Ah for what I do I have never overclocked. I run all items at their spec settings and think of scaling as working with much larger datasets and things like that.
I definitely don't agree that the intel systems scale vastly better. Most of the 4+ way benchmarks I have see with 8 or more cores go to amd pretty handily, The more memory the benchmarks need to use the worse off it gets for intel. So for desktops and very small servers where IO is not very important Intel is currently ahead in pure performance. If you need to setup an 8 core db server with 32GB of ram I would definitely go with opterons.
AMD is definitely not losing on the higher end server stuff, they are losing on the gaming desktops though since the Core 2 is a faster chip. For business work you pretty much never need something very fast. Probably the 3600+ is overkill for just about any business task and it currently as the best value of any chip I know of.
I have spent a fair while on vista 64 trying to get the dang thing to work. After a recent driver update it now hard locks on startup and using the roll back option also hard locks so it looks like it will need a complete format and reinstall again. Vista 64 is one of the reasons I decided to just get an xbox360 to play games on instead. I only use windows for games and keeping windows running on this box is a pain in the neck. XP 64 works ok but not great, however some things like 3d sound don't work and many games just crash. The problem seems to be that I have 8GB of ram in this box and creative labs cards under windows have a lot of problems if you have more then 3GB of ram or so. Under linux every piece of hardware in this box works flawlessly. I have seen the direction that windows has been going, it seems to keep getting harder to get the darn thing working and take more fidling to keep it working. My kubuntu install worked the first time I installed and it has kept working, the most complex thing I need to do to maintain the box is to click on the update icon and tell it to go ahead.;) This leaves my time free to get my actual work done, however I am tired of booting over to windows to play games only to have the games crash, the system crash etc. For me the consoles have won now, I have a wii and xbox360 and both of them are working great. If microsoft wants to really convince me that windows is the future they need to support some basic things better first. From what I have read so far it appears the major thing that xp64 and vista64 lack is support for an IOMMU which apparently can take care of all of these problems I have with the hardware under windows since that would allow transparently mapping 64bit address spaces for 32bit aware hardware. Apparently vista +1 *might* support it, meanwhile linux has supported it for a while and it works fine. So in 3-5 years maybe windows will be ready for usage again.
In kubuntu just right click on the disk and select eject and that will unmount and eject the cd. KDE has actually had that feature for quite a few years now but I can see how someone might not notice it.
Microsoft solved the DirectAudio problem in Vista for you already, they killed it. Because of how they redid the system all things that use DirectAudio in vista (EAX works through DirectAudio) is software done now. It supposedly has something to do with the DRM system but what it comes down to is that if you want to do 3d audio for a game your only choice anymore in OpenAl. Using DirectAudio now is a pretty stupid thing to do. OpenAL will work on xp and vista and can be hardware accelerated on both.
If you think that this future of the linux video drivers being better then the windows ones in the future then think again. It already happened. The nvidia 8800 series drivers are currently more stable under linux for both 32bit and 64bit versions then the windows xp, xp64, vista and vista64 versions of the drivers are. Those drivers also came out on the day the card came out. At the rate things are going it will be a year before the vista or xp drivers for the 8800 cards to be as good as the linux driver is.
Darned if I know why it is true but it is definitely my experience and the experience of many others. I guess there is just something about making drivers for linux that is just vastly easier then doing them for xp and vista. It is not just video drivers though, lots of high end hardware works better under linux then under windows. Get almost any dual cpu motherboard that supports 4GB+ of ram and see how well windows supports stuff versus linux.
I have the dragonball game and I have had a LOT of fun with it. So far it is the best fighting game I have played on any platform. I am not actually a DBZ fan, I have only seen a few of the episodes but the game is fun to play. It takes a while to get the hang of the controls so do the training stuff first. However the fights are a lot of fun, you have huge areas to move in, you can fly, move super fast and the attacks go way over the top. Some of the attacks can even destroy a planet.:)
It is just a lot of fun to play. The violence in it appeals to me more then the realistic violence in other games, this games violence is more like an acme cartoon. It is nice to be able to punch someone through a hill.
It is a game that you will probably have fun with, just know that it does take a while to get the hang of all the controls you can do.
It doesn't hurt redhat at all. You need to read more stuff on the actual GPLv3 and not just those weirdo places. The requirements are that if you require digital signatures to make software work with your device that you must also give users the ability to sign their own code. With redhat and the other linux dists that use digital signatures you can install any software even without a valid signature so that clause does not even apply. You can also sign your own packages and tell the system to trust your signature.
In debian based systems this is done by
sudo apt-key add key.gpg
You can do the same on redhat systems just different syntax. So either way it does not effect those systems. RMS has no problem with authentication and even encourages it. All he is saying is that you can't give someone the code without giving them the keys to use the code as the license allows if keys are required. Look at tivo, it is under the gpl but you can't modify the code and run it on YOUR tivo with the gpl licensed code that you have because you don't have the digital signatures. You own the device, you have the code and they have implemented a feature to nullify your rights under the gpl. That is what the provision is designed to protect.
Try running a 64bit windows system on any card from sblive up through x-fi with more then 3GB of ram and then wonder why you purchased the card at all. Nearly all the EAX stuff gets disabled and some kind of hardware buffering on the card gets disabled. I have run into a lot of games that seem to crash just because they use EAX and stuff gets disabled which should not be disabled. This issue has been known for years and I don't see anything that is fixing it however the linux drivers don't seem to suffer from this issue at all.
Creative used to be just about the most compatible sound card system out there and had fairly decent drivers. Now I am more likely to get stuff just working on some built in sound chip on a motherboard without any screwing around. Creative has grown more arrogant over time and closed in how they do things. They already said that x-fi will never have open drivers for it but based on what I have been reading on their windows drivers and that they still don't have that 3GB+ issue fixed on their cards I don't see any point in getting it.
Creative is doing a great job of driving me towards console gaming. With consoles at least I can just pop the disc in and the thing will work. For this generation of consoles so far I have a wii and I will probably get an xbox 360 also sometime this year and just use that. Consoles have been getting more powerful but computers have been getting a lot harder to get things running for doing any kind of games. My box is working flawlessly under linux for all my development work (which is the reason I have 8GB of ram) but dual booting to windows sure lets to find out how miserable the support is for higher end stuff. Actually you can even hit the creatieve 4GB memory limit with less then 3GB of memory on the system. Just install 2 8800GTX in the system have 2GB of ram and some other card that eats up a little memory and that will do it. I think you should even use dual 7950GX2 into of 8800GTX + 2GB and that would do it all on its own.
I definitely like working on the linux side of things and windows has improved many things like stability and speed but at the same time vendors have become more closed. This seems to directly be causing the problems of getting the dang stuff to work right. I will definitely miss some of the pc games but getting them to work just takes too much.
Your soundblaster live problem sure sounds strange. I used one for many years before I go an audigy2 zs and I have never had problems with either under linux. I read that you can change the volumes with alsa-mixer so why wouldn't the regular volume controls work? I know with kde the default mixer (kmix) works just fine with alsa and oss and with it I can change main volume but also any of the individual volumes that alsa has found on my card. It would seem strange that other sound controls wouldn't work with alsa since that is standard but maybe whatever one you are using doesn't.
Actually that feature has been in apt now for about a year now. I see it come up fairly often in my kubuntu system when I remove stuff I don't need anymore and it offers to remove a bunch of the things that where installed only to meet the requirements and nothing else needs.
You could look at how opera does it. They provide packages for dang near everything and they even provide repositories so I can have my system use that and always have the most updated version of opera.
Software installation needs to be simple as: click on package, enter password to authorize installation, use newly installed software. Hmm on kde on debian based systems I have been doing this for years. You can click on a deb file, the system will prompt for the root password and then install it, this should also work for rpm based systems but I have not used one in a long time.
Wow you are really sick. Your moral values would allow you to torture someone to death? That is just sick. If a decision is made that someone has done acts that are so horrible that they can not remain in the society and they are to be killed your obligation is to kill them in the most humane manner possible. A single gunshot to the head, poison etc but it must be quick and painless. The very idea that it would be okay to torture someone for any reason is just sick. What kind of person are you that you would actually want to watch or be involved with torturing someone and feel better for doing it? Why do you get a rise off of causing other people pain? How are you any better?
The only outcome I can see of your views is to make society vastly worse.
Also how can you possibly be bombarded with porn? I have had email accounts for about 14 years now and used spam filters later when they became necessary and I have not been bombarded with porn. Heck I have seen very little actual porn. A default spamassassin will block it all just fine. If you just browse the web in general you won't find porn either, you have to go looking for it. I have not seen any porn on developer sites, games sites, hardware sites (motherboard, video card etc), regular stores etc. What are you doing that you get bombarded with porn?
It sure seems like you have bought into a culture of fear about the world and want to take your views out on other people. Go ahead and check the fbi and other organizations on crime statistics. Violent crimes of all types have been going down for over 10 years now and that includes crimes against children. If you where okay with letting your children play outside 10 years ago it is even safer now. You are being controlled through fear not through reason. You believe the world is a certain way and you only listen to those that affirm your beliefs. Don't let things like actual facts about sexual crimes against children going down intefere with your "knowledge" that these things are on the rise and more dangerous then ever. Don't let our fears about all the horrible things that can happen to children interfere with the facts that these things are all in decline and have been for a long time.
As long as you fear all of these things you can be trivially controlled to do and support stupid things. By the time you wakeup you will realize you have no control left since you gave it all away.
Check at the bottom the 32 and 64 bit linux drivers are beta and you can use them right now. It looks like they also have bsd and solaris support today also.
I happen to love the package systems. Have you actually tried to keep a windows or mac box updated? Isn't it fun tracking down all the updates for all the software you have installed and trying to keep it all working together. With my linux systems I can update the entire system to tested packages that work together trivially. Heck on my systems if there are any updates to any installed software then adept will just put up a little icon in my tray to say there are updates available. I can click that icon and all updates for all installed software are done.
Installing software is even better. Look at what it takes to get software installed under windows or macs. You have to go download the software, see if it has any dependencies that you need to download also (like.net, some media codecs, xml libraries, new installer version) versus just clicking on adept, clicking on the program you want to install and telling it to install. Anything the program needs will be installed with it and the dang thing will work.
My experience is that only people that grew up on windows and macs have problems with the package system. New users I have helped tended to get it right away and don't have problems with it. I definitely think that a package system is the best way to go for making it easier to install software and keep the whole system maintained.
Yeah because that little warning triangle icon in kubuntu that I click on that does all the updates requires all the CLI knowledge. Heck so does using adept. If you are going to make comments at least make sure they are accurate. You can add, remove and update all software without ever using the cli on kubuntu/ubuntu and the windows people I have shown it to find that it is easier then doing the same on windows. Especially since the system will keep ALL installed software updated unlike windows update which only does a few programs.
Many KDE 4 apps including konqueror are being ported to windows and osx where it will run natively. Also khtml is not as tied to kde as you might think, there is a reason that apple chose it as the base for safari. I have to admit I am really looking forward to being able to use konqueror under windows like I do on my linux boxes instead of firefox. Konqueror runs faster, renders more pages accurately, looks to have a better security system and requires a tiny fraction of the memory and cpu time of firefox. In order of browers I would say that safari/konqueror are the best followed by opera and then a ways after that would be gecko systems and then IE. The reason I don't like opera as much is that getElementById in opera is wrong. It makes the name and id namespaces which is should not do. It is a reported bug and it seems they won't fix it which is a pain.
I don't like microsoft very much but I certainly don't hate them, hate is very counterproductive. However for what I do I certainly prefer KDE to windows or mac interfaces. My job is writing database software and I often deal with data in many locations. With kde urls are transparent for reading and writing. That means if I need to edit a config file on a remote server I can just use sftp to the remote url and just edit it with a local app. When I hit save it will be saved to the remote machine. I have seen nothing in the windows or mac world nearly as well done or with as many protocols supported as the kde ioslave system. KDE also has a great shared component system. I have one spell checker, one text editor component etc. No matter how I look at source code it will look the same. I can open in it a lightweight viewer, my heavier IDE etc and it will be highlighted the same way since it used the same component.
Sure those features may not appeal to the masses and some of them are complex conceptually so they won't ever understand then most likely. However KDE probably saves me a few weeks per year in time from all of its features. I use linux and KDE since for what I do I have found no system that is even close to as productive for me.
I also don't see why you paint all the linux people with the same brush. You have said more then a few times there that we all want to beat microsoft and take over the world etc with linux. However some of us just care about getting work done and don't care about this as a religion. I really don't care if linux takes over. I use linux because it is the best I can find for what I need to get done and I value software freedom and mostly that is a practical reason. I have been bitten too many times to tie my business to a proprietary system. Over the years the free software systems have certainly been a much better way to do things for me.
Here is what I have noticed. The people in power are the most likely ones to lie since they have more to lose. I don't believe the democrats and when they where in power they did a lot of lieing. However now that the republicans are in power they are doing more of the lieing simply because they have more opportunity to do so. If the democrats where in power again they would do the same thing.
Heck if you really look at it are there any actual republicans or democrats in power? Republicans are supposed to be conservative, small government, fiscal responsibility etc. When is the last time you saw that? Highest debts then ever, more spending, bigger government etc is the rule right now.
Same goes for democrats. You know actual liberals that really are. People that look at what reality is like now and see what can be changed to actually improve it. It used to be that democrats where pro change for the better but where also for fiscal responsibility. Now we have democrats that spend every dime we have and the changes they want are the changes that benefit mostly their own power and the other rich people. I have not see a real democrat or republican in office in a long time.
If you actually believe in the democrat or republican party lines I don't see how you can vote for people in either party in good concience given the state that both parties are in.
So in essence I don't believe that anything that republicans or democrats say is really the truth except where it happens to work in their favor and selective telling of the truth is often worse the lieing.
Re:What will make KDE the perfect desktop...
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KDE 3.5.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is how debian based distros have done kde since at least 2.x and I think since kde 1.x. Right now for example on debian/ubuntu etc you could just do apt-get install kwordquiz and it would just install the package and the base requirements for it, not all the rest of the packaged in kdeedu. The issue you are having is not a kde problem. I don't know what distro you are using that does things that way but most of the ones I am familiar with have had kde broken up fairly fine grained for a long time now.
Are you sure there are fiscal conservative republicans in office. Based on the spending I find that REALLY hard to believe. Mostly what I see in office are the same groups of people with two different names. I don't think there are any democrats or republicans in office right now and there have not been for a good long while. A real liberal government I could deal with, I could also deal with an actual conservative government. However it seems right now the people we have in government are neither. They are there for their own personal power and money. It sure seems they stomp on states rights a good deal, spend more money then they have and they both love to "save the children" while taking away more rights.
It just seems that the democrats bring up some issues since that is their talking points but both sides vote to pass them. The republicans bring up other talking points and both vote on them also. The reason there are two "sides" is to make people think there is a difference between them. That way you can say you are voting for the "better" side. I don't see how liberals or conservatives can back pretty much anyone in office right now.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is just sending things downhill all you are changing is how fast we are falling. Next time vote for whoever you think will do the best job no matter what their chances are. I am not advocating voting for green, democrat, republican, or whatever other parties there might be. For each position look at all your choices and decide which person you think would honestly do the best job no matter what their chances of winning are. Anything less is how we got into this situation in the first place.
I want to add to this that most high level languages have highly optimized primatives and large standard libraries. While it is true that about 99% of the time is spent in 5% of the code it often works out that the 5% of code can be handed off to built in language features and standard libraries. For example it is unlikely that you will be able to beat the built in dictionary code in python or the sorting routines. Also there are many language structures which sure make it easier to write more efficient code.
1 So what I suggest is first write your code in a high level language 2 Profile the code 3 Find the slower parts and see what there is built into the language that can handle that problem 4 Profile the code 5 Replace algorithms with more efficient ones 6 Profile the code 7 Find external libraries in wide usage that you can pass off work to 8 Profile the code 9 Hand Code your own optimized functions for what is left
Most applications don't get beyond step 3 and very few get beyond step 5. Also as you get more experience you learn more about what language features you should always hand off to and what algorithms are more appropriate for a situation so you find yourself coding around step 5 anyways but that takes experience. I have found this leads to code that executes quickly, has vastly fewer bugs, and is easier to maintian long term.
I know there are a lot of slow programs written in python but there are also many fast ones. The biggest issue I see for faster programs in higher level languages is people that don't learn them. What I mean is that you find many people that say they know 20 different languages but they really write the same code the same way in all of them. The most obvious example I can think of in python is that strings are immutable. Building up a large string by adding a lot of little strings together is extremely expensive. I have worked with people that came from c/c++ backgrounds and they would just always do things that way no matter how often they where shown better ways to do the same thing. As a result, depending on the size of the dataset, their programs would run 10 to 1000x slower then they should have, they also used more memory which further slowed things down. Heck I have even watched someone spend several days writing a custom sorting routine in python instead of using the built in sort. Their code was buggy, did not sort correctly in many cases and ran about 100x slower then the built in sort.
So I do agree that higher level languages can give you faster performance in most general purpose applications, ie don't write device drivers in it. However the actual performance of a given solution is mostly based on how good a programmer is. Well written python will run faster then badly written c. Well written c will run faster then badly written python etc.
There are other issues also. Zope/Plone has a far better security system that the.NET stack by a LONG shot. Every connection is run as the user that made the connection, every since object/attribute/method that is accessed is security checked to make sure it is okay. Having security issues with zope is pretty much unheard of. Over the past 5 years or so there have only been a handful of issues and almost all of them required someone to be able to edit things like dtml, python scripts or zpt which is not common for anyone other then those maintaining the site.
The other issue is that while zope itself is pretty darn fast plone is not. It really needs the whole caching system to get acceptable speed. Mostly plone has been written to make it easier for novices to get stuff up and running and without shooting themselves in the foot, it has not been written for speed.
There are other tuning things that are recommended to do also like the object cache. By default it is very very low so that zope won't use much memory. I think it default to about 2000 objects in the cache however most people probably run it with 20000 or more.
Actually I disagree that OSX is ahead of its competition. In some areas you might be right but in general I think that KDE is a lot more advanced. The IOSlave system and the kparts are both highly integrated into the rest of the system and used to great effect.
Anywhere in kde that you want to use a file you can use an IOSlave. This gives you url transparency for reading and writing in every app very easily. For example you can send a file in kmail and then use sftp to load an attachment from a remote server and hit send. It will grab the file and attach it just fine. You can go to a form on a webpage that expects a file say for uploading an image and give it an http, ftp, sftp, etc url to an image and just hit submit to upload it. These IOSlaves are integral to the system and I would say on average they save me several hours per week.
The other major thing is the kpart system. Other systems seem to just pay lipservice to reusing components. In kde there is one address book system, one spellchecking system, one terminal window system, one proxy configuration system etc. I can configure those things in just one palce and they are reused everywhere. Actually for text editors there is a good example of this take kate. Kate actually is two pieces one is an application called kate and the other is the actual kpart called kate. By default the kate text editor, kwrite, kdevelop3, embedded text views etc all use kate. So you can configure syntax highlighting for example and no matter where you look at the code it will be shown the same way. I have not seen anything remotely close to this in any other system.
For what I do kde is more advanced then pretty much any other gui system out there and it saves a lot more time them osx, windows etc do.
Also as a note you can write kde apps in python and ruby. Those are definitely flexible yet safe programming langauges and you can get apps up and running very quickly with those.
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Ah for what I do I have never overclocked. I run all items at their spec settings and think of scaling as working with much larger datasets and things like that.
I definitely don't agree that the intel systems scale vastly better. Most of the 4+ way benchmarks I have see with 8 or more cores go to amd pretty handily, The more memory the benchmarks need to use the worse off it gets for intel. So for desktops and very small servers where IO is not very important Intel is currently ahead in pure performance. If you need to setup an 8 core db server with 32GB of ram I would definitely go with opterons.
AMD is definitely not losing on the higher end server stuff, they are losing on the gaming desktops though since the Core 2 is a faster chip. For business work you pretty much never need something very fast. Probably the 3600+ is overkill for just about any business task and it currently as the best value of any chip I know of.
I have spent a fair while on vista 64 trying to get the dang thing to work. After a recent driver update it now hard locks on startup and using the roll back option also hard locks so it looks like it will need a complete format and reinstall again. Vista 64 is one of the reasons I decided to just get an xbox360 to play games on instead. I only use windows for games and keeping windows running on this box is a pain in the neck. XP 64 works ok but not great, however some things like 3d sound don't work and many games just crash. The problem seems to be that I have 8GB of ram in this box and creative labs cards under windows have a lot of problems if you have more then 3GB of ram or so. Under linux every piece of hardware in this box works flawlessly. I have seen the direction that windows has been going, it seems to keep getting harder to get the darn thing working and take more fidling to keep it working. My kubuntu install worked the first time I installed and it has kept working, the most complex thing I need to do to maintain the box is to click on the update icon and tell it to go ahead. ;) This leaves my time free to get my actual work done, however I am tired of booting over to windows to play games only to have the games crash, the system crash etc. For me the consoles have won now, I have a wii and xbox360 and both of them are working great. If microsoft wants to really convince me that windows is the future they need to support some basic things better first. From what I have read so far it appears the major thing that xp64 and vista64 lack is support for an IOMMU which apparently can take care of all of these problems I have with the hardware under windows since that would allow transparently mapping 64bit address spaces for 32bit aware hardware. Apparently vista +1 *might* support it, meanwhile linux has supported it for a while and it works fine. So in 3-5 years maybe windows will be ready for usage again.
In kubuntu just right click on the disk and select eject and that will unmount and eject the cd. KDE has actually had that feature for quite a few years now but I can see how someone might not notice it.
Microsoft solved the DirectAudio problem in Vista for you already, they killed it. Because of how they redid the system all things that use DirectAudio in vista (EAX works through DirectAudio) is software done now. It supposedly has something to do with the DRM system but what it comes down to is that if you want to do 3d audio for a game your only choice anymore in OpenAl. Using DirectAudio now is a pretty stupid thing to do. OpenAL will work on xp and vista and can be hardware accelerated on both.
If you think that this future of the linux video drivers being better then the windows ones in the future then think again. It already happened. The nvidia 8800 series drivers are currently more stable under linux for both 32bit and 64bit versions then the windows xp, xp64, vista and vista64 versions of the drivers are. Those drivers also came out on the day the card came out. At the rate things are going it will be a year before the vista or xp drivers for the 8800 cards to be as good as the linux driver is.
Darned if I know why it is true but it is definitely my experience and the experience of many others. I guess there is just something about making drivers for linux that is just vastly easier then doing them for xp and vista. It is not just video drivers though, lots of high end hardware works better under linux then under windows. Get almost any dual cpu motherboard that supports 4GB+ of ram and see how well windows supports stuff versus linux.
I have the dragonball game and I have had a LOT of fun with it. So far it is the best fighting game I have played on any platform. I am not actually a DBZ fan, I have only seen a few of the episodes but the game is fun to play. It takes a while to get the hang of the controls so do the training stuff first. However the fights are a lot of fun, you have huge areas to move in, you can fly, move super fast and the attacks go way over the top. Some of the attacks can even destroy a planet. :)
It is just a lot of fun to play. The violence in it appeals to me more then the realistic violence in other games, this games violence is more like an acme cartoon. It is nice to be able to punch someone through a hill.
It is a game that you will probably have fun with, just know that it does take a while to get the hang of all the controls you can do.
It doesn't hurt redhat at all. You need to read more stuff on the actual GPLv3 and not just those weirdo places. The requirements are that if you require digital signatures to make software work with your device that you must also give users the ability to sign their own code. With redhat and the other linux dists that use digital signatures you can install any software even without a valid signature so that clause does not even apply. You can also sign your own packages and tell the system to trust your signature.
In debian based systems this is done by
sudo apt-key add key.gpg
You can do the same on redhat systems just different syntax. So either way it does not effect those systems. RMS has no problem with authentication and even encourages it. All he is saying is that you can't give someone the code without giving them the keys to use the code as the license allows if keys are required. Look at tivo, it is under the gpl but you can't modify the code and run it on YOUR tivo with the gpl licensed code that you have because you don't have the digital signatures. You own the device, you have the code and they have implemented a feature to nullify your rights under the gpl. That is what the provision is designed to protect.
Try running a 64bit windows system on any card from sblive up through x-fi with more then 3GB of ram and then wonder why you purchased the card at all. Nearly all the EAX stuff gets disabled and some kind of hardware buffering on the card gets disabled. I have run into a lot of games that seem to crash just because they use EAX and stuff gets disabled which should not be disabled. This issue has been known for years and I don't see anything that is fixing it however the linux drivers don't seem to suffer from this issue at all.
Creative used to be just about the most compatible sound card system out there and had fairly decent drivers. Now I am more likely to get stuff just working on some built in sound chip on a motherboard without any screwing around. Creative has grown more arrogant over time and closed in how they do things. They already said that x-fi will never have open drivers for it but based on what I have been reading on their windows drivers and that they still don't have that 3GB+ issue fixed on their cards I don't see any point in getting it.
Creative is doing a great job of driving me towards console gaming. With consoles at least I can just pop the disc in and the thing will work. For this generation of consoles so far I have a wii and I will probably get an xbox 360 also sometime this year and just use that. Consoles have been getting more powerful but computers have been getting a lot harder to get things running for doing any kind of games. My box is working flawlessly under linux for all my development work (which is the reason I have 8GB of ram) but dual booting to windows sure lets to find out how miserable the support is for higher end stuff. Actually you can even hit the creatieve 4GB memory limit with less then 3GB of memory on the system. Just install 2 8800GTX in the system have 2GB of ram and some other card that eats up a little memory and that will do it. I think you should even use dual 7950GX2 into of 8800GTX + 2GB and that would do it all on its own.
I definitely like working on the linux side of things and windows has improved many things like stability and speed but at the same time vendors have become more closed. This seems to directly be causing the problems of getting the dang stuff to work right. I will definitely miss some of the pc games but getting them to work just takes too much.
Your soundblaster live problem sure sounds strange. I used one for many years before I go an audigy2 zs and I have never had problems with either under linux. I read that you can change the volumes with alsa-mixer so why wouldn't the regular volume controls work? I know with kde the default mixer (kmix) works just fine with alsa and oss and with it I can change main volume but also any of the individual volumes that alsa has found on my card. It would seem strange that other sound controls wouldn't work with alsa since that is standard but maybe whatever one you are using doesn't.
Actually that feature has been in apt now for about a year now. I see it come up fairly often in my kubuntu system when I remove stuff I don't need anymore and it offers to remove a bunch of the things that where installed only to meet the requirements and nothing else needs.
You could look at how opera does it. They provide packages for dang near everything and they even provide repositories so I can have my system use that and always have the most updated version of opera.
Wow you are really sick. Your moral values would allow you to torture someone to death? That is just sick. If a decision is made that someone has done acts that are so horrible that they can not remain in the society and they are to be killed your obligation is to kill them in the most humane manner possible. A single gunshot to the head, poison etc but it must be quick and painless. The very idea that it would be okay to torture someone for any reason is just sick. What kind of person are you that you would actually want to watch or be involved with torturing someone and feel better for doing it? Why do you get a rise off of causing other people pain? How are you any better?
The only outcome I can see of your views is to make society vastly worse.
Also how can you possibly be bombarded with porn? I have had email accounts for about 14 years now and used spam filters later when they became necessary and I have not been bombarded with porn. Heck I have seen very little actual porn. A default spamassassin will block it all just fine. If you just browse the web in general you won't find porn either, you have to go looking for it. I have not seen any porn on developer sites, games sites, hardware sites (motherboard, video card etc), regular stores etc. What are you doing that you get bombarded with porn?
It sure seems like you have bought into a culture of fear about the world and want to take your views out on other people. Go ahead and check the fbi and other organizations on crime statistics. Violent crimes of all types have been going down for over 10 years now and that includes crimes against children. If you where okay with letting your children play outside 10 years ago it is even safer now. You are being controlled through fear not through reason. You believe the world is a certain way and you only listen to those that affirm your beliefs. Don't let things like actual facts about sexual crimes against children going down intefere with your "knowledge" that these things are on the rise and more dangerous then ever. Don't let our fears about all the horrible things that can happen to children interfere with the facts that these things are all in decline and have been for a long time.
As long as you fear all of these things you can be trivially controlled to do and support stupid things. By the time you wakeup you will realize you have no control left since you gave it all away.
Now
b etadriver.html
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70
Check at the bottom the 32 and 64 bit linux drivers are beta and you can use them right now. It looks like they also have bsd and solaris support today also.
I happen to love the package systems. Have you actually tried to keep a windows or mac box updated? Isn't it fun tracking down all the updates for all the software you have installed and trying to keep it all working together. With my linux systems I can update the entire system to tested packages that work together trivially. Heck on my systems if there are any updates to any installed software then adept will just put up a little icon in my tray to say there are updates available. I can click that icon and all updates for all installed software are done.
.net, some media codecs, xml libraries, new installer version) versus just clicking on adept, clicking on the program you want to install and telling it to install. Anything the program needs will be installed with it and the dang thing will work.
Installing software is even better. Look at what it takes to get software installed under windows or macs. You have to go download the software, see if it has any dependencies that you need to download also (like
My experience is that only people that grew up on windows and macs have problems with the package system. New users I have helped tended to get it right away and don't have problems with it. I definitely think that a package system is the best way to go for making it easier to install software and keep the whole system maintained.
Yeah because that little warning triangle icon in kubuntu that I click on that does all the updates requires all the CLI knowledge. Heck so does using adept. If you are going to make comments at least make sure they are accurate. You can add, remove and update all software without ever using the cli on kubuntu/ubuntu and the windows people I have shown it to find that it is easier then doing the same on windows. Especially since the system will keep ALL installed software updated unlike windows update which only does a few programs.
Many KDE 4 apps including konqueror are being ported to windows and osx where it will run natively. Also khtml is not as tied to kde as you might think, there is a reason that apple chose it as the base for safari. I have to admit I am really looking forward to being able to use konqueror under windows like I do on my linux boxes instead of firefox. Konqueror runs faster, renders more pages accurately, looks to have a better security system and requires a tiny fraction of the memory and cpu time of firefox. In order of browers I would say that safari/konqueror are the best followed by opera and then a ways after that would be gecko systems and then IE. The reason I don't like opera as much is that getElementById in opera is wrong. It makes the name and id namespaces which is should not do. It is a reported bug and it seems they won't fix it which is a pain.
I don't like microsoft very much but I certainly don't hate them, hate is very counterproductive. However for what I do I certainly prefer KDE to windows or mac interfaces. My job is writing database software and I often deal with data in many locations. With kde urls are transparent for reading and writing. That means if I need to edit a config file on a remote server I can just use sftp to the remote url and just edit it with a local app. When I hit save it will be saved to the remote machine. I have seen nothing in the windows or mac world nearly as well done or with as many protocols supported as the kde ioslave system. KDE also has a great shared component system. I have one spell checker, one text editor component etc. No matter how I look at source code it will look the same. I can open in it a lightweight viewer, my heavier IDE etc and it will be highlighted the same way since it used the same component.
Sure those features may not appeal to the masses and some of them are complex conceptually so they won't ever understand then most likely. However KDE probably saves me a few weeks per year in time from all of its features. I use linux and KDE since for what I do I have found no system that is even close to as productive for me.
I also don't see why you paint all the linux people with the same brush. You have said more then a few times there that we all want to beat microsoft and take over the world etc with linux. However some of us just care about getting work done and don't care about this as a religion. I really don't care if linux takes over. I use linux because it is the best I can find for what I need to get done and I value software freedom and mostly that is a practical reason. I have been bitten too many times to tie my business to a proprietary system. Over the years the free software systems have certainly been a much better way to do things for me.
Here is what I have noticed. The people in power are the most likely ones to lie since they have more to lose. I don't believe the democrats and when they where in power they did a lot of lieing. However now that the republicans are in power they are doing more of the lieing simply because they have more opportunity to do so. If the democrats where in power again they would do the same thing.
Heck if you really look at it are there any actual republicans or democrats in power? Republicans are supposed to be conservative, small government, fiscal responsibility etc. When is the last time you saw that? Highest debts then ever, more spending, bigger government etc is the rule right now.
Same goes for democrats. You know actual liberals that really are. People that look at what reality is like now and see what can be changed to actually improve it. It used to be that democrats where pro change for the better but where also for fiscal responsibility. Now we have democrats that spend every dime we have and the changes they want are the changes that benefit mostly their own power and the other rich people. I have not see a real democrat or republican in office in a long time.
If you actually believe in the democrat or republican party lines I don't see how you can vote for people in either party in good concience given the state that both parties are in.
So in essence I don't believe that anything that republicans or democrats say is really the truth except where it happens to work in their favor and selective telling of the truth is often worse the lieing.
This is how debian based distros have done kde since at least 2.x and I think since kde 1.x. Right now for example on debian/ubuntu etc you could just do apt-get install kwordquiz and it would just install the package and the base requirements for it, not all the rest of the packaged in kdeedu. The issue you are having is not a kde problem. I don't know what distro you are using that does things that way but most of the ones I am familiar with have had kde broken up fairly fine grained for a long time now.
Are you sure there are fiscal conservative republicans in office. Based on the spending I find that REALLY hard to believe. Mostly what I see in office are the same groups of people with two different names. I don't think there are any democrats or republicans in office right now and there have not been for a good long while. A real liberal government I could deal with, I could also deal with an actual conservative government. However it seems right now the people we have in government are neither. They are there for their own personal power and money. It sure seems they stomp on states rights a good deal, spend more money then they have and they both love to "save the children" while taking away more rights.
It just seems that the democrats bring up some issues since that is their talking points but both sides vote to pass them. The republicans bring up other talking points and both vote on them also. The reason there are two "sides" is to make people think there is a difference between them. That way you can say you are voting for the "better" side. I don't see how liberals or conservatives can back pretty much anyone in office right now.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is just sending things downhill all you are changing is how fast we are falling. Next time vote for whoever you think will do the best job no matter what their chances are. I am not advocating voting for green, democrat, republican, or whatever other parties there might be. For each position look at all your choices and decide which person you think would honestly do the best job no matter what their chances of winning are. Anything less is how we got into this situation in the first place.
I want to add to this that most high level languages have highly optimized primatives and large standard libraries. While it is true that about 99% of the time is spent in 5% of the code it often works out that the 5% of code can be handed off to built in language features and standard libraries. For example it is unlikely that you will be able to beat the built in dictionary code in python or the sorting routines. Also there are many language structures which sure make it easier to write more efficient code.
1 So what I suggest is first write your code in a high level language
2 Profile the code
3 Find the slower parts and see what there is built into the language that can handle that problem
4 Profile the code
5 Replace algorithms with more efficient ones
6 Profile the code
7 Find external libraries in wide usage that you can pass off work to
8 Profile the code
9 Hand Code your own optimized functions for what is left
Most applications don't get beyond step 3 and very few get beyond step 5. Also as you get more experience you learn more about what language features you should always hand off to and what algorithms are more appropriate for a situation so you find yourself coding around step 5 anyways but that takes experience. I have found this leads to code that executes quickly, has vastly fewer bugs, and is easier to maintian long term.
I know there are a lot of slow programs written in python but there are also many fast ones. The biggest issue I see for faster programs in higher level languages is people that don't learn them. What I mean is that you find many people that say they know 20 different languages but they really write the same code the same way in all of them. The most obvious example I can think of in python is that strings are immutable. Building up a large string by adding a lot of little strings together is extremely expensive. I have worked with people that came from c/c++ backgrounds and they would just always do things that way no matter how often they where shown better ways to do the same thing. As a result, depending on the size of the dataset, their programs would run 10 to 1000x slower then they should have, they also used more memory which further slowed things down. Heck I have even watched someone spend several days writing a custom sorting routine in python instead of using the built in sort. Their code was buggy, did not sort correctly in many cases and ran about 100x slower then the built in sort.
So I do agree that higher level languages can give you faster performance in most general purpose applications, ie don't write device drivers in it. However the actual performance of a given solution is mostly based on how good a programmer is. Well written python will run faster then badly written c. Well written c will run faster then badly written python etc.
There are other issues also. Zope/Plone has a far better security system that the .NET stack by a LONG shot. Every connection is run as the user that made the connection, every since object/attribute/method that is accessed is security checked to make sure it is okay. Having security issues with zope is pretty much unheard of. Over the past 5 years or so there have only been a handful of issues and almost all of them required someone to be able to edit things like dtml, python scripts or zpt which is not common for anyone other then those maintaining the site.
The other issue is that while zope itself is pretty darn fast plone is not. It really needs the whole caching system to get acceptable speed. Mostly plone has been written to make it easier for novices to get stuff up and running and without shooting themselves in the foot, it has not been written for speed.
There are other tuning things that are recommended to do also like the object cache. By default it is very very low so that zope won't use much memory. I think it default to about 2000 objects in the cache however most people probably run it with 20000 or more.
Actually I disagree that OSX is ahead of its competition. In some areas you might be right but in general I think that KDE is a lot more advanced. The IOSlave system and the kparts are both highly integrated into the rest of the system and used to great effect.
Anywhere in kde that you want to use a file you can use an IOSlave. This gives you url transparency for reading and writing in every app very easily. For example you can send a file in kmail and then use sftp to load an attachment from a remote server and hit send. It will grab the file and attach it just fine. You can go to a form on a webpage that expects a file say for uploading an image and give it an http, ftp, sftp, etc url to an image and just hit submit to upload it. These IOSlaves are integral to the system and I would say on average they save me several hours per week.
The other major thing is the kpart system. Other systems seem to just pay lipservice to reusing components. In kde there is one address book system, one spellchecking system, one terminal window system, one proxy configuration system etc. I can configure those things in just one palce and they are reused everywhere. Actually for text editors there is a good example of this take kate. Kate actually is two pieces one is an application called kate and the other is the actual kpart called kate. By default the kate text editor, kwrite, kdevelop3, embedded text views etc all use kate. So you can configure syntax highlighting for example and no matter where you look at the code it will be shown the same way. I have not seen anything remotely close to this in any other system.
For what I do kde is more advanced then pretty much any other gui system out there and it saves a lot more time them osx, windows etc do.
Also as a note you can write kde apps in python and ruby. Those are definitely flexible yet safe programming langauges and you can get apps up and running very quickly with those.