"Federal Judge John Carmack has ordered the break up of Novell after ruling they are a monopoly. The decision calls for Novell to be broken up into two parts: one to concentrate on manufacturing Tivos the other on OpenBSD development. Competitors such as Boeing and open source projects like vi shuold be very pleased with the decision."
"Monkey points us to an article over at The Register that has some pretty wicked quotes from Pope John Paul II about AltaVista. He thinks that AltaVista should focus less on profits and more on decapitating zombies. Pope John Paul II says "Instead of pouring money into the black hole of developing flying cars, they should focus on decapitating zombies and the profits will come their way." There are many more interesting tidbits in the article, but I'll let you discover and discuss them."
i don't think you'd be able to run that 2.4 ghz p4 fanless, you're still putting out 45 watts or so of heat where most passively-cooled rigs can only support a max of ~20 watts from the cpu.
you might want to try reading the silentpcreview.com forums some time - many people there share your views and are extremely knowledgable and capable when it comes to noise-related computer questions. from the parts you listed (vantec "stealth", ick!) you could have a much quieter rig on your hands. and don't knock the led fans too much - the most popular quiet fan at the moment, the yate loon d12sm-12, was only available in blue led form for some time.
er, you know a passive system isn't silent by your definition either - you still have air circulating because of convection from heat! and that air movement does make noise.
the folks at silentpcreview.com have a better method for defining silence - if your computer operates at or below your ambient noise level, then guess what - it's silent. i say this because whether it's turned on or off, the ambient noise level you perceive doesn't change.
silentpcreview's founder, mike chin, has access to a lab (in which he performs his reviews) with ambient noise levels below 15 dBA, and yes he has computers (with fans!) that operate at that noise level. he knows this, because his bruel & kjaer 2203 sound meter can get useful dBA readings down to 10 dBA (tested in anechoic chamber). if you've spent enough to get your recording environment down to 10 dBA ambient levels, you've wasted your money, because no electronic recording system can make use of such a ridiculously low noise-floor.
anyway, yes there are fans that are for these purposes silent, and we use them all the time. undervolt a yate loon d12sl-12 or globe S1202512L to 4 or 5 volts and they'll barely crack 15 dBA at 1 metre. if that's too loud for you, i'm wondering what kind of hard drives you use as they'll make more noise than that without being put behind a brick wall.
anyway, i'm sure you'd enjoy the silentpcreview.com articles and forums, and even though you claim to be a silent computing fan, i guarantee you'll be surprised at the lengths some of us have gone to in the name of silencing.
storagereview.com has an almost unheard-of method for detecting drive noise - the standard test of dBA is to have the micrphone 1 metre away at an angle that avoids any airflow (which doesn't happen with hard drives of course). storagereview decided they'd go a different route, and they test at a distance of 18 millimetres in a noisy environment! their testing page even says that the value they get doesn't really capture the drive's noise signature, as quiet drives can have annoying whines, and loud drives a much less-intrusive white-noise signature. see for yourself, first paragraph here. also, they don't even test seek noise - possibly the most important facet of drive noise! seeks are much harder to mask with insulation than idle noise.
one site where people actually take the time to characterise drive noise from sensical distances, silentpcreview.com, has ignored storagereview's noise measurements for some time now, as they are out of touch with reality. the difference between a 7200.7 and a samsung sp1614n is night and day, if you actually own one of each as i do.
luckily, mike chin has access to some of the best sound measuring equipment and an office with an ambient background noise of 15 dBA or so. he's done some great reviews of fans in this environment, but hasn't turned to hard drives yet. but here's a silentpcreview article comparing the samsung directly to the 7200.7, i think you'll see how much more effort they put into acoustics than storagereview.
I've written CPU core emulators before, so I know what I'm talking about when I say that the NES emulators you hail aren't the paragon of emulation either. Heck just load up Micro Machines and you'll see a misplaced line or three due to hblank timing issues! The horror!
Give up this dream of true hardware emulation - the interface is what matters, the *appearance* of true abstraction, and the fact that a user cares about pixel-level details (when the artists who worked on the game probably could care less) speaks more about obsessive traits than about the ability of modern PCs to perform cycle-exact emulation.
When these systems are actually a piece of *history*, people studying them through emulators won't give a damn about pixels here and there, since the specs will likely be available as well. I mean seriously. "These ancient games used a custom co-processor and none of them used this particular opcode, so it was never implemented! If only we had that missing and useless code!"
It sounds like audiophiles who swear by their $800 gold-plated diamond-filament USB cable that carries a digital signal as well as any $5 generic one, if not worse.
If we were going for an absurd system where all regligions were officially allocated time, sure. But that system would be... absurd. Which is why no class time should be set aside for regligious indulgence, but kids can do as they please before school/during recess/between classes/after school.
Thereby no religions are favoured or discriminated against, it's up to the *individual* to do as they please without infringing on the rights of others to an unfettered education.
> My point is that the GPL does not require such a signed contract, only an action on the part of the licensee, to be binding. Right?
No, wrong. You don't have to accept the terms of the GPL to distribute the works, but in that case, you would be infringing the copyright of the author. Copyright is infringed when you distribute their work without their permission. That's what copyright is - a monopoly on *distribution*.
> If the GPL is binding without a signed contract, by virtue of an action taken by the licensee (in this case distribution), why is another license (such as the Intuit license I mentioned previously) not binding as well based on an action taken by the licensee (in this case opening the sleeve containing the CD after the licensee has been warned that doing so constitutes acceptance of the license)?
The "actions" however are completely different and you refuse to acknowledge this. In one case, you're REDISTRIBUTING A COPYRIGHTED WORK, which is the sole thing copyright law exists to govern! You're committing a crime by redistributing the GPL'ed work, and the only way you can "get away with it" is because there's a license attached that says "don't worry, you're doing something illegal, but the copyright owners hereby swear they won't act against you as long as you agree to X,Y,Z." It's not a license, it's a reprieve! Do you see the difference yet?
In the other case, you're in an intuitively ambiguous land of contracts being "agreed" to without the contracter being present to witness it! What if a minor "agreed" to it? Or some third party that disposed of the license and passed it on? This brutalisation of contract law (at least two informed parties mutually agreeing to and signing a document detailing restrictions, assignations and penalties, with copies kept by all) into some bastard child where no one bar the package opener is present, no copies are retained and no negotiations possible is completely unlike anything before it.
That is the difference and I don't know why you won't comment on it. In one case you've distributed a copyrighted work, in the other you've done the same to one of your possessions as you can with ANY OTHER POSSESSION, bar things the government has outlawed or you have SIGNED A CONTRACT SAYING SO. You're trying to fundamentally change contract law. That's a big hurdle to a lot of people.
> If the GPL can say that distributing a GPL'd work constitutes acceptance of the license, and the license is binding, how can that be? There's no contract.
Er, because if you distribute it, you're distributing someone else's copyrighted works. *DISTRIBUTING*. Not copying/modifying/studying for your own private use, *DISTRIBUTING*. The only way you could do that is with the copyright holder's permission, which happens to be spelled out in the GPL. That's how copyright law works, and that's the whole point of it. If someone else was allowed to distribute it at will, I wouldn't have an artifical monopoly on it.
I'm not sure why you don't see the difference - in the proprietary case, someone is receiving a copyrighted work and experimenting on it in their own privacy. At no point do they *DISTRIBUTE* that work to anyone else, all they could do is describe it to a third party. If they wanted to distribute it, they would need the express permission of the copyright holder. Well, GPL software comes with just that express permission, which is why you're allowed to distribute it.
Nobody is pushing for compulsory prayer. Just the freedom to pray. That is an exercise of religion. Congress shall make no law prohibiting it.
I have no issue with allowing prayer in (public) school, as long as all religions are allowed - with say excerpts from the Koran on the wall alongside the 10 commandments. Time in the day allowed for prayers towards Mecca, etc. If all religions (wicca, satanism, etc.) are given equal time things could become unwieldly. Which is why it would be stupid for the school itself to conduct prayers, but let kids do whatever religious activities they want outside class time so as not to take time out of the other student's learning time.
Creationism is a widely held, not disproved, and scientifically sound theory. Teach it as a theory. Teach the other theories as theories as well. Show how they may coexist and how particular theories conflict with each other.
I suppose you could teach it as a theory. But how would you fill a lesson? "Some people believe that an invisible being created everything, by methods we do not know or understand. Any questions you have about this process cannot be answered because we don't understand the invisible being's methods. Lesson over."
This is very interesting for me, as I've got quite a bit of experience with XviD and libavcodec's MPEG-4 code, and have read over the 14496-2 document more than a couple times.
Exactly what parts or properties of the encoded streams are not "true MPEG-4"? HIBT? DIC?
Re:Found the original program
on
Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 3, Informative
A great many people use search engines as modern-day confessional booths - supposedly confidential ways to bear their most personal and private thoughts (well, search engines are more useful, but suck at spiritual advice).
And who wouldn't want to listen in on a confessional booth every now and then? Sure you'll never know who made what search, but it's a peek inside someone's psyche that you would never get the chance to see otherwise. Mental voyeurism.
Plus you may (~may~) find out that everyone else really is as weird as you in private. But why you'd need this on a belt buckle is anyone's guess.
Yes, one should deliberately (ab)use the natural tendency to falter in such situations.
Think of it as hacking the peer pressure effect to get the desired outcomes. You're enticing yourself into doing something you know you should, but would otherwise slip out of.
I think it'd be a better idea to build some discipline, than intentionally crippling your PC. What if you need access to some internet-bound information during your work?
Just pick an activity (jogging, gym, studying, whatever) and involve a friend in it - if two people , however slack, are depending on each other at a set time to show up, they'll have much better luck sticking to it than if they were alone. Not wanting to let a friend down and all that.
That's if you're using a read-decode-execute-loop emulator, sure. That can also give you a 200-500x speed penalty for recent architectures.
To speed things up a bit (i.e. go from 500x slower to only 4x slower, or even native speed) you crack the emulated instructions down into an intermediate language that you can then apply optimizations to and compile into your host's native machine code.
In other words, imagine you had a program that could decompile a Linux-PPC binary back into the C code it was originally written in. You could then compile that C code for Linux-x86. If you start from C code, the speed of the compiled programs should be the same on both platforms (or close), right? That's the aim of dynamic translation - find out what the code is actually doing and perform that natively on your own hardware.
And, it's what QEMU does to run as fast as it does - some 120 times faster than the Bochs x86 interpretive emulator.
And in windows you can give per-user per-file access for people to read, list, create, modify, update security settings, change auditing behaviours, execute, read attributes, delete or take ownership.
What was your point? Your "but" seemed to imply that windows was incapable of this. I guess you can't set access controls as primitive as "rwxrwxrwx" in windows, but I think that's a good thing.
We are getting closer though - VirtuaNES is looking great, and SnesGT looks/sounds far more authentic than zsnes/snes9x ever have for me. Heck, SNESAPU has at last managed to be a bit-exact match of the SNES digital audio output, so we already have 'perfect' sound in that case (read up on the reverse engineering that required some time!).
While it'll never be perfect, eventually those old consoles (not to mention the battery backups for save games) will die, and I'll be happy to play on with emulators. I can't really afford the alternative.
Actually it's tending towards the opposite direction - as older consoles were less powerful, every last cycle had to be squeezed out of the CPU, along with every last little hard-to-predict nuance of the PPU itself. This makes the games much more susceptible to slight variations in the timing of emulated instructions/interrupts.
As consoles get newer, more and more work is done in high-level development environments (somewhat with the SNES, almost all with the generation of consoles that followed) so that emulators have more leeway and more forgiving games. Heck, with new consoles like the N64, Playstation and even the Gamecube, you can recompile the game's assembly code into native x86 assembly (thus throwing off the timing) and reroute the graphics calls to DirectX, yet still have most games work properly, thanks to more modern, frame-skip-tolerant written-in-C-or-C++-with-frameworks console games.
Wow, so all you have to do is type 3 little commands in Linux and it reads your mind to decide any configuration settings, thus being more convenient than your (elongated) windows example?
As far as Windows users are concerned, bzip2 is a form of encryption.
Nice trolling, but *nix has finally gotten a port of 7-zip after all this time, despite it being GPL'ed since its inception and compressing far, far better than bzip2 in every conceivable test.
The question is, why should windows users care about bzip2 when superior formats have been available?
The response is to lock down XP sufficiently so that users can't install anything, but I wonder what other problems this would incur. It certainly wouldn't work well in most home environments.
Is this a windows or a user issue? If a Linux desktop was as popular, don't you think the same annoyances would appear? If not, why not?
Apps are easier to install (config && make && make install) and easier to obtain in that I can always download the app I need, for instant gratification.
I can't possibly agree with that, after the hell I've gone through installing *nix programs inside msys. Dependencies are nightmarish and I've never had that happen in windows (apart from VB runtimes, which now ship with the OS).
Better logging when things go wrong. When Windows apps fail, I frequently get no error message, or a useless one.
In my experience, I just get a stack trace in *nix. Apart from that, most serious applications (windows or *nix) keep log files or the event log itself.
Superior flexibility. There are many small tools that do one thing well. I can glue them together in spontaneous shell scripts to extract information from large numbers of files.
You can get the same tools for windows. If your coleague stored his work in.swc or.pdf files in *nix your little scripts might not have worked as well either.
*) Simplicity. I never have registry problems under Linux. Uninstalling an app is a simple matter of deleting the files. I don't have the sort of application interaction issues I see in Windows.
Partially because *nix apps typically do not interact with each other. Hence the nightmares of copy and paste (which *always* works in windows), interface fragmentation, etc.
If all I do with my damn car is drive to work and back (i.e. email/chat/games), then of course the Ford (windows) is better in that example!
Do you get it yet? People want to USE their computers, not configure them, or even know that configuration is possible. They want to use a computer to get a job done, not sit in wonder and awe at the computer itself.
I'll tell you why more people don't use *nix - if you EVER have to do ANYTHING via the command-line or editing config files, people will avoid it. Why? Because Windows has already achieved that! Why would people take a step (that they would consider) backwards? For freedom? You can't be that out of touch with Joe and Jane Average.
Here's a quick rundown - misconceptions pitted against other misconceptions:
I like KDE better than Windows XP. It's a better desktop with more features that are easier to tweak and fix if something goes wrong.
Unelss you want to copy and paste between disparate applications, or have all or even most GUI-based applications have the same theme and menu order as each other.
The command line actually has real unadulterated power under Linux!
If you install additional packages, so will windows.
I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.
How often has your registry been corrupted? You do know there are multiple live backups kept? I've been working on NT/2K systems for more than 5 years and have never suffered registry corruption. This makes me wonder more than anything else *WHAT THE HELL* *nix users do to windows boxes that hoses them so badly.
I like the fact that my nine year old can't break it... no matter how hard she tries...
I guess you've taken the time to give her a non-root account. If you'd done the same in windows (instead of letting her run as root/admin) the situation would be the same. I've seen many, many more rootkits and local privilege escalation exploits for linux than I have for win2k. The windows security model is *much* more robust and fine-grained than linux, surely you must admit that much.
I like the fact that my wife can't install software on my desktop when she's not logged in as me.
Again, if you're handing out admin accounts on a windows box, you deserve what you get. Your own administrative incompetence is not the fault of windows.
I like Linux because I never have to worry about the status of my license, or installing it on multiple machines.
Can't argue with that one.
It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.
With KDE, GNOME and all the productivity apps and games your family wants to use?!?! Amazing!! I must say that's better than windows can manage.
It's nice that Linux doesn't have 19 system processes that report to the Microsoft mother-ship for no good reason at all, that can't be turned off.
Name one. One. I'm a windows administrator, perhaps I can help you disable this mysterious boogieman process that is haunting you, that I've never encountered.
t's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well.
What, the MSDN doesn't exist anymore? I've only ever encountered one error that I was unable to diagnose (you have heard of the windows event log I hope), which was a STOP error eventually tracked to a faulty motherboard trace.
I must admit I'm a tad skeptical of BenQ's manufacturing quality, but on one occasion they have come through for me.
Right now I'm reading this post back on a 15" BenQ FP557s LCD monitor I bought for $145 refurbished - no dead pixels, still running like a champ after 8 or so months (cheapest search now shows it going for ~$280). Sure it was a gamble buying a refurbed LCD without seeing it first, but it sure paid off for me!
Slashdot Mirror
these are great!
"Federal Judge John Carmack has ordered the break up of Novell after ruling they are a monopoly. The decision calls for Novell to be broken up into two parts: one to concentrate on manufacturing Tivos the other on OpenBSD development. Competitors such as Boeing and open source projects like vi shuold be very pleased with the decision."
"Monkey points us to an article over at The Register that has some pretty wicked quotes from Pope John Paul II about AltaVista. He thinks that AltaVista should focus less on profits and more on decapitating zombies. Pope John Paul II says "Instead of pouring money into the black hole of developing flying cars, they should focus on decapitating zombies and the profits will come their way." There are many more interesting tidbits in the article, but I'll let you discover and discuss them."
i don't think you'd be able to run that 2.4 ghz p4 fanless, you're still putting out 45 watts or so of heat where most passively-cooled rigs can only support a max of ~20 watts from the cpu.
you might want to try reading the silentpcreview.com forums some time - many people there share your views and are extremely knowledgable and capable when it comes to noise-related computer questions. from the parts you listed (vantec "stealth", ick!) you could have a much quieter rig on your hands. and don't knock the led fans too much - the most popular quiet fan at the moment, the yate loon d12sm-12, was only available in blue led form for some time.
er, you know a passive system isn't silent by your definition either - you still have air circulating because of convection from heat! and that air movement does make noise.
the folks at silentpcreview.com have a better method for defining silence - if your computer operates at or below your ambient noise level, then guess what - it's silent. i say this because whether it's turned on or off, the ambient noise level you perceive doesn't change.
silentpcreview's founder, mike chin, has access to a lab (in which he performs his reviews) with ambient noise levels below 15 dBA, and yes he has computers (with fans!) that operate at that noise level. he knows this, because his bruel & kjaer 2203 sound meter can get useful dBA readings down to 10 dBA (tested in anechoic chamber). if you've spent enough to get your recording environment down to 10 dBA ambient levels, you've wasted your money, because no electronic recording system can make use of such a ridiculously low noise-floor.
anyway, yes there are fans that are for these purposes silent, and we use them all the time. undervolt a yate loon d12sl-12 or globe S1202512L to 4 or 5 volts and they'll barely crack 15 dBA at 1 metre. if that's too loud for you, i'm wondering what kind of hard drives you use as they'll make more noise than that without being put behind a brick wall.
anyway, i'm sure you'd enjoy the silentpcreview.com articles and forums, and even though you claim to be a silent computing fan, i guarantee you'll be surprised at the lengths some of us have gone to in the name of silencing.
one site where people actually take the time to characterise drive noise from sensical distances, silentpcreview.com, has ignored storagereview's noise measurements for some time now, as they are out of touch with reality. the difference between a 7200.7 and a samsung sp1614n is night and day, if you actually own one of each as i do.
luckily, mike chin has access to some of the best sound measuring equipment and an office with an ambient background noise of 15 dBA or so. he's done some great reviews of fans in this environment, but hasn't turned to hard drives yet. but here's a silentpcreview article comparing the samsung directly to the 7200.7, i think you'll see how much more effort they put into acoustics than storagereview.
Wow, quite the perfectionist aren't we.
I've written CPU core emulators before, so I know what I'm talking about when I say that the NES emulators you hail aren't the paragon of emulation either. Heck just load up Micro Machines and you'll see a misplaced line or three due to hblank timing issues! The horror!
Give up this dream of true hardware emulation - the interface is what matters, the *appearance* of true abstraction, and the fact that a user cares about pixel-level details (when the artists who worked on the game probably could care less) speaks more about obsessive traits than about the ability of modern PCs to perform cycle-exact emulation.
When these systems are actually a piece of *history*, people studying them through emulators won't give a damn about pixels here and there, since the specs will likely be available as well. I mean seriously. "These ancient games used a custom co-processor and none of them used this particular opcode, so it was never implemented! If only we had that missing and useless code!"
It sounds like audiophiles who swear by their $800 gold-plated diamond-filament USB cable that carries a digital signal as well as any $5 generic one, if not worse.
If we were going for an absurd system where all regligions were officially allocated time, sure. But that system would be... absurd. Which is why no class time should be set aside for regligious indulgence, but kids can do as they please before school/during recess/between classes/after school.
Thereby no religions are favoured or discriminated against, it's up to the *individual* to do as they please without infringing on the rights of others to an unfettered education.
> My point is that the GPL does not require such a signed contract, only an action on the part of the licensee, to be binding. Right?
No, wrong. You don't have to accept the terms of the GPL to distribute the works, but in that case, you would be infringing the copyright of the author. Copyright is infringed when you distribute their work without their permission. That's what copyright is - a monopoly on *distribution*.
> If the GPL is binding without a signed contract, by virtue of an action taken by the licensee (in this case distribution), why is another license (such as the Intuit license I mentioned previously) not binding as well based on an action taken by the licensee (in this case opening the sleeve containing the CD after the licensee has been warned that doing so constitutes acceptance of the license)?
The "actions" however are completely different and you refuse to acknowledge this. In one case, you're REDISTRIBUTING A COPYRIGHTED WORK, which is the sole thing copyright law exists to govern! You're committing a crime by redistributing the GPL'ed work, and the only way you can "get away with it" is because there's a license attached that says "don't worry, you're doing something illegal, but the copyright owners hereby swear they won't act against you as long as you agree to X,Y,Z." It's not a license, it's a reprieve! Do you see the difference yet?
In the other case, you're in an intuitively ambiguous land of contracts being "agreed" to without the contracter being present to witness it! What if a minor "agreed" to it? Or some third party that disposed of the license and passed it on? This brutalisation of contract law (at least two informed parties mutually agreeing to and signing a document detailing restrictions, assignations and penalties, with copies kept by all) into some bastard child where no one bar the package opener is present, no copies are retained and no negotiations possible is completely unlike anything before it.
That is the difference and I don't know why you won't comment on it. In one case you've distributed a copyrighted work, in the other you've done the same to one of your possessions as you can with ANY OTHER POSSESSION, bar things the government has outlawed or you have SIGNED A CONTRACT SAYING SO. You're trying to fundamentally change contract law. That's a big hurdle to a lot of people.
> If the GPL can say that distributing a GPL'd work constitutes acceptance of the license, and the license is binding, how can that be? There's no contract.
Er, because if you distribute it, you're distributing someone else's copyrighted works. *DISTRIBUTING*. Not copying/modifying/studying for your own private use, *DISTRIBUTING*. The only way you could do that is with the copyright holder's permission, which happens to be spelled out in the GPL. That's how copyright law works, and that's the whole point of it. If someone else was allowed to distribute it at will, I wouldn't have an artifical monopoly on it.
I'm not sure why you don't see the difference - in the proprietary case, someone is receiving a copyrighted work and experimenting on it in their own privacy. At no point do they *DISTRIBUTE* that work to anyone else, all they could do is describe it to a third party. If they wanted to distribute it, they would need the express permission of the copyright holder. Well, GPL software comes with just that express permission, which is why you're allowed to distribute it.
I have no issue with allowing prayer in (public) school, as long as all religions are allowed - with say excerpts from the Koran on the wall alongside the 10 commandments. Time in the day allowed for prayers towards Mecca, etc. If all religions (wicca, satanism, etc.) are given equal time things could become unwieldly. Which is why it would be stupid for the school itself to conduct prayers, but let kids do whatever religious activities they want outside class time so as not to take time out of the other student's learning time.
Creationism is a widely held, not disproved, and scientifically sound theory. Teach it as a theory. Teach the other theories as theories as well. Show how they may coexist and how particular theories conflict with each other.
I suppose you could teach it as a theory. But how would you fill a lesson? "Some people believe that an invisible being created everything, by methods we do not know or understand. Any questions you have about this process cannot be answered because we don't understand the invisible being's methods. Lesson over."
This is very interesting for me, as I've got quite a bit of experience with XviD and libavcodec's MPEG-4 code, and have read over the 14496-2 document more than a couple times.
Exactly what parts or properties of the encoded streams are not "true MPEG-4"? HIBT? DIC?
A great many people use search engines as modern-day confessional booths - supposedly confidential ways to bear their most personal and private thoughts (well, search engines are more useful, but suck at spiritual advice).
And who wouldn't want to listen in on a confessional booth every now and then? Sure you'll never know who made what search, but it's a peek inside someone's psyche that you would never get the chance to see otherwise. Mental voyeurism.
Plus you may (~may~) find out that everyone else really is as weird as you in private. But why you'd need this on a belt buckle is anyone's guess.
Yes, one should deliberately (ab)use the natural tendency to falter in such situations.
Think of it as hacking the peer pressure effect to get the desired outcomes. You're enticing yourself into doing something you know you should, but would otherwise slip out of.
I think it'd be a better idea to build some discipline, than intentionally crippling your PC. What if you need access to some internet-bound information during your work?
Just pick an activity (jogging, gym, studying, whatever) and involve a friend in it - if two people , however slack, are depending on each other at a set time to show up, they'll have much better luck sticking to it than if they were alone. Not wanting to let a friend down and all that.
That's if you're using a read-decode-execute-loop emulator, sure. That can also give you a 200-500x speed penalty for recent architectures.
To speed things up a bit (i.e. go from 500x slower to only 4x slower, or even native speed) you crack the emulated instructions down into an intermediate language that you can then apply optimizations to and compile into your host's native machine code.
In other words, imagine you had a program that could decompile a Linux-PPC binary back into the C code it was originally written in. You could then compile that C code for Linux-x86. If you start from C code, the speed of the compiled programs should be the same on both platforms (or close), right? That's the aim of dynamic translation - find out what the code is actually doing and perform that natively on your own hardware.
And, it's what QEMU does to run as fast as it does - some 120 times faster than the Bochs x86 interpretive emulator.
And in windows you can give per-user per-file access for people to read, list, create, modify, update security settings, change auditing behaviours, execute, read attributes, delete or take ownership.
What was your point? Your "but" seemed to imply that windows was incapable of this. I guess you can't set access controls as primitive as "rwxrwxrwx" in windows, but I think that's a good thing.
We are getting closer though - VirtuaNES is looking great, and SnesGT looks/sounds far more authentic than zsnes/snes9x ever have for me. Heck, SNESAPU has at last managed to be a bit-exact match of the SNES digital audio output, so we already have 'perfect' sound in that case (read up on the reverse engineering that required some time!).
While it'll never be perfect, eventually those old consoles (not to mention the battery backups for save games) will die, and I'll be happy to play on with emulators. I can't really afford the alternative.
Actually it's tending towards the opposite direction - as older consoles were less powerful, every last cycle had to be squeezed out of the CPU, along with every last little hard-to-predict nuance of the PPU itself. This makes the games much more susceptible to slight variations in the timing of emulated instructions/interrupts.
As consoles get newer, more and more work is done in high-level development environments (somewhat with the SNES, almost all with the generation of consoles that followed) so that emulators have more leeway and more forgiving games. Heck, with new consoles like the N64, Playstation and even the Gamecube, you can recompile the game's assembly code into native x86 assembly (thus throwing off the timing) and reroute the graphics calls to DirectX, yet still have most games work properly, thanks to more modern, frame-skip-tolerant written-in-C-or-C++-with-frameworks console games.
Wow, so all you have to do is type 3 little commands in Linux and it reads your mind to decide any configuration settings, thus being more convenient than your (elongated) windows example?
Nice trolling, but *nix has finally gotten a port of 7-zip after all this time, despite it being GPL'ed since its inception and compressing far, far better than bzip2 in every conceivable test.
The question is, why should windows users care about bzip2 when superior formats have been available?
Is this a windows or a user issue? If a Linux desktop was as popular, don't you think the same annoyances would appear? If not, why not?
Apps are easier to install (config && make && make install) and easier to obtain in that I can always download the app I need, for instant gratification.
I can't possibly agree with that, after the hell I've gone through installing *nix programs inside msys. Dependencies are nightmarish and I've never had that happen in windows (apart from VB runtimes, which now ship with the OS).
Better logging when things go wrong. When Windows apps fail, I frequently get no error message, or a useless one.
In my experience, I just get a stack trace in *nix. Apart from that, most serious applications (windows or *nix) keep log files or the event log itself.
Superior flexibility. There are many small tools that do one thing well. I can glue them together in spontaneous shell scripts to extract information from large numbers of files.
You can get the same tools for windows. If your coleague stored his work in .swc or .pdf files in *nix your little scripts might not have worked as well either.
*) Simplicity. I never have registry problems under Linux. Uninstalling an app is a simple matter of deleting the files. I don't have the sort of application interaction issues I see in Windows.
Partially because *nix apps typically do not interact with each other. Hence the nightmares of copy and paste (which *always* works in windows), interface fragmentation, etc.
Security. Yes, it really is more secure.
True.
If all I do with my damn car is drive to work and back (i.e. email/chat/games), then of course the Ford (windows) is better in that example!
Do you get it yet? People want to USE their computers, not configure them, or even know that configuration is possible. They want to use a computer to get a job done, not sit in wonder and awe at the computer itself.
I'll tell you why more people don't use *nix - if you EVER have to do ANYTHING via the command-line or editing config files, people will avoid it. Why? Because Windows has already achieved that! Why would people take a step (that they would consider) backwards? For freedom? You can't be that out of touch with Joe and Jane Average.
I like KDE better than Windows XP. It's a better desktop with more features that are easier to tweak and fix if something goes wrong.
Unelss you want to copy and paste between disparate applications, or have all or even most GUI-based applications have the same theme and menu order as each other.
The command line actually has real unadulterated power under Linux!
If you install additional packages, so will windows.
I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.
How often has your registry been corrupted? You do know there are multiple live backups kept? I've been working on NT/2K systems for more than 5 years and have never suffered registry corruption. This makes me wonder more than anything else *WHAT THE HELL* *nix users do to windows boxes that hoses them so badly.
I like the fact that my nine year old can't break it... no matter how hard she tries...
I guess you've taken the time to give her a non-root account. If you'd done the same in windows (instead of letting her run as root/admin) the situation would be the same. I've seen many, many more rootkits and local privilege escalation exploits for linux than I have for win2k. The windows security model is *much* more robust and fine-grained than linux, surely you must admit that much.
I like the fact that my wife can't install software on my desktop when she's not logged in as me.
Again, if you're handing out admin accounts on a windows box, you deserve what you get. Your own administrative incompetence is not the fault of windows.
I like Linux because I never have to worry about the status of my license, or installing it on multiple machines.
Can't argue with that one.
It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.
With KDE, GNOME and all the productivity apps and games your family wants to use?!?! Amazing!! I must say that's better than windows can manage.
It's nice that Linux doesn't have 19 system processes that report to the Microsoft mother-ship for no good reason at all, that can't be turned off.
Name one. One. I'm a windows administrator, perhaps I can help you disable this mysterious boogieman process that is haunting you, that I've never encountered.
t's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well.
What, the MSDN doesn't exist anymore? I've only ever encountered one error that I was unable to diagnose (you have heard of the windows event log I hope), which was a STOP error eventually tracked to a faulty motherboard trace.
I must admit I'm a tad skeptical of BenQ's manufacturing quality, but on one occasion they have come through for me.
Right now I'm reading this post back on a 15" BenQ FP557s LCD monitor I bought for $145 refurbished - no dead pixels, still running like a champ after 8 or so months (cheapest search now shows it going for ~$280). Sure it was a gamble buying a refurbed LCD without seeing it first, but it sure paid off for me!