"A script in this movie is causing Macromedia Flash Player 6 to run slowly. If it continues to run your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort this script?"
The handset of an old analog phone is by no means better or more ergonomic than a good cellphone, but it looks odd and you can't buy it, so it sets its owner apart.
I disagree. Standard phone handsets have been designed to be comfortable to use. They fit around the side of your head, and can be pressed against your ear while the mouthpiece is reasonably close to your mouth. You can hold on to them by gripping between your shoulder and your head.
Mobile phones are designed to fit in your pocket. They're too small, they're flat and they have buttons on them, all of which prevent them from being as good for the purpose of being a handset as a proper handset is. But of course, proper handsets aren't ideal for putting in your pocket...
"usher back a time they experienced only barely, if at all.' " it should say briefly not barely. Learn grammer..
That sentence is perfectly valid, from a grammatical basis. (Or should I say grammetical?)
Perhaps you should suggest they learn better vocabulary, but then again, that's even harder to spell...
I disagree, anyway. Barely is a valid choice in that sentence. It isn't as _good_ as briefly, which is more precise in its meaning, but it does the job adequately, I feel.
the sound warmth, whether it be psychological or real, is definitely different then solid state amps.
Yes. It's called distortion. It's usually considered undesirable, because it makes the music not sound like it was intended to sound like. If the producer wanted you to hear it like that, he'd have added it to the recording.
Re:Hubble Telescope: Maximum Science for your Buck
on
Antarctic Telescope?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Another limitation of Hubble is that it only provides images in the visible range
Err... bollocks. Hubble includes at least IR and UV instruments, and I believe further instruments designed to operate at a wide variety of wavelengths.
> But the libc build is, apparently, highly dependent on your kernel version. This is a big problem, as it eliminates the first of these options as being viable.
WTF are you talking about.
According to the technical documentation, glibc is only guaranteed to work on the same kernel version you built it on. This is because kernel header file changes can cause binary incompatibilities, etc.
So, you can't statically link glibc to an application and distribute it. Or if you do, you need to test it with all kernel versions and publish a range for which it will work.
There is glibc 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3
OK, so how come when I want to run Informix CSDK on Linux, it's only supported if I have either 2.2.4, 2.2.5, 2.2.93, or 2.3.2 (with a special build)? There's more to it than just the major/minor version -- incompatibilies can exist on patchlevels too.
My main problem is that I like to do some useful work while I'm waiting for the patch to download. If I have to reboot in the middle & then download another patch (as the XP install required) this disturbs my work, resulting in me being less productive.
Next thing you know Microsoft will start asking Windows pirates to come forward on their own volition.
Isn't there a section in the installation process where it suggests that if you don't have a certificate of authenticity, you ought to call 1-800 RULE GIT and let them know about it?
When I first stared using linux (96/97) dialup was my only option and while there were non winmodem modems out there, they were definatly not in my price range.
Hmm? When I bought a modem in this period, I didn't find it much of a problem. There was maybe a GBP 5 (about $7 US) premium for a modem from a vendor known not to use such dubious technology. Not a bank-breaker back when an entry level computer system cost about 50% more than a modern equivalent.
Right now, about half the PCs out there are still running older versions of Windows. The majority of those are running Windows 98 (!). The rest of running some form of XP. Yes, half the PCs sounds like a big success, but it doesn't ensure hegemony.
My stats disagree with yours somewhat; I get something like 55% of people on XP.
No one is going to ship an XP only piece of hardware, today. Tomorrow, possibly.
I don't see that. NT4 and Win95 were both very popular platforms still when USB devices started shipping, despite the fact that neither supported USB. In fact, it was largely the massive shift over to USB devices that killed these OSs, not the other way around.
More than you would think apparently. Sysadmins, DBAs, developers... depending on your business model of course. At the very least, your organization would have sysadmins who would have full access to all the systems. Not one guy, but a group of sysadmins.
And guess what... who would be able to get an end around on any anti-copying system MS implements that doesn't completely disable all USB devices ever? That's right the sysadmins. They could just install a new computer and copy the data to their USB drive before they switch on the features that would prevent it. (They have to be disabled by default; the ordinary users would get too confused otherwise)
How many people will buy a USB-product that doesn't work when you plug it into a Windows PC? How many support calls and returns would they get when the product doesn't work and Window pops up a message saying there is something wrong with the product?
Conversely, how many people will buy an update to the Windows operating system that won't work on their PC? How many people will return Longhorn because when they plugged their digital camera in, it refused to talk to it, but it worked fine with XP?
You are talking about the company that couldn't even get "ping" right after they were handed the source code for it from Berkeley, with surprisingly nasty consequences.
I'll admit that I'm not aware of the problem you're talking about, but I can't help wondering whether or not it is related to the numerous Unix vendors who had to release updates for their 'ping' tools in the late nineties, in order to avoid a DoS attack possible with them?
there will always be companies willing to sell computers on the basis of not being encumbered by useless "Trust". "Having problems playing your media files? Don't let the big boys tell you what you can do with your computer! Buy a PC from TrustNobody, Inc. and do what you want, whenever you want!"
I think you misunderstand what Trusted Computing is. It isn't a mechanism which disallows you from performing actions (presumably by monitoring what you're doing with your computer and stopping the process if it does something "illegal"). It is a system that allows you to do things that a non-Trusted computer _cannot_ do. Like play a DRM-encumbered media file that has been encrypted to a key you don't know, but which is stored on the trusted chip on the motherboard.
So, at least for the ordinary person, it isn't a matter of the Trusted computer not letting them do things that they could do with an unTrusted one; in fact it is the other way around.
And sure, they can make a copy of that DRM encumbered file. Nobody else will be able to play it, though, because nobody else has the same key on their Trusted chip.
Man... with all these "Luke, I am your father" posts, it would appear Amidala really got around. Did they have paternity tests in "Long ago" and "Far, far away?"
I'm sure there's a naked and petrified somewhere in there... but I refuse, I tell you!
I tell you, I'd be petrified at the idea of sleeping with either Jar-Jar _or_ Jabba.
Same comment applies to install time... if you choose a minimal install, it takes very little time to install -- however, you have to take the time and frigging deselect everything that is preselected for you, and then go through the million dialogs saying "xyz depends on this library" and turn a bunch of things back on you way in the negative as far as install time goes. If you choose a default install, be prepared to wait about 4 hours.
An XP install takes about a half hour.
Hmmm... interesting. The last Linux install I did (SuSE personal 9.1) took approximately half an hour. I did customise the package list a little; I didn't have much trouble with dependencies -- it just present a list of packages that were being installed automatically to resolve them, which I accepted before it installed. I'll admit that I ended up installing some stuff I didn't want, but then the entire installation came to only about 700Mb, including many applications that aren't included by default with a Windows installation, like an office suite (OpenOffice), personal information manager, viewers for several file types that MS don't provide (e.g. PDF), a selection of text editors (vim, joe, kwrite, kate), an up-to-date Java runtime, and lots of other random things.
Once I had finished the install, the online update installed a couple of security patches that downloaded in about 10-20 minutes over my modem link.
With XP, the install took a similar amount of time, but I additionally had to install several other applications that took about 10-20 minutes each to achieve the same level of functionality. Also, the download of security updates after the installation took somewhere in the region of 2 hours, and I had to reboot twice in order to install everything (the Linux updates did not require a reboot).
The LSB doesn't change the fact that applications are linked to a specific libc version, and changes in that can easily cause the application to break.
The solution, of course, is either for non open-source applications to statically link libc (which is the usual approach on windows) or a standard version to be agreed on and stuck to for long periods of time between distributions.
But the libc build is, apparently, highly dependent on your kernel version. This is a big problem, as it eliminates the first of these options as being viable.
Exactly how does this differ from Microsoft's EULA which basically says, if you use this, it's your fault. MS telling people that they have some responsiblity for anything is kind of humorous in a sick way.
I think you missed the point. What I think he was saying is that when something goes wrong with Windows, people blame Microsoft and it gives them a bad image, because they've paid for something that doesn't work. When something goes wrong with free software that you've downloaded, you aren't so critical. You haven't paid for it, so you don't really blame anyone for selling you something that didn't work. But, with more and more people paying for "professional" standard distributions, e.g. RedHat Enterprise, Linux is going to end up facing more and more people feeling the same way about its bugs as they do about MS's bugs. He's not apportioning responsibility for this -- he's saying that the consumers will.
To put this in perspective, a terabyte is 2^40 bytes. 64 bit file systems can handle (with ease) up to 2^74 bytes; thats 2^34 terabytes.
2^34 is 1 terabyte / 256 bytes. Assuming a constant geometric progression, we're talking about at least the length of time between now and when the first practical computer systems were built (so about 50 years). And that's if we don't hit a fundamental limit of the universe and become unable to continue increasing density.
one day the progression of storage could become geometric
Progression of storage capacity is already geometric (every so often it doubles). You mean exponential (every so often it squares).
Exponential improvements are rare. In fact, I'm not aware of any environment in which humanity has ever made exponential improvements for a sustained period of time.
And don't tell me that the people won't need the storage. Storing relatively low quality HD video exceeds practical storage media today in terms of size and power requirements.
I calculated in another post the amount of video that can be stored on the largest possible 64 bit file system with 1k blocks, using uncompressed, high definition video. It amounted to 45,000 years worth of footage. Work it out yourself. You've got 2^74 bytes to play with, and your video takes about 300Mb/s.
Out if interest, if you could store a bit per electron, you'd have to have a mass of electrons that would occupy a cube of approximately 1,000 km on each side just to store the data. That's the kind of scale we're dealing with here. And that's just 64 bit file systems, not 128 bit ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, very cool.
"A script in this movie is causing Macromedia Flash Player 6 to run slowly. If it continues to run your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort this script?"
BUT.. the flash implementation is very clear, easy to use and a good bit of coding. So Ner.
Sorry, according to the copy I've just downloaded, there are NaN words in the archive, and the word I've just clicked on (""), is at position NaN.
I wouldn't say it was exactly the greatest coding in the world.
The handset of an old analog phone is by no means better or more ergonomic than a good cellphone, but it looks odd and you can't buy it, so it sets its owner apart.
I disagree. Standard phone handsets have been designed to be comfortable to use. They fit around the side of your head, and can be pressed against your ear while the mouthpiece is reasonably close to your mouth. You can hold on to them by gripping between your shoulder and your head.
Mobile phones are designed to fit in your pocket. They're too small, they're flat and they have buttons on them, all of which prevent them from being as good for the purpose of being a handset as a proper handset is. But of course, proper handsets aren't ideal for putting in your pocket...
"usher back a time they experienced only barely, if at all.' " it should say briefly not barely. Learn grammer..
That sentence is perfectly valid, from a grammatical basis. (Or should I say grammetical?)
Perhaps you should suggest they learn better vocabulary, but then again, that's even harder to spell...
I disagree, anyway. Barely is a valid choice in that sentence. It isn't as _good_ as briefly, which is more precise in its meaning, but it does the job adequately, I feel.
If you insist
the sound warmth, whether it be psychological or real, is definitely different then solid state amps.
Yes. It's called distortion. It's usually considered undesirable, because it makes the music not sound like it was intended to sound like. If the producer wanted you to hear it like that, he'd have added it to the recording.
Another limitation of Hubble is that it only provides images in the visible range
Err... bollocks. Hubble includes at least IR and UV instruments, and I believe further instruments designed to operate at a wide variety of wavelengths.
Sorry, pal, but commercial Linux distributions don't distribute updates (and upgrades) for free.
Actually, frequently they do. Of course, MS do as well - they call them service packs.
> But the libc build is, apparently, highly dependent on your kernel version. This is a big problem, as it eliminates the first of these options as being viable.
WTF are you talking about.
According to the technical documentation, glibc is only guaranteed to work on the same kernel version you built it on. This is because kernel header file changes can cause binary incompatibilities, etc.
So, you can't statically link glibc to an application and distribute it. Or if you do, you need to test it with all kernel versions and publish a range for which it will work.
There is glibc 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3
OK, so how come when I want to run Informix CSDK on Linux, it's only supported if I have either 2.2.4, 2.2.5, 2.2.93, or 2.3.2 (with a special build)? There's more to it than just the major/minor version -- incompatibilies can exist on patchlevels too.
I don't get what the obcession over reboots is...
My main problem is that I like to do some useful work while I'm waiting for the patch to download. If I have to reboot in the middle & then download another patch (as the XP install required) this disturbs my work, resulting in me being less productive.
Next thing you know Microsoft will start asking Windows pirates to come forward on their own volition.
Isn't there a section in the installation process where it suggests that if you don't have a certificate of authenticity, you ought to call 1-800 RULE GIT and let them know about it?
When I first stared using linux (96/97) dialup was my only option and while there were non winmodem modems out there, they were definatly not in my price range.
Hmm? When I bought a modem in this period, I didn't find it much of a problem. There was maybe a GBP 5 (about $7 US) premium for a modem from a vendor known not to use such dubious technology. Not a bank-breaker back when an entry level computer system cost about 50% more than a modern equivalent.
Right now, about half the PCs out there are still running older versions of Windows. The majority of those are running Windows 98 (!). The rest of running some form of XP. Yes, half the PCs sounds like a big success, but it doesn't ensure hegemony.
My stats disagree with yours somewhat; I get something like 55% of people on XP.
No one is going to ship an XP only piece of hardware, today. Tomorrow, possibly.
I don't see that. NT4 and Win95 were both very popular platforms still when USB devices started shipping, despite the fact that neither supported USB. In fact, it was largely the massive shift over to USB devices that killed these OSs, not the other way around.
More than you would think apparently. Sysadmins, DBAs, developers... depending on your business model of course. At the very least, your organization would have sysadmins who would have full access to all the systems. Not one guy, but a group of sysadmins.
And guess what... who would be able to get an end around on any anti-copying system MS implements that doesn't completely disable all USB devices ever? That's right the sysadmins. They could just install a new computer and copy the data to their USB drive before they switch on the features that would prevent it. (They have to be disabled by default; the ordinary users would get too confused otherwise)
How many people will buy a USB-product that doesn't work when you plug it into a Windows PC? How many support calls and returns would they get when the product doesn't work and Window pops up a message saying there is something wrong with the product?
Conversely, how many people will buy an update to the Windows operating system that won't work on their PC? How many people will return Longhorn because when they plugged their digital camera in, it refused to talk to it, but it worked fine with XP?
You are talking about the company that couldn't even get "ping" right after they were handed the source code for it from Berkeley, with surprisingly nasty consequences.
I'll admit that I'm not aware of the problem you're talking about, but I can't help wondering whether or not it is related to the numerous Unix vendors who had to release updates for their 'ping' tools in the late nineties, in order to avoid a DoS attack possible with them?
there will always be companies willing to sell computers on the basis of not being encumbered by useless "Trust". "Having problems playing your media files? Don't let the big boys tell you what you can do with your computer! Buy a PC from TrustNobody, Inc. and do what you want, whenever you want!"
I think you misunderstand what Trusted Computing is. It isn't a mechanism which disallows you from performing actions (presumably by monitoring what you're doing with your computer and stopping the process if it does something "illegal"). It is a system that allows you to do things that a non-Trusted computer _cannot_ do. Like play a DRM-encumbered media file that has been encrypted to a key you don't know, but which is stored on the trusted chip on the motherboard.
So, at least for the ordinary person, it isn't a matter of the Trusted computer not letting them do things that they could do with an unTrusted one; in fact it is the other way around.
And sure, they can make a copy of that DRM encumbered file. Nobody else will be able to play it, though, because nobody else has the same key on their Trusted chip.
OK, this is it. What is it with the walkie-talkie jokes? What is this about?
Man ... with all these "Luke, I am your father" posts, it would appear Amidala really got around. Did they have paternity tests in "Long ago" and "Far, far away?"
I'm sure there's a naked and petrified somewhere in there... but I refuse, I tell you!
I tell you, I'd be petrified at the idea of sleeping with either Jar-Jar _or_ Jabba.
Same comment applies to install time ... if you choose a minimal install, it takes very little time to install -- however, you have to take the time and frigging deselect everything that is preselected for you, and then go through the million dialogs saying "xyz depends on this library" and turn a bunch of things back on you way in the negative as far as install time goes. If you choose a default install, be prepared to wait about 4 hours.
An XP install takes about a half hour.
Hmmm... interesting. The last Linux install I did (SuSE personal 9.1) took approximately half an hour. I did customise the package list a little; I didn't have much trouble with dependencies -- it just present a list of packages that were being installed automatically to resolve them, which I accepted before it installed. I'll admit that I ended up installing some stuff I didn't want, but then the entire installation came to only about 700Mb, including many applications that aren't included by default with a Windows installation, like an office suite (OpenOffice), personal information manager, viewers for several file types that MS don't provide (e.g. PDF), a selection of text editors (vim, joe, kwrite, kate), an up-to-date Java runtime, and lots of other random things.
Once I had finished the install, the online update installed a couple of security patches that downloaded in about 10-20 minutes over my modem link.
With XP, the install took a similar amount of time, but I additionally had to install several other applications that took about 10-20 minutes each to achieve the same level of functionality. Also, the download of security updates after the installation took somewhere in the region of 2 hours, and I had to reboot twice in order to install everything (the Linux updates did not require a reboot).
The LSB doesn't change the fact that applications are linked to a specific libc version, and changes in that can easily cause the application to break.
The solution, of course, is either for non open-source applications to statically link libc (which is the usual approach on windows) or a standard version to be agreed on and stuck to for long periods of time between distributions.
But the libc build is, apparently, highly dependent on your kernel version. This is a big problem, as it eliminates the first of these options as being viable.
Exactly how does this differ from Microsoft's EULA which basically says, if you use this, it's your fault. MS telling people that they have some responsiblity for anything is kind of humorous in a sick way.
I think you missed the point. What I think he was saying is that when something goes wrong with Windows, people blame Microsoft and it gives them a bad image, because they've paid for something that doesn't work. When something goes wrong with free software that you've downloaded, you aren't so critical. You haven't paid for it, so you don't really blame anyone for selling you something that didn't work. But, with more and more people paying for "professional" standard distributions, e.g. RedHat Enterprise, Linux is going to end up facing more and more people feeling the same way about its bugs as they do about MS's bugs. He's not apportioning responsibility for this -- he's saying that the consumers will.
Hey, wait! What about hi-def 3D holographic voxel video? I bet that'd eat through a ton of drive space!
Perhaps. But I doubt I'll get to use it with a Sun server bought any time this decade. Or next. They're being _very_ premature.
To put this in perspective, a terabyte is 2^40 bytes. 64 bit file systems can handle (with ease) up to 2^74 bytes; thats 2^34 terabytes.
2^34 is 1 terabyte / 256 bytes. Assuming a constant geometric progression, we're talking about at least the length of time between now and when the first practical computer systems were built (so about 50 years). And that's if we don't hit a fundamental limit of the universe and become unable to continue increasing density.
or somewhere in the region of 45,000 hours of footage.
Sorry, the ludicrous scale of the units involved momentarily confused me. I meant 45,000 years.
one day the progression of storage could become geometric
Progression of storage capacity is already geometric (every so often it doubles). You mean exponential (every so often it squares).
Exponential improvements are rare. In fact, I'm not aware of any environment in which humanity has ever made exponential improvements for a sustained period of time.
And don't tell me that the people won't need the storage. Storing relatively low quality HD video exceeds practical storage media today in terms of size and power requirements.
I calculated in another post the amount of video that can be stored on the largest possible 64 bit file system with 1k blocks, using uncompressed, high definition video. It amounted to 45,000 years worth of footage. Work it out yourself. You've got 2^74 bytes to play with, and your video takes about 300Mb/s.
Out if interest, if you could store a bit per electron, you'd have to have a mass of electrons that would occupy a cube of approximately 1,000 km on each side just to store the data. That's the kind of scale we're dealing with here. And that's just 64 bit file systems, not 128 bit ones.