I think the importance of tech demoes have diminished greatly in recent years, when cards have had more or less the same capabilities (not speed, maybe) anyways. I mean, a DX9 tech demo is theoretically able to run on any card that can "do" DX9.
Also, when it comes to bragging rights, "prettier tech demo!" just doesn't work on most people. Intangibles like frame rate and features are what people can easily point to.
That's not to say GPU tech demoes are worthless - but in comparison to other stuff, they've had their day in the sun. Fortunately, I predict a long life for them on consoles:).
I suppose if you're really worried about write limits, you can also use JFFS (I think that's the one!), which also tries to minimize/spread the writing. I really doubt you'll have too much of an issue, especially if you use the CF for the OS and apps, and an ultra-quiet hard drive for data.
At the risk of sounding like a bigger loser than I really am:
One time, when I was bored a number of years ago (think, 10-12 years ago), I was browsing through the complete listing of viruses for the Mac that the virus scanner would catch. There were only a couple hundred at the time, and pretty much all of them were trojans.
Something that struck me was the number of political ones. A rather significant percentage were designed to spread a message. I find this interesting, because nowadays, that political element seems to be totally gone. That's not to say they didn't have destructive payloads - I recall that more often than not, they did.
I think it would be a fairly interesting study to hunt down early virus databases and compare them to ones today.
Sociologists might have fun with this sort of thing. Speaking as economist, I doubt it's worth studying - the primary reason being that you can't guarantee people are making optimal choices.
I would highly recommend you actually do some research for yourself rather than forcing/.'ers to do it.
However, for those who were wondering: When Microsoft got.Net as an ECMA standard, they were forced into giving out the patents as RAND: royalty-free and non-discriminatory licensing. Non-discriminatory does not _necessarily_ mean GPL compatible, which is where the problems could arise. However, other people have noted that Microsoft does not generally use _patents_ offensively, and thus the threat is probably non-existent.
Ergo, there _could_ be a problem, but Microsoft would probably have to be VERY desperate to attempt to squash Mono, since they have no prior record of using patents offensively.
Depends on what "a distance" means. You're apparently assuming it means "a mile away with the naked eye", or something along those lines. More likely, it means " a couple hundred feet" - at which point you could probably figure out those are US flags on the shoulders of the incoming soldiers.
You're also ignoring the usage of _binoculars_, which were highly fashionable at the time the Geneva Conventions were drafted.
In any event, most guerillas simply do not meet those standards, and are thus not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. If you can't tell the theoretical difference between desert camo and dressing as a civilian, there's not much I'm going to be able to do to convince you, I think.
It's probably simply a matter of cultural tastes. The Japanese have always been up for buying small, nifty gadgets than Americans. I'm sure there's something Americans buy more than Japanese, too.
Example: small cars sell well in Europe, but US buyers balk at them. Two different cultures, two different sets of buying priorities. Nothing wrong with that.
Have you ever actually tried doing that? USB->parallel has always been tricky to set up, and, at best, marginally supported by print drivers (in both Linux and Windows). And if you want bi-directional, you're almost certainly out of luck. At least that was true with all four printers I tried it on.
In other words, USB->Parallel is an ugly solution, and it's best not to get into the situation in the first place.
I'm never going to buy another printer that doesn't have an ethernet jack built into it (or 802.11b, but you get the point). It's the only relatively sane way to future proof them, and more to the point, almost certainly keep future OS compatibility. Interestingly, it looks as if you can get consumer-level printers with built-in wireless networking now (HP 5850, for example).
And I'm sure the next release from ATI will, too. Ditto for nVidia. The graphics chip vendors don't support XF86, they support Linux. And when pretty much the entire Linux world is moving to X.org, it's pretty obvious they're going to be targetting that.
Why? Every major distro has switched at this point. New distributions are almost always forks ("derivatives") of popular distributions (typically RH/Fedora, Slack, or Debian), so it's unlikely that any new distributions are going to be using XF86.
If other older, less popular distros keep using it, who cares? No one's going to waste time supporting XF86 if it only has.1% of the Linux marketshare. I mean, have you _ever_ heard of anyone putting any serious effort into supporting MetroX or AcceleratedX? Of course not. Those X servers didn't hurt Linux, and neither will XF86.
"There is absolutely no reason in this day and age of spam to run a legit mail server off of a dynamic IP address.:-)"
Speak for yourself.
For someone like myself, who does a lot of hopping between networks, using the "ISP's SMTP server" is a collossal pain in the ass, forcing me to constantly change the SMTP server settings.
OTOH, running my own sendmail is fast, effective, and pretty much always works. I don't see how I should be banned from running my own mail server because some people abuse it. With that wonderful logic, it's time to shut down every P2P service, because most people are abusing them.
While I doubt many/.'ers keep kosher, for people who do, it's very difficult to shop online. Here's why:
Basically, the way you can tell if something is certified kosher is to examine the packaging for a "hecsher" - it's that little circle with a U inside, or the Star of David with a K in it, or any similar looking thing (obviously, different markings are from different kosher-cert orgs, so you've got to be careful to know which ones to trust).
However, it can be VERY difficult to ascertain what's kosher certified or not from online photos of the good. A lot of the time, the packaging shown online won't have the hecsher, or it'll be too small to see what it is, that sort of thing. Online shopping is therefore a bitch for the kosher consumer, and will continue to be until someone figures out how to exploit this problem for some commercial gain.
Seeing as kosher Jews (forgive me for stereotyping) tend to be pretty good eaters (ie, would order quite a bit), you'd think there would be _some way_ to make some money off this. Hmm.
But, anyways, there's one kind of person that an online supermarket just doesn't help too much these days.
I agree. There's nothing wrong with the current Linux paradigm for searching. The little "search for files" thing in FC1/GNOME works like a charm, very fast.
I wish that updatedb could be a little more sensible in the times it picks to thrash my hard drive doing indexing, but I realize that's probably more of a cron issue.
Maybe to you. Some of us, on the other hand, actually have good enough ears to tell the difference. This kind of comparison also can involve sound card and speaker quality. A POS sound card/chip with $3 tinny speakers is not really conducive to testing this kind of thing.
To be fair, I used to believe it was all BS until I actually tried it - and, believe it or not, I could tell the difference.
Now, ordinarily, a little quality loss wouldn't bother me that much if I was just yanking crap off IRC or P2P[1], because I didn't pay for it, so who the hell am I to complain? But at the prices that iTunes is charging (ie, the same price as a real CD), that's unacceptable.
-Erwos
[1] A habit which I've stopped, I may add, and not because of iTunes or the RIAA.
"How about we wait until we don't have to fight any more goddamn wars"
We've been fighting wars for all of human history. It's unlikely that'll happen anytime soon.
The biggest problem people have on/. is addressing reality _as it is_, rather than how it should be. If you think war is going to end anytime soon, you're deluded.
I also enjoy this theory that's so popular on/. that "space research is so much more beneficial than military research for the common man". I've never seen anyone actually prove that, and I think it's foolish to take it at face value.
This whole "explore the universe" bit has been done and done again. Star Trek, ST:TNG, Voyager, Enterprise - I think we've seen enough of the damn universe.
A good sci-fi military drama (what was the last real one - Space and Beyond?) set in the Star Trek universe (around the time of ST:TNG) could be absolutely amazing, and it would explore a mostly-unseen part of the Federation.
With regards to 1: I don't know how you think Linux is "getting better" when we're talking about yanking rmmod entirely.
However, realize this is not something that's fully under control of the kernel devs anyways. Some hardware simply does not enjoy being reprogrammed.
With regards to 2: This is a vendor problem, not a Linux problem. Linus is not the one who should be held accountable for irresponsible hardware vendors.
Totally OT, but you're totally misusing former President Eisenhower's little quote. Please do a little research on it - he was using "complex" in the psychological sense.
Actually, engineering is infamous as a career that doesn't have a very high salary max compared to, say, investment or management.
Anecdote: I originally wanted to enter college as a computer engineer, but my father (who's an EE) made it very clear that it was NOT a good career move - so I switched to CS (since, honestly, I didn't care THAT much).
It could very well be that the screwing of engineers salary-wise (compared to managers) is part of the problem. It's not a surprise that people are shying away from engineering when there's a lot more money to be made on the securities market, or from getting an MBA.
I take some umbrage that college students are "lazy", because not wanting to be an engineer is not synonymous with laziness. Ever seen the amount of work it takes to be an architect? Mind-blowing, at least here at UMCP.
In any case, you have no proof of that laziness, so I'll discard your personal theory into the trashcan where it belongs. Does it somehow enlarge your penis to call all non-engineers lazy?
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I think the importance of tech demoes have diminished greatly in recent years, when cards have had more or less the same capabilities (not speed, maybe) anyways. I mean, a DX9 tech demo is theoretically able to run on any card that can "do" DX9.
:).
Also, when it comes to bragging rights, "prettier tech demo!" just doesn't work on most people. Intangibles like frame rate and features are what people can easily point to.
That's not to say GPU tech demoes are worthless - but in comparison to other stuff, they've had their day in the sun. Fortunately, I predict a long life for them on consoles
-Erwos
Just because your software is open-source doesn't make it suddenly immune to the laws of your country.
-Erwos
I suppose if you're really worried about write limits, you can also use JFFS (I think that's the one!), which also tries to minimize/spread the writing. I really doubt you'll have too much of an issue, especially if you use the CF for the OS and apps, and an ultra-quiet hard drive for data.
-Erwos
At the risk of sounding like a bigger loser than I really am:
One time, when I was bored a number of years ago (think, 10-12 years ago), I was browsing through the complete listing of viruses for the Mac that the virus scanner would catch. There were only a couple hundred at the time, and pretty much all of them were trojans.
Something that struck me was the number of political ones. A rather significant percentage were designed to spread a message. I find this interesting, because nowadays, that political element seems to be totally gone. That's not to say they didn't have destructive payloads - I recall that more often than not, they did.
I think it would be a fairly interesting study to hunt down early virus databases and compare them to ones today.
-Erwos
Sociologists might have fun with this sort of thing. Speaking as economist, I doubt it's worth studying - the primary reason being that you can't guarantee people are making optimal choices.
eBay is a far more useful beast.
-Erwos
I would highly recommend you actually do some research for yourself rather than forcing /.'ers to do it.
.Net as an ECMA standard, they were forced into giving out the patents as RAND: royalty-free and non-discriminatory licensing. Non-discriminatory does not _necessarily_ mean GPL compatible, which is where the problems could arise. However, other people have noted that Microsoft does not generally use _patents_ offensively, and thus the threat is probably non-existent.
However, for those who were wondering:
When Microsoft got
Ergo, there _could_ be a problem, but Microsoft would probably have to be VERY desperate to attempt to squash Mono, since they have no prior record of using patents offensively.
That's how I understand it, anyways.
-Erwos
I gotta hope the guy they find to pilot the thing has his life insurance paid up.
-Erwos
Depends on what "a distance" means. You're apparently assuming it means "a mile away with the naked eye", or something along those lines. More likely, it means " a couple hundred feet" - at which point you could probably figure out those are US flags on the shoulders of the incoming soldiers.
You're also ignoring the usage of _binoculars_, which were highly fashionable at the time the Geneva Conventions were drafted.
In any event, most guerillas simply do not meet those standards, and are thus not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. If you can't tell the theoretical difference between desert camo and dressing as a civilian, there's not much I'm going to be able to do to convince you, I think.
-Erwos
It's probably simply a matter of cultural tastes. The Japanese have always been up for buying small, nifty gadgets than Americans. I'm sure there's something Americans buy more than Japanese, too.
Example: small cars sell well in Europe, but US buyers balk at them. Two different cultures, two different sets of buying priorities. Nothing wrong with that.
-Erwos
Have you ever actually tried doing that? USB->parallel has always been tricky to set up, and, at best, marginally supported by print drivers (in both Linux and Windows). And if you want bi-directional, you're almost certainly out of luck. At least that was true with all four printers I tried it on.
In other words, USB->Parallel is an ugly solution, and it's best not to get into the situation in the first place.
I'm never going to buy another printer that doesn't have an ethernet jack built into it (or 802.11b, but you get the point). It's the only relatively sane way to future proof them, and more to the point, almost certainly keep future OS compatibility. Interestingly, it looks as if you can get consumer-level printers with built-in wireless networking now (HP 5850, for example).
-Erwos
And I'm sure the next release from ATI will, too. Ditto for nVidia. The graphics chip vendors don't support XF86, they support Linux. And when pretty much the entire Linux world is moving to X.org, it's pretty obvious they're going to be targetting that.
-Erwos
"I would bet many will continue on using xfree86"
.1% of the Linux marketshare. I mean, have you _ever_ heard of anyone putting any serious effort into supporting MetroX or AcceleratedX? Of course not. Those X servers didn't hurt Linux, and neither will XF86.
Why? Every major distro has switched at this point. New distributions are almost always forks ("derivatives") of popular distributions (typically RH/Fedora, Slack, or Debian), so it's unlikely that any new distributions are going to be using XF86.
If other older, less popular distros keep using it, who cares? No one's going to waste time supporting XF86 if it only has
-Erwos
"There is absolutely no reason in this day and age of spam to run a legit mail server off of a dynamic IP address. :-)"
Speak for yourself.
For someone like myself, who does a lot of hopping between networks, using the "ISP's SMTP server" is a collossal pain in the ass, forcing me to constantly change the SMTP server settings.
OTOH, running my own sendmail is fast, effective, and pretty much always works. I don't see how I should be banned from running my own mail server because some people abuse it. With that wonderful logic, it's time to shut down every P2P service, because most people are abusing them.
-Erwos
Galeon runs fairly well on my RH8 laptop with 96mb of RAM and 166mhz Pentium MMX. GNOME would barely run with 32mb of RAM in the first place, though.
-Erwos
While I doubt many/.'ers keep kosher, for people who do, it's very difficult to shop online. Here's why:
Basically, the way you can tell if something is certified kosher is to examine the packaging for a "hecsher" - it's that little circle with a U inside, or the Star of David with a K in it, or any similar looking thing (obviously, different markings are from different kosher-cert orgs, so you've got to be careful to know which ones to trust).
However, it can be VERY difficult to ascertain what's kosher certified or not from online photos of the good. A lot of the time, the packaging shown online won't have the hecsher, or it'll be too small to see what it is, that sort of thing. Online shopping is therefore a bitch for the kosher consumer, and will continue to be until someone figures out how to exploit this problem for some commercial gain.
Seeing as kosher Jews (forgive me for stereotyping) tend to be pretty good eaters (ie, would order quite a bit), you'd think there would be _some way_ to make some money off this. Hmm.
But, anyways, there's one kind of person that an online supermarket just doesn't help too much these days.
-Erwos
I agree. There's nothing wrong with the current Linux paradigm for searching. The little "search for files" thing in FC1/GNOME works like a charm, very fast.
I wish that updatedb could be a little more sensible in the times it picks to thrash my hard drive doing indexing, but I realize that's probably more of a cron issue.
-Erwos
Maybe to you. Some of us, on the other hand, actually have good enough ears to tell the difference. This kind of comparison also can involve sound card and speaker quality. A POS sound card/chip with $3 tinny speakers is not really conducive to testing this kind of thing.
To be fair, I used to believe it was all BS until I actually tried it - and, believe it or not, I could tell the difference.
Now, ordinarily, a little quality loss wouldn't bother me that much if I was just yanking crap off IRC or P2P[1], because I didn't pay for it, so who the hell am I to complain? But at the prices that iTunes is charging (ie, the same price as a real CD), that's unacceptable.
-Erwos
[1] A habit which I've stopped, I may add, and not because of iTunes or the RIAA.
Monopolistic tactics, anyways. And you can certainly engage in those even without being a true monopoly (see: Microsoft).
-Erwos
"How about we wait until we don't have to fight any more goddamn wars"
/. is addressing reality _as it is_, rather than how it should be. If you think war is going to end anytime soon, you're deluded.
/. that "space research is so much more beneficial than military research for the common man". I've never seen anyone actually prove that, and I think it's foolish to take it at face value.
We've been fighting wars for all of human history. It's unlikely that'll happen anytime soon.
The biggest problem people have on
I also enjoy this theory that's so popular on
-Erwos
Too bad PETA threw away all its credibility on stupid, bullshit issues.
-Erwos
I agree.
This whole "explore the universe" bit has been done and done again. Star Trek, ST:TNG, Voyager, Enterprise - I think we've seen enough of the damn universe.
A good sci-fi military drama (what was the last real one - Space and Beyond?) set in the Star Trek universe (around the time of ST:TNG) could be absolutely amazing, and it would explore a mostly-unseen part of the Federation.
-Erwos
With regards to 1:
I don't know how you think Linux is "getting better" when we're talking about yanking rmmod entirely.
However, realize this is not something that's fully under control of the kernel devs anyways. Some hardware simply does not enjoy being reprogrammed.
With regards to 2:
This is a vendor problem, not a Linux problem. Linus is not the one who should be held accountable for irresponsible hardware vendors.
-Erwos
"Military-Industrial Complex"
Totally OT, but you're totally misusing former President Eisenhower's little quote. Please do a little research on it - he was using "complex" in the psychological sense.
-Erwos
Actually, engineering is infamous as a career that doesn't have a very high salary max compared to, say, investment or management.
Anecdote: I originally wanted to enter college as a computer engineer, but my father (who's an EE) made it very clear that it was NOT a good career move - so I switched to CS (since, honestly, I didn't care THAT much).
It could very well be that the screwing of engineers salary-wise (compared to managers) is part of the problem. It's not a surprise that people are shying away from engineering when there's a lot more money to be made on the securities market, or from getting an MBA.
I take some umbrage that college students are "lazy", because not wanting to be an engineer is not synonymous with laziness. Ever seen the amount of work it takes to be an architect? Mind-blowing, at least here at UMCP.
In any case, you have no proof of that laziness, so I'll discard your personal theory into the trashcan where it belongs. Does it somehow enlarge your penis to call all non-engineers lazy?
-Erwos
It looks like the same thing as Metabyte PGC - and Alienware was supposed to be the roll-out partner for that.
Nothing wrong with it, though - PGC actually did work, and was previewed independently by several people (I think Sharky?).
-Erwos