What the fuck are you talking about? SPEC runs functions on both the integer and floating point units that are taken from a wide array of common funtions. There's a bunch of crap flooding the waves about SPEC but the whole point of SPEC is you can do anything you want to optimize performance EXCEPT alter the actual source code. SPEC doesn't use SSE or 3DNow! instructions just like it doesn't use AltiVec. The G4 is a good performer but this crap about SPEC benchmarks has become ludicrous. C't did a shitty benchmarking job but it isn't the fault of SPEC or the tests. If you want to blame x86 bias look to the compilers. It's tough to find a proper PPC C compiler let alone a proper Fortran PPC compiler.
If you want liability for software kiss the GPL goodbye and look forward a stifling of developmental progress in software. Under a liability law the GPL would be unenforcible because it provides that the author is in no way responsible for the software you're using. One of the two isn't going to work out and I think the liability law would have a little more clout. That is assuming people even develop software anymore. I'm not going to put myself in a position to get sued because of a bug in my software. I'm not going to go through the hassle and effort to try to start my own business if any software we write is going to lead to our legal raping because we couldn't possibly squash all the bugs in our code.
The GPL and free software in general would be forced the way of the Dodo. If your license couldn't absolve you from responsibility for your code fucking up a whole tenet of the GPL would be meaningless. Besides being impossible to develop no one would continue to use it. If the possibility for a software glitch to cause monetary damage are you going to pick a vendor you can sue or can't sue? Managers are going to go with the folks they can slap a lawsuit against in order to recoup damages. Why would you use an open source application in which a bug could cause you millions in damages that you couldn't recoup? The only reason managers go with open source software now is they can't sue vendors of proprietary software for bugs so they go with the lower TCO (whichever option that is).
It is also ridiculous to compare an operating system like Windows to some RTOS or firmware system that control hazardous equipment. Windows and Linux aren't designed for use in hazardous environments. They also are not cleared to operate on certain pieces of equipment. If a system doesn't pass a safety inspection it isn't going to get sold. A heart monitor isn't going to run Linux and the control equipment for a nuclear reactor is not going to have Clippy morphing into a bicycle.
Which means no one would use open source software. If you've got two competing products, one open and one closed. The possibility of a bug in the application will lead to millions of dollars in damages. You know this from the beginning. With a liability law, even a lopsided one like you suggestion in place, a company is going to go with the closed solution. Why? Because if you know a bug will cost millions of dollars you're going to go with the product you've got a chance of recouping damages with. You'll pick the software with a vendor you can sue. Bah source code shmorse code, the cost of fixing potential problems in code in damn high if it is done well. You've also got the fact that you can never squash all bugs in software. Yet again the user of Free software gets shafted, not only can they not sue the vendor for a million dollar bug but they also have to spend their own money in order to try to fix it.
Gofuckyou*self. You had a valid point until you said I ought not complain because you didn't. I have the 333 Lombard as well and I'm sorry but OSX is NOT usable on it. I don't have time to sit around waiting for a menu to drop down or for OmniWeb to finih rendering a page after scrolling down a couple of lines. Videos that playied fine in OS9 on Quicktime skipped and sputtered in X and iTunes couldn't seem to keep itself working properly. Office v.X didn't run very fast either, maybe I just type too fast because I was constantly waiting for it to catch up with me, Office 98 in OS9 never had that problem and neither did AppleWorks in OS9. Right now I'm stuck with a copy of Office v.X I can't use until some point in the future when I get a new Mac.
The problem isn't my Lombard being slow, the problem is OSX not supporting any of the hardware in it worth shit. There's no support for the graphics card so I had to run in 16 bit colour mode or else spend all my time waiting for windows and menus to render. OSX would have been four times more usable if there was a "turn off all the fucking Bezier curve graphics" button that would have taken me back to a Platinum interface.
It's called HFS and splits a file into three parts, called forks. The data fork contains the actual file information, the resource fork contains information about that information, and desktop information entry tells Finder about the file. The resource and data forks are the cool part. The resource fork allows for pretty much what you suggest. You can fairly easily grep data about a file in order to find a particular file or set of files in a directory. Where can one find HFS? The good ol' Mac.
It is really interesting to see Linux users of all people berating HURD for whatever perceived faults it has. This of course has come to be the expected response. For those of you berating HURD, do you realize what operating system you're a proponent of? A couple years ago if you said Linux someone thought you had sneezed. It is really ridiculous to sit back and spout off about why HURD will fail. If someone says the same of Linux you mod them down to -1 or piss your pants and curse their immortal soul. For supposedly intelligent and enlightened folk you're pretty stupid.
I see HURD as a pretty cool system, though I am bias as I'm a fan of micro-kernel designs by the virtue of being more configurable than monolithic kernels. If you don't like a component, you know what interfaces it uses so you can go and write your own to better suit your needs. You could write a scheduler and memory management system that was more specific to the needs of a web server or database or graphical workstation or what have you. That strikes me as particularly extensible and flexible, something which is a tenet of Free Software. HURD of course isn't perfect and could have gone with a faster MK like L4 but Mach was the big deal MK wise at the time so it was designed around it. It could be ported or rewirtten entirely for L4 which may actually happen if it hits real production quality. If it does see the light of day this year, a day on which much money will exchange hands, it will have a nice system to sit on top of it in the form of Debian HURD. It would give HURD a definite validity, as much at least as Debian has in the eyes of its users and proponents. Shit most people could use Debian on top of HURD and not know they weren't actually running Linux.
On the topic of the WindowsNT MK, it really is a micro-kernel design but with a few modifications to the implimentation in order to get better performance at the cost of modularity and in some cases stability. The NT Executive instead of passing everything through the kernel to the hardware the I/O manager talks directly to the hardware. The Executive Services are also running in kernel space rather than user space so a problem with them can lead to the kernel locking up. The source of most BSoDs in WinNT are these direct links to hardware and the device drivers running in kernel space. A fucked device driver leads to the entire system going down in some cases. I imagine Microsoft went this route with NT because it was originally designed to run on the 386 which was a slow bitch when it came to context switching, a Machier kernel would have just been too dog slow on it. It isn't so much a cheap hack as it is a decision to actually get a product out the door rather than wait for hardware to improve and propogate.
I'm not asking my Mac to live forever, I don't even have that old of a Mac. I have a Lombard Powerbook. Will I get seven years out of it? I sure fucking hope so. Will I get seven years out of it with OSX? Not likely unless Apple pulls a rabbit out of their ass. OSX is a dog on older hardware, hardware mind you, that is only one or two years old. There's a class action lawsuit against Apple right now that they lied about OSX's ability to run on their G3 based systems. Contrary to what Linux users believe, a kernel does not mean you have a functional computer. The original poster IS segregating the community as he has decided to talk only with those with OSX because it wooed him over to a Macintosh. That borders on ridiculousness. I hate whining bitches who whine about other people whining.
Congrats you've got a ton of money to throw down on a new Mac. However don't go and say Mac loyalists resisting the New Way are a bewildered bunch. You've not used a Mac for several years only to have the virtual carpet tugged under you and then told your hardware isn't going to run the new OS. There's people who've been using subsequent versions of MacOS of system they've had for five years and even more. I'm not about to plunk down another couple thousand dollars just to be able to run OS X, OS9 and LinuxPPC have the stuff I need. By segregating yourself from the older Mac community you're missing out on a good deal. I guess it is true that converts make the best fanatics.
This is even true in telcom diagrams in textbooks and so forth "oh yeah the backup cable is strung alongside the main wire". Woe to he that wonders aloud why the backup wiring runs along side the main wiring.
A Linux utopia brought about by a bigger monopoly than Microsoft? What in the fuck are you thinking? Wow great it is a Linux kernel and an entirely AOL-ized environment on top of it, not GNU tools, just the Linux kernel between the AOl environment and the hardware. That would be just awesome. You go from Windows to AOL-OS. The great caveat is in order to use AOL-OS you need to be an AOL/TW subscriber for x dollars a month. Man I certainly can't wait to live in your retarded Linux utopia. Please let it come soon!
The point of PGP was nobody used the command line interface. If I can't drag my keyring onto a window and have the program import it then I'm not fucking using it.
Actually the bombs dropped in WW2 were much much dirtier than the small tactial nukes we have now. It isn't like there is an environmentally clean nuclear weapon or anything but I definitely think your argument is backwards. A modern tactical weapon would have far less impact on subsequent generations than the first generation weapons used 60 years ago.
It means they are legally exempt from rampant idiocy. Java's SDK says the same thing. The GPL generalizes it more saying the author is responsible in no way for the software. Regulations for nuclear control equipment and medical devices only allow for qualifying software to be run on such devices, being stated in the EULA on Windows and many other programs is merely compliance with these regulations.
Actually it means GCC is 30% faster than Visual Studio's compiler which is notoriously shitty. You're also basing your aguement on too few details. You don't know which compiler flags were used so you can't compare -O3 optimized code to VS optimized code. The VS compiler is not the world's greatest compiler and I think they should have gone with the Borland C++ compiler for Windows. Your compiler makes a big difference in the speed at which code is going to run.
A couple years ago I read about a similar thread of research concerning fractal antennas. You can eiter have an array of fractal elements or a single wire bent into a fractal shape. With the array of elements you can get the range and reception qualities of a random antenna array and still have an efficient system like a regular array. With a single wire you it ends up needing only a fraction of the space it needed before for the same length wire. You can fit a half wavelength dipole inside the housing of the phone quite easily. Jagging the shape of the wire introduces natural capacitance and inductance so less external equipment is needed to tune the antenna. IIRC the single wire antennas used Koch curves. The people who started the research on them formed a company called Fractal Antenna Systems who are trying to work with eantenna manufacturers. Sych antennas could be molded into the plastic case of a cell phone AND be 20% more efficient. A link to Koch curves (java is a good thing to have) is here. I don't remember which SciAm article I read the story from but I think it was in 1999.
Part of Alan Cox's job requirement is to blow smoke up the ass of Linux users. "Of course we're going to win the battle for the desktop" as if he is going to tell you how inane that idea is. The rallying cry is to oust Windows from the world of desktop PCs and stand up for...yadda yadda. It isn't going to happen, any chance Linux ever gets to be TRUELY mainstream is going to fail because it is going to trip over all the fucking baggage it is going to be carrying with it. Drop the baggage and you get alot leaner and more robust.
The interface is baggage, the toolset is baggage, and most certainly the fanatical religious users are baggage. The command line is a good tool, it makes sense with a computer in fact. For some people typing commands is much faster than pointing and clicking can ever be. Just for the sake of geek tradition should these commands be two or three letter abbriviations that often times don't make sense in the slightest? No. Natural language is what a GUI is all about, icons take the place of more complex structures because they are easier to understand and deal with. The same ought to be true of console shells, the language I would use to tell someone to do something should be damn similar to the one I tell a computer to do something. The GNU tools are old, the concept is worn out get the fucking net. Archaic interfaces are fine for technical folks who've got little else to do than worry about the intricacies of interfacing with a computer. They don't fly with people who don't give a fuck.
Linux stories are always about Linux playing catch up and pulling hopeful statistics out of the ass of someone. Alan makes a comment about a site replacing computers with 20,000 Linux based systems. Oh wow.02% of Windows PCs. Hot damn someone call someone! The day Linux stops playing catch up to the rest of the world is the day is does something impressive. Open source has been shown to work when it comes to developing a complex project (not to say it is the only way that works or is even an efficient way, it merely works) but in order to make a difference you need to be innovative! Like I said drop the baggage and you'll get somewhere. Repackaging the same old shit and calling it version 2.0 is the SAME thing commercial software vendors get berated for yet the irony is lost on Linux users.
Where the fuck are you getting this from? It wasn't like the music industry had some sort of epiphany as disco was dying out and signed any "real" music acts. The music industry is ALL about fads and always has been. Occupying the same charts as Abba and the BeeGees were Aerosmith and KISS. The big music companies sign bands for dollar signs, not artistic expression. Real music acts, you must not have gotten out much in the 80s. Every couple years the record industry shits out another brick for consumption by those who want to be the status quo. Those who don't go for one fad will go for another fad, those not wishing to be part of any of the other fads will find yet another fad to mode themselves into. There's fads and minifads. The only way you're ever going to not be part of a fad is if you sit at home and make your own music by farting on a snare drum which will probably itself become a fad. If you don't want veiled references to sexual acts you better just turn off the radio. Music is and always will be (hopefully) filled with sexual inuendo.
Read the fucking law. If you own a copyright you have to actively defend it, if you don't your copyright is lost and you're up the creek without a fucking canoe. For all the bitching slashdot reading Linux fanboys do about the evils of copyrights they know jack shit about them. The next version of eBooks will probably have a better encryption scheme than ROT13 but the fact they had ANY protection is enough to pursue someone in court. Circumventing even light protection is plenty to bring a case against someone because it tacitly proves intent to commit the crime and thus in civil court satisfies the requirement of more likely than not.
I don't think Linux becoming popular makes Andy Tenenbaum wrong about micro kernels. Linux got popular because it was free (always good for poor college students), ran on their 386 computers (yet again a shot in the arm from poor college students), and somebody got the bright idea of porting the GNU toolset onto it making it a functional cheap Unix-like OS that ran on cheap computers. I think had Minix been more libre licensing slashdot geeks would be chanting Andy's name rather than Linus's. Windows NT, MacOS X, and BeOS are good examples of how Andy hit the nail on the head talking kernel architecture. BeOS was technically cool but poor marketing and Microsoft and Apple heavy handing killed it. Kinda off topic I know.
You can also use features in Mozilla, Konqueror, and IE to save content for offline browsing. It isn't an actual method to speed up your connection to websites but it does let you browse stuff pretty quickly. You can wait for everything to save to disk while making coffee or using the john and come back to do your browsing. One of the cool aspects of Ximian Evolution is the RDP news linker. Now if only Arts and Letters would put up an RDP too!
But this is not Russia, Elcomsoft was selling their product here in the US which got them in trouble. If you have corporate representation in a country you are bound by their laws. I'd have to accord with Russia's laws if I were conducting business there. Elcomsoft had a business office in the US and thus their product needs to follow the laws in this country. If you have a retail store in California do you think you can say your company is based in New Hampshire so you don't have to pay sales tax? Not quite. In Russia Elcomsoft would have a case but here they don't. It's sad Elcomsoft has to be the figurehead of the anti-DMCA. They are not a poor defenseless company whom have been thrown to the lions by big bad Adobe, they make spam software and software to circumvent the copyright protection on eBooks supposedly to be in accordance of Russian law. However why sell this in the US? Seems it provides a means to fuck over eBook publishers to me. I don't see a valid use other than warezing copies of eBooks. Boohoo poor Elcomsoft.
Web accelerators are bunko. While there are a few tricks one can pull to get the most out of their internet connection you're not going to make it magically 3x faster by any means. Optimizing MTU settings and using some HTTP tricks to max out your available bandwidth might garner you a kilobyte every once in a while nobody is going to able to give you a 3x increase on your POTS modem. If you want an apparent speed increase either beef up the disk space allocated to your browser's cache. You can also find download accelerators that will use multiple simulteneous HTTP connections to the same server for the same file and with the packets arriving out of order the accelerator combines them into a single contiguous file. It is nowhere near a 3x increase though.
Slashdot Mirror
What the fuck are you talking about? SPEC runs functions on both the integer and floating point units that are taken from a wide array of common funtions. There's a bunch of crap flooding the waves about SPEC but the whole point of SPEC is you can do anything you want to optimize performance EXCEPT alter the actual source code. SPEC doesn't use SSE or 3DNow! instructions just like it doesn't use AltiVec. The G4 is a good performer but this crap about SPEC benchmarks has become ludicrous. C't did a shitty benchmarking job but it isn't the fault of SPEC or the tests. If you want to blame x86 bias look to the compilers. It's tough to find a proper PPC C compiler let alone a proper Fortran PPC compiler.
If you are the vendor you can be sued. Was I not clear enough?
If you want liability for software kiss the GPL goodbye and look forward a stifling of developmental progress in software. Under a liability law the GPL would be unenforcible because it provides that the author is in no way responsible for the software you're using. One of the two isn't going to work out and I think the liability law would have a little more clout. That is assuming people even develop software anymore. I'm not going to put myself in a position to get sued because of a bug in my software. I'm not going to go through the hassle and effort to try to start my own business if any software we write is going to lead to our legal raping because we couldn't possibly squash all the bugs in our code.
The GPL and free software in general would be forced the way of the Dodo. If your license couldn't absolve you from responsibility for your code fucking up a whole tenet of the GPL would be meaningless. Besides being impossible to develop no one would continue to use it. If the possibility for a software glitch to cause monetary damage are you going to pick a vendor you can sue or can't sue? Managers are going to go with the folks they can slap a lawsuit against in order to recoup damages. Why would you use an open source application in which a bug could cause you millions in damages that you couldn't recoup? The only reason managers go with open source software now is they can't sue vendors of proprietary software for bugs so they go with the lower TCO (whichever option that is).
It is also ridiculous to compare an operating system like Windows to some RTOS or firmware system that control hazardous equipment. Windows and Linux aren't designed for use in hazardous environments. They also are not cleared to operate on certain pieces of equipment. If a system doesn't pass a safety inspection it isn't going to get sold. A heart monitor isn't going to run Linux and the control equipment for a nuclear reactor is not going to have Clippy morphing into a bicycle.
Which means no one would use open source software. If you've got two competing products, one open and one closed. The possibility of a bug in the application will lead to millions of dollars in damages. You know this from the beginning. With a liability law, even a lopsided one like you suggestion in place, a company is going to go with the closed solution. Why? Because if you know a bug will cost millions of dollars you're going to go with the product you've got a chance of recouping damages with. You'll pick the software with a vendor you can sue. Bah source code shmorse code, the cost of fixing potential problems in code in damn high if it is done well. You've also got the fact that you can never squash all bugs in software. Yet again the user of Free software gets shafted, not only can they not sue the vendor for a million dollar bug but they also have to spend their own money in order to try to fix it.
Gofuckyou*self. You had a valid point until you said I ought not complain because you didn't. I have the 333 Lombard as well and I'm sorry but OSX is NOT usable on it. I don't have time to sit around waiting for a menu to drop down or for OmniWeb to finih rendering a page after scrolling down a couple of lines. Videos that playied fine in OS9 on Quicktime skipped and sputtered in X and iTunes couldn't seem to keep itself working properly. Office v.X didn't run very fast either, maybe I just type too fast because I was constantly waiting for it to catch up with me, Office 98 in OS9 never had that problem and neither did AppleWorks in OS9. Right now I'm stuck with a copy of Office v.X I can't use until some point in the future when I get a new Mac.
The problem isn't my Lombard being slow, the problem is OSX not supporting any of the hardware in it worth shit. There's no support for the graphics card so I had to run in 16 bit colour mode or else spend all my time waiting for windows and menus to render. OSX would have been four times more usable if there was a "turn off all the fucking Bezier curve graphics" button that would have taken me back to a Platinum interface.
It's called HFS and splits a file into three parts, called forks. The data fork contains the actual file information, the resource fork contains information about that information, and desktop information entry tells Finder about the file. The resource and data forks are the cool part. The resource fork allows for pretty much what you suggest. You can fairly easily grep data about a file in order to find a particular file or set of files in a directory. Where can one find HFS? The good ol' Mac.
Kind of like /etc?
It is really interesting to see Linux users of all people berating HURD for whatever perceived faults it has. This of course has come to be the expected response. For those of you berating HURD, do you realize what operating system you're a proponent of? A couple years ago if you said Linux someone thought you had sneezed. It is really ridiculous to sit back and spout off about why HURD will fail. If someone says the same of Linux you mod them down to -1 or piss your pants and curse their immortal soul. For supposedly intelligent and enlightened folk you're pretty stupid.
I see HURD as a pretty cool system, though I am bias as I'm a fan of micro-kernel designs by the virtue of being more configurable than monolithic kernels. If you don't like a component, you know what interfaces it uses so you can go and write your own to better suit your needs. You could write a scheduler and memory management system that was more specific to the needs of a web server or database or graphical workstation or what have you. That strikes me as particularly extensible and flexible, something which is a tenet of Free Software. HURD of course isn't perfect and could have gone with a faster MK like L4 but Mach was the big deal MK wise at the time so it was designed around it. It could be ported or rewirtten entirely for L4 which may actually happen if it hits real production quality. If it does see the light of day this year, a day on which much money will exchange hands, it will have a nice system to sit on top of it in the form of Debian HURD. It would give HURD a definite validity, as much at least as Debian has in the eyes of its users and proponents. Shit most people could use Debian on top of HURD and not know they weren't actually running Linux.
On the topic of the WindowsNT MK, it really is a micro-kernel design but with a few modifications to the implimentation in order to get better performance at the cost of modularity and in some cases stability. The NT Executive instead of passing everything through the kernel to the hardware the I/O manager talks directly to the hardware. The Executive Services are also running in kernel space rather than user space so a problem with them can lead to the kernel locking up. The source of most BSoDs in WinNT are these direct links to hardware and the device drivers running in kernel space. A fucked device driver leads to the entire system going down in some cases. I imagine Microsoft went this route with NT because it was originally designed to run on the 386 which was a slow bitch when it came to context switching, a Machier kernel would have just been too dog slow on it. It isn't so much a cheap hack as it is a decision to actually get a product out the door rather than wait for hardware to improve and propogate.
I'm not asking my Mac to live forever, I don't even have that old of a Mac. I have a Lombard Powerbook. Will I get seven years out of it? I sure fucking hope so. Will I get seven years out of it with OSX? Not likely unless Apple pulls a rabbit out of their ass. OSX is a dog on older hardware, hardware mind you, that is only one or two years old. There's a class action lawsuit against Apple right now that they lied about OSX's ability to run on their G3 based systems. Contrary to what Linux users believe, a kernel does not mean you have a functional computer.
The original poster IS segregating the community as he has decided to talk only with those with OSX because it wooed him over to a Macintosh. That borders on ridiculousness. I hate whining bitches who whine about other people whining.
Congrats you've got a ton of money to throw down on a new Mac. However don't go and say Mac loyalists resisting the New Way are a bewildered bunch. You've not used a Mac for several years only to have the virtual carpet tugged under you and then told your hardware isn't going to run the new OS. There's people who've been using subsequent versions of MacOS of system they've had for five years and even more. I'm not about to plunk down another couple thousand dollars just to be able to run OS X, OS9 and LinuxPPC have the stuff I need. By segregating yourself from the older Mac community you're missing out on a good deal. I guess it is true that converts make the best fanatics.
This is even true in telcom diagrams in textbooks and so forth "oh yeah the backup cable is strung alongside the main wire". Woe to he that wonders aloud why the backup wiring runs along side the main wiring.
A Linux utopia brought about by a bigger monopoly than Microsoft? What in the fuck are you thinking? Wow great it is a Linux kernel and an entirely AOL-ized environment on top of it, not GNU tools, just the Linux kernel between the AOl environment and the hardware. That would be just awesome. You go from Windows to AOL-OS. The great caveat is in order to use AOL-OS you need to be an AOL/TW subscriber for x dollars a month. Man I certainly can't wait to live in your retarded Linux utopia. Please let it come soon!
The point of PGP was nobody used the command line interface. If I can't drag my keyring onto a window and have the program import it then I'm not fucking using it.
Actually the bombs dropped in WW2 were much much dirtier than the small tactial nukes we have now. It isn't like there is an environmentally clean nuclear weapon or anything but I definitely think your argument is backwards. A modern tactical weapon would have far less impact on subsequent generations than the first generation weapons used 60 years ago.
Excellent, a notably confusing and shitty interface. That will definitely propogate the use of cryptography!
It means they are legally exempt from rampant idiocy. Java's SDK says the same thing. The GPL generalizes it more saying the author is responsible in no way for the software. Regulations for nuclear control equipment and medical devices only allow for qualifying software to be run on such devices, being stated in the EULA on Windows and many other programs is merely compliance with these regulations.
Actually it means GCC is 30% faster than Visual Studio's compiler which is notoriously shitty. You're also basing your aguement on too few details. You don't know which compiler flags were used so you can't compare -O3 optimized code to VS optimized code. The VS compiler is not the world's greatest compiler and I think they should have gone with the Borland C++ compiler for Windows. Your compiler makes a big difference in the speed at which code is going to run.
A couple years ago I read about a similar thread of research concerning fractal antennas. You can eiter have an array of fractal elements or a single wire bent into a fractal shape. With the array of elements you can get the range and reception qualities of a random antenna array and still have an efficient system like a regular array. With a single wire you it ends up needing only a fraction of the space it needed before for the same length wire. You can fit a half wavelength dipole inside the housing of the phone quite easily. Jagging the shape of the wire introduces natural capacitance and inductance so less external equipment is needed to tune the antenna. IIRC the single wire antennas used Koch curves. The people who started the research on them formed a company called Fractal Antenna Systems who are trying to work with eantenna manufacturers. Sych antennas could be molded into the plastic case of a cell phone AND be 20% more efficient. A link to Koch curves (java is a good thing to have) is here. I don't remember which SciAm article I read the story from but I think it was in 1999.
Part of Alan Cox's job requirement is to blow smoke up the ass of Linux users. "Of course we're going to win the battle for the desktop" as if he is going to tell you how inane that idea is. The rallying cry is to oust Windows from the world of desktop PCs and stand up for...yadda yadda. It isn't going to happen, any chance Linux ever gets to be TRUELY mainstream is going to fail because it is going to trip over all the fucking baggage it is going to be carrying with it. Drop the baggage and you get alot leaner and more robust.
.02% of Windows PCs. Hot damn someone call someone! The day Linux stops playing catch up to the rest of the world is the day is does something impressive. Open source has been shown to work when it comes to developing a complex project (not to say it is the only way that works or is even an efficient way, it merely works) but in order to make a difference you need to be innovative! Like I said drop the baggage and you'll get somewhere. Repackaging the same old shit and calling it version 2.0 is the SAME thing commercial software vendors get berated for yet the irony is lost on Linux users.
The interface is baggage, the toolset is baggage, and most certainly the fanatical religious users are baggage. The command line is a good tool, it makes sense with a computer in fact. For some people typing commands is much faster than pointing and clicking can ever be. Just for the sake of geek tradition should these commands be two or three letter abbriviations that often times don't make sense in the slightest? No. Natural language is what a GUI is all about, icons take the place of more complex structures because they are easier to understand and deal with. The same ought to be true of console shells, the language I would use to tell someone to do something should be damn similar to the one I tell a computer to do something. The GNU tools are old, the concept is worn out get the fucking net. Archaic interfaces are fine for technical folks who've got little else to do than worry about the intricacies of interfacing with a computer. They don't fly with people who don't give a fuck.
Linux stories are always about Linux playing catch up and pulling hopeful statistics out of the ass of someone. Alan makes a comment about a site replacing computers with 20,000 Linux based systems. Oh wow
Where the fuck are you getting this from? It wasn't like the music industry had some sort of epiphany as disco was dying out and signed any "real" music acts. The music industry is ALL about fads and always has been. Occupying the same charts as Abba and the BeeGees were Aerosmith and KISS. The big music companies sign bands for dollar signs, not artistic expression. Real music acts, you must not have gotten out much in the 80s. Every couple years the record industry shits out another brick for consumption by those who want to be the status quo. Those who don't go for one fad will go for another fad, those not wishing to be part of any of the other fads will find yet another fad to mode themselves into. There's fads and minifads. The only way you're ever going to not be part of a fad is if you sit at home and make your own music by farting on a snare drum which will probably itself become a fad. If you don't want veiled references to sexual acts you better just turn off the radio. Music is and always will be (hopefully) filled with sexual inuendo.
Read the fucking law. If you own a copyright you have to actively defend it, if you don't your copyright is lost and you're up the creek without a fucking canoe. For all the bitching slashdot reading Linux fanboys do about the evils of copyrights they know jack shit about them. The next version of eBooks will probably have a better encryption scheme than ROT13 but the fact they had ANY protection is enough to pursue someone in court. Circumventing even light protection is plenty to bring a case against someone because it tacitly proves intent to commit the crime and thus in civil court satisfies the requirement of more likely than not.
I don't think Linux becoming popular makes Andy Tenenbaum wrong about micro kernels. Linux got popular because it was free (always good for poor college students), ran on their 386 computers (yet again a shot in the arm from poor college students), and somebody got the bright idea of porting the GNU toolset onto it making it a functional cheap Unix-like OS that ran on cheap computers. I think had Minix been more libre licensing slashdot geeks would be chanting Andy's name rather than Linus's. Windows NT, MacOS X, and BeOS are good examples of how Andy hit the nail on the head talking kernel architecture. BeOS was technically cool but poor marketing and Microsoft and Apple heavy handing killed it. Kinda off topic I know.
You can also use features in Mozilla, Konqueror, and IE to save content for offline browsing. It isn't an actual method to speed up your connection to websites but it does let you browse stuff pretty quickly. You can wait for everything to save to disk while making coffee or using the john and come back to do your browsing. One of the cool aspects of Ximian Evolution is the RDP news linker. Now if only Arts and Letters would put up an RDP too!
But this is not Russia, Elcomsoft was selling their product here in the US which got them in trouble. If you have corporate representation in a country you are bound by their laws. I'd have to accord with Russia's laws if I were conducting business there. Elcomsoft had a business office in the US and thus their product needs to follow the laws in this country. If you have a retail store in California do you think you can say your company is based in New Hampshire so you don't have to pay sales tax? Not quite. In Russia Elcomsoft would have a case but here they don't. It's sad Elcomsoft has to be the figurehead of the anti-DMCA. They are not a poor defenseless company whom have been thrown to the lions by big bad Adobe, they make spam software and software to circumvent the copyright protection on eBooks supposedly to be in accordance of Russian law. However why sell this in the US? Seems it provides a means to fuck over eBook publishers to me. I don't see a valid use other than warezing copies of eBooks. Boohoo poor Elcomsoft.
Web accelerators are bunko. While there are a few tricks one can pull to get the most out of their internet connection you're not going to make it magically 3x faster by any means. Optimizing MTU settings and using some HTTP tricks to max out your available bandwidth might garner you a kilobyte every once in a while nobody is going to able to give you a 3x increase on your POTS modem. If you want an apparent speed increase either beef up the disk space allocated to your browser's cache. You can also find download accelerators that will use multiple simulteneous HTTP connections to the same server for the same file and with the packets arriving out of order the accelerator combines them into a single contiguous file. It is nowhere near a 3x increase though.