Microsoft recommended 128mb of ram for XP. How well does it run on that? Microsoft recommended 1GB for Vista. Same thing. Yea. So, recommended settings aren't anywhere what you need for good performance. Firefox will run on 512mb of ram, but unless you're still running a P4 and XP, you probably have 2GB or more.
Honestly, yes. Go look on the Maemo forum: There's a "mugen" aftermarket battery with double the capacity of stock. It makes the phone about a quarter-inch thicker, though. Some people like it, others complain that the phone's/already/ too fat!
So just grab an alpha/nightly? They've got a nice download page for em, and/usually/ they work right. Just keep one or two older nightlys around so when they/do/ break something, you can go back to that. Or simply disable updates.
I don't know why, but I don't experience these problems. Perhaps I don't have enough Greasemonkey scripts. I mean, I typically end up with around 1.5gb or so of total system usage with: 1. 50 FF tabs open and loaded 2. FF given a memory cache of 1GB to play with 3. Firefox's disk cache symlinked to/tmp/, which has been mounted to a tmpfs(ram-backed fiesystem). And I don't care! See, after getting 4gb of ram, and having like 6 more in swap, I don't worry about memory usage: I want things to use as/much/ memory as they can, so I get better performance. Sure, on a phone with 256mb, you want things to be as lightweight as possible. On a new system with 4+ gb of ram? why/not/ use it?
I'd call you a troll, but some people do have this issue. For me, however, I have way better luck on Linux than anything else. Running this stress test: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ gives me: 450fps* in FF 6.0A1(latest nightly), 45fps in Reconq, and about 30fps in Chrome!
(*Note: Set minimum timeout to 0 in ff prefs, also remove the two lines of code in the above test that limit the output number to 60fps) Compare this to about 22fps on Windows XP on Firefox on my fathers machine, which is almost as powerful as mine(Phenom x4 3.2ghz vs. Phenom II x4 3.5) - No HW acceleration there. So yea, I like Linux. I upgraded to it from XP a few years back and am loving it.
It'd be solved/really/ easily if MS simply mandated a "unbrickable" device, something like how the Nokia N900 does it: A special bootloader that, when booting with the USB cable plugged in, can boot from code transferred over USB, and chainload that into a proper flash. Then when you brick your device, just flash it back to the last version and go on with your life. But that'd be too easy. Especially as it might let someone run *gasp* custom firmware! Abd we can't have that!
They can, they just don't want to. All they have to do is make it slightly thicker amd double the size of the battery. Heck, I want to see a phone where the battery is the back cover(like the old Nokia dumbphones), and also has a small second battery inside it, something that can power the ram/cpu for 5 minutes. Then, you can just yank the dead battery, plug a new one in/without rebooting/. It would also allow for multiple battery sizes: Want a slim phone? Ok, use a small battery. Need two weeks of life? use a large battery.
Very true... Aside from "breaking" the Dolphin Search in KDE 4.6(In 11.04). Frigging idiots should have left it alone; It's now not possible to use advanced search bits like was available in the last version.... I find myself going back to the command line for a lot of my searches(3 gnu find)
The thing is, we already have this. Right now, you can choose from at least five different desktop-"configuration" sets(DE+other bits) with a single command -- sudo apt-get install *ubuntu-desktop. On top of that, theres loads of tweaks that can be done to each of these DE-sets, and whole chunks can be replaced easily. Heck, I'm running KDE desktop, Metacity for my WM & decorator, and a bunch of GTK apps. I'm also running the same basic configuration I've had for three or so Ubuntu versions, porting my/home/ folder each time.
Now, to be honest, I think Gnome 3 is a problem and should be dropped - Whereas in Gnome 2 you could simply install a nice tool to select your theme, now they've decided that "users shouldn't need to do that", and made me have to use gconf-editor to do it. Not smart, idiots -- Theming is one of those things that everyone likes to mess with. Unity, on the other hand... I can see it being useful for certain applications, like tablets and netbooks. On a laptop? No. On a desktop? Very NO. Wayland may be useful at some point, but I won't be using Unity with it.
But the parent was talking about geeks in particular. And yes, it is subjective, which is why someone who likes it goes 'WTF? How come you/don't/ like the Ribbon?", and I go "WTF? The command line's the best thing ever!". It's all subjective.
So, why not do what autodesk does for autocad: Provide configuration options and multiple UIs. Want to use a command line? Go ahead. Want a custom ribbon or menu system? Easy. Then allow saving/importing of custom profiles, so when you upgrade to the latest and greatest you don't/have/ to change! Oh, wait. That would be smart.
See, that's the thing: Geeks want to adapt if the new paradidgm is/better/ than the old one. If it's the same or worse, geeks will simply go 'why bother?', or 'I have to/pay/ for something/less/ useful? get real!' This is why Android tablets have taken off among the geeks: The new paradidgm is better than the old one(for some things). With Linux, you're at least gaining a load of programming tools, free software(as in beer), and the gui interface isn't that much different from XP.
As far as office goes, it's a matter of the old version doing just as well with less resources on top of not needing to learn a new version. Why upgrade for no appreciable benefit?
If microsoft were smart, they'd do what autodesk did with autocad: Provide multiple configurable interfaces, including a/command line/. I mean, when I learned autocad in school, I found myself using the comand line at least as much as the gui, and I'm a guy who learned on Windows mainly.
'Course, I then found out how nice a command line everywhere could be when I switched to Linux; It's now a part of my every day routine. Having a nice command-box in Word/Excel would definitely be nice.
Getting back to the Ribbon, I don't see the benefit. I like the good old file, edit, view menues. It just seems more useful...
Heh. I've always used ambidextrous or/right handed/ mice with my left hand... in right-handed button mode(well, once I started using actual mice - I used TrackPoints before that most of the time). Adjusting to the left-handed deathadder was quite a bit of a retraining for me, but does seem to have increased my accuracy and such.
They've so far only made one mouse in a left-handed version, and that most likely as an experiment(Their founder being left handed might also have something to do with it...) You can buy it here: http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/pd/productID.182251700 or on Amazon etc.
As far as incandescent lightbulbs go, it's a bad thing in some places and fine in others. In the middle of California, sure... Not only are you wasting a lot of energy, but that energy then has to be moved to the outside, wasting even/more/ energy. In the middle of Alaska, or even the northern states, however -- places that need heating and not cooling, incandescent lights are fine. The wasted energy is used to heat the building. In addition, you have several problems with CFLs: 1. Made in China. We aren't -- and/won't/ -- be producing any of our lights now, relying on someone else to do it for us. What happens if we stop being able to import new ones? Say the dollar goes down to the point at whch they can't be afforded? Oh, and they're cheaply made and full of mercury too..
2. Climate-sensitive: CFLs hate high humidity, and extremely high and low temperatures. Which means they aren't good for outside lights if the temperature drops below freezing, or in ovens, refrigeraters etc. Same with bathrooms, honestly.
3. Slow start. Sure, for a living room light, it's fine. For a closet, however, not so much.
4. Low power factor. I haven't seen one CFL over 0.4 PF. Not a big deal for one or two, but it could easily distort the wave form when you have several millions lights going, which could cause other problems. Unless it gets filtered by the pole transformer, of course.
That all being said, I've been using flourescent lights for years, and were a relatively early adopter of CFLs. I just don't think they're appropriate everywhere, nor do I think the mandate was a good idea. Incentives might be a better idea.
Well, see, I agree with you... to some extent. Personally, I'm/really/ happy that Nvidia came out with their shutter glasses 3d system. Why? Because before that, you couldn't get a "hd" monitor(1680x1050 or greater) that did over 100hz. Heck, even 70hz is hard to find. I seem to be one of few people who can tell the difference between 60hz and greater; Without motion blur, the difference is huge. As such, I love my true120hz LCD monitor.
That being said, I'm not impressed by polarized 3d: Now, instead of adding/more/ data(double the effective framerate), you're splitting it between two eyes. That/can't/ be as good.
You've answered your own questiom there: Opening SQLite files from a nice cross-platform interface? Way useful! Aggregating social media? Why bother. Oh, I'm sure some kid's made some extension to do just that, but it's not popular because it's not exactly useful. And possibly because all the social-media-addicted-idiots have already switched to Chrome.
See TheDailyWTF: http://www.thedailywtf.com/ I think you'll find that it's/far/ more common than you want to admit. And these companies are/not/ going to upgrade, even if it's cheaper. They would probably just use an ancient bit of hardware instead... Or an insecure old version of Windows.
See, that's the thing. If you need it patched, you/can/ pay someone to do it. And sure, a high quality super programmer may cost loads, but there are plenty of people out there - teens and such mostly - who are willing to work fof one heck of a lot less. They might even do it for free if they needed it themselves. And it's not like they'd be programming much of said patch themselves; Probably more like grabbing the patch from a later version, modifying it slightly, and backporting it. This may cost more than a new Windows licence, but what do you do if your old 16-bit legacy application won't run on Vista or 7? It could cost one heck of a lot more to update a legacy application than to pay some kid to apply a patch for you... Of course, with a/linux/ legacy app, you might just be able to recompile it to run on the new OS. Probably won't be able to do that with Windows, even/with/ the source code, due to compiler incompatibilities.
Not only this, but we see the same thing happen with special versions of Linux like Maemo: Long after Nokia basically abandoned the N900, quite a few bits have been backported to improve it's kernel. Not to mention all the fixes that one or more people have brought to the platform because it's predominitely open.
If it was running Windows XP, do you think that/anyone/ other than MS could improve it that way? I think not!
Yup; It's been supported in the nightlies/betas since a week or two after Google announced it was being added to Chrome. It's slightly rough around the edges as of yet: It appears to be single-threaded and if you've got a bunch of javascript timers running code on a dozen+ tabs, it can stutter/drop frames sometimes. This/used/ to be really annoying for high-motion videos, but I haven't noticed it since upgrading to the 6.0 nightlies. The other thing that would be nice is a OS-plugin option allowing the use of gnome-mplayer or VLC for playing HTML5 content; that way you could have hardware-accelerated video when you've got a native player, and a fallback when you don't.
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Microsoft recommended 128mb of ram for XP. How well does it run on that?
Microsoft recommended 1GB for Vista. Same thing.
Yea. So, recommended settings aren't anywhere what you need for good performance. Firefox will run on 512mb of ram, but unless you're still running a P4 and XP, you probably have 2GB or more.
Honestly, yes. Go look on the Maemo forum: There's a "mugen" aftermarket battery with double the capacity of stock. It makes the phone about a quarter-inch thicker, though. /already/ too fat!
Some people like it, others complain that the phone's
So just grab an alpha/nightly? They've got a nice download page for em, and /usually/ they work right. Just keep one or two older nightlys around so when they /do/ break something, you can go back to that. Or simply disable updates.
I don't know why, but I don't experience these problems. Perhaps I don't have enough Greasemonkey scripts. /tmp/, which has been mounted to a tmpfs(ram-backed fiesystem). /much/ memory as they can, so I get better performance. /not/ use it?
I mean, I typically end up with around 1.5gb or so of total system usage with:
1. 50 FF tabs open and loaded
2. FF given a memory cache of 1GB to play with
3. Firefox's disk cache symlinked to
And I don't care!
See, after getting 4gb of ram, and having like 6 more in swap, I don't worry about memory usage: I want things to use as
Sure, on a phone with 256mb, you want things to be as lightweight as possible. On a new system with 4+ gb of ram? why
I'd call you a troll, but some people do have this issue.
For me, however, I have way better luck on Linux than anything else.
Running this stress test: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/
gives me: 450fps* in FF 6.0A1(latest nightly), 45fps in Reconq, and about 30fps in Chrome!
(*Note: Set minimum timeout to 0 in ff prefs, also remove the two lines of code in the above test that limit the output number to 60fps)
Compare this to about 22fps on Windows XP on Firefox on my fathers machine, which is almost as powerful as mine(Phenom x4 3.2ghz vs. Phenom II x4 3.5) - No HW acceleration there.
So yea, I like Linux. I upgraded to it from XP a few years back and am loving it.
It'd be solved /really/ easily if MS simply mandated a "unbrickable" device, something like how the Nokia N900 does it: A special bootloader that, when booting with the USB cable plugged in, can boot from code transferred over USB, and chainload that into a proper flash.
Then when you brick your device, just flash it back to the last version and go on with your life.
But that'd be too easy. Especially as it might let someone run *gasp* custom firmware! Abd we can't have that!
They can, they just don't want to. All they have to do is make it slightly thicker amd double the size of the battery. /without rebooting/.
Heck, I want to see a phone where the battery is the back cover(like the old Nokia dumbphones), and also has a small second battery inside it, something that can power the ram/cpu for 5 minutes.
Then, you can just yank the dead battery, plug a new one in
It would also allow for multiple battery sizes: Want a slim phone? Ok, use a small battery. Need two weeks of life? use a large battery.
Easy solution.
Very true... Aside from "breaking" the Dolphin Search in KDE 4.6(In 11.04). Frigging idiots should have left it alone; It's now not possible to use advanced search bits like was available in the last version.... I find myself going back to the command line for a lot of my searches(3 gnu find)
Mod parent up!
The thing is, we already have this. Right now, you can choose from at least five different desktop-"configuration" sets(DE+other bits) with a single command -- sudo apt-get install *ubuntu-desktop. /home/ folder each time.
On top of that, theres loads of tweaks that can be done to each of these DE-sets, and whole chunks can be replaced easily. Heck, I'm running KDE desktop, Metacity for my WM & decorator, and a bunch of GTK apps. I'm also running the same basic configuration I've had for three or so Ubuntu versions, porting my
Now, to be honest, I think Gnome 3 is a problem and should be dropped - Whereas in Gnome 2 you could simply install a nice tool to select your theme, now they've decided that "users shouldn't need to do that", and made me have to use gconf-editor to do it. Not smart, idiots -- Theming is one of those things that everyone likes to mess with.
Unity, on the other hand... I can see it being useful for certain applications, like tablets and netbooks. On a laptop? No. On a desktop? Very NO.
Wayland may be useful at some point, but I won't be using Unity with it.
That is true. But the new method could also be slower, for what you want to do.
But the parent was talking about geeks in particular. And yes, it is subjective, which is why someone who likes it goes 'WTF? How come you /don't/ like the Ribbon?", and I go "WTF? The command line's the best thing ever!". It's all subjective.
So, why not do what autodesk does for autocad: Provide configuration options and multiple UIs. Want to use a command line? Go ahead. Want a custom ribbon or menu system? Easy. Then allow saving/importing of custom profiles, so when you upgrade to the latest and greatest you don't /have/ to change!
Oh, wait. That would be smart.
See, that's the thing: Geeks want to adapt if the new paradidgm is /better/ than the old one. If it's the same or worse, geeks will simply go 'why bother?', or 'I have to /pay/ for something /less/ useful? get real!'
This is why Android tablets have taken off among the geeks: The new paradidgm is better than the old one(for some things).
With Linux, you're at least gaining a load of programming tools, free software(as in beer), and the gui interface isn't that much different from XP.
As far as office goes, it's a matter of the old version doing just as well with less resources on top of not needing to learn a new version. Why upgrade for no appreciable benefit?
If microsoft were smart, they'd do what autodesk did with autocad: Provide multiple configurable interfaces, including a /command line/. I mean, when I learned autocad in school, I found myself using the comand line at least as much as the gui, and I'm a guy who learned on Windows mainly.
'Course, I then found out how nice a command line everywhere could be when I switched to Linux; It's now a part of my every day routine. Having a nice command-box in Word/Excel would definitely be nice.
Getting back to the Ribbon, I don't see the benefit. I like the good old file, edit, view menues. It just seems more useful...
Heh. I've always used ambidextrous or /right handed/ mice with my left hand... in right-handed button mode(well, once I started using actual mice - I used TrackPoints before that most of the time). Adjusting to the left-handed deathadder was quite a bit of a retraining for me, but does seem to have increased my accuracy and such.
They've so far only made one mouse in a left-handed version, and that most likely as an experiment(Their founder being left handed might also have something to do with it...)
You can buy it here: http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/pd/productID.182251700 or on Amazon etc.
razerd on linux + qrazercfg. Works great now that I figured out how to compile it.
3500dpi on my Lefty DeathAdder's very nice.
As far as incandescent lightbulbs go, it's a bad thing in some places and fine in others. /more/ energy. /won't/ -- be producing any of our lights now, relying on someone else to do it for us. What happens if we stop being able to import new ones? Say the dollar goes down to the point at whch they can't be afforded?
In the middle of California, sure... Not only are you wasting a lot of energy, but that energy then has to be moved to the outside, wasting even
In the middle of Alaska, or even the northern states, however -- places that need heating and not cooling, incandescent lights are fine. The wasted energy is used to heat the building.
In addition, you have several problems with CFLs:
1. Made in China. We aren't -- and
Oh, and they're cheaply made and full of mercury too..
2. Climate-sensitive: CFLs hate high humidity, and extremely high and low temperatures. Which means they aren't good for outside lights if the temperature drops below freezing, or in ovens, refrigeraters etc. Same with bathrooms, honestly.
3. Slow start. Sure, for a living room light, it's fine. For a closet, however, not so much.
4. Low power factor. I haven't seen one CFL over 0.4 PF. Not a big deal for one or two, but it could easily distort the wave form when you have several millions lights going, which could cause other problems. Unless it gets filtered by the pole transformer, of course.
That all being said, I've been using flourescent lights for years, and were a relatively early adopter of CFLs. I just don't think they're appropriate everywhere, nor do I think the mandate was a good idea. Incentives might be a better idea.
Well, see, I agree with you... to some extent. Personally, I'm /really/ happy that Nvidia came out with their shutter glasses 3d system. Why? Because before that, you couldn't get a "hd" monitor(1680x1050 or greater) that did over 100hz. Heck, even 70hz is hard to find.
I seem to be one of few people who can tell the difference between 60hz and greater; Without motion blur, the difference is huge.
As such, I love my true120hz LCD monitor.
That being said, I'm not impressed by polarized 3d: Now, instead of adding /more/ data(double the effective framerate), you're splitting it between two eyes. That /can't/ be as good.
You've answered your own questiom there: Opening SQLite files from a nice cross-platform interface? Way useful! Aggregating social media? Why bother.
Oh, I'm sure some kid's made some extension to do just that, but it's not popular because it's not exactly useful. And possibly because all the social-media-addicted-idiots have already switched to Chrome.
See TheDailyWTF: http://www.thedailywtf.com/ /far/ more common than you want to admit. And these companies are /not/ going to upgrade, even if it's cheaper. They would probably just use an ancient bit of hardware instead... Or an insecure old version of Windows.
I think you'll find that it's
See, that's the thing. If you need it patched, you /can/ pay someone to do it. And sure, a high quality super programmer may cost loads, but there are plenty of people out there - teens and such mostly - who are willing to work fof one heck of a lot less. They might even do it for free if they needed it themselves. /linux/ legacy app, you might just be able to recompile it to run on the new OS. Probably won't be able to do that with Windows, even /with/ the source code, due to compiler incompatibilities.
And it's not like they'd be programming much of said patch themselves; Probably more like grabbing the patch from a later version, modifying it slightly, and backporting it.
This may cost more than a new Windows licence, but what do you do if your old 16-bit legacy application won't run on Vista or 7? It could cost one heck of a lot more to update a legacy application than to pay some kid to apply a patch for you...
Of course, with a
Mod parent up!
Not only this, but we see the same thing happen with special versions of Linux like Maemo: Long after Nokia basically abandoned the N900, quite a few bits have been backported to improve it's kernel. Not to mention all the fixes that one or more people have brought to the platform because it's predominitely open.
If it was running Windows XP, do you think that /anyone/ other than MS could improve it that way? I think not!
Long Live Linux!
Geany. It's not perfect, but it's free, and it has navigation-to-function also.
Yup; It's been supported in the nightlies/betas since a week or two after Google announced it was being added to Chrome. /used/ to be really annoying for high-motion videos, but I haven't noticed it since upgrading to the 6.0 nightlies.
It's slightly rough around the edges as of yet: It appears to be single-threaded and if you've got a bunch of javascript timers running code on a dozen+ tabs, it can stutter/drop frames sometimes. This
The other thing that would be nice is a OS-plugin option allowing the use of gnome-mplayer or VLC for playing HTML5 content; that way you could have hardware-accelerated video when you've got a native player, and a fallback when you don't.
You have to enable the HTML5 beta, silly!
http://www.youtube.com/html5
Works with my 6.0a1 nightly.