When I studied Artificial Neural nets at uni, one of the major obstacles to widespread acceptance of them was that they were very difficult to verify. Although they tended to do certain jobs very well (pattern recognition, in the main), it was very difficult to mathematically explain why they worked. People are loth to trust something which they don't understand and may break in some wierd, unforseen circumstance.
It's also interesting that the founder of the company studied at Aberdeen Uni, where I did my first degree (but not in computing). --
Re:What a waste of $500b
on
CALEA update
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· Score: 1
...authorized $500 million for the purpose of reimbursing the telecommunications industry for its costs...
I've seen a laptop which had a sticker saying "designed for Windows 95/98/NT" but didn't have NT drivers for the sound card. Dell's response was something along the lines of "if the machine boots NT, it's designed for NT".
No, I wasn't particularly happy with that response.
PS: Don't get on to me about why we were using NT and not 9[85] or linux. It was the staff member's choice and it was their laptop. As it was, at the time, the ATi Lite card wasn't supported under XFree in any case. --
It's also worth bearing in mind that sometimes the Celeron can be faster than an equivalent MHz PIII (I think it's something to do with having a faster cache speed). Check out this article over at Ars Technica. Disabling Celeron SMP would effectively reduce the chances of Intel having the fastest x86 based system even more (especially now that AMD have managed to overtake Intel FPU performance). --
If I'm interested in Perl, CGI's and Java, I would have been able to select multiple options. The answers aren't mutually exclusive. On average, each respondant would have been interested in 2.33 technologies. --
Surprising just how popular Delphi is. My guess is that a lot of the respondants are Windows users who currently develop with Delphi. The linux users probably skewed the C/C++ a bit more.
Another thing I noticed was that more people were interested in GTK+ than Qt, but more people wanted to develop for KDE than for GNOME... Seemed a little strange. --
atents are not secrets. If I patent a process to make widgets, the information on my process is publically available.
This is one reason the makers of Irn Bru (a soft drink made in Scotland) have never patented their recipe; this way no-one gets to know how it is made. The exact recipe for the main syrup used is known by the two managers (I assume it's also written down and locked up somewhere else in case both managers die).
IANAL, but I think that if a patent holder doesn't protect it's intellectual property, it loses the right to defend. If Freetype has been around for a long time, it could be argued that this is the case.
Two flies in the ointment; I can't remember if this is in relation to trademarks or patents; I could, however, imagine similar laws applying to the two. Secondly, to fight Apple in the courts would require a fair bit of money which I would imagine the Freetype authors don't have (they certainly couldn't afford legal advice on the patents, according to the web page).
In any case, I hope Apple allows the continued use of truetype fonts for no charge. *crosses fingers* --
Am I the only one to have Netscape crash every time I visit the site? (Solaris 7 + Sun's version of Netscape, FWIW). lynx seems to work fairly OK, but it's a pain viewing a frames page with lynx... --
I guess this partially explains why SGI is giving XFS to linux; the kind of need it themselves to allow linux to have some of those features as part of their corporate strategy.
Not that I'm complaining; any improvement to linux is a good thing. With the resources they have, and some of the development work they have under IRIX, linux should come on in leaps and bounds. --
Linux supports most 3DFX cards; I bought a Voodoo3 2000 PCI last week and got the X drivers installed last night. I was able to get X up fairly easily, but it wasn't perfect; I think there were a few file conflict kicking about, but I now have 1024x768 with 32-bit colour depth running fine.
3DFX is a huge improvement and it really makes games cook.
Yup, Bernstein wrote qmail. The fact that his personality is, well, objectionable has put many people off using qmail (I use it here at work, and it isn't too bad). He has his opinions on the 'right' way to do things and doesn't like anyone telling him that his way is 'wrong'. The qmail list archives are full of that sort of argument. --
Please don't let stories like this put people off developing open source software. Yes, there are jerks out there, but there are some cool people as well.
About my only contribution to open source software has been adding Solaris support to XMMS; I've put a fair bit of work into it, but others have been forthcoming with patches, modifications and rewrites. Nobody has tried to claim excess credit for work or tried to fork it off, perhaps because I've been willing to accept that (a) I am not a brilliant programmer and (b) others can do it better. Noone has insulted me or called me names (one person said the code was a mess, but I agreed with him; he was one of the coders who supplied fixes). In short, my only experience within open source software has been good.
Open source projects can be very successful; just look at Apache, which has scores (hundreds?) of developers. However, the larger the project, the larger the requirement for a core developer or small core team to coordinate efforts.
In this case above, the maintainer perhaps couldn't devote as much time as he would have liked to the project (or as much as it deserved?) resulting in Mr J. trying to take over.
The world is full of jerks, and unfortunately some of them use computers. Try to make the world a better place by not being one of them. --
It's not just the "multiple ethernet cards", it's the "multiple connections". As I understand it, once the kernel is handling one bit of TCP, several functions in the kernel get locked out, hurting performance. In other words, the granularity of the locks isn't small enough.
Work is ongoing in this in light of the redone Mindcraft tests which showed that, even with tuning, a powerful quad processor unit was better running NT than linux for file sharing. Uptime, reliablity and CGI performance are a different matter entirely, however. --
"There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks". Yes, all benchmarks are a 'bit funny', but this one is worse than usual; whoever conducted it is a bit naive about how to perform benchmarks. --
FreeBSD's advantages come into play since its TCP stack is threaded; linux still uses some heavy locking in the kernel hurting TCP performance. Since this was (a) a uniprocessor machine and (b) the requests were coming in sequentially, linux didn't lose out by much. This benchmark isn't particularly useful in that regard since it doesn't reflect real world situations. --
Well, a few flaws are fairly obvious in the benchmarks:
All tests were conducted through the local loopback adapter.
This kind of makes the tests rather non-applicable to real-world scenarios. It will also negate any differences in device drivers and bring in new problems with differences in loopback drivers.
In addition, the load will be affected by the script running on the same machine.
The tests were conducted with this script.
Using a bourne shell to conduct tests is not something I would view as particularly useful; perl would have been better, since it could compile itself to begin with to be more efficient (ie, faster). Also, this will give one concurrent test at a time; not particularly relevant in real-world situations.
In conclusion, basing FreeBSD performance vs linux performance using these figures is lunacy. --
My guess is that FreeBSD won; it's known for having a better TCP stack than linux (a fact the linux developers have acknowledged).
Personally, I've use SunOS 4 and hated the interface; I much prefer Solaris (ie, SVR4) which linux is closer, so linux is my preferred choice. YMMV, of course.
Even if nothing else comes of the case, it has forced M$ to be less predatory, allowing companies to develop things in different directions (ie, away from M$). Things like Dell shipping PC's with Redhat, various companies investing in linux (and other OS's).
Possibly the worst that could happen would be for Microsoft to get off scot-free; if this were to happen, it would vindicate all their prior practices and forces other companies to follow their practices 'or else'. The potential LART wielded by the courts has made them behave themselves, that's all. --
Slashdot Mirror
It's also interesting that the founder of the company studied at Aberdeen Uni, where I did my first degree (but not in computing).
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No, I wasn't particularly happy with that response.
PS: Don't get on to me about why we were using NT and not 9[85] or linux. It was the staff member's choice and it was their laptop. As it was, at the time, the ATi Lite card wasn't supported under XFree in any case.
--
It's also worth bearing in mind that sometimes the Celeron can be faster than an equivalent MHz PIII (I think it's something to do with having a faster cache speed). Check out this article over at Ars Technica. Disabling Celeron SMP would effectively reduce the chances of Intel having the fastest x86 based system even more (especially now that AMD have managed to overtake Intel FPU performance).
--
If I'm interested in Perl, CGI's and Java, I would have been able to select multiple options. The answers aren't mutually exclusive. On average, each respondant would have been interested in 2.33 technologies.
--
Another thing I noticed was that more people were interested in GTK+ than Qt, but more people wanted to develop for KDE than for GNOME... Seemed a little strange.
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Just a small aside on patent law...
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Two flies in the ointment; I can't remember if this is in relation to trademarks or patents; I could, however, imagine similar laws applying to the two. Secondly, to fight Apple in the courts would require a fair bit of money which I would imagine the Freetype authors don't have (they certainly couldn't afford legal advice on the patents, according to the web page).
In any case, I hope Apple allows the continued use of truetype fonts for no charge. *crosses fingers*
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See the Original slashdot article and the followup.
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Slashdot isn't the problem; it's the braindead Vovida site. Disabling Java seems to fix the problem, though.
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Am I the only one to have Netscape crash every time I visit the site? (Solaris 7 + Sun's version of Netscape, FWIW). lynx seems to work fairly OK, but it's a pain viewing a frames page with lynx...
--
Not that I'm complaining; any improvement to linux is a good thing. With the resources they have, and some of the development work they have under IRIX, linux should come on in leaps and bounds.
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3DFX is a huge improvement and it really makes games cook.
For those who are looking, http://glide.xxedgexx.com/3DfxRPMS _vb_glibc.html has the linux 3DFX drivers (still beta, but they do seem to work).
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Yup, Bernstein wrote qmail. The fact that his personality is, well, objectionable has put many people off using qmail (I use it here at work, and it isn't too bad). He has his opinions on the 'right' way to do things and doesn't like anyone telling him that his way is 'wrong'. The qmail list archives are full of that sort of argument.
--
About my only contribution to open source software has been adding Solaris support to XMMS; I've put a fair bit of work into it, but others have been forthcoming with patches, modifications and rewrites. Nobody has tried to claim excess credit for work or tried to fork it off, perhaps because I've been willing to accept that (a) I am not a brilliant programmer and (b) others can do it better. Noone has insulted me or called me names (one person said the code was a mess, but I agreed with him; he was one of the coders who supplied fixes). In short, my only experience within open source software has been good.
Open source projects can be very successful; just look at Apache, which has scores (hundreds?) of developers. However, the larger the project, the larger the requirement for a core developer or small core team to coordinate efforts.
In this case above, the maintainer perhaps couldn't devote as much time as he would have liked to the project (or as much as it deserved?) resulting in Mr J. trying to take over.
The world is full of jerks, and unfortunately some of them use computers. Try to make the world a better place by not being one of them.
--
Work is ongoing in this in light of the redone Mindcraft tests which showed that, even with tuning, a powerful quad processor unit was better running NT than linux for file sharing. Uptime, reliablity and CGI performance are a different matter entirely, however.
--
"There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks". Yes, all benchmarks are a 'bit funny', but this one is worse than usual; whoever conducted it is a bit naive about how to perform benchmarks.
--
FreeBSD's advantages come into play since its TCP stack is threaded; linux still uses some heavy locking in the kernel hurting TCP performance. Since this was (a) a uniprocessor machine and (b) the requests were coming in sequentially, linux didn't lose out by much. This benchmark isn't particularly useful in that regard since it doesn't reflect real world situations.
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In addition, the load will be affected by the script running on the same machine.
Using a bourne shell to conduct tests is not something I would view as particularly useful; perl would have been better, since it could compile itself to begin with to be more efficient (ie, faster). Also, this will give one concurrent test at a time; not particularly relevant in real-world situations.In conclusion, basing FreeBSD performance vs linux performance using these figures is lunacy.
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Personally, I've use SunOS 4 and hated the interface; I much prefer Solaris (ie, SVR4) which linux is closer, so linux is my preferred choice. YMMV, of course.
Let the holy war commence :)
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Yet again, Scotland does it first :)
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Possibly the worst that could happen would be for Microsoft to get off scot-free; if this were to happen, it would vindicate all their prior practices and forces other companies to follow their practices 'or else'. The potential LART wielded by the courts has made them behave themselves, that's all.
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