So the only benefit I see to ext3 (and admittedly it is a fairly significant one) is the ability to go from ext2 to ext3 without any data migration required.
Is it really that hard to convert from ext2 to ReiserFS or XFS? I've never tried it.
I just installed WinXP and converted my 10 GB FAT32 partition to NTFS. The conversion took about 2 reboots and 10 minutes. It was totally automatic, with no input necessary on my part. Is is that much harder to convert in Linux?
Yes, XOSL is not a LILO replacement. All it does to boot an OS is call that particular OS's bootloader (which must be installed on the OS's partition), which then does all the hard work itself. It's a nice way to select your OS if nothing else.
GRUB understands filesystems. This means you can drop into a simple GRUB shell and poke around your partitions looking for a kernel to boot. It's really a lifesaver if you mess some stuff up by accident. You can also change kernel boot parameters and do other stuff all from within the bootloader before your OS is loaded, making it much nicer than LILO.
(This of course could open up an interesting buisness plan - a software house that specializes in creating contracts to do work on Open Source software...)
Yes, that is a very interesting business plan. Hmmm. Imagine a company composed of developers experienced with open-source projects. Other companies, instead of buying closed-source products, pay this company to assign a developer to fix up an existing open-source project to meet their specifications. This way, companies can get the benefits of open source without doing everything themselves and they get someone to blame if something goes wrong, the open source community gets improved programs, and there is finally a workable open-source business plan!
The future of KDE Personal Information Management applications looks good. Instead of going the "me-too-Outlook-clone" route, they are keeping each application separate (but still connected). The KDE PIM website has info on the various programs in the KDE PIM suite, and this page has a roadmap for future development for 3.0.
After actually using XP, I have to say that MS did more than make their interface candy-colored: They actually improved its usability at the same time. Here are some of the improvements I've noticed:
The new window min/max/close buttons are twice the size of the old ones, making them MUCH easier and faster to hit with the mouse. I'm surprised how much I like this.
The start button actually extends all the way to the bottom-left of the screen, finally obeying Fitt's law. You can hit it much faster now.
The taskbar buttons likewise extend all the way to the bottom of the screen, making it faster to hit them.
An auto-hidden taskbar always pops up immediately instead of sliding for faster access.
Toolbars are locked into place until you want to customize them, preventing you from accidentally grabbing them and moving them when you don't want to, and freeing up the screen space that the resize handles used to take up.
The system tray hides unused icons for much much less clutter.
Some other things about XP:
The "Help and Support center" is quite useful. Yesterday I learned all about the new features of the command shell using it (tab completion woohoo!). It has a nice batch file command reference, and everything is well-written. It's almost as good as having man pages for everything.
The new start menu takes some getting used to, but it is at least no worse than the old one. I like the way it presents you with your six most commonly used applications (but I don't like how it gives IE and Outlook preferential treatment at the top).
No, I find that XP reboots randomly while changing the screensaver, bypassing the BSOD entirely.
Okay, so I'm certain that the problem is my video drivers (all the GL screensavers are 3D accelerated now) and not Windows XP. It's still annoying though.
GRUB co-exists just fine with XP. I recently installed XP, then converted my fat32 partition to NTFS (it doesn't do it automatically). Through it all, GRUB continued to work just fine. Actually, I was somewhat surprised that WinXP didn't try to overwrite it with a bootloader of its own.
Some of the changes appear to allow KDE users the option to run Nautilus. My question is why? Why would a KDE user use Nautilus instead of Konqueror?
I'm serious here. I've never used Nautilus. What features does it have that Konqueror doesn't? How do they compare in speed now that all these optimizations have been made?
I'm thinking of a suburban neighborhood with lots of school-age kids. I think a NAN would be good for a place like that too. Of course, a NAN wouldn't be workable for a lot of places, but there are a lot of suburban housing developments going up all over the place, at least in California. In these developments are lots of fairly well-off people, living close together, many with school-age children interested in the Internet and computers who have friends in the same neighborhood. Kids who play computer games and download MP3s. Seems like the perfect place for a NAN to me.
Metricom wasn't the same thing. They were providing wireless Internet access in small areas of a few cities to the very small percentage of people who both could afford and wanted small internet devices. A NAN could be set up anywhere you have a fairly large number of people with computers living in close proximity, i.e. suburbia. An 'out of the box' solution that would allow neighbors to wirelessly connect their computers into a local network might be something that could take off, even if it didn't provide access to the larger Internet by itself.
The same goes for the corparate world; do most small, medium, or big businesses need to be connected into the Internet? Probably not, but, it sure is nice to be, and prospective users of NAN's are going to think the same way.
Then they can buy their own internet connection. I'm not talking about a choice between the Internet and a NaN, I'm talking about each computer being connected both to the NaN, and to the Internet by a seperate link such as a dial-up connection. You would still have the Internet, you just wouldn't get a fast connection to it through the NaN. The NaN would be a separate network all to itself, and it would still be useful because it is very high-speed and low-latency for local stuff.
I do not know where you live, but I certainly do NOT want my neighbors MP3's, if the even know what a MP3 is (hey, some people do not, really), and I am sure I do not want their files,
I live in a college, where we have a land-line network. Everyone shares their MP3s. It's really great to be able to browse your friend's MP3s and download them in literally seconds. Videos and other large files work the same way, and networked games are awesome. Just because you don't like your particular neighbor's taste in music doesn't mean that you wouldn't find something you liked on an entire neighborhood network. And if a neighborhood network was established, there would be lots of cool things you could do with it.
If I wanted to share with my peer group, I would, hmmmm... go out to the Internet, hit up some IRC, Usenet/ or/. problem solved.
Unless you have a 56K. Then you have to wait for hours to download songs. This way you can swap files with your friends in your neighborhood essentialy instantly, faster than even a cable connection.
A Neighborhood Network wouldn't need a connection to the Internet to be useful. You could play network games, share music and videos, transfer computer files, use it as a videophone, whatever, all without an Internet connection. Just the MP3 sharing aspect of it would be enough for many people to want it. Everyone can buy their own Internet connection if they want it, seperately from the neighborhood network. The logistics and cost of providing an internet connection through the neighborhood network can be entirely avoided.
How about this: Everyone buys their own seperate connection to the Internet, and the NaN is simply used for high-bandwidth low-latency neighborhood communication, not connected to the Internet? That way people can share their files or play games or do whatever through a nice fast local network, and the Internet is still there for longer-distance communication, and you don't have to worry about paying for an Internet connection. With that cost out of the way, there's essentially no cost to the network and everyone can connect for free.
Someone needs to write some point-and-click software for Windows to set up a network like this. Something where you could go to the store, buy some wireless network cards, plug them into some computers, run this software, and have an instant network. If it is easy enough, people will start doing it. The killer app would be MP3 sharing - Everyone in the neighborhood can share their MP3s at 1000x the speed of their puny modems that they had before. It would be great! Once the network was established, new uses for it would start coming out of the woodwork; uses so novel that we haven't even thought of them yet.
Even more usability fun: Drag the My Computer icon onto the taskbar, then move the resulting bar as far to the right as possible. Haven't you always wanted the Control Panel as a pull-out menu? Not to mention the entire contents of all your drives. This works for any directory as well. Create a directory of quick shortcuts to your favorite programs and make it a menu!
Apps have the potential to run just as fast (faster even) on Linux using WINE as they do on "real" Windows. There is no emulation going on, WINE is simply an implementation of Win32 for Linux.
Someone earlier mentioned that DirectX is becoming a standard for audio effects plugins - WINE could be used to run these plugins in much the same manner as mplayer or whatever its called runs Windows video codecs under Linux (x86 only, though).
Scanning the spot across a large surface wouldn't make the large surface appear to all be as brightly lit as the spot - it would make the whole large surface appear to be dimly lit. For retention to work the image must form on your eye first, but if the image is only in one position for a fraction of a second, it won't get formed in the first place.
Why do TVs work then, you ask? Well, the phosphors on your TV are individually much much brighter than an LED shined on a surface from some distance away. Also, the phosphors continue to glow for some time after the electron beam has already passed.
Re:Oh yea! Especailly the new Harry Potter set!
on
Battle Over Blocks
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The reason so many people hate the new sets is the proliferation of "special pieces." It used to be that lots of Lego sets came with special pieces such as hinges, turntables, and such, but they could always be used in your own models, and most of the pieces were still good old vanilla lego bricks. Now it seems that it is impossible to buy a set without over half of its pieces being large, oddly shaped pieces that can hardly be used in any way other than to build the set in the instructions. Regular lego blocks make up fewer and fewer of the actual pieces. It hinders the creativity aspect when you can only build one thing from your lego pieces. Its sort of missing the point. Legos just become some sort of model kit like a model airplane, which isn't what Legos should be.
this has nothing to do with audio playback, which has no latency sensitivity (because of buffering)
Unless you're writing a game, where sounds have to happen at specific times synchronized with events on-screen. Or you're in KDE and you want a "minimize" sound effect to happen when you press the button, not a second afterward. Or you're writing a media player and you want to have an EQ that responds immediately rather than a second from now, making it a tedious chore to adjust the settings.
Large latency is very noticable in these situations. While it may sound like pointless whining to complain about the "minimize" sound effect being a second late, it really creates a bad perception in the user's mind about the speed of KDE. These things are actually important.
XMMS is Winamp 2, for all intents and purposes. It is an almost exact clone. Winamp is the best MP3 player out there for Windows right now (IMHO), it is small and fast and flexible and does its job well, much like XMMS.
Winamp 3 is the next version of Winamp with better skins and plugin support, and an MP3 database that lets you load in all your music, then select and sort it by artist, genre, album, year, and whatever else is contained in an ID3 tag. It might be good when its finished, but its a long way from being finished right now. So basically, Winamp 3 will be like what XMMS 2 might be like, if such a thing were made.
soloution: buy more memory.... Please. we're dying out here.
Seriously... go to pricewatch.com, look at the bottom of the page. 128 MB of PC133 RAM is 5 FREEKING DOLLARS!!! Buy some RAM!
What I can't understand is that if you go to Best Buy or Circuit City, all the computers that they are selling still have only 128 MB of RAM. To get more you've got to go into the $2000+ range, or upgrade it yourself. What is the problem here? New computers nowadays should have 256 MB at the very least, what with RAM prices these days. Why are they selling computers with the bare minimum of RAM and processor speeds in the GHz range?
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Wow, that stinks. How come Microsoft could make a FAT32 to NTFS converter and no one can make an ext2 to XFS or ReiserFS converter?
Is it really that hard to convert from ext2 to ReiserFS or XFS? I've never tried it.
I just installed WinXP and converted my 10 GB FAT32 partition to NTFS. The conversion took about 2 reboots and 10 minutes. It was totally automatic, with no input necessary on my part. Is is that much harder to convert in Linux?
That's correct. The original post I was replying to said that it didn't look like XOSL could replace LILO, so I said yes, he was correct, it couldn't.
Yes, XOSL is not a LILO replacement. All it does to boot an OS is call that particular OS's bootloader (which must be installed on the OS's partition), which then does all the hard work itself. It's a nice way to select your OS if nothing else.
GRUB understands filesystems. This means you can drop into a simple GRUB shell and poke around your partitions looking for a kernel to boot. It's really a lifesaver if you mess some stuff up by accident. You can also change kernel boot parameters and do other stuff all from within the bootloader before your OS is loaded, making it much nicer than LILO.
Yes, that is a very interesting business plan. Hmmm. Imagine a company composed of developers experienced with open-source projects. Other companies, instead of buying closed-source products, pay this company to assign a developer to fix up an existing open-source project to meet their specifications. This way, companies can get the benefits of open source without doing everything themselves and they get someone to blame if something goes wrong, the open source community gets improved programs, and there is finally a workable open-source business plan!
The future of KDE Personal Information Management applications looks good. Instead of going the "me-too-Outlook-clone" route, they are keeping each application separate (but still connected). The KDE PIM website has info on the various programs in the KDE PIM suite, and this page has a roadmap for future development for 3.0.
- The new window min/max/close buttons are twice the size of the old ones, making them MUCH easier and faster to hit with the mouse. I'm surprised how much I like this.
- The start button actually extends all the way to the bottom-left of the screen, finally obeying Fitt's law. You can hit it much faster now.
- The taskbar buttons likewise extend all the way to the bottom of the screen, making it faster to hit them.
- An auto-hidden taskbar always pops up immediately instead of sliding for faster access.
- Toolbars are locked into place until you want to customize them, preventing you from accidentally grabbing them and moving them when you don't want to, and freeing up the screen space that the resize handles used to take up.
- The system tray hides unused icons for much much less clutter.
Some other things about XP:Okay, so I'm certain that the problem is my video drivers (all the GL screensavers are 3D accelerated now) and not Windows XP. It's still annoying though.
GRUB co-exists just fine with XP. I recently installed XP, then converted my fat32 partition to NTFS (it doesn't do it automatically). Through it all, GRUB continued to work just fine. Actually, I was somewhat surprised that WinXP didn't try to overwrite it with a bootloader of its own.
I'm serious here. I've never used Nautilus. What features does it have that Konqueror doesn't? How do they compare in speed now that all these optimizations have been made?
Metricom wasn't the same thing. They were providing wireless Internet access in small areas of a few cities to the very small percentage of people who both could afford and wanted small internet devices. A NAN could be set up anywhere you have a fairly large number of people with computers living in close proximity, i.e. suburbia. An 'out of the box' solution that would allow neighbors to wirelessly connect their computers into a local network might be something that could take off, even if it didn't provide access to the larger Internet by itself.
Then they can buy their own internet connection. I'm not talking about a choice between the Internet and a NaN, I'm talking about each computer being connected both to the NaN, and to the Internet by a seperate link such as a dial-up connection. You would still have the Internet, you just wouldn't get a fast connection to it through the NaN. The NaN would be a separate network all to itself, and it would still be useful because it is very high-speed and low-latency for local stuff.
I do not know where you live, but I certainly do NOT want my neighbors MP3's, if the even know what a MP3 is (hey, some people do not, really), and I am sure I do not want their files,
I live in a college, where we have a land-line network. Everyone shares their MP3s. It's really great to be able to browse your friend's MP3s and download them in literally seconds. Videos and other large files work the same way, and networked games are awesome. Just because you don't like your particular neighbor's taste in music doesn't mean that you wouldn't find something you liked on an entire neighborhood network. And if a neighborhood network was established, there would be lots of cool things you could do with it.
If I wanted to share with my peer group, I would, hmmmm... go out to the Internet, hit up some IRC, Usenet/ or /. problem solved.
Unless you have a 56K. Then you have to wait for hours to download songs. This way you can swap files with your friends in your neighborhood essentialy instantly, faster than even a cable connection.
A Neighborhood Network wouldn't need a connection to the Internet to be useful. You could play network games, share music and videos, transfer computer files, use it as a videophone, whatever, all without an Internet connection. Just the MP3 sharing aspect of it would be enough for many people to want it. Everyone can buy their own Internet connection if they want it, seperately from the neighborhood network. The logistics and cost of providing an internet connection through the neighborhood network can be entirely avoided.
Someone needs to write some point-and-click software for Windows to set up a network like this. Something where you could go to the store, buy some wireless network cards, plug them into some computers, run this software, and have an instant network. If it is easy enough, people will start doing it. The killer app would be MP3 sharing - Everyone in the neighborhood can share their MP3s at 1000x the speed of their puny modems that they had before. It would be great! Once the network was established, new uses for it would start coming out of the woodwork; uses so novel that we haven't even thought of them yet.
What? That's what prior art is for! If you don't patent it no one else can, because you have prior art.
And aside from the fact that that is exactly the way it works, we shouldn't have any problems, right?
Even more usability fun: Drag the My Computer icon onto the taskbar, then move the resulting bar as far to the right as possible. Haven't you always wanted the Control Panel as a pull-out menu? Not to mention the entire contents of all your drives. This works for any directory as well. Create a directory of quick shortcuts to your favorite programs and make it a menu!
Do you use the preemptible kernel patches?
Apps have the potential to run just as fast (faster even) on Linux using WINE as they do on "real" Windows. There is no emulation going on, WINE is simply an implementation of Win32 for Linux.
Someone earlier mentioned that DirectX is becoming a standard for audio effects plugins - WINE could be used to run these plugins in much the same manner as mplayer or whatever its called runs Windows video codecs under Linux (x86 only, though).
Why do TVs work then, you ask? Well, the phosphors on your TV are individually much much brighter than an LED shined on a surface from some distance away. Also, the phosphors continue to glow for some time after the electron beam has already passed.
The reason so many people hate the new sets is the proliferation of "special pieces." It used to be that lots of Lego sets came with special pieces such as hinges, turntables, and such, but they could always be used in your own models, and most of the pieces were still good old vanilla lego bricks. Now it seems that it is impossible to buy a set without over half of its pieces being large, oddly shaped pieces that can hardly be used in any way other than to build the set in the instructions. Regular lego blocks make up fewer and fewer of the actual pieces. It hinders the creativity aspect when you can only build one thing from your lego pieces. Its sort of missing the point. Legos just become some sort of model kit like a model airplane, which isn't what Legos should be.
Unless you're writing a game, where sounds have to happen at specific times synchronized with events on-screen. Or you're in KDE and you want a "minimize" sound effect to happen when you press the button, not a second afterward. Or you're writing a media player and you want to have an EQ that responds immediately rather than a second from now, making it a tedious chore to adjust the settings.
Large latency is very noticable in these situations. While it may sound like pointless whining to complain about the "minimize" sound effect being a second late, it really creates a bad perception in the user's mind about the speed of KDE. These things are actually important.
Winamp 3 is the next version of Winamp with better skins and plugin support, and an MP3 database that lets you load in all your music, then select and sort it by artist, genre, album, year, and whatever else is contained in an ID3 tag. It might be good when its finished, but its a long way from being finished right now. So basically, Winamp 3 will be like what XMMS 2 might be like, if such a thing were made.
Seriously... go to pricewatch.com, look at the bottom of the page. 128 MB of PC133 RAM is 5 FREEKING DOLLARS!!! Buy some RAM!
What I can't understand is that if you go to Best Buy or Circuit City, all the computers that they are selling still have only 128 MB of RAM. To get more you've got to go into the $2000+ range, or upgrade it yourself. What is the problem here? New computers nowadays should have 256 MB at the very least, what with RAM prices these days. Why are they selling computers with the bare minimum of RAM and processor speeds in the GHz range?