basically what DJB has done is found ways to incorporate extra hardware to eliminate redundant operations when performing number field sieve (NFS). he's implemented NFS in a non-linear way, which results in a threefold increase in speed from linear NFS implementation.
it's a wonder no one thought of it before. oh, wait, i think a three-letter agency might have... better update those keys!
all four Prolog and LISP Win32 applications developers were getting nervous.
nice solution to a non-issue.
something tells me this idea is half-baked
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
there's just something about people saying "Cover the platter part with plastic wrap and put it in a safe spot" and telling me to Dremel my hard drive that tells me they have not thought this out very well. considering that a speck of dust can be disastrous to a drive, i don't think i really want to make a pile of metal shavings inside and put it all back together.
You have to admit, the current generation of computer users, raised on the Web and AIM, isn't of too much use for a lot of things. Years of passive entertainment has dulled their senses, and they would rather the computers played with them than they play with the computers.
There are so many users who are *lost* when the network is down... it's like they don't know what to do with a computer. The past generation knew how to tinker because it was the entertainment... now the spirit's being lossed. It's a good thing the old-timers are so tenacious.
It's seems like they've been in beta for 3-4 years
it seems like they've been in beta for 3-4 years because they have. and even now at 0.9.8 they are cramming in new features, breaking things in the process. and even now at 0.9.8 Mozilla is unstable ("crashy" as the Users would say) and definitely not ready for prime time.
Mozilla is a glaring example of why Open Sourcing a company project is no guarantee that anything good will come of it. mod me flamebait if you must, but i maintain that as long as OSS is not as featureful OR as stable as its propietary competition, no one, but NO ONE will use it.
I do agree that OS X is a pig, but disagree that it is the underlying design. Something went terribly wrong in the transition from NextStep to OS X.
My Turbo-Color Slab from NeXT (33Mhz 68030 (040?) IIRC with 32MB of RAM) seems just as zippy as my 400Mhz G4 with 1.5GB of RAM.
okay. you're lying. either that or exaggerating. i know this because, believe i am typing this response in OmniWeb 2, running on NeXTSTEP 3.3, running on a TurboColor. it's a good exercise in patience, bringing me back to my old days.
www.nytimes.com, for example, takes about a minute and a half to render. this may have been "zippy" then but no one can say the same now. what is more admirable, i think, is that i can use this as the only head in my room (i have a NetBSD/x86 box, but it's running headless) and i have something that is both beautiful and functional. but not zippy.
There was no reason to take a perfectly good computer and run it slow except marketing.
the iMac is aimed at a user who does not want to deal with the hardware very much. including a
100MHz FSB instead of a 133MHz bus allows the clueless User to purchase the cheapest memory possible.
Now Apple has some faster models, they can give the imac some breathing room.
as the announcements of the iMac and the G4/2x1GHz were less than a month apart, and the new iMacs are not even shipping yet, don't you think that maybe Apple had them in mind as in-the-market-together already?
it's not that i love Motif. it's that i don't think GTK has done anything except make it look better, and that's not a lot of progress for ten years.
maybe GTK is not the correct choice for the future
on
Looking Ahead at GNOME 2
·
· Score: 0, Troll
GTK widgets are pretty, sure, but i don't see how they've improved the usefulness of the X Window System any. i can't think of any way in which GTK has enriched the X experience beyond Athena or Motif widgets. does X really need 1000 faces?
building a low-fat box is a snap. just install a distro which is obviously devoid of bells and whistles. the bloated distros like Red Hat and Mandrake and SUSE look totally retarded next to little powerhouses like slackware and stripped-down debian.
or, if you want a beautiful pure-UNIX box with unbeatable package management and outstanding security, install NetBSD (my favorite:).
maybe the best server OS is not the best PDA OS
on
Linux PDA Part Deux
·
· Score: 4, Informative
why does the Slashdot crowd get so excited when some random gadget runs Linux? do people think it has the same features as the i386 version?
an i386 OS (like Windows or Linux) needs to be crippled all over the place before it will run on a PDA or some similarly tiny device. why do people assume that the best OS for the server/desktop is the best OS for the PDA?
i'd rather have a ground-up PDA OS, myself. it's not like you can usefully share code between PDA Linux and regular Linux anyway.
instead of wasting spare cycles on SETI@home, we could be using them to find Osama.
no, i'm serious.
resolution of 61cm is more than enough to detect the movement of a cluster of people/troops. images could be sent to a central server, for distributed analysis and any unexplained masses moving to Pakistan could be pinpointed. why couldn't the US dedicate the spare CPU cycles to finding this terrorist?
i avoided drawing the similarity lest i get downmodded, but you've got the right idea.
a content-free author
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Steven Johnson? this is the same guy responsible for Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, a book i've had the misfortune to read. Mr Johnson seems to have the Wired Magazine-style flair for making mountains out of molehills, making blind reaches into that which he knows nothing about (i.e. physics), and making an ass out of himself. do yourself a favor and read something smarter (maybe something from the Oprah Book Club?).
(the fact that most of the comments are clarifications on the HTTP-REFERRER discussion seems to suggest that the book might not terribly engaging to the Slashdot audience anyhow.)
Slashdot Mirror
since drivers deal with the kernel and not userspace apps, RMS can keep his grubby little mitts of this one. i'd call it a "Linux" driver.
basically what DJB has done is found ways to incorporate extra hardware to eliminate redundant operations when performing number field sieve (NFS). he's implemented NFS in a non-linear way, which results in a threefold increase in speed from linear NFS implementation.
it's a wonder no one thought of it before. oh, wait, i think a three-letter agency might have...
better update those keys!
i'm trying to think of a +1, Insightful thing to say, but i feel i am underqualified.
;-)
all four Prolog and LISP Win32 applications developers were getting nervous.
nice solution to a non-issue.
there's just something about people saying "Cover the platter part with plastic wrap and put it in a safe spot" and telling me to Dremel my hard drive that tells me they have not thought this out very well. considering that a speck of dust can be disastrous to a drive, i don't think i really want to make a pile of metal shavings inside and put it all back together.
You have to admit, the current generation of computer users, raised on the Web and AIM, isn't of too much use for a lot of things. Years of passive entertainment has dulled their senses, and they would rather the computers played with them than they play with the computers.
There are so many users who are *lost* when the network is down... it's like they don't know what to do with a computer. The past generation knew how to tinker because it was the entertainment... now the spirit's being lossed. It's a good thing the old-timers are so tenacious.
It's seems like they've been in beta for 3-4 years
it seems like they've been in beta for 3-4 years because they have. and even now at 0.9.8 they are cramming in new features, breaking things in the process. and even now at 0.9.8 Mozilla is unstable ("crashy" as the Users would say) and definitely not ready for prime time.
Mozilla is a glaring example of why Open Sourcing a company project is no guarantee that anything good will come of it. mod me flamebait if you must, but i maintain that as long as OSS is not as featureful OR as stable as its propietary competition, no one, but NO ONE will use it.
I do agree that OS X is a pig, but disagree that it is the underlying design. Something went terribly wrong in the transition from NextStep to OS X.
My Turbo-Color Slab from NeXT (33Mhz 68030 (040?) IIRC with 32MB of RAM) seems just as zippy as my 400Mhz G4 with 1.5GB of RAM.
okay. you're lying. either that or exaggerating. i know this because, believe i am typing this response in OmniWeb 2, running on NeXTSTEP 3.3, running on a TurboColor. it's a good exercise in patience, bringing me back to my old days.
www.nytimes.com, for example, takes about a minute and a half to render. this may have been "zippy" then but no one can say the same now. what is more admirable, i think, is that i can use this as the only head in my room (i have a NetBSD/x86 box, but it's running headless) and i have something that is both beautiful and functional. but not zippy.
There was no reason to take a perfectly good computer and run it slow except marketing.
the iMac is aimed at a user who does not want to deal with the hardware very much. including a
100MHz FSB instead of a 133MHz bus allows the clueless User to purchase the cheapest memory possible.
Now Apple has some faster models, they can give the imac some breathing room.
as the announcements of the iMac and the G4/2x1GHz were less than a month apart, and the new iMacs are not even shipping yet, don't you think that maybe Apple had them in mind as in-the-market-together already?
...JonKatz's last article?
;-)
i read that as "Mega Public WANG" at first.
hey, it's the Australians. you just never know.
How does it feel to work for the only company ever pushed out of a market by Open Source Software?
boy, i must be getting old. i remember being psyched when i finally got a machine fast enough to run it.
my favorite lightweight wm: tvtwm
The coolist things about GTK are #1 - It's Free (Speach) and #2 It's cross platform (Unix, Max and Win32)
yeah, those are the coolest things about it. i prefer software whose coolest features are features, not licensing and 8-way compatibility.
call me a troll i guess...
it's not that i love Motif. it's that i don't think GTK has done anything except make it look better, and that's not a lot of progress for ten years.
GTK widgets are pretty, sure, but i don't see how they've improved the usefulness of the X Window System any. i can't think of any way in which GTK has enriched the X experience beyond Athena or Motif widgets. does X really need 1000 faces?
building a low-fat box is a snap. just install a distro which is obviously devoid of bells and whistles. the bloated distros like Red Hat and Mandrake and SUSE look totally retarded next to little powerhouses like slackware and stripped-down debian.
:).
or, if you want a beautiful pure-UNIX box with unbeatable package management and outstanding security, install NetBSD (my favorite
why does the Slashdot crowd get so excited when some random gadget runs Linux? do people think it has the same features as the i386 version?
an i386 OS (like Windows or Linux) needs to be crippled all over the place before it will run on a PDA or some similarly tiny device. why do people assume that the best OS for the server/desktop is the best OS for the PDA?
i'd rather have a ground-up PDA OS, myself. it's not like you can usefully share code between PDA Linux and regular Linux anyway.
screw that, gimme a BSD server with a pinball table (Attack from Mars or Medieval Madness, please) in the break room!
Hmmmm. That's amazing. I wonder how many billions of Solitaires go into a single Slashdot?
if you are referring to Slashcode development, perhaps you are thinking of the "monkeys with typewriters" analogy...
what part of
2 ;$ t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
- -$ h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$
;$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>> ;4^
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=14
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271 );if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3]
$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q =$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<< 9,$_=$t[$_]^
(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}p rint+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval
don't you understand??
c'mon, this is such a pile of bullshit it's ridiculous.
Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said Afroze's claims about the company were "bizarre and unsubstantiated and should be treated skeptically."
for once, we can all agree with a Microsoft spokesman.
instead of wasting spare cycles on SETI@home, we could be using them to find Osama.
no, i'm serious.
resolution of 61cm is more than enough to detect the movement of a cluster of people/troops. images could be sent to a central server, for distributed analysis and any unexplained masses moving to Pakistan could be pinpointed. why couldn't the US dedicate the spare CPU cycles to finding this terrorist?
i avoided drawing the similarity lest i get downmodded, but you've got the right idea.
Steven Johnson? this is the same guy responsible for Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, a book i've had the misfortune to read. Mr Johnson seems to have the Wired Magazine-style flair for making mountains out of molehills, making blind reaches into that which he knows nothing about (i.e. physics), and making an ass out of himself. do yourself a favor and read something smarter (maybe something from the Oprah Book Club?).
(the fact that most of the comments are clarifications on the HTTP-REFERRER discussion seems to suggest that the book might not terribly engaging to the Slashdot audience anyhow.)