In retrospect, I've got to admire the dedication and self-control demonstrated by the E developers.
Back when E17 was started, it was a bloated (if awesome) project. I got sick and tired of waiting for it to finish, and pretty much soured on it when they started changing things drastically, making components (like efm - the file manager component of E17 at the time) discontinued. Granted, that's partially to be expected, but it was in development for years at that time - and reasonably stable despite.
Flash forward to now: it's a very, very lightweight window manager (compared to many others, at least) with a fairly rich featureset. It's been used recently on the "ePC" (2 years ago?) and IIRC it's been used on phones. The libraries are featureful and there is quite a lot of functionality exposed in the interfaces for the size of everything. The windowing toolkits are fast, and the result on my screen is likewise fast (and smooth) - even without acceleration. The libraries themselves are basically like the fltk2 toolkit, in many ways - but significantly more 'polished'.
It may have taken 10 years to 'get right' (or close to it) but the end result is, frankly, quite impressive.
Currently, the vast majority of consumer PCs and servers are 100% functional Intel computers - even if there are other chips involved.
Intel has something to meet pretty much every single PC requirement:
* Intel HDA * Intel Media Accelerator * Intel Ethernet * Intel chipsets * Intel motherboards * Intel x86 derived processors for:
- ultramobile (eg. ULP Atoms)
- mobile (eg. multicore and higher end Atoms)
- desktops (i3, i5)
- high-end workstations (i7)
- servers (Xeon) * Complete, SoC solutions at many of those tiers: phone, tablet, desktop
They do the bulk of the engineering on this stuff, and are cut out of the end 10-20% profit for the 'consumable' product. Why would they not want to get into the 'consumer product' arena (as that's where Apple is sucking up the profits)? They make the Apple product, after all: beyond what Intel (and nVidia/ATI) put in, all Apple is providing is more-or-less as functional as a cardboard box with double-sided tape. Considering the cost to Intel to jump in - offshore the manufacturing of some cases in China @ $5/each - it makes sense to invest in the marketing to make it tenable. They'll see great profits as a result, I'm sure.
I'm not sure why this makes them 'strange': Intel has a reputation of being an 'engineering only' company but they're quite big, with big marketing/sales/advertising, etc. budgets, and some fairly subtantial clout when it comes to successfully advertising their products to consumers. In terms of consumer name recognition, Intel = PC.
Never mind that the absence of a pat-down on high speed rail is a bit of a misdirection/misnomer/outright lie. They're pushing for patdowns on everything from border crossing to Amtrak. What would make HSR any different, exactly?
Fucking politicians. (Can I say that, still, or does this put me on a list?)
worse still, the design overrides your minimum font size (which is completely unforgivable), and is absolutely unusable on high dpi screens.
I'm not having a problem resizing font sizes. Granted, I don't think I've got a high dpi screen ( don't really even pay attn to that stuff anymore - $200 22" Acer 16:9 LCD), but in Chrome/Chromium, resizing works just fine (as does my larger-than-normal default).
I always thought FF resizing was broken, so maybe that's the problem you're running into?
In their defense, this layout is one of the better "web 2.0" designs I've seen. It's clean, orderly, and not too much dead space.
And, like you've said, it's better than the old design. It seems a bit slower in its AJAXyness at the moment, but it is much more consistent in behavior, from what I can see. The "slowness" may simply be a perception thing, too: personally, I still check the status bar to see what the page is doing, and AJAX makes things feel slower due to not having that.
Not terribly sure, to be honest with you. The PSU only has a 35 watt rating, so I'm not bending things too much; it's been a while since I tested it at the wall, but I find it hard to believe it'd be much more than that.
It's one of these: http://www.accurateit.com/images/items/compaq_ipaq.jpg
It's got the original 700Mhz CPU (board wouldn't boot with a 900Mhz replacement), a single fan in the PSU (quiet), an 80G disk, and 386Mb of RAM. I'll be very sad when it finally kicks off to the great divide - I no longer have any replacement components for it, so when something dies (short of the HDD, which I can replace with CF), it's gone. The thing has been on the 'upgrade mill' since Debian 3 (now on 5), is regularly using less than 128Mb of RAM, runs vbox headless w/ a 2k server instance, and a handful of network tools.
I don't understand why MS would have to sell a competitor in a "corporate" environment to the iPad. The iPad has almost nothing to offer.
None of the selling points for corporate IT are hit by the iPad. TCO? Management? Administration? Application control? AD integration? The iPad simply has none of these. Let me know when the iPad is able to be controlled by the same mechanisms WinMo phones and Windows desktops are (as well as Linux desktops and to a (very) small degree, Android phones) and we'll talk.
It would appear that, based on power use and the performance of various chips, that the CPUs days of being the power hog and performance workhorse of the common desktop are over. Anything which today needs high-end CPU can (or at least, should) be able to utilize the GPU on the card as well - and to greater effect.
At the same time, We're seeing similar power use increases in our GPUs today that we did 8-10 years ago with CPUs. Performance is increasing, but power input is, as well. 40db for a graphics card is quite a bit, as is 230+ watts (ohmygod, that's more than my entire system while playing a game).
I wonder how long it'll be until we see the same kind of power performance improvements in GPU design as we saw in CPU design a couple years ago.
All said, it's quite a contrast from the 700Mhz celeron I still have cooking away with the 'whole system' power envelope at about 25 watts (PSU is only 35 watts), and have for the past 8 years. No, it's not gaming, but it's doing quite a lot just the same.
Give most people the power an average corporation has, and they will behave in quite the psychopathic fashion - regardless of their actual intent and efforts. Even the most even-keel, straight laced person with the kind of power that corporations have would end up committing countless human rights violations "because I can".
HP seems really fond of what I call "irrelevance campaigns". They keep having them with a myriad of vendors and, despite any concrete 'excellence' in any one area they're focusing on, push them hard for a short period of time then drop them like they're hot. Sometimes it's the result of a purchase/merger, new product, or some other such thing, but the result is almost always the same:
* HP branded Citrix XenServer (preinstalled) * HP 'mini' netbooks (good deal while they lasted, but then they hiked the price and changed the feature set - and they were instantly no longer desirable for what they were, at the price that they were0 * The Palm acquisition + WebOS (where's that going? nowehere) * Selling Oracle boxes (again, nowhere) * Selling Ubuntu preinstalled
There are a number of others, but these are the main ones that spring to mind. Ironically, HP manages to keep hanging on (and even excelling in many regards) due to having some damn fine server, workstation, and switch hardware, of late (despite how much their printers have sucked for the past ~decade).
Spam isn't the problem. If someone's scraped content is useful to me, I'll use it.
The problem is that whatever they're doing to eliminate the so-called spam is also making the use of exacting search terminology useless - literally, 100%, useless. Good luck finding anything useful from a line of output from `dmesg` - you'll find a dozen unanswered messages from Ubuntu forums from 4 years ago, and not much else.
From my observation, there are two kinds of searches:
* Stupid Searches * Professional Searches
The former provides some of the best material since the inception of the web. This category of searches is, by far, the largest category: things like "weather 90210", "what is pi", "how to boil eggs", "am i pregnant" and so on: the results on these are, in all likelihood, close to scientifically perfect.
More complex searches, however, are failing at rates which have not been seen since before AtlaVista. I can't search for a thing
Like you say: I more often just go to wikipedia now, for anything remotely technical, and use the included external links for more information. It's more consistently not-shitty. With google, in my field, I'm more likely to find an 9-year-old mailing list post than I am anything modern or useful.
For the vast majority of searches for the vast majority of people (myself included) the results are good. For anything that matters, it's become increasingly frustrating: I can't imaging getting to where I am now, professionally, without the google of earlier times. It helped me figure out hwo to "ask" intelligent "questions" and to be succinct in what I was looking for. Today? Good luck finding anything much at all, never mind useful.
The people of China respond: "Why would we pay for something which we can take without consequence, make granular changes to, and resell as our own?"
There is 0 motivation for them to compete on even ground; this includes "we will pirate software as we damn please as your stupid laws do not apply here".
I'd wager that 90% of American, British, and misc. European people also pirate software. So what?
If this were a problem, it'd have a negative impact on society. If it has any impact, the impact is a result of other societal issues which likewise cause people to not buy software.
I just paid $500ish for a computer. It came with shit software. Why should I have to pay more than $500 for that? It's not worth it to me.
As for the graphics, sure Quake was 3D in both objects and map but this was early primitive 3D.
It's further confounded by the fact that most kids at that age had a low-end computer (not a gaming computer) - they were still thousands of dollars - or the 'old' family PC. At least the friends I had at the time: they were lucky to have Pentium class hardware (66Mhz - 100Mhz). I remember a kid playing Quake at something like 2-3 fps on a 486sx - at the smallest postage stamp size, with his face right in front of the monitor. Just... no.
Duke, on the other hand, ran just fine on 33Mhz hardware with 4-6Mb of RAM. Hell, I remember someone playing it on early Pentium hardware at a resolution that rivals most modern games and their standard resolution.
Sure, it was all sprite-based, but it really didn't matter all that much: game mechanics were better as was the actual game play (than Quake - the various Quake weapon mods were pretty damn awesome).
Actually, if the quality of the result of their contributions is to be any judge, they should probably quit doing so. FreeBSD and PHP might stop sucking (fbsd 8.x+ and php 5.3, for instance).
They would never agree to a public-owned wire service. Instead, they would eliminate the limits on the number of services with access to public rights of way. Thus, you would have eighteen different companies digging up your streets to run their own lines.
No; no, you would not. That makes absolutely no sense.
Even now, you can lease line from other companies. Why would that not continue? In fact, it would likely accelerate: you might even have municipalities lay the fabric themselves and lease it to customers (to the benefit of the city/muni).
Libertarians aren't against all government. Most of the ones I know are very much for government - just not federal and/or state government of excessive reach and application, the benefit of which largely goes to those in government. No, most libertarians would likely be very much for these kinds of things being orchestrated at the local level - or even the state level, in some cases.
Hell, get rid of the burdensome state and federal taxes, and living somewhere like NY might actually become affordable and desirable.
Dear god, that is horrendous. More pictures, please!
Did the installer(s) by chance have accents which might suggest they came from Arabia or African proper? Rumour has it that kind of bumfuckery is common there.
they can pay $75k/yr for a programmer to maintain and enhance Sakai for their needs.
Why in the world would they do that?
It makes more sense to pay ~several (gotta take into account the employer costs) 3rd-4th year CS undergrads to do the work (or have them do it for free, as a part of a work study, capstone, whatever).
Suppose the city was upgrading to higher pressure water in order to be able to reach further (yeah I know doesn't really work that way).
By the false extension of logic and reality, your analogy is pretty bad. You can't base the thesis of your argument on "Suppose balls were square..." and expect cogency.
More like: my water bill goes up because the city deems it appropriate to redistribute the cost to me for the new subdivision, instead of pushing it to where it belongs (the people in the new subdivision).
As far as IPv6, I see only two benefits: * bigger address space * DNSSEC (which is arguably fairly large, because it'll -hopefully - cut down on spam significantly.)
This does not offset the negatives: * Yet one more complexity I've got to deal with on a daily basis (as for many other already-overworked IT guys) * Lots, and lots of upgrades to existing software and hardware. Do you have any idea how many programs are out there which simply won't work with IPv6 addressing, depending on arcane methods of operation? Sure, there may be ways around them, there may be upgrade paths, and there may be some delay until actual action needs to be taken but the fact remains that it puts a huge burden of extra cost on IT. * When I have a hard time getting management to jump on existing projects (financially), like EOL'ing old 5+ year-old hardware in favor of newer, more reliable kit, do you think I'd like to put another cost on his desk? If I can barely justify the migration to myself (it -might- be a 'nice to have', so -other- people, likely not within our realm of significance, want to talk to us), how am I going to push that to her?
(Yahoo! runs FreeBSD on their web frontend servers and for backend operations, last I heard.)
Isn't there something a bit 'iffy' in terms of the quality of the KAME reference implementation that FreeBSD uses for it's IPv6 stack? I seem to recall reading something about it not being quite 'complete' or stable, but that may have been in the context of something else.
If the US or Israel did it, they'd make it look like someone else did it. This kind of thing has big reprecussions; why would they allow all arrows to point to them?
* accounting is easier * you've never heard of an overworked business accountant * accountants make 1.5x+ as much * accountants don't get yelled at for it not being done yesterday
Slashdot Mirror
In retrospect, I've got to admire the dedication and self-control demonstrated by the E developers.
Back when E17 was started, it was a bloated (if awesome) project. I got sick and tired of waiting for it to finish, and pretty much soured on it when they started changing things drastically, making components (like efm - the file manager component of E17 at the time) discontinued. Granted, that's partially to be expected, but it was in development for years at that time - and reasonably stable despite.
Flash forward to now: it's a very, very lightweight window manager (compared to many others, at least) with a fairly rich featureset. It's been used recently on the "ePC" (2 years ago?) and IIRC it's been used on phones. The libraries are featureful and there is quite a lot of functionality exposed in the interfaces for the size of everything. The windowing toolkits are fast, and the result on my screen is likewise fast (and smooth) - even without acceleration. The libraries themselves are basically like the fltk2 toolkit, in many ways - but significantly more 'polished'.
It may have taken 10 years to 'get right' (or close to it) but the end result is, frankly, quite impressive.
Currently, the vast majority of consumer PCs and servers are 100% functional Intel computers - even if there are other chips involved.
Intel has something to meet pretty much every single PC requirement:
* Intel HDA
* Intel Media Accelerator
* Intel Ethernet
* Intel chipsets
* Intel motherboards
* Intel x86 derived processors for:
- ultramobile (eg. ULP Atoms)
- mobile (eg. multicore and higher end Atoms)
- desktops (i3, i5)
- high-end workstations (i7)
- servers (Xeon)
* Complete, SoC solutions at many of those tiers: phone, tablet, desktop
They do the bulk of the engineering on this stuff, and are cut out of the end 10-20% profit for the 'consumable' product. Why would they not want to get into the 'consumer product' arena (as that's where Apple is sucking up the profits)? They make the Apple product, after all: beyond what Intel (and nVidia/ATI) put in, all Apple is providing is more-or-less as functional as a cardboard box with double-sided tape. Considering the cost to Intel to jump in - offshore the manufacturing of some cases in China @ $5/each - it makes sense to invest in the marketing to make it tenable. They'll see great profits as a result, I'm sure.
I'm not sure why this makes them 'strange': Intel has a reputation of being an 'engineering only' company but they're quite big, with big marketing/sales/advertising, etc. budgets, and some fairly subtantial clout when it comes to successfully advertising their products to consumers. In terms of consumer name recognition, Intel = PC.
Exactly!
Never mind that the absence of a pat-down on high speed rail is a bit of a misdirection/misnomer/outright lie. They're pushing for patdowns on everything from border crossing to Amtrak. What would make HSR any different, exactly?
Fucking politicians. (Can I say that, still, or does this put me on a list?)
worse still, the design overrides your minimum font size (which is completely unforgivable), and is absolutely unusable on high dpi screens.
I'm not having a problem resizing font sizes. Granted, I don't think I've got a high dpi screen ( don't really even pay attn to that stuff anymore - $200 22" Acer 16:9 LCD), but in Chrome/Chromium, resizing works just fine (as does my larger-than-normal default).
I always thought FF resizing was broken, so maybe that's the problem you're running into?
In their defense, this layout is one of the better "web 2.0" designs I've seen. It's clean, orderly, and not too much dead space.
And, like you've said, it's better than the old design. It seems a bit slower in its AJAXyness at the moment, but it is much more consistent in behavior, from what I can see. The "slowness" may simply be a perception thing, too: personally, I still check the status bar to see what the page is doing, and AJAX makes things feel slower due to not having that.
Not terribly sure, to be honest with you. The PSU only has a 35 watt rating, so I'm not bending things too much; it's been a while since I tested it at the wall, but I find it hard to believe it'd be much more than that.
It's one of these: http://www.accurateit.com/images/items/compaq_ipaq.jpg
It's got the original 700Mhz CPU (board wouldn't boot with a 900Mhz replacement), a single fan in the PSU (quiet), an 80G disk, and 386Mb of RAM. I'll be very sad when it finally kicks off to the great divide - I no longer have any replacement components for it, so when something dies (short of the HDD, which I can replace with CF), it's gone. The thing has been on the 'upgrade mill' since Debian 3 (now on 5), is regularly using less than 128Mb of RAM, runs vbox headless w/ a 2k server instance, and a handful of network tools.
I don't understand why MS would have to sell a competitor in a "corporate" environment to the iPad. The iPad has almost nothing to offer.
None of the selling points for corporate IT are hit by the iPad. TCO? Management? Administration? Application control? AD integration? The iPad simply has none of these. Let me know when the iPad is able to be controlled by the same mechanisms WinMo phones and Windows desktops are (as well as Linux desktops and to a (very) small degree, Android phones) and we'll talk.
It would appear that, based on power use and the performance of various chips, that the CPUs days of being the power hog and performance workhorse of the common desktop are over. Anything which today needs high-end CPU can (or at least, should) be able to utilize the GPU on the card as well - and to greater effect.
At the same time, We're seeing similar power use increases in our GPUs today that we did 8-10 years ago with CPUs. Performance is increasing, but power input is, as well. 40db for a graphics card is quite a bit, as is 230+ watts (ohmygod, that's more than my entire system while playing a game).
I wonder how long it'll be until we see the same kind of power performance improvements in GPU design as we saw in CPU design a couple years ago.
All said, it's quite a contrast from the 700Mhz celeron I still have cooking away with the 'whole system' power envelope at about 25 watts (PSU is only 35 watts), and have for the past 8 years. No, it's not gaming, but it's doing quite a lot just the same.
Can you imagine if they weren't honest with him?
They'd be filthy fucking rich and not care about some hour and a half long fantastical childrens' story, or its 'factual coherrency'?
No, you'll need a cooed robot retina for that.
Really?
Give most people the power an average corporation has, and they will behave in quite the psychopathic fashion - regardless of their actual intent and efforts. Even the most even-keel, straight laced person with the kind of power that corporations have would end up committing countless human rights violations "because I can".
HP seems really fond of what I call "irrelevance campaigns". They keep having them with a myriad of vendors and, despite any concrete 'excellence' in any one area they're focusing on, push them hard for a short period of time then drop them like they're hot. Sometimes it's the result of a purchase/merger, new product, or some other such thing, but the result is almost always the same:
* HP branded Citrix XenServer (preinstalled)
* HP 'mini' netbooks (good deal while they lasted, but then they hiked the price and changed the feature set - and they were instantly no longer desirable for what they were, at the price that they were0
* The Palm acquisition + WebOS (where's that going? nowehere)
* Selling Oracle boxes (again, nowhere)
* Selling Ubuntu preinstalled
There are a number of others, but these are the main ones that spring to mind. Ironically, HP manages to keep hanging on (and even excelling in many regards) due to having some damn fine server, workstation, and switch hardware, of late (despite how much their printers have sucked for the past ~decade).
Spam isn't the problem. If someone's scraped content is useful to me, I'll use it.
The problem is that whatever they're doing to eliminate the so-called spam is also making the use of exacting search terminology useless - literally, 100%, useless. Good luck finding anything useful from a line of output from `dmesg` - you'll find a dozen unanswered messages from Ubuntu forums from 4 years ago, and not much else.
From my observation, there are two kinds of searches:
* Stupid Searches
* Professional Searches
The former provides some of the best material since the inception of the web. This category of searches is, by far, the largest category: things like "weather 90210", "what is pi", "how to boil eggs", "am i pregnant" and so on: the results on these are, in all likelihood, close to scientifically perfect.
More complex searches, however, are failing at rates which have not been seen since before AtlaVista. I can't search for a thing
Like you say: I more often just go to wikipedia now, for anything remotely technical, and use the included external links for more information. It's more consistently not-shitty. With google, in my field, I'm more likely to find an 9-year-old mailing list post than I am anything modern or useful.
For the vast majority of searches for the vast majority of people (myself included) the results are good. For anything that matters, it's become increasingly frustrating: I can't imaging getting to where I am now, professionally, without the google of earlier times. It helped me figure out hwo to "ask" intelligent "questions" and to be succinct in what I was looking for. Today? Good luck finding anything much at all, never mind useful.
It's great for porn image searching, though.
The people of China respond: "Why would we pay for something which we can take without consequence, make granular changes to, and resell as our own?"
There is 0 motivation for them to compete on even ground; this includes "we will pirate software as we damn please as your stupid laws do not apply here".
I'd wager that 90% of American, British, and misc. European people also pirate software. So what?
If this were a problem, it'd have a negative impact on society. If it has any impact, the impact is a result of other societal issues which likewise cause people to not buy software.
I just paid $500ish for a computer. It came with shit software. Why should I have to pay more than $500 for that? It's not worth it to me.
As for the graphics, sure Quake was 3D in both objects and map but this was early primitive 3D.
It's further confounded by the fact that most kids at that age had a low-end computer (not a gaming computer) - they were still thousands of dollars - or the 'old' family PC. At least the friends I had at the time: they were lucky to have Pentium class hardware (66Mhz - 100Mhz). I remember a kid playing Quake at something like 2-3 fps on a 486sx - at the smallest postage stamp size, with his face right in front of the monitor. Just... no.
Duke, on the other hand, ran just fine on 33Mhz hardware with 4-6Mb of RAM. Hell, I remember someone playing it on early Pentium hardware at a resolution that rivals most modern games and their standard resolution.
Sure, it was all sprite-based, but it really didn't matter all that much: game mechanics were better as was the actual game play (than Quake - the various Quake weapon mods were pretty damn awesome).
Actually, if the quality of the result of their contributions is to be any judge, they should probably quit doing so. FreeBSD and PHP might stop sucking (fbsd 8.x+ and php 5.3, for instance).
They would never agree to a public-owned wire service. Instead, they would eliminate the limits on the number of services with access to public rights of way. Thus, you would have eighteen different companies digging up your streets to run their own lines.
No; no, you would not. That makes absolutely no sense.
Even now, you can lease line from other companies. Why would that not continue? In fact, it would likely accelerate: you might even have municipalities lay the fabric themselves and lease it to customers (to the benefit of the city/muni).
Libertarians aren't against all government. Most of the ones I know are very much for government - just not federal and/or state government of excessive reach and application, the benefit of which largely goes to those in government. No, most libertarians would likely be very much for these kinds of things being orchestrated at the local level - or even the state level, in some cases.
Hell, get rid of the burdensome state and federal taxes, and living somewhere like NY might actually become affordable and desirable.
Dear god, that is horrendous. More pictures, please!
Did the installer(s) by chance have accents which might suggest they came from Arabia or African proper? Rumour has it that kind of bumfuckery is common there.
they can pay $75k/yr for a programmer to maintain and enhance Sakai for their needs.
Why in the world would they do that?
It makes more sense to pay ~several (gotta take into account the employer costs) 3rd-4th year CS undergrads to do the work (or have them do it for free, as a part of a work study, capstone, whatever).
Suppose the city was upgrading to higher pressure water in order to be able to reach further (yeah I know doesn't really work that way).
By the false extension of logic and reality, your analogy is pretty bad. You can't base the thesis of your argument on "Suppose balls were square..." and expect cogency.
More like: my water bill goes up because the city deems it appropriate to redistribute the cost to me for the new subdivision, instead of pushing it to where it belongs (the people in the new subdivision).
As far as IPv6, I see only two benefits:
* bigger address space
* DNSSEC (which is arguably fairly large, because it'll -hopefully - cut down on spam significantly.)
This does not offset the negatives:
* Yet one more complexity I've got to deal with on a daily basis (as for many other already-overworked IT guys)
* Lots, and lots of upgrades to existing software and hardware. Do you have any idea how many programs are out there which simply won't work with IPv6 addressing, depending on arcane methods of operation? Sure, there may be ways around them, there may be upgrade paths, and there may be some delay until actual action needs to be taken but the fact remains that it puts a huge burden of extra cost on IT.
* When I have a hard time getting management to jump on existing projects (financially), like EOL'ing old 5+ year-old hardware in favor of newer, more reliable kit, do you think I'd like to put another cost on his desk? If I can barely justify the migration to myself (it -might- be a 'nice to have', so -other- people, likely not within our realm of significance, want to talk to us), how am I going to push that to her?
As long as FreeBSD doesn't die, they should.
(Yahoo! runs FreeBSD on their web frontend servers and for backend operations, last I heard.)
Isn't there something a bit 'iffy' in terms of the quality of the KAME reference implementation that FreeBSD uses for it's IPv6 stack? I seem to recall reading something about it not being quite 'complete' or stable, but that may have been in the context of something else.
If the US or Israel did it, they'd make it look like someone else did it. This kind of thing has big reprecussions; why would they allow all arrows to point to them?
Makes you wonder who actually did it.
And:
* accounting is easier
* you've never heard of an overworked business accountant
* accountants make 1.5x+ as much
* accountants don't get yelled at for it not being done yesterday