8.04 is suffering with sound issues Not just me then. My upgrade ran smoothly, but now I hear no sound at all. I've also had some graphics issues. I'm trying to get some help via the forums.
My wife and kids all use my Kubuntu system and generally cope pretty well. I don't let them install anything themselves.
I think that beginners should be given clear guidance on things like installing Flash as it's pretty much an essential for the average user.
How do you manage with 25 lines? My old BBC Micro could manage that. These days I have more like 50 in whatever editor I happen to be using.
I like plenty of vertical resolution, especially when working on documents aimed at A4 so that I can see a whole page at reasonable resolution. I tend to move toolbars to the side of the screen to maximise the available space. In Firefox I have also taken measures to be able to see more of a page at a time.
Widescreen is great for video, but for any sort of vertically scrolling material it is less than optimal, unless you can rotate it of course. I guess there is the advantage of having somewhere for all the extra windows you seem to need in modern IDEs.
For development I would generally prefer two 4:3 monitors to one big widescreen for the same money.
The problem with this plan is that it doesn't scale out. It's subject to the Windmill effect, where it's contesting with other uses for land, and eventually, it will be a source of clutter on the landscape. Huh? What other uses are there for large areas of desert? I recently heard about a scheme in Egypt where they intend that the shade below the mirrors will allow for agriculture in the desert, perhaps with water from solar-powered desalination plants.
Solar is a near perfect power source requiring minimal systems to exploit it, totally renewable and producing no waste. The fact that people in countries with year-round sunshine are heating their water with gas or electricity is ridiculous. The oil and gas people are exploiting their leverage to maintain their monopoly, regardless of the consequences.
Even in the grey UK there are people heating most of their water with solar. I just wish I had the spare cash to set up my own system.
I have 20Mb Virgin cable broadband having been on ntl dial-up and then various BB speeds from 512 upwards. When we built a new house we just got the cable hook-up and so do not have a BT line. That means that switching to ADSL will cost me a bit more up front to get a line.
I'm reasonably happy with Virgin in that it generally just works and the speed is okay. I can't see I see much difference from 4Mb to 20Mb for general surfing. The upload rate of 768kb/s seems a bit crap.
If you aren't prepared to cough up the extra cash, he says he'll put you in the Internet 'bus lane.'" but don't bus lanes allow you to bypass the traffic jams?
"He so fast he can turn off the light and be in bed before the room get dark!" I can do that as my X10 controlled lights dim up/down when you switch on/off.
Of course the speed of dark is higher than the speed of light as it needs to get out of the way before the light gets there.
I had my first hands-on with an EEE at the LUG last night. It's a cool gadget. I don't really need a full laptop, but I would like something I could use on the move that offers more than a PDA. The EEE is probably cheaper than a PDA with similar spec, but still small enough to slip into hand luggage.
I want one, but don't have the spare cash right now.
I was on a Virgin flight a few years back and they had to reboot the unit next to me. So I got to see Tux then. I seem to remember it being a pretty nice system to use. It was way ahead of others I encountered around that time.
On a (reasonably) clear motorway in good weather in a well maintained car and 100MPH is actually fine
The problem is that people try to go that fast even when none of those conditions is satisfied. In fog, snow and heavy traffic I see people who think they are great drivers trying to go faster than is safe. People may overestimate how safe they are in their nice quiet car with its ABS and airbags. I don't deny that you are probably much less likely to die than in a 1960s Jaguar E-Type or similar from when the first motorways opened in the UK.
I would be interested to see: a. Details of fuel consumption for a given car at 70, 80, 90 and 100mph. I expect to see a substantial difference b. How survivable a crash into, for example, a bridge pillar is at each of those speeds
We Beeb owners looked down on Spectrum owners. We were far superior with our proper keyboards and solid build quality. We did envy some of their games, even if the Speccy could only do two colours per character block.
I wrote loads of little programs on my Beeb, including a simple Mandelbrot. I liked playing with graphics. Unfortunately those programs are all lost now. I had them on cassettes that got dumped some time. I upgraded mine from a 16KB Model A to have 32KB. Never got a floppy drive, so had to load games like Elite from tape. Had fun with various other games too.
I sold my Beeb in the mid-90s for about 30 quid including the tape deck and my games. I wonder if it is still out there. I kind of miss it.
Re:Don't think so.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
For instance the AMD Athlon X2 64-bit dual core chip i use, is quieter, less power hungry and more powerful than its intel-equivalent. I thought all chips were pretty much silent. It tends to be the cooling fan that makes the noise, but using less power should allow for a quieter fan.
I've used several AMD processors (couple of Durons and now an Athlon X2). I chose them on a value for money basis. I never buy the fastest chips that command a heavy price premium, so the arguments over who has the top chip of the moment are irrelevant to me. I considered an Intel for my current PC, but the price difference was minimal and I know the AMD-based chipsets a bit better so I knew it should work for me. I do like to support the underdog, but not if it exceeds my budget.
Even in the last few years I have met people who consider AMD to be inferior or less reliable than Intel chips. Intel's marketing millions must be doing something for them, but I find their jingle intensely annoying when it crops up in the middle of an ad.
In a similar vein I hear Yahoo are adopting OpenID. There's hope for the internet yet.
Personally I use Google's chat servers via their client on Windows and Kopete on Linux. I would like to use open protocols exclusively, but I'm stuck with Skype for most of my contacts. They are largely non-technical and need something that Just Works.
IANAS (not a scientist), but I expect their theories often get misrepresented on TV for the sake of not confusing the audience. A lot of science is hard and may take years to understand, a one-hour special may not get it all across. Scientific understanding changes with time, unlike most religious beliefs, but we can't expect every TV show and book to be updated to bring them into line with current understanding. A good scientist should be ready to give up their 'beliefs' if new evidence shows them to be wrong. In the end they are human beings like the rest of us and are vulnerable to pride and other 'sins'. A lot of evidence will be open to different interpretations.
Just because something is counterintuitive, doesn't mean it can't be true. Large parts of quantum physics and other sciences is counterintuitive. Even things like the earth being a sphere and going around the sun are counter to how they appear to the average person.
I'm not sure you can ever disprove god, but you can show that miracles are unnecessary.
I'll also say that we can do without this sort of 'museum' that peddles ideas that were disproved long before it was founded.
This is why I abandoned Yahoo as my primary web email long ago. I think I ended up there after using Rocket Mail that may have been taken over by them. I still have a Yahoo home page, but only really for a couple of cartoons to start my day. If I try to go to my mail from there I can't seem to get straight to my inbox, so end up needing several click to read any new mail.
I only really keep my Yahoo account for their Groups, but hardly use that apart from the odd post on Freecycle.
I'm much happier with Gmail and iGoogle. I need some sort of webmail for when I'm at work. I have GTalk to alert me of new mail. The Google spam filters seem to do a slightly better job too.
Pretty much echoes my thoughts. Moving to HD will mean a new TV, new player and paying more for broadcast TV if I want HD. I don't watch much TV anyway and most DVD watching in our house is by the kids who don't care about HD. I'm still on a CRT TV that I inherited from someone buying a big plasma.
I think that the moves to stereo and widescreen for broadcast TV were more significant for most of the public. They are just being brainwashed into 'upgrading' to flat screens with HD as the sweetner.
I empathise with those who complain about non-skipable warnings on DVDs. My player (Sony) doesn't let me skip them. I paid for the damn things, why should I have to be preached to about piracy. I bet the pirate copies don't have this 'feature'. Disney are amonst the worst for this and you sometimes have to skip past a load of trailers to get to the menu. These are the most watched disks as well. I've just not got around to building a media server to host just the films.
I would go for something with 3 wheels, a safety cage and weather protection if it could take two people plus a small amount of luggage. It wouldn't be much heavier than a motorbike, but could be more aerodynamic and so could be much more efficient than a car. It should also be a lot cheaper. The fact is that a lot of motorbikes are not that efficient due to concentrating on maximum power output. 80mph is quick enough for real life driving. It would be easier to park than a car too. Where will Indian cities find to park all these extra cars?
Wouldn't we all? I'm sure that current types of car could be made more efficient by reducing weight and having smarter engines, but that will cost more. With rising fuel costs you may well save more in the long term. To get real efficiency you will have to compromise. Do you need 300HP? How often do you need all your load space? I do most of my driving in a small MPV with just me in it. I get 46mpg (UK), but it's still costing a lot to run. Something like this would make more sense
Looks fairly cool, but not the quickest thing. It's aerodynamic to save fuel and very light-weight. The cost seems reasonable. Maybe in a year or so I will be able to buy one.
Here in the UK our taxes pay for the Ordnance Survey mapping, but we have to pay for the results. I don't know the exact licencing rules, but it could be that a charity would have to pay to include a detailed map to show where they were holding an event. They could use the OSM map for free. Many cities are very well mapped, but there is still a lot of work to do. I've been doing my village when I have time. I've already covered some features that are not on Google.
This gets me thinking that maybe I should use a temperature sensor that makes Folding/dnet/whatever run whenever it gets cold enough to need the heating.
It's probably not a good idea to run these on servers if you are having to cool the server room already.
I do have a bit of a conflict between my geeky side wanting to run this stuff and my green side that wants to cut my energy usage. As others have pointed out a good compromise is to have an app that can just use a limited %age of the available CPU like Folding can on Windows. I'm running dnet on my dual-core laptop, but only letting it use one core to keep the heat down.
Does Slashdot itself have any easy way to extract your list of friends or their posts? I'm interested in what my friends have to say, but I have to go to each one's page to see what's new.
I too want to be able to identify which of my friends from one network are on another, but this will have to depend on whether a person wants their accounts to be linked. FOAF uses email address (or a hash of it) to identify people, but that may not always be an option. In some cases it is not hard to guess what the email address would be and check that against the hash. I wonder if the spammers have bothered with that course.
I favour using something like FOAF to declare what identities you have, but that doesn't provide for verification that it's really you unless you can include something like the http://microid.org/ that http://claimid.com/ uses.
I can foresee some issues with how you link back to the FOAF from each site. There have been attempts at creating a FOAF index, but that opens up more privacy and centralisation issues.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife and kids all use my Kubuntu system and generally cope pretty well. I don't let them install anything themselves.
I think that beginners should be given clear guidance on things like installing Flash as it's pretty much an essential for the average user.
How do you manage with 25 lines? My old BBC Micro could manage that. These days I have more like 50 in whatever editor I happen to be using.
I like plenty of vertical resolution, especially when working on documents aimed at A4 so that I can see a whole page at reasonable resolution. I tend to move toolbars to the side of the screen to maximise the available space. In Firefox I have also taken measures to be able to see more of a page at a time.
Widescreen is great for video, but for any sort of vertically scrolling material it is less than optimal, unless you can rotate it of course. I guess there is the advantage of having somewhere for all the extra windows you seem to need in modern IDEs.
For development I would generally prefer two 4:3 monitors to one big widescreen for the same money.
Solar is a near perfect power source requiring minimal systems to exploit it, totally renewable and producing no waste. The fact that people in countries with year-round sunshine are heating their water with gas or electricity is ridiculous. The oil and gas people are exploiting their leverage to maintain their monopoly, regardless of the consequences.
Even in the grey UK there are people heating most of their water with solar. I just wish I had the spare cash to set up my own system.
I'm reasonably happy with Virgin in that it generally just works and the speed is okay. I can't see I see much difference from 4Mb to 20Mb for general surfing. The upload rate of 768kb/s seems a bit crap. If you aren't prepared to cough up the extra cash, he says he'll put you in the Internet 'bus lane.'" but don't bus lanes allow you to bypass the traffic jams?
Point taken, but it shows how advances in technology can give us superhuman powers :)
As a brit I'm not sure I've ever actually seen/heard SNL, but I'm sure it will have been repeated on one of our many channels.
Of course the speed of dark is higher than the speed of light as it needs to get out of the way before the light gets there.
I had my first hands-on with an EEE at the LUG last night. It's a cool gadget. I don't really need a full laptop, but I would like something I could use on the move that offers more than a PDA. The EEE is probably cheaper than a PDA with similar spec, but still small enough to slip into hand luggage.
I want one, but don't have the spare cash right now.
I think we should abandon stereo as some people are deaf in one ear.
Hell some people can't hear at all. We should go back to silent movies!
I was on a Virgin flight a few years back and they had to reboot the unit next to me. So I got to see Tux then. I seem to remember it being a pretty nice system to use. It was way ahead of others I encountered around that time.
The problem is that people try to go that fast even when none of those conditions is satisfied. In fog, snow and heavy traffic I see people who think they are great drivers trying to go faster than is safe. People may overestimate how safe they are in their nice quiet car with its ABS and airbags. I don't deny that you are probably much less likely to die than in a 1960s Jaguar E-Type or similar from when the first motorways opened in the UK.
I would be interested to see:
a. Details of fuel consumption for a given car at 70, 80, 90 and 100mph. I expect to see a substantial difference
b. How survivable a crash into, for example, a bridge pillar is at each of those speeds
We Beeb owners looked down on Spectrum owners. We were far superior with our proper keyboards and solid build quality. We did envy some of their games, even if the Speccy could only do two colours per character block.
I wrote loads of little programs on my Beeb, including a simple Mandelbrot. I liked playing with graphics. Unfortunately those programs are all lost now. I had them on cassettes that got dumped some time. I upgraded mine from a 16KB Model A to have 32KB. Never got a floppy drive, so had to load games like Elite from tape. Had fun with various other games too.
I sold my Beeb in the mid-90s for about 30 quid including the tape deck and my games. I wonder if it is still out there. I kind of miss it.
I've used several AMD processors (couple of Durons and now an Athlon X2). I chose them on a value for money basis. I never buy the fastest chips that command a heavy price premium, so the arguments over who has the top chip of the moment are irrelevant to me. I considered an Intel for my current PC, but the price difference was minimal and I know the AMD-based chipsets a bit better so I knew it should work for me. I do like to support the underdog, but not if it exceeds my budget.
Even in the last few years I have met people who consider AMD to be inferior or less reliable than Intel chips. Intel's marketing millions must be doing something for them, but I find their jingle intensely annoying when it crops up in the middle of an ad.
In a similar vein I hear Yahoo are adopting OpenID. There's hope for the internet yet.
Personally I use Google's chat servers via their client on Windows and Kopete on Linux. I would like to use open protocols exclusively, but I'm stuck with Skype for most of my contacts. They are largely non-technical and need something that Just Works.
IANAS (not a scientist), but I expect their theories often get misrepresented on TV for the sake of not confusing the audience. A lot of science is hard and may take years to understand, a one-hour special may not get it all across. Scientific understanding changes with time, unlike most religious beliefs, but we can't expect every TV show and book to be updated to bring them into line with current understanding. A good scientist should be ready to give up their 'beliefs' if new evidence shows them to be wrong. In the end they are human beings like the rest of us and are vulnerable to pride and other 'sins'. A lot of evidence will be open to different interpretations.
Just because something is counterintuitive, doesn't mean it can't be true. Large parts of quantum physics and other sciences is counterintuitive. Even things like the earth being a sphere and going around the sun are counter to how they appear to the average person.
I'm not sure you can ever disprove god, but you can show that miracles are unnecessary.
I'll also say that we can do without this sort of 'museum' that peddles ideas that were disproved long before it was founded.
This is why I abandoned Yahoo as my primary web email long ago. I think I ended up there after using Rocket Mail that may have been taken over by them. I still have a Yahoo home page, but only really for a couple of cartoons to start my day. If I try to go to my mail from there I can't seem to get straight to my inbox, so end up needing several click to read any new mail.
I only really keep my Yahoo account for their Groups, but hardly use that apart from the odd post on Freecycle.
I'm much happier with Gmail and iGoogle. I need some sort of webmail for when I'm at work. I have GTalk to alert me of new mail. The Google spam filters seem to do a slightly better job too.
That's the old version. This looks more like what I want
http://www.carver-worldwide.com/Home/Index.asp?nc=1
although the fuel consumption is not brilliant. It's about the same as I get from my car. I also see that it costs about twice as much as my car!
Pretty much echoes my thoughts. Moving to HD will mean a new TV, new player and paying more for broadcast TV if I want HD. I don't watch much TV anyway and most DVD watching in our house is by the kids who don't care about HD. I'm still on a CRT TV that I inherited from someone buying a big plasma.
I think that the moves to stereo and widescreen for broadcast TV were more significant for most of the public. They are just being brainwashed into 'upgrading' to flat screens with HD as the sweetner.
I empathise with those who complain about non-skipable warnings on DVDs. My player (Sony) doesn't let me skip them. I paid for the damn things, why should I have to be preached to about piracy. I bet the pirate copies don't have this 'feature'. Disney are amonst the worst for this and you sometimes have to skip past a load of trailers to get to the menu. These are the most watched disks as well. I've just not got around to building a media server to host just the films.
I would go for something with 3 wheels, a safety cage and weather protection if it could take two people plus a small amount of luggage. It wouldn't be much heavier than a motorbike, but could be more aerodynamic and so could be much more efficient than a car. It should also be a lot cheaper. The fact is that a lot of motorbikes are not that efficient due to concentrating on maximum power output. 80mph is quick enough for real life driving. It would be easier to park than a car too. Where will Indian cities find to park all these extra cars?
Wouldn't we all? I'm sure that current types of car could be made more efficient by reducing weight and having smarter engines, but that will cost more. With rising fuel costs you may well save more in the long term. To get real efficiency you will have to compromise. Do you need 300HP? How often do you need all your load space? I do most of my driving in a small MPV with just me in it. I get 46mpg (UK), but it's still costing a lot to run. Something like this would make more sense
http://evolution.loremo.com/
Looks fairly cool, but not the quickest thing. It's aerodynamic to save fuel and very light-weight. The cost seems reasonable. Maybe in a year or so I will be able to buy one.
Maybe it's time to revive this old idea
http://www.duntemann.com/charvolant.jpg
Of course they shouldn't make phones. They should make more Wiis so that I can get one for my wife who wants one for Xmas.
Who has time to play games?
OSM are importing the TIGER data. It may just take a few months
OSM wiki
Here in the UK our taxes pay for the Ordnance Survey mapping, but we have to pay for the results. I don't know the exact licencing rules, but it could be that a charity would have to pay to include a detailed map to show where they were holding an event. They could use the OSM map for free. Many cities are very well mapped, but there is still a lot of work to do. I've been doing my village when I have time. I've already covered some features that are not on Google.
This gets me thinking that maybe I should use a temperature sensor that makes Folding/dnet/whatever run whenever it gets cold enough to need the heating.
It's probably not a good idea to run these on servers if you are having to cool the server room already.
I do have a bit of a conflict between my geeky side wanting to run this stuff and my green side that wants to cut my energy usage. As others have pointed out a good compromise is to have an app that can just use a limited %age of the available CPU like Folding can on Windows. I'm running dnet on my dual-core laptop, but only letting it use one core to keep the heat down.
Does Slashdot itself have any easy way to extract your list of friends or their posts? I'm interested in what my friends have to say, but I have to go to each one's page to see what's new.
I too want to be able to identify which of my friends from one network are on another, but this will have to depend on whether a person wants their accounts to be linked. FOAF uses email address (or a hash of it) to identify people, but that may not always be an option. In some cases it is not hard to guess what the email address would be and check that against the hash. I wonder if the spammers have bothered with that course.
I favour using something like FOAF to declare what identities you have, but that doesn't provide for verification that it's really you unless you can include something like the http://microid.org/ that http://claimid.com/ uses.
I can foresee some issues with how you link back to the FOAF from each site. There have been attempts at creating a FOAF index, but that opens up more privacy and centralisation issues.