Isn't it enough that you use it? (speaking generally here, not specifically to the previous poster) Or do you need the masses to agree with you before your choice can be validated?
Amen! This attitude characterises any number of 'religious wars' in the geek world: emacs vs vi, amiga vs st (going back a bit), mac vs pc.
I have favourites in each of those (pc, st, emacs), but I don't care if you like them or not - why does it matter?
In a world where you buy South Park episodes at 2 to a tape, or disk, what makes you think publishers want to fill the disk?
Part of it seems to be that it's cheaper to make two single-layer disks than one double-layer disk (at a guess), leading to boxed sets where one disk would do it, but I don't think copyright-owners want to blow their wad in one go.
(DVD-Audio and SuperCD (or whatever Sony call theirs) both have support for 24bit/96khz and for multichannel (surround) audio - that's why they use larger format disks.
Huh? The MIPS R4000 is a CPU, not a graphics processor. The whole point of SGIs workstations is that all the graphics work is offloaded into specialised hardware (not so revolutionary now, but pretty nifty when they first started doing it). That and some really clever memory and I/O architecture in the higher-end (Octane and up) systems.
58db is not really that quiet, except when compared to a 6-fan server... a real quiet PC runs around 35db or even less (one manufacturer claims as low as 16.5dBA). Sources I have found (see below) compare 55db to "standing next to a busy road". That said, there is a fair bit of variation in how measurements are taken.
between the two there's very little software which isn't available packaged to work on a Red Hat box
Thanks for the pointer - I liked APT when I used to have a Debian system. However, the first 3 things I tried to install using it are apparently in the 'very little' pile you talk about: jove, xdu, and lavaps. None of those are particularly obscure or cutting-edge. Still, it'll save me carrying my RH CDs around.
But system have been pretty damn noisy for the last couple of years - just how far back do you want to go?
What would work better is being able to buy lower clock-speed processors using the newer (cooler-running) manufacturing processes. At the time, a Cyrix 6x86/166 need special heatsinks and whatnot. I bet you can make the same thing with only passive cooling by updating the fab processes. A K6-2/500 with no fan would be reasonably fast for an X server, and pretty quiet too. All you'd need is a decent video card from just before they all started to have fans.
Is it quiet compared to normal jet-engined overclock systems, or compared to a room with no PC in it? I see what seems to be a bank of 6 fans on the top of that thing...
So what is the seagate part number, so we can all enjoy it? (seriously, drive manufacturers tend to make several drives of the same capacity at any given time)
Also, I like the fact that I can order from quietpc.com without having to pay through the nose like I do from US companies (assuming they are even broadminded enough to believe the rest of the world exists). The grass is always greener...
[the silentdrive is US-made, and has been reviewed on/. before, and most of their other parts are actually resold, not made by them - you probably can source them locallly]
Except if the problem is related to their connection (my experience of this sort of thing is from ISP support). Besides, would you want to pay for a phone call everytime your software died? I don't. Not to mention you'd end up a story on slashdot about evil spyware.
There is already software to do it though - Netscape has shipped with what used to be Full Circle's Talkback client, which reports bugs back to Netscape. Full Circle appears to have been bought by ePeople, and then by support.com, according to this press release. No sign of an actual product, however.
It's not a new thing... back when there was only one IRC network (around 1992/3), I remember seeing Macbeth played out on IRC - not with bots but people, though.
Character did indeed leave the channel as they went offstage, and of course you only need enough people for the maximum number of actors in any scene, because "costume changes" are instant./nick dagger/join #stage/me floats before lady macbeth
I've been thinking for some time that pictorial cues would make for better error messages than the current situation. Anyone who has spent time doing customer support has had a conversation something like this: "it's broken" "did it give any error message?" "yeah, something about error or something" "please put your head in the blender"
Has anyone done any research into pictorial errors? I think the average end-user might actually remember 'blue puppy with a banana'. You don't need too many symbols before you can encode a fair number of error messages especially if you include a small number of colour variations, and the sort of thing used currently by people like MS is meaningless to everyone but the programmer anyway (long hex codes). Once you've accepted that the user is not in a position to fix the problem themselves, then the challenge becomes one of conveying the information to the support person without corruption or loss of detail.
Obviously, having software that doesn't produce errors or allow the user into 'error' situations would be better still, but that seems to be too hard.
IIRC, you still do have to pay for a radio license, but only if you don't have a TV license. Radio licenses are about 6 quid or something silly. It's been a while since I read the form, but that was certainly the case only a few years ago.
Other license trivia: there is a discount on a TV license for blind people, but it is only of about £10 [about as scary as the drive-through ATM we used on holiday in Tennessee with Braille-embossed buttons].
All of them, and many others, are quite arguably better examples of film as art.
Thats odd, because I watch films for entertainment. I actually like the movies I've seen from both groups you mentioned (I've not seen Run Lola Run or FMJ), and my favourite of those is probably Brazil, but I don't see why people should be limited in their voting to film as art. I would probably vote fairly highly for Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for instance, which is never a cinematic masterpiece, but it floats my boat every time I see it.
Bit of both I suppose... Since the odds of having both manufacturers using a naming scheme or performance scale that is impartial are pretty slim, having one describe performance in terms of the other is a reasonable substitute to me. I'd rather be able to compare either to (for instance) the PowerPPC range or SPARCs where the clock speed for similar perfomance is drastically different, but the only common ground then becomes SPECint and SPECfp, which manufacturers seem to dislike (presumably because they can't couch it in marketing spin).
Anyway, AMD don't call the new chips "virtual 1600Mhz" at all - what's the lie? In terms of performance, the naming is reasonably accurate, if not a little conservative.
If I go into a store and want to compare computers, and one is advertised as an Intel P4 1800 MHz and the other is an AMD XP 1800+ that is very confusing.
If you go into a store and want to compare computers, and you are intending to do it based on clock speed, then you have lost.
For a start, it isn't the first time this has been done - Cyrix did it with their 6x86 line of processors about 4-5 years ago. From the reviews/benchmarks I've seen, AMD has actually been rather conservative in it's 'pentium-equivalence' ratings. P4/1600 vs AthlonXP1600+ seems to come out in favour of the AMD part in reviews I've seen.
While Mhz is a 'real solid hard fact', the assumption that clock speed is directly proportional to performance across all processors is a stupid one. That harms consumers, and plays into Intel's clock-centric hands.
.tv were taking bids rather than orders for the more 'desirable'.tv subdomains about 18 months ago. They had a nice page where you could see the current bids for things like m.tv
Re:Speaking of laptop power savings: LED backlight
on
Via One-ups Transmeta
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· Score: 1
Saving power is a relative thing. I have a tosh laptop with a mobile pentium III and GeForce2Go (i.e. theoretically 'laptop' parts) that puts out enough heat that the manual strongly recommends not putting the thing on your lap! I get the impression that the screen is not really such a huge proportion of the power requirements in modern laptops.
Huh? How on earth does such a thing tell the difference between my session key and (say) Amazon's ISIN stock codes? Surely anyone using a piece of software like this is going to have a severly degraded experience of a lot of the web? Why not just kick yourself in the balls repeatedly and be done with it?
Define PDA... the first Psion Organiser dates back to at least October 1984 (got an ad for one). The extremely usuable Psion series 3 dates back to at least 1991.
You're right of course - all I was trying to say was that only testing the finished software product, and only then by usage testing, is a poor development methodology. I wasn't intending to imply manufacturing does do that either, just that in my mind a manufacturing process has a more concrete 'finished product' - I get the impression you might have some ties to that part of industry:)
It's interesting to read in Writing Solid Code that before the practices in the book were made standard across MS, they had products cancelled because of runaway buglists. The book was published a few years ago now, so all current products were theoretically built using those methods, yet there are still some pretty fundamental mistakes being unearthed - use of a good libc would expose a lot of the buffer overrun problems that IIS has had, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
surely thats A/UX (apple unix originally for 68k then PPC) not AIX (IBM Unix originally for POWER then PPC)?
Isn't it enough that you use it? (speaking generally here, not specifically to the previous poster) Or do you need the masses to agree with you before your choice can be validated?
Amen! This attitude characterises any number of 'religious wars' in the geek world: emacs vs vi, amiga vs st (going back a bit), mac vs pc.
I have favourites in each of those (pc, st, emacs), but I don't care if you like them or not - why does it matter?
barely useable os with features similiar to linux .9 does not excite me
I remember using 0.99pl12 for real work for the whole of summer 1993 quite happily on a 486/33...
Read up on what 'fair use' actually means in the context of Copyright law.
Hint: It isn't to do with what you think is fair.
In a world where you buy South Park episodes at 2 to a tape, or disk, what makes you think publishers want to fill the disk?
Part of it seems to be that it's cheaper to make two single-layer disks than one double-layer disk (at a guess), leading to boxed sets where one disk would do it, but I don't think copyright-owners want to blow their wad in one go.
(DVD-Audio and SuperCD (or whatever Sony call theirs) both have support for 24bit/96khz and for multichannel (surround) audio - that's why they use larger format disks.
Huh? The MIPS R4000 is a CPU, not a graphics processor. The whole point of SGIs workstations is that all the graphics work is offloaded into specialised hardware (not so revolutionary now, but pretty nifty when they first started doing it). That and some really clever memory and I/O architecture in the higher-end (Octane and up) systems.
I found that after asking :)
58db is not really that quiet, except when compared to a 6-fan server... a real quiet PC runs around 35db or even less (one manufacturer claims as low as 16.5dBA). Sources I have found (see below) compare 55db to "standing next to a busy road". That said, there is a fair bit of variation in how measurements are taken.
This page has much more info.
between the two there's very little software which isn't available packaged to work on a Red Hat box
Thanks for the pointer - I liked APT when I used to have a Debian system. However, the first 3 things I tried to install using it are apparently in the 'very little' pile you talk about: jove, xdu, and lavaps. None of those are particularly obscure or cutting-edge. Still, it'll save me carrying my RH CDs around.
But system have been pretty damn noisy for the last couple of years - just how far back do you want to go?
What would work better is being able to buy lower clock-speed processors using the newer (cooler-running) manufacturing processes. At the time, a Cyrix 6x86/166 need special heatsinks and whatnot. I bet you can make the same thing with only passive cooling by updating the fab processes. A K6-2/500 with no fan would be reasonably fast for an X server, and pretty quiet too. All you'd need is a decent video card from just before they all started to have fans.
Is it quiet compared to normal jet-engined overclock systems, or compared to a room with no PC in it? I see what seems to be a bank of 6 fans on the top of that thing...
I'm looking for silent or near to it.
So what is the seagate part number, so we can all enjoy it? (seriously, drive manufacturers tend to make several drives of the same capacity at any given time)
/. before, and most of their other parts are actually resold, not made by them - you probably can source them locallly]
Also, I like the fact that I can order from quietpc.com without having to pay through the nose like I do from US companies (assuming they are even broadminded enough to believe the rest of the world exists). The grass is always greener...
[the silentdrive is US-made, and has been reviewed on
Except if the problem is related to their connection (my experience of this sort of thing is from ISP support). Besides, would you want to pay for a phone call everytime your software died? I don't. Not to mention you'd end up a story on slashdot about evil spyware.
There is already software to do it though - Netscape has shipped with what used to be Full Circle's Talkback client, which reports bugs back to Netscape. Full Circle appears to have been bought by ePeople, and then by support.com, according to this press release. No sign of an actual product, however.
It's not a new thing... back when there was only one IRC network (around 1992/3), I remember seeing Macbeth played out on IRC - not with bots but people, though.
/nick dagger /join #stage /me floats before lady macbeth
Character did indeed leave the channel as they went offstage, and of course you only need enough people for the maximum number of actors in any scene, because "costume changes" are instant.
I've been thinking for some time that pictorial cues would make for better error messages than the current situation. Anyone who has spent time doing customer support has had a conversation something like this: "it's broken" "did it give any error message?" "yeah, something about error or something" "please put your head in the blender"
Has anyone done any research into pictorial errors? I think the average end-user might actually remember 'blue puppy with a banana'. You don't need too many symbols before you can encode a fair number of error messages especially if you include a small number of colour variations, and the sort of thing used currently by people like MS is meaningless to everyone but the programmer anyway (long hex codes). Once you've accepted that the user is not in a position to fix the problem themselves, then the challenge becomes one of conveying the information to the support person without corruption or loss of detail.
Obviously, having software that doesn't produce errors or allow the user into 'error' situations would be better still, but that seems to be too hard.
IIRC, you still do have to pay for a radio license, but only if you don't have a TV license. Radio licenses are about 6 quid or something silly. It's been a while since I read the form, but that was certainly the case only a few years ago.
Other license trivia: there is a discount on a TV license for blind people, but it is only of about £10 [about as scary as the drive-through ATM we used on holiday in Tennessee with Braille-embossed buttons].
Star Wars - A New Hope
That's what it's called now - when I saw it in 1978 (or whenever it was released), it was just plain "Star Wars". No episode anything, no subtitle.
All of them, and many others, are quite arguably better examples of film as art.
Thats odd, because I watch films for entertainment. I actually like the movies I've seen from both groups you mentioned (I've not seen Run Lola Run or FMJ), and my favourite of those is probably Brazil, but I don't see why people should be limited in their voting to film as art. I would probably vote fairly highly for Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for instance, which is never a cinematic masterpiece, but it floats my boat every time I see it.
Bit of both I suppose... Since the odds of having both manufacturers using a naming scheme or performance scale that is impartial are pretty slim, having one describe performance in terms of the other is a reasonable substitute to me. I'd rather be able to compare either to (for instance) the PowerPPC range or SPARCs where the clock speed for similar perfomance is drastically different, but the only common ground then becomes SPECint and SPECfp, which manufacturers seem to dislike (presumably because they can't couch it in marketing spin).
Anyway, AMD don't call the new chips "virtual 1600Mhz" at all - what's the lie? In terms of performance, the naming is reasonably accurate, if not a little conservative.
If I go into a store and want to compare computers, and one is advertised as an Intel P4 1800 MHz and the other is an AMD XP 1800+ that is very confusing.
If you go into a store and want to compare computers, and you are intending to do it based on clock speed, then you have lost.
For a start, it isn't the first time this has been done - Cyrix did it with their 6x86 line of processors about 4-5 years ago. From the reviews/benchmarks I've seen, AMD has actually been rather conservative in it's 'pentium-equivalence' ratings. P4/1600 vs AthlonXP1600+ seems to come out in favour of the AMD part in reviews I've seen.
While Mhz is a 'real solid hard fact', the assumption that clock speed is directly proportional to performance across all processors is a stupid one. That harms consumers, and plays into Intel's clock-centric hands.
.tv were taking bids rather than orders for the more 'desirable' .tv subdomains about 18 months ago. They had a nice page where you could see the current bids for things like m.tv
Saving power is a relative thing. I have a tosh laptop with a mobile pentium III and GeForce2Go (i.e. theoretically 'laptop' parts) that puts out enough heat that the manual strongly recommends not putting the thing on your lap! I get the impression that the screen is not really such a huge proportion of the power requirements in modern laptops.
Huh? How on earth does such a thing tell the difference between my session key and (say) Amazon's ISIN stock codes? Surely anyone using a piece of software like this is going to have a severly degraded experience of a lot of the web? Why not just kick yourself in the balls repeatedly and be done with it?
Isn't it the SHAPE extension that allows Kjofol to do funky shaped skins? Isn't that what oclock and xeyes has been doing since at least 1992 or so?
Define PDA... the first Psion Organiser dates back to at least October 1984 (got an ad for one). The extremely usuable Psion series 3 dates back to at least 1991.
You're right of course - all I was trying to say was that only testing the finished software product, and only then by usage testing, is a poor development methodology. I wasn't intending to imply manufacturing does do that either, just that in my mind a manufacturing process has a more concrete 'finished product' - I get the impression you might have some ties to that part of industry :)
It's interesting to read in Writing Solid Code that before the practices in the book were made standard across MS, they had products cancelled because of runaway buglists. The book was published a few years ago now, so all current products were theoretically built using those methods, yet there are still some pretty fundamental mistakes being unearthed - use of a good libc would expose a lot of the buffer overrun problems that IIS has had, for example.