I tend to disagree with the framebuffer comments. From my experience with it, it's a lot slower than the traditional text only console and using Shift-PgUp/PgDn to scroll back and forth doesn't work quite right (pieces of text from previously displayed pages remain on screen). Yeah, the Tux penguins on boot are a nice gimmick to show off to your friends, but that's all they're really good for.
I only place I use the framebuffer support is on my laptop with its fixed pixel LCD. The text console looks terrible with uneven stretching of pixels to match the LCD resolution -- very annoying to read. With a frame buffer, I set the console to use a mode that matches the LCD resolution, making things more readable.
I just don't use Netscape for downloading files now. What I do is right click the download link, copy link to clipboard, open an xterm, and then use wget to download the file. That way, if netscape crashes (like it always does), the download is unharmed. Plus, wget is smarter than netscape. If the server isn't letting anyone in at the moment, wget keeps trying. If the connection gets dropped, wget keeps trying and will resume where it left off as soon as it can get reconnected.
As an ASU student, I am totally against these two bills. The day I heard about the dorm room proposal I hunted down her web site and fired off two emails stating as such.
Not true, I've been using -W1 on my IBM Deskstar 22GXP ever since I got it (at least a year ago) and haven't had any problems. I could see this causing trouble if you suddenly lose power from time to time, but my machine is on a Best Power UPS, so I don't have any problems with that.
This may be true, but also look at the NSA job restrictions -- if you work for them, you are not allowed to talk about your work to anyone outside of the NSA, including after you leave the NSA and work elsewhere.
It's not just the underwriters that get a nice profit on the difference between IPO prices and the first publically traded share prices. It's also whoever gets in on the IPO price; in the case of Red Hat and VA Linux, this is individual Linux developers profitting. I do not see this as a bad thing. What better way to reward the developers who have made these Linux companies possible than providing them with an influx of extra cash along with raising cash for the company to expand?
Its not like an individual Linux developer could ever raise cash for developement by him/herself through an IPO normally. Joe Developer with component X patches in the kernel files for IPO and gets enough investors to know about it to make the IPO sucessful? I don't think so.
Is this really possible? I was under the impression that the Palms use irOBEX and can not do the low frequency remote control IR stuff. At least, I know that my laptop's IR port can't turn TVs on and off, but it can talk to my Palm.
I don't find this trend annoying at all, as long as the new hardware has enough technical documentation freely available for Linux developers to work with. I think the greatest gains are usually only possible if you don't have to maintain backwards compatibility with old software. As long as documentation is available, new hardware that increases performance and decreases cost can only help propel Linux (and other open source software) further ahead of the closed source competition.
Think about it. A lot of new and exciting things are now coming out due to the source code availability of Linux. Empeg car MP3 players, Playstation 2, that Linux powered high speed ethernet switch, etc all come to mind. So what if new hardware requires tweaked software? It just makes it harder for Microsoft to keep up with us.
Yeah, those original, lopsided plastic box Logitech mice last forever. My brother is still using one that's over a decade old now too. A dog chewed through the cable once, but we stole a fresh cable off of a modern day cheap mouse that had died and the darn thing still works great.
Eh? I think you're missing the fact that you can easily use these mice wheels under Linux/X11 using some very minor tweaks. Check out the mouse howto and the program imwheel.
Scrolling in Netscape with the wheel is very convenient compared to using that dinky Motif scroll bar on the side.
I also have to disagree on this one. At home, I bought a Logitech First Mouse+ instead of a Microsoft Intellimouse mostly because I hate Microsoft (Logitech -was- a dollar or two cheaper, but big deal). Anyway, the Logitech mouse's wheel is not as precise as the Microsoft one and it's much too easy to end up rolling it when you really meant to click it without rolling, unlike the Microsoft mouse. It also feels more flimsy than the Microsoft mouse.
In short, if I were to do it over again, I would buy a Microsoft mouse instead of the Logitech now that I know what the Logitech mouse is really like in comparison (we use the Microsoft mice at work).
I'd have to disagree. Our Microsoft Natural keyboards at work have been in use for a few years and are deteriorating fast. The keys are getting harder and harder to push and it's getting bad enough that I really think these keyboards are probably accelerating our RSI problems.
At home I've got some cheap AT&T split ergonomic keyboard I bought about the same time we got the MS keyboards at work and it is still in very good working order. I definitely would not buy another one of those MS keyboards, especially ever since they went with their "Elite" line where all they did was screw up the positioning of your arrow keys and made some keys half sized.
Looks like a neat idea for a desktop machine, but what about laptops? It seems to me, if Microsoft would implement a really good virtual, scrollable desktop like XFree86 has, screen real estate is not such a big deal because I can make the application window bigger than the screen and only view the tool bars on screen when I need them anyway.
The place that this is really necessary is on laptop computers where video memory is usually not plentiful enough to have a huge virtual desktop. However, I can't see why this mouse is really necessary, since the touch pad on a laptop should already have the capability to detect when the user's finger is resting on the touch pad area. Only additional software is needed in this case.
Of course, IBM's Thinkpads with their trackpoint sticks will need some added hardware I think.
I've always believed that older people probably have just as much capability to learn new stuff as the younger folks, but they just have less motivation to do so. I mean, when you're young and just starting out, you -need- to learn as much as possible to stay alive, secure a good paying job, catch a good mate, start a family, etc.. But once you've married, have a mess a kids who can more or less take care of themselves, and have enough beans saved up to live comfortably without working anymore, why bother putting the effort into learning new stuff? Learning hard stuff takes a lot of effort, effort which a young person might be willing to expend, but not necessarily someone who already has all the essentials in life achieved.
There are, of course, some people who love the challege and continue learning all their lives, even after fulfilling life essentials.
But then there should also be a second distribution that is more of a "rolling release" system that maybe gets a bi-weekly set of updates. I think this second distribution is needed to keep up with the active development in the area of user applications.
What you're describing sounds like the Red Hat RawHide distribution. While I've never installed a full blown rawhide distro, I do steal SRPMs from it from time to time when a new release of some package comes out that I just gotta have for my standard Red Hat release. Sometimes I even burn new CDs with the updated packages integrated in. See fix-rhcd for some information on how to burn custom RH CDs.
It's seems kind of ironic that the Feds are complaining about poor security in Microsoft software, then praising how stable and secure Linux is, when the Feds are probably part of the problem. I agree, with the Feds: Linux will help to improve security through encrypted file systems and network pipes (www.kerneli.org) plus encrypted/signed email and files (www.gnupg.org). However, Linux had a hard time getting here since all the developement of these strong security tools had to be done outside of the country. Maybe when the Feds have Linux installed all over the place and get tired of having to patch their kernel all the time (to get the International Crypto pieces), they'll start thinking about making the restrictions a little more open.
We're finally getting somewhere! I have held off buying a Diamon Rio due to their tiny storage size. I mean, what's the point of using MP3 if you don't have enough space to keep your -entire- music collection at your fingers at any time?
The one this I wished this article would mention is how long the device will run on a charge. Currently I've been hauling my IBM Thinkpad 390E notebook around with me to do me CS projects on -and- be my "portable" MP3 player. With 6GB of disk space and two Li-Ion batteries installed, I can listen to my entire collection for over 9 hours each day without carrying the wall brick.
When Java first came about, I thought, gee, this is gonna be great. We'll get all programmers to code in Java. It's a sweet, well designed language to program with. All programs will be cross platform and even if many programmers are still using Windows, I'll be able to run all the latest software on my Linux boxes.
Several years later, Java still runs like crap almost everywhere. When I see a description for a really cool program announced on Freshmeat, I go to download and find it's written in Java, then think, oh damn, it'll run like crap because Java will slow it down, waste memory, be a pain to get running, and probably crash once in a while as well, even if the actual code the author of the program did the best job coding as possible. Hell, snes9x does a better job of fast, stable, cross platform run time executation of non-native machine code, and that machine code wasn't even designed for this like Java byte code. Arg!
Java is most definitely not the holy grail of software. Linux and open source software is. If Sun would have gotten their head out of their asses and release all of the JDK under GPL, Java might have had a fighting chance. Instead, I look on to the great C/C++ coming out of the GIMP, KDE, GNOME, Koffice etc projects making Linux have all the wonderful software programs available that I dreamed about back when Java came out.
While it's true that having 10 different groups of programmers for your 10 versions will waste time, as each group has to get re-acquainted with the source base, it still may be better in the long run to rotate people through the project. Why? If you're programming component Gizmo, and you know that somebody later on, other than yourself, is going to have to maintain Gizmo, you're going to think a little more about making Gizmo easy to understand/documented. However, if you believe that you are the only one that will ever be maintaining this Gizmo for a long time, why bother with documentation/understandable design -- you can get your new features implemented faster by skipping those steps. The nomadic consultant programmers will understand that they need to write better code such that the system can be maintained.
This brings up an interesting question: how is code handled inside Microsoft? Do programmers end up running their own modules for long periods of time without rotatation of programmers? If so, this may explain why Microsoft's programs started out being fairly good, with new features ahead of the competition, yet now, several years later, they are having horrible problems with stability and code bloat. One reason I think Linux is so stable is that the programmers expect and hope that others will view and improve their code, so they write it in an understandable fashion. Microsoft code is undoubtly terribly more ugly to look at than any open source project (just ask the folks who got University licenses to see the NT source).
In this business, even if you're an "employee" of a company, how long do you really expect to stay with that single company anyway? While working for one company, someone may decide to be labelled "employee" or "contractor" simply depending upon how they want to do their taxes, what kind of short term benefits may be provided, personal reasons, etc not because they are more or less skilled than the other guy. Some places are reporting over 25 percent turnover per year of their IT staff. I see no reason why being more or less skilled than others would make you choose one label or the other.
"Lie-flat" binding is nice. What I'm talking about is pages falling out of the book. While separate pages lie completely flat on a desk, I wouldn't call them lie-flat -binding- since they are no longer bound.;-)
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I tend to disagree with the framebuffer comments. From my experience with it, it's a lot slower than the traditional text only console and using Shift-PgUp/PgDn to scroll back and forth doesn't work quite right (pieces of text from previously displayed pages remain on screen). Yeah, the Tux penguins on boot are a nice gimmick to show off to your friends, but that's all they're really good for.
I only place I use the framebuffer support is on my laptop with its fixed pixel LCD. The text console looks terrible with uneven stretching of pixels to match the LCD resolution -- very annoying to read. With a frame buffer, I set the console to use a mode that matches the LCD resolution, making things more readable.
I just don't use Netscape for downloading files now. What I do is right click the download link, copy link to clipboard, open an xterm, and then use wget to download the file. That way, if netscape crashes (like it always does), the download is unharmed. Plus, wget is smarter than netscape. If the server isn't letting anyone in at the moment, wget keeps trying. If the connection gets dropped, wget keeps trying and will resume where it left off as soon as it can get reconnected.
http://www.azleg.state.az.us/memb ers/jmcgrath.htm
jmcgrath@azleg.state.az.us
As an ASU student, I am totally against these two bills. The day I heard about the dorm room proposal I hunted down her web site and fired off two emails stating as such.
Not true, I've been using -W1 on my IBM Deskstar 22GXP ever since I got it (at least a year ago) and haven't had any problems. I could see this causing trouble if you suddenly lose power from time to time, but my machine is on a Best Power UPS, so I don't have any problems with that.
This may be true, but also look at the NSA job restrictions -- if you work for them, you are not allowed to talk about your work to anyone outside of the NSA, including after you leave the NSA and work elsewhere.
For those wondering, I believe the story the above author is talking about can be found at http://www.fadetoblack.com/now/
It's not just the underwriters that get a nice profit on the difference between IPO prices and the first publically traded share prices. It's also whoever gets in on the IPO price; in the case of Red Hat and VA Linux, this is individual Linux developers profitting. I do not see this as a bad thing. What better way to reward the developers who have made these Linux companies possible than providing them with an influx of extra cash along with raising cash for the company to expand?
Its not like an individual Linux developer could ever raise cash for developement by him/herself through an IPO normally. Joe Developer with component X patches in the kernel files for IPO and gets enough investors to know about it to make the IPO sucessful? I don't think so.
Is this really possible? I was under the impression that the Palms use irOBEX and can not do the low frequency remote control IR stuff. At least, I know that my laptop's IR port can't turn TVs on and off, but it can talk to my Palm.
I don't find this trend annoying at all, as long as the new hardware has enough technical documentation freely available for Linux developers to work with. I think the greatest gains are usually only possible if you don't have to maintain backwards compatibility with old software. As long as documentation is available, new hardware that increases performance and decreases cost can only help propel Linux (and other open source software) further ahead of the closed source competition.
Think about it. A lot of new and exciting things are now coming out due to the source code availability of Linux. Empeg car MP3 players, Playstation 2, that Linux powered high speed ethernet switch, etc all come to mind. So what if new hardware requires tweaked software? It just makes it harder for Microsoft to keep up with us.
Yeah, those original, lopsided plastic box Logitech mice last forever. My brother is still using one that's over a decade old now too. A dog chewed through the cable once, but we stole a fresh cable off of a modern day cheap mouse that had died and the darn thing still works great.
Eh? I think you're missing the fact that you can easily use these mice wheels under Linux/X11 using some very minor tweaks. Check out the mouse howto and the program imwheel.
Scrolling in Netscape with the wheel is very convenient compared to using that dinky Motif scroll bar on the side.
I also have to disagree on this one. At home, I bought a Logitech First Mouse+ instead of a Microsoft Intellimouse mostly because I hate Microsoft (Logitech -was- a dollar or two cheaper, but big deal). Anyway, the Logitech mouse's wheel is not as precise as the Microsoft one and it's much too easy to end up rolling it when you really meant to click it without rolling, unlike the Microsoft mouse. It also feels more flimsy than the Microsoft mouse.
In short, if I were to do it over again, I would buy a Microsoft mouse instead of the Logitech now that I know what the Logitech mouse is really like in comparison (we use the Microsoft mice at work).
I'd have to disagree. Our Microsoft Natural keyboards at work have been in use for a few years and are deteriorating fast. The keys are getting harder and harder to push and it's getting bad enough that I really think these keyboards are probably accelerating our RSI problems.
At home I've got some cheap AT&T split ergonomic keyboard I bought about the same time we got the MS keyboards at work and it is still in very good working order. I definitely would not buy another one of those MS keyboards, especially ever since they went with their "Elite" line where all they did was screw up the positioning of your arrow keys and made some keys half sized.
Looks like a neat idea for a desktop machine, but what about laptops? It seems to me, if Microsoft would implement a really good virtual, scrollable desktop like XFree86 has, screen real estate is not such a big deal because I can make the application window bigger than the screen and only view the tool bars on screen when I need them anyway.
The place that this is really necessary is on laptop computers where video memory is usually not plentiful enough to have a huge virtual desktop. However, I can't see why this mouse is really necessary, since the touch pad on a laptop should already have the capability to detect when the user's finger is resting on the touch pad area. Only additional software is needed in this case.
Of course, IBM's Thinkpads with their trackpoint sticks will need some added hardware I think.
I've always believed that older people probably have just as much capability to learn new stuff as the younger folks, but they just have less motivation to do so. I mean, when you're young and just starting out, you -need- to learn as much as possible to stay alive, secure a good paying job, catch a good mate, start a family, etc.. But once you've married, have a mess a kids who can more or less take care of themselves, and have enough beans saved up to live comfortably without working anymore, why bother putting the effort into learning new stuff? Learning hard stuff takes a lot of effort, effort which a young person might be willing to expend, but not necessarily someone who already has all the essentials in life achieved.
There are, of course, some people who love the challege and continue learning all their lives, even after fulfilling life essentials.
But then there should also be a second distribution that is more of a "rolling release" system that maybe gets a bi-weekly set of updates. I think this second distribution is needed to keep up with the active development in the area of user applications.
What you're describing sounds like the Red Hat RawHide distribution. While I've never installed a full blown rawhide distro, I do steal SRPMs from it from time to time when a new release of some package comes out that I just gotta have for my standard Red Hat release. Sometimes I even burn new CDs with the updated packages integrated in. See fix-rhcd for some information on how to burn custom RH CDs.
I can dream at least, eh?
We're finally getting somewhere! I have held off buying a Diamon Rio due to their tiny storage size. I mean, what's the point of using MP3 if you don't have enough space to keep your -entire- music collection at your fingers at any time?
The one this I wished this article would mention is how long the device will run on a charge. Currently I've been hauling my IBM Thinkpad 390E notebook around with me to do me CS projects on -and- be my "portable" MP3 player. With 6GB of disk space and two Li-Ion batteries installed, I can listen to my entire collection for over 9 hours each day without carrying the wall brick.
Not really. There are better ways to do this, more securely. VPN mini-HOWTO is a good start.
Several years later, Java still runs like crap almost everywhere. When I see a description for a really cool program announced on Freshmeat, I go to download and find it's written in Java, then think, oh damn, it'll run like crap because Java will slow it down, waste memory, be a pain to get running, and probably crash once in a while as well, even if the actual code the author of the program did the best job coding as possible. Hell, snes9x does a better job of fast, stable, cross platform run time executation of non-native machine code, and that machine code wasn't even designed for this like Java byte code. Arg!
Java is most definitely not the holy grail of software. Linux and open source software is. If Sun would have gotten their head out of their asses and release all of the JDK under GPL, Java might have had a fighting chance. Instead, I look on to the great C/C++ coming out of the GIMP, KDE, GNOME, Koffice etc projects making Linux have all the wonderful software programs available that I dreamed about back when Java came out.
While it's true that having 10 different groups of programmers for your 10 versions will waste time, as each group has to get re-acquainted with the source base, it still may be better in the long run to rotate people through the project. Why? If you're programming component Gizmo, and you know that somebody later on, other than yourself, is going to have to maintain Gizmo, you're going to think a little more about making Gizmo easy to understand/documented. However, if you believe that you are the only one that will ever be maintaining this Gizmo for a long time, why bother with documentation/understandable design -- you can get your new features implemented faster by skipping those steps. The nomadic consultant programmers will understand that they need to write better code such that the system can be maintained.
This brings up an interesting question: how is code handled inside Microsoft? Do programmers end up running their own modules for long periods of time without rotatation of programmers? If so, this may explain why Microsoft's programs started out being fairly good, with new features ahead of the competition, yet now, several years later, they are having horrible problems with stability and code bloat. One reason I think Linux is so stable is that the programmers expect and hope that others will view and improve their code, so they write it in an understandable fashion. Microsoft code is undoubtly terribly more ugly to look at than any open source project (just ask the folks who got University licenses to see the NT source).
In this business, even if you're an "employee" of a company, how long do you really expect to stay with that single company anyway? While working for one company, someone may decide to be labelled "employee" or "contractor" simply depending upon how they want to do their taxes, what kind of short term benefits may be provided, personal reasons, etc not because they are more or less skilled than the other guy. Some places are reporting over 25 percent turnover per year of their IT staff. I see no reason why being more or less skilled than others would make you choose one label or the other.
Mark that up once again. How about the annoucement that Red Hat Linux 6.1 is in beta testing stage now?
For encrypted filesystems, try www.kerneli.org -- the International Kernel Crypto patch.
"Lie-flat" binding is nice. What I'm talking about is pages falling out of the book. While separate pages lie completely flat on a desk, I wouldn't call them lie-flat -binding- since they are no longer bound. ;-)