I'm less experienced with Linux than many, but all I can say is that 1) X has never autodetected anything that would blow my monitor up, 2) I've never had that much trouble getting it to work, even when it detects my 1280x800 screen as 1024x768 and I have to kick it a little bit.
Office? I count "randomly generating temporary files and neglecting to clean them up" as doing something poorly.
1) Winamp plays oggs out of the box, along with a bazillion other formats. So does xmms.
2) They're building an operating system. It's their job to include things with it that might be useful -- like, say, filesystem drivers. IMO including common filesystem drivers is a hell of a lot more their job than Windows Media Player.
3) No, it doesn't. It makes me click through a bunch of bullshit, breaks things, requires the use of IE on a new install, requests a reboot after the most trivial of updates, and keeps recreating Windows Messenger and Windows Media Player icons in a dozen places that I have to track down and delete.
... until they start fixing some glaring bugs in Windows. I've got a legal copy of Windows XP, but the only reason I do is because it came with my laptop, and the only reason I got a laptop with Windows included is because it was crazy on sale. Were I buying a machine now, I'd get an Asus z70va and slap a pirate copy on it.
This machine has 1.25 GiB of RAM. Most of the time when I try to hibernate it -- if I've ever run anything memory-intensive, whether or not it's still open -- I get an "Insufficient resources to complete the API" error, and it doesn't hibernate. (I have about 30 GB of disk free, so that is most certainly not the issue).
There are all sorts of glaring flaws in Windows. Do I really care if I get access to the shit on Windows Update (Ooh, new version of Windows Media Player that probably still won't play oggs without me having to mess with codecs)? Not really. Security updates? Yay, I'll lose my install of Guild Wars, at worse, if someone gets past my firewall and "4dminist4t0r5" (doesn't quite sound like "r00ts", but whatever) it. All my *important* stuff is on the Linux half of this machine, and since Microsoft *still* doesn't have an ext3 filesystem driver, it's safe from the kiddies.
When Windows Update works like emerge, I might consider using it.
The article attempted the same thing: "Windows sysadmins are more efficient..." etc., as if the efficiency was a product of both the qualities of the OS and the sysadmins that it attracts.
I'm just pointing out an example where the combination of Windows and its sysadmins caused problems for the Windows parts of campus.
I'd also like to point out that I'm at the University of Arizona, a Linux shop. While there are probably many factors that go into it running better than UAH, I've noticed that the one major issue I've faced -- broken fonts on a machine assigned to me in a lab -- was fixed, as soon as the sysadmin got my email, in five minutes over ssh.
... the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the network service was absolutely horrendous. Nothing worked right, packet loss across campus was obscene, registering for classes using their system didn't work, the webpage was often down, systems were clunky, etc.
The only things that weren't always broken on campus were the DNS server, the student webpages, and email.
All of these were hosted on one of the few UNIX machines they used, email.uah.edu. I used my shell account without issues for six years while I was there; the network often died around it (because the networking people were largely incompetent clods), but the UNIX administrators in charge of keeping email.uah.edu working always managed to keep it going.
Correction: the corporate masters of the artists who write them, and some of the pretty faces and breast implants that jiggle while they sing them, already have more money than they know what to do with.
Today I was at a meeting discussing computing issues for numerical simulations of particle physics being done on computers at CERN. One big complaint was that they're having a hard time finding places to put some of their machines because of thermal issues.
Now, these machines all run Linux, do server duties and loads of floating-point math (Monte Carlo calculations), and are in a situation where cooling is an issue.
Nonetheless... on all the machines I've used there,/proc/cpuinfo says they're running P4's or P4-based Xeons. Wouldn't running Athlon 64's or Opterons (in 64-bit mode, since they're all on Linux) give better performance and less heat?
I'm not proposing government intervention in business -- actually, I'm proposing less, by claiming that what the government wants done it should do itself without the opportunities for waste and corruption that come with contracts.
Government employees too hard to fire? That can be fixed.
Then that's tough. Do you really think the well-being of a company (whose sole customer is the government) should be placed ahead of the interests of justice? If it's determined that open code for the Breathalyser is the only way to ensure justice is being served, then so shall it be, and the market will just have to deal with it.
Personally I think there's way too much contracting being done already. If the US Government wants breathalysers, they can hire some engineers to design them, and post the code. I bet this'll be cheaper than contracting someone to do it (Halliburton, anyone?), and the world will get the blueprints and code for a breathalyser for free.
***
My grandmother died recently, a notorious pack-rat. Cleaning out her attic, we found pamphlets distributed by the government during the 1940's and 1950's. They included a *very detailed* guide to the mechanical and carpentry properties of different sorts of wood -- everything you'd want to know about selecting wood to build with. Another talked about radioactive fallout -- what isotopes are likely to be present, the effects of radiation on humans, how radioactive decay works, and the like.
I was impressed. Name some recent effort by the US government to provide information to the public on such a detailed level, not because it's politically expedient or profitable but just because *it is the government's prime job to be useful to its citizens.*
I have a Gentoo Linux laptop which, in the interest of portability and dual-booting, has to be booted frequently. I've not done anything fancy or funky with it, and don't know all that much about the scripts behind the boot sequence.
At home it has an 802.11 network connection; at work it has an Ethernet connection.
Now, when I'm using it at home it takes forever to go through the DHCP timeout on eth0, even though there's no link. Is there a simple way to either 1) tell it not to do a DHCP lookup unless it sees a link on eth0, or 2) tell it to go ahead with the boot process while waiting for the DHCP response?
The issue is that *we don't know that he was earning his living in an illegal manner until he has been convicted!*
Now, this guy -- by non-judicial standards of ethics -- needs to be kicked in the balls and force-fed his own p3n15 pi11z. But the FBI, as an arm of the law, has to play by the law. That law says that you can't shut someone down from doing something unless you have evidence that it's illegal.
There's a fundamental difference between confiscating someone's crack and confiscating their computer. Mere possession of crack is illegal; if you stop a guy with crack, you know he's doing something illegal with it, and can take it.
Whether or not this guy is doing something illegal hasn't been determined yet. By all accounts the purpose of the raid wasn't to gather evidence to be used at trial; it was to stop the flood of spam by seizing his computers. While that's going to make the Internet a better place, it's not the way the law works. If the FBI really wanted to look for evidence, they'd bring a hacker with them on the raid and do a find | grep p3n15 on his boxes.
Indeed. Even the Athlon 64's are pretty efficient thanks to Cool and Quiet. I'm typing this on an Athlon 64 laptop that gets pretty darn good battery life -- and the A64 it runs is, basically, a desktop A64.
It says something about the underlying quality of the design that they could just take the damn thing and slap it in a laptop, with basically no modifications, and it'd do well.
It seems like AMD is staying competitive, both in technology and in economics, in some unfavorable circumstances. The Big Thing advertised about the A64 is the AMD64 capability, yet it compares favorably with the competition in the 32-bit world. It compares favorably with the P4 despite its significantly lower power consumption. It works well in laptops, despite being designed for desktops.
On the economic side, despite Intel's arm-twisting of Dell et al. and marketing juggernaut, AMD remains profitable and keeps a decent market share.
This is great for monopoly-busting of IE and all, but it doesn't help the user from a usability standpoint. The new version of Netscape is still sub-par as far as browsers go; preinstalling Opera or Firefox would actually help users.
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I'm less experienced with Linux than many, but all I can say is that 1) X has never autodetected anything that would blow my monitor up, 2) I've never had that much trouble getting it to work, even when it detects my 1280x800 screen as 1024x768 and I have to kick it a little bit.
Office? I count "randomly generating temporary files and neglecting to clean them up" as doing something poorly.
1) Winamp plays oggs out of the box, along with a bazillion other formats. So does xmms.
2) They're building an operating system. It's their job to include things with it that might be useful -- like, say, filesystem drivers. IMO including common filesystem drivers is a hell of a lot more their job than Windows Media Player.
3) No, it doesn't. It makes me click through a bunch of bullshit, breaks things, requires the use of IE on a new install, requests a reboot after the most trivial of updates, and keeps recreating Windows Messenger and Windows Media Player icons in a dozen places that I have to track down and delete.
Setting my Windows Update to "idiot" will make me not have to do a thing to get random updates I don't want. That behavior is NOT what I want.
Using emerge I get what I want, when I want it, with no bullshit.
And, yes, I have SP2. They say it only mitigates the problem, it doesn't actually solve it. And, sure enough, I still have the issue.
I don't mind spending five minutes editing a well-documented file format, ONCE, to get X to work.
I do mind having to spend ten minutes digging through random menu options to get a software program to not do something dumb.
... until they start fixing some glaring bugs in Windows. I've got a legal copy of Windows XP, but the only reason I do is because it came with my laptop, and the only reason I got a laptop with Windows included is because it was crazy on sale. Were I buying a machine now, I'd get an Asus z70va and slap a pirate copy on it.
This machine has 1.25 GiB of RAM. Most of the time when I try to hibernate it -- if I've ever run anything memory-intensive, whether or not it's still open -- I get an "Insufficient resources to complete the API" error, and it doesn't hibernate. (I have about 30 GB of disk free, so that is most certainly not the issue).
There are all sorts of glaring flaws in Windows. Do I really care if I get access to the shit on Windows Update (Ooh, new version of Windows Media Player that probably still won't play oggs without me having to mess with codecs)? Not really. Security updates? Yay, I'll lose my install of Guild Wars, at worse, if someone gets past my firewall and "4dminist4t0r5" (doesn't quite sound like "r00ts", but whatever) it. All my *important* stuff is on the Linux half of this machine, and since Microsoft *still* doesn't have an ext3 filesystem driver, it's safe from the kiddies.
When Windows Update works like emerge, I might consider using it.
The article attempted the same thing: "Windows sysadmins are more efficient..." etc., as if the efficiency was a product of both the qualities of the OS and the sysadmins that it attracts.
I'm just pointing out an example where the combination of Windows and its sysadmins caused problems for the Windows parts of campus.
I'd also like to point out that I'm at the University of Arizona, a Linux shop. While there are probably many factors that go into it running better than UAH, I've noticed that the one major issue I've faced -- broken fonts on a machine assigned to me in a lab -- was fixed, as soon as the sysadmin got my email, in five minutes over ssh.
... the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the network service was absolutely horrendous. Nothing worked right, packet loss across campus was obscene, registering for classes using their system didn't work, the webpage was often down, systems were clunky, etc.
The only things that weren't always broken on campus were the DNS server, the student webpages, and email.
All of these were hosted on one of the few UNIX machines they used, email.uah.edu. I used my shell account without issues for six years while I was there; the network often died around it (because the networking people were largely incompetent clods), but the UNIX administrators in charge of keeping email.uah.edu working always managed to keep it going.
At least in most of the USA, speeding is not a crime in the sense of "infringement on other people's rights."
Speed traps are used as a revenue source for small towns.
Looking at my bandwidth vs. time graph while using Skype, it transmits constantly at about the same bitrate.
Correction: the corporate masters of the artists who write them, and some of the pretty faces and breast implants that jiggle while they sing them, already have more money than they know what to do with.
The actual artists aren't so lucky.
I'm safe, at least partially!
http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/josquin.html
I'd be surprised if these machines even had GPU's and monitors, let alone ones are decent at vector computation.
All the code is written in C, incidentally.
Today I was at a meeting discussing computing issues for numerical simulations of particle physics being done on computers at CERN. One big complaint was that they're having a hard time finding places to put some of their machines because of thermal issues.
/proc/cpuinfo says they're running P4's or P4-based Xeons. Wouldn't running Athlon 64's or Opterons (in 64-bit mode, since they're all on Linux) give better performance and less heat?
Now, these machines all run Linux, do server duties and loads of floating-point math (Monte Carlo calculations), and are in a situation where cooling is an issue.
Nonetheless... on all the machines I've used there,
This's work especially well in Australia, when the root-kit *could* be the carrot...
I can't think of anything that would get Cedega fixed up and ready for prime time faster.
There is no school right to free speech, but the speech in question had nothing to do with the school.
Can a school expel someone without warning for, for example, eating hot dog buns on a Friday?
Of course not, unless their contract said "We reserve the right to expel you for any reason whatsoever."
... you should probably consider power costs as well.
An Athlon 64 idles at around 10W, and under full load pulls (according to the rated Max Thermal Dissipation Power on my 3400+) 62W.
The Pentium 4's idle at ~50-80, so I've heard, and under full load pull 120-150.
The P4 is dead. Both Intel and AMD have viable products on the market (Pentium M / Athlon 64), but the P4 isn't one of them.
Price/performance benchmarks?
Wow, slippery slope argument for the win.
I'm not proposing government intervention in business -- actually, I'm proposing less, by claiming that what the government wants done it should do itself without the opportunities for waste and corruption that come with contracts.
Government employees too hard to fire? That can be fixed.
Then that's tough. Do you really think the well-being of a company (whose sole customer is the government) should be placed ahead of the interests of justice? If it's determined that open code for the Breathalyser is the only way to ensure justice is being served, then so shall it be, and the market will just have to deal with it.
Personally I think there's way too much contracting being done already. If the US Government wants breathalysers, they can hire some engineers to design them, and post the code. I bet this'll be cheaper than contracting someone to do it (Halliburton, anyone?), and the world will get the blueprints and code for a breathalyser for free.
***
My grandmother died recently, a notorious pack-rat. Cleaning out her attic, we found pamphlets distributed by the government during the 1940's and 1950's. They included a *very detailed* guide to the mechanical and carpentry properties of different sorts of wood -- everything you'd want to know about selecting wood to build with. Another talked about radioactive fallout -- what isotopes are likely to be present, the effects of radiation on humans, how radioactive decay works, and the like.
I was impressed. Name some recent effort by the US government to provide information to the public on such a detailed level, not because it's politically expedient or profitable but just because *it is the government's prime job to be useful to its citizens.*
I have a Gentoo Linux laptop which, in the interest of portability and dual-booting, has to be booted frequently. I've not done anything fancy or funky with it, and don't know all that much about the scripts behind the boot sequence.
At home it has an 802.11 network connection; at work it has an Ethernet connection.
Now, when I'm using it at home it takes forever to go through the DHCP timeout on eth0, even though there's no link. Is there a simple way to either 1) tell it not to do a DHCP lookup unless it sees a link on eth0, or 2) tell it to go ahead with the boot process while waiting for the DHCP response?
The issue is that *we don't know that he was earning his living in an illegal manner until he has been convicted!*
Now, this guy -- by non-judicial standards of ethics -- needs to be kicked in the balls and force-fed his own p3n15 pi11z. But the FBI, as an arm of the law, has to play by the law. That law says that you can't shut someone down from doing something unless you have evidence that it's illegal.
There's a fundamental difference between confiscating someone's crack and confiscating their computer. Mere possession of crack is illegal; if you stop a guy with crack, you know he's doing something illegal with it, and can take it.
Whether or not this guy is doing something illegal hasn't been determined yet. By all accounts the purpose of the raid wasn't to gather evidence to be used at trial; it was to stop the flood of spam by seizing his computers. While that's going to make the Internet a better place, it's not the way the law works. If the FBI really wanted to look for evidence, they'd bring a hacker with them on the raid and do a find | grep p3n15 on his boxes.
Indeed. Even the Athlon 64's are pretty efficient thanks to Cool and Quiet. I'm typing this on an Athlon 64 laptop that gets pretty darn good battery life -- and the A64 it runs is, basically, a desktop A64.
It says something about the underlying quality of the design that they could just take the damn thing and slap it in a laptop, with basically no modifications, and it'd do well.
It seems like AMD is staying competitive, both in technology and in economics, in some unfavorable circumstances. The Big Thing advertised about the A64 is the AMD64 capability, yet it compares favorably with the competition in the 32-bit world. It compares favorably with the P4 despite its significantly lower power consumption. It works well in laptops, despite being designed for desktops.
On the economic side, despite Intel's arm-twisting of Dell et al. and marketing juggernaut, AMD remains profitable and keeps a decent market share.
They're complaining that juries give inconsistent results?
That a jury might rule one way one time, and another way the next?
These guys need to start submitting Slashdot stories. They're experts at old news.
This is great for monopoly-busting of IE and all, but it doesn't help the user from a usability standpoint. The new version of Netscape is still sub-par as far as browsers go; preinstalling Opera or Firefox would actually help users.
Once again, marketing triumphs over utility.