I don't see how the killer NIC was found to do anything. That page contains no benchmarks at all.
The page I did see with benchmarks used the most unscientific way of doing it -- testing the game with and without, but get this, not by running a standard demo, but by having people play it. Given the small margin this claims to win you can skew the average framerate easily, just look at more intensive places if you want to drop it, or at a wall if you want to raise it.
Win2K at least here was adopted quite enthusiastically. Win95/98/ME had many problems, including frequent crashes and GDI/USER resource exhaustion. Want to run two copies of something big like 3D Studio Max? In Win9x you couldn't, because it used more than half of the USER/GDI resources that were available. Plus that sometimes leaked. Every techie I know got Win2K very fast, and the local geeks distributed pirated CDs to all their friends because it cut down on the amount of times people asked them to help with computer problems.
WinXP in my experience wasn't nowhere as well received, but wasn't that negative. It doesn't seem to have the Vista stigma. Here we're still on Win2K. But the reasons not to upgrade to XP and not to upgrade to Vista are different.
XP simply doesn't add anything very necessary for what we use it here. So upgrading would be pretty much a waste of time and increase hardware requirements. My attitude to XP is pretty much "Well, eh, it's pretty, but why bother". Now if I was replacing all the hardware at once I probably wouldn't have much against it.
Now Vista has a real reputation of being a bad deal. Dramatic increase of system requirements, new IT issues to deal with, compatibility issues... unlike XP it doesn't just not add anything I couldn't live without, but it also brings a whole heap of new problems, which is the real problem with it.
Coworker recently bought a laptop and brought it here. We booted it up and started messing with it. Two hours later we both concluded "Ugh, what a pain in the ass". I think he's going to install XP on it now.
Let's say we can actually remove the brain of a clone and keep the body somewhat intact for spare parts.
That would present an ethical problem, but it's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about growing bodies that never had a brain in the first place.
Looking at the past history and current society, it would be certain that some individual would find a way to (and would really want to) have sex with the body.
Since reproduction/procreation is a purely physical process that does not need brain interaction to work properly. We would then end up with legitimate children of a body and a jerk. How would you classify those children. Are they children of the living mom whose body produced the child, simply child of a body and what would be their social ranking/role/responsibilities.
Growing a body without a brain would probably be done by genetic manipulation, which I imagine would result in children that would die during development. And since that's the case you might as well make the clone sterile, solving that problem.
So the ethical question will remain: if we are CAPABLE of doing something, that doesn't mean that DOING it is ethical. Self-evident? Sure it is, but we stupid hairless apes can't even agree on the morality of convenience-killing our not-quite-born young, do you think we're ready to resolve the question about whether we 'should' be growing what will for all intents be PEOPLE for their spare-part value?
Well, my assumption is that we'd grow organs, not a full human to then remove the brain.
I don't think it can be reasonably argued that a brain-less clone is a person since the medical definition of death is that the brain is non-functional. And if a collection of alive (transplantable ) organs without a brain is somehow a person, what does that mean for transplantation?
Hell, there are credible reports that the most populous country on the planet is selling the organs of prisoners on the black market, how big a step is this from that?
Er, huge difference? Selling organs from prisoners involves mutilating a living intelligent being. Growing a full body without a brain is just growing tissue, something we already routinely do, except more complex.
Certainly the duplicate would insist that it was indeed 'you', because it genuinely thinks that it is. But, if we destroyed your original body, would your consciousness resume in the duplicate? Or would this-instance-of-you end, and someone exactly like you take over?
My guess is that it wouldn't be me. I see it this way:
Imagine you've duplicated your body and are now working on the brain. You assemble it neuron by neuron (ignore the impracticality for the sake of the argument). Will there be a point where you add a neuron and your perspective suddenly changes from seeing your clone on an operation table to feeling yourself lie on the table and seeing the original operate the brain building machine?
I can't think of any reason why should such a thing happen. In my view, a transporter is simply doing that except much faster.
Writers live off of royalties- unless they're on a full time writing staff job, such as those who work in television writing teams, they're completely dependent on royalties to survive. Writing movies would not be a sustainable way to make a living if not for royalties.
And what stops them from demanding a contract with a hourly rate, or asking for a higher price?
So, this has EVERYTHING to do with the WGA strike, because they're striking based on lack of royalties from new media distribution.
It's a contract issue. If they aren't happy with royalties they should negotiate a different form of payment.
Programming is a 9-5 kind of job- writing is not- good movie scripts don't happen just day after day on a mechanical work schedule like code- they spend months working on a piece of work, if not longer, then submit it for a sale price, and rely on royalties from their work thereafter. Scripts only sell for 10's of thousands in most cases. It's the same way novel writers sustain themselves.
Programming is the kind of job you make it be. Several options:
A. Work a 9-5 job B. Write your own software and sell copies C. Contractor at a hourly rate D. Contractor charging for the completed work E. Writing a money generating program (poker playing bot, website that provides a service, etc)
Myself I do A, C and D, and think B is a bad idea and getting worse by the day.
I don't see what's so different about writing that options C and D are not possible.
These simply aren't salaried positions. The writing market depends on manic depression and torrential bursts of talent!
Nobody said it had to be salaried
Notice that writing jobs aren't farmed out to developing companies like programming jobs.
I think this has more to do with culture than anything else. Programming is the same everywhere, but finding somebody in India who can write for an american public is probably quite challenging.
Indeed not. What you do is to first block everything, then unblock only what's needed.
This is really not all that hard to setup. It runs a web server? Ok, open port 80. It needs to run SSH? Open port 22, if possible restricted to the ip addresses the admin uses (this can backfire if the admin needs to administrate using a PDA in the middle of nowhere though)
Firewalling is really quite easy on that level. Now if you want to do things manually with iptables then you need a good knowledge of TCP/IP, and a good understanding of how things get filtered. Firewalling a server should be pretty easy, but if you have users it can be pretty tricky to have a configuration that provides security without driving people mad
No, but seriously I think the technical challenges created by somehow genetically modifying a human to have no brain or a significantly modified zero-consciousness brain are far, far, greater than those that were up against cloning. I suspect that cloning helps us create brainless organ-donors in the same way that the wheel helped us create space rockets.
Why, this even happens naturally. People are born with all sorts of horrific malformations, some of which include no brain, and probably being born as a vegetable as well. It's probably much faster to figure it out from that than try to do it from scratch.
Of course a problem with doing things this way is that the clone's genetic code would include all this extreme brain damage, making it probably impossible to reproduce normally.
I'm a programmer. I charge by the hour. Once you pay me, I couldn't care less what happens with it after that. Same way I don't see why the WGA would need to have any concern about what happens to the movie. Once the work is done and they're paid, it's not their problem.
Payment per copy sold of an infinitely duplicable product isn't a stable way of doing business these days. Payment per work done however continues working perfectly fine.
Grow a clone without a brain to avoid the ethical implications. Keep it safely stored (frozen in liquid nitrogen?). If you need a transplant of anything you can get a new organ, fully compatible, and even better than before (lungs undamaged by smoke/contamination, etc).
Might work as a way of living longer. Heart is not doing so well when you're 70? Replace it with one from a 20 year old clone.
I could see modified clones being used. A gender swapped clone, a clone with blue eyes, fixed genetics to avoid diseases and cancer, etc. If you could move your brain to a new clone and keep this up long enough I could see people building a "perfect self", by fixing all the defects in each new iteration that they found in the previous body.
Rentals work perfectly fine without DRM. In fact piracy of rented games can provide profit that usually wouldn't exist.
This was quite long ago, back when CD burners were a new thing, so most people didn't have one. Speeds were about 4-8X IIRC.
Children can easily get enough money for a rental, but have a noticeably harder time getting enough to buy the game. So what they'd often do is rent the game and immediately pirate it.
Funnily enough, around here there was a place with an arrangement that was just perfect for this. Both the shop that rented games and the one that copied them were located one right next to the other. This was inside a building full of small shops. The arrangement was that of a hollow square, with shops on both sides of the corridor.
So what people would do is rent a game, exit towards the stairs as if to exit the shop (to avoid annoying the shopkeeper), but instead of doing that walk the loop until they ended up at the shop that copied CDs. A short while later they'd have their copy, and return the rental a day or two later. This also ensured the copy worked properly.
The guy who rented games didn't like this all that much, but if somebody only has $10, they aren't going to pay for a $30 game with that. For children $30 is a significant investment. So if they didn't rent it, they probably would not pay anything at all for it, and just find a friend and copy something of theirs instead.
For the shop that copied CDs, they were more than happy enough to accept CDs obviously coming from the rental shop.
Interestingly enough, despite the rampant piracy everybody made cash. The rental shop owner obviously paid for the rental copies. People rented his stuff so he got paid too. And the CD copying shop profited quite nicely as well. Making piracy impossible would mean that couldn't afford to pay the full price wouldn't rent at all, and hence nobody but the copy shop would get paid.
Now this is of course for physical goods. If DRM is indeed necessary for online rental, I won't miss the lack of it, as I regard DRM as a much greater evil.
KMail has very good support for it. Thunderbird with Enigmail works nicely too.
The problem with crypto is that it's hard to understand. You can create a key, set up kmail, and teach your grandma to enter the passphrase when asked, but that won't be secure. Public key crypto needs the users to follow the proper procedure for exchanging keys and verifying signatures, and explanations of how all that works sounds terribly boring to many people.
That 60 MB/s is almost never attainable in practice.
SATA drives have a seek latency of about 9ms. This means that the drive can perform 111 seeks per second. Assume a very pessimistic scenario of reading a 2KB cluster. Your drive's performance is now about 200KB/s.
For an expensive and low capacity SCSI drive, you can get 3.3ms, with about 600KB/s worst case scenario.
This is assuming you're actually reading data you're interested in. Some of that will involve reading filesystem metadata, which from the user's POV isn't what you're actually interested in. For a directory with lots of small files I imagine you could get maybe half of that performance.
I've seen SSD latency being quoted to be around 0.01ms. The same calculation above gives 195MB/s, assuming reading takes no extra time (which is false)
From this you can see that a hard disk is highly limited by seek latency, while a SSD is much more limited by read/write speed.
DRM makes new media real to people working in entertainment and production- people who rely on very accurate tracking of views/sales to make their bread. If you are pro linux desktop, you need to be supporting an open DRM option as opposed to no DRM at all- and I mean option. We should encourage open media whenever possible, but allow for DRM in cases where its necessary for artist/production payment schemes.
No. I don't support DRM, period.
If it uses DRM, I don't buy it or use it. If it even supports DRM (portable music players say), I will specifically look for the device that either supports none or has the least amount of it.
Linux is about choice, right? If you want to see a version of the linux world that is not compatible with the consumer market, look at Stallman and the FSF. The elimination of the market is not a market viable option.
And I should care about the market why exactly? I used Debian for a long time. RMS liked, IIRC. It worked perfectly fine for me.
I don't see how linux operates without company constraints. It is far more constrained in that it is reliant on multiple-company "coalitions" to get any major change done. Apple or Microsoft can simply say "you know, screw our former base" and create a more modern vision for their system in a single generation- they have total platform control with a hierarchy of talent and experience. That's real organization.
Haha. Whoever at MS or Apple says "let's screw our userbase" won't keep their job for very long. MS is well known for maintaining backwards compatibility for a very long time. Apple shipped emulators to compensate for an architecture change. They certainly have broken compatibility, but that's not something that is done easily or often.
I didn't mean precisely that, however. What I mean is that companies have to deal with issues that aren't relevant to many Linux distributions. Including a popup blocker in IE was probably a major decision for MS -- what if our partners get annoyed, or people block ads on MSN? How can we implement this feature in such a way that we can say "See, we have that too", while not creating a conflict with another division? MS also isn't going to let you run Windows on a 32-way box, or have the box be a domain controller without asking for a good deal of extra cash, while Linux distributions need not have any artificial limits like that.
There is life outside of unix, you know.
Tried it. Many times. I used MS-DOS, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, PTS-DOS, OS/2 Warp, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2000, NT 3.51, NT4. I maintained many Windows boxes. I currently prefer Linux to all of that.
I'll eat my words when I see open source solutions that are both A) Not corporate and B) not alternatives.
Many Linux distributions are non-commercial. Debian and Gentoo for example. What do you mean by "not alternatives" though?
I hate to break it to you, but A) the WRT54G isn't an access point, it's a NAT router that happens to have an AP built into it
You're clutching at straws here. It works as a WiFi AP, and that's what matters.
and B) the new versions DON'T run Linux, they use vxworks. Presumably Cisco wasn't very impressed by being forced to release their code and opted for a solution that they could control better.
What is this "their code"? An access point that runs Linux has a kernel and software the vast percentage of which weren't written by Cisco. At best Cisco added a driver for the chipset and some code for the web interface. Hardly a huge sacrifice compared to the amount of code they got for free. Not to mention that nothing stops them from using a closed source kernel module and writing the CGI scripts in some compiled language.
No, the reason the new versions don't run Linux is that vxworks can be made to work using less RAM and Flash space, which costs less to manufacture.
Linux certainly has it easier in applications like cell phones, but I'm not so sure of that domination will have to wait for the death of the desktop. I don't think the desktop will die completely, for that matter.
Microsoft seems to be having trouble coming up with a good reason for a new Windows version. IMO, the last Windows version that was good was Win2K. There's some point where an operating system, or any application for that matter, really does all it's supposed to do.
Once you get to that point, there's little of importance to add, so you start piling up eyecandy and pointless features. You can see this in things like antiviruses. Once you have an antivirus that does what it's supposed to, what do you add to distinguish it from the competition? It seems that this currently means custom GUI widgets that are often less usable than the native ones. Windows seems to be going through something like that.
On the other hand, Linux still has a way to go in the desktop area, and has the advantage of that it can easily choose not to include annoying things Microsoft does (DRM, say). Linux, being able to deliver without being subject to the constraints of a company, can ultimately reach a point where it can provide things MS can't.
For example, with Windows you have to pay $$$ to get a domain controller. With Linux you don't need to pay extra, and in fact Samba makes it possible to make a box that works as one that's cheaper than just the MS license for the OS.
There was a story here some time ago about that there are WiFi access points running Linux at Microsoft. The WRT54G access points are very well known even by people who don't know how to use Linux. Linux runs on various other embedded devices as well. Linux is big in the server arena, especially for cheap web hosting and such. Very big operations (Google, Akamai, etc) run massive amounts of Linux boxes.
The desktop will get there eventually. I hear more and more about Ubuntu making excellent progress, and thanks to Linux being open that means that any improvements to one distribution can propagate to other ones as well.
Well, I would ramble on more about voltage flux warnings etc, but I have to run and change my print toner... I have less than 1000 pages left!
Well, it depends on how you use the printer. Here I'm sitting near a printer used to print product catalogs. 1000 pages left is a sign of that if there's no extra toner left, ordering some now would be a very good idea.
Really the right thing to do would be making the threshold configurable. Also depending on the cartridge, the precise amount of toner might be hard to measure.
The default appearance in SL is female, so unless the bot changes its appearance, it's going to look female.
Bots, when created appear naked due to the bot's user not bothering to write the code needed to make it wear some clothes, or logging in under the account to put something on. This makes them very recognizable though, so I expect at some point the bot runners will start dressing them.
I got to agree with Ash on that they're pretty ugly. Not enough fur.
Bullshit. Somebody released it already, there was a torrent somewhere IIRC.
There's nothing useful in MS code for pretty much anybody.
For those who'd like to improve on it, it's effectively pointless, as any attempt to release any improvement will result in a lawsuit from MS.
For those who'd like to reuse parts of the code, it's basically a death sentence for whatever project (open or not) they're involved in, as well as their professional carreer. Even if somehow it doesn't get to that it'll mean very serious problems at the very least.
For those who'd like to learn from it without copying anything, it's also dangerous, as one day MS might accuse them of copying parts of the Windows source.
For those who don't give a damn about it, it's still bad, as it gives MS a way to create problems for projects closely related to Windows like Wine and ReactOS, even if they never, ever saw a line of the original source.
Maybe about the only sort of person who benefits from it is the sort looking for holes to exploit in the OS to profit from, but even that is doable just fine without the source anyway, and somebody taking advantage of security exploits for money is infringing several laws already in any case. I don't think this kind is a significant part of the slashdot population.
If anybody gave me a CD with that, I'd grind it into tiny pieces, burn it, then scatter the ashes.
What people think in India is largely irrelevant to me. If they think the Earth is flat then that's their problem.
The US however has the annoying tendency of pushing their insanity on the rest of the civilized part of the planet. But the way things are going they'll probably descent to third world levels of education soon enough, so the problem will solve itself eventually. I only hope the nukes stop being usable before that happens.
I brought this subject up several times in a conversation with europeans. Those who don't follow slashdot and similar sites hadn't heard about the concept of "intelligent design" at all, and needed it explained. And all of them went "WTF?" at the explanation.
The vast majority of the population hasn't even heard of ID. All the religious arguments I participated in (and there were quite a few) always revolved around the existence/inexistence of a deity, evolution wasn't brought up even once.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how the killer NIC was found to do anything. That page contains no benchmarks at all.
The page I did see with benchmarks used the most unscientific way of doing it -- testing the game with and without, but get this, not by running a standard demo, but by having people play it. Given the small margin this claims to win you can skew the average framerate easily, just look at more intensive places if you want to drop it, or at a wall if you want to raise it.
Actually, not really.
Win2K at least here was adopted quite enthusiastically. Win95/98/ME had many problems, including frequent crashes and GDI/USER resource exhaustion. Want to run two copies of something big like 3D Studio Max? In Win9x you couldn't, because it used more than half of the USER/GDI resources that were available. Plus that sometimes leaked. Every techie I know got Win2K very fast, and the local geeks distributed pirated CDs to all their friends because it cut down on the amount of times people asked them to help with computer problems.
WinXP in my experience wasn't nowhere as well received, but wasn't that negative. It doesn't seem to have the Vista stigma. Here we're still on Win2K. But the reasons not to upgrade to XP and not to upgrade to Vista are different.
XP simply doesn't add anything very necessary for what we use it here. So upgrading would be pretty much a waste of time and increase hardware requirements. My attitude to XP is pretty much "Well, eh, it's pretty, but why bother". Now if I was replacing all the hardware at once I probably wouldn't have much against it.
Now Vista has a real reputation of being a bad deal. Dramatic increase of system requirements, new IT issues to deal with, compatibility issues... unlike XP it doesn't just not add anything I couldn't live without, but it also brings a whole heap of new problems, which is the real problem with it.
Coworker recently bought a laptop and brought it here. We booted it up and started messing with it. Two hours later we both concluded "Ugh, what a pain in the ass". I think he's going to install XP on it now.
That would present an ethical problem, but it's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about growing bodies that never had a brain in the first place.
Growing a body without a brain would probably be done by genetic manipulation, which I imagine would result in children that would die during development. And since that's the case you might as well make the clone sterile, solving that problem.
Well, my assumption is that we'd grow organs, not a full human to then remove the brain.
I don't think it can be reasonably argued that a brain-less clone is a person since the medical definition of death is that the brain is non-functional. And if a collection of alive (transplantable ) organs without a brain is somehow a person, what does that mean for transplantation?
Er, huge difference? Selling organs from prisoners involves mutilating a living intelligent being. Growing a full body without a brain is just growing tissue, something we already routinely do, except more complex.
My guess is that it wouldn't be me. I see it this way:
Imagine you've duplicated your body and are now working on the brain. You assemble it neuron by neuron (ignore the impracticality for the sake of the argument). Will there be a point where you add a neuron and your perspective suddenly changes from seeing your clone on an operation table to feeling yourself lie on the table and seeing the original operate the brain building machine?
I can't think of any reason why should such a thing happen. In my view, a transporter is simply doing that except much faster.
You really don't see a difference between removing somebody's brain and growing a body that didn't have one in the first place?
Do you then think there's something wrong with growing replacement parts (been done with ears for example)?
What's the ethical difference between growing a new ear and growing a full set of organs, brain excluded?
Absolutely not
And what stops them from demanding a contract with a hourly rate, or asking for a higher price?
It's a contract issue. If they aren't happy with royalties they should negotiate a different form of payment.
Programming is the kind of job you make it be. Several options:
A. Work a 9-5 job
B. Write your own software and sell copies
C. Contractor at a hourly rate
D. Contractor charging for the completed work
E. Writing a money generating program (poker playing bot, website that provides a service, etc)
Myself I do A, C and D, and think B is a bad idea and getting worse by the day.
I don't see what's so different about writing that options C and D are not possible.
Nobody said it had to be salaried
I think this has more to do with culture than anything else. Programming is the same everywhere, but finding somebody in India who can write for an american public is probably quite challenging.
Indeed not. What you do is to first block everything, then unblock only what's needed.
This is really not all that hard to setup. It runs a web server? Ok, open port 80. It needs to run SSH? Open port 22, if possible restricted to the ip addresses the admin uses (this can backfire if the admin needs to administrate using a PDA in the middle of nowhere though)
Firewalling is really quite easy on that level. Now if you want to do things manually with iptables then you need a good knowledge of TCP/IP, and a good understanding of how things get filtered. Firewalling a server should be pretty easy, but if you have users it can be pretty tricky to have a configuration that provides security without driving people mad
Why, this even happens naturally. People are born with all sorts of horrific malformations, some of which include no brain, and probably being born as a vegetable as well. It's probably much faster to figure it out from that than try to do it from scratch.
Of course a problem with doing things this way is that the clone's genetic code would include all this extreme brain damage, making it probably impossible to reproduce normally.
What's the WGA got to do with DRM?
I'm a programmer. I charge by the hour. Once you pay me, I couldn't care less what happens with it after that. Same way I don't see why the WGA would need to have any concern about what happens to the movie. Once the work is done and they're paid, it's not their problem.
Payment per copy sold of an infinitely duplicable product isn't a stable way of doing business these days. Payment per work done however continues working perfectly fine.
Replacement parts.
Grow a clone without a brain to avoid the ethical implications. Keep it safely stored (frozen in liquid nitrogen?). If you need a transplant of anything you can get a new organ, fully compatible, and even better than before (lungs undamaged by smoke/contamination, etc).
Might work as a way of living longer. Heart is not doing so well when you're 70? Replace it with one from a 20 year old clone.
I could see modified clones being used. A gender swapped clone, a clone with blue eyes, fixed genetics to avoid diseases and cancer, etc. If you could move your brain to a new clone and keep this up long enough I could see people building a "perfect self", by fixing all the defects in each new iteration that they found in the previous body.
Rentals work perfectly fine without DRM. In fact piracy of rented games can provide profit that usually wouldn't exist.
This was quite long ago, back when CD burners were a new thing, so most people didn't have one. Speeds were about 4-8X IIRC.
Children can easily get enough money for a rental, but have a noticeably harder time getting enough to buy the game. So what they'd often do is rent the game and immediately pirate it.
Funnily enough, around here there was a place with an arrangement that was just perfect for this. Both the shop that rented games and the one that copied them were located one right next to the other. This was inside a building full of small shops. The arrangement was that of a hollow square, with shops on both sides of the corridor.
So what people would do is rent a game, exit towards the stairs as if to exit the shop (to avoid annoying the shopkeeper), but instead of doing that walk the loop until they ended up at the shop that copied CDs. A short while later they'd have their copy, and return the rental a day or two later. This also ensured the copy worked properly.
The guy who rented games didn't like this all that much, but if somebody only has $10, they aren't going to pay for a $30 game with that. For children $30 is a significant investment. So if they didn't rent it, they probably would not pay anything at all for it, and just find a friend and copy something of theirs instead.
For the shop that copied CDs, they were more than happy enough to accept CDs obviously coming from the rental shop.
Interestingly enough, despite the rampant piracy everybody made cash. The rental shop owner obviously paid for the rental copies. People rented his stuff so he got paid too. And the CD copying shop profited quite nicely as well. Making piracy impossible would mean that couldn't afford to pay the full price wouldn't rent at all, and hence nobody but the copy shop would get paid.
Now this is of course for physical goods. If DRM is indeed necessary for online rental, I won't miss the lack of it, as I regard DRM as a much greater evil.
Huh? There's integration of GPG about everywhere.
KMail has very good support for it. Thunderbird with Enigmail works nicely too.
The problem with crypto is that it's hard to understand. You can create a key, set up kmail, and teach your grandma to enter the passphrase when asked, but that won't be secure. Public key crypto needs the users to follow the proper procedure for exchanging keys and verifying signatures, and explanations of how all that works sounds terribly boring to many people.
That 60 MB/s is almost never attainable in practice.
SATA drives have a seek latency of about 9ms. This means that the drive can perform 111 seeks per second. Assume a very pessimistic scenario of reading a 2KB cluster. Your drive's performance is now about 200KB/s.
For an expensive and low capacity SCSI drive, you can get 3.3ms, with about 600KB/s worst case scenario.
This is assuming you're actually reading data you're interested in. Some of that will involve reading filesystem metadata, which from the user's POV isn't what you're actually interested in. For a directory with lots of small files I imagine you could get maybe half of that performance.
I've seen SSD latency being quoted to be around 0.01ms. The same calculation above gives 195MB/s, assuming reading takes no extra time (which is false)
From this you can see that a hard disk is highly limited by seek latency, while a SSD is much more limited by read/write speed.
No. I don't support DRM, period.
If it uses DRM, I don't buy it or use it. If it even supports DRM (portable music players say), I will specifically look for the device that either supports none or has the least amount of it.
And I should care about the market why exactly? I used Debian for a long time. RMS liked, IIRC. It worked perfectly fine for me.
Haha. Whoever at MS or Apple says "let's screw our userbase" won't keep their job for very long. MS is well known for maintaining backwards compatibility for a very long time. Apple shipped emulators to compensate for an architecture change. They certainly have broken compatibility, but that's not something that is done easily or often.
I didn't mean precisely that, however. What I mean is that companies have to deal with issues that aren't relevant to many Linux distributions. Including a popup blocker in IE was probably a major decision for MS -- what if our partners get annoyed, or people block ads on MSN? How can we implement this feature in such a way that we can say "See, we have that too", while not creating a conflict with another division? MS also isn't going to let you run Windows on a 32-way box, or have the box be a domain controller without asking for a good deal of extra cash, while Linux distributions need not have any artificial limits like that.
Tried it. Many times. I used MS-DOS, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, PTS-DOS, OS/2 Warp, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2000, NT 3.51, NT4. I maintained many Windows boxes. I currently prefer Linux to all of that.
Many Linux distributions are non-commercial. Debian and Gentoo for example. What do you mean by "not alternatives" though?
You're clutching at straws here. It works as a WiFi AP, and that's what matters.
What is this "their code"? An access point that runs Linux has a kernel and software the vast percentage of which weren't written by Cisco. At best Cisco added a driver for the chipset and some code for the web interface. Hardly a huge sacrifice compared to the amount of code they got for free. Not to mention that nothing stops them from using a closed source kernel module and writing the CGI scripts in some compiled language.
No, the reason the new versions don't run Linux is that vxworks can be made to work using less RAM and Flash space, which costs less to manufacture.
Linux certainly has it easier in applications like cell phones, but I'm not so sure of that domination will have to wait for the death of the desktop. I don't think the desktop will die completely, for that matter.
Microsoft seems to be having trouble coming up with a good reason for a new Windows version. IMO, the last Windows version that was good was Win2K. There's some point where an operating system, or any application for that matter, really does all it's supposed to do.
Once you get to that point, there's little of importance to add, so you start piling up eyecandy and pointless features. You can see this in things like antiviruses. Once you have an antivirus that does what it's supposed to, what do you add to distinguish it from the competition? It seems that this currently means custom GUI widgets that are often less usable than the native ones. Windows seems to be going through something like that.
On the other hand, Linux still has a way to go in the desktop area, and has the advantage of that it can easily choose not to include annoying things Microsoft does (DRM, say). Linux, being able to deliver without being subject to the constraints of a company, can ultimately reach a point where it can provide things MS can't.
For example, with Windows you have to pay $$$ to get a domain controller. With Linux you don't need to pay extra, and in fact Samba makes it possible to make a box that works as one that's cheaper than just the MS license for the OS.
Linux is winning, but not in desktop things yet.
There was a story here some time ago about that there are WiFi access points running Linux at Microsoft. The WRT54G access points are very well known even by people who don't know how to use Linux. Linux runs on various other embedded devices as well. Linux is big in the server arena, especially for cheap web hosting and such. Very big operations (Google, Akamai, etc) run massive amounts of Linux boxes.
The desktop will get there eventually. I hear more and more about Ubuntu making excellent progress, and thanks to Linux being open that means that any improvements to one distribution can propagate to other ones as well.
Well, it depends on how you use the printer. Here I'm sitting near a printer used to print product catalogs. 1000 pages left is a sign of that if there's no extra toner left, ordering some now would be a very good idea.
Really the right thing to do would be making the threshold configurable. Also depending on the cartridge, the precise amount of toner might be hard to measure.
It's sad that when some new tech comes out, there's immediately a comment asking about whether this could be used for terrorism/rootkits/etc.
Explanation:
"Ruth" is the name for the default female avatar.
The default appearance in SL is female, so unless the bot changes its appearance, it's going to look female.
Bots, when created appear naked due to the bot's user not bothering to write the code needed to make it wear some clothes, or logging in under the account to put something on. This makes them very recognizable though, so I expect at some point the bot runners will start dressing them.
I got to agree with Ash on that they're pretty ugly. Not enough fur.
Bullshit. Somebody released it already, there was a torrent somewhere IIRC.
There's nothing useful in MS code for pretty much anybody.
For those who'd like to improve on it, it's effectively pointless, as any attempt to release any improvement will result in a lawsuit from MS.
For those who'd like to reuse parts of the code, it's basically a death sentence for whatever project (open or not) they're involved in, as well as their professional carreer. Even if somehow it doesn't get to that it'll mean very serious problems at the very least.
For those who'd like to learn from it without copying anything, it's also dangerous, as one day MS might accuse them of copying parts of the Windows source.
For those who don't give a damn about it, it's still bad, as it gives MS a way to create problems for projects closely related to Windows like Wine and ReactOS, even if they never, ever saw a line of the original source.
Maybe about the only sort of person who benefits from it is the sort looking for holes to exploit in the OS to profit from, but even that is doable just fine without the source anyway, and somebody taking advantage of security exploits for money is infringing several laws already in any case. I don't think this kind is a significant part of the slashdot population.
If anybody gave me a CD with that, I'd grind it into tiny pieces, burn it, then scatter the ashes.
What people think in India is largely irrelevant to me. If they think the Earth is flat then that's their problem.
The US however has the annoying tendency of pushing their insanity on the rest of the civilized part of the planet. But the way things are going they'll probably descent to third world levels of education soon enough, so the problem will solve itself eventually. I only hope the nukes stop being usable before that happens.
They heard of it, they simply don't take it literally. For them it's an allegory, not The Truth.
Actually it's largely an American thing.
I brought this subject up several times in a conversation with europeans. Those who don't follow slashdot and similar sites hadn't heard about the concept of "intelligent design" at all, and needed it explained. And all of them went "WTF?" at the explanation.
The vast majority of the population hasn't even heard of ID. All the religious arguments I participated in (and there were quite a few) always revolved around the existence/inexistence of a deity, evolution wasn't brought up even once.