Running Windows XP on a 400Mhz PII with SCSI RAID underneath and it flies. Linux/X11 does not on the same hardware, regardless of optimizations, distros, windowing managers, etc.
There are a number of things you have to ensure:
- you're running a recent kernel, optimized for your hardware - you're using an accelerated driver (this makes a HUGE difference). If you have recent hardware, this means running a binary driver which isn't likely to be installed by default. - you have dma enabled (you'd be surprised how many linux machines don't have dma turned on for the drives, which results in only a tenth of normal drive performance) - you're not loading more software than you have ram for (same rule as windows, run a small enough set of software so it doesn't have to swap in and out parts constantly). This happens less nowadays, but it used to be that a "complete" install would leave a linux system almost unusable because of all the services filling up the ram.
My personal experience is that X is fast and responsive if it and the linux install it runs on are configured correctly. I have an athlon 700 running kde3 which is extremely responsive. OK, so it's anecdotal evidence yet again, but the fact that people do have responsive X systems does say something about X's potential for performance, right?
By the way. Don't switch distro's to try to fix problems. Only switch distro's because you like the underlying philosophy of the other distro better. It's my personal experience that any distro can be made to do anything any other distro can be made to do. It may not be as easy, but it can always be done. After all, underneath they're all running the same code.
I'm against software patents, but blocking patents altogether seems like a pretty bad idea to me.
Why?
I'm serious. Why would getting rid of all patents be a bad idea? Yes, I know, I know, they benefit society. But do they really? Do you know them to be a benefit, or do you take it on faith because they have been telling you all your life?
Maybe someone can respond with a credible study in support of the patent system. I'm still looking for one.
Don't expect exhaustive feature lists soon. The purpose of this post was to communicate to large clients that they shouldn't switch to firefox because IE7 will be here "soon". It's classic tried and true delaying strategy from MS. Anyone who has been around long enough has seen them do this tons of times. They probably don't even know exactly what features IE7 will have. All they know is firefox is getting good enough clients are considering switching away from MS products, and they need to stop those clients from doing that.
First we make a prediction that some identified event will have an effect, then we assess the data to see the actual outcome. Though some people suggest that we should do so, we never "find a deviation [and then] check the news"
So, basically, instead of finding a deviation and checking the news, they check the news and then find a deviation. There is no difference there. You're highly likely to find deviations if you look for them. What you need to do, as some other posters have already pointed out, is calculate/measure how often spikes happen, how often world events happen, and how often that would mean there would be a correlation, and see if you get a different degree of correlation from your actual results than what your measurements/calcutions would suggest. Have they done that, I wonder?
The appropriate stance is "I'll believe it when they prove it", not "that can't be true."
No, the appropriate stance is "I'll believe it when after a thorough vetting by the wider scientific community everyone fails to disprove it, but I still won't have anything more than personal beliefs on my side in support of this issue".
Most of science is based on the principle of postulating theories, and trying to disprove them. That's why it takes decades, if not centuries, for new scientific theories to become accepted. And that's why the peer review process is so important. It is logically impossible to prove any theorem true through supporting evidence. Any branch of science where you can't reason logically from factual first principles (like physics, and everything descending from it, like biology, chemistry,...), has this basic characteristic of unprovability.
As for these guys, it's quite simple. They need to postulate a disprovable theory on exactly what this box does, and then they have to try to disprove it, and most importantly, bring everything they have to the scientific community and have them peer review it. In my opinion, this whole thing is just going to fall apart when they do that. "Predicting" two events in several years worth of time is perfectly attributable to the extremes of randomness, which is how I expect this thing to be explained, even if it actually did it.
They'd have to do that for the entire HTML control and any application that used the HTML control, including Windows Explorer. You'd end up with the whole OS in a sandbox.
Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily, but it does kind of defeta the purpose.
No, you'd end up with a compartmentalized OS, with every process having its own sandbox, regulating what it can and cannot do, but fooling the program into thinking it can do it all, unless it uses the new security api to discover its true permissions. See the linux program fakeroot for an example, which fools programs into thinking they're running as root, while they are not, and makes it so they can't truly access the things they think they can access. There's no reason something comparable couldn't be done on windows, except that it would be a lot of engineering.
Re:Parent is flamebait and trollish. Mod down.
on
LokiTorrent Shut Down
·
· Score: 1
Just because you have a twisted sense of entitlement does not make you right....
That's basically what the MPAA did in this case, and while they are an organization akin to the mob (I think we agree here), they've managed to have all the laws written on their side.
So, um, what side are you arguing on here? Who is at fault? The MPAA for bribing politicians into passing immoral laws, or the citizenry for immorally breaking the justified laws of the MPAA?
Theft is deprivation. Your example is deprivation, because the store is deprived of one cd, the parent's example is not deprivation, because adobe has lots no revenue from him using a pirate copy of photoshop. So, by extension, what the parent was talking about is not theft.
Now, sure, you can define theft as obtaining something someone else doesn't want you to obtain, but in that case I'm going to say bush stole the presidency, regardless of the electoral outcome.
Microsoft's need to remain compatible with apps that ran on the old DOS-based Windows means that they have to accomodate programs that assumed they were effectively root!
There's no reason you couldn't build a virtual machine or emulation layer to run those apps inside of that completely blocks an app from messing up your system. Wine does that exact same thing (though admittedly, they haven't focused much on security).
Well, ok, so it would cost a lot of developer time without paying itself back in added revenue, which is why they wouldn't do it, but still...
But "evolution" does address the origin of life, because that is how the word is used (most people think evolution makes god redundant, since it explains life). The Theory of Evolution is the more specific one regarding speciation. Sorry to be a nitpick, but you were also being a nitpick.
Only, it doesn't. If evolution is taught as an explanation of the origins of life, then it is being taught wrongly. It does not attempt to make claims about life's origins, nor should it. It's imho not a theological theory, since it does not claim or disclaim that God created life.
Besides, in my personal opinion anti-evolution is a political tool. It's a form of misdirection designed to keep people in line inside their religious community, and focus their attention in manageable ways so they wouldn't start asking themselves why the core principle of Jesus' teachings (helping those in need) is so ignored by today's political establishment (to the point that a fifth of america is living below the poverty line, despite it being feasible to all but erase poverty if the political will was there). Same thing with abortion. It's all politics.
Windows has indeed gotten stable enough that the jokes about instability sound tired, but it's not bulletproof yet. Just last week I got a bluescreen from the adobe svg viewer 6 beta by loading an svg file that was 100 percent to spec. A simple browser plugin shouldn't be able to do a division by zero in kernel space (which is what I surmise caused the bluescreen), even if it is only beta.
And ofcourse, there is still the file locking problem you mention that causes the need for a reboot when some types of updates are installed. If only windows had inodes.
Apple invented the hard drive based consumer mp3 player. Before that the only people with HD-based mp3 players were geeks or early adopters, with players that catered to that crowd (advanced recording features, large physical dimensions to afford large disk sizes, extra geek stuff like ethernet interfaces,...). The ipod made it possible to give your mom an mp3 player and have her make use of it with minimal guidance. This is because the entire "ipod experience" (and I know that's a laden term) fits together smoothly, from the first time you turn it on, over how you use itunes to put music on there, to actually putting on an album during daily use. There are no "tricks" you need to figure out. It all just works. This is incidentally why the windows ipod market didn't really take off until itunes became available on windows. The software before that was so horrible my mind has blanked out its name. Ah, yes, now I remember, musicmatch, which was anything but. *shivers*
I have yet to see another HD-based mp3 player that has the entire package: a good player UI, good PC music management software, and an easy way to get almost any sort of music legally from the internet.
You don't know if a site requires IE features until you're actually in the middle of parsing/rendering it (which is a pipelined operation in modern browsers).
Personally, I think what would be better is to modify the gecko engine to have a validation framework, so it becomes possible to put a smiley face on the statusbar that smiles for standards compliant sites, looks average for sites that aren't standards compliant but still are perfectly renderable, and a frown for sites that can not be rendered in a browser that wishes to be standards compliant.
There's a bug for this in bugzilla, but it was marked WONTFIX because there is no validation framework in gecko, and nobody wants to spend the time adding one and getting it performant.
Oh, don't worry, if the ISP's start switching browsers, firefox will become the marketleader. IIRC, once upon a time ISP's distributed netscape by default, IE made valiant inroads, and then the ISP's started bundling IE which led to a mad marketshare rush that left netscape a niche player. I think firefox is edging up to that marketshare tipping point now, where it's going to become the default browser to bundle with things, and thereby getting automatic installs on many, many machines.
Though admittedly, there is much less reason to bundle a browser with your service/software nowadays, when every OS has a browser bundled in by default.
It's caused by unlucky timing. It depends on your connection type, distance to the slashdot servers, time of day, phase of the moon, and many, many other factors. It's a bug in the gecko engine that is only triggered by non-standard pages, like slashdot, though this doesn't happen uniquely on slashdot. If I'm not mistaken, it will be fixed in the next version of firefox.
Personally I think it's a good thing that slashdot has such hairy html code. The first thing prospective browser makers do is try to render slashdot. And since slashdot puts up a decent fight against being rendered correctly, that makes for better browsers.
xpi will not be the way these things install themselves. It's much easier to simply make an executable and put it on a site, enticing users to run the file after downloading. After all, messing with the xpi whitelist is more work than clicking a few links and having an installer open.
Unless a security flaw is found in xpi which allows circumventing the whitelist ofcourse.
FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW, you can just choose to not start it. I'm tempted to say your better off with Debian on a lower end G4 PowerPC system like the mini though.
Though you honestly think debian is a better desktop system than mac os x? I mean, mac os x seems to have the best of both worlds. All the mac software and all the X11 software, running inside the same environment using the same window manager.
Inertia my friend. Inertia is the reason my firewall is still running a 2.2 kernel, even though it's slow, doesn't support smart firewalling and can't combine software raid and journaling without corrupting the filesystem.
I understand heat will kill a drive very quickly, but supposing you could adequately cool the drive, would keeping it spinning really hurt it? AFAIK the problem is not keeping the drive spinning, it's spinning it up again, and again, and again.
Sticking a tilted window in a corner isn't particularly useful, because you'd have to tilt it yourself, place it yourself, retrieve it yourself, and then tilt it back to normal. Too much work, too little benefit.
Flipping over a window to get more information is basically a tabbed dialog interface, which with minimal screen real estate wasted you can do right now (admittedly without the cool flipping effects).
Honestly, if 3D interfaces on 2D screens actually let you do more work, they would be all over the place. 3D interfaces are only "faster" on true 3D screens with true 3D manipulating devices (like gloves and so on).
Though I admit 3D interfaces look like they could kick your ass without even trying.
- It requires learning a new way of programming. - It's not available on all systems.
Unless and until this stuff is available as os-level api's where a single function does all the work for you from any programming language, and where it falls back to software-based algorithms if no appropriate gpu is available this stuff isn't going to go anywhere.
but to confuse "their", "there" and "they're", and especially the last, is to be completely unaware of what one is actually saying
No, because when you're typing a stream of thought you're thinking in audio and relying on your brain to subconsciously convert that to type. At least that's how most people do it. Obviously people who were born deaf don't think in audio. I agree it's a consequence of not paying much attention to what you're typing (and so appears more often when people are lazy/tired), but more often that not the speaker actually does know the difference between the terms perfectly, but his brain is messing up the conversion to typed text.
- I can not conceive that at that point in time anything that used transistors was even remotely as cool as the mac. It's a sad testament to the power of low prices and commodity software that the mac didn't do better.
Slashdot Mirror
Running Windows XP on a 400Mhz PII with SCSI RAID underneath and it flies. Linux/X11 does not on the same hardware, regardless of optimizations, distros, windowing managers, etc.
There are a number of things you have to ensure:
- you're running a recent kernel, optimized for your hardware
- you're using an accelerated driver (this makes a HUGE difference). If you have recent hardware, this means running a binary driver which isn't likely to be installed by default.
- you have dma enabled (you'd be surprised how many linux machines don't have dma turned on for the drives, which results in only a tenth of normal drive performance)
- you're not loading more software than you have ram for (same rule as windows, run a small enough set of software so it doesn't have to swap in and out parts constantly). This happens less nowadays, but it used to be that a "complete" install would leave a linux system almost unusable because of all the services filling up the ram.
My personal experience is that X is fast and responsive if it and the linux install it runs on are configured correctly. I have an athlon 700 running kde3 which is extremely responsive. OK, so it's anecdotal evidence yet again, but the fact that people do have responsive X systems does say something about X's potential for performance, right?
By the way. Don't switch distro's to try to fix problems. Only switch distro's because you like the underlying philosophy of the other distro better. It's my personal experience that any distro can be made to do anything any other distro can be made to do. It may not be as easy, but it can always be done. After all, underneath they're all running the same code.
I'm against software patents, but blocking patents altogether seems like a pretty bad idea to me.
Why?
I'm serious. Why would getting rid of all patents be a bad idea? Yes, I know, I know, they benefit society. But do they really? Do you know them to be a benefit, or do you take it on faith because they have been telling you all your life?
Maybe someone can respond with a credible study in support of the patent system. I'm still looking for one.
Don't expect exhaustive feature lists soon. The purpose of this post was to communicate to large clients that they shouldn't switch to firefox because IE7 will be here "soon". It's classic tried and true delaying strategy from MS. Anyone who has been around long enough has seen them do this tons of times. They probably don't even know exactly what features IE7 will have. All they know is firefox is getting good enough clients are considering switching away from MS products, and they need to stop those clients from doing that.
First we make a prediction that some identified event will have an effect, then we assess the data to see the actual outcome. Though some people suggest that we should do so, we never "find a deviation [and then] check the news"
So, basically, instead of finding a deviation and checking the news, they check the news and then find a deviation. There is no difference there. You're highly likely to find deviations if you look for them. What you need to do, as some other posters have already pointed out, is calculate/measure how often spikes happen, how often world events happen, and how often that would mean there would be a correlation, and see if you get a different degree of correlation from your actual results than what your measurements/calcutions would suggest. Have they done that, I wonder?
The appropriate stance is "I'll believe it when they prove it", not "that can't be true."
...), has this basic characteristic of unprovability.
No, the appropriate stance is "I'll believe it when after a thorough vetting by the wider scientific community everyone fails to disprove it, but I still won't have anything more than personal beliefs on my side in support of this issue".
Most of science is based on the principle of postulating theories, and trying to disprove them. That's why it takes decades, if not centuries, for new scientific theories to become accepted. And that's why the peer review process is so important. It is logically impossible to prove any theorem true through supporting evidence. Any branch of science where you can't reason logically from factual first principles (like physics, and everything descending from it, like biology, chemistry,
As for these guys, it's quite simple. They need to postulate a disprovable theory on exactly what this box does, and then they have to try to disprove it, and most importantly, bring everything they have to the scientific community and have them peer review it. In my opinion, this whole thing is just going to fall apart when they do that. "Predicting" two events in several years worth of time is perfectly attributable to the extremes of randomness, which is how I expect this thing to be explained, even if it actually did it.
They'd have to do that for the entire HTML control and any application that used the HTML control, including Windows Explorer. You'd end up with the whole OS in a sandbox.
Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily, but it does kind of defeta the purpose.
No, you'd end up with a compartmentalized OS, with every process having its own sandbox, regulating what it can and cannot do, but fooling the program into thinking it can do it all, unless it uses the new security api to discover its true permissions. See the linux program fakeroot for an example, which fools programs into thinking they're running as root, while they are not, and makes it so they can't truly access the things they think they can access. There's no reason something comparable couldn't be done on windows, except that it would be a lot of engineering.
Just because you have a twisted sense of entitlement does not make you right. ...
That's basically what the MPAA did in this case, and while they are an organization akin to the mob (I think we agree here), they've managed to have all the laws written on their side.
So, um, what side are you arguing on here? Who is at fault? The MPAA for bribing politicians into passing immoral laws, or the citizenry for immorally breaking the justified laws of the MPAA?
Theft is deprivation. Your example is deprivation, because the store is deprived of one cd, the parent's example is not deprivation, because adobe has lots no revenue from him using a pirate copy of photoshop. So, by extension, what the parent was talking about is not theft.
Now, sure, you can define theft as obtaining something someone else doesn't want you to obtain, but in that case I'm going to say bush stole the presidency, regardless of the electoral outcome.
Microsoft's need to remain compatible with apps that ran on the old DOS-based Windows means that they have to accomodate programs that assumed they were effectively root!
There's no reason you couldn't build a virtual machine or emulation layer to run those apps inside of that completely blocks an app from messing up your system. Wine does that exact same thing (though admittedly, they haven't focused much on security).
Well, ok, so it would cost a lot of developer time without paying itself back in added revenue, which is why they wouldn't do it, but still...
But "evolution" does address the origin of life, because that is how the word is used (most people think evolution makes god redundant, since it explains life). The Theory of Evolution is the more specific one regarding speciation. Sorry to be a nitpick, but you were also being a nitpick.
Only, it doesn't. If evolution is taught as an explanation of the origins of life, then it is being taught wrongly. It does not attempt to make claims about life's origins, nor should it. It's imho not a theological theory, since it does not claim or disclaim that God created life.
Besides, in my personal opinion anti-evolution is a political tool. It's a form of misdirection designed to keep people in line inside their religious community, and focus their attention in manageable ways so they wouldn't start asking themselves why the core principle of Jesus' teachings (helping those in need) is so ignored by today's political establishment (to the point that a fifth of america is living below the poverty line, despite it being feasible to all but erase poverty if the political will was there). Same thing with abortion. It's all politics.
WMA is entirely ms-owned and not standardized, fairplay is a layer over MPEG4/AAC, which is standardized and not under apple's control.
Windows has indeed gotten stable enough that the jokes about instability sound tired, but it's not bulletproof yet. Just last week I got a bluescreen from the adobe svg viewer 6 beta by loading an svg file that was 100 percent to spec. A simple browser plugin shouldn't be able to do a division by zero in kernel space (which is what I surmise caused the bluescreen), even if it is only beta.
And ofcourse, there is still the file locking problem you mention that causes the need for a reboot when some types of updates are installed. If only windows had inodes.
Apple invented the hard drive based consumer mp3 player. Before that the only people with HD-based mp3 players were geeks or early adopters, with players that catered to that crowd (advanced recording features, large physical dimensions to afford large disk sizes, extra geek stuff like ethernet interfaces, ...). The ipod made it possible to give your mom an mp3 player and have her make use of it with minimal guidance. This is because the entire "ipod experience" (and I know that's a laden term) fits together smoothly, from the first time you turn it on, over how you use itunes to put music on there, to actually putting on an album during daily use. There are no "tricks" you need to figure out. It all just works. This is incidentally why the windows ipod market didn't really take off until itunes became available on windows. The software before that was so horrible my mind has blanked out its name. Ah, yes, now I remember, musicmatch, which was anything but. *shivers*
I have yet to see another HD-based mp3 player that has the entire package: a good player UI, good PC music management software, and an easy way to get almost any sort of music legally from the internet.
It's timing related. It depends on what OS, hardware, drivers, network, geographical location, and so on you have.
It has gotten better over time, but is still not fixed in firefox 1.0.
You don't know if a site requires IE features until you're actually in the middle of parsing/rendering it (which is a pipelined operation in modern browsers).
Personally, I think what would be better is to modify the gecko engine to have a validation framework, so it becomes possible to put a smiley face on the statusbar that smiles for standards compliant sites, looks average for sites that aren't standards compliant but still are perfectly renderable, and a frown for sites that can not be rendered in a browser that wishes to be standards compliant.
There's a bug for this in bugzilla, but it was marked WONTFIX because there is no validation framework in gecko, and nobody wants to spend the time adding one and getting it performant.
Oh, don't worry, if the ISP's start switching browsers, firefox will become the marketleader. IIRC, once upon a time ISP's distributed netscape by default, IE made valiant inroads, and then the ISP's started bundling IE which led to a mad marketshare rush that left netscape a niche player. I think firefox is edging up to that marketshare tipping point now, where it's going to become the default browser to bundle with things, and thereby getting automatic installs on many, many machines.
Though admittedly, there is much less reason to bundle a browser with your service/software nowadays, when every OS has a browser bundled in by default.
It's caused by unlucky timing. It depends on your connection type, distance to the slashdot servers, time of day, phase of the moon, and many, many other factors. It's a bug in the gecko engine that is only triggered by non-standard pages, like slashdot, though this doesn't happen uniquely on slashdot. If I'm not mistaken, it will be fixed in the next version of firefox.
Personally I think it's a good thing that slashdot has such hairy html code. The first thing prospective browser makers do is try to render slashdot. And since slashdot puts up a decent fight against being rendered correctly, that makes for better browsers.
xpi will not be the way these things install themselves. It's much easier to simply make an executable and put it on a site, enticing users to run the file after downloading. After all, messing with the xpi whitelist is more work than clicking a few links and having an installer open.
Unless a security flaw is found in xpi which allows circumventing the whitelist ofcourse.
FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW, you can just choose to not start it. I'm tempted to say your better off with Debian on a lower end G4 PowerPC system like the mini though.
Though you honestly think debian is a better desktop system than mac os x? I mean, mac os x seems to have the best of both worlds. All the mac software and all the X11 software, running inside the same environment using the same window manager.
Inertia my friend. Inertia is the reason my firewall is still running a 2.2 kernel, even though it's slow, doesn't support smart firewalling and can't combine software raid and journaling without corrupting the filesystem.
I understand heat will kill a drive very quickly, but supposing you could adequately cool the drive, would keeping it spinning really hurt it? AFAIK the problem is not keeping the drive spinning, it's spinning it up again, and again, and again.
Sticking a tilted window in a corner isn't particularly useful, because you'd have to tilt it yourself, place it yourself, retrieve it yourself, and then tilt it back to normal. Too much work, too little benefit.
Flipping over a window to get more information is basically a tabbed dialog interface, which with minimal screen real estate wasted you can do right now (admittedly without the cool flipping effects).
Honestly, if 3D interfaces on 2D screens actually let you do more work, they would be all over the place. 3D interfaces are only "faster" on true 3D screens with true 3D manipulating devices (like gloves and so on).
Though I admit 3D interfaces look like they could kick your ass without even trying.
Two reasons:
- It requires learning a new way of programming.
- It's not available on all systems.
Unless and until this stuff is available as os-level api's where a single function does all the work for you from any programming language, and where it falls back to software-based algorithms if no appropriate gpu is available this stuff isn't going to go anywhere.
That's why apple created coreimage.
but to confuse "their", "there" and "they're", and especially the last, is to be completely unaware of what one is actually saying
No, because when you're typing a stream of thought you're thinking in audio and relying on your brain to subconsciously convert that to type. At least that's how most people do it. Obviously people who were born deaf don't think in audio. I agree it's a consequence of not paying much attention to what you're typing (and so appears more often when people are lazy/tired), but more often that not the speaker actually does know the difference between the terms perfectly, but his brain is messing up the conversion to typed text.
Two things struck me after watching it:
- I can not conceive that at that point in time anything that used transistors was even remotely as cool as the mac. It's a sad testament to the power of low prices and commodity software that the mac didn't do better.
- Steve Jobs used to look a lot cooler.