For years, Slashdoters have been trying to apply a three-step business model where the third step is "Profit". Rossi has shown the world an alternative template for a business model that is likely to be much more successful:
1. Customers buy your device.
2. Profit!
3.....something....
That's worth a (US) patent in its own right!
Re:Best Distro to try this new KDE with?
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I went with 64-bit on the laptop because it was a fresh install and my laptop has 8GB of RAM. There's probably no need to "fix" your install if you have invested much extra time in setting it up for yourself. 64-bit can be a bit faster, but probably not so much that you'd notice it for everyday tasks. Though some tasks, like audio encoding and general compression, are a bit faster: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_natty_pae64
In other news, Fedora 15 just pushed out Linux kernel 2.6.40 (aka 3.0)! Thanks Fedora people! I hope it fixes my stability issues. If it does, I'll be happy to stay with Fedora and will probably move my desktop machine to it instead of Kubuntu.
Re:Best Distro to try this new KDE with?
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I got a Sandy Bridge laptop recently with only the Intel HD 3000 graphics. I was aware that Kubuntu 11.04 wasn't going to play nice with the GPU, as the kernel was too old, so I installed 64-bit "Fedora 15 KDE Plasma Desktop Spin" (catchy name) on it instead and it worked surprisingly well. Fedora have back-ported lots of the Linux and X/Mesa stuff for the Intel HD 3000 GPU to kernel 2.6.38 and that sold it to me. It locks up a few times a week, though, so it's not perfect. It still needs a few more back-ports.
I tried a clean install of Kubuntu 11.04 64-bit on a separate partition of my desktop machine (AMD), but I lost count of the number of things that were severely broken with it in only five minutes of toying about. No thanks. I'm staying with Kubuntu 10.10 32-bit on that machine for now, but I've finally lost all faith in it; as KDE 4 gets steadily better, Kubuntu gets steadily worse.
Having found that "yum" on Fedora has solved the "RPM hell" that made me abandon RedHat for Debian a decade ago, and having migrated to Kubuntu half a decade ago because Debian+KDE was too much of a headache to configure and maintain, I'm on the lookout for any distro that can do a decent KDE desktop with good Intel HD 3000 support (i.e., Linux 3.x) and the minimum of packaging/configuration fuss. Fedora 15 should keep me going until then.
Looking up some datasheets on Kingston's "valueram.com", 2x1GB DDR2 DIMMs use about 1.0-1.4W depending on clock speed. That drops to about 0.8-0.9W for DDR3 modules.
Why is a nearly 5 year old article making news just now?
There are lots of discovery stories reported on Slashdot and they always end with, "It will probably be a number of years before it appears on retailer shelves." Well, this story ends the very same way, but this time the amount of rampant speculation in the comments can be kept to a minimum, as here we are "a number of years" later.
I say, more of this sort of thing, Slashdot! It keeps the trolls at bay.
It is not necessarily because something "better" comes along. It may be entirely sufficient for something "else" to come along. (Allegedly) teenagers using MySpace discovered that their parents had signed up, so they had to go somewhere else to protect their "privacy" and Facebook became the new darling. Now that their parents have signed up to Facebook, the teenagers are probably on the look-out for something else.
Another thing that mitigates the network effect is that these services are not mutually exclusive. A user and a few friends can sign up to a new service and watch it grow while still maintaining a presence in the old service. Perhaps the user will only post the more incriminating pics of their "private" lives on the new service, so that their parents won't see them. Thus, a new exclusive club is started, but a day will come when it is not exclusive enough and users seeking more "privacy" will move on so they can feel special again.
It is hard to argue with TFA that wrapping a few open standards around photo sharing sites, contact lists, e-mail, etc. might be enough to start a revolution--might. With e-mail, for example, we can have traditional mail applications (MUAs), web-mail, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, etc., but they all work together and users can choose whatever combination they want to do their e-mailing. All it takes is some cleverness and we can have a similar profusion of broadly compatible aggregation applications that perform a similar role to Facebook. We can already see this happening with the way Facebook support is being integrated into, for example, MS Outlook and smartphones.
The author finds "some good data on Wikipedia" (respect!) showing that the "lithography size" will be reduced from 32nm in 2010 to 11nm in 2022. He calculates this to be a "volumetric improvement" of 50%. There I was thinking that it was an 846% improvement, but I hadn't taken the third dimension into account.
Nevertheless, I think the author has a point, but he is missing part of the picture: NAND flash SSDs may not replace HDDs any time soon, but other types of non-volatile memory may well do so.
HDD densities will probably increase, but the slow access and transfer times and the static unrecoverable error rate will probably relegate them to use for back-ups or as cheap mass-storage devices for non-critical data. SSDs, however, are not restricted by the limits of NAND flash. Non-volatile memory technologies such spin transfer torque RAM and phase-change RAM have a good chance of replacing NAND flash memory in SSDs. These technologies are available today. Memristors are probably the most exciting development, as they promise a breakthrough in memory density. HP have a memristor-based design that could make petabyte SSDs possible, but we'll probably have to wait a few more years to see if that pans out. There are also major advances being made in fabrication technology, with cheap "printable" electronics already in consumer devices.
Real random-access memory that is cheap, reliable and fast is probably only a few years away from the mass market. There is so much money to be made by such an advance that R&D spending will not be lacking. So, the author is wrong; SSDs will dominate in the near future, just not NAND flash SSDs.
P.S. I don't have any SSDs because they are too small and expensive compared to my 1TB HDDs!
[T]he-a meeen deefffficoolty... is tu determeene-a vheech oorguneezeshun is zee IT cumpuny, und vhet is nut: 'Vheele-a frum a furmel pueent ooff feeoo it is impusseeble-a tu deestingooish betveee sufftvere-a defelupers frum zee ooeel.
OK, but apart from police services, fire departments, curb-side trash removal, winter snow removal, labor regulation, environmental regulation and judicial services, WHAT HAS THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT EVER DONE FOR US?
for the sake of appearances or to placate foreign interests
The blasphemy law was passed because the constitution prohibits blasphemy and requires that laws be passed to enforce that prohibition. Nothing had been done about this for decades and nobody cared. The government suddenly decided that someone might take a case against them for failure to legislate for blasphemy, so we got this law that was described as being a trivial law to tie up a few constitutional loose ends and sure the fine is only E100,000! Of course, the proper solution would have been to change the constitution, but...well...down with that sort of thing!
If you take a look at Kingston's "Alliances" page, you can see that they make memory modules that are sold under other brand names such as "Toshiba". The information is scant, but it sounds like for some Toshiba modules, Toshiba supply the wafer and Kingston chop it up and package it into memory modules that are sold under the Toshiba brand. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Toshiba would sell "Toshiba" modules assembled by Kingston using memory supplied by, say, Samsung.
It all boils down to whether or not you can expect the module to die sooner rather than later and whether or not you'll get your money back if it does. Some brands are better than others in this respect and, yes, "you get what you pay for," most of the time. Who makes the chips and who puts them together is anyone's guess these days. The same product could have different chips from different manufacturers in it depending on the batch. It is not worth worrying about...as long as you keep backups.
b) The woman for opening it and infecting the computer?
c) Yahoo for not blocking it?
d) The hospital for not only allowing internet access from a computer with personally identifiable information, but for also allowing the spyware to get installed.
e) Some combination of the above?
f) Nobody. It was a failure of the "system", so nobody has to take responsibility.
Apart from BEER, humanity itself, controlled fire, language (probably), sterilisation of food and water, the world's tallest building (a pyramid) until recently, the roots of most modern popular music genres, airmail (by homing pigeon), the pendulum, the tunnel boring machine, stone tools, knives, pigments, burial, housing, bread, plywood, cement, river boats, sutures, the aqueduct, candles, glass, the water clock, toothpaste, metal block printing, coffee, the astrolabe, the ventilator, explosive gunpowder, the cannon, handguns, cartridges, heart transplants, the CAT scanner,....
It does not cut "all power to the car". Think of what would happen to your headlights and your power-steering!
TFA explains that it limits the fuel going to the engine by instructing the engine management system to do so. In effect, it is just overriding the input from the electronic throttle that most modern cars have.
Just buy a car with an old-fashioned cable throttle connected to a carburettor and see how they cope with that. That $12m Ferrari that was sold yesterday would do the trick!
(You're going to correct me and reply that the Ferrari has fuel injection or something, aren't you?)
Slashdot Mirror
For years, Slashdoters have been trying to apply a three-step business model where the third step is "Profit". Rossi has shown the world an alternative template for a business model that is likely to be much more successful:
1. Customers buy your device. ....something....
2. Profit!
3.
That's worth a (US) patent in its own right!
I went with 64-bit on the laptop because it was a fresh install and my laptop has 8GB of RAM. There's probably no need to "fix" your install if you have invested much extra time in setting it up for yourself. 64-bit can be a bit faster, but probably not so much that you'd notice it for everyday tasks. Though some tasks, like audio encoding and general compression, are a bit faster: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_natty_pae64
In other news, Fedora 15 just pushed out Linux kernel 2.6.40 (aka 3.0)! Thanks Fedora people! I hope it fixes my stability issues. If it does, I'll be happy to stay with Fedora and will probably move my desktop machine to it instead of Kubuntu.
I got a Sandy Bridge laptop recently with only the Intel HD 3000 graphics. I was aware that Kubuntu 11.04 wasn't going to play nice with the GPU, as the kernel was too old, so I installed 64-bit "Fedora 15 KDE Plasma Desktop Spin" (catchy name) on it instead and it worked surprisingly well. Fedora have back-ported lots of the Linux and X/Mesa stuff for the Intel HD 3000 GPU to kernel 2.6.38 and that sold it to me. It locks up a few times a week, though, so it's not perfect. It still needs a few more back-ports.
I tried a clean install of Kubuntu 11.04 64-bit on a separate partition of my desktop machine (AMD), but I lost count of the number of things that were severely broken with it in only five minutes of toying about. No thanks. I'm staying with Kubuntu 10.10 32-bit on that machine for now, but I've finally lost all faith in it; as KDE 4 gets steadily better, Kubuntu gets steadily worse.
Having found that "yum" on Fedora has solved the "RPM hell" that made me abandon RedHat for Debian a decade ago, and having migrated to Kubuntu half a decade ago because Debian+KDE was too much of a headache to configure and maintain, I'm on the lookout for any distro that can do a decent KDE desktop with good Intel HD 3000 support (i.e., Linux 3.x) and the minimum of packaging/configuration fuss. Fedora 15 should keep me going until then.
Looking up some datasheets on Kingston's "valueram.com", 2x1GB DDR2 DIMMs use about 1.0-1.4W depending on clock speed. That drops to about 0.8-0.9W for DDR3 modules.
Why is a nearly 5 year old article making news just now?
There are lots of discovery stories reported on Slashdot and they always end with, "It will probably be a number of years before it appears on retailer shelves." Well, this story ends the very same way, but this time the amount of rampant speculation in the comments can be kept to a minimum, as here we are "a number of years" later.
I say, more of this sort of thing, Slashdot! It keeps the trolls at bay.
And that single atom in a RAM cell doesn't count as a transistor?
No, it counts as a capacitor.
Want to try making this argument against someone *NOT* deeply involved in this industry?
Aren't we already doing that?
OMG ... reminds me of the V-1 buzz bombs the Germans dropped in London between 1942-45.
Something tells me that you were not actually in London at the time.
the 35mm tilt/shift lenses 2 axes of adjustment cannot compare with the 3 axes of adjustment available in a view camera.
Canon's two latest (Feb. 2009) "TS-E" lenses for 35mm cameras have 3 axes of adjustment.
I tried feeding a bit of a DNA sequence into my Java compiler. I was hoping to run the program and simulate some protein, but all I got was this:
What am I doing wrong? Does someone want to check if it works any better with a C compiler? Maybe I need to RTFA again.
It is not necessarily because something "better" comes along. It may be entirely sufficient for something "else" to come along. (Allegedly) teenagers using MySpace discovered that their parents had signed up, so they had to go somewhere else to protect their "privacy" and Facebook became the new darling. Now that their parents have signed up to Facebook, the teenagers are probably on the look-out for something else.
Another thing that mitigates the network effect is that these services are not mutually exclusive. A user and a few friends can sign up to a new service and watch it grow while still maintaining a presence in the old service. Perhaps the user will only post the more incriminating pics of their "private" lives on the new service, so that their parents won't see them. Thus, a new exclusive club is started, but a day will come when it is not exclusive enough and users seeking more "privacy" will move on so they can feel special again.
It is hard to argue with TFA that wrapping a few open standards around photo sharing sites, contact lists, e-mail, etc. might be enough to start a revolution--might. With e-mail, for example, we can have traditional mail applications (MUAs), web-mail, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, etc., but they all work together and users can choose whatever combination they want to do their e-mailing. All it takes is some cleverness and we can have a similar profusion of broadly compatible aggregation applications that perform a similar role to Facebook. We can already see this happening with the way Facebook support is being integrated into, for example, MS Outlook and smartphones.
Let me see if I can explain this in 'lay' terms:
To implement a parallel bus, you have to have each and every wire be within a certain variance.
Sorry, you lost me at the end of the very first sentence. I realise now why you put the word "lay" in quotes. What is a "variance"?
The author finds "some good data on Wikipedia" (respect!) showing that the "lithography size" will be reduced from 32nm in 2010 to 11nm in 2022. He calculates this to be a "volumetric improvement" of 50%. There I was thinking that it was an 846% improvement, but I hadn't taken the third dimension into account.
Nevertheless, I think the author has a point, but he is missing part of the picture: NAND flash SSDs may not replace HDDs any time soon, but other types of non-volatile memory may well do so.
HDD densities will probably increase, but the slow access and transfer times and the static unrecoverable error rate will probably relegate them to use for back-ups or as cheap mass-storage devices for non-critical data. SSDs, however, are not restricted by the limits of NAND flash. Non-volatile memory technologies such spin transfer torque RAM and phase-change RAM have a good chance of replacing NAND flash memory in SSDs. These technologies are available today. Memristors are probably the most exciting development, as they promise a breakthrough in memory density. HP have a memristor-based design that could make petabyte SSDs possible, but we'll probably have to wait a few more years to see if that pans out. There are also major advances being made in fabrication technology, with cheap "printable" electronics already in consumer devices.
Real random-access memory that is cheap, reliable and fast is probably only a few years away from the mass market. There is so much money to be made by such an advance that R&D spending will not be lacking. So, the author is wrong; SSDs will dominate in the near future, just not NAND flash SSDs.
P.S. I don't have any SSDs because they are too small and expensive compared to my 1TB HDDs!
[T]he-a meeen deefffficoolty... is tu determeene-a vheech oorguneezeshun is zee IT cumpuny, und vhet is nut: 'Vheele-a frum a furmel pueent ooff feeoo it is impusseeble-a tu deestingooish betveee sufftvere-a defelupers frum zee ooeel.
OK, but apart from police services, fire departments, curb-side trash removal, winter snow removal, labor regulation, environmental regulation and judicial services, WHAT HAS THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT EVER DONE FOR US?
for the sake of appearances or to placate foreign interests
The blasphemy law was passed because the constitution prohibits blasphemy and requires that laws be passed to enforce that prohibition. Nothing had been done about this for decades and nobody cared. The government suddenly decided that someone might take a case against them for failure to legislate for blasphemy, so we got this law that was described as being a trivial law to tie up a few constitutional loose ends and sure the fine is only E100,000! Of course, the proper solution would have been to change the constitution, but...well...down with that sort of thing!
As a Canadian this disgusts me. [...] What the hell gives these assholes the right to demand ANYTHING?
All your base are belong to QE2. You are so pwned, innit.
(Excuse: http://xkcd.com/166/)
If you take a look at Kingston's "Alliances" page, you can see that they make memory modules that are sold under other brand names such as "Toshiba". The information is scant, but it sounds like for some Toshiba modules, Toshiba supply the wafer and Kingston chop it up and package it into memory modules that are sold under the Toshiba brand. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Toshiba would sell "Toshiba" modules assembled by Kingston using memory supplied by, say, Samsung.
It all boils down to whether or not you can expect the module to die sooner rather than later and whether or not you'll get your money back if it does. Some brands are better than others in this respect and, yes, "you get what you pay for," most of the time. Who makes the chips and who puts them together is anyone's guess these days. The same product could have different chips from different manufacturers in it depending on the batch. It is not worth worrying about...as long as you keep backups.
1.3MB for the "footer1.png" file! Linus is gonna be pissed when he sees the bill for data on his Google phone.
You are closer to the truth than you think: the fertilizer they were spreading was actually urea!
Should that be, "for fuque's sake"?
We've released a new version of Rakudo Perl 6 every month since December 2007. That's 24 months in a row.
Those were "development" releases. How many of those releases could anyone confidently use in place of Perl 5 in a production environment?
Thats 99 Gigs of difference.
Thanks for muddying that up for us. Are those 99 decimal "Gigs" or 99 binary "Gigs"? Your comment doesn't say.
More importantly, by rounding off using normal conventions the difference is 100 GB or 93 GiB.
f) Nobody. It was a failure of the "system", so nobody has to take responsibility.
Apart from BEER, humanity itself, controlled fire, language (probably), sterilisation of food and water, the world's tallest building (a pyramid) until recently, the roots of most modern popular music genres, airmail (by homing pigeon), the pendulum, the tunnel boring machine, stone tools, knives, pigments, burial, housing, bread, plywood, cement, river boats, sutures, the aqueduct, candles, glass, the water clock, toothpaste, metal block printing, coffee, the astrolabe, the ventilator, explosive gunpowder, the cannon, handguns, cartridges, heart transplants, the CAT scanner, ....
You mean, apart for all that?
It does not cut "all power to the car". Think of what would happen to your headlights and your power-steering!
TFA explains that it limits the fuel going to the engine by instructing the engine management system to do so. In effect, it is just overriding the input from the electronic throttle that most modern cars have.
Just buy a car with an old-fashioned cable throttle connected to a carburettor and see how they cope with that. That $12m Ferrari that was sold yesterday would do the trick!
(You're going to correct me and reply that the Ferrari has fuel injection or something, aren't you?)