I think that there is a high probility that at least one company will make linux drivers for their wireless card in the next year.
Already done. Ralink already offer Linux drivers for their 802.11 chipsets from their official website. The last time I looked, these used the nVidia/ATI-style 'closed binary blob plus glue code' approach for their drivers, but that doesn't seem to be the case any longer.
Europe and Canada have high tax burdens compared to the U.S. Think how much higher those tax burdens would be if those countries were spending 5%+ of their GDP on their militaries. That might not cause many of their compaies to fail, but it surely wouldn't help any of them succede!
On the contrary, it looks as though the going rate is about $30-60b for industrialised countries, including most-likely hypothetical symmetric opponents, regardless of GDP, size of territory or population.
I'd say more pertinent questions are 'Who does the US feel so threatened by that it feels the need to spend more than China, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia combined?' and 'Might it be that the US is just a little paranoid?'
One way to look at this is that the U.S. taxpayer is subsidising the socialist economies of the West by providing their defense. It's an open question whether those countries could maintain their social programs and provide for their own defense if we didn't keep them dry under our umbrella. The fact that they are right now having to cut back their social programs and taxes to save their economies suggests that they would be forced to choose between guns or butter if we left them on their own.
Maybe during the Cold War that point of view could be taken, but I don't think it's valid any longer.
So, we pay for the Canadians and the Europeans to have a fancy ``social safety net'', then they laugh at us because we don't have one, and insult us because we have a big military. Maybe we should let those sleazeballs on the Continent deal with the Balkans and the Middle East and Russia and China on their own dime, and just take care of ourselves for a while? I bet we'd be laughing a lot longer than they would....
As far as the Balkans go, yes, Europe probably should have taken a greater, and sooner interest. Given the history of that region, though, some reluctance is pe
Personally, I picked up an ex-corporate Sun Hurricane for about 100GBP which I run through a Linksys 4 port KVM. Bargain.
For TV, I'm not sure I agree. I don't really watch enough TV for eyestrain to be a problem, but the ex-Rental set I bought (branded 'Finlandia' and made in... Finland, surprise, surprise!) is fine.
I wasn't really advocating anyone actually buying one of those 28" sets from LIDL, but there's no denying that CRT-based TVs have come down massively in price, particularly if you're after a 4:3 rather than 16:9 widescreen set. It might even be worth doing a little pythagoras to see whether you can get a bigger physical picture - even with 16:9 material - on an equivalently-priced 4:3 set.
Just recently, in the UK, LIDL were selling a 28" CRT with NICAM stereo and 3 years warranty for 129GBP (so about US$250) - albeit a relatively unknown brand (probably built in Turkey by Beko or Lodos like most TVs available in Europe these days, though). I paid 110GBP for an ex-rental 20" set about 7 years ago.
The people who turn them down either have:
a) A problem with royalty (Benjamin Zephania or however you spell it turned it down for this reason).
Actually, Benjamin Zephaniah's reasons were a bit more complicated. The long and short of it is what the 'E' in the OBE stands for, and its history. More details in this article, from the man's own mouth.
Those people who work hard to deliver games should not be told to give it away for free just to comply with the ridiculous notion that "Linux" should always equal "open source" or "free" just because the operating system happens to be free. This is one attitude of the Linux/FOSS community that I simply despise.
I'm not sure 'everything for gratis' is a widespread viewpoint within the Linux or FOSS community. I'm pretty hardcore about having infrastructure as Free software, but games I could care less about. They're just a bit of fun, so seeing the code isn't such a big deal. Some publishers recognise that most of the value is tied up in the game content rather than the engine after 6 months or so, so it's nice when id opens the source for their older games so they can be maintained with respect to newer distributions, allowing them to continue running flawlessly many years later (unlike the pile of DOS games I have that only run under dosbox these days, due to their rather specific hardware requirements - ISA SB/GUS, VESA BIOS extensions, etc).
Despite not being much of a gamer, I've bought a lot of games for Linux (Quake 1 & 2, Simon the Sorceror, RTCW, Unreal Tournament, Uplink) - all of them had official or unofficial engine code in order to play them natively.
Re:From the article: Drivers need to support the g
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 1
Doesn't support of OpenGL imply support for that game? Or are game makers adding proprietary OpenGL extensions?
Sort of.
IANA Graphics Programmer, but as I understand it, all the production drivers implement the base GL spec, but some implement more or less of the various extensions to the base spec. nVidia in particular add a lot of extensions to their drivers, some of which are valuable to games programmers. If these a game is coded in such a way as to require these extensions, and the driver in use doesn't implement them (whether by banging on the hardware, or by providing a slow software emulation), you're SOL.
If you run glxinfo on machines with different video hardware and/or drivers, you should be able to see the difference in the extensions they provide. Here's the output from a machine with a Radeon 7500 using the standard Free drivers from kernel 2.6 and X.org 6.8.1:
My brother has a CoolPix 950 with a CCD element stuck red. They wanted a few hundred bucks to repair it
That's appalling. I've got an Olympus C-750UZ which, after a few months of use, I spotted had four greenish-white dead pixels clumped together. Olympus handled it as a regular warranty repair (though it did take something like 7 weeks...)
Our users are the admins of their machines. They can load whatever software they want...
That's the only way to run a network of computer-savvy users.
Sure, but on the other hand, I suspect this is probably at the root of why Microsoft can't really grok why their products are so hard to use in typical enterprises. Very few of the non-technical workers in most enterprises are competent at managing their machines, so tools to make this easy and effective to do centrally are a must. Microsoft are beginning to understand this, but they're still way behind UNIX (probably even VMS!) in this respect.
Eh, this is talking about their IT infrastructure. It would look pretty bad if it was based on unix servers and oracle databases.
Not only would it look, it would be bad for the future development of Microsoft's products; if they were inadequate for even internal use, how could they hope to compete on the open market? Not even Microsoft is that dumb.
I went for the C-750. The S602 was good, but bulky and, I felt, rather conspicuous for inner-city photography. The S7000 was also good, but was similarly bulky and cost more. The S5000 was also bulky, but cheaper, and with a zoom that matched the C-750, but had rather over-aggressive JPEG compression, forcing one to use RAW mode and post-process more extensively than might otherwise be the case. I'll confess to not examining the 6490 as closely as perhaps I should have, but I gather it is rather more limited in terms of manual controls and also uses a proprietary Li-Ion battery.
The C-750 was the right choice for me, for now. I might well be shopping around for a D- or film SLR in a couple of years, once I've improved my technique with the C-750. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I was going to buy a Thinkpad T42 but now I'll get an Apple Powerbook on it's next rev (January in all likelihood).
BTW Apple is #1 in Laptop customer satisfaction. I love Thinkpads (I have 2 right now) but I won't buy a Levono Thinkpad.
Powerbooks are fine kit and no mistake, but don't fool yourself that you're buying Apple hardware - they're all made by the same set of Taiwanese ODMs that make PC laptops - Compal and Quanta, for instance. My "Toshiba" laptop is actually designed and built by Compal, as are many Dell and Elonex models.
Oops. Just checked that with someone who is in the UK public sector, and it turns out I should probably have said 'EAL4 is the bare minimum...' (i.e. it's considered good enough to handle documents that are classified RESTRICTED).
EAL3 is considered good enough for medical records, though, apparently.
More likely, the NSA were only appearing to contribute to the Linux kernel, while they were actually introducing subtle and cleverly obfuscated bugs that will allow them to read Osama's email, and tell on him to his mother if he blows things up.
I know you meant that comment (mainly) in jest, but that accusation has been levelled at the NSA before, when DES was being developed. They made changes to the design of the S-boxes, which, at the time baffled NSA outsiders and left some people suspecting they were backdoors to allow the NSA to (more) easily decrypt messages. As it turns out, the modifications were countermeasures against differential cryptanalysis - a technique only known publically some 10-15 years after the design of DES was finalised. So sometimes they are the good guys.
Of course, I'm not sure such a difference between the spooks' capabilities and that of the public/academic sector still exists. Indeed, some have argued that it may have even gone the other way now...
Common Criteria approval for a given product means that it's easier or possible to deploy that product in a government environment where security is a concern.
EAL3 is just about the bare minimum the likes of the UK police will accept without good reasons (e.g. there's no EAL3-approved product in a given category, and having something is better than nothing).
For home, most people choose [...
2) something capable of web and email [...] For 2, everything works, but a PC is cheapest.
Depends whether you're costing the time necessary to fix silly hardware incompatibilities (that don't occur if you buy 100% Apple gear) or spyware/virus issues. This, of course, will be proportional to the skill of the user or their friends or children.;-)
Right now, for any non-technical user who just wants a computing appliance, doesn't have technical skills or help available, and is in the market for a new machine, I'd recommend a Mac.
And I'm a PC-using Linux type, and have been since 1995. Works for me, but maybe not for everyone.
Not many open source aficionados will realize the impact, but by making Solaris 10 free and capable of operating on any kind of hardware, Sun is making a coup in the server market.
Except Solaris x86 won't run on 'any kind of hardware' because their HCL is pitifully short. Heck, it didn't even support the S3 864 video card and SB16 on the 1995-era 486 I tried it on. I don't think it turned on IDE disc DMA either. In 1998. This was the same hardware I bought for Slackware 2.2.0 (and which it worked perfectly with from day one), dammit.
And if, as I expect, Sun don't GPL it (or GPL-compatible, at least), then I can't see many of the interesting drivers making it across as many of them will be easiest to port from the Linux kernel. The X server might get a few drivers, and some BSD kernel drivers might get ported, but IMHO, Linux's HCL is second only to Windows on x86 these days. Heck, if you run it on SPARC, you can even use devices that Solaris/SPARC doesn't support!
Solaris/SPARC has its place, but x86 has missed its opportunity. Sun should have open sourced it before 1999 or so if they wanted to beat Linux on commodity hardware. Or they should have pulled them collective finger out and wrote more and better drivers than us ragtag collection of volunteers - esepcially seeing as signing NDAs isn't a problem for Sun, but it is for us.
You were just saying to wait for a package from the distro maintainers. Now it's 'go fix it yourself' if you don't like it? That flippant attitude will be the first thing to turn people off of Linux.
I've always explained it like this: you can either download tarballs, do './configure;make;make install' and roll your own binaries and/or native packages (which is equivalent to being in Microsoft or some ISV's development team and having access to the latest development code), or you can exercise some patience and wait for someone to do all the hard work for you (equivalent to popping along to your local PC World, or Frys or whatever, and buying a boxed application). Don't confuse being able to use bleeding-edge unpackaged software with needing to.
Consistent with this, I only hype to newbies features and software that are available out-of-the-box from a standard distro.
It's not just memory and storage that shared libraries help conserve; it's also administrator (and sometimes developer) effort. If applications are statically linked against a library that is later found to have a security flaw, it can be a complete pain to audit systems and find all the applications that are so linked. This happened with zlib.
Wow, $200 is a quite astonishingly low budget for this project, nevertheless - good luck!
My alma mater had an 'Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles Lab', which consisted of M680x0 VME machines mounted to a motorized chassis with a bunch of sensors (collision, light, ultrasound, video). I'm pretty sure they were powered by rechargeable lead-acid cells when they were 'off the leash'. I dread to think how much all that must have cost back then. Probably a few grand per robot.:-/
I'd suggest going with a similar design, but using slightly less esoteric hardware - a soekris device, perhaps. Unfortunately, that'll probably blow most of your budget alone.:-(
I'd like to play PC games, and my timeframe I'd like to do is "before the next ice age".
Whereas I don't really care about any games that came out after 1999 or so (hence my Radeon 7500 still performs fine for me), but I/do/ care about being able to use the hardware I've paid for for as long as I want to (rather than as long as the hardware vendor doesn't want me to buy new kit) and I like having the fallback position of being able to self-support if there are problems. So I try and by documented hardware supported by Free drivers these days.
Ah, that's interesting. That's the first (hopefully) unbiased assessment of PV cell energy payback I've seen, and, to a non-specialist, looks fairly inclusive. It'll be interesting to see whether the estimates of energy usage to produce PV-grade silicon (rather than recycling already-crystalised microelectronics scrap) holds out, but there's some independent confirmation quoted, which is a good sign.
Well done, you've just made a short-term-PV-skeptic a bit more optimistic.;-)
Linux doesn't have binaries? AHHHHH***Kernel Panic trap 0x000
Pretty much everyone who runs linux runs 'canned' binaries.
Debian and all the RPM-based distros have source packages, so you can examine and read the exact code that you're running on your system. You can't do that (easily and/or inexpensively) with Windows, Irix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX,...
Slashdot Mirror
Already done. Ralink already offer Linux drivers for their 802.11 chipsets from their official website. The last time I looked, these used the nVidia/ATI-style 'closed binary blob plus glue code' approach for their drivers, but that doesn't seem to be the case any longer.
ASUS are even declaring official 'Linux support' on the boxes of their Ralink-based cards. I don't know how good the drivers are yet, let alone the hardware, but at a current retail price of 17GBP in the UK, I might give one a punt shortly.
% GDP/US$ spent on defence:
USA: 3.3%, $370.7b
China: 3.5-5.0%, $60b
Russia: 1.4%, $18b (2005)
France: 2.6%, $45b
Germany: 1.5%, $35b
North Korea: 22.9%, $5.2b
Cuba: 1.8%, $0.57b
Iran: 3.3%, $4.3b
Syria: 5.9%, $0.86b
Canada: 1.1%, $9.8b
Australia: 2.8%, $14.1b
Japan: 1%, $42.4b
UK: 2.4%, $42.8b
Israel: 8.7%, $9.1b
Europe and Canada have high tax burdens compared to the U.S. Think how much higher those tax burdens would be if those countries were spending 5%+ of their GDP on their militaries. That might not cause many of their compaies to fail, but it surely wouldn't help any of them succede!
On the contrary, it looks as though the going rate is about $30-60b for industrialised countries, including most-likely hypothetical symmetric opponents, regardless of GDP, size of territory or population.
I'd say more pertinent questions are 'Who does the US feel so threatened by that it feels the need to spend more than China, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia combined?' and 'Might it be that the US is just a little paranoid?'
One way to look at this is that the U.S. taxpayer is subsidising the socialist economies of the West by providing their defense. It's an open question whether those countries could maintain their social programs and provide for their own defense if we didn't keep them dry under our umbrella. The fact that they are right now having to cut back their social programs and taxes to save their economies suggests that they would be forced to choose between guns or butter if we left them on their own.
Maybe during the Cold War that point of view could be taken, but I don't think it's valid any longer.
So, we pay for the Canadians and the Europeans to have a fancy ``social safety net'', then they laugh at us because we don't have one, and insult us because we have a big military. Maybe we should let those sleazeballs on the Continent deal with the Balkans and the Middle East and Russia and China on their own dime, and just take care of ourselves for a while? I bet we'd be laughing a lot longer than they would ....
If you're worried about China, stop providing about one third of their defence budget purely through Wal-Mart!
As far as the Balkans go, yes, Europe probably should have taken a greater, and sooner interest. Given the history of that region, though, some reluctance is pe
Personally, I picked up an ex-corporate Sun Hurricane for about 100GBP which I run through a Linksys 4 port KVM. Bargain.
For TV, I'm not sure I agree. I don't really watch enough TV for eyestrain to be a problem, but the ex-Rental set I bought (branded 'Finlandia' and made in... Finland, surprise, surprise!) is fine.
I wasn't really advocating anyone actually buying one of those 28" sets from LIDL, but there's no denying that CRT-based TVs have come down massively in price, particularly if you're after a 4:3 rather than 16:9 widescreen set. It might even be worth doing a little pythagoras to see whether you can get a bigger physical picture - even with 16:9 material - on an equivalently-priced 4:3 set.
Just recently, in the UK, LIDL were selling a 28" CRT with NICAM stereo and 3 years warranty for 129GBP (so about US$250) - albeit a relatively unknown brand (probably built in Turkey by Beko or Lodos like most TVs available in Europe these days, though). I paid 110GBP for an ex-rental 20" set about 7 years ago.
This won't work. Muggers will nick anything these days
a) A problem with royalty (Benjamin Zephania or however you spell it turned it down for this reason).
Actually, Benjamin Zephaniah's reasons were a bit more complicated. The long and short of it is what the 'E' in the OBE stands for, and its history. More details in this article, from the man's own mouth.
I'm not sure 'everything for gratis' is a widespread viewpoint within the Linux or FOSS community. I'm pretty hardcore about having infrastructure as Free software, but games I could care less about. They're just a bit of fun, so seeing the code isn't such a big deal. Some publishers recognise that most of the value is tied up in the game content rather than the engine after 6 months or so, so it's nice when id opens the source for their older games so they can be maintained with respect to newer distributions, allowing them to continue running flawlessly many years later (unlike the pile of DOS games I have that only run under dosbox these days, due to their rather specific hardware requirements - ISA SB/GUS, VESA BIOS extensions, etc).
Despite not being much of a gamer, I've bought a lot of games for Linux (Quake 1 & 2, Simon the Sorceror, RTCW, Unreal Tournament, Uplink) - all of them had official or unofficial engine code in order to play them natively.
Sort of.
IANA Graphics Programmer, but as I understand it, all the production drivers implement the base GL spec, but some implement more or less of the various extensions to the base spec. nVidia in particular add a lot of extensions to their drivers, some of which are valuable to games programmers. If these a game is coded in such a way as to require these extensions, and the driver in use doesn't implement them (whether by banging on the hardware, or by providing a slow software emulation), you're SOL.
If you run glxinfo on machines with different video hardware and/or drivers, you should be able to see the difference in the extensions they provide. Here's the output from a machine with a Radeon 7500 using the standard Free drivers from kernel 2.6 and X.org 6.8.1:
That's appalling. I've got an Olympus C-750UZ which, after a few months of use, I spotted had four greenish-white dead pixels clumped together. Olympus handled it as a regular warranty repair (though it did take something like 7 weeks...)
That's the only way to run a network of computer-savvy users.
Sure, but on the other hand, I suspect this is probably at the root of why Microsoft can't really grok why their products are so hard to use in typical enterprises. Very few of the non-technical workers in most enterprises are competent at managing their machines, so tools to make this easy and effective to do centrally are a must. Microsoft are beginning to understand this, but they're still way behind UNIX (probably even VMS!) in this respect.
Not only would it look, it would be bad for the future development of Microsoft's products; if they were inadequate for even internal use, how could they hope to compete on the open market? Not even Microsoft is that dumb.
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Fuji S602Z
Fuji S7000
Fuji S5000
Olympus C-750UZ
Kodak 6490
I went for the C-750. The S602 was good, but bulky and, I felt, rather conspicuous for inner-city photography. The S7000 was also good, but was similarly bulky and cost more. The S5000 was also bulky, but cheaper, and with a zoom that matched the C-750, but had rather over-aggressive JPEG compression, forcing one to use RAW mode and post-process more extensively than might otherwise be the case. I'll confess to not examining the 6490 as closely as perhaps I should have, but I gather it is rather more limited in terms of manual controls and also uses a proprietary Li-Ion battery.
The C-750 was the right choice for me, for now. I might well be shopping around for a D- or film SLR in a couple of years, once I've improved my technique with the C-750. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
BTW Apple is #1 in Laptop customer satisfaction. I love Thinkpads (I have 2 right now) but I won't buy a Levono Thinkpad.
Powerbooks are fine kit and no mistake, but don't fool yourself that you're buying Apple hardware - they're all made by the same set of Taiwanese ODMs that make PC laptops - Compal and Quanta, for instance. My "Toshiba" laptop is actually designed and built by Compal, as are many Dell and Elonex models.
EAL3 is considered good enough for medical records, though, apparently.
--
I know you meant that comment (mainly) in jest, but that accusation has been levelled at the NSA before, when DES was being developed. They made changes to the design of the S-boxes, which, at the time baffled NSA outsiders and left some people suspecting they were backdoors to allow the NSA to (more) easily decrypt messages. As it turns out, the modifications were countermeasures against differential cryptanalysis - a technique only known publically some 10-15 years after the design of DES was finalised. So sometimes they are the good guys.
Of course, I'm not sure such a difference between the spooks' capabilities and that of the public/academic sector still exists. Indeed, some have argued that it may have even gone the other way now...
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EAL3 is just about the bare minimum the likes of the UK police will accept without good reasons (e.g. there's no EAL3-approved product in a given category, and having something is better than nothing).
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Honestly, sub-pixel anti-aliasing is the best thing for LCD-type displays (and Trinitrons, at a pinch).
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Depends whether you're costing the time necessary to fix silly hardware incompatibilities (that don't occur if you buy 100% Apple gear) or spyware/virus issues. This, of course, will be proportional to the skill of the user or their friends or children. ;-)
Right now, for any non-technical user who just wants a computing appliance, doesn't have technical skills or help available, and is in the market for a new machine, I'd recommend a Mac.
And I'm a PC-using Linux type, and have been since 1995. Works for me, but maybe not for everyone.
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Except Solaris x86 won't run on 'any kind of hardware' because their HCL is pitifully short. Heck, it didn't even support the S3 864 video card and SB16 on the 1995-era 486 I tried it on. I don't think it turned on IDE disc DMA either. In 1998. This was the same hardware I bought for Slackware 2.2.0 (and which it worked perfectly with from day one), dammit.
And if, as I expect, Sun don't GPL it (or GPL-compatible, at least), then I can't see many of the interesting drivers making it across as many of them will be easiest to port from the Linux kernel. The X server might get a few drivers, and some BSD kernel drivers might get ported, but IMHO, Linux's HCL is second only to Windows on x86 these days. Heck, if you run it on SPARC, you can even use devices that Solaris/SPARC doesn't support!
Solaris/SPARC has its place, but x86 has missed its opportunity. Sun should have open sourced it before 1999 or so if they wanted to beat Linux on commodity hardware. Or they should have pulled them collective finger out and wrote more and better drivers than us ragtag collection of volunteers - esepcially seeing as signing NDAs isn't a problem for Sun, but it is for us.
--
I've always explained it like this: you can either download tarballs, do './configure;make;make install' and roll your own binaries and/or native packages (which is equivalent to being in Microsoft or some ISV's development team and having access to the latest development code), or you can exercise some patience and wait for someone to do all the hard work for you (equivalent to popping along to your local PC World, or Frys or whatever, and buying a boxed application). Don't confuse being able to use bleeding-edge unpackaged software with needing to.
Consistent with this, I only hype to newbies features and software that are available out-of-the-box from a standard distro.
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My alma mater had an 'Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles Lab', which consisted of M680x0 VME machines mounted to a motorized chassis with a bunch of sensors (collision, light, ultrasound, video). I'm pretty sure they were powered by rechargeable lead-acid cells when they were 'off the leash'. I dread to think how much all that must have cost back then. Probably a few grand per robot. :-/
More details can be found in this introductory paper.
I'd suggest going with a similar design, but using slightly less esoteric hardware - a soekris device, perhaps. Unfortunately, that'll probably blow most of your budget alone. :-(
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Whereas I don't really care about any games that came out after 1999 or so (hence my Radeon 7500 still performs fine for me), but I /do/ care about being able to use the hardware I've paid for for as long as I want to (rather than as long as the hardware vendor doesn't want me to buy new kit) and I like having the fallback position of being able to self-support if there are problems. So I try and by documented hardware supported by Free drivers these days.
Horses for courses though.
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Well done, you've just made a short-term-PV-skeptic a bit more optimistic. ;-)
--
Pretty much everyone who runs linux runs 'canned' binaries.
Debian and all the RPM-based distros have source packages, so you can examine and read the exact code that you're running on your system. You can't do that (easily and/or inexpensively) with Windows, Irix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, ...
--