... to finally get 64bit support? Although I have to say a few years ago, when I started running Ubuntu amd64, it would have been more useful. Nowadays there are a number of decent workarounds, Google Chrome being one of them, npviewer another.
That is the big question. In Europe the law says you are only allowed to track people who agree to tracking. So current industry practice is to "presume" an implicit acknowledgement that free services on the internet are financed by ads and tracking.
Once the user sets a "do not track" flag, that (already flimsy) argument falls down completely, and advertisers have to stop tracking you. It is legally quite clear, and I would not be surprised to see legal proceedings before the end of the year. Of course the user has little (if any) damages, so there is no motivation to become active, but there is also the possibility of action from competitors under anti-competitive regulations.
So you get people being charged with this offense for ridiculous things like exceeding the speed limit by 50km/h in an 80 km/h zone
What is it about speeding that gives people the feeling they are entitled to it? The speed limit is the law - breaking it is breaking the law, and of course that has to be punished (otherwise the law would no longer be respected). And speeding is most certainly not a victimless crime - most fatal accidents involve either speeding, alcohol, mobile phones or some other disregard for the law.
For the geeks here: a vehicle travelling at 130 km/h has 2 1/2 times the kinetic energy of a vehicle traveling at 80 km/h. And after a fixed breaking distance to impact the difference becomes even larger.
Absolutely - a whole generation in the 70s has based their ideology partly on the fact that "TV sell people". You can love it, you can hate it, but if you pretend that this is "news", you are an idiot.
> The netbook, which was on the same boat few years ago, is now, obtainable around $200 price point, which gives you at least twice the CPU power in most cases, a full keyboard, multiple expansion ports, more memory and storage space, alas, no touch screen.
I agree about extension ports and easy of installing software, but I am not sure about the CPU power. It is difficult to compare, but it seems that the HP TouchPad actually has more CPU and graphics power than a (single core) Atom. Good tablets certainly feel faster than a netbook (which are typically slugging even under light use). Still netbooks have their place - for example if you want to give a PowerPoint presentation on a projector. It just works.
Oh I am. Because you can teach concepts, ideas and topic, but not programs. That's why you teach carpentry, and not hammer. Computers are not different: you can teach writing and graphics design, but not Word and PowerPoint. The later are (poor?) tools for the former, but you have to teach the concepts, not the implementation, or you will never get anywhere.
But the real problem is that teaching computers is cheaper. Someone (no doubt a high level school manager) must have thought that with PCs everywhere, you can use cheaper or fewer teachers. The opposite is the case: you have to teach computers in smaller cohorts, and the teachers need better training. That is at least until you have reached some basic threshold knowledge, after which kids can (given enough skills, intelligence, opportunity and perseverance) learn a lot by themselves.
In the long term, we will get a lot better about using computers in the classroom. But for now we are the very beginning, and we are just testing different things. It is no surprise that most don't work.
I have to say I understand the emotions. Facebook was great when it came out - it was like nothing else out there - and I am very grateful for it. But time has changed, and facebook isn't what it used to be (of course). We had a great time, but the love is gone, and maybe it is time to move on.
Which is why it is such a shame that they are still true. In fact Java 1.0 would start in 3 seconds on my PC back then when it is up to date. Java 1.6 takes 10 seconds to start...
> Every Java application, desktop or otherwise, I have written has been very snappy, very responsive.
Once they are up and running that may be. But the start-up time is always terrible, and it seems to be getting worse with every new version of Java, even the ones that promise more speed.
> Don't they reset privacy setting every once in a while or something like that? I don't pay them a lot of attention.
Yes, that would be my bigger complaints. You can restrict access in facebook, but you always have to be on the ball, because new features are opt-out, and they often "ruin" (supposedly inadvertently) your privacy settings. Ok, it hasn't happened since this announcement, but I would expect that to continue.
What is a desktop in the PC world is your SOC in the embedded world. It even comes with RAM and Flash (not on chip, but on package), if you want to.
The difference is that the PC environment has over a long time filtered down to a few typical devices for each type. Your network hardware is probably Realtek, or maybe Intel or an embedded AMD chip. You graphics card is NVidia, AMD or Intel. Your mouse does not matter, because it always talk USB HID etc.
In the ARM world, you also have standard components, but every integrator makes tiny (and usually pointless) changes that render them incompatible on the software level. Linus is right - this is neither necessary nor sustainable. It is one of the reasons that you can get software updates for a 5 year old PC, but not for a 6 months old smartphone.
> Come to think of it, someone should put in place some dampening for high frequency trading, too.
We already have that, it is the rotational inertia of the turbines and generators in big power plants. Those things are huge, so spinning up or down takes a while. This is the reason that everybody talks about the grid frequency, because it is an indicator for power stored in inertia.
What be need is a power store fast enough to pick up when the frequency drops. There are schemes in place to remove big consumers from the grid, but that is a very intrusive operation. So power plants often run around 105% of the required power, just to be able to cope with the spikes. Hydro-power could help here, but unless you live in Scandinavia, it is very difficult to implement. Compressed air storage is another interesting approach, if the technology matures towards a reasonable round trip efficiency.
So slashdot runs a story that links to a story that links to a story that links to the report.
I wonder what that says about the readers here. I feel like the good times of slashdot are over, and only idiots and nostalgic users are still around.
Each major release is taking longer
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Each release takes longer before it becomes useful. KDE 1.1 was working just right for me. So was KDE 2.3. KDE 3 did not really mature until 3.3 or 3.4. KDE 4 is just now getting there, after 8 minor releases. Some things are still working better in KDE 3, or in KDE 1 for that.
Don't get me wrong, I like KDE. But we are paying a huge price for "progress".
I think they real question is why in 2011, there is still no way to open an attachment without risking the security of your system. Attachments were invented in 1990, and yet they still don't work as they should. I think this says more about the state of the software industry than about people.
32bit Linux has a huge advantage over 32bit Windows: it easily supports more than 4 GB of RAM. PAE has been working for years, and it is standard on most Linux distributions now.
At the same time 64bit Linux still struggles with library paths, and until the fat elf format comes along, I do not see a proper solution to that.
That being said, 64bit Linux works perfectly fine, as long as you do not need some troublesome third party 32bit binary to work.
Yes, it is a bit lame. My first 64bit system is long dead and replaced (Athlon64 - decent performance, but it was just not cost effective to upgrade from 1GB of DDR RAM), and I am considering doing the same with my second one now. Ubuntu/amd64 has been reasonably usable since about LTS 6.06, and even flash kind of worked with a wrapper.
In the mean time, Adobe *still has not released* a 64bit plugin. No surprise here, you do not expect slashdot stories to be accurate even in the main point of the story.
I have to say that XFCE is getting mighty fat recently - it is no fun on an old PC or even in a virtual machine. Which means that I am moving on to LXDE - it does just what I want, and it does it quickly.
Is there a law that says software has to get fat over time? Because that is surely the way it is going. KDE 1.0 was pretty light at some point, and up to KDE 3 it worked well in a virtual machine. I guess I could always use trinity instead - but then again I really like okular over kpdf...
Au contraire - it is the official time of GB and Ireland. As such it is subject to Daylight Saving Time (called BST), and very different from UTC. So using GMT could cause never ending confusion...
Funny enough gruve.com made exactly that mistake: it does not support DST for GMT. And support is unable to help.
Anyway, the C in UTC stands for coordinated, so I cannot see how they could redefine it without turning it into a lie.
> As of beta 2, you can now sync wirelessly, but syncing in general has become somewhat unreliable.
Wow, and it is only 2011:-). But honestly, I could never figure out why the iPhone is so complicated about setting up. You need a PC (or Mac) to do it, and you need to install iTunes, which essentially takes over your system. And it does not suit me anyway, because I have more than one main computer. All other gadgets are fine with that, and Android does not even need a base computer. But the iPhone still feels like tethered to your iTunes installation. I admit that it probably works for a lot of people, but it just wouldn't work for me.
You complain about lack of freedom with the iPhone, and you want to switch to Samsung? Seriously, that seems like you are just replacing one evil with another. There are certainly open android phones out there, but they are not made by Samsung.
At least that's what it looks like to me. Of course some companies have a complicated menu and a (long) hold loop on a premium rate number, and that's where any technical solution will fail. $20 just to listen to some hold music? Unfortunately that is no longer inconceivable, it is actually quite common.
> So if... I pay the ransom, am I supporting terrorists?
Yes, you are. You may feel justified in doing so, but you most certainly are funding (and rewarding) criminal activity.
We have seen in Somalia how that works out. The insurances only cared about the bottom line, and so they paid off the terrorists. The terrorists then did two things (both completely logical): use the money to buy more weapons, and increase the ransom demands.
That is why you don't negotiate with terrorists, at least not with the goal of paying them.
Slashdot Mirror
... to finally get 64bit support? Although I have to say a few years ago, when I started running Ubuntu amd64, it would have been more useful. Nowadays there are a number of decent workarounds, Google Chrome being one of them, npviewer another.
That is the big question. In Europe the law says you are only allowed to track people who agree to tracking. So current industry practice is to "presume" an implicit acknowledgement that free services on the internet are financed by ads and tracking.
Once the user sets a "do not track" flag, that (already flimsy) argument falls down completely, and advertisers have to stop tracking you. It is legally quite clear, and I would not be surprised to see legal proceedings before the end of the year. Of course the user has little (if any) damages, so there is no motivation to become active, but there is also the possibility of action from competitors under anti-competitive regulations.
In any case things are bound to change.
So you get people being charged with this offense for ridiculous things like exceeding the speed limit by 50km/h in an 80 km/h zone
What is it about speeding that gives people the feeling they are entitled to it? The speed limit is the law - breaking it is breaking the law, and of course that has to be punished (otherwise the law would no longer be respected). And speeding is most certainly not a victimless crime - most fatal accidents involve either speeding, alcohol, mobile phones or some other disregard for the law.
For the geeks here: a vehicle travelling at 130 km/h has 2 1/2 times the kinetic energy of a vehicle traveling at 80 km/h. And after a fixed breaking distance to impact the difference becomes even larger.
Absolutely - a whole generation in the 70s has based their ideology partly on the fact that "TV sell people". You can love it, you can hate it, but if you pretend that this is "news", you are an idiot.
> The netbook, which was on the same boat few years ago, is now, obtainable around $200 price point, which gives you at least twice the CPU power in most cases, a full keyboard, multiple expansion ports, more memory and storage space, alas, no touch screen.
I agree about extension ports and easy of installing software, but I am not sure about the CPU power. It is difficult to compare, but it seems that the HP TouchPad actually has more CPU and graphics power than a (single core) Atom. Good tablets certainly feel faster than a netbook (which are typically slugging even under light use). Still netbooks have their place - for example if you want to give a PowerPoint presentation on a projector. It just works.
They're teaching Powerpoint.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Oh I am. Because you can teach concepts, ideas and topic, but not programs. That's why you teach carpentry, and not hammer. Computers are not different: you can teach writing and graphics design, but not Word and PowerPoint. The later are (poor?) tools for the former, but you have to teach the concepts, not the implementation, or you will never get anywhere.
But the real problem is that teaching computers is cheaper. Someone (no doubt a high level school manager) must have thought that with PCs everywhere, you can use cheaper or fewer teachers. The opposite is the case: you have to teach computers in smaller cohorts, and the teachers need better training. That is at least until you have reached some basic threshold knowledge, after which kids can (given enough skills, intelligence, opportunity and perseverance) learn a lot by themselves.
In the long term, we will get a lot better about using computers in the classroom. But for now we are the very beginning, and we are just testing different things. It is no surprise that most don't work.
I have to say I understand the emotions. Facebook was great when it came out - it was like nothing else out there - and I am very grateful for it. But time has changed, and facebook isn't what it used to be (of course). We had a great time, but the love is gone, and maybe it is time to move on.
> Arguments for slow Java are so 1990's.
Which is why it is such a shame that they are still true. In fact Java 1.0 would start in 3 seconds on my PC back then when it is up to date. Java 1.6 takes 10 seconds to start...
> Every Java application, desktop or otherwise, I have written has been very snappy, very responsive.
Once they are up and running that may be. But the start-up time is always terrible, and it seems to be getting worse with every new version of Java, even the ones that promise more speed.
> Don't they reset privacy setting every once in a while or something like that? I don't pay them a lot of attention.
Yes, that would be my bigger complaints. You can restrict access in facebook, but you always have to be on the ball, because new features are opt-out, and they often "ruin" (supposedly inadvertently) your privacy settings. Ok, it hasn't happened since this announcement, but I would expect that to continue.
> And there's already a more standard approach to this - 2.5mm audio jacks.
Too simple, Apple would never do that. If they can come up with a fancy, convoluted and extravagant solution to a simple problem, they take it.
What is a desktop in the PC world is your SOC in the embedded world. It even comes with RAM and Flash (not on chip, but on package), if you want to.
The difference is that the PC environment has over a long time filtered down to a few typical devices for each type. Your network hardware is probably Realtek, or maybe Intel or an embedded AMD chip. You graphics card is NVidia, AMD or Intel. Your mouse does not matter, because it always talk USB HID etc.
In the ARM world, you also have standard components, but every integrator makes tiny (and usually pointless) changes that render them incompatible on the software level. Linus is right - this is neither necessary nor sustainable. It is one of the reasons that you can get software updates for a 5 year old PC, but not for a 6 months old smartphone.
> Come to think of it, someone should put in place some dampening for high frequency trading, too.
We already have that, it is the rotational inertia of the turbines and generators in big power plants. Those things are huge, so spinning up or down takes a while. This is the reason that everybody talks about the grid frequency, because it is an indicator for power stored in inertia.
What be need is a power store fast enough to pick up when the frequency drops. There are schemes in place to remove big consumers from the grid, but that is a very intrusive operation. So power plants often run around 105% of the required power, just to be able to cope with the spikes. Hydro-power could help here, but unless you live in Scandinavia, it is very difficult to implement. Compressed air storage is another interesting approach, if the technology matures towards a reasonable round trip efficiency.
So slashdot runs a story that links to a story that links to a story that links to the report.
I wonder what that says about the readers here. I feel like the good times of slashdot are over, and only idiots and nostalgic users are still around.
Each release takes longer before it becomes useful. KDE 1.1 was working just right for me. So was KDE 2.3. KDE 3 did not really mature until 3.3 or 3.4. KDE 4 is just now getting there, after 8 minor releases. Some things are still working better in KDE 3, or in KDE 1 for that.
Don't get me wrong, I like KDE. But we are paying a huge price for "progress".
I think they real question is why in 2011, there is still no way to open an attachment without risking the security of your system. Attachments were invented in 1990, and yet they still don't work as they should. I think this says more about the state of the software industry than about people.
32bit Linux has a huge advantage over 32bit Windows: it easily supports more than 4 GB of RAM. PAE has been working for years, and it is standard on most Linux distributions now.
At the same time 64bit Linux still struggles with library paths, and until the fat elf format comes along, I do not see a proper solution to that.
That being said, 64bit Linux works perfectly fine, as long as you do not need some troublesome third party 32bit binary to work.
Yes, it is a bit lame. My first 64bit system is long dead and replaced (Athlon64 - decent performance, but it was just not cost effective to upgrade from 1GB of DDR RAM), and I am considering doing the same with my second one now. Ubuntu/amd64 has been reasonably usable since about LTS 6.06, and even flash kind of worked with a wrapper.
In the mean time, Adobe *still has not released* a 64bit plugin. No surprise here, you do not expect slashdot stories to be accurate even in the main point of the story.
I have to say that XFCE is getting mighty fat recently - it is no fun on an old PC or even in a virtual machine. Which means that I am moving on to LXDE - it does just what I want, and it does it quickly.
Is there a law that says software has to get fat over time? Because that is surely the way it is going. KDE 1.0 was pretty light at some point, and up to KDE 3 it worked well in a virtual machine. I guess I could always use trinity instead - but then again I really like okular over kpdf...
A broken watch shows the correct time twice a day, something that a clock 5 minutes late never does.
> GMT hasn't been in use for a long time
Au contraire - it is the official time of GB and Ireland. As such it is subject to Daylight Saving Time (called BST), and very different from UTC. So using GMT could cause never ending confusion...
Funny enough gruve.com made exactly that mistake: it does not support DST for GMT. And support is unable to help.
Anyway, the C in UTC stands for coordinated, so I cannot see how they could redefine it without turning it into a lie.
> As of beta 2, you can now sync wirelessly, but syncing in general has become somewhat unreliable.
Wow, and it is only 2011 :-). But honestly, I could never figure out why the iPhone is so complicated about setting up. You need a PC (or Mac) to do it, and you need to install iTunes, which essentially takes over your system. And it does not suit me anyway, because I have more than one main computer. All other gadgets are fine with that, and Android does not even need a base computer. But the iPhone still feels like tethered to your iTunes installation. I admit that it probably works for a lot of people, but it just wouldn't work for me.
You complain about lack of freedom with the iPhone, and you want to switch to Samsung? Seriously, that seems like you are just replacing one evil with another. There are certainly open android phones out there, but they are not made by Samsung.
If the called party records the call, I don't think they can really argue if the caller does the same.
At least that's what it looks like to me. Of course some companies have a complicated menu and a (long) hold loop on a premium rate number, and that's where any technical solution will fail. $20 just to listen to some hold music? Unfortunately that is no longer inconceivable, it is actually quite common.
> So if ... I pay the ransom, am I supporting terrorists?
Yes, you are. You may feel justified in doing so, but you most certainly are funding (and rewarding) criminal activity.
We have seen in Somalia how that works out. The insurances only cared about the bottom line, and so they paid off the terrorists. The terrorists then did two things (both completely logical): use the money to buy more weapons, and increase the ransom demands.
That is why you don't negotiate with terrorists, at least not with the goal of paying them.