It would appear to me that Flash is crippling web browsing, as it stands. Its slow, very bloated, and doesn't handle well on older hardware. The lack of Flash ability hardly cripples the web, either - not unless your "web use" is centered around Flash games, email, and IM.
Maybe the OP didn't know that Intel also makes ARM processors (the StrongARM arch).
Personally, I think this is just Canonical saying "let's get some small/low power ARM-based desktops out there, already!" - which is, IMO, a step in the right direction. ARM is more-or-less fast enough for most of what everyone does, especially with the arch's ability to have sub-processors for specific tasks.
No, this isn't an attack at Intel, so much as it is an attack at MS and a little something to encourage vendors to start making HPCs and low-end desktops using ARM hardware instead of Atom, I think.
Meh. I'm a smoker. (Coincidentally, I also have a very strong sense of smell which is only blunted by smoking right after having had a cigarette - I will often/usually be able to smell things others can't.)
I have 'surprised' quite a few people in a work environment when they have found out I smoke. Most people can not tell if a person is a smoker.
Yet, when someone crashes - IE, by pure, involuntary accident - into a lampost, at most the people in the vehicle die. If someone, through intent and ignorance, dumps a bucket of toxic refuse from one of his projects down the drain, infant mortality goes up 3% locally, cavities increase, local birds start dying off, and so on.
You get the picture. That's why idiots messing with chemistry is problematic.
A gun is a simple mechanical device. You can learn to use one properly in as little time as it takes to learn how to use a blender or coffee maker.
Fucking around with chemicals of the "lab" variety - something which can have many, many more repercussions than a single (or even multiple) delinquent firearm discharge. A gun going off MIGHT hit someone. Chemicals seeping into the water WILL get into the water supply.
There is a simple, logical reason why chemicals are so heavily regulated. It's because too many people have experimented in the past, and that cost often
Question: what does a person do with their failed (or even successful) projects? Well, there's going to be refuse - chemical byproducts - for nearly any reaction, and they're not mostly going to be harmless gases which will float away.
They are, more than likely, going to be water soluble or suspended in water, to one degree or another. Most reasonably advanced science projects will result in waste equivalent to pouring lead powder in someone's water softener.
For instance, let's say someone's experimenting with metals, like maybe stainless steel electrodes in their quest for world conquest or free power, or some such rot. Stainless steel used as electrodes for electrolysis will... get this, result in chromate byproducts. You know, those nasty things which are highly regulated by the EPA, have MSDS with big angry words on them, and generally anger a lot of people when poured down drains due to the impact on plant and animal life. Apparently it kills shit and prevents new shit from growing.
And that's just one idea off the top of my head while this kind of regulation is a "good" thing. There is no liberty for an individual in this; it's selfishness.
There comes a point of diminished return for the society to allow for people to tinker with things they don't quite understand, and to require a high threshold for entry. Encourage that entry, yes; but people are much more likely, at this point, to rediscover a hundred thousand mistakes, and maybe a couple dozen pre-existing discoveries, than to make a genuine discovery using commonly available chemicals. Just not going to happen.
There are other things to explain this, too, not just the "early morning"
At least around here, people's activities change during the cold part of the months. Not only does coffee become more of a staple, but warm beverages in general - like tea and hot chocolate. In this household, tea and/or coffee happens 3-5 times a day, with an average of maybe 5.
My coffee maker is also on for at least five hours a day. If not the one at home, then the one at work. I'll usually only drink a total of 4 or 5 cups, but it'll still be on. I'm more likely to drink coffee in volume during the DST part of the year.
Also, when people come home at night, it's going to be different than coming home during the summer. They're still going to want to get out and do things, but chances are it's maybe an hour or an hour to two hours until dark. They're not going to have the time to go out for a round of golf, or do other "active" things they might do for the summer. So: they watch TV or get on the computer, drink a cup of tea, or maybe have a long dinner.
Then, there's also the cold. People trade outdoor activities for indoor activities, and then might be spending more itme in the shop/garage/basement, on the computer, watching TV, etc. than they would during the warm parts of the month (when they'll be camping, fishing, RVing, 4-wheeling, etc.).
Though, overall, I think that a 1% power increase is pretty negligible given the likely substantial increases in indoor activities during this time of the year. Hell, it's almost within the scope of statistical error, and certainly statistically insignificant.
I wonder how this "1% power use increase" evens out with the likely drop in gasoline use during this time of the year? I bet we're more than breaking even.
Along those lines, but more oriented along the "single user" use pattern:
I've found that modern linux distros, running on single-core processors (ie last-gen hardware), will typically run very slow/sluggish while doing anything relatively processor or IO intensive (compiling, running an emulator, most Flash stuff within Firefox, updatedb, and so on and so forth).
For instance, my primary system is still a Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M, slow-as-tar old 20G replacement disk). Recently, I was using gxemul fairly extensively, and would hog 20-30%+ processor utilization (don't recall what the load average was, I think it was in the 2-4 range); everything was sluggish, as was task switching.
Instead of reniceing the greedy processes to be lower, I simply set the priority of several processes to be higher (a niceness of -1 or -2). In my case, that was Xorg (-3), xfce4-panel (-2), and firefox (-1). This required root privileges, yes. However, I found that it yielded better performance results (at least noticeably) than renicing the greedy process.
I would consider "desktop performance" while performing high load/IO tasks more along the lines of what I recall kernel 2.0-2.2 providing (IE do what you want on the backend, your desktop will still be fast-as-hell responsive).
Granted, this isn't a solution to do automatically from xinitrc or such. Though I thought of throwing together a little ps/awk/grep/sed glue to do it automatically on X start/login. It isn't necessary unless you've got something eating cycles, and I'm not quite sure how to do it cleanly.
You mean like they said that Vista was a 'complete overhaul'? And Windows XP? And Windows 2003 (2000 server w/ XP improvements)? And Windows 2000 (NT4 w/ w9x type graphical interface)?
No, each and every one of MS's operating systems (and dare I say, products) have been incremental improvements of the previous version - to the exception of their first products, which they either made themselves (in the case NT and the non-NT Windows strain) or bought from elsewhere.
I don't know how long you've been around, but as recent as (oh) 1998 or so, the hard drive was seemingly the loudest part of the system. You could always hear the clicking/etc. of the drive.
Simple answer: they are making a massive killing on these devices, and there is no need
Think about it: shit resolutions means lower battery use. This is important, not only because the Atom isn't all that efficient, but also because batteries cost more than (most of) the electronics. They just market it as a 7", 9" or what have you LCD, and most people don't give a damn (largely because they don't know a damn). This ultimately saves a little battery economy, allowing them to stretch the minuscule 2hr runtime a little further.
That "$100 price point!" nonsense was just that: nonsense, of the marketing type. Not much different than MS saying "the next version will have feature X!" and then not releasing with feature X, and people buying it anyway (due to the hype).
A while ago there were some 400MHz MIPS-based computers floating around the internet, being advertised as costing $98. Not all that powerful (1Gb SSD, wifi, 128M RAM), but reasonable enough for 'netbook' functionality with the right software. Oh, you can get them for $98 each - you just have to buy 100 at a time. Buy one retail (afaik there's only one retailer in the US, can't recall which) and it's $250.
The reasoning is simple, really: get someone emotionally committed at $100, and they've already budgeted/made the purchase in their heads. When it comes out for $225, they don't conceive it as $125 more than what was promised; they see it as a $125 cost and, while inconvenient, still something they're willing to do - even though it's well over twice as much.
Why does it have 'emergency heaters'? This is a device expected to last 90 days during the warm season (as far as I can tell, it landed late spring/early summer). It was made, supposedly, on a 'shoestring' budget. Heaters would substantially increase the cost while likely decreasing the longevity of the lander due to increased battery drain; for a 90 day mission, this doesn't seem acceptable to me.
With this news, I have to wonder if the Mars landers weren't initially intended to last much, much longer than the advertised 90 days. And I do mean "advertised": the "longer than planned for" lifespan of these probes has been nothing but a windfall for NASA in terms of public goodwill for their endeavors. (It's not really 'wasting' money if they can push the budget of a project so far beyond what was planned for, is it?)
The presence of heaters tells me that a design goal was to have these probes run into the cold season. The fact that they didn't both last that long tells me that they potentially screwed up but due to their Scotty Guestimates, it looks good.
Remember: this is the crowd that thinks "Natalie Portman" and "hot grits" are binary compatible, and that in Soviet Russia, slashdot understands you in a kind, loving, Open Source inclusion, sort of way.
I'd also guess that the median age for Slashdot readers (by page views) has remained around, oh, 20 since its inception.
Actually, I don't believe it is called 'breaking and entering' to enter an unlocked building without permission.
And, while it's not terribly clear, he evidently did have permission due to anyone with district access being able to access the file(s). He had permission to be on the system, as a part of the school district.
Also, to use an analogy: a computer network in public school, where every student has access, is akin to, well, a student going to the school after-hours and noticing the door ajar on his teacher's classroom, only to look in and see her purse sitting there. He then notifies her of her lapse in judgment.
Yep. Unless the processor is being utilized at or near 100% on 8.04, the P3M 1.2GHz in my Thinkpad X30 does not leave the 'powersave' mode - which downcycles to ~800Mhz. This happens even when the power adapter is plugged in.
As far as actual, realized performance, the biggest thing it did was make the system slightly more latent than it should have been when doing something while something with a high CPU load ran. In this case, I noticed it while running gxemul (which uses a fair amount of CPU) and web browsing. I should note that I ran the laptop for a good 3+ months with Ubuntu 8.04 (fresh install, previously running debian) without noticing this.
On a system which has more than one CPU scaling frequency alternative, I can see how this would (directly) downwardly impact performance of applications. I'm not sure what the newer CPUs have for available power states, but I suspect it correlates closely to 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 maximum designed clock.
For what it's worth, I 'fixed' this glitch on my system by adjusting the over-aggressive processor down-throttling. All I did was:
Now the system will cycle up under a heavy load (say, over 20% - I've not actually tested it) CPU load, such as under common non-youtube browsing activities, programming, word processing, and the like.
If an economic or religious shutdown isn't violent, what is it, then? It most certainly is an exercise of force.
(Besides, we're talking about science fiction, here. If you can tell the future, of COURSE you're going to have an alternative to violence - it's like a rapist calling to set up a time and place for an appointment. The "Asimov" model here doesn't even come close to fitting realistic real-world scenarios because of this.)
you think it's the 50-year-old grandmother who uses AOL to check her e-mail and look up cooking recipes that's pushing the limits of computing technology?
Eh, no. But, consider: the AOL client on an 800MHz system with 512Mb RAM is going to be doggedly slow with the AOL client (as well as all the OEM-bundled shit, and the little "helper" applications their photo/print/scan applications installed running in the background). And that's not even including spyware!
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this yet, but a metadata filesystem would save so much time.
Oh really? And how much time do you think the average user would save of your time when they can't find a file (which they likely labeled "kldslkd letter" or something equally stupid/lazy), and come asking for help?
And really, tagging is a pain in the ass. How many tags would I have to put in to make it effective? "angela letter" or "2008 business analysis frankfurt" or what have you wouldn't be any more effective than a flat locate database interface. And what if you used something contextual, which doesn't actually relate to the file, or the context changes (eg. "home" or "address" or "girlfirend" or "spouse" - tags for things which are going to change throughout one's life).
Slashdot Mirror
It would appear to me that Flash is crippling web browsing, as it stands. Its slow, very bloated, and doesn't handle well on older hardware. The lack of Flash ability hardly cripples the web, either - not unless your "web use" is centered around Flash games, email, and IM.
Maybe, maybe so.
Maybe the OP didn't know that Intel also makes ARM processors (the StrongARM arch).
Personally, I think this is just Canonical saying "let's get some small/low power ARM-based desktops out there, already!" - which is, IMO, a step in the right direction. ARM is more-or-less fast enough for most of what everyone does, especially with the arch's ability to have sub-processors for specific tasks.
No, this isn't an attack at Intel, so much as it is an attack at MS and a little something to encourage vendors to start making HPCs and low-end desktops using ARM hardware instead of Atom, I think.
Meh. I'm a smoker. (Coincidentally, I also have a very strong sense of smell which is only blunted by smoking right after having had a cigarette - I will often/usually be able to smell things others can't.)
I have 'surprised' quite a few people in a work environment when they have found out I smoke. Most people can not tell if a person is a smoker.
Yet, when someone crashes - IE, by pure, involuntary accident - into a lampost, at most the people in the vehicle die. If someone, through intent and ignorance, dumps a bucket of toxic refuse from one of his projects down the drain, infant mortality goes up 3% locally, cavities increase, local birds start dying off, and so on.
You get the picture. That's why idiots messing with chemistry is problematic.
Well, actually no. There's a difference.
A gun is a simple mechanical device. You can learn to use one properly in as little time as it takes to learn how to use a blender or coffee maker.
Fucking around with chemicals of the "lab" variety - something which can have many, many more repercussions than a single (or even multiple) delinquent firearm discharge. A gun going off MIGHT hit someone. Chemicals seeping into the water WILL get into the water supply.
There is a simple, logical reason why chemicals are so heavily regulated. It's because too many people have experimented in the past, and that cost often
Question: what does a person do with their failed (or even successful) projects? Well, there's going to be refuse - chemical byproducts - for nearly any reaction, and they're not mostly going to be harmless gases which will float away.
They are, more than likely, going to be water soluble or suspended in water, to one degree or another. Most reasonably advanced science projects will result in waste equivalent to pouring lead powder in someone's water softener.
For instance, let's say someone's experimenting with metals, like maybe stainless steel electrodes in their quest for world conquest or free power, or some such rot. Stainless steel used as electrodes for electrolysis will... get this, result in chromate byproducts. You know, those nasty things which are highly regulated by the EPA, have MSDS with big angry words on them, and generally anger a lot of people when poured down drains due to the impact on plant and animal life. Apparently it kills shit and prevents new shit from growing.
And that's just one idea off the top of my head while this kind of regulation is a "good" thing. There is no liberty for an individual in this; it's selfishness.
There comes a point of diminished return for the society to allow for people to tinker with things they don't quite understand, and to require a high threshold for entry. Encourage that entry, yes; but people are much more likely, at this point, to rediscover a hundred thousand mistakes, and maybe a couple dozen pre-existing discoveries, than to make a genuine discovery using commonly available chemicals. Just not going to happen.
What is this Wayland you refer to?
There are other things to explain this, too, not just the "early morning"
At least around here, people's activities change during the cold part of the months. Not only does coffee become more of a staple, but warm beverages in general - like tea and hot chocolate. In this household, tea and/or coffee happens 3-5 times a day, with an average of maybe 5.
My coffee maker is also on for at least five hours a day. If not the one at home, then the one at work. I'll usually only drink a total of 4 or 5 cups, but it'll still be on. I'm more likely to drink coffee in volume during the DST part of the year.
Also, when people come home at night, it's going to be different than coming home during the summer. They're still going to want to get out and do things, but chances are it's maybe an hour or an hour to two hours until dark. They're not going to have the time to go out for a round of golf, or do other "active" things they might do for the summer. So: they watch TV or get on the computer, drink a cup of tea, or maybe have a long dinner.
Then, there's also the cold. People trade outdoor activities for indoor activities, and then might be spending more itme in the shop/garage/basement, on the computer, watching TV, etc. than they would during the warm parts of the month (when they'll be camping, fishing, RVing, 4-wheeling, etc.).
Though, overall, I think that a 1% power increase is pretty negligible given the likely substantial increases in indoor activities during this time of the year. Hell, it's almost within the scope of statistical error, and certainly statistically insignificant.
I wonder how this "1% power use increase" evens out with the likely drop in gasoline use during this time of the year? I bet we're more than breaking even.
Along those lines, but more oriented along the "single user" use pattern:
I've found that modern linux distros, running on single-core processors (ie last-gen hardware), will typically run very slow/sluggish while doing anything relatively processor or IO intensive (compiling, running an emulator, most Flash stuff within Firefox, updatedb, and so on and so forth).
For instance, my primary system is still a Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M, slow-as-tar old 20G replacement disk). Recently, I was using gxemul fairly extensively, and would hog 20-30%+ processor utilization (don't recall what the load average was, I think it was in the 2-4 range); everything was sluggish, as was task switching.
Instead of reniceing the greedy processes to be lower, I simply set the priority of several processes to be higher (a niceness of -1 or -2). In my case, that was Xorg (-3), xfce4-panel (-2), and firefox (-1). This required root privileges, yes. However, I found that it yielded better performance results (at least noticeably) than renicing the greedy process.
I would consider "desktop performance" while performing high load/IO tasks more along the lines of what I recall kernel 2.0-2.2 providing (IE do what you want on the backend, your desktop will still be fast-as-hell responsive).
Granted, this isn't a solution to do automatically from xinitrc or such. Though I thought of throwing together a little ps/awk/grep/sed glue to do it automatically on X start/login. It isn't necessary unless you've got something eating cycles, and I'm not quite sure how to do it cleanly.
You mean like they said that Vista was a 'complete overhaul'? And Windows XP? And Windows 2003 (2000 server w/ XP improvements)? And Windows 2000 (NT4 w/ w9x type graphical interface)?
No, each and every one of MS's operating systems (and dare I say, products) have been incremental improvements of the previous version - to the exception of their first products, which they either made themselves (in the case NT and the non-NT Windows strain) or bought from elsewhere.
Quick, get an axe.
I used to have a CRT which did this - a 21"er back in 1999-2000 or so. I had to get rid of it; it was unbearable.
It was different in pitch at different resolutions, and got higher, but somewhat quieter as well. Still...
I traded it for a 15" LCD (which I still have) in 2001 or so. I never used a CRT after that - I couldn't stand the sound. Thankfully, CRTs are gone. :)
I don't know how long you've been around, but as recent as (oh) 1998 or so, the hard drive was seemingly the loudest part of the system. You could always hear the clicking/etc. of the drive.
Yeah, you and me too! Let me know when you find somewhere you can actually buy them from, short of paying importation fees!
Simple answer: they are making a massive killing on these devices, and there is no need
Think about it: shit resolutions means lower battery use. This is important, not only because the Atom isn't all that efficient, but also because batteries cost more than (most of) the electronics. They just market it as a 7", 9" or what have you LCD, and most people don't give a damn (largely because they don't know a damn). This ultimately saves a little battery economy, allowing them to stretch the minuscule 2hr runtime a little further.
That "$100 price point!" nonsense was just that: nonsense, of the marketing type. Not much different than MS saying "the next version will have feature X!" and then not releasing with feature X, and people buying it anyway (due to the hype).
A while ago there were some 400MHz MIPS-based computers floating around the internet, being advertised as costing $98. Not all that powerful (1Gb SSD, wifi, 128M RAM), but reasonable enough for 'netbook' functionality with the right software. Oh, you can get them for $98 each - you just have to buy 100 at a time. Buy one retail (afaik there's only one retailer in the US, can't recall which) and it's $250.
The reasoning is simple, really: get someone emotionally committed at $100, and they've already budgeted/made the purchase in their heads. When it comes out for $225, they don't conceive it as $125 more than what was promised; they see it as a $125 cost and, while inconvenient, still something they're willing to do - even though it's well over twice as much.
Why does it have 'emergency heaters'? This is a device expected to last 90 days during the warm season (as far as I can tell, it landed late spring/early summer). It was made, supposedly, on a 'shoestring' budget. Heaters would substantially increase the cost while likely decreasing the longevity of the lander due to increased battery drain; for a 90 day mission, this doesn't seem acceptable to me.
With this news, I have to wonder if the Mars landers weren't initially intended to last much, much longer than the advertised 90 days. And I do mean "advertised": the "longer than planned for" lifespan of these probes has been nothing but a windfall for NASA in terms of public goodwill for their endeavors. (It's not really 'wasting' money if they can push the budget of a project so far beyond what was planned for, is it?)
The presence of heaters tells me that a design goal was to have these probes run into the cold season. The fact that they didn't both last that long tells me that they potentially screwed up but due to their Scotty Guestimates, it looks good.
Obligatory: "You must be new here".
Remember: this is the crowd that thinks "Natalie Portman" and "hot grits" are binary compatible, and that in Soviet Russia, slashdot understands you in a kind, loving, Open Source inclusion, sort of way.
I'd also guess that the median age for Slashdot readers (by page views) has remained around, oh, 20 since its inception.
Actually, I don't believe it is called 'breaking and entering' to enter an unlocked building without permission.
And, while it's not terribly clear, he evidently did have permission due to anyone with district access being able to access the file(s). He had permission to be on the system, as a part of the school district.
Also, to use an analogy: a computer network in public school, where every student has access, is akin to, well, a student going to the school after-hours and noticing the door ajar on his teacher's classroom, only to look in and see her purse sitting there. He then notifies her of her lapse in judgment.
I noticed that some children in fact has no problem using `find ~ -type f` - it is for their parents we need to come up with something.
Yes, but what happens when those children are no longer such, and are adults who have to put up with the mechanizations we've created for them?
Yep. Unless the processor is being utilized at or near 100% on 8.04, the P3M 1.2GHz in my Thinkpad X30 does not leave the 'powersave' mode - which downcycles to ~800Mhz. This happens even when the power adapter is plugged in.
As far as actual, realized performance, the biggest thing it did was make the system slightly more latent than it should have been when doing something while something with a high CPU load ran. In this case, I noticed it while running gxemul (which uses a fair amount of CPU) and web browsing. I should note that I ran the laptop for a good 3+ months with Ubuntu 8.04 (fresh install, previously running debian) without noticing this.
On a system which has more than one CPU scaling frequency alternative, I can see how this would (directly) downwardly impact performance of applications. I'm not sure what the newer CPUs have for available power states, but I suspect it correlates closely to 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 maximum designed clock.
For what it's worth, I 'fixed' this glitch on my system by adjusting the over-aggressive processor down-throttling. All I did was:
echo 1 > titan:/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load
Now the system will cycle up under a heavy load (say, over 20% - I've not actually tested it) CPU load, such as under common non-youtube browsing activities, programming, word processing, and the like.
If an economic or religious shutdown isn't violent, what is it, then? It most certainly is an exercise of force.
(Besides, we're talking about science fiction, here. If you can tell the future, of COURSE you're going to have an alternative to violence - it's like a rapist calling to set up a time and place for an appointment. The "Asimov" model here doesn't even come close to fitting realistic real-world scenarios because of this.)
Obviously Asimov never had to contend with an armed robbery, rape, or violent assault before.
Short of dying/surrendering and taking a beating/willingly participating in the rape, violence is the only option.
Of course this could also be said as "Corollary: the above does not hold valid in the event of violence being in execution already."
you think it's the 50-year-old grandmother who uses AOL to check her e-mail and look up cooking recipes that's pushing the limits of computing technology?
Eh, no. But, consider: the AOL client on an 800MHz system with 512Mb RAM is going to be doggedly slow with the AOL client (as well as all the OEM-bundled shit, and the little "helper" applications their photo/print/scan applications installed running in the background). And that's not even including spyware!
My question is: doesn't this violate FCC regulations on electronics?
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this yet, but a metadata filesystem would save so much time.
Oh really? And how much time do you think the average user would save of your time when they can't find a file (which they likely labeled "kldslkd letter" or something equally stupid/lazy), and come asking for help?
And really, tagging is a pain in the ass. How many tags would I have to put in to make it effective? "angela letter" or "2008 business analysis frankfurt" or what have you wouldn't be any more effective than a flat locate database interface. And what if you used something contextual, which doesn't actually relate to the file, or the context changes (eg. "home" or "address" or "girlfirend" or "spouse" - tags for things which are going to change throughout one's life).