I think I worked around the problem by stabilizing the reset line with a condensor or so. Then the power supply finally died, so I played with 6V batteries to power my C64 and one day accidently killed it somehow:-(. IIRC the toilet has gone by now as well.
You'd have had to use more than 6V batteries to get your C64 to boot; the power supply provided both DC and AC voltage (5VDC and 11VAC IIRC) -- I had built a power supply from a small transformer and some small gel-cell batteries since I had no decent 78xx regulators on me.
The problem is probably a ground loop; probably the noise is being conducted along the ground wires. More directly grounding the components to each other may help.
It may just be my universe, but I don't ever recall coming across a grounded fluorescent lamp. That, and none of the wires in ethernet is ground... there's a differential TX pair and another differential RX pair, the rest being unconnected.
I would be willing to bet that it's a noise spike getting misinterpreted as a (bad) ethernet frame. UTP is generally pretty good at ignoring common mode noise but but without really getting into the details of the problem I can't say whether the noise really is common mode or just "almost" common-mode.
IMO WOL should only wake on a good packet destined for the MAC of the sleeping computer, but it appears that it's just another broken technology.
3000 people that we know of. So I overstated things.
Yes, you overstated things. People do that all the time to garner more support for their cause. I'm just not letting it go unnoticed.
If you say no to this, then you're saying you'd rather have the honest law-abiding citizens be dead.
You don't get to make the rules. I'm saying that substituting lives for lives isn't humane.
You obviously don't put values on lives; I do.
How can you say you put values on lives when you're so willing to kill a bunch of other people? How do you know that some of the people killed in the WTC weren't members fo the various organizations you disagree with? Oh that's right. They were all innocent people and are heroes and martyrs because you say they are. You make some mention of this later in your post but the point stands: What is sick and evil to you is normal to others. I'm quite certain that CC members have children and have fought in wars. I'm certain that while I also find NAMBLA disgusting, they are in some way also positiviely contributing to society. Your broad generalizations and conclusion-jumping belongs nowhere in any power hierarchy.
I'm not going to get nitty-gritty about it, but I'll say this much: I'd rather sick evil fucks die than ordinary people.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. You must be absolutely careful with whom you let decide are the "sick evil fucks" -- I'm sure that someone thinks that of you in some way and if so, tha tmeans your head is on the block.
The fact is, we all put value on life, whether we want to admit it or not. Everyone values their family first, then friends. Most people value normal citizens over crooks.
Wait a minute, I thought you just said it was obvious that I didn't put value on lives. Now everyone does?
At least I have the courage to say what we all think and believe. You're just saying politically correct crap to up your "karma" or whatever.
My karma's already at the cap and has been there since the cap was initiated. Saying what's on your mind is fine; I have no problem with that. Don't expect it to go unchallenged though.
A few more fucks to add to my list of people who should have been in the WTC instead of the 10,000 good, decent people who actually died.
What a barbaric, inhumane thing to say. Of course I don't think I should expect too much from a non-person such as yourself -- you didn't even try to be remotely correct (<3000 died)
for non-management type grunt positions like IT and DB Programming, a Union is the only way to make sure that you dont get fscked.
So instead of getting screwed by the company, you get screwed by your union? No thanks, at least I can negotiate with a company. Inside a union I'd only be able to make what my union says I can make. I'd only be able to get promoted based on my seniority which really doesn't necessessarily say shit about my technical level or useful experience. And on top of that, My voice would be overruled by the lazy and stupid.
My main concern with moving to a Unix environment is scheduling with MS Exchange. I would need to find an affordable mail server application that can compete if not beat out Exchange Server. Is there such a thing?
Steltor makes Corporate Time Server, which is really LDAP, IMAP, SMTP and their proprietary app for calendaring (using open protocols) -- It costs about the same as Exchange Server but everything's out in the open. We briefly evaluated them about 6 months ago but other projects become higher priority. I think I'll be reviewing them again shortly.
I would wager that most of the people doing assembly coding now are in highly specialized fields, especially embedded programming.
As an embedded systems designer I can tell you that even here in the embedded world, assembly x86 is nowhere to be found, except for maybe in the lowlevel init. Even there, though, it's used to get the environment ready for C and calls a C function to start all the real work, very much in the same manner as the Linux kernel source shows.
Assembly programming is everywhere in the embedded world, just not x86 or anything powerful enough to be able to use a C compiler. I routinely do large Microchip PIC systems entirely in assembler, but that's only because of one of two reasons: they're not suited for C (the 18Cxxx is a different story now), or I need every last word of program and data space.
I remember someone proposing illuminating lines with an x-ray maser, in an attempt get very high speed transfer. It exceeded the limitations of the wire by not using it. The wire only contained the data.
Ahh yes I remember this one. He claimed to use a maser to influence (modulate) the magnetic field in the power line which would be able to bounce across pole pigs instead of being attenuated. I guess he never heard of Maxwell...
When I worked for a telecomms consultancy a few years back I saw with a demonstration of 70Mb/s over standard POTS cable. There's _plenty_ of potential still in copper.
Not if you want to avoid having that same 70Mb/s feed available on every other pair in the trunk, there isn't.
Yes you can get stupendous amounts of traffic through UTP; look at GigE or even LVDS. You have two basic factors: length and crosstalk. Increase power to get the same speed further out, and you increase crosstalk. Reduce crosstalk by either dropping speed or lowering transmission power.
The reason you can't get 100mbps ethernet speeds over UTP at 5kft is because the telco will not allow you to push that much energy through your pair because you will cause horrendous crosstalk in the trunk your pair shares with the other 52 or more pairs. When Mrs. Gadzky three doors down calls up and says that there's this terrible hissing in the background Ma Bell will come over and shut you down.
IIRC Shannon's law [C = W log2(1 + S/N )] determines the theoretically available error-free data rate in a transmission system given bandwidth and SNR. No coding method to date has even come close to this level so you're right, there's room for improvement. However hitting that limit is full of its own little problems (pulse widening, etc.).
Re:"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-base
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No way in hell that MS would make the office formats XML
Sure they would. They'd just do what they do now; embed the WMF data (perhaps as Base64) into <mstag> and <mstag/> tags.
XML doesn't mean shit, only that the data is organized in some kind of fashion. It does not guarantee that the data is open and accessible
SO also has support for reading WordPerfect 8 files, which is very very important to a lot of people.
Re:Open Office
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A little bit of research on your part would go a long way; OO does not have a database component (i.e. like Microsoft Office's Access), nor does it have some file filters, fonts or the clipart that StarOffice has.
For me, the database component is required, but I would plunk down my $80 for SO to "help the cause" -- I use OO right now on both Linux and Windows and under Windows, it rocks. It rocks incredibly hard. Linux OO has some issues like fonts and startup time but being able to open (and save) Microsoft documents without issue is great.
I'd love to see a KDE wrapper for SO/OO; having access to all the office functionality through DCOP and have the damn thing look right would be nice. I've tried out OpenOffice, KOffice and HancomOffice. At this point I would say OO is in the lead, with KOffice gaining ground fast. Hancom was nice but just too... odd.
I was under the impression that you were a winvocate [1]; possibly a Sun employee who still feels that Windows is what belongs on the desktop. Glad to see that I was wrong.
Wow I hope I don't come across like that to everyone!
I personally feel that Windows' days are numbered. Unfortunately the actual count is still very high.:-(
Just because a GSM phone transmits digital (encoded, compressed and encrypted) doesn't mean it just pushes ones and zeroes out the antenna! You still need an (analogue) radio part.
Yes, and that is what I tried explaining. You're correct; there is an analog output but your transmitter and its PA can be optimized for sending digitial data as opposed to analog data. If you're only sending binary data you only have a discrete number of output patterns. And since your switch is always fully on or always fully off, you have minimal losses in the switch. Kind of (but not exactly) like how a light switch doesn't (normally) get warm, but a light dimmer does.
Sorry I was a little quick to post. My previous post is good, but I forgot to add this.
As a bonus, your phone's batteries last alot longer in a city than in the country on a GSM network (but not on analog phone).
The only reason your digital (PCS, GSM) phone's batteries last longer (and stays cooler, too) is because the signal is either on or off, 1 or 0. Analog phones consumed a lot of current in the switch (transistor) and PA because it had to dissipate a lot of power being half-on.
Yes, I know the PA and such still generates an analog signal but you're talking about the difference between night and day; one has to generate two signal states (I'm not certain of the actual encoding method so I'm not positive that there is a carrier), where the other has to accurately produce every possible state between fully off and fully on. I don't believe that PWM is practial at these frequencies.
(spinning offtopic) It's like the old variable frequency drives for AC induction motors; they used to generate beautiful voltage waveforms because they essentially used big op-amps with huge output stages. Unfortunately their efficiency was shitty because the output stage had to dissipate any power not being delivered to the motor. Any design in the past 6 years or so uses IGBTs and PWM to digitally switch full voltage/no voltage to the motor, generating an average waveform that looks like a sinewave. It makes for shitty voltage waveforms and the fast risetimes tend to destroy the first few windings of the motor coils but the power consumption went from kilowatts to watts on the drives themselves since the transistors never had to dissipate much power. Same thing on digital cellphones, except at milliwatt levels.:-)
Somebody once told me that a T-Bird (T1...T3 packet sniffer) cost 40 grand.
Yeah, and a PC used to cost $4G, too.
Dallas Semiconductor makes E1/T1 framer ICs which you could interface to a Motorola 68k or something nice and fast for peanuts. It's been a while since I went through the Dallas datasheets but I'm certain that you can use them to sniff the data stream with a little extra circuitry to block any transmissions from the third (sniffer) framer. The actual data stream on the wire is very well documented and if you put something like this on a PCI card and modified some Linux WAN drivers I'm sure you could make a sniffer without too much difficulty. Hell it'd be even easier if you modified an existing supported WAN card with an internal DSU, like the LMC 1200.
No matter how you look at it, it'll be hardware mods + software mods, unless the framer can be programmed NOT to emit anything, which I'm not sure is possible. Also DS2/3 sniffers will be a good sight more expensive I'm sure. The loop lengths on those are not very long for copper and there's a lot more critical timing.
Now you could say that this knowledge is specialized and that the design of such a thing could be $40k -- true enough. I happen to have the knowledge and I do contract design work...:-)
But not on the desktop; you have a consistant pattern of posting articles complaining about things you do not like about the current state of affairs on the Linux desktop.
I use Linux on the desktop. Several, in fact. While I'm actually honoured that you took enough time to wade through my/. postings to get an idea of what kind of Linux user I am, I do believe that your conclusions are a little.. uh.. incorrect.
Yes, I do tend to post messages with specific complaints about the state of Linux on the desktop. However I don't recall posting a comment to the effect of it'll never happen or that it's totally unusable (especially in the last year or so) -- I do say that it's not for Joe Sixpack at this point in time and I still stand behind that. However to say that I don't like it on the desktop is a stretch, to say the least.
If you don't like a desktop with both KDE and GNOME applications, start coding applications in KDE which GNOME has and KDE doesn't, or vice versa.
I try. I'm by no means a decent applications programmer (embedded systems is where I make my money) but I am kinda/sorta active on #kde and I do submit decent bug reports and feature requests. I direct my energy to where it will have the least impedance mismatch, so to speak.
Oh, I forgot, this io Slashdot, home to people who love to whine and are too pathetic to actually do anything to help things.
Also home to many smart people and a place where the demographic is hard to run across elsewhere, which is why you'll also find me posting "asides" or off-topically; sometimes the right person will be reading and I find an answer far faster than I could have otherwise. You can paint me with any brush you like, it doesn't change who I am.
You're speculating. I'm speculating.
True. However there are degrees of logic and/or reality which can be used to direct or modify the speculation. If you see a dead cat at the side of the road do you think that someone killed their pet and then dumped it there, or do you think that perhaps it was hit by a vehicle as it tried to cross? You don't know, but logic and rationalization come into play and you tend to think the latter.
We both speculated, but I honestly believe that my version is perhaps a little more grounded than yours. I would love to believe that Linux has enough clout that (most) hardware vendors don't think of it as a last-minute touch-up. I'd love to believe that Linux has the software business support to bring it programs like Dreamweaver, Nero, Photoshop, AutoDesk and whoever makes AccPAC. I'd love to believe these things but I know they're not true. And yes I know of Quanta, KreateCD, GIMP, and AppGen, but most of those just are not good enough (yet). Getting there, though.
It has enough clout that all major video chipsets have Linux support; either through having open specs so that libre software developers can develop drivers for them; or through binary-only drivers developed by the chipset maker for Linux.
Again, true. It's taken some time and likely a lot of people writing email to these companies (I am among them), but that isn't the kind of clout I was speaking about.
Neomagic, however, eventually learned the folly of having an anti-Linux policy, and were forced to leave the Laptop chipset market altogether; I am sure that the various laptop makers did not appreciate all of the returns from people who wanted to use Linux.
You want to back that up even just a little bit? I love Linux and I'm running it on this Compaq EVO N160 but to think that a video *chipset* manufacturer even sees laptop returns due to Linux is absurd. In fact if you look at the page you provided, the drivers are done by Precision Insight; Someone over there probably talked them down into allowing source release, not hordes of Linux users who demanded their money back from the laptop vendors, who got so upset that they called Neomagic.
"follow of having an anti-Linux policy" -- geez do you believe the crap you write? Yes Linux is great in servers and it's making headway (very great headway) in the desktop market but it hasn't got clout like you try to attribute to it.
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I think I worked around the problem by stabilizing the reset line with a condensor or so. Then the power supply finally died, so I played with 6V batteries to power my C64 and one day accidently killed it somehow :-(. IIRC the toilet has gone by now as well.
You'd have had to use more than 6V batteries to get your C64 to boot; the power supply provided both DC and AC voltage (5VDC and 11VAC IIRC) -- I had built a power supply from a small transformer and some small gel-cell batteries since I had no decent 78xx regulators on me.
The problem is probably a ground loop; probably the noise is being conducted along the ground wires. More directly grounding the components to each other may help.
It may just be my universe, but I don't ever recall coming across a grounded fluorescent lamp. That, and none of the wires in ethernet is ground... there's a differential TX pair and another differential RX pair, the rest being unconnected.
I would be willing to bet that it's a noise spike getting misinterpreted as a (bad) ethernet frame. UTP is generally pretty good at ignoring common mode noise but but without really getting into the details of the problem I can't say whether the noise really is common mode or just "almost" common-mode.
IMO WOL should only wake on a good packet destined for the MAC of the sleeping computer, but it appears that it's just another broken technology.
3000 people that we know of. So I overstated things.
Yes, you overstated things. People do that all the time to garner more support for their cause. I'm just not letting it go unnoticed.
If you say no to this, then you're saying you'd rather have the honest law-abiding citizens be dead.
You don't get to make the rules. I'm saying that substituting lives for lives isn't humane.
You obviously don't put values on lives; I do.
How can you say you put values on lives when you're so willing to kill a bunch of other people? How do you know that some of the people killed in the WTC weren't members fo the various organizations you disagree with? Oh that's right. They were all innocent people and are heroes and martyrs because you say they are. You make some mention of this later in your post but the point stands: What is sick and evil to you is normal to others. I'm quite certain that CC members have children and have fought in wars. I'm certain that while I also find NAMBLA disgusting, they are in some way also positiviely contributing to society. Your broad generalizations and conclusion-jumping belongs nowhere in any power hierarchy.
I'm not going to get nitty-gritty about it, but I'll say this much: I'd rather sick evil fucks die than ordinary people.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. You must be absolutely careful with whom you let decide are the "sick evil fucks" -- I'm sure that someone thinks that of you in some way and if so, tha tmeans your head is on the block.
The fact is, we all put value on life, whether we want to admit it or not. Everyone values their family first, then friends. Most people value normal citizens over crooks.
Wait a minute, I thought you just said it was obvious that I didn't put value on lives. Now everyone does?
At least I have the courage to say what we all think and believe. You're just saying politically correct crap to up your "karma" or whatever.
My karma's already at the cap and has been there since the cap was initiated. Saying what's on your mind is fine; I have no problem with that. Don't expect it to go unchallenged though.
A few more fucks to add to my list of people who should have been in the WTC instead of the 10,000 good, decent people who actually died.
What a barbaric, inhumane thing to say. Of course I don't think I should expect too much from a non-person such as yourself -- you didn't even try to be remotely correct (<3000 died)
for non-management type grunt positions like IT and DB Programming, a Union is the only way to make sure that you dont get fscked.
So instead of getting screwed by the company, you get screwed by your union? No thanks, at least I can negotiate with a company. Inside a union I'd only be able to make what my union says I can make. I'd only be able to get promoted based on my seniority which really doesn't necessessarily say shit about my technical level or useful experience. And on top of that, My voice would be overruled by the lazy and stupid.
Unions? No thank you.
My main concern with moving to a Unix environment is scheduling with MS Exchange. I would need to find an affordable mail server application that can compete if not beat out Exchange Server. Is there such a thing?
Steltor makes Corporate Time Server, which is really LDAP, IMAP, SMTP and their proprietary app for calendaring (using open protocols) -- It costs about the same as Exchange Server but everything's out in the open. We briefly evaluated them about 6 months ago but other projects become higher priority. I think I'll be reviewing them again shortly.
/I was thinking the exact same thing. I didn't hear a damn thing come of the month-o-fixin'. Nobody noticed.
I would wager that most of the people doing assembly coding now are in highly specialized fields, especially embedded programming.
As an embedded systems designer I can tell you that even here in the embedded world, assembly x86 is nowhere to be found, except for maybe in the lowlevel init. Even there, though, it's used to get the environment ready for C and calls a C function to start all the real work, very much in the same manner as the Linux kernel source shows.
Assembly programming is everywhere in the embedded world, just not x86 or anything powerful enough to be able to use a C compiler. I routinely do large Microchip PIC systems entirely in assembler, but that's only because of one of two reasons: they're not suited for C (the 18Cxxx is a different story now), or I need every last word of program and data space.
I remember someone proposing illuminating lines with an x-ray maser, in an attempt get very high speed transfer. It exceeded the limitations of the wire by not using it. The wire only contained the data.
Ahh yes I remember this one. He claimed to use a maser to influence (modulate) the magnetic field in the power line which would be able to bounce across pole pigs instead of being attenuated. I guess he never heard of Maxwell...
When I worked for a telecomms consultancy a few years back I saw with a demonstration of 70Mb/s over standard POTS cable. There's _plenty_ of potential still in copper.
Not if you want to avoid having that same 70Mb/s feed available on every other pair in the trunk, there isn't.
Yes you can get stupendous amounts of traffic through UTP; look at GigE or even LVDS. You have two basic factors: length and crosstalk. Increase power to get the same speed further out, and you increase crosstalk. Reduce crosstalk by either dropping speed or lowering transmission power.
The reason you can't get 100mbps ethernet speeds over UTP at 5kft is because the telco will not allow you to push that much energy through your pair because you will cause horrendous crosstalk in the trunk your pair shares with the other 52 or more pairs. When Mrs. Gadzky three doors down calls up and says that there's this terrible hissing in the background Ma Bell will come over and shut you down.
IIRC Shannon's law [C = W log2(1 + S/N )] determines the theoretically available error-free data rate in a transmission system given bandwidth and SNR. No coding method to date has even come close to this level so you're right, there's room for improvement. However hitting that limit is full of its own little problems (pulse widening, etc.).
No way in hell that MS would make the office formats XML
Sure they would. They'd just do what they do now; embed the WMF data (perhaps as Base64) into <mstag> and <mstag/> tags.
XML doesn't mean shit, only that the data is organized in some kind of fashion. It does not guarantee that the data is open and accessible
I hate replying to myself...
SO also has support for reading WordPerfect 8 files, which is very very important to a lot of people.
A little bit of research on your part would go a long way; OO does not have a database component (i.e. like Microsoft Office's Access), nor does it have some file filters, fonts or the clipart that StarOffice has.
For me, the database component is required, but I would plunk down my $80 for SO to "help the cause" -- I use OO right now on both Linux and Windows and under Windows, it rocks. It rocks incredibly hard. Linux OO has some issues like fonts and startup time but being able to open (and save) Microsoft documents without issue is great.
I'd love to see a KDE wrapper for SO/OO; having access to all the office functionality through DCOP and have the damn thing look right would be nice. I've tried out OpenOffice, KOffice and HancomOffice. At this point I would say OO is in the lead, with KOffice gaining ground fast. Hancom was nice but just too ... odd.
(do I REALLY need to mention that this is sarchasm?)
I sure hope I don't have to jump across it. :-)
I was under the impression that you were a winvocate [1]; possibly a Sun employee who still feels that Windows is what belongs on the desktop. Glad to see that I was wrong.
Wow I hope I don't come across like that to everyone!
I personally feel that Windows' days are numbered. Unfortunately the actual count is still very high. :-(
Just because a GSM phone transmits digital (encoded, compressed and encrypted) doesn't mean it just pushes ones and zeroes out the antenna! You still need an (analogue) radio part.
Yes, and that is what I tried explaining. You're correct; there is an analog output but your transmitter and its PA can be optimized for sending digitial data as opposed to analog data. If you're only sending binary data you only have a discrete number of output patterns. And since your switch is always fully on or always fully off, you have minimal losses in the switch. Kind of (but not exactly) like how a light switch doesn't (normally) get warm, but a light dimmer does.
Sorry I was a little quick to post. My previous post is good, but I forgot to add this.
As a bonus, your phone's batteries last alot longer in a city than in the country on a GSM network (but not on analog phone).
The only reason your digital (PCS, GSM) phone's batteries last longer (and stays cooler, too) is because the signal is either on or off, 1 or 0. Analog phones consumed a lot of current in the switch (transistor) and PA because it had to dissipate a lot of power being half-on.
Yes, I know the PA and such still generates an analog signal but you're talking about the difference between night and day; one has to generate two signal states (I'm not certain of the actual encoding method so I'm not positive that there is a carrier), where the other has to accurately produce every possible state between fully off and fully on. I don't believe that PWM is practial at these frequencies.
(spinning offtopic) It's like the old variable frequency drives for AC induction motors; they used to generate beautiful voltage waveforms because they essentially used big op-amps with huge output stages. Unfortunately their efficiency was shitty because the output stage had to dissipate any power not being delivered to the motor. Any design in the past 6 years or so uses IGBTs and PWM to digitally switch full voltage/no voltage to the motor, generating an average waveform that looks like a sinewave. It makes for shitty voltage waveforms and the fast risetimes tend to destroy the first few windings of the motor coils but the power consumption went from kilowatts to watts on the drives themselves since the transistors never had to dissipate much power. Same thing on digital cellphones, except at milliwatt levels. :-)
GSM has an intrinsic part of its design to ramp down the power that the phones transmit at when the signals are strong.
So does AMPS. That has been part of cellphone network design from the very outset.
Somebody once told me that a T-Bird (T1...T3 packet sniffer) cost 40 grand.
Yeah, and a PC used to cost $4G, too.
Dallas Semiconductor makes E1/T1 framer ICs which you could interface to a Motorola 68k or something nice and fast for peanuts. It's been a while since I went through the Dallas datasheets but I'm certain that you can use them to sniff the data stream with a little extra circuitry to block any transmissions from the third (sniffer) framer. The actual data stream on the wire is very well documented and if you put something like this on a PCI card and modified some Linux WAN drivers I'm sure you could make a sniffer without too much difficulty. Hell it'd be even easier if you modified an existing supported WAN card with an internal DSU, like the LMC 1200.
No matter how you look at it, it'll be hardware mods + software mods, unless the framer can be programmed NOT to emit anything, which I'm not sure is possible. Also DS2/3 sniffers will be a good sight more expensive I'm sure. The loop lengths on those are not very long for copper and there's a lot more critical timing.
Now you could say that this knowledge is specialized and that the design of such a thing could be $40k -- true enough. I happen to have the knowledge and I do contract design work... :-)
But not on the desktop; you have a consistant pattern of posting articles complaining about things you do not like about the current state of affairs on the Linux desktop.
I use Linux on the desktop. Several, in fact. While I'm actually honoured that you took enough time to wade through my /. postings to get an idea of what kind of Linux user I am, I do believe that your conclusions are a little .. uh.. incorrect.
Yes, I do tend to post messages with specific complaints about the state of Linux on the desktop. However I don't recall posting a comment to the effect of it'll never happen or that it's totally unusable (especially in the last year or so) -- I do say that it's not for Joe Sixpack at this point in time and I still stand behind that. However to say that I don't like it on the desktop is a stretch, to say the least.
If you don't like a desktop with both KDE and GNOME applications, start coding applications in KDE which GNOME has and KDE doesn't, or vice versa.
I try. I'm by no means a decent applications programmer (embedded systems is where I make my money) but I am kinda/sorta active on #kde and I do submit decent bug reports and feature requests. I direct my energy to where it will have the least impedance mismatch, so to speak.
Oh, I forgot, this io Slashdot, home to people who love to whine and are too pathetic to actually do anything to help things.
Also home to many smart people and a place where the demographic is hard to run across elsewhere, which is why you'll also find me posting "asides" or off-topically; sometimes the right person will be reading and I find an answer far faster than I could have otherwise. You can paint me with any brush you like, it doesn't change who I am.
You're speculating. I'm speculating.
True. However there are degrees of logic and/or reality which can be used to direct or modify the speculation. If you see a dead cat at the side of the road do you think that someone killed their pet and then dumped it there, or do you think that perhaps it was hit by a vehicle as it tried to cross? You don't know, but logic and rationalization come into play and you tend to think the latter.
We both speculated, but I honestly believe that my version is perhaps a little more grounded than yours. I would love to believe that Linux has enough clout that (most) hardware vendors don't think of it as a last-minute touch-up. I'd love to believe that Linux has the software business support to bring it programs like Dreamweaver, Nero, Photoshop, AutoDesk and whoever makes AccPAC. I'd love to believe these things but I know they're not true. And yes I know of Quanta, KreateCD, GIMP, and AppGen, but most of those just are not good enough (yet). Getting there, though.
It has enough clout that all major video chipsets have Linux support; either through having open specs so that libre software developers can develop drivers for them; or through binary-only drivers developed by the chipset maker for Linux.
Again, true. It's taken some time and likely a lot of people writing email to these companies (I am among them), but that isn't the kind of clout I was speaking about.
Neomagic, however, eventually learned the folly of having an anti-Linux policy, and were forced to leave the Laptop chipset market altogether; I am sure that the various laptop makers did not appreciate all of the returns from people who wanted to use Linux.
You want to back that up even just a little bit? I love Linux and I'm running it on this Compaq EVO N160 but to think that a video *chipset* manufacturer even sees laptop returns due to Linux is absurd. In fact if you look at the page you provided, the drivers are done by Precision Insight; Someone over there probably talked them down into allowing source release, not hordes of Linux users who demanded their money back from the laptop vendors, who got so upset that they called Neomagic.
"follow of having an anti-Linux policy" -- geez do you believe the crap you write? Yes Linux is great in servers and it's making headway (very great headway) in the desktop market but it hasn't got clout like you try to attribute to it.
I think he was hoping that you would guess what they were (they're not too hard to figure out, right?).
I must be really slow today, I didn't see a list of 40 or any reference to 40 anything elsewhere in the thread. <shrug>
I've got 40 strong reasons why Linux will have a powerful desktop presence in the near future and Microsoft is running scared,
Care to list them?
It might just be a stylesheet issue.
DOesn't appear to be. Looking at the source, I don't see any <HTML></HTML> or <HEAD< tags at all. I thought they were required for HTML?
They seriously called it the WIA?
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAA
Whatcha got? It's my WYE-ah! Set you on FYE-ah!
Sorry, it's bedtime I think...