states that while Linus started hacking on a kernel, he later wrote an entire operating system. It is quite clear that the writer actually believes this, despite being told otherwise by the actual original creator of the operating system most oftenly used with Linux. Why he chose not to check this claim baffles me.
As someone who believes that a correct retelling of history is crucial to progress, I am appalled at this blatant disregard of the truth.
I was mostly thinking about choosing between the new and classic variants of the start menu. I assume there is some way of editing the default user's HKEY_LOCAL_USER registry, but I have been unable to find out how.
I'd love to see a post from someone who's actually used Linux for years and gone to Windows for one reason or another
I use Windows XP Pro at work, whilst being a long time Slackware user at home. Before Slackware I used various proprietary BASICs and a little DOS. At first I hated working in Windows. Nothing works the way you want it to. Printer drivers (I have never installed a single printer driver on my machine at home, my old HP Laser just works anyway) conflicting with each other, not being able to set the right screen frequency, because I need a monitor driver and so on.
After learning all the little quirks (there are probably just as many oddities with GNU/Linux that I don't notice) I can now work efficiently with XP , but would never let it replace my beloved unix at home. As long as you're doing something anticipated by the programmers, Windows is beautifully simple to use. When you are trying to ad lib, your screwed. I suppose you could set Windows with lots of little helper programs and registry tweaks, but im Linux I don't have to.
Examples:
Get a file from a Mac user, who doesn't tag.doc and.xls on his Office file names and don't know what it is? Most unix filesystem browsers use file magic, and identify these files correctly.
Want your MOD.* files to open with ModPlug Player when you click on them? Windows Explorer can't grok prefixes.
Want to download a URL to a local file? Write an HTML document with a link, or download the Windows version of the standard GNU/Linux utility wget.
Windows package management just simply sucks.
Want to set reasonable defaults for new users, like how their Start Menu behaves or what theme they get? There might be a way to do this, but I still haven't figured out how.
I have no idea how to download streamed media so I can watch it behind our corporate firewall. At home, this is my preferred way of watching online movies, due to bandwidth uncertainty.
I have seen less than ten GNU/Linux crashes in my eight years of Linux experience. Last week, some program or other in my XP box had a BSoD shootout with my printer, but aside from that, I get perhaps one crash every two or three months, which is still a lot. This is not, I believe, caused by Windows, but rather by poor applications and drivers. Somehow, though, Windows seems to attract poor applications and drivers.
Granted, a lot of my problems stem from me not knowing my way around the system, but I think this is why you don't see many "I switched to Windows" stories. People tend not to do this to themselves voluntarily.
"Also, it would be illegal according to the terms of the agreement to post this policy here"
Well, I for one am not bound by this agreement, even by AA's definition. I quote: "In return for gaining access to the Site and using it, you agree to be bound by the following Agreement without limitation or qualification"
I never continued past that point, and never clicked the "I agree" button. Of course, it wouldn't make any legal difference if I did.
(I don't even recall seeing any Linux binary drivers from ATi - Does he mean the XiG drivers you have to *pay extra for*?)
ATI has had drivers out for the R200 (as found in the Radeon 8500 and FireGL 8x00 series) for quite some time, although poorly advertised. They were previously branded as FireGL drivers, but have always worked fine with the Radeon too, as both cards share the same core. These drivers are supposedly both reliable and fast.
Slashdot Mirror
5 megapixels is overkill for a lot of applications. For ordinary 15cm (~6") photo paper printouts of vacation photos, 3 Mpixels is enough. For web use I'd say 1Mpixel is plenty good enough.
Bad quality is more often due to crappy lenses and ultra-low quality CCD's than low resolution. If a 2Mpixel CCD is cheaper than an equivalent 4Mpixel one, it has a place in the market.
For those of us who have always used unix on the desktop, it feels quite odd when these reports come around saying it's almost ready.
I have been exclusively using Slackware GNU/Linux on the desktop since late last century. The most noticable change I have noticed during this time is decreasing stability. XFree86 4.x is nowhere near as stable as 3.x (and takes much longer to start up, too). Applications tend to crash now and then, something which pretty much never happened four or five years ago. Granted, they have much more features now.
I first used graphical unix UI's about ten years ago. That was SunOS with OpenLook (XView), and I instantly loved the interface (including the standard apps, MailTool and whatnot). I don't think I would have the same love at first sight experience if I was new to unix today. Perhaps focus has been too much on mimicking eye candy and too little on improving (or even preserving) quality?
I believe the storage capacity of a standard coin is 1 bit, heads or tails. Some coins can also be placed on their edge, producing a third result. This is however considered out of spec, and will generally stabilize to one of the two defined states.
I googled this up. Quicktime, so you'll need the proper codecs for mplayer (or a Mac).
a wa rds_Bband.mov
http://img-nex.theonering.net/movies/gollum_mtv
You might have misunderstood the client/server part. X is just a server. Programs that want to display things connect to the X server. Thus, applications like xterm, mozilla or quake are the clients.
Please disregard this post if this is what you meant.
In my experience, a relatively fast 35mm film (say ASA400) is about equivalent to a 4 Mpixel digital camera. This is more than enough for standard size photo prints, but as you imply, not quite enough for a blowup.
Professional and high-end amateur digital cameras are at 10Mpixel, so they should give you 40% better resolution. What that means in terms of film grain equivalency beats me, though. I've never had access to such a camera, and don't have any high-quality scans of slow speed grade film photos to analyze.
If I turn off my monitors, my apartment is also lit solely by LEDs.
Well, cursed be technological advances! I bought a Sony MD last week, and perhaps wouldn't have had I known this then. Oh, well, it's still as good as it was last week, I suppose.
The DRM might just be the same as all MD players/recorders use, and have always used; they all honour a "Digital original/copy" flag which tells them each original may only be digitally copied once, after which the copy is marked as a digital copy, and may not be digitally subcopied.
The effect is that every other copy must be analogue and repacked, thus degrading quality. This has turned out to be an acceptable balance between consumers' rights/convenience and publishers' concern, enabling the minidisc's market dominance.
I think the article had been a good one if it had passed all mention of GNU and the Free Software movement completely. After all, Linus has never been a part of the Free Software movement, he has in fact stated several times that he does not care for politics and idealism.
Now, I can accept the argument that GNU/Linux is not technically an operating system. It is still a technical platform, and one that nearly all Linux desktop or server users use. Most programs that are distributed for Linux (Of course C is portable, but binaries generally are not) are in fact linked against GNU libraries and will only run on GNU/Linux systems.
As I said, the term Operating System can refer to a great many things. In a general interest, non-technical article, which specifically mentions both kernels and operating systems, I think it is quite clear it does not refer to the kernel.
As for trying to rename Linux GNU/Linux, I have been searching the FSF website for evidence of these claims (after all, if the FSF actually does claim that the Linux kernel should be renamed GNU/Linux, I am the one who needs to get my facts straight), but the only references to GNU/Linux I can find specifically state that the kernel is called nothing but Linux, and that GNU/Linux refers to a larger system.
The FSFs official stand on this can be found here: http://www.fsf.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
Oh, bother! Unless someone posts something very intruiging I won't participate any more in this debate. I hope I have made my position clear. There are much better resources on the Free Software movement on the web than me. Check them out if you're wondering why it is you can have complete systems with applications and all for free.
This entire debate has been exceptionally pleasant considering it's on Slashdot.
Yes, Stallman is stubborn and more than a bit pig-headed. I think we all know this. My point is, he has a very real reason for preferring Free Software over Open Source, and it is not because he coined the first. The Open Source Initiative was founded for the very purpose of denouncing Stallman's ideas (or more precisely, his rhetoric), which he has devoted much of his life to. Free Software and Open Source are not the same thing.
I'm not saying the OSI is evil, I'm just saying they have a different ideological base than the FSF, and Stallman is an ideologist. The reporter should have looked up Stallman's reasons for not using the term open source, and not just assume it's an ego thing.
The term operating system can refer to a great range of things. The system Stallman calls GNU/Linux is not the Linux kernel, or even the Linux kernel with bootloaders and init systems, but the Linux kernel with the GNU libraries and GNU tools. This could arguably be called an operating system. When Linux is used without these GNU components (I have such a system), nobody ever suggested calling the system GNU/Linux. Incidentally, such systems run very few "Linux" programs, since these often rely on the GNU environment.
The article states that "Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux", which seems false to me. Of course, I don't know what Stallman said to the reporter, but this would go against his and the FSF's official policy.
Stallman is stubborn because he beleives strongly in what he is doing. Look through the comments here on Slashdot and see how many think GNU is irrelevant, and that are confused as to what exactly the term GNU/Linux refers to (whether they think it's a correct name for the OS or not, people should at least look into what it means before they bash it). Clueless articles like the one in Wired often do more harm than outright malignity, in that they reinforce widespread misunderstandings.
Probably because the BSDs ship with their own userland.
I agree that in some contexts the term operating system refers to the kernel (or, in the case of microkernel architectures, the microkernel and its servers). On the outside of a retail box, however, or in a general interest news article, it means a complete system for operating your computer, which includes a standard library API and a set of utilities, such as a command parser (shell).
This article specifically uses both the term kernel and the term operating system, thereby implying that an operating system is more than just the kernel.
I would contact consumer right authorities if I purchased an operating system and got nothing but a kernel.
Stallman is not very good at public relations, I agree that he is very clumsy at times. The point is, Linux and GNU live in symbiosis. Neither would thrive without the other.
However, a system consists of several parts, XFree86 and KDE or Gnome can be as important parts of a system as anything else, or perhaps that one killer app that the system is used for, be it the web browser, the video editor or whatever.
What all operating systems that are distributions of GNU/Linux have in common, though, are the Linux kernel and the GNU userland. These form the foundation upon which all else is built. My firewall runs Linux, but not GNU. Several other machines I administrate run variants of GNU/Linux.
I am not usually one to get into flamewars over naming schemes, I don't really care that much. This article was littered with factual fallacies, however. I really think a writer has a responsibility to do a little more fact checking.
First off, let me say that I am terribly sorry if I have offended you by having a less than perfect grasp of a foreign language.
Secondly; my point exactly! Credit is what drives the free and open software movement, and as such should be placed where it is due. Note that Stallman does not call the system a RMS/Torvalds system, he acknowledges everyone who has worked on the GNU project, as well as everyone who has worked on Linux.
The thing is, Linux is not a derivative of GNU. Nobody ever wanted to call the Linux kernel GNU/Linux. It is quite obviously named "Linux". Some of us think that calling entire GNU systems Linux just because they include Linux is as wrong as calling Windows "Notepad". As an aside, I would call the actual OS "Slackware" or "SUSE" or whatever.
Quite sad really, the way he dismisses Richard Stallman and the GNU project as a failed project predating Linux and now trying to cash in on Linux' good name by renaming it GNU/Linux.
Stallman refused to appear in the article unless the reporter got his terminology straight, which is reported as "Stallman insists Torvalds' work should properly be called GNU/Linux, because early contributors adapted GNU components for Linux - never mind that the Linux core is non-GNU and now approaches 6 million lines of code."
He further reports that "He obstinately rejects the term open source despite its now near universal use, preferring free software, the name he coined."
If the reporter had checked his facts just a little bit, he would have realised that GNU/Linux refers to GNU systems using the Linux kernel. Further, he would learn and that open source was coined to renounce some of the ideas behind free software. The names can never be interchangable.
The article also clearly states that while Linus started hacking on a kernel, he later wrote an entire operating system. It is quite clear that the writer actually believes this, despite being told otherwise by the actual original creator of the operating system most oftenly used with Linux. Why he chose not to check this claim baffles me.
As someone who believes that a correct retelling of history is crucial to progress, I am appalled at this blatant disregard of the truth.
I was mostly thinking about choosing between the new and classic variants of the start menu. I assume there is some way of editing the default user's HKEY_LOCAL_USER registry, but I have been unable to find out how.
I use Windows XP Pro at work, whilst being a long time Slackware user at home. Before Slackware I used various proprietary BASICs and a little DOS. At first I hated working in Windows. Nothing works the way you want it to. Printer drivers (I have never installed a single printer driver on my machine at home, my old HP Laser just works anyway) conflicting with each other, not being able to set the right screen frequency, because I need a monitor driver and so on.
After learning all the little quirks (there are probably just as many oddities with GNU/Linux that I don't notice) I can now work efficiently with XP , but would never let it replace my beloved unix at home. As long as you're doing something anticipated by the programmers, Windows is beautifully simple to use. When you are trying to ad lib, your screwed. I suppose you could set Windows with lots of little helper programs and registry tweaks, but im Linux I don't have to.
Examples:
Get a file from a Mac user, who doesn't tag .doc and .xls on his Office file names and don't know what it is? Most unix filesystem browsers use file magic, and identify these files correctly.
Want your MOD.* files to open with ModPlug Player when you click on them? Windows Explorer can't grok prefixes.
Want to download a URL to a local file? Write an HTML document with a link, or download the Windows version of the standard GNU/Linux utility wget.
Windows package management just simply sucks.
Want to set reasonable defaults for new users, like how their Start Menu behaves or what theme they get? There might be a way to do this, but I still haven't figured out how.
I have no idea how to download streamed media so I can watch it behind our corporate firewall. At home, this is my preferred way of watching online movies, due to bandwidth uncertainty.
I have seen less than ten GNU/Linux crashes in my eight years of Linux experience. Last week, some program or other in my XP box had a BSoD shootout with my printer, but aside from that, I get perhaps one crash every two or three months, which is still a lot. This is not, I believe, caused by Windows, but rather by poor applications and drivers. Somehow, though, Windows seems to attract poor applications and drivers.
Granted, a lot of my problems stem from me not knowing my way around the system, but I think this is why you don't see many "I switched to Windows" stories. People tend not to do this to themselves voluntarily.
It will most likely run at a multiple of 200 MHz, as it must sync against a 400MHz FSB. Perhaps 2.2 GHz?
After a bit of afterthought, I'm not sure the 386 had an integrated memory controller, but the DX denoted a 32-bit FSB in any case.
0 6. htm#Heading13
I took a quick look around the web, but was unable to find any authorative reference (eg Intel tech docs), but I did come up with the following:
http://cma.zdnet.com/book/upgraderepair/ch06/ch
Which is from the book Upgrading & Repairing PCs.
Perhaps your CPU was a clone? As far as I know, Intel never made any 386 class CPU with an integrated FPU.
Not that it matters to your point, but the SX stands for totally different things in the 386 and 486 lines.
A 486DX includes an FPU, while the 486SX doesn't. If I'm not totally mistaken, the "external" 487 FPU was a complete 486DX.
On the 386, it denoted whether it had a 16-bit or 32-bit memory controller (I forget which is which). Both could make use of an external 387 FPU.
"Also, it would be illegal according to the terms of the agreement to post this policy here"
Well, I for one am not bound by this agreement, even by AA's definition. I quote: "In return for gaining access to the Site and using it, you agree to be bound by the following Agreement without limitation or qualification"
I never continued past that point, and never clicked the "I agree" button. Of course, it wouldn't make any legal difference if I did.
The slashdot crowd should be sending serious funding in the way of this project.
(I don't even recall seeing any Linux binary drivers from ATi - Does he mean the XiG drivers you have to *pay extra for*?)
ATI has had drivers out for the R200 (as found in the Radeon 8500 and FireGL 8x00 series) for quite some time, although poorly advertised. They were previously branded as FireGL drivers, but have always worked fine with the Radeon too, as both cards share the same core. These drivers are supposedly both reliable and fast.