In the past few years I converted our lab over to Linux and here are some of the tools we use for analysis:
GCC for C/C++/FORTRAN coding. It's free, it's not the fastest in the world but it's competent.
Octave is a great, free replacement for Matlab. For general data manipulation it seems fine, where it really lacks relative to Matlab is in the GUI.
Gnuplot is a great all-round, all-purpose, scriptable plotting tool that can also do fitting. For general everyday tasks gnuplot gets used a lot in our lab.
SciGraphica is a great 2d/3d/vector/polar/ plotting and analysis package. It is a little like an Origin clone so is pretty easy to pick up, and can be extended with Python plugins. I am one of the developers;0) (although far too busy atm to contribute, anyone want to help?). More suitable for publication-quality plots and still heavily in development. A new release is imminent. Plug;0).
teTeX is the main (La)TeX distribution for Linux and you'll most probably have it in Debian anyway but for writing reports, articles, books, theses, even letters you shouldn't need to use anything else. Really.
OpenOffice if you have to deal with mad, crazy, annoying.doc using people.
There's plenty more where they came from. Most distrbutions come with a lot of these things anyway. These are mainly analysis or document tools, there's plenty of other things for both these areas and any other which plenty of other posters have shown. I've written a little guide for my local group. Some of it's out of date (and some of it's wrong but I have better things to fix) but it does have a list of common tools we use. And, of course, SAL is a pretty comprehensive database of unix tools. HTH.
Re:Bad screenshots for showing anti-aliasing
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KDE 3.0 Screenshots
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· Score: 2
This is really one of my bette noires. It's one of two simple rules when it comes to image filetypes: if it's raster and it's 'photographic' then use JPEG. If it's more flat in colour or with lots of sharp pixel perfect edges (like a screenshot) use PNG/GIF.
Anything like a graph or a diagram should be done as vector.
Very simple rules but nobody seems to teach them. The number of people I come across that do things like saving data plots as JPEGs is not funny. Windows' inability to save useful complete vector formats is definitely a large factor.
I used to respect Don Knuth. Then I went to his site and he had done screenshots as JPEG. I now wouldn't trust him to set my video;0).
Re:BUG: The red dinosaur
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Mozilla Bug Week
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Ya a couple crusty eurotrash "coderz" contributed some bloat to the project, but let's be realistic, 90% of the developers are the crappy low skill AOL employees that got the unfortunate task of trying to make something useable out of the crusty old netscape code.
Mozilla is not based on the ''crusty old netscape code''. They tried that. They didn't get very far. Mozilla is, afaik, a pretty much complete rewrite from scratch. One of many legitimate reasons it's taken so long to get to the very useable state it is in now.
Mozilla is a very competent and capable browser. About the best available for non-Windows users and plenty of those like it too. It costs you nothing. It's totally open for anyone to do what they want with it. Why do so many people have a problem with this? If you don't like it, don't use it.
It's taken a long time coming, sure, but so was Win2K. At least you've been able to use Mozilla all the time it's been developed. I jumped on board around 0.9 after trying out the earlier versions and not being overly impressed. It's now on all my machines and my users are very happy with it.
It all depends on what you want to do. I run about 10 X terminals on average from a single cpu p3-450 w/ 512MB RAM. This runs KDE2.2.1 for most of these desktop machines and a general range of things like:
Konqueror/Mozilla/Netscape with the various plugins.
StarOffice
xfig/sketch
gimp (+xsane for scanning)
Compiling and running analysis software
plotting and data manipulation
LaTeX document production
ssh+X connections to other machines
shedload of xterm+bash sessions
various games and text editors and downloads and archives etc etc
Ok, not heavy duty stuff 24/7 but the little old server is at it all the time, as well as all the web/email/ftp/samba/nfs stuff on top. This single machine with at least half the cpu power of the celeron systems you tout feels fine. People can have crashed jobs/apps racing the cpu or running code or compiles etc in the background and nobody notices. This isn't to say that if it ever started to have a Load Average of more than about 10 it wouldn't start to be sluggish but that you can run a lot of desktop and general CLI apps on such a machine quite happily
It wouldn't work for people doing heavy gfx work, or video editing or really large simulations etc but that's not what we're talking about here.
At the very least you could have a few more big servers running thin clients if you need that much more cpu power but for our office/lab a single lowspec machine is running the whole place and as responsive as a single stupidly overpowered and pita to admin standalone machine. The machines can be standalone. In fact most of the X Terminals are far more powerful than the server (they also dualboot Win2K) but for most operations there's no difference in responsiveness.
It works for us, and it works for Largo, and it can work for plenty of others. Not everyone but plenty enough.
(The machine is running Linux 2.4 and SuSE 7.2 across 100MBit ether for anyone that's interested)
Firstly the reporting on this is totally over the top for the actual risk involved and goes about mentioning totally unrelated factors (ie Apache. Apache is not involved at all, and something like this is just as likely to work on desktop systems as on servers, it doesn't rely on any server type activity apart from a network connection).
Secondly this 'really nasty trojan' fits the way me and my friends have discussed re Linux viruses and trojans, it goes like this:
Write something that will set up a connection and allow *you* in, or a shell script of some sort to screw around with a system, you know, the usual sort of thing you want to do someone else's system when you're a 15yr old dick.
Attach it to an email.
Send it off to people with the wording "Hi! Here's a great new program. Save it. Use chmod 777 on it. Then copy it to/bin/. Oh, and you'll have to do it as root. But don't worry, it's really fun!"
Sit back and wait as maybe a dozen people at the most fall for it.
Just how is this new trojan any different? Anyone for years now could have done this, but haven't. Why? Because it needs pretty complicated user intervention and people running things as root (something they're repeatedly told not to). If unix email clients become as screwed as OE then it might be time to start worrying.
Bad as Code Red my arse. CR was a worm that propogated itself, you didn't need to be actively stupid to contract and spread CR.
If someone releases something which attacks a currently running service, infects it, and propogates itself without any user intervention then I might be interested. Like Raman and Lion. They were real concerns for admins and they did sod all damage in the grand scheme of things.
Besides, this thing is stopped dead by a firewall.
And RISC OS running on Acorns had it since about 1989 iirc (can't be arsed looking up the dates).
Anything you think is great has been done before countless times be people you've never heard of on systems you've never used. Such is the way of computers.
Maybe in the far future all systems will merge into the exact same looking, same performing, same stability product. Convergent evolution and all that.
The gram is a measurment of mass, whereas the Newton is the measurement of force. Mass changes with gravity and something weighing 1 gram here would be significantly less on the Moon. Force, if I remember rightly is universal. Since 99.9999% of Slashdotters live on the planet Earth I would say that it doesn't really matter how much weight I would 'loose' simply by travelling to the moon.
Not quite. The kilogramme is the unit of mass. The Newton is the unit of force.
Mass is universal. You mass the same on Earth as on the moon as on Mars. Weight is a force. It's the force of the attraction between the mass of the body you're on (and I don't mean J.Lopez;0) and your mass, ie gravity. Thus you weigh more on Earth than on the Moon as the gravitational attraction on Earth (and thus the force) is greater.
This is why astronauts have to be careful in space with big objects; they weigh nothing and so it's very easy to pick them and move them about but they still have the same mass and so need the same amount of force to stop them moving, the inertia is the same; ever tried to stop a 1.5tonne car rolling? You could pick one up with your little finger in space (slowly) but it would still be as hard to stop moving.
Of course there's still the old "is gravitational mass the same as inertial mass" but to any accuracy we've looked so far (and that's a lot of decimal places;0) it is.
Why would a request for metric be offtopic?
After all, besides UK and UK 2.0 (= USA) all
the world is metric. So for those 5%...
Ah, but/. is hosted by those 5% for those 5%.
Too bad, nevermind.
OK, keep your imperial measures, your non-standard
cellphones and your non-ISO paper sizes.
Just pull your nukes out of the rest of the world,
willya?
Er, the UK is metric, you baboon. We still have Imperial measurements in things such as groceries and fuel, but they all come secondary to metric units (you get 568ml of milk which, oh, just so happens to be the same amount as a pint which people are used to). The only things I can think of that are still fully Imperial are pints at the pub (bottled stuff is all metric) and roads being measured in miles.
We use ISO paper sizes, our engineers use metric (hello NASA!), scientists work on metric (usually, or some weird magnitude of it multiplied by e or something), kids in school are taught in metric and only meet Imperial usually in "here's how we convert units" lessons, our weather (such as it is) is nearly always reported in Celsius (F is well and truly dying out).
You don't lose a unit system overnight but we've at least made the effort. Whilst we might say our car went xMPH, a brit scientist would be more likely to say "my scramjet achieved x m/s". Thankyou.
well, a) he should have given the units (211 what? Elephants?)
b) Use SI units for gawd's sake. Celsius if you must, but real scientists use absolute scales. Kelvins anyone?
Thus one might say "raising water from 372K to 373K takes far more energy than raising it from 273K to 372K". A good example is how long it takes to boil a kettle and how long it takes to boil it dry (your kettle using essentially the same power in both processes).
Lesson over. Drop Imperial. Use metric. Even us Brits managed it years ago.
Using the data from the first 10 hours of incidents.org's numbers the data fits very well to an exponential curve.
Using a formula of: y = a*exp(bx) gives values of a=195, b=0.5271 and with a chi^2/(N-2) of 8.5 (ok it's not brilliant but good enough for government work;0).
Why you could even use this for teaching purposes (until the number of machines hits saturation or bandwidth effects kick in, or the admins get off their arse, or... hmmm, this is starting to get more interesting than my thesis;0)
This is why people who want consistently high quality documents across multiple platforms (or even on just the one) use TeX.
Good god, it's been proven and fixed for years, if not decades. It costs nothing. Use it. Incorporate figures with eps (difficult I know with MS-based printer drivers and Windows-based programs being piss-bloody-poor in this department) and you're off. Anything else is just fooling you.
But very few people will and so the rest of us will have to live with the mad, crazy, incompatible, constantly changing, low quality shit that passes as document production these days from the earliest kindergarten My First Word Processed Story to scientific papers and publications and have no choice but to join in and use it too. Hurrah for choice!
And how many people will buy OS X to run it purely on a commandline? We already have BSD and Linux to do that, at least as well, for nowt, on all architectures, so Darwin seems pretty much a dead end.
Darwin at present is little more than a token gesture and I doubt it will ever match the commercial OS X as a desktop OS or the current Freenix's for server/workstations.
Until NC's can deliver the same punch as a PC continuously (in terms of performance and customizability), people will continue to purchase PC's.
Erm, wouldn't a powerful customizable NC just be a PC anyway?
Think how many people just want to read email, use a web browser and maybe write something in a word processor or let the kids draw pictures etc, at most. Make something cheap and powerful to do that and it should meet those people's needs.
The problem is education as always. People seem to be of the idea (maybe through the much greater advertising) that you need a huge, powerful PC to get the best out of the "web" or "multimedia". Rubbish, people were doing both very well indeed on the PCs of yesterday, which are likely to be about the same power as a modern NC. Plus with NCs being more limited in scope (which has to be stressed isn't a bad thing, your video only records and plays things for example but it does them well) they can be set up and coded tighter than the general, allpurpose PC.
NCs. They should be an ideal, cheap addition to any home, but PC arrogance and ignorance is kinda getting in the way...
And don't ask me if I'd buy one because of course I wouldn't. I'm an intelligent geek and therefore represent a very small minority of the world population. Why try to force people to become geeks to use our hardware when they can stay as they are and use something designed for them?
Of course that would reduce the bouyancy by a great deal but you don't need to go that far. The bouyancy comes from the relative low density of the hydrogen gas compared to the atmosphere. You can compress gasses a lot; the significant reduction in volume shoves the density way up and so your bouyancy decreases.
A sufficient array of gas bottles and decent pumps would do the trick I reckon. If you've even used Helium you know you can get one hell of a lot of gas into a 'small' bottle but the bottles sure aren't floating around;0).
(Even though Linux is much more stable in many reguards, its codebase is also changing the most and the most often, and that means things could go wrong, or certain things could slow significantly... As Linux grows and grows, you can believe more problems may arise. Linux is proven to "us," but not to companies.. and open source is the same way.)
But there is nothing at all forcing you to keep upgrading to these newer versions. There's nothing to force you not to.
If your system works don't change it. What do you think this is, Windows? Are all old kernels going to disppear or suddenly stop working because new ones have been released? There's plenty of linux boxes around here, doing their job, day in, day out, with extremely minimal administration, on 2.0 kernels. The same is definitely not so for old Windows machines. You seemingly have little choice in upgrading Windows, simply to get ever closer to that much promised stability and power.
People who upgrade on every single kernel release are suckers for punishment and you don't do it on production servers unless there's a specific problem that's been fixed. In which case the constant release of bugfixes and patches is highly beneficial.
Open Source is proven. It's been around for far longer than proprietary solutions. As always it's pig ignorant management and kiddies who think VB is god's gift to programming who think otherwise.
If you run server systems and want good uptime and efficient support you pay for professional admins and quality hardware. People who reckon that just cos you're using a PC cluster+MSCE combination it's somehow some vast saving on the outlay for a qualified Unix admin? Utter tripe. Using cheapo hardware and clueless point-and-click trained admins loses you just as much if not more through downtime and inefficiency.
There's solid working practices that should be adhered to whether you use OSS or not. A cheaparse MS solution is just as bad as a cheaparse Unix one.
Frink (the little pig in the more costly to build proverbial house made of bricks who can sit back and relax and laugh at all the straw houses blowing down all over the place, silly, cheap piggies running around like crazy trying to keep them up)
Why should including some GPLed code suddenly mean that a company's entire codebase then becomes GPLed too and they have to give all their sources away for free? Where does it say that in the GPL?
Using GPLed code to enhance an existing product seems perfectly fine to me. Your core product is still the same, old, propreitary and thus saleable stuff, you can then give away as much GPL extras as you like, it doesn't stop people from paying for the package.
Not every situation boils down to "Right, let's take this code, fiddle it a bit and sell that as our one and only product."
AOL can take as much Mozilla source as they want, it doesn't stop them making a profit, in fact, it might improve them as they can spend far fewer manhours on developing client software when they can take mozilla and sling some addons on top. Which too can be GPLed. Bundling this free and Free software may not bring direct profits but doesn't stop them making it on other items which have been made more attractive by the inclusion of GPLed software.
If you write something, it's up to you how you want to license it. The coders could have kept it proprietary and then nobody would benefit but them. Or you can GPL and everything's kept out in the open. Or you can public domain it where it's a free for all. If you don't like the license used go write your own code.
If you are a sysadmin, check out OpenBSD. If you have a Linux box at home for playing with and think that you are l33t, stay away from OpenBSD with a 10' pole.
One dreads to think what we need the 10' pole for.
And have little speech bubbles pop up.
It'd be great. You can take your time, and the film would wait until everyone had pressed 'X'.
How's about that for interactive movies?
Sentiments echoed here as although I use the odd KDE2 component like konqueror I much prefer to use a smaller, quicker, less cluttered WM like IceWM for my everyday desktop.
Even on high-end (athlon/piii with 128MB+ RAM) machines you can really tell the difference.
I'm all for everyone using what suits them but how many from now on are going to be proffered GNOME/KDE by their distro and never really realise that there are alternatives? (Everyone here but me would be using KDE all the time if I hadn't forcibly pointed out alternatives...which they're now using of their own accord).
Meanwhile I'm thankful to KDE for providing an easy to get into desktop for my new users, but that doesn't mean I like it much or like the direction it seems to be taking (at least RAM-wise my app server is drowning in swap because of KDE2).
As long as KDE is kept relatively modular and happy to work with other environments, I see no absolute need for a a KDElite when you can use one of the many ultra-lite, yet functional, WMs with whichever parts of KDE (and GNOME) you want to use.
Re:Already used in sme high end software
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KDE Gesture Control
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· Score: 1
I have used some high end CAD software like Mentor Graphics that uses gestures extensively. It is more productive than using a mouse when you get used to it.
This is something I'm not understanding in this particular story; people saying Gestures are more intuitive than using the mouse.
Am I missing something or do you make the gestures with the mouse? You're either using the mouse to click on things in a menu/structured manner or you're waving it around in a gesture. Either way you're using the mouse.
Personally I find using a mouse to navigate the pointer around a screen, and clicking on menus, plus using the keyboard with the other hand for eg CTRL-C+CTRL-V to copy and paste to be a pretty intuitive system and utilises both hands to good effect. Your mouse hand does the work of navigation+selection, your other hand performs functions such as copy, cut, paste, delete, close-window, move-to-other-desktop etc. With gestures you're doing this presumably with just one hand.
It doesn't seem intuitive, it still relies on one hand on a mouse wiggling around and pressing buttons. But instead of selecting discrete options with discrete clicks and movements it necessitates learning relatively complex movements of the mouse. Something I find no better than mouse+keyboard (and mouse+keyboard is a damnsight more predictable in its response) and automatically makes things hard for people with physical disabilities who may be able to use a mouse or trackerball to select things but for whom making complex gestures is an impossibility.
I occassionally teach IT classes and I find the thought of trying to teach a 'gesture' to someone, and giving them, or the computer, the time to learn it a potential nightmare.
This is a very small step from the standard input
devices to the ultimate goal of mind-controlled input (where all you need to be able to do is think what you want to do and your computer then does it; anything else is just abstraction to one extent or another between what you want to do and how to tell your machine to do it).
Where are the results for IDE/SCSI transfer rates/latency?
Where are the results for networking?
I definitely noticed a jump in performance between 2.2.16 and 2.4.0 so they must be missing something here.
They note the large increase in hardware support, but don't seem to realise that this new support and improved support has given Linux much more performance than their benchmarks might show.
Maybe the improvements in X etc have helped but no real performance difference between 2.1.38 and 2.4.0? Put any such machines through real world work and you'll soon spot the difference...
While true, this doesn't really have anything to do with the Church encouraging population growth.
It also doesn't do a single thing to discourage it. They also have ignored appeals either from the people themselves or representatives on their behalf to discontinue this practice; mostly from areas where high birth rates are holding the countries in question back. Birth control liberates females to the same sexual freedom that males have. The child can also (potentially) have the concentrated upbringing and education that a large family cannot.
We are discussing the minor points of religious ideology at the expense of the major argument here. My reference to catholocism was only meant as one example where proscribing zero birth control can be detrimental. Feel free to argue the benefits, I just can't see them myself. I don't see any way we can justifiably allow continued large birth rates in any society which wants its population to advance beyond subsistance.
I reiterate; the birth rates in advanced countries are generally significantally lower than developing ones. Anything which then continues to force these countries to over reproduce does them nothing but harm (this is by no means limited to cathlocism; there is also basic sex education and cultural predilictions at work here; even in areas where men are told repeatedly that multiple sex partners can lead to a high risk of contracting AIDS they still continue to have multiple partners, in high risk areas, with the resultant pregnancies and spread of disease: attitudes and practices still practised by plenty of men in our so-called developed countries).
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty more where they came from. Most distrbutions come with a lot of these things anyway. These are mainly analysis or document tools, there's plenty of other things for both these areas and any other which plenty of other posters have shown. I've written a little guide for my local group. Some of it's out of date (and some of it's wrong but I have better things to fix) but it does have a list of common tools we use. And, of course, SAL is a pretty comprehensive database of unix tools. HTH.
Anything like a graph or a diagram should be done as vector.
Very simple rules but nobody seems to teach them. The number of people I come across that do things like saving data plots as JPEGs is not funny. Windows' inability to save useful complete vector formats is definitely a large factor.
I used to respect Don Knuth. Then I went to his site and he had done screenshots as JPEG. I now wouldn't trust him to set my video ;0).
Mozilla is not based on the ''crusty old netscape code''. They tried that. They didn't get very far. Mozilla is, afaik, a pretty much complete rewrite from scratch. One of many legitimate reasons it's taken so long to get to the very useable state it is in now.
Mozilla is a very competent and capable browser. About the best available for non-Windows users and plenty of those like it too. It costs you nothing. It's totally open for anyone to do what they want with it. Why do so many people have a problem with this? If you don't like it, don't use it.
It's taken a long time coming, sure, but so was Win2K. At least you've been able to use Mozilla all the time it's been developed. I jumped on board around 0.9 after trying out the earlier versions and not being overly impressed. It's now on all my machines and my users are very happy with it.
Ok, not heavy duty stuff 24/7 but the little old server is at it all the time, as well as all the web/email/ftp/samba/nfs stuff on top. This single machine with at least half the cpu power of the celeron systems you tout feels fine. People can have crashed jobs/apps racing the cpu or running code or compiles etc in the background and nobody notices. This isn't to say that if it ever started to have a Load Average of more than about 10 it wouldn't start to be sluggish but that you can run a lot of desktop and general CLI apps on such a machine quite happily
It wouldn't work for people doing heavy gfx work, or video editing or really large simulations etc but that's not what we're talking about here.
At the very least you could have a few more big servers running thin clients if you need that much more cpu power but for our office/lab a single lowspec machine is running the whole place and as responsive as a single stupidly overpowered and pita to admin standalone machine. The machines can be standalone. In fact most of the X Terminals are far more powerful than the server (they also dualboot Win2K) but for most operations there's no difference in responsiveness.
It works for us, and it works for Largo, and it can work for plenty of others. Not everyone but plenty enough.
(The machine is running Linux 2.4 and SuSE 7.2 across 100MBit ether for anyone that's interested)
Secondly this 'really nasty trojan' fits the way me and my friends have discussed re Linux viruses and trojans, it goes like this:
Just how is this new trojan any different? Anyone for years now could have done this, but haven't. Why? Because it needs pretty complicated user intervention and people running things as root (something they're repeatedly told not to). If unix email clients become as screwed as OE then it might be time to start worrying.
Bad as Code Red my arse. CR was a worm that propogated itself, you didn't need to be actively stupid to contract and spread CR.
If someone releases something which attacks a currently running service, infects it, and propogates itself without any user intervention then I might be interested. Like Raman and Lion. They were real concerns for admins and they did sod all damage in the grand scheme of things.
Besides, this thing is stopped dead by a firewall.
Anything you think is great has been done before countless times be people you've never heard of on systems you've never used. Such is the way of computers.
Maybe in the far future all systems will merge into the exact same looking, same performing, same stability product. Convergent evolution and all that.
Not quite. The kilogramme is the unit of mass. The Newton is the unit of force.
Mass is universal. You mass the same on Earth as on the moon as on Mars. Weight is a force. It's the force of the attraction between the mass of the body you're on (and I don't mean J.Lopez ;0) and your mass, ie gravity. Thus you weigh more on Earth than on the Moon as the gravitational attraction on Earth (and thus the force) is greater.
This is why astronauts have to be careful in space with big objects; they weigh nothing and so it's very easy to pick them and move them about but they still have the same mass and so need the same amount of force to stop them moving, the inertia is the same; ever tried to stop a 1.5tonne car rolling? You could pick one up with your little finger in space (slowly) but it would still be as hard to stop moving.
Of course there's still the old "is gravitational mass the same as inertial mass" but to any accuracy we've looked so far (and that's a lot of decimal places ;0) it is.
Er, the UK is metric, you baboon. We still have Imperial measurements in things such as groceries and fuel, but they all come secondary to metric units (you get 568ml of milk which, oh, just so happens to be the same amount as a pint which people are used to). The only things I can think of that are still fully Imperial are pints at the pub (bottled stuff is all metric) and roads being measured in miles.
We use ISO paper sizes, our engineers use metric (hello NASA!), scientists work on metric (usually, or some weird magnitude of it multiplied by e or something), kids in school are taught in metric and only meet Imperial usually in "here's how we convert units" lessons, our weather (such as it is) is nearly always reported in Celsius (F is well and truly dying out).
You don't lose a unit system overnight but we've at least made the effort. Whilst we might say our car went xMPH, a brit scientist would be more likely to say "my scramjet achieved x m/s". Thankyou.
b) Use SI units for gawd's sake. Celsius if you must, but real scientists use absolute scales. Kelvins anyone?
Thus one might say "raising water from 372K to 373K takes far more energy than raising it from 273K to 372K". A good example is how long it takes to boil a kettle and how long it takes to boil it dry (your kettle using essentially the same power in both processes).
Lesson over. Drop Imperial. Use metric. Even us Brits managed it years ago.
Using a formula of: y = a*exp(bx) gives values of a=195, b=0.5271 and with a chi^2/(N-2) of 8.5 (ok it's not brilliant but good enough for government work ;0).
Why you could even use this for teaching purposes (until the number of machines hits saturation or bandwidth effects kick in, or the admins get off their arse, or... hmmm, this is starting to get more interesting than my thesis ;0)
Good god, it's been proven and fixed for years, if not decades. It costs nothing. Use it. Incorporate figures with eps (difficult I know with MS-based printer drivers and Windows-based programs being piss-bloody-poor in this department) and you're off. Anything else is just fooling you.
But very few people will and so the rest of us will have to live with the mad, crazy, incompatible, constantly changing, low quality shit that passes as document production these days from the earliest kindergarten My First Word Processed Story to scientific papers and publications and have no choice but to join in and use it too. Hurrah for choice!
I find it hard to take seriously people who espouse open computing and standards when they can't even take the effort to do so themselves.
Darwin at present is little more than a token gesture and I doubt it will ever match the commercial OS X as a desktop OS or the current Freenix's for server/workstations.
Darwin is to OS X as the Linux kernel is to a distribution. Sure it runs but it's sod all use without the rest of it.
Erm, wouldn't a powerful customizable NC just be a PC anyway?
Think how many people just want to read email, use a web browser and maybe write something in a word processor or let the kids draw pictures etc, at most. Make something cheap and powerful to do that and it should meet those people's needs.
The problem is education as always. People seem to be of the idea (maybe through the much greater advertising) that you need a huge, powerful PC to get the best out of the "web" or "multimedia". Rubbish, people were doing both very well indeed on the PCs of yesterday, which are likely to be about the same power as a modern NC. Plus with NCs being more limited in scope (which has to be stressed isn't a bad thing, your video only records and plays things for example but it does them well) they can be set up and coded tighter than the general, allpurpose PC.
NCs. They should be an ideal, cheap addition to any home, but PC arrogance and ignorance is kinda getting in the way...
And don't ask me if I'd buy one because of course I wouldn't. I'm an intelligent geek and therefore represent a very small minority of the world population. Why try to force people to become geeks to use our hardware when they can stay as they are and use something designed for them?
Of course that would reduce the bouyancy by a great deal but you don't need to go that far. The bouyancy comes from the relative low density of the hydrogen gas compared to the atmosphere. You can compress gasses a lot; the significant reduction in volume shoves the density way up and so your bouyancy decreases.
A sufficient array of gas bottles and decent pumps would do the trick I reckon. If you've even used Helium you know you can get one hell of a lot of gas into a 'small' bottle but the bottles sure aren't floating around ;0).
But there is nothing at all forcing you to keep upgrading to these newer versions. There's nothing to force you not to.
If your system works don't change it. What do you think this is, Windows? Are all old kernels going to disppear or suddenly stop working because new ones have been released? There's plenty of linux boxes around here, doing their job, day in, day out, with extremely minimal administration, on 2.0 kernels. The same is definitely not so for old Windows machines. You seemingly have little choice in upgrading Windows, simply to get ever closer to that much promised stability and power.
People who upgrade on every single kernel release are suckers for punishment and you don't do it on production servers unless there's a specific problem that's been fixed. In which case the constant release of bugfixes and patches is highly beneficial.
Open Source is proven. It's been around for far longer than proprietary solutions. As always it's pig ignorant management and kiddies who think VB is god's gift to programming who think otherwise.
If you run server systems and want good uptime and efficient support you pay for professional admins and quality hardware. People who reckon that just cos you're using a PC cluster+MSCE combination it's somehow some vast saving on the outlay for a qualified Unix admin? Utter tripe. Using cheapo hardware and clueless point-and-click trained admins loses you just as much if not more through downtime and inefficiency.
There's solid working practices that should be adhered to whether you use OSS or not. A cheaparse MS solution is just as bad as a cheaparse Unix one.
Frink (the little pig in the more costly to build proverbial house made of bricks who can sit back and relax and laugh at all the straw houses blowing down all over the place, silly, cheap piggies running around like crazy trying to keep them up)
Using GPLed code to enhance an existing product seems perfectly fine to me. Your core product is still the same, old, propreitary and thus saleable stuff, you can then give away as much GPL extras as you like, it doesn't stop people from paying for the package.
Not every situation boils down to "Right, let's take this code, fiddle it a bit and sell that as our one and only product."
AOL can take as much Mozilla source as they want, it doesn't stop them making a profit, in fact, it might improve them as they can spend far fewer manhours on developing client software when they can take mozilla and sling some addons on top. Which too can be GPLed. Bundling this free and Free software may not bring direct profits but doesn't stop them making it on other items which have been made more attractive by the inclusion of GPLed software.
If you write something, it's up to you how you want to license it. The coders could have kept it proprietary and then nobody would benefit but them. Or you can GPL and everything's kept out in the open. Or you can public domain it where it's a free for all. If you don't like the license used go write your own code.
One dreads to think what we need the 10' pole for.
Waking up Father Jack?
And have little speech bubbles pop up. It'd be great. You can take your time, and the film would wait until everyone had pressed 'X'. How's about that for interactive movies?
Even on high-end (athlon/piii with 128MB+ RAM) machines you can really tell the difference.
I'm all for everyone using what suits them but how many from now on are going to be proffered GNOME/KDE by their distro and never really realise that there are alternatives? (Everyone here but me would be using KDE all the time if I hadn't forcibly pointed out alternatives...which they're now using of their own accord).
Meanwhile I'm thankful to KDE for providing an easy to get into desktop for my new users, but that doesn't mean I like it much or like the direction it seems to be taking (at least RAM-wise my app server is drowning in swap because of KDE2).
As long as KDE is kept relatively modular and happy to work with other environments, I see no absolute need for a a KDElite when you can use one of the many ultra-lite, yet functional, WMs with whichever parts of KDE (and GNOME) you want to use.
This is something I'm not understanding in this particular story; people saying Gestures are more intuitive than using the mouse.
Am I missing something or do you make the gestures with the mouse? You're either using the mouse to click on things in a menu/structured manner or you're waving it around in a gesture. Either way you're using the mouse.
Personally I find using a mouse to navigate the pointer around a screen, and clicking on menus, plus using the keyboard with the other hand for eg CTRL-C+CTRL-V to copy and paste to be a pretty intuitive system and utilises both hands to good effect. Your mouse hand does the work of navigation+selection, your other hand performs functions such as copy, cut, paste, delete, close-window, move-to-other-desktop etc. With gestures you're doing this presumably with just one hand.
It doesn't seem intuitive, it still relies on one hand on a mouse wiggling around and pressing buttons. But instead of selecting discrete options with discrete clicks and movements it necessitates learning relatively complex movements of the mouse. Something I find no better than mouse+keyboard (and mouse+keyboard is a damnsight more predictable in its response) and automatically makes things hard for people with physical disabilities who may be able to use a mouse or trackerball to select things but for whom making complex gestures is an impossibility.
I occassionally teach IT classes and I find the thought of trying to teach a 'gesture' to someone, and giving them, or the computer, the time to learn it a potential nightmare.
This is a very small step from the standard input devices to the ultimate goal of mind-controlled input (where all you need to be able to do is think what you want to do and your computer then does it; anything else is just abstraction to one extent or another between what you want to do and how to tell your machine to do it).
No, no, no. The reason is even more simple. We found out it is made of cheese!
Gack!
What could be more off-putting than an enormous globe of rotten milk hanging over our heads? gack gack gack.
Where are the results for networking?
I definitely noticed a jump in performance between 2.2.16 and 2.4.0 so they must be missing something here.
They note the large increase in hardware support, but don't seem to realise that this new support and improved support has given Linux much more performance than their benchmarks might show.
Maybe the improvements in X etc have helped but no real performance difference between 2.1.38 and 2.4.0? Put any such machines through real world work and you'll soon spot the difference...
While true, this doesn't really have anything to do with the Church encouraging population growth.
It also doesn't do a single thing to discourage it. They also have ignored appeals either from the people themselves or representatives on their behalf to discontinue this practice; mostly from areas where high birth rates are holding the countries in question back. Birth control liberates females to the same sexual freedom that males have. The child can also (potentially) have the concentrated upbringing and education that a large family cannot.
We are discussing the minor points of religious ideology at the expense of the major argument here. My reference to catholocism was only meant as one example where proscribing zero birth control can be detrimental. Feel free to argue the benefits, I just can't see them myself. I don't see any way we can justifiably allow continued large birth rates in any society which wants its population to advance beyond subsistance.
I reiterate; the birth rates in advanced countries are generally significantally lower than developing ones. Anything which then continues to force these countries to over reproduce does them nothing but harm (this is by no means limited to cathlocism; there is also basic sex education and cultural predilictions at work here; even in areas where men are told repeatedly that multiple sex partners can lead to a high risk of contracting AIDS they still continue to have multiple partners, in high risk areas, with the resultant pregnancies and spread of disease: attitudes and practices still practised by plenty of men in our so-called developed countries).