Funny. The first time I double clicked an RPM to install it was 5+ years ago. I then didn't have to choose anything. Done.
The first time I tried a graphical package manager that let me just pick an app I wanted from a list and click "install" or equivalent was also 5+ years ago. Done.
Every distro I've used in the last few years still supports apt and/or yum so an install is as easy as "apt-get install foo" or "yum install foo" in addition to the GUI options.
These devices fit in the bag I use to and from work, and about 1-1.2kg extra doesn't bother me. A "normal" laptop doesn't fit with all the other stuff I carry around, and weigh too much. The size difference also means a great deal when traveling in terms of how much extra space I get in my carry on for other items (which means less likelihood of having to check in a bag, which means less time wasted at the airport, which makes me a hell of a lot happier about business travel)
You miss the point. For the people buying these things, small and light are the main features. Small and light have so far usually meant ridiculously expensive (i.e. Sony Vaio expensive). What's new is laptops with tolerable performance that are small, light and price wise in "normal" laptop range or below.
You can get lots of cheap laptops. Problem is they're usually 3.5kg+ and huge beasts that really are more like desktops in a laptop packaging.
You cannot have a two party democratic system because it will by the nature of popularity contests (which is what western style democracy really is) always tend to have both parties come together in the middle because that is where the votes are.
I agree with this. The US electoral system is a sham which makes it next to impossible for alternatives to emerge, and as a result the US political landscape is more static than almost any other "democracy".
In france they recently had an election with the slogan. "Elect the crook, not the fascist". The voter could only choose between a known corrupt politician and an openly fascist one.
I suppose you are referring to the Chirac vs. Le Pen second round in 2002. But you missed the point. The voter could choose amongst a wide range of candidates. Chirac (the crook) and Le Pen (the "fascist") were the two candidates that got the most votes in the first round. When no single candidate get more than 50% of the vote, French law requires a second round with only the two top candidates.
The voters had already discarded all the other candidates, and the people who had voted for neither accordingly saw it as a matter of picking the lesser of two evils.
(As a side note, I don't think people outside France truly appreciates how nasty Le Pen is. May 1st 1994 I was in France with my French class, and our teacher took us to see one of the Front Nationale demonstrations to let us see what they were about, and it was absolutely an eye opener to see youth in uniforms with armbands reminiscent of the Hitlerjugend marching in the streets of Paris and using slogans that could have been used by the nazis with just a translation)
Batista was elected in '40, yes. But he lost the '44 election, and then took power again in '52 through a coup. He was then overthrown in '58. So Cuba was "free and democratic" under Batista for 4 years, and a dictatorship for 6.
If you are trying to imply the '54 election when he ran unopposed was free and fair, then the other reply you got comparing him to Mugabe was quite fitting.
There's a vast difference between not wanting to be a puppet state controlled by a US supported dictator who hands property over to US corporations whenever he felt like it, and not wanting Americans.
If you can't understand that difference you'll have a big problem understanding Cuba.
Castro was fiercely nationalistic, not unlike a lot of US politicians, and had a lot against US influence on that basis. His opposition to the US and to Americans only strengthened as a result of the US response after he took power and started taking back what had been stolen from the Cuban people by Batista, a lot of which had been handed over to US companies.
You really need to go back and read some history. Castro, for example, had no major problem with the US, despite US support for Batista. What he did have a problem with what major US companies having been given control over large part of the Cuban economy through deals with Batista. Castro turned to the Soviet union largely as a result of the US reaction when he seized property from US companies.
Time and time again we've seen this happen. Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam was a nationalist. He refashioned his politics in terms favored the only backers available to him and became "communist" when it was clear the US would continue supporting it's puppets in the south, for example.
A large part of the rebel movements that started spouting communist slogans etc. over the last few decades did so first when that was how they got support because the Soviet Union and others saw it as an opportunity. Many of them would have preferred or were open to support from the West, but were ignored or branded terrorists because the dictators they went up against were supported by the West, and turned to whomever were willing to fund them or provide weapons.
No, it isn't, since it needs to check each character to see if it's the start/end of whatever lexical element it is currently processing.
It means the minimal parsing cost once the data is in memory of a sax parser is a compare and conditional branch per character, while a length delimited protocol has a minimal parsing cost that can approach a single memory read (in the extreme case of a single length identifier for a field that can be skipped.
Whether that overhead matters to you greatly depend on the application - for most normal usage the IO latency and context switches will tend to be more expensive than the difference between character delimiting and length delimiting, all else being equal. But the Google's applications aren't typical due to sheer scale, and all else is rarely equal.
The variable length integer encoding is also not something Google invented. I first saw that specific encoding in a paper on writing compact symbol files for Oberon in the mid 90's, and I'm sure it's much older than that.
I've yet to need to connect my laptop to a single piece of equipment that has HDMI input. I have however frequently needed to connect it to equipment that has VGA, and somewhat less frequently to DVI.
Weight and size. Cheap laptops are usually heavy and big. The EEE is the cheap and small, so it competes against high priced Vaio's etc. for people who want a small and light laptop but don't need the performance / memory of the expensive models.
For comparison a Vaio in the same weight class costs 2.5 times as much in the UK, and is larger.
Agreed. I don't WANT the 904 or the 1000 - they're big enough that I'd rather just bring my main laptop with me instead. The 900 is the smallest I could reasonably use for an hour here and there, and light enough to just put in my bag and bring it everywhere.
Same here - the 1000 doesn't appeal to me at all. It's too small to be my primary machine, and too large to be suitable to carry around whenever I just want to be able to work an hour or two on the move.
Have you tried to LIFT one of the cheap high spec'ed laptops? Most of the cheap laptops weigh in at 3.5kg-4kg. Personally I refuse to buy a laptop about the 2.5kg range. My wife ended up buying a Vaio last year because she got an 11" one at around 1.2kg, but it was 2.5 times the price of an EEE - for what she needs it for an EEE is sufficient, and the small form factor is a huge bonus.
You miss the point. Anyone who truly has something to hide to the extent of worrying about torture will have an utterly plausible explanation or ten prepared. That won't stop someone who is willing to use torture from continuing until they get more or you have resisted for so long that they believe you are telling the truth when you're saying there is no more.
So when they get the first password, they continue until they get another or they decide there's no way you could have withstood that much. And when they get your second password, they'll still go on in the hope of a third, unless the data they find would totally fill the disk.
Each time you give up something, they'll assume there may be more until they've kept torturing you for a long time without getting any more information.
I specifically pointed to the C-One. The entire point of the C-One is to develop a full system that will use a compatible CPU as well as FPGA versions of the remaining components.
The point being that you won't need to run an emulator - you're still able to run the software unmodified on actual hardware. Does the fact that it uses FPGA's disqualify it for you? If so, why?
The C64 used many different revisions of various components over the years (just look at an early revision board vs. one of the later ones - the early ones were full of simple logic chips, while the later ones had large empty areas), and people have plugging things like the SuperCPU into genuine C64's for years, as well as large numbers of other enhancements - where do you draw the line?
They do when they've short-circuited. I more than once repaired C64's by opening it up, plugging it in, and feeling each chip until I found the one that was burning hot or giving off smoke. Usually one of the bloody 6526's (CIA - the IO chip; both the 6526, and it's successor, the 8520 that was used on the Amiga, are notorious for burning out easily if you short the inputs, which really is pretty stupid for an IO chip connected directly to an external interface).
The evidence of the USSR and China and Vietnam show it to be true. Communism simply doesn't work. Why else would the USSR have collapsed economically, or China and Vietnam moved quickly (and continuously) towards a more free-market economy?
Neither the USSR, China or Vietnam have ever claimed to be communist.
That you seem to believe they are, demonstrate both a complete lack of understanding of what communism entails and a complete lack of understanding of the policies of the self-proclaimed socialist countries. Self-proclaimed because they certainly never followed anything resembling Marxist policies apart from perhaps the first year or two of the USSR.
Excuse me? I thought the USSR had two levels of wealth: none or all. For the US, we have a large continuum from zero to massive. But here's the big difference: in the US you can actually MOVE along that continuum. In the USSR, once a peasant always a peasant.
You completely fail to grasp the point you replied to. Lets read that again shall we "Western economies in the early 21st century are more socialist than the USSR ever was in terms of wealth redistribution and state support of industry.".
In other words, he's saying there's more equality in countries like the US than there used to be in the USSR. You effectively state your agreement when you write that the USSR "had two levels of wealth: none or all".
That makes the US closer to the Marxist idea of socialism that is centered on removing economic differences than the USSR where such differences was not only allowed to grow bigger, but where government policy actively increased the class divide. The USSR was at the extreme opposite of Marxist ideals, much closer to a feudal state than to capitalism in many ways, and even further from socialism or communism in structure.
There were certainly elements of ideas shared with socialism in the USSR, when it came to a social support network etc., but then there were elements of such things in many feudal states in different forms for a very simple reason (and this comes straight from Marxism):
In a feudal system, a person is a resource to the regime. If that person can't continue to produce, you've lost capital. It's in your interest to provide a level of support. In capitalism that economic interest in providing help is gone, as companies can just replace workers at will.
Apart from that, your long rant about the joys of free markets is totally off base - nothing prevents a socialist community from utilizing markets to optimize allocation of resources as an alternative to planning. The issue is not market mechanisms, but creating markets that rewards the right behavior. That stalinist semi-feudal regimes chose to use outdated planning methods proves only that those planning methods didn't work or were poorly executed.
You seriously put the population density of the SF Bay Area forward as demonstration the world is overpopulated? People CHOOSE to live there. It doesn't mean there's not plenty of space left in the world where you could have a pleasant life and plenty of land for a low cost. I choose to live in London, and as a result live in a tiny house compared to what I could afford somewhere rural, but I don't go around and delude myself into thinking that London is an accurate representation of whether or not the world is overcrowded. But then again I'm from Norway, where the population density is about 14 people per square kilometer and the total population is about half that of London.
That depends on what you mean by "making any more". There are 6510 compatible CPU's still being manufactured, and there are emulations of the rest available for FPGA's, and there's the C-One based on FPGA's + a compatible CPU that aims for full compatibility with the C64 and a number of other old home computers.
Personally I'll stick with emulation, though the C-One looks like something it'd be fun to own, so maybe if/when they get something a bit less beta...
There's a famous quote attributed to Richard Branson. On the question from an interviewer about how to become a millionaire, he supposedly answered "you begin as a billionaire, and then you start an airline" in reference to Virgin Atlantic. Somehow I have the feeling he'd prefer to be more cautious this time around - Branson lost a whole lot of money before they managed to turn Virgin Atlantic around.
He specifically mentioned video depositions. But who'd keep them online anyway? I'd burn a duplicate set of DVDs and have someone like Iron Mountain take them away for safekeeping.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why she'd likely be using one of the GUI frontends that come with every modern distro.
The first time I tried a graphical package manager that let me just pick an app I wanted from a list and click "install" or equivalent was also 5+ years ago. Done.
Every distro I've used in the last few years still supports apt and/or yum so an install is as easy as "apt-get install foo" or "yum install foo" in addition to the GUI options.
These devices fit in the bag I use to and from work, and about 1-1.2kg extra doesn't bother me. A "normal" laptop doesn't fit with all the other stuff I carry around, and weigh too much. The size difference also means a great deal when traveling in terms of how much extra space I get in my carry on for other items (which means less likelihood of having to check in a bag, which means less time wasted at the airport, which makes me a hell of a lot happier about business travel)
You can get lots of cheap laptops. Problem is they're usually 3.5kg+ and huge beasts that really are more like desktops in a laptop packaging.
You cannot have a two party democratic system because it will by the nature of popularity contests (which is what western style democracy really is) always tend to have both parties come together in the middle because that is where the votes are.
I agree with this. The US electoral system is a sham which makes it next to impossible for alternatives to emerge, and as a result the US political landscape is more static than almost any other "democracy".
In france they recently had an election with the slogan. "Elect the crook, not the fascist". The voter could only choose between a known corrupt politician and an openly fascist one.
I suppose you are referring to the Chirac vs. Le Pen second round in 2002. But you missed the point. The voter could choose amongst a wide range of candidates. Chirac (the crook) and Le Pen (the "fascist") were the two candidates that got the most votes in the first round. When no single candidate get more than 50% of the vote, French law requires a second round with only the two top candidates.
The voters had already discarded all the other candidates, and the people who had voted for neither accordingly saw it as a matter of picking the lesser of two evils.
(As a side note, I don't think people outside France truly appreciates how nasty Le Pen is. May 1st 1994 I was in France with my French class, and our teacher took us to see one of the Front Nationale demonstrations to let us see what they were about, and it was absolutely an eye opener to see youth in uniforms with armbands reminiscent of the Hitlerjugend marching in the streets of Paris and using slogans that could have been used by the nazis with just a translation)
If you are trying to imply the '54 election when he ran unopposed was free and fair, then the other reply you got comparing him to Mugabe was quite fitting.
If you can't understand that difference you'll have a big problem understanding Cuba.
Castro was fiercely nationalistic, not unlike a lot of US politicians, and had a lot against US influence on that basis. His opposition to the US and to Americans only strengthened as a result of the US response after he took power and started taking back what had been stolen from the Cuban people by Batista, a lot of which had been handed over to US companies.
Time and time again we've seen this happen. Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam was a nationalist. He refashioned his politics in terms favored the only backers available to him and became "communist" when it was clear the US would continue supporting it's puppets in the south, for example.
A large part of the rebel movements that started spouting communist slogans etc. over the last few decades did so first when that was how they got support because the Soviet Union and others saw it as an opportunity. Many of them would have preferred or were open to support from the West, but were ignored or branded terrorists because the dictators they went up against were supported by the West, and turned to whomever were willing to fund them or provide weapons.
So, yeah, people will need that much space.
Consider HD video, photos at ridiculous resolution and tons of music.
It means the minimal parsing cost once the data is in memory of a sax parser is a compare and conditional branch per character, while a length delimited protocol has a minimal parsing cost that can approach a single memory read (in the extreme case of a single length identifier for a field that can be skipped.
Whether that overhead matters to you greatly depend on the application - for most normal usage the IO latency and context switches will tend to be more expensive than the difference between character delimiting and length delimiting, all else being equal. But the Google's applications aren't typical due to sheer scale, and all else is rarely equal.
The variable length integer encoding is also not something Google invented. I first saw that specific encoding in a paper on writing compact symbol files for Oberon in the mid 90's, and I'm sure it's much older than that.
I've yet to need to connect my laptop to a single piece of equipment that has HDMI input. I have however frequently needed to connect it to equipment that has VGA, and somewhat less frequently to DVI.
For comparison a Vaio in the same weight class costs 2.5 times as much in the UK, and is larger.
Agreed. I don't WANT the 904 or the 1000 - they're big enough that I'd rather just bring my main laptop with me instead. The 900 is the smallest I could reasonably use for an hour here and there, and light enough to just put in my bag and bring it everywhere.
Same here - the 1000 doesn't appeal to me at all. It's too small to be my primary machine, and too large to be suitable to carry around whenever I just want to be able to work an hour or two on the move.
Have you tried to LIFT one of the cheap high spec'ed laptops? Most of the cheap laptops weigh in at 3.5kg-4kg. Personally I refuse to buy a laptop about the 2.5kg range. My wife ended up buying a Vaio last year because she got an 11" one at around 1.2kg, but it was 2.5 times the price of an EEE - for what she needs it for an EEE is sufficient, and the small form factor is a huge bonus.
So when they get the first password, they continue until they get another or they decide there's no way you could have withstood that much. And when they get your second password, they'll still go on in the hope of a third, unless the data they find would totally fill the disk.
Each time you give up something, they'll assume there may be more until they've kept torturing you for a long time without getting any more information.
The point being that you won't need to run an emulator - you're still able to run the software unmodified on actual hardware. Does the fact that it uses FPGA's disqualify it for you? If so, why?
The C64 used many different revisions of various components over the years (just look at an early revision board vs. one of the later ones - the early ones were full of simple logic chips, while the later ones had large empty areas), and people have plugging things like the SuperCPU into genuine C64's for years, as well as large numbers of other enhancements - where do you draw the line?
They do when they've short-circuited. I more than once repaired C64's by opening it up, plugging it in, and feeling each chip until I found the one that was burning hot or giving off smoke. Usually one of the bloody 6526's (CIA - the IO chip; both the 6526, and it's successor, the 8520 that was used on the Amiga, are notorious for burning out easily if you short the inputs, which really is pretty stupid for an IO chip connected directly to an external interface).
Ewww... Here I was hoping for a hot alien babe, and I get freakin Shatners nipples... Thanks a lot.
The evidence of the USSR and China and Vietnam show it to be true. Communism simply doesn't work. Why else would the USSR have collapsed economically, or China and Vietnam moved quickly (and continuously) towards a more free-market economy?
Neither the USSR, China or Vietnam have ever claimed to be communist.
That you seem to believe they are, demonstrate both a complete lack of understanding of what communism entails and a complete lack of understanding of the policies of the self-proclaimed socialist countries. Self-proclaimed because they certainly never followed anything resembling Marxist policies apart from perhaps the first year or two of the USSR.
Excuse me? I thought the USSR had two levels of wealth: none or all. For the US, we have a large continuum from zero to massive. But here's the big difference: in the US you can actually MOVE along that continuum. In the USSR, once a peasant always a peasant.
You completely fail to grasp the point you replied to. Lets read that again shall we "Western economies in the early 21st century are more socialist than the USSR ever was in terms of wealth redistribution and state support of industry.".
In other words, he's saying there's more equality in countries like the US than there used to be in the USSR. You effectively state your agreement when you write that the USSR "had two levels of wealth: none or all".
That makes the US closer to the Marxist idea of socialism that is centered on removing economic differences than the USSR where such differences was not only allowed to grow bigger, but where government policy actively increased the class divide. The USSR was at the extreme opposite of Marxist ideals, much closer to a feudal state than to capitalism in many ways, and even further from socialism or communism in structure.
There were certainly elements of ideas shared with socialism in the USSR, when it came to a social support network etc., but then there were elements of such things in many feudal states in different forms for a very simple reason (and this comes straight from Marxism):
In a feudal system, a person is a resource to the regime. If that person can't continue to produce, you've lost capital. It's in your interest to provide a level of support. In capitalism that economic interest in providing help is gone, as companies can just replace workers at will.
Apart from that, your long rant about the joys of free markets is totally off base - nothing prevents a socialist community from utilizing markets to optimize allocation of resources as an alternative to planning. The issue is not market mechanisms, but creating markets that rewards the right behavior. That stalinist semi-feudal regimes chose to use outdated planning methods proves only that those planning methods didn't work or were poorly executed.
You seriously put the population density of the SF Bay Area forward as demonstration the world is overpopulated? People CHOOSE to live there. It doesn't mean there's not plenty of space left in the world where you could have a pleasant life and plenty of land for a low cost. I choose to live in London, and as a result live in a tiny house compared to what I could afford somewhere rural, but I don't go around and delude myself into thinking that London is an accurate representation of whether or not the world is overcrowded. But then again I'm from Norway, where the population density is about 14 people per square kilometer and the total population is about half that of London.
Personally I'll stick with emulation, though the C-One looks like something it'd be fun to own, so maybe if/when they get something a bit less beta...
There's a famous quote attributed to Richard Branson. On the question from an interviewer about how to become a millionaire, he supposedly answered "you begin as a billionaire, and then you start an airline" in reference to Virgin Atlantic. Somehow I have the feeling he'd prefer to be more cautious this time around - Branson lost a whole lot of money before they managed to turn Virgin Atlantic around.
He specifically mentioned video depositions. But who'd keep them online anyway? I'd burn a duplicate set of DVDs and have someone like Iron Mountain take them away for safekeeping.