As for how I get by with one monitor (cheap daewoo 15") - I use the console. I mapped alt-h and alt-l to switch consoles to the left/right so I can do it with one hand while holding my tea in the other. It's funny how I wanted a huge Sony back when I was in Windows but had no money to get one and now that I have the money I'm much happier with console/ 15". Don't print nothing out either, cept to read in the subway.
This doesn't make any damn sense. Reflected light can be very painful (for instance, when its reflected from the snow) and it never hurt anyone to look at them light bugs (whatchamacallit). There is no conceptual difference between regular and reflected light.
> The best public health system in the World is the government funded and run UK National Health System. It provides better care for less than the US system costs. I heard that UK health gov't officials are very reluctant to give you any medical help. Which is only natural if they don't get money directly from you. I had personal experience with gov't medical system in ussr, which sucked too. Generally I think it's quite possible that businesses are more effective, especially small ones. But, as far as space exploration goes - this is probably a bad idea. Businesses must go for quick returns. A business cannot invest one billion of dollars even if it is fairly sure that in 200-300 years it'll be well worth it. Government has more freedom here - it won't go bankrupt (at least, it can afford way more spendings before it does).
I happen to be working with Photoshop every day for a few hours. I tried Gimp as well. Photoshop is the only windows program I'm using. So why am I not switching? Simple. Gimp can't cut it for professional graphics manipulation - far from it. I don't think any Photoshop users (except for maybe warez kids) switched to Gimp - those who payed $600 for Photoshop, need it's high end capabilities. I haven't been following Gimp development effort, but I *hope* in a year or so I will be able to switch. I plan to try the next big version when it comes out. It's a little annoying to see people knock Photoshop though - that pretty much means that you are not a graphics professional and have no business judging Photoshop to start with.
> Americans should realize that they are not the first and foremost in every single aspect of civilization. Far from it...
I got impression that Americans are the first overall though. I can't help but think that in part many of other high developed country's ventures in hi tech are made 'to show them yanks'. US is nice cause they just do whatever they like. US made one big mistake though: its result is that almost every other nation hates their guts. If things go wrong for US.. everybody else will laugh.
I didn't like stranger (but yes, number of beast was much worse yet). Most of his early books are excellent though - like galaxy citizen or starship troopers.
moon is a harsh mistress is supposed to be one of his finest books. Yes, supposed to be. in my opinion, it's one of his worst books. I wouldn't know if it's got a good or bad ending cause I could never finish it.. I'd go about 1/2 way through it and stop. That happened 2 or 3 times. Anyway, I loved tons of his other books and never noticed any problem with the ending.. try starship troopers or galaxy citizen or.. I could name 20 more.
Re:R.A.H. and crappy novels
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
I totally agree. About 10 or so late RAH books were horrible. To be fair I must note that most of his early books are finest examples of the genre. Orson scott card? heh.. Please don't insult the memory of the master of scifi by comparing him to Card.. I was majorly unimpressed by the ender's game, and the biggest problem with it (the way I see it) was that he kept saying "look how smart this kid is.. aint he smart?" while examples where he was showing his talent were pathetic. Ender would do something banal and obvious and everybody would be oh soooo impressed. I remember one bit where in one war game he pretends he's dead while he in fact is not - and this passes as a new strategy he invented. This may seem as a nitpicking but I think this is a major problem with Card: he wants to make some kind of impression like "this kid is really smart" but he doesn't have imagination or skill to get this point across, so he cheats. Compare Ender with any Heinlein hero: Ender, correct me if i'm wrong, *never* makes a mistake.. Ender a geek? seems more like a robot to me.. but wait, Lem's or Asimov's robots seemed much more human than Ender! I'm really curious *WHY* is 'Ender's game' so much drooled over? It's got nothing.
In this context, a link is exactly like as if he had it on his hd. Their concern is, if he has an a href tag on his page that points to an mp3 file, people can come and download it, which steals revenue from artists. Nobody really can say if this is true, mp3s may be promoting artists, or may be hurting them, but traditional view is that mp3s steal revenue. Anyway, it's clear that the link in this case is equivalent to having the file on his site, isn't it obvious? Many pointed out: "what if i have link to a page with links...?" Well, that's why we have juries. I guess if the links says "here you can get some mp3s" then jury will agree he's guilty, if it just says "here's a nice page to visit" and the page has various links including some links to mp3s.. then he isn't guilty because he may not have known there were mp3s there and in fact mp3s might have been added after he linked the page. - Rainy
This is offtopic and i'm only replying cause I don't want people to just read one post saying AC rocks and going to the store and buying it.. Anyway, here's my take: AC sucks. Why? I don't know. I'm an long time civ series fan and I *should* like it, but I don't. Everything seems to be in place but it just ain't fun. Anyway, if you're thinking of buying it, try to get it from a friend first and check it out beforehand...
First of all, it's very hard to give any hard data here. My personal opinion based on experience is that if you use $ cdparanoia -Bz "1-" to rip entire disc and encode it with bladenc at 256kbps, mp3 quality won't be a bottleneck, at least on my system. I have a reasonably good amp/speakers that cost me $250 for speakers and $320 for amp (paradigm minimonitor 3's and nad C340) and when I listen to mp3s I can hear internal computer noises, cdrom spinning up, static discharges, internal power supply, etc. I have a reasonably good audio card (sb audiopci64 based on ensoniq 1370 chipset). Encoder's quality is not the bottleneck in this case. It might be if you go with extremely high end sound card like Event gine ($300?), but i woudln't bet on it. overall cdparanoia/bladenc at 256 is easy, fast, and good enough unless you invest money in soundcard and invest ALOT of time in testing various configurations. - Rainy
Re:Am I alone? (spoilers)
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
I can't believe my eyes as I read all the "ender's game is great" posts. I figure I've read thousands of sci-fi books and it's down there with the worst. How can anyone read any of Heinlein's 30 or so good books (yes, some of his late stuff is pathetic) or Asimov's Steel Caves trilogy and Foundation or.. Hell, it doesn't feel right to compare Ender's game to *these* books. Scifi genre is so full of shit BUT I still can't name a book that would be much worse than Ender's game. The post I'm replying to pointed out a few things; it's really hard for me to point out something because the book was all fuck*d up. Like, the way he "showed 'em" how much of a genius he is at one of the games where he pretended he's 'knocked out' and suddenly started shootin' out of the blue.. OH GOD, what a genius. Einstein should be jealous. Compare that with Heinlein's Starship Troopers for instance (not the movie, please, the book!). Sheesh. Now, the discussion groups.. he deserves some credit there, but as a work of literature, the book is quite pathetic. Now, somebody please tell me.. Is there anybody here who read the books that I listed here and really really thinks ender's game is up there with them? Am I losing my mind? - Rainy
How come there are so many window managers, for instance, and NO free browser meant to replace ns/ie coming from the community? Not even planned.. I really don't get this. Is it that much more difficult? Is making a browser more difficult than writing a kernel with assembly code? Is it less fun? More importantly, why is it that people spend time working on very similar things like making another text editor, another desktop system, another mail transport engine, but nobody made *one* browser or even started working on one? As the things are right now, I'm using lynx. It's great but I wish it had jscript/frames. Some sites require that. It'd be nice if lynx could render tables the way ns/ie do. But, Linux obviously needs a graphical browser that is competitive with ns/ie. I think it's quite possible that mozilla won't get anywhere. I think this should've started out alot simpler: no mail, news, even java. Fast, clean browser with html/jscript/css/ssl, very modular, gpld and community would play with it and make it into something really cool. Maybe it'd make sense to start working on a clean light browser from a scratch right now? Mozilla might make it, but what happens if it doesn't? How is Linux going to amount to anything if 95% of pages on the Net will be made specifically for IE in a few years?
Also, anybody wants to help me make a subspace clone for linux?:)
That sounds right BUT.. Think of the people who already use windows or unix. Think of the people who buy a certain platform because they know someone who uses it (and can help with it).
There's a huge inertia involved in here and it keeps increasing as more applications are developed and more people buys computers. Beos could be that 'system of the future' but it seems like it's taking stuff from unix (gnu utilities, gimp) instead of developing something that'd be easier to use and at the same time as powerful. We'll see I guess.
This would all be true if you don't care what average company or an average Joe thinks of MS vs. Linux. I do care because this will affect our hardware choices. As far as software goes, I could live on free software alone... Also, you're missing the point that free software community can focus on something as well. As Linux said, developers didn't care for benchmarks before but now that MS raised the question, they do care very much about it. I agree with you that pc world benchmark had no objective meaning. Well, maybe very little meaning. But it has *huge* subjective meaning, and it does matter.
Let's see.. "We stronly suspect aliens made these plans and military looted them from alien's spaceship in '40s. IBM was trying to figure them out back then but couldn't, but now we got a really bright scientist and we did it.. this thing is great, its 90gig, its 14 Teraherz, transfer rates in terabits per second. ATAPI interface included. We'll start at $800/pop but soon it'll be $20 a dozen."
If I was shopping for a new system.. I'd either get a really cheap and reasonably fast cel or.. really cheap and kickass fast dual cel. The word is making dual cel systems is painless now, with some adapters or something. Yes, I know, dual systems only work with only a few OSen/programs. But hey, these are the programs that require that much horsepower. It seems like AMD is having huge losses because of celeron and they can't afford to sell athlon cheaper.. Does this all mean AMD will go bankrupt? I hope not. If they do, intel will start overcharging for fast cpu's again. I wonder if DOJ going to attack intel for cel pricing..
1. FSF started this whole thing. 2. FSF tools are essential to the system, less so than the kernel but there's more code in FSF tools than in kernel, FSF probably deserves as much credit as Linus. 3. RMS is trying to keep the concept of free software alive. GNU/Linux may sound silly, but does RMS really think the name will be changed? I don't think so, most likely he just tries to remind everybody about the concept that lays in the foundation. 4. Before attacking RMS like this, he should probably write as much essential linux system code as RMS.
In particular, with that " it's just a matter of time, however, before the "open hardware" advocates come out"
People writing software is one thing, but it's silly to compare this to making a cpu, for example. This analogy simply does not work.
I disagree with ORA's article too. They're making money off UNIX and I'm not saying its bad, since they're making a great job, but it's obvious that they're interested in promoting the viewpoint that free software is something that was necessary at the start and now OSS is coming into play and sort off replace FSF. Well, it might be true but I hope that the opposite happens - OSS will help the concept to get into mainstream and in ~10 years all commercial software will be replaced by GPLd software, and coders will be making money by tweaking the software to fit specific companie's needs. That would be better for everybody in the long run, IMHO.
When they say that PC will disappear and turn into all the appliances, i fail to see what exactly they mean.. HD will go into a hair dryer, monitor will go into tv, ram will go to your stereo, motherboard will be somewhere in the kitchen, video card will be built into garbage disposer.. I dunno what the hell do they mean.
1) This design is most likely real. If it wasn't, they would be stupid to expect any funding just based on their claims. Not likely considering that they are professionals.
2) It will get sufficient funding if its confirmed to be real. Not necessaritly from Russia or from US.
3) Ok, its fast, its real, there are 2 questions left, how much time will it take to make and how expensive will it be? If it's 3x faster than merced but 10x more expensive, everybody will just get dual or quad merceds. BUT there's something worth considering here: design cost is alot less in Russia than it is in US right now. This may result in E2k actually being cheaper than Merced.
The article that started this thread was saying that: Buran was a failure, even though it was copied from our shuttle but they couldn't pull it off, hence they can't design the chip on their own.
My point was that Buran's failure is due to the fact it was mindlessly copied from shuttle.
I don't know who's space program is superior.. I think even experts would have trouble proving that one side is better, due to the fact that space programs are very complex and multi-faceted and an expert who is sufficiently aware of one field in space program wouldn't know much about other fields.
I definitely wouldn't even try to say which program is superior.. its impossible to say just by following news or reading a few books targeted at general population.
Slashdot Mirror
No, there is another way.. but you won't like it.
As for how I get by with one monitor (cheap daewoo 15") - I use the console. I mapped alt-h and alt-l to switch consoles to the left/right so I can do it with one hand while holding my tea in the other. It's funny how I wanted a huge Sony back when I was in Windows but had no money to get one and now that I have the money I'm much happier with console/ 15". Don't print nothing out either, cept to read in the subway.
This doesn't make any damn sense. Reflected light can be very painful (for instance, when its reflected from the snow) and it never hurt anyone to look at them light bugs (whatchamacallit). There is no conceptual difference between regular and reflected light.
Well, yeah, if you froze to death, you wouldn't lose another coat again.. That is a powerful lesson.
> The best public health system in the World is the
government funded and run UK National Health System. It provides
better care for less than the US system costs.
I heard that UK health gov't officials are very reluctant to give you any medical help. Which is only natural if they don't get money directly from you. I had personal experience with gov't medical system in ussr, which sucked too. Generally I think it's quite possible that businesses are more effective, especially small ones. But, as far as space exploration goes - this is probably a bad idea. Businesses must go for quick returns. A business cannot invest one billion of dollars even if it is fairly sure that in 200-300 years it'll be well worth it. Government has more freedom here - it won't go bankrupt (at least, it can afford way more spendings before it does).
I happen to be working with Photoshop every day for a few hours. I tried Gimp as well. Photoshop is the only windows program I'm using. So why am I not switching? Simple. Gimp can't cut it for professional graphics manipulation - far from it. I don't think any Photoshop users (except for maybe warez kids) switched to Gimp - those who payed $600 for Photoshop, need it's high end capabilities. I haven't been following Gimp development effort, but I *hope* in a year or so I will be able to switch. I plan to try the next big version when it comes out. It's a little annoying to see people knock Photoshop though - that pretty much means that you are not a graphics professional and have no business judging Photoshop to start with.
> Americans
should realize that they are not the first and foremost in every
single aspect of civilization. Far from it...
I got impression that Americans are the first overall though. I can't help but think that in part many of other high developed country's ventures in hi tech are made 'to show them yanks'. US is nice cause they just do whatever they like. US made one big mistake though: its result is that almost every other nation hates their guts. If things go wrong for US.. everybody else will laugh.
I didn't like stranger (but yes, number of beast was much worse yet). Most of his early books are excellent though - like galaxy citizen or starship troopers.
moon is a harsh mistress is supposed to be one of his finest books. Yes, supposed to be. in my opinion, it's one of his worst books. I wouldn't know if it's got a good or bad ending cause I could never finish it.. I'd go about 1/2 way through it and stop. That happened 2 or 3 times. Anyway, I loved tons of his other books and never noticed any problem with the ending.. try starship troopers or galaxy citizen or .. I could name 20 more.
I totally agree. About 10 or so late RAH books were horrible. To be fair I must note that most of his early books are finest examples of the genre. Orson scott card? heh.. Please don't insult the memory of the master of scifi by comparing him to Card.. I was majorly unimpressed by the ender's game, and the biggest problem with it (the way I see it) was that he kept saying "look how smart this kid is.. aint he smart?" while examples where he was showing his talent were pathetic. Ender would do something banal and obvious and everybody would be oh soooo impressed. I remember one bit where in one war game he pretends he's dead while he in fact is not - and this passes as a new strategy he invented. This may seem as a nitpicking but I think this is a major problem with Card: he wants to make some kind of impression like "this kid is really smart" but he doesn't have imagination or skill to get this point across, so he cheats. Compare Ender with any Heinlein hero: Ender, correct me if i'm wrong, *never* makes a
mistake.. Ender a geek? seems more like a robot to me.. but wait, Lem's or Asimov's robots seemed much more human than Ender! I'm really curious *WHY* is 'Ender's game' so much drooled over? It's got nothing.
In this context, a link is exactly like as if he had it on his hd. Their concern is, if he has an a href tag on his page that points to an mp3 file, people can come and download it, which steals revenue from artists. Nobody really can say if this is true, mp3s may be promoting artists, or may be hurting them, but traditional view is that mp3s steal revenue. Anyway, it's clear that the link in this case is equivalent to having the file on his site, isn't it obvious? Many pointed out: "what if i have link to a page with links...?" Well, that's why we have juries. I guess if the links says "here you can get some mp3s" then jury will agree he's guilty, if it just says "here's a nice page to visit" and the page has various links including some links to mp3s.. then he isn't guilty because he may not have known there were mp3s there and in fact mp3s might have been added after he linked the page.
- Rainy
This is offtopic and i'm only replying cause I don't want people to just read one post saying AC rocks and going to the store and buying it.. Anyway, here's my take:
AC sucks. Why? I don't know. I'm an long time civ series fan and I *should* like it, but I don't. Everything seems to be in place but it just ain't fun. Anyway, if you're thinking of buying it, try to get it from a friend first and check it out beforehand...
First of all, it's very hard to give any hard data here. My personal opinion based on experience is that if you use
$ cdparanoia -Bz "1-" to rip entire disc and encode it with bladenc at 256kbps, mp3 quality won't be a bottleneck, at least on my system. I have a reasonably good amp/speakers that cost me $250 for speakers and $320 for amp (paradigm minimonitor 3's and nad C340) and when I listen to mp3s I can hear internal computer noises, cdrom spinning up, static discharges, internal power supply, etc. I have a reasonably good audio card (sb audiopci64 based on ensoniq 1370 chipset). Encoder's quality is not the bottleneck in this case. It might be if you go with extremely high end sound card like Event gine ($300?), but i woudln't bet on it. overall cdparanoia/bladenc at 256 is easy, fast, and good enough unless you invest money in soundcard and invest ALOT of time in testing various configurations.
- Rainy
I can't believe my eyes as I read all the "ender's game is great" posts. I figure I've read thousands of sci-fi books and it's down there with the worst. How can anyone read any of Heinlein's 30 or so good books (yes, some of his late stuff is pathetic) or Asimov's Steel Caves trilogy and Foundation or.. Hell, it doesn't feel right to compare Ender's game to *these* books. Scifi genre is so full of shit BUT I still can't name a book that would be much worse than Ender's game. The post I'm replying to pointed out a few things; it's really hard for me to point out something because the book was all fuck*d up. Like, the way he "showed 'em" how much of a genius he is at one of the games where he pretended he's 'knocked out' and suddenly started shootin' out of the blue.. OH GOD, what a genius. Einstein should be jealous. Compare that with Heinlein's Starship Troopers for instance (not the movie, please, the book!). Sheesh. Now, the discussion groups.. he deserves some credit there, but as a work of literature,
the book is quite pathetic. Now, somebody please tell me.. Is there anybody here who read the books that I listed here and really really thinks ender's game is up there with them? Am I losing my mind?
- Rainy
How come there are so many window managers, for instance, and NO free browser meant to replace ns/ie coming from the community? Not even planned.. I really don't get this. Is it that much more difficult? Is making a browser more difficult than writing a kernel with assembly code? Is it less fun?
:)
More importantly, why is it that people spend time working on very similar things like making another text editor, another desktop system, another mail transport engine, but nobody made *one* browser or even started working on one?
As the things are right now, I'm using lynx. It's great but I wish it had jscript/frames. Some sites require that. It'd be nice if lynx could render tables the way ns/ie do. But, Linux obviously needs a graphical browser that is competitive with ns/ie.
I think it's quite possible that mozilla won't get anywhere. I think this should've started out alot simpler: no mail, news, even java. Fast, clean browser with html/jscript/css/ssl, very modular, gpld and community would play with it and make it into something really cool.
Maybe it'd make sense to start working on a clean light browser from a scratch right now? Mozilla might make it, but what happens if it doesn't? How is Linux going to amount to anything if 95% of pages on the Net will be made specifically for IE in a few years?
Also, anybody wants to help me make a subspace clone for linux?
That sounds right BUT..
Think of the people who already use windows or unix. Think of the people who buy a certain platform because they know someone who uses it (and can help with it).
There's a huge inertia involved in here and it keeps increasing as more applications are developed and more people buys computers. Beos could be that 'system of the future' but it seems like it's taking stuff from unix (gnu utilities, gimp) instead of developing something that'd be easier to use and at the same time as powerful.
We'll see I guess.
This would all be true if you don't care what average company or an average Joe thinks of MS vs. Linux.
I do care because this will affect our hardware choices.
As far as software goes, I could live on free software alone...
Also, you're missing the point that free software community can focus on something as well. As Linux said, developers didn't care for benchmarks before but now that MS raised the question, they do care very much about it.
I agree with you that pc world benchmark had no objective meaning. Well, maybe very little meaning. But it has *huge* subjective meaning, and it does matter.
Let's see..
"We stronly suspect aliens made these plans and military looted them from alien's spaceship in '40s. IBM was trying to figure them out back then but couldn't, but now we got a really bright scientist and we did it.. this thing is great, its 90gig, its 14 Teraherz, transfer rates in terabits per second. ATAPI interface included. We'll start at $800/pop but soon it'll be $20 a dozen."
Is it me, or shouldn't this have been posted?
If I was shopping for a new system.. I'd either get a really cheap and reasonably fast cel or.. really cheap and kickass fast dual cel. The word is making dual cel systems is painless now, with some adapters or something.
Yes, I know, dual systems only work with only a few OSen/programs. But hey, these are the programs that require that much horsepower.
It seems like AMD is having huge losses because of celeron and they can't afford to sell athlon cheaper..
Does this all mean AMD will go bankrupt? I hope not. If they do, intel will start overcharging for fast cpu's again. I wonder if DOJ going to attack intel for cel pricing..
ah well
1. FSF started this whole thing.
2. FSF tools are essential to the system, less so than the kernel but there's more code in FSF tools than in kernel, FSF probably deserves as much credit as Linus.
3. RMS is trying to keep the concept of free software alive. GNU/Linux may sound silly, but does RMS really think the name will be changed? I don't think so, most likely he just tries to remind everybody about the concept that lays in the foundation.
4. Before attacking RMS like this, he should probably write as much essential linux system code as RMS.
In particular, with that "
it's just a matter of time, however, before the "open
hardware" advocates come out"
People writing software is one thing, but it's silly to compare this to making a cpu, for example. This analogy simply does not work.
I disagree with ORA's article too. They're making money off UNIX and I'm not saying its bad, since they're making a great job, but it's obvious that they're interested in promoting the viewpoint that free software is something that was necessary at the start and now OSS is coming into play and sort off replace FSF. Well, it might be true but I hope that the opposite happens - OSS will help the concept to get into mainstream and in ~10 years all commercial software will be replaced by GPLd software, and coders will be making money by tweaking the software to fit specific companie's needs. That would be better for everybody in the long run, IMHO.
:-)
When they say that PC will disappear and turn into all the appliances, i fail to see what exactly they mean.. HD will go into a hair dryer, monitor will go into tv, ram will go to your stereo, motherboard will be somewhere in the kitchen, video card will be built into garbage disposer.. I dunno what the hell do they mean.
Somebody explain, if you can.
1) This design is most likely real. If it wasn't, they would be stupid to expect any funding just based on their claims. Not likely considering that they are professionals.
2) It will get sufficient funding if its confirmed to be real. Not necessaritly from Russia or from US.
3) Ok, its fast, its real, there are 2 questions left, how much time will it take to make and how expensive will it be? If it's 3x faster than merced but 10x more expensive, everybody will just get dual or quad merceds. BUT there's something worth considering here: design cost is alot less in Russia than it is in US right now. This may result in E2k actually being cheaper than Merced.
This might be very cool in a few years..
woot.. Simpsons time
I agree..
The article that started this thread was saying that: Buran was a failure, even though it was copied from our shuttle but they couldn't pull it off, hence they can't design the chip on their own.
My point was that Buran's failure is due to the fact it was mindlessly copied from shuttle.
I don't know who's space program is superior.. I think even experts would have trouble proving that one side is better, due to the fact that space programs are very complex and multi-faceted and an expert who is sufficiently aware of one field in space program wouldn't know much about other fields.
I definitely wouldn't even try to say which program is superior.. its impossible to say just by following news or reading a few books targeted at general population.