I don't know about that. However, it's been pretty clearly established that, five or six years ago, a tech hobbyist could use Linux as his sole desktop. He might have to use care in purchasing hardware, and he might have to deal with LaTeX instead of a word processor. He might have to re-request documents in a different format. He might spend an awfully long time getting things up and running. However, Linux was usable alone.
KDE and GNOME and other projects steadily got easier to use and were cleaned up. Windows compatibility improved. Companies slowly started to throw their weight behind Linux.
Two or three years ago, I'd say that a power user could reasonably start using Linux. There were still some annoying issues. Antialiasing wasn't in use, and many folks noticed this, if they were accustomed to Windows-style antialiasing. Sound drivers at the time were usually OSS/Free, so distributions used software sound servers to do sound mixing, which frequently resulted in poor-quality-resampled sound that broke up. XFree86 3.3 was still around, and 3D support in 3.3 was pretty bad. You still had to use the command line for a reasonable number of things (probably looking online for someone having the same problem), though folks were working hard on frontends.
Today, I think that a power user can comfortably run Linux, without any of the old drawbacks. 3d support is generally roughly on par with Windows. Audio is much better -- most distributions use ALSA and take advantage of hardware mixing, though more unusual features like hardware reverb generally aren't supported. Things like support for cheapo printers and reliable Windows filesharing support are in place. Most Windows productivity programs have an acceptably usable equivalent, and while document compatibility still isn't perfect (OpenOffice isn't identical with MS Office), it's good enough for most people to comfortably get work done without making an annoyance of themselves. Things are *not* equivalent to Windows. While most unusual hardware can be made to work one way or another (for example, I have a SmartHome USB X10 controller that can be made to work under 2.4 by compiling and installing modules myself...though 2.6 support is not in), it's still not flawless. The typical Linux distribution has gained weight -- GNOME and KDE are both quite heavyweight. Games are just not there -- this may not be an issue for the business desktop, but it's a huge deal for the home desktop. Binary software distribution (and no matter how nice it would be for everything to be open source, it just isn't going to happen) is a phenomenal pain in the ass, even in the presence of the LSB. I have Loki games, games that I purchased perhaps two years ago, that already do not run on current distributions. There is no existing technical solution, short of using Java bytecode and taking the performance hit that doing so entails.
I find that XP Home's multiuser workstation environment is much more accessable to a typical home user. Jane can log on, then she can switch to Bob, then he can log off and Jane can continue using her software. While I have run multiple X servers before on my box, I don't believe that there are any major distros that support such a setup nicely out of the box, and I remember running into all sorts of interesting bugs at the time -- run OpenGL software or something, and freezes started coming up.
Two of the major players in the Linux productivity world are OpenOffice and Mozilla, requred for MS Office and IE equivalence. Both of these use oddball widget sets. They are usable, and generally operate roughly like other applications on the system do. However, they are still disconcerting to the user. I *know* when something is using Athena or XUL or whatever OpenOffice uses, and I adapt my behavior accordingly. It's still confusing, unintuitive, and looks unprofessional to someone just trying to do work, however. By comparison, the Qt-Gtk differences are much mor
Well...things did happen. It's true that the prediction of every grandmother using Linux on her desktop hasn't happened. However, there have been significant advancements. Linux as a server has spread like wildfire. Linux as a power-user's workstation is quite feasible. You really don't need to be a coder or hard-core tech hobbyist any more to use it. The gateway has been lowered a lot.
Also, remember that, while it's true that not everyone has switched to Linux, a lot more people are moving from Windows to Linux than the other way around. The Linux userbase is steadily and quickly growing, though expecting Linux to completely overwhelm inertia and companies to install Linux over all their copies of Windows tomorrow does seem unlikely.
People tend to be pretty sensitive about their purchasing experiences when shopping. With cars, there are usually a lot of competitors within easy driving range. If a woman feels peeved that she's not being properly treated, she simply won't shop at that store. The free market should take care of things, to be honest.
I'm not married, but I suspect that if I was and was talking to a furniture salesman at an interior furnishings store with my wife, the wife is more likely to be addressed by default. I suspect the salesman would end up speaking more to whoever is asking more questions, in the end. I don't find the concept of this particularly offensive or irritating.
My guess about the feature list: as Slashdotters love to note about tech items, many technology products have bullet points and specs listed that are not particularly useful in actually judging the limitations and capabilities of the product. For some reason, some quirk of the male and female psyche, I rarely see females proudly enumerating, showing off products to their friends based on bullet points. I *do* see guys doing this. Hence, different bullet points being handed to the men. It's just something that the salesman (or -woman, given the context of this article) hopes will sell an item more effectively.
Any idea what it would take to use this as an opportunuty to establish a sort of Azalia Certified for Linux Logo and a set of requirements that goes with it?
That would be you, a web server, and GIMP to do up the logo.
The question is what it would take to get journalists to be interested in it.
Hopefully someone will automate or simplify ALSA for low-end use.
The distros that have shipped ALSA as default, like SuSE, have had pretty good dummy-proof setup of ALSA for a while. Probably every major distro will be using ALSA in 2.6, which means that the remaining OSS/Free holdouts, like Red Hat, will be doing up easy-to-use UIs for ALSA.
I also stopped using ALSA a while ago -- it was just a pain in the ass to recompile the alsa-driver package each time I upgraded the kernel, and all the software I use also supports an OSS interface (and *most* was using ALSA through the OSS compatibility interface). I expect I'll be using it again in 2.6.
Centrino's wireless Ethernet controller is roughly the WiFi equivalent of a WinModem. Some of the components that are traditionally done in hardware (I'd guess the same stuff as in WinModems, like the DSP work, though I don't know the exact extent of the "softwarization") are done in software. Intel is not holding back on Linux support to secretly help out Microsoft -- I agree with you there. They're just in the same position as the WinModem vendors. If they supply their product's crown jewels -- open source the software that does a lot of the heavy lifting in their hardware product -- they've funded the R&D for what will be promptly snapped up by competitors and produced more cheaply.
So, you are right that there is no plot to help out Microsoft, but the grandparent is right that Intel may be cagey about supporting a platform where users are rabid about having source (and much of the architecture works less reliably without source).
Frankly, I'm frusterated with the whole laptop situation, and I wish, wish, wish that laptop vendors would make some critical mistake in the price wars and accidently commoditize their product, with standard components and form factors, so that things can be built and swapped out a la desktops.
You have *all playthrough inputs on your sound card muted* and you're still getting audible noise?
I have an emu10k1-based card. Turns out that the OSS/Free drivers (one of the four free drivers available for this card -- there's the OSS/Free drivers, the native kernel driver, Creative's driver (which may be an adaptation of the native kernel driver, not sure), and ALSA. I started using OSS/Free, since Red Hat had defaulted to using OSS/Free with my old card. I kept getting noise -- sort of a buzzing -- when doing things that caused major busses to switch on and off slowly -- moving mice, dragging windows around. I checked my mixer, and all the inputs were indeed muted. It turns out that apparently, the OSS/Free drivers didn't *list* all of the available on-board inputs. There were some still on-board inputs that still were on that I could see after switching to ALSA. I muted the additional inputs with ALSA, and the buzzing went away.
I'm not sure whether there would be any really audible difference, but Creative sells a relatively cheap (compared to professional equipment) external DAC called the Extigy that might be what you want.
...and say that I don't think that fancy packaging is a really good idea.
While fancy packaging might help roll boxes off the shelves, software (at least in my experience) doesn't usually come from retail anymore -- one orders it online.
And ultimately, all the trinkets you get are just that -- trinkets. They wind up in the wastebasket, taking up space. Marathon's triangular boxes did it, Quake's tin box did it, etc. I was actually rather pleased with my purchases from Linux Game Publishing, Tribsoft, and Loki, which all simply came with a card and a CD or two in a DVD case. No waste, no having to dispose of tons of packaging materials, no blowing money on something that I'll see once that then forget about.
I have no idea how much it cost to put Quake III in a custom-embossed tin box, but let's assume that it was about 50 cents. I have no idea how many units Quake III sold, but I would assume that it is at least half a million units. Given only those assumptions, there's five artists that could have been hired for a year's work each to add more textures and better graphics to Quake III. That's an awfully tough tradeoff. I'd rather have the game itself be nicer, to be honest.
There are still a few convincing reasons to ship things in a package. Most of the time, I'd prefer to have my documentation in plain text, if I can get it. It's easier to search. However, sometimes things wind up in PDF on a CD. It's good that they can't get lost, but it's also rather annoying to read through a PDF, and a pain to print out hundreds of pages. Some manuals (I remember the SuperPaint manual) are quite readable while munching on lunch, and should stay in the form of wood pulp.
In general, though, I'm happy to see fancy boxes and addins go away. They just don't provide much benefit. Heck, I'd be happy to have a CD with nothing more than the name of the product printed on it -- no fancy, colored artwork, even.
I'm trying to figure out exactly what all of the hubub is about. From what I can tell from a quick Googling, Plone is a piece of software that helps people use Zope more easily, by slapping a GUI on it. Zope is a Python-based content management system. Content management systems are apparently something vaguely along the lines of Slashcode -- they store data in a database and let you more easily generate webpages from said data. They would be used by someone who wants to set up an e-commerce website or a blog-capable website.
I may be utterly wrong -- I'm a little surprised that I couldn't immediately turn up a simple explanation of what these things are on the web. If I'm missing something here, can someone clarify?
Just dropped by the GDB website, and took a gander. Apparently GDB 6.0 is out. Its changelog has this fascinating little gem:
* GNU/Linux support for fork, vfork, and exec.
The "catch fork", "catch exec", "catch vfork", and "set follow-fork-mode" commands are now implemented for GNU/Linux. They require a 2.5.x or later kernel.
There are some other biggies, like Objective C support. This is definitely something to check out -- I'm hoping that RH will be including it in Fedora Core 2.
So break out that 2.6.1 kernel and get fork-following!
It should be noted that the "high quality SCSI drives" are still rebranded Seagates.
"Seagates" and "high quality SCSI drives" are hardly mutually exclusive -- if anything, they're closer to synonymous. Seagate is the dominant provider of hard drives for the enterprise market (i.e. pricy, high reliability drives). I think you'll also find, looking back at whatever you considered "high quality" drives, that there's a pretty good chance that it's a Seagate drive.
I don't understand why you'd need 112 CPUs to do data warehousing. As a matter of fact, I would imagine that data warehousing would be decidedly an I/O bound task.
These are also the same people who enjoy particpating in system administration discussions when their system administration experience only stems from the 4 boxes they have at home.
Remember that Linux was written by people at home who liked dicking about with computers before you criticize too harshly.
I wrote a computational scientific program in Matlab for my research group. I then tested it out on the Sun Blade and my own P4 3.06 GHz w/ HT laptop. The Sun Blade computed at nearly 3X the speed of the Pentium 4. Now we are wondering why we didn't just buy a nice custom built PC for 1/3 the price...
Just wanted to point out that one is running on a laptop, which could have processor cycling involved, unless you're sure that that's not the case.
I also realize Matlab runs poorly on Unix due to FP instruction sets not being available.
Okay, now this went right over my head. Durrr...what? I admit that I haven't used MATLAB on *IX for a while, but I see no reason that floating point instructions couldn't be used by MATLAB, just as they are in every other program using floating point numbers on my system.
"Even" Linux? Good *God*, man. Debian had things down to "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade;", and Red Hat is down to "yum update". How little typing (or few characters for your cron job) do you *need* before you're happy?
I admit that if you install a new kernel, you're going to have to reboot the machine to start taking advantage of it.
Last, what the hell is it with your cheap ass sales people. Is the sun logo so expensive that you can't afford to give out tshirts, cups and other good will crap to your biggest customers. Pizza?!? WTF! HP gave the whole department some of the best vendor shirts we've ever had. IBM gets us drinks and cigars. EMC tooks us to the matrix the day BEFORE it opened. I can go on and on. Instead, as one of your biggest clients in the region we get bad pizza and bad patches?!?
I wasn't aware that business types expected bribes these days. Perhaps I'm just naive. Christ, you folks expect kickbacks in the form of Matrix opening tickets in order to do business with someone? I was pretty disgusted with the whole Olympic committee thing, but this is downright pervasive.
* Most computers don't have very nice microphones.
* You need to wear headphones instead of using speakers (to keep from sending crap over the mic). A lot of folks don't have headphones handy at their computer and/or don't feel like using them.
* Bandwidth *used* to be a constraint, and is still not something to sneeze at. Basic DSL packages generally provide 128kbps upstream, and modems about a quarter of that.
I hate to say it, but consoles may be better platforms for co-operative play (which I've discovered that I really, really like -- the computer is the only loser, and the other player helps add in a random element). Console co-ops *do* suffer from a number of limitations. There aren't a heck of a lot of pixels that get slapped on a TV screen, and splitting them up further is kind of bad.
However, most co-op games are much better if the players can talk to each other -- text messages, a la Quake multiplayer, work, but just aren't a good substitute for voice. That means that either you need good remote voice capabilities -- and remote voice over IP has its share of problems -- or you need players to be sitting next to each other. Folks don't have a bank of computers right next to each other of the same class to play a current game, which means that, sadly, for most real-time co-op games, the PC isn't a great platform.
The main drawback of the console multiplayer game, the inability to easily provide private information to any one player, is not generally an issue in co-operative games, since it's okay if other people know how much health you have and where you are.
Good gameplay with poor plot sells much better than a brilliant story with horrid gameplay.
Or at least has more replay value, which in a game that is both moddable and multiplayer-capable, is a big deal.
Man, I wish someone would sit down and clone the TA feature set that (well, back when I played RTSes) other RTSes seem to lack. It's not that hard, and it's already been done well. Infinite resource generators. Long range guns. Powerful naval units (the naval portion of that game is fantastic). Modability. 3D units. Flamamble terrain. Ability to optionally use LOS, fog of war, etc. Most micromanagement handled by the computer -- you can queue up an unlimited number of units, queue up orders, give general orders ("do not deviate from your ordered path, but return fire if attacked"), queued-up orders, automatic healing/repair by units capable of this when patrolling, the concept of a Commander -- a piece that you can play as a trump card, but that if lost loses the round. So much fun.
They were also most recently cursed at for their uninspired, boring and derivative work on Unreal 2. Anyone who played it hated it. Word of mouth was terrible.
I could never figure this out. It certainly wasn't exceptional -- no Marathon-class groundbreaking story, Halo-class groundbreaking gameplay, or Unreal-class groundbreaking graphics, but I found it fairly fun to play. I never got particularly nervous in some levels where I should have, and the characters were flat. However, there were nice weapon effects, the scripted levels where you defend against attackers were fun (at least for me), etc.
I guess U2 wasn't the big deal that U1 was, but neither was it a Daikatana.
WoT should never have been made because only the 2 people who bought the books wanted it,
I always vaguely thought that there were a fair number of people that enjoyed Wheel of Time out there, but perhaps people just don't read books much anymore, with video games easily available.
A source that is trivially searchable is no longer a good source for plagiarism, because a prof can check a paper with a single click.
The current fragmentation (and commercial nature) of existing sources is what gives rise to plagiarism. There's a good chance that someone can write a paper at university A and that if someone else submits the same paper a year later at university B, the lecturer won't be able to pick up on the fact. Hence, it's easy for websites that allow archiving and downloading of papers to spring up.
The Google folks (who are frusterated with automated scripts that hammer the bajeezus out of their search engine, trying to let result spammers figure out the ranking of a given page) have said on their policy page that if you're beating up on their servers with an automated system, they can ban you.
Now, they don't seem to to it lightly. I've written a couple scripts that use Google, but I also put some limits on the thing -- one second delays between searches and the like.
But if a teacher is forcing a student to go through this process, then that teacher is basically saying that their students are not trustworthy and is an assumption of guilt by default.
Frankly, I suspect that, sadly, the majority of university students have cheated to some extent at one point or another. It's depressing, but if you don't have what it takes and you're under a lot of pressure to perform...
Slashdot Mirror
even baby joe can use it.
I don't know about that. However, it's been pretty clearly established that, five or six years ago, a tech hobbyist could use Linux as his sole desktop. He might have to use care in purchasing hardware, and he might have to deal with LaTeX instead of a word processor. He might have to re-request documents in a different format. He might spend an awfully long time getting things up and running. However, Linux was usable alone.
KDE and GNOME and other projects steadily got easier to use and were cleaned up. Windows compatibility improved. Companies slowly started to throw their weight behind Linux.
Two or three years ago, I'd say that a power user could reasonably start using Linux. There were still some annoying issues. Antialiasing wasn't in use, and many folks noticed this, if they were accustomed to Windows-style antialiasing. Sound drivers at the time were usually OSS/Free, so distributions used software sound servers to do sound mixing, which frequently resulted in poor-quality-resampled sound that broke up. XFree86 3.3 was still around, and 3D support in 3.3 was pretty bad. You still had to use the command line for a reasonable number of things (probably looking online for someone having the same problem), though folks were working hard on frontends.
Today, I think that a power user can comfortably run Linux, without any of the old drawbacks. 3d support is generally roughly on par with Windows. Audio is much better -- most distributions use ALSA and take advantage of hardware mixing, though more unusual features like hardware reverb generally aren't supported. Things like support for cheapo printers and reliable Windows filesharing support are in place. Most Windows productivity programs have an acceptably usable equivalent, and while document compatibility still isn't perfect (OpenOffice isn't identical with MS Office), it's good enough for most people to comfortably get work done without making an annoyance of themselves. Things are *not* equivalent to Windows. While most unusual hardware can be made to work one way or another (for example, I have a SmartHome USB X10 controller that can be made to work under 2.4 by compiling and installing modules myself...though 2.6 support is not in), it's still not flawless. The typical Linux distribution has gained weight -- GNOME and KDE are both quite heavyweight. Games are just not there -- this may not be an issue for the business desktop, but it's a huge deal for the home desktop. Binary software distribution (and no matter how nice it would be for everything to be open source, it just isn't going to happen) is a phenomenal pain in the ass, even in the presence of the LSB. I have Loki games, games that I purchased perhaps two years ago, that already do not run on current distributions. There is no existing technical solution, short of using Java bytecode and taking the performance hit that doing so entails.
I find that XP Home's multiuser workstation environment is much more accessable to a typical home user. Jane can log on, then she can switch to Bob, then he can log off and Jane can continue using her software. While I have run multiple X servers before on my box, I don't believe that there are any major distros that support such a setup nicely out of the box, and I remember running into all sorts of interesting bugs at the time -- run OpenGL software or something, and freezes started coming up.
Two of the major players in the Linux productivity world are OpenOffice and Mozilla, requred for MS Office and IE equivalence. Both of these use oddball widget sets. They are usable, and generally operate roughly like other applications on the system do. However, they are still disconcerting to the user. I *know* when something is using Athena or XUL or whatever OpenOffice uses, and I adapt my behavior accordingly. It's still confusing, unintuitive, and looks unprofessional to someone just trying to do work, however. By comparison, the Qt-Gtk differences are much mor
Well...things did happen. It's true that the prediction of every grandmother using Linux on her desktop hasn't happened. However, there have been significant advancements. Linux as a server has spread like wildfire. Linux as a power-user's workstation is quite feasible. You really don't need to be a coder or hard-core tech hobbyist any more to use it. The gateway has been lowered a lot.
Also, remember that, while it's true that not everyone has switched to Linux, a lot more people are moving from Windows to Linux than the other way around. The Linux userbase is steadily and quickly growing, though expecting Linux to completely overwhelm inertia and companies to install Linux over all their copies of Windows tomorrow does seem unlikely.
People tend to be pretty sensitive about their purchasing experiences when shopping. With cars, there are usually a lot of competitors within easy driving range. If a woman feels peeved that she's not being properly treated, she simply won't shop at that store. The free market should take care of things, to be honest.
I'm not married, but I suspect that if I was and was talking to a furniture salesman at an interior furnishings store with my wife, the wife is more likely to be addressed by default. I suspect the salesman would end up speaking more to whoever is asking more questions, in the end. I don't find the concept of this particularly offensive or irritating.
My guess about the feature list: as Slashdotters love to note about tech items, many technology products have bullet points and specs listed that are not particularly useful in actually judging the limitations and capabilities of the product. For some reason, some quirk of the male and female psyche, I rarely see females proudly enumerating, showing off products to their friends based on bullet points. I *do* see guys doing this. Hence, different bullet points being handed to the men. It's just something that the salesman (or -woman, given the context of this article) hopes will sell an item more effectively.
Any idea what it would take to use this as an opportunuty to establish a sort of Azalia Certified for Linux Logo and a set of requirements that goes with it?
That would be you, a web server, and GIMP to do up the logo.
The question is what it would take to get journalists to be interested in it.
Hopefully someone will automate or simplify ALSA for low-end use.
The distros that have shipped ALSA as default, like SuSE, have had pretty good dummy-proof setup of ALSA for a while. Probably every major distro will be using ALSA in 2.6, which means that the remaining OSS/Free holdouts, like Red Hat, will be doing up easy-to-use UIs for ALSA.
I also stopped using ALSA a while ago -- it was just a pain in the ass to recompile the alsa-driver package each time I upgraded the kernel, and all the software I use also supports an OSS interface (and *most* was using ALSA through the OSS compatibility interface). I expect I'll be using it again in 2.6.
Centrino's wireless Ethernet controller is roughly the WiFi equivalent of a WinModem. Some of the components that are traditionally done in hardware (I'd guess the same stuff as in WinModems, like the DSP work, though I don't know the exact extent of the "softwarization") are done in software. Intel is not holding back on Linux support to secretly help out Microsoft -- I agree with you there. They're just in the same position as the WinModem vendors. If they supply their product's crown jewels -- open source the software that does a lot of the heavy lifting in their hardware product -- they've funded the R&D for what will be promptly snapped up by competitors and produced more cheaply.
So, you are right that there is no plot to help out Microsoft, but the grandparent is right that Intel may be cagey about supporting a platform where users are rabid about having source (and much of the architecture works less reliably without source).
Frankly, I'm frusterated with the whole laptop situation, and I wish, wish, wish that laptop vendors would make some critical mistake in the price wars and accidently commoditize their product, with standard components and form factors, so that things can be built and swapped out a la desktops.
You have *all playthrough inputs on your sound card muted* and you're still getting audible noise?
I have an emu10k1-based card. Turns out that the OSS/Free drivers (one of the four free drivers available for this card -- there's the OSS/Free drivers, the native kernel driver, Creative's driver (which may be an adaptation of the native kernel driver, not sure), and ALSA. I started using OSS/Free, since Red Hat had defaulted to using OSS/Free with my old card. I kept getting noise -- sort of a buzzing -- when doing things that caused major busses to switch on and off slowly -- moving mice, dragging windows around. I checked my mixer, and all the inputs were indeed muted. It turns out that apparently, the OSS/Free drivers didn't *list* all of the available on-board inputs. There were some still on-board inputs that still were on that I could see after switching to ALSA. I muted the additional inputs with ALSA, and the buzzing went away.
I'm not sure whether there would be any really audible difference, but Creative sells a relatively cheap (compared to professional equipment) external DAC called the Extigy that might be what you want.
Note that, IIRC, GDB already had HP-UX support fork()-following support, but I haven't seen anything about Solaris, AIX, or BSD support.
...and say that I don't think that fancy packaging is a really good idea.
While fancy packaging might help roll boxes off the shelves, software (at least in my experience) doesn't usually come from retail anymore -- one orders it online.
And ultimately, all the trinkets you get are just that -- trinkets. They wind up in the wastebasket, taking up space. Marathon's triangular boxes did it, Quake's tin box did it, etc. I was actually rather pleased with my purchases from Linux Game Publishing, Tribsoft, and Loki, which all simply came with a card and a CD or two in a DVD case. No waste, no having to dispose of tons of packaging materials, no blowing money on something that I'll see once that then forget about.
I have no idea how much it cost to put Quake III in a custom-embossed tin box, but let's assume that it was about 50 cents. I have no idea how many units Quake III sold, but I would assume that it is at least half a million units. Given only those assumptions, there's five artists that could have been hired for a year's work each to add more textures and better graphics to Quake III. That's an awfully tough tradeoff. I'd rather have the game itself be nicer, to be honest.
There are still a few convincing reasons to ship things in a package. Most of the time, I'd prefer to have my documentation in plain text, if I can get it. It's easier to search. However, sometimes things wind up in PDF on a CD. It's good that they can't get lost, but it's also rather annoying to read through a PDF, and a pain to print out hundreds of pages. Some manuals (I remember the SuperPaint manual) are quite readable while munching on lunch, and should stay in the form of wood pulp.
In general, though, I'm happy to see fancy boxes and addins go away. They just don't provide much benefit. Heck, I'd be happy to have a CD with nothing more than the name of the product printed on it -- no fancy, colored artwork, even.
I'm trying to figure out exactly what all of the hubub is about. From what I can tell from a quick Googling, Plone is a piece of software that helps people use Zope more easily, by slapping a GUI on it. Zope is a Python-based content management system. Content management systems are apparently something vaguely along the lines of Slashcode -- they store data in a database and let you more easily generate webpages from said data. They would be used by someone who wants to set up an e-commerce website or a blog-capable website.
I may be utterly wrong -- I'm a little surprised that I couldn't immediately turn up a simple explanation of what these things are on the web. If I'm missing something here, can someone clarify?
Just dropped by the GDB website, and took a gander. Apparently GDB 6.0 is out. Its changelog has this fascinating little gem:
* GNU/Linux support for fork, vfork, and exec.
The "catch fork", "catch exec", "catch vfork", and "set follow-fork-mode"
commands are now implemented for GNU/Linux. They require a 2.5.x or later
kernel.
There are some other biggies, like Objective C support. This is definitely something to check out -- I'm hoping that RH will be including it in Fedora Core 2.
So break out that 2.6.1 kernel and get fork-following!
It should be noted that the "high quality SCSI drives" are still rebranded Seagates.
"Seagates" and "high quality SCSI drives" are hardly mutually exclusive -- if anything, they're closer to synonymous. Seagate is the dominant provider of hard drives for the enterprise market (i.e. pricy, high reliability drives). I think you'll also find, looking back at whatever you considered "high quality" drives, that there's a pretty good chance that it's a Seagate drive.
I don't understand why you'd need 112 CPUs to do data warehousing. As a matter of fact, I would imagine that data warehousing would be decidedly an I/O bound task.
Orange Micro also sold an x86 expansion board for Nubus-based systems.
These are also the same people who enjoy particpating in system administration discussions when their system administration experience only stems from the 4 boxes they have at home.
Remember that Linux was written by people at home who liked dicking about with computers before you criticize too harshly.
I wrote a computational scientific program in Matlab for my research group. I then tested it out on the Sun Blade and my own P4 3.06 GHz w/ HT laptop. The Sun Blade computed at nearly 3X the speed of the Pentium 4. Now we are wondering why we didn't just buy a nice custom built PC for 1/3 the price...
Just wanted to point out that one is running on a laptop, which could have processor cycling involved, unless you're sure that that's not the case.
I also realize Matlab runs poorly on Unix due to FP instruction sets not being available.
Okay, now this went right over my head. Durrr...what? I admit that I haven't used MATLAB on *IX for a while, but I see no reason that floating point instructions couldn't be used by MATLAB, just as they are in every other program using floating point numbers on my system.
Even linux is better.
"Even" Linux? Good *God*, man. Debian had things down to "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade;", and Red Hat is down to "yum update". How little typing (or few characters for your cron job) do you *need* before you're happy?
I admit that if you install a new kernel, you're going to have to reboot the machine to start taking advantage of it.
Last, what the hell is it with your cheap ass sales people. Is the sun logo so expensive that you can't afford to give out tshirts, cups and other good will crap to your biggest customers. Pizza?!? WTF! HP gave the whole department some of the best vendor shirts we've ever had. IBM gets us drinks and cigars. EMC tooks us to the matrix the day BEFORE it opened. I can go on and on. Instead, as one of your biggest clients in the region we get bad pizza and bad patches?!?
I wasn't aware that business types expected bribes these days. Perhaps I'm just naive. Christ, you folks expect kickbacks in the form of Matrix opening tickets in order to do business with someone? I was pretty disgusted with the whole Olympic committee thing, but this is downright pervasive.
Yeah, but among the drawbacks:
* Most computers don't have very nice microphones.
* You need to wear headphones instead of using speakers (to keep from sending crap over the mic). A lot of folks don't have headphones handy at their computer and/or don't feel like using them.
* Bandwidth *used* to be a constraint, and is still not something to sneeze at. Basic DSL packages generally provide 128kbps upstream, and modems about a quarter of that.
I hate to say it, but consoles may be better platforms for co-operative play (which I've discovered that I really, really like -- the computer is the only loser, and the other player helps add in a random element). Console co-ops *do* suffer from a number of limitations. There aren't a heck of a lot of pixels that get slapped on a TV screen, and splitting them up further is kind of bad.
However, most co-op games are much better if the players can talk to each other -- text messages, a la Quake multiplayer, work, but just aren't a good substitute for voice. That means that either you need good remote voice capabilities -- and remote voice over IP has its share of problems -- or you need players to be sitting next to each other. Folks don't have a bank of computers right next to each other of the same class to play a current game, which means that, sadly, for most real-time co-op games, the PC isn't a great platform.
The main drawback of the console multiplayer game, the inability to easily provide private information to any one player, is not generally an issue in co-operative games, since it's okay if other people know how much health you have and where you are.
Good gameplay with poor plot sells much better than a brilliant story with horrid gameplay.
Or at least has more replay value, which in a game that is both moddable and multiplayer-capable, is a big deal.
Man, I wish someone would sit down and clone the TA feature set that (well, back when I played RTSes) other RTSes seem to lack. It's not that hard, and it's already been done well. Infinite resource generators. Long range guns. Powerful naval units (the naval portion of that game is fantastic). Modability. 3D units. Flamamble terrain. Ability to optionally use LOS, fog of war, etc. Most micromanagement handled by the computer -- you can queue up an unlimited number of units, queue up orders, give general orders ("do not deviate from your ordered path, but return fire if attacked"), queued-up orders, automatic healing/repair by units capable of this when patrolling, the concept of a Commander -- a piece that you can play as a trump card, but that if lost loses the round. So much fun.
They were also most recently cursed at for their uninspired, boring and derivative work on Unreal 2. Anyone who played it hated it. Word of mouth was terrible.
I could never figure this out. It certainly wasn't exceptional -- no Marathon-class groundbreaking story, Halo-class groundbreaking gameplay, or Unreal-class groundbreaking graphics, but I found it fairly fun to play. I never got particularly nervous in some levels where I should have, and the characters were flat. However, there were nice weapon effects, the scripted levels where you defend against attackers were fun (at least for me), etc.
I guess U2 wasn't the big deal that U1 was, but neither was it a Daikatana.
WoT should never have been made because only the 2 people who bought the books wanted it,
I always vaguely thought that there were a fair number of people that enjoyed Wheel of Time out there, but perhaps people just don't read books much anymore, with video games easily available.
I have to disagree.
A source that is trivially searchable is no longer a good source for plagiarism, because a prof can check a paper with a single click.
The current fragmentation (and commercial nature) of existing sources is what gives rise to plagiarism. There's a good chance that someone can write a paper at university A and that if someone else submits the same paper a year later at university B, the lecturer won't be able to pick up on the fact. Hence, it's easy for websites that allow archiving and downloading of papers to spring up.
It's not mine -- it's a friend's business. It doesn't at the moment -- I think they're going to add extra "premium" services at some point.
The Google folks (who are frusterated with automated scripts that hammer the bajeezus out of their search engine, trying to let result spammers figure out the ranking of a given page) have said on their policy page that if you're beating up on their servers with an automated system, they can ban you.
Now, they don't seem to to it lightly. I've written a couple scripts that use Google, but I also put some limits on the thing -- one second delays between searches and the like.
But if a teacher is forcing a student to go through this process, then that teacher is basically saying that their students are not trustworthy and is an assumption of guilt by default.
Frankly, I suspect that, sadly, the majority of university students have cheated to some extent at one point or another. It's depressing, but if you don't have what it takes and you're under a lot of pressure to perform...