If there was an article about the difference between nuclear fusion and tidal power generation, would you post about how you prefer the Sony Playstation because it has better games?
You always need to watch out for cases where one of the two choices actually is better.
For example, take a musket versus a modern rifle. There is the edge case of historical reenactments, but for all "real" use cases such as hunting or killing someone the rifle has much better functionality and performance.
People who are that clueless can just be told that their computer is being upgraded, and they'll morph into clueless OpenOffice users in a few months. They still won't know the difference between a window and a file, but they'll be just as functional as they were before.
Seriously. Your files are on your desktop, or occasionally visibile in your home folder ("My Documents" under Windows). If you touch anything else, you better know what you're doing when it breaks. This is true on both Linux and Windows.
You're just going to confuse people. Very simply, there are two solid desktop Linux distributions and a bunch of technical "specific purpose" distributions. The two distros are Ubuntu and SuSE, and SuSE is only really useful if you want tech support from Novel rather than "some random african company".
Reading through the thread, it's mostly stopped with Ubuntu. Most of the problems are with some other distribution, and most of the suggestions are to try Ubuntu. I personally agree. Ubuntu really is more polished than most of the other distros people are using.
Automagically is a technical term that refers to a situation where something Just Works and the user doesn't need to understand the specifics. It's especially applicable in situations where something that was hard to develop isn't hard to use. Automagical behaviour is *exactly* what you want, because anything else would require some understanding of what's going on.
Mostly because often needing to compile / load modules is generally bullshit. You need to do that about twice as frequently as you need to hand edit the registry to get something working under Windows.
There are numerous printers, scanners, and digital cameras that work perfectly with Linux out of the box.
In fact, support is good enough that I suggest the following method if you're too lazy to look at a hardware compatibility list:
- Go to the store and buy what you want.
- Try it on your Linux machine. It will probably just work.
- If it doesn't, return it and buy a different brand.
- If the second item doesn't work, you're very unlucky. Contact technical support for your Linux distro and ask them to suggest a specific brand and model.
So... somehow having the program be a ".run" file instead of a ".exe" file makes the process way harder?
The normal method is even easier than that.
- Open your package manager.
- Search for "nvidia" (or "ati")
- Select the resulting package(s).
- Press "install".
I haven't had to build a kernel to get a piece of hardware working in years, and that's including a pretty large spread of Linux desktop systems (I'm currently responsible for 5 of them, all with different hardware).
Mostly hardware just works. When it doesn't (like for nVidia 3d support) you need to install some package - which is slightly easier than installing a Windows driver.
It's 2006 now. As a rule, Linux supports hardware out of the box. There are some exceptions, but even if you buy your hardware at random and *return and replace the rare hardware that doesn't work with linux*, you'll still be spending less time arguing with the sales guy about your return than the Windows driver install for that hardware would have taken.
Most Windows users don't understand the details of the registry, or even the "Networking" control panel. Although computers are more useful with more understanding, some people just want to install and run a couple of apps. Linux does that fine - the only thing that users need to learn is to use their package manager instead of CompUSA and random download sites. The package manager should be easier anyway.
You are making two incorrect assumptions. First you assume that operating systems with no buggy drivers are a realistic expectation - they aren't. Second, you assume that people won't debug drivers if crashes don't result in system crashes - also not true.
A microkernel is "correct" in the same way access checking is correct - it allows a stupid mistake to result in an exception that can be handled (and easily logged & debugged) rather than a hard crash. Hard crashes suck for users (because all data in memory is lost) and developers (because you need to load up a debugger to even figure out what happened).
Human time is way more valuable than CPU time at this point - a performance hit to make debugging easier is almost always a good deal.
Minix needed to be simple enough that it was useful to Tanenbaum. Going through the whole Linux kernel with students in a reasonable number of semesters would be pretty much impossible.
14% takes that 2GHz processor down to 1720MHz, a 3GHz processor to 2580MHz.
The 14% hit is probably only on those specific kernel operations that are now going through a layer of indirection that they wouldn't otherwise go through. A good chunk of this stuff is on operations that aren't (generally) CPU limited to begin with like disk & network access. Stuff that is CPU performance sensitive frequently has no system calls at all. You're going to get a performance hit, but it's not going to be noticible except in specific edge cases (i.e. forks might get slower which would hurt Apache performance).
Any performance hits from a microkernel will be reduced further as people optimize around them. Correct is absolutely more important than fast in this case.
Trusted computing merely checks that the code hasn't changed since it was shipped. This verifies that no new bugs have been added and that no old old bugs have been fixed.
I don't see any reason why labor would be significant with a profit margin like that - for that much money you could train illegal immigrants to do it for $3/hour. Hell, if you buy used cars instead of new cars, the margin becomes even more massive.
My conclusion is that someone's making up numbers or this was true for about 8 minutes before the market corrected.
VLC is designed to work. All the time. When you download the binary.
MPlayer is designed to be fast. When you compile it with the correct options for your hardware. So you can get the best possible performance. Even if you're doing something silly like playing a high def XviD on a Pentium Pro that doesn't even have a GUI on it.
20 minutes to steal a car is more than fast enough if there's no visible sign of you doing it. Here's the scenario:
- You spot a target car parked somewhere.
- You park next to it, and press "enter" on your laptop.
- After closing the screen on your laptop and throwing it under the seat, you wait.
- When the lights on the target car flash because your laptop has found the unlock & start code, your buddy goes and drives it to the chop shop.
- You pick up your buddy at the chop shop ready to steal the next car.
Note that at no point does it visibly look like your breaking into a car or anything. Anyone who sees your buddy get in to the target car and drive off will assume it's his car. The only risk is that someone who knows the target car isn't yours sees your buddy drive off with it, in which case you probably don't want to have valid plates on your working car.
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Now, that doesn't nessisarily do anything else that you wanted, but security and stability it's got.
There would be a stable interface, which would make people complain less about binary drivers not working.
Why are you even posting in this thread?
If there was an article about the difference between nuclear fusion and tidal power generation, would you post about how you prefer the Sony Playstation because it has better games?
For example, take a musket versus a modern rifle. There is the edge case of historical reenactments, but for all "real" use cases such as hunting or killing someone the rifle has much better functionality and performance.
People who are that clueless can just be told that their computer is being upgraded, and they'll morph into clueless OpenOffice users in a few months. They still won't know the difference between a window and a file, but they'll be just as functional as they were before.
Here's the answer to your Ubuntu media problems, as found two clicks away from the default browser start page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats.
As for making Linux a SMB file server for Windows boxes - yea, some hard things are still hard.
Who edits config files?
Seriously. Your files are on your desktop, or occasionally visibile in your home folder ("My Documents" under Windows). If you touch anything else, you better know what you're doing when it breaks. This is true on both Linux and Windows.
You're just going to confuse people. Very simply, there are two solid desktop Linux distributions and a bunch of technical "specific purpose" distributions. The two distros are Ubuntu and SuSE, and SuSE is only really useful if you want tech support from Novel rather than "some random african company".
Reading through the thread, it's mostly stopped with Ubuntu. Most of the problems are with some other distribution, and most of the suggestions are to try Ubuntu. I personally agree. Ubuntu really is more polished than most of the other distros people are using.
Automagically is a technical term that refers to a situation where something Just Works and the user doesn't need to understand the specifics. It's especially applicable in situations where something that was hard to develop isn't hard to use. Automagical behaviour is *exactly* what you want, because anything else would require some understanding of what's going on.
Printers are super cheap now. This is a perfect opportunity to buy a Lexmark color laser printer (which works perfectly under Linux) for like $300.
Mostly because often needing to compile / load modules is generally bullshit. You need to do that about twice as frequently as you need to hand edit the registry to get something working under Windows.
There are numerous printers, scanners, and digital cameras that work perfectly with Linux out of the box.
In fact, support is good enough that I suggest the following method if you're too lazy to look at a hardware compatibility list:
- Go to the store and buy what you want.
- Try it on your Linux machine. It will probably just work.
- If it doesn't, return it and buy a different brand.
- If the second item doesn't work, you're very unlucky. Contact technical support for your Linux distro and ask them to suggest a specific brand and model.
The normal method is even easier than that.
- Open your package manager.
- Search for "nvidia" (or "ati")
- Select the resulting package(s).
- Press "install".
I haven't had to build a kernel to get a piece of hardware working in years, and that's including a pretty large spread of Linux desktop systems (I'm currently responsible for 5 of them, all with different hardware).
Mostly hardware just works. When it doesn't (like for nVidia 3d support) you need to install some package - which is slightly easier than installing a Windows driver.
It's 2006 now. As a rule, Linux supports hardware out of the box. There are some exceptions, but even if you buy your hardware at random and *return and replace the rare hardware that doesn't work with linux*, you'll still be spending less time arguing with the sales guy about your return than the Windows driver install for that hardware would have taken.
Most Windows users don't understand the details of the registry, or even the "Networking" control panel. Although computers are more useful with more understanding, some people just want to install and run a couple of apps. Linux does that fine - the only thing that users need to learn is to use their package manager instead of CompUSA and random download sites. The package manager should be easier anyway.
A microkernel is "correct" in the same way access checking is correct - it allows a stupid mistake to result in an exception that can be handled (and easily logged & debugged) rather than a hard crash. Hard crashes suck for users (because all data in memory is lost) and developers (because you need to load up a debugger to even figure out what happened).
Human time is way more valuable than CPU time at this point - a performance hit to make debugging easier is almost always a good deal.
Minix needed to be simple enough that it was useful to Tanenbaum. Going through the whole Linux kernel with students in a reasonable number of semesters would be pretty much impossible.
The 14% hit is probably only on those specific kernel operations that are now going through a layer of indirection that they wouldn't otherwise go through. A good chunk of this stuff is on operations that aren't (generally) CPU limited to begin with like disk & network access. Stuff that is CPU performance sensitive frequently has no system calls at all. You're going to get a performance hit, but it's not going to be noticible except in specific edge cases (i.e. forks might get slower which would hurt Apache performance).
Any performance hits from a microkernel will be reduced further as people optimize around them. Correct is absolutely more important than fast in this case.
Trusted computing merely checks that the code hasn't changed since it was shipped. This verifies that no new bugs have been added and that no old old bugs have been fixed.
I don't see any reason why labor would be significant with a profit margin like that - for that much money you could train illegal immigrants to do it for $3/hour. Hell, if you buy used cars instead of new cars, the margin becomes even more massive.
My conclusion is that someone's making up numbers or this was true for about 8 minutes before the market corrected.
Different design goals for different audiences.
VLC is designed to work. All the time. When you download the binary.
MPlayer is designed to be fast. When you compile it with the correct options for your hardware. So you can get the best possible performance. Even if you're doing something silly like playing a high def XviD on a Pentium Pro that doesn't even have a GUI on it.
20 minutes to steal a car is more than fast enough if there's no visible sign of you doing it. Here's the scenario:
- You spot a target car parked somewhere.
- You park next to it, and press "enter" on your laptop.
- After closing the screen on your laptop and throwing it under the seat, you wait.
- When the lights on the target car flash because your laptop has found the unlock & start code, your buddy goes and drives it to the chop shop.
- You pick up your buddy at the chop shop ready to steal the next car.
Note that at no point does it visibly look like your breaking into a car or anything. Anyone who sees your buddy get in to the target car and drive off will assume it's his car. The only risk is that someone who knows the target car isn't yours sees your buddy drive off with it, in which case you probably don't want to have valid plates on your working car.
If that were actually the case, it would stabilize out right quick as people legitimately purchased camrys to strip.
So... what mathematical property does the Twofish algorithm rely on?