And let's not forget Jerzy Buzek (Polish MEP, ex-Prime minister), Michel Rocard (French MEP, ex-Prime minister) and Andrew Duff (English MEP) for their excellent, intelligent, patient work. Thanks, gentlemen, we wouldn't have won without your invaluable help. Thank you so much!
Wouldn't it make more sense to do it the other way around? Make the update available first, then after some time make the new, complete package available.
By releasing packages before the update is made available, you are almost asking for current users of Firefox 1.0 to download the full 1.0.1, which will result in a higher load on your servers.
That's missing the point IMHO. I don't want to pay for an ultra-fast, ultra-heating CPU I don't need and then pay (and how much!) again for a case that makes it usable.
What I want is a CPU which doesn't heat in the first place. Same for graphics card and power supply. It's still easy to find fanless graphics adapters. CPUs exist but are not widely available. Fanless power supplies are very rare and expensive, but I guess it could be better if all components in the computers were designed for low power consumption and dissipation instead of top speed. There is a market and I just hope that companies like Transmeta (or others, even Intel or AMD) won't miss it.
I'm quite fed up with these noisy computers. I have 4 of them at home, and except for the laptop, they all generate much noise, because they heat so much that every little piece, CPU first, needs a fan. I hardly can hear me think anymore. One of these systems acts as a server that I keep up at night. I did my best to make it go silent but I can still hear it behind the door.
In some way it means the same as another post right before mine: low power dissipation. This value has dramatically increased in the past few years, in the name of the top speed race, but at the price of our tranquility.
It also joins the view of anther poster that most users don't need the extra power offered by the latest CPUs. I certainly don't, so I'd rather use a quiet 1GHz machine than a noisy 3GHz one.
This is why I'm quite sad to see that you cannot easily buy Transmeta-based systems. This is exactly the kind of CPU I would enjoy, if only my online computer parts store had that available. What I am really looking for is a completely fanless system.
Not exactly my definition of high resolution. I think that recent handhelds have typical 320 x 320 resolution, don't they?
Ultra long battery life - up to 6 hours
Doesn't the news item advertise 8 hours?
Changeable colours - choose from 265
Frankly, do we need that many colours to pick from? I think not. Some marketing droid must have thought that a big number here would impress the customer.
(Note that I couldn't read the article yet, as the site is obviously/.ed.)
I have had such bad experiences with VIA hardware that I will most probably never buy anything from them again.
First there was this VIA Rhine-based network adapter (D-Link DFE530TX), which looked cool and I bought 8 of them (for me and friends). One year later, as 100Mbps ethernet networks were becoming more popular, we realized that the Rhine would fail under moderate to heavy load. There was apparently an undocumented hardware design problem which had to be worked around in drivers, at the price of performance. This took a long time to get it to work reliably under Linux and *BSD.
Then I got a VIA KT133-based motherboard (Asus A7V133-C). It's only after I had bought it that I leant about the IDE support being unreliable and requiring -again- software workarounds to prevent data corruption. I also had difficulties getting a video grabbing device to work properly (DC10+), and the docs clearly stated that VIA chips were known to cause much trouble.
To put it short, I would not trust VIA as a base for a mini-ITX system. So it's quite nice to see Transmeta as a possible alternative now.
And Vibrant supplies the advertisers and splits the revenue that is generated with the publisher. In a sense,
it's like found money.
And you thought money grew on trees? You idiot! Money grows in news websites!
It's always fun when people come in and explain they have found a new way to generate money out of nothing. Fun or sad, depends on your local mood I suppose.
BTW, I have been quoting a quote (from Vibrant) in the article, not the article itself, which is really interesting and well-written.
Since he/she is a Gentoo user, I guess he/she may have been updating his system, downloading and checking (through md5sum) various packages at that time, and finding that all of them successfully installed, except TransGaming's one. This is enough to assume that the package was causing the trouble, not the system, at least in a first time. And it turned out to be correct.
As a side note, I don't think that cracking md5sum in a way that it'll return random hashes makes much sense. This is more likely to catch the user's attention than anything else. Unless of course the user gets upset and is stupid enough to plain disable checking "because it doesn't seem to work anymore", in which case I agree it could help a cracking operation.
Many boys are given legos. Many girls are given dolls.
My sister and I were both given Legos when we were young. We were both given dolls too. And it happens that I'm now into computer science, while she's baroque music. So even when given the same opportunities as kids, grown up by the same parents at the same place and going to the same schools until we were 17 year old or so, we have completely different interests now.
So, either we were born with differences, be they related to gender or not, or there are just too many factors to be taken into account through one's life and any individual signal we pick and try to analyze is completely undistinguishable from the overall noise.
(...) No one was on the losing side of this situation.
I wonder why that many people keep claiming that "nobody loses money" when they get something of value without paying for it. In the example above, person Y obviously took benefit in the trades for little to no effort. And the final buyer obviously lost money since he/she could have bought the same from X, for less.
Same when you take the train without buying a ticket. You can pretend it didn't cost anyone anything since the train would have been there anyway. Such a poor argument may convince a 8 year old kid maybe. Just because you stole a very small amount of money to a huge number of persons doesn't mean you didn't steal. If nothing else, you stole comfort. Nobody likes travelling in a crowded train.
All these affirmations and theories can be dismissed with a very simple rule. Just wonder what would happen if just anybody was doing the same. Trains wouldn't be there, and stock markets would crash. Oh, wait. It already happened, and more than once.
When the stock markets "win" several percent in value in a single day, don't tell me it represents anything real. That much value wasn't magically created just because trade people gave buy and sell orders. Actually, no value at all was created by these people (nor will ever be). Stock market is all about what people think, what people think other people may or may not think, etc. Unlimited level of indirection is possible, and this explains why stock markets change values that fast and don't represent anything real.
These games (because that's what they are, really) are certainly very, very interesting from a social and psychological points of view. That's a pity that they affect economics (and real life) in the end though, and in large proportions even, since the input is more noise than signal.
The fact is, more often than not, ads servers are slow. Web pages design being sometimes such that the rest of the page won't load before the ad has, you end up waiting for no reason before you can read the information you came for. This is my first reason for blocking ads. That and the wasted bandwidth (not really significant anymore with fast Internet accesses, granted), Flash ads complaining about missing plugins (really gets on my nerves), or bringing the CPU down on its knees for no apparent reason.
To me, the future of advertisement is in user-requested ads. Yes, the kind of thing Google does. Interested in something? Search for information and commercials at the same time. And I really mean: decent, informative ads, matching your request, aware of your geographical location, and so on. That's the kind of ad I'd click since it would be likely to interest me (as opposed to 99.99% of the ads seen of web sites these days).
Face it, with the advent of Firefox and other (existing or yet to come) advanced browsers, built-in ad-blocking will be on everyone's desktop within a year. Providing it can be set up with little effort (and it really could, if a common base is set up) by about anyone, advertisers will have to switch to decent, non-intrusive ways to touch visitors.
Same here. I RMA'd it, and god a repaired (not new) one from IBM, same model. Some days after I installed it, it made the same strange noise the first one did, but had no error or lock up. No problem since this time.
Now, I keep an eye on it, expecting it to crash at anytime. My new hard disk drive is a 30GB Maxtor, and it works well so far.
I now regret my good "old" Western Digital drives - before IBM got their hands on WD.
Slashdot Mirror
And let's not forget Jerzy Buzek (Polish MEP, ex-Prime minister), Michel Rocard (French MEP, ex-Prime minister) and Andrew Duff (English MEP) for their excellent, intelligent, patient work. Thanks, gentlemen, we wouldn't have won without your invaluable help. Thank you so much!
Wouldn't it make more sense to do it the other way around? Make the update available first, then after some time make the new, complete package available.
By releasing packages before the update is made available, you are almost asking for current users of Firefox 1.0 to download the full 1.0.1, which will result in a higher load on your servers.
That's missing the point IMHO. I don't want to pay for an ultra-fast, ultra-heating CPU I don't need and then pay (and how much!) again for a case that makes it usable.
What I want is a CPU which doesn't heat in the first place. Same for graphics card and power supply. It's still easy to find fanless graphics adapters. CPUs exist but are not widely available. Fanless power supplies are very rare and expensive, but I guess it could be better if all components in the computers were designed for low power consumption and dissipation instead of top speed. There is a market and I just hope that companies like Transmeta (or others, even Intel or AMD) won't miss it.
I still couldn't read the article BTW :(
Silence.
I'm quite fed up with these noisy computers. I have 4 of them at home, and except for the laptop, they all generate much noise, because they heat so much that every little piece, CPU first, needs a fan. I hardly can hear me think anymore. One of these systems acts as a server that I keep up at night. I did my best to make it go silent but I can still hear it behind the door.
In some way it means the same as another post right before mine: low power dissipation. This value has dramatically increased in the past few years, in the name of the top speed race, but at the price of our tranquility.
It also joins the view of anther poster that most users don't need the extra power offered by the latest CPUs. I certainly don't, so I'd rather use a quiet 1GHz machine than a noisy 3GHz one.
This is why I'm quite sad to see that you cannot easily buy Transmeta-based systems. This is exactly the kind of CPU I would enjoy, if only my online computer parts store had that available. What I am really looking for is a completely fanless system.
Not exactly my definition of high resolution. I think that recent handhelds have typical 320 x 320 resolution, don't they?
Doesn't the news item advertise 8 hours?
Frankly, do we need that many colours to pick from? I think not. Some marketing droid must have thought that a big number here would impress the customer.
(Note that I couldn't read the article yet, as the site is obviously /.ed.)
I have had such bad experiences with VIA hardware that I will most probably never buy anything from them again.
First there was this VIA Rhine-based network adapter (D-Link DFE530TX), which looked cool and I bought 8 of them (for me and friends). One year later, as 100Mbps ethernet networks were becoming more popular, we realized that the Rhine would fail under moderate to heavy load. There was apparently an undocumented hardware design problem which had to be worked around in drivers, at the price of performance. This took a long time to get it to work reliably under Linux and *BSD.
Then I got a VIA KT133-based motherboard (Asus A7V133-C). It's only after I had bought it that I leant about the IDE support being unreliable and requiring -again- software workarounds to prevent data corruption. I also had difficulties getting a video grabbing device to work properly (DC10+), and the docs clearly stated that VIA chips were known to cause much trouble.
To put it short, I would not trust VIA as a base for a mini-ITX system. So it's quite nice to see Transmeta as a possible alternative now.
And you thought money grew on trees? You idiot! Money grows in news websites!
It's always fun when people come in and explain they have found a new way to generate money out of nothing. Fun or sad, depends on your local mood I suppose.
BTW, I have been quoting a quote (from Vibrant) in the article, not the article itself, which is really interesting and well-written.
Since he/she is a Gentoo user, I guess he/she may have been updating his system, downloading and checking (through md5sum) various packages at that time, and finding that all of them successfully installed, except TransGaming's one. This is enough to assume that the package was causing the trouble, not the system, at least in a first time. And it turned out to be correct.
As a side note, I don't think that cracking md5sum in a way that it'll return random hashes makes much sense. This is more likely to catch the user's attention than anything else. Unless of course the user gets upset and is stupid enough to plain disable checking "because it doesn't seem to work anymore", in which case I agree it could help a cracking operation.
My sister and I were both given Legos when we were young. We were both given dolls too. And it happens that I'm now into computer science, while she's baroque music. So even when given the same opportunities as kids, grown up by the same parents at the same place and going to the same schools until we were 17 year old or so, we have completely different interests now.
So, either we were born with differences, be they related to gender or not, or there are just too many factors to be taken into account through one's life and any individual signal we pick and try to analyze is completely undistinguishable from the overall noise.
I wonder why that many people keep claiming that "nobody loses money" when they get something of value without paying for it. In the example above, person Y obviously took benefit in the trades for little to no effort. And the final buyer obviously lost money since he/she could have bought the same from X, for less.
Same when you take the train without buying a ticket. You can pretend it didn't cost anyone anything since the train would have been there anyway. Such a poor argument may convince a 8 year old kid maybe. Just because you stole a very small amount of money to a huge number of persons doesn't mean you didn't steal. If nothing else, you stole comfort. Nobody likes travelling in a crowded train.
All these affirmations and theories can be dismissed with a very simple rule. Just wonder what would happen if just anybody was doing the same. Trains wouldn't be there, and stock markets would crash. Oh, wait. It already happened, and more than once.
When the stock markets "win" several percent in value in a single day, don't tell me it represents anything real. That much value wasn't magically created just because trade people gave buy and sell orders. Actually, no value at all was created by these people (nor will ever be). Stock market is all about what people think, what people think other people may or may not think, etc. Unlimited level of indirection is possible, and this explains why stock markets change values that fast and don't represent anything real.
These games (because that's what they are, really) are certainly very, very interesting from a social and psychological points of view. That's a pity that they affect economics (and real life) in the end though, and in large proportions even, since the input is more noise than signal.
The fact is, more often than not, ads servers are slow. Web pages design being sometimes such that the rest of the page won't load before the ad has, you end up waiting for no reason before you can read the information you came for. This is my first reason for blocking ads. That and the wasted bandwidth (not really significant anymore with fast Internet accesses, granted), Flash ads complaining about missing plugins (really gets on my nerves), or bringing the CPU down on its knees for no apparent reason.
To me, the future of advertisement is in user-requested ads. Yes, the kind of thing Google does. Interested in something? Search for information and commercials at the same time. And I really mean: decent, informative ads, matching your request, aware of your geographical location, and so on. That's the kind of ad I'd click since it would be likely to interest me (as opposed to 99.99% of the ads seen of web sites these days).
Face it, with the advent of Firefox and other (existing or yet to come) advanced browsers, built-in ad-blocking will be on everyone's desktop within a year. Providing it can be set up with little effort (and it really could, if a common base is set up) by about anyone, advertisers will have to switch to decent, non-intrusive ways to touch visitors.
Same here. I RMA'd it, and god a repaired (not new) one from IBM, same model. Some days after I installed it, it made the same strange noise the first one did, but had no error or lock up. No problem since this time. Now, I keep an eye on it, expecting it to crash at anytime. My new hard disk drive is a 30GB Maxtor, and it works well so far. I now regret my good "old" Western Digital drives - before IBM got their hands on WD.