...my local council collects electronic compenents
for recycling every fortnight.
Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 4, Informative
What does "ability to distribute customer's applications without being bound by the GPL" mean? Is this gem the reason they were surprised by Richard Stallman's words?
It simply means that you can compile things with the Cygwin gcc on
Windows and the resulting binary isn't covered by
the GPL. This wasn't true with earlier versions,
which were linked against a GPL Cygwin DLL, and
hence compiled programs were required to be GPL if
they were to be distributed. This just brings it
in line with the GNU development toolchain
on other platforms. There's nothing sinister
going on here.
These aren't the droids you're looking for. You
may go about your business. Move along...
Take care of your appearance, which means go to the gym
Complete rubbish. I've never been to a gym
in my life, I make no attempt whatsoever to
lead a healthy lifestyle, and
empirical evidence seems to suggest I'm doing
pretty well so far (it's been nearly 15 years
since I was last single).
The 5500 has all of the above except the 400 mhz xscale processor, and can be had "new in original packaging" for less than $200 if you keep your eyes open on e-bay.
True, but it doesn't have the screen. I have both
an SL-5500 and a SL-C860. The 860's screen is so much better it's really not
funny. It has to be seen to be believed. It's an
amazingly crisp display, and at 640x480, it's able
to give me an 80x24 text console, which the 5500
couldn't manage even with the smallest font size.
Sharp are coming so close to making the perfect
machine. The only thing lacking from the 860 is
builtin bluetooth -- I have to use a separate CF
card for that (I'd rather be putting extra storage
in that slot). Now the 6000 has all the features,
but for reasons that I don't understand, has
reverted to the sliding keyboard form factor,
rather than the clamshell design of the 860. If
they could just put the 6000 in a clamshell case
with the larger keyboard, I'd be very happy indeed...
I played a difficult and frustrating game where I killed camels using a space ship. Apparently that is what Llamasoft is all about. Very disappointing.
I have to wonder what you were expecting, if you
found it disappointing. If the game's called
"{Attack,Revenge} of the mutant camels", how can
you be disappointed to find a game involving killing
camels? The clue's is the title, one would have
thought...
At firest reading about the tab thing, the bile swelled up. (Heck, my vim config won't even let me type a tab anymore.)
Funny... my first thought was almost exactly the
opposite -- "thank the gods that someone's finally
done this right!" It will prevent a whole class
of subtle bugs, simply by flagging the error
immediately, rather than silently continuing with
different (and unintended) behaviour.
Re:web designers...siiigh.
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Why jpg for something more suited to a gif?
You mean PNG, not GIF. Nothing is really suited to
a GIF. The sole exception is animated images for
web use, and even then, that's only until MNG gains
more widespread browser support.
I've had a look at things like the XDA (you look a real dork holding a big wide PDA to your ear when making a phone call, and it also runs Windows - I don't want MS bloatware in my pocket thanks).
As a perfect example of why I don't have an XDA,
my boss just came round asking if anyone knew how
to do a hard reset on the XDA, as his had hung, and
a normal reset wasn't fixing it. So he's about to
lose all the settings etc he had on the phone...
True. Workstation
framebuffers always used to be 1152x900,
which gave just over a million pixels (that
resolution was chosen to maximize the display
area for cards with 1MB of video memory).
However, when the PC world finally caught up with
workstation resolutions, they opted for 1152x864
instead, in order to preserve the 4:3 aspect ratio[1],
thus it's slightly less than 1 million pixels.
[1] No, I don't know why they did this either, as
they were quite happy to use a different
aspect ratio elsewhere (e.g., for 1280x1024).
Myth. Linux does (and has for many years) run on
just as many platforms as NetBSD. Most of NetBSDs
"platforms" are actually just variants on a single
architecture. Thus while NetBSD counts atari and
amiga as separate ports, Linux just treats them as
part of a single Linux/m68k port. In fact, NetBSD
runs on two architectures that aren't currently
supported by Linux (ns32k and vax), whereas Linux
run on five that aren't supported by NetBSD
(mips64, ppc64, s390, sh4 and etrax). I'm not
trying to put down the worthy efforts of the
NetBSD community, but I just get a bit fed up
with people claiming that it's more widely ported
than Linux. It was true in the past, but hasn't
been for some time.
Of course, Gosling was never an X architect. Those
were Scheifler, Gettys and Newman. Gosling was the
architect of NeWS, a competing windowing system
that ultimately lost out to X. Yes, IHBT. Thank you and good night.
You have bookmarks now, to quickly go to a folder you use often
This alone is worth the upgrade. I've been waiting
for this for a long time, primarily for GIMP, where
I have separate directories for the same image saved at different resolutions. Being able to quickly go
to one or the other is a major win for me. I just
hope they've implemented it per app, and not
globally...
Check out this driver comparison on the Radeon 9000. The DRI drivers perform very poorly.
Either I'm missing something, or you're just
not reading it right. Take this quote from the
linked article, for example:
In general, the ATI driver just seems to be slow. In a lot of tests it is more than 3 times slower than the dri driver, in a few cases more than 100 times slower.
So by your logic,
ATI know their hardware intimately -- so
well in fact, that they can write
a driver that's up to 2 orders of magnitude slower
that a free driver. That's not doing much to
prove your case...
Its turning your $300 graphics card into a $75 card, for a very little bit of extra freedom
That "little bit of extra freedom" is worth at
least $225 to me. Besides, only a fool buys a
$300 video card. Yes, I may get flamed for that
comment, but that doesn't detract from the fact
that (with a few exceptions) it's true.
I don't think the OSS spirit is about forcing people to open their code. If they choose to, great. If they don't, well, we can just code something better. That's precisely what GNU did to UNIX.
No, the point is that we can't[1] code
something better because they won't release the
necessary programming information. I personally
don't particularly want ATI or Nvidia to open
source their drivers. What I want them to do is
provide the necessary programming information.
When the 2.8 kernel breaks your binary drivers
and your vendor doesn't release an updated
version, you may start regretting your lack of
source code and/or programming info.
[1] Without reverse engineering their drivers,
which is a huge task, and not likely to happen soon.
There are NO good OSS 3D drivers. [...] When OSS manages to make a good set of drivers for the R100 or R200 (whose specs *are* available) then they can say "OSS drivers would be better!" Until then, its just whining.
No, it's not just whining. Freedom is important to
some of us (for both pragmatic and idealistic
reasons). I'd rather have a slightly slower driver
than a fast clsoed source one, and to be honest, I
haven't noticed my RV100 being particularly slow.
It's more than good enough for what I use --
mostly 2D, plus some 3D gaming and home brewed
OpenGL apps. Are other cards
faster? Probably. Would I really notice? Maybe.
Would the extra speed really be worth giving up
my freedom? Nope. Note that I run a very
heterogeneous network, running Linux not
only on x86,
but also on Sparc, Alpha, PPC, MIPS and (as of
a couple of weeks ago) ARM. In fact, I think I've
got all of the major architectures covered now:-)
Closed source drivers tend to only be available
for x86.
Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.
You're barking up the wrong tree.
Were that the cause of the closed source nature
of the drivers, it
would be a non-issue. They could simply release the
full specs and programming information for the card,
and someone else could write a driver. But they
refuse to do that.
Yes, when we looked into it, emacs was
actually only using around 1MB in the late '80s.
But then, the machine only had 8MB to start with
and we typically had 20-40 concurrent users...
Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift... since everyone knows that's what emacs stands for anyway.
Well, not quite. It always used to stand for
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. Of course,
that was in the days when 8MB was a lot of memory.
Nowadays, it seems like half the apps on my machine
use that much...
Sweep has a lot of neat features, though. They're both free, so if you use Linux, why not grab both, and use each where appropriate?
Agreed completely. I didn't realise the disk vs
memory based difference. But like you say, use
whichever is most appropriate to what you need.
A little competition never harmed anyone, and will
hopefully serve to improve both projects...
Hopefully open source software will help make studio recording costs go down
There are already recording studios that use
Sweep.
I know that diversity is always good, but it doesn't
look like Audacity gives anything that Sweep doesn't
already, and has been doing for some time.
So it sounds like one of their difficulties is the fact that they were previously using M$ stuff and it is proving more difficult than they expected to disentangle themselves from it.
True enough. But the salient point that everyone
seems to miss when looking at things like this is
that a trasition from software A to software B is
always difficult, for pretty much any A
and any B. Were Linux in a dominant position
instead, we might well be seeing similar
stories about a
few high profile sites struggling with an attempted
switch to Windows...
I guess Linux on zaurus is changing the equation a little.
s/a little/a lot/
Where you went for the PC110, I went for a Libretto.
And like you, mine's wearing out, and showing its
age. But that's OK. My Zaurus is simply wonderful.
I have a couple of the earlier models, which are
fine proofs of concept, but somewhat limited for
real world use. All of that changed with the clamshell
Zauruses. The older models could only manage a
72 column console, even in their tiniest font,
and the keyboard was a little on the small side.
My C860, though, has a much bigger keyboard due
to the change in form factor, and it
can quite happily handle the
magic 80 columns with a perfectly readable font.
Combine it with a bluetooth card and suitable
mobile phone, and I now have my two killer
applications -- mobile web browsing, and mobile
ssh access to my home and work machines. And even
better, it's a full computer, running a real OS
that's small enough to fit in a pocket
(something the Libretto, for all its goodness,
couldn't quite manage).
Yes, it's still a little on the pricey side, but
fortunately, mine was bought for me by the
company to allow remote administration:-) You
can get them in the UK from shirtpocket,
who will do the Japanese to English conversion
for you and supply a complete, ready to use machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Harrow.
...my local council collects electronic compenents for recycling every fortnight.
It simply means that you can compile things with the Cygwin gcc on Windows and the resulting binary isn't covered by the GPL. This wasn't true with earlier versions, which were linked against a GPL Cygwin DLL, and hence compiled programs were required to be GPL if they were to be distributed. This just brings it in line with the GNU development toolchain on other platforms. There's nothing sinister going on here. These aren't the droids you're looking for. You may go about your business. Move along...
Complete rubbish. I've never been to a gym in my life, I make no attempt whatsoever to lead a healthy lifestyle, and empirical evidence seems to suggest I'm doing pretty well so far (it's been nearly 15 years since I was last single).
True, but it doesn't have the screen. I have both an SL-5500 and a SL-C860. The 860's screen is so much better it's really not funny. It has to be seen to be believed. It's an amazingly crisp display, and at 640x480, it's able to give me an 80x24 text console, which the 5500 couldn't manage even with the smallest font size. Sharp are coming so close to making the perfect machine. The only thing lacking from the 860 is builtin bluetooth -- I have to use a separate CF card for that (I'd rather be putting extra storage in that slot). Now the 6000 has all the features, but for reasons that I don't understand, has reverted to the sliding keyboard form factor, rather than the clamshell design of the 860. If they could just put the 6000 in a clamshell case with the larger keyboard, I'd be very happy indeed...
I have to wonder what you were expecting, if you found it disappointing. If the game's called "{Attack,Revenge} of the mutant camels", how can you be disappointed to find a game involving killing camels? The clue's is the title, one would have thought...
Funny... my first thought was almost exactly the opposite -- "thank the gods that someone's finally done this right!" It will prevent a whole class of subtle bugs, simply by flagging the error immediately, rather than silently continuing with different (and unintended) behaviour.
You mean PNG, not GIF. Nothing is really suited to a GIF. The sole exception is animated images for web use, and even then, that's only until MNG gains more widespread browser support.
As a perfect example of why I don't have an XDA, my boss just came round asking if anyone knew how to do a hard reset on the XDA, as his had hung, and a normal reset wasn't fixing it. So he's about to lose all the settings etc he had on the phone...
It's worse than that. Mine (an Olympus C2020Z) claims 2.1 megapixels, yet is still only 1600x1200.
True. Workstation framebuffers always used to be 1152x900, which gave just over a million pixels (that resolution was chosen to maximize the display area for cards with 1MB of video memory). However, when the PC world finally caught up with workstation resolutions, they opted for 1152x864 instead, in order to preserve the 4:3 aspect ratio[1], thus it's slightly less than 1 million pixels.
[1] No, I don't know why they did this either, as they were quite happy to use a different aspect ratio elsewhere (e.g., for 1280x1024).
Myth. Linux does (and has for many years) run on just as many platforms as NetBSD. Most of NetBSDs "platforms" are actually just variants on a single architecture. Thus while NetBSD counts atari and amiga as separate ports, Linux just treats them as part of a single Linux/m68k port. In fact, NetBSD runs on two architectures that aren't currently supported by Linux (ns32k and vax), whereas Linux run on five that aren't supported by NetBSD (mips64, ppc64, s390, sh4 and etrax). I'm not trying to put down the worthy efforts of the NetBSD community, but I just get a bit fed up with people claiming that it's more widely ported than Linux. It was true in the past, but hasn't been for some time.
Of course, Gosling was never an X architect. Those were Scheifler, Gettys and Newman. Gosling was the architect of NeWS, a competing windowing system that ultimately lost out to X. Yes, IHBT. Thank you and good night.
This alone is worth the upgrade. I've been waiting for this for a long time, primarily for GIMP, where I have separate directories for the same image saved at different resolutions. Being able to quickly go to one or the other is a major win for me. I just hope they've implemented it per app, and not globally...
Either I'm missing something, or you're just not reading it right. Take this quote from the linked article, for example:
So by your logic, ATI know their hardware intimately -- so well in fact, that they can write a driver that's up to 2 orders of magnitude slower that a free driver. That's not doing much to prove your case...
That "little bit of extra freedom" is worth at least $225 to me. Besides, only a fool buys a $300 video card. Yes, I may get flamed for that comment, but that doesn't detract from the fact that (with a few exceptions) it's true.
I don't think the OSS spirit is about forcing people to open their code. If they choose to, great. If they don't, well, we can just code something better. That's precisely what GNU did to UNIX.
No, the point is that we can't[1] code something better because they won't release the necessary programming information. I personally don't particularly want ATI or Nvidia to open source their drivers. What I want them to do is provide the necessary programming information. When the 2.8 kernel breaks your binary drivers and your vendor doesn't release an updated version, you may start regretting your lack of source code and/or programming info.
[1] Without reverse engineering their drivers, which is a huge task, and not likely to happen soon.
No, it's not just whining. Freedom is important to some of us (for both pragmatic and idealistic reasons). I'd rather have a slightly slower driver than a fast clsoed source one, and to be honest, I haven't noticed my RV100 being particularly slow. It's more than good enough for what I use -- mostly 2D, plus some 3D gaming and home brewed OpenGL apps. Are other cards faster? Probably. Would I really notice? Maybe. Would the extra speed really be worth giving up my freedom? Nope. Note that I run a very heterogeneous network, running Linux not only on x86, but also on Sparc, Alpha, PPC, MIPS and (as of a couple of weeks ago) ARM. In fact, I think I've got all of the major architectures covered now :-)
Closed source drivers tend to only be available
for x86.
You're barking up the wrong tree. Were that the cause of the closed source nature of the drivers, it would be a non-issue. They could simply release the full specs and programming information for the card, and someone else could write a driver. But they refuse to do that.
Yes, when we looked into it, emacs was actually only using around 1MB in the late '80s. But then, the machine only had 8MB to start with and we typically had 20-40 concurrent users...
Well, not quite. It always used to stand for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. Of course, that was in the days when 8MB was a lot of memory. Nowadays, it seems like half the apps on my machine use that much...
I see lots of patching in my immediate future...
Agreed completely. I didn't realise the disk vs memory based difference. But like you say, use whichever is most appropriate to what you need. A little competition never harmed anyone, and will hopefully serve to improve both projects...
There are already recording studios that use Sweep. I know that diversity is always good, but it doesn't look like Audacity gives anything that Sweep doesn't already, and has been doing for some time.
True enough. But the salient point that everyone seems to miss when looking at things like this is that a trasition from software A to software B is always difficult, for pretty much any A and any B. Were Linux in a dominant position instead, we might well be seeing similar stories about a few high profile sites struggling with an attempted switch to Windows...
Where you went for the PC110, I went for a Libretto. And like you, mine's wearing out, and showing its age. But that's OK. My Zaurus is simply wonderful. I have a couple of the earlier models, which are fine proofs of concept, but somewhat limited for real world use. All of that changed with the clamshell Zauruses. The older models could only manage a 72 column console, even in their tiniest font, and the keyboard was a little on the small side. My C860, though, has a much bigger keyboard due to the change in form factor, and it can quite happily handle the magic 80 columns with a perfectly readable font. Combine it with a bluetooth card and suitable mobile phone, and I now have my two killer applications -- mobile web browsing, and mobile ssh access to my home and work machines. And even better, it's a full computer, running a real OS that's small enough to fit in a pocket (something the Libretto, for all its goodness, couldn't quite manage).
Yes, it's still a little on the pricey side, but fortunately, mine was bought for me by the company to allow remote administration :-) You
can get them in the UK from shirtpocket,
who will do the Japanese to English conversion
for you and supply a complete, ready to use machine.