What I want to know is: if they were going to sell it anyways and it was only going to be available on 2 or 3 platforms to begin with, why didn't they just use Qt and C++?
It would have had way better performance and while C++ isn't as friendly of a language, Qt takes a lot of the sting away.
As a student, I have to say that PDFs are the most annoying format ever. Especially when it's mostly a plain text typed document that could have been stored in RTF or a scan of someone's handwriting that could have been stored as an image format.
PDF requires you to load Adobe's bloated and crappy software everytime you want to go and check something on the course website. It also forces you to spend time downloading and installling Adobe's crappy and bloated software.
The only documents for which PDFs are acceptable are ones with elaborate formatting such as brochures or papers done in latex.
This is the same as saying we need "spacial web-browing" remove the back and forward buttons. Remove all buttons, the address bar EVERYTHING. And people can just navigate by "surfing the links" because it is more "natural".
This is a bit of a tangent but whenever I use a browser, I do remove all the menus except for the tabs.
In Mozilla, Back is the first option available when you right click so it's a lot faster to right click, nudge to the right and left click than it is to click the GUI button. In Opera or with Radial Context menus in FireFox, just hold down a button and drag left.
And when you're going to type in a URL, your hands are going to be at the keyboard anyways so why bother wasting screen real estate with the address bar? In Opera, F2 opens the Go window. I haven't found the equivalent in Firefox yet, Ctrl-O seems to suck.
So anyways, while these things are not intuitive at all, screen space is valuable (especially on low resolution displays like my 1024x768 LCD). Everything that's on a tool bar should have a keyboard shortcut and should be easy to make disappear. I know that GNOME 2.4 does not conform to this.
I think the source article was originally posted on slashdot a while back.
I suspect that after the next federal electrion, fair use will get its ass kicked just as badly here as in the States. The only glimmer of hope is that the Canadian public is more wired than the US and might actually care enough to stop that from happening.
This was done a long time ago under DirectX, Glide, and OpenGL by the Metabyte Wicked3D line of products. You would get glasses with 2 LCD screens and a Wicked3D card or their driver CD. The drivers would then render 2 images that were slightly offset from eachother by intercepting the calls at some level. I almost bought the glasses but decided it wasn't worth the investment if I ended up hating it.
It worked with a shitload of games though, which was cool.
Every file and directory in my home dirs at work and school look like a mailbox to Mail.app, which makes it pretty annoying when I actually want to select the few legitimate mailboxes that I made with procmail. If there's a way to see just certain IMAP mailboxes on the right side panel, I'd like to know. Until then, I'll stick with Thunderbid.
Thunderbird also let's me use the same mail program between my linux pc, iBook, and work. Which means I don't have to fish around for options.
Mail.app also seems less responsive for some reason. I've noticed the same thing with iCal, some of the MacOS X applications just aren't fast. Maybe it's because my machine is only a 800MHz G3, but with 640MB, there should be plenty of RAM.
Don't forget ICC. If GCC could even begin to compete somewhat with the Intel compilers, the scientific community would probably take notice. From the experiences of the programmers and students at our department, Intel stuff is really buggy and wastes a lot of time with things like 'Internal Compiler Errors' and examples in the documentation that either don't work or don't compile.
Maybe IFC and ICC work better if you're not doing anything complicated or using exotic hardware, they probably weren't tested much on Itanium systems with 64GB of ram.
Another thing to worry about with GigE is that each frame recieved needs to send an interrupt to the cpus. If you increase your interrupt throttle on any card with decent drivers, you take more cpu power but also get increased performance.
With 100MBit networks, the performance hit of these interrupts are negligible but that's not the case with faster networks.
Jumbo frames should help with this but even on a network with all the same high end Intel cards and all the same SMC switches, we still saw drastically reduced network performance when they were enabled. I don't think they work at all the way they're supposed to between different vendors.
The Intel e1000 drivers that we use in linux started auto adjusting their interrupts with the 2.6 kernel and we found that it resulted in shitty performance. By manually tweaking the InterruptThrottleRate option on the module, we got the best bandwidth to performance ratio. It seems like Intel probably tunes their drivers to work best under sporadic activity though, while we needed performance for long periods of high load.
Of course, I only have experience with the e1000 cards so YMMV.
You mean that same price / performance "disparity" that BLEW AWAY Dell and any and all other intel based supercompter clusters?
That must be the reason why VT choose G5s and OSX...:)
The kind of computing used in scientific applications is very different than your average desktop. Matrix calculations use very little branching but love the Altivec vector stuff.
Code that branches a lot (like compiles) seem to fair better on hyperthreading P4s. A 'make -j 4 bzImage' seems to get a 10-30% performance increase. Whereas hyperthreading has no benefit for science stuff, it even confuses the linux kernel a bit because it's hard to tell which cpus are logical, so that jobs actually run a bit slower.
So anyways, the needs of a computing cluster are not the needs of a desktop user. IE: you probably wouldn't want the PS2's weak 300MHz 128-bit cpu for a desktop even though there's a cluster built out of those too.
Re:they don't need that much disk space
on
Speculating About Gmail
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The text and headers that make up the bulk of e-mail also gzips quite well. Some kind of compressed filesystem would probably be worth the extra processing overhead.
Maybe somebody can clarify for me, but aren't the costumes in Tron just shoulder pads and 80's style hockey helmets with some weird effects and stylings? They sure do look like it when I caught it on TV the other day.
I used to think they looked pretty cool until I realized that. Now it's just kind of funny. It makes you realize that it's really just a bunch of fully grown adults running around a soundstage pretending to be IN TEH COMPUTAR.
Actually, we are seriously considering moving from Redhat to Debian. If you look at the version numbers for most of the stuff in RHEL, it's all pretty old. A similar system could be built with Debian stable along with a handful of unstable and testing packages.
What you pay for with Redhat Enterprise is something that's stable, slightly older, and with automatic updating. What's the point? Debian is doing it for free and we wouldn't have to put up with this licensed 'Update Server' and 'Per CPU' shit.
Like really, they expect us to pay more because they increased the NR_CPUS value in the kernel config? Their server products just don't seem to offer much value for the price that they're charging.
I don't know, maybe their support is really awesome, but I doubt it would help much more than google unless your problems are really obscure or undiscovered bugs.
Now what if you want to copy some mp3s from a directory but not all of them and there's not much of a consistent pattern in their names. It's way faster just to hold down Control and click the ones you want instead of hitting tab 50 times while trying to autocomplete the names.
When playing mp3s from the linux commandline, mc is preinstalled on most systems and far easier because it allows you to say "That one there" instead of "mpg321 Elliot\ Smith\ -\ Roman\ Candle\ -\ Last\ Call.mp3". Just a week or two ago, I was trying to explain this concept to a unix guy who was far more hardcore than I and he freaked out. mc is the devil apparently, it ruins the zen-like sanctity of the command line!
I didn't give enough detail. We have old pentium 1 systems with nothing but X running with vncviewer as the login program. Most of our users use the default RedHat GNOME + Mozilla setup and that's what eats up about 256MB. Users can also VNC into these systems from home.
It's mostly just fancy xhosting except that xhost has become a dirty word because of some Sun equipment that they had before I worked there.
Anwyays, we can save costs this way since one new $500 machine has enough power to serve several desktops. Eventually, the older pentium systems get phased out and I guess the machines that we buy now will become VNC clients or whatever the equivalent of the day will be.
If you look at past versions of windows, 500MB for Longhorn isn't really that crazy either. From experience, I'd say you needed about 32MB to be comfortable in Win98, 64MB in WinME, 96-128MB in Win2k, and 192MB in WinXP. 500MB in 2006 just seems like a natural progression. (And by comfortable, I mean being able to run the OS and other things to make it usable like a browser, e-mail app, and whatever else is needed. In reality, much less is needed to get the OS to actually run, it will just run like ass.)
Of course, after having to manage several GNOME/Mozilla users on a VNC server at work (university departments are poor), I've gotten into the habit of making sure there is at least 256MB per user to prevent running out of swap and taking the machine down completely. So Linux isn't really doing that well in terms of memory usage either.
Memory usage in current environments is all pretty insane to me anyways though. A harddrive is literally a million times slower than ram for latency. You'd figure operating system and desktop development people would want to use as little swapping as possible as doing so would dramatically improve the responsiveness of the system and, consequentially, the user experience.
Because MacOS X needs a shitload of RAM to run decently. If all you need is vim and a browser, fluxbox on linux is a far better solution. Especially when the last generation stuff only came with 128MB of ram by default and is increedibly cheap right now. Less swapping off the harddrive also improves battery life.
RAM is cheap now though. I'd say you need about 384MB to keep OS X running smoothly and the terminal application is fairly nice.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 20 after having problems in university courses (before that, school was never challenging enough to force me to focus for more than 15 minutes at a time). I've found it incredibly difficult to find resources on ADHD for adults, even my physician only really has experience with children. This treatment looks really interesting.
I'm still struggling through my undergrad courses and have recently switched from Ritalin to Dexadrine. Any treatments or resources on ADD for adults would be much appreciated. I'm sure there must be others in the slashdot crowd who can provide me with information.
And please, anyone who thinks the disorder is some big hoax can forget about responding. I have blisters on my feet from pacing around while trying to do programming assignments, I don't need your laughably sheltered opinion.
I'm living in a cramped dorm room and ended up creating the same setup that you're considering. I have my PS2 connected to the cheapest BT878 card I could find (it's a $50 KWorld card from www.newegg.com ).
I use TVTime in Linux (the 2.6 kernel worked without a hitch) and DScaler in windows and it works out pretty well. I actually found my Redhat 9 install handled the card with much less hassle than Windows, no drivers or setup were required.
You need to ditch Sony's stock composite out cable however. The scanlines really standout and get annoying after a while (the screen has a ripple pattern constantly moving downwards). You also don't get a picture that's sharp enough to display 640x480 very well.
I bought an S-Video Monster Cable from Electronics Boutique and the sharpness was greatly improved. Before then, I thought a lot of my games were displayed 320x240. The scanlines still exist but are far less annoying. I've mostly tuned them out using fancy display filters.
Altogether, getting a monitor with TV-inputs might be a better solution. I assume the scanline problems would go away. My problems could also just be from buying a shitty capture card.
Ya, arts students almost always seem to take the backseat to more scientifically inclined disciplines when it comes to funding. The administration just can't recognize the powerful emotive force of a good collage.
I hate consumer electronics for this very reason. I end up buying a computer where I have no control over what software is running on it. It's my damn hardware.
Provide an SDK for your device and within a month, there will be tons of value added to your device for free. Things the engineers would have never thought of, neat visualizations, usability enhancements, alternative formats, the list is endless. The open source movement has shown that there is an endless supply of free labour to be provided by tinkerers.
That companies like Apple, Creative, whoever owns Rio this week, and iRiver rufuse to to acknowledge this when making their MP3 players is simply insane. It's like they're all covering their eyes, hoping it'll go away. The first to cave in will make a huge return on investment.
Re:password quandry
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I had the same problem with my computer account at school. We weren't even allowed to use permutations of words that could be found in the dictionary.
So instead of thinking of some random combination I just found a pattern on the qwerty keyboard that met the requirements. This is far less secure than what I would have chosen since anyone who catches me typing in my pass can instantly recognize it.
The whole thing is retarded anyways. I, the user, should be allowed to chose my password and its appropriate level of security. The system runs Unix and I have no permissions to anything but my own stuff. There's not really much damage that could be done aside from whiping out my personal things, so why bother with such strict securty?
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know is: if they were going to sell it anyways and it was only going to be available on 2 or 3 platforms to begin with, why didn't they just use Qt and C++?
It would have had way better performance and while C++ isn't as friendly of a language, Qt takes a lot of the sting away.
As a student, I have to say that PDFs are the most annoying format ever. Especially when it's mostly a plain text typed document that could have been stored in RTF or a scan of someone's handwriting that could have been stored as an image format.
PDF requires you to load Adobe's bloated and crappy software everytime you want to go and check something on the course website. It also forces you to spend time downloading and installling Adobe's crappy and bloated software.
The only documents for which PDFs are acceptable are ones with elaborate formatting such as brochures or papers done in latex.
This is a bit of a tangent but whenever I use a browser, I do remove all the menus except for the tabs.
In Mozilla, Back is the first option available when you right click so it's a lot faster to right click, nudge to the right and left click than it is to click the GUI button. In Opera or with Radial Context menus in FireFox, just hold down a button and drag left.
And when you're going to type in a URL, your hands are going to be at the keyboard anyways so why bother wasting screen real estate with the address bar? In Opera, F2 opens the Go window. I haven't found the equivalent in Firefox yet, Ctrl-O seems to suck.
So anyways, while these things are not intuitive at all, screen space is valuable (especially on low resolution displays like my 1024x768 LCD). Everything that's on a tool bar should have a keyboard shortcut and should be easy to make disappear. I know that GNOME 2.4 does not conform to this.
Oh ya, so that explains this picture of our current heritage minister then?
I think the source article was originally posted on slashdot a while back.
I suspect that after the next federal electrion, fair use will get its ass kicked just as badly here as in the States. The only glimmer of hope is that the Canadian public is more wired than the US and might actually care enough to stop that from happening.
This was done a long time ago under DirectX, Glide, and OpenGL by the Metabyte Wicked3D line of products. You would get glasses with 2 LCD screens and a Wicked3D card or their driver CD. The drivers would then render 2 images that were slightly offset from eachother by intercepting the calls at some level. I almost bought the glasses but decided it wasn't worth the investment if I ended up hating it.
It worked with a shitload of games though, which was cool.
http://www.stereo3d.com/wicked3d.htm
Every file and directory in my home dirs at work and school look like a mailbox to Mail.app, which makes it pretty annoying when I actually want to select the few legitimate mailboxes that I made with procmail. If there's a way to see just certain IMAP mailboxes on the right side panel, I'd like to know. Until then, I'll stick with Thunderbid.
Thunderbird also let's me use the same mail program between my linux pc, iBook, and work. Which means I don't have to fish around for options.
Mail.app also seems less responsive for some reason. I've noticed the same thing with iCal, some of the MacOS X applications just aren't fast. Maybe it's because my machine is only a 800MHz G3, but with 640MB, there should be plenty of RAM.
Don't forget ICC. If GCC could even begin to compete somewhat with the Intel compilers, the scientific community would probably take notice. From the experiences of the programmers and students at our department, Intel stuff is really buggy and wastes a lot of time with things like 'Internal Compiler Errors' and examples in the documentation that either don't work or don't compile.
Maybe IFC and ICC work better if you're not doing anything complicated or using exotic hardware, they probably weren't tested much on Itanium systems with 64GB of ram.
Another thing to worry about with GigE is that each frame recieved needs to send an interrupt to the cpus. If you increase your interrupt throttle on any card with decent drivers, you take more cpu power but also get increased performance.
With 100MBit networks, the performance hit of these interrupts are negligible but that's not the case with faster networks.
Jumbo frames should help with this but even on a network with all the same high end Intel cards and all the same SMC switches, we still saw drastically reduced network performance when they were enabled. I don't think they work at all the way they're supposed to between different vendors.
The Intel e1000 drivers that we use in linux started auto adjusting their interrupts with the 2.6 kernel and we found that it resulted in shitty performance. By manually tweaking the InterruptThrottleRate option on the module, we got the best bandwidth to performance ratio. It seems like Intel probably tunes their drivers to work best under sporadic activity though, while we needed performance for long periods of high load.
Of course, I only have experience with the e1000 cards so YMMV.
The kind of computing used in scientific applications is very different than your average desktop. Matrix calculations use very little branching but love the Altivec vector stuff.
Code that branches a lot (like compiles) seem to fair better on hyperthreading P4s. A 'make -j 4 bzImage' seems to get a 10-30% performance increase. Whereas hyperthreading has no benefit for science stuff, it even confuses the linux kernel a bit because it's hard to tell which cpus are logical, so that jobs actually run a bit slower.
So anyways, the needs of a computing cluster are not the needs of a desktop user. IE: you probably wouldn't want the PS2's weak 300MHz 128-bit cpu for a desktop even though there's a cluster built out of those too.
The text and headers that make up the bulk of e-mail also gzips quite well. Some kind of compressed filesystem would probably be worth the extra processing overhead.
Maybe somebody can clarify for me, but aren't the costumes in Tron just shoulder pads and 80's style hockey helmets with some weird effects and stylings? They sure do look like it when I caught it on TV the other day.
I used to think they looked pretty cool until I realized that. Now it's just kind of funny. It makes you realize that it's really just a bunch of fully grown adults running around a soundstage pretending to be IN TEH COMPUTAR.
Still a good movie though.
Actually, we are seriously considering moving from Redhat to Debian. If you look at the version numbers for most of the stuff in RHEL, it's all pretty old. A similar system could be built with Debian stable along with a handful of unstable and testing packages.
What you pay for with Redhat Enterprise is something that's stable, slightly older, and with automatic updating. What's the point? Debian is doing it for free and we wouldn't have to put up with this licensed 'Update Server' and 'Per CPU' shit.
Like really, they expect us to pay more because they increased the NR_CPUS value in the kernel config? Their server products just don't seem to offer much value for the price that they're charging.
I don't know, maybe their support is really awesome, but I doubt it would help much more than google unless your problems are really obscure or undiscovered bugs.
Ya but at 10 000 pages per set of batteries, it'll pay for itself in energy savings!
Well ok, probably not.
Now what if you want to copy some mp3s from a directory but not all of them and there's not much of a consistent pattern in their names. It's way faster just to hold down Control and click the ones you want instead of hitting tab 50 times while trying to autocomplete the names.
When playing mp3s from the linux commandline, mc is preinstalled on most systems and far easier because it allows you to say "That one there" instead of "mpg321 Elliot\ Smith\ -\ Roman\ Candle\ -\ Last\ Call.mp3". Just a week or two ago, I was trying to explain this concept to a unix guy who was far more hardcore than I and he freaked out. mc is the devil apparently, it ruins the zen-like sanctity of the command line!
I didn't give enough detail. We have old pentium 1 systems with nothing but X running with vncviewer as the login program. Most of our users use the default RedHat GNOME + Mozilla setup and that's what eats up about 256MB. Users can also VNC into these systems from home.
It's mostly just fancy xhosting except that xhost has become a dirty word because of some Sun equipment that they had before I worked there.
Anwyays, we can save costs this way since one new $500 machine has enough power to serve several desktops. Eventually, the older pentium systems get phased out and I guess the machines that we buy now will become VNC clients or whatever the equivalent of the day will be.
If you look at past versions of windows, 500MB for Longhorn isn't really that crazy either. From experience, I'd say you needed about 32MB to be comfortable in Win98, 64MB in WinME, 96-128MB in Win2k, and 192MB in WinXP. 500MB in 2006 just seems like a natural progression. (And by comfortable, I mean being able to run the OS and other things to make it usable like a browser, e-mail app, and whatever else is needed. In reality, much less is needed to get the OS to actually run, it will just run like ass.)
Of course, after having to manage several GNOME/Mozilla users on a VNC server at work (university departments are poor), I've gotten into the habit of making sure there is at least 256MB per user to prevent running out of swap and taking the machine down completely. So Linux isn't really doing that well in terms of memory usage either.
Memory usage in current environments is all pretty insane to me anyways though. A harddrive is literally a million times slower than ram for latency. You'd figure operating system and desktop development people would want to use as little swapping as possible as doing so would dramatically improve the responsiveness of the system and, consequentially, the user experience.
I think I'll just stick with fluxbox.
I left my wallet on that probe too. Fuck!
Because MacOS X needs a shitload of RAM to run decently. If all you need is vim and a browser, fluxbox on linux is a far better solution. Especially when the last generation stuff only came with 128MB of ram by default and is increedibly cheap right now. Less swapping off the harddrive also improves battery life.
RAM is cheap now though. I'd say you need about 384MB to keep OS X running smoothly and the terminal application is fairly nice.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 20 after having problems in university courses (before that, school was never challenging enough to force me to focus for more than 15 minutes at a time). I've found it incredibly difficult to find resources on ADHD for adults, even my physician only really has experience with children. This treatment looks really interesting.
I'm still struggling through my undergrad courses and have recently switched from Ritalin to Dexadrine. Any treatments or resources on ADD for adults would be much appreciated. I'm sure there must be others in the slashdot crowd who can provide me with information.
And please, anyone who thinks the disorder is some big hoax can forget about responding. I have blisters on my feet from pacing around while trying to do programming assignments, I don't need your laughably sheltered opinion.
The repo business is in a golden age, one that will never end! So when is this guy's IPO coming out?
But an NDA is close enough. Who cares what you remember if you can never communicate that memory to someone else.
I'm living in a cramped dorm room and ended up creating the same setup that you're considering. I have my PS2 connected to the cheapest BT878 card I could find (it's a $50 KWorld card from www.newegg.com ).
I use TVTime in Linux (the 2.6 kernel worked without a hitch) and DScaler in windows and it works out pretty well. I actually found my Redhat 9 install handled the card with much less hassle than Windows, no drivers or setup were required.
You need to ditch Sony's stock composite out cable however. The scanlines really standout and get annoying after a while (the screen has a ripple pattern constantly moving downwards). You also don't get a picture that's sharp enough to display 640x480 very well.
I bought an S-Video Monster Cable from Electronics Boutique and the sharpness was greatly improved. Before then, I thought a lot of my games were displayed 320x240. The scanlines still exist but are far less annoying. I've mostly tuned them out using fancy display filters.
Altogether, getting a monitor with TV-inputs might be a better solution. I assume the scanline problems would go away. My problems could also just be from buying a shitty capture card.
Ya, arts students almost always seem to take the backseat to more scientifically inclined disciplines when it comes to funding. The administration just can't recognize the powerful emotive force of a good collage.
Let me guess, you went to a state college too.
I hate consumer electronics for this very reason. I end up buying a computer where I have no control over what software is running on it. It's my damn hardware.
Provide an SDK for your device and within a month, there will be tons of value added to your device for free. Things the engineers would have never thought of, neat visualizations, usability enhancements, alternative formats, the list is endless. The open source movement has shown that there is an endless supply of free labour to be provided by tinkerers.
That companies like Apple, Creative, whoever owns Rio this week, and iRiver rufuse to to acknowledge this when making their MP3 players is simply insane. It's like they're all covering their eyes, hoping it'll go away. The first to cave in will make a huge return on investment.
I had the same problem with my computer account at school. We weren't even allowed to use permutations of words that could be found in the dictionary.
So instead of thinking of some random combination I just found a pattern on the qwerty keyboard that met the requirements. This is far less secure than what I would have chosen since anyone who catches me typing in my pass can instantly recognize it.
The whole thing is retarded anyways. I, the user, should be allowed to chose my password and its appropriate level of security. The system runs Unix and I have no permissions to anything but my own stuff. There's not really much damage that could be done aside from whiping out my personal things, so why bother with such strict securty?