And I agree. One of my co-workers in Scotland was commenting that they had a force 7 gale going there. I looked it up. 31-38 mph winds. We have a word for that in Kansas: Spring.
A gale is really just the step after breeze (force 6 is strong breeze), you go through all the gale levels (7-9) then all the storm levels (10-12) before you get to a hurricane. Not sure where he's from in Scotland for a gale to be all that special, they should be getting roughly the same weather as us here in Norway over the North Sea and it's not that uncommon.
Even though storms have the full force of the Atlantic to build on, the strongest hurricane we've measured here in Norway was in 1992 and it was only a class 2, most years go without a single hurricane of any category. Gale is a windy day, storms are the only kind of storm and hurricanes are on TV. Same with tornadoes, very rare.
The hurricane scale goes higher - a level F3 tornado (158 - 206 mph) would be a category 5 hurricane (>155 mph) and there's no match for a F4 or F5 tornado. And thank you very much for that...
There has been exactly one "x900" card and it's the 5970. Historically, the dual cards used to be called X2 like in 4870 X2 but the 5970 wasn't fully a 5870 X2 (would break the ATX spec) so they gave its own name and series. What is worse is that the 5870 is performing better than 6870 and same for 5850 and 6850. The price reduction is nice, but in all honesty they should have been named either as the 6700 series or as 6850 and 6830 respectively.
Because writing implementations for the most important open source projects is necessary to get it "out there", it's a cost whoever wants to make yet another audio system takes. For the people creating applications it's another cost with no benefit.
Seriously, get a grip. Most people will compile it using the default flags unless they got a reason to change it. That it doesn't involve everyone is roughly equivalent to other people on other distros hardening their machine by disabling stuff they dont' use.
I think a certain university network I know has (had?) 10 GB/day. However, that did not apply to intra-campus bandwidth so it only encouraged people to access the ridiculous amounts available locally.
I suspect a bit of both. Apple is pushing java out of the mobile space with iOS, and probably wants to set themselves up as controlling the Cocoa toolkit that runs on everything from iPhones via iPads to OS X to OS X Server. As long as you stay in the Apple sphere, of course.
However, I don't think the timing with Oracle is coincidental either, with the Android lawsuit and so on I think the see the opportunity to "sink" java as a development platform. Microsoft pushes.NET, Apple pushes Cocoa, Google pushes their "this is not Java", Linux is running in 50 different directions. Oracle is going to have to work hard to market Java on their own.
Who knows? It's pretty hard to know if anything is constant when we on the universal scale has measured it just at one point. Maybe there's some other kind of "field" we don't notice because it covers the entire Milky Way and we wouldn't really realize it until we tried repeating the experiment in another galaxy.
Of course we have tried doing simulations of what we observe and it seems all the universe works the same, but the data is very limited.
It's why nothing has come of thirty years of "Middle East Peace Talks". All the talking in the world won't do you any good if both parties at the table aren't really sincere.
And both parties at the table must have the authority to make their side lay down the arms and support in the population to make such an agreement on their behalf. Sincerity is just one of the problems...
Is the placebo effect real? Yes, if you don't care how you achieve results. They'd call it Chrome Deluxe 2010 Ultra Extreme if that'd bring more users. Unlike many open source projects that are anti-marketing, not just neutral to it but actually opposed to using more "marketable" names.
True, I was projecting a little based on what Netflix, Hulu, Voddler etc. offer today and in practice you'd have an Akamai-like system around the world. However, it's not like you have to push everything in real time. For TV and movie releases with a fixed release date you could download an encrypted version at night and at release time you get the decryption key. If you want something streaming live you might have to turn down the quality settings down to "normal" 1080p (~11 Mbit), 720p (~5 Mbit) or 480p (~2 Mbit). With use comes bandwidth, ISPs won't be able to hold back progress (except maybe in the US). Checking the bandwidth stats from Norway ~50% of all households can do DVD streaming and ~20% some form of HD today and that many people could get faster lines but don't see the point. If the content came, this revolution could happen quite quickly at least in some parts of the world.
Yep. Google released a bunch of data on hard disk reliability, not broken down by manufacturer but they said it didn't make much difference. And you know big OEMs like Dell keep track of warrany HDD failures and the "That #%*&%/# Dell ate my documents" hit to their reputation as opposed to other hardware that just breaks means they'd get rid of any poor manufacturers quickly, even if they were slightly cheaper. Also people that deliver big storage solutions and such. Of course you could end up with a lemon model but you wouldn't really know that until late in the game when its reliability numbers really diverge.
Well, apparently the torrent software has had some issues with torrenting directly to my file server (mapped cifs directory) or when I've had to shut it down. For many smaller things of 1-2 GB it's been easier to just downloading it to the SSD and copy it in batches. I know, it's part of the "not ideal" stuff but well I *could* and the computer didn't have any of the stuttering and slowness you get if you do that to a regular HDD. Still, it's definitively one of the things I'd do differently to cut down on writes next time.
My Vertex SSD started getting all crazy on Sunday, SMART reported I had average of 4700 writes/cell and a max of almost 15000 and the bad blocks full flag was set. My firmware says its rated for 10000 writes/cell but in the last firmwares OCZ has set it down to 5000/cell. It was not failing gracefully at all. Things just got crazier and crazier with fsck reporting more and more corruption.
It's 1.5 years old and I admit I've been using it heavily with OS and all sorts of torrents and freenet and whatnot and pushed 90% full most of the time, but I've not intentionally been trying to burn it out and it was mounted with relatime not atime. Still, it's more than possible and I suspect even with what I'd consider "normal" use it'd be dead within 5 years. The speed is seductive but that also makes you burn through more GBs because you don't notice them so much and no, they last far from infinitely long.
Either the moderation is a "insightful for funny" mod or it's on crack. Only one 3.2 GB or so drive I had many yeats ago has failed in that way, all the others have gone completely bye-bye which means all 20 partitions go down at once. It's not redundant when the same failure will knock out all of them...
I think that's almost entirely due to everybody storing their own copies. Searching the BluRay store at amazon.com I get 9352 titles. If we assume 50 GB/disc - some are smaller, some are duplicate versions and some are multi-disc sets but not too far off - then that's 500 TB. Is that much? It's 133 of these drives, and that'd store pretty much all high-def content produced to date. It's out of the league of a home server but if there was such a thing as Spotify for movies it would be a piece of cake. If we'd all stream our video the reason most people buy TB-size discs would be gone. Yes, I know there are exceptions but those are exceptions.
Depends on how low you go, BluRays are way above the bandwidth/pixel sweet spot. The sweet spot is around 0.2 bits/pixel which is ~10 Mbit for 1080p24 and ~4.5 Mbit for 720p24. Plus audio of course. So if you have a 5 Mbit line, getting a theoretical 1080p bandwidth-starved signal will actually be worse than 720p. For anyone above 10 Mbit 1080p will likely be an improvement.
What I really mean, and WANT, is: have ONE API, whether it be for widgets, sound, video, input device management, packaging (not the least of things, that), and... Name something desktop related here.
Why advocate a) Qt and b) common APIs when you can't use a) to write b)? You can not use any part of Qt with GNOME because they will not take anything C++, even a C++ library with C bindings. The few attempts at unification like DBus have to be written in C and be entirely unlike any code you'd normally write for Qt or with Qt. That is what you don't seem to "get", the APIs aren't different just to be different, they're different because they have to come from two different code bases and the way you'd write an API with Qt (C++ and MOC) is entirely different than you would or could write with C.
Something like this is a store. A repository has no infrastructure to do access or license control, it's just an open mirror. Anyway, you can see by the glorious selection in Ubuntu's store how popular the idea is...
We're ridiculously far from a technological level where we can do this. Also, it'd require huge amounts of energy to get it up there in the first place...
The short version: Qt is an excellent toolkit. KDE is a not equally great as a DE. Many people simply prefer GNOME and would need a GNOME/Qt to switch. Since GNOME is C and KDE is C++ there is a holy war and a lot of work do be done to merge it into one system where "KDE" or "GNOME" is simply a set of user preferences.
First you have to win the applications, then you can swap Windows out with Linux from under them. The whole "Welcome to Linux, none of your old software will work but for everything there is a G/KApp that is better" is a non-starter.
And I don't mean the social semantic desktop, but to win traditional applications. Has anyone outside of Linux ever heard of e.g. digiKam? By the way an open source project with a very good name. No, they haven't.
I've noticed there's not so much interest in making open source work on Windows or Mac. Linux apps for Linux users is preaching to the choir, Getting that software on other platforms would be evangelizing, because there's at least hope it'd be picked up by others.
Package systems tend not to contain non-free software. The article mentions this ideological point
For one there's not much to be had. But a few (opera, flash) I use are available from the partner repository. The closed source Catalyst/nVidia drivers are also easy to install, and I suppose most freeware could get a spot there. What the repositories don't contain much of is payware, it's not a store.
And for that, there's the PC builders. At least many of the IT shops around here that sell parts will also sell you a complete PC built to specifications though you don't really get any integration testing, they just make sure basic things like CPU socket matching motherboard socket so that it boots. Every time I build a PC I use a disappropriate amount of time on little things like connecting all the chassis buttons and lights to the motherboard and whatnot. That guy at the PC shop which does this regularly has a workbench ready and will know all the tricks and finish in much less time. It's not quite as cheap as a mass built one but worth the money.
Slashdot Mirror
Developer/lawyer ratio over time... now that'd be an interesting graph.
And I agree. One of my co-workers in Scotland was commenting that they had a force 7 gale going there. I looked it up. 31-38 mph winds. We have a word for that in Kansas: Spring.
A gale is really just the step after breeze (force 6 is strong breeze), you go through all the gale levels (7-9) then all the storm levels (10-12) before you get to a hurricane. Not sure where he's from in Scotland for a gale to be all that special, they should be getting roughly the same weather as us here in Norway over the North Sea and it's not that uncommon.
Even though storms have the full force of the Atlantic to build on, the strongest hurricane we've measured here in Norway was in 1992 and it was only a class 2, most years go without a single hurricane of any category. Gale is a windy day, storms are the only kind of storm and hurricanes are on TV. Same with tornadoes, very rare.
Category 3 hurricane is Winds (1 min sustained winds): 111-130 mph
Category F2 tornado is Significant Tornado: 112 - 157 mph
The hurricane scale goes higher - a level F3 tornado (158 - 206 mph) would be a category 5 hurricane (>155 mph) and there's no match for a F4 or F5 tornado. And thank you very much for that...
There has been exactly one "x900" card and it's the 5970. Historically, the dual cards used to be called X2 like in 4870 X2 but the 5970 wasn't fully a 5870 X2 (would break the ATX spec) so they gave its own name and series. What is worse is that the 5870 is performing better than 6870 and same for 5850 and 6850. The price reduction is nice, but in all honesty they should have been named either as the 6700 series or as 6850 and 6830 respectively.
Because writing implementations for the most important open source projects is necessary to get it "out there", it's a cost whoever wants to make yet another audio system takes. For the people creating applications it's another cost with no benefit.
Seriously, get a grip. Most people will compile it using the default flags unless they got a reason to change it. That it doesn't involve everyone is roughly equivalent to other people on other distros hardening their machine by disabling stuff they dont' use.
I think a certain university network I know has (had?) 10 GB/day. However, that did not apply to intra-campus bandwidth so it only encouraged people to access the ridiculous amounts available locally.
I suspect a bit of both. Apple is pushing java out of the mobile space with iOS, and probably wants to set themselves up as controlling the Cocoa toolkit that runs on everything from iPhones via iPads to OS X to OS X Server. As long as you stay in the Apple sphere, of course.
However, I don't think the timing with Oracle is coincidental either, with the Android lawsuit and so on I think the see the opportunity to "sink" java as a development platform. Microsoft pushes .NET, Apple pushes Cocoa, Google pushes their "this is not Java", Linux is running in 50 different directions. Oracle is going to have to work hard to market Java on their own.
Who knows? It's pretty hard to know if anything is constant when we on the universal scale has measured it just at one point. Maybe there's some other kind of "field" we don't notice because it covers the entire Milky Way and we wouldn't really realize it until we tried repeating the experiment in another galaxy.
Of course we have tried doing simulations of what we observe and it seems all the universe works the same, but the data is very limited.
It's why nothing has come of thirty years of "Middle East Peace Talks". All the talking in the world won't do you any good if both parties at the table aren't really sincere.
And both parties at the table must have the authority to make their side lay down the arms and support in the population to make such an agreement on their behalf. Sincerity is just one of the problems...
Is the placebo effect real? Yes, if you don't care how you achieve results. They'd call it Chrome Deluxe 2010 Ultra Extreme if that'd bring more users. Unlike many open source projects that are anti-marketing, not just neutral to it but actually opposed to using more "marketable" names.
True, I was projecting a little based on what Netflix, Hulu, Voddler etc. offer today and in practice you'd have an Akamai-like system around the world. However, it's not like you have to push everything in real time. For TV and movie releases with a fixed release date you could download an encrypted version at night and at release time you get the decryption key. If you want something streaming live you might have to turn down the quality settings down to "normal" 1080p (~11 Mbit), 720p (~5 Mbit) or 480p (~2 Mbit). With use comes bandwidth, ISPs won't be able to hold back progress (except maybe in the US). Checking the bandwidth stats from Norway ~50% of all households can do DVD streaming and ~20% some form of HD today and that many people could get faster lines but don't see the point. If the content came, this revolution could happen quite quickly at least in some parts of the world.
Yep. Google released a bunch of data on hard disk reliability, not broken down by manufacturer but they said it didn't make much difference. And you know big OEMs like Dell keep track of warrany HDD failures and the "That #%*&%/# Dell ate my documents" hit to their reputation as opposed to other hardware that just breaks means they'd get rid of any poor manufacturers quickly, even if they were slightly cheaper. Also people that deliver big storage solutions and such. Of course you could end up with a lemon model but you wouldn't really know that until late in the game when its reliability numbers really diverge.
Well, apparently the torrent software has had some issues with torrenting directly to my file server (mapped cifs directory) or when I've had to shut it down. For many smaller things of 1-2 GB it's been easier to just downloading it to the SSD and copy it in batches. I know, it's part of the "not ideal" stuff but well I *could* and the computer didn't have any of the stuttering and slowness you get if you do that to a regular HDD. Still, it's definitively one of the things I'd do differently to cut down on writes next time.
My Vertex SSD started getting all crazy on Sunday, SMART reported I had average of 4700 writes/cell and a max of almost 15000 and the bad blocks full flag was set. My firmware says its rated for 10000 writes/cell but in the last firmwares OCZ has set it down to 5000/cell. It was not failing gracefully at all. Things just got crazier and crazier with fsck reporting more and more corruption.
It's 1.5 years old and I admit I've been using it heavily with OS and all sorts of torrents and freenet and whatnot and pushed 90% full most of the time, but I've not intentionally been trying to burn it out and it was mounted with relatime not atime. Still, it's more than possible and I suspect even with what I'd consider "normal" use it'd be dead within 5 years. The speed is seductive but that also makes you burn through more GBs because you don't notice them so much and no, they last far from infinitely long.
Either the moderation is a "insightful for funny" mod or it's on crack. Only one 3.2 GB or so drive I had many yeats ago has failed in that way, all the others have gone completely bye-bye which means all 20 partitions go down at once. It's not redundant when the same failure will knock out all of them...
I think that's almost entirely due to everybody storing their own copies. Searching the BluRay store at amazon.com I get 9352 titles. If we assume 50 GB/disc - some are smaller, some are duplicate versions and some are multi-disc sets but not too far off - then that's 500 TB. Is that much? It's 133 of these drives, and that'd store pretty much all high-def content produced to date. It's out of the league of a home server but if there was such a thing as Spotify for movies it would be a piece of cake. If we'd all stream our video the reason most people buy TB-size discs would be gone. Yes, I know there are exceptions but those are exceptions.
Depends on how low you go, BluRays are way above the bandwidth/pixel sweet spot. The sweet spot is around 0.2 bits/pixel which is ~10 Mbit for 1080p24 and ~4.5 Mbit for 720p24. Plus audio of course. So if you have a 5 Mbit line, getting a theoretical 1080p bandwidth-starved signal will actually be worse than 720p. For anyone above 10 Mbit 1080p will likely be an improvement.
What I really mean, and WANT, is: have ONE API, whether it be for widgets, sound, video, input device management, packaging (not the least of things, that), and... Name something desktop related here.
Why advocate a) Qt and b) common APIs when you can't use a) to write b)? You can not use any part of Qt with GNOME because they will not take anything C++, even a C++ library with C bindings. The few attempts at unification like DBus have to be written in C and be entirely unlike any code you'd normally write for Qt or with Qt. That is what you don't seem to "get", the APIs aren't different just to be different, they're different because they have to come from two different code bases and the way you'd write an API with Qt (C++ and MOC) is entirely different than you would or could write with C.
Something like this is a store. A repository has no infrastructure to do access or license control, it's just an open mirror. Anyway, you can see by the glorious selection in Ubuntu's store how popular the idea is...
We're ridiculously far from a technological level where we can do this. Also, it'd require huge amounts of energy to get it up there in the first place...
The short version: Qt is an excellent toolkit. KDE is a not equally great as a DE. Many people simply prefer GNOME and would need a GNOME/Qt to switch. Since GNOME is C and KDE is C++ there is a holy war and a lot of work do be done to merge it into one system where "KDE" or "GNOME" is simply a set of user preferences.
First you have to win the applications, then you can swap Windows out with Linux from under them. The whole "Welcome to Linux, none of your old software will work but for everything there is a G/KApp that is better" is a non-starter.
And I don't mean the social semantic desktop, but to win traditional applications. Has anyone outside of Linux ever heard of e.g. digiKam? By the way an open source project with a very good name. No, they haven't.
I've noticed there's not so much interest in making open source work on Windows or Mac. Linux apps for Linux users is preaching to the choir, Getting that software on other platforms would be evangelizing, because there's at least hope it'd be picked up by others.
Package systems tend not to contain non-free software. The article mentions this ideological point
For one there's not much to be had. But a few (opera, flash) I use are available from the partner repository. The closed source Catalyst/nVidia drivers are also easy to install, and I suppose most freeware could get a spot there. What the repositories don't contain much of is payware, it's not a store.
And for that, there's the PC builders. At least many of the IT shops around here that sell parts will also sell you a complete PC built to specifications though you don't really get any integration testing, they just make sure basic things like CPU socket matching motherboard socket so that it boots. Every time I build a PC I use a disappropriate amount of time on little things like connecting all the chassis buttons and lights to the motherboard and whatnot. That guy at the PC shop which does this regularly has a workbench ready and will know all the tricks and finish in much less time. It's not quite as cheap as a mass built one but worth the money.