> If they want solar to REALLY catch on someone is going to need to develop not just a cost-effective solar cell, but also a > cost-effective way to store and reuse the energy collected during the day.
Agreed. Flywheels seem like a nice solution to that problem. Of course, next thing we'll know they'll be writing about "torque pollution";-)
Ever heard of chaos theory? I wonder what happens when the initial conditions in a chaotic system map straight onto something governed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Would you call THAT random?
(Full disclosure, I've been using Debian since 1996. I'm backporting packages to stable as I write this, so I'm definitely not coming from a "one size fits all" perspective.)
If there is one thing that appeals to me about Gentoo (as I understand it), it's the concept of meta-configuration at build time. Unfortunately, lots of options in packages get configured at BUILD TIME, so either the binary packages have those options on, or they don't. When this is the case, if the distro doesn't provide multiple binary packages with all of the useful configurations, then you end up having to build from source. (IMO, building from source means compiling from source packages whenever possible.)
So I like the concept of saying in one place, "build for KDE", "build with ssl support", "build with ldap support", etc. Maybe someday everything will be runtime configurable, but until that day, I'll be wishing for that meta-level of configuration...
Having said all of that, check out apt-source, apt-build, and their ilk if you're interested in "Debian from source". Debian binary packages solve about 97% of my problems so I'm not usually looking for "make world" kind of functionality.
There are a lot of comments about "the Pentium M came out ahead in most benchmarks". That's true of the graphics benchmarks using an AGP video card. (Which is curious given the speed difference of the FSB in each setup.) I do have to wonder how this is relevant in a test that is supposed to be comparing laptop performance, where there isn't generally an option to upgrade the graphics. Maybe this suggests that to get a relevant comparison between laptops, you need to benchmark the actual systems you're comparing - duh!
The "cpu only" benchmark results are mixed. The 2M cache on the Pentium looks like a real win, but the AMD still 'wins' a number of tests. As always, the conclusion seems to be 'you need to test with your own applications to see which will work better for you'...
> No, even photovoltaic solar panels aren't passive. They prevent energy that would > reaching the ground from doing so, altering the energy balance there.
That's why putting them on the roofs of buildings makes sense (IMHO). You've already disrupted the environment in that spot, and you can locally consume the power...
[snip] > 1. They run a full OS. The device and software are Turing complete, [/snip]
First one to implement a TCP/IP stack on hardware that isn't turing complete at some level of abstraction (or can't be configured to be - I'm thinking FGPAs here) wins a virtual cookie.
You might want to check out this article about Trails when you get a chance. Trails uses the some of the more interesting J2EE frameworks - (Hibernate, Spring, and Tapestry being some of the key pieces) to create something quite like Ruby on Rails but with Java under the hood... In the interest of full disclosure, I know the creator of Trails from my old Java user's group in Cincinnati.
> Also of interest is the software these NASA people use.
I worked (as a consultant) on this team. Development was done in Eclipse on Windows, using (x)emacs, ant, etc and/or eclipse on Linux and Solaris, using Apple's IDE on Mac. Basically the developers used whatever they were effective with, that's one nice part about using a cross-platform language.
> Maybe he's changed since then, and maybe the attitude problem was more one of poor communication than of obnoxiousness
Branden has really mellowed out a lot over the years. He did a decent job communicating as treasurer of SPI[1], and I think he is ready for the role of DPL. Time will tell, of course, but I find his initial email encouraging.
[1] SPI has had several "accounting scandals", info is publically available if you're interested. Some people want to lay the blame at Branden's feet, but IMHO it was a situation that he inherited, not one of his own making.
> KTerm was far behing xterm, unless XTerm has a large buffer, since it seems to slow down linearly with buffer size.
If by "KTerm" you mean Konsole, I will say that it was only recently that I could switch to Konsole - probably KDE 3.2.x because it used to be too slow. It's now indistinguishable compared to xterm in my opinion. Mapping multiple sessions to ALT-F1-F6 like the linux console inside of konsole makes it more functional than xterm... I've switched for good.
(Although for remote sessions I've still be using xterm. Any good tips for remote konsoles, anyone?)
I have a Shuttle SN95G5. It's very cool and quiet. I've got a Winchester core Athlon 64 3200+, which is supposedly lower power than the older cores. All I know is the machine is fast, cool, and quiet. (Unlike the grandparent post, I have only one hard disk in this machine so I have not seen any cooling issues.)
We have one in our kitchen. It's decent. It looks nice, it doesn't take up a lot space. We have the keyboard mounted under a counter - it's got an integrated pointing device. The downside is that it's really not upgradeable as it has mostly non-standard parts.
You can find them on ebay. Not cheap, but not crazy expensive either.
Building one seems like a neat idea, but using a laptop seems like such overkill to me, in terms of processing power and power requirements.
Is there some solution like the EtherNut that can also drive a flat panel display? And where to get a decent deal on a flat panel? If I'm builing a picture frame, bigger is better! I guess displays up to 1280x1024 have dropped in price a fair amount, but what about more resolution than that?
Some ThinkPads have got some nice resolution in a small format screen - anyone have a good source for those? (I know, I know, probably ebay!) I suppose in the end the cheapest solution is going to be a whole laptop from ebay... Perhaps diskless and underclocked to reduce the power consumption and heat generation. Anyone tried that?
> So, you poor Wikipedians, finish your sorry library project and create something much more unique.
I don't know... I decided to take a quick look at everything2 because I had not before, and wikipedia impresses me every time I check it out. I happen to come from Marion, OH, home of Warren G. Harding. (Sure, the rest of the planet thinks the guy was a terrible president but in Marion he's a home town boy and worshipped!) Anyways, I looked him up on both. I have to say that the Wikipedia Article looks much nicer than the the Everything2 article, contains more info, links, etc... I'd be happy to see a counter-example though!
>> and water will heat the coffee to 145 degrees > wow, thats pretty hot.. or are you still using fahrenheits?
I think that superheated steam will wake you up more effectively than regular old caffeine, don't you?! The big problem, of course, is making the pressurized "coffee steam vessel" affordable.;-)
So can I build my own Matrix-like movie with this, and merge myself in as an actor? I would be an interesting twist to home movies to merge 3d animations and real video!
> I would recomend using unstable rather than testing.
In general I agree with you - there's usually not much point to running testing. But given the imminent freeze and upcoming release of sarge, testing is a good place to be right now. In fact, running it is one of the only ways to help debug the sarge release... Getting lots of people to do live upgrades and file bug reports when they have problems is important to having the best new stable release possible.
I've been running stable (woody) since it came out, and it has served me well. I started using Adrian Bunk's backports, and then selected things from backports.org... Then I upgraded to KDE from downloads.kde.org, and then openoffice from some other backport collection. Amazingly enough, this collection of software worked well enough for me.
I recently took the plunge and converted a couple of machines to testing (soon to be sarge). First thing I will say is that even with all of the backports, the upgrade went very smoothly. And I'll also say that sarge is working well for me; so well that I've installed it on several other machines using the new debian-installer rc candidates, and that has worked flawlessly for me as well!
As soon as security update support is up and running for testing, anyone remotely interested in sarge should consider upgrading and filing bug reports as appropriate. This is how you can help speed up the "real" release of sarge!
And I do think that when sarge comes out, it's going to be an excellent platform. It is so much nicer about hardware autodetection, font handling, and about a million other things... Without losing any of the old things that you love about Debian.
Lets hope that the next stable release doesn't take too long, although given Debian's nature, it's hard to see how it won't... Assuming the official compiler moves to gcc 3.4 (or the upcoming 4.0), then there is going to be another painful transition for all of those C++ applications. Hopefully someday g++ will have a stable C++ ABI and those transitions won't be an issue for projects shipping C++ libraries... (This was one of the major issues for getting KDE into unstable earlier this year.)
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> If they want solar to REALLY catch on someone is going to need to develop not just a cost-effective solar cell, but also a
;-)
> cost-effective way to store and reuse the energy collected during the day.
Agreed. Flywheels seem like a nice solution to that problem. Of course, next thing we'll know they'll be writing about "torque pollution"
Ever heard of chaos theory? I wonder what happens when the initial conditions in a chaotic system map straight onto something governed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Would you call THAT random?
(Full disclosure, I've been using Debian since 1996. I'm backporting packages to stable as I write this, so I'm definitely not coming from a "one size fits all" perspective.)
If there is one thing that appeals to me about Gentoo (as I understand it), it's the concept of meta-configuration at build time. Unfortunately, lots of options in packages get configured at BUILD TIME, so either the binary packages have those options on, or they don't. When this is the case, if the distro doesn't provide multiple binary packages with all of the useful configurations, then you end up having to build from source. (IMO, building from source means compiling from source packages whenever possible.)
So I like the concept of saying in one place, "build for KDE", "build with ssl support", "build with ldap support", etc. Maybe someday everything will be runtime configurable, but until that day, I'll be wishing for that meta-level of configuration...
Having said all of that, check out apt-source, apt-build, and their ilk if you're interested in "Debian from source". Debian binary packages solve about 97% of my problems so I'm not usually looking for "make world" kind of functionality.
Enough rambling for now.
There are a lot of comments about "the Pentium M came out ahead in most benchmarks". That's true of the graphics benchmarks using an AGP video card. (Which is curious given the speed difference of the FSB in each setup.) I do have to wonder how this is relevant in a test that is supposed to be comparing laptop performance, where there isn't generally an option to upgrade the graphics. Maybe this suggests that to get a relevant comparison between laptops, you need to benchmark the actual systems you're comparing - duh!
The "cpu only" benchmark results are mixed. The 2M cache on the Pentium looks like a real win, but the AMD still 'wins' a number of tests. As always, the conclusion seems to be 'you need to test with your own applications to see which will work better for you'...
> No, even photovoltaic solar panels aren't passive. They prevent energy that would
> reaching the ground from doing so, altering the energy balance there.
That's why putting them on the roofs of buildings makes sense (IMHO). You've already disrupted the environment in that spot, and you can locally consume the power...
[snip]
> 1. They run a full OS. The device and software are Turing complete,
[/snip]
First one to implement a TCP/IP stack on hardware that isn't turing complete at some level of abstraction (or can't be configured to be - I'm thinking FGPAs here) wins a virtual cookie.
You might want to check out this article about Trails when you get a chance. Trails uses the some of the more interesting J2EE frameworks - (Hibernate, Spring, and Tapestry being some of the key pieces) to create something quite like Ruby on Rails but with Java under the hood... In the interest of full disclosure, I know the creator of Trails from my old Java user's group in Cincinnati.
> Also of interest is the software these NASA people use.
I worked (as a consultant) on this team. Development was done in Eclipse on Windows, using (x)emacs, ant, etc and/or eclipse on Linux and Solaris, using Apple's IDE on Mac. Basically the developers used whatever they were effective with, that's one nice part about using a cross-platform language.
> Maybe he's changed since then, and maybe the attitude problem was more one of poor communication than of obnoxiousness
Branden has really mellowed out a lot over the years. He did a decent job communicating as treasurer of SPI[1], and I think he is ready for the role of DPL. Time will tell, of course, but I find his initial email encouraging.
[1] SPI has had several "accounting scandals", info is publically available if you're interested. Some people want to lay the blame at Branden's feet, but IMHO it was a situation that he inherited, not one of his own making.
> GCC 4.0 features an entirely new C++ parser. The new parser is tremendously faster than the one in GCC 3.3
[snip]
But it's the same parser as g++ 3.4. It is faster (and fixes bugs) compared to g++ 3.3, but calling it "tremendously faster" seems a bit of stretch.
> KTerm was far behing xterm, unless XTerm has a large buffer, since it seems to slow down linearly with buffer size.
If by "KTerm" you mean Konsole, I will say that it was only recently that I could switch to Konsole - probably KDE 3.2.x because it used to be too slow. It's now indistinguishable compared to xterm in my opinion. Mapping multiple sessions to ALT-F1-F6 like the linux console inside of konsole makes it more functional than xterm... I've switched for good.
(Although for remote sessions I've still be using xterm. Any good tips for remote konsoles, anyone?)
> Before you buy one of these dual-core processors for your server, make sure that your software vendor isn't going to double your price on you.
/usr/share/common-licenses and I didn't find anything in there like that. Even if the prices doubled, $2*0 is still OK with me.
I looked in
Gotta love free software.
I have a Shuttle SN95G5. It's very cool and quiet. I've got a Winchester core Athlon 64 3200+, which is supposedly lower power than the older cores. All I know is the machine is fast, cool, and quiet. (Unlike the grandparent post, I have only one hard disk in this machine so I have not seen any cooling issues.)
> When Mankind can prove it can live in equilibrium oni Earth, then it can spread elsewhere.
What do we do when we prove we can't then?!
We have one in our kitchen. It's decent. It looks nice, it doesn't take up a lot space. We have the keyboard mounted under a counter - it's got an integrated pointing device. The downside is that it's really not upgradeable as it has mostly non-standard parts.
You can find them on ebay. Not cheap, but not crazy expensive either.
Those actually look like the Duplo-size MegaBloks...
Building one seems like a neat idea, but using a laptop seems like such overkill to me, in terms of processing power and power requirements.
Is there some solution like the EtherNut that can also drive a flat panel display? And where to get a decent deal on a flat panel? If I'm builing a picture frame, bigger is better! I guess displays up to 1280x1024 have dropped in price a fair amount, but what about more resolution than that?
Some ThinkPads have got some nice resolution in a small format screen - anyone have a good source for those? (I know, I know, probably ebay!) I suppose in the end the cheapest solution is going to be a whole laptop from ebay... Perhaps diskless and underclocked to reduce the power consumption and heat generation. Anyone tried that?
> So, you poor Wikipedians, finish your sorry library project and create something much more unique.
I don't know... I decided to take a quick look at everything2 because I had not before, and wikipedia impresses me every time I check it out. I happen to come from Marion, OH, home of Warren G. Harding. (Sure, the rest of the planet thinks the guy was a terrible president but in Marion he's a home town boy and worshipped!) Anyways, I looked him up on both. I have to say that the Wikipedia Article looks much nicer than the the Everything2 article, contains more info, links, etc... I'd be happy to see a counter-example though!
>> and water will heat the coffee to 145 degrees
;-)
> wow, thats pretty hot.. or are you still using fahrenheits?
I think that superheated steam will wake you up more effectively than regular old caffeine, don't you?! The big problem, of course, is making the pressurized "coffee steam vessel" affordable.
> You *could* have done that with Blender already instead of waiting for a blob tool that's too inaccurate for those purposes.
Sure, I could have but could my kids?
So can I build my own Matrix-like movie with this, and merge myself in as an actor? I would be an interesting twist to home movies to merge 3d animations and real video!
> Best of all, this provides for an excellent place for storing artifacts and the like and in setting shop.
Until I walk up with a pair of scissors, or better yet, a box cutter.
> I would recomend using unstable rather than testing.
In general I agree with you - there's usually not much point to running testing. But given the imminent freeze and upcoming release of sarge, testing is a good place to be right now. In fact, running it is one of the only ways to help debug the sarge release... Getting lots of people to do live upgrades and file bug reports when they have problems is important to having the best new stable release possible.
Read the article...
It's not support for security for testing in general, but in preparation for the release of sarge.
I've been running stable (woody) since it came out, and it has served me well. I started using Adrian Bunk's backports, and then selected things from backports.org... Then I upgraded to KDE from downloads.kde.org, and then openoffice from some other backport collection. Amazingly enough, this collection of software worked well enough for me.
I recently took the plunge and converted a couple of machines to testing (soon to be sarge). First thing I will say is that even with all of the backports, the upgrade went very smoothly. And I'll also say that sarge is working well for me; so well that I've installed it on several other machines using the new debian-installer rc candidates, and that has worked flawlessly for me as well!
As soon as security update support is up and running for testing, anyone remotely interested in sarge should consider upgrading and filing bug reports as appropriate. This is how you can help speed up the "real" release of sarge!
And I do think that when sarge comes out, it's going to be an excellent platform. It is so much nicer about hardware autodetection, font handling, and about a million other things... Without losing any of the old things that you love about Debian.
Lets hope that the next stable release doesn't take too long, although given Debian's nature, it's hard to see how it won't... Assuming the official compiler moves to gcc 3.4 (or the upcoming 4.0), then there is going to be another painful transition for all of those C++ applications. Hopefully someday g++ will have a stable C++ ABI and those transitions won't be an issue for projects shipping C++ libraries... (This was one of the major issues for getting KDE into unstable earlier this year.)