Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
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· Score: 1
Zero gravity is hard on the body. Low gravity too, but less so. It probably wouldn't be good for astronaughts to stay on a moon base for much longer than they currently stay on the ISS.
I'm sure they'll do some testing to find out what acceptable tolerances are.
But that wouldn't protect them from users adding unsupported hardware that they bought on the discount shelf at CompUSA. People are less likely to expect such hardware to work in an Apple computer, but if they buy a Dell or Gateway branded box with OSX, all bets are off.
No, they'll all be indistinguishable from each other offering no benefit to the consumer. The rigid contracts with the major labels guarantee that the only way a player can distinguish themselves is in how they handle indie artists.
Apples reserves will suffer from the fact that nobody sensible will by a (doomed) PPC part from now on.
If you buy an iBook now, you should have no trouble getting the latest Mac software to run on it for at least 4 or 5 years (it will take at least that long before PPC Macs are no longer the majority).
I may not be the typical person, but I still intend on buying a Mac in the near future. The switch to Intel, while surprising, won't change my buying decision at all.
Since the hardware abstraction happens at the Darwin level, I would expect that if Apple wanted to, they could make OSX run on anything that BSD runs on.
Think about it. They've abstracted enough to make a smooth (presumably) transition from PPC to x86...they can probably transition to any architecture they want without too much trouble.
When will people who just purchased new powerbooks need to worry that new mac software will no longer run on their depricated PPC machines?
From what I read, new Intel Macs will use Rosetta to be able to run PPC binaries, but will there be something that allows PPC Macs to run Intel binaries?
If the market is sufficiently large, then each player can have a relatively small percentage of the market and still do HUGE business. I suspect that is what the GP post meant.
What you've described is possible, but I would think that that would be a pathological case. It is extremely likely that there will be some page inflation, but whether or not this behavior dominates the virtual memory space depends largely on the design and implementation of the program in question. Your experiences may be different, but I've never seen a leak that didn't first exhaust swap space before causing program failure.
What you just said has an intuitive appeal to it, but it's wrong.
Memory lost to a memory leak is, by definition, not part of the resident set for the process and as such, is the most likely candidate to be swapped out to disk. Therefore, as long as you have swap space left on disk, other apps should not be noticeably effected.
If it becomes important to the people, then it will become important to the politicians. Educate your fellow man. Raise their awareness. This will increase the pressure on politicians to react appropriately.
If the charger had some sort of temporary energy storage (like a big supercap or a fly wheel), then the charger could trickle charge during off-peak hours and the car could be charged whenever from the charger's internal energy store. This would do wonders to help flatten the grid demand.
There are lots of ways to address this problem. The above idea was just the first to pop into my head.
If the motors are wheel-mounted, then there are no transmissions involved. Even if there are transmissions involved, they will be simple 1-gear arrangements which are orders of magnitudes more reliable than today's multi-gear transmissions.
But back on point, you would need a separate staff to offer support to those laptops. Anything from configuring Xorg, to trying to get the wireless card to work, to actually joining a network. And a large number of cards are not supported under linux.
I find this argument disengenious. People who willingly switch to linux generally support themselves using the community as a resource. If everyone was switched, then you would need support staff trained on Linux, but you could simply retrain your existing support staff (assuming they weren't dead weight) and that would be their new job since they would no longer have to support the old OS.
For example, the tech support here doesn't even know us Linux users exist because they only pay attention to people to ask them for help. We're quite capable of supporting ourselves and so we don't even show up on their radar.
I don't know this to be true, but since the commercial vendors backported patches for the 2.4 series, I would suspect that they would backport patches for the 2.6 series. If that is indeed the case, then fixes in the 2.6.11 kernel have probably been incorporated into the 2.6.8 kernels used by Red Hat, SUSE, etc.
So, the question is: did they benchmark using the vanilla 2.6.8 kernel or a heavily patched 2.6.8 kernel from one of the commercial distros?
Mod parent up! He's pointed out a very important thing about OpenBSD: there are lots of us who don't consider a machine to be completely trustworthy unless it's supported by OpenBSD, even if we don't intend on running OpenBSD on that machine.
The developers will fix bugs that are visible. In this case, the bugs were made visible because of Acid2. If people keep making public AcidX tests, they increase the visability of bugs and the bugs are more likely to get fixed.
This is simply the way it works. Don't view this as cheating.
It is never my intension to spend time interacting with the window manager, but there are things that I expect the window manager to do for me: 1. provide independent work spaces so that I can keep programming terminals, web browsers, email clients, etc. seperate from each other so that I never have to spend time searching for the window I want. 2. provide a fast way of switching between workspaces such that I can bounce between them without moving my hands away from the keyboard. 3. remember which window last had focus when I return to a workspace. 4. provide a fast way of switching window focus without my hands leaving the keyboard. 5. not waste screen space on things that only have meaning to the window manager (task bars, launchers, icons of minimized windows, etc).
The only interactions with the window manager where it is acceptable to require the mouse are: 1. moving windows 2. resizing windows 3. cutting and pasting between windows For everything else, it's okay to use the mouse, but there should be a way to do it without leaving the keyboard.
With a well configured window manager, everything else becomes as automatic as hitting the esc key in vi. That's how I like it, and yes, I'm much more productive that way.
Sorry, but I don't get you people. Who the fuck cares what "window manager" is running? Do you spend all your time playing with your window manager or do you run software to actually accomplish something productive?
You've got it backwards. Those of use who care about window managers do so because we want to minimize the pain of working with a window manager so that we can be more productive.
I use FVWM because I can configure it to stay out of my way as much as possible so that I can work in the fashion most natural to me.
Even if the schools do no such thing, the OSS community still benefits in may ways. Just off the top of my head: - larger pool of potential developers - more pressure on hardware manufacturers to play nicely with OSS - increased visibility of OSS projects - erosion of MS mindshare
Heck, anything that makes it more difficult for people to see MS as the only solution provider for everything makes my job easier.
Re:Maybe some truth there
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yeah, but none of those make real money for Microsoft. Profits made from Office and Windows subsidize everything else that Microsoft does. This is why Microsoft seems to desperate lately: their only two cash cows are under the heaviest attack from OSS.
BTW, did anyone else notice that MS slashed their R&D budget? How do they expect to thrive in new markets if they don't try new stuff? You can only leverage a desktop monopoly so far...
Slashdot Mirror
Zero gravity is hard on the body. Low gravity too, but less so. It probably
wouldn't be good for astronaughts to stay on a moon base for much longer than
they currently stay on the ISS.
I'm sure they'll do some testing to find out what acceptable tolerances are.
But that wouldn't protect them from users adding unsupported hardware that
they bought on the discount shelf at CompUSA. People are less likely to expect
such hardware to work in an Apple computer, but if they buy a Dell or Gateway
branded box with OSX, all bets are off.
Please mod parent up. He's exactly right.
I never have mod points when I need 'em...
A store could do this with independent artists. Lots of independent
artists give away MP3s on their own websites.
Lots of indie labels would also be willing to do this since they would
see MP3s as good publicity for their artists.
There are ways to do, just not if you're interesting in top-40 tunes.
No, they'll all be indistinguishable from each other offering no benefit to
the consumer. The rigid contracts with the major labels guarantee that the only
way a player can distinguish themselves is in how they handle indie artists.
Apples reserves will suffer from the fact that nobody sensible will by a (doomed) PPC part from now on.
If you buy an iBook now, you should have no trouble getting the latest Mac
software to run on it for at least 4 or 5 years (it will take at least that
long before PPC Macs are no longer the majority).
I may not be the typical person, but I still intend on buying a Mac in the
near future. The switch to Intel, while surprising, won't change
my buying decision at all.
Since the hardware abstraction happens at the Darwin level, I would expect
that if Apple wanted to, they could make OSX run on anything that BSD runs on.
Think about it. They've abstracted enough to make a smooth (presumably)
transition from PPC to x86...they can probably transition to any architecture
they want without too much trouble.
When will people who just purchased new powerbooks need to worry that new
mac software will no longer run on their depricated PPC machines?
From what I read, new Intel Macs will use Rosetta to be able to run PPC
binaries, but will there be something that allows PPC Macs to run Intel
binaries?
If the market is sufficiently large, then each player can have a relatively
small percentage of the market and still do HUGE business. I suspect that is
what the GP post meant.
How easy is it to find AAAA size batteries?
I don't think I've ever seen them on sale anywhere.
What you've described is possible, but I would think that that would be
a pathological case. It is extremely likely that there will be some page
inflation, but whether or not this behavior dominates the virtual memory
space depends largely on the design and implementation of the program in
question. Your experiences may be different, but I've never seen a leak that
didn't first exhaust swap space before causing program failure.
What you just said has an intuitive appeal to it, but it's wrong.
Memory lost to a memory leak is, by definition, not part of the resident set
for the process and as such, is the most likely candidate to be
swapped out to disk. Therefore, as long as you have swap space left on disk,
other apps should not be noticeably effected.
If it becomes important to the people, then it will become important to the
politicians. Educate your fellow man. Raise their awareness. This will increase
the pressure on politicians to react appropriately.
If the charger had some sort of temporary energy storage (like a big supercap
or a fly wheel), then the charger could trickle charge during off-peak hours
and the car could be charged whenever from the charger's internal energy store.
This would do wonders to help flatten the grid demand.
There are lots of ways to address this problem. The above idea was just the
first to pop into my head.
If the motors are wheel-mounted, then there are no transmissions involved.
Even if there are transmissions involved, they will be simple 1-gear
arrangements which are orders of magnitudes more reliable than today's
multi-gear transmissions.
But back on point, you would need a separate staff to offer support to those laptops. Anything from configuring Xorg, to trying to get the wireless card to work, to actually joining a network. And a large number of cards are not supported under linux.
I find this argument disengenious. People who willingly switch to linux
generally support themselves using the community as a resource. If everyone
was switched, then you would need support staff trained on Linux, but you
could simply retrain your existing support staff (assuming they weren't dead
weight) and that would be their new job since they would no longer have to
support the old OS.
For example, the tech support here doesn't even know us Linux users exist
because they only pay attention to people to ask them for help. We're quite
capable of supporting ourselves and so we don't even show up on their radar.
I don't know this to be true, but since the commercial vendors backported
patches for the 2.4 series, I would suspect that they would backport patches
for the 2.6 series. If that is indeed the case, then fixes in the 2.6.11
kernel have probably been incorporated into the 2.6.8 kernels used by
Red Hat, SUSE, etc.
So, the question is: did they benchmark using the vanilla 2.6.8 kernel
or a heavily patched 2.6.8 kernel from one of the commercial distros?
Mod parent up! He's pointed out a very important thing about OpenBSD: there
are lots of us who don't consider a machine to be completely trustworthy
unless it's supported by OpenBSD, even if we don't intend on running OpenBSD
on that machine.
The developers will fix bugs that are visible.
In this case, the bugs were made visible because of Acid2.
If people keep making public AcidX tests, they increase the visability of
bugs and the bugs are more likely to get fixed.
This is simply the way it works. Don't view this as cheating.
It is never my intension to spend time interacting with the window manager, but
there are things that I expect the window manager to do for me:
1. provide independent work spaces so that I can keep programming terminals,
web browsers, email clients, etc. seperate from each other so that I never
have to spend time searching for the window I want.
2. provide a fast way of switching between workspaces such that I can bounce
between them without moving my hands away from the keyboard.
3. remember which window last had focus when I return to a workspace.
4. provide a fast way of switching window focus without my hands leaving
the keyboard.
5. not waste screen space on things that only have meaning to the window
manager (task bars, launchers, icons of minimized windows, etc).
The only interactions with the window manager where it is acceptable to require
the mouse are:
1. moving windows
2. resizing windows
3. cutting and pasting between windows
For everything else, it's okay to use the mouse, but there should be a way to
do it without leaving the keyboard.
With a well configured window manager, everything else becomes as automatic
as hitting the esc key in vi. That's how I like it, and yes, I'm much more
productive that way.
Sorry, but I don't get you people. Who the fuck cares what "window manager" is running? Do you spend all your time playing with your window manager or do you run software to actually accomplish something productive?
You've got it backwards. Those of use who care about window managers do so
because we want to minimize the pain of working with a window manager
so that we can be more productive.
I use FVWM because I can configure it to stay out of my way as much as possible
so that I can work in the fashion most natural to me.
What's a physics card?
With electricity that expensive, are people in Hawaii investing alternative energy
solutions like solar, wind, and wave power?
Even if the schools do no such thing, the OSS community still benefits in may
ways. Just off the top of my head:
- larger pool of potential developers
- more pressure on hardware manufacturers to play nicely with OSS
- increased visibility of OSS projects
- erosion of MS mindshare
Heck, anything that makes it more difficult for people to see MS as the only
solution provider for everything makes my job easier.
Yeah, but none of those make real money for Microsoft. Profits made from
Office and Windows subsidize everything else that Microsoft does. This is
why Microsoft seems to desperate lately: their only two cash cows are under
the heaviest attack from OSS.
BTW, did anyone else notice that MS slashed their R&D budget? How do they
expect to thrive in new markets if they don't try new stuff? You can only
leverage a desktop monopoly so far...