If GNOME is having trouble as a desktop environment, one obvious solution is to find new niches. Lopez and Sanchez suggested following KDE's lead and producing a tablet
These guys are complete idiots. GNOME isn't working as what it is, a desktop environment, so let's turn it into something completely different, only with the same name.
That's right, these advertising geniuses would similarly suggest one company drop out of the canned food business to produce "Chef Boyardee Automotive Parts."
If you're going to make something completely different, come up with a different name and a different project. Don't hideously warp something that already exists in order to steal the name recognition and produce something that is "Marketable."
What about the problem of dust getting inside while changing the screen? Few people have the clean-rooms necessary to get factory-quality results. Sure, it'll take five minutes to change the screen, but it'll take three more hours of repeatedly taking the bezel off, spraying it with a can of air, and putting it back on to remove the inevitable particles getting in.
Miguel's stated that, as a standard, OOXML is alright, but also shuddered at dealing with the way Microsoft abused binary segments in the format. The reason Novell et the GNOME foundation are so involved is for simple compatibility reasons. What better way to lure Windows users away than to provide support for the formats their existing documents are probably already in?
The method of arriving at 16.2 million colors is actually simple.
On a true 8-bit display, the value range for each component is from 0-255. Because the 6-bit display can only display 1/4 of those numbers (0-63), it must dither for the rest in the form of (0, 4, 8, 12, 16...). The interpolation method is usually capable of representing 3 values between each color, but because the numbers on the end (... 244, 248, 252) are missing the final value, 255, there is no final value to dither in. So those final 3 values (253, 254, 255) are missing. Thus, you only have 253 values for each dithered component (since we include 0). 253 * 253 * 253 = 16194277 ~= 16.2M.
The only reason you should fully discharge a battery is to calibrate the battery meter. Full discharges have a negative effect on battery life. http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm
Opteron Benchmarks, not Athlon 64
on
AMD64 Preview
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The benchmarks are from a 2ghz Opteron, not an Athlon 64. It is intended to give an example of the performance from the new chip. Unfortunately, upon introduction, only the Athlon FX, running on ECC memory will be capable of using dual-channel memory. And from what I've heard, this cpu will cost in the vicinity of $600+. The first non-ECC dual-channel platform will be introduced in 2004.
The thing has sucky games, doesn't emulate at full speed, and don't forget the ethical implications of downloading and using roms illegally. Not to mention that the screen won't have the correct aspect ratio to emulate half these systems without some method of scaling/bilinear interpolation to make it ugly/fuzzy. I saw this awhile ago and it obviously didn't impress me. I think the biggest turnoff is a lack of decent first-party games. I mean, look at what a lack of games did to the XBox. If you want an obscure handheld, try the defunct Wonderswan color.
Ah, let's not forget what "John Travolta" wrote Conan O'Brien about:
Dear Conan: Thank you for not mentioning 'Battlefield Earth' the last time I was on your show. The sooner people forget that I directed 'Battlefield Earth,' produced 'Battlefield Earth,' and starred in 'Battlefield Earth,' the better it will be for Battlefield Earth and me.
Battlefield Earthly, John "Battlefield Earth" Travolta
The problem with such an approach is that it would drastically increase latency between the memory and the processor. While theoretically you could transfer an enormous amount of data in a short amount of time, random access to data would be very slow. The actual bandwidth comes into effect when a large amount of data is being fed to the processor in a steady stream, but when you need only a small bit of data, it would travel at the actual bus speed across the pipe, in this case 200mhz for the Athlon and 133mhz for the Pentium 4. This is why the Pentium 4 excels using Rambus at 32ns while the Athlon prefers 8ns DDR.
Gee, I was hoping they'd do some screenshots using Doom Legacy instead of software Doom. But I guess the screenshots would kill their server then, so maybe it's not a good idea.
I just so happened to have ordered a Gameboy Advance SP from Lik-Sang after ncsx closed their pre-orders. Unfortunately, Nintendo's production is lagging and pre-orders haven't been fulfilled. In my opinion, Lik-Sang should have sent this Gameboy out with the rest of the pre-orders. I'm not against taking apart the thing to find out its workings and all, but I AM against the OTHER article they posted and then removed. In this one they destroyed one of the new gameboys by smashing it and lighting it on fire to appease the owners of past gameboys. Now, tell me whether or not that is being wasteful.
I'm pretty sure that Squaresoft wasn't acquired by Enix. Rather Square (not Squaresoft) merged with Enix. As I recall this was a long time ago and there was a large fight over stock prices. Square's stock only got about 60 some cents to Enix's dollar in the new company, making square stockholders quite angry. The dispute was settled about a month ago.
If the new release appears to cause problems, be sure to remove/move your profile directory. This is one of the things I always forget to do when installing a new release because most of the time it doesn't make a difference. Also, although the source tarballs aren't posted, I was able to steal one out of the Redhat SRPMS that appears to be authentic (using rpm2tgz/rpm2targz and there's another tarball inside). Now why couldn't they just post the tarball first?
I'm sorry to say that these people obviously haven't messed with the fonts stuff other than the top layer of complexity. I suggest if you are really interested in font antialiasing and configuration you look at Fontconfig and Xft2. Keith Packard has done an excellent job with these products along many other cool things within X (ie. Render Extension, RandR, the new XCursor system). Compiling everything with Fontconfig/Xft2 support is a little daunting at first, but when you're done it looks great.
I was looking forward to the faster internet connection when I came to college too. Unfortunately, when I got there I was severely disappointed to find out that the internet, not just a part of it, is subpar. I mean subpar compared to the dialup connection, whose bandwidth I thought I left behind a year ago. Clearly this is the result of the large amount of people overusing the bandwidth with things like P2P programs. There is a 200mb/day upload limit before you're switched to lower speeds, but from the number of people I've heard talking about running servers on this bandwidth, I think there's quite a few ways around it. My opinion is, when you're on a shared connection where bandwidth becomes an issue to others who just want to browse the web or check email (I seriously get 60% packet loss), then they should ban it. As for me, I'm actually looking forward to going home where I have 512k fixed wireless!
I wonder what Larry Wall thinks of this.
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft advertising all over the place. They even seem to have crept into the osdn advertisements on slashdot. I captured a screenshot here.
I believe, from most articles I've read, that the AMD Opteron is targetted solely at the server market, similar to Intel's Xeon series of processors. AMD is going to try to remain true to the Athlon name with all its upcoming desktop processors. Personally, I think they will go with "AMD Athlon 64" as the new desktop brand. What's really to wonder about is their model number versus clock speed system. Up until now, they've used a linear equation to relate them:
(1.5*CLOCK)-500=MODEL
or
((2*MODEL)+1000)/3=CLOCK
This is actually contrary to the popular belief that they compare the Athlon XP's model number to the Pentium 4s' or Thunderbirds' performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that the bumpers on the inside are more intelligently placed so that the screens don't touch and scratch the hell out of the top one.
If GNOME is having trouble as a desktop environment, one obvious solution is to find new niches. Lopez and Sanchez suggested following KDE's lead and producing a tablet
These guys are complete idiots. GNOME isn't working as what it is, a desktop environment, so let's turn it into something completely different, only with the same name.
That's right, these advertising geniuses would similarly suggest one company drop out of the canned food business to produce "Chef Boyardee Automotive Parts."
If you're going to make something completely different, come up with a different name and a different project. Don't hideously warp something that already exists in order to steal the name recognition and produce something that is "Marketable."
What about the problem of dust getting inside while changing the screen? Few people have the clean-rooms necessary to get factory-quality results. Sure, it'll take five minutes to change the screen, but it'll take three more hours of repeatedly taking the bezel off, spraying it with a can of air, and putting it back on to remove the inevitable particles getting in.
Why not change the "Red" component? Here's hoping they adopt the ambiguous Iron Cross as their new logo.
Miguel's stated that, as a standard, OOXML is alright, but also shuddered at dealing with the way Microsoft abused binary segments in the format. The reason Novell et the GNOME foundation are so involved is for simple compatibility reasons. What better way to lure Windows users away than to provide support for the formats their existing documents are probably already in?
The method of arriving at 16.2 million colors is actually simple.
...). The interpolation method is usually capable of representing 3 values between each color, but because the numbers on the end (... 244, 248, 252) are missing the final value, 255, there is no final value to dither in. So those final 3 values (253, 254, 255) are missing. Thus, you only have 253 values for each dithered component (since we include 0). 253 * 253 * 253 = 16194277 ~= 16.2M.
On a true 8-bit display, the value range for each component is from 0-255. Because the 6-bit display can only display 1/4 of those numbers (0-63), it must dither for the rest in the form of (0, 4, 8, 12, 16
It's really stupid. Just say 262144 colors.
The only reason you should fully discharge a battery is to calibrate the battery meter. Full discharges have a negative effect on battery life. http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm
Many people hate the new splash screen. No offense to him, but it's my opinion that the selector of the splash has particularly bad taste. There were several better ones.
The benchmarks are from a 2ghz Opteron, not an Athlon 64. It is intended to give an example of the performance from the new chip. Unfortunately, upon introduction, only the Athlon FX, running on ECC memory will be capable of using dual-channel memory. And from what I've heard, this cpu will cost in the vicinity of $600+. The first non-ECC dual-channel platform will be introduced in 2004.
The thing has sucky games, doesn't emulate at full speed, and don't forget the ethical implications of downloading and using roms illegally. Not to mention that the screen won't have the correct aspect ratio to emulate half these systems without some method of scaling/bilinear interpolation to make it ugly/fuzzy. I saw this awhile ago and it obviously didn't impress me. I think the biggest turnoff is a lack of decent first-party games. I mean, look at what a lack of games did to the XBox. If you want an obscure handheld, try the defunct Wonderswan color.
Ah, let's not forget what "John Travolta" wrote Conan O'Brien about:
Dear Conan:
Thank you for not mentioning 'Battlefield Earth' the last time I was on your show. The sooner people forget that I directed 'Battlefield Earth,' produced 'Battlefield Earth,' and starred in 'Battlefield Earth,' the better it will be for Battlefield Earth and me.
Battlefield Earthly,
John "Battlefield Earth" Travolta
The problem with such an approach is that it would drastically increase latency between the memory and the processor. While theoretically you could transfer an enormous amount of data in a short amount of time, random access to data would be very slow. The actual bandwidth comes into effect when a large amount of data is being fed to the processor in a steady stream, but when you need only a small bit of data, it would travel at the actual bus speed across the pipe, in this case 200mhz for the Athlon and 133mhz for the Pentium 4. This is why the Pentium 4 excels using Rambus at 32ns while the Athlon prefers 8ns DDR.
Gee, I was hoping they'd do some screenshots using Doom Legacy instead of software Doom. But I guess the screenshots would kill their server then, so maybe it's not a good idea.
I just so happened to have ordered a Gameboy Advance SP from Lik-Sang after ncsx closed their pre-orders. Unfortunately, Nintendo's production is lagging and pre-orders haven't been fulfilled. In my opinion, Lik-Sang should have sent this Gameboy out with the rest of the pre-orders. I'm not against taking apart the thing to find out its workings and all, but I AM against the OTHER article they posted and then removed. In this one they destroyed one of the new gameboys by smashing it and lighting it on fire to appease the owners of past gameboys. Now, tell me whether or not that is being wasteful.
I'm pretty sure that Squaresoft wasn't acquired by Enix. Rather Square (not Squaresoft) merged with Enix. As I recall this was a long time ago and there was a large fight over stock prices. Square's stock only got about 60 some cents to Enix's dollar in the new company, making square stockholders quite angry. The dispute was settled about a month ago.
If the new release appears to cause problems, be sure to remove/move your profile directory. This is one of the things I always forget to do when installing a new release because most of the time it doesn't make a difference. Also, although the source tarballs aren't posted, I was able to steal one out of the Redhat SRPMS that appears to be authentic (using rpm2tgz/rpm2targz and there's another tarball inside). Now why couldn't they just post the tarball first?
I'm sorry to say that these people obviously haven't messed with the fonts stuff other than the top layer of complexity. I suggest if you are really interested in font antialiasing and configuration you look at Fontconfig and Xft2. Keith Packard has done an excellent job with these products along many other cool things within X (ie. Render Extension, RandR, the new XCursor system). Compiling everything with Fontconfig/Xft2 support is a little daunting at first, but when you're done it looks great.
I was looking forward to the faster internet connection when I came to college too. Unfortunately, when I got there I was severely disappointed to find out that the internet, not just a part of it, is subpar. I mean subpar compared to the dialup connection, whose bandwidth I thought I left behind a year ago. Clearly this is the result of the large amount of people overusing the bandwidth with things like P2P programs. There is a 200mb/day upload limit before you're switched to lower speeds, but from the number of people I've heard talking about running servers on this bandwidth, I think there's quite a few ways around it. My opinion is, when you're on a shared connection where bandwidth becomes an issue to others who just want to browse the web or check email (I seriously get 60% packet loss), then they should ban it. As for me, I'm actually looking forward to going home where I have 512k fixed wireless!
Microsoft advertising all over the place. They even seem to have crept into the osdn advertisements on slashdot. I captured a screenshot here.
See if this is believable
I believe, from most articles I've read, that the AMD Opteron is targetted solely at the server market, similar to Intel's Xeon series of processors. AMD is going to try to remain true to the Athlon name with all its upcoming desktop processors. Personally, I think they will go with "AMD Athlon 64" as the new desktop brand. What's really to wonder about is their model number versus clock speed system. Up until now, they've used a linear equation to relate them:
(1.5*CLOCK)-500=MODEL
or
((2*MODEL)+1000)/3=CLOCK
This is actually contrary to the popular belief that they compare the Athlon XP's model number to the Pentium 4s' or Thunderbirds' performance.