I rip my CDs to 128 kb MP3s using gogo, and like you, I can't tell the difference while listening. However, the artifacts become far more noticable if I do any kind of effects on it (reverb, extra stereo, bass/treble boost, etc). Higher bitrates help, but the problem never completely goes away.
What educational software that they use is going to be work on it?
It's been a while since I was in school, but some of the things I remember them teaching were:
Typing: This is usually done with any program that students can type with, like a word processor. Yes, Linux has this.
Computer Literacy: Linux can be used to learn how to boot a system, log in, and run various programs. It's not difficult to do little things like change the background image, setup screensavers, create files and directories, etc. It is also quite capable of browsing the web. These are the types of things taught in computer literacy, and Linux can do them all.
Office Suites: Word processing and speadsheets. Schools are supposed to teach concepts, so which program they choose has little relevance. Even if they use MS Office, by the time these kids get into the real world, MS will have released a new version, with different layout. Yes, Linux has office suites.
Programming: Linux has a full suite of programming languages, including C, C++, and Java, which seem to be so popular in schools these days.
HTML: Linux has web servers, and supports advanced features like CGI programming and embedded languages. I would even say that Linux is superior to Windows in this area.
There may be some specialized cases where Linux doesn't have the right software, but for the majority of cases, I'd say it's more than capable of serving the role.
Hear, hear! Very insightful post (I wish I had moderator privileges right now to mod you up).
Anyway, one thing I've always wondered about (and I'm not a parent, so maybe I'm missing something here) is how much porn really hurts our children. I mean, sex is a natural part of life -- we all do it eventually. When parents shield their kids from porn, who are they protecting -- their kids or themselves? Small children are naturally curious, and when they see something they don't fully comprehend (which includes a *lot* of things), they become inquisitive. They start asking questions their parents will be uncomfortable answering. Maybe it's better for the parents that they never ask those awkward questions to begin with. I tend to believe that's why we started shielding our children from porn. But today, I think today most people have had the notion that seeing porn will psychologically impair our children pounded into their heads for so many years, they just believe it without question. And that's just sad.
I wonder how hard it would be to turn the demoronizer into a proxy, so that pages could be fixed in real-time instead of hoping the authors would fix their HTML themselves (which often doesn't happen).
Many have thought HP's calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case.
If their calculator division was making money, then why on earth was it chosen to be closed down? They should have chosen something that was loosing them money. If there were no departments loosing money, then they shouldn't have had to cut *any* departments.
I bought From Zero's One Nation Under CD back in July and noticed I couldn't play it in my CDROM drive (though it played fine in my "normal" CD player). I was able to rip it with CD Paranoia, though it went very slow. I just assumed the disc was warped or something, which I didn't mind so much since I was able to rip it to MP3s (which I always do with the music I buy).
If the RIAA found out they were using P2P technology, they would be in serious trouble. The RIAA has graciously enlightened us all about how P2P is a tool of criminals and has no legitimate uses in this world. Oh the horror!
Has anybody else noticed that, since 2.4.10, the reported memory usage appears to be wrong? I noticed in the change logs that this was supposedly fixed in 2.4.13-pre1, but I still see the problem. Running "free" shows that I'm using up 245MB of RAM on the "-/+ buffers/cache" line (I'd paste it here, except Slashdot is rejecting the post due to "lameness filter encountered. *sigh*). Now I know I'm not using 245 MB of RAM (after subtracting out the buffers and cache), and I can prove it by running a program which allocates about 350MB of ram then frees it. When I do that, my memory usage, including swap, drops to about 70-80 MB. Is anybody else seeing this?
Keep in mind that MS's power is derived from the number of people using their products, so even if you don't buy a copy, you are still strengthening MS's monopoly by using it.
Loki has filed chapter 11. This doesn't mean they are dead, but that they are in debt and need a way out. This move will allow them to reorganize, but without our support, they may soon disappear. If you want to save Loki, the best thing you can do is go buy some of their games. So get in there and spend some money. It's the only way to save them.
Also, keep in mind that loosing Loki is especially bad for Linux since there is nobody else to take their place.
I have nothing against making a UI intuitive for new users, but I'm also interested in making it useful for experienced users. Afterall, we are only beginners at something for a short amount of time. Once I become familiar with how something works, I'm more interested in being able to do what I want without too much pain. Drop down menus (or popup menus, like the "start" button) are easy to use, but tedious for the more experienced user when you have to search through 3 or 4 levels of submenus. Ditto for filemanagers. If I know the name of the program I want to run, Having to search through hundreds of icons for it is a lot slower that just typing it in at a command line (which I often do under *nix), especially when I can use tab completion.
So, while I often see studies like this where they test newbies, people don't actually become productive until they familiarize themselves with the environment. For that reason, I'd like to see a comparison / study of how productive more experienced users are with various UIs. I think that would be a more meaningful test.
Easy... just create a similar hurricane effect on the other side of your shower curtain to balance things out. I mean, if you don't mind flooding your house, of course.
The point so many people are missing here is that P2P is just a technology, and like any technology, it is neither good nor bad. The good and the bad come from how it's used.
One of the problems with the internet today is that 99.9% of the content is being provided on 0.1% of the machines connected to it. The idea of having centralized servers is nice because it makes administration easy, but lacks many advantages of a distributed environment which P2P provides. P2P promises to even out the numbers above. Instead of 0.1% of machines providing 99.9% of the worlds web pages, we could have 80% (maybe more, maybe less) of the machines providing that same 99.9% of the content. Furthermore, by distributing content in this way, it reduces the strain on any given web server. A large number of hits on a single web server can bring it down. In a distributed environment, these same hits will be distributed across a large number of machines, and even if one goes down, the rest will remain up, making it possible to still retrieve the requested data.
Some examples of P2P (some of these may not be to purists) would be things like email, chat clients (ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger), Usenet news, IRC file transfers, networked games (not the massively multiplayer ones like EverQuest, though). We might even consider PPP, which stands for Point to Point Protocol, though the way in which it is most often used isn't fully P2P. With the influx of people running private web servers off their home machines, even the world wide web is turning into P2P. Also consider file sharing on an intranet. Each machine acts as both a client and server, and is therefore P2P.
I think P2P has the potential to make networked environments far more robust and sustainable than the client/server model which is so widespread these days. Its advantages, in my opinion, far outweigh the disadvantages.
People have been waiting for this for many a year and nothing has come of it. I remember reading that it required supercooled nitrogen which is not exactly ecconomical.
Right, but what I'm referring to are high temperature superconductors. If some day a way is determined to create such things, the liquid nitrogen will be unnecessary.
I'm still waiting for a breakthrough in superconductors. Imagine a CPU that can run at extremely high speeds and generate no descernable heat. You wouldn't need a heat sink or fan, making your system run that much quieter.
Now if we could just get harddrives to run silent, we'd be all set (yes, I know about the solid state drives, but they're way too expensive and have too little capacity). Maybe when holographic drives become reality...
I really don't have a problem with copyright holders wanting to protect their data. And as long as their actions have no adverse effects on people obeying the law, I don't mind if they put restrictions on our abilities to copy things. However, if I buy a tape recorder so I can record lecture notes in school, for example, I should not be penalized because the technology can be used in an illegal manner. Technology is neither good nor evil -- it's how it's used that makes the difference. Limiting technology so it can't be used in illegal ways generally also means limiting how it can be used in legal ways as well. It also complicates the devices and limits their flexibility, which means they become less useful to people who want the most out of their electronics. I see us spiraling into a dark age of technology where companies become all-powerful through the ignorance of government and the average person. The question remains as to how long it will take before we reach our next renaissance.
I guess it depends where you live as to what is considered "good pay". In and around Kansas City, most IT professionals earn between $45K and $65K per year (putting Linuxgruven at the low end of the scale). I would imagine in a place like silicon valley, those number would be higher. Much higher.
I definitely think Elite deserves a place in this list. Another game I think worthy is the original Might & Magic. IIRC, it was the first role playing fantasy game with a first person perspective.
No, see, while the CPU will finally be fast enough, the amount of time it takes for the hard drive to read the needed 20 gigs of data (actually, it's only 500 MB, but due to Microsoft's patented read and re-read technology, it reads the data 40 times), it will still take an hour or more to boot. A spokesperson from Microsoft said they are looking into caching the data in a RAM drive so the subsequent reads will occur at a much higher rate. Computer experts warn that to be able to store the 500 MB of data, Windows will require an additional 4 GB of RAM, which will in turn drive up the costs of computers. Market analysts, however, are quick to point out the increased sales of RAM will help out our falling economy, giving it the boost it needs to recover.
Keep in mind there is probably a fair amount of overlap with other desktop environments. There's nothing that says someone can't run more that one desktop. This is especially true on multiuser systems, as some users may use KDE, some Gnome, some XFCE, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I rip my CDs to 128 kb MP3s using gogo, and like you, I can't tell the difference while listening. However, the artifacts become far more noticable if I do any kind of effects on it (reverb, extra stereo, bass/treble boost, etc). Higher bitrates help, but the problem never completely goes away.
It's been a while since I was in school, but some of the things I remember them teaching were:
- Typing: This is usually done with any program that students can type with, like a word processor. Yes, Linux has this.
- Computer Literacy: Linux can be used to learn how to boot a system, log in, and run various programs. It's not difficult to do little things like change the background image, setup screensavers, create files and directories, etc. It is also quite capable of browsing the web. These are the types of things taught in computer literacy, and Linux can do them all.
- Office Suites: Word processing and speadsheets. Schools are supposed to teach concepts, so which program they choose has little relevance. Even if they use MS Office, by the time these kids get into the real world, MS will have released a new version, with different layout. Yes, Linux has office suites.
- Programming: Linux has a full suite of programming languages, including C, C++, and Java, which seem to be so popular in schools these days.
- HTML: Linux has web servers, and supports advanced features like CGI programming and embedded languages. I would even say that Linux is superior to Windows in this area.
There may be some specialized cases where Linux doesn't have the right software, but for the majority of cases, I'd say it's more than capable of serving the role.Hear, hear! Very insightful post (I wish I had moderator privileges right now to mod you up).
Anyway, one thing I've always wondered about (and I'm not a parent, so maybe I'm missing something here) is how much porn really hurts our children. I mean, sex is a natural part of life -- we all do it eventually. When parents shield their kids from porn, who are they protecting -- their kids or themselves? Small children are naturally curious, and when they see something they don't fully comprehend (which includes a *lot* of things), they become inquisitive. They start asking questions their parents will be uncomfortable answering. Maybe it's better for the parents that they never ask those awkward questions to begin with. I tend to believe that's why we started shielding our children from porn. But today, I think today most people have had the notion that seeing porn will psychologically impair our children pounded into their heads for so many years, they just believe it without question. And that's just sad.
I wonder how hard it would be to turn the demoronizer into a proxy, so that pages could be fixed in real-time instead of hoping the authors would fix their HTML themselves (which often doesn't happen).
Many have thought HP's calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case.
If their calculator division was making money, then why on earth was it chosen to be closed down? They should have chosen something that was loosing them money. If there were no departments loosing money, then they shouldn't have had to cut *any* departments.
Does anyone know of other CDs with this problem?
I bought From Zero's One Nation Under CD back in July and noticed I couldn't play it in my CDROM drive (though it played fine in my "normal" CD player). I was able to rip it with CD Paranoia, though it went very slow. I just assumed the disc was warped or something, which I didn't mind so much since I was able to rip it to MP3s (which I always do with the music I buy).
They use packet-based, point-to-point connections
If the RIAA found out they were using P2P technology, they would be in serious trouble. The RIAA has graciously enlightened us all about how P2P is a tool of criminals and has no legitimate uses in this world. Oh the horror!
Has anybody else noticed that, since 2.4.10, the reported memory usage appears to be wrong? I noticed in the change logs that this was supposedly fixed in 2.4.13-pre1, but I still see the problem. Running "free" shows that I'm using up 245MB of RAM on the "-/+ buffers/cache" line (I'd paste it here, except Slashdot is rejecting the post due to "lameness filter encountered. *sigh*). Now I know I'm not using 245 MB of RAM (after subtracting out the buffers and cache), and I can prove it by running a program which allocates about 350MB of ram then frees it. When I do that, my memory usage, including swap, drops to about 70-80 MB. Is anybody else seeing this?
Keep in mind that MS's power is derived from the number of people using their products, so even if you don't buy a copy, you are still strengthening MS's monopoly by using it.
Loki has filed chapter 11. This doesn't mean they are dead, but that they are in debt and need a way out. This move will allow them to reorganize, but without our support, they may soon disappear. If you want to save Loki, the best thing you can do is go buy some of their games. So get in there and spend some money. It's the only way to save them.
Also, keep in mind that loosing Loki is especially bad for Linux since there is nobody else to take their place.
I was kind of wondering where the horses came from. Surely they didn't have any on the space station.
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I have nothing against making a UI intuitive for new users, but I'm also interested in making it useful for experienced users. Afterall, we are only beginners at something for a short amount of time. Once I become familiar with how something works, I'm more interested in being able to do what I want without too much pain. Drop down menus (or popup menus, like the "start" button) are easy to use, but tedious for the more experienced user when you have to search through 3 or 4 levels of submenus. Ditto for filemanagers. If I know the name of the program I want to run, Having to search through hundreds of icons for it is a lot slower that just typing it in at a command line (which I often do under *nix), especially when I can use tab completion.
So, while I often see studies like this where they test newbies, people don't actually become productive until they familiarize themselves with the environment. For that reason, I'd like to see a comparison / study of how productive more experienced users are with various UIs. I think that would be a more meaningful test.
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Easy ... just create a similar hurricane effect on the other side of your shower curtain to balance things out. I mean, if you don't mind flooding your house, of course.
--
The point so many people are missing here is that P2P is just a technology, and like any technology, it is neither good nor bad. The good and the bad come from how it's used.
One of the problems with the internet today is that 99.9% of the content is being provided on 0.1% of the machines connected to it. The idea of having centralized servers is nice because it makes administration easy, but lacks many advantages of a distributed environment which P2P provides. P2P promises to even out the numbers above. Instead of 0.1% of machines providing 99.9% of the worlds web pages, we could have 80% (maybe more, maybe less) of the machines providing that same 99.9% of the content. Furthermore, by distributing content in this way, it reduces the strain on any given web server. A large number of hits on a single web server can bring it down. In a distributed environment, these same hits will be distributed across a large number of machines, and even if one goes down, the rest will remain up, making it possible to still retrieve the requested data.
Some examples of P2P (some of these may not be to purists) would be things like email, chat clients (ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger), Usenet news, IRC file transfers, networked games (not the massively multiplayer ones like EverQuest, though). We might even consider PPP, which stands for Point to Point Protocol, though the way in which it is most often used isn't fully P2P. With the influx of people running private web servers off their home machines, even the world wide web is turning into P2P. Also consider file sharing on an intranet. Each machine acts as both a client and server, and is therefore P2P.
I think P2P has the potential to make networked environments far more robust and sustainable than the client/server model which is so widespread these days. Its advantages, in my opinion, far outweigh the disadvantages.
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People have been waiting for this for many a year and nothing has come of it. I remember reading that it required supercooled nitrogen which is not exactly ecconomical.
Right, but what I'm referring to are high temperature superconductors. If some day a way is determined to create such things, the liquid nitrogen will be unnecessary.
--
I'm still waiting for a breakthrough in superconductors. Imagine a CPU that can run at extremely high speeds and generate no descernable heat. You wouldn't need a heat sink or fan, making your system run that much quieter.
Now if we could just get harddrives to run silent, we'd be all set (yes, I know about the solid state drives, but they're way too expensive and have too little capacity). Maybe when holographic drives become reality...
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I really don't have a problem with copyright holders wanting to protect their data. And as long as their actions have no adverse effects on people obeying the law, I don't mind if they put restrictions on our abilities to copy things. However, if I buy a tape recorder so I can record lecture notes in school, for example, I should not be penalized because the technology can be used in an illegal manner. Technology is neither good nor evil -- it's how it's used that makes the difference. Limiting technology so it can't be used in illegal ways generally also means limiting how it can be used in legal ways as well. It also complicates the devices and limits their flexibility, which means they become less useful to people who want the most out of their electronics. I see us spiraling into a dark age of technology where companies become all-powerful through the ignorance of government and the average person. The question remains as to how long it will take before we reach our next renaissance.
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I make 80K/yr designing web pages with FrontPage
I guess it depends where you live as to what is considered "good pay". In and around Kansas City, most IT professionals earn between $45K and $65K per year (putting Linuxgruven at the low end of the scale). I would imagine in a place like silicon valley, those number would be higher. Much higher.
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The state may claim ownership of the computers, but if they were bought with taxpayer money, then aren't they really owned by the taxpayers?
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I definitely think Elite deserves a place in this list. Another game I think worthy is the original Might & Magic. IIRC, it was the first role playing fantasy game with a first person perspective.
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What we need is a language that promotes concise but readable code.
I believe that was one of the goals of Python. If nothing else, it forces you to indent your code properly.
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No, see, while the CPU will finally be fast enough, the amount of time it takes for the hard drive to read the needed 20 gigs of data (actually, it's only 500 MB, but due to Microsoft's patented read and re-read technology, it reads the data 40 times), it will still take an hour or more to boot. A spokesperson from Microsoft said they are looking into caching the data in a RAM drive so the subsequent reads will occur at a much higher rate. Computer experts warn that to be able to store the 500 MB of data, Windows will require an additional 4 GB of RAM, which will in turn drive up the costs of computers. Market analysts, however, are quick to point out the increased sales of RAM will help out our falling economy, giving it the boost it needs to recover.
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According to the site, Multics is short for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service. Does anyone know what, if anything, Unix stands for?
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Keep in mind there is probably a fair amount of overlap with other desktop environments. There's nothing that says someone can't run more that one desktop. This is especially true on multiuser systems, as some users may use KDE, some Gnome, some XFCE, etc.
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So, basically what you're saying is that if something is enjoyable, it can't be marketable?
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