3) Speaking of noise - WD300 Raptors? Congrats, you just put the noisiest modern hard drives in a machine "built to be quiet" - if no expense was to be spared, why is this thing not outfitted with Solid State Disks???
That's not really accurate, the newest Velociraptors are 2.5" hard drives encased in a large 3.5" heatsink that also is very effective at quieting the drive. Anandtech measured extremely reasonable sound levels in its review, so I'd be careful before casting aspersions on that front.
I hate to respond to myself but: Yeah the market share of Linux is not huge, Nvidia is probably not terrified of losing sales to Larrabee on some desktop Linux boxes (high end supercomputing apps could be an interesting niche they might care about though). However, it is afraid that OEMs will be interested in Larrabee as a discrete card where Intel never had a solution before. Given the problems that Nvidia has had with execution over the last year, and the fact that Intel knows how to keep suppliers happy, THAT is where Nvidia is really afraid.
Jen-Hsun Huang has never been one to keep his trap shut when given the chance... even though Nvidia is in the red right now. Lesson one: When a CEO comes out and tries to use a legal dispute related to a contract as a pulpit to make a religious sermon, he knows he's wrong. See Darl McBride and Hector Ruiz as other examples of dumbass CEO's who love to see themselves in magazines but don't want to be bothered with pesky details like turning a profit or actually competing.
Intel is #1 in graphics when it comes to shipments... now I'm not saying I'd want to play 3D games on their chips, but guess what: despite what you see on Slashdot, very few users want to play these games. Further, I've got the crappy Intel integrated graphics on my laptop, and Kubuntu with KDE 4.2 is running quite well thanks to the 100% open source drivers that Intel has had it's own employees working on for several years. I'm not saying Intel graphics will play Crysis, but they do get the job done without binary blobs.
Turning the tables on Huang, the real "fear" here is of Larrabee... this bad-boy is not going to even require "drivers" in the conventional sense, it will be an open stripped-down x86 chip designed for massive SIMD and parallelism... imagine what the Linux developers will be able to do with that not only in graphics but for GPGPU using OpenCL. Will it necessarily be faster than the top-end Nvidia chips? Probably not... but it could mean the end of Nvidia's proprietary driver blobs for most Linux users who can get good performance AND an open architecture... THAT is what scares Nvidia.
You are making a massive logic error that AMD's marketing department is very happy about right now: You simply took 2 model numbers and put them up against each other as being "equal". If you look at actual performance, the Phenom II 940 is about equivalent to a Core 2 Q9400... a MUCH cheaper CPU that can be used with MUCH cheaper motherboards and with cheaper DDR2 RAM. Plus, the Core 2 uses far less power, and is likely going to overclock much better than the Phenom. In fact, when Intel cut prices on the Q9400 AMD responded by matching the cuts on the Phenom II that had been out for less than 2 weeks... AMD knows damn well that the Q9400 is equivalent to it's top-end model, but intentionally chose to mimic the high-end Intel model numbers to confuse the sheeple.
AMD's marketing department would like to thank you for your help.
1. Icons: If you like the old ones so much import them. Due to the fact that the "old" KDE had multiple sets of Icons there was never any "one" set of icons that were the perfect standard for all time anyway. Nice attempt at a troll though.
2. K-menu working the same as the old one: YES and it has existed since KDE 4.0. If you read my post you would have seen exactly how to add it as well.. although that might require using a mouse in a slightly different way than the exact way you claimed you used to do in in KDE 3.5 so maybe it's beyond your comprehension.
3. The taskbar manages tasks and can group them together or not group them together and can have one or more rows depending upon how you configure it. I'm sorry if one task item might be off by one pixel which would cause you to have a cardiac infarction.
Let me guess: You never actually used KDE 3 and your trolling... AND the next post about KDE 4 will be how much you hate it because you don't think the developers have added anything new & exciting whily also making KDE 4 a carbon-copy of KDE 3 for no reason other than the fact you cannot make minute adjustments to some simple changes.
I've been tracking the 4.2 betas on Kubuntu's repositories, and the final release is working very nicely. KDE 4.2 is finally at a stage where the 4 series can replace the 3.5 series for the large majority of users, and I've been using KDE since 2.0 came out.
Now I know there are going to be a ton of complaints about how "broken" KDE 4 is... but I have my own response to the critics. Is KDE 4.2 perfect? No, but I challenge you to show me a desktop that is "perfect". KDE 4 has finally gained critical mass, and even more great stuff is in store.
Thanks again to all the KDE 4 developers and bug testers who kept working even when it wasn't easy or popular! Your perseverance has paid off.
You actually raise an excellent point because the GPL can only be enforced on redistribution of either the original work OR a derivative work based on the original GPL'd code. In this case, the FSF wants to say that the plugins are derivative works... but unless you actually include GPL'd code in your plugin, there is no way for them to force you to distribute the code as GPL. Now, the GCC developers may try to entice developers into making a derivative work by giving out a GPL'd "skeleton" plugin that has enough code to be considered a copyrightable work that you would then modify and have to distribute under the GPL. However, if you just read the specs for how the plugins interoperate with GCC and wrote the plugin on your own without actually copying GPL'd code... there would be no requirement to distribute just the plugin under the GPL.
There may be a simpler explanation too: The summary might be misinterpreting the FSF, and what is really going on is that all "official" plugins that will come with GCC in the future will have to be GPL'd to gain inclusion with the "official" GCC distribution. This is something that the FSF could exercise control over.
1. It introduces its own tags ( and , I'm looking at you.) that aren't included in the standards
You can blame those tags on the original Netscape browsers from back in the bad-old days, IE only copied them. In a way it was MS trying to stay "standards compliant" back
when then "standard" was whatever Netscape decided to do. Besides, if nobody uses those tags anymore (at least not on a modern site) I don't see it as causing any major harm.
I agree with the other sentiments, although practically all new PCs are shipping with IE 7 now, and many will auto-update to IE 8 when the time comes. While IE 8 is not superior to Firefox 3, it is much more standards compliant.
Try out the latest KDE 4.2 RC1 builds on any major distro of your choice. I'm running Kubuntu which has historically had many people complaining about breaking KDE, and even in Kubuntu 4.2 is a REALLY nice environment to work in. Major issues people have complained about are gone (you can hide or shrink the size of the taskbar, there is a quicklanuch applet that brings quicklaunch back to the taskbar, and if you hate the new KDE launch menu system there is a popular alternative called Lancelot you can use instead). Finally, if you don't like the new system for dealing with desktop icons (I personally think the new system is brilliant since I can represent multiple folders on my desktop at once) you can turn your entire desktop into a folder view with file icons anywhere. There are some VERY cool features in 4.2 as well, like plasmoids that actually work correctly, a compositing system that is better than compiz IMHO (less bling, more actual functionality), and most of the apps you love in KDE 3 are ported over at this point, but you can still run KDE3 apps in the KDE4 environment just in case they aren't.
I though KDE 4.1 was barely useable, but at this point, 4.2 is my preferred desktop over KDE 3.5 or Gnome or the (surprisingly slow) XFCE. I will say that the 4.0 release was handled poorly. The KDE developers did try to say that 4.0 was intended for developers to hack on, but unfortunately the big 4.0 number seemed to attract distros that should not have released 4.0 as a replacement for 3.5. The KDE developers did have a good reason though, because 4.0 was a signal to KDE application developers that it was time to get on the ball and start porting things to the new infrastructure. KDE does not have a huge developer base, and resources can't be wasted on trying to develop for 3.5 and 4.X series simultaneously. 4.0 was the milestone where the underlying infrastructure was ready for developers to begin making the improvements that are now becoming visible in 4.2 and will only get better in future releases.
I always find it amazing that whenever anyone is asked to give an example of a "great" government project they always mention the interstate highways... while 99.9999% of those same people usually bemoan SUV's, "evil" suburban communities, CO2 emissions from cars, the decay of inner cities, and the lack of railroads. Then they launch into a tirade about how all the bad things come entirely from the free market and how we need the government to intervene to fix all those problems that the free market created.... and so the circle goes.
So you think Bush was evil which justifies repression on a scale that even people who fantasized about how evil Bush was couldn't come up with? I love it. You think Bush was worse than Hitler because he hurt some terrorists' feelings, but you have absolutely no problem with imprisoning actual Americans who dare to disagree with the talking points your are parroting... beautiful. Let me guess, the fact that some Jew is committing the unthinkable crime against humanity of breathing air is also a problem that Obama should "solve" for you too?
Now the real question - did Bush's staff remvoe the "H"s from the keyboards in the White House? Very classy there asshole. It's well known for all his failings Bush has made this the smoothest presidential transition in US history. The Bushes even went so far as to move their personal belongings out of the Whitehouse early so that it would be easier for the Obama's to move in. This is a far cry from the "caring" Bill Clinton who didn't even leave the Whitehouse in time and had an "enlightened" staff who vandalized their own offices -- the offices paid for with my tax money -- out of spite. The real big question is, how long will Slashdot's daily 2-minutes of hate orgy be able to last now that Bush is gone? I mean, you can try to spend the next 4 years saying that everything bad happening is because Bush used to be President, but it will get stale after a while and the hate mongers will need someone new to victimize. Probably some random Republican who has no real power but doesn't bow fast enough.
In case most of you had forgotten, Obama is basically copying John McCain who specifically mentioned doing this in the debates. Of course at the time McCain did it Slashdot thought it was an evil intrusion of privacy. But now that Obama wants to do the exact same thing it's an enlightened 21st century idea that only some Luddite old guy like McCain could ever oppose.
There's a major problem with your logic. Intel is coming out with a lower-cost mainstream Nehalem, but it is not discontinuing the current i7 sockets, they will continue as a high-end option and you'll be able to slap 32nm Westmere's in there when the time comes. AM2+ is at the very end of the road. As for the older Core 2 quad socket 775's, they are getting nearer the end of the line, but with some price cuts the current 775 socket systems are still going to outperform anything AMD has until at least 2010... the Core 2's are at the end of the technology ramp-up road, but not at the end of the price-performance road.
The main problem is that AMD is doing the exact same thing Intel did when the P4 was out: they went to a smaller litho process, slapped on cache, and cranked up the clockspeed. If you read the review carefully you'll note that while the new Phenoms are faster than some Core 2 quads, they are not faster on a clock-for-clock basis. Remember back when AMD was leading in that category and it was such a big deal?
As of right now the Phenoms are a good deal IF you already own an AM2+ mobo... otherwise they are not a good deal for 2 reasons: 1. AMD is coming out with the incompatible AM3 socket that will use DDR3 memory in the next few months, so these current chips will have a very short shelf life; 2. Intel doesn't have to do any innovation at all to beat these chips, all it has to do is drop the prices on current Core 2 quads like the 9550 that outperform the Phenoms but are currently priced higher... dropping prices ain't rocket science and there are rumors these cuts could be coming by the end of the month.
As for the Core i7, sure it is more expensive, but even the 920 model appears to wail on these chips, and there is a whole lot more future-proofness in buying a low-end i7 right now. Interestingly, the review mentions the new Phenoms have 758 million transistors which means they have about 27 million more transistors than Nehalem... but Nehalem at 2.66 Ghz is easily beating a Phenom at 3.0Ghz. It looks like what AMD really needs is a new architecture, but that does not appear to be coming any time soon.
About the Atom, while it is true that some models of the Atom CPU are 32-bit only, remember that the devices they are in are likely to have less than 4GB of RAM in them to begin with. The Atom line does support 64-bit (see the N230 used in desktop models), but not all of the Atom parts have it enabled, most likely to save a little bit of power on very small devices.
Of course... even if Windows 7 is faster than XP, it would still likely struggle on a 32-bit Atom, so the question remains, why put it out in a 32 bit flavor at all... I'm not 100% sure. Frankly, while it would likely cause most of Slashdot to scream that Microsoft has "abandoned" old Athlons and P4's, I wouldn't mind if they went 64 bit only and left some of the cruft behind.
Wouldn't it just be geekier to have passwords in Blue Midnight Wish or SANDstorm rather than boring old MD5, even if it makes no practical difference whatsoever?
s/geekier/stupid and irresponsible
Let me guess, the submitter likes to enable all the useless bling effects on Compiz but never gets any work done, and has racing stripes on his Civic....
I went to Carnegie Mellon and took classes from a bunch of professors who were all freakin' geniuses and here is the second most important lesson I learned about cryptography: NEVER DO IT YOURSELF. And a corollary to that is never use a cryptographic system someone else cooked up until it has been through the vigorous peer review that these hash functions will go through. This was an important lesson to a bunch of egotistical CMU students, and I hope the ones who were actually smart listened. (The first most important lesson is an old one: if you think cryptography is the solution to all your security problems, you don't understand cryptography or your security problems).
"Whaa! But the ciphers we have now are already broken!!" The current hash functions that are "broken" like SHA-1 are not trivially broken, but broken in a sense that in some scenarios might make it somewhat easier to conduct either a pre-image attack (useful if you know somebody's password hash and want to make a password that will hit the same hash) or a collision attack (useful in some cases where you are trying to forge a messsage to match a digital signature.... but if the fake message has to contain lots of garbage bytes even a successful collision might not pass the smell test). "Somewhat Easier" does not mean you can do it on your iPhone, it just means that it might take a supercomputer 100 years instead of the heat death of the universe to do it. This is still very important, but it is a world apart from an algorithm that has never been tested... those could be blown wide open and cracked almost instantly with trivial computing power. To use a bad car analogy, just because a seat belt won't save your life in every car accident doesn't mean it's just as safe to strap plastic explosives to your gas tank and hook them up to a mercury switch detonator.
As for "open source" making these cryptographic models available quickly, I wasn't aware that text editors froze up and stopped you from writing code if it wasn't going to be open source. The reason commercial vendors won't jump on a new cryptographic protocol before they are validated is that their customers would (rightly) go ballistic and their credibility would be smashed. Fortunately for all of us the leaders of the open source community have a little more sense that you and you won't see any of these hashes in the Linux kernel or OpenSSL until they are at least in the final rounds of competition and there is some evidence that they have value. OSS has the advantage that its software implementation can be publicly validated and peer reviewed, but having your code opened up to the world is actually much MORE dangerous if you are just screwing around because you think a hash function has a badass sounding name. I'm glad Torvalds is in charge of Linux and not "jd".
Yeah... but the first amendment also does not prevent a private employer from discriminating on the basis of religion either, because it is impossible for a private employer to violate the first amendment (see state action doctrine). Instead, the violations (if there are any) are of federal statutory law.. and if a statute is deemed to violate the constitution the constitution will win. It looks like Diskeeper is trying to argue that current statutes that these employees are using to sue them are unconstitutional restraints on their first amendment rights to practice their religion. This is an interesting issue since there definitely are cases where it is completely acceptable to have private discriminate based on religion.... like for example it is perfectly acceptable to prevent non-Catholics from becoming Catholic priests. However, since Diskeeper maintains an outward appearance of being a normal, for-profit company, it will likely not get the extra leeway that an organization based around a particular religion would receive. Scientology is a whack-job cult, but its tax-exempt status is still a matter of law (unless they manage to screw up and lose it again).
That's like saying that since cars have existed for over 100 years it is impossible to get a patent on a new development for a car. Looking at the claims, this patent is (unsurprisingly) not trying to claim the use of 3-D technology in a computer GUI. Instead, look at independent claim 1:
1. A graphical user interface, comprising:a viewing surface;a back surface axially disposed from the viewing surface to define a depth;one or more side surfaces extending from the back surface to the viewing surface;a visualization object receptacle disposed on one or more of the side surfaces; and one or more visualization objects disposed within the visualization object receptacle, the one or more visualization objects corresponding to one or more system objects.
The Apple application is for the use of a room-like setting where there is organization of visual elements along the "floor", "walls", and "ceiling" of the room. This is definitely different than looking glass, about the closest thing I've seen would be a demo from Qt on a Wolfenstein + desktop elements interface: see video here. However, it is unclear if the Wolfenstein demo actually anticipates the claims of this patent on two grounds: 1. the use of a static room could be different enough from the use of a maze, and the Wolfenstein demo does not stack & arrange elements like Apple is claiming) and 2. The Apple invention likely predates the WolfQt code.
Additionally, as is often the case with Slashdot, the readers do not understand the difference between a granted patent and a patent application. This is ONLY an application, and as any patent practitioner knows, what you originally apply for is often much different than what you eventually get granted as a patent.
Finally, before everyone in here panics that Linux will be illegal in 2 weeks or some other nonsense, just look at the subject matter that Apple is patenting: It's a stupid room with windows pasted on the wall! Who cares!! Even if Apple gets the patent, just don't go out and copy them and you'll be fine. The attitude of panic on here is actually indicative of a deeper fear. It's not that patents "stifle innovation", but instead that patents mean you can't just make a direct knock-off of some other UI which is what really freaks some people out.
I know that this is meant as a (not very well thought out) attack on the logic of graphene transistors improving but...
Your mobile phone of today is actually much more powerful in many respects than a mainframe of the 70's or 80's. The reason that a mainframe of today is still more powerful than a cellphone is because mainframes have been advancing at the same time.
In addition, your analogy is also a stupid straw man: a graphene transistor is designed to to the exact same job a silicon transistor does, while a cellphone was never intended to replace a mainframe (duh to you).
but I really don't see how the submitter managed to misunderstand the article on such a basic level, with the editor(s) not catching it either.
Well, if you think the submitter and editors are halfway smart and cynical, then you would think they knew that the vast majority if Windows users are not even at risk but put up the story anyway because it fits their agenda.
On the other hand, if you think they truly are drooling idiots, then the submitter probably only read the headline of the article, and the editors only half-read the submission before posting it instead of articles that are likely much more interesting.
It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which scenario happened.
The Linux Kernel uses version 2 and will continue to do so since Torvalds is not a religious martyr for the Church of Stallman. Therefore, it makes sense to release a driver likely to be used with Linux under the same license that Linux uses.
Slashdot Mirror
3) Speaking of noise - WD300 Raptors? Congrats, you just put the noisiest modern hard drives in a machine "built to be quiet" - if no expense was to be spared, why is this thing not outfitted with Solid State Disks???
That's not really accurate, the newest Velociraptors are 2.5" hard drives encased in a large 3.5" heatsink that also is very effective at quieting the drive. Anandtech measured extremely reasonable sound levels in its review, so I'd be careful before casting aspersions on that front.
I hate to respond to myself but: Yeah the market share of Linux is not huge, Nvidia is probably not terrified of losing sales to Larrabee on some desktop Linux boxes (high end supercomputing apps could be an interesting niche they might care about though). However, it is afraid that OEMs will be interested in Larrabee as a discrete card where Intel never had a solution before. Given the problems that Nvidia has had with execution over the last year, and the fact that Intel knows how to keep suppliers happy, THAT is where Nvidia is really afraid.
Jen-Hsun Huang has never been one to keep his trap shut when given the chance... even though Nvidia is in the red right now. Lesson one: When a CEO comes out and tries to use a legal dispute related to a contract as a pulpit to make a religious sermon, he knows he's wrong. See Darl McBride and Hector Ruiz as other examples of dumbass CEO's who love to see themselves in magazines but don't want to be bothered with pesky details like turning a profit or actually competing.
Intel is #1 in graphics when it comes to shipments... now I'm not saying I'd want to play 3D games on their chips, but guess what: despite what you see on Slashdot, very few users want to play these games. Further, I've got the crappy Intel integrated graphics on my laptop, and Kubuntu with KDE 4.2 is running quite well thanks to the 100% open source drivers that Intel has had it's own employees working on for several years. I'm not saying Intel graphics will play Crysis, but they do get the job done without binary blobs.
Turning the tables on Huang, the real "fear" here is of Larrabee... this bad-boy is not going to even require "drivers" in the conventional sense, it will be an open stripped-down x86 chip designed for massive SIMD and parallelism... imagine what the Linux developers will be able to do with that not only in graphics but for GPGPU using OpenCL. Will it necessarily be faster than the top-end Nvidia chips? Probably not... but it could mean the end of Nvidia's proprietary driver blobs for most Linux users who can get good performance AND an open architecture... THAT is what scares Nvidia.
You are making a massive logic error that AMD's marketing department is very happy about right now: You simply took 2 model numbers and put them up against each other as being "equal". If you look at actual performance, the Phenom II 940 is about equivalent to a Core 2 Q9400... a MUCH cheaper CPU that can be used with MUCH cheaper motherboards and with cheaper DDR2 RAM. Plus, the Core 2 uses far less power, and is likely going to overclock much better than the Phenom. In fact, when Intel cut prices on the Q9400 AMD responded by matching the cuts on the Phenom II that had been out for less than 2 weeks... AMD knows damn well that the Q9400 is equivalent to it's top-end model, but intentionally chose to mimic the high-end Intel model numbers to confuse the sheeple.
AMD's marketing department would like to thank you for your help.
I already posted so I can't mod you up, but well said sir!
1. Icons: If you like the old ones so much import them. Due to the fact that the "old" KDE had multiple sets of Icons there was never any "one" set of icons that were the perfect standard for all time anyway. Nice attempt at a troll though.
2. K-menu working the same as the old one: YES and it has existed since KDE 4.0. If you read my post you would have seen exactly how to add it as well.. although that might require using a mouse in a slightly different way than the exact way you claimed you used to do in in KDE 3.5 so maybe it's beyond your comprehension.
3. The taskbar manages tasks and can group them together or not group them together and can have one or more rows depending upon how you configure it. I'm sorry if one task item might be off by one pixel which would cause you to have a cardiac infarction.
Let me guess: You never actually used KDE 3 and your trolling... AND the next post about KDE 4 will be how much you hate it because you don't think the developers have added anything new & exciting whily also making KDE 4 a carbon-copy of KDE 3 for no reason other than the fact you cannot make minute adjustments to some simple changes.
I've been tracking the 4.2 betas on Kubuntu's repositories, and the final release is working very nicely. KDE 4.2 is finally at a stage where the 4 series can replace the 3.5 series for the large majority of users, and I've been using KDE since 2.0 came out.
Now I know there are going to be a ton of complaints about how "broken" KDE 4 is... but I have my own response to the critics. Is KDE 4.2 perfect? No, but I challenge you to show me a desktop that is "perfect". KDE 4 has finally gained critical mass, and even more great stuff is in store.
Thanks again to all the KDE 4 developers and bug testers who kept working even when it wasn't easy or popular! Your perseverance has paid off.
You actually raise an excellent point because the GPL can only be enforced on redistribution of either the original work OR a derivative work based on the original GPL'd code. In this case, the FSF wants to say that the plugins are derivative works... but unless you actually include GPL'd code in your plugin, there is no way for them to force you to distribute the code as GPL. Now, the GCC developers may try to entice developers into making a derivative work by giving out a GPL'd "skeleton" plugin that has enough code to be considered a copyrightable work that you would then modify and have to distribute under the GPL. However, if you just read the specs for how the plugins interoperate with GCC and wrote the plugin on your own without actually copying GPL'd code... there would be no requirement to distribute just the plugin under the GPL.
There may be a simpler explanation too: The summary might be misinterpreting the FSF, and what is really going on is that all "official" plugins that will come with GCC in the future will have to be GPL'd to gain inclusion with the "official" GCC distribution. This is something that the FSF could exercise control over.
KDE 4.2 is no trainwreck. Here's my take on KDE 4.2. My personal verdict is that KDE 4 has surpassed KDE 3.5 for daily use and is ready for primetime.
1. It introduces its own tags ( and , I'm looking at you.) that aren't included in the standards
You can blame those tags on the original Netscape browsers from back in the bad-old days, IE only copied them. In a way it was MS trying to stay "standards compliant" back
when then "standard" was whatever Netscape decided to do. Besides, if nobody uses those tags anymore (at least not on a modern site) I don't see it as causing any major harm.
I agree with the other sentiments, although practically all new PCs are shipping with IE 7 now, and many will auto-update to IE 8 when the time comes. While IE 8 is not
superior to Firefox 3, it is much more standards compliant.
Try out the latest KDE 4.2 RC1 builds on any major distro of your choice. I'm running Kubuntu which has historically had many people complaining about breaking KDE, and even in Kubuntu 4.2 is a REALLY nice environment to work in. Major issues people have complained about are gone (you can hide or shrink the size of the taskbar, there is a quicklanuch applet that brings quicklaunch back to the taskbar, and if you hate the new KDE launch menu system there is a popular alternative called Lancelot you can use instead). Finally, if you don't like the new system for dealing with desktop icons (I personally think the new system is brilliant since I can represent multiple folders on my desktop at once) you can turn your entire desktop into a folder view with file icons anywhere. There are some VERY cool features in 4.2 as well, like plasmoids that actually work correctly, a compositing system that is better than compiz IMHO (less bling, more actual functionality), and most of the apps you love in KDE 3 are ported over at this point, but you can still run KDE3 apps in the KDE4 environment just in case they aren't.
I though KDE 4.1 was barely useable, but at this point, 4.2 is my preferred desktop over KDE 3.5 or Gnome or the (surprisingly slow) XFCE. I will say that the 4.0 release was handled poorly. The KDE developers did try to say that 4.0 was intended for developers to hack on, but unfortunately the big 4.0 number seemed to attract distros that should not have released 4.0 as a replacement for 3.5. The KDE developers did have a good reason though, because 4.0 was a signal to KDE application developers that it was time to get on the ball and start porting things to the new infrastructure. KDE does not have a huge developer base, and resources can't be wasted on trying to develop for 3.5 and 4.X series simultaneously. 4.0 was the milestone where the underlying infrastructure was ready for developers to begin making the improvements that are now becoming visible in 4.2 and will only get better in future releases.
I always find it amazing that whenever anyone is asked to give an example of a "great" government project they always mention the interstate highways... while 99.9999% of those same people usually bemoan SUV's, "evil" suburban communities, CO2 emissions from cars, the decay of inner cities, and the lack of railroads. Then they launch into a tirade about how all the bad things come entirely from the free market and how we need the government to intervene to fix all those problems that the free market created.... and so the circle goes.
So you think Bush was evil which justifies repression on a scale that even people who fantasized about how evil Bush was couldn't come up with? I love it.
You think Bush was worse than Hitler because he hurt some terrorists' feelings, but you have absolutely no problem with imprisoning actual Americans who dare to disagree with the talking points your are parroting... beautiful. Let me guess, the fact that some Jew is committing the unthinkable crime against humanity of breathing air is also a problem that Obama should "solve" for you too?
Now the real question - did Bush's staff remvoe the "H"s from the keyboards in the White House?
Very classy there asshole. It's well known for all his failings Bush has made this the smoothest presidential transition in US history. The Bushes even went so far as to move their personal belongings out of the Whitehouse early so that it would be easier for the Obama's to move in. This is a far cry from the "caring" Bill Clinton who didn't even leave the Whitehouse in time and had an "enlightened" staff who vandalized their own offices -- the offices paid for with my tax money -- out of spite. The real big question is, how long will Slashdot's daily 2-minutes of hate orgy be able to last now that Bush is gone? I mean, you can try to spend the next 4 years saying that everything bad happening is because Bush used to be President, but it will get stale after a while and the hate mongers will need someone new to victimize. Probably some random Republican who has no real power but doesn't bow fast enough.
In case most of you had forgotten, Obama is basically copying John McCain who specifically mentioned doing this in the debates. Of course at the time McCain did it Slashdot thought it was an evil intrusion of privacy. But now that Obama wants to do the exact same thing it's an enlightened 21st century idea that only some Luddite old guy like McCain could ever oppose.
There's a major problem with your logic. Intel is coming out with a lower-cost mainstream Nehalem, but it is not discontinuing the current i7 sockets, they will continue as a high-end option and you'll be able to slap 32nm Westmere's in there when the time comes. AM2+ is at the very end of the road. As for the older Core 2 quad socket 775's, they are getting nearer the end of the line, but with some price cuts the current 775 socket systems are still going to outperform anything AMD has until at least 2010... the Core 2's are at the end of the technology ramp-up road, but not at the end of the price-performance road.
The main problem is that AMD is doing the exact same thing Intel did when the P4 was out: they went to a smaller litho process, slapped on cache, and cranked up the clockspeed. If you read the review carefully you'll note that while the new Phenoms are faster than some Core 2 quads, they are not faster on a clock-for-clock basis. Remember back when AMD was leading in that category and it was such a big deal?
As of right now the Phenoms are a good deal IF you already own an AM2+ mobo... otherwise they are not a good deal for 2 reasons: 1. AMD is coming out with the incompatible AM3 socket that will use DDR3 memory in the next few months, so these current chips will have a very short shelf life; 2. Intel doesn't have to do any innovation at all to beat these chips, all it has to do is drop the prices on current Core 2 quads like the 9550 that outperform the Phenoms but are currently priced higher... dropping prices ain't rocket science and there are rumors these cuts could be coming by the end of the month.
As for the Core i7, sure it is more expensive, but even the 920 model appears to wail on these chips, and there is a whole lot more future-proofness in buying a low-end i7 right now. Interestingly, the review mentions the new Phenoms have 758 million transistors which means they have about 27 million more transistors than Nehalem... but Nehalem at 2.66 Ghz is easily beating a Phenom at 3.0Ghz. It looks like what AMD really needs is a new architecture, but that does not appear to be coming any time soon.
About the Atom, while it is true that some models of the Atom CPU are 32-bit only, remember that the devices they are in are likely to have less than 4GB of RAM in them to begin with. The Atom line does support 64-bit (see the N230 used in desktop models), but not all of the Atom parts have it enabled, most likely to save a little bit of power on very small devices.
Of course... even if Windows 7 is faster than XP, it would still likely struggle on a 32-bit Atom, so the question remains, why put it out in a 32 bit flavor at all... I'm not 100% sure. Frankly, while it would likely cause most of Slashdot to scream that Microsoft has "abandoned" old Athlons and P4's, I wouldn't mind if they went 64 bit only and left some of the cruft behind.
s/geekier/stupid and irresponsible
Let me guess, the submitter likes to enable all the useless bling effects on Compiz but never gets any work done, and has racing stripes on his Civic....
I went to Carnegie Mellon and took classes from a bunch of professors who were all freakin' geniuses and here is the second most important lesson I learned about cryptography: NEVER DO IT YOURSELF. And a corollary to that is never use a cryptographic system someone else cooked up until it has been through the vigorous peer review that these hash functions will go through. This was an important lesson to a bunch of egotistical CMU students, and I hope the ones who were actually smart listened. (The first most important lesson is an old one: if you think cryptography is the solution to all your security problems, you don't understand cryptography or your security problems).
"Whaa! But the ciphers we have now are already broken!!" The current hash functions that are "broken" like SHA-1 are not trivially broken, but broken in a sense that in some scenarios might make it somewhat easier to conduct either a pre-image attack (useful if you know somebody's password hash and want to make a password that will hit the same hash) or a collision attack (useful in some cases where you are trying to forge a messsage to match a digital signature.... but if the fake message has to contain lots of garbage bytes even a successful collision might not pass the smell test). "Somewhat Easier" does not mean you can do it on your iPhone, it just means that it might take a supercomputer 100 years instead of the heat death of the universe to do it. This is still very important, but it is a world apart from an algorithm that has never been tested... those could be blown wide open and cracked almost instantly with trivial computing power. To use a bad car analogy, just because a seat belt won't save your life in every car accident doesn't mean it's just as safe to strap plastic explosives to your gas tank and hook them up to a mercury switch detonator.
As for "open source" making these cryptographic models available quickly, I wasn't aware that text editors froze up and stopped you from writing code if it wasn't going to be open source. The reason commercial vendors won't jump on a new cryptographic protocol before they are validated is that their customers would (rightly) go ballistic and their credibility would be smashed. Fortunately for all of us the leaders of the open source community have a little more sense that you and you won't see any of these hashes in the Linux kernel or OpenSSL until they are at least in the final rounds of competition and there is some evidence that they have value. OSS has the advantage that its software implementation can be publicly validated and peer reviewed, but having your code opened up to the world is actually much MORE dangerous if you are just screwing around because you think a hash function has a badass sounding name. I'm glad Torvalds is in charge of Linux and not "jd".
Yeah... but the first amendment also does not prevent a private employer from discriminating on the basis of religion either, because it is impossible for a private employer to violate the first amendment (see state action doctrine). Instead, the violations (if there are any) are of federal statutory law.. and if a statute is deemed to violate the constitution the constitution will win. It looks like Diskeeper is trying to argue that current statutes that these employees are using to sue them are unconstitutional restraints on their first amendment rights to practice their religion. This is an interesting issue since there definitely are cases where it is completely acceptable to have private discriminate based on religion.... like for example it is perfectly acceptable to prevent non-Catholics from becoming Catholic priests. However, since Diskeeper maintains an outward appearance of being a normal, for-profit company, it will likely not get the extra leeway that an organization based around a particular religion would receive. Scientology is a whack-job cult, but its tax-exempt status is still a matter of law (unless they manage to screw up and lose it again).
A Little Known Maryland Scientist Has Made Public
YES! We have a new winner for most descriptive Slashdot headline EVAR!
That's like saying that since cars have existed for over 100 years it is impossible to get a patent on a new development for a car.
Looking at the claims, this patent is (unsurprisingly) not trying to claim the use of 3-D technology in a computer GUI. Instead, look at independent claim 1:
The Apple application is for the use of a room-like setting where there is organization of visual elements along the "floor", "walls", and "ceiling" of the room. This is definitely different than looking glass, about the closest thing I've seen would be a demo from Qt on a Wolfenstein + desktop elements interface: see video here. However, it is unclear if the Wolfenstein demo actually anticipates the claims of this patent on two grounds: 1. the use of a static room could be different enough from the use of a maze, and the Wolfenstein demo does not stack & arrange elements like Apple is claiming) and 2. The Apple invention likely predates the WolfQt code.
Additionally, as is often the case with Slashdot, the readers do not understand the difference between a granted patent and a patent application. This is ONLY an application, and as any patent practitioner knows, what you originally apply for is often much different than what you eventually get granted as a patent.
Finally, before everyone in here panics that Linux will be illegal in 2 weeks or some other nonsense, just look at the subject matter that Apple is patenting: It's a stupid room with windows pasted on the wall! Who cares!! Even if Apple gets the patent, just don't go out and copy them and you'll be fine. The attitude of panic on here is actually indicative of a deeper fear. It's not that patents "stifle innovation", but instead that patents mean you can't just make a direct knock-off of some other UI which is what really freaks some people out.
I know that this is meant as a (not very well thought out) attack on the logic of graphene transistors improving but...
Your mobile phone of today is actually much more powerful in many respects than a mainframe of the 70's or 80's. The reason that a mainframe of today is still more powerful than a cellphone is because mainframes have been advancing at the same time.
In addition, your analogy is also a stupid straw man: a graphene transistor is designed to to the exact same job a silicon transistor does, while a cellphone was never intended to replace a mainframe (duh to you).
but I really don't see how the submitter managed to misunderstand the article on such a basic level, with the editor(s) not catching it either.
Well, if you think the submitter and editors are halfway smart and cynical, then you would think they knew that the vast majority if Windows users are not even at risk but put up the story anyway because it fits their agenda.
On the other hand, if you think they truly are drooling idiots, then the submitter probably only read the headline of the article, and the editors only half-read the submission before posting it instead of articles that are likely much more interesting.
It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which scenario happened.
The Linux Kernel uses version 2 and will continue to do so since Torvalds is not a religious martyr for the Church of Stallman. Therefore, it makes sense to release a driver likely to be used with Linux under the same license that Linux uses.