I was unable to justify the added cost of a smartphone plan, and didn't expect the price to get down to a reasonable range for several more years, if ever. But I recently found that Virgin Mobile US offers unlimited data/text and 300 minutes of voice for $25/mo, without being tied to a contract. This is a much better deal than anything else I've found in the US (it's less than what many of my friends pay for their dumbphone contract), and was enough to finally bring me into the smartphone world. They have two Android phones right now - the Intercept and the newly-released Optimus V. Neither one is a top-of-the-line phone, but the Optimus is particularly impressive for the price.
I think it's unlikely that Perl is being used for any of the heavy computations. I would guess that Perl is being used as a glue language that interfaces with the database and programs written in lower-level languages to do the heavy lifting.
I tend to have the opposite experience. When I need to use it, IE7 is quite fast and responsive for me, and it will certainly open tabs as quickly as I can hit Ctrl-T. On the other hand, Firefox (on any computer I've used) occasionally has a bit of a delay when opening new tabs, especially if other pages are rendering in the background, you have a few complex sites (like gmail) open, or you have more than 3-4 tabs open.
There are a bunch of great reasons to use Firefox - adblock, keyword bookmarks, decent standards support, Firebug, etc. But in my experience (especially post-1.5), the responsiveness of the UI is not one of those reasons.
I worked on the same floor as Van Allen at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate. He was quite an amazing guy - even at 90 years old, he still came to his office nearly every day to work on data from Pioneer. I had a number of conversations with him, and he clearly still loved what he was doing.
My fondest memory of him is when he was presented with an award at Iowa a few years back. The actual award was a glass globe with some intricate internal designs composed of another material. However, the globe was much heavier than it appeared. So he spent the next few minutes explaining to those around him how we could figure out its density using size and mass, and then figure out the internal composition based on that. Then he actually went through the rough calculation and narrowed it down to two or three likely materials. He was well known around the Physics department for his skills as an educator, and I'm glad that I was able to witness a bit of that firsthand.
Up until a few years ago he was still using an ancient punchcard-based programmable calculator for most of his computations. Van obviously new it was out of date, but he had so much experience with it that he could still use it fairly quickly. He showed me the array of cards he had written over the years for doing things like converting RA/Dec to Az/Alt and performing Newton's method. Around this time, a professor of mine started to teach Van how to use modern programs like Mathcad for doing things like this, and he was very excited and receptive to working in a way that was fairly new to him.
I know a lot of people who really admired this man, and he's really going to be missed up on the 7th floor.
I see a lot of people here recommending foobar2000 as a Winamp replacement. I've tried it briefly a few times and have never been very impressed, but I must be missing something. Why are so many people so adamant about foobar2000's superiority? Can somebody out there give me some reasons why they prefer it? Winamp has served me well for many years, but I'm always interested in finding something better.
First let's start with something that might return some "sensible" (i.e. not ridiculously high) numbers. On the Apple II, Basic programmers had access to an incredibly low resolution mode with 40x40 pixels and 16 colors. Assuming we only use 2 colors (say, black and white), there are:
2^(40*40) = 4.44 x 10^481 possible screen images.
Whew! Already far beyond the 2^256 limit discussed. But out of curiosity, we can look at some other numbers. Using the full 16-color support of this low-res mode:
16^(40*40) = 3.90 x 10^1926
How many possible terminal screens are there, assuming only alphanumeric (and space) characters?
(26+26+10+1)^(80*24) = 5.41 x 10^3454
And some other modes of interest:
320 x 200, 2 colors: 8.31 x 10^19265 320 x 200, 256 colors: 2.27 x 10^154127 640 x 480, 256 colors: 2.07 x 10^739811
After this, direct computation was far too slow, but we can get rough estimates:
640 x 480, 16-bit color:
640*480*log10(65536) = 10^1,479,622
800 x 600, 16-bit color:
800*600*log10(65536) = 10^2311910
1024 x 768, 16-bit color: 10^3787833
And finally...
1024 x 768, 32-bit color: 10^7575677
Yep, a 1 with 7.5 million zeroes behind it. So we may all have to wait awhile before we see a computer sequentially generate a picture of alternate post-Caesar Earth. Still, an interesting thought.
I love the Firebird/Firefox lines of browsers under Linux and Windows. I would also love to use Firefox on my new G5 under OS X, but there are three really annoying problems:
1. Scrolling with the mouse scroll wheel goes WAY too fast, making it almost unusable 2. Middle-clicking on a link does not open a new tab (or do anything for that matter) 3. Middle-clicking to scroll (autoscroll) also does not work.
Do other people see this same behavior? Are there any fixes?
>But I would still like to see hardware hacking of stuff I could use.
That's what companies are for. This guy is doing something he thinks is fun and interesting for his own benefit. He's not trying to cater to your wants, and I don't see why you think he should.
The operating system is not the only factor that decides system uptime. Many people do not leave their computer on all the time for one reason or another. For example, I turn mine off every night because I can't sleep with the noise. But boot times are important for many other reasons. Boot times are very important for people who dual boot and have to switch operating systems often. My work forces me to switch between Windows and Linux about 6 times per day. If Windows takes 5 minutes to boot, that's a half hour of time that has been lost. It's even more important when doing service work on computers. I used to work at a local tech shop, and the reboot times add up when you have to install a number of different applications or drivers. Also, we used to test parts, so if I had 50 video cards to test, that meant booting Windows 50 times. A great deal of time is wasted depending on how long it takes to load.
BeOS is probably the fastest-booting full-featured operating system, taking about 7 seconds to boot. DOS is of course much faster, although there isn't a whole lot for it to do. MS-DOS 5.0 with no autoexec.bat/config.sys presents a command prompt pretty much instantly after POST, even on a 486. I once got an extremely minimal Linux to boot in 3 seconds on a Pentium 90 when I was designing a car mp3 stereo. However, that was without any daemons running, no unnecessary drivers, etc... so it was not really a usable general-purpose operating system. In the Windows world, I would consider Win95 to be the fastest (contrary to every review and ad for Win98+ that claimed faster boot and shutdown times). A fresh install of Win95 on my Athlon 800 loads in under 10 seconds, although this starts going up when you install a real video driver, Internet Explorer 5, etc. Still, if you carefully monitor what gets loaded on startup, you can keep Win95's boot time under 30 seconds, which helps immensely when rebooting many times daily is necessary. Even in cases of normal use, a short boot time is a great convenience.
This article claims that many libraries are re-used only if the same application is running twice. However, this probably happens more often than you would think. I can remember times when I've had 15 Internet Explorer windows open. If all of these were using completely independent portions of memory (with no shared libraries), I doubt if a 128 MB system could handle the load. Furthermore, consider the case of Linux, where nearly ALL applications are linked to the standard C library. To run a quick test, I compiled "Hello World" both statically and dynamically linked. The shared library version was just under 12K, while the statically-linked version was slighly under 1 megabyte! Imagine if every little utility in Linux - cp, ls, touch, chown, date, df, echo, more - were statically linked. Just this extremely minimal set of utilities would be larger than Netscape 4.76 statically linked with the Motif libraries! Furthermore, look at the difference between the statically and dynamically linked versions of Netscape. The static version is 7.69M, which is almost 33% larger than the dynamic version, weighing in at 5.8M. The author claims that dynamic libraries do not lead to significantly smaller executables, but I consider 33% in this case to be quite a significant difference.
I admit shared libraries can be a pain when not widely distributed. I recently wrote a simple GUI-based program in Visual C++ 6, which links against the latest VC runtime library. When I gave this to the person who had asked for it, they were unable to use it because they did not have the latest library. For the sake of simplicity, I made a statically-linked version and was amazed when my little 400K program started approaching 5MB in size. Transferring such a program over a dialup connection is not fun, and to do so more than once because of statically-linked libraries is both a waste of time and space.
I remember several years back when I first wanted to install the Enlightenment window manager and having to compile and install about 10 different programs and libraries just to get it to work. It was a pain, and I thought there should be an easier way. When a program uses a library speficically written for that program, and with only limited usefulness outside the realm of that program, I think static linking is acceptable. However, doing away with shared libraries altogether would be foolish and shortsighted.
Just my opinion. If my figures are horribly inaccurate, feel free to correct me.
On the whole I agree with you, except for one thing: what was so tasteless about the Simpsons?
(Note that I said *was* as I'm not going to attempt to defend the poor excuses for episodes created in the last two years)
I think it was initially promoted as having a style of comedy more akin to Southpark and Bevis and Butthead - popping in swear words at every opportunity, etc. However, this didn't continue for very long... even by the second season the show had evolved to using some of the highest-level comedy I've ever seen. It makes fun of life in general, and I can't see how that can be considered "tasteless".
It looks like I'm pretty much alone on this one, but I really didn't like AP2 that much. It was about what I had expected, but it just wasn't as enjoyable to me as the first one. It kinda gave me the impression that everybody just got together for a weekend and threw together a movie. I know it's supposed to be like that, but I thought the general style of the first movie was better.
The characters didn't really seem to carry over from the first movie very well either. Dr. Evil seemed way too... competent in this movie, Austin seemed too incompetent, and Felicity doesn't even compare to Vanessa in the first one.
Then there were those other characters... I think Fat Bastard and Mini Me both give Jar Jar some strong competition for "Most Annoying Character of 1999".
Now, before you start flaming me, I just want to make a point... I didn't say I hated the movie. The jokes were wonderful... I think I laughed way more at this movie than I did at AP1 the first time I saw it. But the movie itself just didn't appeal to me... that's why I think the first one was better.
Wow... I had this idea a few years ago. I even messed around with Slackware's installation script to make it work, but I never did anything with it. I'm glad to see this happen in a released distribution though... it's SO much better than the annoying "Why Win9x is great" messages in certain other OS install programs.
Slashdot Mirror
I was unable to justify the added cost of a smartphone plan, and didn't expect the price to get down to a reasonable range for several more years, if ever. But I recently found that Virgin Mobile US offers unlimited data/text and 300 minutes of voice for $25/mo, without being tied to a contract. This is a much better deal than anything else I've found in the US (it's less than what many of my friends pay for their dumbphone contract), and was enough to finally bring me into the smartphone world. They have two Android phones right now - the Intercept and the newly-released Optimus V. Neither one is a top-of-the-line phone, but the Optimus is particularly impressive for the price.
I think it's unlikely that Perl is being used for any of the heavy computations. I would guess that Perl is being used as a glue language that interfaces with the database and programs written in lower-level languages to do the heavy lifting.
I tend to have the opposite experience. When I need to use it, IE7 is quite fast and responsive for me, and it will certainly open tabs as quickly as I can hit Ctrl-T. On the other hand, Firefox (on any computer I've used) occasionally has a bit of a delay when opening new tabs, especially if other pages are rendering in the background, you have a few complex sites (like gmail) open, or you have more than 3-4 tabs open.
There are a bunch of great reasons to use Firefox - adblock, keyword bookmarks, decent standards support, Firebug, etc. But in my experience (especially post-1.5), the responsiveness of the UI is not one of those reasons.
I worked on the same floor as Van Allen at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate. He was quite an amazing guy - even at 90 years old, he still came to his office nearly every day to work on data from Pioneer. I had a number of conversations with him, and he clearly still loved what he was doing.
My fondest memory of him is when he was presented with an award at Iowa a few years back. The actual award was a glass globe with some intricate internal designs composed of another material. However, the globe was much heavier than it appeared. So he spent the next few minutes explaining to those around him how we could figure out its density using size and mass, and then figure out the internal composition based on that. Then he actually went through the rough calculation and narrowed it down to two or three likely materials. He was well known around the Physics department for his skills as an educator, and I'm glad that I was able to witness a bit of that firsthand.
Up until a few years ago he was still using an ancient punchcard-based programmable calculator for most of his computations. Van obviously new it was out of date, but he had so much experience with it that he could still use it fairly quickly. He showed me the array of cards he had written over the years for doing things like converting RA/Dec to Az/Alt and performing Newton's method. Around this time, a professor of mine started to teach Van how to use modern programs like Mathcad for doing things like this, and he was very excited and receptive to working in a way that was fairly new to him.
I know a lot of people who really admired this man, and he's really going to be missed up on the 7th floor.
I see a lot of people here recommending foobar2000 as a Winamp replacement. I've tried it briefly a few times and have never been very impressed, but I must be missing something. Why are so many people so adamant about foobar2000's superiority? Can somebody out there give me some reasons why they prefer it? Winamp has served me well for many years, but I'm always interested in finding something better.
Simple, just follow step number 2:
???
After that, profit is inevitable!
1000! is 2565 digits long... approximately 4.0238 x 10^2564.
:)
Larger than a googol, and just barely smaller than a googolplex.
Some quick numbers on this:
First let's start with something that might return some "sensible" (i.e. not ridiculously high) numbers. On the Apple II, Basic programmers had access to an incredibly low resolution mode with 40x40 pixels and 16 colors. Assuming we only use 2 colors (say, black and white), there are:
2^(40*40) = 4.44 x 10^481 possible screen images.
Whew! Already far beyond the 2^256 limit discussed. But out of curiosity, we can look at some other numbers. Using the full 16-color support of this low-res mode:
16^(40*40) = 3.90 x 10^1926
How many possible terminal screens are there, assuming only alphanumeric (and space) characters?
(26+26+10+1)^(80*24) = 5.41 x 10^3454
And some other modes of interest:
320 x 200, 2 colors: 8.31 x 10^19265
320 x 200, 256 colors: 2.27 x 10^154127
640 x 480, 256 colors: 2.07 x 10^739811
After this, direct computation was far too slow, but we can get rough estimates:
640 x 480, 16-bit color:
640*480*log10(65536) = 10^1,479,622
800 x 600, 16-bit color:
800*600*log10(65536) = 10^2311910
1024 x 768, 16-bit color: 10^3787833
And finally...
1024 x 768, 32-bit color: 10^7575677
Yep, a 1 with 7.5 million zeroes behind it. So we may all have to wait awhile before we see a computer sequentially generate a picture of alternate post-Caesar Earth. Still, an interesting thought.
I love the Firebird/Firefox lines of browsers under Linux and Windows. I would also love to use Firefox on my new G5 under OS X, but there are three really annoying problems:
1. Scrolling with the mouse scroll wheel goes WAY too fast, making it almost unusable
2. Middle-clicking on a link does not open a new tab (or do anything for that matter)
3. Middle-clicking to scroll (autoscroll) also does not work.
Do other people see this same behavior? Are there any fixes?
>But I would still like to see hardware hacking of stuff I could use.
That's what companies are for. This guy is doing something he thinks is fun and interesting for his own benefit. He's not trying to cater to your wants, and I don't see why you think he should.
The operating system is not the only factor that decides system uptime. Many people do not leave their computer on all the time for one reason or another. For example, I turn mine off every night because I can't sleep with the noise. But boot times are important for many other reasons. Boot times are very important for people who dual boot and have to switch operating systems often. My work forces me to switch between Windows and Linux about 6 times per day. If Windows takes 5 minutes to boot, that's a half hour of time that has been lost. It's even more important when doing service work on computers. I used to work at a local tech shop, and the reboot times add up when you have to install a number of different applications or drivers. Also, we used to test parts, so if I had 50 video cards to test, that meant booting Windows 50 times. A great deal of time is wasted depending on how long it takes to load.
BeOS is probably the fastest-booting full-featured operating system, taking about 7 seconds to boot. DOS is of course much faster, although there isn't a whole lot for it to do. MS-DOS 5.0 with no autoexec.bat/config.sys presents a command prompt pretty much instantly after POST, even on a 486. I once got an extremely minimal Linux to boot in 3 seconds on a Pentium 90 when I was designing a car mp3 stereo. However, that was without any daemons running, no unnecessary drivers, etc... so it was not really a usable general-purpose operating system. In the Windows world, I would consider Win95 to be the fastest (contrary to every review and ad for Win98+ that claimed faster boot and shutdown times). A fresh install of Win95 on my Athlon 800 loads in under 10 seconds, although this starts going up when you install a real video driver, Internet Explorer 5, etc. Still, if you carefully monitor what gets loaded on startup, you can keep Win95's boot time under 30 seconds, which helps immensely when rebooting many times daily is necessary. Even in cases of normal use, a short boot time is a great convenience.
But maybe that's just me.
This article claims that many libraries are re-used only if the same application is running twice. However, this probably happens more often than you would think. I can remember times when I've had 15 Internet Explorer windows open. If all of these were using completely independent portions of memory (with no shared libraries), I doubt if a 128 MB system could handle the load. Furthermore, consider the case of Linux, where nearly ALL applications are linked to the standard C library. To run a quick test, I compiled "Hello World" both statically and dynamically linked. The shared library version was just under 12K, while the statically-linked version was slighly under 1 megabyte! Imagine if every little utility in Linux - cp, ls, touch, chown, date, df, echo, more - were statically linked. Just this extremely minimal set of utilities would be larger than Netscape 4.76 statically linked with the Motif libraries! Furthermore, look at the difference between the statically and dynamically linked versions of Netscape. The static version is 7.69M, which is almost 33% larger than the dynamic version, weighing in at 5.8M. The author claims that dynamic libraries do not lead to significantly smaller executables, but I consider 33% in this case to be quite a significant difference.
I admit shared libraries can be a pain when not widely distributed. I recently wrote a simple GUI-based program in Visual C++ 6, which links against the latest VC runtime library. When I gave this to the person who had asked for it, they were unable to use it because they did not have the latest library. For the sake of simplicity, I made a statically-linked version and was amazed when my little 400K program started approaching 5MB in size. Transferring such a program over a dialup connection is not fun, and to do so more than once because of statically-linked libraries is both a waste of time and space.
I remember several years back when I first wanted to install the Enlightenment window manager and having to compile and install about 10 different programs and libraries just to get it to work. It was a pain, and I thought there should be an easier way. When a program uses a library speficically written for that program, and with only limited usefulness outside the realm of that program, I think static linking is acceptable. However, doing away with shared libraries altogether would be foolish and shortsighted.
Just my opinion. If my figures are horribly inaccurate, feel free to correct me.
...Napster starts searching for .ogg files too.
Just wondering, how do you find these hostnames? Is there some way to query their DNS to list all sub-domains?
Seriously, I know like 3 people her who use Linux! I think that's enough to justify holding it here! Now we just need to find someone to orgainze....
On the whole I agree with you, except for one thing: what was so tasteless about the Simpsons?
(Note that I said *was* as I'm not going to attempt to defend the poor excuses for episodes created in the last two years)
I think it was initially promoted as having a style of comedy more akin to Southpark and Bevis and Butthead - popping in swear words at every opportunity, etc. However, this didn't continue for very long... even by the second season the show had evolved to using some of the highest-level comedy I've ever seen. It makes fun of life in general, and I can't see how that can be considered "tasteless".
It looks like I'm pretty much alone on this one, but I really didn't like AP2 that much. It was about what I had expected, but it just wasn't as enjoyable to me as the first one. It kinda gave me the impression that everybody just got together for a weekend and threw together a movie. I know it's supposed to be like that, but I thought the general style of the first movie was better.
The characters didn't really seem to carry over from the first movie very well either. Dr. Evil seemed way too... competent in this movie, Austin seemed too incompetent, and Felicity doesn't even compare to Vanessa in the first one.
Then there were those other characters... I think Fat Bastard and Mini Me both give Jar Jar some strong competition for "Most Annoying Character of 1999".
Now, before you start flaming me, I just want to make a point... I didn't say I hated the movie. The jokes were wonderful... I think I laughed way more at this movie than I did at AP1 the first time I saw it. But the movie itself just didn't appeal to me... that's why I think the first one was better.
Wow... I had this idea a few years ago. I even
messed around with Slackware's installation script
to make it work, but I never did anything with it.
I'm glad to see this happen in a released
distribution though... it's SO much better than
the annoying "Why Win9x is great" messages in
certain other OS install programs.