I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 with FF 3 and still noticed one day that FF consumed > 500MB RAM (out of 1GB), when I left it open for a couple of days over the weekend when I was away and the machine came to a crawl. I had to ssh into the machine and kill FF to regain control of my desktop. So I'm still not sure if FF 3 has fixed all the memory leak problems.
Fixed cost: $150 + $260 = $410 I'm assuming here that I'll be using all the free software. Variable cost (not considering the countless hours of joy you'll have converting) = $14/movie On average a new Blu-ray DVD movie is available for ~ $27. So to break even you'll need convert ~32 HD DVD movies to Blu-ray.
This calculation is completely ignoring the cost of the HD DVD movies, which any way worthless now.
Arguably you'll still have some use for the Blu-ray drive in future, but your "investment" in HD DVD drive will have diminishing returns after the conversion project is over.
I have about 20 HD DVD movies, so I'm going to just wait till Blu-ray player and disc prices come down, and then think of building my movie collection again.
The largest private company in India (Reliance) has soft-launched WiMax for consumers in some parts of Bangalore... and a quick search on Google reveals users are not very happy. SIFY, Aircel and VSNL already offer WiMax for corporate customers in some parts of the country.. More here
Hey remember a recent case of a computer illiterate mom facing a lawsuit by music industry because she was clueless about firewalls and security of her computer? Remember, just like cars, now being clueless about your computer can land you in jail
I don't think both Intel and AMD are stupid enough to not 'allow' to run any other OS running on their CPUs... It's simple enough, the more people use their CPUs the more money they make... It will be upto the OS to use or leave alone those features... Also, these companies will start focusing on markets where they see highest growth in future, that would be Asia. Asian countries are already adopting open source OSes for various reasons, so if Intel & AMD want to sell more and more processors in these countries they will have to leave the option of using or not using the DRM featues to the OSes..
I am a Video/Audio/Photography enthusiast. I make lot of digital video home movies, and then edit them. I used to use a P3 667 earlier and the video editing program used to take 45 minutes to render a 15 minute clip. Now with my P4 2.4(Northwood) it takes less than 15 minutes to render a 15 minute clip. Of course I also have 2 huge hard disks and a CD-RW to burn my MPEG files. One 5 minute clip at DVD resolution takes approx 1 GB of disk space (in AVI format, because that's the native format of my video editor). I am not claiming that the performance improvement over the older P3 machine is all due to a faster processor. Every thing has become faster. I'm using RDRAM instead of DDR, using ATA100 disks instead of older UDMA disks, and a 24X CD-RW in place of a 4x one.
I also scan and retouch lots of photos I take. Because I want to have the best quality, I scan my negatives at 2400dpi resolution and then retouch those photos. Since the images are huge, a faster processor with RDRAM helps a lot.
People who ask questions like "What a poor illiterate farmer is going to do with it?" just don't get it. Unbalanced growth has costed india a lot already. India is the largest producer of food grain and milk in the world now. But because of poor infrastructure they can not be transported to all parts of the country in fast and cheap way. The roads in India are horrible. If India had in improving infrastructure too, then all the money and effort spent in increasing food-grain and milk production through the 'Green Revolution' project would have been more useful. India is trying to achieve 100% literacy rate by end of this decade. If cheap and easy access to information which Simputer would provide is not available by then then the literacy campaign too would be less effective. When you have 10 problems to sove with varying degree of importance and urgency, you don't make policy to solve the most urgent problem first, then next urgent etc. Ofcourse one should put more effort in solving the most urgent problem.
Electronic Voting Booth
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
It is surprising that US doesn't use Electronic Voting on wide scale. Given the abundance of resources and general tech savvy people in that country, one would expect this.
Even India is experimenting with Electronic Voting Booths. In the last general election in 98 there were some places where they implemented that successfully.
The moment polling time is over the election officer presses a button and you have the result. No ballots, no counting and no recounting.
The voting is simple too. The voter just goes to the polling station verifies his/her ID and then proceeds to voting booth and presses a button for his candidate. no holes to punch, no arrows to follow.
I have little over 5 years of coding experience.
I have worked in both kind of companies.
Company 1-
Providing software for a small speciality market
# of developers 15
Every project is required 'yesterday'
Project Manager will laugh at you if you talk about
coding standards, methodology, algorithms, documentation.... 'These thing don't matter much It's just a waste of time. finally what product you deliver should work... that's it' was the philosopy
Company 2-
A huge consulting company with many offices and a big list of multi-national clients.
# of developers in thousands
This company was ISO-9000-2 certified. So everything you studied in the software engineering book was relitiously observed. "Do what you document and document what you do!" was the punch line.
The projects would span years and would go through all the software development life cycle stages you can find in a software engineering book.
The final products would be of good quality in general.
But the amount of documentation/test plans/reports and in general lot of work I always felt was time consuming. It was just too much.. sometimes I felt the Company 1 model with a little better practices would suffice to genrate same quality of code than the company 2 practices.
One very important thing to remember is all the modern computer languages can be expressed with rules using BNF(Backus Normal Form). These computer languages are called Context Free languages. None of the known spoken languages are can fit into the definition of a structured language except Sanskrit.
Panini was a Sanskrit Grammarian from India in 6th century BC. Panini's grammar provides 4,000 rules that describe the Sanskrit of his day completely. This grammar is acknowledged to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all times. What is remarkable is that Panini set out to describe the entire grammar in terms of a finite number of rules. Frits Staal
has shown that the grammar of Panini represents a universal grammatical and computing system. From this perspective it anticipates the logical framework of modern computers.
Read more about PaniniPanini Grammer
My Experience as a Linux newbie and what I desired most as a Linux Newbie...
Though linux was new to me UNIX wasn't. So didn't have to understand how linux system works in general. I didn't have many of those questions that are faced by my other friends who started to use or experiment with linux and had no prior *NIX experience.
I didn't know how to configure my sound card, how to use TrueType fonts, how to use jdk1.1.7 with StarOffice, How to configure my network card which the RedHat install program failed to detect, how to use my CD-RW drive with linux machine. It took me some time to solve the mystery of winmodems.
Almost always I could find answers to my questions on either HOWTO, Deja, LinuxStart, tunelinux or irc.linux.com #linuxhelp. Because my problems were trivial people on linux related IRC channles didn't show any interest in solving my problems. They most of the times just used to ignore me, or tell me to RTFM... but my problem was I even didn't know which program I'm supposed to use to solve the problem so how would I know which man page to read? May be the questions I was asking were silly, but I even didn't know that they were silly.
But I could always solve the problems with one of the popular Linux website's help. I was willing to take efforts and knew where to look. I wonder how many new Linux users do that. Particularly if s/he was a windows user in past. Linux HOWTOs are a great help. Websites like justlinux.com, tunelinux.com, Deja, linuxstart.com do a good job.
Sometimes I was overwhelmed by the amount of information available about a subject. It took time to filter through all that information and get the answer.
It is best for a newbie to get in touch with some local Linux guru and learn from him/her. Every linux enthusiast can contribute some of his time to local Linux user group and help new linux users learn more.
I set my user preferences to see only comments>=score 2. It works well if I see an article from the main page, however, if I see an article in "ask slashdot" it doen't seem to work. I still see all the comments >= score 0. Is that what is intended?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 with FF 3 and still noticed one day that FF consumed > 500MB RAM (out of 1GB), when I left it open for a couple of days over the weekend when I was away and the machine came to a crawl. I had to ssh into the machine and kill FF to regain control of my desktop. So I'm still not sure if FF 3 has fixed all the memory leak problems.
Fixed cost: $150 + $260 = $410
I'm assuming here that I'll be using all the free software.
Variable cost (not considering the countless hours of joy you'll have converting) = $14/movie
On average a new Blu-ray DVD movie is available for ~ $27. So to break even you'll need convert ~32 HD DVD movies to Blu-ray.
This calculation is completely ignoring the cost of the HD DVD movies, which any way worthless now.
Arguably you'll still have some use for the Blu-ray drive in future, but your "investment" in HD DVD drive will have diminishing returns after the conversion project is over.
I have about 20 HD DVD movies, so I'm going to just wait till Blu-ray player and disc prices come down, and then think of building my movie collection again.
Sigh...
The largest private company in India (Reliance) has soft-launched WiMax for consumers in some parts of Bangalore... and a quick search on Google reveals users are not very happy. SIFY, Aircel and VSNL already offer WiMax for corporate customers in some parts of the country..
More here
This is still old news. There are no new details in this article that were not already present in the one Slashdot reported on Sunday (the CNN Money article, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_arc hive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm?section=money_ latest)
Hey remember a recent case of a computer illiterate mom facing a lawsuit by music industry because she was clueless about firewalls and security of her computer? Remember, just like cars, now being clueless about your computer can land you in jail
I don't think both Intel and AMD are stupid enough to not 'allow' to run any other OS running on their CPUs...
It's simple enough, the more people use their CPUs the more money they make... It will be upto the OS to use or leave alone those features...
Also, these companies will start focusing on markets where they see highest growth in future, that would be Asia. Asian countries are already adopting open source OSes for various reasons, so if Intel & AMD want to sell more and more processors in these countries they will have to leave the option of using or not using the DRM featues to the OSes..
I am a Video/Audio/Photography enthusiast. I make lot of digital video home movies, and then edit them. I used to use a P3 667 earlier and the video editing program used to take 45 minutes to render a 15 minute clip. Now with my P4 2.4(Northwood) it takes less than 15 minutes to render a 15 minute clip. Of course I also have 2 huge hard disks and a CD-RW to burn my MPEG files. One 5 minute clip at DVD resolution takes approx 1 GB of disk space (in AVI format, because that's the native format of my video editor).
I am not claiming that the performance improvement over the older P3 machine is all due to a faster processor. Every thing has become faster. I'm using RDRAM instead of DDR, using ATA100 disks instead of older UDMA disks, and a 24X CD-RW in place of a 4x one.
I also scan and retouch lots of photos I take. Because I want to have the best quality, I scan my negatives at 2400dpi resolution and then retouch those photos. Since the images are huge, a faster processor with RDRAM helps a lot.
Mandrake!!! Windows XP Home Edition???
Since when did Mandrake start shipping Windows XP?
Looks like there is some limit on how many people can visit it per day. Does somebody have a cached copy? or alternate location?
People who ask questions like "What a poor illiterate farmer is going to do with it?" just don't get it. Unbalanced growth has costed india a lot already. India is the largest producer of food grain and milk in the world now. But because of poor infrastructure they can not be transported to all parts of the country in fast and cheap way. The roads in India are horrible. If India had in improving infrastructure too, then all the money and effort spent in increasing food-grain and milk production through the 'Green Revolution' project would have been more useful. India is trying to achieve 100% literacy rate by end of this decade. If cheap and easy access to information which Simputer would provide is not available by then then the literacy campaign too would be less effective. When you have 10 problems to sove with varying degree of importance and urgency, you don't make policy to solve the most urgent problem first, then next urgent etc. Ofcourse one should put more effort in solving the most urgent problem.
See the latest news:
There was some problem and the launch didn't take place:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/mar/28gslv1.htm
http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/mar/28gslv2.htm
It is surprising that US doesn't use Electronic Voting on wide scale. Given the abundance of resources and general tech savvy people in that country, one would expect this.
Even India is experimenting with Electronic Voting Booths. In the last general election in 98 there were some places where they implemented that successfully.
The moment polling time is over the election officer presses a button and you have the result. No ballots, no counting and no recounting.
The voting is simple too. The voter just goes to the polling station verifies his/her ID and then proceeds to voting booth and presses a button for his candidate. no holes to punch, no arrows to follow.
why can't US do that?
And here is the Intel's press release
Lucky you!!
For the price you bought your coaster, I could buy a cool coffee table!
I have little over 5 years of coding experience.
I have worked in both kind of companies.
Company 1-
Providing software for a small speciality market
# of developers 15
Every project is required 'yesterday'
Project Manager will laugh at you if you talk about
coding standards, methodology, algorithms, documentation.... 'These thing don't matter much It's just a waste of time. finally what product you deliver should work... that's it' was the philosopy
Company 2-
A huge consulting company with many offices and a big list of multi-national clients.
# of developers in thousands
This company was ISO-9000-2 certified. So everything you studied in the software engineering book was relitiously observed. "Do what you document and document what you do!" was the punch line.
The projects would span years and would go through all the software development life cycle stages you can find in a software engineering book.
The final products would be of good quality in general.
But the amount of documentation/test plans/reports and in general lot of work I always felt was time consuming. It was just too much.. sometimes I felt the Company 1 model with a little better practices would suffice to genrate same quality of code than the company 2 practices.
What do you think?
One very important thing to remember is all the modern computer languages can be expressed with rules using BNF(Backus Normal Form). These computer languages are called Context Free languages. None of the known spoken languages are can fit into the definition of a structured language except Sanskrit.
Panini was a Sanskrit Grammarian from India in 6th century BC. Panini's grammar provides 4,000 rules that describe the Sanskrit of his day completely. This grammar is acknowledged to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all times. What is remarkable is that Panini set out to describe the entire grammar in terms of a finite number of rules. Frits Staal
has shown that the grammar of Panini represents a universal grammatical and computing system. From this perspective it anticipates the logical framework of modern computers.
Read more about Panini Panini Grammer
Take a look at http://www.linux-firewall-tools.com/linu x
Here's intels site for upnp:
http://www.intel.com/ial/upnp/
My Experience as a Linux newbie and what I desired most as a Linux
Newbie...
Though linux was new to me UNIX wasn't. So didn't have to understand
how linux system works in general. I didn't have many of those
questions that are faced by my other friends who started to use or
experiment with linux and had no prior *NIX experience.
I didn't know how to configure my sound card, how to use TrueType
fonts, how to use jdk1.1.7 with StarOffice, How to configure my
network card which the RedHat install program failed to detect, how to
use my CD-RW drive with linux machine. It took me some time to solve
the mystery of winmodems.
Almost always I could find answers to my questions on either HOWTO,
Deja, LinuxStart, tunelinux or irc.linux.com #linuxhelp. Because my
problems were trivial people on linux related IRC channles didn't show
any interest in solving my problems. They most of the times just used
to ignore me, or tell me to RTFM... but my problem was I even didn't
know which program I'm supposed to use to solve the problem so how
would I know which man page to read? May be the questions I was asking
were silly, but I even didn't know that they were silly.
But I could always solve the problems with one of the popular Linux
website's help. I was willing to take efforts and knew where to
look. I wonder how many new Linux users do that. Particularly if s/he
was a windows user in past. Linux HOWTOs are a great help. Websites
like justlinux.com, tunelinux.com, Deja, linuxstart.com do a good job.
Sometimes I was overwhelmed by the amount of information available
about a subject. It took time to filter through all that information
and get the answer.
It is best for a newbie to get in touch with some local Linux guru and
learn from him/her. Every linux enthusiast can contribute some of his
time to local Linux user group and help new linux users learn more.
I set my user preferences to see only comments>=score 2. It works well if I see an article from the main page, however, if I see an article in "ask slashdot" it doen't seem to work.
I still see all the comments >= score 0.
Is that what is intended?
-Nak