Its a shame Sugar didn't turn out to be as popular as it could have been. I know as a kid I used to play with the computer for hours on end, changing settings and playing with QBASIC (gorillas anyone?). By giving children an open source OS to play with (as well as some kind of instruction) they might have really had the opportunity to learn something.
However, in terms of the OLPC goal, they should of gotten on their knees and begged for Windows XP. Giving children all around the world laptops is the more important goal than spreading FOSS, and the lack of a windows environment is what helped its competition grow and crush the project. I remember at least one major sale was blocked because Intel's competing laptop (which was more expensive) had a windows environment. If they would of dual booted sugar, the children would of found it and learned it. If anything else, just to annoy their parents.
"The reason why it's acceptable that Firefox, Opera etc does this is because the user chose to download the browser."
You're using a double standard here. I downloaded Google Chrome so I could go and try it out. Give it the benefit of the doubt, and so forth. I didn't need it to be my default browser any more than I needed Opera to be my default browser when I decided to try it out.
Certainly its easy to fix this. Most of the browsers will demand to be set as the default browser when you open them, but this is a conversation for the new and inexperienced users who don't know how to change that. If they did download Chrome (because Google is pushing chrome aggressively on every page) having it be the default browser could be a huge learning curve.
Now, I'm all for making users learn something, but eventually they end up calling you on the phone and demand you make it work right.
I don't know how many of you ever played Mechwarrior 4, but at its very heart it was an open source game. In Mechwarrior 4 mercenaries, you were allowed to model and add your own vehicles, weapons, and maps to the game. The Mw4 community added no less than 30 incredible mechs to the game, as well as a wide variety of vehicles and weapons that were throughly tested and balanced through extensive player testing.
It was this community effort that brought mechwarrior in line with its true battletech roots, and Microsoft gained a lot of my respect because not only did they allow it? They encouraged it, by making these extensions easy to build and distribute.
The only complaint I have is that the open source expansions broke Microsoft's expansion, and I couldn't use my WarHawk anymore. (Masakari, to you Inner Sphere Trash).
In Grand Junction, Colorado it is illegal to simply dump your electronics in the trash. You're required to pay a $50 processing fee for all old electronics. This includes computers, televisions, and basically anything larger than an iPod. $5-10 to dipose of your electronics with this other company is not a bad deal at all.
If you read through the entire article, you can find some interesting information on what it was he wanted us to do. Instead of regulating CO2 emissions, he states that it is more economical to reduce the amount of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth. I don't really understand his position. In effect, he's saying, "I don't believe in global warming. However, even if I did, there's no reason to regulate CO2 emissions." He seems bent against regulation of CO2 at any cost.
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work. This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
This man strikes me as being very much against any type of environmental regulation, and I'm not surprised that the EPA is trying to silence him.
You don't seem to understand, even a little. These numbers are on a piece of paper that no longer exists on a computer. Not even the most advanced computer script in the world can adjust paper. So okay, I understand part of your point, put it into the computer first, and then run the script. These documents are crawling with numbers. Line numbers, electrical classifications, instrument identifiers. Even if I had a script to manage the process, you then have the problem of units. I'm not doing 5000 ft to meter conversions. We have lengths (using both ft, in, ',and "), weights, volumes, temperatures, powers (hp, MMBtu/hr, kW, MW) and so forth. Even if you could have a script smart enough to check for units, how would it tell the difference between a temperature and a temperature change? If I have a heat exchanger with a temperature change of 50ÂF, the correct metric temperature change is 27.8ÂC. If you got 10ÂC, you used the wrong method. The sheer amount of back checking I would have to do to make sure a rogue script didn't destroy my drawings would be insane.
This is not a simple database you're playing with.
I work for an engineering company, and unit conversions are not a trivial operation. All of our drawings are created in autocad, and after several years it becomes difficult if not impossible to find the original file. As such, converting achieved documents requires recreating the document entirely from scratch. We also use a fairly vigorous quality control system that requires 3 engineers to check every document change, verify the calculation, and repeat the calculation using a different method to ensure that no mistakes were made.
We recently acquired an older project where we needed to simply change the title block on each page, and this process took roughly 5000 hours. For something on the scale of the space shuttle, 370 million isn't unheard of.
Could somebody please explain to me why the license matters? I mean, I understand that if a license limits mpeg-4 encoding to a single government computer running Windows ME that was lost 5 years ago, that the license is a HUGE barrier to entry to use the codec. However, in this case the license seems to be the only single category in which Theora wins. The compression is worse than mpeg-4. The compression takes more space. But look! The license is a little better! WINNER!
There is a recurring joke told by the person that runs Kingdom of Loathing, and he tells it (or references it) weekly in his podcast, and it goes something like this:
My development group is banding together to release a new MMORPG called "The Future". In "The Future" all content will be user created, because according to everybody user created content is the future. Everything will be provided by users, characters, classes, npcs, quests, art, even the combat system, spells, magic, and theme of the game. The game itself will ship as a large gray box in which users will be given the tools to create whatever they want.
And after a few months when the design has settled down, in "The future" players will be represented by cocks and balls, where they will travel around landscapes of cocks and balls with cock and ball trees and animals. And they will kill monsters shaped like cocks and balls with their penis swords and penis spells. Because as any person who has ever been on the Internet knows, this is what people with the spare time to create this stuff will do.
And that's "The Future".
I'm not saying user created content can't be an excellent source of entertainment, I just don't think letting users create the entire thing will work.
I'm going to guess that this statement applies to most of the people on slashdot.
"I provide tech support to my friends and family."
Doesn't it chill your blood to imagine that you could very suddenly be in a situation where every single person you know who gets a new computer is going to need you to set it up? They will be totally and completely helpless without Internet explorer, they won't be able to burn it to a CD or put it on a flash drive without your detailed instructions.
And then it won't work. And it won't be what they're used to be because FireFox/chrome/IE 8 isn't IE 6. And then you'll have to come over again to explain that the download manager isn't stealing their awful FWD: jokes.
This isn't progress, this is a punishment to each and every one of us.
Although that website is ancient, its a collection of a vast amount of material on the evolution/creationism debate that was held exclusively on usenet. It serves as an amazing reference so that if you see the same conversation starting for the nth time you can post the link and close the thread.
Now that may seem dismissive, but you would be amazed how many times you will see creationists copy and paste first posts from anti-evolution websites, which have detailed answers that would be a pain to type out each time.
Because the summary wasn't kind enough to give you the answer to the question, here it is.
Human evaluators (mostly college students) are trained in the art of validating a search engine result. They examine the results of their searches, and determine which ones are the most highly relevant. For example, searching for the Olympics should yield information about the 2008 Olympics (or any current one) instead of the 1996 Olympics. The reviewers frequently work on the same query results, that way they can see how consistently the reviewers are rating websites.
The vast upshot of this, is that it helps weed out those websites that are cheating the system, and trying to get their website as the #1 google hit, so they can show you ads. So the large part of what they are doing is tracking spam websites, not real ones.
This is basically a list of my favorite games of all time, with the notable exception of John Madden Football. Seriously, what the heck? How is it they make 1 every year, and its a top seller? I've never understood this phenomenon, especially because they only record him saying about 5 things.
Now to be completely fair, in real life he only uses about 5 phrases, but they could have mixed it up a little.
But overall, it looks like a good read. I think I'll try to hunt down a copy.
I like Captain Hook's theory (the post above mine) with a slight modification. In addition to being useful for grazing a large area while remaining mostly still (cover a 30 foot circle while stationary) long necks are also used in the mating ritual. Physical attractiveness (in the eyes of the animal) is a powerful force. Particularly in birds, in which the male tends to be colorful (such as a male peacock) while the female tends to blend in with the environment.
You need a larger imagination. You have successfully described flying squirrels. I think they fit the category nicely for bats with wings that cannot fly. Go over to wikipedia and look at them for yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_squirrel
They also have flying possums, but they lack the name recognition (thanks Rocky and Bullwinkle!).
As an engineer, I have to design pumps to move fluid through pipes, and one of the biggest factors you have is the height at the destination of the fluid. Running this calculation right now, a mere 1 foot of height increase is roughly the same as pumping something an extra 20 feet. Now that might not seem like much, but add 10 feet of height to a line (such as a vein in a neck) and you are looking at 200 feet of pipe.
Although nobody is really surprised that Microsoft has made their software comply with the letter of the law and not the spirit, is this really a big issue? If, as the summary says, the marketplace is demanding a grand interoperability between software products, then we might see the rapid uptake of OOO in the near future. Failing that, if nobody switches, then the market has spoken loud and clear, Nobody cares.
Honestly, the single most productive thing you could do to ensure the rapid uptake of open standards would be to make openoffice.org an amazing product. Put all of your time and effort into making it clearly superior, and at that point everyone will use an ODF by default.
Iâ(TM)ve never been a huge fan of head tracking. I mean, it sounds like a cool idea, but it seems like it would require either excessive movement on your part to do anything meaningful, or it would require you to sit almost absolutely still in order to keep your display even semi-stable.
The real problem though is with people that would wear them in public. We already hate people that wear Bluetooth headsets everywhere (you know who you are), how fun would it be to have somebody that looks like theyâ(TM)re looking at you, when in reality theyâ(TM)re looking up dirty pictures of Summer Glao on the internet.
I think this has some promise, but it would need to have an immense number of scenarios to play through. When I was playing StarCraft (and I assure you, I played like a crack addict) the main thing that kept me playing was the wide variety and type of scenarios.
Who remembers the generic 9x9 defense maps of every flavor (lurker, sunken defense, etc.)? The RPG maps, where you could have characters that leveled and learned skills? The really awful paint version where you drew on the minimap with pylons to make art?
Sure, the main attraction was the standard 3v3 BGH, but it was fun to mess around with the other stuff.
This tutorial describes how to set up and run an UnrealIRCD server on OpenSuSE 10.2 and Fedora Core 6. It also shows how to install Anope IRC services. Anope is a set of Services for IRC networks that allows users to manage their nicks and channels in a secure and efficient way, and administrators to manage their network with powerful tools.
Its FOSS, you can setup SSL, and it should be fairly easy to log/manage. With the tools available each person would be setting up their own chat room (just by naming it) and logging should be a snap.
To be honest, I've never really understood how the pro gaming leagues really made any money. I understand that sponsors will give money to anything (re: Pizza hut advertising on a NASA rocket http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2202), but this is no excuse. At the very most I'm indifferent about how well other people play the games I play, and I'm pretty sure most of my friends are the same way. The economy is just a useful scapegoat in this situation.
Let's take a survey:
How many of you enjoy watching other people play video games?
How many of you have dismissed players that dominate you as having spent way too much time playing video games?
What's your favorite kind of cheese? I'm partial to those Kraft American Singles.
You should look into linuxhaters
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You should look into the Linux Haters Blog published here: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/
The author is a former Linux contributor, and he offers many valuable insights into some of the issues with the code, for example:
Let me attempt to summarize.
A) PulseAudio needs to work with existing applications, so it implements an ALSA emulation layer, except, it's not complete. Only 70% of ALSA applications work. So it's like, totally ready.
B) So, in the true open source fashion, you should port your app to be a native PulseAudio client. Except that you can't. There's this yet-another-audio-library called libsidney, but it's not ready yet. (Hmm, this sounds familiar...)
C) Fedora led the way in incorporating PulseAudio before it was ready, breaking audio for thousands of users. Then because open source is about copying good ideas and bad ones, a ton of other distros adopted it as well. Amazing guys. In a way, you've spread bad code that breaks audio on thousands of computers faster than a virus could have. And it's immune to antivirus!
D) so now that we're in this "mess" (as the lead developer of PulseAudio calls it*), LSB comes along and says "we're going to standardize how your write audio apps!" Oh, but wait, ALSA's now "old" (we hardly knew ye), and I can't directly program PulseAudio. Hmm... So the article's brilliant solution? Standardize on the PulseAudio-safe subset of ALSA.
WHAT THE FUCK.
I can just imagine the future alsa man page. A big listing of functions, with a nice little asterisk next to those functions that you shouldn't use unless you want your app to totally FAIL on a system which has been sodomized by Pulse Audio. I can just see the developers of commercial Linux sound apps (all three of them) jumping for joy.
And thus unfolds another chapter in long history of failed sound systems on Linux. Can they make it much worse? I, for one, am excited to see how much worse they can make it until we all go back to listening to square waves on our PC speakers.
* BTW, also notice that it's the PulseAudio guy calling Linux audio a mess. Did he forget that it was his project that took the existing mess, and unloaded a giant steaming turd on it? Congratufuckinglations. You've just made it worse. You're a truly a worthy OSS contributor.
He's pretty harsh, but he always has a point behind it.
One of the main reasons why modern operating systems take so long to boot is that they are very bulky: a huge amount of code needs to be read when a computer is first turned on. Consisting of far fewer lines of code than Windows, Presto needs just a few hundred megabytes of memory, says Jordan Smith, product marketing manager at Xandros. Microsoft's Vista operating system, in contrast, recommends at least 15 gigabytes of free disk space to install.
I don't think the reviewer really understands what's happening here. Recommended amount of hard drive space is not installed space (although I'm aware that Vista is a beast). And the reviewer has apparently compared RAM to HD space.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a shame Sugar didn't turn out to be as popular as it could have been. I know as a kid I used to play with the computer for hours on end, changing settings and playing with QBASIC (gorillas anyone?). By giving children an open source OS to play with (as well as some kind of instruction) they might have really had the opportunity to learn something.
However, in terms of the OLPC goal, they should of gotten on their knees and begged for Windows XP. Giving children all around the world laptops is the more important goal than spreading FOSS, and the lack of a windows environment is what helped its competition grow and crush the project. I remember at least one major sale was blocked because Intel's competing laptop (which was more expensive) had a windows environment. If they would of dual booted sugar, the children would of found it and learned it. If anything else, just to annoy their parents.
"The reason why it's acceptable that Firefox, Opera etc does this is because the user chose to download the browser."
You're using a double standard here. I downloaded Google Chrome so I could go and try it out. Give it the benefit of the doubt, and so forth. I didn't need it to be my default browser any more than I needed Opera to be my default browser when I decided to try it out.
Certainly its easy to fix this. Most of the browsers will demand to be set as the default browser when you open them, but this is a conversation for the new and inexperienced users who don't know how to change that. If they did download Chrome (because Google is pushing chrome aggressively on every page) having it be the default browser could be a huge learning curve.
Now, I'm all for making users learn something, but eventually they end up calling you on the phone and demand you make it work right.
I don't know how many of you ever played Mechwarrior 4, but at its very heart it was an open source game. In Mechwarrior 4 mercenaries, you were allowed to model and add your own vehicles, weapons, and maps to the game. The Mw4 community added no less than 30 incredible mechs to the game, as well as a wide variety of vehicles and weapons that were throughly tested and balanced through extensive player testing.
It was this community effort that brought mechwarrior in line with its true battletech roots, and Microsoft gained a lot of my respect because not only did they allow it? They encouraged it, by making these extensions easy to build and distribute.
The only complaint I have is that the open source expansions broke Microsoft's expansion, and I couldn't use my WarHawk anymore. (Masakari, to you Inner Sphere Trash).
In Grand Junction, Colorado it is illegal to simply dump your electronics in the trash. You're required to pay a $50 processing fee for all old electronics. This includes computers, televisions, and basically anything larger than an iPod. $5-10 to dipose of your electronics with this other company is not a bad deal at all.
If you read through the entire article, you can find some interesting information on what it was he wanted us to do. Instead of regulating CO2 emissions, he states that it is more economical to reduce the amount of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth. I don't really understand his position. In effect, he's saying, "I don't believe in global warming. However, even if I did, there's no reason to regulate CO2 emissions." He seems bent against regulation of CO2 at any cost.
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work. This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
This man strikes me as being very much against any type of environmental regulation, and I'm not surprised that the EPA is trying to silence him.
System Error:
Password too short.
You don't seem to understand, even a little. These numbers are on a piece of paper that no longer exists on a computer. Not even the most advanced computer script in the world can adjust paper. So okay, I understand part of your point, put it into the computer first, and then run the script. These documents are crawling with numbers. Line numbers, electrical classifications, instrument identifiers. Even if I had a script to manage the process, you then have the problem of units. I'm not doing 5000 ft to meter conversions. We have lengths (using both ft, in, ',and "), weights, volumes, temperatures, powers (hp, MMBtu/hr, kW, MW) and so forth. Even if you could have a script smart enough to check for units, how would it tell the difference between a temperature and a temperature change? If I have a heat exchanger with a temperature change of 50ÂF, the correct metric temperature change is 27.8ÂC. If you got 10ÂC, you used the wrong method. The sheer amount of back checking I would have to do to make sure a rogue script didn't destroy my drawings would be insane.
This is not a simple database you're playing with.
I work for an engineering company, and unit conversions are not a trivial operation. All of our drawings are created in autocad, and after several years it becomes difficult if not impossible to find the original file. As such, converting achieved documents requires recreating the document entirely from scratch. We also use a fairly vigorous quality control system that requires 3 engineers to check every document change, verify the calculation, and repeat the calculation using a different method to ensure that no mistakes were made.
We recently acquired an older project where we needed to simply change the title block on each page, and this process took roughly 5000 hours. For something on the scale of the space shuttle, 370 million isn't unheard of.
Could somebody please explain to me why the license matters? I mean, I understand that if a license limits mpeg-4 encoding to a single government computer running Windows ME that was lost 5 years ago, that the license is a HUGE barrier to entry to use the codec. However, in this case the license seems to be the only single category in which Theora wins. The compression is worse than mpeg-4. The compression takes more space. But look! The license is a little better! WINNER!
Flops is short for FLoating point Operations Per Second. There is a point to the s.
There is a recurring joke told by the person that runs Kingdom of Loathing, and he tells it (or references it) weekly in his podcast, and it goes something like this:
My development group is banding together to release a new MMORPG called "The Future". In "The Future" all content will be user created, because according to everybody user created content is the future. Everything will be provided by users, characters, classes, npcs, quests, art, even the combat system, spells, magic, and theme of the game. The game itself will ship as a large gray box in which users will be given the tools to create whatever they want.
And after a few months when the design has settled down, in "The future" players will be represented by cocks and balls, where they will travel around landscapes of cocks and balls with cock and ball trees and animals. And they will kill monsters shaped like cocks and balls with their penis swords and penis spells. Because as any person who has ever been on the Internet knows, this is what people with the spare time to create this stuff will do.
And that's "The Future".
I'm not saying user created content can't be an excellent source of entertainment, I just don't think letting users create the entire thing will work.
I'm going to guess that this statement applies to most of the people on slashdot.
"I provide tech support to my friends and family."
Doesn't it chill your blood to imagine that you could very suddenly be in a situation where every single person you know who gets a new computer is going to need you to set it up? They will be totally and completely helpless without Internet explorer, they won't be able to burn it to a CD or put it on a flash drive without your detailed instructions.
And then it won't work. And it won't be what they're used to be because FireFox/chrome/IE 8 isn't IE 6. And then you'll have to come over again to explain that the download manager isn't stealing their awful FWD: jokes.
This isn't progress, this is a punishment to each and every one of us.
You should investigate talkorigins.org
Although that website is ancient, its a collection of a vast amount of material on the evolution/creationism debate that was held exclusively on usenet. It serves as an amazing reference so that if you see the same conversation starting for the nth time you can post the link and close the thread.
Now that may seem dismissive, but you would be amazed how many times you will see creationists copy and paste first posts from anti-evolution websites, which have detailed answers that would be a pain to type out each time.
Because the summary wasn't kind enough to give you the answer to the question, here it is.
Human evaluators (mostly college students) are trained in the art of validating a search engine result. They examine the results of their searches, and determine which ones are the most highly relevant. For example, searching for the Olympics should yield information about the 2008 Olympics (or any current one) instead of the 1996 Olympics. The reviewers frequently work on the same query results, that way they can see how consistently the reviewers are rating websites.
The vast upshot of this, is that it helps weed out those websites that are cheating the system, and trying to get their website as the #1 google hit, so they can show you ads. So the large part of what they are doing is tracking spam websites, not real ones.
This is basically a list of my favorite games of all time, with the notable exception of John Madden Football. Seriously, what the heck? How is it they make 1 every year, and its a top seller? I've never understood this phenomenon, especially because they only record him saying about 5 things.
Now to be completely fair, in real life he only uses about 5 phrases, but they could have mixed it up a little.
But overall, it looks like a good read. I think I'll try to hunt down a copy.
I like Captain Hook's theory (the post above mine) with a slight modification. In addition to being useful for grazing a large area while remaining mostly still (cover a 30 foot circle while stationary) long necks are also used in the mating ritual. Physical attractiveness (in the eyes of the animal) is a powerful force. Particularly in birds, in which the male tends to be colorful (such as a male peacock) while the female tends to blend in with the environment.
You need a larger imagination. You have successfully described flying squirrels. I think they fit the category nicely for bats with wings that cannot fly. Go over to wikipedia and look at them for yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_squirrel
They also have flying possums, but they lack the name recognition (thanks Rocky and Bullwinkle!).
As an engineer, I have to design pumps to move fluid through pipes, and one of the biggest factors you have is the height at the destination of the fluid. Running this calculation right now, a mere 1 foot of height increase is roughly the same as pumping something an extra 20 feet. Now that might not seem like much, but add 10 feet of height to a line (such as a vein in a neck) and you are looking at 200 feet of pipe.
Although nobody is really surprised that Microsoft has made their software comply with the letter of the law and not the spirit, is this really a big issue? If, as the summary says, the marketplace is demanding a grand interoperability between software products, then we might see the rapid uptake of OOO in the near future. Failing that, if nobody switches, then the market has spoken loud and clear, Nobody cares.
Honestly, the single most productive thing you could do to ensure the rapid uptake of open standards would be to make openoffice.org an amazing product. Put all of your time and effort into making it clearly superior, and at that point everyone will use an ODF by default.
Wow, not sure what happened there, apparently slashdot isn't a huge fan of apostrophes.
Iâ(TM)ve never been a huge fan of head tracking. I mean, it sounds like a cool idea, but it seems like it would require either excessive movement on your part to do anything meaningful, or it would require you to sit almost absolutely still in order to keep your display even semi-stable. The real problem though is with people that would wear them in public. We already hate people that wear Bluetooth headsets everywhere (you know who you are), how fun would it be to have somebody that looks like theyâ(TM)re looking at you, when in reality theyâ(TM)re looking up dirty pictures of Summer Glao on the internet.
I think this has some promise, but it would need to have an immense number of scenarios to play through. When I was playing StarCraft (and I assure you, I played like a crack addict) the main thing that kept me playing was the wide variety and type of scenarios. Who remembers the generic 9x9 defense maps of every flavor (lurker, sunken defense, etc.)? The RPG maps, where you could have characters that leveled and learned skills? The really awful paint version where you drew on the minimap with pylons to make art? Sure, the main attraction was the standard 3v3 BGH, but it was fun to mess around with the other stuff.
This tutorial describes how to set up and run an UnrealIRCD server on OpenSuSE 10.2 and Fedora Core 6. It also shows how to install Anope IRC services. Anope is a set of Services for IRC networks that allows users to manage their nicks and channels in a secure and efficient way, and administrators to manage their network with powerful tools.
Its FOSS, you can setup SSL, and it should be fairly easy to log/manage. With the tools available each person would be setting up their own chat room (just by naming it) and logging should be a snap.
To be honest, I've never really understood how the pro gaming leagues really made any money. I understand that sponsors will give money to anything (re: Pizza hut advertising on a NASA rocket http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2202), but this is no excuse. At the very most I'm indifferent about how well other people play the games I play, and I'm pretty sure most of my friends are the same way. The economy is just a useful scapegoat in this situation. Let's take a survey: How many of you enjoy watching other people play video games? How many of you have dismissed players that dominate you as having spent way too much time playing video games? What's your favorite kind of cheese? I'm partial to those Kraft American Singles.
Let me attempt to summarize. A) PulseAudio needs to work with existing applications, so it implements an ALSA emulation layer, except, it's not complete. Only 70% of ALSA applications work. So it's like, totally ready. B) So, in the true open source fashion, you should port your app to be a native PulseAudio client. Except that you can't. There's this yet-another-audio-library called libsidney, but it's not ready yet. (Hmm, this sounds familiar...) C) Fedora led the way in incorporating PulseAudio before it was ready, breaking audio for thousands of users. Then because open source is about copying good ideas and bad ones, a ton of other distros adopted it as well. Amazing guys. In a way, you've spread bad code that breaks audio on thousands of computers faster than a virus could have. And it's immune to antivirus! D) so now that we're in this "mess" (as the lead developer of PulseAudio calls it*), LSB comes along and says "we're going to standardize how your write audio apps!" Oh, but wait, ALSA's now "old" (we hardly knew ye), and I can't directly program PulseAudio. Hmm... So the article's brilliant solution? Standardize on the PulseAudio-safe subset of ALSA. WHAT THE FUCK. I can just imagine the future alsa man page. A big listing of functions, with a nice little asterisk next to those functions that you shouldn't use unless you want your app to totally FAIL on a system which has been sodomized by Pulse Audio. I can just see the developers of commercial Linux sound apps (all three of them) jumping for joy. And thus unfolds another chapter in long history of failed sound systems on Linux. Can they make it much worse? I, for one, am excited to see how much worse they can make it until we all go back to listening to square waves on our PC speakers. * BTW, also notice that it's the PulseAudio guy calling Linux audio a mess. Did he forget that it was his project that took the existing mess, and unloaded a giant steaming turd on it? Congratufuckinglations. You've just made it worse. You're a truly a worthy OSS contributor.
He's pretty harsh, but he always has a point behind it.
One of the main reasons why modern operating systems take so long to boot is that they are very bulky: a huge amount of code needs to be read when a computer is first turned on. Consisting of far fewer lines of code than Windows, Presto needs just a few hundred megabytes of memory, says Jordan Smith, product marketing manager at Xandros. Microsoft's Vista operating system, in contrast, recommends at least 15 gigabytes of free disk space to install.
I don't think the reviewer really understands what's happening here. Recommended amount of hard drive space is not installed space (although I'm aware that Vista is a beast). And the reviewer has apparently compared RAM to HD space.