Small size and fast speed is what they should have tuned for not huge swapping and slow response.
Small size and minimal swapping *is* what they've been tuning it for. Anyone who's used Java 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and the latest 1.5 can easily see the massive improvements in each version. However, it is important to realize that Windows is not very well optimized for OOP programming. It's far too aggressive about swapping (even on a machine with gigs of RAM!) making all kinds of problems for users. Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris don't exhibit the same degree of issues with the VM (though some issues do still exist thanks to the mismatch between Java's true OOP design and the OS's 4K paging system), but they also tend not to be quite as well optimized as the Windows version.
Still, performance is more than adequate on any system, which has caused game providers to embrace the platform for their needs.
Anyone who still clings to the idea that "Java is slow" is only proving that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
I haven't programmed for Java since the first implementation years ago, so I'm not very knowledgable in how it has changed over the years.
Java the language and Java the instruction set have changed very little over the years. Java has instead focused on libraries, making it tremendously compatible with itself. Sun also forces VM providers to pass their Compatibility Test Kit before they can use the brand name "Java".
You really should check it out sometime. The base library has pretty much everything you could every possibly need or want. And if it's not there, it's a guarantee that a third party library exists. Go ahead and name something you need. Anything. I'll bet a library can be found for it.:-)
I think the OSS community could do a FAR better job implementing a Java/AJAX/DHTML-style language with millions of programmers inputting what they want to see, and the other millions working on refining the structures.
You must mean Mono? While your heart is in the right place, I think you may have the rose colored glasses on a little tight there. The OSS community is extremely good at producing software, but it's not so good at producing standards. Between OSS vs. ALSA, RPM vs. DEB vs. Portage vs. (whatever), GNOME APIs vs. KDE APIs, LSB vs. RedHat vs. United Linux, etc, the OSS community hasn't been particularly good about agreeing on things. Efforts like the Free Desktop movement have helped, but it can still be a real PITA to target both GNOME and KDE.
The next step, I believe, is creating a more realistic "standard" emulation structure for software./i>
Like Java? It's standard, it's cross platform, and it's already in widespread use. Plus performance has already been tuned to extremes, not to mention the sheer number of Desktop and non-desktop libraries available for it. Thanks to its popularity, you can use Swing, SWT, wxWindows, GTK, QT, or any of your other favorite crossplatform front-ends for your Java apps.
Now that processors are incredibly fast, we're likely to see little performance increases in the tasks that 90% of the world uses PCs for:
Unfortunately, this is a falsifyable statement. As much as we'd like emulation to keep pace with technology, even the fastest processors today have a hard time emulating something as "simple" as a 286 or 386 from days gone by. This has been extremely frustrating for those of us who remember old games but can't get enough performance to actually make them work well. Research is still underway, but don't expect miracles from emulation technology. The really fast stuff (e.g. VMWare) actually only virtualizes the hardware, but lets the instruction set run on the real processor.
Not to start flaming, but I've always maintained that the expansive hard drive sizes over the years certainly hasn't aided in the idea of creating (and maintaining) tight, clean code.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, small hard drives and less powerful systems didn't exactly encourage readable code either. Unrolled loops, cycle saving "tricks", and millions of premature optimizations were a large part of the earlier days of computing.
Java is actually quite interesting because it's one of the first (the first?) languages to encourage readable code. Sadly, anyone who's been introduced to Microsoft C++ (Hungarian notation, damn underscores in front of everything, etc.) may be beyond hope of ever properly utilizing the language.
It's not so bad. They keep shifting to different camera angle, shots of the moon, shots of Khan gloating, more angles of Kirk, more shots of the moon, more shots of Khan gloating, Spock raising an eyebrow, more angles on Kirk, a few shots of Dr. Marcus and Dr. Marcus looking at each other, more shots of Khan gloating, Spock shifting in his chair, more shots of the moon, Scotty with a horrified look on his face, more angles of Kirk...
You get the idea.
Just consider it the new "WAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUPPPP!" craze.
Believe it or not, I remember once I saw there was an experiment in which a company (I do not remember if it was Dell) gave away free computers to the users which where add suported (this was more than 8 years ago).
It was FreePC.com, IIRC. They were a separate startup that thought they would make it big by offering a PC with a real resolution of 1024x768, but an effective resolution of 800x600. (The rest was ad space.) They also provided the dial up service. Many people (myself included) signed up for the offer. Unsurprisingly, the company went under long before most people (again, including myself) actually received their PCs.
BTW, they had a monthly charge if you didn't watch enough ads. I think the problem they had was that they couldn't line up enough advertisers to make a profit, and they couldn't charge the users for actually looking at their placeholders.
Even though you can try to justify it and I am sure there are some isolated usefulness, I'd say NO, at least for work PC.
Personally, I think it's a great idea. If Microsoft moved all their Windows products to Adware, then computer users would start to grumble. Computer users grumbling will eventually produce a desire to move off of Windows. Then I'll come along and charge $150/hr to set them up with "more technologically advanced Macintoshes". See? It's a win-win for everyone!
Of course, I'd need to take my time setting up the Macs. The blasted things are too damn easy to install. I don't even need to ghost the machines! Just extract all the Applications they need. Hmm... maybe I can find an old 10MBit hub. Preferrably with plenty of collisions. Or maybe I'll just charge thousands of dollars to make up a study saying that companies could save money by moving to Macs...
* For the humor impaired, the above is a joke. I don't usually advertise the fact that I make up studies.
Actually it is. A spamfilter doesn't try to bind meaning to what it sees, it just matches certain schemes and patterns which were created by artificial means (like by a bayesian filter) and scores based on that. An intelligent ad sensing mechanism needs to find _meaning_ in the emails - human meaning - to display relevant advertising.
You give our friends over at Google too much credit. Their scheme is most likely no different than a spam filter. It looks at the words in the message, sorts them by number of occurances, applies a probability to each word for its "relevance" (Hey look! Bayesian math!), and then does a lookup of advertisements related to those words. It probably goes through one more step to reassign probability based on higher paying ads, but that's about it.
So in the end you're talking about assigning no more "meaning" to the words than the spam filters assign.
From what I can tell, the Flashback 2 only includes 2600 games, though.
Correct. As I said, it's a true 2600.:-)
(Actually, there are a couple of compatibility problems with more obscure cartriges - that being why the cartrige port isn't installed by default - but otherwise the system is very close to the original.)
Anyhow, I want an Atari 400/800 version or nothing!
Which comes back to my original point. An A800 laptop sold for around $50 with the original BASIC and purchasable games would... RULE!
I'm certainly not arguing that the price is high. I *still* have college debts, and I dropped out! My point is that I don't believe that the real problem is the cost. No one has actually shown any figures that fewer kids are going to college. (I'm betting that figures would show that way more kids go to college today than did 10 or 20 years ago.) The problem is that we're graduating fewer advanced degrees. Kids go to college, get their BS, and leave. That's the real problem.
Don't worry about that. The music companies will soon be implementing a new system to assist you in getting the lowest price! Here's how it works:
Every song in the system will be ordered by the number of downloads it had last month. The rank will then be sorted in reverse. The position of the music on that list will be its price. Therefore, Britney Spears will cost only a penny, while Simon and Garfunkel will cost $300! See? Now you can get Britney Spears for cheaper! Aren't you HAPPY!
I suspect that one of the main reasons that this data could possibly be true is the substantial cost of Education here in the US.
I suspect you're wrong. What I actually suspect is that children today are raised on the idea that college is just another stage in schooling, and not something to be strived for. So they go, they get their four years of drinking, partying, and football, don't learn anything, then get a job they're not actually qualified for, despite the piece of paper that says they are.
College is supposed to be a place where you can get access to all the resources you need. Put it's a pull system. No one is going to make you do it. Since most students assume that it's really just a push system, guess what happens? Personally, I think that parents should stop preparing to send their kids to college, and let them fend for themselves. If a kid really wants to go to college, it is NEVER too late.
The question of Access is one about the cost of conversion, not whether Access is competitive with other databases - it isn't.
That's why Access isn't used as a database. If that were the only problem, conversions would be cheap and easy. The real problem is that Access is used as a RAD tool for fast application development. As anyone who's taken the "Oh, we'll do a throw-away prototype first" route can attest, you inevitably get stuck with the design because it's simply too costly to reverse engineer all the bits of business logic that are now stuck in the app.
Sometimes companies bite the bullet anyway. These companies almost always find that the conversion is expensive, painful, and take months after the deployment of the initial release to actually meet the feature set of the original application.
Access is a trap, and it is one that Microsoft continues to use to keep companies bonded to MS Office for Windows. The fact that the OSS community has decided to ignore Access has only played into Microsoft's hands.
Good points. One you didn't mention, however, is the point that really annoyed me while using it: The quality of the stories was consistently dropping. The digg users were continually finding stories about fart jokes or stupid flash animations far more interesting than any real info on science and technology. Thus the automatic filtering has been breaking down due to the opinion of its users. The end result is that you still have to do a massive amount of manual filtering to find anything of interest.
Oh, and their search engine sucks just as badly as Slashdot's. It works better technologically, but you still can never find the old stories you're looking for.
Most of these use a wide variety of COM objects only implemented on Windows.
This is different from my own experience. The standard controls are usually the only ones used because:
1) Distributing ActiveX/COM controls is a PITA 2) Access doesn't correctly support the full range of controls. (I've seen plenty of controls that work fine in VB, fail miserably in Access.)
The real holy grail of Access support is the VBA language. All kinds of business logic tidbits are stuck into VBA.
Even if we do consider that ActiveX/COM controls are the real problem, making minor changes to use alternative controls is a lot less costly than rewriting the entire application.:-)
Let me repeat, that still doesn't help companies that have software written in Access.
Many companies use Access because it's easy for the moment. The costs later down the line are not something they consider.
And to address your point specifically, a large number of Access databases actually store no real data of their own. Instead they link off to a much larger server somewhere else, making them useful as a RAD (Rapid Application Development) front-end. The limitations of the software in this situation are even less clear to the developer, making the Access trap that much more dangerous.
If I were to take a Wild Ass Guess(TM), I'd point to SATA and PCI-Express as being likely candidates. Many distros weren't up on these technologies until recently, as the 2.6 kernel has had a few ups and downs in supporting them, and I don't think that 2.4 supported them at all. The NForce2 chipset doesn't help either (though you can get drivers from NVidia's site if the included drivers don't work for you). I still can't install Yoper on my machine despite the supposed kernel support for SATA drives.
Given that you're using an nForce2 board (rather than the far more compatible nForce4), I'd suggest trying the whole "driver disk" route. i.e. When you're going through the SuSE install, it gives you the opportunity to insert a manufacturer's driver disk. Create yourself a disk using the software on nVidia's website, then insert that when prompted. If you can get the driver disk working, you may be able to get SuSE up and running.
Good luck, and try to watch out for the quirky hardware next time.;-)
In my experience, there is only one app that makes it impossible for the companies I've worked at to switch over to an alternative OS: Microsoft Access.
Love it or hate it (mostly hate it), it lets companies quickly create interfaces to larger databases. It's so simply and easy to do, that many developers don't realize (or perhaps care) that they'll be paying heavily for their choice later on when either their needs scale beyond Access, or Microsoft releases a new (usually incompatible) version.
Sadly, just about everyone I've spoken with has considered Access support to be unimportant to office conversions. "They should use a real database," they say. While that's a fine stance to take, that doesn't help companies that are already relying on MS Access. And if you take the emulation route to get Access support, you might as well just run Windows in the first place.
It's really too bad that the Access format is so widely ignored. Much of the groundwork has already been laid for reading/writing the format, and StarOffice/OSS have a real chance to make Access work correctly. IMHO, managers given the opportunity to use their existing Access applications on a better platform would jump at the chance to save money and support calls.
I don't live in Massachusetts, but I'd guess the lack of press has a lot to do with the general public's tenuous grasp on the concept of file formats, let alone the idea of why any one format should be considered 'better' than another.
That's probably part of it. But part of it also is that this fight is happening mostly online. All the news sources carrying are online, and all the arguments are presented online. Heck, the story listed was RFCed on the Linux4Christians mailing list prior to publishing.
Journalists are getting better at watching the Internet for stories, but they've still got a long way to go. They're ignoring far too many major events that the Internet is buzzing with.
If you mean the Atari 7800 flashbacks, they weren't genuine emulators; they'd simply reprogrammed the game IIRC, and there were apparently quite a few differences between the Flashbacks and the "real thing"
This was true of the Atari Flashback 1. The Flashback 2.0 (still suffering from supply problems) is a true 2600 that runs the original games, has original styling (including the joysticks!) and even has the pins for a cartrige slot (if you're good enough with a solder). Head over to AtariAge.com sometime and read all about the latest version.
You can get the actual device at Amazon, but you'll have to use one of their third-party stores. Amazon themselves doesn't have it in stock yet. (Though QVC does? WTF?)
That's because it was already posted over at AtariAge. (A huge site in of itself.) This story just freaks me out, because I was just looking at this over there, then refreshed Slashdot and found it here. Weird.
The laptop itself is pretty cool, though. Reminds me of when I used to play with the Atari computers in the library. (We had Frogger!) I have to wonder how cheaply someone could produce such a device as a kids toy? I mean, the Atari Flashbacks (1 & 2) were both reasonably successful at $30. All that's needed is to add an LCD screen, a cart port, Atari BASIC, and sell it for $50. Voila! A retro-development platform!:-)
Scattered all over the world? As I said, the primary root servers are in the US. From an ICANN meeting report:
.....
name org city type url
a InterNIC Herndon, VA, US com http://www.internic.org/
b ISI Marina del Rey, CA, US edu http://www.isi.edu/
c PSInet Herndon, VA, US com http://www.psi.net/
d UMD College Park, MD, US edu http://www.umd.edu/
e NASA Mt View, CA, US usg http://www.nasa.gov/
f ISC Palo Alto, CA, US com http://www.isc.org/
g DISA Vienna, VA, US usg http://nic.mil/
h ARL Aberdeen, MD, US usg http://www.arl.mil/
i NORDUnet Stockholm, SE int http://www.nordu.net/
j (TBD) (colo w/A) 0 http://www.iana.org/
k RIPE London, UK int http://www.ripe.net/
l (TBD) (colo w/B) 0 http://www.iana.org/
m WIDE Tokyo, JP int http://www.wide.ad.jp/ .....
(Note that there are probably more servers online by now. However, this is the newest list I could find.)
Volunteers or not, the respective governments would still have to seize the servers or otherwise coerce the owners of those servers to give them up. Which would most likely (as I said) entail escalation of force. It would also have little impact if the entire country/region is not pointing to the seized root server.
P.S. MODS: Love the mod trolling. Overrated? How brave of you.
So does this mean that the Internet isn't going to fall apart now, like the U.N. was predicting?
Or more precisely, the Internet isn't going to break like the UN threatened to do. Of course, such a move would have carried little (if any) weight. US netizens would continue about thier business, mostly oblivious to the loss of the rest of the world (except for email, that would be a pain) while the rest of the world screams bloody murder at their stupid governments because they can't reach many of the sites they use daily. (Slashot being an example of this.)
That's assuming, of course, that the member countries actually had any way of shutting things down. They have control over their domains, but the machines are still handled by ICANN. Attempting to sieze those machines would have meant police or military escalation. And even then, they still couldn't break much. They would then need every DNS server to redirect to a new root server controlled by the UN. (Since it's doubtful that the UN could gain access to the primary root servers.) They could redirect the IP address, but then things would get even dicer for them, and increase the yelling and screaming from the populace.
In the end the UN did the right thing. They stopped throwing a hissy fit and let sleeping dogs lie in exchange for a token method of voicing their opinions on DNS allocation. Did it buy them much in actual authority? No. However, they now have a central method for disseminating any complaints to the public. (i.e. Rueters: "UNCANN, released a press release today [criticizing/congratulating] the latest moves by ICANN.")
Slashdot Mirror
Small size and fast speed is what they should have tuned for not huge swapping and slow response.
Small size and minimal swapping *is* what they've been tuning it for. Anyone who's used Java 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and the latest 1.5 can easily see the massive improvements in each version. However, it is important to realize that Windows is not very well optimized for OOP programming. It's far too aggressive about swapping (even on a machine with gigs of RAM!) making all kinds of problems for users. Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris don't exhibit the same degree of issues with the VM (though some issues do still exist thanks to the mismatch between Java's true OOP design and the OS's 4K paging system), but they also tend not to be quite as well optimized as the Windows version.
Still, performance is more than adequate on any system, which has caused game providers to embrace the platform for their needs.
Anyone who still clings to the idea that "Java is slow" is only proving that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
I haven't programmed for Java since the first implementation years ago, so I'm not very knowledgable in how it has changed over the years.
:-)
Java the language and Java the instruction set have changed very little over the years. Java has instead focused on libraries, making it tremendously compatible with itself. Sun also forces VM providers to pass their Compatibility Test Kit before they can use the brand name "Java".
You really should check it out sometime. The base library has pretty much everything you could every possibly need or want. And if it's not there, it's a guarantee that a third party library exists. Go ahead and name something you need. Anything. I'll bet a library can be found for it.
I think the OSS community could do a FAR better job implementing a Java/AJAX/DHTML-style language with millions of programmers inputting what they want to see, and the other millions working on refining the structures.
You must mean Mono? While your heart is in the right place, I think you may have the rose colored glasses on a little tight there. The OSS community is extremely good at producing software, but it's not so good at producing standards. Between OSS vs. ALSA, RPM vs. DEB vs. Portage vs. (whatever), GNOME APIs vs. KDE APIs, LSB vs. RedHat vs. United Linux, etc, the OSS community hasn't been particularly good about agreeing on things. Efforts like the Free Desktop movement have helped, but it can still be a real PITA to target both GNOME and KDE.
The next step, I believe, is creating a more realistic "standard" emulation structure for software.
Like Java? It's standard, it's cross platform, and it's already in widespread use. Plus performance has already been tuned to extremes, not to mention the sheer number of Desktop and non-desktop libraries available for it. Thanks to its popularity, you can use Swing, SWT, wxWindows, GTK, QT, or any of your other favorite crossplatform front-ends for your Java apps.
Now that processors are incredibly fast, we're likely to see little performance increases in the tasks that 90% of the world uses PCs for:
Unfortunately, this is a falsifyable statement. As much as we'd like emulation to keep pace with technology, even the fastest processors today have a hard time emulating something as "simple" as a 286 or 386 from days gone by. This has been extremely frustrating for those of us who remember old games but can't get enough performance to actually make them work well. Research is still underway, but don't expect miracles from emulation technology. The really fast stuff (e.g. VMWare) actually only virtualizes the hardware, but lets the instruction set run on the real processor.
Not to start flaming, but I've always maintained that the expansive
hard drive sizes over the years certainly hasn't aided in the idea of
creating (and maintaining) tight, clean code.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, small hard drives and less powerful systems didn't exactly encourage readable code either. Unrolled loops, cycle saving "tricks", and millions of premature optimizations were a large part of the earlier days of computing.
Java is actually quite interesting because it's one of the first (the first?) languages to encourage readable code. Sadly, anyone who's been introduced to Microsoft C++ (Hungarian notation, damn underscores in front of everything, etc.) may be beyond hope of ever properly utilizing the language.
It's not so bad. They keep shifting to different camera angle, shots of the moon, shots of Khan gloating, more angles of Kirk, more shots of the moon, more shots of Khan gloating, Spock raising an eyebrow, more angles on Kirk, a few shots of Dr. Marcus and Dr. Marcus looking at each other, more shots of Khan gloating, Spock shifting in his chair, more shots of the moon, Scotty with a horrified look on his face, more angles of Kirk...
You get the idea.
Just consider it the new "WAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUPPPP!" craze.
Believe it or not, I remember once I saw there was an experiment in which a company (I do not remember if it was Dell) gave away free computers to the users which where add suported (this was more than 8 years ago).
It was FreePC.com, IIRC. They were a separate startup that thought they would make it big by offering a PC with a real resolution of 1024x768, but an effective resolution of 800x600. (The rest was ad space.) They also provided the dial up service. Many people (myself included) signed up for the offer. Unsurprisingly, the company went under long before most people (again, including myself) actually received their PCs.
BTW, they had a monthly charge if you didn't watch enough ads. I think the problem they had was that they couldn't line up enough advertisers to make a profit, and they couldn't charge the users for actually looking at their placeholders.
Even though you can try to justify it and I am sure there are some isolated usefulness, I'd say NO, at least for work PC.
Personally, I think it's a great idea. If Microsoft moved all their Windows products to Adware, then computer users would start to grumble. Computer users grumbling will eventually produce a desire to move off of Windows. Then I'll come along and charge $150/hr to set them up with "more technologically advanced Macintoshes". See? It's a win-win for everyone!
Of course, I'd need to take my time setting up the Macs. The blasted things are too damn easy to install. I don't even need to ghost the machines! Just extract all the Applications they need. Hmm... maybe I can find an old 10MBit hub. Preferrably with plenty of collisions. Or maybe I'll just charge thousands of dollars to make up a study saying that companies could save money by moving to Macs...
* For the humor impaired, the above is a joke. I don't usually advertise the fact that I make up studies.
Actually it is. A spamfilter doesn't try to bind meaning to what it sees, it just matches certain schemes and patterns which were created by artificial means (like by a bayesian filter) and scores based on that. An intelligent ad sensing mechanism needs to find _meaning_ in the emails - human meaning - to display relevant advertising.
You give our friends over at Google too much credit. Their scheme is most likely no different than a spam filter. It looks at the words in the message, sorts them by number of occurances, applies a probability to each word for its "relevance" (Hey look! Bayesian math!), and then does a lookup of advertisements related to those words. It probably goes through one more step to reassign probability based on higher paying ads, but that's about it.
So in the end you're talking about assigning no more "meaning" to the words than the spam filters assign.
Because ODBC will run VBA scripts on forms and generate printable reports on a database that has no data.
We're you paying attention at all?
From what I can tell, the Flashback 2 only includes 2600 games, though.
:-)
Correct. As I said, it's a true 2600.
(Actually, there are a couple of compatibility problems with more obscure cartriges - that being why the cartrige port isn't installed by default - but otherwise the system is very close to the original.)
Anyhow, I want an Atari 400/800 version or nothing!
Which comes back to my original point. An A800 laptop sold for around $50 with the original BASIC and purchasable games would... RULE!
I'm certainly not arguing that the price is high. I *still* have college debts, and I dropped out! My point is that I don't believe that the real problem is the cost. No one has actually shown any figures that fewer kids are going to college. (I'm betting that figures would show that way more kids go to college today than did 10 or 20 years ago.) The problem is that we're graduating fewer advanced degrees. Kids go to college, get their BS, and leave. That's the real problem.
Don't worry about that. The music companies will soon be implementing a new system to assist you in getting the lowest price! Here's how it works:
Every song in the system will be ordered by the number of downloads it had last month. The rank will then be sorted in reverse. The position of the music on that list will be its price. Therefore, Britney Spears will cost only a penny, while Simon and Garfunkel will cost $300! See? Now you can get Britney Spears for cheaper! Aren't you HAPPY!
I suspect that one of the main reasons that this data could possibly be true is the substantial cost of Education here in the US.
I suspect you're wrong. What I actually suspect is that children today are raised on the idea that college is just another stage in schooling, and not something to be strived for. So they go, they get their four years of drinking, partying, and football, don't learn anything, then get a job they're not actually qualified for, despite the piece of paper that says they are.
College is supposed to be a place where you can get access to all the resources you need. Put it's a pull system. No one is going to make you do it. Since most students assume that it's really just a push system, guess what happens? Personally, I think that parents should stop preparing to send their kids to college, and let them fend for themselves. If a kid really wants to go to college, it is NEVER too late.
The question of Access is one about the cost of conversion, not whether Access is competitive with other databases - it isn't.
That's why Access isn't used as a database. If that were the only problem, conversions would be cheap and easy. The real problem is that Access is used as a RAD tool for fast application development. As anyone who's taken the "Oh, we'll do a throw-away prototype first" route can attest, you inevitably get stuck with the design because it's simply too costly to reverse engineer all the bits of business logic that are now stuck in the app.
Sometimes companies bite the bullet anyway. These companies almost always find that the conversion is expensive, painful, and take months after the deployment of the initial release to actually meet the feature set of the original application.
Access is a trap, and it is one that Microsoft continues to use to keep companies bonded to MS Office for Windows. The fact that the OSS community has decided to ignore Access has only played into Microsoft's hands.
Good points. One you didn't mention, however, is the point that really annoyed me while using it: The quality of the stories was consistently dropping. The digg users were continually finding stories about fart jokes or stupid flash animations far more interesting than any real info on science and technology. Thus the automatic filtering has been breaking down due to the opinion of its users. The end result is that you still have to do a massive amount of manual filtering to find anything of interest.
Oh, and their search engine sucks just as badly as Slashdot's. It works better technologically, but you still can never find the old stories you're looking for.
Most of these use a wide variety of COM objects only implemented on Windows.
:-)
This is different from my own experience. The standard controls are usually the only ones used because:
1) Distributing ActiveX/COM controls is a PITA
2) Access doesn't correctly support the full range of controls. (I've seen plenty of controls that work fine in VB, fail miserably in Access.)
The real holy grail of Access support is the VBA language. All kinds of business logic tidbits are stuck into VBA.
Even if we do consider that ActiveX/COM controls are the real problem, making minor changes to use alternative controls is a lot less costly than rewriting the entire application.
Let me repeat, that still doesn't help companies that have software written in Access.
Many companies use Access because it's easy for the moment. The costs later down the line are not something they consider.
And to address your point specifically, a large number of Access databases actually store no real data of their own. Instead they link off to a much larger server somewhere else, making them useful as a RAD (Rapid Application Development) front-end. The limitations of the software in this situation are even less clear to the developer, making the Access trap that much more dangerous.
If I were to take a Wild Ass Guess(TM), I'd point to SATA and PCI-Express as being likely candidates. Many distros weren't up on these technologies until recently, as the 2.6 kernel has had a few ups and downs in supporting them, and I don't think that 2.4 supported them at all. The NForce2 chipset doesn't help either (though you can get drivers from NVidia's site if the included drivers don't work for you). I still can't install Yoper on my machine despite the supposed kernel support for SATA drives.
;-)
Given that you're using an nForce2 board (rather than the far more compatible nForce4), I'd suggest trying the whole "driver disk" route. i.e. When you're going through the SuSE install, it gives you the opportunity to insert a manufacturer's driver disk. Create yourself a disk using the software on nVidia's website, then insert that when prompted. If you can get the driver disk working, you may be able to get SuSE up and running.
Good luck, and try to watch out for the quirky hardware next time.
In my experience, there is only one app that makes it impossible for the companies I've worked at to switch over to an alternative OS: Microsoft Access.
Love it or hate it (mostly hate it), it lets companies quickly create interfaces to larger databases. It's so simply and easy to do, that many developers don't realize (or perhaps care) that they'll be paying heavily for their choice later on when either their needs scale beyond Access, or Microsoft releases a new (usually incompatible) version.
Sadly, just about everyone I've spoken with has considered Access support to be unimportant to office conversions. "They should use a real database," they say. While that's a fine stance to take, that doesn't help companies that are already relying on MS Access. And if you take the emulation route to get Access support, you might as well just run Windows in the first place.
It's really too bad that the Access format is so widely ignored. Much of the groundwork has already been laid for reading/writing the format, and StarOffice/OSS have a real chance to make Access work correctly. IMHO, managers given the opportunity to use their existing Access applications on a better platform would jump at the chance to save money and support calls.
I don't live in Massachusetts, but I'd guess the lack of press has a lot to do with the general public's tenuous grasp on the concept of file formats, let alone the idea of why any one format should be considered 'better' than another.
That's probably part of it. But part of it also is that this fight is happening mostly online. All the news sources carrying are online, and all the arguments are presented online. Heck, the story listed was RFCed on the Linux4Christians mailing list prior to publishing.
Journalists are getting better at watching the Internet for stories, but they've still got a long way to go. They're ignoring far too many major events that the Internet is buzzing with.
If you mean the Atari 7800 flashbacks, they weren't genuine emulators; they'd simply reprogrammed the game IIRC, and there were apparently quite a few differences between the Flashbacks and the "real thing"
This was true of the Atari Flashback 1. The Flashback 2.0 (still suffering from supply problems) is a true 2600 that runs the original games, has original styling (including the joysticks!) and even has the pins for a cartrige slot (if you're good enough with a solder). Head over to AtariAge.com sometime and read all about the latest version.
You can get the actual device at Amazon, but you'll have to use one of their third-party stores. Amazon themselves doesn't have it in stock yet. (Though QVC does? WTF?)
That's because it was already posted over at AtariAge. (A huge site in of itself.) This story just freaks me out, because I was just looking at this over there, then refreshed Slashdot and found it here. Weird.
:-)
The laptop itself is pretty cool, though. Reminds me of when I used to play with the Atari computers in the library. (We had Frogger!) I have to wonder how cheaply someone could produce such a device as a kids toy? I mean, the Atari Flashbacks (1 & 2) were both reasonably successful at $30. All that's needed is to add an LCD screen, a cart port, Atari BASIC, and sell it for $50. Voila! A retro-development platform!
(That's right kids, real BASIC, Old-Skool style!)
Volunteers or not, the respective governments would still have to seize the servers or otherwise coerce the owners of those servers to give them up. Which would most likely (as I said) entail escalation of force. It would also have little impact if the entire country/region is not pointing to the seized root server.
P.S. MODS: Love the mod trolling. Overrated? How brave of you.
So does this mean that the Internet isn't going to fall apart now, like the U.N. was predicting?
Or more precisely, the Internet isn't going to break like the UN threatened to do. Of course, such a move would have carried little (if any) weight. US netizens would continue about thier business, mostly oblivious to the loss of the rest of the world (except for email, that would be a pain) while the rest of the world screams bloody murder at their stupid governments because they can't reach many of the sites they use daily. (Slashot being an example of this.)
That's assuming, of course, that the member countries actually had any way of shutting things down. They have control over their domains, but the machines are still handled by ICANN. Attempting to sieze those machines would have meant police or military escalation. And even then, they still couldn't break much. They would then need every DNS server to redirect to a new root server controlled by the UN. (Since it's doubtful that the UN could gain access to the primary root servers.) They could redirect the IP address, but then things would get even dicer for them, and increase the yelling and screaming from the populace.
In the end the UN did the right thing. They stopped throwing a hissy fit and let sleeping dogs lie in exchange for a token method of voicing their opinions on DNS allocation. Did it buy them much in actual authority? No. However, they now have a central method for disseminating any complaints to the public. (i.e. Rueters: "UNCANN, released a press release today [criticizing/congratulating] the latest moves by ICANN.")
Jobs exclaims: What you say?