Linux on the Desktop absolutely has to kill/prune this tangled hierarchy. Explain to me the distinction of "/usr/local" on a desktop machine?? *Everything* is LOCAL.
"Also remember *shared memory*. Only 1 instance of the program itself is run - the rest is just individual states."
HUH? The size of the code is only a few megs...the vast majority of memory used is on the heap, and each user gets their own. So the image of the Mozilla binary, say a few megs, might be shared...but each user is still going to rack up their *own* personal 30-50 MB of RAM.
Excuse me while I reserve my judgement on whether Microsoft will not eventually find a way to make these heretofore distinct and independent entities, merged in one ugly ball that is only available through a process which ultimately deposits money one way or another in Microsoft's pockets.
or how about just using the pragma cache directives to tell browsers to cache each page at *least* 15 minutes...so every time I hit the back button it doesn't go to the server again?
From the not-helpful department...
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
...ok, here's a brilliant suggestion I'm sure nobody has thought of - would merely simplifying the HTML of the site save some precious bandwidth costs? I mean, even if you just shave off a few percent of size on the web pages, wouldn't that save a lot of money? Lowercasing tags is rumored to aid compression too - which brings us to.gz - Netscape at least can unzip/read gzipped files: would the trade off in cpu for dynamically gzipping save money?. How about allowing people to disable what they don't want to see...e.g. I have rarely ever used the whole Sections bar on the left, and don't use most of the other links on the left either. I suppose I could switch to the Lite version, but I'd think even a small reduction of Normal-mode size would lead to a little savings. Hell, halve the topic icons.
Anyway, that's my non-helpful naive suggestion. Damn, I'm probably just wasting more bandwidth posting this.
...isn't there some agency that funds art or journalism? Would it help to go non-profit? Do *all* my tax dollars go to the war against drugs, peer-to-peer computing, and for supporting corrupt regimes overseas?
Goddamnit...we have to solve this damn problem, and it doesn't look like anybody has any ideas. Is there a number of a dollar amount that can be tossed out? What is slashdot's membership size?
$/subscribing members == ???
What about a distributed mirroring technology? I have a T1 at work (I work at a major university) and would be glad to provide what bandwidth I can without being fired (hell, we blow money around here like there's no tomorrow anyway). This has got to end...maybe there needs to be a "United Way" of the net...a big fund that people can contribute to (tax-deductable of course) that keeps decent projects afloat.
The funny thing is, they don't even *explain* their position. They just take it for granted that labels not making money and record stores going out of business is a BAD thing. In that same vein where is all the buggy-whip propaganda? "Oh no kids! All the bugy-whip stores will go out of business! Please don't drive cars! It's communism!"
You're going to leave it up to the *politicians* to discriminate between white hat and black hat, good and bad viruses? Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather have no legislation at all, and us techies can sort it out. Once you let politicians into the mix, all of a sudden campaign donators are the ones consistently making "good" viruses, while political enemies are the ones making "bad" viruses.
The difference is, of course, that YOU are paying for your laptop (through tuition), while I am NOT. If I were a taxpayer and you were going to a public school I'd have to pay for whatever whizzy thing the politicians decided everybody needed.
A-fucking-men. In my day ~93-94 we had a computer lab that served these purposes:
1) email
2) games
3) warez
4) h4x0ring
Probably category 2 and 3 should be merged. Our poor sysadmin spent most of his time kicking people out of the lab after lunch time, and futily trying to erase any games and warez found on the network. Of course some clever kid would find a why to set the BIOS password every once in a while, requiring that the computer actually be manually opened up and fiddled with. These computers were really only useful for the one programming class that our school had (we had a whole other lab of lower-end computers just for typing class). I can only imagine the "productivity" boost that giving laptops to kids in class would have. Absolutely a fucking waste of money. Not *only* a waste of money, because they would actually have a *negative* effect. Hey, let's just give everybody a GameBoy Advance to expose them to "high tech" electronics. It would cost less. It seems this governer does have some clue, but really laptops are a magnificent waste of money, which could otherwise be spent on medical subsidies, education (ok, REAL education), the poor/homeless, or just being given back to the taxpayer. You will hate high-tech in the classroom once you get a job and realize how much of your income goes to the school district, which you yourself don't use, and you have no children, but have to pay anyway.
There was a similar study simulating prisons, in the 70s...I think it was done by Berkeley, or one of those schools in California. Anyway, they got a bunch of undergrads and completely randomly separated them into "prisoners" and "guards". The experiment was amazing: the guards eventually became sadistic and really mean to the prisoners, employing punishment, and rewards for good behavior...the prisoners squabbled and fought each other, became depressed, revolted. I think they had to call it off because people were becoming suicidal - completely forgetting that it was all *an experiment*, they really thought they were a prisoner, or that as a guard it was their duty to "stick it" to the prisoners...even though these were the same people that would have been studying and going out together just two weeks before. I think PBS had a show on about this. Totally fascinating.
I think the "Youth" should be able to make up their own minds how they want to contribute to society. Not be used as a tool for ruling elites.
Bah...that's my little rant.
Even better - wind power is proving pretty efficient without the nasty side effect of having to create awkward solar cells, creating/disposing toxic chemicals, etc.
Wind power is a viable alternative but the government, heavily lobbied by the status-quo energy industry, just wont throw money into alternative technologies, like it does into petroleum based research & development etc.
The UI for changing file type registrations is not the issue. A court can't order that this be made more intuitive (what's "intuitive"?). However, a court CAN order that Microsoft applications play by the same rules as third party applications and don't get any special preference. For instance, a court can order that preinstalled Microsoft applications DON'T get to commandeer file associations by default - just leave them *undefined* until the application launches first. This is what every other third party application has to do at install, or runtime. Why should Microsoft get a special privilege. There is no technical barrier to this (or at least there shouldn't be one), and if there is one, it only underscores Microsoft's ugly integration and promotion of its own applications. If Microsoft wants to own certain file types, it should have to compete with everybody else on a level playing field - not commandeer them beforehand and then force everybody else to try to take them away. The author briefly touches on this point at the end of the article, but is mostly caught up in the muddy UI issue.
Slashdot Mirror
ahahahaahahahahaaah!
Wait, wtf are you talking about?
Bahaahaahahaha! Don't forget /usr/local/*, and /opt, and /share...
Linux on the Desktop absolutely has to kill/prune this tangled hierarchy. Explain to me the distinction of "/usr/local" on a desktop machine?? *Everything* is LOCAL.
I like how in the preview he says that K-Pax is X of *your* light years away. As if light years was some peculiarly human measurement.
"Also remember *shared memory*. Only 1 instance of the program itself is run - the rest is just individual states."
HUH? The size of the code is only a few megs...the vast majority of memory used is on the heap, and each user gets their own. So the image of the Mozilla binary, say a few megs, might be shared...but each user is still going to rack up their *own* personal 30-50 MB of RAM.
Excuse me while I reserve my judgement on whether Microsoft will not eventually find a way to make these heretofore distinct and independent entities, merged in one ugly ball that is only available through a process which ultimately deposits money one way or another in Microsoft's pockets.
Um, there's a checkbox right under this text area labeled: "Post Anonymously"
or how about just using the pragma cache directives to tell browsers to cache each page at *least* 15 minutes...so every time I hit the back button it doesn't go to the server again?
...ok, here's a brilliant suggestion I'm sure nobody has thought of - would merely simplifying the HTML of the site save some precious bandwidth costs? I mean, even if you just shave off a few percent of size on the web pages, wouldn't that save a lot of money? Lowercasing tags is rumored to aid compression too - which brings us to .gz - Netscape at least can unzip/read gzipped files: would the trade off in cpu for dynamically gzipping save money?. How about allowing people to disable what they don't want to see...e.g. I have rarely ever used the whole Sections bar on the left, and don't use most of the other links on the left either. I suppose I could switch to the Lite version, but I'd think even a small reduction of Normal-mode size would lead to a little savings. Hell, halve the topic icons.
Anyway, that's my non-helpful naive suggestion. Damn, I'm probably just wasting more bandwidth posting this.
...isn't there some agency that funds art or journalism? Would it help to go non-profit? Do *all* my tax dollars go to the war against drugs, peer-to-peer computing, and for supporting corrupt regimes overseas?
Goddamnit...we have to solve this damn problem, and it doesn't look like anybody has any ideas. Is there a number of a dollar amount that can be tossed out? What is slashdot's membership size?
$/subscribing members == ???
What about a distributed mirroring technology? I have a T1 at work (I work at a major university) and would be glad to provide what bandwidth I can without being fired (hell, we blow money around here like there's no tomorrow anyway). This has got to end...maybe there needs to be a "United Way" of the net...a big fund that people can contribute to (tax-deductable of course) that keeps decent projects afloat.
The funny thing is, they don't even *explain* their position. They just take it for granted that labels not making money and record stores going out of business is a BAD thing. In that same vein where is all the buggy-whip propaganda? "Oh no kids! All the bugy-whip stores will go out of business! Please don't drive cars! It's communism!"
Wow...do you live in the US? You obviously do not have a requisite fear of the stupidity of law and the political system.
You're going to leave it up to the *politicians* to discriminate between white hat and black hat, good and bad viruses? Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather have no legislation at all, and us techies can sort it out. Once you let politicians into the mix, all of a sudden campaign donators are the ones consistently making "good" viruses, while political enemies are the ones making "bad" viruses.
The difference is, of course, that YOU are paying for your laptop (through tuition), while I am NOT. If I were a taxpayer and you were going to a public school I'd have to pay for whatever whizzy thing the politicians decided everybody needed.
A-fucking-men. In my day ~93-94 we had a computer lab that served these purposes:
1) email
2) games
3) warez
4) h4x0ring
Probably category 2 and 3 should be merged. Our poor sysadmin spent most of his time kicking people out of the lab after lunch time, and futily trying to erase any games and warez found on the network. Of course some clever kid would find a why to set the BIOS password every once in a while, requiring that the computer actually be manually opened up and fiddled with. These computers were really only useful for the one programming class that our school had (we had a whole other lab of lower-end computers just for typing class). I can only imagine the "productivity" boost that giving laptops to kids in class would have. Absolutely a fucking waste of money. Not *only* a waste of money, because they would actually have a *negative* effect. Hey, let's just give everybody a GameBoy Advance to expose them to "high tech" electronics. It would cost less. It seems this governer does have some clue, but really laptops are a magnificent waste of money, which could otherwise be spent on medical subsidies, education (ok, REAL education), the poor/homeless, or just being given back to the taxpayer. You will hate high-tech in the classroom once you get a job and realize how much of your income goes to the school district, which you yourself don't use, and you have no children, but have to pay anyway.
Oh, it just like a *male* to whine and cry....
CompuServe? That still *exists*?? No need to respond, it obviously must...but I assumed it had died its well earned death long ago.
And go straight to jail when the owner complains about your intrusion! Brilliant!
A better idea is to pick up the phone or email the idiot...maybe the email could be automated.
There was a similar study simulating prisons, in the 70s...I think it was done by Berkeley, or one of those schools in California. Anyway, they got a bunch of undergrads and completely randomly separated them into "prisoners" and "guards". The experiment was amazing: the guards eventually became sadistic and really mean to the prisoners, employing punishment, and rewards for good behavior...the prisoners squabbled and fought each other, became depressed, revolted. I think they had to call it off because people were becoming suicidal - completely forgetting that it was all *an experiment*, they really thought they were a prisoner, or that as a guard it was their duty to "stick it" to the prisoners...even though these were the same people that would have been studying and going out together just two weeks before. I think PBS had a show on about this. Totally fascinating.
Mod parent down: -100000 brain fart
"Cyber Youth"
"Big Brother Youth"
"Hitler Youth"
...
I think the "Youth" should be able to make up their own minds how they want to contribute to society. Not be used as a tool for ruling elites.
Bah...that's my little rant.
Even better - wind power is proving pretty efficient without the nasty side effect of having to create awkward solar cells, creating/disposing toxic chemicals, etc.
Wind power is a viable alternative but the government, heavily lobbied by the status-quo energy industry, just wont throw money into alternative technologies, like it does into petroleum based research & development etc.
$5 per month is still cheaper than upgrading to a new Windows OS every 2 years.
We are at war with terrorism. We have always been at war with terrorism. Boot lace supplies are up 3.5% this year.
The UI for changing file type registrations is not the issue. A court can't order that this be made more intuitive (what's "intuitive"?). However, a court CAN order that Microsoft applications play by the same rules as third party applications and don't get any special preference. For instance, a court can order that preinstalled Microsoft applications DON'T get to commandeer file associations by default - just leave them *undefined* until the application launches first. This is what every other third party application has to do at install, or runtime. Why should Microsoft get a special privilege. There is no technical barrier to this (or at least there shouldn't be one), and if there is one, it only underscores Microsoft's ugly integration and promotion of its own applications. If Microsoft wants to own certain file types, it should have to compete with everybody else on a level playing field - not commandeer them beforehand and then force everybody else to try to take them away. The author briefly touches on this point at the end of the article, but is mostly caught up in the muddy UI issue.