Hmm, well, the standard of VOIP is pretty good with a good network connection. Maybe you could buy one of those pretty boxes from the guy who makes lindows -- the ones with a RJ11 on one side and ethernet on the other.
That way you can get a portable phone that will work at home:-)
If price was the only issue, you'd be right. But for many people their time is valuable, their setup is valuable, the tiny risk to their data of an upgrade has a value.
Lets take it as true that upgrading every two years means you, on average, have a better computer for less money. But, it usually takes about a week to migrate windows to a new computer -- product activation keys, setting up all the new software, etc. Once you give those extras a reasonable value, you suddenly see that it is no longer an advantage for an average person to upgrade every two years.
Now, tinkerers (by which I include anybody reading slashdot) are a whole different category. They have a cost of zero (or even a benefit) to setting up a new computer and so are best to buy cheap and buy often.
PS: Having said that, I'm still pissed that my MX440 can't play a 3D rendered board game -- the mouse jerks around the screen:-(
it gets away from what I consider to be the basic nature of higher education. As a student, I'm the consumer. I'm paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows.
Well, perhaps your problem is that this is not the definition of higher education that universities subscribe to. Their job is to put the knowledge out there, in easily accessable format. It is also fairly standard to also assess how much you absorb, though it comes a distant second to providing the information.
To call yourself a consumer is very close to wrong; your job is to learn the stuff, not to consume it. A consumer could just sit there, mechanically do the work that is presented and expect to get a pass. Would you really want a university degree to only mean "Can do the work that is put in front of him". Likewise, to call the professor your teacher is also very close to wrong; their job is to provide you with an environment where you can learn, including things like lectures, but to say their job is to teach you. Well, no, it isn't. Teachers would carefully go through their material and ensure it is in a format that will maximise student knowedge. But the goal of a unviersity is to prove the students can learn, which means a huge part of the professor's job is to make you do the learning instead of providing the knowledge in byte-size chunks.
In this course, the student was pushed to learn a lot. Therefore the professor did a great job. End of story, grades don't really come into it. Would it really hurt to have a failure on your record because you physically couldn't push yourself hard enough to pass this course? Does anybody give a toss what grades you get?
To take a random personal anecdote, I remember being furious with my physics teacher at high school for failing me on an externally assessed assignment "because you could do better". How could he? When this assignemnt directly affected the final grade I'd get at HS! Now, I'm glad he did it, because that was the first time I was told that if you're not doing your best you may as well fail, which has been an invaluable attitude to have throughout grad school. If it wasn't for that I might have coasted through undergrad, meeting all the requirements to pass, and not had the breadth or depth of knowledge needed in grad school. And sure the failure on that assignment is on my high school record, as if anybody is going to look at that.
I see this assignment in a similar light: It may well be that this course is the first time these students have been pushed to breaking point. That will be a damn important lesson for them from now on, far more valuable than the grade of the course. Just like if you go into business, then it is entirely possible for you to give your job everything you have and still come out bankrupt. Life is tough, and learning how to fail and then pick yourself up is a damn useful lesson.
Naturally, you can't apply this to every course, just like it would have sucked if I'd failed high school due to the teachers believing I could do better. But now and again it is useful to have the bar raised beyond your ability, or the rug ripped out from under you (say turning up to a class and having the professor declare that you will give the class today). Because, life doesn't present challenges in carefully measured amounts of compexity, with the steps nicely laid out for you to follow, so a university education that does is doing you a disservice.
PS: Sorry for the rant, I'm just sick of kids expecting me to tell them stuff instead of working it out for themselves and then saying I'm not teaching them properly when I don't hand them knowledge on a platter.
As you note, the difference between AIFF and wav is a byte swap. Further, you didn't even have to read the article to see that the firmware was open since it was lined in the blurb. So, if you would like AIFF support, you know what to do. Hint: It isn't complain on slashdot.
I was learning calculus on my own If you're learning calculus on your own, you're going to expect things to be different. For people who have the luxury of a class where they learn calculus, I think you'll find your argument doesn't hold. Certainly I recall that in second and third year calc, when asked to compute a derivative or an integral we would usually be given the answer. That way the lecturer could ask a more complex problem that tested more techniques and still expect the right percentage of students to get it correct. Naturally, the answer is not always given to ensure the technique of working backwards is not always available.
Oh, _I_ put no faith in the results
on
Truth in Advertising?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But the fancy numbers aren't for me, they're for PHBs that like to see lots of impressive numbers -- after all, the other product has them so if this one doesn't...
Looking at computer specs lately I'm beginning to think the principal point of them is to bulk out the specs -- make it look like it has lots of features, and the actual content of the specs is irrelevant.
They already have this. Basically it isn't good enough at noting a) is similar to b), especially when coupled with a strong incentive to grant patents.
Now, if you made your software about flashlights a bit smarter, then it might start getting useful.
Have you ever tried to refactor a large piece of software? There are huge constraints on what you can do because it is virtually impossible to adjust the architecture.
That is the difference between what can be achieved by refactoring compared to what can be achieved by rewriting. If your architecture is correct then you can improve on it with refactoring, but if it has huge design flaws that you're working around with ugly hacks, then there is no way for refactoring to fix those design flaws. You just have to rewrite large chunks from scratch.
Sure, apple hasn't open sourced many bits they wrote from scratch (rendezvous?) but to they projects they have used they have contributed back pretty generously.
Sure, they've taken advantage of other people being generous, and why not? Those people chose to give away the software. But in my opinion they've been generous enough in return. One of the nice things about open source is that, with so many people using it, any given user does not have to give back much in order for us to get a lot.
The last comp I bought was chosen principally because it was quiet/low power. That's essentially buying on design decisions -- price performance it is a real white elephant, and in terms of components it doesn't even support USB2. I very nearly went with a silent computer instead, but 600MHz just sounded too painful after 3GHz.
And look at Apple. They're fairly well engineered, but the #1 selling factor for them is the nice design.
Xen won't run an OS unless that OS has been especially ported to Xen. I.e. it is ideal for running linux, BSD, and not much else. It is also x86 only (I can't use it as a MOL replacement).
It has one huge benefit over VMWare, it is extremely fast. The virtual machine has so close to the performance of the host that it would be reasonable to do such things as: implement a 100% reliable server on your computer and then implement an up-to-date desktop machine inside it. Implement virtual hosting on cheap x86 hardware. Run two distros simultaneously, etc.
Personally I think running a reliable server on the same hardware as your unreliable desktop would be nice. Have the one machine always work correctly for handling mail, printing, web serving, etc. But still up to date.
what we have may not be a free market, but this band would have saved a lot of money by paying for media instead of signing up. Calling it a monopoly is going too far.
Well, I installed gentoo last week, and I was disgusted at the installer. The current (non-graphical) installer automates almost nothing. It doesn't even automate the things that would be trivial to automate. Let me contrast the installer with the (famous) debian installer.
1: Download and burn the installation CDs (trivial for both gentoo and debian). Boot CDs.
At this point Debian presents you with an installation menu (choose your keyboard or language is first, I forget). Whereas gentoo presents you with a root prompt. Um hello? What is the installer program called? What do I type?
After searching the gentoo CD you'll hopefully come across/mnt/cdrom/doc/handbook/txt/handbook.txt (filename slightly wrong). Once you find it, it is pretty obvious this is the instructions. I wonder how long it takes the average guy to find it?
The first instruction is to type cfdsk, then mkfs.ext3/dev/hda5. Oh, half a dozen other filesystems are offered. A hint for newbies suggests ext3 might be best for normal computers (though it is hardly written for newbies to follow). No instructions are given for installing if you already have an OS installed. Nothing explaining that hda is the primary master... There is no way this could be followed by anybody without linux experience.
Next we tar -zxvf a tarball. Better not make a typo and install in the wrong place... Next we cd to/mnt/gentoo and type./scripts/bootstrap.sh. Why don't we cd to/mnt/gentoo/scripts and run./bootstrap.sh? I don't know...
Now, at this point I'm sitting there wondering why? why do I have to do this? why can't they automate these steps? How much work would it have been to write a little curses program that lets me choose a filesystem, finds which tarballs I have, extracts it, and runs bootstrap for me?
Ok, now we have to configure the network and the docs go down a little sidetrack explaining WEP and ESSID... that's great guys... I'm just trying to install an OS here... automating ifconfig eth0 inet dhcp would have been appreciated, but hey I already knew to type that, so you didn't need to automate anything, right?
emerge sync, emerge world... that wasn't too hard... Again, it could have been automated. Oh, and some progress bars would be nice, the number of files you've downloaded doesn't tell me a lot if I don't have a clue how many files there are.
Next I'm supposed to write an fstab by hand with no assistance except a few sample lines in the docs? Really? No sweat mate! No explaination of the keep/dump flags or what I should put there. No explaination of the order of things... And you better not make a typo.
Now I'm supposed to install a kernel from scratch with no sample configuration file to go off? No wonder idiots never manage to get gentoo installed. _I_ knew that/proc/config.gz exists and so I didn't have to write it from scratch but the docs didn't tell me that... The docs also told me about something called genkernel, which turned out not to be installed (emerge genkernel) and once installed generously informs me I don't have a configuration file. The docs also claim genkernel isn't as good, and they claim they'll get around to documenting it after they've explained the manual way (but then they don't)...
Finally I just have to set up a few symbolic links for the timezone, install a cron program (why didn't bootstrap do that?), install a logger (again, why didn't bootstrap...).
Gee, that was easy! You know, I think a graphical installer might help;-)
Looks nice. I keep my pegasos in a cupboard which is a bit more of a pain for putting DVDs in than it should be, but still pretty good.
Out of the cupboard it is quite noisy, but in the cupboard it is no louder than a notebook. Of course, I could have just gone with a notebook instead but then I wouldn't have been able to reuse two hard drives without (loud) external enclosures.
*sigh* don't you know the hush already? I almost ran out of drool when I saw it the first time;-)
Yes, it can do both backend and frontend. The highest spec machine is the 1.2GHz nermeiah core. Put a reiser and a PVR 350 in it, 256MB RAM (more is a waste of time according to the myth website), a DVD writer, and one of them 400GB disks and you're set. Oh, and it looks gorgeous, you would not want to hide it away in a cupboard. They'll even sell it to you set up like that, for about $2500:-(
As you note, you can set up mythbackend on another machine somewhere and run mythfrontend by the TV (perhaps on your xbox). But... this thing is silent and low power consuming, it makes a lot of sense for it to be the machine you're leaving on 24/7. Especially since it is fast enough to handle your mail and web server, etc.
I don't know about you, but in my world a box is perfect if it is also affordable. I reserve the term 'ultimate' for the best at any cost. Maybe this is being pedantic, but IMO the Hush boxes are as beautiful as they are unobtainable. Try configuring them online -- the charge for ram is double what it is at newegg.
Personally I went for a pegasos (http://www.pegasos.org/) because the CPU is fast enough that you don't need hardware MPEG. Of course I would have liked the hushpc better, but I have better uses for the $2000 that a fully decked out hushpc costs...
When was the last time a one-man garage SW shop won a case against MS? I know of cases microsoft has lost. With a few very notable exceptions they were against IP companies that were fairly well financed for litigation, and perhaps offered a few products on the side (like SCO really).
The performa I remember from '94 was the first apple to have the screen integrated with the CPU. Ok, so it was essentially separate in reality, not like the new iMac, but... PCs at the time also had the screen totally separate. Now you're seeing the screen and the computer being integrated more often, but the IPX was the first that I know about, and the performa the first mainstream computer to do it.
Were I the curator, I wouldn't have included the iBook, but I would have included the first sony viao, and a sun IPX (which is where apple got the idea for a performa from)
Interesting, I'm about to be in the same boat -- my wife got an iPod (last day of the third generation, she couldn't wait a week for the fourth... oh well, her choice). Anyway it was working ok under linux but when she decided she wanted her own computer she ordered an iMac (due next week).
Anyway, I formatted the ipod as FAT32 or whatever the windows one is, just because the linux drivers for UFS and HFS seemed a bit experimental. So when her mac arrives it will appear to be a windows iPod (which is full of songs but has never been plugged into itunes, I wonder how it will cope with that:)
I guess I can always run the old dd trick to corrupt the partition table and convince the mac to restore it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, well, the standard of VOIP is pretty good with a good network connection. Maybe you could buy one of those pretty boxes from the guy who makes lindows -- the ones with a RJ11 on one side and ethernet on the other.
:-)
That way you can get a portable phone that will work at home
If price was the only issue, you'd be right. But for many people their time is valuable, their setup is valuable, the tiny risk to their data of an upgrade has a value.
:-(
Lets take it as true that upgrading every two years means you, on average, have a better computer for less money. But, it usually takes about a week to migrate windows to a new computer -- product activation keys, setting up all the new software, etc. Once you give those extras a reasonable value, you suddenly see that it is no longer an advantage for an average person to upgrade every two years.
Now, tinkerers (by which I include anybody reading slashdot) are a whole different category. They have a cost of zero (or even a benefit) to setting up a new computer and so are best to buy cheap and buy often.
PS: Having said that, I'm still pissed that my MX440 can't play a 3D rendered board game -- the mouse jerks around the screen
After all, we've all heard the horror stories about windows users who installed the windows update only to have lots of software break.
;-)
Surely apple will be similar?
it gets away from what I consider to be the basic nature of higher education. As a student, I'm the consumer. I'm paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows.
Well, perhaps your problem is that this is not the definition of higher education that universities subscribe to. Their job is to put the knowledge out there, in easily accessable format. It is also fairly standard to also assess how much you absorb, though it comes a distant second to providing the information.
To call yourself a consumer is very close to wrong; your job is to learn the stuff, not to consume it. A consumer could just sit there, mechanically do the work that is presented and expect to get a pass. Would you really want a university degree to only mean "Can do the work that is put in front of him". Likewise, to call the professor your teacher is also very close to wrong; their job is to provide you with an environment where you can learn, including things like lectures, but to say their job is to teach you. Well, no, it isn't. Teachers would carefully go through their material and ensure it is in a format that will maximise student knowedge. But the goal of a unviersity is to prove the students can learn, which means a huge part of the professor's job is to make you do the learning instead of providing the knowledge in byte-size chunks.
In this course, the student was pushed to learn a lot. Therefore the professor did a great job. End of story, grades don't really come into it. Would it really hurt to have a failure on your record because you physically couldn't push yourself hard enough to pass this course? Does anybody give a toss what grades you get?
To take a random personal anecdote, I remember being furious with my physics teacher at high school for failing me on an externally assessed assignment "because you could do better". How could he? When this assignemnt directly affected the final grade I'd get at HS! Now, I'm glad he did it, because that was the first time I was told that if you're not doing your best you may as well fail, which has been an invaluable attitude to have throughout grad school. If it wasn't for that I might have coasted through undergrad, meeting all the requirements to pass, and not had the breadth or depth of knowledge needed in grad school. And sure the failure on that assignment is on my high school record, as if anybody is going to look at that.
I see this assignment in a similar light: It may well be that this course is the first time these students have been pushed to breaking point. That will be a damn important lesson for them from now on, far more valuable than the grade of the course. Just like if you go into business, then it is entirely possible for you to give your job everything you have and still come out bankrupt. Life is tough, and learning how to fail and then pick yourself up is a damn useful lesson.
Naturally, you can't apply this to every course, just like it would have sucked if I'd failed high school due to the teachers believing I could do better. But now and again it is useful to have the bar raised beyond your ability, or the rug ripped out from under you (say turning up to a class and having the professor declare that you will give the class today). Because, life doesn't present challenges in carefully measured amounts of compexity, with the steps nicely laid out for you to follow, so a university education that does is doing you a disservice.
PS: Sorry for the rant, I'm just sick of kids expecting me to tell them stuff instead of working it out for themselves and then saying I'm not teaching them properly when I don't hand them knowledge on a platter.
As you note, the difference between AIFF and wav is a byte swap. Further, you didn't even have to read the article to see that the firmware was open since it was lined in the blurb. So, if you would like AIFF support, you know what to do. Hint: It isn't complain on slashdot.
I was learning calculus on my own
If you're learning calculus on your own, you're going to expect things to be different. For people who have the luxury of a class where they learn calculus, I think you'll find your argument doesn't hold. Certainly I recall that in second and third year calc, when asked to compute a derivative or an integral we would usually be given the answer. That way the lecturer could ask a more complex problem that tested more techniques and still expect the right percentage of students to get it correct. Naturally, the answer is not always given to ensure the technique of working backwards is not always available.
But the fancy numbers aren't for me, they're for PHBs that like to see lots of impressive numbers -- after all, the other product has them so if this one doesn't...
Looking at computer specs lately I'm beginning to think the principal point of them is to bulk out the specs -- make it look like it has lots of features, and the actual content of the specs is irrelevant.
They already have this. Basically it isn't good enough at noting a) is similar to b), especially when coupled with a strong incentive to grant patents.
Now, if you made your software about flashlights a bit smarter, then it might start getting useful.
Have you ever tried to refactor a large piece of software? There are huge constraints on what you can do because it is virtually impossible to adjust the architecture.
That is the difference between what can be achieved by refactoring compared to what can be achieved by rewriting. If your architecture is correct then you can improve on it with refactoring, but if it has huge design flaws that you're working around with ugly hacks, then there is no way for refactoring to fix those design flaws. You just have to rewrite large chunks from scratch.
Sure, apple hasn't open sourced many bits they wrote from scratch (rendezvous?) but to they projects they have used they have contributed back pretty generously.
Sure, they've taken advantage of other people being generous, and why not? Those people chose to give away the software. But in my opinion they've been generous enough in return. One of the nice things about open source is that, with so many people using it, any given user does not have to give back much in order for us to get a lot.
The last comp I bought was chosen principally because it was quiet/low power. That's essentially buying on design decisions -- price performance it is a real white elephant, and in terms of components it doesn't even support USB2. I very nearly went with a silent computer instead, but 600MHz just sounded too painful after 3GHz.
And look at Apple. They're fairly well engineered, but the #1 selling factor for them is the nice design.
Heh, maybe, not my field. I would have said it is more like a fancy version of chroot than a microkernel myself.
Xen won't run an OS unless that OS has been especially ported to Xen. I.e. it is ideal for running linux, BSD, and not much else. It is also x86 only (I can't use it as a MOL replacement).
It has one huge benefit over VMWare, it is extremely fast. The virtual machine has so close to the performance of the host that it would be reasonable to do such things as: implement a 100% reliable server on your computer and then implement an up-to-date desktop machine inside it. Implement virtual hosting on cheap x86 hardware. Run two distros simultaneously, etc.
Personally I think running a reliable server on the same hardware as your unreliable desktop would be nice. Have the one machine always work correctly for handling mail, printing, web serving, etc. But still up to date.
what we have may not be a free market, but this band would have saved a lot of money by paying for media instead of signing up. Calling it a monopoly is going too far.
Well, I installed gentoo last week, and I was disgusted at the installer. The current (non-graphical) installer automates almost nothing. It doesn't even automate the things that would be trivial to automate. Let me contrast the installer with the (famous) debian installer.
/mnt/cdrom/doc/handbook/txt/handbook.txt (filename slightly wrong). Once you find it, it is pretty obvious this is the instructions. I wonder how long it takes the average guy to find it?
/dev/hda5. Oh, half a dozen other filesystems are offered. A hint for newbies suggests ext3 might be best for normal computers (though it is hardly written for newbies to follow). No instructions are given for installing if you already have an OS installed. Nothing explaining that hda is the primary master... There is no way this could be followed by anybody without linux experience.
/mnt/gentoo and type ./scripts/bootstrap.sh. Why don't we cd to /mnt/gentoo/scripts and run ./bootstrap.sh? I don't know...
/proc/config.gz exists and so I didn't have to write it from scratch but the docs didn't tell me that... The docs also told me about something called genkernel, which turned out not to be installed (emerge genkernel) and once installed generously informs me I don't have a configuration file. The docs also claim genkernel isn't as good, and they claim they'll get around to documenting it after they've explained the manual way (but then they don't)...
;-)
1: Download and burn the installation CDs (trivial for both gentoo and debian). Boot CDs.
At this point Debian presents you with an installation menu (choose your keyboard or language is first, I forget). Whereas gentoo presents you with a root prompt. Um hello? What is the installer program called? What do I type?
After searching the gentoo CD you'll hopefully come across
The first instruction is to type cfdsk, then mkfs.ext3
Next we tar -zxvf a tarball. Better not make a typo and install in the wrong place... Next we cd to
Now, at this point I'm sitting there wondering why? why do I have to do this? why can't they automate these steps? How much work would it have been to write a little curses program that lets me choose a filesystem, finds which tarballs I have, extracts it, and runs bootstrap for me?
Ok, now we have to configure the network and the docs go down a little sidetrack explaining WEP and ESSID... that's great guys... I'm just trying to install an OS here... automating ifconfig eth0 inet dhcp would have been appreciated, but hey I already knew to type that, so you didn't need to automate anything, right?
emerge sync, emerge world... that wasn't too hard... Again, it could have been automated. Oh, and some progress bars would be nice, the number of files you've downloaded doesn't tell me a lot if I don't have a clue how many files there are.
Next I'm supposed to write an fstab by hand with no assistance except a few sample lines in the docs? Really? No sweat mate! No explaination of the keep/dump flags or what I should put there. No explaination of the order of things... And you better not make a typo.
Now I'm supposed to install a kernel from scratch with no sample configuration file to go off? No wonder idiots never manage to get gentoo installed. _I_ knew that
Finally I just have to set up a few symbolic links for the timezone, install a cron program (why didn't bootstrap do that?), install a logger (again, why didn't bootstrap...).
Gee, that was easy! You know, I think a graphical installer might help
Looks nice. I keep my pegasos in a cupboard which is a bit more of a pain for putting DVDs in than it should be, but still pretty good.
Out of the cupboard it is quite noisy, but in the cupboard it is no louder than a notebook. Of course, I could have just gone with a notebook instead but then I wouldn't have been able to reuse two hard drives without (loud) external enclosures.
*sigh* don't you know the hush already? I almost ran out of drool when I saw it the first time ;-)
:-(
Yes, it can do both backend and frontend. The highest spec machine is the 1.2GHz nermeiah core. Put a reiser and a PVR 350 in it, 256MB RAM (more is a waste of time according to the myth website), a DVD writer, and one of them 400GB disks and you're set. Oh, and it looks gorgeous, you would not want to hide it away in a cupboard. They'll even sell it to you set up like that, for about $2500
As you note, you can set up mythbackend on another machine somewhere and run mythfrontend by the TV (perhaps on your xbox). But... this thing is silent and low power consuming, it makes a lot of sense for it to be the machine you're leaving on 24/7. Especially since it is fast enough to handle your mail and web server, etc.
I don't know about you, but in my world a box is perfect if it is also affordable. I reserve the term 'ultimate' for the best at any cost. Maybe this is being pedantic, but IMO the Hush boxes are as beautiful as they are unobtainable. Try configuring them online -- the charge for ram is double what it is at newegg.
Personally I went for a pegasos (http://www.pegasos.org/) because the CPU is fast enough that you don't need hardware MPEG. Of course I would have liked the hushpc better, but I have better uses for the $2000 that a fully decked out hushpc costs...
> > ... they were against IP companies that were fairly well financed for litigation ...
> eolas
Just like I said then?
When was the last time a one-man garage SW shop won a case against MS? I know of cases microsoft has lost. With a few very notable exceptions they were against IP companies that were fairly well financed for litigation, and perhaps offered a few products on the side (like SCO really).
Yes, I'd forgotten the Plus, 512kE, lisa, etc. I wonder if the old sun or the old mac came first :)
The performa I remember from '94 was the first apple to have the screen integrated with the CPU. Ok, so it was essentially separate in reality, not like the new iMac, but... PCs at the time also had the screen totally separate. Now you're seeing the screen and the computer being integrated more often, but the IPX was the first that I know about, and the performa the first mainstream computer to do it.
Were I the curator, I wouldn't have included the iBook, but I would have included the first sony viao, and a sun IPX (which is where apple got the idea for a performa from)
Interesting, I'm about to be in the same boat -- my wife got an iPod (last day of the third generation, she couldn't wait a week for the fourth... oh well, her choice). Anyway it was working ok under linux but when she decided she wanted her own computer she ordered an iMac (due next week).
:)
Anyway, I formatted the ipod as FAT32 or whatever the windows one is, just because the linux drivers for UFS and HFS seemed a bit experimental. So when her mac arrives it will appear to be a windows iPod (which is full of songs but has never been plugged into itunes, I wonder how it will cope with that
I guess I can always run the old dd trick to corrupt the partition table and convince the mac to restore it.
apt-cache search diff3 should find it I think. Else google. It is still marked experimental in unstable.