Oh, I don't know. I'll be giving it a try since I want something more lightweight than GNOME or KDE and less band-wagon oriented (.NET/C++).
I also fancy learning a bit of Objective-C.
It wouldn't stop them from doing any work at all. All you would do is say : here's the Official Linux Golden Source and to contribute you have to make a proposal, justify it, think of what you might break and the consequenses, what the benefits are and why they're relevant, and how you're going to do it.
When you've written your code it can be submitted for testing and "peer review". Then, if it passes, it becomes part of the official Linux source. That way, everyone gets a fair crack of the whip and Linus only has to take an executive role as far as other peoples' contributions are concerned.
"I run exclusively linux at home but I've never even gotten to play Q3A or UT in their linux incarnations
because my hardware sux and I can't afford anything better. =] "
I know how you feel. There's so much bad coding out there, or bad engineering decisions.
I remember when doom ran on a 386, and a 3.54MHz Z80 machine would do wireframe 3D...
I used to work in an environment (nuclear power) where we had a robust and comprehensive engineering change system, with umpteen layers of peer review, administrative interlocks and independent assessments for any changes to the System. The root of it all was the Quality Assurance Policy, under which were the Management Control Procedures and then the people doing the work. It may be overkill for and OS kernel, but maybe these guys need to think of using such a system (but cut down) on their kernel?
You could always try the Borland Windows stuff under WINE. It's a while since I've tried (a year or so) but I've had Delphi install and run under WINE reasonably well.
For the absolute beginner out there, start off with the naked eye. Go out somewhere dark away from streetlighting (>>20 miles if poss.) and admire the heavens.
When I was in my early teens, for learning the constellations, I found the Collins Guide to Stars and Planets invaluable. It's got star maps, nothern and southern hemisphere for each month of the year, and brief descriptions of the planets and other main features of the solar system.
When you've learned a few of the constellations and about the types of stars out there, get some binoculars and a tripod stand for them. Magnification doesn't matter as much as diameter of the lenses (ie light collecting power is most important).
Look at things like double stars, the Orion nebula, the Andromeda galaxy.
When you get a bit better at finding your way around, get yourself a newtonian reflecting telescope of at leat 6 inches diameter.
Then, you're away!
Add stepper motors, link to a PC. Put on an SLR camera or a CCD.....
As for software, in my day it was skyglobe, but nowadays xephem is what you want:-)
Join an ammateur astronomy club.
Have fun. Stay up all night watching the silent splendour of the night sky that most people never appreciate.
Good luck:-)
Unfortunately, they are more likely to just get a cracked version of the Windez game because Linux is still percieved as "too difficult" by those who have heard of it.
It has been said before, but one way may have been to make a Linux boot CD with the game on it, so you could just restart your machine and go straight to the game via a Linux boot.
It would also therefore be much easier to make intel and Mac versions of the game ie a recompile rather than an expensive and tedious port.
What really disappoints me is that those of use who use Linux exclusively at home (ie no Windows or Mac in the house) now have nowhere to buy games. I bought Quake III, Descent 3 and Unreal Tournament (which I've never got working incidentally). The Free Beer crowd are really annoying. I was and am willing to pay good money for quality software. That's why I bought the Official Slackware. Commercial software has its place. If you want free-beer games, wheel out your gcc and get coding!
It would be nice in a perfect world if it was simple to write cross-platform games and just recompile for the target platform. That way, Windows, Mac and Linux (on various CPU architectures) people would all get access to the stuff. However, we haven't reached that level of technological ability yet.
The only hope now is that WINE gets good enough to run most Windows games, and that someone comes up with a dynamic binary translator for x86 object code so that you can run x86 binaries on any other architecture at full speed.
Oh well. Anyway, I have little time to play games unfortunately. In between working for a living, feeding myself, spending time with my girlfriend, drinking beer and doing the odd bit of LGPL coding, games seem insignificant.
Easily.
Instead of two or more controllers contending for the PCI bus, you have one SCSI controller (with up to 7 drives on it). The SCSI card takes care of the drives, and you have less traffic over the PCI bus.
This is also my understanding : contention of the PCI bus. Some systems have multiple PCI busses (sorry, can't name one of the top of my head) and if you only use one peripheral on each bus, it gets the whole bandwidth to itself. AGP is essentially a dedicated PCI bus (although double- or quad-pumped) to the graphics processor/memory. Therefore, it has no contention and 4x the throughput (potentially).
SCSI is a much better option for fast disk access, especially if you stripe the disks. I've seen a 100% performance boost (ie a doubling of speed) on a 12-hour job by employing disk striping.
Of course I didn't. This is slashdot. You just post the first thing that comes into your head, as long as it's nagative, bigotted and ignorant.
Haven't you learned?
One of the problems with things like this is how does it work when you go to do the weekly shopping. Imagine you have a very hungry family of 2 adults and 3 children. With this system you'd have to make sure your little tram took you from right outside the supermarket to your front door or else you'd be changing many times with lots of heavy bags of shopping.
It has often been said that if fossil fuel generators had to dispose of their waste cleanly, then nuclear would be much cheaper.
I don't really know abou the cost of running a fast reactor. Dounreay ion the north coast of Scotland had 3 of them, but a recession, shor-sighted government etc. had them shut down and they're now decomissioning.
You don't have to operate a fast reactor in breeder mode, and in fact one of the Dounreay reactors may have been opearted without a uranium blanket. One of my friends went on a university tour of it. It was open to the public, just like all the other UK civillian reactors. Fast reactors are much smaller due to the absence of a moderator (they work on fast neutrons after all) and they have an extremely high power density, hence the liquid metal coolant. The coolant gets highly activated in the neutron flux, hence there are two loops, a primary and a secondary, and then on to a steam circuit. That adds complexity. Also, your pipework has to be much better quality, since a sodium leak (especially into the steam circuit) would be a disaster. On a gas cooled station, a leak is pretty trivial since the coolant is very "clean".
I could go on...
I am well aware of the Japanese problems. We were a member or the World Assosciation of Nuclear Operators and got to hear all of the news. Nuclear sites do not operate in a vacuum.
Britain's fast reactors are all shut down and decomissioning now:-(
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Oh, I don't know. I'll be giving it a try since I want something more lightweight than GNOME or KDE and less band-wagon oriented (.NET/C++).
I also fancy learning a bit of Objective-C.
Maybe it would weed out more of the hare-brained stuff. I don't know, it was only a suggestion.
Shouldn't there be something about Raging Speedhorn here too?
It wouldn't stop them from doing any work at all. All you would do is say : here's the Official Linux Golden Source and to contribute you have to make a proposal, justify it, think of what you might break and the consequenses, what the benefits are and why they're relevant, and how you're going to do it.
When you've written your code it can be submitted for testing and "peer review". Then, if it passes, it becomes part of the official Linux source. That way, everyone gets a fair crack of the whip and Linus only has to take an executive role as far as other peoples' contributions are concerned.
"I run exclusively linux at home but I've never even gotten to play Q3A or UT in their linux incarnations
because my hardware sux and I can't afford anything better. =] "
I know how you feel. There's so much bad coding out there, or bad engineering decisions.
I remember when doom ran on a 386, and a 3.54MHz Z80 machine would do wireframe 3D...
*during the war...*
my 0.02 Eu:
I used to work in an environment (nuclear power) where we had a robust and comprehensive engineering change system, with umpteen layers of peer review, administrative interlocks and independent assessments for any changes to the System. The root of it all was the Quality Assurance Policy, under which were the Management Control Procedures and then the people doing the work. It may be overkill for and OS kernel, but maybe these guys need to think of using such a system (but cut down) on their kernel?
Since when were movies like that "adult?" ...
They're for spotty 14-year-old boys who have still to, well,
Is she dead?
Excellent. Now we'll be free of her whinging and warbling after the tributes...which will last a week or two.
"On many UNIX workstations, GCC makes slower/much slower code than the system vendor's compiler. "
Yes, but if Borland C++ only generates code for the IA-32 architecture, what use is it to them?
You could always try the Borland Windows stuff under WINE. It's a while since I've tried (a year or so) but I've had Delphi install and run under WINE reasonably well.
For the absolute beginner out there, start off with the naked eye. Go out somewhere dark away from streetlighting (>>20 miles if poss.) and admire the heavens. :-)
:-)
When I was in my early teens, for learning the constellations, I found the Collins Guide to Stars and Planets invaluable. It's got star maps, nothern and southern hemisphere for each month of the year, and brief descriptions of the planets and other main features of the solar system.
When you've learned a few of the constellations and about the types of stars out there, get some binoculars and a tripod stand for them. Magnification doesn't matter as much as diameter of the lenses (ie light collecting power is most important).
Look at things like double stars, the Orion nebula, the Andromeda galaxy.
When you get a bit better at finding your way around, get yourself a newtonian reflecting telescope of at leat 6 inches diameter.
Then, you're away!
Add stepper motors, link to a PC. Put on an SLR camera or a CCD.....
As for software, in my day it was skyglobe, but nowadays xephem is what you want
Join an ammateur astronomy club.
Have fun. Stay up all night watching the silent splendour of the night sky that most people never appreciate.
Good luck
Unfortunately, they are more likely to just get a cracked version of the Windez game because Linux is still percieved as "too difficult" by those who have heard of it.
It has been said before, but one way may have been to make a Linux boot CD with the game on it, so you could just restart your machine and go straight to the game via a Linux boot.
It would also therefore be much easier to make intel and Mac versions of the game ie a recompile rather than an expensive and tedious port.
What really disappoints me is that those of use who use Linux exclusively at home (ie no Windows or Mac in the house) now have nowhere to buy games. I bought Quake III, Descent 3 and Unreal Tournament (which I've never got working incidentally). The Free Beer crowd are really annoying. I was and am willing to pay good money for quality software. That's why I bought the Official Slackware. Commercial software has its place. If you want free-beer games, wheel out your gcc and get coding!
It would be nice in a perfect world if it was simple to write cross-platform games and just recompile for the target platform. That way, Windows, Mac and Linux (on various CPU architectures) people would all get access to the stuff. However, we haven't reached that level of technological ability yet.
The only hope now is that WINE gets good enough to run most Windows games, and that someone comes up with a dynamic binary translator for x86 object code so that you can run x86 binaries on any other architecture at full speed.
Oh well. Anyway, I have little time to play games unfortunately. In between working for a living, feeding myself, spending time with my girlfriend, drinking beer and doing the odd bit of LGPL coding, games seem insignificant.
Easily.
Instead of two or more controllers contending for the PCI bus, you have one SCSI controller (with up to 7 drives on it). The SCSI card takes care of the drives, and you have less traffic over the PCI bus.
Can it do 40+ miles to the gallon? How much do new tyres cost?
This is also my understanding : contention of the PCI bus. Some systems have multiple PCI busses (sorry, can't name one of the top of my head) and if you only use one peripheral on each bus, it gets the whole bandwidth to itself. AGP is essentially a dedicated PCI bus (although double- or quad-pumped) to the graphics processor/memory. Therefore, it has no contention and 4x the throughput (potentially).
SCSI is a much better option for fast disk access, especially if you stripe the disks. I've seen a 100% performance boost (ie a doubling of speed) on a 12-hour job by employing disk striping.
...with a low-power Transmeta CPU code morphing PowerPC code... That would rule!
I didn't realise there were that many coders into Country and Western.
Of course I didn't. This is slashdot. You just post the first thing that comes into your head, as long as it's nagative, bigotted and ignorant.
Haven't you learned?
Next, we might see the spider baby! It has the body of a spider, but the mind of a baby...
Dude,
Where can I get some of the beer you're drinking?
:-)
Ozzy says : Smoke 'em, get high. But I've got a bad chest.
One of the problems with things like this is how does it work when you go to do the weekly shopping. Imagine you have a very hungry family of 2 adults and 3 children. With this system you'd have to make sure your little tram took you from right outside the supermarket to your front door or else you'd be changing many times with lots of heavy bags of shopping.
From the text: "he's developed against many different platforms." :-)
Maybe that's how you feel when Windows is your OS
It has often been said that if fossil fuel generators had to dispose of their waste cleanly, then nuclear would be much cheaper.
I don't really know abou the cost of running a fast reactor. Dounreay ion the north coast of Scotland had 3 of them, but a recession, shor-sighted government etc. had them shut down and they're now decomissioning.
You don't have to operate a fast reactor in breeder mode, and in fact one of the Dounreay reactors may have been opearted without a uranium blanket. One of my friends went on a university tour of it. It was open to the public, just like all the other UK civillian reactors. Fast reactors are much smaller due to the absence of a moderator (they work on fast neutrons after all) and they have an extremely high power density, hence the liquid metal coolant. The coolant gets highly activated in the neutron flux, hence there are two loops, a primary and a secondary, and then on to a steam circuit. That adds complexity. Also, your pipework has to be much better quality, since a sodium leak (especially into the steam circuit) would be a disaster. On a gas cooled station, a leak is pretty trivial since the coolant is very "clean".
I could go on...
I am well aware of the Japanese problems. We were a member or the World Assosciation of Nuclear Operators and got to hear all of the news. Nuclear sites do not operate in a vacuum. :-(
Britain's fast reactors are all shut down and decomissioning now