That is an OS problem. And yes it is VERY annoying.
I used to love it when me and everyone in my office would simultaneously be informed via a sound and popup box that steals the keyboard focus that a Netware printer spool drive was full (and the admin was a dumbass).
Why is this story on Slashdot? Because this is big news in USA? Outside USA this is not as big as The South-east Asian Tsunami or the USA World Trade Center crashes.
This is what we Americans hate about the rest of the world's population. Noone but us seems to know what is important and right for the world.
That was sarcasm just in case you could not tell. I know that sarcasm can be a difficult in writing, especially if its not in your native language.
To me, this is not news of any kind. NK has nuclear weapons. Oh, I'm scared. I mean here in the US there are gun toting thugs that illegally carry concealed weapons all the time that could shoot me at any time, but I'm not scared of them either.
Just about every person in the world has the capacity to take out another human. Fortunately, its not that common.
"Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East."
Its pretty clear that the whole WMD thing and the mass confusion and patriotism after 9/11/01 were just convenient for an invasion. After all, a benevolent country like the US could never overtly attack another country for purely economic reasons, right?
Until the U.S. adopts a "loser pays" court system similar to the UK, these types of exploratory frivolous lawsuits will continue.
Imagine if on the other hand SCO had to pay for IBMs entire legal defense to their frivolous lawsuit after they lost. This lawsuit never would have seen the light of day.
I'm not sure. SCO has spent many millions (I forget the actual value) in legal expenses.
However, there is nothing stopping IBM from suing SCO for a frivolous lawsuit.
1) Programming for two or more processors is more work, and prone to more subtle and strange errors.
Threaded apps, and multitasking OSes have been around for years. Even if an app is single threaded, the user is still benefited by having 2 or more processors because the system is still very responsive, even if one app has one CPU completely pegged.
the presence of a female CEO that demonstrates that there's no difference between men and women when it comes to performance in that area
It's gender-neutral underwhelming work, and her femininity doesn't matter one way or the other.
I know I'm going to get modded to trolldom quickly, but this fairy tail stuff has gone too far.
People, there are differences between men and women. Just like there are differences between different men. Just like there are differences between cars, horses, computers, airplanes, or anything else. There is nothing wrong with that.
Saying that "the presence of a female CEO demonstrates that there's no difference between men and women when it comes to performance in that area" is like saying that the presence of a bicycle on the interstate demonstrates that there is not difference between bicycles and cars. If bikes were so great to use on the interstate, everyone would use them instead, but instead the reality is that people use cars or occasionally motorcycles or some other internal combustion chamber powered vehicle.
What kinds of qualities do CEOs have? The biggest is probably leadership, which other characteristics to include humility, low ego, a strong will, a commitment to serving a corporation, being prepared to take the blame for failure while attributing success to others. Sounds kinda like a father figure, now doesn't it? Just a good old guy.
Are those qualities that you desire or respect from women? Are those qualities that your mother has? Do you wish your mother was more like that if not? What about your wife or girlfriend? Do you get together with the guys and say, "I want to meet a girl that has a low ego and leadership qualities"? If you have a daughter, is this how you are going to raise her to be?
I'm sick of people perpetuating fairytales like this. People are not "created equal". Everybody is different, and thats a good thing. I think that embracing people's strengths from their differences is more important than thinking that everybody is the same.
Technically according to the law receiving services for "free" is considered income and it should be reported on your taxes.
Re:There is a problem with Social Security.
on
State of the Union
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· Score: 1
If I die before I can collect nothing will come of my "investment" for my family.
Give me a break.
If you die before your wife, your wife will get $250 for a funeral! When your wife dies, nobody gets anything. A now-dead president/actor from California brought you this "investment". I'm sure Nancy appreciated getting the $250 when he died, and thought of him.
If applications were coded as if there were actual restrictions, if speed and efficency were a consideration, then this would be a valid option.
I call BS here. For one thing, for "normal users" processor speed does not matter anymore. Any CPU made in the past 2 or 3 years is fine for most everybody. You can look at the web, read email, do office app stuff, play with your digital camera, and it will be fine.
Now look at your "power user" aka gamer, digital video/pictures, audio, or the like. These apps are optimized to the max. In fact, those apps are the only ones that say on the box that they use CPU features like MMX, altivec, or optimized for a specific processor or its features.
I've used "bloated" software for years, and I refuse to change that. Why? Because I like the features, flexibility, and development speed of said software. What kinds of software am I talking about? Things like Perl and shell scripts. Will these kinds of programs be replaced by "unbloated" versions anytime soon. Nope. Its too handy to have the program and source code be the same thing. Its known that using something like C, C++, or assembly would be faster, but who cares? Noone is going to create user accounts and copy files to remote machines via assembly.
Also, software is not bloated in terms of sustained CPU usage (aside from the power stuff I mentioned earlier). Software is bloated in terms of needing "bursty" CPU utilization (oftentimes this is coupled with IO performance as well) such as when an application is initialized or started. Addressing the needs of CPUs today is the challenge of chip designers, not cranking out more cycles per second. A CPU with more torque if you will is something that would interest people greatly. It would be cool and quiet, but it would quickly provide the burst of power quickly when necessary. This would be very interesting in conjunction with SMP or multicore processors where the other physical CPUs or cores can be inactive until necessary, and then go back to sleep.
99.9% of cellphones are on a digital network (CDMA/TDMA/iDEN/GSM/GPRS/etc) and can not provide the channel clarity needed for analog signals
Even though I'm familiar with the differences with analog and digital signals, this at first seems a bit ironic. To those that have bought into the marketing hype about digital speakers, cable TV, and telephones, I guess they are scratching their heads.
As an AC points out, credit cards use a 300 baud modem over an analog line. And anyone that has heard a modem, well it sounds like noise, and I would assume that the digital filters that they use on cell (err, mobile) phones would completely screw up that type of communication.
Where are my CPU cycles and memory going on my AMD 3500+ and 1Gig 400MHz DDR Ram? Most of the time, nowhere.
Thats true and untrue, depending on how you look at it. I have a CPU meter on my personal machine and I expect it to be hovering around 0. Right now its just got a little of activity going as I type this because it is spell checking as I type each word. Much less than 10% of the CPU. (I wish OSes came with these things so that people were aware of what was going on with their machine like if its infected with a virus or something, but thats another topic).
I expect it to stay hovering at the 0 mark unless I am doing something. Now, when its not true and when I want good CPU performance is when I launch an app, or do something that requires a little more CPU power like using scp, where it is encrypting or decrypting all of the information that I can put down my network connection as fast as possible. (Or if I forget to leave flash enabled and some cute ad or something is eating 100% of my CPU).
Also its worth mentioning that most people don't need that much CPU power. Look at PowerBook and Mac Mini users. Those are pretty old processors. In the Intel land, anything over 1.5 or so GHz should be more than fine for most people.
Also, most people don't understand bottlenecks. They don't know that CPU processing is about an order of magnitude greater than memory access, and that memory access is about an order of magnitude slower than disk access which in turn is about an order of magnitude slower than network access. I remember when someone 1st got their brand new 486 and I was commenting on how quick it was, and then we were waiting for a file to be copied to or from a floppy and he said "That is fast?".
So the cycles really only get used in bursts for doing something, and it adds to the user experience. With the advent of mulitcore processors, and hopefully power saving by lowering clock speeds when unneeded. I would expect this "bursty" performance to be even more exaggerated. It ads to the user experience. Its only people that really know what they are doing to need sustained CPU processor speed, and for them, nothing is ever fast enough.
Take OSX. Why do people need the dual G5s? Well, its for that fancy gui and shite.
I've got to call you bluff here. Unlike XP (as you say, I have no experience here), that gets slower with each update. OS X actually gets a little quicker with each update. I've heard that one OS update was very noticeable with older G3 processors.
Oh, and the dual G5s. Those are designed for people that have the cash and the need for such a box. They are the highest end of the Mac spectrum. Every heard of a PowerBook, a Mac Mini, an iMac (minus the brand new one) or an iBook? All of those have single G4s in them. There is an iMac and a PowerMac G5 machine that you can get with only one processor if you want.
I work with someone that runs OS X on a 400MHz G4 daily.
Back in 2000 or so, I was trying to figure out why Word docs wore so bloated so I looked at them in a hex editor. I noticed a ton of NULLs in the document. So I wrote a simple C program to count the NULLs.
Believe it or not, something like 60% of the document was NULLs.
So its not really bloated, its just full of nothing:)
Some kind of accountability on eBay's (or whoever's) part.
An escrow service or something like it would be nice. For example, I buy something, lets say a used phonebook from somebody. I buy it for $300. I send $300 to eBay. eBay notifies the seller that they have received the cash, and that the seller should ship the item. I get my beautiful used phonebook and it looks OK, so I tell eBay to send the cash to the seller.
If my phonebook is defective or not what I expected, I send it back to the seller via some kind of registered mail so that they sign for it upon receipt. I get back $300 minus some kind of retainer fee or whatever.
How hard is that?
I mean what the hell are the fees for at eBay? A website and advertising all over the place? Everybody and their mother has a website. If eBay wants my business, I expect some kind of accountability from them.
We can't seem to get our outdated shuttles off the ground safely, or keep a permanent space staion running effectively. Is now a good time to tinker with another planet's atmosphere?
News Flash: The sellers on eBay are the only customers of eBay.
Funny, if there were no buyers, then there would be no sellers.
I refuse to do any business on eBay. I tried once about 5 years ago or so, and got ripped off by some guy in China. I don't trust eBay nor do I trust PayPal.
The idea seems nice, but the whole thing seems so shady that I can't tell who to trust, so I just don't bother. All of the feedback can be rigged. Buyers can be scammed out of a purchase. Sellers can be scammed out of a purchase. PayPal can simply hold your funds. And neither eBay nor PayPal take any responsibility for the actions of the buyers or sellers. What good is any of this?
I personally don't understand why anyone does business with either eBay or PayPal. I've emailed shareware authors trying to give them money for software because the only method of payment was PayPal. I found it interesting that when I contacted them telling them I wanted to give them money they would not take a check from me.
Personally, I would like to do business with a responsible company that provides a service like eBay, but it seems as though I'm in the minority.
Its been a while since I've used a Gnome app, but I thought that for at least 7 or 8 years you could type in a path and even use tab completion to finish the filename for you.
Well, even google had apprehensions about doing this. I remember hearing about some issue about google selling the playboy trademark for "men entertainment" stuff. In fact, another news.com.com article about it http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5190324.html?tag=n efd.lede says that google knew it was risky to sell trademarked words for targeted advertising, and decided to take the gamble.
The difference is that if company X mentions company Y in an ad, it is clear. Company X is not legally allowed to say something untrue about company Y.
But here the difference is that a user is using Google in good faith to search for a product by name for Company Y and is getting links to company X. It may be a fine line, but I can see how it can be seen as deceptive and in this case company Y has a specific trademark on its product that is leading to company x.
This analogy sucks. The correct analogy would be akin to this person buying a car and driving straight into the middle of the highway and expecting not to be hit by another motorist.
Bullshit. You mean that everyone selling a computer should tell you to not connect it to the internet?
Or, better yet, when is it "safe" to put a Window's PC on the internet?
Slashdot Mirror
And its been going on for government interests since at least the late 80s with MDMA.
I guess science isn't really science anymore.
That is an OS problem. And yes it is VERY annoying.
I used to love it when me and everyone in my office would simultaneously be informed via a sound and popup box that steals the keyboard focus that a Netware printer spool drive was full (and the admin was a dumbass).
4. They are still in business.
Why is this story on Slashdot? Because this is big news in USA? Outside USA this is not as big as The South-east Asian Tsunami or the USA World Trade Center crashes.
This is what we Americans hate about the rest of the world's population. Noone but us seems to know what is important and right for the world.
That was sarcasm just in case you could not tell. I know that sarcasm can be a difficult in writing, especially if its not in your native language.
To me, this is not news of any kind. NK has nuclear weapons. Oh, I'm scared. I mean here in the US there are gun toting thugs that illegally carry concealed weapons all the time that could shoot me at any time, but I'm not scared of them either.
Just about every person in the world has the capacity to take out another human. Fortunately, its not that common.
"Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East."
Depends on how you define threat. http://www.feasta.org/documents/papers/oil1.htm
Its pretty clear that the whole WMD thing and the mass confusion and patriotism after 9/11/01 were just convenient for an invasion. After all, a benevolent country like the US could never overtly attack another country for purely economic reasons, right?
Until the U.S. adopts a "loser pays" court system similar to the UK, these types of exploratory frivolous lawsuits will continue.
Imagine if on the other hand SCO had to pay for IBMs entire legal defense to their frivolous lawsuit after they lost. This lawsuit never would have seen the light of day.
I'm not sure. SCO has spent many millions (I forget the actual value) in legal expenses.
However, there is nothing stopping IBM from suing SCO for a frivolous lawsuit.
1) Programming for two or more processors is more work, and prone to more subtle and strange errors.
Threaded apps, and multitasking OSes have been around for years. Even if an app is single threaded, the user is still benefited by having 2 or more processors because the system is still very responsive, even if one app has one CPU completely pegged.
the presence of a female CEO that demonstrates that there's no difference between men and women when it comes to performance in that area
It's gender-neutral underwhelming work, and her femininity doesn't matter one way or the other.
I know I'm going to get modded to trolldom quickly, but this fairy tail stuff has gone too far.
People, there are differences between men and women. Just like there are differences between different men. Just like there are differences between cars, horses, computers, airplanes, or anything else. There is nothing wrong with that.
Saying that "the presence of a female CEO demonstrates that there's no difference between men and women when it comes to performance in that area" is like saying that the presence of a bicycle on the interstate demonstrates that there is not difference between bicycles and cars. If bikes were so great to use on the interstate, everyone would use them instead, but instead the reality is that people use cars or occasionally motorcycles or some other internal combustion chamber powered vehicle.
What kinds of qualities do CEOs have? The biggest is probably leadership, which other characteristics to include humility, low ego, a strong will, a commitment to serving a corporation, being prepared to take the blame for failure while attributing success to others. Sounds kinda like a father figure, now doesn't it? Just a good old guy.
Are those qualities that you desire or respect from women? Are those qualities that your mother has? Do you wish your mother was more like that if not? What about your wife or girlfriend? Do you get together with the guys and say, "I want to meet a girl that has a low ego and leadership qualities"? If you have a daughter, is this how you are going to raise her to be?
I'm sick of people perpetuating fairytales like this. People are not "created equal". Everybody is different, and thats a good thing. I think that embracing people's strengths from their differences is more important than thinking that everybody is the same.
Technically according to the law receiving services for "free" is considered income and it should be reported on your taxes.
If I die before I can collect nothing will come of my "investment" for my family.
Give me a break.
If you die before your wife, your wife will get $250 for a funeral! When your wife dies, nobody gets anything. A now-dead president/actor from California brought you this "investment". I'm sure Nancy appreciated getting the $250 when he died, and thought of him.
If applications were coded as if there were actual restrictions, if speed and efficency were a consideration, then this would be a valid option.
I call BS here. For one thing, for "normal users" processor speed does not matter anymore. Any CPU made in the past 2 or 3 years is fine for most everybody. You can look at the web, read email, do office app stuff, play with your digital camera, and it will be fine.
Now look at your "power user" aka gamer, digital video/pictures, audio, or the like. These apps are optimized to the max. In fact, those apps are the only ones that say on the box that they use CPU features like MMX, altivec, or optimized for a specific processor or its features.
I've used "bloated" software for years, and I refuse to change that. Why? Because I like the features, flexibility, and development speed of said software. What kinds of software am I talking about? Things like Perl and shell scripts. Will these kinds of programs be replaced by "unbloated" versions anytime soon. Nope. Its too handy to have the program and source code be the same thing. Its known that using something like C, C++, or assembly would be faster, but who cares? Noone is going to create user accounts and copy files to remote machines via assembly.
Also, software is not bloated in terms of sustained CPU usage (aside from the power stuff I mentioned earlier). Software is bloated in terms of needing "bursty" CPU utilization (oftentimes this is coupled with IO performance as well) such as when an application is initialized or started. Addressing the needs of CPUs today is the challenge of chip designers, not cranking out more cycles per second. A CPU with more torque if you will is something that would interest people greatly. It would be cool and quiet, but it would quickly provide the burst of power quickly when necessary. This would be very interesting in conjunction with SMP or multicore processors where the other physical CPUs or cores can be inactive until necessary, and then go back to sleep.
I hate to be an "I told you so", but I could have predicted that XPI would be the first line of attack for people when I first heard of it.
Why can't a browser simply be a browser anymore?
All it needs to do is render html, optionally show pictures, and supply widgets for forms.
That is it.
99.9% of cellphones are on a digital network (CDMA/TDMA/iDEN/GSM/GPRS/etc) and can not provide the channel clarity needed for analog signals
Even though I'm familiar with the differences with analog and digital signals, this at first seems a bit ironic. To those that have bought into the marketing hype about digital speakers, cable TV, and telephones, I guess they are scratching their heads.
As an AC points out, credit cards use a 300 baud modem over an analog line. And anyone that has heard a modem, well it sounds like noise, and I would assume that the digital filters that they use on cell (err, mobile) phones would completely screw up that type of communication.
Where are my CPU cycles and memory going on my AMD 3500+ and 1Gig 400MHz DDR Ram? Most of the time, nowhere.
Thats true and untrue, depending on how you look at it. I have a CPU meter on my personal machine and I expect it to be hovering around 0. Right now its just got a little of activity going as I type this because it is spell checking as I type each word. Much less than 10% of the CPU. (I wish OSes came with these things so that people were aware of what was going on with their machine like if its infected with a virus or something, but thats another topic).
I expect it to stay hovering at the 0 mark unless I am doing something. Now, when its not true and when I want good CPU performance is when I launch an app, or do something that requires a little more CPU power like using scp, where it is encrypting or decrypting all of the information that I can put down my network connection as fast as possible. (Or if I forget to leave flash enabled and some cute ad or something is eating 100% of my CPU).
Also its worth mentioning that most people don't need that much CPU power. Look at PowerBook and Mac Mini users. Those are pretty old processors. In the Intel land, anything over 1.5 or so GHz should be more than fine for most people.
Also, most people don't understand bottlenecks. They don't know that CPU processing is about an order of magnitude greater than memory access, and that memory access is about an order of magnitude slower than disk access which in turn is about an order of magnitude slower than network access. I remember when someone 1st got their brand new 486 and I was commenting on how quick it was, and then we were waiting for a file to be copied to or from a floppy and he said "That is fast?".
So the cycles really only get used in bursts for doing something, and it adds to the user experience. With the advent of mulitcore processors, and hopefully power saving by lowering clock speeds when unneeded. I would expect this "bursty" performance to be even more exaggerated. It ads to the user experience. Its only people that really know what they are doing to need sustained CPU processor speed, and for them, nothing is ever fast enough.
Take OSX. Why do people need the dual G5s? Well, its for that fancy gui and shite.
I've got to call you bluff here. Unlike XP (as you say, I have no experience here), that gets slower with each update. OS X actually gets a little quicker with each update. I've heard that one OS update was very noticeable with older G3 processors.
Oh, and the dual G5s. Those are designed for people that have the cash and the need for such a box. They are the highest end of the Mac spectrum. Every heard of a PowerBook, a Mac Mini, an iMac (minus the brand new one) or an iBook? All of those have single G4s in them. There is an iMac and a PowerMac G5 machine that you can get with only one processor if you want.
I work with someone that runs OS X on a 400MHz G4 daily.
Just my 2c.
Back in 2000 or so, I was trying to figure out why Word docs wore so bloated so I looked at them in a hex editor. I noticed a ton of NULLs in the document. So I wrote a simple C program to count the NULLs.
:)
Believe it or not, something like 60% of the document was NULLs.
So its not really bloated, its just full of nothing
OK, then what's your proposed solution?
Some kind of accountability on eBay's (or whoever's) part.
An escrow service or something like it would be nice. For example, I buy something, lets say a used phonebook from somebody. I buy it for $300. I send $300 to eBay. eBay notifies the seller that they have received the cash, and that the seller should ship the item. I get my beautiful used phonebook and it looks OK, so I tell eBay to send the cash to the seller.
If my phonebook is defective or not what I expected, I send it back to the seller via some kind of registered mail so that they sign for it upon receipt. I get back $300 minus some kind of retainer fee or whatever.
How hard is that?
I mean what the hell are the fees for at eBay? A website and advertising all over the place? Everybody and their mother has a website. If eBay wants my business, I expect some kind of accountability from them.
We can't seem to get our outdated shuttles off the ground safely, or keep a permanent space staion running effectively. Is now a good time to tinker with another planet's atmosphere?
But we are already good at fucking up planets!
News Flash: The sellers on eBay are the only customers of eBay.
Funny, if there were no buyers, then there would be no sellers.
I refuse to do any business on eBay. I tried once about 5 years ago or so, and got ripped off by some guy in China. I don't trust eBay nor do I trust PayPal.
The idea seems nice, but the whole thing seems so shady that I can't tell who to trust, so I just don't bother. All of the feedback can be rigged. Buyers can be scammed out of a purchase. Sellers can be scammed out of a purchase. PayPal can simply hold your funds. And neither eBay nor PayPal take any responsibility for the actions of the buyers or sellers. What good is any of this?
I personally don't understand why anyone does business with either eBay or PayPal. I've emailed shareware authors trying to give them money for software because the only method of payment was PayPal. I found it interesting that when I contacted them telling them I wanted to give them money they would not take a check from me.
Personally, I would like to do business with a responsible company that provides a service like eBay, but it seems as though I'm in the minority.
Its been a while since I've used a Gnome app, but I thought that for at least 7 or 8 years you could type in a path and even use tab completion to finish the filename for you.
Is this nolonger the case?
Sure there is.. someone out there needs to invent a volume control that will mute Flash without muting itunes/rhythmbox etc.
You can get iTunes for Linux? Didn't know that.
Also, the best way I've found to mute Flash that works on all platforms is to go into your browser's preferences and check "Disable plugins".
Now there are not those annoying flash ads on webpages or those lovely background sounds that some people think are cute.
Well, even google had apprehensions about doing this. I remember hearing about some issue about google selling the playboy trademark for "men entertainment" stuff. In fact, another news.com.com article about it http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5190324.html?tag=
Looks like in some legal systems they lost.
And what exactly *is* "unfair competition" anyway?
Here we call if FUD.
The difference is that if company X mentions company Y in an ad, it is clear. Company X is not legally allowed to say something untrue about company Y.
But here the difference is that a user is using Google in good faith to search for a product by name for Company Y and is getting links to company X. It may be a fine line, but I can see how it can be seen as deceptive and in this case company Y has a specific trademark on its product that is leading to company x.
To me it seems like a fair ruling.
This analogy sucks. The correct analogy would be akin to this person buying a car and driving straight into the middle of the highway and expecting not to be hit by another motorist.
Bullshit. You mean that everyone selling a computer should tell you to not connect it to the internet?
Or, better yet, when is it "safe" to put a Window's PC on the internet?