Does your system come with a dedicated video card, or use main memory?
The Vostro V130n has a Sandy Bridge processor, and is using the integrated Intel graphics with shared system memory. I've never had any problems using external display on it, but it's also a much newer system than you are talking about, as it came with 2GB of memory from the factory. I'd have to check the BIOS for how much memory is actually being used by the graphics.
Possibly a biased source, but not exactly a shocking conclusion.
That's the problem. While the conclusion is hardly surprising, and is in fact what many people have been predicting for years, a lot of people are going to say "oh, it's Microsoft, FUD!" and ignore it. Interestingly, using many of the same vectors a virus for Linux is equally possible, it's just that most virus writing these days is done for profit, and it's not a big enough target to make it worth their time.
1: Some modern distros require 768 MB RAM or more, and almost all of them are 256 MB+, while XP Home Edition is 64 MB required, 128 MB recommended. Much of this bloat is in the kernel, which even if built fully modular now has so many hooks and semi-optionals that you can't run a normal distro on minimal hardware.
You'd be wrong on that point. My system boots up to 80MB of RAM used (full graphical desktop, with several applications open in the tray, using a 3.0 kernel. There is a newer kernel available in the distro, but I don't see the point in upgrading yet, as there's no new support for my hardware), and even now, with Chromium open and a dozen tabs, it's peaking at 236MB of memory actually used. If I was actually trying to pare down the memory usage, this particular distro (which is quite modern) can boot up to less than 40MB of memory in use, simply by disabling CUPS at startup, using a lighter weight browser, and getting rid of a few of the widgets in e17. The minimum spec for this distro is 128MB of memory recommended (but it'll install in 64MB if you don't mind having a swap partition), and a 300MHz processor.
It's not the kernel that uses so much memory in mainstream distros, it's the desktop environment. KDE in particular is a beast, but Gnome3 isn't that great, either.
Also, Windows XP recommends 64MB minimum memory in the same way that Vista recommended 1GB minimum memory: It'll run, but if you're planning on doing more than one thing at a time, you'd better hope most of them are editing a text file in notepad.
2: The good old problem with hardware support. All old desktops will have XP drivers, but the same can't be said for Linux drivers. (And when they do, depending on the hardware and type, they sometimes won't work as just generic.ko modules, but need special hooks in the kernel, see #1) You have to do your homework to know you get hardware you can fully use under Linux.
That's weird. It's weird because every old computer I've tried installing on, including an ancient Dell laptop (a Latitude LS from ~1999) as recently as yesterday, everything "just worked". No need to install graphics drivers, audio drivers, special hooks, or anything. Even the Prism2-based PCMCIA wireless card worked out of the box. And e17 absolutely flies, even with full screen OpenGL compositing enabled, on the 800MHz P-III with 256MB of RAM.
I still haven't had a single machine where everything Just Worked, and I've lost count of how many dozen Linux installations I've done over the years. The closest I have gotten is the current "Dell Optiplex n" machine at work, but even there, the front panel audio detection doesn't work. You'd think that their "n" line which is sold with no OS (ok, with FreeDOS) would have full hardware/driver support in non-Windows, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I suspect they really sell them for a market of pirates that run illegal copies of Windows, plus a few MS Select customers who do their own licensing.
And yet, here I am typing this on a Vostro v130n, which came with Ubuntu LTS preinstalled, where again, everything "just works". It's been a *very* long time since I've had to fiddle with drivers on a Linux installation, and it's almost always because I want better performance out of a video card.
Of course, all of this is missing an extremely important point, which is that the OP was talking about *new* computers, not something you got 2nd hand from a thrift store. I plan to buy one of these myself, once I see some reviews of XBMC decoding performance. I can power it from the USB plug on my TV, and connect it by HDMI to the TV. Plug it in to the ethernet then point it at my network fileserver, and it's a perfect silent HTPC.
In Windows 7 it will. It'll open the container, and if needed, it can go off to the Internet to download the codec. It has no problem at all with the h.264 MKV DVD rips I've been making.
The only exception to this of which I am aware is that some states have "Good Samaritan" laws that require you to help people under certain, specific circumstances. For example, in my state you are obligated to stop and help someone who is stuck in the snow in a remote area, because the chance of otherwise not finding help and freezing to death is so great. And to be honest, I am not convinced that even that law is completely Constitutional.
That particular situation I haven't heard about... admittedly, I'm in Canada, and we have different laws, but while there's an ethical and moral obligation to help somebody out in that situation (and I would regardless of legal obligation, for exactly the reason you cite), I don't think that there's any legal obligation to help somebody out.
As for Good Samaritan laws, the only province in Canada that still has one is Quebec, and their law speaks about offering medical assistance/first aid to somebody in need. Other provinces have a similar concept, but slightly different, which is a First Responder law. Essentially, if you have professional training as a First Responder, then you're required by law to help out (say an off-duty paramedic or an M.D.), but a by-stander with no professional training (or somebody who only has first aid/CPR training) would not be required to stop.
It's not flawed at all, it's just a position you disagree with. You're an accomplice in any illegal activity if you fail to take any steps to prevent it.
I have an app on my cellphone which breaks WEP encryption. With a little more processing power, WPA is almost as trivially easy to break. You've taken steps to secure your network, but it doesn't matter, because I can still break it if I want to. We live in a different time than the one you're thinking in.
Just about every wireless router on the market today ships with WPA encryption enabled by default. An awful lot of them have randomly generated passkeys by default (though they still largely have standardized SSID's). The installation wizard guides people through setting up their own private password/ssid. If you see an open/unencrypted network out there today, it's either somebody running ancient hardware, or somebody who has deliberately set it up that way.
He was dead anyway, regardless of how well protected his encrypted content was. Also, his network was (and is) set up in such a way that even a year after Bin Laden was captured/killed, we *still* haven't tracked down his lieutenants, I don't think he really had anything to worry about with the security of his data.
You realize you can change the Windows version to behaving like it used to, by turning on the menu bar in the view options? And that you can get the Linux version to behave like the Windows version by turning off the menu bar and enabling a sidebar?
It doesn't matter that your lawyer is working on contingency. If you sue me because my shoes caused your mother's cancer, then my lawyer isn't working on contingency. Even if you don't end up having to pay your legal fees because you didn't win, my lawyer, in a Canadian court, will file a brief requesting that you pay my legal fees under malicious litigation rules, and you'll be on the hook for paying my lawyer for the work she did defending against you.
this is also why they won't try for government contracts because of quotas and the fear they will be stuck dealing with workers they are afraid to let go for fear of spending a year or more dealing with a lawsuit lotto.
You don't have malicious litigation rules that would require the plaintiff to pay legal fees for the defendant if his complaint is found to be without cause?
We have those kinds of rules here in Canada, and it does a pretty good job of stopping people from suing unless they have a legitimate beef.
My house is all WiFi connected, but my desktops have extra NICs with gig connections to my server for backups that don't take forever. Wireless is the AOL of connection media- so easy, your grandmother can use it. But it's not good for serious transfers.
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything. And that was the initial copy... subsequent daily updates from my mail server (in colocation) to my home fileserver complete in under 10s. Store your user files on a network hard drive, and make sure the fileserver has RAID, and you should be fairly safe. If you *really* want to have a backup in a separate system, then connect a second fileserver on a Gig-E switch right next to the main fileserver, and set up rsync with a cronjob. It still won't come close to saturating the connection for any protracted amount of time, except possibly during the initial sync.
54-mbit wireless is fast enough to play media from a central filesever on one or two computers live. More than that it does get a little iffy, but that's why you've got 150- and 300-mbit wireless... my laptop is connected using dual band 300mbit wireless, and never has any problems copying to or from the fileserver.
That's not to say that I don't have NIC's installed. But it is to say that, for now at least, there's no Cat5e going to every room. When I build a new house in a couple of years, there will probably be Cat5e to every room to facilitate an IPTV install, but I expect that I will still mostly use wireless to connect computers, and only plug in to the GigE to install an extra AP if needed, or to connect a desktop computer that doesn't have a wireless adapter. In other words, it'll replace the role that's currently being served adequately by powerline networking adapters.
And then there's the problem of distros breaking on upgrades,
Never seen that with my distro of choice... though they do recommend reinstalling completely if you're going to change the major revision number. Fortunately, on the long-term plan map, that only happens every 2 years.
and the prevalent WORKS_FOR_ME && WONT_FIX responses towards bugs,
Haven't seen that in the support communities for my system. I have seen "works here, can you provide more information about your specific setup so we can try to duplicate it" though.
the really lousy bug-reporting scheme (I tried it with KDE, my cpu went to 100% and never even loaded the desktop, requiring a reinstall from scratch).
That's a complete non-fix, though. That's like fixing the knock in your car's engine by buying a new car. Sure, the knock's gone, but it's major overkill. If you want a bug fixed, then you need to provide information... if nobody can duplicate your situation then nobody can figure out what's actually happening and fix it.
Then there's the lack of social skills among the "self-anointed."
There's a similar lack of social skills among the technocracy in Windows- and Mac-land, too. Or have you never heard somebody in IT saying that you should have to have a license in order to buy a computer before? That doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who can and will help you, but "people" is the important word there. If you don't treat them as people, they're not going to be inclined to help you, and the sad truth is that a lot of people demand that you "FIX IT NAO!" and start to get really pissy if you can't fix it immediately.
Plus their childish insistence on labeling it GNU/linux (do you call it a Firestone/Mustang)? Or M$. Yes, we see what you did there, and no, after the 5,000th time, it's just stupid.
On that, I agree with you completely. But exempt a couple of narrow-minded people you can safely ignore, I never see people doing that any more.
Pointing out the problems invariably gets you labeled as a shill, an astroturfer, or worse.
Clearly you're a shill, and astroturfing for the evil M$ empire, Bill.;)
Pointing out the problems with the GPL - or worse, pointing out that the GPL doesn't even respect the 4 freedoms listed on the home page of the FSF - brings out people who blindly repeat what "everyone who really is a true believer knows."
You're right on this one. GPL does really bring out some of the loonies... just last week, on our IRC channel, we had somebody reading the riot act to our lead developper, because the tools that've been written for the distro are licensed under BSD and Apache, rather than being GPL. Apparently, the idea of having a tool for Linux licensed as anything other than GPL3 was anathema to this person, and they just didn't seem to understand that there are free/permissive licenses out there that aren't GPL.
It's not a religion or a cult, but you could have fooled me.
That depends on who you're asking. Yes, there is the Cult of Stallman out there, but there's lots of people who simply believe that software should be free. There's also lots of people like me who run a variety of different systems in their ecosystem, and use whichever one best suits the task at hand. For 90% of my day-to-day computing, I have an ultraportable laptop with Linux installed on it. For the rare occasion that I want to play a game that doesn't exist on Linux, I have a gaming machine with a (completely legal) Windows 7 Ultimate installation on it. Use what works for you.
And if you come to me for a suggestion, I will work with you to understand what you need, and help you choose whichever system best suits your needs... and if that is Windows, then so be it. Though truthfully, the overwhelming maj
Oh look, Mint is on that list. I'm not running a Ubuntu official distro either, but my browser agent shows as: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0.
Why? Because the distro I have installed, while it maintains its own repos for modern software, is based on Ubuntu LTS and doesn't bother building their own packages for anything that's actively maintained in the Ubu repos. There's nothing to be gained from duplicating work like that, and my distro of choice is in the top 20 on Distrowatch. I would lay odds that a fair number of other distributions do the same thing, which artificially inflates the numbers for Ubuntu.
If you want to help somebody choose a distro, ask them where they're coming from. I usually suggest either gnome or KDE as a first Linux UI, because it's familiar, though I personally prefer e17 by a very wide margin (and e17 can be made to look/behave like either gnome or KDE). Once you know where they're coming from (to help pick which DE), ask what they want to do with the system. With those two pieces of information it's fairly easy to find a distro that will work for them. Consult here, if you need suggestions: http://i.imgur.com/jy1BF.png:)
It is not a reasonable statement at all. The raspi is being sold for 25 dollars which is essentially a throway price and it will run on USB power. Its small size is actually secondary to its appeal. This thing will cost at least 4 times as much for board and CPU and will need an external brick. The fact that people do not see the difference is astounding. Especially considering boards that are close to this have been on store shelves for years and years. Ever heard of Via?
More than 4x as much... cheapest Socket G1/G2 CPU I can find is $160. For the CPU alone. You still have to buy the board, the memory, the hard drive, the case, and the power brick.
This is *not* a competitor.
And yes, you're absolutely right about Via. They're still making C7-based boards for much cheaper. Atom-based board/cpu combos as well are an option, and honestly, a better option since Via C7 is an 8-year old design, and doesn't do 64-bit.
My first thought was that this is a NanoITX board for i3/i5... turns out NanoITX is actually a smaller form factor (less surface area).
This does not compete with RPi at all. It's significantly larger, and will be significantly more expensive. Considering that the CPU alone will cost *at least* $100 (current prices for cheapest Socket G1 I can find is actually $160 and that's not even an i3), it's not going to be hitting the $100 price tag that TFS suggests either.
I'm not even sure you can get real educational programming in the US, but when I compare the channels you listed against something like EQhd or OasisHD, they're not even in the same category.
People paying for these CPU are gamers and enthusiasms anyway, they have a discrete GPU and don't use the built-in one. I'm pretty sure less than 1% of the SandyBridge/IvyBridge sold use the built-in GPU since it's an horror compared to real graphic cards.
You'd be wrong, especially in laptops. I have a Sandy Bridge Celeron U3600 in my laptop, and I'm using the integrated graphics. They're plenty powerful enough for desktop compositing, and I get respectable framerates playing the occasional game.
Depends on the CPU, but most (~90%) Sandy Bridge i5 CPU's will take 4GHz without any problem, and about 50% can hit 4.5GHz without breaking a sweat. This is for an i5 2500k, which comes with a stock clock speed of 3.2GHz. My 2500k is currently running at 4.7GHz and it doesn't have any stability problems at all, even when I run video encodes that keep the CPU at 100% occupancy 24/7... when I push it to 4.8GHz (change the multiplier from 46x to 47x, with system bus at 103MHz), it starts to crash. I suspect that if I had a better cooling setup (using a Cooler Master Hyper 212+ heatsink, which is air cooled and keeps the CPU max temperature around 65'C at 4.7GHz) I may be able to squeeze a few more clock cycles out of the processor, but it's not worth $200 for a water cooling setup.
As a card-carrying dyke who's fully paid up on her membership dues, I couldn't care less about e-peen.
My computer is overclocked because I do a lot of video encoding. For gaming it doesn't make a difference (and if you check the logs, most of the time in most games the CPU underclocks itself to 1.6GHz anyway), but when you're doing a video encode, particularly a large video encode or a lot of transcoding (the kind of operation that will keep your CPU pegged for 3 days in a row, and I'm talking about a Core i5 2500k oc'd to 4.7GHz, with 16GB of RAM), having an overclocked system means a real savings in electricity usage and time, because the marginal increase in power usage for the CPU is offset by the decrease in power usage for everything else by completing the task earlier.
And if saving electricity isn't an argument for you, there is another financial reason to go with the i5 in this situation: it's more than $100 cheaper than the i7 2600k was, and gives a very significant boost in performance over a non-overclocked i7.
It does exist for video, but it doesn't change the frame rate, it changes the amount of information stored per frame. Compressed video doesn't store each frame individually, it stores key frames (usually every 60th frame or something like that), which are the image in its entirety, and every frame after that is just an update of the previous frame, and only contains the pixels that change. This is why MPEG1 video at DVD resolution wouldn't tax a '386, but H.264 at the same resolution would destroy the same processor. This is also why, if you're watching a video over a bad connection (like satellite in crappy weather), the picture will go mosaic for a few seconds and then clear up: if the key frame is what gets corrupted/dropped, especially during a camera angle change, then you're seeing sequential updates applied to the wrong image. Key frames are also used to synchronize the audio stream.
Variable bitrate simply increases or decreases the amount of information that's contained in each update frame based on how much is actually needed to store the update, and video compression codecs have been doing it that way for years, if not decades.
What you're talking about is variable framerate, which is, from all reports I've seen, quite jarring. Your brain naturally sees the world at a higher framerate than either 24/48fps (closer to 74-78fps, actually, which is why 85Hz is considered "flicker free" on CRT displays), and for lack of a better description, it settles into a mode interpolating the image when you're watching a film. If the framerate suddenly changes, it requires more processing power to adjust to the sudden change, and that can be jarring or fatiguing.
It'd be like finding a compromise for those who resisted colour film and colour TV by simply switching on or off colour depending on whether the scene in question really made optimal use of it. It'd be totally jarring and terrible.
Probably because computing is a career which doesn't require a lot of interaction with the public. A lot of transgenders have very serious body image and confidence issues, and it's a very good career choice for somebody who doesn't want to have to face people they don't know.
10 years ago, the price difference between a Celeron and a Pentium made sense when it was a low duty server.
These days, you can put together an AMD-based 2.6GHz quad core with 8GB of RAM for under $400. Less if you have a hard drive and case you're willing to recycle. And that's new hardware... if you go to a second-hand computer store, you can pick up a 3.2GHz dual core with 4GB of RAM for $200, which should be plenty potent enough to handle a straight webserver.
I'm more than a little surprised that slackware.com was running on a 10-year old server in colocation... if the hardware really was that old and underpowered, somebody needs to get fired. I wouldn't keep hardware in colo more than 5 years, and even that is pushing it, simply due to the upgrade cycle and lifecycle of the hardware. I've had a hardware blow up (craters on one of the IC's) on systems that were less than that, and it wasn't pretty.
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Does your system come with a dedicated video card, or use main memory?
The Vostro V130n has a Sandy Bridge processor, and is using the integrated Intel graphics with shared system memory. I've never had any problems using external display on it, but it's also a much newer system than you are talking about, as it came with 2GB of memory from the factory. I'd have to check the BIOS for how much memory is actually being used by the graphics.
Possibly a biased source, but not exactly a shocking conclusion.
That's the problem. While the conclusion is hardly surprising, and is in fact what many people have been predicting for years, a lot of people are going to say "oh, it's Microsoft, FUD!" and ignore it. Interestingly, using many of the same vectors a virus for Linux is equally possible, it's just that most virus writing these days is done for profit, and it's not a big enough target to make it worth their time.
1: Some modern distros require 768 MB RAM or more, and almost all of them are 256 MB+, while XP Home Edition is 64 MB required, 128 MB recommended.
Much of this bloat is in the kernel, which even if built fully modular now has so many hooks and semi-optionals that you can't run a normal distro on minimal hardware.
You'd be wrong on that point. My system boots up to 80MB of RAM used (full graphical desktop, with several applications open in the tray, using a 3.0 kernel. There is a newer kernel available in the distro, but I don't see the point in upgrading yet, as there's no new support for my hardware), and even now, with Chromium open and a dozen tabs, it's peaking at 236MB of memory actually used. If I was actually trying to pare down the memory usage, this particular distro (which is quite modern) can boot up to less than 40MB of memory in use, simply by disabling CUPS at startup, using a lighter weight browser, and getting rid of a few of the widgets in e17. The minimum spec for this distro is 128MB of memory recommended (but it'll install in 64MB if you don't mind having a swap partition), and a 300MHz processor.
It's not the kernel that uses so much memory in mainstream distros, it's the desktop environment. KDE in particular is a beast, but Gnome3 isn't that great, either.
Also, Windows XP recommends 64MB minimum memory in the same way that Vista recommended 1GB minimum memory: It'll run, but if you're planning on doing more than one thing at a time, you'd better hope most of them are editing a text file in notepad.
2: The good old problem with hardware support. All old desktops will have XP drivers, but the same can't be said for Linux drivers. (And when they do, depending on the hardware and type, they sometimes won't work as just generic .ko modules, but need special hooks in the kernel, see #1) You have to do your homework to know you get hardware you can fully use under Linux.
That's weird. It's weird because every old computer I've tried installing on, including an ancient Dell laptop (a Latitude LS from ~1999) as recently as yesterday, everything "just worked". No need to install graphics drivers, audio drivers, special hooks, or anything. Even the Prism2-based PCMCIA wireless card worked out of the box. And e17 absolutely flies, even with full screen OpenGL compositing enabled, on the 800MHz P-III with 256MB of RAM.
I still haven't had a single machine where everything Just Worked, and I've lost count of how many dozen Linux installations I've done over the years. The closest I have gotten is the current "Dell Optiplex n" machine at work, but even there, the front panel audio detection doesn't work. You'd think that their "n" line which is sold with no OS (ok, with FreeDOS) would have full hardware/driver support in non-Windows, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I suspect they really sell them for a market of pirates that run illegal copies of Windows, plus a few MS Select customers who do their own licensing.
And yet, here I am typing this on a Vostro v130n, which came with Ubuntu LTS preinstalled, where again, everything "just works". It's been a *very* long time since I've had to fiddle with drivers on a Linux installation, and it's almost always because I want better performance out of a video card.
Of course, all of this is missing an extremely important point, which is that the OP was talking about *new* computers, not something you got 2nd hand from a thrift store. I plan to buy one of these myself, once I see some reviews of XBMC decoding performance. I can power it from the USB plug on my TV, and connect it by HDMI to the TV. Plug it in to the ethernet then point it at my network fileserver, and it's a perfect silent HTPC.
When did posting something germane to the discussion, and which actually adds to it, become karmawhoring?
The more amusing quirk of the Slashdot moderating system is when you see a first post modded redundant because 20 other people said the same thing....
MS-WMP won't even play mkv files.
In Windows 7 it will. It'll open the container, and if needed, it can go off to the Internet to download the codec. It has no problem at all with the h.264 MKV DVD rips I've been making.
The only exception to this of which I am aware is that some states have "Good Samaritan" laws that require you to help people under certain, specific circumstances. For example, in my state you are obligated to stop and help someone who is stuck in the snow in a remote area, because the chance of otherwise not finding help and freezing to death is so great. And to be honest, I am not convinced that even that law is completely Constitutional.
That particular situation I haven't heard about... admittedly, I'm in Canada, and we have different laws, but while there's an ethical and moral obligation to help somebody out in that situation (and I would regardless of legal obligation, for exactly the reason you cite), I don't think that there's any legal obligation to help somebody out.
As for Good Samaritan laws, the only province in Canada that still has one is Quebec, and their law speaks about offering medical assistance/first aid to somebody in need. Other provinces have a similar concept, but slightly different, which is a First Responder law. Essentially, if you have professional training as a First Responder, then you're required by law to help out (say an off-duty paramedic or an M.D.), but a by-stander with no professional training (or somebody who only has first aid/CPR training) would not be required to stop.
It's not flawed at all, it's just a position you disagree with. You're an accomplice in any illegal activity if you fail to take any steps to prevent it.
I have an app on my cellphone which breaks WEP encryption. With a little more processing power, WPA is almost as trivially easy to break. You've taken steps to secure your network, but it doesn't matter, because I can still break it if I want to. We live in a different time than the one you're thinking in.
Just about every wireless router on the market today ships with WPA encryption enabled by default. An awful lot of them have randomly generated passkeys by default (though they still largely have standardized SSID's). The installation wizard guides people through setting up their own private password/ssid. If you see an open/unencrypted network out there today, it's either somebody running ancient hardware, or somebody who has deliberately set it up that way.
^^ this.
He was dead anyway, regardless of how well protected his encrypted content was. Also, his network was (and is) set up in such a way that even a year after Bin Laden was captured/killed, we *still* haven't tracked down his lieutenants, I don't think he really had anything to worry about with the security of his data.
You realize you can change the Windows version to behaving like it used to, by turning on the menu bar in the view options? And that you can get the Linux version to behave like the Windows version by turning off the menu bar and enabling a sidebar?
If they're going to start copying Chrome's UI, why wouldn't I just install Chrome?
It doesn't matter that your lawyer is working on contingency. If you sue me because my shoes caused your mother's cancer, then my lawyer isn't working on contingency. Even if you don't end up having to pay your legal fees because you didn't win, my lawyer, in a Canadian court, will file a brief requesting that you pay my legal fees under malicious litigation rules, and you'll be on the hook for paying my lawyer for the work she did defending against you.
this is also why they won't try for government contracts because of quotas and the fear they will be stuck dealing with workers they are afraid to let go for fear of spending a year or more dealing with a lawsuit lotto.
You don't have malicious litigation rules that would require the plaintiff to pay legal fees for the defendant if his complaint is found to be without cause?
We have those kinds of rules here in Canada, and it does a pretty good job of stopping people from suing unless they have a legitimate beef.
My house is all WiFi connected, but my desktops have extra NICs with gig connections to my server for backups that don't take forever. Wireless is the AOL of connection media- so easy, your grandmother can use it. But it's not good for serious transfers.
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything. And that was the initial copy... subsequent daily updates from my mail server (in colocation) to my home fileserver complete in under 10s. Store your user files on a network hard drive, and make sure the fileserver has RAID, and you should be fairly safe. If you *really* want to have a backup in a separate system, then connect a second fileserver on a Gig-E switch right next to the main fileserver, and set up rsync with a cronjob. It still won't come close to saturating the connection for any protracted amount of time, except possibly during the initial sync.
54-mbit wireless is fast enough to play media from a central filesever on one or two computers live. More than that it does get a little iffy, but that's why you've got 150- and 300-mbit wireless... my laptop is connected using dual band 300mbit wireless, and never has any problems copying to or from the fileserver.
That's not to say that I don't have NIC's installed. But it is to say that, for now at least, there's no Cat5e going to every room. When I build a new house in a couple of years, there will probably be Cat5e to every room to facilitate an IPTV install, but I expect that I will still mostly use wireless to connect computers, and only plug in to the GigE to install an extra AP if needed, or to connect a desktop computer that doesn't have a wireless adapter. In other words, it'll replace the role that's currently being served adequately by powerline networking adapters.
And then there's the problem of distros breaking on upgrades,
Never seen that with my distro of choice... though they do recommend reinstalling completely if you're going to change the major revision number. Fortunately, on the long-term plan map, that only happens every 2 years.
and the prevalent WORKS_FOR_ME && WONT_FIX responses towards bugs,
Haven't seen that in the support communities for my system. I have seen "works here, can you provide more information about your specific setup so we can try to duplicate it" though.
the really lousy bug-reporting scheme (I tried it with KDE, my cpu went to 100% and never even loaded the desktop, requiring a reinstall from scratch).
That's a complete non-fix, though. That's like fixing the knock in your car's engine by buying a new car. Sure, the knock's gone, but it's major overkill. If you want a bug fixed, then you need to provide information... if nobody can duplicate your situation then nobody can figure out what's actually happening and fix it.
Then there's the lack of social skills among the "self-anointed."
There's a similar lack of social skills among the technocracy in Windows- and Mac-land, too. Or have you never heard somebody in IT saying that you should have to have a license in order to buy a computer before? That doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who can and will help you, but "people" is the important word there. If you don't treat them as people, they're not going to be inclined to help you, and the sad truth is that a lot of people demand that you "FIX IT NAO!" and start to get really pissy if you can't fix it immediately.
Plus their childish insistence on labeling it GNU/linux (do you call it a Firestone/Mustang)? Or M$. Yes, we see what you did there, and no, after the 5,000th time, it's just stupid.
On that, I agree with you completely. But exempt a couple of narrow-minded people you can safely ignore, I never see people doing that any more.
Pointing out the problems invariably gets you labeled as a shill, an astroturfer, or worse.
Clearly you're a shill, and astroturfing for the evil M$ empire, Bill. ;)
Pointing out the problems with the GPL - or worse, pointing out that the GPL doesn't even respect the 4 freedoms listed on the home page of the FSF - brings out people who blindly repeat what "everyone who really is a true believer knows."
You're right on this one. GPL does really bring out some of the loonies... just last week, on our IRC channel, we had somebody reading the riot act to our lead developper, because the tools that've been written for the distro are licensed under BSD and Apache, rather than being GPL. Apparently, the idea of having a tool for Linux licensed as anything other than GPL3 was anathema to this person, and they just didn't seem to understand that there are free/permissive licenses out there that aren't GPL.
It's not a religion or a cult, but you could have fooled me.
That depends on who you're asking. Yes, there is the Cult of Stallman out there, but there's lots of people who simply believe that software should be free. There's also lots of people like me who run a variety of different systems in their ecosystem, and use whichever one best suits the task at hand. For 90% of my day-to-day computing, I have an ultraportable laptop with Linux installed on it. For the rare occasion that I want to play a game that doesn't exist on Linux, I have a gaming machine with a (completely legal) Windows 7 Ultimate installation on it. Use what works for you.
And if you come to me for a suggestion, I will work with you to understand what you need, and help you choose whichever system best suits your needs... and if that is Windows, then so be it. Though truthfully, the overwhelming maj
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/Derivatives
Oh look, Mint is on that list. I'm not running a Ubuntu official distro either, but my browser agent shows as: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0.
Why? Because the distro I have installed, while it maintains its own repos for modern software, is based on Ubuntu LTS and doesn't bother building their own packages for anything that's actively maintained in the Ubu repos. There's nothing to be gained from duplicating work like that, and my distro of choice is in the top 20 on Distrowatch. I would lay odds that a fair number of other distributions do the same thing, which artificially inflates the numbers for Ubuntu.
If you want to help somebody choose a distro, ask them where they're coming from. I usually suggest either gnome or KDE as a first Linux UI, because it's familiar, though I personally prefer e17 by a very wide margin (and e17 can be made to look/behave like either gnome or KDE). Once you know where they're coming from (to help pick which DE), ask what they want to do with the system. With those two pieces of information it's fairly easy to find a distro that will work for them. Consult here, if you need suggestions: http://i.imgur.com/jy1BF.png :)
It is not a reasonable statement at all. The raspi is being sold for 25 dollars which is essentially a throway price and it will run on USB power. Its small size is actually secondary to its appeal. This thing will cost at least 4 times as much for board and CPU and will need an external brick. The fact that people do not see the difference is astounding. Especially considering boards that are close to this have been on store shelves for years and years. Ever heard of Via?
More than 4x as much... cheapest Socket G1/G2 CPU I can find is $160. For the CPU alone. You still have to buy the board, the memory, the hard drive, the case, and the power brick.
This is *not* a competitor.
And yes, you're absolutely right about Via. They're still making C7-based boards for much cheaper. Atom-based board/cpu combos as well are an option, and honestly, a better option since Via C7 is an 8-year old design, and doesn't do 64-bit.
My first thought was that this is a NanoITX board for i3/i5... turns out NanoITX is actually a smaller form factor (less surface area).
This does not compete with RPi at all. It's significantly larger, and will be significantly more expensive. Considering that the CPU alone will cost *at least* $100 (current prices for cheapest Socket G1 I can find is actually $160 and that's not even an i3), it's not going to be hitting the $100 price tag that TFS suggests either.
(reference needed: http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/processors )
H2 and NatGeo? Wtf are you smoking?
I'm not even sure you can get real educational programming in the US, but when I compare the channels you listed against something like EQhd or OasisHD, they're not even in the same category.
People paying for these CPU are gamers and enthusiasms anyway, they have a discrete GPU and don't use the built-in one. I'm pretty sure less than 1% of the SandyBridge/IvyBridge sold use the built-in GPU since it's an horror compared to real graphic cards.
You'd be wrong, especially in laptops. I have a Sandy Bridge Celeron U3600 in my laptop, and I'm using the integrated graphics. They're plenty powerful enough for desktop compositing, and I get respectable framerates playing the occasional game.
Depends on the CPU, but most (~90%) Sandy Bridge i5 CPU's will take 4GHz without any problem, and about 50% can hit 4.5GHz without breaking a sweat. This is for an i5 2500k, which comes with a stock clock speed of 3.2GHz. My 2500k is currently running at 4.7GHz and it doesn't have any stability problems at all, even when I run video encodes that keep the CPU at 100% occupancy 24/7... when I push it to 4.8GHz (change the multiplier from 46x to 47x, with system bus at 103MHz), it starts to crash. I suspect that if I had a better cooling setup (using a Cooler Master Hyper 212+ heatsink, which is air cooled and keeps the CPU max temperature around 65'C at 4.7GHz) I may be able to squeeze a few more clock cycles out of the processor, but it's not worth $200 for a water cooling setup.
As a card-carrying dyke who's fully paid up on her membership dues, I couldn't care less about e-peen.
My computer is overclocked because I do a lot of video encoding. For gaming it doesn't make a difference (and if you check the logs, most of the time in most games the CPU underclocks itself to 1.6GHz anyway), but when you're doing a video encode, particularly a large video encode or a lot of transcoding (the kind of operation that will keep your CPU pegged for 3 days in a row, and I'm talking about a Core i5 2500k oc'd to 4.7GHz, with 16GB of RAM), having an overclocked system means a real savings in electricity usage and time, because the marginal increase in power usage for the CPU is offset by the decrease in power usage for everything else by completing the task earlier.
And if saving electricity isn't an argument for you, there is another financial reason to go with the i5 in this situation: it's more than $100 cheaper than the i7 2600k was, and gives a very significant boost in performance over a non-overclocked i7.
It does exist for video, but it doesn't change the frame rate, it changes the amount of information stored per frame. Compressed video doesn't store each frame individually, it stores key frames (usually every 60th frame or something like that), which are the image in its entirety, and every frame after that is just an update of the previous frame, and only contains the pixels that change. This is why MPEG1 video at DVD resolution wouldn't tax a '386, but H.264 at the same resolution would destroy the same processor. This is also why, if you're watching a video over a bad connection (like satellite in crappy weather), the picture will go mosaic for a few seconds and then clear up: if the key frame is what gets corrupted/dropped, especially during a camera angle change, then you're seeing sequential updates applied to the wrong image. Key frames are also used to synchronize the audio stream.
Variable bitrate simply increases or decreases the amount of information that's contained in each update frame based on how much is actually needed to store the update, and video compression codecs have been doing it that way for years, if not decades.
What you're talking about is variable framerate, which is, from all reports I've seen, quite jarring. Your brain naturally sees the world at a higher framerate than either 24/48fps (closer to 74-78fps, actually, which is why 85Hz is considered "flicker free" on CRT displays), and for lack of a better description, it settles into a mode interpolating the image when you're watching a film. If the framerate suddenly changes, it requires more processing power to adjust to the sudden change, and that can be jarring or fatiguing.
It'd be like finding a compromise for those who resisted colour film and colour TV by simply switching on or off colour depending on whether the scene in question really made optimal use of it. It'd be totally jarring and terrible.
You've never seen The Notorious Bettie Page or O Brother, Where Art Thou?, have you?
Probably because computing is a career which doesn't require a lot of interaction with the public. A lot of transgenders have very serious body image and confidence issues, and it's a very good career choice for somebody who doesn't want to have to face people they don't know.
10 years ago, the price difference between a Celeron and a Pentium made sense when it was a low duty server.
These days, you can put together an AMD-based 2.6GHz quad core with 8GB of RAM for under $400. Less if you have a hard drive and case you're willing to recycle. And that's new hardware... if you go to a second-hand computer store, you can pick up a 3.2GHz dual core with 4GB of RAM for $200, which should be plenty potent enough to handle a straight webserver.
I'm more than a little surprised that slackware.com was running on a 10-year old server in colocation... if the hardware really was that old and underpowered, somebody needs to get fired. I wouldn't keep hardware in colo more than 5 years, and even that is pushing it, simply due to the upgrade cycle and lifecycle of the hardware. I've had a hardware blow up (craters on one of the IC's) on systems that were less than that, and it wasn't pretty.