I have two identical Maxtor drives except that one has liquid bearings and one not (6L040L2 and 6L040J2, which are both 40G 7200RPM drives). And the Lis slightly quieter, but mostly it just sounds different. They are both so damn quiet it's hard to hear them above my CPU fan, but here goes. The L sounds like a chipmunk nibbling on a twig, while the J would be a chipmunk munching on a twig.
Look at your bookshelves (I'll wait). Welcome back. How many of your books are paperbacks, and how many are hardbacks? I would guess 90% paperbacks, but the main bestseller lists track sales of new hardcover books.
If it's a great author I buy the hardback; Good author, the paperback. Once I've "discovered" an author I love, I'm not about to wait unless he's Steven King.
Ok maybe sci fi will become "hot" but would that make sci fi better - probably not.
Probably so! More writers would result in more great stories. And more potentialy great writers would be able to afford spending time writing if they sold more books. And making a best seller list is definitely a way to sell more books.
Sci fi has been hot in movies for a long time and what do we have to show for it - several big budget movies that are complete crap (men in black independance day, that arnold thing, phantom menace etc.) with one medium budget movie that is not that bad (the matrix).
I wouldn't agree SF is hot. quite the contrary. I love movies like Contact, Matrix, Star Wars. But there aren't many. If you want proof go to Blockbuster and look in the SF section. Now look under Drama, Comedy, even Horror. I bet there are 10 times more horror movies made than SF.
in addition, i suppose good Sci-Fi is just too difficult for most to understand
You're probably right. But I can give an interesting counterexample. Andy Beyers, a Washington Post columnist, wrote a horse racing handicapping book called "Picking Winners". Basically, the book explains how to make "speed figures" that measures how fast a horse runs. It's not very complicated math (linear recursion, basic statistics). But the main topic of the whole book is math. He didn't figure many people would read it, but it became a bestseller that is still popular.
Probably many people who bought the book didn't understand it fully. But i bet the ratio is about the same as programmers who buy Knuth's books yet don't understand that math.
People shouldent base what they buy on what everyone else buys anyway, wether it be music or books. The only purpose lists like this serve, is inform publishing companies of what types of books/music are selling well, and to make the artists feel good.
You don't have to read every book on the list. The book THE NANNY DIARIES is on the same list as STAR WARS: EPISODE 2 -- ATTACK OF THE CLONES after all. How many people will read both? Bounty hunters looking for a nanny?
What you do is weed out the cruft (Oprah) and see what's left over. I, for instance, didn't know there was a Star Wars book out, so that was helpful. Now I can read the book and give the ending away to everybody in line on Thursday!
Personally, I find mozilla outrageously fast on Windows; faster than anything else I've tried. However, on Solaris and OSX, the performance isn't where I'd like it to be. (But as the graph above shows, it's getting better, and I've noticed it on OSX.). If you're a user of the Windows platform, and have heard the "slow performance" chatter that goes on, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
My experiences with Mozilla are the opposite. It's fast on Linux, but slow on Windows. And it used to be just the opposite! It used to be like swimming through molasses on Unix.
Navigator 4.7 is still faster rendering many pages. But with the increasing complexity of some web pages (i.e. pages with tables, etc), Mozilla is faster or at least AS fast.
Even if it's a little slower than Nav 4.7X, having tabs, password manager, and nifty jog wheel stuff (use it to move back and forward), makes it worthwhile to use.
The main problem with USEnet is that it still has to route every single article to every single node whether it is going to be read or not. While the flood fill routing was a good scheme when NNTP was developed and the number of nodes was small it is needlessly wasteful now that we have hundreds of thousands of NNTP servers, it is just not necessary to have that level of redundancy to route arround censorship.
Just as a guess, I'd say most news servers only get a partial feed. Some avoid alt.binaries.* altogether certainly. And even when an ISP gets the whole shebang, they often sell access to smaller ISPs, so that the "tree" isn't nearly as nearly as big as it might be. So it's not really that bad.
If you owned an erector set you've built a crane. Which inevitably gets a wrecking ball. Which is pretty useless unless you have a nicely crafted log cabin your little sister built to knock over.
It's not just the news, it's the newspeople. We're spending hours, even days with them. We become attached. They put themselves before us, we can't help but hurl our bitchy judgments back at them. Please, Katie Couric, brush that distracting lock of hair out of your eyes! Please, Peter Jennings, get some sleep! Hey, Ed Bradley, does the gold earring really work right now?
Jennings is really good at talking live; Rather struggles but is interesting nonetheless; Brokaw is slightly better than Dan but knows when to quit. Dan will just keep talking until somebody pushes him out of the chair; you've got to admire his tenacity.
Crazy: A person who keeps doing the same thing again and again expecting different results.
In must be infuriating to him why people don't agree with him when he's sure that his arguments are both correct and, to his mind anyway, persuasive. The problem is that he is still using the same tactics he used 10 years ago, but apparently hoping that the results will be different.
He knows he's right and that if people just understood his point of view that they would rally behind his cause. It's his achilles heel, his kryptonite. Blessed with intelligence but without social skills.
After trying all the browsers my conclusion is that what I'd like is parts of each all lumped together.
Give me the GUI speed of Netscape 4.7X! If I made a wishlist of browser features back when all we had were Netscape and Lynx, this wouldn't have made the top ten. But lack of GUI responsiveness makes browsing like putting tabasco sauce in a wound.
Give me some cool features and the Gtk interface of Galeon. I like Gtk (though I don't think Motif is as bad as some folks think), and things like temporary bookmarks are great.
The tabs from Skipstone! Instead of opening many windows you just used one with a new tab for each new window. Very cool even though Skip crashed a lot.
The size of Opera. I just bought a SDRAM 128MB dimm for $18, but I still like small programs that start and close fast and don't hog resources.
Mozilla's rendering engine. It seems to handle everything you throw at it. Not a very easy task considering everything is written for IE these days.
Konqueror's team of programmers. No matter how good the browser is today, somebody has to maintain it. And despite the fact that Konq does nothing spectacular, it does a good job in all areas: responsiveness, size, stability, design, usefulness. And it all started from int main() not too long ago.
What's sad is that Mozilla is SOOO close to being a great browser. It just lacks the good GUI (good in the sense of responsive, fast, and usable), which has improved some over the years but not enough to give hope that things will radically change.
Then use Lesstif. The code is solid and doesn't have the memory leaks you mention. And I've also use the free Motifs available now and not faced the problems you talk about. I believe you; things have just changed.
And as for Netscape crashing, I don't think Motif is at fault. When I ran Mozilla pre-Gecko (the version based off of 4.7), it crashed plenty and Motif wasn't the cause.
With wine you forgot to mention that it doesn't work unless you already have a Windows partition. At least in my experience, without an Windows tree with its dlls, you can't get anything except minesweeper to run.
I'd love to hear from other people that have had better results though.
Great product, bad marketing. They had some 10 thousand developers signed up, open source and Linux all over the news, and a shortage of good programmers available to companies. All during a Tech boom that had companies scrambling for new ways to get work done. And yet they couldn't get enough projects.
At the start they had some interesting projects posted by HP. But after that available projects slowed nearly to a stop. The ones that did show up were from smaller companies that offered too little money, and even those were slim pickings.
It looks to me like they focused all their attention on the product and neglected the sales pitch to companies, who should have been eager participants. I don't think ``open source'' had anything to do with their failure.
Learn by doing. Thinking is great, but the only way you ever really
learn something thoroughly is by doing it-and particularly by
finishing it, which is harder than it sounds because shipping software
is an unnatural act
This is so true. Just visit Sourceforge and check out projects that die between working and complete. There are so few programmers who can actually finish a project. More so than pure programming ability it separates the great from the merely competent programmers.
Not content to have their parade rained on, the Iraqis
systematically set fire to many of the oil fields in Kuwait. These require explosives to quench -- not a simple task.
They used water to extinguish the fires, not explosives. There was a PBS special or something on it and the quote I remember was "throw enough water at ANY fire and it will eventually go out."
The Linux community hates big binaries. Every time a piece of commercial software is talked about on/., the size of the binary gets mentioned, usually to complain how bloated it is (Wordperfect or Applixware anyone?). The same holds for free code too. You'll never read comments on a Mozilla posting without its size being mentioned by someone. Conversely, we love to mention how small the Linux kernel is compared to Windows.
And Java is BIG. My Jdk1.3 install is 187mb. You could probably install a minimal linux distribution in less space.
As for portability, Java is only as portable as its VM. Having autoconf and being able to./configure; make; make install on any Unix-like system is a lot easier than Java, which allways seems ad-hoc and painful.
Things might change some with gcc3.0, which will probably have gcj (native java compiler) integrated in. That way, at least the startup times are small, and you won't even know your running a program written in Java.
Why not just connect to mozilla's news server? If you use slrn, add a line with
server ``news.mozilla.org'' ``newsrc-mozilla''
to your.slrnrc file (so your regular newsrc file doesn't get overwritten), and run slrn -h news.mozilla.org -create to create the newsrc file.
Since UCAVs are remotely controlled by operators sitting at
computer workstations, there is no need for pilots to fly constant
training missions to keep their skills sharpened; they can sit at the same
workstations and run simulations.
It would be pretty hard to distinguish a simulation from a real battle then, wouldn't it? I won't ruin the ending for people who haven't read the book, but this brought to memory Orson Scott Card's book, a boy named Ender, and his training at battle school.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope that clears up the confusion
He has some top notch talent in his movies and unless they break free of the crap dialogue...
Indeed. Even Robert De Niro couldn't say
and not look and sound like an idiot.Jon Postel I undertand; Stevens makes sense. But how does a guy who played the Bass qualify as News for Nerds?
Peter Travers said it ranks third of the five Star Wars movies.
His ranking
I like Ebert and enjoy his reviews, but this is the one kind of film that always confuses him. For god sakes, he gave Phantom 3 1/2 stars!
They removed the source from their home page, but you can still get it over at debian's site if you want to see what their talking about.
If it's a great author I buy the hardback; Good author, the paperback. Once I've "discovered" an author I love, I'm not about to wait unless he's Steven King.
Probably so! More writers would result in more great stories. And more potentialy great writers would be able to afford spending time writing if they sold more books. And making a best seller list is definitely a way to sell more books.
I wouldn't agree SF is hot. quite the contrary. I love movies like Contact, Matrix, Star Wars. But there aren't many. If you want proof go to Blockbuster and look in the SF section. Now look under Drama, Comedy, even Horror. I bet there are 10 times more horror movies made than SF.
You're probably right. But I can give an interesting counterexample. Andy Beyers, a Washington Post columnist, wrote a horse racing handicapping book called "Picking Winners". Basically, the book explains how to make "speed figures" that measures how fast a horse runs. It's not very complicated math (linear recursion, basic statistics). But the main topic of the whole book is math. He didn't figure many people would read it, but it became a bestseller that is still popular.
Probably many people who bought the book didn't understand it fully. But i bet the ratio is about the same as programmers who buy Knuth's books yet don't understand that math.
You don't have to read every book on the list. The book THE NANNY DIARIES is on the same list as STAR WARS: EPISODE 2 -- ATTACK OF THE CLONES after all. How many people will read both? Bounty hunters looking for a nanny?
What you do is weed out the cruft (Oprah) and see what's left over. I, for instance, didn't know there was a Star Wars book out, so that was helpful. Now I can read the book and give the ending away to everybody in line on Thursday!
My experiences with Mozilla are the opposite. It's fast on Linux, but slow on Windows. And it used to be just the opposite! It used to be like swimming through molasses on Unix.
Navigator 4.7 is still faster rendering many pages. But with the increasing complexity of some web pages (i.e. pages with tables, etc), Mozilla is faster or at least AS fast.
Even if it's a little slower than Nav 4.7X, having tabs, password manager, and nifty jog wheel stuff (use it to move back and forward), makes it worthwhile to use.
Just as a guess, I'd say most news servers only get a partial feed. Some avoid alt.binaries.* altogether certainly. And even when an ISP gets the whole shebang, they often sell access to smaller ISPs, so that the "tree" isn't nearly as nearly as big as it might be. So it's not really that bad.
If you owned an erector set you've built a crane. Which inevitably gets a wrecking ball. Which is pretty useless unless you have a nicely crafted log cabin your little sister built to knock over.
Jennings is really good at talking live; Rather struggles but is interesting nonetheless; Brokaw is slightly better than Dan but knows when to quit. Dan will just keep talking until somebody pushes him out of the chair; you've got to admire his tenacity.
Crazy: A person who keeps doing the same thing again and again expecting different results.
In must be infuriating to him why people don't agree with him when he's sure that his arguments are both correct and, to his mind anyway, persuasive. The problem is that he is still using the same tactics he used 10 years ago, but apparently hoping that the results will be different.
He knows he's right and that if people just understood his point of view that they would rally behind his cause. It's his achilles heel, his kryptonite. Blessed with intelligence but without social skills.
But I'm sure that nobody here can relate.
After trying all the browsers my conclusion is that what I'd like is parts of each all lumped together.
What's sad is that Mozilla is SOOO close to being a great browser. It just lacks the good GUI (good in the sense of responsive, fast, and usable), which has improved some over the years but not enough to give hope that things will radically change.
And as for Netscape crashing, I don't think Motif is at fault. When I ran Mozilla pre-Gecko (the version based off of 4.7), it crashed plenty and Motif wasn't the cause.
I'd love to hear from other people that have had better results though.
Great product, bad marketing. They had some 10 thousand developers signed up, open source and Linux all over the news, and a shortage of good programmers available to companies. All during a Tech boom that had companies scrambling for new ways to get work done. And yet they couldn't get enough projects.
At the start they had some interesting projects posted by HP. But after that available projects slowed nearly to a stop. The ones that did show up were from smaller companies that offered too little money, and even those were slim pickings.
It looks to me like they focused all their attention on the product and neglected the sales pitch to companies, who should have been eager participants. I don't think ``open source'' had anything to do with their failure.
I like your breakdown, basing it on the hardware. But you can also look at it from the opposite end, from the user.
A CS writes programs for users, even users who happen to be other engineers.
A CE writes programs another abstraction away from the CS, programming for programmers.
A EE writes the stuff that forms the foundation for those CS and CE hackers.
Being a CS or sorts (Math), I often envy those EE's so far from the users.
I'm interested in buying Transmeta too.
Take Paypal?
This is so true. Just visit Sourceforge and check out projects that die between working and complete. There are so few programmers who can actually finish a project. More so than pure programming ability it separates the great from the merely competent programmers.
They used water to extinguish the fires, not explosives. There was a PBS special or something on it and the quote I remember was "throw enough water at ANY fire and it will eventually go out."
The Linux community hates big binaries. Every time a piece of commercial software is talked about on /., the size of the binary gets mentioned, usually to complain how bloated it is (Wordperfect or Applixware anyone?). The same holds for free code too. You'll never read comments on a Mozilla posting without its size being mentioned by someone. Conversely, we love to mention how small the Linux kernel is compared to Windows.
And Java is BIG. My Jdk1.3 install is 187mb. You could probably install a minimal linux distribution in less space.
As for portability, Java is only as portable as its VM. Having autoconf and being able to ./configure; make; make install on any Unix-like system is a lot easier than Java, which allways seems ad-hoc and painful.
Things might change some with gcc3.0, which will probably have gcj (native java compiler) integrated in. That way, at least the startup times are small, and you won't even know your running a program written in Java.
Why not just connect to mozilla's news server? If you use slrn, add a line with server ``news.mozilla.org'' ``newsrc-mozilla'' to your .slrnrc file (so your regular newsrc file doesn't get overwritten), and run slrn -h news.mozilla.org -create to create the newsrc file.
It would be pretty hard to distinguish a simulation from a real battle then, wouldn't it? I won't ruin the ending for people who haven't read the book, but this brought to memory Orson Scott Card's book, a boy named Ender, and his training at battle school.