Just when I get used to KDE or Gnome, get it all working, they change it, and break it. Gnome panel used to sit on my minimal fvwm2 desktop, and worked fine, till one day it wouldn't redraw till you moused it, and with Gnome2 it just didn't have the applets I liked anymore. KD3 worked, and then all the fonts went ape with SuSE81.
I now have fvwm2, cpuload for a CPU meter, asmix for a volume control and wmcalclock for a clock/calendar, and they're sweet, small, I can build from source in two minutes, and they work.
Grrr. It's one thing to do a physics simulation with 64 bit doubles, and another thing to keep it stable with 32 bit floats. It's an art and not for the shallow thinker talk to real physicists (and gamers) at companies like Havok and MathEngine. As for intel pandering, he ought to read a book like "Platform Leadership" to learn just what Intel have done to get stuff into the hands of peasants like me, for whom Cray did diddly squat. Scientists? Hah!
I already have intra-ocular lenses in both eyes, and I'm in my forties. Left eye since 2000, right eye since 1997. I was -4D myopic, so being able to swim without glasses is cool (unfortunately my hindbrain tries to compensate for not being able to gawp at interesting bodies as a teeneager). Left eye needed a laser to burn away cells that grew back, right eye cells are off the visual axis. Left eye is -0.25D, good for distances from infinity down to about a metre, right eye -1.0D good down to about 30 cm, optimum for computer monitor and reading. I wear glasses for reading and work just to get best quality, fix astigmatism. There is absolutely no ability to focus the IOL like a biological lens at all, zero accommodation, so good lighting is important, because of the pinhole camera effect increasing depth of field. Downside is that if you need the laser tweaks for cell regrowth, it increases chances of retinal detachment (from 1 in 10k to 1 percent, eeek). I was lucky, I had an excellent doctor who explained everything for fun and curiosity. He was extremely doubtful about any procedure on the eyes (eg laser sculpting, slice and dice, and so on) that could be fixed with glasses or contacts.
Talk to a qualified person about your eyes, you only learn what happened to me, your eyes are different to mine.
Whats the point of building a circuit so fast that a signal can only go 3mm in a tick?
You perhaps don't understand scaling. I once built an 11 million gate equivalent box with a volume of about one cubic foot clocked at 16 MHz. It was almost as difficult as it is to design at 160 MHz, because everything was bigger and slower, but the speed of light is non-negotiable. If you were crazy enough to build say a 1 MHz Pentium out of individual transistors, you'd probably have metre length wires, and you'd still be fighting the speed of light.
3mm is a long way at 100GHz. Try to think like an ant, or a microbe.
Well said. It reminds me of a business plan I once cooked up. ESD doesn't always destroy devices, it can degrade their performance right? So you persuade audiophiles with more money than sense, the folks who happily cough up for gold plated connectors, CD clamps, all that voodoo, that ESD is their worst enemy. You sell them gold plated wriststraps, anti-static mats in fancy packaging, leakage testers, the works. All low cost stuff, but at a loony price. All because ESD does have audible effects if it can damage electronics. Of course vacuum tubes are more rugged, but building a CD player out of valves would be scary...
There was more than a little tongue in cheek humour in the thread (that's why "America was born in rebellion" was moderated funny). At the risk of causing offence, part of the joke is that very naivete that the US has, "why doesn't everyone love us".
I'm British, we had an Empire spanning quarter of the globe. Now we're reduced to being the country whose English accent is synonymous with being the bad guy in Hollywood movies. In a century from now, when the American Empire has fallen (and it will, sooner or later, they all have so far), the acid test will be what your ex-colonies think of the values your empire stood for, whay your legacy was. OK, so the American Empire isn't a landgrab like ours was, but I think you get the gist.
My all time favourite is the one you do in the lab where all the points on the graph come out in a straight line without having to (ahem) ignore any that are "obviously errors".
Offtopic, but when Earth came out, I went to buy it in hardback, and by coincidence, David Brin was signing copies in the shop. I was with my daughter in a pushchair, and waited patiently while someone (it seemed to me) bored DB to death about the rumoured sequel to the Uplift trilogy, and how he should write it. When my turn came, eventually (sigh), I mentioned to DB how I'd read someplace how hard is was to do something new when you've been a success with a trilogy, future universe or whatever. He said never to dismiss the stuff that pays the mortgage. The book dedication to my daughter was spot on too. Earth is one of my all time favourite books, and, as depicted in Earth, I fully expect to be a crumbly old fart baby boomer recording everything those pesky kids get up to via my $10 sunglasses in 2038.
Please, will someone moderate the parent of my reply up, for understanding how important early adopters are in shaping what the mass market gets. Word of mouth and a few bad reviews or critical articles makes the hardware companies ask themselves why they are carrying the can for someone else's interests. It's like advertising, but it works the other way round, becasue early adopters are in fact just marketing experiments.
I think it's funny people with more money than sense get buggy products and do the debugging so I can buy the same thing cheaper a year later on, but someone has to do it.:)
It didn't occur to me to limit such action to Slashdot readers alone. That's preaching to the converted. I'd hope someone here might have suggestions about how we could get Joe six-pack and pointy headed bosses to realise this issue is bad news for them.
As someone else said, we'll have to upgrade eventually, but is there a case for simply postponing upgrades just long enough to make a significant dent in the sales figures? Waiting just one more year might be enough. PC market is very sensitive to the fact folks aren't replacing kit as often as they used to.
There isn't much of a problem, really. If it works real bad, it will be abandoned in the end, one way or another. The Soviet Union...
The time between the October Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall was approximately one lifetime. (Go to the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin if you ever have the chance.)
I use a Philips VL1200 (UK, PAL, dunno about rest of world outside EU) to connect downstairs video to upstairs PC WinTV card via its 2.4 GHz wireless link. The signal survives despite the EM noise from the ~1.3 GHz PC, VL1200 only gets huffy if we turn on the 19 year old microwave oven in the kitchen (gulp), or (and this is speculation) when the sodium vapour street lights turn on.
Slashdot Mirror
Just when I get used to KDE or Gnome, get it all working, they change it, and break it. Gnome panel used to sit on my minimal fvwm2 desktop, and worked fine, till one day it wouldn't redraw till you moused it, and with Gnome2 it just didn't have the applets I liked anymore. KD3 worked, and then all the fonts went ape with SuSE81.
I now have fvwm2, cpuload for a CPU meter, asmix for a volume control and wmcalclock for a clock/calendar, and they're sweet, small, I can build from source in two minutes, and they work.
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/breastcancer/
Example quote from a UK site selling PC stuff that mentions warranty on IBM drives
you forgot about this
Grrr. It's one thing to do a physics simulation with 64 bit doubles, and another thing to keep it stable with 32 bit floats. It's an art and not for the shallow thinker talk to real physicists (and gamers) at companies like Havok and MathEngine. As for intel pandering, he ought to read a book like "Platform Leadership" to learn just what Intel have done to get stuff into the hands of peasants like me, for whom Cray did diddly squat. Scientists? Hah!
Why would SuSE open up a box, find the wallet with 8 discs in it, and take out the DVD, leaving the 7 CDs, for a review copy?
If you've never used a Palm before
It's difficult to shake hands without one
I already have intra-ocular lenses in both eyes, and I'm in my forties. Left eye since 2000, right eye since 1997. I was -4D myopic, so being able to swim without glasses is cool (unfortunately my hindbrain tries to compensate for not being able to gawp at interesting bodies as a teeneager). Left eye needed a laser to burn away cells that grew back, right eye cells are off the visual axis. Left eye is -0.25D, good for distances from infinity down to about a metre, right eye -1.0D good down to about 30 cm, optimum for computer monitor and reading. I wear glasses for reading and work just to get best quality, fix astigmatism. There is absolutely no ability to focus the IOL like a biological lens at all, zero accommodation, so good lighting is important, because of the pinhole camera effect increasing depth of field. Downside is that if you need the laser tweaks for cell regrowth, it increases chances of retinal detachment (from 1 in 10k to 1 percent, eeek). I was lucky, I had an excellent doctor who explained everything for fun and curiosity. He was extremely doubtful about any procedure on the eyes (eg laser sculpting, slice and dice, and so on) that could be fixed with glasses or contacts. Talk to a qualified person about your eyes, you only learn what happened to me, your eyes are different to mine.
[obPrediction: by 2032, Slashdot will have its own TV show]
Ken MacLeod's Cosmonaut Keep has a throwaway line about not being able to get the news on either CNN or Slashdot.
Whats the point of building a circuit so fast that a signal can only go 3mm in a tick?
You perhaps don't understand scaling. I once built an 11 million gate equivalent box with a volume of about one cubic foot clocked at 16 MHz. It was almost as difficult as it is to design at 160 MHz, because everything was bigger and slower, but the speed of light is non-negotiable. If you were crazy enough to build say a 1 MHz Pentium out of individual transistors, you'd probably have metre length wires, and you'd still be fighting the speed of light.
3mm is a long way at 100GHz. Try to think like an ant, or a microbe.
Well said. It reminds me of a business plan I once cooked up. ESD doesn't always destroy devices, it can degrade their performance right? So you persuade audiophiles with more money than sense, the folks who happily cough up for gold plated connectors, CD clamps, all that voodoo, that ESD is their worst enemy. You sell them gold plated wriststraps, anti-static mats in fancy packaging, leakage testers, the works. All low cost stuff, but at a loony price. All because ESD does have audible effects if it can damage electronics. Of course vacuum tubes are more rugged, but building a CD player out of valves would be scary ...
There was more than a little tongue in cheek humour in the thread (that's why "America was born in rebellion" was moderated funny). At the risk of causing offence, part of the joke is that very naivete that the US has, "why doesn't everyone love us".
I'm British, we had an Empire spanning quarter of the globe. Now we're reduced to being the country whose English accent is synonymous with being the bad guy in Hollywood movies. In a century from now, when the American Empire has fallen (and it will, sooner or later, they all have so far), the acid test will be what your ex-colonies think of the values your empire stood for, whay your legacy was. OK, so the American Empire isn't a landgrab like ours was, but I think you get the gist.
My all time favourite is the one you do in the lab where all the points on the graph come out in a straight line without having to (ahem) ignore any that are "obviously errors".
America was born in rebellion
So was the Soviet Union. Duh.
Offtopic, but when Earth came out, I went to buy it in hardback, and by coincidence, David Brin was signing copies in the shop. I was with my daughter in a pushchair, and waited patiently while someone (it seemed to me) bored DB to death about the rumoured sequel to the Uplift trilogy, and how he should write it. When my turn came, eventually (sigh), I mentioned to DB how I'd read someplace how hard is was to do something new when you've been a success with a trilogy, future universe or whatever. He said never to dismiss the stuff that pays the mortgage. The book dedication to my daughter was spot on too. Earth is one of my all time favourite books, and, as depicted in Earth, I fully expect to be a crumbly old fart baby boomer recording everything those pesky kids get up to via my $10 sunglasses in 2038.
Please, will someone moderate the parent of my reply up, for understanding how important early adopters are in shaping what the mass market gets. Word of mouth and a few bad reviews or critical articles makes the hardware companies ask themselves why they are carrying the can for someone else's interests. It's like advertising, but it works the other way round, becasue early adopters are in fact just marketing experiments.
I think it's funny people with more money than sense get buggy products and do the debugging so I can buy the same thing cheaper a year later on, but someone has to do it. :)
Luxury
Your comment was too verbose. You just scream and leap.
It didn't occur to me to limit such action to Slashdot readers alone. That's preaching to the converted. I'd hope someone here might have suggestions about how we could get Joe six-pack and pointy headed bosses to realise this issue is bad news for them.
As someone else said, we'll have to upgrade eventually, but is there a case for simply postponing upgrades just long enough to make a significant dent in the sales figures? Waiting just one more year might be enough. PC market is very sensitive to the fact folks aren't replacing kit as often as they used to.
There isn't much of a problem, really. If it works real bad, it will be abandoned in the end, one way or another. The Soviet Union ...
The time between the October Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall was approximately one lifetime. (Go to the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin if you ever have the chance.)
Looks bad for digital cameras doesn't it?
feed into my WinTV card
I use a Philips VL1200 (UK, PAL, dunno about rest of world outside EU) to connect downstairs video to upstairs PC WinTV card via its 2.4 GHz wireless link. The signal survives despite the EM noise from the ~1.3 GHz PC, VL1200 only gets huffy if we turn on the 19 year old microwave oven in the kitchen (gulp), or (and this is speculation) when the sodium vapour street lights turn on.
This Gorgeous Quote
Hurrah! Well said. I hope someone mods you up to a modest +1 so your post is visible.