MTBF For these builds is estimated at 2.168467 hours, based on 1976 reports and 4284.890000 hours of user testing from testers that have crashed and reported problems. (dev. builds tend to have low MTBF)
Hey, thats pretty good, considering the status of the product and the fact that everyone complains about it so much. Those are cold hard numbers that shout "NO, It doesn't crash that often!"
Of course, thats unacceptable for a production release. Any talkback MTBF numbers available for Netscape 4.x? What are the goals for MTBF?
Oh, and BTW, I do have serious reasons for asking, I'm working on a Kiosk style project where we're considering moving from a custom app to a browser based product and need to consider this kind of thing.
I'll second this, Opera has become my primary Windows browser. I tried (and keep trying) Mozilla but the issues others keep ragging on kept me from adopting it.
Opera does have its share of problems, including ones similar to IE with lots of dropdown listboxes on many open windows but overall it is more stable than IE (I still crash it, but not as often) and best of all, it remembers the websites you have open when it crashes.
The key to getting used to Opera is in the prerferences, it will seem very strange freshly installed. But a few miniutes checking out various options will get you a browser that isn't very much different from IE or Netscape.
Every Netscape 4.x user on windows owes it to themselves to spend some time with it, they just might find they have been missing out on something good.
My wife tried to get me to start the Body for Life thing, she's all into that. Actually she's into any fad diet, she doesn't actually do them but she loves reading about them.
but the meth stuff, I about choked on lunch (hamburger, yogurt & apple - yeah I should have skipped the burger)
Certainly I didn't mean that a game designer can't code, the obvious example that comes to my mind is Peter Molyneux, who is reported to have a big hand in coding the game (and does a great job with publicity besides). But I was also thinking of people like Bruce Shelly of Ensemble and Bill Roper of Blizzard who don't get mentioned as often when it comes to the nuts and bolts of programming. While I'm sure they are quite clueful about technical aspects of the game implementation, I'm not so sure they are cranking code.
And what good would a designer be if they didn't have a clue about the implementation?
I was just going with the (probably incorrect) impression that the Ask Slashdot poster was wondering where he could learn to assemble polygons onscreen so that he had a game.
Look at all the k-rad 3D games that are boring to play. Look at some games that are behind the technology curve that are fun to play (I'll offer up Starcraft and Counter-Strike as a pair of recent examples, I'm sure you can come up with your own).
The skillset that goes into a modern game is enormous. Art (3D modeling, texture art), Music, Game Design & Balance, Programming (3D, Network, UI), etc. You're lucky if you're good at one of these, much less a few of them. Find an area that you are good at and cultivate it, make yourself the best. The companies you mention often have 20-40 people working on a game, you'll have to find your spot on that team.
gamasutra.com is an excellent resource for professional level game development info.
This fight has been going on for a long time. The tablature has been online since the 'good ole days', I remember one of my fellow guitar students talking about back in about '91, when I was like 'duh, how do I get internet'.
The first step was to get the archive dumped off of the University of Nevada's servers. Then anyone else hosting it would get the nasty letters too. You'd have to hope the cross-atlantic links and the Italian site hosting the archive were up and hope you'd be able to find the tab you were looking for quickly enough.
Of course the maintenance goes downhill too, when you can't connect to the archive or officially host it you can't very well keep adding tabs for all the new stuff that keeps coming along, and whether your preferences run toward the newest Blink182 or the next Satriani album or even Shania, being able to grab tab is nice.
And while some might look at tab as 'cheating', don't forget how many beginners learn from it, people that might not get to hang around with decent guitar players or have money for lessons.
Again, the issue comes down to fair use in an interconnected society and the inability of old distribution and reward models to fit to an interconnected society.
Since the original question referenced VB and Kylix I'm assuming the poster wants a 'GUI builder' type of IDE. I believe the most common Python approach to GUI widgets is through Tk. In that case the question might be, are there any Tk GUI builders that handle Python. I don't know the answer, I'll leave the searching as a reader exercise.
There are a couple of basic IDEs for Python, the Windows version even comes with the install. These are about on par with Komodo, faster but with different features.
The sun's orbital period around the galaxy is approx. 250 Million years(from this page). Presumeably we pass though the galactic plane twice? That doesn't match the supposed 26 million year period. This page offers some alternate explanations, including the idea that it isn't the galactic plane but several dust clouds that we might pass through (dust being relative, certainly containing particles large enough to change conditions here on earth maybe?).
As for the 26 million year period itself, Scientific American offers some information.
For the 100th time: Bluetooth and 802.11 are not competing technologies. They each have separate and complimentary uses.
True. But in the end, they provide a measure of wireless access to data. So in that sense they compete.
They both operate in the same frequency range.
But... Bluetooth and the upcoming IEEE 802.11B (note the B) are going to go head to head.
This is where you lose me. 802.11b is not upcoming, it is here and there are products on the market for it. It is an extension to 802.11 to increase the data rate, change the encoding and some other things. Many times when people are talking about 802.11 they are referring to 802.11b.
There is an upcoming 802.11a that will be a significant change but that is a ways off yet.
... that every image you're downloading is compressed in the first place. Yes, GIF, JPEG and even PNG are compression formats. Your browser has to allocate memory for the downloaded compressed file and a larger chunk of memory for the flattened bitmap.
The benefits of a compression system in HTTP 1.1 (look elsewhere for my post with links about this) are as much in the reduction of TCP connection creation and the transfer of the images in a page in one big chunk instead of lots of little requests.
Think real hard for a miniute. The few hundred K or less of HTML and images on an average web page being sucked through a 56K modem are going to be much slower than even virtual memory from a swap file! Memory and processor speed are the last of your considerations.
Apparantly the improvements span more than just compressing stuff. HTTP 1.1 has provision for maintaining a TCP connection for the duration of the transfer of page and page elements instead of creating a new TCP connection for each page element.
Scroll down about halfway for the tables. A quick glance shows that compression works best for low bandwidth connections (naturally) and that the other improvements also made a difference.
It just isn't Sprint.
BeyonDSL and LanWaves both offer it, both have packages somewhere near consumer level. Same concept, don't know the details but it will at least get you connected. And bug me in the next few days, I should be able to get details on what Ricochet is doing here.
I got the impression from the article that it was a somewhat 'backburner' type of job, not a mandate of "Find this spacecraft now" but "If ya get a chance, take a look through these NASA images and see if you can find anything".
If my job consisted of examining images of Iraqi and Chinese air bases and munitions plants, I'd probably welcome some Martian landscape for a change.
Browsers at work, browsers at home, booting different operating systems. Used to send myself email with links, still have a pile in the mail client that I've never visited again. Tried all sorts of bookmark merge programs, wasn't happy with some of those. Tried the Yahoo thing, was way past their limit of 1000 bookmarks. Tried the Blink thing and at least one other service that went out of business (deapleap I think), they were too slow even over my cable connection.
So I rolled my own, well actually I snagged the useful phpHoo, read the pages at webreference to lend myself a clue and put it up where I've got some cheap hosting. Now I just have to remember to use it instead of the browser bookmark functions. Advantages, well, its searchable, its available as long as my host is up, It lets you create tree like organization kind of like Yahoo, and some other stuff I can't think of now. It doesn't import other bookmarks, but I think that would be a good challenge for my limited skills. I also think some buttons tied to 'scriptlets' for the most popular browsers would be a great useability addition, that way you could make the system nearly as painless as a bookmark file.
Looks like some more stuff has come out since I did this, I might take another look at the alternatives. But take a look at phpHoo and its relatives, they just might work like you want them to.
Not that his other comments were insightful, but I was particularly intrigued by the thought that the Peer to Peer and IM stuff is an alternative to DNS, he's right and thats one of the most intriguing things I've considered all day.
I need more time to think about the implications...
I think this might be one of those things that takes a long time for the 'marketplace' to sort out, at least in the sense that something will evolve as a useful alternative. Hmm.
While many web forums offer a search function, this is useable at the site only and not indexable by net-wide spiders (such as Google). While in some cases this is a feature, it locks up the content in a way that prevents it from being found, used and archived by net users in general.
I know a few subject matters very well and am happy to be helpful to pass on knowledge, answer questions and participate in dialogue. When this becomes lost I have to answer the same questions again and again, wasting my time. Furthermore, my answers that may be of help to others are lost, depriving them of knowledge that may have helped them.
I have surface knowledge of a great many more topics. I research these, I try to further my knowledge in some, I have to learn about others for work or for other reasons. Being able to easily find information is invaluable and my publicly archived questions may be useful to others.
I know little or nothing about an even greater range of knowledge. Being able to read what others have asked and answered is a wonderful way to start bridging those gaps.
Unarchiveable web forums, mailing lists that don't archive messages on the web and even IRC let this human knowledge slip away.
Not that there isn't a place for all of the above, but I wish more people would consider things beyond their immediate needs.
While I might agree about a pager satellite and I could care less about the TV satellite, two GPS satellites aren't going to make much of a difference. There is enough redundancy built into the system that taking out two well chosen satellites might leave us with less than an hour a day of decent coverage.
Makes me wonder about the validity of the rest of the stuff you're spouting off about...
Most of these are from the 40s through the 60s and are basically free of copyright encumberance. The descriptions echo the post war and cold war mentality and provide a fascinating look at what 'they' would have us believe. From our vantage point they seem hopelessly naive and optimistic.
There is probably a great deal of good material to be edited into some funny/creative/musical/artistic works.
The real question is, what would the same types of film from the past ten years tell someone 50 years from now?
I stand corrected (and my apologies for implying you are a moron), Intel's literature does mention handhelds. I was caught up in the sample RAID implementations to the point of overlooking the other applications suggested. I also incorrectly assumed you were tying the mention of the Yopy in with the port of Linux to this architecture, which share nothing but the ARM ISA.
Now I'll ask you to reconsider your original post, from my perspective it echos the long running x86 vs PPC or CISC vs RISC arguements. Without your subsequent clarifying messages it read as an ill-informed attack on Intel and on the efforts to port Linux to this chip.
Your original message comes through clearer now I think, why base a media capable PDA on this when you'll waste that extra processing (or battery) power on FP emulation.
Slashdot Mirror
seriously, use what works best.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
MTBF For these builds is estimated at 2.168467 hours, based on 1976 reports and 4284.890000 hours of user testing from testers that have crashed and reported problems. (dev. builds tend to have low MTBF)
Hey, thats pretty good, considering the status of the product and the fact that everyone complains about it so much. Those are cold hard numbers that shout "NO, It doesn't crash that often!"
Of course, thats unacceptable for a production release. Any talkback MTBF numbers available for Netscape 4.x? What are the goals for MTBF?
Oh, and BTW, I do have serious reasons for asking, I'm working on a Kiosk style project where we're considering moving from a custom app to a browser based product and need to consider this kind of thing.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
I'll second this, Opera has become my primary Windows browser. I tried (and keep trying) Mozilla but the issues others keep ragging on kept me from adopting it. Opera does have its share of problems, including ones similar to IE with lots of dropdown listboxes on many open windows but overall it is more stable than IE (I still crash it, but not as often) and best of all, it remembers the websites you have open when it crashes. The key to getting used to Opera is in the prerferences, it will seem very strange freshly installed. But a few miniutes checking out various options will get you a browser that isn't very much different from IE or Netscape. Every Netscape 4.x user on windows owes it to themselves to spend some time with it, they just might find they have been missing out on something good.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
My wife tried to get me to start the Body for Life thing, she's all into that. Actually she's into any fad diet, she doesn't actually do them but she loves reading about them.
but the meth stuff, I about choked on lunch (hamburger, yogurt & apple - yeah I should have skipped the burger)
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Certainly I didn't mean that a game designer can't code, the obvious example that comes to my mind is Peter Molyneux, who is reported to have a big hand in coding the game (and does a great job with publicity besides). But I was also thinking of people like Bruce Shelly of Ensemble and Bill Roper of Blizzard who don't get mentioned as often when it comes to the nuts and bolts of programming. While I'm sure they are quite clueful about technical aspects of the game implementation, I'm not so sure they are cranking code.
And what good would a designer be if they didn't have a clue about the implementation?
I was just going with the (probably incorrect) impression that the Ask Slashdot poster was wondering where he could learn to assemble polygons onscreen so that he had a game.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Look at all the k-rad 3D games that are boring to play. Look at some games that are behind the technology curve that are fun to play (I'll offer up Starcraft and Counter-Strike as a pair of recent examples, I'm sure you can come up with your own).
The skillset that goes into a modern game is enormous. Art (3D modeling, texture art), Music, Game Design & Balance, Programming (3D, Network, UI), etc. You're lucky if you're good at one of these, much less a few of them. Find an area that you are good at and cultivate it, make yourself the best. The companies you mention often have 20-40 people working on a game, you'll have to find your spot on that team.
gamasutra.com is an excellent resource for professional level game development info.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
The first step was to get the archive dumped off of the University of Nevada's servers. Then anyone else hosting it would get the nasty letters too. You'd have to hope the cross-atlantic links and the Italian site hosting the archive were up and hope you'd be able to find the tab you were looking for quickly enough.
Of course the maintenance goes downhill too, when you can't connect to the archive or officially host it you can't very well keep adding tabs for all the new stuff that keeps coming along, and whether your preferences run toward the newest Blink182 or the next Satriani album or even Shania, being able to grab tab is nice.
And while some might look at tab as 'cheating', don't forget how many beginners learn from it, people that might not get to hang around with decent guitar players or have money for lessons.
Again, the issue comes down to fair use in an interconnected society and the inability of old distribution and reward models to fit to an interconnected society.
Good luck to OLGA!
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Since the original question referenced VB and Kylix I'm assuming the poster wants a 'GUI builder' type of IDE. I believe the most common Python approach to GUI widgets is through Tk. In that case the question might be, are there any Tk GUI builders that handle Python. I don't know the answer, I'll leave the searching as a reader exercise. There are a couple of basic IDEs for Python, the Windows version even comes with the install. These are about on par with Komodo, faster but with different features.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
As for the 26 million year period itself, Scientific American offers some information.
intersting stuff!
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Sure is more palatable to look at a motherboard at lunchtime instead of, well, I just won't go there...
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
They both operate in the same frequency range.
This is where you lose me. 802.11b is not upcoming, it is here and there are products on the market for it. It is an extension to 802.11 to increase the data rate, change the encoding and some other things. Many times when people are talking about 802.11 they are referring to 802.11b. There is an upcoming 802.11a that will be a significant change but that is a ways off yet.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
The benefits of a compression system in HTTP 1.1 (look elsewhere for my post with links about this) are as much in the reduction of TCP connection creation and the transfer of the images in a page in one big chunk instead of lots of little requests.
Think real hard for a miniute. The few hundred K or less of HTML and images on an average web page being sucked through a 56K modem are going to be much slower than even virtual memory from a swap file! Memory and processor speed are the last of your considerations.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
preview is your friend.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Apparantly the improvements span more than just compressing stuff. HTTP 1.1 has provision for maintaining a TCP connection for the duration of the transfer of page and page elements instead of creating a new TCP connection for each page element.
Scroll down about halfway for the tables. A quick glance shows that compression works best for low bandwidth connections (naturally) and that the other improvements also made a difference.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Gotta be a cool guy if he thought it was funny.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
It just isn't Sprint. BeyonDSL and LanWaves both offer it, both have packages somewhere near consumer level. Same concept, don't know the details but it will at least get you connected. And bug me in the next few days, I should be able to get details on what Ricochet is doing here.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
If my job consisted of examining images of Iraqi and Chinese air bases and munitions plants, I'd probably welcome some Martian landscape for a change.
Of course, I could be all off in this...
So I rolled my own, well actually I snagged the useful phpHoo, read the pages at webreference to lend myself a clue and put it up where I've got some cheap hosting. Now I just have to remember to use it instead of the browser bookmark functions. Advantages, well, its searchable, its available as long as my host is up, It lets you create tree like organization kind of like Yahoo, and some other stuff I can't think of now. It doesn't import other bookmarks, but I think that would be a good challenge for my limited skills. I also think some buttons tied to 'scriptlets' for the most popular browsers would be a great useability addition, that way you could make the system nearly as painless as a bookmark file.
Looks like some more stuff has come out since I did this, I might take another look at the alternatives. But take a look at phpHoo and its relatives, they just might work like you want them to.
I need more time to think about the implications...
I think this might be one of those things that takes a long time for the 'marketplace' to sort out, at least in the sense that something will evolve as a useful alternative. Hmm.
NASA has an article pointing the unexpected danger even from meteorites.
While many web forums offer a search function, this is useable at the site only and not indexable by net-wide spiders (such as Google). While in some cases this is a feature, it locks up the content in a way that prevents it from being found, used and archived by net users in general.
I know a few subject matters very well and am happy to be helpful to pass on knowledge, answer questions and participate in dialogue. When this becomes lost I have to answer the same questions again and again, wasting my time. Furthermore, my answers that may be of help to others are lost, depriving them of knowledge that may have helped them.
I have surface knowledge of a great many more topics. I research these, I try to further my knowledge in some, I have to learn about others for work or for other reasons. Being able to easily find information is invaluable and my publicly archived questions may be useful to others.
I know little or nothing about an even greater range of knowledge. Being able to read what others have asked and answered is a wonderful way to start bridging those gaps.
Unarchiveable web forums, mailing lists that don't archive messages on the web and even IRC let this human knowledge slip away.
Not that there isn't a place for all of the above, but I wish more people would consider things beyond their immediate needs.
Preview before submit is a good thing.
I meant to say taking out two well chosen satellites might leave us with less than an hour a day without decent coverage.
Makes me wonder about the validity of the rest of the stuff you're spouting off about...
There is probably a great deal of good material to be edited into some funny/creative/musical/artistic works.
The real question is, what would the same types of film from the past ten years tell someone 50 years from now?
Now I'll ask you to reconsider your original post, from my perspective it echos the long running x86 vs PPC or CISC vs RISC arguements. Without your subsequent clarifying messages it read as an ill-informed attack on Intel and on the efforts to port Linux to this chip.
Your original message comes through clearer now I think, why base a media capable PDA on this when you'll waste that extra processing (or battery) power on FP emulation.