I'm a happy user of Dapper, but I must confess the release process seems unfortunate, and suffers from common release process issues nowadays seen all over the place.
Notably: -Release Candidate no longer seems to mean Release Candidate. Meaning RC releases have just become somewhat more conservative betas, instead of ultra conservative releases that at release time are thought to be release level quality, but tagged 'candidate' just in case. Likewise, the update process should be little more aggresive than post-release update. The fact that after any 'RC' release came and updates still numbered in the 50-70 packages a day means something was not quite right.
-The delay did nothing. When I saw the delay announcement, it held promise that they would be feature locked and do a proper six week or so bugfix phase. But functionality changed well into the delay. The delay became less about making what would have been 6.04 rock solid and more about tweaking features and functionality. Developers can't resist tweaking that stuff.
-Release Candidates never become releases. If RC process was strictly done right, you put out a RC that turns out to be acceptable, and it becomes a release (hence the promise of the word 'candidate'. The fact that you have a RC, then some changes, and then Release is not right. It should be RC, if changes needed, apply and do another RC, if no changes, release previous RC.
-Wireless support: Funny thing there, install networkmanager (and probably the gnome applet to go with it) and a great deal of the complexity goes down. It's surprisingly easy. At least with my ipw chipset. It configured things for WPA or WEP or wide open. It lacks LEAP support and therefore I couldn't use just that and had to do more advanced things, but if you just need wide open, WEP, and WPA support it will make configuring the wireless Windows-easy.
-Remote print support: I recently wrestled with printing to a windows desktop system with attached printer, but the bad side effect wasn't as you described. In my case, the target windows Box print queue would hang, requiring restart of the windows print spool service. The workaround was to disable bidirectional support under the ports tab of the printer tab on the windows box. At least in my case with an hp printer/hpijs, you can't do the bidirectional support on a windows server, but hplip would support it locally, but that won't help to access a windows printer.
So wireless support they left out the thing that makes it much easier by default (don't understand why), and with that it would have been very nearly perfect there.
Print support to a Windows shared printer was quite evil and obscure google searches were required to figure it out. It was nothing that Ubuntu itself could have done much about, since HPLIP doesn't support remote printing, and HPIJS supports remote printing, but not the bidirectional features. Add to that the only work around is a server-side print config change. However, I imagine this to be a fairly frequent for Ubuntu users and probably should be documented somewhere prominent.
Multi-core in AMD world means essentially each core is on a memory bus. Well, a very fast memory bus, but still, multiple cores on a package share memory much like two sockets on single core intel servers. So a multi-core single socket AMD processor won't display impressive memory performance relevant to the comparable intel configuration. HT really helps multi-socket scalability, and opens up interesting possibilities for coprocessors and high performance computer interconnects (HTX).
Well, except the oblig. s/ms/us, but pretty much yeah. With Pathscale (now QLogic) Infinipath HTX cards, you can get 1.5 us latency between nodes, Myrinet 10 G PCI-E can get about 2.5 us. Note that there is now 10Gb ethernet making inroads to compete on terms of throughput (which Infinband SDR, Myrinet are roughly 10 Gbps), but latency is of course still problematic. One chief advantage of non-ethernet is those networks are source routed and every node has a full topology map of how to get to their destinations. This has the benefit of distributing the task of routing to more processors, as well as making intelligent routing decisions. With ethernet, switches have a very heavy routing burden in a busy network. Compare this to a Myrinet or Infiniband switch which merely needs to look at the next port tag and send it on. By and large when trying to do benchmarks on these technologies, we generally don't worry too much about which switch is used. Contrast with Ethernet where we have to be mindful of the packets per second capability of the switch...
Of course, on a large scale network, it is much simpler and easier to do switch-routing frames, but for tightly controlled networks, source-routed can be very advantageous.
I will say switch routed frames have the *potential* for much better utilization of multi-port aggregations, but largely the member of a multi-port aggregation used to send a packet is not based on port congestion, but rather on a hash of the MAC address referenced in the packet, which is nothing a source routed network couldn't do.
But for individual workstations/laptops with single users where there is no protection of the data from multiple users, whole disk works well (except for/boot with the kernel and an initrd with dm-crypt tools). I have / and swap encrypted and don't have to worry about theft much with respect to private data.
Individual directory/file encryption is important for multi-user workstations/servers, where you have to worry about other users getting the files when owner is not logged in. encfs and the like provide some additional protection against this, but not much meaningful. It can protect the contents of data on a fileserver from even the administrator though, as I have seen encfs used to translate data from an nfs server to a local workstation mountpoint... I believe the built in windows file encryption mechanism has similar benefit from shared fileservers.
Was walking through a pet shop with a scarlet macaw and it wasn't a random utterance that struck me.
When this bird was invited onto someone's arm, it would climb toward the head, and then proclaim 'lookout!' before proceeding to preen. It obviously had learned this should be said by someone before clamping down on their hair and pulling.
But generally speaking, this behavior isn't quite the same as the parrots are not creating the names themselves, but rather recognizing the meaning of a word and imitating it in an intelligent fashion.
Though it seems possible that clacking and whistling in the wild may have significance simply not recognized. If they so readily recognize the concept of names and use them, they very well could use names humans just never pick up on.
What games have you been playing that chose 6 CD over DVD in a platform that would support either? I know a lot of early PS2 games (i.e. Tekken Tag) Fit on a single CD and therefore didn't ship on DVD media.
Every game that has exceeded the capcity of one CD was put on DVD. Sometimes publishers still opt for a two-disc packaging rather than a daul layer DVD packaging (Xenosaga was dual layr DVD, the sequal packaged as two single layer DVD).
The point is, printing one DVD is cheaper than printing a set of CDs, even when PS2 first hit the scene. Game publishers weren't hesitant, they went where the economics took them.
But I do think the video game console uasge of the media will not significanlt influence things. PS3 video playback is the only thing potentially relevant, and I think Sony's standard will be in trouble if they bank on that. Fact is HD-DVD is beating them to market with players. Right now it means little as the library is small and the players exorbitantly expensive, but by the time PS3 ships, one of two things will happen. Either PS3 is the first Blu Ray device on the market in a sea of resonably priced HD-DVD players (they will come down) and a significant HD-DVD section at your local Best Buy, or other Blu Ray players will get to market and play the significant role over which one becomes predominant. Either way, I think the PS3 movie playback capability will be a moot point.
I would laugh at any suggestion that video game format would even slightly influence the industry. There is no need for interoperability with other devices, so a consumer with Tekken 10 on Blu Rary could give a rats ass about wanting a Blu Ray video player because of that. Video game hardware prices may be affected by the cost of the drive hardware depending on market for their lasers, but that is probably the extent of things. Dreamcast shipped a funky optical drive unlike anyone else's (GD-ROM), and no one really cared one way or the other. They were still able to price competitively and no one even thought about GD-ROM as a larger format. They just did't get quality games/marketing.
you didn't read the comment, if you are faced with any negative impact from your credit report, you have to be able to get it there regardless of the annual limitation.
Also, they don't relay info for free either, other people wanting your info have to pay for it.
Unfortunately, the distros compete with the likes of Windows. As such, though technically speaking X on a multi-user system of any remote importance is a bad idea, if you shrug off X on servers Windows administrators may not like it as much. Install Red Hat or SuSE server oriented distributions and by default you still end up with a X environment. Good administrators know not to run X and it is powerful and even more convenient to run X apps remotely or inside a detachable VNC session. For small business to medium business/departmental servers, expect X servers to be the norm in the enterprise despite best practice.
The obvious solution is X not as root, so the worst you can do is screw around with the devices X really needs access to (screw around with the graphics, and local input devices, but an administrator can still ssh and have an intact, secure system in the ways that matter)
A linux terminal server need only the X libraries, not even a single instance of an X server, which generally requires elevated privileges to run. I think I've seen work to correct that, but as it stands at large an X server runs as root and has to arbitrate security, whereas X applications linked to X libraries, displaying to a thin client over the network, the server has no root level code and only the thin client filesystem/system is at any risk.
In practice such a law would outlaw the key part that makes a DVR, the part that converts QAM/VSB/whatever DVB-s signal you think of to a form amenable to being stored/processed by a general computer. I.e. a computer wouldn't be outlawed, but an Airstar HD-5000 would be outlawed or restricted. That is the definitive piece of equipment that differentiates a TiVO from a computer.
What you'd see is probably the same thing you see today on the DVD drive market with respect to Region protection. Also probably with the similar firmware fun where a broadcast-flag free card is a download away.
I agree DOA is a waste of time to make a movie on, there is next to zero coherent plot, only whatever semblance of a plot could fit quickli between fights. Same with any fighter game, Mortal combat, Street Fighter, etc. Doom's plot was pretty thin to base things off of too. I don't think that movies based on games like Resident Evil would have to suck, that's where you start to get some plot at least.
The key is to find the right balance. There are games with absolutely great stories that take on the order of 4 hours of story telling or more (stripping out gameplay) to convey appropiately. Most of the remainder have maybe 15-20 minutes of plot. In a video game, there isn't much justification for in between.
grow exponentially. I.e. Voodoo1 was just unprecedented. Prior to that everything 3D was similar to Playstation 1, unbearably jagged and incredibly geometrically simple.
At 800x600 with a moderate amount of geometric detail, I'm actually pretty well satisfied. Not horribly jagged, and geometric detail is good enough to approximate a decent scene. Back in the days of Voodoo 1, doubling resoultion and geometry was dramatic (320x240 to 640x480 goes a long way toward a smooth screen). Nowadays it probably doesn't quite require an order of magnitude of improvement in specs to make a wow difference, but it takes more than doubling them.
As to HDR, it looks more natural, but still isn't something that overly wows me.
I didn't say the 5900->7900 leap is insignificant, just that I reserve 'wow' for a revolutionary leap rather than pretty much evolutionary improvements.
You don't patent a name. You trademark a name. You patent a process/methods to an invention. There is no patent on the word 'x-box' either, or Playstation.
I realize there is more to 3D than games, but generally speaking only games provide reason for new video card purchases, since moderate graphics cards can handle XGL and such sufficiently.
I know UT2k4, Quake3 (and below), Doom3, and Neverwinter Nights all run native linux, but why not call for linux compatibility from game publishers? I know at least I'm disappointed in things like Oblivion and NWN2 not being on linux (and by extension not on my list of stuff to buy). NWN1 sucked a fair amount of licenses out of my household, but without Windows licenses and not wanting to use something as much of a kludge as wine to play a game, no more licenses for us...
3dfx voodoo 1 also from a Virge that didn't really do much interesting at all). Before that it was 286 to Pentium (I could play ultima underworld so smoothly compared to my friend's low end 486).
Maybe I'm just not easily impressed anymore, but everything I can recognize as being better now, but it seems evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Going to Pentium is when I got the horsepower to play fundamentally 3D looking games (Doom, Ultima Underworld), whereas before the best I did was Wolf3D. And again, going to Voodoo 1 added a depth to the 3D games and that has evolved from there with higher polycounts. If I went to Voodoo 1 straight to a modern video card, I'd probably be more wowed, but from a 5900 to a 7900, I really just shrug that sort of difference off when I see it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithy_code There is a twist on the sequency not quite being the Fibonacci sequence. Evidently, a twist derived from the Holy Blood, Holy Grail work.
If you don't want to work through it, they even give python code so you can see the 'jackie fister who are you dreadnough' decode for yourself.
I have two hard drives in my Thinkpad. Have to go without internal CD drive, but still interesting. Particularly with external USB CD drives (even ones that draw all the power they need via USB).
I see in their published specs that the 7200 RPM drives run at least 0.4 to 0.6 Watts higher. This may not seem like much, but right now my laptop is sucking about 17 watts of power, and that means about 2.4 to 3.5 percent higher power consumption.
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I'm a happy user of Dapper, but I must confess the release process seems unfortunate, and suffers from common release process issues nowadays seen all over the place.
Notably:
-Release Candidate no longer seems to mean Release Candidate. Meaning RC releases have just become somewhat more conservative betas, instead of ultra conservative releases that at release time are thought to be release level quality, but tagged 'candidate' just in case. Likewise, the update process should be little more aggresive than post-release update. The fact that after any 'RC' release came and updates still numbered in the 50-70 packages a day means something was not quite right.
-The delay did nothing. When I saw the delay announcement, it held promise that they would be feature locked and do a proper six week or so bugfix phase. But functionality changed well into the delay. The delay became less about making what would have been 6.04 rock solid and more about tweaking features and functionality. Developers can't resist tweaking that stuff.
-Release Candidates never become releases. If RC process was strictly done right, you put out a RC that turns out to be acceptable, and it becomes a release (hence the promise of the word 'candidate'. The fact that you have a RC, then some changes, and then Release is not right. It should be RC, if changes needed, apply and do another RC, if no changes, release previous RC.
-Wireless support:
Funny thing there, install networkmanager (and probably the gnome applet to go with it) and a great deal of the complexity goes down. It's surprisingly easy. At least with my ipw chipset. It configured things for WPA or WEP or wide open. It lacks LEAP support and therefore I couldn't use just that and had to do more advanced things, but if you just need wide open, WEP, and WPA support it will make configuring the wireless Windows-easy.
-Remote print support:
I recently wrestled with printing to a windows desktop system with attached printer, but the bad side effect wasn't as you described. In my case, the target windows Box print queue would hang, requiring restart of the windows print spool service. The workaround was to disable bidirectional support under the ports tab of the printer tab on the windows box. At least in my case with an hp printer/hpijs, you can't do the bidirectional support on a windows server, but hplip would support it locally, but that won't help to access a windows printer.
So wireless support they left out the thing that makes it much easier by default (don't understand why), and with that it would have been very nearly perfect there.
Print support to a Windows shared printer was quite evil and obscure google searches were required to figure it out. It was nothing that Ubuntu itself could have done much about, since HPLIP doesn't support remote printing, and HPIJS supports remote printing, but not the bidirectional features. Add to that the only work around is a server-side print config change. However, I imagine this to be a fairly frequent for Ubuntu users and probably should be documented somewhere prominent.
Multi-core in AMD world means essentially each core is on a memory bus. Well, a very fast memory bus, but still, multiple cores on a package share memory much like two sockets on single core intel servers. So a multi-core single socket AMD processor won't display impressive memory performance relevant to the comparable intel configuration. HT really helps multi-socket scalability, and opens up interesting possibilities for coprocessors and high performance computer interconnects (HTX).
mmmmm.... thermite....
Well, except the oblig. s/ms/us, but pretty much yeah. With Pathscale (now QLogic) Infinipath HTX cards, you can get 1.5 us latency between nodes, Myrinet 10 G PCI-E can get about 2.5 us. Note that there is now 10Gb ethernet making inroads to compete on terms of throughput (which Infinband SDR, Myrinet are roughly 10 Gbps), but latency is of course still problematic. One chief advantage of non-ethernet is those networks are source routed and every node has a full topology map of how to get to their destinations. This has the benefit of distributing the task of routing to more processors, as well as making intelligent routing decisions. With ethernet, switches have a very heavy routing burden in a busy network. Compare this to a Myrinet or Infiniband switch which merely needs to look at the next port tag and send it on. By and large when trying to do benchmarks on these technologies, we generally don't worry too much about which switch is used. Contrast with Ethernet where we have to be mindful of the packets per second capability of the switch...
Of course, on a large scale network, it is much simpler and easier to do switch-routing frames, but for tightly controlled networks, source-routed can be very advantageous.
I will say switch routed frames have the *potential* for much better utilization of multi-port aggregations, but largely the member of a multi-port aggregation used to send a packet is not based on port congestion, but rather on a hash of the MAC address referenced in the packet, which is nothing a source routed network couldn't do.
So combining this story with that site, this means spinning water really fast will make a stargate...
But for individual workstations/laptops with single users where there is no protection of the data from multiple users, whole disk works well (except for /boot with the kernel and an initrd with dm-crypt tools). I have / and swap encrypted and don't have to worry about theft much with respect to private data.
Individual directory/file encryption is important for multi-user workstations/servers, where you have to worry about other users getting the files when owner is not logged in. encfs and the like provide some additional protection against this, but not much meaningful. It can protect the contents of data on a fileserver from even the administrator though, as I have seen encfs used to translate data from an nfs server to a local workstation mountpoint... I believe the built in windows file encryption mechanism has similar benefit from shared fileservers.
Was walking through a pet shop with a scarlet macaw and it wasn't a random utterance that struck me.
When this bird was invited onto someone's arm, it would climb toward the head, and then proclaim 'lookout!' before proceeding to preen. It obviously had learned this should be said by someone before clamping down on their hair and pulling.
But generally speaking, this behavior isn't quite the same as the parrots are not creating the names themselves, but rather recognizing the meaning of a word and imitating it in an intelligent fashion.
Though it seems possible that clacking and whistling in the wild may have significance simply not recognized. If they so readily recognize the concept of names and use them, they very well could use names humans just never pick up on.
Where the duck is Fuck Hunt?
What games have you been playing that chose 6 CD over DVD in a platform that would support either? I know a lot of early PS2 games (i.e. Tekken Tag) Fit on a single CD and therefore didn't ship on DVD media.
Every game that has exceeded the capcity of one CD was put on DVD. Sometimes publishers still opt for a two-disc packaging rather than a daul layer DVD packaging (Xenosaga was dual layr DVD, the sequal packaged as two single layer DVD).
The point is, printing one DVD is cheaper than printing a set of CDs, even when PS2 first hit the scene. Game publishers weren't hesitant, they went where the economics took them.
But I do think the video game console uasge of the media will not significanlt influence things. PS3 video playback is the only thing potentially relevant, and I think Sony's standard will be in trouble if they bank on that. Fact is HD-DVD is beating them to market with players. Right now it means little as the library is small and the players exorbitantly expensive, but by the time PS3 ships, one of two things will happen. Either PS3 is the first Blu Ray device on the market in a sea of resonably priced HD-DVD players (they will come down) and a significant HD-DVD section at your local Best Buy, or other Blu Ray players will get to market and play the significant role over which one becomes predominant. Either way, I think the PS3 movie playback capability will be a moot point.
I would laugh at any suggestion that video game format would even slightly influence the industry. There is no need for interoperability with other devices, so a consumer with Tekken 10 on Blu Rary could give a rats ass about wanting a Blu Ray video player because of that. Video game hardware prices may be affected by the cost of the drive hardware depending on market for their lasers, but that is probably the extent of things. Dreamcast shipped a funky optical drive unlike anyone else's (GD-ROM), and no one really cared one way or the other. They were still able to price competitively and no one even thought about GD-ROM as a larger format. They just did't get quality games/marketing.
you didn't read the comment, if you are faced with any negative impact from your credit report, you have to be able to get it there regardless of the annual limitation.
Also, they don't relay info for free either, other people wanting your info have to pay for it.
Still seems horribly broken though.
Unfortunately, the distros compete with the likes of Windows. As such, though technically speaking X on a multi-user system of any remote importance is a bad idea, if you shrug off X on servers Windows administrators may not like it as much. Install Red Hat or SuSE server oriented distributions and by default you still end up with a X environment. Good administrators know not to run X and it is powerful and even more convenient to run X apps remotely or inside a detachable VNC session. For small business to medium business/departmental servers, expect X servers to be the norm in the enterprise despite best practice.
The obvious solution is X not as root, so the worst you can do is screw around with the devices X really needs access to (screw around with the graphics, and local input devices, but an administrator can still ssh and have an intact, secure system in the ways that matter)
A linux terminal server need only the X libraries, not even a single instance of an X server, which generally requires elevated privileges to run. I think I've seen work to correct that, but as it stands at large an X server runs as root and has to arbitrate security, whereas X applications linked to X libraries, displaying to a thin client over the network, the server has no root level code and only the thin client filesystem/system is at any risk.
X11 is actually written entirely in LISP, and therefore there are too many parentheses for a mere mortal to ever get straight.
In practice such a law would outlaw the key part that makes a DVR, the part that converts QAM/VSB/whatever DVB-s signal you think of to a form amenable to being stored/processed by a general computer. I.e. a computer wouldn't be outlawed, but an Airstar HD-5000 would be outlawed or restricted. That is the definitive piece of equipment that differentiates a TiVO from a computer.
What you'd see is probably the same thing you see today on the DVD drive market with respect to Region protection. Also probably with the similar firmware fun where a broadcast-flag free card is a download away.
No SNES, you are just a poser...
I agree DOA is a waste of time to make a movie on, there is next to zero coherent plot, only whatever semblance of a plot could fit quickli between fights. Same with any fighter game, Mortal combat, Street Fighter, etc. Doom's plot was pretty thin to base things off of too. I don't think that movies based on games like Resident Evil would have to suck, that's where you start to get some plot at least.
The key is to find the right balance. There are games with absolutely great stories that take on the order of 4 hours of story telling or more (stripping out gameplay) to convey appropiately. Most of the remainder have maybe 15-20 minutes of plot. In a video game, there isn't much justification for in between.
grow exponentially. I.e. Voodoo1 was just unprecedented. Prior to that everything 3D was similar to Playstation 1, unbearably jagged and incredibly geometrically simple.
At 800x600 with a moderate amount of geometric detail, I'm actually pretty well satisfied. Not horribly jagged, and geometric detail is good enough to approximate a decent scene. Back in the days of Voodoo 1, doubling resoultion and geometry was dramatic (320x240 to 640x480 goes a long way toward a smooth screen). Nowadays it probably doesn't quite require an order of magnitude of improvement in specs to make a wow difference, but it takes more than doubling them.
As to HDR, it looks more natural, but still isn't something that overly wows me.
I didn't say the 5900->7900 leap is insignificant, just that I reserve 'wow' for a revolutionary leap rather than pretty much evolutionary improvements.
You don't patent a name. You trademark a name. You patent a process/methods to an invention. There is no patent on the word 'x-box' either, or Playstation.
At least you got TM right...
I realize there is more to 3D than games, but generally speaking only games provide reason for new video card purchases, since moderate graphics cards can handle XGL and such sufficiently.
I know UT2k4, Quake3 (and below), Doom3, and Neverwinter Nights all run native linux, but why not call for linux compatibility from game publishers? I know at least I'm disappointed in things like Oblivion and NWN2 not being on linux (and by extension not on my list of stuff to buy). NWN1 sucked a fair amount of licenses out of my household, but without Windows licenses and not wanting to use something as much of a kludge as wine to play a game, no more licenses for us...
3dfx voodoo 1 also from a Virge that didn't really do much interesting at all). Before that it was 286 to Pentium (I could play ultima underworld so smoothly compared to my friend's low end 486).
Maybe I'm just not easily impressed anymore, but everything I can recognize as being better now, but it seems evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Going to Pentium is when I got the horsepower to play fundamentally 3D looking games (Doom, Ultima Underworld), whereas before the best I did was Wolf3D. And again, going to Voodoo 1 added a depth to the 3D games and that has evolved from there with higher polycounts. If I went to Voodoo 1 straight to a modern video card, I'd probably be more wowed, but from a 5900 to a 7900, I really just shrug that sort of difference off when I see it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithy_code
There is a twist on the sequency not quite being the Fibonacci sequence. Evidently, a twist derived from the Holy Blood, Holy Grail work.
If you don't want to work through it, they even give python code so you can see the 'jackie fister who are you dreadnough' decode for yourself.
I have two hard drives in my Thinkpad. Have to go without internal CD drive, but still interesting. Particularly with external USB CD drives (even ones that draw all the power they need via USB).
I see in their published specs that the 7200 RPM drives run at least 0.4 to 0.6 Watts higher. This may not seem like much, but right now my laptop is sucking about 17 watts of power, and that means about 2.4 to 3.5 percent higher power consumption.
Still not much, but a factor to consider.
I'm nuts and forgot about the nature of another part of the story, oh well.