it's good to see bsd getting with the times and being released on cd. Although ms-windows has had a 6 year head start with the cd-format I'm sure bsd will be able to compete.
I normally don't respond to trolls, but what the hell.
I believe the story is supposed to be "First official FreeBSD 4.5 CDs." Walnut Creek had been supporting FreeBSD development and creating CDs forever. I think FreeBSD CDs may even predate Windows CDs.
The value of a certification is pretty much proportionate to its popularity. If you've never heard of a certification before, that may clue you in on the value an interviewer is going to assign to it.
If you're stretching to find a certification that matches for job seeking and similar, you may be better off donating some time to security assistance for non-profits or small companies. Experience speaks more loudly than an obscure certification, IMHO.
And yeah - my previous comment is pure speculation. I read the article, regarding claims about music recording and similar. Thing is - the TiVo already has real-time audio encoding and decoding, and a CPU with more than enough horsepower to use any of a number of free, better audio CODECs. Why would another CODEC be neededed for the functionality they list?
Video downloading is the only thing that makes even a little sense. Low bandwidth, computationally inexpensive video is the only place Real has an edge compared to the free alternatives.
TiVo has been experimenting with various forms of advertising. In the past, they've sent adverts through the TiVo's message system, normally used to notify you of channel changes. Then, they made the same adverts pop up as the default screen when you power on the TV. The most obnoxious new advertising attempt put a Lexus sweepstakes entry funtion right at the bottom of the main TiVo menu.
People's TiVos also went and recorded a Lexus commercial which many claimed interfered with another program they had expected the TiVo to record. People were up in arms about this, and for a time, the online TiVo forums were swamped with requests for information on how to opt out of this nonsense. (To opt out, call TiVo. They'll gladly kill future adverts for you. I did, and haven't had any more junk.)
Presumably what TiVo wants to do now is to have video downloaded during the nightly call, so they can do future video advertisements without interfering with program schedules and, more importantly, avoid paying broadcasters to display the commercial/video they want recorded.
As an aside - how many of you bought your TiVo to avoid watching commercials, not to have new ones added?
Re:You're going to be waiting a while...
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2
Mac processors are RISC, unlike the CISC x86s. RISC is much more efficient.
I think that statement is a bit dated. The link you provided definitely is.
What you say may have been true before out-of-order execution, deep pipelining, predictive execution and sundry clever cache methods were introduced.
And the PowerPC line has migrated toward a more bloated instruction set, while the underlying architecture of the Intel (and Athlon, I believe) processors has moved toward RISC. It's tough to say who's closer to which architecture anymore. At best, you can point to ad copy as an indicator of what the company prefers you to call it.
And hell -- PowerPC doesn't even get a register count advantage anymore. L1 cache access speeds are identical to register access, and I believe that's been true since the Pentium III.
If there are people that are seriously interested, let me know. I suspect there will be more bidders on these boxen though. I don't care to make money on them, and I don't mind paying for them in advance, I just need to get an idea of what people would want to realistically pay for them.
I wouldn't think twice about dropping two grand on one. Maybe three if it's all in great shape and includes the nifty original packaging and such.
I'm sure others would pay more.
Re:You're going to be waiting a while...
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2
Why 1.5GHz? ppc is about 30% "better" at the same frequency than x86 so you would still need more than 1.5GHz to surpass.
I'm aware that different processor architectures perform differently at the same clock speed, but I'd like to see some hard numbers on this. People repeat the 30% and "one third" numbers a lot, and I'd like to know where they come from.
Does this mean that popular benchmarks are 30% faster at the same clock, or does this mean that Photoshop and a select few other flashy products perform 30% better?
Also, I hope someone Mac-savvy can comment on the bus speeds of the different Mac models, cache sizes, etc. Last I knew, Macs were still running on 100 and 133MHz busses, which can be rather limiting for many types of work. Are these specs dated, or are there other nifty performance-boosting aspects?
I'd have loved to get my hands on a Be box. I've kept an eye out for these going on eBay and similar, but so far haven't had any luck. It's a pity they only have 20, and I doubt anyone nerdy enough to nab one there is going to be selling it any time soon. Or certainly not at a reasonable price.
Bringing Linux or NetBSD up on a Be would be a step cooler* than running on NeXT or tricked out Amiga hardware.
* yes, cooler is entirely subjective, insert comments about having a life, etc... But tell me you wouldn't want to at least test-drive a BeUNIX Beastie.
You hire a CS guy to improve or develop new technology.
Then you hire an MIS to help run the office software, write randomly nifty or dangerous little Visual Basic apps, and to thumb through "Everything For Dummies" a lot.
Lastly, you hire a CIS to run the servers and protect the CS from the MIS.
Is it just me, or should SGI still be able to sell based on the name, if they take a rational desktop approach?
A pretty, curvy plastic case with the SGI logo prominently displayed, and they could probably compete with Dell for workstation products, while adding 10-15% just for the name.
I work in video games. Many of us, especially my artist coworkers, have worked with SGI extensively in the past. They miss the SGI platform, many with a fondness on par with that of the typical Linux, Mac or Amiga fanatic. And these people do have a voice when it comes to purchasing. If these guys thought they could get "An SGI that runs Windows," but at a sane price (they missed this part with their Windows endeavors), they'd jump on it.
Hell, I'd probably get one too, just for the novelty of it. A bona-fide SGI running Linux just feels cooler than generic PC hardware, even if I know the internals are identical.
There's probably a lot of money to be made in selling branded PC hardware. When Gateway bought Amiga, they could have probably sold thousands more units just by replacing front panels with something stylish and Amiga-esque, flashing a set of BIOSes with a snazzy "Amiga Phoenix" or similar logo & tossing a UAE CD and a Boing! mug in the box. There was no need for them to look into reinventing the PC, just like it was silly of SGI to go about trying to reinvent the PC when they tried shipping Windows products. Commodity hardware is rocketing forward so fast that most any attempt at creating custom hardware for your own PC products is purely daft. It's all about presentation.
Certainly, pretty cases wouldn't have to be SGI's only business line, but it could certainly be a source of safe & easy revenue to help turn things around.
Perhaps assembler itself may not be useful to you, but the type of information you would learn by endeavoring to any kind of low-level programming could be very useful.
If you spend any time trying to choose hardware, fix hardware, optimize performance, resolve application crashes or otherwise go beyond user-level application support and swapping components, you would benefit by a second, more rudimentary view of your system.
If your job is pretty basic or you never worry about growing past your departmental budget, the extra 10% that a system-level view provides probably isn't worth the work. But it's still fun to know stuff, damnit.
More and more sites are relying on embedded closed-source media players which don't work and play well with most free-as-in-speech browsers. It's tough to get a proper feed from many of the major news sites anymore.
Similarly, a surprising number of online banking services, auction houses, etc are putting Windows-centric code on their sites, limiting site usability for many potential customers.
I'm looking forward to seeing if there's going to be a backlash against that in the coming year. When sites realize that a good chunk of users are being cut off, could we see "platform agnostic" and "Linux-friendly" become marketable buzzwords, causing sites to leap on the bandwagon and to start performing real Linux usability testing?
And if "Linux-friendly" logos, icons and similar start to appear on sites, could the alternative operating systems enjoy even more visibility as a result?
"YEAH! Go Linux! Windows sucks!!! eat my r3d hat, M1CR0$OFT!!!"
SlashPh3ar +1 Insightful! bojoH4X0R +1 Funny! eliteboss +1 Informative!
"Though it's hard to beat Visual Studio for
rapid application development."
l33t0r -1 Troll! bsdnut -1 Flamebait! bojoH4X0R_2 -1 Overrated!
"Except that it constrains you with heavy
licensing for the end user."
h4ckerrocket +1 baaaaah! linuxd3wd +1 InMyLittleWorld!
"Which probably doesn't matter, since 90%+ of your customers
already have Windows installed."
supercod-R -1 NotMyBag! CmdrTac0 -1 Heretic! superHaK -1 Blasphemy! C0deG0d -1 KarmaTorch!
Sorry about that. Sit on my hands, no more rum before posting.
Finally, there's the human element to contemplate. We all did stupid stuff when we were kids, which most website vandals are. I don't know any kid who didn't tresspass or vandalize property at least once during their youth. For many, it was the old junkyard or the cemetary. For these kids, its websites.
Maybe my experience was different from others', but - as a kid - I stopped experimenting with stupid things once I was caught. I kept doing bigger and more risky things until I finally got in trouble, and I realized that I wasn't the smartest guy in the world, and that rules weren't just for other people.
Nailing a kid for defacement now might mean that he doesn't need to be nailed for something much more serious later on.
Linux has the potential to take over a small share of the enthusiast desktop marker. However standardizaion needs to occur and one window manager needs development to the point of having all the niceties that microsoft but without the bugs and secutriy holes. Which one will take over?
No, if anything, Linux could use a centralized standard for window manager assets, and Linux could use a portable mechanism for extensions like docked applets, etc.
Most distributions have their own system for generating menus for Window managers that support application launching menus, their own location for shared icons, etc. Normalizing this would help make the multitude of window managers more usable. It's silly that so much work is being repeated from one Linux distribution to the next, and that the smaller ones go without.
As an example of portable extensions, many window managers support little plugins, either as docked applications, or extensions to their tool/launcher bars. There should be a standard library interface which let you use your talky fish hack as a docked WM applet, a KDE tool tray item, or a Gnome launcher bar applet with just one set of code. This would keep the choice of nifty hacks and such from funneling people into just a few choices, and would leverage the kind of modularity that makes unices so damned useful in the first place. Any other extensions should be like this. If there's not a damned good reason to make something KDE-centric, GNOME-centric, WMaker-centric, etc - then don't!
Caveat emptor: I'm a game programmer, and I don't use Visual Basic. I don't know about or understand the ActiveX limitation, so I could very well be suggesting overly complex solutions...
If some queer format is your only choice for DLLs, and your application wouldn't suffer much for lack of shared memory, don't even target DLLs. So long as you can create a stand-alone app, there's nothing to stop you from creating a free-standing application which uses standard Windows message passing to communicate with other applications.
Alternatively, there's nothing to stop one DLL from loading another. If you still need a DLL, you could make a thunking DLL which loads the ActiveX DLL and handles whatever nastiness the ActiveX DLL brings with it, providing a cleaner interface to the user. This should take a supporting Visual C programmer virtually no time at all.
That's good, you silly little zealot you. Be a dear, and leave the productivity up to those of us who use the best tool possible.
I believe I'm being trolled. No less - you'll note that in the original message, I said that free software was all I use at home. Work is another matter. There, I use a mixture of free and non-free tools, using the combination which generates correct data in the most efficient and comfortable environment possible.
I'm not entirely worried if productivity slips at home because a tool takes a little extra work, however. But at home, I am worried about security and stability. These things which are handled for me at work. At home, it's up to me to pick the software to which I'll trust my data. And so I pick peer-reviewed open and free software for home, a decision I never regret.
Why use Mozilla when you can use IE? I mean seriously, it's a better product. Jesus.
I don't use IE at home because I don't own IE at home. And IE doesn't do anything worth setting up a second computer and buying a copy of Windows for. And IE certainly doesn't give me anything worth changing my chosen operating system and giving up control of my system inernals for.
I'm here at work, out of choice, not because I couldn't go home.
I just don't know what else to do with my time. Everyone else is off with their families, or out of town on holiday. I enjoy my work for the most part, especially when I can do it without interruption, which is tougher during the week. If I were at home, I'd just be banging away on the computer.
The alternative is to go home and celebrate Christmas with mom and the sibs, but Christmas is pretty much ruined for me. I don't like the commercial aspect of it, and I don't like that mom would expect me to attend church if I went back there. I'd rather just visit on a few non-holidays, get together because we want to get together, not because it's been prescribed by the churches and every shop with lights in the window.
At home, I run nothing but main and contrib Debian GNU/Linux. No non-free. This means no RealPlayer, no Quicktime, no MS Media. Nothing that I don't get source for. This has also meant no video and audio clips on news sites.
I've been searching for quite some time for a daily news site with MPEG video and MP3 audio, but have found absolutely nothing noteworthy.
Enter the BBC. Admittedly, audio streaming is just a start, but if I were forced to pick the BBC for fully free audio/video news and streaming entertainment, I'd be the last to complain.:)
I'm used to voices being really "warbly" when streaming at low bandwidths. Ogg Vorbis is really holding up on BBC-4. I'm quite impressed.
The low-bandwith music on BBC-1 is still pretty bad, but about as good as anything else I've heard. It's stellar on the high bandwidth BBC-1 stream, however. It's heavy on the treble, where I'm used to having to boost that range.
I'm having a little trouble EQing to correct for the high treble. It seems to have a huge upward curve on the high end where other CODECs just chop or only represent simple harmonic overtones. That makes it a little harsh on some things, but it's nicer than the sensation of listening underwater or through a tube that Real & MS give.
In a nutshell, broadband providers have a lot to gain by restricting users' access, and users have a lot to lose if they let the industry move toward new usage models.
Slashdot Mirror
I normally don't respond to trolls, but what the hell.
I believe the story is supposed to be "First official FreeBSD 4.5 CDs." Walnut Creek had been supporting FreeBSD development and creating CDs forever. I think FreeBSD CDs may even predate Windows CDs.
If you're stretching to find a certification that matches for job seeking and similar, you may be better off donating some time to security assistance for non-profits or small companies. Experience speaks more loudly than an obscure certification, IMHO.
I'm guessing if it were heavier, the difference would be far too small to measure?
Video downloading is the only thing that makes even a little sense. Low bandwidth, computationally inexpensive video is the only place Real has an edge compared to the free alternatives.
People's TiVos also went and recorded a Lexus commercial which many claimed interfered with another program they had expected the TiVo to record. People were up in arms about this, and for a time, the online TiVo forums were swamped with requests for information on how to opt out of this nonsense. (To opt out, call TiVo. They'll gladly kill future adverts for you. I did, and haven't had any more junk.)
Presumably what TiVo wants to do now is to have video downloaded during the nightly call, so they can do future video advertisements without interfering with program schedules and, more importantly, avoid paying broadcasters to display the commercial/video they want recorded.
As an aside - how many of you bought your TiVo to avoid watching commercials, not to have new ones added?
I think that statement is a bit dated. The link you provided definitely is.
What you say may have been true before out-of-order execution, deep pipelining, predictive execution and sundry clever cache methods were introduced.
And the PowerPC line has migrated toward a more bloated instruction set, while the underlying architecture of the Intel (and Athlon, I believe) processors has moved toward RISC. It's tough to say who's closer to which architecture anymore. At best, you can point to ad copy as an indicator of what the company prefers you to call it.
And hell -- PowerPC doesn't even get a register count advantage anymore. L1 cache access speeds are identical to register access, and I believe that's been true since the Pentium III.
I wouldn't think twice about dropping two grand on one. Maybe three if it's all in great shape and includes the nifty original packaging and such.
I'm sure others would pay more.
I'm aware that different processor architectures perform differently at the same clock speed, but I'd like to see some hard numbers on this. People repeat the 30% and "one third" numbers a lot, and I'd like to know where they come from.
Does this mean that popular benchmarks are 30% faster at the same clock, or does this mean that Photoshop and a select few other flashy products perform 30% better?
Also, I hope someone Mac-savvy can comment on the bus speeds of the different Mac models, cache sizes, etc. Last I knew, Macs were still running on 100 and 133MHz busses, which can be rather limiting for many types of work. Are these specs dated, or are there other nifty performance-boosting aspects?
Bringing Linux or NetBSD up on a Be would be a step cooler* than running on NeXT or tricked out Amiga hardware.
* yes, cooler is entirely subjective, insert comments about having a life, etc... But tell me you wouldn't want to at least test-drive a BeUNIX Beastie.
A pretty, curvy plastic case with the SGI logo prominently displayed, and they could probably compete with Dell for workstation products, while adding 10-15% just for the name.
I work in video games. Many of us, especially my artist coworkers, have worked with SGI extensively in the past. They miss the SGI platform, many with a fondness on par with that of the typical Linux, Mac or Amiga fanatic. And these people do have a voice when it comes to purchasing. If these guys thought they could get "An SGI that runs Windows," but at a sane price (they missed this part with their Windows endeavors), they'd jump on it.
Hell, I'd probably get one too, just for the novelty of it. A bona-fide SGI running Linux just feels cooler than generic PC hardware, even if I know the internals are identical.
There's probably a lot of money to be made in selling branded PC hardware. When Gateway bought Amiga, they could have probably sold thousands more units just by replacing front panels with something stylish and Amiga-esque, flashing a set of BIOSes with a snazzy "Amiga Phoenix" or similar logo & tossing a UAE CD and a Boing! mug in the box. There was no need for them to look into reinventing the PC, just like it was silly of SGI to go about trying to reinvent the PC when they tried shipping Windows products. Commodity hardware is rocketing forward so fast that most any attempt at creating custom hardware for your own PC products is purely daft. It's all about presentation.
Certainly, pretty cases wouldn't have to be SGI's only business line, but it could certainly be a source of safe & easy revenue to help turn things around.
If you spend any time trying to choose hardware, fix hardware, optimize performance, resolve application crashes or otherwise go beyond user-level application support and swapping components, you would benefit by a second, more rudimentary view of your system.
If your job is pretty basic or you never worry about growing past your departmental budget, the extra 10% that a system-level view provides probably isn't worth the work. But it's still fun to know stuff, damnit.
And du -k `which login` if you want to guarantee canonical results, but we're not so pedantic that we want to go optimizing our humor now, are we?
Not so sure at all.
Similarly, a surprising number of online banking services, auction houses, etc are putting Windows-centric code on their sites, limiting site usability for many potential customers.
I'm looking forward to seeing if there's going to be a backlash against that in the coming year. When sites realize that a good chunk of users are being cut off, could we see "platform agnostic" and "Linux-friendly" become marketable buzzwords, causing sites to leap on the bandwagon and to start performing real Linux usability testing?
And if "Linux-friendly" logos, icons and similar start to appear on sites, could the alternative operating systems enjoy even more visibility as a result?
SlashPh3ar +1 Insightful! bojoH4X0R +1 Funny! eliteboss +1 Informative!
"Though it's hard to beat Visual Studio for rapid application development."
l33t0r -1 Troll! bsdnut -1 Flamebait! bojoH4X0R_2 -1 Overrated!
"Except that it constrains you with heavy licensing for the end user."
h4ckerrocket +1 baaaaah! linuxd3wd +1 InMyLittleWorld!
"Which probably doesn't matter, since 90%+ of your customers already have Windows installed."
supercod-R -1 NotMyBag! CmdrTac0 -1 Heretic! superHaK -1 Blasphemy! C0deG0d -1 KarmaTorch!
Sorry about that. Sit on my hands, no more rum before posting.
Maybe my experience was different from others', but - as a kid - I stopped experimenting with stupid things once I was caught. I kept doing bigger and more risky things until I finally got in trouble, and I realized that I wasn't the smartest guy in the world, and that rules weren't just for other people.
Nailing a kid for defacement now might mean that he doesn't need to be nailed for something much more serious later on.
No, if anything, Linux could use a centralized standard for window manager assets, and Linux could use a portable mechanism for extensions like docked applets, etc.
Most distributions have their own system for generating menus for Window managers that support application launching menus, their own location for shared icons, etc. Normalizing this would help make the multitude of window managers more usable. It's silly that so much work is being repeated from one Linux distribution to the next, and that the smaller ones go without.
As an example of portable extensions, many window managers support little plugins, either as docked applications, or extensions to their tool/launcher bars. There should be a standard library interface which let you use your talky fish hack as a docked WM applet, a KDE tool tray item, or a Gnome launcher bar applet with just one set of code. This would keep the choice of nifty hacks and such from funneling people into just a few choices, and would leverage the kind of modularity that makes unices so damned useful in the first place. Any other extensions should be like this. If there's not a damned good reason to make something KDE-centric, GNOME-centric, WMaker-centric, etc - then don't!
If some queer format is your only choice for DLLs, and your application wouldn't suffer much for lack of shared memory, don't even target DLLs. So long as you can create a stand-alone app, there's nothing to stop you from creating a free-standing application which uses standard Windows message passing to communicate with other applications.
Alternatively, there's nothing to stop one DLL from loading another. If you still need a DLL, you could make a thunking DLL which loads the ActiveX DLL and handles whatever nastiness the ActiveX DLL brings with it, providing a cleaner interface to the user. This should take a supporting Visual C programmer virtually no time at all.
Yeppers - BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4.
I believe I'm being trolled. No less - you'll note that in the original message, I said that free software was all I use at home. Work is another matter. There, I use a mixture of free and non-free tools, using the combination which generates correct data in the most efficient and comfortable environment possible.
I'm not entirely worried if productivity slips at home because a tool takes a little extra work, however. But at home, I am worried about security and stability. These things which are handled for me at work. At home, it's up to me to pick the software to which I'll trust my data. And so I pick peer-reviewed open and free software for home, a decision I never regret.
I don't use IE at home because I don't own IE at home. And IE doesn't do anything worth setting up a second computer and buying a copy of Windows for. And IE certainly doesn't give me anything worth changing my chosen operating system and giving up control of my system inernals for.
A merry christmas to you also.
I just don't know what else to do with my time. Everyone else is off with their families, or out of town on holiday. I enjoy my work for the most part, especially when I can do it without interruption, which is tougher during the week. If I were at home, I'd just be banging away on the computer.
The alternative is to go home and celebrate Christmas with mom and the sibs, but Christmas is pretty much ruined for me. I don't like the commercial aspect of it, and I don't like that mom would expect me to attend church if I went back there. I'd rather just visit on a few non-holidays, get together because we want to get together, not because it's been prescribed by the churches and every shop with lights in the window.
At home, I run nothing but main and contrib Debian GNU/Linux. No non-free. This means no RealPlayer, no Quicktime, no MS Media. Nothing that I don't get source for. This has also meant no video and audio clips on news sites.
I've been searching for quite some time for a daily news site with MPEG video and MP3 audio, but have found absolutely nothing noteworthy.
Enter the BBC. Admittedly, audio streaming is just a start, but if I were forced to pick the BBC for fully free audio/video news and streaming entertainment, I'd be the last to complain. :)
The low-bandwith music on BBC-1 is still pretty bad, but about as good as anything else I've heard. It's stellar on the high bandwidth BBC-1 stream, however. It's heavy on the treble, where I'm used to having to boost that range.
I'm having a little trouble EQing to correct for the high treble. It seems to have a huge upward curve on the high end where other CODECs just chop or only represent simple harmonic overtones. That makes it a little harsh on some things, but it's nicer than the sensation of listening underwater or through a tube that Real & MS give.
In a nutshell, broadband providers have a lot to gain by restricting users' access, and users have a lot to lose if they let the industry move toward new usage models.