I wouldn't say the US is too big for democracy to function effectively. I would say that it is too big for the current republic the US has established to function effectively. However, there's other type of democracy that could theoretically run very effectively in the US.
But I don't see the US changing to one of the other systems of democracy any time soon.
ok, I was originally going to respond about I thought I remembered a "GDrive" being speculated. And then I googled it and found this, where someone caught Google mentioning efforts towards GDrive in a presentation. So, say they make the GDrive (there's more to the blog [read it], but let's say it's just rented out space on the cloud) and charge for it.
And Chrome OS I heard some speculation about before it came up as real.
What's to stop them from charging for the GDrives monthly, putting Chrome OS on cheap enough hardware, and just giving out those cheap computers for free, charging for GDrives to make up for it?
Remember that stimulus bill that AIG etc. fucked us over on?
There's a piece of that bill that is supposed to make denying coverage because of psychological illnesses illegal. Similar to the proposals in the new health care bills that do the same for medical illnesses.
But that's the US...
However, in this case, though still bullshit, it looks like they just refused to keep paying sick leave, because they thought it looked like she was able to go back to work, instead of going on vacations and to the bars. They should consult with *her* physician on the matter, if they really care. But then I ponder about the privacy laws' influence on doing that, as well...
The more I think about it, the more I hate insurance all together.
Before I reply, I'm going to admit that my experience is not to Mac, but mostly to Linux and a little bit to Windows. Also, my Windows experience on this end is old, so that could be different.
I have a pretty good setup on my box, except only 1GB RAM. For me, and most of what I do, 1GB is more than enough. I'm surprised when I get up to 50-75% usage of my RAM. Most of the time, there's a good reason for why I do get that high, such as running some pretty memory hogging applications or having a large amount of files open in my IDE or office programs or whatever. However, the one thing that blows my mind is when I get up to 95% memory usage after leaving Firefox open for 6-8 hours with only 2-5 tabs open, browsing the internet. Now, if I'm going to flash websites, it only takes 2 hours, but I blame that on flash. Nonetheless, avoiding anything flash that I possibly can, by 6-8 hours, Firefox itself has completely wasted my memory away, and how do I fix it? Close Firefox and wait 2 minutes for it to clear out the memory. Then all of the sudden I'm back to the 30-40% I have right now with 10 tabs open in the developers version of Chrome on Linux. Now, I'm excited about the new Linux kernel providing some help in my whole system not screeching to such a halt with all of that memory being used, but I still can't comprehend how one browser eats my memory like that. Opera randomly crashes on me for no apparent reason, which is equally annoying, but I can still do anything else while leaving it open. And that's essentially why I've given up on Firefox for now.
Sure, I could go buy more memory... if I didn't have the cheapest motherboard available at the time I bought all of the pieces of this computer, and if I wasn't a broke student, barely making it by each month at the moment. Or I can just use a different free alternative that doesn't require me spending any extra money on things I otherwise don't even count as being worth my trouble. Guess which one I chose.
Well, damn. Eventually, everyone would have been in enough fights to have either damaged their brains beyond being able to actually fight any more, or damn hardened fighters--good, in theory, for if the island ever got attacked...
Would probably motivate people to get off their asses and exercise so they can even have a chance in the fights that they would come up with.
Or everyone would just turn in to pussies and the criminals would eventually take over. Hell, if gangs and mafias are willing to fight, but no one else does, so they kick everyone's asses all the time... yeah... I like the former outcome better--it seems more realistic, too.
I was able to say that until I decided to stop using ndiswrapper for my wireless and started using the kernel module available. Now, I think the longest I got it was about 20 days with having to restart my wireless at least every other day, until the only way to get it working again was a full reboot--and oh have I done some playing... some that worked more, but as it worked more, it was more work on my part until it just wasn't worth it any more. NetworkManager actually is what got me up to that 20 days, so I've stuck to it, too. But I sure do miss seeing weeks, months, or longer. I still have this sneaky suspicion that wireless/modem from AT&T modem is part to blame, as we've had similar problems with Windows, too. But, even on other ones, I still have the same problem with Linux.
Yeah, that's my only real motivation behind being happy to see a fast boot, now. Other than that, it's just kernel updates, which I can always hold off on.
Though Ubuntu wants me to reboot over things I still think sound silly to have to reboot over--I always updated those without rebooting on Gentoo; maybe I was just doing it wrong, but it never gave me problems. That is somewhat negated by my lack of updating so regularly, but it's still present.</random side note>
At the hospital where I work, all of the data is held on the servers and accessed through a Citrix client. As painful as that is some days, it does solve that problem, as far as anyone running off with the computer, anyway. Not sure how everyone else does it, though, but we use one of the more popular software packages from CERNER--and how I hate their package in our environment lately, but it's practically my job.
I used to do that, but don't for two reasons, any more.
One, on my Gentoo partition--which I admit I haven't upgraded in a while because I just couldn't be assed with this problem any more--it kept requiring me to uninstall this and that and all of these other funky things to let me update the system as a whole.
Two, even on my Ubuntu partition, I don't have enough space on my hard drive to be bothered downloading updates I don't need or really desire to have. So, I cherry pick which updates I download and install. Which is also why I didn't upgrade for like two weeks. If this wasn't my own personal computer, I'd probably say well hell, get more hard drive space. But for my own personal computer, I don't have the money for that right now. Nor do I really care for that much more. 60GB is fine, even if my music alone needs more than 60GB--I don't listen to all of it anyway; just enough, in combination with other things, to cause a problem in hard drive space if I'm not careful.
The latter could be solved just by saying forget the whole two partitions, but certain things that I've tried and failed multiple times to transfer over one way or the other prevent me from doing that... some things on VirtualBox, such as specific applications that I lost--or more accurately, had stolen from my car--the cd for, for example...
Now, I'm actually wondering if this from Cox is actually closer to what I would desire, more. My biggest problem is that I can't even get the speed I supposedly pay for, really, and therefore could never reach the theoretical limit of what I could get, if I were getting the speeds they advertised to me when I signed up.
Really, there's one thing that makes sense to me (and I don't know how it couldn't make sense): If you're downloading two things, each one's going to be slower than if you did it one after the other, but the total package is probably going to be done in roughly the same amount of time. I admit I'm not extremely knowledgeable about the subject, but I always took it as, essentially, I can only push so much through at once. Which then comes into, ok, they should share it. But, obviously, one thing might be more important than another, and need to use up more at a given point than another.
Initially, I would think, well, have people choose, somehow, what gets sent/received faster and slower. That doesn't work, because of two things (besides just the technical difficulties of implementing such a thing). One, that's inconvenient and few would actually do it for each thing they're using. Two, people are stupid and would try to take up all of the line on ridiculous things, and then complain when their VoIP etc are slow.
So, I guess, automatically choosing somehow would make quite a bit of sense. The QoS would be a decent place to start, and as others have pointed out, it seems that's what they're doing here.
But my overall original point there was, in an ideal world--not necessarily ever in reality, as reality doesn't fit ideal very often--there would always be that 1mb open for me to download from every second (or whatever speed I'm supposed to be getting), coming from my ISP, and whatever anyone else was doing with their 1mbps or whatever from my ISP wouldn't effect me, as they're not taking up the space my ISP has made for me to use. I guess that's somewhat of a throttle itself, as there's theoretically a lot more than 1mb every second that I could be taking up if I was allowed, but if I'm paying for a 1mbps, what do I care if they throttle it to that?
And yeah, that still pushes it beyond that off to beyond my ISP, such as the server or client I'm connecting to, but that just seems obvious to me--if I can download at 1mbps but the server can only upload at 0.1mbps, I'm obviously only going to be able to download at 0.1mbps tops from them (less if others are downloading at the same time, or whatever). And then all of the in-between, of course, too.
I can agree with the way the way they state they're going to do this...
but...
Does this mean that 5 hour download to upgrade stuff on my Linux box because I didn't upgrade for like 2 weeks and some bigger stuff came out (openoffice upgrade, kde 4.2, etc.), is going to take even longer? That, I hate. I already didn't have enough time to sit here and wait for the damn 5 hour downloading.
Oh wait, I don't have Cox any more... ok... dammit, I have AT&T... *kills himself*
My ultimate preference would be to see all of the ISPs upgrade how much bandwidth they can actually handle, instead of getting more and more customers, and then bitching when they don't have enough bandwidth to handle all of the customers they got, while they still go out to get more customers. Would any of this really be a problem, then? I suppose that costs money, but we're all giving them money every month; and many of us got their service expecting no such problems as this. I guess I, like a lot of people I know, just expected too much...
The great part is that, at least in some cases (like the $200 billion mentioned in the summary), they do go as far as as saying such-and-such has to be done with it. But then the companies throw probably that money into lobbying to get such-and-such lowered and lowered until we're sitting here going "wtf happened to x?!" And then the government just sits there happy, because all of the politicians got their bribe money, and by listening to the lobbying, don't have to listen to the companies bitch that they can't do it, even though we gave them billions of dollars to do it.
What's great is, right before I came on slashdot, I saw the History channel comparing what led up to this supposed crisis to what led to the great depression. A pretty big line came up: corruption. As if that's a surprise...
Well, they're correct. Because, apparently, making a copy of a product I bought to a private folder on my computer that only a hacker smart/stupid enough to hack into my computer and grab it from me could get, is nothing but piracy! Damn free use to hell!
I would believe that some of the problems are the nvidia side of things. In fact, I know some of it probably is. But one thing, for example, that really threw me off is kwin wouldn't recognise that it needed to refresh parts of what was being drawn, and so there was an ugly lag on pieces of the window, where something had moved and some times was even drawn twice now. This especially happened a lot with the KDE menu. I wasn't completely sure if it was a Qt, KDE, nvidia, or what, at first. But none of those same Qt apps seem to have any problems at all under OpenBox and others (even Compiz, the only time I had the same problems was using Compiz under KDE, and then only with the KDE panel, menu, etc.). Also, the fact that it did improve with the 4.2 beta got me questioning.
I guess it could be that they're working around nvidia's bugs, but either way, it's going to keep me from happily using KDE until they can get it to work better, because it would happen even if I turned all of the effects and eye candy off. And I admit, I haven't bothered with the open-source nvidia drivers for a few months, but nvidia's drivers have worked better every time I have, making me reluctant to switch...
I decided to install Kubuntu (Intrepid) with KDE4...
After a while, KDE4 began to annoy me enough, I decided what the hell, and tried out the 4.2 beta when it came out. Prior to that, bizarre display problems and a few other problems had limited my enjoyment of the system. I started using Compiz-Fusion, and found some of these things were even worse (of course, in my opinion and experience, Compiz-fusion really sucks at it's current state, when it comes to cleanliness and stability--have had to restart X way too much with it to bother any more). That's when I tried 4.2. I really do hate to say it, as I'm really not pleased with Compiz-fusion, but I was even more disappointed. I know it's beta, so I'll give it a break. But I *really* hope they can fix all of the bugs I've run into (like randomly just crashing probably 1/5 of the time within the first 2-4 hours, especially when I started up an app that used a 32bit visual for composited windows). I won't even bother loading it up if I'm going to be doing any kind of development or running anything else that isn't stable in my standing experience. So, now I'm stuck to OpenBox and if I'm playing with composited windows, xcompmgr (tried FluxBox, which I had liked more for features, but FluxBox doesn't handle 32bit visuals properly O.o). Though, I must admit... there's some other applications I've tried to use under this setup that have a number of display problems as well--the difference seems to be that it's a per-application thing, not the entire desktop.
Sadly, for me, at the current state, KDE 3 annoys me severely as it always has, and I've never really liked GNOME. Outside of my initial experience with Mandrake Linux, I "grew up" in my Linux experience on Gentoo Linux, mostly switching around between Fluxbox, Openbox, etc. and beyond that just setting up my own "desktop environment" out of my own chosen tools, some times taken from KDE or GNOME. I've only really since started actually trying KDE and GNOME since getting annoyed with the downfalls of Gentoo enough to try out another distro. And I'm not really happy.:/
Of course, what am I to say... I find Windows hard to use and a really big pain in the ass, and I haven't gotten past the initial "wtf?! How do I do anything?!" on Mac OS X--more because I've only used it in places that I had to, like on a school computer.
First, I'll not comment on Linux cutting into Microsoft's profit by some margin. But Apple? I don't see that.
As for Intel and IBM. First of all, IBM... IBM should be making some profit off of Linux, as they have Linux solutions, which they even advertise on commercials for some time now.
And Intel... I don't see how Linux could have any real effect on Intel. Unless people are switching to AMD, VIA, and/or other alternatives to run Linux, Intel shouldn't lose anything--people still need the hardware. And Intel has been pretty nice with Linux (even the new graphics memory stuff in the linux kernel came at least in part from Intel).
I'm not completely confident that it's just a bad economy making Microsoft fall, as in my personal experience (yes, therefore, this doesn't hold that much ground), Mac and Linux seem to be seeing more interest from people than usual for the past years. Especially with the iPhone (for Mac, I've had friends and acquaintances consider a Mac over a Windows computer mostly because of their iPhone lately) and Netbooks (Linux, kinda).
And I'm still not seeing "the year of Linux" for desktops. How many times I've had people tell me that their IT admins at work, who use Linux on the servers, say Linux will never work on a desktop, only to be shown my Linux desktop and have me blow away all but maybe a few points made against it--like the "you have to use the command line!" that for most desktop purposes has been dead for quite some time now. There's still too much hate, whether it's ready or not. And those few points can actually be very big for some people, even though they love some of the things I show them that Windows and OS X have nothing really competitive against built-in. I am still surprised by how many of my friends using Windows are blown away by the virtual desktops and want it--I tell them, I've heard of it on Windows, but none of them have figured it out, and love that it's easy to get with Linux. *shrug* That's just an example, but none of those things have been very compelling to make a significant switch for a lot of people.
I should have noted that I don't mean to compare OpenBox to the Windows interface... to me, they're very difficult to compare--OpenBox is meant to be light, fast, and not full of these nice features, meaning the fact that I then have to have other applications running is kind of a given. I was simply using it to compare what's more ideal (at least for the likes of me) to what they've done with Windows 7.
I'm only going to go off of the one thing you said.
No text?! That was something I heard over and over being complained about with OS X's dock. And then I saw that Microsoft decided to do the same for Windows 7's taskbar. WTF?!
I'll admit it. I've floated through multiple OS X like docks in my Linux desktop (Avant, Cairo-dock, kiba-dock, that one for KDE I can't remember the name of, etc.). I've even used the fancy Expose-like features that have come out on Linux as something of a task switching application. But I *ALWAYS* have wanted to see my text on a taskbar--even blackbox's only the one application on the bar at a time was satisfactory compared to only icons, in my opinion. Currently, I'm in OpenBox. I have xcompmgr running, allowing me to use Cairo-dock (currently the least annoying to me, as I use it really only as a launcher for my most common apps), but I still also have pypanel or another equivalent up. Why? Sure, I don't honestly use either one for managing my applications. Honestly, I've stuck happily with keeping my apps organized over the virtual desktops in such a way that the taskbar is almost never used. But take it away, and suddenly I feel completely lost. Take out the text, and I feel just as lost.
Why have they taken out the text?:( It's really depressing to me, and though I rarely use Windows any more, gives me one more reason to use it even less. And I know you can put the text back, but then it looks ridiculous IMHO unless you also make the icons smaller. So, two settings I have to change from the default, when alternatives make it so I can just start it up and the default is good enough to not annoy the shit out of me? I'm no fan of Windows, but this just depresses me. KDE 4's fat default taskbar depresses me as well, but that's a side note.
Because using a browser for my every app means I have to hope I have a browser that not only meets my needs, but also doesn't suck at speed, memory, and other such factors. That's all improving of course. But Firefox get blown off of the list of acceptable to me, as I have to restart firefox regularly because it leaks memory all over the place until it's using over half of my 1GB memory all by itself and begins running slow as all hell and makes everything else I'm doing run slow as all hell along with it, because everything is starting to use swap space instead of RAM.
Opera is about the only other (current) browser I look at as a possibility, but it's far from problem-less itself.
Chrome could have the potential to theoretically change that. But IE, safari... neither are cross-platform to the extent of Qt. Chrome isn't currently either. And those have their own problems as well. Konqueror doesn't display everything properly at the moment (along with--though I haven't paid attention in long enough, it might have changed--not being as cross platform). I'm honestly not happy from a developing regularly used applications standpoint with any browser at the moment. Nevermind if I need critical speed that the browsers, even with JIT compiling the javascript, can't match C (or exceptional Assembly...) for.
There's always going to be a need for native code, and there's always going to be a need for a GUI toolkit that the native code can use. GTK or Qt happen to be on the top of the list for Linux at the moment, and both offer some level of cross-platform (more-so with Qt).
The space for browser-based applications does seem to be growing, but it's never going to push the native code out all together. Just like Java and other languages have never been able to do.
Second, it's more fun if you have a pre-existing psychiatric condition. Personally, it has some nice effects on my PTSD. On the one end, it can help with the numbness and similar symptoms, because I get amped up and happy if I drink enough of it. On the other end, holy shit does the hypervigilance, irritability, and other such symptoms get worse with enough caffeine. Of course, that's really noticeable when you're drinking 3-4 16oz energy drinks every single day, like I used to before I started to realise the extent of my problem. Even down to only one cup of coffee every day, I still don't get any more sleep though, so whatever.
Can't say I've experienced the hallucinations so much, though. But I can only imagine someone with schizophrenia or other disorders causing hallucinations (well, you could try to get away with saying PTSD has hallucinations as they are similar, but there's actually distinct differences between flashback type things of PTSD and hallucinations) drinking a lot of caffeine. Mix it with weed and it's even more fun! I could also say meth, cocaine, and some others, but that sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen, and they can cause hallucinations themselves anyway; and no I'm not kidding--working in an emergency room, I've seen my fair share of heart attacks where the only reasonable explanation was meth/cocaine use.
Nonetheless, I'd be more concerned about ulcers and other problems, like heart problems, that can come with heavy caffeine use. You can at least pass off a somewhat normal life, without ending up in the hospital for it, with the hallucinations, if you really try;)
But I have to admit. I'm not a big fan of Qt. I kind of see it as an oversized, bloated library. I suppose someone could probably argue reasons for every class and functionality that's present in the library, but some of the things in Qt I look at and get turned off. When there's good cross-platform libraries present for things, I don't really get the reasoning behind rewriting those things.
I know most people look at Qt as a GUI library, but I look over everything, and it's so much more than that. And yet, a lot of those other pieces, I've spent a lot of my programming experience learning things that are just as good and at times, in my personal opinion, better than what Qt offers for the same. Even pieces of the C++ standard that I'm sure Qt added on extra functionality in their equivalent, but it gets really hard for me to reason not using the standard libraries that are nearly (nearly because it does depend on what the implementation of the standard libraries on the system supports--not a problem if each platform goes for compliance with the standard, which I believe most go at least pretty damn close) guaranteed to work anywhere the standard libraries are present.
Just for example, I read they now have a whole parallel/multi-threading library going. But I sit here and ask myself with that over and over, what's wrong with boost::thread (which is going to be included in the C++0x standard anyway)? Even more, there's OpenMP for even further niceness. And having plenty of experience to the point that boost::thread comes naturally to me and OpenMP is getting more and more natural, why the hell would I want to go through learning a whole new set of libraries to do the same thing? But at the same time, why would I want to link against 2-3 libraries that do the same thing?
I guess someone could also argue the niceness of having it all in one place, as well. But I find multiple libraries each focused on their specific task much easier to sift through for documentation and examples than the crap of a library that tries to be everything. The flip-side being when you use one thing and another library you want to use uses something different (which I don't run into often enough for it to be a serious problem, honestly).
I wrote a library in C++ that any time I find something (other than GUI, as that's a whole mess of it's own in my opinion) that is difficult to implement for cross-platform purposes due to the different platforms, I write a little class which I can just take out and put in any of my apps. Of course, it also has a few other things like a couple classes such as a multiple-read, single-write access interface (using boost::mutex, the const volatile keywords, and some const_cast action), but it has maybe 4 other things, which mostly compose of other cross-platform libraries that left just a few capabilities I ended up needing out (like Sleep, though I can't say I'm aware of a good Windows equivalent to nanosleep yet, and it kinda makes my code on Windows not as nice when I'm sleeping in milliseconds but meaning to sleep in microseconds or nanoseconds, meaning dividing by 1000 or 1000000).
That's one thing I do like about GTK, though I am annoyed by so many other pieces of it. At least, a lot of what is implemented in GTK and glib isn't really there a million times over already. Partly just because they're using C, which doesn't have some of the nice stuff in the standard already, and doesn't have Boost;). But I don't feel like I'm having to justify to myself either learning a whole new thing I've already learned multiple other alternatives to or linking to a whole 'nother library to do something that's already present in another library I'm linking against.
That's my only gripe about "Hopefully we can get rid of GTK now!" Otherwise, I'm actually happy about this. I do like the GPL, but for libraries and such things, I always felt the LGPL was the better choice (in some cases, I even prefer BSD or MIT type licenses over that, but whatever). So, despite my gripes about Qt, I view this as a good thing.
Oh god, thank you. I was thinking either someone has to point out how this has been done at least a couple times or my head was going to explode. Especially with this being slashdot.
I wasn't thinking Nokia, exactly, though. I was actually thinking about my Palm Treo 700w (yeah, with Windows Mobile), where the majority of the applications I used were downloaded with a similar method. The only thing I don't recall ever using is the colored barcodes, but I can't say that gets me the least bit excited about this one.
Well, and the part about it really just holding a unique ID to get information from Microsoft's servers. But that annoys me more than excites me. I'm sure Microsoft has a great setup with their servers, but I'm always cautious over one company's servers holding it all. The idea where, even if one server holding something I wanted went down, there was at the very least a possibility of finding something similar elsewhere. Plus, it rather gives Microsoft control over what they even put on it, which I'm not a big fan of. It can work, but I like to have every bit of control I can have over the things I own. Which is why I don't, and probably won't, have an (unhacked) iPhone. Yeah, I lose in some respects by that, but for things like my phone, I'll take my complete freedom over features any day. Yeah, the free software movement spoils me a bit...
WebOS has a Linux kernel. So, really, there's a degree of open in there. It's just whether they're ever going to take it farther that would be the question. Who knows.
I have to agree. As someone with PTSD (and not from going into battle; though going into battle in 8th grade, when I essentially got stuck with it, would have been interesting, I must admit...), any distraction can help. It can also make it worse by using it as a means of avoidance--and one of the sections for criteria for PTSD according to the DSM includes symptoms of avoidance that become significantly distressing.
Personally, I do like to play the more mind challenging games, as they do distract me, and the less challenging ones can let my mind slip away some times much easier. Can't say I'm the biggest fan of Tetris, but Minesweeper, Sudoku, and other ones that require more thought are always more nice for me. Except when you can do "Expert" minesweeper in 100 seconds and feel like you're just looking at the numbers and not actually thinking about them... then it kinda sucks... but that's all good.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say the US is too big for democracy to function effectively. I would say that it is too big for the current republic the US has established to function effectively. However, there's other type of democracy that could theoretically run very effectively in the US.
But I don't see the US changing to one of the other systems of democracy any time soon.
ok, I was originally going to respond about I thought I remembered a "GDrive" being speculated. And then I googled it and found this, where someone caught Google mentioning efforts towards GDrive in a presentation. So, say they make the GDrive (there's more to the blog [read it], but let's say it's just rented out space on the cloud) and charge for it.
And Chrome OS I heard some speculation about before it came up as real.
What's to stop them from charging for the GDrives monthly, putting Chrome OS on cheap enough hardware, and just giving out those cheap computers for free, charging for GDrives to make up for it?
Remember that stimulus bill that AIG etc. fucked us over on?
There's a piece of that bill that is supposed to make denying coverage because of psychological illnesses illegal. Similar to the proposals in the new health care bills that do the same for medical illnesses.
But that's the US...
However, in this case, though still bullshit, it looks like they just refused to keep paying sick leave, because they thought it looked like she was able to go back to work, instead of going on vacations and to the bars. They should consult with *her* physician on the matter, if they really care. But then I ponder about the privacy laws' influence on doing that, as well...
The more I think about it, the more I hate insurance all together.
This "thing" has that in the right click menu, when you right click on a process in the table. Just opened it up and found that out. :)
Before I reply, I'm going to admit that my experience is not to Mac, but mostly to Linux and a little bit to Windows. Also, my Windows experience on this end is old, so that could be different.
I have a pretty good setup on my box, except only 1GB RAM. For me, and most of what I do, 1GB is more than enough. I'm surprised when I get up to 50-75% usage of my RAM. Most of the time, there's a good reason for why I do get that high, such as running some pretty memory hogging applications or having a large amount of files open in my IDE or office programs or whatever. However, the one thing that blows my mind is when I get up to 95% memory usage after leaving Firefox open for 6-8 hours with only 2-5 tabs open, browsing the internet. Now, if I'm going to flash websites, it only takes 2 hours, but I blame that on flash. Nonetheless, avoiding anything flash that I possibly can, by 6-8 hours, Firefox itself has completely wasted my memory away, and how do I fix it? Close Firefox and wait 2 minutes for it to clear out the memory. Then all of the sudden I'm back to the 30-40% I have right now with 10 tabs open in the developers version of Chrome on Linux. Now, I'm excited about the new Linux kernel providing some help in my whole system not screeching to such a halt with all of that memory being used, but I still can't comprehend how one browser eats my memory like that. Opera randomly crashes on me for no apparent reason, which is equally annoying, but I can still do anything else while leaving it open. And that's essentially why I've given up on Firefox for now.
Sure, I could go buy more memory... if I didn't have the cheapest motherboard available at the time I bought all of the pieces of this computer, and if I wasn't a broke student, barely making it by each month at the moment. Or I can just use a different free alternative that doesn't require me spending any extra money on things I otherwise don't even count as being worth my trouble. Guess which one I chose.
Well, damn. Eventually, everyone would have been in enough fights to have either damaged their brains beyond being able to actually fight any more, or damn hardened fighters--good, in theory, for if the island ever got attacked...
Would probably motivate people to get off their asses and exercise so they can even have a chance in the fights that they would come up with.
Or everyone would just turn in to pussies and the criminals would eventually take over. Hell, if gangs and mafias are willing to fight, but no one else does, so they kick everyone's asses all the time... yeah... I like the former outcome better--it seems more realistic, too.
I was able to say that until I decided to stop using ndiswrapper for my wireless and started using the kernel module available. Now, I think the longest I got it was about 20 days with having to restart my wireless at least every other day, until the only way to get it working again was a full reboot--and oh have I done some playing... some that worked more, but as it worked more, it was more work on my part until it just wasn't worth it any more. NetworkManager actually is what got me up to that 20 days, so I've stuck to it, too. But I sure do miss seeing weeks, months, or longer. I still have this sneaky suspicion that wireless/modem from AT&T modem is part to blame, as we've had similar problems with Windows, too. But, even on other ones, I still have the same problem with Linux.
Yeah, that's my only real motivation behind being happy to see a fast boot, now. Other than that, it's just kernel updates, which I can always hold off on.
Though Ubuntu wants me to reboot over things I still think sound silly to have to reboot over--I always updated those without rebooting on Gentoo; maybe I was just doing it wrong, but it never gave me problems. That is somewhat negated by my lack of updating so regularly, but it's still present.</random side note>
At the hospital where I work, all of the data is held on the servers and accessed through a Citrix client. As painful as that is some days, it does solve that problem, as far as anyone running off with the computer, anyway. Not sure how everyone else does it, though, but we use one of the more popular software packages from CERNER--and how I hate their package in our environment lately, but it's practically my job.
I used to do that, but don't for two reasons, any more.
One, on my Gentoo partition--which I admit I haven't upgraded in a while because I just couldn't be assed with this problem any more--it kept requiring me to uninstall this and that and all of these other funky things to let me update the system as a whole.
Two, even on my Ubuntu partition, I don't have enough space on my hard drive to be bothered downloading updates I don't need or really desire to have. So, I cherry pick which updates I download and install. Which is also why I didn't upgrade for like two weeks. If this wasn't my own personal computer, I'd probably say well hell, get more hard drive space. But for my own personal computer, I don't have the money for that right now. Nor do I really care for that much more. 60GB is fine, even if my music alone needs more than 60GB--I don't listen to all of it anyway; just enough, in combination with other things, to cause a problem in hard drive space if I'm not careful.
The latter could be solved just by saying forget the whole two partitions, but certain things that I've tried and failed multiple times to transfer over one way or the other prevent me from doing that... some things on VirtualBox, such as specific applications that I lost--or more accurately, had stolen from my car--the cd for, for example...
You know... I read this and started thinking.
Now, I'm actually wondering if this from Cox is actually closer to what I would desire, more. My biggest problem is that I can't even get the speed I supposedly pay for, really, and therefore could never reach the theoretical limit of what I could get, if I were getting the speeds they advertised to me when I signed up.
Really, there's one thing that makes sense to me (and I don't know how it couldn't make sense): If you're downloading two things, each one's going to be slower than if you did it one after the other, but the total package is probably going to be done in roughly the same amount of time. I admit I'm not extremely knowledgeable about the subject, but I always took it as, essentially, I can only push so much through at once. Which then comes into, ok, they should share it. But, obviously, one thing might be more important than another, and need to use up more at a given point than another.
Initially, I would think, well, have people choose, somehow, what gets sent/received faster and slower. That doesn't work, because of two things (besides just the technical difficulties of implementing such a thing). One, that's inconvenient and few would actually do it for each thing they're using. Two, people are stupid and would try to take up all of the line on ridiculous things, and then complain when their VoIP etc are slow.
So, I guess, automatically choosing somehow would make quite a bit of sense. The QoS would be a decent place to start, and as others have pointed out, it seems that's what they're doing here.
But my overall original point there was, in an ideal world--not necessarily ever in reality, as reality doesn't fit ideal very often--there would always be that 1mb open for me to download from every second (or whatever speed I'm supposed to be getting), coming from my ISP, and whatever anyone else was doing with their 1mbps or whatever from my ISP wouldn't effect me, as they're not taking up the space my ISP has made for me to use. I guess that's somewhat of a throttle itself, as there's theoretically a lot more than 1mb every second that I could be taking up if I was allowed, but if I'm paying for a 1mbps, what do I care if they throttle it to that?
And yeah, that still pushes it beyond that off to beyond my ISP, such as the server or client I'm connecting to, but that just seems obvious to me--if I can download at 1mbps but the server can only upload at 0.1mbps, I'm obviously only going to be able to download at 0.1mbps tops from them (less if others are downloading at the same time, or whatever). And then all of the in-between, of course, too.
I can agree with the way the way they state they're going to do this...
but...
Does this mean that 5 hour download to upgrade stuff on my Linux box because I didn't upgrade for like 2 weeks and some bigger stuff came out (openoffice upgrade, kde 4.2, etc.), is going to take even longer? That, I hate. I already didn't have enough time to sit here and wait for the damn 5 hour downloading.
Oh wait, I don't have Cox any more... ok... dammit, I have AT&T... *kills himself*
My ultimate preference would be to see all of the ISPs upgrade how much bandwidth they can actually handle, instead of getting more and more customers, and then bitching when they don't have enough bandwidth to handle all of the customers they got, while they still go out to get more customers. Would any of this really be a problem, then? I suppose that costs money, but we're all giving them money every month; and many of us got their service expecting no such problems as this. I guess I, like a lot of people I know, just expected too much...
Indeed.
The one in North County San Diego (San Marcos) has more of a frankenstein type feel to it. It's actually pretty cool. Heh.
The great part is that, at least in some cases (like the $200 billion mentioned in the summary), they do go as far as as saying such-and-such has to be done with it. But then the companies throw probably that money into lobbying to get such-and-such lowered and lowered until we're sitting here going "wtf happened to x?!" And then the government just sits there happy, because all of the politicians got their bribe money, and by listening to the lobbying, don't have to listen to the companies bitch that they can't do it, even though we gave them billions of dollars to do it.
What's great is, right before I came on slashdot, I saw the History channel comparing what led up to this supposed crisis to what led to the great depression. A pretty big line came up: corruption. As if that's a surprise...
Well, they're correct. Because, apparently, making a copy of a product I bought to a private folder on my computer that only a hacker smart/stupid enough to hack into my computer and grab it from me could get, is nothing but piracy! Damn free use to hell!
I would believe that some of the problems are the nvidia side of things. In fact, I know some of it probably is. But one thing, for example, that really threw me off is kwin wouldn't recognise that it needed to refresh parts of what was being drawn, and so there was an ugly lag on pieces of the window, where something had moved and some times was even drawn twice now. This especially happened a lot with the KDE menu. I wasn't completely sure if it was a Qt, KDE, nvidia, or what, at first. But none of those same Qt apps seem to have any problems at all under OpenBox and others (even Compiz, the only time I had the same problems was using Compiz under KDE, and then only with the KDE panel, menu, etc.). Also, the fact that it did improve with the 4.2 beta got me questioning.
I guess it could be that they're working around nvidia's bugs, but either way, it's going to keep me from happily using KDE until they can get it to work better, because it would happen even if I turned all of the effects and eye candy off. And I admit, I haven't bothered with the open-source nvidia drivers for a few months, but nvidia's drivers have worked better every time I have, making me reluctant to switch...
I decided to install Kubuntu (Intrepid) with KDE4...
After a while, KDE4 began to annoy me enough, I decided what the hell, and tried out the 4.2 beta when it came out. Prior to that, bizarre display problems and a few other problems had limited my enjoyment of the system. I started using Compiz-Fusion, and found some of these things were even worse (of course, in my opinion and experience, Compiz-fusion really sucks at it's current state, when it comes to cleanliness and stability--have had to restart X way too much with it to bother any more). That's when I tried 4.2. I really do hate to say it, as I'm really not pleased with Compiz-fusion, but I was even more disappointed. I know it's beta, so I'll give it a break. But I *really* hope they can fix all of the bugs I've run into (like randomly just crashing probably 1/5 of the time within the first 2-4 hours, especially when I started up an app that used a 32bit visual for composited windows). I won't even bother loading it up if I'm going to be doing any kind of development or running anything else that isn't stable in my standing experience. So, now I'm stuck to OpenBox and if I'm playing with composited windows, xcompmgr (tried FluxBox, which I had liked more for features, but FluxBox doesn't handle 32bit visuals properly O.o). Though, I must admit... there's some other applications I've tried to use under this setup that have a number of display problems as well--the difference seems to be that it's a per-application thing, not the entire desktop.
Sadly, for me, at the current state, KDE 3 annoys me severely as it always has, and I've never really liked GNOME. Outside of my initial experience with Mandrake Linux, I "grew up" in my Linux experience on Gentoo Linux, mostly switching around between Fluxbox, Openbox, etc. and beyond that just setting up my own "desktop environment" out of my own chosen tools, some times taken from KDE or GNOME. I've only really since started actually trying KDE and GNOME since getting annoyed with the downfalls of Gentoo enough to try out another distro. And I'm not really happy. :/
Of course, what am I to say... I find Windows hard to use and a really big pain in the ass, and I haven't gotten past the initial "wtf?! How do I do anything?!" on Mac OS X--more because I've only used it in places that I had to, like on a school computer.
First, I'll not comment on Linux cutting into Microsoft's profit by some margin. But Apple? I don't see that.
As for Intel and IBM. First of all, IBM... IBM should be making some profit off of Linux, as they have Linux solutions, which they even advertise on commercials for some time now.
And Intel... I don't see how Linux could have any real effect on Intel. Unless people are switching to AMD, VIA, and/or other alternatives to run Linux, Intel shouldn't lose anything--people still need the hardware. And Intel has been pretty nice with Linux (even the new graphics memory stuff in the linux kernel came at least in part from Intel).
I'm not completely confident that it's just a bad economy making Microsoft fall, as in my personal experience (yes, therefore, this doesn't hold that much ground), Mac and Linux seem to be seeing more interest from people than usual for the past years. Especially with the iPhone (for Mac, I've had friends and acquaintances consider a Mac over a Windows computer mostly because of their iPhone lately) and Netbooks (Linux, kinda).
And I'm still not seeing "the year of Linux" for desktops. How many times I've had people tell me that their IT admins at work, who use Linux on the servers, say Linux will never work on a desktop, only to be shown my Linux desktop and have me blow away all but maybe a few points made against it--like the "you have to use the command line!" that for most desktop purposes has been dead for quite some time now. There's still too much hate, whether it's ready or not. And those few points can actually be very big for some people, even though they love some of the things I show them that Windows and OS X have nothing really competitive against built-in. I am still surprised by how many of my friends using Windows are blown away by the virtual desktops and want it--I tell them, I've heard of it on Windows, but none of them have figured it out, and love that it's easy to get with Linux. *shrug* That's just an example, but none of those things have been very compelling to make a significant switch for a lot of people.
I should have noted that I don't mean to compare OpenBox to the Windows interface... to me, they're very difficult to compare--OpenBox is meant to be light, fast, and not full of these nice features, meaning the fact that I then have to have other applications running is kind of a given. I was simply using it to compare what's more ideal (at least for the likes of me) to what they've done with Windows 7.
I'm only going to go off of the one thing you said.
No text?! That was something I heard over and over being complained about with OS X's dock. And then I saw that Microsoft decided to do the same for Windows 7's taskbar. WTF?!
I'll admit it. I've floated through multiple OS X like docks in my Linux desktop (Avant, Cairo-dock, kiba-dock, that one for KDE I can't remember the name of, etc.). I've even used the fancy Expose-like features that have come out on Linux as something of a task switching application. But I *ALWAYS* have wanted to see my text on a taskbar--even blackbox's only the one application on the bar at a time was satisfactory compared to only icons, in my opinion. Currently, I'm in OpenBox. I have xcompmgr running, allowing me to use Cairo-dock (currently the least annoying to me, as I use it really only as a launcher for my most common apps), but I still also have pypanel or another equivalent up. Why? Sure, I don't honestly use either one for managing my applications. Honestly, I've stuck happily with keeping my apps organized over the virtual desktops in such a way that the taskbar is almost never used. But take it away, and suddenly I feel completely lost. Take out the text, and I feel just as lost.
Why have they taken out the text? :( It's really depressing to me, and though I rarely use Windows any more, gives me one more reason to use it even less. And I know you can put the text back, but then it looks ridiculous IMHO unless you also make the icons smaller. So, two settings I have to change from the default, when alternatives make it so I can just start it up and the default is good enough to not annoy the shit out of me? I'm no fan of Windows, but this just depresses me. KDE 4's fat default taskbar depresses me as well, but that's a side note.
Because using a browser for my every app means I have to hope I have a browser that not only meets my needs, but also doesn't suck at speed, memory, and other such factors. That's all improving of course. But Firefox get blown off of the list of acceptable to me, as I have to restart firefox regularly because it leaks memory all over the place until it's using over half of my 1GB memory all by itself and begins running slow as all hell and makes everything else I'm doing run slow as all hell along with it, because everything is starting to use swap space instead of RAM.
Opera is about the only other (current) browser I look at as a possibility, but it's far from problem-less itself.
Chrome could have the potential to theoretically change that. But IE, safari... neither are cross-platform to the extent of Qt. Chrome isn't currently either. And those have their own problems as well. Konqueror doesn't display everything properly at the moment (along with--though I haven't paid attention in long enough, it might have changed--not being as cross platform). I'm honestly not happy from a developing regularly used applications standpoint with any browser at the moment. Nevermind if I need critical speed that the browsers, even with JIT compiling the javascript, can't match C (or exceptional Assembly...) for.
There's always going to be a need for native code, and there's always going to be a need for a GUI toolkit that the native code can use. GTK or Qt happen to be on the top of the list for Linux at the moment, and both offer some level of cross-platform (more-so with Qt).
The space for browser-based applications does seem to be growing, but it's never going to push the native code out all together. Just like Java and other languages have never been able to do.
First of all, I thought we knew this already? O.o
Second, it's more fun if you have a pre-existing psychiatric condition. Personally, it has some nice effects on my PTSD. On the one end, it can help with the numbness and similar symptoms, because I get amped up and happy if I drink enough of it. On the other end, holy shit does the hypervigilance, irritability, and other such symptoms get worse with enough caffeine. Of course, that's really noticeable when you're drinking 3-4 16oz energy drinks every single day, like I used to before I started to realise the extent of my problem. Even down to only one cup of coffee every day, I still don't get any more sleep though, so whatever.
Can't say I've experienced the hallucinations so much, though. But I can only imagine someone with schizophrenia or other disorders causing hallucinations (well, you could try to get away with saying PTSD has hallucinations as they are similar, but there's actually distinct differences between flashback type things of PTSD and hallucinations) drinking a lot of caffeine. Mix it with weed and it's even more fun! I could also say meth, cocaine, and some others, but that sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen, and they can cause hallucinations themselves anyway; and no I'm not kidding--working in an emergency room, I've seen my fair share of heart attacks where the only reasonable explanation was meth/cocaine use.
Nonetheless, I'd be more concerned about ulcers and other problems, like heart problems, that can come with heavy caffeine use. You can at least pass off a somewhat normal life, without ending up in the hospital for it, with the hallucinations, if you really try ;)
I guess that's cool.
But I have to admit. I'm not a big fan of Qt. I kind of see it as an oversized, bloated library. I suppose someone could probably argue reasons for every class and functionality that's present in the library, but some of the things in Qt I look at and get turned off. When there's good cross-platform libraries present for things, I don't really get the reasoning behind rewriting those things.
I know most people look at Qt as a GUI library, but I look over everything, and it's so much more than that. And yet, a lot of those other pieces, I've spent a lot of my programming experience learning things that are just as good and at times, in my personal opinion, better than what Qt offers for the same. Even pieces of the C++ standard that I'm sure Qt added on extra functionality in their equivalent, but it gets really hard for me to reason not using the standard libraries that are nearly (nearly because it does depend on what the implementation of the standard libraries on the system supports--not a problem if each platform goes for compliance with the standard, which I believe most go at least pretty damn close) guaranteed to work anywhere the standard libraries are present.
Just for example, I read they now have a whole parallel/multi-threading library going. But I sit here and ask myself with that over and over, what's wrong with boost::thread (which is going to be included in the C++0x standard anyway)? Even more, there's OpenMP for even further niceness. And having plenty of experience to the point that boost::thread comes naturally to me and OpenMP is getting more and more natural, why the hell would I want to go through learning a whole new set of libraries to do the same thing? But at the same time, why would I want to link against 2-3 libraries that do the same thing?
I guess someone could also argue the niceness of having it all in one place, as well. But I find multiple libraries each focused on their specific task much easier to sift through for documentation and examples than the crap of a library that tries to be everything. The flip-side being when you use one thing and another library you want to use uses something different (which I don't run into often enough for it to be a serious problem, honestly).
I wrote a library in C++ that any time I find something (other than GUI, as that's a whole mess of it's own in my opinion) that is difficult to implement for cross-platform purposes due to the different platforms, I write a little class which I can just take out and put in any of my apps. Of course, it also has a few other things like a couple classes such as a multiple-read, single-write access interface (using boost::mutex, the const volatile keywords, and some const_cast action), but it has maybe 4 other things, which mostly compose of other cross-platform libraries that left just a few capabilities I ended up needing out (like Sleep, though I can't say I'm aware of a good Windows equivalent to nanosleep yet, and it kinda makes my code on Windows not as nice when I'm sleeping in milliseconds but meaning to sleep in microseconds or nanoseconds, meaning dividing by 1000 or 1000000).
That's one thing I do like about GTK, though I am annoyed by so many other pieces of it. At least, a lot of what is implemented in GTK and glib isn't really there a million times over already. Partly just because they're using C, which doesn't have some of the nice stuff in the standard already, and doesn't have Boost ;). But I don't feel like I'm having to justify to myself either learning a whole new thing I've already learned multiple other alternatives to or linking to a whole 'nother library to do something that's already present in another library I'm linking against.
That's my only gripe about "Hopefully we can get rid of GTK now!" Otherwise, I'm actually happy about this. I do like the GPL, but for libraries and such things, I always felt the LGPL was the better choice (in some cases, I even prefer BSD or MIT type licenses over that, but whatever). So, despite my gripes about Qt, I view this as a good thing.
Oh god, thank you. I was thinking either someone has to point out how this has been done at least a couple times or my head was going to explode. Especially with this being slashdot.
I wasn't thinking Nokia, exactly, though. I was actually thinking about my Palm Treo 700w (yeah, with Windows Mobile), where the majority of the applications I used were downloaded with a similar method. The only thing I don't recall ever using is the colored barcodes, but I can't say that gets me the least bit excited about this one.
Well, and the part about it really just holding a unique ID to get information from Microsoft's servers. But that annoys me more than excites me. I'm sure Microsoft has a great setup with their servers, but I'm always cautious over one company's servers holding it all. The idea where, even if one server holding something I wanted went down, there was at the very least a possibility of finding something similar elsewhere. Plus, it rather gives Microsoft control over what they even put on it, which I'm not a big fan of. It can work, but I like to have every bit of control I can have over the things I own. Which is why I don't, and probably won't, have an (unhacked) iPhone. Yeah, I lose in some respects by that, but for things like my phone, I'll take my complete freedom over features any day. Yeah, the free software movement spoils me a bit...
WebOS has a Linux kernel. So, really, there's a degree of open in there. It's just whether they're ever going to take it farther that would be the question. Who knows.
I have to agree. As someone with PTSD (and not from going into battle; though going into battle in 8th grade, when I essentially got stuck with it, would have been interesting, I must admit...), any distraction can help. It can also make it worse by using it as a means of avoidance--and one of the sections for criteria for PTSD according to the DSM includes symptoms of avoidance that become significantly distressing.
Personally, I do like to play the more mind challenging games, as they do distract me, and the less challenging ones can let my mind slip away some times much easier. Can't say I'm the biggest fan of Tetris, but Minesweeper, Sudoku, and other ones that require more thought are always more nice for me. Except when you can do "Expert" minesweeper in 100 seconds and feel like you're just looking at the numbers and not actually thinking about them... then it kinda sucks... but that's all good.