They went with MIPS because it doesn't need either a fan or a big heatsink.
I find the MIPS thing a bit of a problem - there's alot of Linux stuff that won't compile nicely for MIPS, and of course none of the RPMS work too well!
Their distro is loosely RedHat based, but they don't track RedHat - they simply used it (4.x??) as the starting point.
I couldn't care less if it's open or closed. All I care about is the quality, and SEGA, overall are the best games manufacturers/writers out there. From Phantasy Star to VF3 SEGA have some of the best stuff out there.
Sure, I'd like to see free (free beer) development options so they can leverage ye olde 15 yr old in a bedroom to write games that can be given away on the net or whatever.
But I really don't consider highly optimised games machines to be important enough to 'open source' for moral reasons - they aren't infrastructre.
Is this similar to the motion jpeg codec (NOT the same as MPEG) used widely as a high quality high bitrate format for captured digital video?
If so, it's quite useful for local playback and editing, and provides very high quality, since each frame is basically just a jpeg. But without any attempt at delta compression, it results in stonking bitrates.
Very useful for editing though.
On further reading this looks more like an MPEG format, since it is based on MPEG 1 code. That would be a pity, since MPEG 1 fills its niche badly, while motion JPEG filss its niche well. However, I can see why a games company would want an MPEG (low bitrate/low quality) format more than a high bit rate high quality format.
Sadly, there are systems that can id people quite well. When these become cost effective, and hooked into the CCTV systems widespread across much of the UK now, such an image database would let the Government monitor your movements quite effectively.
Wow! The found the thieves because the stolen laptops had an application that contained a unique UID, and sent periodic network announcements to a centralised body.
Gosh, if everyone had one of those on their computer, computer crime would be greatly reduced! And if it was built into the OS or even the firmware, it would be hard for thieves to remove.
So, let's petition Intel and AMD and MS to get together so that all new computers report in a unique ID to a central body over the network whenever they have a live net connection.
I respect the guy because he's put alot of hours in doing high quality stuff, especially stuff that others don't do, like the documentation.
But that doesn't give him license to be rude as hell to pretty much anyone he meets in comp.lang.perl.misc. If usenet newbies wind him up and he can't control his temper he should just keep out of it. People would give him alot more respect that way.
Points that need to be repeated over and over again until the unthinking majority realise why it affects them and start complaining too.
But I think your lack of objection to the use of illegally obtained evidence is odd. Where the law is broken in regard to the rights of the person later found guilty some justify that on the grounds that they sacrificed their rights by breaking the law. This ignores the fact that at the time the police broke the law obtaining evidence the criminal was innocent.
But what about when that evidence is obtained by infringing the rights of others? The cops need some tape of the drug dealers doing a deal, so they break into someone's house to set up a camera (no time to get a warrant). Don't know about you but I don't want police tramping around my house uninivted, thanks.
And what if the police decide to just find the drug dealer's girlfriend and torture her until she produces incriminating photgraphs? Would you be happy to convict on evidence obtained like that?
Koreans had moveable type centuries before..
on
ENIAC Story on NPR
·
· Score: 1
The Koreans had moveable wooden type set in wooden racks long before anyone in the west.
In fact, they made a good trade out of printing prayers and poems and religious passages for the Chinese and Japanese market.
So what? Why do you think computing is so important?
Who invented the polio vaccine? Who invented pre-stressed concrete? Who invented plate glass? Who invented SCUBA equipment? Who invented L.E.D's? What was the first jet engine called? What was the first steamship called and who invented it? Who invented the telegraph (hint, NOT the electric telegraph, the one before that)
When these things are first invented they are just minor bits of research - only later do they turn out to be very important, and the names of the people behind them are forgotten by then.
It was ever thus - computing is the great white hope at the moment, but in years to come computers will be as commonplace, and as interesting, as gas turbines, plate glass, pre-formed concrete, and L.E.D's. And no one will care about the fact no one cares who started it all.
P.S. Please don't all start searching the web for answers to the above questions:-)
Since it seems obvious that no one can agree what the first computer was and who invented it, can't all the pretenders to the crown just agree to refer to themselves as:
"One of the first computers"?
Otherwise we'll spend ages arguing about Babbage's difference engine vs ENIAC vs Err, the Bletchly Park machine, vs whatever.
Get mod_perl and the Apache::ASP module. IT gives you 95% of the ASP object module, including response, request, session, application objects, and embedded scripting in Perl.
I did a job a while back for Inmarsat. Inmarsat are lucky - they have geostationary satellites, which are a patently good idea because they stay where you put them, so to speak. Of course there is almost no room for geostatic satellites left but hey...
When anyone in the inmarsat offices mentioned iridium everyone burst out giggling. Low Earth Orbit is a JOKE. Do you have any idea how FAST those things have to go to stay up at such a low altitude? And because the go so fast they are only overhead for a short length of time, so you need so damn many. So, you have hundreds of high speed satellites wizzing around requiring a load of fuel to keep on track. (And when the fuel runs out, the satellite is dead and needs replacing)
And if a single one goes wrong, the chances of it colliding with another are remarkably high, thus wiping out the whole lot in that orbit. (Well, risiking doing so...)
It's a joke. And of course since a given satellite is overhead for so little time, the swignalling is far more complex, requiring all the land stations to be more failure prone blah blah blah.
Sure, Inmarsat have bugger all bandwidth left, but at least you can get a signal from pretty much anywhere but the poles.
Well, in case you hadn't noticed, NFS is pretty poor in Linux - probably the worst implementation of all the well known *nixes.
So, I guess it could use any help that's going.
Yes, it's true that hummingbird make mainly windows software that is agnostic as to the particular kind of unix that it is interfacing. However, Hummingbird make very good software - top quality - and I'm sure their interest in Linux can only be for the good.
Andover.net are a very small company (35 people). They have had three rounds of investment from various VC companies, so it is very likely that these VC companies have between them a majority share of the company.
And I QUOTE:
"Bruce Twickler, President of Andover, noted, "The acquisition, repurposing and commercialization of content is an extraordinary opportunity for growth. Our proprietary database-driven site creation tools, data collection tools, web tracking and reporting systems, and other technologies allow us to get to a breakeven point on a new site quickly.""
Now, how Open Source friendly does that sound.
Advertisers on andover net publications have included:
Microsoft ZD Net
read more here: http://www2.mtdc.com/mtdc/press004.html
I'm happy to give free consultancy, which is why I post to usenet and mailing lists.
But, it just occured to me that Andover.net is a profit making entity - and/. is part of that.
So, the comments I make (assuming they are interesting) attract people to slashdot, make slashdot more valuable, and generally line the pockets of andover.net
And I don't much like that. Can all/. posters get a % dividend of Andover's profits please? After all, it's us who (in large part) make it popular?
But remember, Andover.net, that all the comments are still copyright 1999 "the poster".... I'm waiting for that very small print at the bottom to change one day...
This is intended as only a bullet point list, mail me if you are interested in a solid critique of the GIMP, it's something I'm insterested in. No order of importance..
1. Bad UI. There are two file menus. The nesting is wrong, and too deep for common ops. Few (less than half?) functions can be reached with hotkeys.
2. Confusing selection metaphor, and use of two kinds of 'crawling ants' marque utterly confusing. 3. Dialogues, esp layer dialogues far too big - this maybe a shortcoming of GTK. 4. Antialiasing _very_ poor compared with Pshop. 5. Slow (esp selection dragging) compared with Pshop. 6. Font handling quite appalling, but this is really an X/unix problem - alas no adobe type manager for Linux (AFAIK) 7. Paths are very implemented in a clumsy manner. 8. Wasted and/or inconsistent use of right mouse button throughout.
GIMP has a great feature set implemented in a decidedly disjointed way. It is a case of not having the basics right - all the filters and scripts count for nothing unless you get these three things 100% right on:
Is that stable in the sense of " constantly being updated because we tweak stuff" or "constantly changing because we fix broken stuff" or "completely stable but we release even more completely stable versions every three weeks" or "It's stable because it doesn't crash, but you need to reboot every three weeks to upgrade the kernel anyway" or, rather is it stable in the sense of:
Truth is, if I have something intelligent I want to say, I don't go to/.
Kudos to you for bothering to spend time posting interesting material in this place. One of microsoft's strenght is that they have no pride. No ego. This is also OS's great weakness.
When MS were proved wrong about the Internet they didn't beat their chests and rave about how it sucked. They said "yup, we were wrong, but just look how fast we can turn the world's biggest company around".
What makes you think MS has changed? When Bill Gates thinks to himself one day "you know, *nix is the way to go, I've had it up to here keeping Win32 shored up", then MS will turn around and have the best damn *nix distro out there in the space of 2 years.
The GPL won't matter. They'll grab BSD, write the replacement for X we've all been looking for, write a Win32 compatibility layer, port office, and ship it out the door.
Meanwhile Linux will be saying it sucks because you can't configure the scroll bars to be translucent, and still arguing with each other about whether to use info or man.
Christ, every day I read this damn site I feel like wiping SuSE and stilling *BSD on and having done with the lot of it until some vendor ships a distro that doesn't have wankers for advocates.
Sorry about the language, and before you say 'if you hate/. why read it', well, it's because I hate to see a good thing die. I hate USENET, but I read it because it used to be an amazing place indeed.
Tron was good because it was far ahead of its time. Computers were strange and mysterious, computer games were for the underground. The whole idea of people inside logic was novel and clever.
It's a film that can't be remade. Intel is a household name. People talk about API's and threading and hardware abstraction on the bus to work.
If they tried to remake it you can bet on three things.
1. They'd rave about how it took 10 billion Crays to render, and had models with 10000000 moving parts, so it must be good.
2. It would have children and product placements in it, as well as cool in jokes about 'the industry', because everyone has heared of industry figures now
3. It would suck
Factual Error in press release
on
Red Hat Europe
·
· Score: 1
"Red Hat's UK office and European headquarters is based in Guildford (greater London). "
No. Guildford is a town a long way outside London. No definition of greater London would ever come anywhere near Guildford.
Guildford is an easy 1 hour commute by mainline train from central London, but if RedHat wanted a London office, they should have payed for one:-)
Slashdot Mirror
They went with MIPS because it doesn't need either a fan or a big heatsink.
I find the MIPS thing a bit of a problem - there's alot of Linux stuff that won't compile nicely for MIPS, and of course none of the RPMS work too well!
Their distro is loosely RedHat based, but they don't track RedHat - they simply used it (4.x??) as the starting point.
I couldn't care less if it's open or closed. All I care about is the quality, and SEGA, overall are the best games manufacturers/writers out there. From Phantasy Star to VF3 SEGA have some of the best stuff out there.
Sure, I'd like to see free (free beer) development options so they can leverage ye olde 15 yr old in a bedroom to write games that can be given away on the net or whatever.
But I really don't consider highly optimised games machines to be important enough to 'open source' for moral reasons - they aren't infrastructre.
Is this similar to the motion jpeg codec (NOT the same as MPEG) used widely as a high quality high bitrate format for captured digital video?
If so, it's quite useful for local playback and editing, and provides very high quality, since each frame is basically just a jpeg. But without any attempt at delta compression, it results in stonking bitrates.
Very useful for editing though.
On further reading this looks more like an MPEG format, since it is based on MPEG 1 code. That would be a pity, since MPEG 1 fills its niche badly, while motion JPEG filss its niche well. However, I can see why a games company would want an MPEG (low bitrate/low quality) format more than a high bit rate high quality format.
Sadly, there are systems that can id people quite well. When these become cost effective, and hooked into the CCTV systems widespread across much of the UK now, such an image database would let the Government monitor your movements quite effectively.
. htm
See: http://www.dss.state.ct.us/digital/news11/bhsug11
and
http://www.tao.ca/wind/rre/0587.html
and also
http://www.spy.org.uk/n-mandrake.htm
spy.org.uk have lots of info on CCTV and privacy concerns.
I couldn't help noticing how professional sounding the copy on the product description was. Something of a breath of fresh air.
Also nice to see things like ddd being in the distro, and to see hardware RAID support.
And at a very reasonable price.
Wow! The found the thieves because the stolen laptops had an application that contained a unique UID, and sent periodic network announcements to a centralised body.
:-)
Gosh, if everyone had one of those on their computer, computer crime would be greatly reduced! And if it was built into the OS or even the firmware, it would be hard for thieves to remove.
So, let's petition Intel and AMD and MS to get together so that all new computers report in a unique ID to a central body over the network whenever they have a live net connection.
Yeah! That'd be great..
giggle
Heh - that's the truth.
I respect the guy because he's put alot of hours in doing high quality stuff, especially stuff that others don't do, like the documentation.
But that doesn't give him license to be rude as hell to pretty much anyone he meets in comp.lang.perl.misc. If usenet newbies wind him up and he can't control his temper he should just keep out of it. People would give him alot more respect that way.
"The government that was instated in 1776 has died long ago. "
/. guys kinda state the obvious sometimes :_)
Well, yeah, I mean they'd be around 245 years old otherwise.
Boy, these
Points that need to be repeated over and over again until the unthinking majority realise why it affects them and start complaining too.
But I think your lack of objection to the use of illegally obtained evidence is odd. Where the law is broken in regard to the rights of the person later found guilty some justify that on the grounds that they sacrificed their rights by breaking the law. This ignores the fact that at the time the police broke the law obtaining evidence the criminal was innocent.
But what about when that evidence is obtained by infringing the rights of others? The cops need some tape of the drug dealers doing a deal, so they break into someone's house to set up a camera (no time to get a warrant). Don't know about you but I don't want police tramping around my house uninivted, thanks.
And what if the police decide to just find the drug dealer's girlfriend and torture her until she produces incriminating photgraphs? Would you be happy to convict on evidence obtained like that?
The Koreans had moveable wooden type set in wooden racks long before anyone in the west.
In fact, they made a good trade out of printing prayers and poems and religious passages for the Chinese and Japanese market.
So what? Why do you think computing is so important?
:-)
Who invented the polio vaccine?
Who invented pre-stressed concrete?
Who invented plate glass?
Who invented SCUBA equipment?
Who invented L.E.D's?
What was the first jet engine called?
What was the first steamship called and who invented it?
Who invented the telegraph (hint, NOT the electric telegraph, the one before that)
When these things are first invented they are just minor bits of research - only later do they turn out to be very important, and the names of the people behind them are forgotten by then.
It was ever thus - computing is the great white hope at the moment, but in years to come computers will be as commonplace, and as interesting, as gas turbines, plate glass, pre-formed concrete, and L.E.D's. And no one will care about the fact no one cares who started it all.
P.S. Please don't all start searching the web for answers to the above questions
Since it seems obvious that no one can agree what the first computer was and who invented it, can't all the pretenders to the crown just agree to refer to themselves as:
"One of the first computers"?
Otherwise we'll spend ages arguing about Babbage's difference engine vs ENIAC vs Err, the Bletchly Park machine, vs whatever.
Sigh...
Implemented in Perl.
Get mod_perl and the Apache::ASP module. IT gives you 95% of the ASP object module, including response, request, session, application objects, and embedded scripting in Perl.
I did a job a while back for Inmarsat. Inmarsat are lucky - they have geostationary satellites, which are a patently good idea because they stay where you put them, so to speak. Of course there is almost no room for geostatic satellites left but hey...
When anyone in the inmarsat offices mentioned iridium everyone burst out giggling. Low Earth Orbit is a JOKE. Do you have any idea how FAST those things have to go to stay up at such a low altitude? And because the go so fast they are only overhead for a short length of time, so you need so damn many. So, you have hundreds of high speed satellites wizzing around requiring a load of fuel to keep on track. (And when the fuel runs out, the satellite is dead and needs replacing)
And if a single one goes wrong, the chances of it colliding with another are remarkably high, thus wiping out the whole lot in that orbit. (Well, risiking doing so...)
It's a joke. And of course since a given satellite is overhead for so little time, the swignalling is far more complex, requiring all the land stations to be more failure prone blah blah blah.
Sure, Inmarsat have bugger all bandwidth left, but at least you can get a signal from pretty much anywhere but the poles.
Well, in case you hadn't noticed, NFS is pretty poor in Linux - probably the worst implementation of all the well known *nixes.
So, I guess it could use any help that's going.
Yes, it's true that hummingbird make mainly windows software that is agnostic as to the particular kind of unix that it is interfacing. However, Hummingbird make very good software - top quality - and I'm sure their interest in Linux can only be for the good.
Andover.net are a very small company (35 people). They have had three rounds of investment from various VC companies, so it is very likely that these VC companies have between them a majority share of the company.
And I QUOTE:
"Bruce Twickler, President of Andover, noted, "The acquisition, repurposing and commercialization of content is an extraordinary opportunity for growth. Our proprietary database-driven site creation tools, data collection tools, web tracking and reporting systems, and other technologies allow us to get to a breakeven point on a new site quickly.""
Now, how Open Source friendly does that sound.
Advertisers on andover net publications have included:
Microsoft
ZD Net
read more here:
http://www2.mtdc.com/mtdc/press004.html
I'm happy to give free consultancy, which is why I post to usenet and mailing lists.
/. is part of that.
/. posters get a % dividend of Andover's profits please? After all, it's us who (in large part) make it popular?
But, it just occured to me that Andover.net is a profit making entity - and
So, the comments I make (assuming they are interesting) attract people to slashdot, make slashdot more valuable, and generally line the pockets of andover.net
And I don't much like that. Can all
But remember, Andover.net, that all the comments are still copyright 1999 "the poster".... I'm waiting for that very small print at the bottom to change one day...
"Write back when your OS knows how to fork() :)"
:)
:->
Write back when your OS kernel is 100% thread safe
Let's not throw stones in glass houses
This is intended as only a bullet point list, mail me if you are interested in a solid critique of the GIMP, it's something I'm insterested in.
No order of importance..
1. Bad UI. There are two file menus. The nesting is wrong, and too deep for common ops. Few (less than half?) functions can be reached with hotkeys.
2. Confusing selection metaphor, and use of two kinds of 'crawling ants' marque utterly confusing.
3. Dialogues, esp layer dialogues far too big - this maybe a shortcoming of GTK.
4. Antialiasing _very_ poor compared with Pshop.
5. Slow (esp selection dragging) compared with Pshop.
6. Font handling quite appalling, but this is really an X/unix problem - alas no adobe type manager for Linux (AFAIK)
7. Paths are very implemented in a clumsy manner.
8. Wasted and/or inconsistent use of right mouse button throughout.
GIMP has a great feature set implemented in a decidedly disjointed way. It is a case of not having the basics right - all the filters and scripts count for nothing unless you get these three things 100% right on:
1. Selection management
2. Layer management
3. Colour management
4. User interface
Is that stable in the sense of " constantly being updated because we tweak stuff" or "constantly changing because we fix broken stuff" or "completely stable but we release even more completely stable versions every three weeks" or "It's stable because it doesn't crash, but you need to reboot every three weeks to upgrade the kernel anyway" or, rather is it stable in the sense of:
"Not stable, but in fact, constantly changing."
Only 50% tongue in cheek....
Yes, I think lots of people agree with you.
/.
/. why read it', well, it's because I hate to see a good thing die. I hate USENET, but I read it because it used to be an amazing place indeed.
Truth is, if I have something intelligent I want to say, I don't go to
Kudos to you for bothering to spend time posting interesting material in this place. One of microsoft's strenght is that they have no pride. No ego. This is also OS's great weakness.
When MS were proved wrong about the Internet they didn't beat their chests and rave about how it sucked. They said "yup, we were wrong, but just look how fast we can turn the world's biggest company around".
What makes you think MS has changed? When Bill Gates thinks to himself one day "you know, *nix is the way to go, I've had it up to here keeping Win32 shored up", then MS will turn around and have the best damn *nix distro out there in the space of 2 years.
The GPL won't matter. They'll grab BSD, write the replacement for X we've all been looking for, write a Win32 compatibility layer, port office, and ship it out the door.
Meanwhile Linux will be saying it sucks because you can't configure the scroll bars to be translucent, and still arguing with each other about whether to use info or man.
Christ, every day I read this damn site I feel like wiping SuSE and stilling *BSD on and having done with the lot of it until some vendor ships a distro that doesn't have wankers for advocates.
Sorry about the language, and before you say 'if you hate
"As far as I know, with Linux, most (if not all) of the hardware stuff is figured out dynamically when the computer boots. "
:-)
Sadly, no. In fact, no no no noNO NO NO!! arg. Thud.
Linux can dynamically detect far less hardware (and less reliably) than Win95+, especially if the hardware is less than a year old.
Hardware config for most things is stored in ASCII files on the hard drive, which are read during the boot processes.
Absolutely.
Tron was good because it was far ahead of its time. Computers were strange and mysterious, computer games were for the underground. The whole idea of people inside logic was novel and clever.
It's a film that can't be remade. Intel is a household name. People talk about API's and threading and hardware abstraction on the bus to work.
If they tried to remake it you can bet on three things.
1. They'd rave about how it took 10 billion Crays to render, and had models with 10000000 moving parts, so it must be good.
2. It would have children and product placements in it, as well as cool in jokes about 'the industry', because everyone has heared of industry figures now
3. It would suck
"Red Hat's UK office and European headquarters is based in Guildford (greater London). "
:-)
No. Guildford is a town a long way outside London. No definition of greater London would ever come anywhere near Guildford.
Guildford is an easy 1 hour commute by mainline train from central London, but if RedHat wanted a London office, they should have payed for one
Well, it's a bit of a gamble if you ask me.
I think we should play a game called 'guess the 10 day price' where we guess the price per share after 10 trading days.
I'll go for $25