LOTR was on our high-school's reading list for Eng. Lit. It wasn't a mandatory text then, but it certainly was 'advised' and this was before the Internet, let alone the film.
The thing is that Tolkein was regarded as great Literature. He shared that reading list with others like Joyce.
Is HP great literature? Well, no. However, it is a thumping good read and the children and their relationships with adults very well drawn. The magic and so on make the books fun, but the kids are real to other kids in a way that shouldn't date the books.
HP5 is much bigger than my PDA. However, it is still more convenient to read on paper than on the PDA. However, my PDA is portable and I have often d/led copies of books that I have in print for reading whilst on the go.
HP5 and LOTR are physically big books (although I have the special edition of LOTR that is printed on ultra-thin paper). As printed docs they are only about a meg or two in size. Easy to carry around.
Give me better definition, smaller text and a paperback sized screen, this may change - but only if I don't have to worry about dropping it in the bath!!!!
I understand that she has even given readings in them. However, she is a very rich lady and can afford to be generous. Originally, she was a teacher and like most she would have been fighting to get kids to read more.
Authors in general are a bit mixed up about libraries. True, it represents a hole in their income but at the same time it is a very real example of how they are contributing to the public 'good'.
Incidentally, the difference between a lending library and a downloaded copy is that a library can not lend out more copies than it has. The process is lim iting and readers are forced to wait. Of course, they may then be impatient and go out and buy the book.
As for libraries with sound or video collections, the media has already got quite upset about members of the public being able to take them home and perhaps copy them.
What Sun wants and Microsoft hates is cross-platform compatibility between JVMs. Microsoft felt that the Sun JVM and basic classes were organised more towards X rather than Windows GUI frameworks and they decided to extend and optimise this for Windows. Fair enough, but this undermines to concept of interoperability which Microsoft doesn't care about.
The issue of hardware platforms is another story. I agree that a mass-produced x86 box will always be cheaper than specialised SPARchitecture.
That's why I'm disgusted with Republicans - they aren't acting like conservatives. They are anti-market and pro-business, and business has plenty of power vs. consumers as is.
Actually, I'm afraid that your are wrong there. The Republicans are currently pro a very small section of business. Namely large companies and not entrepreneurs.
The main problem is that these do not have multiple I/O ports. A full PC is better if you want multiple LAN or WAN cards. Sure you won't be able to drive everything at fullspeed, but do you always really need to?
A CISCO router is essentially just a computer with a lot of intelligent ports and a much faster I/O bus. A CISCO router is also just that, a router. However, if you don't mind a performance hit, you can run other stuff on the machine such as proxies or whatever. This, you can't do on the CISCO.
Seriously, you seem to be trolling, but I'll bite.
If there was no competition then there is uniformity and stagnation. In the closed source commercial world, competition happens all the time and the results generally come down to $. It is harder to 'fork' a closed source project because of IP.
In the open source world, projects also can and should compete. The grounds for comeptition may be functionality, the development community or even just general coolness. Because IP issues don't exist to the same degree, projects borrow code and ways of doing things all the whole time.
Each 'failure' is also a success because people can learn from picking over the bones of dead projects. This just isn't possible with closed source.
There may well be good grounds for parallel implementations. In the end it comes down to taste. I like Gnome but she prefers KDE, who is right? There are many ways to cross a river, and each may have their preference as regards boat bridge or swimming.
On my machine (Asus motherboard), standby turns the fans off. The system is obviously still partially powered, (for example, wake on key can be enabled as well as wake on LAN).
What disks are you running? Hibernate mode tends to hit the disks hard. This is what seems to be the main delay on my systems.
I don't think you mean hibernation. That takes a bit longer because of the save to disk. Standby mode is what I think you are referring to, where the CPU is halted and most I/O cards are powered down (except LAN cards with WOL) but memory is powered up so it retains the system state. If the power dies at this point then you have lost the image of the working system and it is like a system crash. Hibernation takes longer as you essentially write all of memory to a hibernation file.
Linux supports both standby and hibernation modes although it needs some hardware and bios support. It has certainly saved my life during a battery failure a few times.
The problem is with standby/hibernation modes is that apart from a hardware reset, everything stays the same, especially programs with memory leaks.
The main issue that someone else commented on is that wheel-mice have modes.
Every so often a wheel mouse under Linux seems to hang (i.e., not do anything) under RH 8 and 9. This isn't the system, it is some kind of confusion caused by the mouse. Switching virtual consoles away from X then back again seems to clean things up wonderfully.
What I would love to know is where is the mouse reset is being generated, i.e. is this X,/dev/mouse or what? Clearly Win either is sending out a periodic mouse reset or it waits for something to seem borked and does the reset automatically.
I would challenge that "top 25" that you talk about. There are a lot of good programs out there within the top 100 if not further down the activity scale.
I agree that CVS is a good example of how the process works, but you should be more favourable to it. Someone produced a solution and it hit a dead-end. It is still adequate for a lot of people but it isn't ClearCase. However, all that code is available for refactoring into another project which will be better. Such a solution is not possible for closed source software unless it is within the vendor.
I would suggest that you look at another project: GnuCash which has changed massively over its lifetime. Stable releases were just that and the implementation details largely opaque to the user. EFfectively, between stable 1.6 and 1.8 was a massive fork. All managed with CVS.
But in theory at least, you need some way of proving that you published it on a particular date. There are digital notary services, at least in theory, and to ensure that your idea was properly established - you would need to ensure that the page was 'notarised'.
Apart from the family, I am into hashing. This has little to do with the stuff that one smokes or puts into brownies. It is just a drinking club that runs. It is quite big (about 200,000 members across 150 countries) but tends to live by disorganisation. Technology fits in well because without any centralised management, it tends to keep together via Email and the web.
It fits in well with a travelling livestyle because almost all capital cities have a club and many major cities. It is a great way of meeting locals as well as other expats.
Its kind of a full time project supporting the kids as well. Not the money thing (although kids are very good at spending it), it is the taxi service that you have to run, the homework that you have to help them with, the worrying when they are out late (how did parents cope before mobile phones?) and so on.
It sounds to me like the developer didn't realise why micro-Linux systems are interesting. The whole value is that most of the code base is widely used and is probably quite reliable.
Perhaps the author lost his way. OSS may sometimes pay your lunch, but only if somebody wants you to mod it so badly that they are prepared to pay for it. The best it can usually do is to help get you consulting gigs.
AIX seems to be stagnating. Mind you I don't get to see current versions so often - I get stuck with a version thats a couple or so years old. I can only talk about the announced features.
His stuff was written some time ago, before Spammers discovered the Usenet. More recently the discussion groups and the intelligences would have been more concerned about multi-species herbal viagra.
I have now just one full-time system with win 2K and 256MB and 2 PII-450s. Performance for playing games is great but only if you play minesweepe and solitaire. I have a part-time system, a laptop with a PIII at 500 MHz, but it is also slow when I want it to do serious work.
If I try to do something serious under Wundows, like dtp, it reminds me of working with Framemaker on a VAXstation 60 with 32MB of memory about ten years ago. You don't *have* to run Gnome or KDE to use X.
As for smoothness under Unix, this is largely a factor of your hertz settings. If you interrupt more, there is more responsiveness but more overhead. It is easy to choose.what you want (and to get rid of services you don't need). It is much harder to do this to Win2K or XP.
I also prefer the brick wall that Unix has between GUI and kernel. Sure it slows things down from the gamong point of view, but I can restart a GUI without rebooting the system.
The things is that Win2K and its derivatives need fairly serious hardware just to breath. If you add office on there you need a 1GHz system with 256MB before you start wanting to play games.
Linux runs on almost anything. However, I agree that if anyone wanted to use it for serious gaming, then that 64MB 120 MHz P2 isn't enough. However, miltiboots work fine and there is nothing really stopping people from running Win and Linux on their fats computer. The trouble is that Linux non-game performance on such a system will just blow people away.
AFAIK, poltics continues to be a 'paid' business. Does Hatch waive his income as a Senator? Does he refuse donations to his relection fund? Hatch is a politician by profession, so it is definitely used for his 'work'.
This is definitely a commercial use, so he should pay for the license. OTOH, it is just some stupid Brit who doesn't have a vote for any senator in the US, so his copyright isn't important, is it?
is airline management software. They do Cargo systems, baggage systems and passenger reservations for many airlines and all over the world.
I don't know how much they actually made from LZW, but the modem market has been dying for a long time (does V.90 even use LZW?) and the GIF license was only needed by picture production s/w.
I use AIX at work and it is my impression that IBM will continue to sell me AIX for some time to come. However, I will see less and less new features appearing in AIX as they reduce their own development staff.
The thing is that Linux is cheap for manufacturers - they no longer have the responsibility of developing a full blown Unix, just the bits that are special to their hardware, i.e., Z-series support.
Lock-in is nice - but it costs a lot for a vendor to have their own operating system. IBM are also big on the services business. Actually, these days they make more money from consultancy than they do on hardware or software.
The VMS file system allowed you to have up to 32767 versions hangin around. If you created a file (which the editor always did by default), the system would create a new version automatically. Version numbers could be limited by directory so only the last n versions are kept. The problem is that 10 versions of a file wiould take a lot of space.
Diff based versioning allows older versions to be kept as a series of differences from the current version. This is compact, but I feel it is pushing too much down to the file system level. A file system should just store data and provide ways of tagging the data to facilitate retrieval (whether directories or whatever).
For real revision control across a project on VMS, there was something called CMS (a little like SCCS/RCS). This would only store diffences but allow you to form groups of elements and enter version sets into classes. It cost money but was very good and could be used via the command line or a GUI. What was nice was the whole thing could be embedded inside scripts or called from other packages so you could really roll your own.
What was really nice on VMS was RMS, the record management system that sat on top of the file system. It meant that all programs could share files, even indexed files. Then there were the use of logical names and search lists.
If I defined a logical, SRC to be a comma separated list of directories, it would work like the Unix Path and the system would look through each directory specified until it found the file. Typically, I would have the working directory, staging area and the base level directory in the list so if something wasn't checked out, it would be automatically pulled from the base level. By redefining the logical, I can switch projects and environments easily.
The thing is that this wasn't the file system and it was an optional layer but it came as a standard system library and all the normal opens went through this layer. However only relational databases tended to bypass it (they did their own locking and had their own ideas about internal file structure). As with the underlying I/O subsystem, this layer above could be used totally asynchronously.
Personally whenever I use a Unix system, it isn't so much the underlying file system that becomes an issue so much as the layer above it. What is inside the file and how I can describe those contents (file metadata or resouce forks). When I open a VMS file, I immediately know things like max record size, blocking factor and so on. I don't always need the in fo, but I can really speed things up when I do.
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The thing is that Tolkein was regarded as great Literature. He shared that reading list with others like Joyce.
Is HP great literature? Well, no. However, it is a thumping good read and the children and their relationships with adults very well drawn. The magic and so on make the books fun, but the kids are real to other kids in a way that shouldn't date the books.
HP5 and LOTR are physically big books (although I have the special edition of LOTR that is printed on ultra-thin paper). As printed docs they are only about a meg or two in size. Easy to carry around.
Give me better definition, smaller text and a paperback sized screen, this may change - but only if I don't have to worry about dropping it in the bath!!!!
Authors in general are a bit mixed up about libraries. True, it represents a hole in their income but at the same time it is a very real example of how they are contributing to the public 'good'.
Incidentally, the difference between a lending library and a downloaded copy is that a library can not lend out more copies than it has. The process is lim iting and readers are forced to wait. Of course, they may then be impatient and go out and buy the book.
As for libraries with sound or video collections, the media has already got quite upset about members of the public being able to take them home and perhaps copy them.
The issue of hardware platforms is another story. I agree that a mass-produced x86 box will always be cheaper than specialised SPARchitecture.
Actually, I'm afraid that your are wrong there. The Republicans are currently pro a very small section of business. Namely large companies and not entrepreneurs.
A CISCO router is essentially just a computer with a lot of intelligent ports and a much faster I/O bus. A CISCO router is also just that, a router. However, if you don't mind a performance hit, you can run other stuff on the machine such as proxies or whatever. This, you can't do on the CISCO.
If there was no competition then there is uniformity and stagnation. In the closed source commercial world, competition happens all the time and the results generally come down to $. It is harder to 'fork' a closed source project because of IP.
In the open source world, projects also can and should compete. The grounds for comeptition may be functionality, the development community or even just general coolness. Because IP issues don't exist to the same degree, projects borrow code and ways of doing things all the whole time.
Each 'failure' is also a success because people can learn from picking over the bones of dead projects. This just isn't possible with closed source.
There may well be good grounds for parallel implementations. In the end it comes down to taste. I like Gnome but she prefers KDE, who is right? There are many ways to cross a river, and each may have their preference as regards boat bridge or swimming.
What disks are you running? Hibernate mode tends to hit the disks hard. This is what seems to be the main delay on my systems.
Linux supports both standby and hibernation modes although it needs some hardware and bios support. It has certainly saved my life during a battery failure a few times.
The problem is with standby/hibernation modes is that apart from a hardware reset, everything stays the same, especially programs with memory leaks.
Every so often a wheel mouse under Linux seems to hang (i.e., not do anything) under RH 8 and 9. This isn't the system, it is some kind of confusion caused by the mouse. Switching virtual consoles away from X then back again seems to clean things up wonderfully.
What I would love to know is where is the mouse reset is being generated, i.e. is this X, /dev/mouse or what? Clearly Win either is sending out a periodic mouse reset or it waits for something to seem borked and does the reset automatically.
I agree that CVS is a good example of how the process works, but you should be more favourable to it. Someone produced a solution and it hit a dead-end. It is still adequate for a lot of people but it isn't ClearCase. However, all that code is available for refactoring into another project which will be better. Such a solution is not possible for closed source software unless it is within the vendor.
I would suggest that you look at another project: GnuCash which has changed massively over its lifetime. Stable releases were just that and the implementation details largely opaque to the user. EFfectively, between stable 1.6 and 1.8 was a massive fork. All managed with CVS.
But in theory at least, you need some way of proving that you published it on a particular date. There are digital notary services, at least in theory, and to ensure that your idea was properly established - you would need to ensure that the page was 'notarised'.
It fits in well with a travelling livestyle because almost all capital cities have a club and many major cities. It is a great way of meeting locals as well as other expats.
Its kind of a full time project supporting the kids as well. Not the money thing (although kids are very good at spending it), it is the taxi service that you have to run, the homework that you have to help them with, the worrying when they are out late (how did parents cope before mobile phones?) and so on.
It sounds to me like the developer didn't realise why micro-Linux systems are interesting. The whole value is that most of the code base is widely used and is probably quite reliable.
Perhaps the author lost his way. OSS may sometimes pay your lunch, but only if somebody wants you to mod it so badly that they are prepared to pay for it. The best it can usually do is to help get you consulting gigs.
AIX seems to be stagnating. Mind you I don't get to see current versions so often - I get stuck with a version thats a couple or so years old. I can only talk about the announced features.
Five minutes later......
works fine for a little bit
Five minutes later....
Believe me, it is too slow. I see the end result of telling developers that memory and cpu power are no object.
Actually, I do agree he is a good read.
If I try to do something serious under Wundows, like dtp, it reminds me of working with Framemaker on a VAXstation 60 with 32MB of memory about ten years ago. You don't *have* to run Gnome or KDE to use X.
As for smoothness under Unix, this is largely a factor of your hertz settings. If you interrupt more, there is more responsiveness but more overhead. It is easy to choose.what you want (and to get rid of services you don't need). It is much harder to do this to Win2K or XP.
I also prefer the brick wall that Unix has between GUI and kernel. Sure it slows things down from the gamong point of view, but I can restart a GUI without rebooting the system.
Linux runs on almost anything. However, I agree that if anyone wanted to use it for serious gaming, then that 64MB 120 MHz P2 isn't enough. However, miltiboots work fine and there is nothing really stopping people from running Win and Linux on their fats computer. The trouble is that Linux non-game performance on such a system will just blow people away.
This is definitely a commercial use, so he should pay for the license. OTOH, it is just some stupid Brit who doesn't have a vote for any senator in the US, so his copyright isn't important, is it?
I don't know how much they actually made from LZW, but the modem market has been dying for a long time (does V.90 even use LZW?) and the GIF license was only needed by picture production s/w.
The thing is that Linux is cheap for manufacturers - they no longer have the responsibility of developing a full blown Unix, just the bits that are special to their hardware, i.e., Z-series support.
Lock-in is nice - but it costs a lot for a vendor to have their own operating system. IBM are also big on the services business. Actually, these days they make more money from consultancy than they do on hardware or software.
Diff based versioning allows older versions to be kept as a series of differences from the current version. This is compact, but I feel it is pushing too much down to the file system level. A file system should just store data and provide ways of tagging the data to facilitate retrieval (whether directories or whatever).
For real revision control across a project on VMS, there was something called CMS (a little like SCCS/RCS). This would only store diffences but allow you to form groups of elements and enter version sets into classes. It cost money but was very good and could be used via the command line or a GUI. What was nice was the whole thing could be embedded inside scripts or called from other packages so you could really roll your own.
What was really nice on VMS was RMS, the record management system that sat on top of the file system. It meant that all programs could share files, even indexed files. Then there were the use of logical names and search lists.
If I defined a logical, SRC to be a comma separated list of directories, it would work like the Unix Path and the system would look through each directory specified until it found the file. Typically, I would have the working directory, staging area and the base level directory in the list so if something wasn't checked out, it would be automatically pulled from the base level. By redefining the logical, I can switch projects and environments easily.
The thing is that this wasn't the file system and it was an optional layer but it came as a standard system library and all the normal opens went through this layer. However only relational databases tended to bypass it (they did their own locking and had their own ideas about internal file structure). As with the underlying I/O subsystem, this layer above could be used totally asynchronously.
Personally whenever I use a Unix system, it isn't so much the underlying file system that becomes an issue so much as the layer above it. What is inside the file and how I can describe those contents (file metadata or resouce forks). When I open a VMS file, I immediately know things like max record size, blocking factor and so on. I don't always need the in fo, but I can really speed things up when I do.