What's funny is that people have been saying that for YEARS.
I used to use Enlightenment back in the day (and loved it) and even looked into helping out on the E17 effort several years ago. The problem is that they are a VERY tight nit group of developers and the way they completely throw out portions of their code (including core libraries) and refactor them at will makes it REALLY tough to get into the code.
I am not trying to put them down in any way. They are doing awesome work... just doing it slowly and in their own corner. Nothing wrong with that, but we are still going to have to wait for a while before we see it packaged up with our favorite distro.
One of the reasons open source has become what it has is because of users. Users are an integral part of any open source project... without them the project will remain buggy and stove-piped.... with them bugs will be found and features will be added.
I am constantly trying to move friends and family to open source products... not only for their benifit but also for the benefit of the projects themselves. Whether or not this is "the right thing to do" is up for grabs... but it makes me happy to see my wife using Firefox and (on the odd occasion that it crashes) clicking the "Submit" button on the crash reporting screen. That is enough reason for me to evangelize.
I was thinking about this same thing the other day...
AMD claims that you can drop the dual-core procs right into existing motherboards... does this mean that a 4-way Opteron system will be 8-way capable with dual cores?
I knew when I wrote that sentence that anal slashdotters everywhere were going to have a field day;-)
I'm talking about 99.9999% of the software out there will do absolutely nothing to your hardware.
All these posts are actually part of the problem! All users hear about is "DONT RUN ANYTHING CAUSE IT _COULD_ FUCK UP YOUR WORLD!" and then they're scared to do ANYTHING themselves... which actually contributes to the problem because doing things yourself includes things like installing anti-spyware programs, firewalls and alternate browsers.
I know you were just trying to give some extra info... and you are correct that there is a TINY slice of software out there that (besides viruses) no normal house-mom is going to ever come into contact with... that COULD do some damage under odd circumstances with a full moon in the sixth quadrant.
The point is that all of that junk is overplayed and users need to relax and explore... while keeping good backups;-)
I wholeheartedly agree with all you wrote... but let me throw some more fat on the fire...
I think people are too afraid of their computers. Let me explain... I was just last night helping my wife (over the phone) fix her parents computer. It had erotic popups all over the place and the computer had ground to a halt (only took about 5 minutes for the computer to stop responding after a reboot). This was a particularly nasty situation.
I had given her a CD with SpyBot and Adaware and Firefox on it to take with her (she was going to visit for easter)... the problem was whenever she would try to run either SpyBot or Adaware the computer would restart (maybe some adware was detecting it? I seriously don't know).
So what's the solution? I had her get all the documents they wanted to keep off the computer and onto a CD (luckily the computer would work long enough to get this done)... and then I walked her through resetting the (Dell) computer back to factory defaults.
In working with her over the phone (she is in NO way computer savvy... just a good user) I noticed that she was always reluctant to do ANYTHING without me telling her EXACTLY what to do. Occasionally (not familiar with their computer) I didn't know EXACTLY how to get passed a certain screen and I would just tell her take a look at what she was seeing and make a choice. Finally after doing this several times I told her "You CANT break it! We're wiping the computer clean! Just choose something and if it doesn't work we can start over!"
She is not alone. I find often that people are reluctant to explore their computers. If you've got all your documents backed up what is the worst that could happen? There is NO way to (physically) hurt the computer with software. As long as you have reinstallation CDs JUST GO FOR IT!
I'm in a clan that has several younger members... because of this I get exposed to their Netspeak. I find that I often out-pace them in typing though, even with all their shortcuts. If schools would just teach proper typing classes then it wouldn't be a problem.
Last time I checked I typed around 150 WPM... so no need to shorten words (In fact I type just about as fast as I can think of the words anyway - so typing any faster would just be a waste).
I recently had a similar experience to "highlighting of what you're looking at" and I enjoyed it.
It came with the new Xorg+New Nvidia Drivers+KDE Beta... with those three things you can turn on transparency where every window EXCEPT the one that is currently in focus is transparent.
Combine this with "Focus follows mouse" and it basically "highlights" the thing you are currently working on... while everything else melts into the background... literally!
If they integrated this with flat panels I could see it being useful for the only thing that was at full brightness is the window that is currently active... while the rest has been dimmed. I think this is pretty close to what the research in this story did (except it looks like they might have been even more fine grained than that).
Not only would it be a usability improvement... but also a savings in power. I'm interested to see if they can bring it to market!
What I usually do is just hit Ctrl+T and get a new tab (which in turn has a blank address bar... and puts the cursor in the address bar as well).
This isn't quite the same thing but usually serves my purpose... I usually do this when I've highlight-copied something in Linux and if I were to click in the address bar it would highlight the current address... thus overwriting what I was intending to paste...
At any rate... Ctrl+T... new tab... blank address.
Project Director Paul Moore said that Steve is now burning up about 102 lbs of fuel per hour and that he had the ability to glide nearly 200 miles, "but only in an emergency."
?
Or are you just questioning whether or not that is possible?
They update every monday-wednesday-friday... it's been this way for years...
Usually the comic is uploaded early in the morning... and is available before the post by Tycho to the front page.
They VERY RARELY deviate from this system... even when they are away at conventions and stuff they still upload sketches and statements every monday-wednesday-friday.
That doesn't sound like "sporadic at best" to me....
I based it on a slew of benchmarks.... and not even from that particular article... that was YOUR article;-)
But I do think the Doom3 bench is a good indicator of the future (just because it is so hard on cards)... regardless of 3d API.
Fact of the matter is that OpenGL is really important to me anyway. When I'm not gaming I'm using linux... which is opengl only. All of the 3d code I've written (mostly visualization for simulations) was all opengl... So if you get right down to it OpenGL performance is important to me...
At any rate... it's obvious that you're just trying to toss some monkey poo around here... so I'll move on.
Core? I'm not so worried about which core my chip is using... I just want the best performance for the price. I'm not overclocking anything... so as long as it's stable with the default heatsink... I don't care about new advances in power consumption or anything.
Let's look at the current prices for some of these chips at pricewatch:
Now just looking at these prices.... where is the jump? On my budget $120 to go from the 3000+ to the 3500+ was a good idea... but to go up another $360 wasn't... so I found my sweet spot.
And... fairly small performance difference for the price margin.
So take these two things together and I bought a reasonably priced CPU that was just marginally less capable than the fastest one on the market (without getting into EE's and FX's)... yes I did my research.
As for your comment on SLI not giving almost double performance... it's obvious that SLI gives better results when the graphics hardware is more stressed... like you mention, higher resolutions is one way to do that... and you are correct that 1280x1024 doesn't tax a 6800GT too badly... WITH THE CURRENT CROP OF GAMES.
Note that I didn't buy two of these NOW because I don't need it... NOW. But in the future when the 6800 is starting to look sluggish (yes, it will happen even at 1280x1024) adding another 6800GT will give close to double the performance... even at 1280x1024.
For evidence of this I turn to your same set of benchmarks. Look at the Doom3 benchmark:
It is well known that Doom3 is harder on hardware (and yes I realize it favors Nvidia a little as well) than HL2. Now whether that is because HL2 is more awesomly (is that a word?) coded is up for debate. The fact of the matter is that Doom3 is more difficult to run at high frame rates.
Look at the 1024x768 with AA and AF Benchmark. The SLI speedup is around 30 Frames or about 50%. Not bad. Now look at the 1600x1200... the speedup is right around %90 (almost double). Somewhere inbetween that would be 1280x1024.
I submit that this benchmark shows that games in the future (the 1600x1200) that tax the hardware more will give a close to double speedup. At any rate it will be way more than some %15...
As for Dual-core... I said in my original post that I want that for compiling. It will directly speedup (almost double) my parrallel "makes"... which is extremely important to me (I will be in grad school getting a degree in Computational Engineering about that time... so compiling large Finite Element codes will happen frequently).
I'm not worried about what it does for gaming. The SLI is futureproofing my gaming... the 939 dual cores are future-proofing my compiling (and other parallel capable CPU intensive tasks... like video encoding).
So... I'm not sure what you're arguing with about dual-cores... I never claimed they helped out gaming.
It's fairly obvious from the tone of your post that you won't ever see that SLI can be a good thing for upgradeability... so all of this probably fell on deaf ears. But I hope you atleast understand how some of us are not "Asinine" for wanting this type of technology....
I just upgraded my computer after having the same one for 4 years... which as a CS major (well, I just graduated) is a pretty long time. How do I make my computer stretch so far? Buy upgradeable solutions up front... and that's exactly what I did this time.
I bought an SLI mobo (MSI K8N Platinum SLI)... put the slowest 939 pin Athlon64 I could find (3500+) (the price ramps up significantly passed this point).... then I bought _ONE_ Geforce6800 GT and 1GB of RAM in two sticks (leaving two slots open)... and finally a 535 watt SLI power supply.... Then hooked it all up to a new 19" Flat Panel.
All in all I paid about $1600... which is a little bit but let's look at the upgradeability.
First of all there's the obvious SLI slot. In about a year when 6800GT's are $150... I'll be able to nearly DOUBLE my performance in games. That's a pretty good upgrade.
I left two RAM slots open so I can jam another set of 1GB sticks in there in a year and have 3GB.
The newly announced dual core chips from AMD will work in my current 939 socket... with a BIOS upgrade... so I will be able to again almost DOUBLE my CPU performance (blah threads, blah, I do a lot of compiling and stuff so it will be a big upgrade for me)
So there you have it. I didn't spend a million dollars... but my computer is REALLY future proof. I probably won't do another $1500 upgrade until about 3 to 4 years from now... and like I mentioned I'm a fairly heavy computer user.
So for me SLI is future proofing my system, and I, for one, am grateful!
I guess it all depends on why you're using KDE in the first place... but for me one of the large reasons is all of the options...
I like to have a perfectly configured system built from the ground up for myself. I take the time to go through each option and select the things that I like.
This is one of the reasons I can't use Windows, Gnome or OSX.... there is just simply a lack of options.
Now I understand that "regular" users don't like being confronted with as many options... But... "regular" users also don't go looking for them. KDE gives a good set of default options (especially if you pay attention during the Wizard that pops up the first time you start KDE)... and for "regular" users they will be happy with that and not worry about it.
My point is that options are never bad. Give a sane set of defaults, but leave the options in there for us power users. A dumb interface is not necessarily a good one.
I've been rolling my own kernel for years now (even applying external patches that I want) and have never had a problem with the Nvidia drivers. (ok, so when the 2.6 kernel first came out you had to apply a patch to the nvidia modules to get it to work with the new kernel... but that was minor)
They ship the drivers with the source code to their module interfaces... which get's compiled for your specific kernel when you install the drivers.
People love to take a whack at Nvidia for not opening their drivers, but in reality they have opened them as much as possible (go read through the module source, there is a LOT that is open in there) - while still retaining their main algorithms in a binary only format. The fact of the matter is that Nvidia cards and drivers "just work".
The one time I use them is for looking up car repair/parts shops.
I like to read the ads in the yellow pages for these types of businesses. ie I was trying to find some new tires for my car so I opened up the yellow pages and all of the tire places had adds telling me what types of tires they carry... so I knew which ones to call (I was looking for specific tires).
But, I agree, I don't use the yellowpages very often... only if I need a good smattering of local stores for a specific purpose.
The thing is why would a third party client want to do away with those features? For me those features are two of the reasons to use Exeeem in the first place... stipping them out would make me not use Exeem.
As it is right now those two feautres work well... I'm sure they've thought about the complexities of doing a distributed commenting and voting system... they seem to have thought about everything else.
I'm still looking for reasons why this app isn't the one I'm going to use. I would really like to say "Eh, it's not an open protocol so I'm not going to use it" but fact of the matter is that Exeem (atleast right now) really does work.... so I'm probably going to use it.
Now that I've downloaded it and tried it out I can say that there are a couple of (really neat!) ways to rate torrents.
Firstly.. after you download a file you can right click on it and "Vote OK" or "Vote NOT OK". It collects the percentage of OKs and displays that as a rating next to the file while you are browsing around.
Next there is also an awesome built in commenting system. You can leave your comments on a file and you can also view all comments made about that file... very interesting indeed!
So using these two methods it should be pretty easy to weed out bad torrents....
I'm pretty sure that in the webcast from the main exeem developer he mentioned something about being able to rate torrents directly in the interface... this way bad torrents get pushed out of the system quickly... I don't know if it's implemented yet, but it sounds like a good idea to me.
That's why I said redirect you to a... page that redirects you (via javascript)... to the securebank.com. But you're right that a browser still might give a warning that you're being auto-redirected to an SSL site... but I think that would be browser dependent.
I've been wonering how hard it would be to get a cert (from verisign) for something like "securebank.com" (where bank is the name of the bank you want to hijack) and use that certificate instead....
I know you would then have actually given Verisign a name and address to go with the Cert... but by the time anyone figured it out you would be out of the country (or maybe you could even spoof these somehow).
I don't know anyone that would take a close enough look at the certificate to see that it wasn't just plain "bank.com" and even if they did they would probably just think that "securebank.com" was the name of their secure online server...
So you use DNS to redirect them to a site (you are controlling the DNS since they connected to your WAP) that redirects them to securebank.com that looks exactly like it should - you get no browser warnings (you do have a valid Verisign Cert for the address they are connecting to) and they go to sign in.... and you have them.
Anyone see a hole? How hard would it be to get a cert like that??
It says in the story that even IE supports a lot of this stuff... including page breaks and margins... I haven't tried it myself but it sounds promising!
Slashdot Mirror
What's funny is that people have been saying that for YEARS.
I used to use Enlightenment back in the day (and loved it) and even looked into helping out on the E17 effort several years ago. The problem is that they are a VERY tight nit group of developers and the way they completely throw out portions of their code (including core libraries) and refactor them at will makes it REALLY tough to get into the code.
I am not trying to put them down in any way. They are doing awesome work... just doing it slowly and in their own corner. Nothing wrong with that, but we are still going to have to wait for a while before we see it packaged up with our favorite distro.
Friedmud
One of the reasons open source has become what it has is because of users. Users are an integral part of any open source project... without them the project will remain buggy and stove-piped.... with them bugs will be found and features will be added.
I am constantly trying to move friends and family to open source products... not only for their benifit but also for the benefit of the projects themselves. Whether or not this is "the right thing to do" is up for grabs... but it makes me happy to see my wife using Firefox and (on the odd occasion that it crashes) clicking the "Submit" button on the crash reporting screen. That is enough reason for me to evangelize.
Friedmud
I was thinking about this same thing the other day...
AMD claims that you can drop the dual-core procs right into existing motherboards... does this mean that a 4-way Opteron system will be 8-way capable with dual cores?
That would be a nice feature indeed.
Friedmud
Sigh....
;-)
;-)
I knew when I wrote that sentence that anal slashdotters everywhere were going to have a field day
I'm talking about 99.9999% of the software out there will do absolutely nothing to your hardware.
All these posts are actually part of the problem! All users hear about is "DONT RUN ANYTHING CAUSE IT _COULD_ FUCK UP YOUR WORLD!" and then they're scared to do ANYTHING themselves... which actually contributes to the problem because doing things yourself includes things like installing anti-spyware programs, firewalls and alternate browsers.
I know you were just trying to give some extra info... and you are correct that there is a TINY slice of software out there that (besides viruses) no normal house-mom is going to ever come into contact with... that COULD do some damage under odd circumstances with a full moon in the sixth quadrant.
The point is that all of that junk is overplayed and users need to relax and explore... while keeping good backups
Friedmud
I wholeheartedly agree with all you wrote... but let me throw some more fat on the fire...
I think people are too afraid of their computers. Let me explain... I was just last night helping my wife (over the phone) fix her parents computer. It had erotic popups all over the place and the computer had ground to a halt (only took about 5 minutes for the computer to stop responding after a reboot). This was a particularly nasty situation.
I had given her a CD with SpyBot and Adaware and Firefox on it to take with her (she was going to visit for easter)... the problem was whenever she would try to run either SpyBot or Adaware the computer would restart (maybe some adware was detecting it? I seriously don't know).
So what's the solution? I had her get all the documents they wanted to keep off the computer and onto a CD (luckily the computer would work long enough to get this done)... and then I walked her through resetting the (Dell) computer back to factory defaults.
In working with her over the phone (she is in NO way computer savvy... just a good user) I noticed that she was always reluctant to do ANYTHING without me telling her EXACTLY what to do. Occasionally (not familiar with their computer) I didn't know EXACTLY how to get passed a certain screen and I would just tell her take a look at what she was seeing and make a choice. Finally after doing this several times I told her "You CANT break it! We're wiping the computer clean! Just choose something and if it doesn't work we can start over!"
She is not alone. I find often that people are reluctant to explore their computers. If you've got all your documents backed up what is the worst that could happen? There is NO way to (physically) hurt the computer with software. As long as you have reinstallation CDs JUST GO FOR IT!
Ok - long story... I apologize...
Friedmud
I agree.
I'm in a clan that has several younger members... because of this I get exposed to their Netspeak. I find that I often out-pace them in typing though, even with all their shortcuts. If schools would just teach proper typing classes then it wouldn't be a problem.
Last time I checked I typed around 150 WPM... so no need to shorten words (In fact I type just about as fast as I can think of the words anyway - so typing any faster would just be a waste).
Friedmud
I recently had a similar experience to "highlighting of what you're looking at" and I enjoyed it.
It came with the new Xorg+New Nvidia Drivers+KDE Beta... with those three things you can turn on transparency where every window EXCEPT the one that is currently in focus is transparent.
Combine this with "Focus follows mouse" and it basically "highlights" the thing you are currently working on... while everything else melts into the background... literally!
If they integrated this with flat panels I could see it being useful for the only thing that was at full brightness is the window that is currently active... while the rest has been dimmed. I think this is pretty close to what the research in this story did (except it looks like they might have been even more fine grained than that).
Not only would it be a usability improvement... but also a savings in power. I'm interested to see if they can bring it to market!
Friedmud
What I usually do is just hit Ctrl+T and get a new tab (which in turn has a blank address bar... and puts the cursor in the address bar as well).
This isn't quite the same thing but usually serves my purpose... I usually do this when I've highlight-copied something in Linux and if I were to click in the address bar it would highlight the current address... thus overwriting what I was intending to paste...
At any rate... Ctrl+T... new tab... blank address.
Friedmud
Are you questioning my assertion?
r sday_8_am_Update.jsp
http://www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com/News/Thu
Project Director Paul Moore said that Steve is now burning up about 102 lbs of fuel per hour and that he had the ability to glide nearly 200 miles, "but only in an emergency."
?
Or are you just questioning whether or not that is possible?
Friedmud
I just read on the site that the plane could glide 200 miles... but they noted that was only for emergency use ;-)
200 miles is quite a ways.
Friedmud
Use:
Demonoid.com
They just recently relocated to a place where it isn't illegal... so I don't think it will be going down any time soon.
Friedmud
?
They update every monday-wednesday-friday... it's been this way for years...
Usually the comic is uploaded early in the morning... and is available before the post by Tycho to the front page.
They VERY RARELY deviate from this system... even when they are away at conventions and stuff they still upload sketches and statements every monday-wednesday-friday.
That doesn't sound like "sporadic at best" to me....
Friedmud
Now you're just slinging crap.
;-)
I based it on a slew of benchmarks.... and not even from that particular article... that was YOUR article
But I do think the Doom3 bench is a good indicator of the future (just because it is so hard on cards)... regardless of 3d API.
Fact of the matter is that OpenGL is really important to me anyway. When I'm not gaming I'm using linux... which is opengl only. All of the 3d code I've written (mostly visualization for simulations) was all opengl... So if you get right down to it OpenGL performance is important to me...
At any rate... it's obvious that you're just trying to toss some monkey poo around here... so I'll move on.
Friedmud
Core? I'm not so worried about which core my chip is using... I just want the best performance for the price. I'm not overclocking anything... so as long as it's stable with the default heatsink... I don't care about new advances in power consumption or anything.
0 41222/vga_charts-06.html
Let's look at the current prices for some of these chips at pricewatch:
$624 - Athlon 64 4000
$261 - Athlon 64 3500 939pin
$180 - Athlon 64 3200 939pin
$146 - Athlon 64 3000 939pin
Now just looking at these prices.... where is the jump? On my budget $120 to go from the 3000+ to the 3500+ was a good idea... but to go up another $360 wasn't... so I found my sweet spot.
Now let's look at the performance numbers.
Here are some application benchmarks from a HardOCP review of my mobo... note the fairly small difference between the 3500+ and 4000+
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDU=
And... here are the gaming benchmarks...
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDY=
And... fairly small performance difference for the price margin.
So take these two things together and I bought a reasonably priced CPU that was just marginally less capable than the fastest one on the market (without getting into EE's and FX's)... yes I did my research.
As for your comment on SLI not giving almost double performance... it's obvious that SLI gives better results when the graphics hardware is more stressed... like you mention, higher resolutions is one way to do that... and you are correct that 1280x1024 doesn't tax a 6800GT too badly... WITH THE CURRENT CROP OF GAMES.
Note that I didn't buy two of these NOW because I don't need it... NOW. But in the future when the 6800 is starting to look sluggish (yes, it will happen even at 1280x1024) adding another 6800GT will give close to double the performance... even at 1280x1024.
For evidence of this I turn to your same set of benchmarks. Look at the Doom3 benchmark:
http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20
It is well known that Doom3 is harder on hardware (and yes I realize it favors Nvidia a little as well) than HL2. Now whether that is because HL2 is more awesomly (is that a word?) coded is up for debate. The fact of the matter is that Doom3 is more difficult to run at high frame rates.
Look at the 1024x768 with AA and AF Benchmark. The SLI speedup is around 30 Frames or about 50%. Not bad. Now look at the 1600x1200... the speedup is right around %90 (almost double). Somewhere inbetween that would be 1280x1024.
I submit that this benchmark shows that games in the future (the 1600x1200) that tax the hardware more will give a close to double speedup. At any rate it will be way more than some %15...
As for Dual-core... I said in my original post that I want that for compiling. It will directly speedup (almost double) my parrallel "makes"... which is extremely important to me (I will be in grad school getting a degree in Computational Engineering about that time... so compiling large Finite Element codes will happen frequently).
I'm not worried about what it does for gaming. The SLI is futureproofing my gaming... the 939 dual cores are future-proofing my compiling (and other parallel capable CPU intensive tasks... like video encoding).
So... I'm not sure what you're arguing with about dual-cores... I never claimed they helped out gaming.
It's fairly obvious from the tone of your post that you won't ever see that SLI can be a good thing for upgradeability... so all of this probably fell on deaf ears. But I hope you atleast understand how some of us are not "Asinine" for wanting this type of technology....
Friedmud
I just upgraded my computer after having the same one for 4 years... which as a CS major (well, I just graduated) is a pretty long time. How do I make my computer stretch so far? Buy upgradeable solutions up front... and that's exactly what I did this time.
I bought an SLI mobo (MSI K8N Platinum SLI)... put the slowest 939 pin Athlon64 I could find (3500+) (the price ramps up significantly passed this point).... then I bought _ONE_ Geforce6800 GT and 1GB of RAM in two sticks (leaving two slots open)... and finally a 535 watt SLI power supply.... Then hooked it all up to a new 19" Flat Panel.
All in all I paid about $1600... which is a little bit but let's look at the upgradeability.
First of all there's the obvious SLI slot. In about a year when 6800GT's are $150... I'll be able to nearly DOUBLE my performance in games. That's a pretty good upgrade.
I left two RAM slots open so I can jam another set of 1GB sticks in there in a year and have 3GB.
The newly announced dual core chips from AMD will work in my current 939 socket... with a BIOS upgrade... so I will be able to again almost DOUBLE my CPU performance (blah threads, blah, I do a lot of compiling and stuff so it will be a big upgrade for me)
So there you have it. I didn't spend a million dollars... but my computer is REALLY future proof. I probably won't do another $1500 upgrade until about 3 to 4 years from now... and like I mentioned I'm a fairly heavy computer user.
So for me SLI is future proofing my system, and I, for one, am grateful!
Friedmud
I guess it all depends on why you're using KDE in the first place... but for me one of the large reasons is all of the options...
I like to have a perfectly configured system built from the ground up for myself. I take the time to go through each option and select the things that I like.
This is one of the reasons I can't use Windows, Gnome or OSX.... there is just simply a lack of options.
Now I understand that "regular" users don't like being confronted with as many options... But... "regular" users also don't go looking for them. KDE gives a good set of default options (especially if you pay attention during the Wizard that pops up the first time you start KDE)... and for "regular" users they will be happy with that and not worry about it.
My point is that options are never bad. Give a sane set of defaults, but leave the options in there for us power users. A dumb interface is not necessarily a good one.
Friedmud
This is absolute driblle.
I've been rolling my own kernel for years now (even applying external patches that I want) and have never had a problem with the Nvidia drivers. (ok, so when the 2.6 kernel first came out you had to apply a patch to the nvidia modules to get it to work with the new kernel... but that was minor)
They ship the drivers with the source code to their module interfaces... which get's compiled for your specific kernel when you install the drivers.
People love to take a whack at Nvidia for not opening their drivers, but in reality they have opened them as much as possible (go read through the module source, there is a LOT that is open in there) - while still retaining their main algorithms in a binary only format. The fact of the matter is that Nvidia cards and drivers "just work".
Friedmud
I would have to say that this post is one of the best I have read in a while. You summed it all up pretty nicely i'd say!
"Institutionalized Stupidity" is a great one liner!
Friedmud
The one time I use them is for looking up car repair/parts shops.
I like to read the ads in the yellow pages for these types of businesses. ie I was trying to find some new tires for my car so I opened up the yellow pages and all of the tire places had adds telling me what types of tires they carry... so I knew which ones to call (I was looking for specific tires).
But, I agree, I don't use the yellowpages very often... only if I need a good smattering of local stores for a specific purpose.
Friedmud
Ummmm ok.
The thing is why would a third party client want to do away with those features? For me those features are two of the reasons to use Exeeem in the first place... stipping them out would make me not use Exeem.
As it is right now those two feautres work well... I'm sure they've thought about the complexities of doing a distributed commenting and voting system... they seem to have thought about everything else.
I'm still looking for reasons why this app isn't the one I'm going to use. I would really like to say "Eh, it's not an open protocol so I'm not going to use it" but fact of the matter is that Exeem (atleast right now) really does work.... so I'm probably going to use it.
Friedmud
Now that I've downloaded it and tried it out I can say that there are a couple of (really neat!) ways to rate torrents.
Firstly.. after you download a file you can right click on it and "Vote OK" or "Vote NOT OK". It collects the percentage of OKs and displays that as a rating next to the file while you are browsing around.
Next there is also an awesome built in commenting system. You can leave your comments on a file and you can also view all comments made about that file... very interesting indeed!
So using these two methods it should be pretty easy to weed out bad torrents....
Friedmud
I'm pretty sure that in the webcast from the main exeem developer he mentioned something about being able to rate torrents directly in the interface... this way bad torrents get pushed out of the system quickly... I don't know if it's implemented yet, but it sounds like a good idea to me.
Friedmud
That's why I said redirect you to a... page that redirects you (via javascript)... to the securebank.com. But you're right that a browser still might give a warning that you're being auto-redirected to an SSL site... but I think that would be browser dependent.
Friedmud
"If the returned cert isn't from bank.com"
I've been wonering how hard it would be to get a cert (from verisign) for something like "securebank.com" (where bank is the name of the bank you want to hijack) and use that certificate instead....
I know you would then have actually given Verisign a name and address to go with the Cert... but by the time anyone figured it out you would be out of the country (or maybe you could even spoof these somehow).
I don't know anyone that would take a close enough look at the certificate to see that it wasn't just plain "bank.com" and even if they did they would probably just think that "securebank.com" was the name of their secure online server...
So you use DNS to redirect them to a site (you are controlling the DNS since they connected to your WAP) that redirects them to securebank.com that looks exactly like it should - you get no browser warnings (you do have a valid Verisign Cert for the address they are connecting to) and they go to sign in.... and you have them.
Anyone see a hole? How hard would it be to get a cert like that??
Friedmud
It says in the story that even IE supports a lot of this stuff... including page breaks and margins... I haven't tried it myself but it sounds promising!
Friedmud