Here I am sitting in the undergraduate library using the computers... and they announce it over the building speakers: A free session to take back your time. My first though was, "But it takes an hour of my time" (which I'm sure someone already said above {see, I'm a good/.er, I don't even read the posts, let alone the articles}).
In any case, this is not some stunt; they are actually doing it.
I looked at Opera a while back and found it to be extremely fast a page loading/rendering. I don't know how it compares to the current Mozilla.
My concern was that Opera could not handle multiple windows at the time. It could, but it was program-based rather than window-manager-based, so you could create a new browser window but it was bounded by the Opera `desktop'. This is entirely unacceptable, IMHO, especially when I have 20 browser windows open simultaneously and they need to be spread out to multiple desktops. At the time, then, the only way to use Opera was to load 14 copies of the thing, and then it wasn't such a good deal.
Is this still the way it is, or have things changed?
Well, this guy is pasted together from different material than me:
1. I'm always early, so I always wake up before my watch goes beep beep, and that is the extent of my alarm clock. But since I'm unemployed, I go back to sleep.
2. For me it's homeless and street people. I never carry cash, so I always have to say I don't have any. Now I can say I'm unemployed.
3. No spouse, and I don't expect to be able to impress any prospective boyfriend. Besides that, if I'm not feeling in top form, I'm going to have trouble meeting people.
4. I think ahead, but I was much more organized and structured about my goals when I was forced to think about them, like when I worked 60 hours a week so had to schedule 2 hours per week to handle this type of thing. Now I can put them in the back of my mind and live in the moment, so I can plan things tomorrow.
5. Scams: I have yet to put any money into a bogus `placement' firm.
6. I shave less often, but I still can't grow a beard; it's annoying as heck.
7. I have cleaned some, but in the last four months I really don't think that my average cleanliness has improved any. I guess I'm something like a slob now.
8. I'm still a snob. I still drink martinis. I still buy imported cheese.
9. I have an aversion to light, so I use as little power as possible, but certainly much more since I'm home all day.
10. I get into movies for free.
11. I went running some at the beginning of the summer, but exercise has never afforded me any antidepressive benefits; it just doesn't. I've done some hiking near the end of the summer, and that because I haven't been occupied with work, this is true. But I'm still in worse shape than I was.
12. I don't exercise unless it's scheduled. I'm not scheduled unless I have some reason to be, apparently.
13. My will power is unchanged. I have a block of non-work time; what do I want to do? Do I want to work on a hobby or sit around? Same decision. The only reason that more hobbies get done is because the total available time is greater.
14. I don't claim to understand this society or this federalist republic.
I have a masters degree, so I agree with the posts that note that I won't be working at MacDonalds; I'm overqualified. I've heard that several times. I've tried some other areas, but apparently I don't have enough training there. At least I still have enough room on my credit card to go out in style.
NOAA provides a great deal of information for free already --- as they are a public service anyway, this only makes sense. It may not contain the precise details that you wish to research, but you can find information about the various forms of data, including ftp-accessible satellite data, at either of the following two sites: NWS Telecommunications Operations Center, or the National Climatic Data Center.
This will be great to see if people have wonkyed their port numbers to try to obfuscate what they're doing, like running smtp on 10025 or something silly. You'll be able to check that there is an MTA on 25 and SSH on 22.
I sure wish Miliki and QuikCAT's internet accelerator had got a bit more off the ground so some comparisons could be run. They were working up products slowly over the last several years, and I fully expected their hard work to pay off in the future; alas, someone jumped the gun (i.e., stupid business people who can only see two feet in front of them and don't realize how research pays off) and pulled the rug out from under them, so now I think they've all but closed up shop.
They had pretty good streaming audio-video on handhelds two years ago, and their image compression has always been really good. I don't think their webpages are the most convincing, because they really don't have enough comparison numbers as far as I'm concerned, but I have seen some of their products behave pretty much as claimed, which makes them very comparable to the accelerators mentioned here.
Alas, all gone now.
Yeah, those crazy staff... I remember we were measuring gravity in a physics lab on a pneumatic/floating table. The experiment was running for days on end, and every day when we looked at the data it would be all wonky about five in the morning. We started in on all sorts of crazy ideas about earthquakes and planes flying over the building; we thought about morning traffic and electrical interference. After three days, we had had enough, so in addition to the locked door we put a "Do Not Enter Sign". Miraculously, the experiment ran fine.
This is more complicated in the United States, I should think, because a good number of organizations will only be able to get machines that are preloaded with Windows. That means that small, non-profit organizations can only look at such a model and drool, because they'll never be able to talk the retailers into refunding their money.
You'll forgive my ignorance, but is the U.S. the only place where this problem exists?
"... [O]ur goal is to complete... at the end of October, draw our conclusions and rapidly roll it out."
Will we be surprised if, two months from now we hear: "Alas, all 500 test subjects hated it terribly; we'll stick with Windows. Oddly, they all seem to have inherited $1M from abroad.".
I was back at Case Western Reserve University (see/.'s recent wiffy post about CWRU) when they were running ATM to student rooms in residence halls on campus. We were using Fore PCA200Es at the time; they were kinda crappy cards, but they worked. There were various Linuxes running on ATM. I was running RedHat 2.0.36 at the time (yeah, this was circa 1998/9), and the ATM driver worked only as a module. Once things were set up, there were very few substantial problems. The 2.2 kernels brought some better support, but I soon switched to OpenBSD and all bets were off.
If you need the support, I see no reason why it shouldn't work. If you don't really need it, Ethernet support is so built-into-everything that the fact that it has 0% software hassle may make it more worthwhile. Of course, if you're talking about networked games... ATM. Yum.
1. The holes in the OS, even if minor, tend to have roots and fingers that stretch out and effect a good deal of the OS. Other posts in this article have more comments on that.
2. Windows Culture. Now, I hate this word, so I'm being a tad bit facetious; see, for example, that NASA needs to fix it's `culture', an amorphous idea at best, IMHO. In any case, here I would argue that it is the culture of Windows to default with automation. Outlook defaults to launching many attachments in the viewer automatically. Attach a picture, and voila! Attach something that says it's a picture but does something malicious instead: Voila, opt-out worm spreading. The `culture' doesn't opt-out.
I mean, I live 5mi from this demonstration, and I don't hear about it until it's over. Was it announced anywhere? Or do I still not understand how people schedule things in this city; i.e., being `on time' means you're 30 minutes late, and things don't get announced until two hours before they happen. Honestly though? Was it announced?
Well, this message is going to be rated Depressed Slacker.
So, how do they go about getting licensee information? I mean, other companies might have that contact information, if someone bought a CD set. But how do they track all those downloads? They must have some pretty amazing products to do that. I wonder how expensive that is?
... if the transition time is reasonably fast. Consider how long it takes a transistor to switch on-board; this (not is but) determines when the CPU is ready to send the result of a calculation. It would seem to me that the more graduations you introduce into your 5V, the longer you'll have to wait, due to transition and bouncing. With this in mind, tertiary seems reasonable, but `base 10' or higher seems questionable.
This is getting closer to my type of movie marathon, though I must agree that theatres should be reminded of that `intermission' word. There are only two things that worry me:
1) Will my connections be able to get me into the marathon the day before it starts when they are testing the setup?
2) Who's going to join me when some theatre gets enough guts to run the weekend James Bond movie marathon?
Great, now we have worm battles. So is SCO going to write a worm that finds SCO in Linux and reports back? And then someone can write a worm that overrides that and changes the code instead?
What exactly is this insatiable need to name things? We attempt to be a global community --- I personally think it would be rather easy for everyone to remember a nice numbered element like Ununnillium --- and instead we go choose some arbitrary, hard-to-remember name.
... when the bsd libc random generator only fails their test-suite 22% more often than LavaRnd; that's only 0.215% failure, in any case. This, to me, is an encouraging thought, especially when I only need to generate PGP keys. Generating presidential election data, on the other hand...
Maybe I'm a bit extreme, but these tests are in no way representative of my browsing environment. Clearly, if the browser can't render a table or include an image, then it pretty much fails the HTML compliancy test. With regards to a browser being useable, however, it's going to take many more tests.
For example, I rarely, if ever, have only one browser window open; I have seven right now. In this measure, Opera fails instantly. The last time I checked, you could have multiple pages loaded in Opera, but they couldn't be outside the main Opera window. With Mozilla and Netscape, I frequently have multiple pages spanning multiple screen pages and multiple desks. In this regard, Netscape wins above Mozilla, though only slightly, because it can launch a new window onto a different desk. If you try to launch a new Mozilla window, which is a little bit slow to begin with, and try to skip to a new desk before it loads, it will pop you back to a different desk, meaning you have to then move the new window to the desk you want. Of course, let's not get into multi-heading, because Opera would fail even more miserably.
If you measure stability, though, Netscape is going to lose. I think Mozilla has crashed one time, ever. Given that I launch a browser, and then run it for weeks without closing it, and given that it goes through many new windows and many removed windows, Netscape loses. It just leaks too much memory. Every 14 days it would crash (rather, it would fill up ALL of the swap space). Mozilla went down for a really bad URL (poor content design). I don't recall it ever going down for a memory leak.
What am I saying? Netscape, while fast, just can't handle what I do to it; it leaks too much. Opera was fast (in my experience), perhaps the fastest browser I've seen (faster than IE), but if I can't browse 55 different pages in 25 to 55 different places on my desktop, forget it. Mozilla wins for now, because the 0.9.x optimizations have made it fast enough to use, and it doesn't die every week like Netscape. The others I have no experience with.
The tests, while interesting information about `old' machines' capabilities, may not be very representative of today's user base, or of today's optimized code.
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Here I am sitting in the undergraduate library using the computers... and they announce it over the building speakers: A free session to take back your time. My first though was, "But it takes an hour of my time" (which I'm sure someone already said above {see, I'm a good /.er, I don't even read the posts, let alone the articles}).
In any case, this is not some stunt; they are actually doing it.
I looked at Opera a while back and found it to be extremely fast a page loading/rendering. I don't know how it compares to the current Mozilla.
My concern was that Opera could not handle multiple windows at the time. It could, but it was program-based rather than window-manager-based, so you could create a new browser window but it was bounded by the Opera `desktop'. This is entirely unacceptable, IMHO, especially when I have 20 browser windows open simultaneously and they need to be spread out to multiple desktops. At the time, then, the only way to use Opera was to load 14 copies of the thing, and then it wasn't such a good deal.
Is this still the way it is, or have things changed?
Well, this guy is pasted together from different material than me:
1. I'm always early, so I always wake up before my watch goes beep beep, and that is the extent of my alarm clock. But since I'm unemployed, I go back to sleep.
2. For me it's homeless and street people. I never carry cash, so I always have to say I don't have any. Now I can say I'm unemployed.
3. No spouse, and I don't expect to be able to impress any prospective boyfriend. Besides that, if I'm not feeling in top form, I'm going to have trouble meeting people.
4. I think ahead, but I was much more organized and structured about my goals when I was forced to think about them, like when I worked 60 hours a week so had to schedule 2 hours per week to handle this type of thing. Now I can put them in the back of my mind and live in the moment, so I can plan things tomorrow.
5. Scams: I have yet to put any money into a bogus `placement' firm.
6. I shave less often, but I still can't grow a beard; it's annoying as heck.
7. I have cleaned some, but in the last four months I really don't think that my average cleanliness has improved any. I guess I'm something like a slob now.
8. I'm still a snob. I still drink martinis. I still buy imported cheese.
9. I have an aversion to light, so I use as little power as possible, but certainly much more since I'm home all day.
10. I get into movies for free.
11. I went running some at the beginning of the summer, but exercise has never afforded me any antidepressive benefits; it just doesn't. I've done some hiking near the end of the summer, and that because I haven't been occupied with work, this is true. But I'm still in worse shape than I was.
12. I don't exercise unless it's scheduled. I'm not scheduled unless I have some reason to be, apparently.
13. My will power is unchanged. I have a block of non-work time; what do I want to do? Do I want to work on a hobby or sit around? Same decision. The only reason that more hobbies get done is because the total available time is greater.
14. I don't claim to understand this society or this federalist republic.
I have a masters degree, so I agree with the posts that note that I won't be working at MacDonalds; I'm overqualified. I've heard that several times. I've tried some other areas, but apparently I don't have enough training there. At least I still have enough room on my credit card to go out in style.
NOAA provides a great deal of information for free already --- as they are a public service anyway, this only makes sense. It may not contain the precise details that you wish to research, but you can find information about the various forms of data, including ftp-accessible satellite data, at either of the following two sites: NWS Telecommunications Operations Center, or the National Climatic Data Center.
This will be great to see if people have wonkyed their port numbers to try to obfuscate what they're doing, like running smtp on 10025 or something silly. You'll be able to check that there is an MTA on 25 and SSH on 22.
I sure wish Miliki and QuikCAT's internet accelerator had got a bit more off the ground so some comparisons could be run. They were working up products slowly over the last several years, and I fully expected their hard work to pay off in the future; alas, someone jumped the gun (i.e., stupid business people who can only see two feet in front of them and don't realize how research pays off) and pulled the rug out from under them, so now I think they've all but closed up shop. They had pretty good streaming audio-video on handhelds two years ago, and their image compression has always been really good. I don't think their webpages are the most convincing, because they really don't have enough comparison numbers as far as I'm concerned, but I have seen some of their products behave pretty much as claimed, which makes them very comparable to the accelerators mentioned here. Alas, all gone now.
Yeah, those crazy staff... I remember we were measuring gravity in a physics lab on a pneumatic/floating table. The experiment was running for days on end, and every day when we looked at the data it would be all wonky about five in the morning. We started in on all sorts of crazy ideas about earthquakes and planes flying over the building; we thought about morning traffic and electrical interference. After three days, we had had enough, so in addition to the locked door we put a "Do Not Enter Sign". Miraculously, the experiment ran fine.
... a spherical cow.
This is more complicated in the United States, I should think, because a good number of organizations will only be able to get machines that are preloaded with Windows. That means that small, non-profit organizations can only look at such a model and drool, because they'll never be able to talk the retailers into refunding their money.
You'll forgive my ignorance, but is the U.S. the only place where this problem exists?
"... [O]ur goal is to complete... at the end of October, draw our conclusions and rapidly roll it out."
Will we be surprised if, two months from now we hear: "Alas, all 500 test subjects hated it terribly; we'll stick with Windows. Oddly, they all seem to have inherited $1M from abroad.".
I was back at Case Western Reserve University (see /.'s recent wiffy post about CWRU) when they were running ATM to student rooms in residence halls on campus. We were using Fore PCA200Es at the time; they were kinda crappy cards, but they worked. There were various Linuxes running on ATM. I was running RedHat 2.0.36 at the time (yeah, this was circa 1998/9), and the ATM driver worked only as a module. Once things were set up, there were very few substantial problems. The 2.2 kernels brought some better support, but I soon switched to OpenBSD and all bets were off.
If you need the support, I see no reason why it shouldn't work. If you don't really need it, Ethernet support is so built-into-everything that the fact that it has 0% software hassle may make it more worthwhile. Of course, if you're talking about networked games... ATM. Yum.
1. The holes in the OS, even if minor, tend to have roots and fingers that stretch out and effect a good deal of the OS. Other posts in this article have more comments on that.
2. Windows Culture. Now, I hate this word, so I'm being a tad bit facetious; see, for example, that NASA needs to fix it's `culture', an amorphous idea at best, IMHO. In any case, here I would argue that it is the culture of Windows to default with automation. Outlook defaults to launching many attachments in the viewer automatically. Attach a picture, and voila! Attach something that says it's a picture but does something malicious instead: Voila, opt-out worm spreading. The `culture' doesn't opt-out.
Enough of this freaking sun and hot weather, in Seattle of all places, which is also why there's no jobs.
I'm going abroad to soak up all those tech jobs that are being shipped overseas!
I mean, I live 5mi from this demonstration, and I don't hear about it until it's over. Was it announced anywhere? Or do I still not understand how people schedule things in this city; i.e., being `on time' means you're 30 minutes late, and things don't get announced until two hours before they happen. Honestly though? Was it announced?
Well, this message is going to be rated Depressed Slacker.
In Seattle? We have a lot of clouds, you know. But I guess that annoying orange orb has been out frying us all summer. Why won't it just go away!?
RC5-1024 here we come!
Call me back in about 200 years.
So, how do they go about getting licensee information? I mean, other companies might have that contact information, if someone bought a CD set. But how do they track all those downloads? They must have some pretty amazing products to do that. I wonder how expensive that is?
Um, as a mathematician I can understand why I might be hired to sell hotdogs, but to justify undefined claims? Naaaa.
... if the transition time is reasonably fast. Consider how long it takes a transistor to switch on-board; this (not is but) determines when the CPU is ready to send the result of a calculation. It would seem to me that the more graduations you introduce into your 5V, the longer you'll have to wait, due to transition and bouncing. With this in mind, tertiary seems reasonable, but `base 10' or higher seems questionable.
This is getting closer to my type of movie marathon, though I must agree that theatres should be reminded of that `intermission' word. There are only two things that worry me:
1) Will my connections be able to get me into the marathon the day before it starts when they are testing the setup?
2) Who's going to join me when some theatre gets enough guts to run the weekend James Bond movie marathon?
Great, now we have worm battles. So is SCO going to write a worm that finds SCO in Linux and reports back? And then someone can write a worm that overrides that and changes the code instead?
What exactly is this insatiable need to name things? We attempt to be a global community --- I personally think it would be rather easy for everyone to remember a nice numbered element like Ununnillium --- and instead we go choose some arbitrary, hard-to-remember name.
... when the bsd libc random generator only fails their test-suite 22% more often than LavaRnd; that's only 0.215% failure, in any case. This, to me, is an encouraging thought, especially when I only need to generate PGP keys. Generating presidential election data, on the other hand...
Maybe I'm a bit extreme, but these tests are in no way representative of my browsing environment. Clearly, if the browser can't render a table or include an image, then it pretty much fails the HTML compliancy test. With regards to a browser being useable, however, it's going to take many more tests.
For example, I rarely, if ever, have only one browser window open; I have seven right now. In this measure, Opera fails instantly. The last time I checked, you could have multiple pages loaded in Opera, but they couldn't be outside the main Opera window. With Mozilla and Netscape, I frequently have multiple pages spanning multiple screen pages and multiple desks. In this regard, Netscape wins above Mozilla, though only slightly, because it can launch a new window onto a different desk. If you try to launch a new Mozilla window, which is a little bit slow to begin with, and try to skip to a new desk before it loads, it will pop you back to a different desk, meaning you have to then move the new window to the desk you want. Of course, let's not get into multi-heading, because Opera would fail even more miserably.
If you measure stability, though, Netscape is going to lose. I think Mozilla has crashed one time, ever. Given that I launch a browser, and then run it for weeks without closing it, and given that it goes through many new windows and many removed windows, Netscape loses. It just leaks too much memory. Every 14 days it would crash (rather, it would fill up ALL of the swap space). Mozilla went down for a really bad URL (poor content design). I don't recall it ever going down for a memory leak.
What am I saying? Netscape, while fast, just can't handle what I do to it; it leaks too much. Opera was fast (in my experience), perhaps the fastest browser I've seen (faster than IE), but if I can't browse 55 different pages in 25 to 55 different places on my desktop, forget it. Mozilla wins for now, because the 0.9.x optimizations have made it fast enough to use, and it doesn't die every week like Netscape. The others I have no experience with.
The tests, while interesting information about `old' machines' capabilities, may not be very representative of today's user base, or of today's optimized code.