From a PIII 450 to an Athlon-XP 2500+ is a 4-5 fold increase in processor speed. Probably a 3-4 fold increase in memory speed (and more of it, too). Disk access maybe twice the speed.
So KDE (your previous desktop of choice) was, say, 3-4 times as fast as before, but this wasn't good enough ?
Oh, and I was forgetting the Gentoo install, so that might speed it up a bit further. If Gentoo optimises things, that includes KDE.
Not to mention that KDE itself has been getting faster and faster since 3.0.
Now you may genuinely prefer XFCE4 - I'm sure some people do, and that's fine.
But I don't believe all that crap about KDE.
Please, if you prefer XFCE4, by all means tell people about it - but let it stand on its own merits.
"The economy in the U.K. is horrid right now. Nobody has any money or work and everyone is on welfare."
Oh, come on, it's not that bad. If people have no money, how come house prices have risen by about 40% in the last two years ?
"What use is advertising to "poor" people if they can't buy most of the crap you are hawking?"
Come off it, this is still a pretty wealthy country, on world-wide basis. It remains to be seen whether this is a good idea, but I'm sure IBM have done their sums, and a bit of research.
"I would have picked Germany, at least they have money. Seig Heil!"
Stop being a prick.
"Oh, in case you are wondering I'm British."
Yep - and the kind of Brit that the rest of us are ashamed about.
About 30 years ago, Frederick Forsyth wrote The Day of The Jackal (and it was then made into a superb film - well recommended if you haven't seen it).
In the book and film, the Jackal (a hired assassin) applies for a copy of the birth certificate of someone who had died as a child. When he gets it, he uses that to apply for a passport in the name of that person.
A year or so ago, some investigative reporters used a similar method to get hold of Frederick Forsyth's ID and get credit cards, etc, in his name. Amazingly, they even got a driving licence in the identity of David Blunkett, who, as the home secretary, is the political head of the department that controls the UKs security services - and who is also widely known to be blind (i.e. why would he be applying for a driving licence?).
When confronted with this information, an astonished Frederick Forsyth said "30 years ago I exposed to the authorities a loophole in their own security and I presumed they would stop it - they didn't."
I cannot see anything in the use of biometric passports themselves that would prevent this trick from working. If you have the means to apply for a passport in the name of a dead person, how is supplying your own fingerprint or iris scan possibly going to help ? Yes, it might stop convicted terrorists applying for passports if their fingerprints or iris scans are on record, but there are huge numbers of people with no convictions. And I'm sure others will point out all the other problems with biometric IDs.
Indeed, if biometric identification means that passports become more "trusted" than previously, then they seem to be making the security situation worse, rather than better - i.e. people will place more of their trust in the biometric ID, to the exclusion of other factors.
From another BBC report, the government estimates that about 1500 issued passports a year are fraudulent (an estimate which is described as "conservative").
"[smartass] So that'll come in handy for hex editing. [/smartass]"
Very funny
But what it will come in handy for, amongst other things, is having a linux-filesystem-within-an-NTFS-file (a bit like the old UMSDOS filesystem) for those people who want to try out Linux, but who don't want to go to the trouble of re-partitioning their disks (with the associated risks of losing data).
Not an ideal solution (certainly performance-wise) - but faster than running (Knoppix-style) from a CD-ROM drive, and allows you free use the CD-ROM drive, too.
"Everyone, and I mean everyone, who has at least rudimentary human intelligence and capability, can pay for their own healthcare."
"No nation, not even the "mighty" US of A has the wealth and willingness to pay for everyone's healthcare yet."
Sounds like a contradiction to me.
I hope you never have a serious, debilitating, long-term illness. If you did, you might, at last, realise the foolishness of the first sentence I quoted.
It's not the best-designed web page, but it's mentioned on Mandrake's home page - it's in the news section towards the right (but has been pushed down a little due to more recent news).
Well Scotland is a low-cost location by the standards of the USA. That's why American industries moved there in the first place (that, and "development grants").
But it's still high-cost compared to other "developing" parts of the world.
If the employment situation is getting worse in a place like Scotland, then it's not going to improve much in the USA any time soon. Not for nuts-and-bolts work.
Educate and train your populace, and give creative people the opportunity to do their thing. It's the only way to keep ahead. Because, really, there's no reason why anyone, anywhere in the world should get any more money than anyone else for doing the same job.
PS: I know some people living near the Silicon Glen area. American companies' eagerness to hire and fire hasn't done anything to make the USA any more popular. It may be business-as-usual for some American companies, but rightly or wrongly, don't expect it to help your country make friends.
Some of us like to be able to concentrate in order to get work done, and find it difficult to switch off from everyone around us. It's just too easy to get distracted by all the conversations around you, joining in when you feel like it.
Seems to me that anti-social people might have fewer problems being distracted.
It's just the latest management fashion. Instead of senior managers using intelligence and common sense to work out for themselves what is a good, productive environment, they just follow the latest fashion that everyone else is talking about.
Give them another five years, and the fashion will be back to individual work areas, with some separation from others, so people can be "more productive".
Re:US Gov't on Linux
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"Seems to me this is just another control mechanism over the media and modern culture..."
By trying to (legitimately) avoid DVD patents and regional encoding, it seems to me like they're trying to avoid control mechanisms over the media and modern culture.
"Perhaps that one Halle Berry lookalike who is really into Linux.....".....and her collection of 458 sad Linux geeks who follow her around everywhere, hoping for a date.
If you desperately need Serial ATA support on an NF7-S, it's available in 2.4 kernels.
Mine works pretty well under Mandrake 9.1, perfectly under Mandrake 9.2, and perfectly under Gentoo if your use the Alan Cox kernel sources (not the "standard" Gentoo kernel, unless it's been updated since I last tried it).
My SATA transfer rates are actually quicker (timed using "hdparm -tT") under 2.4 than 2.6.
Yes, but how fast can data be read back from video RAM to the processor ? I'm sure some visual effects can be processed by the card itself, but the main processor is also going to need speedy access to that data.
In my (perhaps a little contrived) example, I was using over 64MB of video RAM. I'm sure the majority of people are still using graphics cards with 64MB or less of memory (hard-core gamers being an obvious exception).
Actually, that brings up another question. What does X already support by way of backing-store and save-under memory ? (Excuse me, my memory of X operation is very hazy).
"The server stores a tree of windows as it does now. However, unlike today, it keeps the full contents of each mapped window in memory at all times."
What are the memory implications of this ?
With many people using resolutions of 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 in 24-bit or 32-bit colour, dual-displays and multiple desktops becoming more common, this could chew up a lot of RAM.
A single, maximised window at 1600x1200/32-bit is going to use 7.5MB, even if it's just a terminal window. I can quite easily have 10 windows open at one time, especially when web browsing (OK, not all maximised, but not all small, either). There goes 75MB of RAM, just for the screen display (let alone the extra memory X uses for pixmaps, etc). If it's constantly being accessed in order to update the display, it won't be easily paged out to disk, either.
Things like tabbed browsers and terminal programs help quite a bit (assuming that the contents of each tab won't be stored in RAM - or will they ?). But not everyone likes using them.
Would someone with more knowledge about the current workings of X care to comment ?
Actually, when I wrote that I was forgetting two groups of people: people with physical or visual disabilities. But I'm quite sure there are simple means which can be used to enable them to register their vote, without requiring any sort of electronic solution.
Slashdot Mirror
From a PIII 450 to an Athlon-XP 2500+ is a 4-5 fold increase in processor speed. Probably a 3-4 fold increase in memory speed (and more of it, too). Disk access maybe twice the speed.
So KDE (your previous desktop of choice) was, say, 3-4 times as fast as before, but this wasn't good enough ?
Oh, and I was forgetting the Gentoo install, so that might speed it up a bit further. If Gentoo optimises things, that includes KDE.
Not to mention that KDE itself has been getting faster and faster since 3.0.
Now you may genuinely prefer XFCE4 - I'm sure some people do, and that's fine.
But I don't believe all that crap about KDE.
Please, if you prefer XFCE4, by all means tell people about it - but let it stand on its own merits.
"The economy in the U.K. is horrid right now. Nobody has any money or work and everyone is on welfare."
Oh, come on, it's not that bad. If people have no money, how come house prices have risen by about 40% in the last two years ?
"What use is advertising to "poor" people if they can't buy most of the crap you are hawking?"
Come off it, this is still a pretty wealthy country, on world-wide basis. It remains to be seen whether this is a good idea, but I'm sure IBM have done their sums, and a bit of research.
"I would have picked Germany, at least they have money. Seig Heil!"
Stop being a prick.
"Oh, in case you are wondering I'm British."
Yep - and the kind of Brit that the rest of us are ashamed about.
About 30 years ago, Frederick Forsyth wrote The Day of The Jackal (and it was then made into a superb film - well recommended if you haven't seen it).
In the book and film, the Jackal (a hired assassin) applies for a copy of the birth certificate of someone who had died as a child. When he gets it, he uses that to apply for a passport in the name of that person.
A year or so ago, some investigative reporters used a similar method to get hold of Frederick Forsyth's ID and get credit cards, etc, in his name. Amazingly, they even got a driving licence in the identity of David Blunkett, who, as the home secretary, is the political head of the department that controls the UKs security services - and who is also widely known to be blind (i.e. why would he be applying for a driving licence?).
Details are here.
When confronted with this information, an astonished Frederick Forsyth said "30 years ago I exposed to the authorities a loophole in their own security and I presumed they would stop it - they didn't."
I cannot see anything in the use of biometric passports themselves that would prevent this trick from working. If you have the means to apply for a passport in the name of a dead person, how is supplying your own fingerprint or iris scan possibly going to help ? Yes, it might stop convicted terrorists applying for passports if their fingerprints or iris scans are on record, but there are huge numbers of people with no convictions. And I'm sure others will point out all the other problems with biometric IDs.
Indeed, if biometric identification means that passports become more "trusted" than previously, then they seem to be making the security situation worse, rather than better - i.e. people will place more of their trust in the biometric ID, to the exclusion of other factors.
From another BBC report, the government estimates that about 1500 issued passports a year are fraudulent (an estimate which is described as "conservative").
"What's more interesting is that JFS for linux came from their windows version, not their AIX."
"Please, if you don't know what you are talking about, don't present it as fact."
Don't be so ready to act like a jerk. I think it was a typo.
"[smartass] So that'll come in handy for hex editing. [/smartass]"
Very funny
But what it will come in handy for, amongst other things, is having a linux-filesystem-within-an-NTFS-file (a bit like the old UMSDOS filesystem) for those people who want to try out Linux, but who don't want to go to the trouble of re-partitioning their disks (with the associated risks of losing data).
Not an ideal solution (certainly performance-wise) - but faster than running (Knoppix-style) from a CD-ROM drive, and allows you free use the CD-ROM drive, too.
"The open source movement needs to market itself better to the enterprise......If someone did that for the British NHS....."
Someone's already trying pretty hard to do just that.
Oh dear. A weak pun of mass destruction.
"Everyone, and I mean everyone, who has at least rudimentary human intelligence and capability, can pay for their own healthcare."
"No nation, not even the "mighty" US of A has the wealth and willingness to pay for everyone's healthcare yet."
Sounds like a contradiction to me.
I hope you never have a serious, debilitating, long-term illness. If you did, you might, at last, realise the foolishness of the first sentence I quoted.
It's not the best-designed web page, but it's mentioned on Mandrake's home page - it's in the news section towards the right (but has been pushed down a little due to more recent news).
It's also on Mandrake's errata page, this time a little more prominently.
"You think companies do business to make friends?"
Well there's such a thing as motivation of your workforce. Trust also matters, even in business.
There's also the customer's perception of the company they're dealing with.
"Go eat some haggis, you fucking idiot."
Nice attitude you've got there. Remind me again why, given a choice of goods, I should buy the American one ?
Well Scotland is a low-cost location by the standards of the USA. That's why American industries moved there in the first place (that, and "development grants").
But it's still high-cost compared to other "developing" parts of the world.
If the employment situation is getting worse in a place like Scotland, then it's not going to improve much in the USA any time soon. Not for nuts-and-bolts work.
Educate and train your populace, and give creative people the opportunity to do their thing. It's the only way to keep ahead. Because, really, there's no reason why anyone, anywhere in the world should get any more money than anyone else for doing the same job.
PS: I know some people living near the Silicon Glen area. American companies' eagerness to hire and fire hasn't done anything to make the USA any more popular. It may be business-as-usual for some American companies, but rightly or wrongly, don't expect it to help your country make friends.
Who said anything about anti-social ?
Some of us like to be able to concentrate in order to get work done, and find it difficult to switch off from everyone around us. It's just too easy to get distracted by all the conversations around you, joining in when you feel like it.
Seems to me that anti-social people might have fewer problems being distracted.
It's just the latest management fashion. Instead of senior managers using intelligence and common sense to work out for themselves what is a good, productive environment, they just follow the latest fashion that everyone else is talking about.
Give them another five years, and the fashion will be back to individual work areas, with some separation from others, so people can be "more productive".
...or Feds-ora.
"Seems to me this is just another control mechanism over the media and modern culture..."
By trying to (legitimately) avoid DVD patents and regional encoding, it seems to me like they're trying to avoid control mechanisms over the media and modern culture.
"Perhaps that one Halle Berry lookalike who is really into Linux....." .....and her collection of 458 sad Linux geeks who follow her around everywhere, hoping for a date.
Alternatively, you could use the way you act, the way you dress, the way you behave and the way you talk.
And you could ask her "What are your hobbies ?".
"RS is an idealist, and I honour him for his ideals, but idealism has no place in a courtroom, pragmatism is the rule of law."
I's a courtroom, right ?
Surely all he has to do is answer whatever questions he is asked, and tell the truth.
Mandrake also supports serial ATA drives, in both 9.1 and 9.2. I actually used Mandrake 9.1 to install Gentoo (as a dual-boot option).
If you desperately need Serial ATA support on an NF7-S, it's available in 2.4 kernels.
Mine works pretty well under Mandrake 9.1, perfectly under Mandrake 9.2, and perfectly under Gentoo if your use the Alan Cox kernel sources (not the "standard" Gentoo kernel, unless it's been updated since I last tried it).
My SATA transfer rates are actually quicker (timed using "hdparm -tT") under 2.4 than 2.6.
"...but with this pop-up advertising, they were there, without any action on my part, and directly interrupted me."
Just like adverts on TV.
Dear Redhat,
I've just been talking to SuSE and Mandrake.
Where's our knife ?
Oh hang on, we're volunteers. You want us to do it ourselves, right ?
Love,
Fedora
Yes, but how fast can data be read back from video RAM to the processor ? I'm sure some visual effects can be processed by the card itself, but the main processor is also going to need speedy access to that data.
In my (perhaps a little contrived) example, I was using over 64MB of video RAM. I'm sure the majority of people are still using graphics cards with 64MB or less of memory (hard-core gamers being an obvious exception).
Actually, that brings up another question. What does X already support by way of backing-store and save-under memory ? (Excuse me, my memory of X operation is very hazy).
"The server stores a tree of windows as it does now. However, unlike today, it keeps the full contents of each mapped window in memory at all times."
What are the memory implications of this ?
With many people using resolutions of 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 in 24-bit or 32-bit colour, dual-displays and multiple desktops becoming more common, this could chew up a lot of RAM.
A single, maximised window at 1600x1200/32-bit is going to use 7.5MB, even if it's just a terminal window. I can quite easily have 10 windows open at one time, especially when web browsing (OK, not all maximised, but not all small, either). There goes 75MB of RAM, just for the screen display (let alone the extra memory X uses for pixmaps, etc). If it's constantly being accessed in order to update the display, it won't be easily paged out to disk, either.
Things like tabbed browsers and terminal programs help quite a bit (assuming that the contents of each tab won't be stored in RAM - or will they ?). But not everyone likes using them.
Would someone with more knowledge about the current workings of X care to comment ?
Would that be an Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes ?
Actually, when I wrote that I was forgetting two groups of people: people with physical or visual disabilities. But I'm quite sure there are simple means which can be used to enable them to register their vote, without requiring any sort of electronic solution.