Well yes, but it couldn't transmit radio waves because that's damn easy to detect, so it'd have to be autonomous, or its controllers would have to be really good at controlling something that can't give any feedback. Plus it'd have to be about the same body temperature as a bird, because that's also damn easy to detect. Plus it'd be highly suspicious if it got inside anywhere and did anything except look like it was trying to get out. There are much easier ways to spy on people when they're wandering around outside, such as satellites.
Re:Make it slick and easy and cool...
on
Sharp Readies SL-5000D
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
most people still think Linux is an Ugly, cobbled together OS that is difficult to install and use.
As a Linux user since 1995, I agree totally with this statement. No coherence of interface, a lot of work duplication, and no coherent configuration tool, and still people trumpet this as a good thing!
As far as User Interfaces are concerned, keep the appearance customisable, but make sure you've got a standard, well-defined interface. This is where Windows does a hell of a lot better than Linux.
I mean, it is a personal preference, but I don't want a system that refuses to let me swap out the memory pages I want because "it knows what's best" for me.
The relative positioning comment is kinda spurious imo. To get the top-left menu in the macintosh interface, for example, the muscle memory is "push strongly to the top-left, move down slightly". As long as the mouse speed stays the same, that's very easy to store in muscle memory precisely because the cursor "sticks" at the top left once it's already there.
Unfortunately if you decide that UI research has no value, then you're basically concluding that there is no such thing as a "good" UI for the majority of people. This is clearly false - there are a lot of user interfaces out there (the Mac UI is the prime example) which most people *do* find enjoyable to use.
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
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· Score: 1
Actually, your point can be made either way: Nobody runs the original release of KDE, this is true - but that's probably because the original release of KDE is basically unusable, whereas the current release is arguably a Windows-beater.
On the other hand, many people still run the original version of Windows 95, presumably because it meets their needs, or if it doesn't, it's close enough not to be worth the extra hassle of upgrading.
My box (single Athlon 1Ghz, IBM 7200RPM IDE drive) compiles kernels in 5m 45s (make clean; time make dep bzImage on 2.4.13pre1). Pretty good in comparison, considering that this box cost me ~$AUS2000, or perhaps $US1000. I'm using a nvidia geforce card and the emu10k1 driver, and the machine is rock-solid. It would also be a lot cheaper now - high-speed Athlons have come down a lot in price.
I understand the point of having the *ultimate* (rather than just "good") machine, and I realise that kernel compile speed isn't the most wonderful of metrics, but it does drive home the point that the more you pay, the less of a performance advantage you get. There's a price / performance sweet spot, and it's certainly not at the ultra high end.
The only thing I'd add would be a DVD drive - perhaps another $AUS170 for a cheapie Pioneer IDE model.
In some sense, it's just as logical for experienced engineers to write free software as it is for students. Imagine spending a year writing a novel... and then burning the manuscript.
Not a problem.... you did back-up your manuscript, didn't you?
Sure, and from.txt you can trivially create.rtf and not vice-versa. To be even more extreme it's easy to convert from.txt to.png, difficult to convert from.png to.txt, but that's no reason to start distribution textual descriptions in lieu of pictures, because they are suited to entirely different things. I take your final point, but the supporting argument is irrelevant.
A bunch of different servers running in separate address spaces. In NT4, everything's in kernel space, including the GUI, which means everything can stomp on everything else. This is not a microkernel. Even the revisionist NT guys who were trying to cash in on the microkernel hype when they released it had the grace to call it a "modified microkernel". Where "modified" = "not a".
.. which means that you should not have to pay for the composition copyright twice, which means that um...Lucas' point was irrelevant.
On the other hand, you have, as you mentioned, copyright on the remastering, and payment for everyone else in the CD creation process, from brochure and plastic case to CD pressing. Perhaps the compositional copyright isn't the biggest cost at all.
That was a great cheat. Spandex, funky green flowing hair, plus all the power-ups. Spending hours typing in the names of various game designers just to see if they worked, and later figuring out how the passwords in Mega Man 3 worked enough to win levels and get power-ups without all that tedious hand-eye co-ordination, probably marked the start of my interest in computers and programming.
*sigh* Didn't you learn your lesson from your poorly-informed (and similarly Amiga-centric) posting on Linux-kernel? Your ramblings are making all Amiga fans look like idiots, and that bothers me, because I'm one of them.
Actually, if BSD hadn't been involved in a licensing war with AT&T at the time, Linus would have used it. He has stated this, unfortunately I don't have a reference. To paraphrase, the comment was "It looked like BSD was going to disappear under pressure from AT&T. If this hadn't been the case I would probably have just used BSD instead".
If you say these sorts of things without knowing what you're talking about then you just sound silly.
Bah, completely missed the point. If they all they wanted to do was to restrict the locust's movement to two dimensions they could have done it much quicker and more economically by ripping its wings off.
What's more ironic about this story is that for all the advances in electronics, the best way to make a machine that can reliably steer itself is to hook an insect up to it. Nature is still better at this sort of thing than any purely electronic device.
Not only is the story wrong, it is very damaging. I don't work for Red Hat (and am currently running Debian:-) but seriously. This is just stupid.
There are 159 (as of recent check) bugs, not 2500, as mentioned above. Considering perhaps 30% are the same ("install failed") and about half the others are *ahem* trivial (such as "Wrong Icon!" and "Workspace strangeness" including the gem "also, the 2x2 are four separate workspaces. I think you want one work space...") this is pretty good.
Even if the number of bugs per distribution stays constant, as Red Hat's userbase expands there will be more bug reports. This means that even if their QA process stays as good as it always was, every release with significant changes will the be "buggiest release ever".
The link in linuxnewbie was due to someone there reacting to an "inflammatory" remark made by a Red Hat developer. The developer was Alan Cox, major kernel hacker and maintainer of the 2.2 kernel series, and he said "if you think it sucks, return it". Now this might strike people as insensitive, until you read the original "bug report". The report says "Redhat 7.0 should be recalled... this release was a "rush-job"... the QA is terrible." It goes on to say that Red Hat caues nothing but frustration for its users, and ends with a suggestion that this release will cause people to abandon RH for other distros. This isn't even close to a bug report! This is some idiot saying "Redhat sucks," and Alan was right to interpret it that way.
The original "bug" is equivalent to someone replying to "I'm having (some problem) with Linux" with "I upgraded my Linux to Windows 2000 and the problem went away," here. I can't believe this was posted as a story; it's ridiculous.
... not to mention that dd, which performs a sector-by-sector copy, does not interact with the filesystem drivers at all, and so it makes no difference what filesystem(s) are being copied...
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Well yes, but it couldn't transmit radio waves because that's damn easy to detect, so it'd have to be autonomous, or its controllers would have to be really good at controlling something that can't give any feedback. Plus it'd have to be about the same body temperature as a bird, because that's also damn easy to detect. Plus it'd be highly suspicious if it got inside anywhere and did anything except look like it was trying to get out. There are much easier ways to spy on people when they're wandering around outside, such as satellites.
most people still think Linux is an Ugly, cobbled together OS that is difficult to install and use.
As a Linux user since 1995, I agree totally with this statement. No coherence of interface, a lot of work duplication, and no coherent configuration tool, and still people trumpet this as a good thing!
As far as User Interfaces are concerned, keep the appearance customisable, but make sure you've got a standard, well-defined interface. This is where Windows does a hell of a lot better than Linux.
I mean, it is a personal preference, but I don't want a system that refuses to let me swap out the memory pages I want because "it knows what's best" for me.
The relative positioning comment is kinda spurious imo. To get the top-left menu in the macintosh interface, for example, the muscle memory is "push strongly to the top-left, move down slightly". As long as the mouse speed stays the same, that's very easy to store in muscle memory precisely because the cursor "sticks" at the top left once it's already there.
Unfortunately if you decide that UI research has no value, then you're basically concluding that there is no such thing as a "good" UI for the majority of people. This is clearly false - there are a lot of user interfaces out there (the Mac UI is the prime example) which most people *do* find enjoyable to use.
Actually, your point can be made either way: Nobody runs the original release of KDE, this is true - but that's probably because the original release of KDE is basically unusable, whereas the current release is arguably a Windows-beater.
On the other hand, many people still run the original version of Windows 95, presumably because it meets their needs, or if it doesn't, it's close enough not to be worth the extra hassle of upgrading.
My box (single Athlon 1Ghz, IBM 7200RPM IDE drive) compiles kernels in 5m 45s (make clean; time make dep bzImage on 2.4.13pre1). Pretty good in comparison, considering that this box cost me ~$AUS2000, or perhaps $US1000. I'm using a nvidia geforce card and the emu10k1 driver, and the machine is rock-solid. It would also be a lot cheaper now - high-speed Athlons have come down a lot in price.
I understand the point of having the *ultimate* (rather than just "good") machine, and I realise that kernel compile speed isn't the most wonderful of metrics, but it does drive home the point that the more you pay, the less of a performance advantage you get. There's a price / performance sweet spot, and it's certainly not at the ultra high end.
The only thing I'd add would be a DVD drive - perhaps another $AUS170 for a cheapie Pioneer IDE model.
Very easy actually: ls -s |sort -n
In some sense, it's just as logical for experienced engineers to write free software as it is for students. Imagine spending a year writing a novel... and then burning the manuscript.
Not a problem.... you did back-up your manuscript, didn't you?
Sure, and from .txt you can trivially create .rtf and not vice-versa. To be even more extreme it's easy to convert from .txt to .png, difficult to convert from .png to .txt, but that's no reason to start distribution textual descriptions in lieu of pictures, because they are suited to entirely different things. I take your final point, but the supporting argument is irrelevant.
Incorrect! After the amount of childish whining about "GNU/"Linux, I'll be doing my best to misinform people at every chance I get. :)
A bunch of different servers running in separate address spaces. In NT4, everything's in kernel space, including the GUI, which means everything can stomp on everything else. This is not a microkernel. Even the revisionist NT guys who were trying to cash in on the microkernel hype when they released it had the grace to call it a "modified microkernel". Where "modified" = "not a".
ACAR (Australian Commodore and Amiga Review...)
:-)
Wow. I read that religiously. Mr. T is right.
.. which means that you should not have to pay for the composition copyright twice, which means that um...Lucas' point was irrelevant.
On the other hand, you have, as you mentioned, copyright on the remastering, and payment for everyone else in the CD creation process, from brochure and plastic case to CD pressing. Perhaps the compositional copyright isn't the biggest cost at all.
It used to be. Before someone realised how damn unreliable that measurement was.
Bagus? Baygoose sekarli!
Actually, I'm pretty sure that the poster forgot entirely about lossless compression.
That was a great cheat. Spandex, funky green flowing hair, plus all the power-ups. Spending hours typing in the names of various game designers just to see if they worked, and later figuring out how the passwords in Mega Man 3 worked enough to win levels and get power-ups without all that tedious hand-eye co-ordination, probably marked the start of my interest in computers and programming.
*sigh* Didn't you learn your lesson from your poorly-informed (and similarly Amiga-centric) posting on Linux-kernel? Your ramblings are making all Amiga fans look like idiots, and that bothers me, because I'm one of them.
Actually, if BSD hadn't been involved in a licensing war with AT&T at the time, Linus would have used it. He has stated this, unfortunately I don't have a reference. To paraphrase, the comment was "It looked like BSD was going to disappear under pressure from AT&T. If this hadn't been the case I would probably have just used BSD instead".
If you say these sorts of things without knowing what you're talking about then you just sound silly.
Bah, completely missed the point. If they all they wanted to do was to restrict the locust's movement to two dimensions they could have done it much quicker and more economically by ripping its wings off. What's more ironic about this story is that for all the advances in electronics, the best way to make a machine that can reliably steer itself is to hook an insect up to it. Nature is still better at this sort of thing than any purely electronic device.
The original "bug" is equivalent to someone replying to "I'm having (some problem) with Linux" with "I upgraded my Linux to Windows 2000 and the problem went away," here. I can't believe this was posted as a story; it's ridiculous.
Hmm. cyber-masturbation, hyper-masturbation, web-based masturbation.
Sounds promising so far.
When the average person gets significantly fatter.
NTFS is huge.
... not to mention that dd, which performs a sector-by-sector copy, does not interact with the filesystem drivers at all, and so it makes no difference what filesystem(s) are being copied...