The OS that takes a gig of HD space and a hundred or two megs of RAM while still providing no true real-time responsibility does not a good gaming platform make.
Gaming does not need true real time capabilities. It's good enough to be very fast most of the time. You realize that true real time often implies slower average performance, right?
. Also - it is _much_ harder to program something like a game these days.
No, it's somewhat easier to get *substantial* results (as opposed to simple 2d worlds) because of the availability of game engines. Also, you could go the modding route.
Wait a second, does this mean we like Sun again? I'm confused.
No, as stated elsewhere releasing the patents doesn't apply to Linux at all. So essentially their patent grants are worthless.
I was just about to "forgive" Sun (regarding their SCO shenanigans). Not that Sun would care about me or my forgivings, but the idea was to essentially polish their image in the eyes of the community...
I don't know how "Open Source" this really is in the end, because it's covered by patents and they essentially prevent the use outside OpenSolaris. So relicensing *BSD under the CDDL (which you are allowed to do) and integrating some Solaris code makes you liable to be sued. Suck.
For most of us non-competitive typer types, i.e., probably all but maybe one person reading this post, speed isn't a reason to move to Dvorak. But comfort is. This is so much nicer; the gain-per-minute is small, but I still plan to put a lot more minutes in front of a keyboard.
This can't be overemphasized. For those of us who spend 8 hours a day working w/ computer Dvorak is an excellent choice. We can't afford to fsck up our hands because they pay the bills, and we are going to be typing a lot through our careers.
QWERTY users, do you think you will be grateful you didn't lose the productivity for a week 10 years from now when your hands are fscked from all the suboptimal typing? Some investments don't pay off immediately, but the price of not investing may be surprisingly high.
I suspect 90% of the gain for people who notice a gain is that switching layouts forces them to train to a degree they hadn't recently (or perhaps ever) done and to pay more attention to their typing and hand position.
I suspect that the fact that hands move a lot more with QWERTY has some effect. The required hand motions can be calculated from the layout of keys.
magine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V
You don't stretch yor hands to do it - you just use two hands. Left hand presses caps lock (which any sensible user has remapped to ctrl) and right hand presses C and V. That's the ergonomic way to do it. Chording will kill your hands.
-as a dvorak user, I must contend that the greatest advantage is that my fingers don't hurt after 30 minutes of solid typing.
I heartily agree! There is much less physical labour in the typing now. With QWERTY I feel like I'm moving my hands all over the keyboard, while w/ Dvorak esp. the english text comes out smooth as silk. Any reduction in the physical movement while typing is a big plus for ergonomics.
I got comfortable w/ the layout in about a week, even if I didn't reach my Qwerty speed that fast. I still make a bit more errors in Dvorak, possibly because I type much faster and in a more "relaxed" fashion.
And remember, the only HW mod you need to do is to re-arrange the keys, which should be easily detachable from the keyboard.
Yeah, I run OO under X11 on OS X - but it is as ugly as it is on Linux. Which is pretty damned ugly and slow.
Sounds like sour grapes to me. And then they wonder why the opes source community doesn't care about mac users...
Re:How lightweight, if it requires gtk+?
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Blackbox is another personal favorite - it's about as lightweight as you can get.
No, ION is as light as you can get (or ratpoison, but let's be realistic and err on the side of usability). Windows ary typically full screen, without borders. Everything is basically in "workspaces", b/w which you switch by alt-1, alt-2 etc. Works like a charm on that server if you still want to use a browser or GUI apps every now and then.
With this and True Combat: Elite (very playable even if still at testing stage), it appears that ET is the "sweet" platform to write mods to. The mod automatically gets the largest posible audience, including people who don't want to pay to play the mod and people who run Linux.
Not that ET itself is outdated, of course; it's still as addictive and as ass-kickin' as ever.
Of course that's irrelevant because P2P is IO-bound, but that's not the point.;)
But that's exactly the point. Kids who don't know anything about programming thinking that changing the language is going to make their network throughput faster, not realizing that the interpreter overhead is dwarfed by the time spent blocking ahd context-switching.
Not to mention that a select() loop based Python approach probably beats a threaded C++ solution in performance anyway.
He is author of several Free Software projects, most recently the peer-to-peer RPC system Kenosis, and co-author of several books, including The Black Art of Java Game Programming and Mastering Java.
It's fun to see how book-writing hackers act. Sell Java books to the Unwashed Masses, develop own projects in Python. BTW, interestingly enough, one could almost guess from reading the first few paragraphs that the implementation is going to be in Python.
Now we are just waiting for a platform-dependent implementation in C++ and MFC that is supposed to be faster because it's "native code", which all the clueless kids with 8mbit internet connections are going to download...
So, while fleeing might be nice (Ubuntu rocks) it won't bring a better installer.
True, but it provides a refreshing escape from "all archs are important" attitude of Debian. If a distro consider a HP-PA or SPARC port a priority (to the extent of delaying the release), it's not really serving 99% of its users optimally.
Enemy Territory runs quite well on my Linux system
Yes, it runs great, with nvidia drivers as well. It's also free-as-in-beer, so basically you don't have to buy anything. With all the mods including the now-in-testing True Combat: Elite, it may very well be the only game you'll ever need if you don't play too much:-).
Seriously, you can download it for free so there's nothing to lose. And you'll have one less reason to ever boot into windows again.
Wouldn't it be trivial to add package support to RPM, then? A package could easily say that instead of this file, the package requires this package, this version? The coding/design feat doesn't sound like rocket science.
Are you asking for Debian to switch to RPM because it's better or because more people compile software in RPM formats?
No, I would like to see a simplification of the skillset needed to operate a Linux system. Especially if the other alternative is not "better", only "different".
Obviously we are talkin about Debian here, where politics are everything and egos are on the line, so I'm not exactly holding my breath...
Not to mention the awful "media" replacement for mnt...
So it's/media/cdrom instead of/mnt/cdrom? What's the big deal?
no firewall
People should generally prefer the hardware firewall in their DSL modems/whatever, assuming that they have a box with NAT or actual firewall.
no firefox 1.0 last I looked
Yep, but installing the FF1.0 from the official package at mozilla.org works like a charm, and doesn't overwrite the old 0.9.3 or whatever it was.
and a host of other annoyances
Main annoyances are lack of supported KDE and an audio CD burning program (which Nautilus doesn't do). I'm expecting both to be corrected in Hoary.
but it is far from being on par with something like fedora/suse/mandrake when it comes to a desktop.
That's not my experience. I far prefer Ubuntu to any of those you mention, having tried all of them. I love the fact that I can apt-get most of the stuff that is available in debian Sid, yet my system doesn't break every other weekend. Fedora will probably rock too when they finally get their crap together regarding community participation etc.
I hear that a lot, and occasionally someone who knows the differences between rpm and dpkg comes out and says what the differences are. I forget what they are, but I don't believe they are anything that a regular user might care about. rpm and dpkg are basically equivalent.
Has anyone noticed that the RPM distributions are starting to use the apt-get approach?
Of course, is there something in dpkg that makes it more suitable for apt/yum like functionality than rpm? Fedora supports both apt and yum frontends for rpm.
In fact I'm using both Debian and Ubuntu myself and kinda hope that they switched over to rpm. rpm is a standard as specified in LSB, and existence of two popular, basically equivalent tools w/ different interfaces (command line switches) and file formats seems like a waste of effort to me.
They finally got the 3.0r4 out! The international media is ecstatic at this staggering development, and the geeks worldwide are wearing t-shirts saying "3.0r4 is out - and YOU thought Woody was dead".
I don't know, at this day and age releasing a new version of Woody sounds like a bad joke, kinda like 2.2.564 kernels. I bet that the next version of Ubuntu will be out before Sarge hits stable.
At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
That's what the Finnish police themselves say. What's interesting is that MPAA has been attempting to take the "credit" for the raid. Sure, everyone knows they are lying bastards, but one would expect them to pick lies that are not so easy to check...
On Finland-Sweden, and funny legal threats
on
Examining Bittorrent
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Isn't it Sweden?
Yes.
Also, everyone should take a look at their hilarious responses to the letters from lawyers here.
It's therapeutic to see the slimeball lawyers really getting what is coming to them. These guys have really got a daring attitude:-).
Slashdot Mirror
The OS that takes a gig of HD space and a hundred or two megs of RAM while still providing no true real-time responsibility does not a good gaming platform make.
Gaming does not need true real time capabilities. It's good enough to be very fast most of the time. You realize that true real time often implies slower average performance, right?
. Also - it is _much_ harder to program something like a game these days.
No, it's somewhat easier to get *substantial* results (as opposed to simple 2d worlds) because of the availability of game engines. Also, you could go the modding route.
I find that in my experience, most MS Word users have no clue what different file formats are, why they'd care to change,
People who install software for them might have a clue. That's where it matters.
Wait a second, does this mean we like Sun again? I'm confused.
No, as stated elsewhere releasing the patents doesn't apply to Linux at all. So essentially their patent grants are worthless.
I was just about to "forgive" Sun (regarding their SCO shenanigans). Not that Sun would care about me or my forgivings, but the idea was to essentially polish their image in the eyes of the community...
I don't know how "Open Source" this really is in the end, because it's covered by patents and they essentially prevent the use outside OpenSolaris. So relicensing *BSD under the CDDL (which you are allowed to do) and integrating some Solaris code makes you liable to be sued. Suck.
For most of us non-competitive typer types, i.e., probably all but maybe one person reading this post, speed isn't a reason to move to Dvorak. But comfort is. This is so much nicer; the gain-per-minute is small, but I still plan to put a lot more minutes in front of a keyboard.
This can't be overemphasized. For those of us who spend 8 hours a day working w/ computer Dvorak is an excellent choice. We can't afford to fsck up our hands because they pay the bills, and we are going to be typing a lot through our careers.
QWERTY users, do you think you will be grateful you didn't lose the productivity for a week 10 years from now when your hands are fscked from all the suboptimal typing? Some investments don't pay off immediately, but the price of not investing may be surprisingly high.
I suspect 90% of the gain for people who notice a gain is that switching layouts forces them to train to a degree they hadn't recently (or perhaps ever) done and to pay more attention to their typing and hand position.
I suspect that the fact that hands move a lot more with QWERTY has some effect. The required hand motions can be calculated from the layout of keys.
magine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V
You don't stretch yor hands to do it - you just use two hands. Left hand presses caps lock (which any sensible user has remapped to ctrl) and right hand presses C and V. That's the ergonomic way to do it. Chording will kill your hands.
-as a dvorak user, I must contend that the greatest advantage is that my fingers don't hurt after 30 minutes of solid typing.
I heartily agree! There is much less physical labour in the typing now. With QWERTY I feel like I'm moving my hands all over the keyboard, while w/ Dvorak esp. the english text comes out smooth as silk. Any reduction in the physical movement while typing is a big plus for ergonomics.
I got comfortable w/ the layout in about a week, even if I didn't reach my Qwerty speed that fast. I still make a bit more errors in Dvorak, possibly because I type much faster and in a more "relaxed" fashion.
And remember, the only HW mod you need to do is to re-arrange the keys, which should be easily detachable from the keyboard.
Yeah, I run OO under X11 on OS X - but it is as ugly as it is on Linux. Which is pretty damned ugly and slow.
Sounds like sour grapes to me. And then they wonder why the opes source community doesn't care about mac users...
Blackbox is another personal favorite - it's about as lightweight as you can get.
No, ION is as light as you can get (or ratpoison, but let's be realistic and err on the side of usability). Windows ary typically full screen, without borders. Everything is basically in "workspaces", b/w which you switch by alt-1, alt-2 etc. Works like a charm on that server if you still want to use a browser or GUI apps every now and then.
With this and True Combat: Elite (very playable even if still at testing stage), it appears that ET is the "sweet" platform to write mods to. The mod automatically gets the largest posible audience, including people who don't want to pay to play the mod and people who run Linux.
Not that ET itself is outdated, of course; it's still as addictive and as ass-kickin' as ever.
Of course that's irrelevant because P2P is IO-bound, but that's not the point. ;)
But that's exactly the point. Kids who don't know anything about programming thinking that changing the language is going to make their network throughput faster, not realizing that the interpreter overhead is dwarfed by the time spent blocking ahd context-switching.
Not to mention that a select() loop based Python approach probably beats a threaded C++ solution in performance anyway.
And welcome to KBTR (formerly K/.), all Bit-Torrent stories, all the time.
There are enough non-bittorrent articles to fill your workday, so move along, nothing to see here.
Bittorrent and p2p arp the hot topics of today (given all the police raids). New projects are certainly worth discussing.
From TFA:
Kenosis is built in 100% pure Python
[snip]
He is author of several Free Software projects, most recently the peer-to-peer RPC system Kenosis, and co-author of several books, including The Black Art of Java Game Programming and Mastering Java.
It's fun to see how book-writing hackers act. Sell Java books to the Unwashed Masses, develop own projects in Python. BTW, interestingly enough, one could almost guess from reading the first few paragraphs that the implementation is going to be in Python.
Now we are just waiting for a platform-dependent implementation in C++ and MFC that is supposed to be faster because it's "native code", which all the clueless kids with 8mbit internet connections are going to download...
So, while fleeing might be nice (Ubuntu rocks) it won't bring a better installer.
True, but it provides a refreshing escape from "all archs are important" attitude of Debian. If a distro consider a HP-PA or SPARC port a priority (to the extent of delaying the release), it's not really serving 99% of its users optimally.
Enemy Territory runs quite well on my Linux system
:-).
Yes, it runs great, with nvidia drivers as well. It's also free-as-in-beer, so basically you don't have to buy anything. With all the mods including the now-in-testing True Combat: Elite, it may very well be the only game you'll ever need if you don't play too much
Seriously, you can download it for free so there's nothing to lose. And you'll have one less reason to ever boot into windows again.
Wouldn't it be trivial to add package support to RPM, then? A package could easily say that instead of this file, the package requires this package, this version? The coding/design feat doesn't sound like rocket science.
Or are there still other technical reasons?
Are you asking for Debian to switch to RPM because it's better or because more people compile software in RPM formats?
No, I would like to see a simplification of the skillset needed to operate a Linux system. Especially if the other alternative is not "better", only "different".
Obviously we are talkin about Debian here, where politics are everything and egos are on the line, so I'm not exactly holding my breath...
Not to mention the awful "media" replacement for mnt...
/media/cdrom instead of /mnt/cdrom? What's the big deal?
So it's
no firewall
People should generally prefer the hardware firewall in their DSL modems/whatever, assuming that they have a box with NAT or actual firewall.
no firefox 1.0 last I looked
Yep, but installing the FF1.0 from the official package at mozilla.org works like a charm, and doesn't overwrite the old 0.9.3 or whatever it was.
and a host of other annoyances
Main annoyances are lack of supported KDE and an audio CD burning program (which Nautilus doesn't do). I'm expecting both to be corrected in Hoary.
but it is far from being on par with something like fedora/suse/mandrake when it comes to a desktop.
That's not my experience. I far prefer Ubuntu to any of those you mention, having tried all of them. I love the fact that I can apt-get most of the stuff that is available in debian Sid, yet my system doesn't break every other weekend. Fedora will probably rock too when they finally get their crap together regarding community participation etc.
RPM is a package that sucks balls too.
I hear that a lot, and occasionally someone who knows the differences between rpm and dpkg comes out and says what the differences are. I forget what they are, but I don't believe they are anything that a regular user might care about. rpm and dpkg are basically equivalent.
Has anyone noticed that the RPM distributions are starting to use the apt-get approach?
Of course, is there something in dpkg that makes it more suitable for apt/yum like functionality than rpm? Fedora supports both apt and yum frontends for rpm.
In fact I'm using both Debian and Ubuntu myself and kinda hope that they switched over to rpm. rpm is a standard as specified in LSB, and existence of two popular, basically equivalent tools w/ different interfaces (command line switches) and file formats seems like a waste of effort to me.
They finally got the 3.0r4 out! The international media is ecstatic at this staggering development, and the geeks worldwide are wearing t-shirts saying "3.0r4 is out - and YOU thought Woody was dead".
I don't know, at this day and age releasing a new version of Woody sounds like a bad joke, kinda like 2.2.564 kernels. I bet that the next version of Ubuntu will be out before Sarge hits stable.
But anyway, I'm one of the developers in this project, so if you have any questions or comments then post away and I'll try to answer.
What's the probability of getting a version based on Python 2.4? Genexps might be very handy in a memory-starved phone environment...
...
The Anti-1337 Manifesto [umanwizard.com]
;-).
Yeah, dvorak absolutely pwns
...is it good for distributing binary content that might be in violation of copyright laws of some countries?
At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
That's what the Finnish police themselves say. What's interesting is that MPAA has been attempting to take the "credit" for the raid. Sure, everyone knows they are lying bastards, but one would expect them to pick lies that are not so easy to check...
Isn't it Sweden?
:-).
Yes.
Also, everyone should take a look at their hilarious responses to the letters from lawyers
here.
It's therapeutic to see the slimeball lawyers really getting what is coming to them. These guys have really got a daring attitude