The issue is that there are no developers there. There are just users talking authoritatively at other users. You get no inflow of information and the same rumours, bad advice, scaremongering stories are stated again and again.
For example: One person blogs about KMS now working on Intel cards and how plymouth will use this, next person says that nvidia and ati wont be supported by plymouth, the next person blames his system crash on plymouth as that was the thing that was on the screen during the boot, the next person worries how it is impossible to remove plymouth now, the next cries out a conspiracy theory of how the systems are locked-down and freedom is suppressed, the next complains that time is wasted doing this work rather than fixing feature X which he told to a friend once in the pub, yet no one has come running to fix.
None of these things are true and at no point does a developer step in to say "I understand the system and here are the facts". Primarily because there are no developers, just packagers. And though the entire process of spreading fallacies, everyone feels great about themselves thinking they have contributed something. They haven't.
I install whichever OS they ask for. I also install Windows XP and getting the accelerated drivers for that is actually a pain. Why all three? Because there are Suse fans who feel most comfortable using Suse. Because there are multiprocessor simulators which are distributed only in.deb packages. Because, and I really must strongly emphasise this, there really isn't much of a difference between the distributions and there are no dragons!. They are all collections of the same software. If I solve a bug on one, it is the same solution on the others. This is why I feel strongly that distros should upstream their efforts. But perhaps most importantly, I do this because I want people to be comfortable using their computers. The reinstall cycle is about once every 2 years. I would appreciate you not insinuating people being mentally deficient on the ground that I put in more effort that is strictly necessary, after all the open source community is driven by people who put in more effort than the minimum necessary to get the job done, in order to make others' lives better
They've also made it easier to install proprietary drivers, which is always a mess in Fedora.
[citation required] And not just a post by an Ubuntu user who heard it off a friend. I hear this every day and never met anyone who has supporting evidence. Along with "Fedora is just for servers", "Fedora uses bleeding edge so nothing works" and "there be dragons in them hills".
I install Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora on university machines on a daily basis. There is no massive discerning difference between these distributions that makes one much easier for 3d drivers than the other. All three have package repos for proprietary drivers and are as easy to set up.
And that's the entire point. Ubuntu has a massive following of very vocal non-coding users. I contribute an upstream project and I often go to the Ubuntu forums looking for any bugs people have found. These are swamped with hundreds of trolls, moaners and flamers. Most will explain how much of a waste of time a particular project is, how the coders are morons and how things are getting worse every day, while smugly pretending to be uber-experts in everything. None of them would ever consider investigating bugs, talking to people upstream, downloading the code, submitting patches. This is not contributing back to the community.
All this noise distracts from the real contributors who actually do the work, quietly, productively and without much of a fanfare.
Ubuntu community gives as much to the open source community as 4chan gives to the modern art movement.
I spent 2 years installing apt on fedora machines, and about 3 or 4 years ago I stopped, because yum is now just as good as apt. It has the same features, is just as easy and the performance difference is, to me, not visible.
Re:More Torrents == Faster Fedora12 Downloads
on
Fedora 12 Released
·
· Score: 1
Currently downloading and saturating my 100Mbps connection.
Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...
on
Fedora 12 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It works, and it works amazingly well. I admin 50+ machines and I used to always install both the nvidia and ati closed drivers because users want compiz. A year ago ati cards started working out the box, now so does nvidia.
This is fairly low isn't it? Using the climax of a massive democratic process to tie people to a monopolistic format just to show some stats how even Linux users have Moonlight so it is perfectly acceptable for this to become a new standard.
Apple should really be slapped for repeatedly misrepresenting their products. I will buy a beer to anyone who can find a single photo of any of their products on the store website. Every single one has been hand generated usually with incorrect proportions.
Considering that they are looking for dirty bombs which are of little to no threat, they did very well to catch a potentially dangerous radioactive feline. Someone could have received a very nasty scratch. Wikipedia on the dirty bomb: At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for one year, the radiation exposure would be "fairly high", but not fatal.[1] Recent analysis of the Chernobyl accident fallout confirms this, showing that the effect on many people in the surrounding area, although not those in close proximity, was almost negligible.
I keep reading how this MS/Novell agreement is gaining customers but here I can see that: in 2005 Novell/SUSE got 28% in 2006 Novell/SUSE got 16% in 2007 Novell/SUSE got 11.7%
This has gone too far. There is no way you can place the iPhone as the top "Invention". It is a phone just like any other but with a lot of features you would expect on a phone removed. No novelty or ingenuity. The only thing that it has going for it is that it looks nice. If looking nice is a quality of a great invention then I proclaim the Mona Lisa as the greatest invention of Leonardo da Vinci. I will be hearing next that the iPhone gets the Nobel peace prize as well.
Dear Mr Johnson, We are contacting you from the planet Xunxu as you owe twenty five million dollars in child support charges for your population of contribution to our planet.
First of all, thanks for pointing me to that gapminder thing. Hours of fun.
The simplified model is still true for the price of a product. The thing that the GDP vs energy use model doesn't show is the money movement. There has always been a massive movement of money to China where they have a huge manufacturing base. Effectively when you buy that made in china toy you're sending a packet of money to china for them to spend on burning power. The model does break down though in service industry based economies. This sort of answers the much more important question of "Can we be rich yet green?". The way to be rich yet green is to only spend your money of services rather than products, then make sure the people you're giving the money to are not spending it on consumables, and so on, and on. Say I give you $1,000,000 for a back rub, and you pay me back my million for me washing your car. Brilliant! We have both earned a million bucks this year, yet no trees were harmed. Unfortunately the system works against that sort of thing. Although my house is quite green (by that I mean it's really cold in here), my university spends 70% of what is given for my research on services such as very wasteful heating, supercomputers sitting around the place turned on and not doing anything etc. So for now service industry spends most of its money on consumables (products or more directly electricity/fossil fuels). Anyway, the facts that got me to think in this way are the Marxist economics with energy rather than wages and the fact that a number of products now link themselves to the price of oil rather than the price of currency(e.g. United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces).
Energy efficient in which way? For the sake of the planet or for your electricity bill? Generally the energy expended into making a product is directly relative to its price (see Marx and Aristotle). Whether the product is fantastically overpriced and the profits are used to fly CEOs around the world in personal jets, or if the product is made in a sweatshop where the workers are obviously not earning that much and have a greatly smaller carbon footprint than others. Every cent you spend is in turn spent on power. So, don't buy an expensive new PC claiming you are saving the planet. I have such a box myself, it runs MythTV, mldoneky, a webserver, dhcp, samba, mail server... I made it 4 years ago using a cheap 2.4GHz Celeron which is dog slow yet is more than enough for the tasks. On a supply meter it uses an average of 60W. This translates to about £60 of electricity a year ($120). Say I make a new machine which uses just 40W (unlikely), this machine would have to cost less than £20 per year of usage. In your 3 year cycle you would have to make it for £60 ($120).
I suppose you're right in the sense that if we only cared about things which happen within our own lifetimes, the world would become a nasty and dull place. Most scientists work in order to be remembered after they die (even though they aren't around to enjoy it). It just feels like the old computer games which was just one level over and over again which got harder and harder until you die (Ernie Cline quote), except there is no leader board, no second level. Eventually the game gets boring because you realise that although the process might be fun it is fruitless and there really isn't a second level or a prize for getting a million points. Our desperation to throw our DNA around is interesting. Would a colony of cats somewhere in the galaxy not be as satisfying? (serenely would be funnier) Same technological challenges, same source planet. Somehow committing genetic suicide is a bad act even though it has little reasoning about it.
I don't mean to be existential about this but why? We don't have a mission from God to spread and conquer. It seems a little strange how atheists are very keen to strike down the pointless values of religion, yet still believe in many aspects which have no basis. What's the goal here? After billions of years the human race is all over the galaxy, few billion years later and its all over the universe. And then what? We cling on for dear life as we exploit the last few sources of energy as black holes swallow up any traces of our fantastic achievements.
I would just take billions of pill sized coctails of bacteria from all extreme regions of the earth and fire them off semi randomly throughout the galaxy, wait a billion years for them to evolve and contact us back.
Yes and No. There are two improvements here which are happening at the same time. Process shrink (which happens all the time) and the use of High-K dielectric (which is something reather new in the mass manufacture feild anyway)
These 2 are just due to process shrink and nothing special:
* ~2x improvement in transistor density, for either smaller chip size or increased transistor count
* ~30% reduction in transistor switching power
This one is interesting and the OR should be regaded as an XOR.
* >20%improvement in transistor switching speed or >5x reduction in source-drain leakage power Basicly the individual transistors become tunable to decide if they should be fast or low power. Critical path ones will be fast and others will be low power.
And this one is a breakthrough:
* >10x reduction in gate oxide leakage power With static power now accounting for up to 50% of all power this is excelent.
I have spent some time demonstrating to undergrads engineering courses and several times I have seen some amazing students who take to the subject really well. They don't do perticulaly well in the other courses but they seem to enjoy this the course and they go beyond what is expected of them. Then at the end I ask them if they are going to do the engineering modules next year because they will be practically guaranteed top marks in those too and they say no because they want to: Write web pages for a living, Become lawers because they heard that pays well, Knows someone who works with Java and so will take only very soft modules (despite the fact that they failed the java module). This guy has some real potential, he could change the world, he could discover some fantastic advancements for the good of human kind, but no. He wants to be a lawyer.
The line in question is : ' if (browserName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer") {'
If you're gonna pretend to be using IE then unfortunately you will be treated as if you use IE. Feel free to send me a better script which differentiates between IE and Opera pretending to be IE but I don't think it is possible.
I looked at altavista for the first time in years and noticed it being very google like and so I thought it would be nice to see how and why it changed. The script was pretty simple to make but took a while to run (overnight for each one). I like doing stuff like this as it improves my skills in different languages (in this case it was perl) and I thought learning a lot of languages might be an idea before writing my own.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is that there are no developers there. There are just users talking authoritatively at other users. You get no inflow of information and the same rumours, bad advice, scaremongering stories are stated again and again.
For example: One person blogs about KMS now working on Intel cards and how plymouth will use this, next person says that nvidia and ati wont be supported by plymouth, the next person blames his system crash on plymouth as that was the thing that was on the screen during the boot, the next person worries how it is impossible to remove plymouth now, the next cries out a conspiracy theory of how the systems are locked-down and freedom is suppressed, the next complains that time is wasted doing this work rather than fixing feature X which he told to a friend once in the pub, yet no one has come running to fix.
None of these things are true and at no point does a developer step in to say "I understand the system and here are the facts". Primarily because there are no developers, just packagers. And though the entire process of spreading fallacies, everyone feels great about themselves thinking they have contributed something. They haven't.
I install whichever OS they ask for. I also install Windows XP and getting the accelerated drivers for that is actually a pain. Why all three? Because there are Suse fans who feel most comfortable using Suse. Because there are multiprocessor simulators which are distributed only in .deb packages. Because, and I really must strongly emphasise this, there really isn't much of a difference between the distributions and there are no dragons!. They are all collections of the same software. If I solve a bug on one, it is the same solution on the others. This is why I feel strongly that distros should upstream their efforts. But perhaps most importantly, I do this because I want people to be comfortable using their computers. The reinstall cycle is about once every 2 years. I would appreciate you not insinuating people being mentally deficient on the ground that I put in more effort that is strictly necessary, after all the open source community is driven by people who put in more effort than the minimum necessary to get the job done, in order to make others' lives better
They've also made it easier to install proprietary drivers, which is always a mess in Fedora.
[citation required]
And not just a post by an Ubuntu user who heard it off a friend. I hear this every day and never met anyone who has supporting evidence. Along with "Fedora is just for servers", "Fedora uses bleeding edge so nothing works" and "there be dragons in them hills".
I install Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora on university machines on a daily basis. There is no massive discerning difference between these distributions that makes one much easier for 3d drivers than the other. All three have package repos for proprietary drivers and are as easy to set up.
And that's the entire point. Ubuntu has a massive following of very vocal non-coding users. I contribute an upstream project and I often go to the Ubuntu forums looking for any bugs people have found. These are swamped with hundreds of trolls, moaners and flamers. Most will explain how much of a waste of time a particular project is, how the coders are morons and how things are getting worse every day, while smugly pretending to be uber-experts in everything. None of them would ever consider investigating bugs, talking to people upstream, downloading the code, submitting patches. This is not contributing back to the community.
All this noise distracts from the real contributors who actually do the work, quietly, productively and without much of a fanfare.
Ubuntu community gives as much to the open source community as 4chan gives to the modern art movement.
I spent 2 years installing apt on fedora machines, and about 3 or 4 years ago I stopped, because yum is now just as good as apt. It has the same features, is just as easy and the performance difference is, to me, not visible.
Currently downloading and saturating my 100Mbps connection.
It works, and it works amazingly well. I admin 50+ machines and I used to always install both the nvidia and ati closed drivers because users want compiz. A year ago ati cards started working out the box, now so does nvidia.
This is fairly low isn't it?
Using the climax of a massive democratic process to tie people to a monopolistic format just to show some stats how even Linux users have Moonlight so it is perfectly acceptable for this to become a new standard.
Apple should really be slapped for repeatedly misrepresenting their products. I will buy a beer to anyone who can find a single photo of any of their products on the store website. Every single one has been hand generated usually with incorrect proportions.
PackageKit is actually a just a tool which sits on top of yum and does not replace it. It does replace pup and pirut though.
See PackageKit site of the release notes.
Considering that they are looking for dirty bombs which are of little to no threat, they did very well to catch a potentially dangerous radioactive feline. Someone could have received a very nasty scratch.
Wikipedia on the dirty bomb: At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for one year, the radiation exposure would be "fairly high", but not fatal.[1] Recent analysis of the Chernobyl accident fallout confirms this, showing that the effect on many people in the surrounding area, although not those in close proximity, was almost negligible.
I keep reading how this MS/Novell agreement is gaining customers but here I can see that:
in 2005 Novell/SUSE got 28%
in 2006 Novell/SUSE got 16%
in 2007 Novell/SUSE got 11.7%
Can't believe they forgot IBM's big red switch.
This has gone too far. There is no way you can place the iPhone as the top "Invention". It is a phone just like any other but with a lot of features you would expect on a phone removed. No novelty or ingenuity. The only thing that it has going for it is that it looks nice. If looking nice is a quality of a great invention then I proclaim the Mona Lisa as the greatest invention of Leonardo da Vinci. I will be hearing next that the iPhone gets the Nobel peace prize as well.
Dear Mr Johnson, We are contacting you from the planet Xunxu as you owe twenty five million dollars in child support charges for your population of contribution to our planet.
Either: She is obviously good at her job and should keep it.
Or: University degrees aren't worth very much.
First of all, thanks for pointing me to that gapminder thing. Hours of fun.
The simplified model is still true for the price of a product. The thing that the GDP vs energy use model doesn't show is the money movement. There has always been a massive movement of money to China where they have a huge manufacturing base. Effectively when you buy that made in china toy you're sending a packet of money to china for them to spend on burning power.
The model does break down though in service industry based economies. This sort of answers the much more important question of "Can we be rich yet green?".
The way to be rich yet green is to only spend your money of services rather than products, then make sure the people you're giving the money to are not spending it on consumables, and so on, and on.
Say I give you $1,000,000 for a back rub, and you pay me back my million for me washing your car. Brilliant! We have both earned a million bucks this year, yet no trees were harmed.
Unfortunately the system works against that sort of thing. Although my house is quite green (by that I mean it's really cold in here), my university spends 70% of what is given for my research on services such as very wasteful heating, supercomputers sitting around the place turned on and not doing anything etc. So for now service industry spends most of its money on consumables (products or more directly electricity/fossil fuels).
Anyway, the facts that got me to think in this way are the Marxist economics with energy rather than wages and the fact that a number of products now link themselves to the price of oil rather than the price of currency(e.g. United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces).
Energy efficient in which way? For the sake of the planet or for your electricity bill?
Generally the energy expended into making a product is directly relative to its price (see Marx and Aristotle). Whether the product is fantastically overpriced and the profits are used to fly CEOs around the world in personal jets, or if the product is made in a sweatshop where the workers are obviously not earning that much and have a greatly smaller carbon footprint than others. Every cent you spend is in turn spent on power. So, don't buy an expensive new PC claiming you are saving the planet.
I have such a box myself, it runs MythTV, mldoneky, a webserver, dhcp, samba, mail server... I made it 4 years ago using a cheap 2.4GHz Celeron which is dog slow yet is more than enough for the tasks. On a supply meter it uses an average of 60W. This translates to about £60 of electricity a year ($120).
Say I make a new machine which uses just 40W (unlikely), this machine would have to cost less than £20 per year of usage. In your 3 year cycle you would have to make it for £60 ($120).
I suppose you're right in the sense that if we only cared about things which happen within our own lifetimes, the world would become a nasty and dull place. Most scientists work in order to be remembered after they die (even though they aren't around to enjoy it). It just feels like the old computer games which was just one level over and over again which got harder and harder until you die (Ernie Cline quote), except there is no leader board, no second level. Eventually the game gets boring because you realise that although the process might be fun it is fruitless and there really isn't a second level or a prize for getting a million points.
Our desperation to throw our DNA around is interesting. Would a colony of cats somewhere in the galaxy not be as satisfying? (serenely would be funnier) Same technological challenges, same source planet. Somehow committing genetic suicide is a bad act even though it has little reasoning about it.
I don't mean to be existential about this but why? We don't have a mission from God to spread and conquer. It seems a little strange how atheists are very keen to strike down the pointless values of religion, yet still believe in many aspects which have no basis.
What's the goal here? After billions of years the human race is all over the galaxy, few billion years later and its all over the universe. And then what? We cling on for dear life as we exploit the last few sources of energy as black holes swallow up any traces of our fantastic achievements.
I would just take billions of pill sized coctails of bacteria from all extreme regions of the earth and fire them off semi randomly throughout the galaxy, wait a billion years for them to evolve and contact us back.
Yes and No.
There are two improvements here which are happening at the same time. Process shrink (which happens all the time) and the use of High-K dielectric (which is something reather new in the mass manufacture feild anyway)
These 2 are just due to process shrink and nothing special:
* ~2x improvement in transistor density, for either smaller chip size or increased transistor count
* ~30% reduction in transistor switching power
This one is interesting and the OR should be regaded as an XOR.
* >20%improvement in transistor switching speed or >5x reduction in source-drain leakage power
Basicly the individual transistors become tunable to decide if they should be fast or low power. Critical path ones will be fast and others will be low power.
And this one is a breakthrough:
* >10x reduction in gate oxide leakage power
With static power now accounting for up to 50% of all power this is excelent.
I have spent some time demonstrating to undergrads engineering courses and several times I have seen some amazing students who take to the subject really well. They don't do perticulaly well in the other courses but they seem to enjoy this the course and they go beyond what is expected of them. Then at the end I ask them if they are going to do the engineering modules next year because they will be practically guaranteed top marks in those too and they say no because they want to: Write web pages for a living, Become lawers because they heard that pays well, Knows someone who works with Java and so will take only very soft modules (despite the fact that they failed the java module).
This guy has some real potential, he could change the world, he could discover some fantastic advancements for the good of human kind, but no. He wants to be a lawyer.
The line in question is :
' if (browserName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer") {'
If you're gonna pretend to be using IE then unfortunately you will be treated as if you use IE.
Feel free to send me a better script which differentiates between IE and Opera pretending to be IE but I don't think it is possible.
I looked at altavista for the first time in years and noticed it being very google like and so I thought it would be nice to see how and why it changed. The script was pretty simple to make but took a while to run (overnight for each one). I like doing stuff like this as it improves my skills in different languages (in this case it was perl) and I thought learning a lot of languages might be an idea before writing my own.