How about letting some schools do it one way and other schools can do it the other way. There could even be schools that exist somewhere in between on the same spectrum. Then, individuals can choose whatever they think is the most appropriate for them when deciding where to study.
Nah. Lets just force everybody to do it the same way.;-)
PowerPoint - This is the worst example. Made by a different company (orig. for Mac) and then later bought by MS. "Later in 1987, Forethought and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft Corporation for $12 million" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPoint
Xbox Live - An evolution of what games or gaming services on the PC have been doing since services like Kali were popular.
ASP - I'm assuming he meant Active Server Pages. While I can't be sure of the exact timeline according to Wikipedia PHP is a year older than the first release of ASP. Regardless, building scripting into the webserver wasn't a particularly earth shattering new idea.
All of those examples support the premise that Microsoft's M.O. is to scope out a market, get involved, and make small incremental improvements to the technology.
I'm using Konq right now and it looks ok. The only problem I see is on the section bar where the text becomes garbled. If I highlight the text the problem goes away until the page is reloaded.
There aren't any real usability problems with the new layout. At least none since they moved the article links.:-)
Since I don't have mod points: I want to second this recommendation. It was required reading for my Engineering Ethics class, along with one of Richard Feynman's book ("What do You Care what Other People Think", IIRC).
Both are really good. It's one of those rare cases that required reading is that enjoyable.:-)
I set up Plone at our office, mainly for IT, but in the near future other departments may end up using it too. You can choose to keep notes in a wiki, or in more structured forms like a documents in folders. Everything is searchable too.
I ended up writing a plone product for tracking the inventory of our machines. I used archetypes to create a PCInventory and PCInventoryFolder products. Together I get a top level view of where the machines are, the important hardware stats, etc. in a table, and each row links to the more detailed view of the individual hardware. And the web forms dovetail nicely with the old paper forms we used before.
Other nice things Plone gave me was integration (via LDAP) with our Active Directory, so no need to keep two sets of passwords, a nice product for discussion boards, and it was easy to change the look of the site to match the official company website.
All kde programs, including koffice, can print to pdf. It's a function of the printing subsystem, not the app itself.
It's not as good as OO.org at opening word docs, but I just tried one someone emailed me and it opened up fine and I could get at the content.
Even better, they're standardizing on the OpenDocument format. Hopefully, the more folks use opendocument the fewer issues exchanging files between different office apps.
A good question to ask is, whether you want to play music over the network, or if you want all sounds streamed (music,events,games,etc). The first is going to be vastly easier for you to accomplish. Off the top of my head I can think of audioplayers/jukeboxes, like mpd (although that may be unixesque systems only).
The second option is going to be a lot harder to accomplish, especially if you need to play sounds without a lot of latency. I only know of unix type software (esd,mas), and even then they are notoriously hard to get working right.
If you can live with just music, I'd go that route.
It is, but binary drivers aren't supposed to use the GPL licence macro. This "taints" the kernel so that developers know if you post a bug report to the mailing list that you have an un-debuggable driver in your system. And you're a lot less like to be helped in that case.
I don't write drivers, but I also belive you cann't access certain features of the kernel if your driver is not GPL. I could be remembering something wrong though.
Some misunderstandings were made. But of course, if they posted this link, there'd be no point to posting TFA or the arguments that will almost certainly follow.:-)
> This might work, but the question to ask is whether it would really be faster.
Yup, gotta look at the costs too.
> FPGAs are usually a lot slower than ASICs, as another replier pointed out. {snip} > And if the FPGA becomes the critical path in your processing, it had better be fast (or at least faster than your CPU).
But the FPGA is less likely to be the bottle neck anyway, the IO bus probably going to be a bigger factor. But the issue isn't whether an ASIC is faster than an FPGA, its whether the whole round trip of memory->bus->FPGA->bus->memory, will get your data crunched faster than doing it in the processor. Many algorithms can be implemented very efficeintly in hardware, for example DES encryption (an old example, I know) has a lot of bit fiddling that is really slow in a standard processor. They've sold crypto accelerator boards in the past, for this very reason.
The really neat thing about FPGAs is that they can be reprogrammed in board. If one day you are doing a lot of crypto and the next are doing MPEG encoding, you just load an new hardware design onto the FPGA.
The big hurdles have been mostly mentioned in other posts, stuff like most software guys don't know verilog/vhdl and its hardware orientedness:-), and that synthesis can be slow.
But its a cool idea with some potential, I would love to have a board like that in my pc. I should disclaim that I'm currently taking my School's FPGA design class though...
First off, create an alias for "help" that runs a shell script that runs a quick intro to the command line type tutorial, with scrolling, because you can't assume they will know better to pipe it into less.
If your users are familiar with dos you might also make "edit" an alias to "nano -w" or something similar. Forcing them to use vi right away might be offputting. (It was the first time I used unix)
Make sure rm is aliased to 'rm -i' if your distro doesn't do that already.
If you aren't using X, and everything is completely terminal based (or maybe even if it is). I'd make sure GNU screen is installed on those systems. Once your users get comfortable with the basics, screen adds some really nice features to the mix.
I read your link. It sounds like a nice initiative, in fact I really like it when companies do things like that, but you have to face the fact that AMD and its partners are for-profit companies and they don't do anything just because they're nice folks. They see an opportunity to sell to markets that haven't traditionally bought computer products.
This device is a product. They want people to buy the product. They will make as many as they can sell. If both rich and poor both buy the same product economic factors can cause the price down making it even more affordable.
I think that pretty much all I have to say before I need to start dragging out economics principles. Nicely exaggerated metaphor by the way.:-)
There's no stamp on it that says, "Poor People Only". Besides I'm quite confident that the company would be happy to make more. He's not robbing a charity, he's purchasing a product. It just happens to be aimed at low cost markets.
Just because I can afford an expensive product I should choose it over a cheaper one? That's not very resonable... especially since these folks are trying to satisfy their curiosity about a new piece of hardware.
I wouldn't assume so, I know Rocket City Riot (@magnatune) has thier own site. My bet would be that many of the artists don't have the time or desire to run their own website.
I read this article before it hit/. so I'm a little surprised by how many people are posting the same comment (to add an advanced dialog mode) at the same time I agree to some degree. If you've used KDE lately you know there are quite a few dialogs where there are "advanced" buttons. For instance, the "Style" gui window has only 4 widgets, not counting apply/cancel. One of them is an "advanced settings" button.
Of course, like anything there is a lot of room for improvement. I think as more apps are moved over to the new KconfigXT system it will be easier for folks to tweak and improve dialogs. This library lets people describe the settings instead of coding them into a dialog.
I also don't think the invisible password thing is a KDE default. It might be slakware's. I compiled (emerged) kde from source and my login screen shows the stars.
I wonder what problems he had, because I had none installing. Although I did it from 2004.0, I would think things might get more stable as time progressed. Though, I think I tried to pick my hardware as linux supported when I built this system.
It was a huge improvement over Mandrake for AMD64 which I used for about a week. Mandrake, which I love and still use on my i386 system, had way too many packages that were goofed up, or that I had problems with. I think the source based approach is very nice for less popular archs like mine. And, like everyone says, emerge is very nice.
NX works now, with the existing X11 apps you already have. That doesn't just include KDE and GNOME, that includes xclock and emacs and acrobat and so on... that includes those oddball legacy X11 programs that you can't reasonably rebuild to support new libraries. I think that's a pretty valuable ability.
Among other services mentioned, nextel also has this feature.
When I was still on dial-up I had it set up so that when my gateway machine was kicked offline it would redial and and notify me on my phone, along with sending me my new ip.
I don't usually push Linux on desktop users, but there are some real world advantages for them.
- Spyware. I deal with this on a daily basis, so I have a deep hatred for it. OSS software doesn't install spyware, and when proprietary software for Linux is competing with OSS, there's much less of an incentive to pull that kind of thing.
- Cost of add on software. This includes aquiring it. As the user of a Linux Distro, all I have to do is know the name of my software, and there are tools avaiable to fetch and download it for me. No going to the store and plopping down cash.
- Fixability. Two out of five times a windows error is so pathological that you can't seem to get rid of it. Usually reinstalling windows is the best option, and that usually comes with the pain of accessing the data (sometimes without a bootable system) and backing it up. And yes I've seen this kind of thing on XP, but is thankfully much rarer.
Okay, three is enough for now. People usually beat me to making replies because I'm a slow writer.
1. Have you tried installing a distro like Mandrake versus Windows lately? I do quite a few windows installs as part of my job, and its not really that simple. I know this has been said a lot, but this is especially true when it comes time to get all those other apps like Office, IM, pcAnywhere, etc. onto the PC. Distros typcially include this step in the install, with windows everything needs to be done seperately.
2. Many devices are compatable, but require a lot more legwork on part of the user. I agree that this stinks, but it really does depend on the companies building them to cooperate, either with driver disks or unencumbered specs.
3. I don't get this one. Do you mean windows style IPC? If you stick with a desktop like Gnome or KDE you pretty much have interapp communication. Plus CLI applications are already able to do that with pipes. If you mean library reuse, most distro's packages are better at that than most windows apps. They access shared libraries and don't carry around their own copy. And still, even with XP and 2000, I still (occasionaly, to the developer's credit) see windows apps that stomp on each other.
4. Given. But games will only stop one segment of the computer using population. Mom might need the Sims. But grandma just wants email and solitare.
5. I hate configuring some things in windows now that I'm used to config files. So I'm biased. But there are tools out there to do the job. They just need to be a bit more polished. And by polish I mean useful, unlike the new XP-style control panel, which I constantly have to turn off.
I sure hope that windows meets home users needs, otherwise there would be a lot more returned computers. But what I like most about Linux & the distros are the layering capabilities. You can do server, desktop, l33t haX0r desktop, embedded device all with the same core, by picking different layers. And they stay (mostly) compatible.
This means a "windows easy" desktop may be inevetable, but I don't think it will arrive with much fanfare. It'll be a gradual thing, like most OSS development has been.
Every time you see a clock in the little chart it means someone has done an optimization. Thus saying, "no Linux Desktop project is going back and optimizing" is untrue.
In fact, many users welcomed the KDE 3.2 release since it featured noticeable speedups.
Now, I wish there was an archive of the older digests, to show weeks that had more opomization icons, but Derek Kite's older site just redirects to the new one. But either way, saying that no one optimizes is just plain incorrect.
I'm with you. I run KDE on a 400MHz PII with 192MB RAM.
It's featureful, convenient and fast enough so that I can get my work done. In fact on my work machine, which has better hardware and runs W2K, I find I often miss my home desktop.
It's not a game machine by any means, and so I'm looking into upgrading, but it's not for lack of desktop performance.
I'd also like to say that I find the posts that contain some kind of comment like, "I don't know much about GNOME/KDE, but..." quite funny.
Slashdot Mirror
How about letting some schools do it one way and other schools can do it the other way. There could even be schools that exist somewhere in between on the same spectrum. Then, individuals can choose whatever they think is the most appropriate for them when deciding where to study.
;-)
Nah. Lets just force everybody to do it the same way.
He had awful examples.
PowerPoint - This is the worst example. Made by a different company (orig. for Mac) and then later bought by MS. "Later in 1987, Forethought and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft Corporation for $12 million" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPoint
Xbox Live - An evolution of what games or gaming services on the PC have been doing since services like Kali were popular.
ASP - I'm assuming he meant Active Server Pages. While I can't be sure of the exact timeline according to Wikipedia PHP is a year older than the first release of ASP. Regardless, building scripting into the webserver wasn't a particularly earth shattering new idea.
All of those examples support the premise that Microsoft's M.O. is to scope out a market, get involved, and make small incremental improvements to the technology.
If MS Word counts for something, does compiling stuff count towards my software skill?
And therefore using Gentoo is like running a bot? I don't want to get kicked out of life for cheating.
(I really do use gentoo... I'm emerging something right now.)
I'm using Konq right now and it looks ok. The only problem I see is on the section bar where the text becomes garbled. If I highlight the text the problem goes away until the page is reloaded.
:-)
_ slashdot1.png shows the error.
There aren't any real usability problems with the new layout. At least none since they moved the article links.
http://fs.nile.homelinux.net:8000/~john/goofed_up
Since I don't have mod points: I want to second this recommendation. It was required reading for my Engineering Ethics class, along with one of Richard Feynman's book ("What do You Care what Other People Think", IIRC).
:-)
Both are really good. It's one of those rare cases that required reading is that enjoyable.
It took me about 2 minutes to realize it was even there. Plus the arrows are both at the top, which is even more unusual.
So yeah, I agree with you, it really belongs in the bad usability category, especially since it serves no real purpose.
I set up Plone at our office, mainly for IT, but in the near future other departments may end up using it too. You can choose to keep notes in a wiki, or in more structured forms like a documents in folders. Everything is searchable too.
I ended up writing a plone product for tracking the inventory of our machines. I used archetypes to create a PCInventory and PCInventoryFolder products. Together I get a top level view of where the machines are, the important hardware stats, etc. in a table, and each row links to the more detailed view of the individual hardware. And the web forms dovetail nicely with the old paper forms we used before.
Other nice things Plone gave me was integration (via LDAP) with our Active Directory, so no need to keep two sets of passwords, a nice product for discussion boards, and it was easy to change the look of the site to match the official company website.
All kde programs, including koffice, can print to pdf. It's a function of the printing subsystem, not the app itself.
It's not as good as OO.org at opening word docs, but I just tried one someone emailed me and it opened up fine and I could get at the content.
Even better, they're standardizing on the OpenDocument format. Hopefully, the more folks use opendocument the fewer issues exchanging files between different office apps.
A good question to ask is, whether you want to play music over the network, or if you want all sounds streamed (music,events,games,etc). The first is going to be vastly easier for you to accomplish. Off the top of my head I can think of audioplayers/jukeboxes, like mpd (although that may be unixesque systems only).
The second option is going to be a lot harder to accomplish, especially if you need to play sounds without a lot of latency. I only know of unix type software (esd,mas), and even then they are notoriously hard to get working right.
If you can live with just music, I'd go that route.
It is, but binary drivers aren't supposed to use the GPL licence macro. This "taints" the kernel so that developers know if you post a bug report to the mailing list that you have an un-debuggable driver in your system. And you're a lot less like to be helped in that case.
I don't write drivers, but I also belive you cann't access certain features of the kernel if your driver is not GPL. I could be remembering something wrong though.
http://www.kroah.com/log/2005/11/07/#osdl_gkai2
:-)
Some misunderstandings were made. But of course, if they posted this link, there'd be no point to posting TFA or the arguments that will almost certainly follow.
> This might work, but the question to ask is whether it would really be faster.
:-), and that synthesis can be slow.
Yup, gotta look at the costs too.
> FPGAs are usually a lot slower than ASICs, as another replier pointed out. {snip}
> And if the FPGA becomes the critical path in your processing, it had better be fast (or at least faster than your CPU).
But the FPGA is less likely to be the bottle neck anyway, the IO bus probably going to be a bigger factor. But the issue isn't whether an ASIC is faster than an FPGA, its whether the whole round trip of memory->bus->FPGA->bus->memory, will get your data crunched faster than doing it in the processor. Many algorithms can be implemented very efficeintly in hardware, for example DES encryption (an old example, I know) has a lot of bit fiddling that is really slow in a standard processor. They've sold crypto accelerator boards in the past, for this very reason.
The really neat thing about FPGAs is that they can be reprogrammed in board. If one day you are doing a lot of crypto and the next are doing MPEG encoding, you just load an new hardware design onto the FPGA.
The big hurdles have been mostly mentioned in other posts, stuff like most software guys don't know verilog/vhdl and its hardware orientedness
But its a cool idea with some potential, I would love to have a board like that in my pc. I should disclaim that I'm currently taking my School's FPGA design class though...
First off, create an alias for "help" that runs a shell script that runs a quick intro to the command line type tutorial, with scrolling, because you can't assume they will know better to pipe it into less.
If your users are familiar with dos you might also make "edit" an alias to "nano -w" or something similar. Forcing them to use vi right away might be offputting. (It was the first time I used unix)
Make sure rm is aliased to 'rm -i' if your distro doesn't do that already.
If you aren't using X, and everything is completely terminal based (or maybe even if it is). I'd make sure GNU screen is installed on those systems. Once your users get comfortable with the basics, screen adds some really nice features to the mix.
I read your link. It sounds like a nice initiative, in fact I really like it when companies do things like that, but you have to face the fact that AMD and its partners are for-profit companies and they don't do anything just because they're nice folks. They see an opportunity to sell to markets that haven't traditionally bought computer products.
:-)
This device is a product. They want people to buy the product. They will make as many as they can sell. If both rich and poor both buy the same product economic factors can cause the price down making it even more affordable.
I think that pretty much all I have to say before I need to start dragging out economics principles. Nicely exaggerated metaphor by the way.
There's no stamp on it that says, "Poor People Only". Besides I'm quite confident that the company would be happy to make more. He's not robbing a charity, he's purchasing a product. It just happens to be aimed at low cost markets.
Just because I can afford an expensive product I should choose it over a cheaper one? That's not very resonable... especially since these folks are trying to satisfy their curiosity about a new piece of hardware.
I wouldn't assume so, I know Rocket City Riot (@magnatune) has thier own site. My bet would be that many of the artists don't have the time or desire to run their own website.
I read this article before it hit /. so I'm a little surprised by how many people are posting the same comment (to add an advanced dialog mode) at the same time I agree to some degree. If you've used KDE lately you know there are quite a few dialogs where there are "advanced" buttons. For instance, the "Style" gui window has only 4 widgets, not counting apply/cancel. One of them is an "advanced settings" button.
Of course, like anything there is a lot of room for improvement. I think as more apps are moved over to the new KconfigXT system it will be easier for folks to tweak and improve dialogs. This library lets people describe the settings instead of coding them into a dialog.
I also don't think the invisible password thing is a KDE default. It might be slakware's. I compiled (emerged) kde from source and my login screen shows the stars.
I wonder what problems he had, because I had none installing. Although I did it from 2004.0, I would think things might get more stable as time progressed. Though, I think I tried to pick my hardware as linux supported when I built this system.
It was a huge improvement over Mandrake for AMD64 which I used for about a week. Mandrake, which I love and still use on my i386 system, had way too many packages that were goofed up, or that I had problems with. I think the source based approach is very nice for less popular archs like mine. And, like everyone says, emerge is very nice.
NX works now, with the existing X11 apps you already have. That doesn't just include KDE and GNOME, that includes xclock and emacs and acrobat and so on... that includes those oddball legacy X11 programs that you can't reasonably rebuild to support new libraries. I think that's a pretty valuable ability.
Among other services mentioned, nextel also has this feature.
When I was still on dial-up I had it set up so that when my gateway machine was kicked offline it would redial and and notify me on my phone, along with sending me my new ip.
Hopefully, no one will see this post anyway, but just in case, Kerry was never governor. http://www.masshome.com/governors.html
I don't usually push Linux on desktop users, but there are some real world advantages for them.
- Spyware. I deal with this on a daily basis, so I have a deep hatred for it. OSS software doesn't install spyware, and when proprietary software for Linux is competing with OSS, there's much less of an incentive to pull that kind of thing.
- Cost of add on software. This includes aquiring it. As the user of a Linux Distro, all I have to do is know the name of my software, and there are tools avaiable to fetch and download it for me. No going to the store and plopping down cash.
- Fixability. Two out of five times a windows error is so pathological that you can't seem to get rid of it. Usually reinstalling windows is the best option, and that usually comes with the pain of accessing the data (sometimes without a bootable system) and backing it up. And yes I've seen this kind of thing on XP, but is thankfully much rarer.
Okay, three is enough for now. People usually beat me to making replies because I'm a slow writer.
1. Have you tried installing a distro like Mandrake versus Windows lately? I do quite a few windows installs as part of my job, and its not really that simple. I know this has been said a lot, but this is especially true when it comes time to get all those other apps like Office, IM, pcAnywhere, etc. onto the PC. Distros typcially include this step in the install, with windows everything needs to be done seperately.
2. Many devices are compatable, but require a lot more legwork on part of the user. I agree that this stinks, but it really does depend on the companies building them to cooperate, either with driver disks or unencumbered specs.
3. I don't get this one. Do you mean windows style IPC? If you stick with a desktop like Gnome or KDE you pretty much have interapp communication. Plus CLI applications are already able to do that with pipes.
If you mean library reuse, most distro's packages are better at that than most windows apps. They access shared libraries and don't carry around their own copy.
And still, even with XP and 2000, I still (occasionaly, to the developer's credit) see windows apps that stomp on each other.
4. Given. But games will only stop one segment of the computer using population. Mom might need the Sims. But grandma just wants email and solitare.
5. I hate configuring some things in windows now that I'm used to config files. So I'm biased. But there are tools out there to do the job. They just need to be a bit more polished. And by polish I mean useful, unlike the new XP-style control panel, which I constantly have to turn off.
I sure hope that windows meets home users needs, otherwise there would be a lot more returned computers. But what I like most about Linux & the distros are the layering capabilities. You can do server, desktop, l33t haX0r desktop, embedded device all with the same core, by picking different layers. And they stay (mostly) compatible.
This means a "windows easy" desktop may be inevetable, but I don't think it will arrive with much fanfare. It'll be a gradual thing, like most OSS development has been.
Delusional much?
http://cvs-digest.org/
Every time you see a clock in the little chart it means someone has done an optimization. Thus saying, "no Linux Desktop project is going back and optimizing" is untrue.
In fact, many users welcomed the KDE 3.2 release since it featured noticeable speedups.
Now, I wish there was an archive of the older digests, to show weeks that had more opomization icons, but Derek Kite's older site just redirects to the new one. But either way, saying that no one optimizes is just plain incorrect.
I'm with you. I run KDE on a 400MHz PII with 192MB RAM.
It's featureful, convenient and fast enough so that I can get my work done. In fact on my work machine, which has better hardware and runs W2K, I find I often miss my home desktop.
It's not a game machine by any means, and so I'm looking into upgrading, but it's not for lack of desktop performance.
I'd also like to say that I find the posts that contain some kind of comment like, "I don't know much about GNOME/KDE, but..." quite funny.