the network transparency in X11 is a bit rubbish. It uses a huge number of round trips and so is painfully slow over a slow network. still I use it at least weekly because it is really easy. I am sat at my laptop, ssh'ed into a big machine (lots of CPUs and RAM) which runs simulations. If I want to look at a plot i can just do 'evince foo.pdf' and its on my screen (or pylab.show() or whatever). It requires no setup beyond passing -X when you start ssh (or adding forwarding to the config file).
(I also used to use use it for playing music. I had rhythmbox installed on a mini-itx connected to hifi, displaying over ssh on my laptop. it worked but the interface was slow. then i discovered MPD)
VNCing a whole session is just silly, as i spend most of the time on the commandline. also VNC means i have to start a VNC server at one end, and then a VNC client at my end.
but if VNC (or some other protocol, maybe NX) was as easy to use (given that I am already SSHing into the machine) then i would happily switch. if it also worked well with GNU screen, then I would be super happy.
but where does the decryption key live? The play needs to know it to play the file. If you put the key in the hardware, and pass the encrypted stream to the hardware, then you have just moved the DRM to somewhere else. Thats like saying its an open DRM protocol because it works over open TCP.
I understand the desire to replace X. Big chunks of X either aren't needed any more or have moved into other locations (mostly the kernel). but i find it hard to believe that the direction and goals of wayland are so different to what ubuntu want that its worth starting fresh.
maybe now that a display server has so little to do, it something that a small team can knock up in a few months. in which case maybe every window manager will end up being a display server.
How about another metric: Can you dial a useful number without looking at your phone? On a trusty old nokia 3310 (or similar) I could unlock, dial the last used, dial the top number in my phone book, dial emergency services and various other tasks without looking. There are few circumstances where this could be very useful (or save your life).
really? as I understand it can run openCL or openMP or MPI or a bunch of other standards.
Re:Use inode space for 1st part of large files?
on
Linux 3.8 Released
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· Score: 1
thats quite an interesting idea. I imagine it lots of cases the first few bytes of the file have header information. In some cases the header might be all you need to read. in other cases you might read the header to find out how much memory you need to allocate, then do the allocation, then read the rest of the file. so the little speed boost might be quite significant in many common cases.
on the other hand, there must be good reasons that the actual file data is not all stored with the metadata in the first place. so collapsing it back in there may not be a good idea.
recuding consumption can help. but if you want to stop emitting CO_2 even if you have huge improvements in efficiency you will need to double elctricity production ( http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/ ). This is because we would need to electrify heating and transport.
FORTRAN does arrays in a way thats slightly easier for the compiler to optimise. But some modern techniques and data structures are much harder to do in FORTRAN compared to c++. It is also quite easy to call C, C++ or FORTRAN functions from python.
Writing a loop in python is slow. You express that loop as a numpy array operation you get a substantial way towards c speed. if you use numexpr you will get something faster than a simple C version.
Processing big data is as much about moving the data around, and minimising latency in this movement as the raw processing speed. so a language that lets you express things efficiently will win in the end.
also remember that its lots of fun to receive email (and post) intended for someone else in your company with the same (or similar) name. especially if you are a student, and they are a professor.
(i guess its why we have @student.uni.ac.uk. @postgrad.uni.ac.uk and @uni.ac.uk for staff)
As others have pointed out any assumption you make about names is probably wrong for somebody. Some simple examples, i am on the system as 'samuel' but i am known as 'sam'. I have colleagues who are know by their middle name or by their anglicised name.
It sounds like you already have globally unique usernames, so that would be a good starting point. You could then offer people an alias, suggesting fullname, first.last or first.initial.last, but allowing reasonable alternatives.
Also remember that people will have given there email in a hundred and one places that they may not be able to (or remember to) update. So make sure that the old addresses still forward to the new ones.
The linux mint developers have this crazy idea that everyone want to use a mouse and keyboard with their tablet. you probably want the trendy derivative called ubuntu, they have forked the user interface to so that it still works on a tradition touch screen. the trouble is there are so many of these crazy forks, unity, gnome3, plasma, not very sustainable.:-)
i am sorry sir, though you have all the symptoms of cancer i can't really prove scientifically that you definitely have it. So i can justify giving you this expensive treatment. Come back in 20 years and we'll see if its got any worse.
if you plug a drive into another computer you should have no expectation that the computer will respect the permissions, so what is the point of having them. it should be possible to make a udev rule that 777s any external disk when you mount it. or hack ext4 to ignore permissions on external drives.
FAT is in the kernel (presumably reverse engineered). That is supposedly covered by patents. It should not really be any more dangerous to put ntfs, exfat or zfs in the kernel.
(ZFS is slightly odd, in that there is already code that could easily be dropped in if it were not for licensing. It would need some to reimplement it under a GPL licence, but i guess while there is the faint possibility of the original code being relicensed no one will want to put in the work)
Depends. most of the time i am a keyboard person. sometimes i have a mug of coffee in 1 hand and a mouse in the other. In GNOME2 i could do anything easily either with just the mouse, or with just the keyboard. A useful skill to have when dealing with hardware with either a broken mouse or keyboard.
With GNOME3 is seems that some tasks require a keyboard (or you are forced to use a long slow mouse method). Also there seem to be things that are harder to do with the keyboard (maybe just because i have not learned the new shortcuts).
MATE is a quick functional fix. The GNOME2 code may have been old but it was not broken. it was working well for many people. MATE just took the existing code, and made sure that it was still installable on a modern distro. due to the way GNOME3 had been done this entailed renaming everything. (GNOME devs really did not want to to be easy to have GNOME2 and 3 installed together).
This meant that in 2011 and 2012 people could easily keep using a GNOME2 style desktop. So for the people that value that, MATE is great.
Some people think that a DE must be written in the latest libraries, as so are working on GNOME2 style desktops using GNOME3 tech. You could call GNOME3 fallback the first attempt (though it lacked many features), cinnamon is another, and now consort. Also MATE is gradually moving to newer libraries. I guess one of these will be the winner, but for now (from my point of view) MATE is in the lead.
Slashdot Mirror
the network transparency in X11 is a bit rubbish. It uses a huge number of round trips and so is painfully slow over a slow network. still I use it at least weekly because it is really easy. I am sat at my laptop, ssh'ed into a big machine (lots of CPUs and RAM) which runs simulations. If I want to look at a plot i can just do 'evince foo.pdf' and its on my screen (or pylab.show() or whatever). It requires no setup beyond passing -X when you start ssh (or adding forwarding to the config file).
(I also used to use use it for playing music. I had rhythmbox installed on a mini-itx connected to hifi, displaying over ssh on my laptop. it worked but the interface was slow. then i discovered MPD)
VNCing a whole session is just silly, as i spend most of the time on the commandline. also VNC means i have to start a VNC server at one end, and then a VNC client at my end.
but if VNC (or some other protocol, maybe NX) was as easy to use (given that I am already SSHing into the machine) then i would happily switch. if it also worked well with GNU screen, then I would be super happy.
but where does the decryption key live? The play needs to know it to play the file. If you put the key in the hardware, and pass the encrypted stream to the hardware, then you have just moved the DRM to somewhere else. Thats like saying its an open DRM protocol because it works over open TCP.
I understand the desire to replace X. Big chunks of X either aren't needed any more or have moved into other locations (mostly the kernel). but i find it hard to believe that the direction and goals of wayland are so different to what ubuntu want that its worth starting fresh.
maybe now that a display server has so little to do, it something that a small team can knock up in a few months. in which case maybe every window manager will end up being a display server.
How about another metric:
Can you dial a useful number without looking at your phone?
On a trusty old nokia 3310 (or similar) I could unlock, dial the last used, dial the top number in my phone book, dial emergency services and various other tasks without looking. There are few circumstances where this could be very useful (or save your life).
I dont think i could do it on any smart phone.
will it take an HP lawsuit to keep it afloat?
really? as I understand it can run openCL or openMP or MPI or a bunch of other standards.
thats quite an interesting idea. I imagine it lots of cases the first few bytes of the file have header information. In some cases the header might be all you need to read. in other cases you might read the header to find out how much memory you need to allocate, then do the allocation, then read the rest of the file. so the little speed boost might be quite significant in many common cases.
on the other hand, there must be good reasons that the actual file data is not all stored with the metadata in the first place. so collapsing it back in there may not be a good idea.
intel have a very good contender for that specific market. the xeon phi.
unless there is a clear licence allowing them to use the code, they would probably be wise not to look at it at all.
it is already a compile time option on linux since about FF14.
so germany could be at 40% zero carbon electricity if the anti-nuclear crowd had not kicked it back. its quite sad really.
recuding consumption can help. but if you want to stop emitting CO_2 even if you have huge improvements in efficiency you will need to double elctricity production ( http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/ ). This is because we would need to electrify heating and transport.
FORTRAN does arrays in a way thats slightly easier for the compiler to optimise. But some modern techniques and data structures are much harder to do in FORTRAN compared to c++. It is also quite easy to call C, C++ or FORTRAN functions from python.
Writing a loop in python is slow. You express that loop as a numpy array operation you get a substantial way towards c speed. if you use numexpr you will get something faster than a simple C version.
Processing big data is as much about moving the data around, and minimising latency in this movement as the raw processing speed. so a language that lets you express things efficiently will win in the end.
how about firstname.lastname.dateofbirth.mothersmaidenname.bankaccountnumber.banksortcode.creditcardpin.homeaddress@domain.tld
also remember that its lots of fun to receive email (and post) intended for someone else in your company with the same (or similar) name. especially if you are a student, and they are a professor.
(i guess its why we have @student.uni.ac.uk. @postgrad.uni.ac.uk and @uni.ac.uk for staff)
As others have pointed out any assumption you make about names is probably wrong for somebody. Some simple examples, i am on the system as 'samuel' but i am known as 'sam'. I have colleagues who are know by their middle name or by their anglicised name.
It sounds like you already have globally unique usernames, so that would be a good starting point. You could then offer people an alias, suggesting fullname, first.last or first.initial.last, but allowing reasonable alternatives.
Also remember that people will have given there email in a hundred and one places that they may not be able to (or remember to) update. So make sure that the old addresses still forward to the new ones.
The linux mint developers have this crazy idea that everyone want to use a mouse and keyboard with their tablet. you probably want the trendy derivative called ubuntu, they have forked the user interface to so that it still works on a tradition touch screen. the trouble is there are so many of these crazy forks, unity, gnome3, plasma, not very sustainable. :-)
i am sorry sir, though you have all the symptoms of cancer i can't really prove scientifically that you definitely have it. So i can justify giving you this expensive treatment. Come back in 20 years and we'll see if its got any worse.
The part of the earth that has warmed the most or the north pole. i am not sure how you could account for that by an urban heat island effect.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20130115/
+1
if you plug a drive into another computer you should have no expectation that the computer will respect the permissions, so what is the point of having them. it should be possible to make a udev rule that 777s any external disk when you mount it. or hack ext4 to ignore permissions on external drives.
FAT is in the kernel (presumably reverse engineered). That is supposedly covered by patents. It should not really be any more dangerous to put ntfs, exfat or zfs in the kernel.
(ZFS is slightly odd, in that there is already code that could easily be dropped in if it were not for licensing. It would need some to reimplement it under a GPL licence, but i guess while there is the faint possibility of the original code being relicensed no one will want to put in the work)
luckily Excel has an excellent record in handling dates http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/leap-back.html
why dont amazon just add a surcharge for people who want to buy things using apples app store.
Depends. most of the time i am a keyboard person. sometimes i have a mug of coffee in 1 hand and a mouse in the other. In GNOME2 i could do anything easily either with just the mouse, or with just the keyboard. A useful skill to have when dealing with hardware with either a broken mouse or keyboard.
With GNOME3 is seems that some tasks require a keyboard (or you are forced to use a long slow mouse method). Also there seem to be things that are harder to do with the keyboard (maybe just because i have not learned the new shortcuts).
MATE is a quick functional fix. The GNOME2 code may have been old but it was not broken. it was working well for many people. MATE just took the existing code, and made sure that it was still installable on a modern distro. due to the way GNOME3 had been done this entailed renaming everything. (GNOME devs really did not want to to be easy to have GNOME2 and 3 installed together).
This meant that in 2011 and 2012 people could easily keep using a GNOME2 style desktop. So for the people that value that, MATE is great.
Some people think that a DE must be written in the latest libraries, as so are working on GNOME2 style desktops using GNOME3 tech. You could call GNOME3 fallback the first attempt (though it lacked many features), cinnamon is another, and now consort. Also MATE is gradually moving to newer libraries. I guess one of these will be the winner, but for now (from my point of view) MATE is in the lead.